by Lamar Herrin
It was a beautiful fish, and it did everything a beautiful fish engaged in a life-and-death struggle could be expected to do. It pulled line out toward the horizon and then raced straight back at me just to see how fast I could reel in. It swam under the boat to see if I could keep it from tangling the line in the motor’s blades. It took a sounding to the bottom of the lake and then rose to the surface in one powerful, glistening leap, flexing and shaking to dislodge the hook. When it finally came alongside the boat, it cut the water in a pattern of rapid zigs and zags as though it were spelling out for me some code. At the last moment, as it rose within reach, it opened its enormous mouth, and I gripped it by the lower lip and held it just above the surface, shielded by the side of the boat, so that not even Walter could see it. I looked down into its gullet, as pink-edged as the day it was born, thought about releasing it, thought about why we even bothered to fish, thought about making for all my skeptical friends a last meal of this last fish, thought about what it signaled, an end to fishing surely since I wouldn’t catch a bigger or finer one than this, thought about how long I could maintain this paralyzing grip, a man my age, with a fish this big just waiting to make one more violent lash, thought about how many things could fit into a mouth that large, how many minnows, how many red daredevil spoons, thought about that spoon I would need to return to Buck Coggins, one of the Buck Cogginses, even if I planned never to come back here again, but then thought about why I would want to come back with Leland Oldham now gone, a toad, perhaps, in the transmogrifying way of things, become food for the fish, perhaps even become a fish, a lunker of a bass himself, one this big. I never forgot that, from my boyhood on, this had been a lake of transformations. And that was when I held up my trophy catch and showed it to Walter Kidman, whose eyes widened as though I’d turned over a hidden royal flush, a poker hand for the ages, worthy of photographs and applause. Then I unhooked my fish and threw it as unceremoniously as a man my age could into the bottom of the boat, where it made a violent thud and flopped with its smaller kin whose fate it would share. They were all the same, those fish. Big or small, they came to the same end. I shook out my line, reset my drag, and examined my daredevil spoon, the classic kind, with a red stripe down the middle to distinguish it from the silver one that my legendary and long dead cousin Howie Whalen had preferred. I felt extraordinarily alive, so much so that I didn’t even register the fact that my mouth had fallen open in a classic case of a hunter coming to resemble his prey. I gulped at the air, cast out, reeled in, and cast out again, even though I could see that the jumps had ended, the surviving minnows had escaped, and what was left of the bass had gone off to regroup. But I kept casting into that now becalmed water. It was what we’d come for, after all, eight hundred miles, WPA site after WPA site, and like any great battle it had been some show. The enemy, the newly dying and the near dead, who were also our allies, our co-performers in the staging of this production, lay flopping in the bottom of the boat.
Walter must have stepped around those fish as he moved back toward me, and he must have stepped lightly, for the boat barely moved. But he’d have to wait, a last cast, which as every fisherman knew was never the last but, ad infinitum, the one before that. I cast, the red daredevil began to sink, and before I could retrieve it and cast again, Walter seized his chance. Tell me the truth, Jim, he said, firmly, yes, but sadly and wisely, too, as if he knew better than to expect an answer. Do you need a lawyer or not?