The kids, frightened and embarrassed, would wheel Trout Fishing in America Shorty into the store. It would always be a store that sold sweet wine, and he would buy a bottle of wine and then he’d have the kids wheel him back out onto the street, and he would open the wine and start drinking there on the street just like he was Winston Churchill.
After a while the children would run and hide when they saw Trout Fishing in America Shorty coming.
“I pushed him last week,”
“I pushed him yesterday,”
“Quick, let’s hide behind these garbage cans.”
And they would hide behind the garbage cans while Trout Fishing in America Shorty staggered by in his wheelchair.
The kids would hold their breath until he was gone.
Trout Fishing in America Shorty used to go down to L’Italia, the Italian newspaper in North Beach at Stockton and Green Streets. Old Italians gather in front of the newspaper in the afternoon and just stand there, leaning up against the building, talking and dying in the sun.
Trout Fishing in America Shorty used to wheel into the middle of them as if they were a bunch of pigeons, bottle of wine in hand, and begin shouting obscenities in fake Italian.
Tra-la-la-la-la-la-Spa-ghet-tiii!
I remember Trout Fishing in America Shorty passed out in Washington Square, right in front of the Benjamin Franklin statue He had fallen face first out of his wheelchair and just lay there without moving.
Snoring loudly.
Above him were the metal works of Benjamin Franklin like a clock, hat in hand.
Trout Fishing in America Shorty lay there below, his face spread out like a fan in the grass.
A friend and I got to talking about Trout Fishing in America Shorty one afternoon. We decided the best thing to do with him was to pack him in a big shipping crate with a couple of cases of sweet wine and send him to Nelson Algren.
Nelson Algren is always writing about Railroad Shorty, a hero of the Neon Wilderness (the reason for “The Face on the Barroom Floor”) and the destroyer of Dove Linkhorn in A Walk on the Wild Side.
We thought that Nelson Algren would make the perfect custodian for Trout Fishing in America Shorty. Maybe a museum might be started. Trout Fishing in America Shorty could be the first piece in an important collection.
We would nail him up in a packing crate with a big label on it.
Contents:
Trout Fishing in America Shorty
Occupation:
Wino
Address:
C/O Nelson Algren
Chicago
And there would be stickers all over the crate, saying: “GLASS/HANDLE WITH CARE/SPECIAL HANDLING/GLASS/DON’T SPILL/THIS SIDE UP/HANDLE THIS WINO LIKE HE WAS AN ANGEL”
And Trout Fishing in America Shorty, grumbling, puking and cursing in his crate would travel across America, from San Francisco to Chicago.
And Trout Fishing in America Shorty, wondering what it was all about, would travel on, shouting, “Where in the hell am I? I can’t see to open this bottle! Who turned out the lights? Fuck this motel! I have to take a piss! Where’s my key?”
It was a good idea.
A few days after we made our plans for Trout Fishing in America Shorty, a heavy rain was pouring down upon San Francisco. The rain turned the streets inward, like drowned lungs, upon themselves and I was hurrying to work, meeting swollen gutters at the intersections.
I saw Trout Fishing in America Shorty passed out in the front window of a Filipino laundromat. He was sitting in his wheelchair with closed eyes staring out the window.
There was a tranquil expression on his face. He almost looked human. He had probably fallen asleep while he was having his brains washed in one of the machines.
Weeks passed and we never got around to shipping Trout Fishing in America Shorty away to Nelson Algren. We kept putting it off. One thing and another. Then we lost our golden opportunity because Trout Fishing in America Shorty disappeared a little while after that.
They probably swept him up one morning and put him in jail to punish him, the evil fart, or they put him in a nuthouse to dry him out a little.
Maybe Trout Fishing in America Shorty just pedaled down to San Jose in his wheelchair, rattling along the freeway at a quarter of a mile an hour.
I don’t know what happened to him. But if he comes back to San Francisco someday and dies, I have an idea.
Trout Fishing in America Shorty should be buried right beside the Benjamin Franklin statue in Washington Square. We should anchor his wheelchair to a huge gray stone and write upon the stone:
Trout Fishing in America Shorty
20¢ Wash
10¢ Dry
Forever
The Mayor of the Twentieth Century
London. On December 1, 1887; July 7, August 8, September 30, one day in the month of October and on the 9th of November, 1888; on the 1st of June, the 17th of July and the 10th of September 1889 . . .
The disguise was perfect.
Nobody ever saw him, except, of course, the victims. They saw him.
Who would have expected?
He wore a costume of trout fishing in America. He wore mountains on his elbows and bluejays on the collar of his shirt. Deep water flowed through the lilies that were entwined about his shoelaces. A bullfrog kept croaking in his watch pocket and the air was filled with the sweet smell of ripe blackberry bushes.
He wore trout fishing in America as a costume to hide his own appearance from the world while he performed his deeds of murder in the night.
Who would have expected?
Nobody!
Scotland Yard?
(Pouf!)
They were always a hundred miles away, wearing halibutstalker hats, looking under the dust.
Nobody ever found out.
O, now he’s the Mayor of the Twentieth Century! A razor, a knife and a ukelele are his favorite instruments.
Of course, it would have to be a ukelele. Nobody else would have thought of it, pulled like a plow through the intestines.
On Paradise
“Speaking of evacuations, your missive, while complete in other regards, skirted the subject, though you did deal briefly with rural micturition procedure. I consider this a gross oversight on your part, as I’m certain you’re well aware of my unending fascination with camp-out crapping. Please rush details in your next effort. Slit-trench, pith helmet, slingshot biffy and if so number of holes and proximity of keester to vermin and deposits of prior users.”
—From a Letter by a Friend
Sheep. Everything smelled of sheep on Paradise Creek, but there were no sheep in sight. I fished down from the ranger station where there was a huge monument to the Civilian Conservation Corps.
It was a twelve-foot high marble statue of a young man walking out on a cold morning to a crapper that had the classic half-moon cut above the door.
The 1930s will never come again, but his shoes were wet with dew. They’ll stay that way in marble.
I went off into the marsh. There the creek was soft and spread out in the grass like a beer belly. The fishing was difficult. Summer ducks were jumping up into flight. They were big mallards with their Rainier Ale-like offspring.
I believe I saw a woodcock. He had a long bill like putting a fire hydrant into a pencil sharpener, then pasting it onto a bird and letting the bird fly away in front of me with this thing on its face for no other purpose than to amaze me.
I worked my way slowly out of the marsh until the creek again became a muscular thing, the strongest Paradise Creek in the world. I was then close enough to see the sheep. There were hundreds of them.
Everything smelled of sheep. The dandelions were suddenly more sheep than flower, each petal reflecting wool and the sound of a bell ringing off the yellow. But the thing that smelled the most like sheep, was the very sun itself. When the sun went behind a cloud, the smell of the sheep decreased, like standing on some old guy’s hearing aid, and when the sun came back again, the smell o
f the sheep was loud, like a clap of thunder inside a cup of coffee.
That afternoon the sheep crossed the creek in front of my hook. They were so close that their shadows fell across my bait. I practically caught trout up their assholes.
The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari
Once water bugs were my field. I remember that childhood spring when I studied the winter-long mud puddles of the Pacific Northwest. I had a fellowship.
My books were a pair of Sears Roebuck boots, ones with green rubber pages. Most of my classrooms were close to the shore. That’s where the important things were happening and that’s where the good things were happening.
Sometimes as experiments I laid boards out into the mud puddles, so I could look into the deeper water but it was not nearly as good as the water in close to the shore.
The water bugs were so small I practically had to lay my vision like a drowned orange on the mud puddle. There is a romance about fruit floating outside on the water, about apples and pears in rivers and lakes. For the first minute or so, I saw nothing, and then slowly the water bugs came into being.
I saw a black one with big teeth chasing a white one with a bag of newspapers slung over its shoulder, two white ones playing cards near the window, a fourth white one staring back with a harmonica in its mouth.
I was a scholar until the mud puddles went dry and then I picked cherries for two-and-a-half cents a pound in an old orchard that was beside a long, hot dusty road.
The cherry boss was a middle-aged woman who was a real Okie. Wearing a pair of goofy overalls, her name was Rebel Smith, and she’d been a friend of “Pretty Boy” Floyd’s down in Oklahoma. “I remember one afternoon ‘Pretty Boy’ came driving up in his car. I ran out onto the front porch.”
Rebel Smith was always smoking cigarettes and showing people how to pick cherries and assigning them to trees and writing down everything in a little book she carried in her shirt pocket. She smoked just half a cigarette and then threw the other half on the ground.
For the first few days of the picking, I was always seeing her half-smoked cigarettes lying all over the orchard, near the John and around the trees and down the rows.
Then she hired half-a-dozen bums to pick cherries because the picking was going too slowly. Rebel picked the bums up on skidrow every morning and drove them out to the orchard in a rusty old truck. There were always half-a-dozen bums, but sometimes they had different faces.
After they came to pick cherries I never saw any more of her half-smoked cigarettes lying around. They were gone before they hit the ground. Looking back on it, you might say that Rebel Smith was anti-mud puddle, but then you might not say that at all.
The Salt Creek Coyotes
High and lonesome and steady, it’s the smell of sheep down in the valley that has done it to them. Here all afternoon in the rain I’ve been listening to the sound of the coyotes up on Salt Creek.
The smell of the sheep grazing in the valley has done it to them. Their voices water and come down the canyon, past the summer homes. Their voices are a creek, running down the mountain, over the bones of sheep, living and dead.
O, THERE ARE COYOTES UP ON SALT CREEK so the sign on the trail says, and it also says, WATCH OUT FOR CYANIDE CAPSULES PUT ALONG THE CREEK TO KILL COYOTES. DON’T PICK THEM UP AND EAT THEM. NOT UNLESS YOU’RE A COYOTE. THEY’LL KILL YOU. LEAVE THEM ALONE.
Then the sign says this all over again in Spanish. ¡AH! HAY COYOTES EN SALT CREEK, TAMBIEN. CUIDADO CON LAS CAPSULAS DE CIANURO: MATAN. NO LAS COMA; A MENOS QUE SEA VD. UN COYOTE. MATAN. NO LAS TOQUE.
It does not say it in Russian.
I asked an old guy in a bar about those cyanide capsules up on Salt Creek and he told me that they were a kind of pistol. They put a pleasing coyote scent on the trigger (probably the smell of a coyote snatch) and then a coyote comes along and gives it a good sniff, a fast feel and BLAM! That’s all, brother.
I went fishing up on Salt Creek and caught a nice little Dolly Varden trout, spotted and slender as a snake you’d expect to find in a jewelry store, but after a while I could think only of the gas chamber at San Quentin.
O Caryl Chessman and Alexander Robillard Vistas! as if they were names for tracts of three-bedroom houses with wall-to-wall carpets and plumbing that defies the imagination.
Then it came to me up there on Salt Creek, capital punishment being what it is, an act of state business with no song down the railroad track after the train has gone and no vibration on the rails, that they should take the head of a coyote killed by one of those God-damn cyanide things up on Salt Creek and hollow it out and dry it in the sun and then make it into a crown with the teeth running in a circle around the top of it and a nice green light coming off the teeth.
Then the witnesses and newspapermen and gas chamber flunkies would have to watch a king wearing a coyote crown die there in front of them, the gas rising in the chamber like a rain mist drifting down the mountain from Salt Creek. It has been raining here now for two days, and through the trees, the heart stops beating.
The Hunchback Trout
The creek was made narrow by little green trees that grew too close together. The creek was like 12,845 telephone booths in a row with high Victorian ceilings and all the doors taken off and all the backs of the booths knocked out.
Sometimes when I went fishing in there, I felt just like a telephone repairman, even though I did not look like one. I was only a kid covered with fishing tackle, but in some strange way by going in there and catching a few trout, I kept the telephones in service. I was an asset to society.
It was pleasant work, but at times it made me uneasy. It could grow dark in there instantly when there were some clouds in the sky and they worked their way onto the sun. Then you almost needed candles to fish by, and foxfire in your reflexes.
Once I was in there when it started raining. It was dark and hot and steamy. I was of course on overtime. I had that going in my favor. I caught seven trout in fifteen minutes.
The trout in those telephone booths were good fellows. There were a lot of young cutthroat trout six to nine inches long, perfect pan size for local calls. Sometimes there were a few fellows, eleven inches or so—for the long distance calls.
I’ve always liked cutthroat trout. They put up a good fight, running against the bottom and then broad jumping. Under their throats they fly the orange banner of Jack the Ripper.
Also in the creek were a few stubborn rainbow trout, seldom heard from, but there all the same, like certified public accountants. I’d catch one every once in a while. They were fat and chunky, almost as wide as they were long. I’ve heard those trout called “squire” trout.
It used to take me about an hour to hitchhike to that creek. There was a river nearby. The river wasn’t much. The creek was where I punched in. Leaving my card above the clock, I’d punch out again when it was time to go home.
I remember the afternoon I caught the hunchback trout.
A farmer gave me a ride in a truck. He picked me up at a traffic signal beside a bean field and he never said a word to me.
His stopping and picking me up and driving me down the road was as automatic a thing to him as closing the barn door, nothing need be said about it, but still I was in motion traveling thirty-five miles an hour down the road, watching houses and groves of trees go by, watching chickens and mailboxes enter and pass through my vision.
Then I did not see any houses for a while. “This is where I get out,” I said.
The farmer nodded his head. The truck stopped.
“Thanks a lot,” I said.
The farmer did not ruin his audition for the Metropolitan Opera by making a sound. He just nodded his head again. The truck started up. He was the original silent old farmer.
A little while later I was punching in at the creek. I put my card above the clock and went into that long tunnel of telephone booths.
I waded about seventy-three telephone booths in. I caught two trout in a little hole that was like a wagon wheel
. It was one of my favorite holes, and always good for a trout or two.
I always like to think of that hole as a kind of pencil sharpener. I put my reflexes in and they came back out with a good point on them. Over a period of a couple of years, I must have caught fifty trout in that hole, though it was only as big as a wagon wheel.
I was fishing with salmon eggs and using a size 14 single egg hook on a pound and a quarter test tippet. The two trout laTin my creel covered entirely by green ferns, ferns made gentle and fragile by the damp walls of telephone booths.
The next good place was forty-five telephone booths in. The place was at the end of a run of gravel, brown and slippery with algae. The run of gravel dropped off and disappeared at a little shelf where there were some white rocks.
One of the rocks was kind of strange. It was a flat white rock. Off by itself from the other rocks, it reminded me of a white cat I had seen in my childhood.
The cat had fallen or been thrown off a high wooden side walk that went along the side of a hill in Tacoma, Washington. The cat was lying in a parking lot below.
The fall had not appreciably helped the thickness of the cat, and then a few people had parked their cars on the cat. Of course, that was a long time ago and the cars looked different from the way they look now.
You hardly see those cars any more. They are the old cars. They have to get off the highway because they can’t keep up.
That flat white rock off by itself from the other rocks reminded me of that dead cat come to lie there in the creek, among 12,845 telephone booths.
I threw out a salmon egg and let it drift down over that rock and WHAM! a good hit! and I had the fish on and it ran hard downstream, cutting at an angle and staying deep and really coming on hard, solid and uncompromising, and then the fish jumped and for a second I thought it was I frog. I’d never seen a fish like that before.
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