Catch & Release

by Blythe Woolston

  I wake up because it hurts. Every time my heart beats, my cheek hurts. My eyelashes are glued together with snot. It hurts to touch, but what my fingers feel is worse than hurt. This is wrong, so wrong. “Mom!”

  The whole time he’s driving us to the hospital, Dad is using his comfort-to-animals voice, “Shhh-sh-sh-sh, there now, there now, shhhh, it’s all right . . .”

  When we get to the hospital, I see his face in the light streaming out the ER doors. I know something new and horrible. The animal who needs comfort is him.

  What doesn’t kill it makes it stronger.

  That’s the story of MRSA.

  What doesn’t kill it makes it stronger.

  They sucked away the pus.

  They trimmed away the skin and meat that was dead, that was dying. And deeper and deeper into live flesh, they had to slice that away.

  They scraped the bone.

  Then they waited. They waited for organ failure. They waited for the flesh to die.

  But it didn’t.

  I didn’t.

  What doesn’t kill it makes it stronger.

  But it hurts.

  It hurts.

  It hurts.

  When I wake up, there’s a moment when I almost remember. There was a clock with big, red digital numbers in the exam room. They cut my T-shirt off because it would have hurt to pull it over my head. White tile. Bright lights. The smell of rotting bird. Thing is, lying around in a slightly smelly sleeping bag almost remembering rotting to death gives me no joy.

  It’s light, it’s morning cold, and it’s time to stand up and go fishing. It beats the alternative. I unzip the tent and crawl out into the world on my hands and knees. Good morning dirt. Good morning pine needles. Good morning river.

  Odd didn’t even make it into a sleeping bag. He’s immobile in the dirt. It scares me for a minute, but then I can see his back move a little. He’s still breathing.

  So this stretch of river is mine, for this morning, for this moment. The die-hard early risers are fishing someplace less fished. Easy to reach as it is, this water has been fished and fished to death. The water is as green and dark as wine-bottle glass where it runs deep in the channel, but there are no lunkers lurking there. At my feet the riffle is just thicker air, a gloss over the round rocks of the riverbed. So I might catch nothing. I’m OK with that. Right now, it’s just me and the morning and river. I am only that little slice of wind I can whip up with my line. I put this moment, I put this moment, I put this moment—here.

  I’m self-medicating. Casting is anesthetic.

  When I come back to the campground, Odd is up and sitting hunched beside the fire pit where there is no fire.

  “Fuckin’ leg hurts,” he says. “Every fuckin’ thing hurts.”

  “That’s what happens when you sleep on the dirt like a drunk. Get up and move around. Eat some aspirin. Go fishing.”

  “I don’t want to fish. Just get your shit in the car, OK?”

  So I do. Ten minutes later my rod is broke down, my tent and sleeping bag are made into bundles, and I’m ready. We drive down the canyon and through a couple piddly-ass towns where half the houses are falling apart and the other half are held together with a fresh coat of paint and some potted geraniums.

  We stop for coffee at a place before we hit the interstate. I guess we timed it just right. It is so hot it is impossible to drink. Even doctored up with three tiny cups of Irish Creme and two packs of sugar, it is bitter. I take tiny sips and try not to blister my tongue.

  Odd turns on the radio.

  I check my phone.

  “My dad says you need to call your brother,” I say. “You can use mine.”

  “Piss on that,” says Odd.

  “OK,” I say.

  I delete seven messages from Mom. I think she’s stopped talking to me. I’m probably in time-out.

  We are rolling past the town where Bridger went to university. He’s been places here. He’s sat in chairs and licked spoons and seen the way the river looks from the bridges in this town. Polly-That-Was was supposed to do those things too, in the future that isn’t going to be. Bridger was supposed to take her to movies—and steer her to the easy teachers—and kiss her while they were hiking up to the big M on the side of mountain. That won’t be happening. Bridger, that douche, isn’t here now. And Polly-That-Was is dead, dead, dead. We don’t stop. The interstate blows right by, and so do we.

  The back of the tanker is silver and shiny and warps the reflection of D’Elegance’s big square grill into a crazy grin. There’s a happy, winking cartoon cow painted on there. It’s smiling back at D’Elegance and waving a hoof at us. “No BHT!” I guess this should make us happy too.

  “Fuckers!” says Odd and hits the steering wheel with both palms.

  “What? The trucker? He seems fine. He didn’t cut you off or anything.”

  “Not him. The fuckers with the hormones and antibiotics. He must feel pretty guilty, your dad.”

  “What?”

  “Well, he’s there shoving the antibiotics. He probably created the fucking MRSA. He turned some simple crap bug into what ate us.”

  “That doesn’t make sense. I wasn’t the first one to get sick. If my dad’s work had anything to do with the MRSA, I would have been the first one. I would have been exposed first . . .”

  “Don’t be stupid. You know it’s not like playing tag. I know and you know where it comes from—too many fucking antibiotics—and we know it brews in livestock as good as it does in people. And we know who goes around pumping antibiotics into animals: Your dad.”

  “My dad isn’t the only one.”

  “That doesn’t make it better.”

  “My dad does not think he did this to me.”

  “Did you ask him? Did you talk to him?”

  I avoided talking about it—not just with my dad. I tried to ignore everything about MRSA. I started going LALALALA in my head as soon as I overheard a nurse talking about how the CDC was really interested in this particular strain because it worked so fast—

  “It’s like Ebola,” said the nurse, “but they rot instead of bleed out.”

  That was the last thing I learned about my MRSA. That was the last thing I wanted to learn about my MRSA.

  I never read the obits in paper for Cases One, Two, Four, Five, and Seven. I never visited the chain-link fence by the school where the streaky goodbyes were still written on big sheets of white-painted plywood and where the helmets and shoulder pads of the players who died were rigged up like some gad-awful scarecrows over the football field. After the first trip to the grocery store, I learned to shut my eyes while we drove past. I learned to shut my eye.

  After a couple of trips to the grocery store, I learned not to go at all.

  People wanted to mourn. They wanted to remember. But they didn’t want to be reminded while they were picking out a cantaloupe. They didn’t want to glance up and see me touching the bananas. Everybody in town was a MRSA expert by then. They knew how it moves. Everybody in town knew it wasn’t like playing tag. It wasn’t going to jump through the air into their grocery cart. Everybody knew it, but they couldn’t swallow down the instinctive fear. So I stopped going to town.

  It would have been easier on the town if I’d just died too. It would have made the whole thing less random. Random is scary. If a stranger with a gun kills four people, that is way scarier than when four people die in a rollover on the interstate. It’s because people die in cars every day. People adjust to the fear, the way deer in a zoo get used to the smell of a tiger. But random is scary.

  But I didn’t die, I just—randomly—lived.

  What if I had died? What would my memorial have been? How would the world remember Polly-That-Was? I didn’t belong with the empty-helmet scarecrows. But, then, neither did lunch lady or baby. Was there a wall in the cafeteria where they hung up the lunch lady’s picture? Were her ladle and tongs retired? Probably the whole kitchen was gutted and everything she ever touched was incinerated. An
d the baby? Was it even old enough to have something that it used on purpose? Did its mom ever sit on the floor and cry into a little blanket or a pair of tiny socks?

  What about my mom? Could she have lived through it if I died? How would she have remembered Polly-That-Was?

  I don’t know. I don’t want to know. I wouldn’t have known.

  “I’ll find out what’s working,” says Odd as he pulls in at a casino-cafe-gas-flyshop-saloon. All bases covered, pretty much. He walks toward the flyshop entrance. I guess I’m supposed to wait in the car, but I want the bathroom, so I slink in through a door between the casino and cafe. If I was going to put a bathroom someplace, that would be it.

  The sign on the bathroom doors says “Women,” but there is also a picture on it. It’s a trout dressed up like a saloon-girl in lipstick, mascara, a big purple hat with feathers, and a dress that morphs into a tail. It’s a trout. It’s a whore. It’s every guy’s fantasy. And if I step into the bathroom to go pee, I guess I’m buying into it myself. But the other door has a trout wearing a cowboy hat and a gun belt, so there’s that.

  After I wash my hands, I try to pull my fingers through my hair so I can braid it. It’s too late. The back of my head is a prickly mat. I pull a pine needle out of it, but it’s a lost cause. I’m a lost cause.

  “Free Trout Aquarium,” says the sign pointing toward the cafe-giftshop. It might be the only living trout I see all day. Can’t pass that up. So I turn my face to the wall and sidle along in the direction the signs lead me.

  There’s a big trout hovering in a tank that’s big enough for it to turn around, but that’s it. It’s alive, but it probably wishes it wasn’t. A fleshy pink wad of something totally wrong is growing on its nose. Do fish get cancer? Is that growth just going to slowly swallow it up? Will they change the sign to “Free Tumor Aquarium”? Then I see the next tank. It is full of smaller trout. One of them, I guess, will grow up and be moved into the front tank and then live out its days in captivity. Free trout my ass. I want to snatch a mass-produced howling wolf-head sculpture and bash it through the glass. I want to scoop up a couple of little trout and run toward the river before they drown in the air.

  I’m in a pretty terrible mood when Odd gets back to the car.

  “Green Drake, Yellow Sallies, Pale Duns—both morning and evening,” says Odd, listing the fly patterns that are working. “You got any of those?”

  I just glare at him.

  “A Bitch Creek works almost always, so you’re set,” says Odd. His mood is better than mine, and I hate him for it, big time.

  Someone is coming down the path to the river. This is it, I decide. This is the person. This is the place. I’m going to unleash my full-on ugly on this guy—not just my face, but the new deeper-than-skin-deep ugly that is me. I don’t have to plan anything. It will be instinctive, like a rattlesnake, because I’m just that full of ugly. It is dripping from my imaginary fangs.

  Every step I take up the path I feel stronger, and meaner, and uglier. It feels intensely good.

  He’s a very old guy. I’m close enough to see that now, he’s moving slowly, slowly, down the path. He’s using two hiking poles. He’s wearing a hat. I might give him a heart attack—accidentally. If he dies, it will be an act of nature, just like if he slipped off the bank and drowned or hit the trip wire on a coiled snake. I am not responsible for what I am.

  “How’s the river? How are the trout?” He calls out before I’m ready to engage.

  “Can’t complain.” I keep climbing toward him. I take off my hat. He should be able to see me now . . .

  “A beautiful girl on the beautiful river . . .”

  What the fuck? Is he fucking blind? One of the hiking poles is slender, white, tipped in red. His eyes are pale and unfocused under the wide brim of his hat. Yes. He is fucking blind—or good as.

  The old man starts to talk, but in a moment I know he’s not talking, he’s reciting. And I remember the words as I hear them. “The Song of Wandering Aengus.” I memorized it for my snazzy-dazzle English project.

  “I went out to the hazel wood,

  Because a fire was in my head,

  And cut and peeled a hazel wand,

  And hooked a berry to a thread;

  And when white moths were on the wing,

  And moth-like stars were flickering out,

  I dropped the berry in a stream

  And caught a little silver trout.

  “When I had laid it on the floor

  I went to blow the fire aflame,

  But something rustled on the floor,

  And some one called me by my name:

  It had become a glimmering girl

  With apple blossom in her hair

  Who called me by my name and ran

  And faded through the brightening air.

  “Though I am old with wandering

  Through hollow lands and hilly lands,

  I will find out where she has gone,

  And kiss her lips and take her hands;

  And walk among long dappled grass,

  And pluck till time and times are done

  The silver apples of the moon,

  The golden apples of the sun.”

  “Yeats,” I say.

  “Yes, glimmering girl,” and he smiles. “Perhaps the world isn’t so full of weeping after all.”

  I don’t know if he is talking to me or to himself. He is a very old man. Whatever his eyes see, they do not see me. There is room for me to walk easily past him on the trail while he stares in the direction of the river. The air is still, and I can smell him as I step around him. He smells like an old man. He smells like unwashed clothes and old happiness.

  My coiled-up poison is gone.

  “We are doomed,” says Odd. It’s the first thing Odd says when we meet up back at D’Elegance. His good mood was short-lived. I guess he didn’t catch anything, but bad fishing is not equal to doom. What now? I don’t want to ask. I was feeling pretty good there for a few minutes, and I don’t want to lose it because Odd wants to share some sour owl-shit philosophy about how we are all assholes. I just need to redirect his attention. “Hey, I can’t think of any monsters that start with E. I’m drawing a blank . . .”

  “We are fuckin’ doomed,” says Odd.

  “What you mean? Did we take the wrong turn or something?” I might as well give up and ask. If I don’t ask all I’m going to hear for miles will be “doom, doom, doom, doomity, doom, doomed,” like a sleepwalking drummer in a marching band. Let’s just skip the halftime and get on with the game.

  “Something is going to get us,” says Odd.

  Has he been self-medicating again? With what? Prescription pot isn’t supposed to be paranoia-inducing, and what he shared seemed pretty sweet. Maybe catching no fish just gave him too much time to think and work up a mood. A mood of doom.

  “We could just crash here for a while and take a nap until you feel better,” I say. Naps are golden problem solvers. I learned that at Kid-O-Korral.

  “Yeah. Let’s just sleep and pretend it’s not going to get us.”

  “Look Odd, we are totally safe. It’s a nice day. Nothing is going to get us. Serial killers are really rare and that parasite . . . just avoid cat boxes. No problem.”

  “No. Not just us. All of us. Humans are doomed. We are all gonna die.”

  “You got another headache? I’ll buy you some sunglasses and aspirin . . . and coffee and pie. Coffee’s good for headaches. It’s the caffeine.”

  “Is caffeine gonna slow down the fucking apocalypse?”

  I’m kind of over this conversation. We’re all gonna die—blah-blah-blah—what’s the point? There is no point—blah-blah-blah. So I try again, “Let’s just stop and get some coffee and some pie.”

  “It’s that kind of thinking that makes us doomed.”

  “Thinking about coffee and pie? How’s that deadly?”

  “Because it’s herd thinking. We all just want to be together and chew pie together and breathe th
e same air together. It’s got to stop.”

  I agree. Stopping would be good. If we can’t stop for coffee and pie, I’d at least like to stop this talking.

  “We are all doomed. That is, unless we stay away from the herd and shoot strangers on sight.”

  “Really, Odd? Shoot strangers on sight? You know that we—you and me—are strangers?”

  “If somebody shoots us, it’ll serve us right.”

  It’s the last word. He jerks open the car door and slams it after him. He doesn’t even wait for me to get in before he starts the engine. I’m useless to him. Conversation over. He leans forward and turns on the radio.

  I recognize the song. It’s about a little girl with cancer who lost her hair from chemo. I hate that song. I fucking hate the radio. Fuck the rules. I push the scan button.

  “This is a fallen world. We live in a fallen world,” says the radio.

  I push the button again and the radio says, “. . . one of the cars to rupture and leak hydrochloric acid and asphalt into the creek. It is estimated that the three miles below the spill are a dead zone.” I imagine the stretch of river I was fishing this morning changed to acid and asphalt, because somewhere that’s what happened. I push the button.

  “. . . more gun violence after all, lefties. Look at Mexico, right? Mexico has gun control. Ciudad Juarez and Culiacan are paradise now! No cartels running around and leaving dead bodies in the middle of the road, right?” I think about the gun at the bottom of the sleeping bag and how useful it would be for killing strangers. Does Odd know where I put it? I hope not.

  I have my tiny pair of lucky scissors in my fishing vest. They aren’t ordinary fishing scissors meant for tying flies. They are embroidery scissors shaped like a long-beaked bird, a fishing bird. I swiped them out of my mom’s jewelry box when I was eleven. They looked lucky and magical, and I figured fishing takes luck so I put them in the pocket of my vest. As far as fishing mojo goes, they do OK. Better than marshmallow hearts and clovers.