Born to Fish

by Tim Gallagher

  Once when he was in high school, Dave was unknowingly dating the daughter of a major crime boss. One day, three tough-looking men confronted him.

  “Do you know who her dad is?” one of them asked.

  “Yeah, I met him,” said Dave. “I think he runs some kind of paper business or something.”

  “No! He’s the big dude,” the man said, looking Dave hard in the eyes. “Do not screw this up.”

  “I had no idea I was dating Meadow Soprano,” Dave told me, laughing.

  Herb always drove Cadillac Sevilles that were either gray or black. One of Dave’s early memories was his dad driving him to Little League practice one day, and he had to sit in the middle of the front seat because there were several other people in the car. He felt something hard on the seat under him, covered by a blanket. Dave reached down and pulled out a pistol. “You’ve got to move this gun, Dad, because I can’t sit down,” he told him.

  “But honestly, I just never even thought about it,” said Dave. “It was just the way we lived. The funny thing is, my dad was a super nice guy, the nicest guy in the world.”

  Herb would always carry a huge wad of cash in his pocket, and he never minded sharing it. He would often take Greg and Dave, along with various other neighborhood kids, to Shea Stadium to watch a baseball game, followed by a meal at a restaurant. And he would always pick up the tab. He was a good-time guy, and everyone liked him.

  “If we took vacations, I could always take a friend with me, and he would often take a bunch of us out to the movies,” said Dave. “He always had a big bankroll in his pocket, and he was covering everything for everyone. He was a New York guy; he grew up in New York City and was very much cut out of that mold. Then he moved to suburbia but still had that New York edge.”

  (Young Greg could be generous, too. When he was just a kindergartener, he spotted Herb’s roll of money lying on an end table in the bedroom and peeled off a hundred-dollar bill, stuffing it in his pocket. When the ice cream man pulled into the neighborhood later that day, Greg handed him the money to buy ice cream for all the kids lined up at the truck and asked, “Is this enough?” Herb didn’t even know any money had been taken.)

  Herb was also courageous at times. Dave recalls that during one family vacation in Maine, his father spotted a girl struggling in the water offshore, fighting a powerful rip current. “He jumped in the water instantly, swam way out there, and brought her in,” he said. “That’s the kind of guy he was.”

  In many ways, Greg felt closer to Herb growing up than he did to his mother and brother. Herb used to take his wife and sons to Florida every summer; he had a lot of family living in the Fort Lauderdale area and kept a second home there. But after a few years, Diane and Dave eventually stopped going. She really didn’t like Uncle Donny and the other relatives there. She was smart and opinionated and liked to be in control, but down there she was powerless, and, it was clear, anything went.

  Herb and Greg started going to Florida alone, driving together in his Cadillac. The Florida house was in a beautiful rural area called Paradise Village, with corrals, orange groves, and horse farms, and it was certainly a paradise for Greg. He would be gone each day from dawn to nightfall, swimming in the canals—in spite of the alligators—canoeing, and catching snakes and giant catfish.

  “The house was great,” said Greg. “It had orange groves all around it and a canal running right through the backyard. I used to catch catfish at night, drag them across the lawn, and put them in the bathtub. They were huge. I’d mess with them all night and let them go in the morning.”

  One day his father came to the bathroom door, wondering why Greg had been in there so long.

  “What are you doing in there, fishing?” he asked.

  “Yeah, you wanna see what I got?”

  Herb opened the door and peered inside. Swimming around in the bathtub were two giant catfish and an alligator gar—a particularly vicious fish.

  “You’re crazy!” said Herb, laughing. “But get those fucking things back in the water before they die.” He was used to Greg’s antics and didn’t get mad at him. But he immediately made him carry each of the fish from the bathtub to the canal and release them.

  Meanwhile, in Connecticut, Diane was grooming Greg’s brother for a different kind of life. From early on, Dave had been a brilliant student and a star athlete, and Diane strongly encouraged his academic pursuits, eventually sending him to a private school. She was a strong, impressive woman but could be overbearing, and Greg always felt like a screw-up in her eyes. Although he was a bright kid, his learning disabilities made it difficult to keep up with his schoolwork. Diane nagged him constantly and pushed him to be more like his brother. So Greg avoided her as much as possible, even as a child, and would spend days at a time camping in their backyard to be by himself. Herb took little part in the raising of their sons and let Diane do whatever she wanted with Dave and Greg’s upbringing.

  Like a chameleon, Diane was able to fit in with whatever group of people surrounded her. Although she’d been raised Catholic, whenever she was with Greg’s Jewish relatives she dressed, behaved, and spoke like a Jewish woman. When she was with mobsters, she acted like a gangster’s wife. And when she was with her teaching colleagues, she was just like them: intelligent, well-read, and opinionated.

  “People respected her because she was really smart and a great teacher, but she was always pushy, pushy, pushy,” said Greg. “And I hated it.”

  In addition to the mob parties, Herb and Diane would host huge family reunions for the Myerson clan. Herb’s aunt, Bess Myerson, was their most famous relative and lived in New York City. A celebrity, she looked the part: always stunning, with immaculate hairdo, makeup, and clothes. Greg remembers how impressive she looked one time she visited: movie star beautiful, with dark glasses and shimmering jewelry, dazzling everyone around her—except Uncle Al, who promptly picked her up, carried her to the edge of the pool, and threw her in with a great splash. She scrambled out and stood up, drenched to the skin, her hairdo ruined and mascara running down her face. “You son of a bitch, Al!” she screamed. But then she started laughing and joined the party. Greg’s mother brought her some dry clothes to wear.

  It was different with Diane’s family when they gathered at his maternal grandmother’s house on the holidays. Diane and her two sisters had strong opinions and often held divergent political views. The parties would always turn into screaming matches between them. This was the one time Greg couldn’t stand to be at his grandmother’s house, and he would often just leave, walking all the way back to his family home, four miles away.

  * * *

  Trapper Greg

  Everyone in elementary school thought Ron and Matt Bortlein were weird—even the teachers. The brothers, a year apart in age, always kept to themselves and rarely spoke to anyone. Part of the problem was their bullet-headed look. At a time in the mid-1970s when most boys wore their hair longer, the Bortleins’ father would take his electric hair clippers every weekend and buzz their hair down to the nubs, giving them an escaped convict look. And their clothes were just not cool: they wore denim dungarees, flannel shirts, and work boots most of the year, and white T-shirts in summer. The boys also had an unusual way of speaking, garbled and unusually deep for children. They would look down when spoken to and seemed unable to engage in conversation. So Ron and Matt walked the mean hallways of their school as pariahs.

  “They were always really quiet,” said Greg. “They wouldn’t talk to anyone, and no one really talked to them, except to harass them.” And the Bortlein brothers never fought back when kids picked on them. Mild mannered and self-effacing, they just tried their best not to attract any attention. But Greg noticed them. He’s always been drawn to underdogs, and he wanted to know more about them. They were not good students and seemed to have no use for school. They just wanted to get through the day and leave as quickly as possible so they could go out into the woods to hunt and fish. Greg would sometimes run into them there,
carrying .22 rifles to hunt rabbits, squirrels, and other small game for their family. They were living a Depression-era life like the television family in The Waltons.

  Ron and Matt would walk miles each day, deep into the Water Authority forest that surrounded a nearby reservoir. No one but staff was legally allowed inside; it was encircled by chain-link fencing with barbed wire on top and had a padlocked gate to admit Water Authority trucks. When they got to know Greg better, the brothers showed him a secret way to get into the place unseen, but it involved a tough, six-mile hike each way. It was a magical world, where deer were common at a time when they were rarely seen in the other woods Greg frequented. He started hanging around with the Bortleins almost every day, joining them on their long hikes through the woods and becoming very fit. Some days they’d take fly rods and fish for the numerous native brook trout in the streams flowing into the reservoir. Other days they’d hunt small game with their .22 rifles.

  Ron and Matt’s father had a goose blind in the corn stubble field behind their house, and they invited Greg to come over one day after school to hunt with their father. When Greg stepped off the school bus at the Bortleins’ house that afternoon, some of the other boys on the bus heckled him. “You going to hang out with your new best friends, Greggie?” He ignored them.

  Later, he and the Bortlein brothers hid in the blind and watched as their father shot two Canada geese. Greg was completely awed and knew this was exactly the way he wanted to live his life. He didn’t care what other people thought of him. He admired the skills of the Bort­leins and their deep knowledge of woodcraft, and he wanted to learn from them.

  “They were good at everything I wanted to do,” said Greg. “They were just great outdoorsmen—they lived to hunt and fish and hike through the woods. Everyone made fun of them, but I thought they were cool.”

  The Bortleins began sharing their world with him. They told Greg they were fur trappers and had a network of traplines running all through the local marshes and riverbanks. That’s why they went to the woods every day—to check their traps and harvest any beaver, mink, or muskrats they might have caught. They were as skilled as nineteenth-century trappers, and Greg was eager to learn all about it.

  Ron and Matt must have enjoyed having a new friend. They generously taught him everything they knew about trapping: the best places to find muskrats and other animals to catch; what to use for bait; how to set the traps.

  For each set, they would pound a metal stake into the mud in the water, a couple of feet from the bank, and attach a length of chain to it with a jawed trap on the other end. They would leave just enough slack in the chain so the trap could sit on the bank, at the very edge of the water. That way, the instant the trap snapped shut on a muskrat’s leg, it would fall into the water, and the weight of the trap would drag the animal underwater and drown it. So the animals they caught were almost always dead when they came to get them. But one day, a huge raccoon was caught in one of their traps, and it snarled and lunged toward them as they approached. Ron, the elder of the brothers—always a fierce, no-nonsense hunter and trapper—didn’t hesitate. Making a flying dive at the raccoon, he grabbed it with his bare hands and plunged into the river, holding the struggling animal underwater against his chest until it was dead. Ron was scratched, bleeding, and drenched from head to foot when he finally stood up, holding the raccoon limp in his arms. Greg shook his head in amazement. He knew this guy was hardcore.

  One day, Greg happened to mention that his grandmother lived on the banks of the Muddy River in North Haven. The two brothers glanced at each other. “That’s a great place to trap,” said Ron. They offered to sell Greg three traps and help him set them near his grandmother’s house. This was on a Sunday, and Greg figured he could wait until the following weekend to check the traps. But that’s not how it’s done. You need to check traps at least once a day so you can retrieve a trapped animal and prepare its hide as soon as possible after it’s caught. The Bortleins got up well before dawn each day to check their traps, and checked them again after school.

  Greg’s traps hadn’t been out a single day when the Bortleins called his house. Greg’s mom took the call and told him about it as soon as he got home.

  “Who is Matt Bortlein?” she asked as she sat puffing a cigarette at the kitchen table.

  “He’s just a kid at school,” said Greg.

  “Oh—he sounded like an old man,” said Diane. “Well, he just called and said you have three muskrats in your traps.” She stared at him with a look of sheer astonishment as she took another drag on her cigarette. “What the hell is he talking about?”

  Greg stared back blankly and shrugged. He walked out to the garage to use the extension phone and called the Bortleins, but no one answered. After a few tries, he jumped on his bike and rode down to the Muddy River, four miles away. Ron and Matt were sitting on the riverbank waiting when he arrived. They hadn’t touched the traps, but they wanted Greg to know about the muskrats he had caught. He was amazed that they had come all the way over here to check his traps for him.

  “But that was their life,” said Greg. “They were always out in the woods and swamps, and knew everything that was going on there.”

  In addition to teaching Greg how to trap, the Bortleins showed him how to prepare the pelts for market, skinning the muskrat by turning its hide inside out, then stretching it on a rack. The resulting fur pelts were beautiful. They also told him where to sell his pelts and how much money he should receive for them. Trapping was quite a lucrative activity. Muskrats were numerous in the area, and each pelt they sold to a fur buyer in Wallingford could bring ten to twelve dollars or more, depending on its size and condition. Greg was all in. His level of ambition as an eight-year-old was phenomenal.

  Although Ron and Matt were shrewd young businessmen, their entrepreneurial instincts were no match for Greg’s, and trapping opened up endless possibilities for him. Maybe he would finally be able to earn enough money to buy a small motorboat so he could go fishing anytime he liked in Long Island Sound—an idea that had never left his mind since he first went striped bass fishing with the Carlsons. He quickly became obsessed with trapping and surpassed the Bortleins’ efforts. Soon he had dozens of traps set up and down the river and in several other locations.

  Scott Jackson, Greg’s close friend from special ed class, often joined him in his trapping. Earlier, they had always seemed to be running into each other in the woods, and Greg had wondered how Scott kept finding him. Months later, Scott confessed that one day when he was at Greg’s house, he had pulled out his pocketknife and cut a deep notch in one of the lugs of Greg’s Vibram-soled boots, giving it a unique tread pattern that showed up well, whether he was hiking in dirt, mud, or snow, so he was able to follow him anywhere easily. Greg had had no idea. They both laughed about it.

  Greg and Scott spent a lot of time hanging out at Scott’s home, an isolated two-story farmhouse surrounded by plowed fields and farmland. Scott’s brother Brian would often torment the two boys. Four years older than them, Brian was powerfully built and athletic, and he could be incredibly brutal. Even though they were just grade-school kids, he would often slap them around and take their money, sometimes leaving them tied up in the basement. They did everything they could to keep out of his way.

  “I remember one time we walked into the basement, and he was hiding, hanging from the rafters above the door, waiting for us,” said Greg. “When we came in, he dropped down and beat the shit out of us.”

  A few years later, Brian held his family’s home under siege for several days, in a drunken, drugged rage. He locked the house and barred the windows. His parents managed to flee and called the police, who came and surrounded the house. Scott climbed out an upstairs window and was rescued by the fire department with a fire-truck ladder. As a policeman tried to climb up the ladder, Brian threw a toilet seat he’d torn from the bathroom at the policeman, striking him hard and gashing his head. Eventually, the police turned off the water main fo
r the house, waited for him to get thirsty enough to come outside, then jumped him and took him to jail. It wasn’t the first—or last—time he would be incarcerated, or that his path would cross with Greg’s.

  Greg and Scott didn’t have a state license to trap, but it seemed pretty safe—no one else was trapping on the stretch of the Muddy River near his grandmother’s house. But as Greg started branching out to other places, he soon got into trouble. He started trapping in some prime areas where special permits chosen by lottery were required. It didn’t take long for one of the other trappers to stumble upon some of his traps. When Greg came to check them, he found that several had been smashed with a hammer and ruined. He didn’t care; he just set new traps in their place, and tried to make them less visible. But then things took a serious turn.

  One night Greg was collecting the muskrats he’d caught and resetting his traps in one of the best areas. He was using a flashlight so he could see what he was doing, which made him visible from a long distance. Suddenly, bang!—a gunshot echoed across the river and a bullet came screaming past, only a foot or two above him. Greg instantly hit the ground, dropping his flashlight into the water. He lay there in the darkness, shivering in terror, his face pressed hard into the mud. A second later, bang! bang!—two more bullets ripped past. For a long time, he didn’t dare move, but he could hear the blub-blub-blub-blub of a small outboard motor idling out there somewhere, perhaps a couple hundred yards away. After a while, the sound faded, then vanished entirely. Greg was sure it was the other trapper, the one who’d destroyed his traps, trying to scare him off. And he was scared, at first—but then he could feel his face start to burn with anger. He had to get back at this guy somehow.

  Greg talked to Scott about it later that night, and they planned their revenge. Each of them had a .22 rifle, and they decided to bring them along the next time they went to check their traps. They pulled together all the ammunition they had and put the bullets into ten-round clips that they could easily switch whenever they emptied their guns.