Back Seat with Fish

by Henry Hughes

  “Yeah, he’s my son.”

  “Really? Whisker?”

  “Sounds like you know him, too. That name’s from fishing, cause he’s good at it. Or was, when he did it. The Lord ain’t done with that boy, that’s for sure.”

  I considered Delmar a man with far fewer opportunities than someone like Woody, yet he seemed much happier and hopeful—a man who knew how to keep himself afloat in the big waters of life. Delmar went on to tell me about the stranded carp. It just wouldn’t bite, but now it was gone and maybe somebody got it with a pitchfork. “I’m heading home tomorrow,” I said, and he looked right at me. “May God bless you, son, and grant you a safe trip.”

  On the last morning, Woody and I walked up to the north end of Audubon Park. Delmar was there. “You get around,” I said and introduced him to Woody. Woody nodded, “I’ve seen you around. At least someone’s catching fish.” Delmar had another catfish on his stringer.

  I was glad to be in Audubon Park. I had recently read a biography of John James Audubon and knew that he spent time in New Orleans when he was still an emerging artist. I told Woody that here in 1821 Audubon met a beautiful young woman who commissioned him to draw her in the nude. He was nervous, but he did a good job, and she paid him with a fine new gun, asking only that he keep her name a secret. “New Orleans got all kinds of secrets,” Woody said and smiled over the story. Audubon loved hunting, but he found fishing a bit boring. He may have appreciated wading a stream and casting flies to trout, but there wasn’t enough action in plunking bait. I felt the same way today and tied on that oily white auger-tail, worming it around the pilings. After twenty minutes, a fish hit like thunder and made erratic runs back and forth between the poles. “Hallelujah,” I cried. Woody came over, and Delmar watched. It looked like a big pewter porgy but longer, swirling up to the bank, where I reached down and pinched its gills. Whatever it was, somebody in this town will eat it. Deep bodied with a divided dorsal of sharp spines and soft rays, it felt to be a solid three pounds. When I set it down it creaked and groaned like a tight lid on wooden box. This creaking-groaning-croaking voice reminded me of the Long Island weakfish, a member of the drum family that includes redfish. Males of these species vibrate muscles against their swim bladders to create what some call a drumming sound. I told Woody it must be a drum.

  “Dat d’re is a gaspergoo,” Delmar declared.

  “Gasper-goo?” I repeated, relishing the word.

  “It’s good eating. With fish gravy.”

  We wouldn’t have time to prepare the fish, and we offered it with respect to Delmar. “Sure,” he said. I was curious what the drum was eating and asked if we could gut it right there. “Don’t see why not,” Delmar said. The stomach was heavy and crunchy with small snail and mussel shells. I later learned that the gaspergoo, a freshwater drum, could live more than seventy years and that the older males make the most noise. “You keep that fiber in your diet, and you’ll be grunting into old age, too,” Woody told me on the phone months later when we reminisced. School hadn’t worked out too well for Woody.

  “What about New Orleans?” I asked him.

  “There’s a lot of good and a lot of bad. It’s tempting to stay in a place like this, but it could do you in. I’m telling you, man. It’s the Big Hard.”

  Maybe drink and cynicism got the best of Woody, but he kept on fishing. “Sure, I’m still fishing,” he’d say in a late night drunken phone call. “What else is there?”

  Caitlin and I had a good relationship, but our prospects waned. I finished my degree in 1990, hung around West Lafayette, and taught part time, while Caitlin applied and got into graduate school. We celebrated, but everyday life felt increasingly low and muddy. I had little money, my car was breaking down, and Aunt Lil had just been diagnosed with cancer. Should I go back to Long Island? Maybe follow Caitlin to grad school in Pennsylvania? “You should go to Japan,” my fishing friend Sean advised. “They love drinking and fishing. And there are jobs for English teachers.” When I told Caitlin that I had applied to teach in Japan, she was upset.

  “Don’t you think that’s something we need to talk about?”

  “You’re off to grad school. What am I gonna do?”

  “Come with me?”

  “And do what?”

  “Maybe I’d like to go to Japan.”

  “Would you?”

  “We should at least talk about it.”

  We talked, meditated, jogged together, talked some more, but it was clear that we were going to be apart. “How long?” Caitlin asked, and I said I didn’t know.

  Men are afraid of commitment, it is often said. Is it because they fear it will limit their pleasure or power? Everything from evolutionary biology to pop psychology has been used to explain or excuse male behavior that favors multiple partners and social roving. True or not, it’s a shame that these fears and forces prevent some men from ever enjoying the kind of deep and lasting union that rewards so much better than a dozen flings. I would eventually come to understand that commitment is not restriction but rather form—like the meter and lines of a sonnet or the angle and rhythm of a fly cast—that shapes a crucial part of our relationships. There are conventions that dictate these arts—including the art of being together—but every couple must also find its own way of getting along. So much is possible if one is sensitive, creative, and flexible within certain boundaries.

  I appreciate that form now in my late forties, but I didn’t much at twenty-five. My reluctance to renew living together with Caitlin was a rejection of form. I wanted the freedom to come and go as I pleased. I wanted to fish like crazy. At least I was honest with Caitlin about my ambivalent feelings and my increasing desire to be on my own. It was the Big Hard of loving and enjoying someone very much but still feeling incomplete and unsatisfied in the wider world of wonder.

  The summer after her graduation, Caitlin came out to Long Island. The traffic was heavier. More forest, field, and farmland had been turned over to housing and shopping centers. We drank tea and talked in the backyard with Aunt Lil. Lil put seed out every day for the birds. Caitlin smiled and asked, “What’s that one?” pointing to what I thought was some kind of warbler. My brother, David, came quietly through the gate and called the delicate flit of green and brown a vireo. David was almost six foot, broad shouldered and barrel-chested, his straight sandy hair cut short like a guy going into the Army. He was going to be a junior in high school, and he reported on his summer job down on the docks. Caitlin told Lil she had “done a good job raising her boys.” Lil smiled and said she thanked God every day for his help. We could see that Lil was sick, but her spirits were steady, and she was glad to be retired. “Would you like a little pickled herring?” she asked. It was one of her favorite snacks, served with sour cream on little squares of rye bread.

  Lil had taken part of her pension purse and bought my brother a new boat, a seventeen-foot center console Mako with an eighty-horsepower Evinrude outboard motor. Lil spoiled David, telling me quite explicitly that she was trying to make up for the loss of his mother. “Well, that’s one mother of a boat,” I said to Lil, suddenly realizing how stupid and insensitive that sounded. I was jealous. “You are one lucky kid,” I told David. “I never had a boat like that.” My father gave the old China Cat to a carpenter friend who wanted to restore it, but the boat rotted away in his yard.

  Material jealousies wear off fast if we really like someone, and Caitlin and I happily crewed on David’s craft, which he let me christen Queequeg, after our beloved pagan hero from Moby-Dick. Trolling around Buoy 11, not only did we hook the familiar schooling blues but ten- and fifteen-pound striped bass, one after another. “Where did all these stripers come from?” I asked my brother, and we would both learn that commercial restrictions, habitat restoration, pollution controls, and sport management had brought them back. These were large fish but under the thirty-six inch limit, and we carefully released them back into their schools. After comparable environmental and catch management effort
s, fluke were also on the rise. Fluke, sometimes called summer flounder, are predatory, toothy flatfish that hunt the shoals for sand eels and other small fish and squid. We rigged for fluke with a two-ounce sinker, three-foot leader, and a feather-dressed wide-gapped hook baited with shiners. A fluke grabs its prey and swims off before swallowing, so we drifted along the shoal with the sinker just tapping the gravelly bottom, feeling for the tug and letting out another few feet of line before setting the hook.

  “Now,” I shouted, and Caitlin set the hook on a bolting fish.

  “That’s no fluke,” my brother punned when the net slipped under its creamy belly. We caught several, their topside colors varying from speckled tan to dark gray, according to the bottom. Caitlin landed the only keeper—a chocolate brown, lightly spotted, twenty-seven-inch doormat of a fish. That night I steamed the thick fillets the way Sean showed me, and Aunt Lil said it was so good and healthy. “Who needs all that grease?”

  The fish news wasn’t all rosy, however. The winter flounder of my childhood were all but gone. Sea bass and weakfish numbers were way down, and for some reason the mackerel no longer recruited to the north shore in great numbers. A variety of depleted stocks meant that far fewer draggers, lobstermen, and clammers were able to make a living off Long Island. For many, the old ways of life on the water were disappearing.

  “Plenty of eels still around,” Herbie said, trying to cheer us up despite reports that American eels were also diminishing. Having just retired as a union laborer, Herbie devoted himself to eeling and fishing. Life hadn’t been easy for Herb, but as Washington Irving once said of a venerable old angler and seaman, “His face bore the marks of former storms, but present fair weather.” Herbie hired a friend to build him a wooden skiff, and he paid cash for a new outboard, mooring his simple craft in Setauket Harbor. Looking out over the green haven made me think of William Sidney Mount’s painting, Eel Spearing in Setauket Harbor, 1845. It was on the cover of our college American literature anthology, and when I was in South Dakota and Indiana I would stare at the image of the black woman, spear poised, as the young white boy paddled in the stern, thinking about my home waters.

  Herbie took Caitlin and me trolling for blues, and I admired his new outfits, graphite rods with carbolite guides and deep, narrow Daiwa reels loaded with bright wire. “It’s all Japanese now,” Herbie said. “Good stuff.” We trolled the old spots but couldn’t find the schools and didn’t get a single hit. We talked and drank a little beer. When Caitlin had to pee, he pulled out a low cut bucket and told me to lift the bench cushion as a privacy screen. “He’s more of a gentleman than you let on,” Caitlin told me as we crossed the inlet. When we docked and Caitlin walked up to the car, Herb squinted and said, “Nice ass. I bet she’s fun in the sack.” Herbie was born poor on rural Long Island, had little schooling, served in a tank crew during the allied invasion of France, and then shoveled dirt and hauled bricks for forty years. He made a few extra dollars selling furs and eels, and he ate what he caught. “Stay in school,” he used to say. “You don’t wanna do the shit I did.” At sixty-two, he was retired and smiling from his boat, telling me a story about some old lady trying to pick him up at the hardware store. “I’ll show her some hardware,” he laughed, rod between his legs. But just as suddenly as he earned his time, his time was gone. At the end of that summer he complained of abdominal pain, thought he pulled a muscle, and asked his doctor, an old fishing buddy, to give him some Vicodin. People helped Herbie when they could. He finally drove himself to the hospital, but his appendix had burst and he died. His car was packed with rods and tackle for the next morning.

  There are some days I need to fish alone. In the dark of early morning, I parked by the Port Jefferson docks where my mother and I released the shark. I slipped on my fishing vest, picked up my spinning rod and fish-walked East Beach, past where Theresa and I had our goodbye swim, rounding Seaboard Hole as the sun came up. There were the black wooden ribs of the Priscilla Alden, the old ferry that carried my father’s family from New England in the 1920s, and fox tracks under the wild plum bushes that made me smile. Tucked in the strand line I found a little dried seahorse, maybe two inches long, that somehow crystallized my sweet sadness. There was the dawn-burnished Long Island Sound of so many fish and people come and gone. “The water’s the last good thing about this place,” Herbie would say as they bulldozed the topsoil off another field for a car dealership. But he was dead. Caitlin was inland at school; my brother was still in bed. I had no idea what Tim, Theresa, Birch, Janet, Woody, or Sean were doing. I stepped to the water and made a cast.

  “Some things will be hard,” Eugene said, driving me to the airport later in the week.

  I nodded.

  “You’ll miss people,” he went on. “You’ll have to learn Japanese and sit on the floor. But some things will come easy. You’ll see.”

  “Like what?” I asked.

  “Like fishing,” he said.

  Sashimi

  I had been in Japan just one week, and I was thinking about Eugene and my brother on Long Island, how we could fish together for hours, speaking few words over the water in early light but feeling close. Then I thought of silent days fishing alone—sometimes sad, troubled, or unsure—when angling became the language of asking, the fish a hoped-for answer, as easy, elusive, or complicated as any deep truth. Some days there were no fish, some days there were many.

  Here, at dusk, the fishing party of fifteen men shouted back and forth above the roar of the engine, rigging outrageously long poles with sabiki rigs, consisting of five small hooks dressed in capes of pearlescent plastic and tinsel that twinkled like holiday lights. “Like Christmas,” I said, singing a bit of Jingle Bells. The men laughed. I was aboard the fifty-five foot Yutaka Maru. “It means boat of plenty,” explained Usami Manabu, one of the English teachers I would be working with that year. The school was in Niigata Prefecture on a river-crossed rice plain twenty minutes from the Sea of Japan and fishing ports such as Teradomari, where we sailed from that evening. Usami and a few other teachers from the junior high had offered to take me sakana tsuri, fishing, when they heard it was my shumi, my hobby, said to be an important part of everyone’s identity in Japan. Unlike the duties of family and job, which are often foisted upon us, a hobby was something one pursued for pure pleasure, which may have been particularly important in a culture where social forms and responsibilities seemed greater and stricter. Wherever and however we live, it’s good to have a shumi.

  The steel boat plowed north beyond the jetty, the mountainous mainland creased in cedar ravine shadows behind us. Japan was greener than I imagined, but this was the first foreign port from which I ever sailed. I had never been abroad, hadn’t yet learned a sentence of Japanese, but I understood the familiar pitch of the boat, the smell of salt air, the rods and reels ready in their holders.

  We cruised a couple miles offshore, the engine idled down, and the whole deck lit up like a baseball stadium under large clear bulbs swinging from a wire running the length of the boat. The captain set the anchor and then lowered four submersible lamps into the sea, igniting a glowing emerald ring around us. Within ten minutes I started seeing small fish drawn to the chum of our light.

  I was told to fish the bottom, but I stopped on the way down and jigged a little—I knew it as a way of locating fish. The man next to me said “dame,” no good, “tana o awasete,” on the bottom. He gestured with his fist pressed hard against the gunnel and reached over to flip the clutch on my reel. I pulled away, a little annoyed. I know how to fish, I thought. A few minutes later, the first fish were caught, and true enough, it wasn’t until I bounced the bottom that I hooked one myself, an eight-inch silver aji that I swung over the railing.

  I studied the aji that were now being caught in great numbers. Usami pulled a paperback dictionary from his bag and said, “Horse mackerel.” I knew it wasn’t a mackerel, but it certainly shared its schooling and feeding behavior and was caught in a similar fashion. One of the sc
ience teachers approached holding another book. “Jackusu famuly,” he said.

  “Jacuzzi family?” I cocked my head.

  “This fish is jacku’s family,” Usami peered at the book and tried to help.

  “Who’s Jack?” I asked.

  But when I looked at the page it became clear. There was the Japanese word, aji; the Latin, Trachurus japonicus; and the English with a study sentence, “Jack mackerel (Japanese horse mackerel), belonging to the family of jacks, among them the amberjack and trevally.” “Okay,” I smiled. “It’s a jack.” The relieved and joyous faculty repeated, “Jacku, jacku, okay.”

  As the evening progressed, a wild arena unfolded in the green glow below us. Schools of small mackerel and yellowtail (another species of jack) skittered across the surface, squid and swimming crabs hunted the shadows, and a pair of gulls sat at the light’s soft edge. It was a magical world surrounding our boat, and we started catching fish at various depths, sometimes a bonus squid groping an imperiled aji.

  The captain, a short sinewy man who wore a cap eerily similar to Japanese naval officers in World War II, came down to chat with me through Usami. The captain told of a huge sea turtle that once swam into the light of the Yutaka Maru, its swollen flippers entangled in fishing line. He tried to net the turtle so it could be brought on board and the lines cut away, but the alarmed creature dove, and he never saw it again. “That’s sad,” I said, telling him about a dead swan I once found, its beautiful long neck choked in fishing line. “Hakucho,” swan, the captain raised his hands into the sky, telling us that they came every fall from Siberia to winter in Niigata. “Taihen, nē,” that’s terrible, he acknowledged the fate of our turtle and swan. Although such casualties may seem insignificant in the face of vast human interferences on the planet, we nodded solemnly, knowing that every angler has lost harmful line, hooks, and lead, every angler has released fish that would not survive, everyone has injured and killed creatures unintentionally.