by Bill Heavey
It was one of those days they couldn’t put enough numbers on your paycheck to make it worthwhile, when you feel like you might pour sugar in your boss’s gas tank unless you get away to a place where the only thing tugging at you will be a fish. I couldn’t slide out early enough to make it to Lunker City, a two-hour drive. So I did what big people do: I waited until 4:59 and hit the gas for Fallback Flats. The way I look at it, thirteen inches of fish is a hell of a lot more than zero inches, which is what you catch if you stay home.
Traffic was worse than usual and I knew I’d be lucky to get an hour on the water. Redemption came just as the sun was becoming tangled in the trees and three night herons flapped silently overhead (why is it getting to be that you see more kinds of wild birds near cities than in the country?). I was massaging the rocky bottom just upstream of the ledge with a four-inch Scoundrel “live”-colored worm (call me crazy, but I was actually fishing a worm-colored worm) Texas-rigged on an 1/8-ounce slip sinker, when there came the most tentative of taps, the twitch of a sleeping baby’s finger. I raised my rod tip and held my breath, not quite sure I’d felt what I thought I’d felt. When I felt a second bump, I set that hook like it was connected to the backside of an IRS auditor. The ball of adrenaline on the other end began stripping six-pound on a diving break for points north and east and I just held on. My spinning reel was making a sound like someone pulling masking tape off a roll, my arms were shaking, and I knew instantly this was not a catfish because although the fish stayed down, the line was cutting all through the water in a kind of fevered handwriting that could only spell “smallmouth.”
I couldn’t remember if this was the rod I hadn’t changed line on for three months or the fresh one, and I didn’t have time to check. But I made a bunch of promises about product loyalty to whoever’s line this was, because I wanted this fish. He jumped once, fifteen yards out and as big as I’d imagined, then put on a final surge close to the boat when he saw what I looked like. But I kept pressure on him, and then it was over. He was dark and heavy, and as soon as I lifted him the hook fell from his mouth and thocked the deck of the canoe as if he’d been holding on to it out of pure courtesy.
“Oh, buddy, look at you,” I said, as if greeting an infant. I held him down gently with one hand and measured with the other. When stretched full out, my hand measures exactly nine inches from thumb to little finger. The bass was all of that and an inch more and just over three pounds on my right-hand heft-o-meter. He stared back with his wild orange eye and snapped his body, refusing to be friends. How many thousand empty casts had I made at this place to arrive at the one connecting me to this creature? I had the sensation of watching an odometer turn over, of it all beginning again.
I lowered him back into the water, my thumb still in his mouth, and swished him back and forth a couple of times while he lay stunned. I don’t think anybody had ever treated him in this manner before. He wasn’t used to it. Suddenly, with a vicious swipe of his head, he was gone. I held my hand up. There was a little line of blood coming from where he’d nicked my thumb. I sucked it and smiled. The sun had gone for the night, leaving a soft molten glow on the underside of the farthest clouds.
I was back the next morning before the crowds, armed with fresh line and high hopes that the river hadn’t undergone a mood swing during the night. It hadn’t. I hammered them. I got ’em on the Scoundrel, on a three-inch white grub, on a six-inch red shad Slug-Go with insert weights. They weren’t in the eddies or more obvious still water, but holding in the tiniest pockets in relatively strong current about four feet deep. None were as big as the one from the night before, but by fallback standards they were trophies. I didn’t keep strict count, but I bet there were five fish in the 14–16-inch range, including one brawler who got loose in the boat and fought his way forward until he wrapped himself up in my sweatshirt. I fished for several hours, concentrating so hard it was like being in a trance.
When I finally took a break, everything around me seemed more vivid: the throbbing of a drowned limb caught in the current, the river’s endless self-applause as it completed a little ladder of riffles, the ancient scalloped rocks that look like shoulder blades. You can fish for years, not thinking about anything but where your next cast will be, and then look up and see everything around you as if it had just been created. That’s how it felt that day.
I wasn’t able to get back to that place for a week, and then I found about what I expected, which wasn’t much. But it was okay. I’d had my moment of glory, the mystery had been restored. About a month later a friend called up and said he’d like to get out on the water.
“I don’t have much time,” he said almost apologetically, “but we could hit that place nearby on the river if you’re up for it.”
“You think we’re gonna catch anything there?” I asked, not having decided whether I wanted to tell what had really happened.
“Well, prob’ly not,” he admitted. “I just want to get out. But we gotta get lucky there someday.”
“Come on over,” I told him. “We’ll give it a shot.”
SHOPPING IS FUN,
BUT NOT FOR MEN
I have just made the biggest mistake of my life. I have agreed to go shopping with my current girlfriend. “C’mon,” she urged. “We’ll start small. A shirt and a pair of pants. You dress like you haven’t bought any clothes in twenty years.” Actually, it’s only been ten years. It was at Sunny’s Surplus, the one in Georgetown. I bought nine identical pairs of black socks. I understand that is also where Ralph Nader shops.
We leave behind the world of sunlight and fresh air as we descend into the fifth circle of Mazza Gallerie in my Honda. Lose your ticket stub and you stay here until Jesus comes back. “Where are we going?” I ask as calmly as possible. “Filene’s,” says my companion. “You’ll like it. It’s cheap.” We take the elevator up with a young women’s professional gum-chewing team. All have on the kind of canvas coats men wear on dairy farms. “Tourists?” I whisper. “No. Those are barn jackets. They’re in.”
On the way to Filene’s we pass stores that are anything but cheap. Places that sell only Belgian chocolate molded into shapes like a tennis racket or a woman’s leg or a Mercedes hood ornament. Places that sell platinum fountain pens shaped like overstuffed sausages and endorsed by men who have walked on the moon. A store that sells only bonsai trees. There is a sign in the window: will hold your tree while you shop. Why bother? They could just pin it to your lapel.
It’s warm and airless in Filene’s, which appears to operate without sales staff, just people who put merchandise back on hangers after it has been flung on the ground and trampled. Men, I am reminded as my brain begins to shut down, are basically hunters. We like to focus on a single thing to the exclusion of all else, stalk or run it to ground, and then kill it with spear or credit card. Then we go watch television. Women are gatherers. They have wide-angle vision and can actually look at hundreds of things simultaneously, imagining how they would taste or feel, what they could be combined with, and how often they would need to be dry-cleaned. What’s more, women can do this for virtually unlimited amounts of time. My friend, I’m vaguely aware, is as charged as the Energizer Bunny, while I’ve got all the zip of a man on a chloroform binge.
I’m aware of something else, too. Filene’s is not really a store at all. It’s a hospice for new clothes with incurable diseases: orange polyester designer sweatshirts with enough scales for the Miss Carp U.S.A. Pageant, dresses made of viscose and rubber-coated cyclone fencing, suits that virtually guarantee freedom from sexual harassment in the office. We take the escalators up to Menswear, where I first notice the presence of black globes suspended from the ceiling at regular intervals. I instinctively know what these are: death stars, stuffed with microphones and heat-sensing scanners, that are connected to an office building full of minimum-wage security guards who are cramming for night school instead of watching the monitors. My co
mpanion tugs me toward wire racks of shirts and sweaters marked clearance. Here are the untouchables among fashion’s outcasts: plaid flannel shirts the colors of milk shakes and motor oil, rayon garments designed to be worn to professional mustard fights, a white silk number with a postage stamp where the pocket used to be and cuneiform writing all over the front. The stamp is canceled, and if you look hard it reads, casablanca, morocco, 3:31 p.m. 9 nov 1993. Perhaps this is where the designer wanted to be when he was creating this. Tough call. You can’t wear it, mail it, or use it for scratch paper. I pat its sleeve as if everything’s going to be all right. But I know it’s not. I drift away.
I’ve been fighting hard, but this is not a healthy environment. Maybe some kind of low-level kryptonite seepage from those death stars is depleting my life force. Maybe you’re not even supposed to buy these clothes, just come to try and cheer them up. But it’s too late. These clothes know. I’m measuring the distance to the door when my friend pulls me over to Pants, where, among the somber ranks of grays and browns, one of Ralph Lauren’s costlier mistakes is repeated dozens of times in waist sizes 30 to 46. They’re Polo Enduring Quality Dungarees in a multicolored plaid visible from Saturn. This could be a designer’s inside joke, a comment on the seventies, or an impassioned plea for the freedom to be wrong, terribly wrong. All I know is these pants are bouncing off the walls, and if they could talk, they’d be begging for lithium. My companion says, “Wait here,” breathes deeply, and plunges back into the racks. I look around. There are other men here, and some of them are holding up rather well, under the circumstances. Maybe they just walked in. Hell, for all I know, they’re enjoying themselves. But for every functional soldier there are three guys like me, guys who look like they’ve just been hit in the face with a frying pan.
My friend returns and looks at me like a nurse doing triage. “You’re not doing too well, are you?” she says tenderly. I shake my head. “C’mon. We’ll try Woodies. It’s calmer there, and they have chocolate.” Good. With some chocolate, I might rally for another half an hour.
The light is even brighter at Woodies, but there are doors leading to the outside world at each end and more ambient oxygen. Plus it has chocolate. I buy a 1.75-ounce treasure chest of Godiva—four pieces, four bucks—and eat them. The chocolate works on the pain centers of the brain, temporarily stunning them. I rally.
In the men’s department, Ralph Lauren, Liz Claiborne, Tommy Hilfiger, and Alexander Julian have all staked out little zones where they vie with one another to test your intelligence. Alexander opens with a bold gambit: Why wouldn’t you pay $65 for a blue sweatshirt with the Briticism colours written on it in bumpy thread? Liz counters with a sophisticated gray cotton tee devoid of ornamentation for $35. I think she’s bluffing. Tommy’s in your face with the following deal: You give me $92, I’ll give you a made-in-Taiwan rugby shirt with my name printed over your heart, and, on the back, a heraldic griffin clutching a fistful of arrows. Above the griffin floats a kind of brick crown, on either side stand sheaves of wheat à la Budweiser, and below ripples a ribbon that reads est. mcmlxxxv, as if this marked the Norman Conquest instead of the year Billy Joel and Christie Brinkley decided to make it legal. But for sheer chutzpah, Ralph, as always, stands alone. His $127.50 cotton-acrylic sweatshirt features an old-timey teddy bear in a snowsuit on skis. This is genius. It’s like jazz. If you have to ask why adult males will be wearing old-timey teddy bears on their sweats, you’d never get it anyway. The other clever thing that sets Ralph apart is that attached to everything are these little plastic antitheft devices containing two tiny cylinders, one black, one red. A warning states that any tampering will result in the cylinders breaking, presumably combining to form an invisible gas that would make you change your name back to something unmarketable.
My friend, sensing my disorientation, shows me to a display of shirts and promptly stuffs an olive-colored one into my chest. “Go put this on. There’s the dressing room.” In the dressing room I step in front of a three-way mirror before trying the shirt on and notice that I need a haircut and my head has changed shape since the last time I saw the whole package. My skull has gotten longer, or maybe it’s just that my hairline is retreating. It’s fascinating. I never really knew I had a profile. I spend several minutes getting reacquainted with my body, wondering if this is really how I look to other people. “Sir?” a young salesman calls out unsteadily, waking me from my trance. “Your, ah, lady friend asked me to see if everything’s okay.”
“Oh, yeah, fine, fine,” I assure him, putting on the shirt, careful not to look at myself with it on. “That’s a great color on you,” my friend gushes. “But your undershirt’s showing. You button it up to the neck.”
“No.”
“But that’s how they’re worn. It’ll look great. Just try it.”
“No way. Where I grew up only dweebs buttoned their shirts up to the neck without a tie. It’s like stamping moron across your forehead.”
“Just try it,” she pleads.
“You don’t understand. I can’t. My friends would beat me up. And I’d have to help them.”
“Okay, okay. What about these?” She motions to a stack of Perry Ellis Portfolio silk shirts, marked down to thirty-five dollars. “These you wouldn’t necessarily have to button all the way up.”
“Silk?” I ask, managing to make the word sound like cholera.
“Silk,” she says sternly. “Look, I didn’t make you come here. You wanted to. And you must have wanted to try to do something about your wardrobe or you wouldn’t have brought me.”
It’s true. She’s got me. “Which one do you like?” I ask. She thinks, fingering the shirts, finally selecting two: one with brown and blue bars and a funny red squiggle, the other subtler, a pattern of blue and green watercolor brushstrokes with flecks of pale yellow.
“That one,” I say, picking up the second, careful of the pins.
“Aren’t you going to try it on?”
“Don’t need to. That’s the shirt. One giant leap for mankind. Let’s get outta here.”
Two weeks later, I wear the shirt to a close friend’s birthday party. Nobody makes fun of me. Several women friends pat me on the shoulder. “Nice shirt. I wish I could get Jim into something like that,” says one I’ve known for years.
I square my shoulders and smile into the pleasant thrum of the party. “Yeah, well,” I say, figuring I might as well go for it. “Some guys lead, some guys follow.” I look back at her, and the top half of her body has disappeared. She has turned away from me and is laughing silently but so hard she has bent in half. White wine is coming out of her nose.
MONSTER IN A BOX
I keep opening the hatch to the livewell to make sure this is really happening to me. Inside is a largemouth twice as big as any I’ve ever caught before: eight, maybe nine pounds. Actually, I can’t really see it too well down there in the dark, but every once in a while it throws a shoulder against the bulkhead like a sumo wrestler locked in a motel closet.
Even Jerry Martin, a guide from Bass Pro Shops who is taking me out for the day on Stockton Lake, doesn’t want to commit to a guess on weight. “I just haven’t seen enough fish that big, to tell you the truth. If we’d got her before she spawned out, you might have the lake record there,” he says.
The lake record is 9 pounds, 11 ounces. In forty years of fishing—including some when he was on the water 250 days a year as a guide and tournament fisherman—Jerry has caught just two fish over nine pounds. And now I—a pale out-of-towner with airplane peanuts still in my pocket—have got a monster in the box.
In late summer on Stockton, Jerry says, the bass spend the early-morning hours chasing schools of shad in the flats. If it’s overcast, the fish may chase them on and off all day. But on a bluebird day like this one, the bass retreat to pole timber, where they hold so tight you’ve got to bop ’em on the nose to get a strike. Jerry’s bee
n doing this with more success than I have, releasing three sublegal fish while I lose two of his worms to stickups.
Jerry maneuvers the boat to a big lone tree on the edge of the channel and casts his worm to one side while I take the other. Suddenly he grunts, sets his hook hard, then mutters, “Wrapped me.”
Just as his line goes slack, somebody gives my bait a big, dull thump. The next thing I know I’m fighting a fish that moves like a bass, only stronger, the oscillations on the other end slower and more deliberate. It makes three diving runs; my line slashes through the water like the Z that stands for Zorro, and somehow stays clear of the timber. It’s all over in half a minute or two minutes or an hour. I don’t remember. Then Jerry hoists her up and I’m looking at a bass that could swallow a cantaloupe.
When I stop dancing long enough to listen, Jerry asks what I want to do with her. “We can always use a big fish in the aquarium back at the shop,” he says. “If you don’t want to have her mounted, I mean.”
This is a no-brainer: pay $150 so the fish you killed can stare you down from the wall for the rest of your life, or donate it to the people who were nice enough to take you fishing. I tell him I’d be honored to have my fish in their aquarium.
It’s a good life, he tells me. A fish like this is probably nearing the end of her life in the wild. In a temperature-controlled tank, swimming lazily down to a scuba diver twice a day for a nutritionally complete fish cake before adoring crowds, she might live another ten years.