end of digression
2
Water on the Brain
After the doctor’s departure Koznyshev expressed the wish to go to the river with his fishing rod. He was fond of angling and was apparently proud of being fond of such a stupid occupation.
—Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
The too-brief company of Bill Bob helped me see beyond doubt that I was disintegrating as a result of constant fishing, yet I didn’t plan to do anything about it: falling apart as I fished was depressing, but ceasing to fish—that was terrifying! The rings of Saturn were no more alien to me than those portions of earth that did not border trout streams. So I continued my Ideal Schedule and was soon exhibiting more bizarre symptoms: besides the insomnia, tangled tongue, and water hallucinations, I began to hide or even flee when I encountered other fishermen; to avoid human contact I began stockpiling groceries and bought a fifty-gallon gas drum; soon my communications with fellow humanoids consisted of an occasional Thank you, Hi, or Fill-er-up, and that was it. Like many an addled hermit, I started yacking a blue streak, but not to myself. Oh no. I talked to my flyrod, Rodney. As expected, we became almost preternaturally skillful at extracting fish from coastal streams (“we” being Rodney and me). We caught cutthroat in staggering numbers, often over a hundred a day. I kept only enough to eat and my appetite shrank with my ability to sleep; still, I ate trout twice a day and grew no more tired of it than an anteater grows tired of ants, he with his long snout and sticky tongue, me with my Rodney and flies.
By mid-July I was no longer in pain. I was totally bamboozled; I was chicaned; I was necromanced; I was stuffed and nonsensed. I no longer saw anything wrong with my life as it was. Rodney fished because I fished and I fished because Rodney fished. We had an understanding: we were two pieces of fishing gear—smash us, lose us, wear us out, fishing gear will never question your judgment.
In late July, after a week of unseasonable rain, Rod and me undertook an inspection of the Tamanawis starting at the mouth, watching for signs of summer steelhead or sea-run cutthroat. There were steelhead in other coastal rivers, but we only fished the Tamanawis now; saved gas and time, plus we figured it was ours. I was really slavering for a blueback or steelhead; I’d had it with doinky trout; I told Rodney, “You’n’me catch big fish, everything’ll be hunky-dory”—and in my condition this Cro-Magnon notion seemed a sage piece of self-analysis. A mile above tidewater we pulled over to scan a big eddy called “The Shakespeare Hole”—named not after William but after the rod and reel of one Crawdad Benson, a ramshackle old geezer of seventy-some who lived in a ramshackle shack overhanging the pool, and who had fished it almost daily for decades with a ramshackle rod and reel manufactured in the Dvapara Yuga by the Shakespeare Tackle Company. Despite his gear Crawdad nabbed a good many fish, some of them literally off his back porch—living proof of Walton’s adage that it’s the fiddler and not the fiddlestick that makes the music. The Shakespeare Hole was vacant this morning, the hot blue smoke pouring out Crawdad’s stovepipe proving him busy with breakfast—no doubt a batch of the red-shelled crawdads from which he derives nourishment and name. Glancing toward the tail of the hole I was surprised to see a good fish roll. (It’s funny how, fishing the anadromous runs, you think there isn’t a fish in the river till you see one, then you think there’s a fish behind every rock; no matter what, you’re wrong.) Leaving my truck door open so Crawdad wouldn’t hear me, I snuck down for a cast. The fish rolled again. Hurriedly I stripped line, leaving on the weighted Muddler I’d used the night before, explaining to Rodney that it’s better to get any fly out there quick than to waste time calculating the “proper pattern” as H2O would have done (I’d been drilling my superiority to H2O into Rodney for days). I made a roll-cast to stay clear of the brush behind and got the Muddler drifting nicely toward where the fish had shown. When the floating line stopped floating I struck… and a big blueback went flying across the rivertop in a noble but whimsical attempt to escape its plight by transforming itself into a bird: it entered the air over a dozen times, but each flight was shorter, the longed-for wings remained fins, and at last I hauled it ashore—a beautiful 2-pound cutthroat, the sea lice still clinging to its sides.
Soon as I had it in my clutches I found myself pitying it; its leaps were so graceful, its drydocked thrashing so dismal. But a gurgling curiosity centered in my belly wanted to compare its flesh to the flesh of the natives I’d been eating. Despising myself, disobeying myself, I grabbed driftwood and killed it.
I was readying for a second cast when Crawdad’s door creaked open. He couldn’t see me but he knew my pickup. “You! Gus Orviston! You keep outta them traps!” (Ma liked to raid his crawdad traps, and Crawdad figured theft was hereditary.) “Speak up boy! Gus!” As he shuffled down the bank I circled round the brush, jumped in my truck, and gunned down the road, cackling like a redneck in a hot-car movie.
I cleaned the cutthroat in the kitchen sink, discussing fishing plans with Rodney. We decided to take Sardine (my aluminum canoe) down to the estuary to try for more sea-runs on the incoming tide. Remembering I hadn’t fed Alfred and company, I threw the blueback’s guts in the garbage, grabbed a handful of pellets, and tossed them in the tank—but soon as they hit the water it began to churn: the fish went berserk, even the bullheads, but especially Alfred who was everywhere at once, lashing down into the gravel, flying up into the lid, slamming the sides of the tank with his tiny body. I was baffled till I noticed my hands—the big trout’s blood! I’d thrown in food laced with the gore of a deadly enemy. I grabbed a strainer and tried to net the pellets, but the fish didn’t slow. Alfred the Great kept ramming the walls, and the soft, desperate thuds panicked me: he was destroying himself. Suddenly he was in the air and I lunged, trying to catch him, but he bounced off my hands, hit the floor nose-first, and slithered out of my grip again and again. When I finally got him back in the water he slid to the bottom and lay there, a little string of blood hanging from his nose. I netted out the rest of the pellets, increased the flow of water to purge the tank of the sea-run’s blood, and the other fish calmed down and recovered; but Alfred stayed keeled over on one side, finning the aimless way old spawners do once they’ve gone rotten and blind. Then he began to turn belly up. I tried to massage his sides to keep his gills working, but he was so small he kept sliding from my fingers; he’d turned a dull green hue, with gray blotches where his protective coating had been scraped off; his mouth slowly opened and closed, as if he were trying to speak. I kept rubbing. After maybe fifteen minutes he wriggled weakly from my hands and balanced upright in the weeds; I caught the crawdads and threw them in the sink so they couldn’t claw him. The other fish were all right; Sigrid had resumed her sorrowful pose, staring down at the river; but Alfred lay stunned on the bottom, the thread of blood still hanging from his nostril, and watching his uncomprehending eyes, remembering the same look in the eyes of the dying janitor-bass, tears came threading down my cheeks. I was broken up… at first. Then I was disgusted. Hadn’t I killed thousands of fish without a qualm? Why was I wasting time watching this one? He would live or he’d die, and if he died there were millions like him thriving in every stream on the coast. I left him to his fate, gathered my fishing gear, fried up the blueback, choked it down without tasting it, loaded Sardine in the truck and headed down to the estuary.
I fished until 10 P.M., trolling spinners and bait, drifting nymphs and streamers, throwing wet flies and dry, plunking ghost shrimp and crawdad tails; I didn’t see another blueback; all I caught were smolts, most of them steelhead, and every one reminded me of Alfred, making me angrier at my mushy-heartedness and all the more determined to stay where I was. I got home exhausted at 11:30. I unloaded the canoe and gear, lit lights and a fire, cooked and ate dinner, loaded a pipe. Only then did I go to the aquarium.…
Alfred the Great was on his side on top of the water, fins and gills barely moving. All that time he’d fought to stay upright and breathe—such a tiny creature to cling so long t
o its spark of life. I turned him over and started massaging, but whenever I let go he would glide down again. I knew that had I stayed with him he would have recovered, but now he was too feeble. He lived for another hour, then his gills stopped moving. I started blubbering, cursing myself at the same time: “You jerk! Sniveling over one damned minnow… like a ferret deciding to cry over a dead rat.” But my poor little Alfred, my only animate companion, the only fish who’d ever trusted me, who’d swum alongside my finger, who’d nibbled the crawdad’s feelers but darted away before he got pinched, who’d cheered me more than Scotsmen with his dancing. Then Alfred, Garbage-Gut, all the fish I’d ever killed began to haunt me, and they expanded inside me till all the things that suffered—every bleeding and dying creature in the world, every blighted plant and miserable man—every bit of it haunted me. How sad and ludicrous the runniness of our noses in the face of sorrow; how sad the shabby meanness of our meaningless fishy lives. I put Alfred in a bottle of water, just in case, then held him by a lamp: his pitiful little nose was mashed down into his lower jaw; he was beat-up, dulled, and still. I could see us all—Ma, H2O, Bill Bob, me, every being born—stiff as cardboard, belly-up.… I found a flashlight and stumbled down to the Tamanawis, trying all the way to make myself angry, to quash this upsurge of sentiment, to be cold and hard and alone and uncaring—and I thought I was succeeding till I poured Alfred into the river and heard myself say, “Goodbye, Alfred the Great. You were just a fish, but you were my friend.”
Back inside I climbed into the loft and collapsed, leaving a candle burning to stave off the water visions. But when I lay down and stared at Bill Bob’s crayola map of the Tamanawis Valley its water began to flow: I could even hear it; I could even see a silver speck in it—Alfred’s tiny corpse—drifting down the crayon river, glinting in the greenblack water, washing round bend after bend, through riffle, pool, and eddy. And I found myself urging him, hoping he made it clear to the ocean—as if this were terribly important somehow; then I saw myself in the drawing, a crayoned stick figure throwing pinecones in the water, and toy boats and bottles, galloping along beside them, coaxing, conjuring, begging everything that drifted to make it clear to the sea, the sea would make it all right, the sea was big, it was great and wise, it was the final abode of drifting things, so sail, Alfred, sail down, down, down the long valley, down to the sea where you’ll be all right, you’ll be part of the, part of.…
I sat up in bed.
What the hell was I turning into? Sail Alfred? What nautical gush was this? Hell, Shirley Temple was thick-skinned as a rhino, next to me. Alfred? What in blazes was I doing naming a fish? I was as bad as H2O. Nijinsky. Sigrid. Alfred… horseshit! That’s what I’d name my next pet minnow: Horseshit.
I jumped down from the loft, got dressed, grabbed a pen and port jug, and began measuring out six-ounce mugs of wine as I wrote in my Log, telling myself I’d review my efforts later for scientific evidence of the effects of each cup—and knowing damned well that the quintessential pith of the thing was an excuse to get rotten drunk. I began with an account of the day’s fishing, but two mugs later was jabbering aloud to my friend Rodney, writing everything I said in a crabbed scrawl interspersed with blots of wine dripping from my moustache:
… OK Rodney, get that fly over that fish.… No, not in the alders! Can’t you watch what you’re doing? (Rodney nods his tip up and down: “Sure Boss, I can watch. You bet, yes sir, what am I doing, sure, yeah, you bet!”)… All right then, try again.… No! Not the bushes on the back-cast! Can’t you do anything? (Rodney wags his tip from side to side: “No sirree Boss, you know me, nothing right, you bet, sure, thanks, nope, not Rodney!”) time on mug #2: .25 hrs. Assignment for 1:30 a.m. July 22 Mug #3 Slurp #1: Describe in five billion words the appearance, behavior, and history of Rodney T. Flyrod:
First thing I noticed about Rodney back when he was just a dumb blank in the fly-shop was his nudity: him and the other blanks were all naked as noses, standing in a barrel there. Didn’t bother him though. He still don’t wear nothing but a little cork, a few wrappings, and some see-through varnish, so it’s lucky there’s no members growing off him or I’d be ashamed to go fishing with the guy. I’m not even sure which end of him his face is on; he’s like me—a poker face, a wood Indian. Unlike me, he’s eight feet tall, and according to A.M.A. body charts should weigh about 300 lbs, so at four ounces he’s a little on the skinny side. But he won’t eat—refuses meat, drink, or vegetable—and he’s muscular for a beanpole. (Mug #4 Pipe #2) Rod is your basic Strong Silent Type, but he’s sensitive too: he’ll twitch his head at the peck of a trout 50 or 60 feet off. And he’s awfully damned devoted to me; never goes noplace without me. And I like Rodney a lot. I guess I do. I must, carrying him around every day all day dawn to dark Rodney and me all alone in rivers too cold under sun too hot watching water so bright it engraves my brain, keeps me awake, fills my ears, my eyes, my dreams, my (Mug 5) me and Rod out there watching that bright water because, because? because our little fly is on or in it, why else, and we’re curious, Rod and me, wondering which silvery unseen how-big critter outta nowhere’s gonna slash that helpless little treacherous little fly me and Rod are watching out for, which is why we stand there, feet two pilings, back cramped, arms leaden, flesh fried, blood mosquito-food, eyes dazed, glazed, mesmerized, hypnotized and ears by streams and creeks and rivers and we’re Busy the Rodney and Curious the Gus, proud keepers of a unreal insect strolling long the rivertop like a dog on a leash and let one fish touch our doggie and we’ll yank its brains out the way he wishes we’d leave off, me and Rodney, making pretty line-patterns in air nobody sees catching fish nobody knows we catch except the fish who never admit it till we catch them again and make them sorry they lied and dead like Alfred and what kind of game is this we’re playing here, Rodney? What are we doing? Yeah, we don’t know, yeah, you bet, sure boss, OK, and we keep on walking miles for the sake of it, being hermits for it, losing sleep over it, going hungry because of it, crazy thanks to it, no better than dead men at the hands of it and WHY? who makes us? the fish? the river? the stupidity of our selfs? no. I make Rodney and curiosity makes me and Who makes curiosity is probably Who makes us, or maybe I just probably don’t know why. so what? does it matter (Mug 6) if I made rod or he made me, in whose image, what for, on what day, or rested or did or didn’t see it weren’t worth meadow-waffles or alfred or what fish think or people or if there’s a god or gog or magog or hell no it dont make no difference. it’s just fishing, chug a mug (7), just fishing, plain, dumb, and simple like god intended and huge ugly handwriting here and untold crockheaded whirlies but me and by god Rod are gonna get this thing hashed out: here’s what: I made Rodney and he made me and god made us and we made him sorry but here we are anyway, tough titty, two terrible drinks a water altogether designed for the torment and education and destruction of trouts like public school teachers for little kids, that’s what. we give them fishes what for right in the mouth, that’s what, cause we been around, me and Rod, we know their abode, and their going out, and their coming in, therefore do we put our hook in their noses as a sign unto them, and rodney don’t sleep why should I? he dont talk why should I? he dont think or drink or write or go all crazy and alone in a cabin all alone why am I? Why amn’t I snoozing instead of this water whirling whirling letting me not any sleeping why? mug 5 or 9, why amn’t I happy fishing here I wanted where like this is what I wanted my ideal always angling schedule I always always wanted and if it kills me it kills me how I wanted to die, so there, goodnite rodney. all hashed out…
[I staggered to bed with jug and journal]
but why rodney, why god in bed can’t see nothing but waterrunning in my eyes out my eyes my ears my cabin gone all watery water head to foot to fireplace and wont stop and wont stop and wont and O don’t I stick my foot in my mouth’s mind sometimes floating around sideways bellyup like poor poor Alfred trying not to let this thing hash out but by god we’ll get it figured oh oooh now driffing down down coc
keyed, down, hard to write, so hard gliding down but no bottom nowhere dont hit no bottom and O if only my nose’d bust on some lowest bottomest fundamuntelly groundedest thing, then I’d know… where. why I was. am. For. Why i so am what, some day. SO THERE! so where? so sleepy so tired so come O numb night, and cradle this soggy lump till dawns bright dawn dawns…
except, jesus, i mean, maybe he was just a fish, but he Alfred, he was my frend.
3
Anvil Abe and the Phantom Fisherman
Allah, Who payeth the disbeliever his due… is swift at reckoning.… There covereth him a wave, above which is a wave, above which is a cloud. Layer upon layer of darkness. When he holdeth out his hand he scarce can see it.
—Koran XXIV: 39, 40
After a few hours tossing in the throes of drunken nightmares I awoke, bladder bursting. It was dawn. I sat up slowly to the worst headache of my life, crawled down from the loft, and crept outside. As I was splashing the devil’s club I heard a different kind of splash and whirled in time to see the second consecutive leap of a big sea-run cutthroat in H2O’s drift. Had I believed in some Deity, even in a rivergod, I would have turned around and gone back to bed; the thing was just too pat; obviously that fish was a lure wielded by some hungry unseen Intelligence; obviously I was the prey. Sick, shivering, still half-drunk, I belonged nowhere but back in the sack. But when the trout soared high a third time I took the bait. I lurched to the cabin, threw on some clothes, and in ten minutes had Sardine ready to go. Fisherman-consciousness usurped my brain: the sea-runs had to be in. I’d float down to Eaton’s Landing on the estuary by early afternoon, hitchhike home, return in the pickup for the canoe, and catch up on my sleep… sometime. After I died, maybe.
The River Why Page 11