God-damn! What the hell!
The fish ran deep again and I could feel its life energy screaming back up the line to my hand. The line felt like sound. It was like an ambulance siren coming straight at me, red light flashing, and then going away again and then taking to the air and becoming an air-raid siren.
The fish jumped a few more times and it still looked like a frog, but it didn’t have any legs. Then the fish grew tired and sloppy, and I swung and splashed it up the surface of the creek and into my net.
The fish was a twelve-inch rainbow trout with a huge hump on its back. A hunchback trout. The first I’d ever seen. The hump was probably due to an injury that occurred when the trout was young. Maybe a horse stepped on it or a tree fell over in a storm or its mother spawned where they were building abridge.
There was a fine thing about that trout. I only wish I could have made a death mask of him. Not of his body though, but of his energy. I don’t know if anyone would have understood his body. I put it in my creel.
Later in the afternoon when the telephone booths began to grow dark at the edges, I punched out of the creek and went home. I had that hunchback trout for dinner. Wrapped in cornmeal and fried in butter, its hump tasted sweet as the kisses of Esmeralda.
The Teddy Roosevelt Chingader’
The Challis National Forest was created July 1, 1908, by Executive Order of President Theodore Roosevelt . . . Twenty Million years ago, scientists tell us, three-toed horses, camels, and possibly rhinoceroses were plentiful in this section of the country.
This is part of my history in the Challis National Forest. We came over through Lowman after spending a little time with my woman’s Mormon relatives at McCall, where we learned about Spirit Prison and couldn’t find Duck Lake.
I carried the baby up the mountain. The sign said 1½ miles. There was a green sports car parked on the road. We walked up the trail until we met a man with a green sports car hat on and a girl in a light summer dress.
She had her dress rolled above her knees and when she saw us coming, she rolled her dress down. The man had a bottle of wine in his back pocket. The wine was in a long green bottle. It looked funny sticking out of his back pocket.
“How far is it to Spirit Prison?” I asked.
“You’re about half way,” he said.
The girl smiled. She had blonde hair and they went on down. Bounce, bounce, bounce, like a pair of birthday balls, down through the trees and boulders.
I put the baby down in a patch of snow lying in the hollow behind a big stump. She played in the snow and then started eating it. I remembered something from a book by Justice of the Supreme Court, William O. Douglas. DON’T EAT SNOW. IT’S BAD FOR YOU AND WILL GIVE YOU A STOMACH ACHE.
“Stop eating that snow!” I said to the baby.
I put her on my shoulders and continued up the path toward Spirit Prison. That’s where everybody who isn’t a Mormon goes when they die. All Catholics, Buddhists, Moslems, Jews, Baptists, Methodists and International Jewel Thieves. Everybody who isn’t a Mormon goes to the Spirit Slammer.
The sign said 1½ miles. The path was easy to follow, then it just stopped. We lost it near a creek. I looked all around. I looked on both sides of the creek, but the path had just vanished.
Could be the fact that we were still alive had something to do with it. Hard to tell.
We turned around and started back down the mountain. The baby cried when she saw the snow again, holding out her hands for the snow. We didn’t have time to stop. It was getting late.
We got in our car and drove back to McCall. That evening we talked about Communism. The Mormon girl read aloud to us from a book called The Naked Communist written by an ex-police chief of Salt Lake City.
My woman asked the girl if she believed the book were written under the influence of Divine Power, if she considered the book to be a religious text of some sort.
The girl said, “No.”
I bought a pair of tennis shoes and three pairs of socks at a store in McCall. The socks had a written guarantee. I tried to save the guarantee, but I put it in my pocket and lost it. The guarantee said that if anything happened to the socks within three months time, I would get new socks. It seemed like a good idea.
I was supposed to launder the old socks and send them in with the guarantee. Right off the bat, new socks would be on their way, traveling across America with my name on the package. Then all I would have to do, would be to open the package, take those new socks out and put them on. They would look good on my feet.
I wish I hadn’t lost that guarantee. That was a shame. I’ve had to face the fact that new socks are not going to be a family heirloom. Losing the guarantee took care of that. All future generations are on their own.
We left McCall the next day, the day after I lost the sock guarantee, following the muddy water of the North Fork of the Payette down and the clear water of the South Fork up.
We stopped at Lowman and had a strawberry milkshake and then drove back into the mountains along Clear Creek and over the summit to Bear Creek.
There were signs nailed to the trees all along Bear Creek, the signs said, “IF YOU FISH IN THIS CREEK, WE’LL HIT YOU IN THE HEAD.” I didn’t want to be hit in the head, so I kept my fishing tackle right there in the car.
We saw a flock of sheep. There’s a sound that the baby makes when she sees furry animals. She also makes that sound when she sees her mother and me naked. She made that sound and we drove out of the sheep like an airplane flies out of the clouds.
We entered Challis National Forest about five miles away from that sound. Driving now along Valley Creek, we saw the Sawtooth Mountains for the first time. It was clouding over and we thought it was going to rain.
“Looks like it’s raining in Stanley,” I said, though I had never been in Stanley before. It is easy to say things about Stanley when you have never been there. We saw the road to Bull Trout Lake. The road looked good. When we reached Stanley, the streets were white and dry like a collision at a high rate of speed between a cemetery and a truck loaded with sacks of flour.
We stopped at a store in Stanley. I bought a candy bar and asked how the trout fishing was in Cuba. The woman at the store said, “You’re better off dead, you Commie bastard.” I got a receipt for the candy bar to be used for income tax purposes.
The old ten-cent deduction.
I didn’t learn anything about fishing in that store. The people were awfully nervous, especially a young man who was folding overalls. He had about a hundred pairs left to fold and he was really nervous.
We went over to a restaurant and I had a hamburger and my woman had a cheeseburger and the baby ran in circles like a bat at the World’s Fair.
There was a girl there in her early teens or maybe she was only ten years old. She wore lipstick and had a loud voice and seemed to be aware of boys. She got a lot of fun out of sweeping the front porch of the restaurant.
She came in and played around with the baby. She was very good with the baby. Her voice dropped down and got soft with the baby. She told us that her father’d had a heart attack and was still in bed. “He can’t get up and around,” she said.
We had some more coffee and I thought about the Mormons. That very morning we had said good-bye to them, after having drunk coffee in their house.
The smell of coffee had been like a spider web in the house. It had not been an easy smell. It had not lent itself to religious contemplation, thoughts of temple work to be done in Salt Lake, dead relatives to be discovered among ancient papers in Illinois and Germany. Then more temple work to be done in Salt Lake.
The Mormon woman told us that when she had been married in the temple at Salt Lake, a mosquito had bitten her on the wrist just before the ceremony and her wrist had swollen up and become huge and just awful. It could’ve been seen through the lace by a blindman. She had been so embarrassed.
She told us that those Salt Lake mosquitoes always made her swell up when they bit her. Last year, she had t
old us, she’d been in Salt Lake, doing some temple work for a dead relative when a mosquito had bitten her and her whole body had swollen up. “I felt so embarrassed,” she had told us. “Walking around like a balloon.”
We finished our coffee and left. Not a drop of rain had fallen in Stanley. It was about an hour before sundown.
We drove up to Big Redfish Lake, about four miles from Stanley and looked it over. Big Redfish Lake is the Forest Lawn of camping in Idaho, laid out for maximum comfort. There were a lot of people camped there, and some of them looked as if they had been camped there for a long time.
We decided that we were too young to camp at Big Redfish Lake, and besides they charged fifty cents a day, three dollars a week like a skidrow hotel, and there were just too many people there. There were too many trailers and campers parked in the halls. We couldn’t get to the elevator because there was a family from New York parked there in a ten-room trailer.
Three children came by drinking rub-a-dub and pulling an old granny by her legs. Her legs were straight out and stiff and her butt was banging on the carpet. Those kids were pretty drunk and the old granny wasn’t too sober either, shouting something like, “Let the Civil War come again, I’m ready to fuck!”
We went down to Little Redfish Lake. The campgrounds there were just about abandoned. There were so many people up at Big Redfish Lake and practically nobody camping at Little Redfish Lake, and it was free, too.
We wondered what was wrong with the camp. If perhaps a camping plague, a sure destroyer that leaves all your camping equipment, your car ana your sex organs in tatters like old sails, had swept the camp just a few days before, and those few people who were staying at the camp now, were staying there because they didn’t have any sense.
We joined them enthusiastically. The camp had a beautiful view of the mountains. We found a place that really looked good, right on the lake.
Unit 4 had a stove. It was a square metal box mounted on a cement block. There was a stove pipe on top of the box, but there were no bullet holes in the pipe. I was amazed. Almost all the camp stoves we had seen in Idaho had been full of bullet holes. I guess it’s only reasonable that people, when they get the chance, would want to shoot some old stove sitting in the woods.
Unit 4 had a big wooden table with benches attached to it like a pair of those old Benjamin Franklin glasses, the ones with those funny square lenses. I sat down on the left lens, facing the Sawtooth Mountains. Like astigmatism, I made myself at home.
Footnote Chapter to “The Shipping of Trout Fishing in America Shorty to Nelson Algren”
Well, well, Trout Fishing in America Shorty’s back in town, but I don’t think it’s going to be the same as it was before. Those good old days are over because Trout Fishing in America Shorty is famous. The movies have discovered him.
Last week “The New Wave” took him out of his wheelchair and laid him out in a cobblestone alley. Then they shot some footage of him. He ranted and raved and they put it down on film.
Later on, probably, a different voice will be dubbed in. It will be a noble and eloquent voice denouncing man’s inhumanity to man in no uncertain terms.
“Trout Fishing in America Shorty, Mon Amour.”
His soliloquy beginning with, “I was once a famous skip-tracer known throughout America as ‘Grasshopper Nijinsky.’ Nothing was too good for me. Beautiful blondes followed me wherever I went.” Etc. . . . They’ll milk it for all it’s worth and make cream and butter from a pair of empty pants legs and a low budget.
But I may be all wrong. What was being shot may have been just a scene from a new science-fiction movie “Trout Fishing in America Shorty from Outer Space.” One of those cheap thrillers with the theme: Scientists, mad-or-otherwise, should never play God, that ends with the castle on fire and a lot of people walking home through the dark woods.
The Pudding Master of Stanley Basin
Tree, snow and rock beginnings, the mountain in back of the lake promised us eternity, but the lake itself was filled with thousands of silly minnows, swimming close to the shore and busy putting in hours of Mack Sennett time.
The minnows were an Idaho tourist attraction. They should have been made into a National Monument. Swimming close to shore, like children, they believed in their own immortality.
A third-year student in engineering at the University of Montana attempted to catch some of the minnows but he went about it all wrong. So did the children who came on the Fourth of July weekend.
The children waded out into the lake and tried to catch the minnows with their hands. They also used milk cartons and plastic bags. They presented the lake with hours of human effort. Their total catch was one minnow. It jumped out of a can full of water on their table and died under the table, gasping for watery breath while their mother fried eggs on the Coleman stove.
The mother apologized. She was supposed to be watching the fish—THIS IS MY EARTHLY FAILURE—holding the dead fish by the tail, the fish taking all the bows like a young Jewish comedian talking about Adlai Stevenson.
The third-year student in engineering at the University of Montana took a tin can and punched an elaborate design of holes in the can, the design running around and around in circles, like a dog with a fire hydrant in its mouth. Then he attached some string to the can and put a huge salmon egg and a piece of Swiss cheese in the can. After two hours of intimate and universal failure, he went back to Missoula, Montana.
The woman who travels with me discovered the best way to catch the minnows. She used a large pan that had in its bottom the dregs of a distant vanilla pudding. She put the pan in the shallow water along the shore and instantly, hundreds of minnows gathered around. Then, mesmerized by the vanilla pudding, they swam like a children’s crusade into the pan. She caught twenty fish with one dip. She put the pan full of fish on the shore and the baby played with the fish for an hour.
We watched the baby to make sure she was just leaning on them a little. We didn’t want her to kill any of them because she was too young.
Instead of making her furry sound, she adapted rapidly to the difference between animals and fish, and was soon making a silver sound.
She caught one of the fish with her hand and looked at it for a while. We took the fish out of her hand and put it back into the pan. After a while she was putting the fish back by herself.
Then she grew tired of this. She tipped the pan over and a dozen fish flopped out onto the shore. The children’s game and the banker’s game, she picked up those silver things, one at a time, and put them back in the pan. There was still a little water in it. The fish liked this. You could tell.
When she got tired of the fish, we put them back in the lake, and they were all quite alive, but nervous. I doubt if they will ever want vanilla pudding again.
Room 208, Hotel Trout Fishing in America
Half a block from Broadway and Columbus is Hotel Trout Fishing in America, a cheap hotel. It is very old and run by some Chinese. They are young and ambitious Chinese and the lobby is filled with the smell of Lysol.
The Lysol sits like another guest on the stuffed furniture, reading a copy of the Chronicle, the Sports Section. It is the only furniture I have ever seen in my life that looks like baby food.
And the Lysol sits asleep next to an old Italian pensioner who listens to the heavy ticking of the clock and dreams of eternity’s golden pasta, sweet basil and Jesus Christ.
The Chinese are always doing something to the hotel. One week they paint a lower banister and the next week they put some new wallpaper on part of the third floor.
No matter how many times you pass that part of the third floor, you cannot remember the color of the wallpaper or what the design is. All you know is that part of the wallpaper is new. It is different from the old wallpaper. But you cannot remember what that looks like either.
One day the Chinese take a bed out of a room and lean it up against the wall. It stays there for a month. You get used to seeing it and then you go by one day a
nd it is gone You wonder where it went.
I remember the first time I went inside Hotel Trout Fishing in America. It was with a friend to meet some people.
“I’ll tell you what’s happening,” he said. “She’s an ex-hustler who works for the telephone company. He went to medical school for a while during the Great Depression and then he went into show business. After that, he was an errand boy for an abortion mill in Los Angeles. He took a fall and did some time in San Quentin.
“I think you’ll like them. They’re good people.
“He met her a couple of years ago in North Beach. She was hustling for a spade pimp. It’s kind of weird. Most women have the temperament to be a whore, but she’s one of these rare women who just don’t have it—the whore temperament. She’s Negro, too.
“She was a teenage girl living on a farm in Oklahoma. The pimp drove by one afternoon and saw her playing in the front yard He stopped his car and got out and talked to her father for a while.
“I guess he gave her father some money. He came up with something good because her father told her to go and get her things. So she went with the pimp. Simple as that.
“He took her to San Francisco and turned her out and she hated it. He kept her in line by terrorizing her all the time. He was a real sweetheart.
“She had some brains, so he got her a job with the telephone company during the day, and he had her hustling at night.
“When Art took her away from him, he got pretty mad. A good thing and all that. He used to break into Art’s hotel room in the middle of the night and put a switchblade to Art’s throat and rant and rave. Art kept putting bigger and bigger locks on the door, but the pimp just kept breaking in—a huge fellow.
“So Art went out and got a .32 pistol, and the next time the pimp broke in, Art pulled the gun out from underneath the covers and jammed it into the pimp’s mouth and said, ‘You’ll be out of luck the next time you come through that door, Jack.’ This broke the pimp up. He never went back. The pimp certainly lost a good thing.
Trout Fishing in America Page 6