Back Seat with Fish

by Henry Hughes

  When we got back in the boat, I noticed the gas hose had come off the fuel tank. I pushed it back in, but after an hour of trolling I could see we were sucking way too much fuel. We turned back toward Port Jefferson and made it halfway. “Shit. We’re out of gas,” I told them in the sudden silence of our starved engine. We were without a radio and adrift in water deeper than our anchor line. “Might as well keep drinking,” Eugene said. And we did. Beer after beer, moving slowly east with the outgoing tide.

  It was getting on four o’clock, and I started wondering what would happen if we didn’t get picked up before dark. Huge ships crossed the sound. We had no running lights, no horn, no charts. How would anyone know where we were? Then Eugene, head wrapped in a red bandana and cracked sunglasses, pointed and rasped, “Arg, mateys. Sail on the horizon.”

  We waved over a yacht named Euphoria, and they agreed to call the Coast Guard. We expected orange helicopters and an official boarding, so we flattened all our empty beer cans and hid them under the life jackets. An hour later, a sluggish cabin cruiser showed up, Coast Guard Auxiliary, skippered by our neighbor, ill-tempered Mr. O’Malley, whose house we egged every Halloween. He bull horned, “Put on your life jackets.” It may have been the first time we ever wore them, and they smelled of mold and beer. Our rescuers approached, threw us a towline, and kindly dragged us back to the ramp in Port Jeff, where my father and Eugene’s father were waiting. “What the hell happened?” they asked. We were late, tired, sun-dried, and beer fuzzled, but we explained, and Mr. Jones went over to make a donation while my father assisted getting the boat on the trailer.

  “How many beers have you had?” my father asked.

  “Just a couple. I’m fine.”

  Feeling too wasted to pilot, I once again gave the wheel of the family station wagon to Eugene—always a better driver—and we headed home. A few blocks from the water, we heard a terrible grinding noise and looked back to see a shower of sparks. Eugene did what any driver might do when something is wrong—he hit the brakes. But the trailer had come unhitched, and when our car stopped, the wheeling boat rolled on, crashing through the wagon’s back door and widow, showering us in blue glass. “What the fuck!” Eugene screamed.

  “I don’t know,” Birch calmly replied, “but I’d say we just got rear-ended by your boat,” the fish chasing, seaweed festooned prow of the China Cat having joined him in the backseat.

  My father must have felt some relief in my return to college. But when I called him to say that a student had been killed drinking and driving on a country road outside Mitchell, he got serious and said, “You better think about that.”

  I survived my senior year, and my father, Aunt Lil, twelve-year-old brother, David, and my friend, Tim, drove together to South Dakota for my graduation. The occasion raised much revelry, and Professor Ditta and his wife threw a party at their house. My father, who had never graduated high school, talked and laughed all night with professors, parents, and my friends. Woody, Xanti, Birch, and Ben Whitehorse were there. There was a keg of beer, a few bottles of booze, and discreet smokes available in the bushes.

  Janet planned to bake a six-pound brown trout I caught a month before from the Missouri River, but while thawing on the counter, the fish was seized and eaten by her two golden retrievers. She instead brought out two pans of baked walleye she had caught with her dad.

  “This is the best fish I ever tasted,” Tim said.

  “Fantastic,” I quickly added.

  Tim and Janet hit it off, and by the time the party was winding down and my family had returned to their motel, I thought something might happen between the three of us. We walked back to my room in Graham Hall, mostly packed up in boxes and suitcases. The little fridge was still plugged in, and there were a few remaining wine coolers, refreshing after the long night of talking. I sat on the couch with Janet while Tim stood above us admiring Janet’s legs.

  “Would you like to see some more of them?” she asked.

  “Sure,” Tim said. Janet smiled and pulled up her skirt.

  Tim kneeled before her and began caressing her thighs, and Janet pulled him forward for a long kiss. I joined in.

  At seven in the morning, the phone rang. It was my father. “Hey, where are you? Your brother is waiting. You taking him fishing or what?”

  “Shit. Okay, right. I’m on my way.” Janet was asleep on the bed, Tim snored on the couch, and I was a sticky, smelly, hungover mess. I shook Tim awake, and we both took hot showers in the communal dorm bathroom, looking a little awkwardly at each other.

  Speed dressed and gear gathered, we raced Janet’s pickup to the motel. We were an hour late, everyone was watching television, and my brother was upset. But Tim and I were in high spirits, despite the hangovers, and we promised donuts and plenty of good fishing. I made a big deal over my brother’s new spinning outfit with a red Cardinal reel that Aunt Lil bought him the day before. “Be careful with him around the water,” Lil said. My father gave me twenty dollars. “Hey,” he looked right into my bloodshot eyes, “Watch your brother.”

  We stopped for donuts and coffee. My brother, chubby like me at twelve, gobbled down two Bismarcks, drained a strawberry milk, and said he felt sick. Tim and I savored the coffee but couldn’t eat. We drove down a washboard gravel road—“I’m gonna puke,” my brother threatened, but he didn’t—to the grassy banks of the Jim River, where I told him we could catch some catfish. David could cast pretty well, but there were countless snags, and it was frustrating for him and us. I had to help him break off and retie a few times, and he said, “I hate this place.”

  I had not fished with my brother for many months, and now he was straining my patience. In this same way I surely must have exhausted my father, a man who doesn’t even like fishing. But maybe that made it easier. I had expectations and got annoyed when my brother didn’t follow instructions or when he complained. David made another swift cast, and the top half of his rod shot into the water. “My pole’s gone! My new pole,” he screamed. “I hate this.”

  “It’s okay,” I calmed him. “Just reel slowly.” Somewhere out in the river the retrieved sinker stopped at the top guide and brought the launched section back to us. “Man, Dave. Are you trying to spear the fish or what?” He laughed, and I told him I had shot top sections off my rod many times, explaining how some ferrules are prone to it and that he needed to check that the two pieces were snug. He looked at me and laughed. “That was cool. Can I do it again?”

  It had been a couple hours without a bite, so I rigged up a night crawler under a bobber and told David to cast upstream and let it drift with the current. I just wanted him to catch something.

  The sun came out and I joined Tim under a railroad trestle and watched my brother cast his baited rig. My little brother had come all this way, and all I did was get drunk and stoned, debauch myself, show up late and hungover, poison him with donuts and abandon him on the bank to fish and fumble alone. He reeled in, lifted the rod straight up and the line wrapped around the tip. I watched him struggle with the tangle but felt too tired to get up and help. He finally unwrapped the line and made a good cast. “That’s it,” I yelled. “Just leave it there a while.”

  “That was pretty wild last night,” Tim leaned back on his rolled sweatshirt.

  “It sure was,” I said.

  “You’re okay with it?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “You think Janet’s okay with it?” he asked.

  “She seemed okay last night,” I said. “We’ll talk about it later.”

  Tim and I fell asleep, waking to my brother’s cries. I looked over and saw him at the water’s edge, rod bent deeply, and something splashing ten yards in front of him. We ran over and saw him battling a large bronze fish. “Take it easy, Dave,” I coached him. “Don’t horse it,” Tim said. The fish fought well. I could see the bold scales and golden, barbeled face of a carp. Most Americans deem carp a trash fish, but this tenacious ten-pounder saved our day. “Good job, bro
. He’s huge.” It was no mean achievement for a young angler to keep casting even after his brother passed out. And it takes skill to land a big fish on six-pound test. When the carp came up in the net, we high fived and hugged David. He looked like the happiest kid in the world.

  We carried the fish back to town and showed it around. People took photos and congratulated my brother, asking if he planned on going to college in Mitchell. Ben Whitehorse hailed us, explaining that carp “was damn bony,” but he also told us how to prepare it, cutting off the head, gutting, scaling, and then knifing deep slashes in the sides down to the bone. “Deep fry the whole thing,” he made a gesture like a bounce pass. He said the little bones would dissolve and that the flesh was fine. We cleaned the carp and packed it in a squeaky Styrofoam cooler with ice from the motel. But there was so much going on with the move that I called up Ben and asked if he wanted the fish. “No Indian’s gonna eat a damn carp,” he said. “But I know a white lady who might.”

  “Norwegian?” I asked with a smile when he came by.

  “I think maybe she is. Yeah, something like that,” Ben smiled. “Real nice.”

  And that’s the last time I saw Ben Whitehorse, driving off with another big fish in the backseat of his old car.

  Schooling

  Gazing down into the orange-brown Wabash River from the old State Street Bridge linking Lafayette and West Lafayette, Indiana, I could see large carp picking at what looked to be a fuzzy love seat jammed under the pilings. “Water’s polluted,” a man walking his dog told me when I asked him about fishing. “Eli Lilly upriver. PCBs, mercury. You don’t want to eat those fish,” he made a sour face, and his dog barked. But I wouldn’t mind catching them, I thought.

  It was August 1987, and I was starting the master’s program in writing at Purdue University, an institution of nearly thirty thousand students. Driving the family’s aging Buick station wagon with the boat-smashed back door past West Lafayette’s blaring fraternity parties with bikinied girls water-sliding down palatial lawns, past Boilermaker fanfare, students queued to buy books, and grand brick buildings dedicated entirely to subjects like entomology, I found Burnham’s hunting and fishing store in a red tin barn above the river. I got a fishing license, bought what little gear I could afford, and spent many hours talking with the proprietors, Luke and Edith Short. Luke also did boat motor repair, and the big building featured his outboard collection, including a skinny 1925 Johnson, famous for its reliable flywheel magneto made in South Bend, Indiana. There were 1940s and ’50s deco-finned Johnsons and Evinrudes, dorky Sears Elgins, and slick Mercurys from the ’60s and ’70s that reminded me of old Ralph’s Fishing Station. Luke always had time for my questions, and in the days before the Internet, he’d pull atlases and old books off the shelf, pointing out a spot or reading up on a fish. “I think you caught a mooneye,” he said after looking at my photograph. “Always wondered what the hell they were. Kinda like a shad, wouldn’t ya say?” He would thumb through thick catalogs and take my special orders—floating jigs, a cross bar ceramic knife sharpener, a ten-gauge shotgun—promising it would be there next Friday.

  From Burnham’s parking lot the Wabash looked like a wide, muddy, slow-going southern river. Although teeming with life, people often disparaged the river as “polluted, ugly, scary, and disgusting.” “Do you actually touch that thing?” other students asked with horrified expressions as we drove over a bridge. I’ve fished many troubled rivers—the Wabash, Hudson, Shinano, Nanchang, Chao Phraya, Mississippi, Willamette—but would never write off living water, no more than I would disown a sick friend. “It’s a lovely river,” I’d say. Of course, I wanted healthier water, and I attended meetings of the local Izaak Walton League, signed petitions, voted on new legislation, and went door-to-door asking people not to throw oil down their storm drains. It’s hard to know what to do in the face of such a complex problem. “Start by getting to know it,” Luke at Burnham’s told me when I expressed my worries about the Wabash.

  So I walked the banks and cast soft plastic lures and plugs around brushy snags, bedsprings, woody sloughs, and tire-banked flood ponds, hooking crappie, largemouth bass, sunfish, and sauger with camouflaged bodies that reminded me of old fighter planes.

  “It’s great, but I can’t seem to catch a walleye,” I reported back to Luke.

  “Maybe you’re fishing the wrong school,” he said, pulling straight his University of Minnesota sweatshirt and turning to his wife with a smile.

  “He’s been saying that silly thing for twenty years,” Edith patted him on the back. “Tell him your secrets, honey.”

  Luke explained that in the murky Wabash I needed a lure that made noise. Following his advice and casting what he called the Minnesota maraca, a three-inch football-shaped Rattlin’ Rapala, behind a downed sycamore, I caught my first decent walleye, maybe three pounds. I studied the large teeth, the golden, cross-hatched complexion, and namesake eyes that glowed like a lion’s in safari lights.

  At first there was something distant and inaccessible about the walleye’s metallic stare. We emotionally connect with animals by looking into their eyes. I loved the warm eyes of my dogs and cats. The blinking eyes of a shot duck pulled flapping from the icy water made me uneasy. The stilling eyes of dying rabbits and the fox I killed haunt me still. “The soft eyes open,” James Dickey writes in “The Heaven of Animals,” illuminating the presence of an eternal animal spirit that challenges traditional Christian theology denying that animals have souls. The cold, shallow eyes of fish—bright and colorful as they are—may not move us as easily. That makes it easier for some of us to kill and eat them. Elizabeth Bishop says the large yellow eyes of the fish she caught “shifted a little, but not / to return my stare.”

  Fish can appear unfeeling until we get to know them, watch and feed them underwater or in an aquarium, exchanging bits of squid for liquid glints of appreciation. My brother’s pet bergall seemed to express with his eyes the curiosity and hunger of a puppy as he poked out of his cave for a bit of turkey.

  So what about the eyes of a fish that we’re going to eat? Very few people look into the living eyes of their food. Walt Whitman looked into the eyes of an ox. “What is that you express in your eyes?” he asked. “It seems to me more than all the print I have read in my life.” I held the walleye a few inches under the water and then tilted up the head and looked again into his eyes: river, hunger, other walleye, and terrible predators like me. Although I read hundreds of books in graduate school—many of those pages now forgotten—I shall never forget the telling gaze of that walleye I returned to the dark, swirling river.

  The Wabash swirled with a multitude of fish eating and being eaten, among them vast schools of gizzard shad. I caught walleye, bass, and catfish bulging with shad and watched gulls dipping over the silver schools. In winter, flocks of the more delicate ring-billed gulls appeared on the river just as the shad were recruiting into great shoals that sometimes choked the ponds linked to the river. On the Williamsburg Ponds connected to the Wabash River in West Lafayette, I watched in horror as a massive school of corralled and panicked shad began gasping and dying. The gulls fed on the silver fish while they were alive. When the fish died and floated, the birds rejected them, and thousands of pale shad, along with collaterally suffocated catfish and bass, lined the banks.

  Staring at a raft of dead fish, I opened a letter from Janet telling me that she was doing great in school, had been elected student government president, and was dating another man. We had talked about staying together over the miles, but our letters and phone calls thinned out. When I didn’t answer her last letter, she said she knew it was over. I felt guilty and tried to call her but chickened out. Instead I dashed off an apology letter. I had handled the breakup badly—I admitted that—but I didn’t ask her to reconsider. I called a new friend.

  Erin and I met at Harry’s Chocolate Shop, an old tin-ceilinged, wide-windowed college bar that poured stiff drinks and tall beers and packed in crowds that usually be
came unbearably dense and loud. One got the sense that they never scrubbed Harry’s, just swept and re-varnished the sticky palimpsest of conversation, flirtation, discovery, and delight—and plenty of wasted time—into another amber veneer of collegiate civilization.

  We were sitting at a back table when we overheard the woman behind us talking about the fish kill. “Excuse me,” I said, and we met Pamela, a doctoral student in biology. She explained that fish kills happen naturally but can be augmented by environmental degradation. Pamela was surprised that a couple of “literature types” were so aware of life and death on the river. “Of course,” I said. “We’re poets. Always attuned to nature.” Pamela just looked at us and smiled, and I wasn’t sure if she heard me. Harry’s was getting crowded and noisy. Erin asked if we should all get some dinner, and when we stepped out on the cold, quieter sidewalk, Pamela offered her place. We picked up some groceries, two bottles of wine, and walked up to Pamela’s apartment, a neat one-bedroom with framed paintings of dark landscapes and a silver bass encircled in watercress. “This is pretty fine art for a biology type,” I teased, and she told us that her mother painted and her father liked to fish. I asked about the image of the silver bass, conveying my nostalgia for the Long Island striped bass. “Yes,” she said. “They’re closely related.” She talked about a hybrid of white and striped bass that were introduced into Indiana’s rivers. “The hybrids are fertile,” she said. “There’s evidence of reproduction.” I loved her knowledge. She put on some Tracy Chapman, made a salad, and heated bread. I opened and poured wine, and we drank, ate, and talked away the evening. Although Pamela and I had a fish connection, her eyes were on Erin, and she kept asking about her writing and what books she loved. When Pamela got up, she touched Erin’s shoulder, and Erin stared at her. Around one, I said goodnight. “Can you get home all right?” I asked Erin, and Pamela reminded her of all the wine she’d had and said she could stay. I smiled, thanked Pamela, and walked home, feeling a little lonely.