Round Rock

by Michelle Huneven

  “Best catfish hole in the whole lake,” Libby told Red. “But with your high-dollar equipment, you’ll want to fish further up there.” She pointed to where the finger of water widened into the lake itself. “I guarantee you’ll catch at least one crappie.” Deadpan, she pronounced the word obscenely.

  Red smiled. Out here in the warming day, Libby seemed more physical and energetic, truly spirited. She was one of those people who seemed familiar to Red from the moment he laid eyes on her, as if, contrary to fact, there’d never been a time when she wasn’t somewhere in his life. As she unfolded chairs, assembled poles, her face was guileless and happy. Her shin-length pedal pushers made her calves look muscled, her ankles bony, her feet strong and capable of traversing great distances.

  In the time that Red had one pole ready to go, Libby had all four of hers snapped together and threaded with line. She called Joe over to her. “You ever been fishing?” she said.

  “Once, with a friend. Didn’t catch anything.”

  “Your luck’s about to change, knock wood.” Libby rapped the side of her head with her fist. “Let’s get these lines in the water.” She spread out newspaper and opened a Tupperware container of pork livers. She tipped the bowl toward Joe. “Gross, huh?”

  “Really gross.”

  “Catfish go crazy for it.” She cut the meat into bloody chunks, baited the line of the first pole, rinsed her hand in the lake, and cast expertly. The liver sailed out and plunked in the water. Libby leaned the pole against the back of one chair. “Watch that for me, Joe, until Lewis gets it secured?”

  Lewis clustered rocks around the handles until the poles stood on their own.

  Joe frowned. “Don’t you hold the poles in your hands?”

  “Not these,” she said. “You’ll hold the spinning poles your Dad bought, but this is catfishing. Nothing labor-intensive about it. Just bait and wait. You need your hands free. I mean, what if you have to scratch an itch?” She baited and cast the next pole. “Hold this now, okay? Couple of weeks ago, I leaned a pole up against the chair and before I knew it, both the pole and the chair were in the lake. Lewis had to go in after them. Got a big old catfish.”

  Red was wishing by now that he hadn’t gotten the spinning rods. They were too fussy and fragile, the three-pound test like spiderwebs in his fingers. He was grateful Libby was distracting Joe, lest the boy witness his ineptitude.

  Once their gear was ready, Red and Joe had to walk a good distance away from Libby and Lewis, and then from each other, in order to cast. Too far apart to talk. So much for interaction; fishing, it seemed, was yet another exercise in solitude.

  The night before, Joe had spent a long time practice-casting in the Round Rock roadway. He cast until he could send out a lure in a fine, long arc in any direction. He hit specific rocks and trees and other targets. Now he fished with ease, casting, reeling in, casting, reeling in, his face expressing the same focus and intensity as when he read or ran. After a fruitless half an hour, Red worried that the boy was bored, and tried to project confidence that there were fish that would bite. And sure enough, Red had a strike and pulled in a pan-sized bluegill. Libby jumped to her feet and ran up whooping. Joe stared long and hard at the fish, as if memorizing what he should aim for. “All right, Dad,” he said.

  They resumed casting. The morning was warm and still. Water lapped at the shore in tiny waves. From the mechanical daze of repetitive motion, Red heard Joe quietly and pointedly say, “Dad.” Joe’s pole was curling in a tightening parabola. Libby was over in an instant. “Good!” she cried. “Now keep your pole up. Relax, don’t panic. Let him swim. Don’t haul him in too fast. Right, good. Pole up! Let him run a bit. Jesus, Joe, what do you have there?”

  “I don’t know!” Joe was jubilant.

  Lewis came over for a closer look. An old man fishing farther down the spit shaded his eyes to see what was going on, then put a rock in his chair and ambled up.

  “Big, huh, Dad?” Joe said.

  “I’ll say,” said Red.

  The nylon line unzipped the water.

  “You’re doing great,” said Libby.

  “You sure are,” Red said.

  Indeed, Joe grew calmer by the moment. He kept his pole up, maintaining a constant, steady tension, as if he’d been fishing all his life.

  “So what do you think?” Libby asked.

  “I think I’ll bring him on in now,” Joe said.

  Red realized this was no pretty little panfish long before it broke the surface. He thought maybe sheepshead or sucker, though, and wasn’t prepared for the way it kept coming out of the water. At first Red thought it was a snake, but in the next instant, he realized it was an eel—worm, snake, and bottom fish combined. Mud-brown, yellow-eyed, its girth triangular, its skin dented and scarred. The five of them stood there as the eel writhed on the parched mud, two barbs of the brass treble hook imbedded in its jaw. The tiny eyes, spaced so far apart, seemed barely functional or necessary.

  “Straight from the Pleistocene,” Lewis said.

  “Some eat ’em,” said the old guy. “I never would.”

  Joe looked around, his face white and his eyes wide with excitement and fear. “So what do I do?” he asked loudly.

  “Oh, we’ll throw it back,” said Libby. “No big deal.”

  Red reached to touch his son’s shoulder and caught sight of an entire family approaching: father and mother, boy and girl, all wearing brightly colored nylon windbreakers and carrying new-looking picnic gear and tackle boxes. They could have marched straight off the camping pages in the Sears catalog. The father, a fit, handsome man in his early forties, led the way. Over his windbreaker, he wore one of those special fishing vests with dozens of pockets. This man, Red thought, would know how to catch the right fish. This man’s son would never catch some freak species of aquatic life.

  “Whatcha got over there?” the man called.

  When nobody answered, he said something to his wife and kids, then started toward Red’s group. He squeezed into their circle between Joe and the old man. “Freshwater eel,” he said, glancing at Joe. “You caught this?”

  Joe looked from Red to Libby to Lewis and said nothing.

  The man unsheathed a knife on his belt and crouched down, the blade as bright and clear as a mirror. He flicked the side of the eel with the tip.

  “What the—?” Lewis blurted.

  “Used to see these all the time in Asia.” He grunted, edging forward, and lowered his foot onto the eel’s head. “Ugly suckers.” With one strong, fluid pull, he sliced the eel in two. The uneven sections, head and tail, went crazy. Everyone hopped back. The man stood up and wiped the knife on his pantleg. “There you go.” He nodded gravely at Red, at Lewis, at the old man. Everyone kept backing away from him and the bloody, flopping eel halves. “Y’all have a good day now.”

  They watched him rejoin his family. Then Libby reached down and lifted Joe’s pole from the dirt, the eel’s twitching head hanging from the hook. She took a pair of needle-nosed pliers from her back pocket, grasped the eel’s head, and began to pry the hook loose.

  Red roused himself. “I can do that,” he said.

  “Done,” said Libby, tossing the head into the lake. “And a free meal for the catfish.” Then she picked up the tail end and threw it in. “Dessert, too.” She rinsed her hands in the water and flicked the moisture off her fingers at Joe. “Some first fish,” she said.

  AFTERWARD, Joe sat by himself on the rocks above the shore. Red let him be for half an hour, then climbed up. “You okay?”

  “Yeah,” Joe said.

  “We can leave if you want.”

  “I just need to think about it.”

  Red went back to his casting, if only to demonstrate his continued faith in fishing, and caught another bluegill. As the sun gained strength, so did the wind. Lewis was in his chair reading a book. Libby, behind sunglasses, stared straight ahead, as if willing fish to her hook. The old guy down the way packed up his chair and poles and lef
t, raising a hand in silent salute. Red wished Joe would start fishing again, but he just sat there above them, scratching a big rock with a little rock.

  Suddenly, Libby leapt to her feet. “Here’s dinner,” she called, and pulled in a five-pound catfish as big as Red’s arm.

  Joe came down to inspect it, crouching over the fish with Libby. Red couldn’t hear what they were saying, but as soon as Libby got the fish on a stringer, she stood up. “I don’t know about you other fisherpersons,” she said, “but Joe and I are going to have some brunch.”

  They sat on quilts and Libby passed out bacon and egg-salad sandwiches. In this fresh air, Red’s hunger was shocking. His first sandwich was gone before anyone else’s was even unwrapped. Libby handed him another one. He restrained himself from devouring it on the spot by reaching into a bag of chicharrones, dipping a dry blistery rind into a carton of fresh salsa.

  “Eee-ow, Dad,” Joe said. “You’re really going to eat that?”

  “Why not?” Red said.

  “They’re delicious.” Libby reached for a rind to prove it.

  “Fat fried in fat,” Lewis said. “Makes my arteries harden just to look at them.”

  The chicharrón, tasting faintly yet pleasantly like sweat, shattered in Red’s mouth. The salsa filled his eyes with tears. Libby handed Pepsis all around.

  Stretching out, Red absently ate chicharrones and watched Lewis hesitate over the sandwich Libby offered. “Come on,” she said softly, “I know you like egg-salad sandwiches. That’s why I made them. But if you don’t want it, I’ll just throw it to the catfish.”

  Red wanted to laugh out loud at Lewis’s recalcitrance—such a classic alcoholic need to control. Lewis had no trouble feeding other people, but balked when offered nourishment. Lewis’s biggest weakness, Red thought, might be his inability to accept the incredible gifts that life hurled his way on a regular basis.

  After building a little stack of food in front of Lewis, Libby turned her attention to Joe. “Don’t take that militaristic jerk personally. We’ve run into some real doozies out here, I swear. Once, Lewis and I decided to go fishing at night and a huge family was encamped right along this inlet. Mom, dad, grandparents, fifty million kids, two mean little mutts barking all the time. They had Coleman lanterns, radios, a portable TV playing the ball game. They must’ve had about fifteen lines in the water. Lewis and I were forced way out on the spit”—Libby waved toward the lake—“where we’d never catch anything. After an hour or so, we gave up.

  “We’re walking back to our car, trying to sneak past the dogs, when the grandfather calls us over. Do we want some catfish? he asks, only we don’t understand him right away. He has a funny accent, or maybe a speech impediment. ‘Got morn we kin et up,’ he says. ‘Got three freezers full at home.’ Lewis—the cook here—says, sure, we’ll take some catfish.” Libby paused to take a drink of Pepsi.

  “We didn’t know what we were in for,” Lewis said.

  “No lie,” said Libby. “The old guy takes us to his wife. ‘Mammy,’ he says, ‘give these folks your fish.’ So the old gal hauls a stringer out of the water, hand over hand. Meanwhile, the kids gather around us, close. I keep thinking they’re touching my clothes, but when I turn to look, they shrink back. The dogs are sniffing our ankles. The whole family is, I don’t know, a few bricks short. Big, wide faces. Thin, almost nonexistent lips. Eyes really far apart.

  “And the fish! They were the biggest cats I’ve ever seen. Twelve and fourteen pounds. Bigger than the dogs. The woman pulls one fish off the stringer, hugs it around the middle and gathers it to her chest like she’s cuddling a baby. The fish isn’t dead, so it’s writhing all down her chest, slithering out of her arms, down her legs, probably stinging her like crazy. When it finally hits the ground, one of the boys pins it with a sharp stick until Lewis and I can get it on our stringer. We take the other fish too, don’t ask me why. I don’t know what we were thinking.”

  “We were thinking,” said Lewis, “about fried catfish with my jalapeño sauce.”

  “Yeah, but when we got home, we had to skin the damn things before we could go to bed.” Libby reached over and touched Red’s pant leg. “You ever skinned a catfish?”

  “No,” Red croaked. He took a swig of Pepsi. Something had lodged in his upper chest, his gorge. It hurt to swallow.

  “Normally,” Libby said, “you nail their heads to a piece of wood and pull the skin off with pliers.”

  “Yuck,” said Joe.

  “It is yucky,” said Libby. “But it’s the easiest way. Except these fish were so big, I didn’t have a nail long enough to go through their heads and stick in the wood.”

  “You’d need a railroad spike,” said Lewis.

  “Oh, God, it was five in the morning before we finally got to bed, and then neither one of us could sleep.”

  Libby stopped talking and looked at Red. “You okay?”

  Red found that by sitting perfectly still, he could ignore the sensation in his chest. He gave what he thought would pass for a confident nod, although even that quick tilt of the neck shot needlelike sprays of pain through his chest.

  Libby frowned, but went on with her story. “So anyway, we’re lying in bed and Lewis starts talking. And it’s like he’s saying exactly the same things that were running through my mind. ‘All I can think about are fish,’ he says. ‘I feel like I’m swimming in a school of fish. I feel like I am a fish. Where did those people come from? Why were their eyes were so far apart?’ And then, Lewis sits bolt upright in bed and yells, ‘They weren’t people, they were catfish!’ ”

  Red tried to laugh, but the obstruction in his chest was too big and too painful. It felt, he had to admit, exactly like his heart. In fact, there was no doubt: his heart was swelling, about to burst. He put his palm on his chest and pushed. He was in big trouble. He tried to conjure a way back to the car, to town, to the emergency room, but he’d never make it up those sharp rocks.

  He heard Libby talking as if from a great distance. “They probably looked so much like catfish because that’s all they ate,” she was saying. “But where was their car? How’d they get all that junk down there? I think … Are you all right?”

  Libby’s face loomed in front of him, her eyes enormous with concern.

  “I don’t know,” he croaked. “My chest …”

  Libby stared at him hard, her eyes darkening, then broke into gasps of laughter. “Look!” She held up the near-empty cellophane bag of pork rinds. “Jesus! You have the chicharrón choke! My God, Red, you can’t eat these things without washing them down with something!” She tore off the pull tab and handed him another Pepsi. “They get stuck and expand. Oh, you poor baby. I know, it really, really hurts—doesn’t it?” She stopped talking to laugh some more. “Drink. But it’s going to get worse for a minute before it gets better. They’ll really swell now.”

  Red drank, and the waddage of rinds indeed seemed to balloon beyond his capacity to contain it. Drawing breath was like taking a thick, blunt knife in the chest. When slowly, miraculously, the pain began to ebb, he wanted to weep with relief.

  “My God,” said Libby, “this expedition’s been a disaster from the start. What time is it—almost ten? What say we pack up?”

  The pain stopped. Red took a deep breath. His heart was fine. He wouldn’t die. He was so relieved he probably would’ve agreed to anything. “Great,” he said. “Let’s.”

  “Hear, hear,” said Libby, getting to her feet. “I like a man who says ‘let’s.’ ”

  Red liked her too. Her thick ponytail and bright laughter. Her knobby ankles, the bold way she handled bait and fish and pieces of fish, not to mention her kindness to Joe. She managed with ease the small acts of attention he found paralyzing.

  As Red drove them all home in his truck, the vague ache lingering in his chest became a specific sadness: that age and weight, his own inarguable fate, had disqualified him from Libby’s romantic consideration. Though she was undeniably fond of him, when it came to lov
e he was clearly out of the running.

  LIBBY AND LEWIS watched meteor showers from her front deck. Single stars sprang out of nowhere, shooting this way and that. “Buddhists,” Lewis said, “believe our true nature is really the great sky mind.”

  “Mmmm.” He could, it seemed, deliver a lecture on almost anything.

  “And this miserable, fragile biological existence is just a place to work out karma. Eventually, though, if you play your cards right, you can cycle out of existence.”

  “Who wants to do that?” said Libby.

  “It’s supposed to be okay. Like that period between falling asleep and dreaming. What the Tibetans call the Great Illumination.”

  “Why am I not convinced?”

  “It takes training. Once you’re trained, you’d be aware of that state, and then you’d know what’s so great about it. It sounds good to me—an end to endless mental sausage-making.”

  “I’d rather be reincarnated.”

  “So would Bodhisattvas. They won’t settle for enlightenment until they’ve helped everybody else get there too. Which is what this life is supposed to be about. Helping others.” Sighing, Lewis stretched his arms over his head. “Red Ray does a pretty good job of it.”

  “You think he’s a Bodhisattva?”

  “Almost. Maybe in his next life, since he’s spent so much of this one in service to others.”

  “But you’re that way too,” said Libby. “Your job is pure service. I mean, you can’t be doing it for the money.”

  “But Libby!” Lewis nosed into her neck. “I am doing it for the money!”

  “You’re so tender with the men.” She strummed his ribs.

  “Not really. They bug me.”

  “I’ve seen you,” she said. “They bug you but you still help them.”

  “Oh, Libby.” Lewis snaked his arms around her, tangled his legs with hers. “I like your version of me. Very generous. And totally full of shit.”