by Henry Hughes
The summer I turned thirteen, 1978, is hard to recall. I remember praying, asking God to heal my mother. “God has a plan for all of us,” our pastor counseled. I wanted God to change his plans.
There were kind friends. Mr. Wakoski and Arthur picked me up at four in the morning, always asked how my mother was feeling, and we drove to Montauk and Captree, where we boarded huge party boats and felt the great swells of the ocean, sometimes getting sick, usually feeling good, training our black binoculars on knobby nosed humpback whales and catching doormat fluke and big bluefish. Mr. Wakoski once reeled in a thirty-inch bluefish with a normal head and an emaciated body. Thorned deep in the throat, the remains of a hook and a lump of scar tissue prevented the poor fish from swallowing. The head clear and sharp, the body wasting away. “Save him,” I begged. Mr. Wakoski twisted his lips, then reached in with his needle nose pliers and extracted the hook, opening a space in the scar tissue. He slipped the bluefish below the boat rails into the ocean. “He might make it,” he smiled.
After fishing at Montauk, we’d sometimes go over to Captain Frank Mundus’ boat and see if he’d caught any sharks. Captain Mundus hammed it up for the crowd, wearing a safari hat and hoop earrings, his toenails painted red and green for port and starboard. A couple blue sharks hung from gin poles one afternoon above the dock, their stomachs bulging out through their mouths. One of the sharks was still alive, and its rippling gills made me uneasy and sick.
“Are you okay?” Mr. Wakoski looked at me with concern.
“What are they going to do with those sharks?” I asked.
“Nothing. Maybe cut out the jaws. Cruel, isn’t it?” he said.
Mr. Wakoski seemed kinder and more patient with my endless questions, but when I asked him if he believed there was a benevolent god in the universe, he just farted and rolled down the window.
Tony’s parents invited me over often, brought trays of lasagna and ziti to our house, and dropped Tony and me off at the docks or a pond to fish the day away. Tony’s grandmother told me in Italian—Tony interpreted—that she lit candles in church for my mother.
Herbie was also a good friend. When frost covered Long Island, he would sit and talk with my father and me around the woodstove in the garage, drinking his cheap whisky and smoking a Camel. Sometimes we’d just stare at the garage floor, by now a Modernist collage from all the projects we spray-painted over the years—duck decoys, fishing lures, buoys, model airplanes, and tanks. Herbie talked about World War II when his tank crew landed in France after the invasion. “It was the first time I saw a lot of dead people,” he said, and we stared at him. “In a truck. Germans. Young, most of them.”
My father rubbed his face and lit a cigarette. “There were some dead in Korea.”
“Never know what the world’s gonna throw at you, Charley—there, here, anywhere.” Herbie stood and warmed his hands over the stove. “You just gotta get through it.”
That November, Herbie and I launched the jon boat into Port Jefferson Harbor looking for big blues on their fall feeding binges. We had medium spinning rods loaded with twelve-pound test, and a box of hand-turned cedar plugs about the size of half-smoked cigars lit with bright red concave mouths and trailing treble hooks wrapped in local deer hair. Birds were working outside Seaboard Hole, and I moved the boat in slowly then cut the engine, and we drifted close to the thrashing shoal of feeding fish. Herbie made the first cast, and after two chugs, a fish attacked his plug, missed, and then was on. I took up the oars and eased us off the shoal while Herbie fought the fish, his face composed in familiar pleasure. “Good fish,” I said. Then there was a gray leap as the bluefish broke the surface and got free. “Damn,” he said. “Well, go on. Get in there.” I cast and retrieved as he showed me, jerking the rod back to chug, splash, and dance the lure like a wounded baitfish. But the blues had gone down and disappeared. We did not see another rise all morning. Clouds rolled in with the wind, dropping the temperature, forcing us to zip up and turn for home. Canada geese filled the sky with their honking, flying over the headland where we set our traps the winter before.
I thought of the fox. Had she been alive, would she have tilted her ears to the sound of those birds? And though I believed there was nothing morally wrong with killing that fox, I regretted doing it. The wind brought up a nasty chop, and we slapped back to the takeout with frozen hands and faces, glad to be in the warm cab of the truck.
Two weeks later in the middle of a cold night, my mother died at home in bed next to my father.
Holy Mackerel
In the spring of 1979, following my mother’s death, our azaleas were as bright as ever, but my father and aunt never mentioned them. The country was in a recession, again people waited in lines for gas, and my father was out of work for weeks at a time. The residual bills from my mother’s illness, despite insurance, strained our family, and Aunt Lil stayed up late cutting coupons from the paper and sewing my torn pants. Then there was my brother, a three-year-old who needed daycare so Lil could return to work. My father sold some of our antiques and split firewood, hustling an odd job here and there. He never turned angry or dangerously despondent, he just stilled. I was thirteen. He let me do what I wanted, never checking on my homework or chores, and I could come and go pretty much as I pleased. I was running and lifting weights, my body slowly changing. I tried out for the junior high basketball team and got cut. My father didn’t say anything. In the evening he drank beer, watched a game on television, and occasionally went out to the local gin mill with a friend.
“Come on, Dad,” I shook him from his sleep on the couch.
“Okay, okay,” he raised a hand in surrender.
He had been out late but promised to take me fishing in the morning. I got him up. Lil cooked breakfast, but he hardly ate. His truck was full of scrap metal, so we loaded the jon boat in the back of the family station wagon. It was May, and I was keen to jig for mackerel, which entered the spring Sound in vast numbers, readily biting anything twinkled before their pointed mouths.
We drove past old Ralph’s Fishing Station, condemned by the Town of Brookhaven and deserted. When we last saw Ralph he looked miserable. “Dey wanna make a park,” he said, egg-shaped pouches under his eyes. Ralph and Barbara fought hard against eviction, lost their lease, but were offered new property above Mt. Sinai’s east inlet. “Ralph works hard and drinks hard,” my father said. “We’ll see what happens.”
“Barbara’s a really hard worker, too,” I said.
My father looked at me, then turned back to the road, and there was long silence in his foggy head. “Yeah,” he finally spoke. “They’re a good team. They’ll make it.”
We followed the winding road around Mount Sinai Harbor and pulled into the parking lot facing the sound at Cedar Beach. A nor’wester was pushing swells and whitecaps. “We’re not getting out there today,” my father said.
“It’s not that bad,” I countered.
“You wanna drown for a damn mackerel? Don’t be silly.”
We drove to the harbor side, and it was relatively calm, although a stiff breeze clanked lines against the aluminum masts of sailboats.
“This looks okay,” he said. “Why don’t you try for some flounder?”
“I don’t have any bait.”
“Pull some mussels off those pilings.”
I rolled my eyes in frustration. “That stinks,” I said.
“Well then, we’re going home.” And as he put the car in gear, I relented. We backed down the ramp, launched the boat, and my father helped me pick some mussels, then told me he was staying in the car. He needed more sleep. “Stay in the harbor,” he said. “I’ll be right here. Okay?”
It was okay. I headed out, waving to him over the noise of the outboard, into the channel past a sailboat named Sanity. Fishing alone was fine with me. The air was chilly, but spring was greening the marsh and leafing the high wooded hills to the west. Anchoring near Crystal Brook, I rigged for flounder, pulled out the stained plywood cutting boa
rd, cracked a mussel, baited up, and dropped. The tide was rising, black ducks flew overhead, and a mute swan parted the cord grass. I thought of those times my father and I brought home a bucket of flounder that Mom admired. Sometimes the fillets were thin, but she dipped them in egg and breadcrumbs, shook on Old Bay Seasoning, fried them in butter, and set them on the table with tartar sauce and ketchup. Secretly she would buy more flounder fillets at Wally Brown’s fish market to supplement our meager harvest, the impossibly thick pieces heavy on the fork and satisfying in our mouths. “You guys did a nice job catching these flounder,” she’d say. I would mention Jesus multiplying loaves and fishes, and my mother would laugh, “So, you did learn something in Sunday school.” Aunt Lil reminded me that Jesus’s disciples were fishermen and that I should follow their example.
I thought of my beer-drinking father listening to the Mets while his neglected pole slumped against the side of the boat, and me, eating two sandwiches and a bag of chips washed down with orange soda, worshipping a ten-inch flounder like some old Cananite kneeling before scaly-suited Dagon, the fish god who promised a bountiful catch and more religious holidays in the school calendar. Even the apostles started out as wayward goofballs, so maybe we did have a chance at respectable discipleship. I thought of the grief the disciples felt when Jesus died, their amazement when he appeared after the resurrection and gobbled down a piece of broiled fish, and then their elation and transformation over his proven promise of eternal life. But even as a child I knew the resurrection was no different than the fantastic stories of the Setauket Indians who sent their dead drifting into a glorious, torch-lit, fish-filled afterlife.
Anchored alone in Mt. Sinai Harbor, soft lapping under the hull, my hand holding a rod at attention for the slightest sign of life, a single gull hovering above, I just started crying. I didn’t cry at my mother’s funeral. It all seemed confusing, her death impossible, worse, an intrusion into my life. How could she have changed so much? How could she have grown so weird, sick, distant, and ugly? My once beautiful mother, bald and bloated, wandering madly through the house or screaming at me. Then I felt a wave of guilt. I’m sorry, Mom. I’m so sorry—and I wept on.
Maybe we have souls, I thought, but really we are just animals with brains and hearts, and when they are destroyed and fail, we disappear. Mussels smashed on the cutting board. Our seventh-grade science teacher explained that a salt deficiency in our brains could render us idiots, could make happy people depressed and suicidal. We are fragile estuaries with billions of neurons flashing like shiners. I prayed to God to heal my mother. I prayed with utter sincerity. Now it seemed silly. It was just nature. She got sick and died. Like fish, we would all die in the bucket or in the dark tide, lost to sickness, age, or bigger fish. I could die right now, tie the anchor around my neck, and roll over the side.
I got a bite—a tentative tapping, then a tug—so I set the hook, reeling in a hand-sized flounder. I carefully unhooked the fish and let it go. “Not today,” I said aloud. Five minutes later I caught an even smaller one. Flounder made a weak showing that year. No one else was fishing for them. Mackerel. I had to get out and get the mackerel.
I started the outboard, pulled up the anchor, and shot across the harbor toward the inlet. Cormorants came up black and shimmering with sand eels in their bills. A returning cruiser rose and fell as it entered the breakwater. It was still rough. With the engine in neutral, I changed out my flounder rig for a Christmas tree, a line of red and green two-inch tubes on long hooks weighted with a two-ounce diamond jig, ready for mackerel.
The inlet was a horse market of confused water. Back in gear and surging forward into a large swell, a wall of water came over the bow and soaked me. Other waves came in from the side. Scared but not sure how to turn around, I pointed the boat’s square face toward the biggest waves and pressed on, salt water drenching my body and stinging my eyes. A couple inches of water sloshed around my feet, so I picked up the little bucket that held the mussels and bailed with one hand, keeping my other on the tiller throttle. Beyond the jetty, the waves became more regular, and I could see a line of boats about a half mile from shore. That’s where I needed to be. My father was sleeping. He’d never know.
Fortunately mackerel are fished on a drift, not by anchoring. I approached the line of boats, most of them twenty feet or longer, put the engine in neutral, and dropped my line. My father and I had jigged for mackerel the year before on a calm day from a friend’s runabout. I knew how to do it, but this tossing made things tough. Head down and picking a bit of backlash out of my reel, the boat suddenly lurched to the side and I smashed my hand on the oarlock. I put the engine back in gear, got aligned in the waves, and started jigging, my hand throbbing and swelling. Instantly there were fish.
The Atlantic mackerel is a two-pound torpedo that fights like hell. Get three or four on the line, and it’s a rod-bending thrill that rewards in astonishing color—an iridescent blue-green back vermiculated in dark stripes. Mackerel are easy to grab, and I quickly unhooked the first fish and was back in the water.
Boats drifted by pulling up dozens of fish. Mackerel-crowded seas, indeed, I would think back years later reading Yeats, amazed that my own young heart was so “sick with desire.” One cruiser got close, and a man yelled, “You shouldn’t be out here, kid. It’s way too rough.” A woman in yellow raingear fishing sturdily off the stern of a forty-foot gameboat shouted, “Hey, do your parents know you’re out here?” The way she cocked her head and studied me, I wondered if she knew them. “Put on your life jacket,” she told me. We never wore life jackets. Mine floated next to the gas tank.
Over fifty mackerel flopped and drummed on the wet floor of my boat. Holy mackerel—I suddenly understood the expression as a blessing. Our line of boats drifted closer to Cedar Beach, and I could see people jogging and walking dogs. A boy was flying a kite. Not thinking anything of it at first, I heard a persistent car horn. And when I looked over I saw headlights flashing. It was our station wagon. It was my father. He got out of the car and waved his arms. I waved back. He pumped his pointed hand toward the inlet.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” he said when I cut the engine, gliding the boat onto the ramp. “Didn’t you hear what I said? Are you deaf?”
“No,” I said. “I’m fine.”
“You’re not using this boat for the rest of the summer.”
“Why?” I yelled back. “’Cause you’re too scared? ’Cause you’d rather get drunk and sleep all day?”
“Let’s go,” he said. “Get that engine off.”
My hand swollen and bruised, I unscrewed the outboard, lifted it off the transom, and set it on the ramp. We tried lifting the boat, but it was too heavy with all the fish and water, so we unloaded the gear, pulled the drain plug, and stuffed the fish into burlap bags. My father was silent.
At home I washed and put away equipment, and my father brought out the Castro Oil can. “You know what to do,” he said. I filled the can with water, set the engine inside, and ran it to flush out the corrosive salt. At the sound of the engine the neighbors came over, as they often did, to see what we caught. “Mackerel,” my father said. “Take all you want.” Grouchy old Mr. Stanley from next door wrapped a couple in newspaper and muttered, “Thanks.” My three-year-old brother, David, came out with Aunt Lil. “You catched fishes,” the little boy chirped, picking one up with both hands and bringing it to his lips for a kiss. Herbie drove up and looked at the heap of mackerel. “Holy mackerel! How the hell did you get these? There was small craft warnings this morning.” My father just shook his head and said nothing. I smiled at Herbie and watched him light a cigarette. “You wouldn’t be smiling,” he said and paused to take a drag and exhale, “if you went swimming in that cold water. I known a few that’s done it, and they ain’t around to tell the story.”
But here I am, telling you the story, reminding you to wear life jackets and know the water that your craft can handle. Don’t drown for a damn mackerel! I say. But going out
that morning also saved me from drowning.
China Cat
Later in the week of our mackerel, at the end of dinner, my father pushed aside his plate, lit a cigarette, and echoed one of our favorite lines from Jaws, “Well, I think you’re gonna be needin’ a bigger boat.” There was no money, so I asked, “How?”
“Nicky’s got one he wants out of his yard. It needs a lot of work. We’ll start with that and then figure out an engine.”
I was throwing a baseball with a new friend, Tim, when my father pulled up towing a boat. It was a sixteen-foot wooden runabout with a sports car windshield and a red scripted brand plate, Eltro, dangling from one screw on the plywood side. Keel splintered, floorboards and bow deck rotted, it also needed caulking, paint, and an engine, but it had solid ribs and gunnels and beautiful chrome running lights.
We stripped the deck hardware, removed the windshield and plastic steering wheel, and, with the help of a couple neighbors, turned the boat over on blocks, nearly crushing Mr. Stanley’s gouty foot. He growled that “a boat was a hole in the water where you threw your money.” The image of a hole in the ocean enraptured me for a long time. A deep windowed well or a glass elevator down into the fish haunted depths. “A hole in the water,” I repeated to my focused father as we sized up the hull. “Hole? Where?” he asked.
I had worked with my father before, unenthusiastically repairing the porch and building a shed, but the boat project brought us close, and I learned from him. We took measurements for a new keel, scraped, patched, and caulked, finally painting the boat’s belly red. In a month we were ready to turn the Eltro back onto the trailer and roll it into the garage. Rotten decking tore off easily, and we stripped old paint with a torch and scraper. My father had heavy pneumatic sanders, and on my first go I lost control of the wheel and chewed a moon out of the mahogany. Then I got the hang of it.