Back Seat with Fish

by Henry Hughes

  We packed the canoe, and I tied the wine to the seat frame. Caitlin got in while I steadied and then eased us off the gravelly bank, taking the back seat and pushing with my paddle. From Ralph’s rental skiff off Long Island to this gliding arrow in Indiana, I have always loved the sensation of being suspended and moving over water. Gravity can be a real drag on our terrestrial lives, but water offers buoyant possibilities. Caitlin smiled brightly, getting a feel for the paddle and stroke. A pair of mallards swam up to us, and she said they were “ducky little lovers.”

  The water was moving swiftly, and as it narrowed, its speed and power rose more like a river, the red canoe glancing off rocks and bumping logs. I was looking for a good place to stop and do some fishing, but the water was higher than anticipated, and it seemed best to keep moving. Shooting through a timbered flume, an overhanging branch caught one of the fishing rods. Reaching to grab it, I felt how tippy we were, and Caitlin was having trouble bringing the bow around. I tried to rudder with my paddle, but we swung diagonally across the river, hitting a large rock.

  “That was scary,” Caitlin turned back to me once we settled into calmer water.

  “We’re fine,” I said. “Just relax.”

  We turned another corner and the river funneled into a rapid passage dammed by a huge fallen tree. “Get to the side,” I yelled. “Paddle left, hard.” There was a moment of confusion about whether I meant left direction or left paddle, and then we dug hard, powering the canoe across and down the river. But the current was overwhelming and we slammed into the tree. There was that moment of what do I do? The roar of water, the canoe smashed lengthwise against the trunk, river pouring in my lower end. As I plunged, I saw Caitlin above me, her body falling in a scream. There was a cold blast, dark noise, my head rubbing against the rough bark of the tree and popping up on the other side. I looked for Caitlin. In a moment she was there, frightened but swimming, and we touched ground together, hugging and shaking. I helped her to a rock and waded out to retrieve our swamped canoe. There was only one rod, no cooler, no floating cushions, one paddle, and the tethered jug of wine. I took a long drink and handed the bottle to Caitlin.

  Caitlin and I drank some wine and shivered on the shadowed rocks. Her wet shirt stuck to her chest, her nipples sharp and dark.

  “We weren’t even wearing life jackets,” she said.

  “I know. I think he forgot them.”

  “What about you? Jesus, Henry. You’re supposed to know about this shit. That was so fucking stupid.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  I got up and looked for my other rod, the cooler, and the second paddle but found only a straw hat snagged in the bushes, perhaps the bobbing farewell of another hapless paddler on the spring river.

  “You okay, Cait?” I asked again, helping her back into the canoe. She nodded, but I knew she was cold and shaken. A few hundred feet down river we found our other paddle and one cushion. The movement was good for Caitlin, and as we got into a wide, calm stretch of river, the sun came out like a golden blessing, and she smiled. After a half hour of sun, Caitlin stripped off her wet clothes down to her swimsuit, the blonde light returning to her hair, the muscles in her back and shoulders flexing to the rhythm of each stroke. I took off everything but my underpants and the straw hat, and we dried and warmed and paddled. Passing the wine, the fear washed away, and we talked about the accident and how it felt to go under the tree. We might have gotten snagged and drowned, but we didn’t. We rose shining and alive. For those of us with safe, calm, and steady lives, perhaps dozing on the warm ferry ride of middle-class America, a survived shipwreck brings quite a high. Worth the risk, I thought. Definitely worth the risk.

  I drank more wine and, without any lunch, felt quite buzzed. “You wanna stop here for a bit?” I asked, and we glided into a sandy pocket, scattering a school of minnows. Caitlin stepped out and stretched. She looked beautiful. We held each other and kissed, pulling off our remaining clothes and lying back on the river-softened trunk of a downed elm. Our lovemaking was a little wilder that day on Wildcat Creek.

  The Big Hard

  For spring break 1990, Caitlin and I drove down to New Orleans to visit Woody, my old friend from college who was studying chemistry at Tulane. We savored the increasingly warmer winds of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Alabama, playing and replaying Paul Simon’s Graceland album, loving the voices and rhythms of Ladysmith Black Mambazo. Just a month before, South Africa’s President De Klerk announced that he would repeal apartheid and free Nelson Mandela after more than twenty-seven years in prison. We drove past Civil War monuments and, somewhere in Alabama, pulled into a park and slept in our car. I got up early, pissed, and walked down a trail, staring into the deep woods and out past a fresh green field. I imagined a line of slaves working the rows while a white overseer rode on a horse above them. The fields were hemmed by a pretty creek. There was no one fishing.

  We drove into New Orleans, following Woody’s handwritten directions down Carrolton Avenue toward the river, parking on Short Street, and knocking on his chipped door. He had a small dark apartment. There was no bed, just a sleeping bag and some blankets folded on the floor. The place had been picked up a bit, but the kitchen counter and sink were piled with pots and pans and crimson crab shells. “I’m gonna make you a nice Cajun dinner,” he said. It was great to see Woody, and he and Caitlin got talking about New Orleans and poverty segregation and liberal reform. The city had shined up during the 1980s oil boom, but there were still poor parishes, political corruption, and countless social problems. Woody was informed and fairly open-minded but more cynical than usual. “It’s all bullshit,” he would say over and over as we talked politics. “This ain’t no Big Easy,” he said. “It’s a Big Hard.” When I asked about graduate school, he said it was bringing him down.

  “You’re a TA now, right?” I asked. “How’s the teaching?”

  “Shit, Hughes, you know it’s work. And my supervisor’s a prick.”

  We drank some cheap wine and ate Woody’s fine supper of wild rice covered in a zesty crab sauce with a side of smothered okra. Woody led us down St. Charles, and Caitlin admired the mansions draped with sleeping cats. “It would be great to live here,” she said. “Expensive as shit,” Woody scowled. Back on Carrolton at a lowbrow blues bar, we had a round of bourbon and just listened. I felt relaxed walking back to Woody’s. He wanted to do a bit more drinking, but we said we were tired. We stopped by his car, the side window taped up in plastic.

  “Last month they fucking broke in and stole my fishing poles,” Woody said.

  “No.”

  “Fuck, yeah. This ain’t a great neighborhood.”

  “I’ll bring my rods inside.”

  “What about my car?” Caitlin asked.

  “Maybe we better park it up by Cheryl’s.” Woody’s girlfriend lived a few blocks away in a safer neighborhood. Woody and Caitlin drove off to park, and I sat on some steps and looked over the railroad tracks and levee to a flickering stretch of the Mississippi. Two teenaged black guys walked by.

  “Hey, you need a little weed, man?”

  “No, thanks,” I said.

  “A’right. We’s right up the street. You ask for Whisker.”

  “Okay, thanks,” I answered and smiled but didn’t want to get too friendly.

  The next morning Woody had to set up a lab at school. I drank a cup of instant coffee, ate a couple stale beignets from on top of the fridge, kissed Caitlin, donned my new fishing vest, grabbed my medium spinning rod, and stepped onto the cool and quiet streets, past a couple homeless guys sleeping under a tree, over the tracks, and up and down the levee. At the base of the levee were long pools of trapped floodwater, and I walked around them and found a trail down through the brush to the river. This river is huge, I thought, looking out over the Mississippi’s oily gray complexion shifting with the cloudy sky. Heavy tugboats pushed barges. There were smaller boats and some kind of dredge chewing away upstream. I wasn’t sure what to do with all this wate
r, so I just started casting a chubby auger-tailed white worm on a quarter-ounce jig head.

  Without any bites, I kept moving upriver, where I met an older black man with a meaty catfish on a stringer. “Nice fish,” I said.

  “Once in a while the good Lord gives me one,” he said. We had a long talk about fishing and the river. He looked at my lures and said I might catch a green trout, a largemouth bass, but if I wanted catfish I better use some bait. “You wanna lit’l bit of dis here?” he asked. “I make it.” He showed me marble-size balls of dark clayish bait. I found an old bleached chicken liver container in the bushes, and he dropped in a few pieces. “Good things come to those who bait,” he chuckled. “Now if you got time an’ a car, you ought to go over da river to da West Bank towards Belle Chasse or Lafitte and try for some redfish an speckled trout. They bitin’ right now I heard. An artificial wid a piece of shrimp on it no problem.” I thanked him and told him my name. “I’m Delmar, nice to meet ya,” he said and made another cast.

  Upriver beside a bight where the water swirled and stalled, I rigged for catfish, stuck on Delmar’s special bait, cast, and sat down. I fished for three hours without a bite, listening to the sounds of industry and commerce along the river. Two men in their thirties set up chairs nearby and fished lazily into the weekday morning. I thought of Bing Crosby and Louis Armstrong singing about skipping work and hanging a sign, “Gone Fishin’,” though I preferred a more discreet approach, calling in sick and angling far from campus where my students wouldn’t see me. In any case, a fishing escape from the workday seemed in keeping with what I still wanted to believe was the Big Easy, a city reputed for its laid-back, love-to-play attitude. Things were different back in the busy Big Apple, but there was the New York legend of Rip Van Winkle, who avoided profitable labor to “fish all day without a murmur, even though he should not be encouraged by a single nibble.” Then again, old Rip caught hell from his wife. I looked at my watch and reluctantly started back over the levee.

  Down in the long flood pool, I saw a fish. Getting closer, the lines and scales of a huge carp, three feet long, became clear. I approached gently and presented the bait near his head, but it only spooked him and he yawed off a few feet. I made my next cast way ahead of him, and gently dragged the bait along the bottom toward his barbels. “Come on,” I whispered. For a moment he seemed interested, and then he moved away. I took off the catfish bait, lightened my lead, and looked in the grass for a worm or grub, finding only a torn pretzel. It was rock hard, but I managed to drill the hook into a shard. The bait floated nicely above the split shot, and I gently presented it to the carp. I could see everything. The carp slowly approached the pretzel, touched it—its thick lips round in low note embouchure—then turned away. “Come on!” I couldn’t believe it. I tried for another half hour, but this fish wouldn’t bite. The carp was in shallow water, clooping at the end of a tapering pool. Maybe I could drive him up the shore and grab him. It would be great to show up at the apartment with this Mississippi monster.

  I took off my vest, set down my rod, and, with jeans and sneakers on, I waded into the pool up to my knees and then turned and walked toward the carp. He faced away from me, hovering in a foot of water. This looked promising. I came up slowly, watching the feathery undulations of his fins and fanning gills, got right over him, and sent my hands down into the water—ready, so ready. The moment I touched him he bolted, plowing a wake through the shallows and into the deep end of the pool. When I stepped out of the water to higher ground I could see him. He composed himself and swam back into the shallows. I composed myself and made one more ursine effort but failed.

  Walking across the grass toward River Road I saw that weed-selling kid, Whisker, talking to Delmar. Delmar walked on, carrying his gear and two fine catfish. I waved, he stopped, and I told him about the carp. “You try doughballs?” he asked.

  “Pretzel,” I said.

  “It’s been a day of blessings,” he smiled. “Maybe I’ll give it a try.”

  “Good luck, Delmar.”

  When I got in, Caitlin was a little annoyed. I was over an hour late and soaked below the waist. “Did you fall in?” she asked.

  “No, I tried to grab a carp.”

  Woody came in, set down his bag, and listened to my account of the huge fish trapped in the levee.

  “Let’s shoot ’im,” Woody said, grabbing his duck poaching .22 from the corner of the room. “Let me get some more rounds.”

  “Great!” I said.

  “Are you two crazy?” Caitlin boiled. “You’re just gonna walk through the streets with a gun?”

  “Dis here is N’awlins, dahling,” Woody exaggerated an accent and grin. “Just a little redneck recreation.”

  “Shooting a fish? No, I’m not sticking around for this. I’ve been waiting here to do something in this city. This is ridiculous.”

  I knew what I had to do. “All right, Woody. We’ll let this one go.”

  Sensible, mature women have on several occasions saved me from reckless folly. I changed into some dry clothes, and we picked up Woody’s girlfriend, Cheryl, and drove south to Magazine Street, where we spent a lovely, languorous, drink-and-food filled afternoon at Miss May’s and The Club. Cheryl was a bright, attractive woman with full strawberry hair and green eyes, and Caitlin and I enjoyed her company very much. She did have more conservative viewpoints and made some comments about affirmative action and the failure of African Americans to educate themselves that angered Woody and led to a low-level fight that clouded the afternoon.

  I told Woody about Delmar and asked about catching some redfish. The next day, Caitlin, Woody, and I got an early start and drove Caitlin’s car south over the bridge and down the expressway across Harvey Canal, where Woody said he caught some big catfish, one with a bird in its stomach and another stuffed with cigarette butts. Fish, like people, put the craziest things in their mouths. We stopped at a tackle and charter shop in Lafitte. The air was muggy and fishy. Gulls and pelicans billed around the canal. A chartered boat trip was out of our price range, but Woody pressed a blubbery, bald man behind the counter with questions, and I listened. “You know where dat strip club used to be?—try behind there,” the man drawled, rubbing his belly. There were other conversations about “ditch crawfish, if you know where they’s at” and some kind of fish gravy “made wit carrots, onyun, and celry.”

  Past the long town of Lafitte and down a gloomy gravel road, we found a bayou that looked promising. Caitlin was worried about leaving her car parked in a “creepy swamp,” and I was dying to explore the place and start fishing. “Come on, Cait,” I said. “We’re here,” as if that settled it. We walked a spongy trail to its swampy margin. There were tall trees draped in Spanish moss and the eyes and snout of a small alligator ventured into the sticky air. We caught nothing, and Caitlin insisted we check on the car. “Another half hour,” I begged. Something swirled in the tea-colored water. There were turtles, mud hens, and the distinct crack of a gunshot a few hundred yards away. I thought of the pirate Jean Lafitte slipping through the mist with his rum and gold. “That’s it,” Caitlin said when we heard another gunshot. We found the car unmolested and drove to a lunch dive where the waiter’s tie was so stained and flecked with food it would have boiled down into a nice fish gravy. The special was redfish and rice. “I hope I don’t get sick,” Caitlin held her spotted water glass up to the light. You could buy alcohol almost anywhere in Louisiana, and I ordered a round of straight vodkas as a preventive measure against microbes. After lunch we stopped at a bulkhead along a brackish canal and tried plunking some shrimp for redfish. Two rough-looking white guys whistled at Caitlin and asked if they could buy beer from us. We gave them a couple cans from our cooler and were glad to see them move along. Again, no fish.

  Woody popped in a Stevie Ray Vaughn cassette tape, and we picked up some catfish fillets from the market and drove back to Cheryl’s for dinner. She and Woody seemed okay. Cheryl made her mother’s recipe of blackened cat, dippi
ng the fillets in melted butter and rolling them in a bowl of paprika, cayenne pepper, black pepper, white pepper, salt, garlic powder, onion powder, dried basil, thyme, and God knows what else. She dribbled a little more butter on the crusty fillets and set them in a red-hot cast iron skillet and covered it. We drank wine, heard crackling sounds, and after three minutes she lifted the lid to a cloud of delicious smoke. Cheryl turned the fillets and dampened the chimney once more. The very air had become a tantalizing appetizer. After a few more minutes, the catfish came smoking out of the pan, the spices roasted dark to the flesh. I had no trouble telling Cheryl, “This is some of the best fish I’ve ever eaten.”

  Caitlin and I took long walks downtown and through the French Quarter. We talked, listened to music, admired the filigreed ironwork, ate oysters, shopped, drank different things, toured graveyards and little museums, and lingered around buskers and bookstores. Sometimes tensions rose between us about what we might eat or buy, what we might do in the next hour or in the next year, and I felt this must be the continuous challenge of a relationship. One time New Orleans author Kate Chopin wrote about marriage and that “blind persistence with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature.” Caitlin stroked a black cat stretched out on a shop counter.

  “I wish we could get a cat,” she said.

  “Won’t that be a hassle with school and everything?” I frowned.

  “You love cats,” she said. “You don’t even know what you want.”

  But when things were right with us, they were very right. Out in the sun we sat on a bench and kissed long and deep. “The Big Easy,” I whispered, swimming a hand up her skirt. Caitlin smelled of lavender and clean sweat. “Not here,” she smiled and pushed my hand down. I felt close to her body, and at night, with Woody snoring, we made love.

  Still, I would sneak out for a couple hours each morning and explore the Mississippi. At the end of the week, I saw Delmar talking to Whisker again. When Whisker walked off, I went down to Delmar. “You know that guy?” I couldn’t resist asking.