Back Seat with Fish

by Henry Hughes

  The next morning my father went out to his flagpole, as he does every morning, but that day under the stars and stripes he raised the banner of the People’s Republic of China, its red field flashing gold stars against the blue Atlantic sky. His old buddy from the Korean War, Tony, came by and turned furious—“That’s the damn Red Chinese, Charley. What the hell you doing?” My father waved him away. “We’re not at war with China. What’s the matter with you?” They didn’t talk much after that. “To hell with Tony,” my father said. “I love Jin Lei.”

  Folks loved Jin Lei. She was outgoing, warm, bright, and funny, though some people disapproved of our arrangement. “Are they married or what?” a neighbor woman interrogated my father. “We got enough Orientals in this country,” she hissed, and dad accidently backed over her petunias. And one of my brother’s mentors, a retired teacher who owned a stamp shop in Stony Brook, went on about my deceiving the US government and disgracing the institution of marriage. My brother stood by me and told the man that this country could use a few more people like Jin Lei.

  Jin Lei and I talked about being friends rather than lovers, and she thought we might just need more time to get to know each other again. “Maybe you are so afraid,” she said to me. I just looked at her. She gently asked if I was afraid of losing the women in my life. She spoke of my mother’s death when I was thirteen and the recent loss of Aunt Lil. “Maybe,” I said.

  We drove around Long Island, and Jin Lei asked about the fish glued to the backs of cars. “Jesus fish,” I said and explained the revived symbol once used by early Christians to identify each other.

  “Christians really like fish,” she nodded.

  I went on to talk about Jesus and the net-casting disciples, and the Greek word ICHTHYS, fish, that served as an acronym signifying “Jesus Christ, God’s Son. Savior.” Jin Lei listened then asked, “Do people think you strange to love fish and not God?”

  “I love God, just not in the way most Christians do,” I said. “God is fish. Fish is God.”

  Jin Lei shook her head in confusion. “I need some money for school. In China, we pray for money. Can you pray to your fish god for some money?”

  I laughed and said we might have better luck harvesting some shellfish. So we picked and sold oysters to earn some extra cash, and Jin Lei quickly developed a knack for haggling with restaurant owners over the price. “Now I’m a real capitalist,” she joked. It was wonderful watching her in America. Alone one afternoon when door-to-door missionaries showed up, Jin Lei accepted their free Bible, invited them into our living room for tea, and started telling them about Laozi, even offering to send them copies of the Dao De Jing.

  “It’s gonna take more than a prayer,” my father said to us as he listened to the low compression cylinders of the ’85 Buick Regal my uncle gave me. “Eight hundred miles to Indiana? I wouldn’t risk it.” But he had a friend with a low mileage 1986 Olds engine that would work in my Regal. We bought the Olds engine for two bushels of oysters. My father parked the tired Buick under the oak tree in the backyard, swung block and tackle over a thick limb, pulled out the clunker, and dropped in a smooth-running transplant that carried me for years.

  In August of 1997, Jin Lei and I loaded the repowered car with boxes, suitcases, and some fishing gear, said goodbye, and drove west listening to Jin Lei’s CD of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. She kept replaying “Fishing in the Dark,” saying it was our song.

  In West Lafayette, Indiana, we rented a second floor apartment at Williamsburg on the Wabash, a faux colonial complex beside the Wabash River and just a couple hundred feet from two flood ponds where had I fished many times as a master’s student. It had been six years, and I’d seen a lot of strange and wonderful water around the world, but the Wabash basin held a special place in my muddy heart. Before we even unpacked, I pulled out a rod, walked through the sycamores and maples down the steep bank, and made a cast. After ten minutes a solid fish took my jig. Jin Lei stood behind me, “Hen hao,” she cheered. “We have dinner.”

  “Well,” I said, trying to ease her hopes. “There’s a lot of pollution in this water.”

  “Worse than China?”

  “Maybe not. No. But let’s throw this one back.” When I saw that the silvery gray fish was a drum, I howled, “Gaspergoooo,” old times and old waters rising. I held up the fish for Jin Lei.

  “I love this place,” she said.

  After long, hot days preparing for school, we’d have a light dinner of rice and vegetables and then cool off down by the river-linked ponds. Bordered by high banks and trees, the South Williamsburg Pond offered a wonderfully wild sanctuary for beavers, birds, turtles, and fish. There were constant splashes and rise forms. Longnose gar hovered a few inches below the surface, and the dark shadows of larger fish—bowfin, catfish, sturgeon, paddlefish—passed by as we cast or just watched. Jin Lei and I had been translating some Chinese fishing poems, and she recited the simple ninth-century verses of Bai Juyi, “Walking around the pond, I watch intently the fish as they swim.” Jin Lei and I walked or sat together; sometimes I scribbled in a small notebook or wandered off, casting into the wooded cover or across the deep drop, just needing some time alone. One night I snagged, landed, and released a large paddlefish that reminded me of the one Ben Whitehorse caught from the Missouri almost twenty years before. Using three-inch floating Rapalas, I also hooked a few big gar, but their hard, toothy jaws always shed the lure or cut the line. A Mexican man in a cowboy hat told me to use yarn wrapped around the lure, claiming it would get stuck in the gar’s teeth. “We do it down in Tamaulipas,” he said. It was good advice, and one warm afternoon I landed a yard-long gar using, you might say, the fish’s own teeth as hooks. I talked to the man from Tamaulipas now and then, and he once told me about catching fish from the backseat of a car.

  “You were sitting in the backseat with your rod?” I asked, confused.

  “No, no,” he shook his head. “The car’s in water. The fish like to hide there.”

  He pointed downriver to some sloughs and explained in vividly gestured English that he dropped his bait through the back window of a partially submerged car and caught some sunfish and a catfish “right off the backseat.” In Mexico, he said, they always fished in and around sunken cars.

  I retranslated this story to Jin Lei, who latched onto the automobile aspect, floating on the pond in an inner tube, kick-trolling a Ford Fender and a Dardevle spoon she dug out of my tackle box, miraculously picking up a three-pound channel catfish that she was determined to cook and eat. I called a biologist friend who explained the advisory.

  “One or two meals a month of smaller catfish from the Wabash would be okay. Don’t eat fish over ten pounds, and definitely fillet everything.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’d give it a full oil change if I could.”

  Jin Lei and I did our best to carefully fillet the catfish, frying the pink blushed slabs of pale meat in virgin olive oil and freshly chopped garlic. “Haochi,” Jin Lei said. “Delicious.”

  After a few days back in Indiana, I went to see my old friend, Sean McNerney. We had exchanged letters while I was in Asia, and I called him from New York. Sean had abandoned his degree program, but he worked his way up to head chef at C-Rays, a well-regarded restaurant in town. I stepped into the kitchen one night after closing, and Sean was sitting at the end of a steel counter, joking in Spanish with a couple Latino men in grimy aprons. He saw me and stood, heavier, wearier, his face shiny and red from the heat and labor of a hundred dinners. “Salveo piscator,” hail angler, he greeted me in Latin and asked if I had seen the new translation of the Odyssey, lamenting that they still hadn’t gotten the fishing scenes right.

  Our friendship instantly renewed, we returned to our old angling spots below the Oakdale Dam on the Tippecanoe River, stopping at the bait shop to see bourbon-nosed Smitty and his cats, and caught our limit of silver bass and several large carp and suckers. I told Sean how in China we used anise to mask human odors, but these American c
arp seemed less discriminating. Asia had given me a new attitude about carp, and we kept a couple that Jin Lei prepared for a group of new friends, including two Chinese professors. “Hao chi!” the praise went up around the table as we plucked out cloves of pale, succulent flesh with our chopsticks. Everyone was asking how and where we caught the fish. There was a good Asian market in West Lafayette, but customers complained that their fish tasted muddy. “From fish farms, yes?” Professor Wang asked me, pushing back her long black hair.

  “Probably,” I said, explaining that the carp we were eating came from the clear, cool waters of the Tippecanoe River. The fish moved upstream to the dam, where there was an abundance of small shad and other forage. “And I clean the fish right away and pack them in ice. They’re very fresh,” I said.

  “Yesterday?” Wang asked.

  “Yes,” I said, filling her glass with a little more white wine.

  “So to get a fish like this you must catch it,” she seemed to study my face.

  “Yes,” I said. “Or know a fisherman.”

  Jin Lei read the situation perfectly. The following week she collected orders and then sent Sean and me fishing. “We need six carp about this big,” Jin Lei opened her hands to the length of her keyboard. “Or a little longer.”

  “Come with us, Jin Lei,” Sean urged.

  “I must study,” she said without remorse.

  Jin Lei liked to fish and play, but she loved to read and study. She took to the wide waters of an American university like a fish. She made friends, connected with the Chinese community on campus, had her transcripts translated, and was enrolled in undergraduate classes that would qualify her for a master’s program in comparative literature.

  “What do you want to be?” I asked her one day.

  “A professor like you,” she said.

  I smiled and nodded but knew her skills in English were a long way from a master’s thesis or a doctoral dissertation. Just a few months ago, I spied her reading children’s books pulled from the shelves of my father’s house. She was sounding out difficult words, looking up vocabulary, and making notes. Now she stared at an online gloss of Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, despairing over Jim’s diction. “I’ll help you when we get back,” I said, kissing her cheek.

  Sean and I scrubbed out his dirty cooler and filled it with ice from a local motel’s ice machine. “Don’t worry,” Sean said. “Conchita—the housekeeper here—she’s the sister of my line cook.”

  “Good guanxi,” I commended Sean, explaining the term.

  At the Oakdale Dam we set up our gear, and Sean pulled out bottle of ouzo.

  “What the hell are you doing with that?” I asked.

  “Anise, man. Let’s rub some on our hands. Maybe we’ll catch even more.”

  I laughed out loud and told him it was probably a waste of good booze. So we shifted East to West, and like old Greek fishermen, we took long pulls of ouzo, rolled up our sleeves, and got our lines in the water.

  I started throwing a chrome Castmaster, thinking I’d pick up a silver bass, but I hooked a twenty-inch carp, took him down through the rock race and beached him on the gravel. I cut the gills, bled and gutted the fish, and tossed the entrails into the river. Then Sean hooked one. “I can’t believe they’re taking lures,” he beamed. I helped him land the fish, and when I pulled out my knife an old bearded man approached me with a bucket. “Gimme the guts, will ya?” he asked.

  “Guts? Sure,” I said. “For what?”

  “Crayfish bait. You gonna have more? Heads, too. I’ll leave the pail here.” He put a rag over the pail and screwed it down into the gravel. The next carp Sean hooked was snagged in the back. Then I caught one in the mouth and then snagged a sucker. “Bite or get out of the way,” we joked. There must have been a dense concentration of carp and suckers below the dam. In two hours we caught twenty fish; killed eight carp, four suckers, and three silvers; filled the old man’s gut bucket; and packed our ice chest with one last fish.

  “What the hell you doing with all them carp?” the old man asked.

  “We gotta bunch of Chinese friends who really love them.”

  “Shit, them niggers and chinks can have ’em.”

  “What did you say?” Sean leaned into the man, but I put my hand on my friend’s shoulder and addressed the crayfisherman.

  “You don’t know what you’re missing, old-timer.”

  “Shit,” he grumbled.

  “Bug eater,” Sean jabbed as we walked away.

  Back at Williamsburg, Jin Lei gave us addresses of where we were to drop off the fish.

  “So, am I collecting money for these?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. “Say they are gift.”

  “Okay,” I shrugged.

  We delivered the first brace of fish to Professor Wang. She thanked us warmly and handed me a couple books. “These are for Jin Lei. And tell her to come see me on Monday. I have an idea for her.”

  At another Chinese professor’s house we got more books for Jin Lei, and the professor asked if Sean could do an East-West luncheon at C-Rays for an upcoming conference. “Sure,” Sean said, and they talked menu and cost. At the barracks-like married student housing complex we called on Zou Zhen, a Chinese graduate student doing a doctorate in American literature. Zou Zhen and I had spoken about my idea for a dissertation on early American narratives about China, and when I gave him a fish, he handed me a bibliography of books by missionaries that were new to me. “This is gold,” I said, thanking him over and over. This kind attention continued with a couple more fish lovers, and it soon became obvious that Jin Lei had tied into some serious guanxi.

  The following week, Sean and I continued our carp fishing operations, landed twenty fish, delivered a dozen, and were left with a heavy surplus. “You wanna try the Asian market?” I suggested. West Lafayette and Lafayette both had Asian food stores. I knew the Taiwanese family that ran the West Lafayette market, and we told them about our haul of fresh fish. “Let me see,” the man said. We stepped out to my car and opened the trunk and our ice packed cooler. He pulled a fish out, smelled it, and asked, “You have license?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Okay. How much?”

  Sean and I looked at each other. “Well,” I said, “How about some trade?”

  “Trade?” the man tilted his head.

  “I’m looking for some ma la spice,” Sean queried.

  “Rice noodles, tofu, dried seaweed?” I added.

  “Okay, okay,” the proprietor said. And thus began our fish and grocery barter. We iced up at the hotel, Conchita adding little soaps and coffee packets to our pickups in exchange for a few fresh fish. Sean even considered a carp special for C-Ray’s—“We’ll call it Cyprina, after the Latin name.” I applauded the idea, but the owner, Ray, scorned it away, “We’re not gonna serve trash fish.” Ray continued to offer farm-raised salmon and muddy tilapia when there was an abundant supply of fine carp swimming through the state.

  One morning Sean collected me in his little Nissan pickup. I was terribly hungover, up half the night drinking with my major professor, Dick Thompson. Studies were going well, but it was hard to keep up with Thompson, a good scholar and teacher who, at twice my age, could put away a barrel of bourbon and never fumble a word. Thompson and I took a taxi home, and I was trying to remember where I left my car when Sean started reciting a litany of hangover cures, including two raw owl eggs prescribed by the Roman natural philosopher Pliny the Elder in the first century.

  “Pull the fuck over, and I’ll raid an owl’s nest,” I growled.

  “I don’t think it’s the breeding season,” Sean tightened his lips and clenched the wheel.

  I was always happy to go fishing, but after a month of snagging carp and suckers out of the river and delivering them to friends and markets, I began to feel a little less like an angler. The hangover further soured my attitude. We caught several fish at the dam, walked up to the parking lot, and saw the old crayfisherman step out of his truc
k, toss an empty can into the bushes, and go into the Oakdale Inn. His Ford was plastered with rebel flags and bumper stickers like Kick Their Ass, Take Their Gas. I opened the cooler, pulled out a small carp, and shoved it up his tailpipe.

  “What the hell’s gotten into you?” Sean looked into my bloodshot eyes.

  I took another fish from the ice and pointed it at Sean. “Look at this fish, Sean. Do we even know this fish?”

  “I think you need some sleep, Henry.”

  “Listen to me. We used to love and remember every fish. Right? Every fish. Now we’re hustlers.”

  “We’re having fun. And people are eating our fish.”

  “I don’t know, Sean.” I shoved the stiff fish back onto the ice. Herbert Hoover, in a speech years after his presidency, praised fishing as a “mockery of profits and egos” and a “quieting of hate.” I went over, pulled the carp out of the old guy’s tailpipe, and threw it to a nest of cats gathered around the kitchen door of the inn.

  Sean drove us home, and I leaned back in the seat, slipping into a foamy dream, tumbling through white water, feeling like I would sink and drown, but my body was held up by thousands of fish—carp, bass, catfish—their shiny bodies squirming beneath me. I was crowd surfing over a stadium of admiring fish. Then they vanished and I sunk, drowning in the darkening water. I woke gasping. “Take it easy, buddy,” Sean said. When we got to the Asian market in West Lafayette the owner looked worried. “State man in here,” he said. “Ask about carp. Come from where?”

  “The Tippecanoe. You know that,” I said.

  “Need your license number to sell.”

  “I don’t have any license to sell,” I said.