by Henry Hughes
Langkawi’s December jungles were insanely hot and wet. A civet cat sprang behind a bamboo fence, and I watched leggy, eye-ringed myna birds, so like our common starlings, pick crumbs from the yard where I sat sweating, eating nasi goring—fried rice and veggies that tasted like something Caitlin once made from a recipe snipped out of her mother’s Good Housekeeping. Everything felt both exotic and familiar, and I wasn’t cracking up.
The next morning I took a long fish-walk to a swampy village and arranged for a boat trip through the root-tangled mangrove swamps. I had walked several miles and was glad to be sitting in the wooden pirogue watching rusty red sea eagles, iguanas, turtles, and mudskippers—small fish that walk on shore and breathe air—while my guide rambled on about a snake in his wife’s bed. The blue-spotted, bubble-eyed mudskippers flashed their high dorsals and pulled themselves in and out of holes, sometimes jumping for joy or something that seemed like joy in this wild world of possibilities.
The Malay guide spoke a few languages, and after he calmed down about the snake we started talking about fish and fishing, using some French and Japanese words to fill in the gaps. Knowing this was a wildlife preserve, I asked him about some men pulling nets starred with crabs and small fish. My guide was easy. “Chari makan,” he said. “Everybody has a right to get their food.” I told him I was also looking for some fish to catch and eat. “Go to the restaurant,” he laughed, gesturing cash fanned from a fat wallet. I felt a little embarrassed and quickly mimed the actions of a man casting and reeling. “Oh, okay,” he said, wriggling his ropey arm. I thought he was back on the snake, but he described an aggressive fish called murrel swimming through the rice fields and marshes.
After we docked, my mangrove guide set me up with a handsome young man in a splashy green sarong and Hard Rock Café T-shirt who drove me to a village where two older men agreed to walk me to the reedy edge of a murky, steamy pond fed by a slow river. They had bamboo poles, and I extended the telescopic spinning rod I brought from Japan. Using minnows on rusted hooks, within a few minutes one man pulled in a foot-long fish that I recognized by reputation—snakehead, a dreaded invasive species in the United States but rightfully at home here in Southeast Asia. I tossed and retrieved a blueish plug, raising something on the third try and hooking one on the next cast. Dark and long, like a meaty eel, this seventeen-inch snakehead fought well and made the men smile. “Ikan hantu,” they said, “fish for dinner.” A number of children had gathered around, and they asked me questions in Malay and English: “What is your hometown? Do you like soccer?” They giggled when I turned to answer. The snakehead was well-toothed and slick, but I wrangled it into the plastic laundry basket with the other fish and carried them up to an open pavilion-style eatery where a woman scrubbed off the slime and large scales. She asked me questions I could only answer with a smile. She smiled back, sliced fillets, and dropped them into a wok crackling with oil and red pepper. Despite its muddy home, the fried, pink flesh was firm, fine grained, and mild. I thanked the woman and ate heartily.
A growing taste for Southeast Asia also drew me to Jakarta, Indonesia, and on to Bali Island the following spring. The beautiful, saronged Balinese woman at the losman where I lodged kept an almost equally beautiful blue betta fish in a pickle jar on the shelf. The villages and temples were green and calming, but I couldn’t resist spending a couple days in the touristy southern city of Kuta, checking out the clubs and bars full of young men and women from Australia and Germany. After a night of too much drinking and some reckless sex, I took a long shower and visited a Hindu temple to light incense and reflect. A young man outside the temple said he was a driver and could show me the island.
Andres was bright and friendly, chatting away as we crossed terraced rice fields and cascading jungles. Stopping at another Hindu temple with luxuriant lotus ponds, I reflected further on my promiscuous lifestyle, watching a swirling school of pretty striped cichlids. Was I as simple and milt driven as these cavorting fish? I certainly admired their beauty and freedom, cherishing their fishy place in the world. I loved to catch fish, feel, see, and hold them for a moment. Sometimes I killed and ate them. I admired and sought women for their intelligence, beauty, and difference, and I loved having sex with them, but I would never coerce or force a woman into my bed. I admit to using some deception, to playing down one relationship in hopes of securing a new one, to making claims about myself that weren’t entirely true. I am not proud of these lures, these deceptions. Although comparable desires at some playful metaphoric level—There are a lot of fish in the sea—fish and people are very different.
Andres’ English was excellent, and when I told him that I loved fish and women in different ways—in ways I couldn’t yet fully understand—he squinted in confusion, paused, and then explained that Vishnu once appeared as a great fish and warned of a world-cleansing deluge, instructing the good king, who was tender to Vishnu-the-fish when he was just a minnow, to build an ark and spare the useful creatures of the land and few decent people. The story rang some Christian bell buoys, to be sure, but I wondered how a fish eating, philandering fisherman from afar would fair under an admonishing Hindu fish god. Vegetarianism and sexual abstinence honors the gods and brings us closer to Nirvana. When I explained my quandary to Andres, he laughed. “You’re not Hindu, so don’t worry.”
Andres dropped me off near Tulaben, where I planned to scuba dive on the wreck of the Liberty, a US Army transport ship that was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine in 1942. The remains of the ship lay just off the northwest shore of Bali in thirty to a hundred feet of water. Getting my gear ready on the beach, I saw and heard several Japanese travelers, including a couple from Niigata, and we chatted a bit. The Indonesian dive master came over, buddied me with a German named Herman, and we dove the wreck, following each other under rusted archways that scraped my tank. Although the wreck was heavily encrusted in coral, we could still see portals, chains, ladders, and the guns of the old ship. The profusion of fish life was remarkable—striped angels, parrotfish, snappers, sweetlips, grouper, anemonefish, and a beautiful, poisonous lionfish hovering in an orange cave. Gazing up with our bubbles into the silvery-blue light, we watched a circling school of bigeye jacks and, above them, a small boat. It was a fish’s view of the world, and I saw myself in the boat, dropping a line and hoping again and again for something I believed in but often couldn’t see.
Herman and I had a beer together on the beach, talked diving, and joked about the Japanese and Germans returning to Bali with a better attitude. The Germans I knew were always more willing than the Japanese to talk about history’s darker chapters. Herman and I hiked up to a village of bamboo houses and rickety little shops with signs for San Miguel Beer and Salem Cigarettes. Small black pigs and brown chickens scavenged, and people came down from the coffee plantations and napped in elevated pavilions. We walked out on a promontory and looked down on the Bali Sea. Herman said his friend went on a fishing charter and caught giant trevally and red snapper. But right before us we could see locals using Bali jukungs, outrigger canoes with crab claw sails, plying their nets and hand lines. “You should join them,” Herman pointed to the beach. “That’s real fishing.”
I spoke to a young man who said his father would take me out fishing with hand lines. I left my fishing rod in my hut and at midmorning met the father, who I called Nelayan, Fisherman, which made him laugh. He was in his forties, dark skinned, and sinewy with great veins running down his biceps. He wore light cotton shorts, a worn T-shirt, and a Japanese-style jungle hat with a neck flap that read “Bali Fun.” Freshly painted in red, white, and green, his wooden jukung stretched a narrow fifteen feet crossed by two timbered outriggers pontooned port and starboard with bamboo. Nelayan, his son, and I, with the help of another man, picked up the boat and carried it the forty feet down to the water. I hopped in, and Nelayan followed, grabbing his double-ended paddle and moving us out. A couple hundred feet from the shore, something dark breached, and I shuddered—sharks?—but it wa
s a pair of spinner dolphins gracefully coasting the island. When we got to a spot he liked, Nelayan handed me a bamboo spool wrapped with monofilament that ended in a well-used hook weighted with a spark plug. We pulled salted sardine-like baits from a round cookie tin.
Nelayan spoke no English except “Okay” and “No,” and I knew only a couple polite expressions in Bahasa Indonesian, but we got on fine. Fishing often found the shared language that sustained my travels. I dropped the baited hook down, letting the line roll off the spool and holding it out with my right hand, feeling for the bite. We caught a couple small snappers and tossed them into a reed basket. Most Balinese ate fish.
But it was a slow morning. The sun got high, and flies buzzed around our bait as we drifted closer to shore. We paddled in and were greeted by Nelayan’s son. I told him that I enjoyed myself, but I wanted to try it again, “Tomorrow morning before daybreak, 5:30 am, okay?” The son translated, and Nelayan smiled and nodded. I would pay him twenty dollars.
That evening I skipped drinking, wrote in my journal, set my travel clock, and woke to the sound of roosters in the cool ocean air of Bali. A couple geckos scurried up the bamboo walls of my rented hut, and I dressed and brushed my teeth. Out on the dark beach, men were preparing boats and equipment. Nelayan and his son helped me put my camera in a plastic bag and tuck it under the bench. There was a little bit of surf that morning, and we had to make a piercing launch into the waves. I was given a paddle this time, digging hard as we arrowed through the breakers and into the moon-frosted roll of open water. Nelayan directed us to a different spot, a better spot, I reasoned, now that he knew I was serious, and by sunrise we were catching some hearty reef fish and filling our basket.
I liked the physical intimacy of the hand line but can’t deny that I missed the fishing rod, a wonderful instrument that seems to amplify and heighten life at the other end while also absorbing its shock and power. With the hand line, I could hook fish easily with a firm jerk of my wrist, but fighting the fish had less of a sensory thrill. And with a large grouper, it was harder to absorb the fish’s power and administer drag.
Sitting comfortably, spool in my left hand, line played out in my extended right hand, my mind was musing on the virtues of fine graphite drawn to a smooth, progressive taper, and I was yanked off balance and nearly pulled overboard. Something huge had my bait. Line blistered out, burning my fingers and sending the bamboo bobbin bouncing across the belly of the canoe. I grabbed the spool with both hands and tried to pay out line, but there were stops and runs and our canoe was jerked sideways and then towed backward. Nelayan yelled something and gestured, but I had no idea what to do other than give some line and hold on. The monofilament was pretty heavy, maybe forty-pound test, and with our canoe underway I felt like Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea or Ishmael in the whale boat. The Bali sleigh ride lasted a hundred feet and then everything went slack. “Oh God,” I moaned, my legs shaking from the adrenaline. I pulled in the line and saw that it was bitten through. Nelayan made more painful sounds and then put his flat hands together and pointed over his head, like a tall prayer. I recognized the diver’s sign for shark. We must have hooked a big shark or ray. “What else could it have been?” I asked his son when we pushed up on the beach. “Nobody know,” he said. I sucked my scored fingers and picked up our basket of fish. “Good it got away, maybe,” the young man said. “My father try to catch everything. He crazy.”
My father seemed quite the opposite of Nelayan. Stories tell of a wild teenager, dropping out of high school to play ball, work, drink, and tear around Port Jefferson on his Harley. But the man I knew was careful and measured. He was faithful to his wife and job. He never remarried after my mother’s death, telling us, “One good marriage is enough for me.” And he declined offers for more challenging work or promotions with heavier responsibilities. When his aging boss offered him the small crane business, he said “No thanks,” accepting easier work on oiler’s wages with other outfits. “I want nothing to do with running a business,” he told me. My father was steady and hardworking but not emotionally or professionally adventuresome or ambitious. Maybe there was something dangerous about trying to catch everything, but I was willing to try. Younger than Santiago and older than Ishmael, I wanted to be close to something wilder and bigger than myself.
It must be this hubris in some men that leads them to greatness or dramatic failure—or worse, shame.
Other fishermen came ashore and held up some small tuna and shouted to us. Nelayan, his son, and I walked over. One of the men filleted the tuna and set it out on an old board and then someone else doused the red flesh in lime juice. We all picked up hunks and started eating. It was good. One of the men carried a few pieces up the beach to a thatched hut where an old woman was pulling fishing nets off the potted plants outside her door. When the man walked up, the woman threw down the nets in anger. It looked like the man was trying to apologize as he offered the fish. Island to island, I thought, things are different and the same. Back on Long Island I remembered Aunt Lil getting frustrated with me as she pulled yards of monofilament from the vacuum’s roller brush. “Damn this fishing line,” she cursed. “It’s all over the place.” But I had just gotten a hot tip on weakfish close to shore, and I dashed out of the house to grab my surf gear, pick up a friend, and head to the beach. Now I wanted to go back to that moment as a different kind of man. I wanted another chance. “Sorry Lil,” I’d say. “I’ll take care of it. You relax.” Maybe bring her some pickled herring on a cracker.
Kings and Emperors
I sat at the edge of Aunt Lil’s bed. She was dying of cancer. “Read something to me,” she asked and squeezed my hand. “Read me one of those stories you like so much.” I pulled a collection off the shelf. So many stories were draped in death, so I started Updike’s “A&P,” suddenly thinking it too adolescent. Lil liked it. “I spent a lotta time in supermarkets,” she said, her cracked lips turned up in a smile. And she found it funny that the bikinied girls went to so much trouble to buy a jar of pickled herring. When Sammy in the story quits his job, angry and embarrassed over the way his manager scolds the scantily clad girls, Lil said, “I’d bet you’d do that.”
“I don’t know, Lil. I need a job.”
I did need work, and a letter from China offered a university teaching position in Beijing if I wanted it. It was the summer of 1994, and I had been home for a month. “You should go,” my father said, lifting the lid on the Crock-Pot to check his beef stew. He had just retired and was doing a little cooking. My brother was starting his first year of college in Massachusetts.
“But what about Lil?” I asked.
“What can you do?” he said. “I’ll take care of her.”
I accepted the teaching job in Beijing, hoping I could get home at Christmas. Eugene came by to visit. He and Aunt Lil were good friends, and the three of us sat around the kitchen table, sipping tea and talking. Our marmalade cat, Twain, jumped on the table, and I reached over to grab him. “Let ’im stay,” Lil said, stroking the cat as he dropped and rolled over some newspapers, purring. After an hour, I walked Lil back to bed, then lifted Twain and set him down beside her. Eugene and I stepped out on the back steps to talk and watch the birds. He and his brother were going fishing in Thailand and wanted me to come along. “It’s on the way to China,” he said. “We’ll pay for the boat. Come on. I won’t see you for a while. Let’s fish together.”
On an August morning I said goodbye to Aunt Lil. She wanted to come out into the driveway and see me off the way she always did, but she couldn’t make it. We sat on the breezeway couch and held hands until my father warned I’d miss my plane.
“I’ll see you at Christmas,” I promised.
“You be careful, now.” She hugged and kissed me, smiling over her tears. “Don’t fall in that Yellow River.”
Bangkok’s pungent humidity smelled familiar. I had been here before, checked into ten dollar a night guest houses with paint-chipped rooms, wobbly ceiling fans,
and leaky toilets that sashayed water across the floor. There were crazy, careening tuk-tuk taxi rides across the city, always to a cousin’s jewelry store or a friend’s travel agency. Over the course of three visits from Japan, I befriended a Thai driver named Sang, who took me to meet his family outside the city, where his father raised and fought bettas, Siamese fighting fish. Dropped in a tank together, the cocky males fin-flashed and then charged and nipped each other while men shouted bets with fistfuls of red baht. Back in Bangkok, Sang drove us to restaurants overlooking the Chao Phraya River, the River of Kings, where we slurped the gingery heat of turtle soup and feasted on tom yam goong, steamed stingray, spicy prawns, fried swim bladders, braised grouper, and endless varieties of pad thai. Sauces and soups brought the fire of chilies to the mellow milk of coconuts and coriander.
There was plenty of Singha beer, Mekong whisky, and good smoke that opened the gate to other sensations: bizarre sex shows and the lurid nightlife around Patpong, where numbered women danced or slumped like used cars on a sales lot. I took some pleasure at Patpong—and it might’ve been okay, had I not broken a condom and woke the next morning in the horrible shadow of AIDS and the impassive face of the purchased woman. Confused and disgusted with myself, I wandered alone through smoky neighborhoods and a Buddhist temple veined by a canal that came alive at dusk with fish rising in endless swirls and splashes. The next evening I returned to the temple with my telescopic spinning rod. The rubber worm plopped into the dark canal, and I instantly hooked a large, eel-like monster—God knows what it was—that overpowered me and broke off. A young monk in saffron robes ran up. “No, no,” he said, fanning his hands. Another monk joined him and said, “We not fishing here.” I opened my wallet, repeating, “I’m very sorry, very sorry,” and gave them five dollars each. Although an obvious purchase of religious indulgence, they smiled and bowed. I bowed and hurried out of the grounds with my rod and spirits unstrung.