Catch & Release

by Blythe Woolston

My fly book is so pretty, so well organized, so full of things that are too tiny—hello, sweet little Flashback Pheasant Tail Nymph—or too fuzzy-headed to give me a fighting chance of getting the line threaded. Grasshoppers have been helicoptering up under my feet since I got out of the car, so a hopper is good, I got to figure. So I pick a Joe’s Hopper from the fly book.

  I take my good-luck fishing scissors out of my pocket and give myself a nice, clean-cut line to work with. I steady myself and I hold my breath and it actually works. I’ve got a fly on. I can fish. It’s probably more luck than skill, but I’m adding it to my imaginary list of coping skills anyway: able to thread a fly and tie a hook knot.

  Trout have good vision and a hard-earned sense of self-preservation. I can’t say I’ve got research to back it up, but I bet most fish of any size have been jerked out of this water a couple of times. Part of growing up a trout, I guess. That sort of experience makes an impression on their raisin-sized brains, so the fish in this river are cagey fish. They are wily fish. They want to eat, but they know it isn’t that simple. They know better than to trust the world. They know happiness sometimes has strings attached. They have to be tricked. The first trick is invisibility. All that takes is a nine-foot rod and a careful approach to the water. The second trick is to bring the dead to life. The fly at the end of the line is not just deadly but dead. I have to make it look like life, I have to make it look like food. I can do that. I’m a practiced liar.

  Fishing is all about lies, and not the ones people tell about the monsters that got away. Fishing is about the lies we tell to the fish and the lies they choose to believe.

  I stand up and haul out some line. The reel ticks like I’m winding up a clock; the only other sound is the water talking over rocks. There is a moment—there— that likely-looking place where the current brings the food, that is the moment where I want to the hopper to drop. My first cast falls short. Nothing is where or when it appears to be. Even the rocks are a lie. Light bends when it moves through the water, and the result is deceptive. Things are dislocated. So even the river tells lies, I guess. I just have to adapt. I give myself more line, enough to pull its own weight, enough to build some distance and carry me, or at least to carry my bad intentions. Then I reach out again into the world. I put this moment, I put this moment, I put this moment—here— and the fish consents to believe. BAM! ZING! All that time wound up in the reel unwinds. Let’s dance, you fishie, let’s dance.

  In a moment I will have this fish in my wet hand. I will remove the hook. I will lean forward and place it back in the water, and, after a second, it will dart away. I’ll feel the water on my own hands, taking away the traces of slime. That slime and glow of colors on my memory are all that the trout leaves with me. After the release, I will move downstream a little bit more and cast again.

  That’s the way it’s supposed to go, but it doesn’t.

  It is a little tiny fish, and the hook isn’t in its lip. It’s through its eye. Through good and hard, since when I set the hook with the smart tug it pulled the barbless wire point right into the bone. Weirdly, the eye with the hook in it looks as bright and marginally intelligent as the other, perfect eye.

  It’s blushing: it’s a little cutthroat. It’s beautiful and it would have been more beautiful tomorrow. Stupid damn fish.

  I smack it hard on a rock to stop everything that’s gone wrong. Then I take out my pocketknife and slit through the tender belly. I push out the guts with my thumb. I don’t check to see what he has been eating, because I’m finished with fishing for the day.

  The catch-and-release fantasy is over.

  “Shit,” says Odd. “That all you caught. Better than me. Total shutout.” He looks at the tiny fish again, “That’s, like, a bite for each of us. I might go cannibal on you.”

  I realize that Odd wasn’t fishing catch-and-release. He wanted to kill fish. He wanted to eat them. I know next to nothing about Odd Estes, but he fishes for meat. Maybe that is all I need to know.

  Odd’s as busy as a beaver, a whacked-out zombie beaver, dragging chunks of tree around.

  We are at a campground a few miles upstream from the falls. The water here looks like excellent fishing. Much easier to navigate than below the falls. Even Odd could have caught something here, but that’s all water under the bridge and way downstream. We are here to eat and sleep. As far as I’m concerned, the fishing is over.

  “Alrighty then, I’ll get this fire going and cook that fish,” says Odd. He has accumulated a heap of branches, roots, and bark in a ring of blackened rocks. He doesn’t seem to have any system to it. No “start with the kindling” for Odd. It’s just a chaotic slash pile.

  It’s not going to be a tidy, efficient, campstove dinner.

  I’m not especially hungry, which is a good thing, because I might be watching Odd try to get a fire started for the foreseeable future. Or at least that would be the case if Odd were sane and stupid instead of just stupid. Turns out, he knows what he’s up to—in the way that the guys who build fires at keggers know how to get it done. He pulls a coffee can out of the trunk. When Odd cooks, the essential ingredient is gas-soaked sawdust.

  Insto-conflagration. The flames roar into life, and sparks fly up looking for a new home. Smokey Bear would not be happy.

  Odd is unconcerned. He takes a couple of six-packs out of the trunk and hauls them down to the creek to sink them so they will get cold. I am deeply surprised. Beer in the trunk, and it only shows up now. There were no empties rattling around in the car. It didn’t even smell like beer. In fact the car interior was spotless. It is weird, now I think about it. I know guys are car-proud sometimes, but it’s not like Odd’s dinosaur Cadillac represents the local masculine standard. It isn’t fast. It isn’t tough. It doesn’t even have decent speakers. It’s more like the idea of a car some little kid built out of Legos and living room furniture.

  Now the beer’s in the creek, and Odd brings out a plastic milk crate with a box of cereal, a cast iron skillet, and a can of Crisco in it.

  “Gimme the fish.”

  So I hand the one-eyed trout to Odd. He sticks it in the pan with a gob of Crisco. He takes some time fiddling with it until he gets it set on the least tippy rocks by the fire. The Crisco melts and runs like clear water. The eye of the trout turns milky white and shrivels. This is a terrible way to cook a fish.

  The beers come out of the river cold. I’m thirsty and hungrier than I was before I had a couple of bites of trout to whet my appetite. I pour the first one in me like it was a drink of water.

  We both walk down to the river’s edge for round two.

  Odd cups his hand and squats with his weight on his live leg. He shakes his two hands together. “Hopper,” he says. Then he tosses it out onto a still place in the river. A rainbow rises, silver and pink, and sips the bug off the top of the water.

  I dive for a hopper of my own but miss. It’s hard to know where anything is. How big is that rock? Rocks come in all sizes. Did I miss by an inch or six? The hopper flies right into Odd’s chest. He reaches down and picks it off. “For the lady,” he says.

  I can feel the hooked feet of the grasshopper tugging at the skin of my hand when I pick it up. Then I toss it. A widening, nervous ripple grows out from the place where it lands. And then another circle is born when a little trout bangs the surface and the hopper is gone. We keep catching grasshoppers and tossing them into the water. This is the best kind of fishing. At least I think that is the opinion of the fish. By the time we finish the next beer, the sun drops and the shadows rise up until a river of twilight fills up the whole canyon, and it’s too dark for grasshopper catching. Odd pulls the rest of the beer out of the water like a stringer of fish. I see there’s a grace in his movements. He doesn’t bend or rise or turn with ease, but he moves. He is always moving.

  “You’re doing good, Odd, with the leg, I mean,” I say when we settle beside the fire.

  “I’m getting there,” he says; he clacks his beer can against the met
al below his knee. “This ain’t gonna change, so I got two choices. I can blow my brains out, or I can get the fuck on with it. You musta tumbled to that, too, Polly.”

  I don’t tell him all I do is sleep, eat, and watch TV. It’s kind of a middle option, it seems to me, frozen between dead and doing something.

  I don’t drink six beers, but I drink five. The fire dies down. The stars come out—and so many mosquitoes even DEET can’t keep them from trying to get at my blood. I unzip my tent and crawl in quick before every vampire bug on the planet can follow.

  I am wide awake.

  I should be able to fall asleep. I’ve peed three times and I should be able to fall asleep now. But it is one thing to climb into a sleeping bag and it’s another to go to sleep. I slept most of the afternoon in the car, so I’m not exactly tired. I think that the bigger issue is a break in routine. I don’t sleep that much at night anymore.

  I sleep late in the morning—no school, no job—why get out of bed? I do a lot of evasive nap-taking. If I’m asleep or pretending to be asleep, the mommybot tippytoes around, tucks me in, but doesn’t expect me to look at her or say anything.

  When everyone else is asleep, I take my laptop to bed. I look really, really awful by the screen light. I know because I’ve taken pictures of myself with the webcam on my laptop. And then I proved it wasn’t just my opinion. I checked with the whole wide world. Polly Furnas just watched TV with her friends Kyle and Cartman. June 8 at 1:22 A.M. Polly Furnas has zero friends. June 8 at 1:26 A.M. Polly Furnas is playing a little ChatSees. June 8 at 3:22 A.M. “Welcome to ChatSees random video chat. Enable A/V. Press STRAT to begin.”

  I still don’t really know how long anyone will look at me, because I don’t let them look at me for more than a moment. I cast myself out into the world. I drift along on the current. Somewhere out there is a raisin-brain who wants something that I almost am. I catch their eye and there is a moment, a moment of connection. Then the lie breaks and I see the recognition or, as happens more often, it’s obvious it’s just some pervert whacking off. Am I different than the perverts? Not really. I’m after the exact same thing.

  On really bad nights I keep wishing that the next face I’ll see when I click will be Bridger’s. I wonder how long it will take him to recognize me. Part of me knows that he won’t pause long enough to see who I am. He won’t pause long enough to see who I was. I click and click through hundreds of strangers all around the planet. It is never Bridger.

  Sometimes I’m more pissed at Bridger’s mom than I am at him. I want to know why she doesn’t just make him do the right thing. He should at least call once in a while until we could both pretend that we were losing interest. Seriously, since that letter in the hospital, nada. And his mom— “Call me Mom-B, Polly”— hasn’t called either. I used to eat dinner there every Thursday. She taught me how to make Bridger’s favorite mac and cheese, full of Asiago and white cheddar, baked in muffin cups so there is more edge of crispy toasted cheese. We used to go shopping together because we trusted each other to tell the honest truth about how we looked when we tried on clothes.

  That’s over. I can’t trust her to tell me how I look because Mom-B doesn’t even want to see me. There was a get-well card in the mail right after I got out of the hospital. A get-well card: when you care enough to do the very least. I opened the envelope. I saw a goofy little dog with plastic googly eyes and a bandaid on its nose. Inside it said, “Heal!” because—haha—that’s what you say to dogs. “The Morgan Family,” that’s how it was signed. No “Love,” no “Bridger,” no “Mom-B,” just, “The Morgan Family.”

  One-big-happy-family, that was The Plan. But onebig-happy-family involved Polly-That-Was. She was going to be part of The Morgan Family, not me. That Polly saw things differently. That Polly didn’t pick off one of dog’s plastic googly eyes and flick it across the room, but I did.

  Come morning, there is nothing to eat but dry cereal, Lucky Charms, that Odd eats by the handful. Last night’s little bit of fish and lot of beer isn’t what you would call a sustaining meal. We could probably pull more fish out of the river here. It looks plenty fishy. But then there would be the cooking, which I don’t want to do and I sure don’t want Odd to do. I think we should just head home. Odd agrees. Maybe he is hungry too.

  But Odd has a plan for the way back, not that I know about it. He hangs a left past Mcleod on the Boulder road instead of heading straight to the interstate. There is more than one way home. We’ll catch the interstate again at Livingston, that’s Odd’s plan. He’s delaying my food and shower, but he’s the driver.

  Then he snaps on the radio. We are high enough or there is a transmitter station or something, because the reception is great. I only wish there was anything worth receiving. Turns out there is something I enjoy less than Odd’s brother on the radio with his forecast of next season’s Class-B football ones-to-watch. What’s on now is definitely worse. Last time I heard this song, it was good as true. I could be up high on some ridge and half-drunk Bridger would shout my name into the wind and give me everything he had to give. That was how it was to live. But that asshat Bridger won’t be shouting my name anymore. So I just grit my teeth and glare out the window at cows and antelope, because that’s what’s there. The cows swivel around on their stumpy meat-box legs and stare at us while we pass. I can practically read their minds: “Can I eat it? No. Will it hurt me? No. What should I do? Chew.”

  Antelope are slightly more interesting. They bounce up and down the hillsides like wind-up bunnies. From a distance they are adorable. They can out-Bambi Bambi in the giant eyes and spindly legs departments. That doesn’t make them cute. In fact, it makes them a little creepy once you see one up close.

  How they look isn’t the half of it, though.

  Antelope are sex fiends, and speed drives them crazy with desire. It makes sense, since speed is pretty much all they have going for them in survival-of-the-fittest contest. But they are sort of indiscriminate in their fetish. One attempted to rape a field researcher on a dirt bike. Dirt bikes go really fast, so he was asking for it, from an antelope perspective.

  But that isn’t even the strangest thing about antelope. They are bloody little murderers before they are born.

  Antelope start out as part of a litter. Up to eight eggs are fertilized and find a spot in the mom antelope’s generous, two-room womb. Ferocious competition between the siblings begins within days—in fact, they start strangling each other while they are only threads of cells. That thins the unborn herd a little, but it doesn’t stop there. As the antelope fawns grow, they basically kick, knock, push, jab any remaining brothers or sisters right out the door a long time before they are ready for that adventure. Little pink antelope fetuses drop to the frozen ground under the sagebrush. It’s not like they dot the landscape like wads of bubble-gum at a bus stop. They are sort of a rare find. I have never found one myself, but my dad brought one home to show me once. Being a big-animal vet gives him an interesting angle on what children ought to know.

  Suddenly, Odd snaps off the radio.

  “You got any brothers or sisters, Polly? Don’t look like you got any.”

  “There’s just me. I’m my parents’ one and only.”

  “I’m number three. It took them three tries to achieve perfection.” He pauses to zap a smile like there is someone to impress with his dazzely-brights. “My sister Thea was beautiful, but she’s dead to us. My brother Buck is—not perfect. Why’d your parents stop with you?”

  “I don’t know, Odd.”

  But I do know.

  My mom told me when we had our first convos about sex. Bam! Sandwiched between tampons and cramps, she segued into in vitro fertilization and how it isn’t always easy to have babies. I don’t know how common it is to include that type of information in “the talk,” but my guess is not very. At least, when I talked to my friends at school they had all heard the deets about tampons, cramps, and how babies are made—but the cells mixed in a lab dish, not so much. My
news was interesting, but way less interesting than what girls with brothers had to say about penises with mushroom tops and penises with turtleneck sweaters, which is all a girl person ought to need to know about circumcision.

  I think maybe my mom would love it if I had screwed up and had a baby. She could have had another one that way. But she isn’t the kind of person who would plan out whatever would make her happy like a bunch of chess moves. She wouldn’t let me be a pawn no matter what she had to gain. So I was well informed.

  I understood how I came to be.

  I wasn’t cooked up the good old-fashioned way.

  My parents tried. Nothing came of it.

  Then the tests started.

  It was an escalating war on the lack of baby.

  How did my dad feel when my mom got on the plane and flew to California to get a baby?

  He never said.

  How did my mom look?

  My guess is she looked determined.

  They had come to some sort of agreement, those two. And I am the result.

  There were four. That was too many. Two went away. That meant twins.

  Twins are perfect.

  It was going to be twins.

  It was going to be twins until my brother? sister? stopped growing. Failure to thrive. That’s a nice way to say I hogged the best spot. I refused to share. And the other one shriveled up like a balloon with a slow leak. One week there were two heartbeats. And then there was only one. I was a bloody little murderer before I was born.

  I am an only child.

  “D’Elegance needs gas,” says Odd when we wind down and out of the hills and get near the interstate. So he turns in the opposite direction from home.

  “What kind of mileage does the Elephant get?” I ask. The name fits the ridiculous, lumbering car. Bridger called his truck Buffy.