Back Seat with Fish

by Henry Hughes

  Arthur came by and said, “Wood boats are a lot of work,” and that he and his dad were “fiberglass men.” Tony said it was “great,” and hoped we could get out soon because his grandmother had been sick and fish made her feel better.

  My new friend, Tim, who had moved to the neighborhood a few months before, helped me with the boat after school. Tim’s father died when he was just a baby, and he lived with his mother and sister in a small house one street over. He was a good looking boy with smooth dark skin and deep brown eyes. And though he was a year younger than I was, a lot more girls hung around him. We both played lacrosse—he excelled and I struggled—and I’d see him after practice in the locker room, his lean muscular body so different from my pink hamminess. I thought him as beautiful as any girl and once said he had “nice eyes.” He snapped his head back and sneered, “Are you queer?”

  “No,” I said and never talked about his body again. Tim was athletic and could handle any game, routinely beating me in everything from horseshoes to one-on-one basketball—my motor skills still warming up in my mid-teens. My father took us to his union picnic, and during the softball game I misjudged a pop fly that hit me in the head. He and Tim joked about it later. “The only thing he can throw is a hook,” my father quipped. “The only thing he can catch is a fish,” Tim rejoined, and they laughed, pleased with their teamwork.

  But I was strong enough for my age to handle heavy tools and materials, patient enough to measure, remeasure, cut wood, and drive screws. On nice days I’d pull the boat out of the garage into the sun. “Did you move this yourself?” my father would ask when he got home.

  Herbie came by to check on the job and give advice. “Put a foot a water in it and let it sit for a few hours before you launch.”

  “What are you talking about?” I said. “It’s all caulked and painted.”

  “It’s an old wooden boat. It’s gonna leak until that wood swells up.”

  Herbie would sit and watch us work, sipping whisky, and recounting small boats that had bashed rocks and sunk, run aground, or gotten swept away by wind and tide. When Aunt Lil wasn’t around, he would also tell Tim and me about women he laid in boats. “We were suckin’ and lickin’ and stickin’ and—Oh, God, this woman couldn’t get enough. I tried to get up, but she had me like an octopus.” I shook my head and laughed, becoming used to his sordid tales. Tim blushed but listened.

  By my fourteenth birthday in the summer of 1979, the Eltro was ready for her maiden voyage, powered by a rebuilt Evinrude 25 that my father financed through a friend at the local marine shop. For a final touch, an old ship’s wheel came off our living room wall. My mother had bought it at an antique shop and hung it next to a tacky print of a sailboat. I took the wheel apart, sanded and re-varnished the rim and spokes, and, with the help of my father, refastened everything with stainless steel bolts. From here I’d steer the China Cat, christened after a beloved Grateful Dead song, Garcia’s guitar and voice dancing high like a crazy junk on the cosmic tides.

  We launched China Cat on a sunny Saturday afternoon. The ramp at Port Jefferson was a madhouse—amateurs and professionals putting in and pulling out vessels of various sizes with varying degrees of patience and politeness for their fellow boaters. My father was skilled at backing up trailers, and he zipped us down between two rigs, pushed off our boat, and handed me the bow line. Tim stood next to me and asked, “Do we get in?” I didn’t know. There was a slight breeze and the boat started drifting toward an adjacent trailer. Someone else was backing down, and he yelled, “Are you guys going out or what?” Other boats were stacking up on the floating dock and idling in wait. We were getting squeezed, so I climbed in the boat and Tim followed. We bumped the trailer next to us and spun slowly around. I dropped the engine in position, pumped the gas bulb, opened the choke, and pulled it to a roaring start. I had no idea what to do next, but I saw my father quicken his pace in the parking lot, flick his cigarette, jump over the railing, and run down the ramp onto the floating dock. He leaped into our boat, idled down the engine, and put it in gear. “Good job, boys,” he said, maneuvering us through the traffic. Something felt squishy, and we looked down at a few inches of water rising in the bottom of the boat. “That’s all right,” my father said, and we laughed, bailed, and toured the harbor.

  Aunt Lil didn’t find leaky boats so funny. That summer, like every summer on Long Island, there were drownings. A young boy fell off his Sunfish sailboat and drowned in Long Island Sound; a girl slipped from a dock and perished in the Great South Bay. Lil stuck the Newsday articles on the fridge. She made me promise to wear my life jacket and not go out so far. I promised but did whatever I pleased.

  The China Cat was leaky until she swelled, underpowered but cheap on gas, sluggish on the turn but steady in the waves, and she brought us to the fish. My father let me take the boat out with friends, launching us in the early hours before work. “Be careful,” is all he’d say.

  Herbie showed me how to troll for bluefish with color-coded nylon-sheathed leaded line, a six foot leader of thirty-pound test monofilament, and an umbrella rig. The umbrella was a cross of heavy wire, each arm trailing a foot of mono and a large hook jacketed in colored tubing. It looked like a ceiling mobile mimicking a school of sand eels. Some old-timers said to tip the hooks with pork rind, but it didn’t seem to make much difference.

  Tony, Tim, and I would take the boat through Port Jefferson’s breakwater, heading northeast toward Buoy 11, a large green can buoy marking Mount Misery Shoal. “Troll the can,” people would chant. Throttling down as slow as possible, we’d carefully lay the umbrella rigs out behind us, making sure each tube was spinning properly, and then drop back four to six colors of line (each color marked ten yards) depending on the depth and speed variances due to wind and tide. The schooling blues were typically on the shoal inside Buoy 11 in fifteen to twenty feet of water. Some mornings the rods would come alive immediately. I’d hit neutral, and we’d take turns reeling in the fish, sometimes doubles, rarely triples, once a bluefish on every one of the four hooks. We celebrated with cigarettes pilfered from my father’s pack, feeling woozy but triumphant.

  Trolling too close to a cluster of lobster buoys on a foggy Friday morning, our umbrella rig snagged one of the pots below. Tim and I pulled up the heavy trap to free our hooks, and we saw that it held a large dark lobster. We took it. Thrilled by the idea of bringing home some delicious and valuable lobsters for the weekend, we pulled a couple more pots and grabbed three more lobsters, hiding them at the bottom of our plastic Coleman cooler. That afternoon when we got home and unpacked, my father saw the big antennae waving up from the ice. “Where did you get these lobsters?” he asked.

  “We caught them,” I said. “They took our clam bait on the bottom. Can you believe it?”

  “I don’t ever want to see that again,” my father turned serious. “You understand me?”

  “Yes,” I dropped my eyes. We ate the lobsters, but my father offered none of his usual appreciation. “They hang pirates,” he said, leaving the table and never mentioning it again.

  On most summer days, we’d catch a couple dozen bluefish of two and three pounds each, tossing them in our coolers packed with ice made from milk cartons in our home freezers. Blues were easy to fillet, and if kept cold, the meat would stay firm. “A bonanza!” Tony’s grandmother clapped her hands in delight when we lifted the dripping plastic bags of gray and red fillets.

  Some people didn’t like the taste of bluefish—“Too gamey, too fishy,” they’d say. Aunt Lil picked up a recipe from the owner of the Stony Brook appliance store where we bought a new range. We soaked the fillets in milk for an hour, then frosted them with mayonnaise mixed with pepper, garlic, cilantro, and dill. Wrapped skin-side down loosely in foil and placed in the oven at 350 or on a hot closed grill for about fifteen or twenty minutes, they cooked into a creamy cadeau. For the last five minutes on the grill, my father would open the foil and punch holes through the bottom, the ignited drippings smoki
ng the fish to an even finer finish.

  My friends and I loved to catch blues, but we also found that fighting fish on trolled leaded line and wire umbrella rigs was losing its luster, the power of the fish drained by the heavy tackle. With no knowledge of or access to downriggers, we tried to jig or spin cast with lighter gear whenever possible. It was often at daybreak that we’d spot a whirl of white birds or a writhing school of rusty bunker and motor in for a closer look. Blues! Anticipating the direction of our drift, I’d cut the engine, and we’d slide silently toward the pack—gull cries, wild splashing, oil, and blood in a haze across the water. We’d cast to the edge of the boil and feel the attack.

  Even after a thousand times, even now after the millionth time—from the hook, through the line and rod, into the body and mind—fish thrill. There’s a thrill in the chase. Tackle and boat preparations the day before, early rising and stalking, setting or casting lines, the hopeful repetition and careful adjustment, the waiting—and then the big thrill of the hit, the rod bent and jumping with the living power of the fish. Fish thrill us with their struggle to survive. It’s a human pleasure that doesn’t translate into anything else except animal wildness—like cats and killer whales that toy with their living food—and the worst forms of human cruelty where someone enjoys the long struggle and suffering of his victim. Even in hunting, one hopes for a fast, clean kill. In fishing, the greater the fight, the greater the thrill. “Nice,” Tim would say with a grin when the hooked bluefish made a panicked dash. It may be barbaric, but anyone who loves to fish loves the sensation of a struggling creature. The blues jumped and ran and eventually came to the boat, snap-jawed and yellow eyed.

  One morning my father helped me launch the boat then drove off to work in Middle Island. I had arranged to meet Tony, but he never showed. I waited more than an hour, finally motoring out alone, crossing the rough breakwater into the choppy sound. Birds were working off a large tumble of rocks on the sound side of Seaboard Hole, near where we had caught the fox that February morning. I moved in close to the boiling fish and cast a stainless steel Hopkins lure that I had buffed up with Aunt Lil’s silver polish. Something powerful struck. My rod bent double and pulsed wildly as line sang off the spool. Yes, yes, I thanked the heavens, adjusting my drag and gaining line when I could. For fifteen minutes I stayed with its long runs and broad dodges, keeping the line clear of the prop when it got close and shot under the hull. Finally, in the sweating thrill of an instant, my flimsy blue net at the ready, there was a huge swirl and tail splash, then a glowing bronze flank just below the surface. Oh, my God, I said aloud. Striped bass! Stripers were scarce in those days around Port Jefferson, caught only by pros with live eels under the moon. But I was into a huge one—how big I’ll never know. Suddenly it was gone, the snapped line sagging between the guides of my rod. Another boat had pulled close to watch the battle, and the man behind the wheel just shook his head and sped away. The late morning sun suddenly felt hot, a ferry horn groaned in the distance, and herring gulls hovered above. I would later learn that Tony’s grandmother, a great old Italian lady who loved to hear about our adventures, had died in the night. “You boys bring home some nice fish, okay?” she would always tell us. All I brought home that day was a story.

  “The story doesn’t really explain insanity, it just dramatizes it,” I heard this tough-looking guy tell a cute girl in the hallway of our high school. It was my sophomore year, 1980, and I was playing junior varsity football. I recognized the guy from the locker room. He kissed the girl goodbye and waved me over. “I hear you’re into fishing,” he said. Eugene Jones moved with his family from Valley Stream, where his father had an appliance store. He was a year older, played varsity football, wore an earring, and had the street cred of a guy who had grown up close to the action of New York City. Tough but artistic, he painted the back of his denim jacket with the skeleton and roses of the Grateful Dead. I liked him.

  It was mid-October and getting colder, but I suggested we take my jon boat to Lake Ronkonkoma, joking with him about my uncle’s delicatessen special of bacon and dough that nailed my first bass.“Hey, whatever. We’ll try that shit.” He told me about a deadly chum for snappers—canned mackerel mixed with oatmeal—and I made a note.

  “Where’d you fish for snappers?” I asked.

  “Stony Brook.”

  “Me, too.” We shared a history of snapper fishing not far from where his grandmother lived and where his father had set up a new store. “We bought a stove from your dad. And got that recipe for bluefish. It’s good,” I told him.

  “No fucking way?” he said, picking up his books when the bell rang. “I’ll tell my dad you like it.”

  I was fifteen, without a driver’s license, but my father said that on Sunday Eugene could drive our station wagon, loaded with the jon boat, to Lake Ronkonkoma. We both had football games on Saturday—we both won—and Eugene came over to talk to my dad before heading out to a party. “Nice ta meet ya, Mr. Hughes,” Eugene said, though it sounded like “Mista Yooze.” I could tell that my father was circumspect. Eugene had a city accent, scarred face, and, at that hour, somewhat glassy eyes. But my father admired the great blocks and tackles he made that afternoon, and they shook hands. “Don’t worry,” Eugene said, “I’ll take care a dis guy.”

  On the drive to the lake the next morning, Eugene said he was a little hungover, and we stopped at 7-Eleven to get some coffee and bagels. He told me about the post game party and how he pulled off Bonnie Gambini’s shirt and she gave him head in his car. “She’s got great tits and great lips, man.” I had kissed a couple girls and squeezed Tracy Bromberg’s breasts over her sweater in the woods behind our house, but she pushed me away. It seemed girls were not physically—sexually—attracted to me. “You’re alright, man,” Eugene assured me. “There’s a lot of fish in da sea. It’ll happen.” But he had been laid. “With the right girl, it’s fuckin’ awesome,” he said. “Look into her eyes when you’re hanging out. After a while, man, you can tell if she wants it.” I made a note.

  Eugene also liked school and reading, and we talked about our favorite stories and poems.

  “You know that one about catching the big fish?” he asked.

  “Sure,” I said. Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish” was a high school standard.

  “Good poem, but if I catch a sonofabitch like that—fuck it, man—I’m keeping it.”

  A gorgeous day dawned over the kettlehole of Lake Ronkonkoma—cool but clear and windless. Having moved beyond the deli special, I showed Eugene how to cast and twitch rubber worms around the lake’s submerged timber. It was snaggy, and we got hung up a few times, but that’s where the fish were. Good things don’t often come easy, we agreed. Eugene was skilled with a spinning rod and soon caught a chunky largemouth bass, clipping it on the stringer. “My father’s gonna love that,” he said. We each caught a couple smaller bass, then Eugene hooked a huge fish that crashed the surface and was gone. “Jesus, man,” I said. “That might’a been a five-pounder.” Eugene didn’t swear or complain, he just smiled and said, “That was so cool.” As the sun got higher and the bite subsided, I rowed to the Islip side of the lake and recommended anchoring up and still-fishing with worms. “Might catch a catfish.”

  “Sounds good,” Eugene said.

  The anchor set and the lines down, Eugene pulled two Heinekens from his lunch cooler. He popped the caps with his lighter and handed me one. “Nice,” I said. Red and orange maples glowed back at us from the still lake, and a pair of wood ducks flew by. “Beautiful ducks,” Eugene smiled.

  We talked about birds, football, the Iran hostage crisis, boycotting the Olympics, grain embargoes, the upcoming election, the Grateful Dead, fish, and girls. I told him the Ronkonkoma story of the Indian princess who drowned heartbroken in the lake and now lures young men to their watery graves. “Shit, man. I’m putting on my life jacket,” he acted a bit of panic. Getting into our second beer, I felt wonderful. Then Eugene reached into his pocket and pulle
d out a joint. “You up for a smoke?”

  “I only tried it once. Don’t know if I felt anything,” I said. “But sure. Yeah.”

  Eugene admitted to being busted for weed and sent to a counseling center in Valley Stream. “What a joke,” he said and puffed. “I learned more from those fuck-ups about drugs and shoplifting.” With that confession out of the way and the day so fine, I smoked with my friend and felt the world become even more beautiful. Our conversation ranged from global politics to vast cosmological inquiries. If ice existed on other planets, certainly there must be more water in the universe, certainly more life, more fish. What would angling be like in other worlds? Does the moon affect tides in a lake of this size? Do fish understand time or just move to the rhythms of light and dark, warm and cold? Did that bass feel pain when the hook went through his mouth? “It certainly tried hard to get away,” I observed. Did the other fish feel good when we released them? “Shit yeah,” Eugene said. My rod tip fluttered and I reeled in a yellow perch. “Maybe you should thank the Indian princess,” Eugene said and smiled. I held the golden, black-barred perch up to the sun. “These are good eating,” I said.

  “Put ’im on the stringer,” he said and nodded approvingly.

  I looked at the perch, its gills rising and falling. “Do you think fishing is wrong?” I asked.

  “Are you stoned, man?” Eugene laughed but began working over the question.

  “You could become a vegetarian,” he opened his hands before some invisible salad. “But if you’re gonna eat meat, this is the way to do it. We’re predators.”

  Long Island Sound rippled with predation and offered good bottom fishing for blackfish and porgies feeding on worms and small shellfish. Starting in the spring and summer of 1981, Eugene and I took the China Cat on many trips off Old Field Point, west of Port Jefferson. The point’s original lighthouse was built in 1823, and from 1830 to 1856 it was tended by a single woman. I imagined her out in her craggy garden, picking flowers for her table, as I rowed by in my wool suit, waving and coming ashore with a basket of fish and a bottle of wine. “You like older women?” Eugene asked. He had slept with a friend’s mother and said it was wild. “They really want it. And they know what they’re doing.” Eugene often spoke in clichés about women unless pressed for more detail. “Confidence,” he said. “When a woman—I mean a guy, too—is confident and comfortable with themselves, then they’re better in bed. Active, you know. Not just lay there like a fish.”