Back Seat with Fish

by Henry Hughes

  “We catch trout,” my third grade friend Arthur Wakoski told me. “Maybe you can come with us.” Arthur came from a fishing and hunting family. His father was a plumber, his mother a high-school teacher. Their house was dank and odorous with a huge algae-veiled 80-gallon aquarium stocked with sunfish, bass, and a young pickerel that was eating his way toward solitude. Splotchy English setters had the run of the place; guns, antlers, and mounted gamebirds sprung from the walls. And walking into Arthur’s garage was like wading into a ransacked sporting-goods store—rods and tackle in wild profusion, stacks of decoys, coolers, nets, boots, boxes of ammunition. Through Arthur, I was introduced to the open-faced spinning reel, the importance of light line, split-shot sinkers, and seductive lures. There were fly rods in Arthur’s garage, but those were his father’s, and we were not to touch.

  The trout season in New York State opened on April first. Mr. Wakoski was taking Arthur and me fishing at Lower Yapank Lake, a millpond on Long Island’s Carmans River. I was nine years old on opening day in 1975. It was a Tuesday, and Mr. Wakoski took a day off work. My mother gave me permission to skip school.

  The Wakoskis picked me up before dawn in their Chevy Blazer with a ten-foot square-bowed jon boat sticking out the back. Mr. W was a big man prone to flatulence, Arthur was chubby, and I was fat, and we all sat up close in the front seat. “Do you think trout is the most important fish in America?” I asked Mr. W.

  “That’s a stupid question,” he said.

  “I thought maybe the bass is the most famous. I don’t know if that would include the striped bass. I was talking about the largemouth bass. But everyone seems to love the trout. We don’t have salmon. What kind of trout will we catch today?”

  “Tickle trout,” Mr. W said, staring into the headlit morning.

  “I’ve never heard of it.”

  “Oh, yeah. They raise them in special hatcheries. And if you hook one and get it alongside the boat, you need to reach down and tickle it.”

  We arrived at Yapank Lake just as it was getting light, parking below a creepy Victorian mansion with one cracked window aglow. A man and a boy my age were casting from the bank, and I walked over and asked if they had caught any tickle trout. “What?” the boy laughed. The man just ignored me and kept casting.

  Arthur and I helped pull the jon boat from the back of the Blazer and slide it partway into the lake. Jon boats were popular with fishermen and waterfowlers on Long Island. Flat bottomed, square ended, and low to the water, they were convenient and stable in calm lakes and bays. “Cast off,” I cried, our awkward weight suspended like a magic carpet over the dark water. I started asking questions about the depth and temperature of the lake, and Mr. W shushed me. He handled boats much more quietly and gently than my father. Rowing a couple hundred feet, he eased down the mushroom anchor and silently handed us rods that had already been set up with small snap swivels and Mepp’s spinners.

  Many people had lined the bank and the culvert around the spillway. Mr. W whispered, “The fish like to hold here. It reminds them of the hatchery.” Folks were casting lures and baited hooks hanging from bobbers. Arthur said little, he just started casting. Cars with people going to work whizzed toward the expressway on Yapank Road. One boy swung back to cast and hooked a passing sedan. The rod shot out of his hands and bounced down the pavement, parts flying off before we saw the deep red brake lights and heard angry voices. I recognized that the boat gave us an advantage over those people on the bank. We could approach from the deeper water and had much more space to cast. There were no branches above, no sunken shopping carts below. I heard some splashes and then started seeing fish rise. Mr. W lit a cigarette, opened his Thermos, poured a cup of coffee, farted, and started casting. Someone on the shore caught a fish, then someone else was into one. Long silvery trout were swung up on the bank or steered into landing nets. Then Arthur was on. The fish jumped. “That’s a nice one,” I said. The fish splashed again, ran a bit, then slowly surrendered to Mr. W and the landing net. “Is it a tickle trout?” I asked.

  “Just a rainbow. But a good one,” Mr. W chuckled, snapping the fish on an aluminum chain and dropping it over the side. We fished on. I could hear Arthur’s trout rattle the chain alongside our boat, and I thought of prisoners in medieval dungeons. As it got lighter, I could see the fettered fish, its greenish spotted back and flashing pink sides, and I felt sorry for him.

  Then I got one. My nerves tingled when the fish ran, taking line. But I kept good tension and reeled when possible. When it skied in a silver shiver, someone from the bank yelled, “Nice one!”

  “That’s a tickle trout,” Mr. W said. “You can’t net him. Bring him alongside and just tickle his belly.”

  Even more anxious, having never caught a trout, I wanted to land it and show it to my family. Its long resplendent beams glowed in the green water. I wanted it. My heart raced faster. “Oh, wow,” Arthur spoke up.

  As the fish tired and lay on its side, I put my hand underneath it—maybe sixteen inches of trembling brilliance—and did just as Mr. W said. But when I tickled the fish it flipped wildly and was gone. No, no, my heart dropped. Arthur had his hand on the handle of the net, but he let it go and wouldn’t look at me. There were voices from the bank: “Sorry, dude,” “Bummer, man.” “Why the hell didn’t you use the net?” one guy shouted.

  “It was a tickle trout, you idiot,” I yelled back, choked with tears. “You can’t net them!”

  “Wakoski’s an asshole,” Herbie Clark said as we sat in our garage. My father had the woodstove going and we were helping Herbie bend wire mesh into muskrat traps.

  “Easy, Herbie,” my father dampened him and handed him a long block of wood that he used as a form, pushing the mesh around its corners and tamping it with a rubber mallet.

  “Well that’s just damn cruel,” Herbie shook his head and started telling a story about a charter-boat captain out of Montauk. “This rich guy calls him up wantin’ to catch a big tuna. There were no tuna around at that time, but the captain needs the money and knows this guy doesn’t know shit about fishing or the ocean. So he takes the guy out to where a lot of porpoises gather. He hooks up some mackerel on a light leader, figuring maybe a porpoise will bite, the guy will feel like he’s fighting the fish of a lifetime and then the porpoise—a strong fucking animal—will break off, and a good time’s had by all.”

  “Except the porpoise,” my father looked alarmed.

  “Well that’s right, Charley. The plan works and the porpoise takes the bait. The rod’s down and the reel’s going, and before the captain can get off the bridge, the fucking guy picks up the pole, tightens the drag—he’s doesn’t know shit—and zing the rod flies out of his hands.”

  “Get outta here,” my father sat up in his chair, squinting at Herb.

  “It happened, Charley. The porpoise washes up on the beach a few days later with this line trailing out his mouth. They pull in the captain’s rod and reel—the guy puts his damn name on everything—and call the cops. People are going crazy. The whole town is in an uproar. I think that whole marine mammals deal—you know the thing to save the whales and all that shit—started right there. That jerk never worked again.”

  I learned from a teacher in school that trout tickling was a real practice, often associated with poaching and deceit, though young Abe Lincoln is said to have tickled trout for his hungry family’s supper, and in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night Maria marks the despised Malvolio as a “trout that must be caught with tickling.” Still, it was no way to teach a boy how to land his first rainbow.

  I was wounded by the lost trout and Mr. Wakoski’s joke, but I found relief in retelling the story. In school on Monday, I enthralled friends with splashing accounts of trout caught and lost. There were boys interested, of course, but I watched the eyes of Denise Cavalo as I relived in words the big trout coming alongside the boat. Denise and I talked more and more in third grade. She wasn’t just cute, she was smart. You might say I wanted to catch her, but I drea
ded what a girl might think should I expose my methods in terms of lures, hooks, nets, and the possibility of being eaten. I did tell her that fishing was my hobby; she said hers was cats, and that did it. The next day at recess I asked Denise to be my girlfriend. She was very pretty, and I wanted to kiss her. She said she just wanted to be friends. “Why?” I pressed. “My mother thinks I’m too young to date,” she said. But her friend told me it was because I was fat.

  I always knew I was a fat kid. “Chubby,” my mother would say. “Too heavy,” my father shook his head. My family vowed to work together and restrict my diet. Aunt Lil gave me a bag of grapes for the movies—“Instead of that greasy popcorn”—and my buddy and I threw them at other kids sitting below. “Can we get a slice of pizza?” I’d ask my father on the way home from fishing. “Okay, but don’t tell your mother.” And after a few hours of painful shopping, my mother would suggest a reward, “Let’s get some ice cream, but don’t tell your father.” They were also concerned that my favorite activity was too sedentary. “He’s got to lose some weight, get some exercise,” Dr. Greco admonished during my yearly physical. “What sports do you like?” he asked me.

  “Fishing.”

  “Fishing? What, you just sit on a rock all day drinking soda? You gotta be moving. Maybe like Hemingway you can walk a river. Or row a boat. But you can’t just sit around.”

  My mother nodded. She had never read Hemingway, but she understood the idea of a vigorous sporting life and encouraged me with books about Teddy Roosevelt and Zane Grey. In the car ride home, when I put my head down in shame, she snugged her arm around my shoulders. We didn’t wear seatbelts then, and she could pull me close. She was pregnant, her body big and warm. “Oh, sweetie. It’s gonna be all right. We just want you to be healthy. You’ve got to start taking care of yourself.”

  So I started fish-walking. I walked, sometimes with a friend, sometimes alone, miles down the beach, throwing lures to nothing or snappers or snags. The strand line along the beach was heaped with dead reeds and garbage: cans, shotgun shells, plastic wrappers, cigarette butts, soggy rats, you name it. I learned about tampons and poked my stick at what I first thought were eel skins, describing them to Herbie, who laughed and said they were “rubbers.” But there were also the treasures of snapped lures, lobster buoys, seashells, crispy crab carapaces, and notable dead fish: a dinosauric Atlantic sturgeon; a giant angler, known as a goosefish, with its crescent mouth of curved teeth; and a sun-pleated shark nearly eight feet long with a propeller gash across its head. I was fascinated and terrified by the idea of sharks close to home.

  Much more dangerous than swimming with sharks, however, was pedaling my bicycle across two highways and down a narrow winding road to dig clams or help Herbie catch eels around Ralph’s Fishing Station. I’d smell the brewy fumes of low tide as the trees opened to reeds, gulls, and miles of shining silt cut with silvery streams where sandpipers needled and dipped. Sometimes Ralph’s wife, Barbara, would invite me in for a cookie. The old house smelled damp and marshy, their big television raised on cement blocks above the boggy carpet. Even the cookies were redolent of salty tides that often flooded the back rooms. But no one in their family seemed to mind. Herbie told me their house was built too low and close to the water and that the Town of Brookhaven wanted the place condemned to make a park. Living so close to and even in the water seemed wonderful to me.

  Walking out on the mud flats I’d often join a group of black men in high boots, chopping away with flat-tined bent pitchforks, picking steamer clams from the mud and dropping them into wire baskets. The salt shallows shimmered with all sorts of creatures: snails, clams, crabs, killifish, an array of birds, curious dogs, and even Arnold the pig, who would happily eat a steamer clam, crunching it in his mouth, shell and all like a half cooked egg.

  Every spring, dark brown horseshoe crabs, sometimes more than two feet long, shoveled in for small clams, worms, and shrimp. Closely related to extinct sea scorpions and resembling the trilobites that once covered the earth’s shallow seas, horseshoe crabs also look a bit like ’54 Hudsons, Darth Vaders, or medieval knights—the rounded front helmet martially ridged and arching into meshed eyes, the triangular lower plate fiercely spiked and hinged to a dagger tail that helps the chevalier pivot and change direction. After four hundred million years of evolutionary success among the brutal armies of the sea, their toughest joust is certainly with humans. Men loaded pickup trucks with spawning horseshoe crabs to use for eel bait, calling for my help. I’d reach down and lift them by their tails, revealing clusters of BB-sized blue eggs, small clutching claws, and leathery book gills rhythmically flapping the damp glissando of changing times.

  However conservationally unsound, the best bait for eels, Herbie confirmed, was a female horseshoe crab with eggs. He devised a guillotine, chopping the crabs into blue-blooded quarters that we stuffed into eel pots fashioned with funneled entrances and back doors hinged with squares of old inner tube. American eels wriggled all over Long Island’s muddy harbors, and we dropped the baited pots on the bottom for an overnight high tide, singing “Pay day” when they came up heavy and writhing with dark brown custard-bellied eels. Coated with a heavy slime, they were hard to grab, but I tried, suffering a couple nasty bites that healed slowly. “This is how you do it,” Herbie said, tipping the open traps into a cooler and putting the shiny maze to sleep on ice. Fresh or smoked, they fetched a good price at market. Once Herbie cleaned and skinned a bundle for our dinner, and as Aunt Lil dropped them into the hot oil they twitched noticeably. “God help me,” she prayed, turning them with a fork. Knowing eels could live in fresh water, I introduced a pair into one of our twenty-gallon home aquariums. The eels remained quiet during the day, but turning on an evening lamp revealed their serpentine soirées. They glided like ribbons around the tank, frisking each other and gobbling up the remaining mollies and tetras. One night an eel escaped and was found in a semidry state on the kitchen floor, first by our early rising cat Tommy and then by my pregnant mother. Eels were no longer welcome in our home.

  But almost every other creature and person was welcome. We had five dogs, two cats, a rabbit, a pen of ducks and chickens, a small turtle, a garter snake, and a few aquariums bubbling with various species of fish. And then we got my brother.

  In December of my tenth year, 1975, ten days before Christmas, my brother, David, was born. It didn’t mean all that much to me, but everyone seemed happy. Presents under the tree, roast turkey, eggnog, John Denver’s Rocky Mountain Christmas Special. I peeked at my mother breast feeding in the bedroom. Her boobs were huge, and I wanted to see more but knew I shouldn’t. My father handed out cigars and bought a bottle of Johnny Walker. Herbie came over, got very drunk, went to the bathroom, and fell backward into the tub. “Tickle him,” I suggested, and my father laughed. Passed out and immovable, we put a pillow under his head, covered him with a wool blanket, and let him sleep it off. Waking in the early hours, the battered, homebound reveler alarmed our German shepherd, Heidi, and the dog bit and ripped the back pocket of Herbie’s holiday trousers. Aunt Lil later repaired the pants, but said, “The drunk fool deserved it.”

  The Shark and the Fox

  One late afternoon in the summer of 1977, my father dropped off my friend Tony and me at the docks in Port Jefferson. Dad was meeting a buddy and driving to Shea Stadium for a Mets game. “Behave yourselves and be careful,” he’d always say.

  “Thanks, Mr. Hughes,” Tony waved, pulling a Playboy out of his bag.

  A few months earlier, Tony had caught me in a joke. “You’re good at fishing, right?” he asked me in front of some other boys in our sixth grade class.

  “Yeah, I am,” I lifted my head with pride.

  “Are you good at putting on the bait?”

  “Yeah, sure,” I said.

  “Then you must be a master baiter.” Tony and the other boys cracked up laughing and made jerking off gestures. First I felt angry, then I smiled.

  Tony and I became good friends
and proficient dock anglers, using bait and hooking a variety of delights—flounder, porgy, bergall, blackfish, late summer snappers, and an occasional girly magazine snagged from a dumpster.

  But most of the fish we caught were light—“How you gonna clean this?” my father asked, looking at a postcard-sized flounder, shaking his head and telling me to bury it in the garden. Sometimes these corpses would be exhumed by a dog or raccoon. I remember a rank breeze across the yard one hot day, the pallid, maggot seething heads writhing above ground. Sickening and wasteful but for a little fertilizer. Still it was hard for me to let things go. Possession can be empowering, and understanding and controlling my desires for things—toys, fish, and even people—were lessons slow in coming. As a boy I wanted to come home with a prize, something of value—boasting rights, dinner, eel bait, even fertilizer, anything. “Just let ’em go next time,” my father repeated, handing me the shovel.

  Tony and I were determined, therefore, to catch larger fish—a ten-pound bluefish, a doormat fluke, a lunker weakfish, or perhaps even the coveted striped bass. Mr. Caraftis kept a tackle shop on Barnum Avenue, named after P. T. Barnum, who bought property in Port Jefferson with plans for headquartering his bizarre circus. Barnum’s scheme failed, but Mr. C’s showmanship under a mounted striped bass played on. “Sometimes at night the big fish come.” He leaned over the counter and whispered, “Very, very big fish.” We were riveted. “They smell the bait,” he tapped his nose. “They circle slowly, then move in.” I looked at the shining bass above him. “You’ll feel a tug,” he paused, staring into our eyes. “But let ’em take it and count to five—okay?—then Yah!” he gestured a dramatic hook set.