by Ava Finch
There is a scrolling marquee listing the entertainment and demo schedule at the top of the escalator. A dance troupe called the White Tails is slated for noon. The Mermen Nabbertackle Choir will be opening for a Billy Ray Cyrus impersonator named Willie Ray Cyrus. The master of ceremonies is the most famous fishing-show host of all time, Rob Mack from the Trout Channel, whom RayAnne would have wagered money on having died, maybe more than once, making her wonder if the Trout Channel doesn’t trot out a Rob Mack lookalike now and then like CBS did with Lassie. The early-evening wrap-up is a fashion show of waders, quick-wicking underwear, and fishing vests from the clothier FishunFashun. Under “Just for the Ladies” is an appearance by beefcake calendar favorite Mr. Northern Tool. Under “Activities,” there’s Casting for Beginners and a chef’s demonstration for cooking freshwater bisque at Lefty’s Bait and Tackle.
“Our Lefty’s?”
Cassi’s taking more video with her phone. “Yup.”
“Do we have to go?”
“You should at least introduce yourself to the underwriters.”
As they descend the escalator, the scope of the expo is stunning, the size of a small town, a grid of aisles with street signs. It’s surrounded by several stages for entertainment, two food courts, and elaborately constructed environments, like the fake blue Mylar lake showcasing yachts and bass boats. There’s an archery field where plastic target deer stand in fake grass and shudder each time they are struck with graphite arrows flung from complicated bows. There is a wall of fiberglass cliffs populated with taxidermy elk and rams. There’s a long line to get into the Lucite-walled shooting range where the moving target posters are human silhouettes. Gun barrels poke from portable duck blinds aimed at flocks of stuffed mallards and geese suspended from above by wires.
The escalator deposits them on Winchester Avenue, where they are immediately absorbed into a current of men that surges and slows at booths like MuskTang Sally’s, where a shivering teen in a fur bikini hands out scratch-and-sniff samples of game scents: Doe Potion Number Nine, Madam Gazelle, and CariBooty. There are, in fact, many products and weapons being proffered and suggestively caressed by scantily clad girls.
Most booths have video monitors looping presentations or infomercials of their products and services, such as the one featuring a chicken pecking at the ground, minding its own business, then exploding after being shot with a new improved ammunition. The air is filled with the twang of country music, pips of muffled gunfire, and the natterings of three thousand men. Exhaust fans drone but cannot clear the odors of cordite, barbeque sauce, and AXE.
It suddenly dawns on Cassi, and she elbows RayAnne. “We’re supposed to solicit memberships for WYOY here?”
RayAnne answers glumly, “You see why I resisted?”
Cassi shrugs. “Well, they have paid for a booth . . . so I suppose it’s the exposure that’s important?”
“Pragmatist.”
“It might even be interesting.” Seeing RayAnne’s look, she adds, “In a socio-anthropological sort of way, of course. Or maybe we could sneak out early?”
RayAnne has never been able to sneak out of anything. “There’re probably sponsors lurking around taking notes.”
Along the way they are distracted by a wire enclosure of water spaniels and retriever puppies. “Aw, look.”
When RayAnne bends, a boy quickly steps in front of her. “You can’t pet ’em, lady. They’re bein’ trained.”
Just across the aisle from the puppies is a demo kitchen where a man wearing a chef’s hat and a bandolier of ammo across his chest serves up little samples of game bird he’s cooked over an electric grill.
“I’m starving,” Cassi says, tugging RayAnne. The chef is explaining how the product, Spice Shot, works, spreading out his cartridges. “You got your Lemon Pepper, Cajun Spice, Traditional, and Teriyaki. All packed right here in this ammo, ’cept there’s no birdshot, just rock salt, so nothing to break your teeth on. Just load up a flavor cartridge, cock, and kill. Your bird is seasoned before it hits the ground!”
The smell of pheasant is making the puppies crazy, so that they jump and strain against the fence, yelping and falling back when their shock collars buzz.
RayAnne pulls Cassi along. “Let’s just find our spot.” She consults her map and in five minutes they’ve located the RV. It’s parked on Astroturf with the back end, the Tiffany end, smack on the aisle, exhaust pipes front and center. “Great.”
The tables have stacks of giveaway calendars and logo pens for her to sign with in the event anyone might want her autograph. There’s a pair of iPads loaded with WYOY pledge forms and Square to accept donations. They rearrange the booth and look through the promo merchandise, T-shirts and mugs stamped “Get Hooked”; “Good Things Come to Those Who Bait”; “Catch, Release, Repeat (Sundays at 6 p.m. WYOY)”; “I’m a Woman, I Fish. Deal with It.” There are a dozen boxes under the table filled with more swag than they will ever get rid of. Cassi checks her watch, saying brightly, “Only seven hours to go.”
“Don’t forget tomorrow.” At least RayAnne has something to look forward to—the day after the expo ends, she goes directly to Florida for an entire week to visit her grandmother, where she will do little more than read, lie around on the beach with her brother and nephews, and throw a party—Dot is turning eighty. RayAnne pulls out a tattered paperback from her backpack, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, which has been an effective sedative every night for the past week. After two pages she sighs. “What’ve you got?”
“Piercr.” Cassi wriggles down with her iPhone. “It’s the steampunker’s Grindr.” After a half hour, no passersby have stopped, though many men slow to examine the female end of the RV and comment on her barrels. Cassi makes a “Free” sign for the stack of calendars and pushes them closer to the aisle.
Two guys elbow each other and point to Tiffany, one asking RayAnne, “When’s she showing up?”
“Ah . . . later.” RayAnne looks over her glasses. “If you become a WYOY member, you get a mug or one of these T-shirts.”
Cassi hands one over. “When Tiffany comes back she’ll autograph that for you. While you’re wearing it.”
RayAnne shoots her a look. “But only if you sign up at the Lunker Level.”
The man looks at the literature on the table, including the small “NPT” sign. “Yeah? What the hell is NPT again?”
“National Public Television.”
“And I’m supposed to pay to watch it?”
Cassi crosses her arms. “You pay for cable.”
“Point.” He turns to his friend and jerks his head at Tiffany. “Al, you ever seen this chick on TV?”
Al shrugs. “Not really. My wife watches this show. It’s like Oprah in a boat.”
“It is?” RayAnne asks.
The guy takes out his wallet and holds his credit card like he might snatch it back. “I want a mug and a shirt.”
By three p.m., the table is littered with empty coffee cups, yogurt containers, and expo swag Cassi has harvested on her forays out into the aisles. She’s just arrived with more, asking, “Any more suckahs?”
“Only one since you left,” RayAnne says. “That’s a grand total of a dozen.” She holds up the T-shirt she’s signed with a fat red marker, To Studmuffin Dave, Tiffany! “We’ll just tell them she’s come and gone. Here they all are, personalized; we’ll tell them it’s lipstick.”
“To Steamin’ Steven? That’s a lot of hearts.”
They go through Cassi’s recent score: bullet-shaped candy, logo fridge magnets, billed caps, trout-shaped oven mitts—only one tasteful item, a calendar of old ads for fishing gear from Lefty’s Bait, the single item RayAnne sets aside for herself. Another calendar is from a gun company, featuring half-nude coeds posing suggestively with semiautomatic weapons. Cassi snorts at February and its G-string-clad girl riding a semiautomatic. “So, happiness is a war
m gun?”
August is even more offensive. “Oh, come on.” RayAnne frowns. “That cannot taste good.”
Cassi is ready to toss the calendar when she notices it comes with a little translucent package. “Look,” she says. “A camo-condom!”
“That alone . . .” RayAnne shudders. “That could rocket me over the fence.”
Above their heads, a flat screen aimed at the aisle plays a video that no one pays the slightest bit of attention to, probably because RayAnne has set the volume to barely audible. It loops a collection of impromptu shorts and outtakes from the show. In the first, RayAnne is busy outfitting her line and choosing bait, gently pawing through her tackle box, talking as if thinking aloud.
“What draws me to fishing? I suppose the act of it, you know? It’s so . . . hopeful. Though I think catching fish is really overemphasized and overrated. I mean, unless you’re feeding your family or work on a trawler, getting skunked is no tragedy. Fishing is peaceful, you’re in a boat, and the world is back there on shore. For me . . . for me, it’s a way to think, to relax.” She begins doing something that requires both hands, holding the line between her teeth while talking. “Sho there’s the occasional triumph, you might get a fighter, shome exshitement . . .” Caught up in the motions of tying her leader, she severs the line with a bite, then, remembering the camera, she looks up and says, “Oh, but don’t do what I just did . . . unless you have dental coverage. Where was I? Oh, yeah. Catching a fish can be fun, but the old saying? Anticipation is the purest form of pleasure? That’s it, just getting out there is what matters, that’s our goal here on Fishing.”
Such monologues weren’t scripted; in fact most were filmed candidly when she thought she was merely answering casual questions from the crew. The tapes were dug up after responses from audiences indicated they most liked RayAnne when she was just being herself. She wasn’t initially keen on the idea of the videos, but after seeing them edited and strung together, they seemed okay after all, maybe because she meant what she said on them—that, at best, fishing is merely a sort of meditation with no agenda, how, in a boat, calm has a chance to surface. That sometimes doing next to nothing is important.
RayAnne pops up. “I gotta stretch my legs. Want anything? Coke? Assault rifle?”
“Nah.” Cassi barely looks up, engrossed in a new game, boots propped. “Hey, stop in at Lefty’s. I told them you’d be by.”
“Great. Thanks.”
Vendors she passes promote everything from feather-light titanium rods and strap-on depth finders to Ferrari-style bass boats with matching trailers priced many times more than an average car. Expos are geared to portray fishing as an alpha sport, requiring state-of-the-art everything, all designed to tempt males of a certain age with expendable incomes to own the fastest boat or most enviable rod, men with wallets crammed with bills in higher denominations than their emotional IQs. The place teems with them.
She’s a little twitchy passing the booths that sell weapons and handguns, and is reminded of Bernadette’s philosophy on gun issues. Whenever a school shooting or murder is in the news, Bernadette goes a little rabid. “If only knives would come back into fashion! Murder would be so much rarer. Any coward can shoot a gun; it’d actually take balls to kill someone with a knife, up close and visceral.” Her mother has a point. If drive-by killings entailed throwing rounds of knives out of moving car windows, inner-city streets would become nursery-safe. No one’s going to hold up a Kwik Trip with a Leatherman.
No doubt Bernadette would label the men at the expo less evolved for the enjoyment they take in stalking and killing. Looking around, there is admittedly not much introspection going on at the corner of Glock Lane and Taxidermy Avenue. Near an exit, RayAnne waffles, pining for fresh air, but her vendor tag is back in the booth acting as a bookmark, so she might not get back in the door without it . . . which might not be such a bad thing, except she hasn’t got her phone either.
At the concession stand, greasy hot dogs ride little Ferris wheels under heat lamps. She buys the only healthy thing on offer, a smoothie, sucking it down at a stand-up table chosen because it’s too small to share. On the way back, she stops in a bathroom, but upon leaving turns the wrong way. By the time she realizes, she’s deep into the weapons side of the convention hall, dead-ended under a banner emblazoned “Steve and Steve’s Kill Cam!”
There’s no one in the Kill Cam booth, but on a wide video screen, two men in fatigues stand stiffly with hands clasped over their groins. Steve and Steve bellow in tandem, “Film the kill! Relive the hunt!” They demonstrate how to attach the Kill Cam to a rifle barrel and operate it like a scope. Squinting at their cue cards, they pitch. “One great way to remember a great hunt!” says Steve. “Who says that you cannot hunt out of season?” Other Steve asks. The scene cuts to them reclining in loungers watching a massive flat screen where a felled doe twitches on bloodstained snow.
“Jeezus,” RayAnne mutters. “How gr—”
“Grisly?” The low voice comes from directly behind.
Turning, she says, “Gruesome.”
She blinks at a face she recognizes but cannot place. It takes a beat. The man frowning up at the screen is the guy from the WYOY parking lot. The dimpled musician, so far out of context she grows slightly flummoxed. He takes a step forward, still fastened to the screen. “You suppose they write their own copy?”
“You assuming they can write?”
“There’s that.” He has a deep laugh.
“Have we met?” she asks, immediately thinking, Is that the best you can come up with?
“Not formally.” He grins. “But I’ve been hoping to, actually. I’m Hal. Hal Bergen.”
He says it in a way that makes her think she should know him, but she cannot think why. Offering her hand, she automatically braces to receive the crushing, knuckle-aligning handshake men at these sorts of events tend to employ—the testosterone squeeze, the you’re playing a man’s game here, little lady crush. But his clasp is light and wrong. She looks down to see his hand is half encased in a sort of brace, like a leather golf glove with stays. After a slice of silence during which she stupidly stares, he eases his hand away, winking. “Bad day at the sawmill.”
She laughs, assuming she’s meant to. His other hand seems okay.
“How’s the show been for you so far?” he asks.
“This show?”
She can be such an idiot. Her brother Kyle claims that, around men, her social skills regress to age ten, suggesting she might adopt any approach besides her own. The guy—whose name she has promptly forgotten—is better looking than she remembers, but then she’s up close now, wearing glasses (not her lovely new glasses of course, but the clunky Harry Potter ones). Her hair is jammed in a clip; she’s not wearing a smidgeon of makeup. He, on the other hand, looks professionally styled to a state of semiscruff as if for an indie album cover shoot. His hair is a dark mop threaded with early silver. He’s got the sort of eyelashes wasted on a man, and his mouth is particularly good, dimples exactly where she would have placed them herself.
Ky claims she’s unfairly wary of handsome men because of Big Rick.
“Um, are we supposed to know each other?”
“Supposed to?” He looks slightly puzzled. “Well, no, not . . . Ah, you mean fraternize?”
“I’m not sure . . . what I mean.” Now flummoxed might as well be stamped across her forehead. As it tends to in awkward situations, her flight instinct kicks in and she surveys the aisle over his shoulder. “Anyway, yeah, I should really get back.”
“Oh?” He’s clearly disappointed.
She shrugs. “Good to meet you . . .”
“Good to meet you too, RayAnne. See you later, I hope?”
Later? She’s halfway down the aisle before slowing. He knew her name? She hadn’t offered it. Maybe he works at one of the businesses that share the same building as WYOY, like the al
t-rock FM station on the eighth floor, or the wind-power turbine distributor. Might he be one of the dozen male viewers watching the show? Remembering where she meant to go in the first place, she pats multiple pockets, but her expo map is gone, probably left at the concession stand. She turns back, hoping the guy might have one, or maybe know where Lefty’s Bait is, but he’s gone, the only sounds more gunshots erupting from speakers at the Kill Cam booth and more pips of gunfire from the indoor shooting range.
She aims herself past another aisle of weapon booths. At the NRA stage a crowd is gathered to hear what’s-his-Wayne holding forth on his ten-point plan to train and arm grade-school hall monitors, while a boy wearing body armor walks the length of the stage before turning awkwardly like a model, not quite carrying it off under the weight of the vest and the firearm. She shudders, thinks of her twin nephews, while Mr. LaPierre bombasts. Her brother Ky maintains that when it comes down to it, those who deserve it rarely get gunned down.
A shortcut takes her through the marina, a relative oasis compared to the rest of the expo. At the Evinrude dock she sees Roger Lyndon and instinctively ducks to avoid his radar. Too late—he’s made eye contact and one bushy eyebrow has jumped. His voice isn’t loud and carries his words like cargo on a barge. “Hey, hey, hey. Look who we have here! Miss RayAnne Dahl.” Roger is surrounded by the usual interchangeable klatch of minions not yet fired, ready to trip over each other to fetch whatever Roger snaps his fingers at.
“Uncle Roger.” It’s what she has called him since she was five. Forget that the word “uncle” conjures protective or trustworthy. Roger is nobody’s uncle; he’s the Don Corleone of pro fishing—if a favor needs doing or a deal needs cutting, it’s Uncle Roger one goes to. She feels his gaze ooze across her and somehow take in everything, front and back. RayAnne feels her confidence peel to the floor like some yellow skin to skid on with the next misstep. As he reaches for her, she steps squarely backwards and extends a hand for him to shake. He practically tuts and presses her hand aside to pull her into a cloying embrace, ripe with cigar smoke and Old Spice, snugging her too closely and for a beat too long, as if waiting for her to relax into the grip she’s already wiggling from.