by Bob Thompson
My tirade of righteous indignation felt so good.
The bull just stood there and looked at me, taking long whiffs of the air. I yelled and screamed some more, but he didn’t seem to care. He stood dead still staring at me, only his nostrils flaring as he breathed deeply. Finally, heaving a big breath, he turned around and walked off slowly.
I couldn’t resist a swinging target and sent another spherical missile to sting the leathery sack. The bull just flinched slightly as he walked away.
I stood there basking for a while in my rightful vengeance before walking back to the store.
After that, the bull’s routine underwent a marked change. He didn’t hang out at the persimmon tree that much anymore. It seemed that he just hung around the pond and waited for me. No matter how quiet I was or what time of day or night I tried, when I sneaked down the ditch and looked up, there would be the bull: waiting, daring. Even when I just rode my bike down the road beside the field, he would meet me at the fence corner and trot along on the other side, escorting me down the length of his kingdom. I never got to wet another hook in that pond again.
I often think about that brief stitch in time, and when I’m nose to nose with someone, so angry and frustrated that I’m beginning to think about their points of vulnerability, I remember that old bull and before I do or say anything, I ask myself, “I wonder if I’ll ever want to fish in their pond again.”
Harp
I’ve always thought that I could learn something from everyone, that it didn’t matter how old or young, mean or obstreperous—if you spent enough time with someone, you’d be able to glean some bit of truth from their life experience.
The common line on Harp was that his orneriness, coupled with a dubious sense of humor and his unfortunate choice of companions, made him a questionable role model for impressionable youth; but his less than sterling character did nothing to diminish his stature as the best fly fisherman anyone could recall.
Among other things, the front porch of Granny’s store served as the union hall of the local fishermen. Anyone looking for a spur-of-the-moment fishing partner could stop by the porch and choose from whatever journeymen were available. I, as an apprentice, had little standing, but there were many blessed occasions when I was the only one available.
Parental permission for fishing at Crawford Lake had been established by prior precedent and was mostly perfunctory, but it still needed to be secured—and quickly, before a preferred fishing partner with years of seniority could arrive and ruin my afternoon. I had to hurry into the store, identify the supervising adult and, in my most earnest and pleading voice, beg permission.
Crawford Lake was privately owned but free to all, a thirty-two-acre oxbow lake a mile and a half away straight down the road, the closest of the many such bodies of water scattered under the big sweeping curve of the Ohio, and many of the locals, including Harp, kept wooden johnboats tied up there.
Humpy, Fuzz, Henry, and Bunk were my most reliable fishing buddies for crappie and bluegill, and I had been careful to maintain a reputation as a respectful and helpful novice, but I had yet to receive the coveted fly-fishing invitation from Harp. I was acutely aware that when and if it came, there would be additional scrutiny given to the offer, and I knew why.
My parents and grandmother weren’t at all comfortable with the attitudes and habits that the lifelong bachelor might impart during long mornings and afternoons sculling along the back side of Crawford Lake; specifically, they were uncomfortable at Harp’s well-known and little-hidden Saturday night outings with the notorious Dube Jenkins.
Like clockwork, every Saturday afternoon Harp would park his truck at the store and visit with the congregation while waiting for his partner in crime. Eventually, Dube, who I’m convinced was the model for Charles Schultz’s Pig Pen character, would show up in a cloud of dust and smoke. He was careful to park his decrepit and badly listing Ford in the gravel lot just across the road that had served the competing, but now closed, grocery of Tom and Lou Harper. Dube almost never got out of the car because of the understood policy concerning drinking or obvious drunkenness on Granny’s premises. Dube was always drinking and usually in enough quantity to be obvious, so he would stay in his rattletrap with the motor running till Harp could finish off his Pepsi and conversation. Walking across the road to the opposite side of the car, Harp would shoo the reluctant coon dog from the front passenger seat into the back, reach through the open window to the only functional door latch, and settle into the dusty blanket-over-bare-springs-seat-cover of the ratty old car. With the motor over-revved and the clutch squealing, they would disappear into their regular Saturday night adventure, trailed by the ever-present cloud of dust and blue smoke. If anyone actually knew details of their adventures, they were not discussed in my presence.
What I did know was that the next morning after an adventure, Harp’s 1949 olive-drab Chevy pickup would be parked in the store’s gravel parking lot. Harp would either be sitting straight up with his open mouth and nose pointed toward the sagging roof liner or leaning against the steering wheel, hard against the disconnected horn—a necessary modification so that his or my family’s Sunday morning slumber would not be disturbed.
He would alternate between these positions like a sleeper turning from one side to the other in bed. The parking lot bordered both my parents’ and my grandmother’s front yard; and since he was in plain view of the considerable Sunday morning church traffic, there had been some debate within the family on whether to allow this practice to continue. The consensus was that it was safer for Harp and the community to let him sleep it off in a relatively secure place.
Usually, he would wake up around noon and drive home. To do him justice, Harp was not a bothersome or everyday drunk, and he was always the model of sobriety at the store. But still, I knew that if the stars did one day align and he asked me to go fishing with him, getting permission would be a dicey business with plenty of questions and conditions. Harp was no doubt aware of these barriers, which had a detrimental effect on my progress in the fine and elusive art of fly fishing.
I had learned the rudiments, mostly from Humpy and Bunk, but if the front porch stories were to be believed, their skills weren’t comparable to Harp’s.
I had watched him from other boats on the cucumber-shaped lake, and struggled to imitate his movements. With a short-handled sculling paddle in one hand and his waxed bamboo rod in the other, he could expertly position and power the boat while simultaneously sending yards of lime-green fishing line rolling in a wave across the water’s surface, snapping the feathery bait into the precise spot his practiced eye or intuition had determined ought to contain a bluegill or bass. He’d let it linger only a few moments before flicking the long flexible rod up, lifting the popper from the surface to send it winging back toward the boat, where he would keep the floating line in a holding pattern above his head till a subtle snap of his wrist would send it back rolling out over the surface to splash the imitation insect down lightly among the fallen cypress tops near shore. It was a graceful ballet, interrupted frequently by jumping fish and the excitement of landing a fighting sunfish or bass.
In contrast, I was not as graceful or precise, and even when my fly didn’t hook an overhanging tree limb, my fishing companion, or me, it did not always land where I intended—and when it did, seldom was a hungry mouth waiting to lunge at it.
But one day the seams of the universe aligned, and Crockett and I were in the right space. Crockett, my best friend and Harp’s nephew, and I were lounging high up in Raymond Long’s apple tree, gorging on green apples and discussing eleven-year-old boy stuff. We watched as Harp’s truck, loaded with fishing gear, passed under us on the road below. It stopped at the store a hundred yards or so away and in a few minutes came back toward us, halting under the tree.
“Can’t find anybody at the store to go fishing,” he yelled. “You fellows want to go?”
“Sure,” we shouted back, scrambling excitedly down the
tree and into the bed of his truck.
My stomach did not feel great, but I wasn’t going to let a small matter like that stand in my way of going fly fishing with Harp.
Harp seemed to know exactly what needed to be done as we parked in front of the store. With me trailing behind him in prayer, Harp went straight into the grocery and told Granny that he was going to take Crockett fishing at Crawford Lake and wondered if it was okay for me to go along.
Granny looked at him closely for a moment, sizing him up. He was clear eyed and concise, and his speech was without any hint of a slur as I stood with pitiful pleading eyes behind him. I nearly fainted when finally she nodded and gave her conditions: that I always stay seated on a float cushion, wear a life jacket, and be home before dark.
I scurried out the back door to get my fishing gear from the tool shed on the back porch and ran across the parking lot to Harp’s truck.
Harp said that I’d better take a sandwich along because we were “liable to be down for a while if they’re biting.” I told him I didn’t feel much like eating, that my stomach was a little upset.
With a twinkle in his eye, he said, “Probably them apples. You know what’s good for that?”
“What?” I asked.
“Prunes,” he said with a wry smile.
“Great, thanks!” I ran back into the store and told Granny I was going to take some snacks.
“Okay.” She didn’t look up from her quilting as I stuck a box of Del Monte prunes and, for good measure, a bottle of prune juice into a paper bag.
In the back of Harp’s pickup I dug into the prunes, hoping to stop the rumblings from my lower section as the old truck bounced along the dusty brown gravel road through the river bottoms to the lake.
While Crockett and I hauled our fishing tackle from the truck down the hill to the boat landing, Harp unchained his handmade johnboat from the big cypress tree. Once it was loaded and our lines, lures, and poles were readied, we shoved off into fishing paradise. Watching Harp and incorporating his subtle tips elevated my skill level appreciably and by early afternoon we had stringers full of sunfish and large-mouth bass. This long-fantasized-about day could not have been better except for my stomach; the prunes weren’t working at all. I was having to cautiously shift from one side to the other to alleviate the internal pressure, and even though we were out in the open water with a slight breeze blowing, Crockett wrinkled his nose at my near-continuous flatulence, suggesting that “something dead must have crawled up inside you.” Harp, concentrating on steering and fishing, didn’t seem to notice.
As another stomach cramp hit me, I leaned to one side as I had been doing all afternoon, but this time something was different. “No!” I thought as the unthinkable suddenly became a reality. In my mind I desperately searched for other explanations for the warm sensation in my blue jeans, but the smell confirmed the worst. I let out a primal “Ahhhhh!” as I dropped my pole and jumped up from my damp seat.
I had broken my first promise to Granny. A wooden flat-bottomed johnboat is no place to stand up, even carefully, and my leap was by no means careful. The boat lurched violently from side to side as all occupants struggled to keep it from flipping over. Waving my arms for balance, I staggered side to side in the narrow boat before falling backward into the wooded seat with a sickening squishing noise.
Harp, now on his knees in the bottom of the boat, was laughing so hard that tears streamed down his cheeks. Crockett, also in the bottom of the boat gripping both gunwales, looked at us like we’d lost our minds.
“Prunes, that’s what I’m gonna call you. Prunes—that’s it, Prunes!” Harp shouted in glee as I sat bewildered and miserable, finally believing the stories of his dark side.
Slowly, I stowed my fishing gear and slipped first one leg and then the other over the side of the boat. Holding on to the side of the boat with one hand, I loosed my belt and unbuttoned my pants with the other, then struggled out of the fouled garments while Crockett paddled toward shore.
Harp, still immobilized with laughter, was beginning to reconstruct the episode into a story. When we reached the landing, I stayed in the water, rinsing my pants out before wading ashore and climbing into the bed of the truck. It was true about Harp! He was a mean, ornery old ass. All the way back to the store I could hear him laughing and adding details to the wretched story. In the following weeks, the narrative and nickname were endlessly repeated, on the front porch and who knew where else.
I dreaded Harp’s visits to the store and the sound of his raucous laughter as he asked, “Hey, Prunes, want to go fishing this afternoon? Want to take some green apples and prunes and go fishing?”
I got into the habit of glancing out the front window of our house every morning, checking the parking lot for his truck, before I went to the store. One day as I looked out that big living-room window at Harp’s truck, an idea popped into my head.
On the weekend before the Fourth of July, my family annually made the twenty-mile trip west on US Highway 60 to Wickliffe, crossing the Cairo Ohio River Bridge to the southern tip of Illinois and then less than a mile later traversing the long and narrow 1929 bridge across the Mississippi into Missouri where legal firework stores lined the highway. At that time, fireworks were illegal in Kentucky so these were not pop-up roadside stands but supermarket-sized emporiums stocked with pyrotechnics of every kind: Black Cat firecrackers, cherry bombs, M80s, roman candles, and innumerable types of colorful aerial rockets.
As I loaded a basket with bottle rockets and M80s, I saw exactly what I had been looking for. I slipped two packages into the basket and held my breath, hoping my father wouldn’t notice as the checkout lady totaled up the merchandise. Sitting in the back seat of the Pontiac Star Chief on the way home, I clandestinely moved the special packages out of the shopping bag and into my pocket.
That next morning, Sunday, I got up before anyone else to look out the front window, making sure Harp’s truck was in its usual spot, him asleep at the wheel, then went back to bed. When the rest of the family started stirring, getting breakfast and preparing for church, I complained of not feeling well. Since I had never faked an illness before, I was taken seriously and allowed to go back to bed. Mom said I could stay home because Granny wasn’t going either; she would be next door at her house preparing a big dinner for visiting relatives. I nodded weakly.
When Mom and Dad were gone, I dressed and took a blanket and pillow out to the hammock in front of Granny’s house. Waiting till all the church traffic had gone by and making sure Granny was occupied in the kitchen, I pretended to notice something out at the edge of the yard, just in case she or Grandma Starks was watching. I quickly darted out to Harp’s truck and, after another look at Granny’s picture window, slid to the ground and squirmed up under the in-line six-cylinder motor.
I repeated the instructions for the “Deluxe Auto Fooler, with Smoke, Whistle and Bang” from memory as I worked: “(1) Remove a spark-plug wire on the opposite side of motor from carburetor, (2) Attach bare wire to the top of spark plug, (3) Replace spark-plug wire, (4) Attach remaining wire to any metal part on the motor.” Just to be sure, I attached a second Fooler to another spark plug. Looking out from under the truck to make sure Granny wasn’t watching or a car wasn’t coming, I scooted out and slipped back to the safety of the hammock.
Whether it was the sound of returning church traffic or the July sun baking him inside the cab, Harp finally woke up just after noon. Watching from the hammock, I saw him rub his eyes for a moment, shaking off the grogginess and getting his bearings.
I knew his routine. He pulled out the manual choke knob on the dash, pushed in on the clutch, moved the column shifter into first gear, turned the ignition switch on, and finally pressed the starter button on the floorboard. A moment after the motor came to life, smoke started rolling up from under the hood, pouring out of both wheel wells and coming through the holes in the floorboard. I saw Harp’s eyes widen and his body stiffen. When the high-pitched whistle started,
he began scrambling for the door handle.
Then came the two loud bangs, lending urgency to his fumbling, and he lunged at the door. As he slammed his left shoulder into the stubborn exit hatch, it finally popped open, yanking his foot off the clutch and sending him rolling out sideways toward the gravel as the still-in-gear truck lurched forward. With the choke closed and the motor racing on the rich fuel mix, the old truck bucked forward, adding a spin component to Harp’s descent and hard landing on the rocky surface.
Harp watched on all fours from a cloud of dust and smoke as the spluttering and burping truck crashed into the concrete base supporting a wooden corner post of the store’s front porch. It shoved the truncated pyramid pedestal up against the Gulf No-Nox gas pump before stalling as the porch roof sagged onto the top of its cab. The dust was just settling when my parents’ Pontiac pulled into the lot and Granny came running out to see what all the commotion was about. The parking lot was soon full of visiting relatives and church traffic stopping to see the spectacle.
Bewildered, Harp looked around until his eyes fixed on me lying in my hammock, smiling. There’s a lot to be said for nonverbal communication at such moments. Considerable information passed between us during that short eye contact. You can’t use treachery without teaching it.
With eyes downcast, Harp made his apologies to my dad and grandmother. He promised he’d pay for the damages and that he’d never park there again.
It was middle of the afternoon before the banged-up truck was freed, the porch corner propped up, and the crowd cleared out. I was feeling a lot better.
To his credit, Harp paid for the porch, never parked in our lot on Saturday nights, and never told anybody about the Auto Foolers. He also never called me Prunes again.