Back Seat with Fish

by Henry Hughes

  We spent ten dollars—a lot of money—on whole bunker, large hooks, and slide sinker rigs, and then deployed our baits and waited, reeling in small sandy colored rock crabs that often dropped off as we winched them from the water. Gulls and herons flew by; pigeons picked grit from the parking lot. We looked at the Playboy, quickly stuffing it in Tony’s bag when anyone approached. Tony’s rod tip twitched, and he leapt up, reeled, and declared, “I got one,” bringing up a horseshoe crab as big as a sink. I lifted it by the tail. “Should we save it for Herbie’s eel pots?” I asked. “Ah, throw it back,” Tony said.

  It was dusk, and my mother was going to pick us up in an hour. Tony and I sat on our huge cooler, disturbing each other constantly to grab another cookie or a can of R.C. Cola. Some other men came down and started casting their baits. Tony said they were Italian. “You speak Italian?” I asked. “A little,” he said. The men were loud and swigged from bottles wrapped in brown bags.

  “Aye, you catcha anything?” one man asked.

  “Crabs,” I said.

  “They catcha da crabs,” he repeated to the others, and they all laughed.

  My rod tip began to twitch. I picked it up and felt life—then a smart strike. This was no crab. I waited a few moments like Mr. C. advised, then set the hook and felt everything come alive. “I got one! Oh, yeah.” Tony reeled in and coached me. “Take it easy. Do the drag. That’s it. Easy.”

  The fish took line and I stayed with him, finally reeling in a bit when it circled back. “He’s big,” I said. The men started cheering. It took ten minutes to bring the fish in close. Never had I experienced such a contest. Then we saw a long brown form in the dock-lit water—head and tail unmistakable. “Oh my god,” I yelled. “It’s a shark.”

  I had never really recovered from seeing the film Jaws in 1975 when I was ten. My parents took me to the Coram Drive-In where the great white lunged from the screen like an immense nightmare. I loved the movie—titillated by the naked girl and shocked by her ill-fated swim, fascinated by Hooper’s marine biology, and absolutely enamored with Quint and the fishing scenes, line ticking off the big reel as he buckles himself in the fighting chair. The film was set in a southern New England town not unlike my own. And I learned that Peter Benchley’s original story was inspired by shark fishing off Long Island’s Montauk Point with the famous Captain Frank Mundus, as well as the history of the 1916 Jersey Shore attacks, including the case of a shark entering Matawan Creek and killing two boys. This made me anxious about swimming in any water connected to the ocean. Although the chance was infinitesimally small, it was possible, I thought, always possible, that I could be attacked by a shark—the pointed head, eyes rolled back as the white skin wrinkled behind the widening, tooth-filled mouth. I even contemplated my karma: after all my predations on fish, would I justly be eaten by one? Through delight and fear, the film Jaws ignited in me, as in many people, a fascination with sharks and shark attacks. I borrowed every book on the subject from the school and public libraries, did fifth grade reports on shark biology, and gave the class a chilling recitation of the USS Indianapolis disaster in World War II, during which more than 200 sailors were killed by sharks after their ship—which had successfully delivered components for the atomic bomb—was torpedoed by the Japanese. I collected shark teeth. I wanted to catch a shark.

  “Dogfish,” one of the Italian men waved his hand dismissively as the great fish thrashed on the surface. “We gotta get it,” I screamed at Tony, eyeing the twelve-foot drop to the water. But not far from where we stood there was a ladder down to a floating dock. I started moving the fish in that direction, its floppy dorsal slicing the water like a shark, a real shark. “Go down the ladder,” I ordered Tony, and he started down the old barnacled rungs. He looked uncertain. “Ouch. Shit,” he yelled. “I cut myself.”

  “It’s okay. My mom’s coming. She’s got bandages.”

  “Are you crazy? Sharks can smell blood. No way.” He was back up on the gravel sucking his hand.

  “We gotta get this shark!” I screamed and just started cranking up the fish, my fiberglass pole bent double, my drag conceding until I screwed it down, the two-foot shark splashing out of the water. After about four feet of craning, the rod snapped and the fish plunged back into the harbor. But he was still on. I cranked him up on the short splintered boom and swung him onto the gravel.

  “I don’t know what you’re going to do with him,” my mother said, driving up Port Hill toward Tony’s house. She had reluctantly let me put the cooler, filled with seawater and shark, next to me on the towel-covered back seat of her Buick. I held it steady, listening to the soft splashes. At our house, my mother helped me lift the cooler onto the lawn and then went in to check on my baby brother and Aunt Lil. I opened the cooler and stared at the shark, touching its sandpapery skin, marveling over its yellow cat eyes narrowing in the lamplight. Running inside to the upstairs bathroom, where my mother wouldn’t see, I drew a cold bath—too excited to think about the difference between fresh and salt water. I ran back outside, pulled on a pair of garden gloves, grabbed the shark, twisting like crazy, and carried it through the house into the bathtub. In the bright water every shark line was clear: the famous fins, the dashing checkmark of a tail, the sharp nose against the porcelain as it made tight turns and pulsed forward into another white curve of nowhere. Then I thought of the fresh water.

  Running downstairs, already sobbing, I cried, “Mom, mom!” and opened her bedroom door to find her standing in bra and panties listening to Nat King Cole.

  “Yes,” she said, a little annoyed.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. The shark. We gotta let him go.”

  “What?”

  “He’s going to die. Please, Mom. Drive me back to the harbor. Please!”

  “It’s ten o’clock at night. I’m getting ready for bed. Why did you keep him?”

  But the shark went back in the cooler of salt water, back on the towel next to me in the backseat of the Buick, and my mother drove us back to the dock. The Italian men were still fishing, and when they saw my mother in her denim shorts and the low cut top she would only wear around the house on summer evenings, they whistled and whooped, lifting their bottles. Together my mother and I carried the cooler to the edge of the dock and tipped out the fish, watching him fall through the blue light into the dark water, swimming smoothly away. There was a moment of silence, and then my mother said, “He’ll see his friends now and tell them quite a story,” hugging me with one arm and kissing the top of my head.

  In the fall of 1977, when I was twelve, my mother began experiencing terrible migraines. She took afternoons off and lay in her shaded room. She was irritable and impatient, then apologized and hugged me and sometimes cried. After several visits to the doctor and hospital, she was diagnosed with a large brain tumor. Just after Christmas, surgery confirmed a malignancy. I remember my father bringing her home. Her trembling smile, the kerchief slipping to reveal a rectangular panel, like an attic door, cut and stitched in the side of her head. Aunt Lil made her comfortable on the couch and brought her a cup of tea. Our shepherd, Heidi, nosed up, and my mother rubbed her ears. My brother, David, was two. My father carried him in, and my mother held him tightly. There was an awkward silence between us, then my mother told me that one of her doctors had taken his family to a cabin on a lake in New Hampshire where they caught loads of trout.

  “He’d showed me the pictures,” my mother said. “Maybe we should go there next summer.”

  “I’d love it,” I said, snuggling into her.

  That November I started trapping with Herbie. He’d pick me up in his rusty tan Oldsmobile, and we’d drive to Setauket to set and check muskrat traps. Wading through the marshes and tidal creeks at low tide, we pulled swing-door cage traps from muddy burrows with drowned muskrats. When skinned and dried, their glossy brown pelts fetched six dollars apiece. With my father’s work unsteady, trapping gave me the only extra money I’d have before Christmas. Herbie was also a licensed n
uisance trapper, and his reputation for success and courteous professionalism landed him many jobs in the affluent neighborhoods of Belle Terre, Setauket, and Old Field. We pulled up to a big house, and a stately, silver-haired woman directed us to the stables. “Mr. Clark, just let me know if there’s anything you need,” she’d say and leave us to our work. Herbie set a couple of Tomahawk live traps for raccoons and explored the shelves and cabinets of the tack room. “Looking for pest signs,” he’d say as he pulled out a bottle of Scotch. “Don’t mind if I do, Mrs. Wright,” taking a long pull and smiling at me. “Now if she’d just give me a blow job, we’d call this quite a day.”

  Herbie removed unwanted squirrels, possums, and raccoons, accepting a check and assuring his clients that the animals were going to a better place. He released the squirrels and possums far away, but it was mid winter in New York, and a prime raccoon skin could be sold for thirty dollars. My father did not like trapping, but he supported my interests and enjoyed the project spirit. With the woodstove cranking in our garage-gone-shop, my father and I fashioned wire traps, dyed and waxed Conibear traps, welded stakes, and cut and planed wooden stretching boards for fleshing and drying skins. Herbie taught us how to skin, hanging the muskrat or raccoon by one foot, then the other, pulling and cutting the pelt off the carcass like a great glove. It was greasy, sometimes stinky work, especially if I slipped and cut open the belly of a muskrat, its sour green undigested dinner bulging out. In school we did a lesson on the Hudson Bay Company and the fur trade. I raised my hand and told the class that I trapped and sold furs. “On Long Island?” the surprised teacher asked, her raccoon collared coat hanging at the back of the room. “Sure,” I said. “Just down the street.”

  “There are fox on the beach,” Herbie told my father and me one winter evening as we sat on folding chairs in the garage. “I saw them digging in the sand.”

  “Oh yea?” my father raised an eyebrow and tipped his beer. “How do you catch those guys?”

  “Fox is smart. Gotta use leg holds. Double coil spring. I got some.”

  “I don’t like those traps,” my father grimaced.

  “Fox is bringing seventy-five dollars, Charley.” Herbie drank from a coffee cup half filled with Old Crow.

  “Well, you guys do what you want,” my father stood up, lit a cigarette, and tapped the shiny, sweating raccoon skin on the stretching board. My father’s words, Do what you want, stayed with me. He would allow me to participate, and even support me, in endeavors that he did not like but could not oppose on any rational or moral grounds. “I eat veal, and look at the way those poor things are treated,” he’d confess. “I think leg hold traps are cruel. But if you can live with it, go ahead.”

  My father rescued a badly dented twelve-foot aluminum jon boat from a scrap yard and bought a used Sears outboard to set me up with my first watercraft. I loved it. After a test run in the harbor, he said that I could use it for trapping. One early February afternoon, he helped Herbie and me load the jon boat in his pickup, wished us luck, and Herbie drove us down to Port Jefferson’s East Beach. The north shore harbors could be brutally cold, windy, and rough in winter, but on this cloudy Saturday, a mild south breeze merely rippled the surface. Clammers dropped their long rakes from wooden scows and dug hardshell clams. “Damn hard work,” Herbie shouted over the engine noise. Flocks of broadbill ducks congregated in long rafts, sometimes lifting in flight before our bow. Herbie kept pointing and smiling. He had his beat-up, double barrel 12 gauge—a gun he claimed to have ditched in the reeds a few times when the game wardens were after him—and when a few broadbill flew toward us, he swung up and fake fired two shots. We landed at Seaboard Hole, often just called The Cove, a five acre gouge created by the dredging of the Seaboard Sand and Gravel Corporation, where my father’s father—who died long before I was born—worked as a marine mechanic for twenty years. Herbie and I pulled the boat up on the sand beside the rotted remains of an old wooden barge and walked the barrier beach toward the east breakwater, noting the droppings and long prints of rabbits. Then Herbie kneeled down and showed me the tracks and diggings of a fox.

  Fox trapping was not easy. I carried long iron stakes my father helped us cut and weld, my mother’s garden trowel, and wax paper. Herbie hammered down a stake anchoring a trap and then dug an angled hole, just as a fox might. He unscrewed a dirty jar and, with a stick, skewered out some of his special marinated chicken bait and dropped it into the hollow. After troweling out the soil before the hole, he set the trap and delicately placed it in the depression. I handed him the precut square of wax paper, and he gingerly covered the pan and trigger, sifting small leaves and dirt over the wax paper and exposed jaws. “Dirthole set,” he instructed, spraying fox urine and brushing over our boot trail as we walked out. We made half a dozen sets, finishing at dusk as dark flocks of waterfowl swept the sky and settled in the cove.

  Returning at dawn, I burned with something like the possibility and expectation of a first cast. We flushed a couple cottontail rabbits from the bushes above the beach then crested a hill and saw that our first set was empty. The first five sets were empty, one sprung and turned over. “Damn clever devils,” Herbie grumbled. We came up on the last set and I was breathing heavy and sweating under my coat. Then I saw the fox, like a flame in the gray brush. The animal quickly pulled back against the chain, whining and leaping in different directions. As we got closer, an excited fear came over me. Herbie approached slowly, the fox strained in one direction, and Herbie slipped a dogcatcher’s noose around its neck and pulled tight. “All right, hold this,” he ordered me. I hesitated. “Come on, dammit,” he said. I walked up and could hardly believe I was so close to a wild fox. Although we knew there were foxes around, I had never seen one. Now I was inches away.

  I held the fox and felt it struggle in the noose. “Hold it still now,” Herbie commanded. The animal was breathing rapidly, its sides rising and falling. I can still see its plush orangey fur, the sharp ears, long snout, the black nose, and whiskers. Herbie pulled a .22 pistol from his pocket, put it between the eyes of the fox and pulled the trigger. There was frantic kicking and twisting. I held it so tight, my arms and shoulders ached for days. Then the animal was quiet.

  “Okay, boy. We got ourselves a beauty,” Herbie patted me on the back.

  When we got home I ran into the house, shouting, “A fox, we caught a fox.” Aunt Lil was giving my brother breakfast at the kitchen table. “Wow,” she said. “That’s great.”

  “Where’s Dad?” I asked.

  “He’s with Mom,” Lil said. “She had a bad night.”

  “Oh. Okay.” I stood silent for a moment, frustrated by the suspension of excitement. Herbie hung the fox in the garage. He said it was a vixen. Again, I studied the stunning rusty red body, black paws, and black-lined ears. Hanging from its hind foot, the thick, coal-tipped tail arced down over its back, the pink tongue and a bit of red foam dripped from its mouth.

  I called Arthur, and he and his father came over to admire the fox and ask where and how we caught it. “Snared it in Montauk,” Herbie growled, having never warmed to Arthur’s father after the tickle trout incident. My friend Tony rode his bike over. He stared, stroked the fox’s fur and asked if we were going to make a coat for my mother. “That’s a good idea,” I said. My father came into the garage and congratulated us. I watched him go up to the fox and touch the paw where the trap had held her. There was a ring of raw skin and a bit of dried blood. Herbie said he’d be back later and we could skin it.

  That afternoon, when I was up in my room doing homework, I heard yelling downstairs. Our shepherd, Heidi, was lying on my bed. Her ears perked up, she lifted her head, then jumped off and ran downstairs. I followed.

  The door to the garage was open, and my mother was standing baldheaded in her bathrobe on the landing. “What is this!? What is going on here!?” she screamed. “How could you do this?” She started crying hysterically and my father put his arms around her. “It’s okay, Marion. Come ins
ide. Herbie and Henry are trapping now. You know that.” My father guided my mother back into our family room and onto the couch. “Oh, that poor fox,” she cried. She looked at me with tears and what seemed like a crazed expression of confusion and horror. “Henry, no. Please.” Aunt Lil brought her a pill and a glass of milk. I walked outside.

  My father came up to me later that afternoon. “No more trapping this season.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Why do you think? It upsets your mother.”

  “She’s acting crazy.”

  “You heard what I said.”

  Herbie came and took away the fox. “Your mother’s very sick,” he said. “You gotta understand that.”

  The night’s dinner might have been painfully quiet were it not for the antics of my two-year-old brother. “Mushrooms, mushrooms,” he loved the word. “Stinky mushrooms in Daddy’s shoes.” And we all laughed. But right before my mother left the table, she put her arm around me. “Please, dear,” she said. “Please, for the fox, okay?”

  There was chemotherapy, radiation, mega doses of expensive vitamins purchased from a quacky relative, but my mother’s condition deteriorated. There were days when she was lucid and loving, asking me about school or to help her in the garden pulling a few weeds. She laughed, watching television with us, and came into the garage to admire a cooler full of icy mackerel. “These would be great on the barbecue,” she’d say. “Fish are so healthy.” But there were more and more days when her mind was lost. She rambled on nonsensically, looked at me as if I were a stranger, ordered friends out of the house, and told me no one would care if she died. One evening while my father and I were watching television, my mother came into the shadows of the kitchen, pulled a carving knife from the drawer, raised it above her chest, and screamed, “I’m going to kill myself,” bringing the knife down gently into the folds of her robe and sobbing as my father leapt up to hold her.