by Peter Markus
BOB, or MAN on BOAT
a novel
Peter Markus
1334 Woodbourne Street
Westland, MI 48186
www.dzancbooks.org
Copyright © 2011, Text by Peter Markus
All rights reserved, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher.
Published 2011 by Dzanc Books
A Dzanc Books rEprint Series Selection
eBooksISBN-13: 978-1-936873-84-5
Printed in the United States of America
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
for my father
who first showed me the river
and my mother
who told me stories about the stars
In a boat, on a river, lived a man.
Bob.
Bob fished.
It’s what Bob did.
All of the time.
Fish. And fish.
Sometimes, Bob ate the fish. But most of the time, what Bob did with the fish was, Bob sold the fish.
It’s how Bob lived.
A boat. A river.
Fish.
A man.
Bob.
Look at Bob’s hands. His knuckles are rivers. The skin on Bob’s hands, fish-scale covered, they look like they’ve been dipped in stars.
When Bob fishes, he fishes with his hands.
Bob is a hand-liner.
A hand-liner is a fishing man who fishes with his fishing line running through his hands.
Bob does not fish with a fishing pole to help him fish his fish in with.
At night is when Bob likes to fish best. The river at night is the river that Bob likes most.
The river at night is his.
Bob’s.
By day, Bob sleeps.
The river, when the sun is on the river, is the river that Bob does not like to fish.
When the sun is on the river, the river gets too muddy with boats that do not belong to Bob.
Bob is a man who lives on his boat.
Bob does not like to step foot off of his boat.
Bob is his boat.
Bob’s boat is his home.
Bob’s boat, like most boats, it has a name.
Bob.
Its name is.
The word Bob is nowhere to be found painted onto the back of Bob’s boat.
But when you see Bob’s boat, out on the river, what you would say is, even if you do not see Bob there on it, you would say, Look, there’s Bob.
Bob’s boat is a boat made out of metal.
Bob’s boat is older than Bob.
Bob’s boat used to belong to Bob’s father.
Bob’s father is the man who taught Bob how to fish.
Bob’s father was a man who liked to fish too.
But not as much as Bob.
Bob’s father, when he wasn’t fishing, he was working at the mill.
Bob’s father was what we call, in our town, a hot metal man.
In our town there is a mill that used to make steel out of a stone we call ore.
But the mill, our mill, it is no longer a mill that makes steel.
The mill, it has been dark and quiet and with no fire burning inside it since Bob was a young man about ready to make steel alongside his father.
The mill, it’s still there, where it has always been, on the bank of the river, shipwrecked and rusting in the riverbank’s mud.
The river, like the mud, it will always be.
And Bob will be there on it. As long as there is a river there. As long as there are fish in the river for Bob to fish.
Fish, Bob will fish.
Bob will live.
There he is now.
Say hello to Bob.
Raise up your right hand.
Bob won’t wave back.
Bob can’t hear you.
No, it’s not that Bob is deaf.
It’s just that Bob chooses not to hear.
There are people in this town who say about Bob that Bob only talks to fish. That Bob only listens to fish.
I am not one of those people.
Bob does not talk to fish.
That is, Bob does not just talk to fish.
Bob sings to fish.
Listen.
There is, I know, a difference.
I know about this difference because I am Bob’s son.
I am a Bob too.
Bob does not know that I am his.
I am his even though Bob does not know this.
I too am a Bob who likes to fish.
By telling you about Bob, I am more of a father to Bob than Bob is a father to me.
But unlike Bob, I do not live to fish.
There is, in this, a difference.
I have a life outside the river.
I have a wife that I love. I have a little boy whose name is not Bob.
My boy’s name, it is Robert.
We call him Bobby.
But Bobby’s friends, they all call him Bob.
Bobby does not know that Bob is my father.
Bobby does not know that Bob is his grandfather.
But Bobby knows who the Bob out on the river is.
Everyone in this town knows who that Bob is.
Bob is what we call, in this dirty river town, a river rat.
A river man.
Bob is the river.
Bob is this river town’s river man.
Bob knows this river better than you and I know that we have ten fingers on our hands.
Bob knows where the fish are in this river.
Bob knows what the bottom of the river is like and where it is that the fish like to be fish.
This river, it is a muddy river.
This river is not the kind of a river that you can see down to the bottom of it even when you are standing in it only up to your knees.
There are people in town who believe that Bob can see all the way down to the river’s bottom.
I am one of those people.
I have seen Bob lean over the side of his boat and I have seen him seeing, I have seen him looking, all the way down to the river’s muddy bottom.
Everybody knows that the bottom of the river is where the big fish like to be fish.
Even those in our town who do not fish know enough about fish to know this about fish.
Even when Bob is not fishing, Bob is thinking about fishing.
If Bob is not on his boat fishing, Bob is on his boat getting himself ready to fish.
There are things to tend to, there are things to fix, on a boat like Bob’s.
Boats like Bob’s sometimes leak.
A boat that leaks can sometimes become a boat that sinks.
There is a story about Bob that, one night in April, the wind turned on Bob and came all of a sudden blowing from out of the south and the river, it turned all of a sudden into more like a big lake with seas as big as Bob is tall and that night, Bob’s boat, it turned over, but unlike other boats that turn over, Bob’s boat, it did not into the river sink.
There is no one I know who was on the river that night to say if this story is made up.
It was not the kind of a night that people other than Bob were out on the river fishing.
The river that night was all Bob’s.
The next morning, Bob was seen bailing bucket after bucket of muddy river water out of his boat.
Need a hand, Bob? a few river people called out.
Bob did not look up from his boat.
Bob did not stop bailing the muddy river water out of his boat.
; That night, Bob was back, in his boat, out on the river fishing.
The river, that night, was back to being a river and not like being a lake.
When Bob came back in, the next morning, Bob’s boat, it was filled up, not with muddy river water, it was filled up with muddy river fish.
You won’t ever hear Bob call out, the way some fisher people call out, Fish on!
When Bob fishes, if his lips are moving at all, Bob is whispering to the fish.
What does a man whisper when he whispers to fish?
What does a man like Bob whisper when he is whispering to fish?
What does Bob whisper when he moves his lips to whisper to the river’s fish?
Only Bob, and only the fish, know the answer to this.
Some people who fish kiss the fish that they fish out of the river.
Some people who fish say to the fish that they fish, Come to Papa.
Bob is not one of these people.
Bob is Bob.
Bob takes the fish that he fishes out of the river and he fishes them into his boat.
Bob takes the fish that he fishes out of the river and Bob sells the fish, but not so that he can eat.
Bob takes the fish that he fishes out of the river and Bob sells the fish that he fishes out of the river so that Bob can keep on fishing.
So that Bob can continue to live.
Fish on.
Sometimes, at night, when the fish are slow to bite, Bob looks up from the river and looks up into the sky for stars.
Some nights, Bob sees how many stars in the sky he can count.
One night, Bob counted up to two hundred and twenty-two.
That was a bad night for fishing.
That was a good night for counting stars.
Most nights, the fish start biting before Bob can count up to ten.
On a good night of fishing, on a bad night for counting stars, Bob can fill up his boat with more fish than there are stars up in the sky.
Nights like this, Bob’s boat is no longer just a boat.
It is a constellation of fish.
Out on the river, out where the river runs out and turns into lake, there is a lighthouse out there to light the way for boats to see by.
There is a man out there who works this lighthouse light.
Actually there are three men out there who work this lighthouse light together.
None of their names are Bob.
None of these men live in the lighthouse there at the edge of the river where the river runs out and turns into the lake.
The lake is big, it is bigger than the river is, and there are ships out there that come from places faraway.
Germany.
China.
Russia.
Duluth.
I don’t know how these boats get from over there to over here.
It is a long way.
I would have to look at a map to find this out.
I don’t have a map right now for me to look at.
Oceans are crossed.
Canals.
Locks.
Lakes.
Rivers.
Some of these ships, freighters, they come into the river, in from the lake, loaded down with ore.
Others come carrying coils of steel.
There are men who live on these ships.
There are men who work on these ships.
Just like Bob.
When Bob sees these ships coming in from the lake, cutting upriver through the dredged up channels, he knows enough to steer clear of these ships and these ships’ big wakes.
Boats like Bob’s have been known to turn over in the wakes made by these big ships.
This is not to say that Bob does not fish in the channels made for big ships like these.
These channels are sometimes where the big fish are waiting, and where the fishing is sometimes best.
On nights like these, when the fish are in the channels, Bob goes out there to fish.
There is a light shining out on the front of Bob’s boat.
It is green and red.
There is another light on the back of Bob’s boat too.
This other light is white.
These lights are not lights so that Bob can see where the river is.
Bob knows where the river is.
Bob can see this without these lights for him to see the river by.
These lights are so that Bob can be seen by ships like the big ships who come in from the lake.
The lighthouse men all know Bob’s boat when they look out to see what there is out there at night on the river for them to see.
Sometimes Bob can be seen going out to the lake to fish when he knows the fish are out there waiting.
But even though Bob will go and fish the lake, it’s the river that Bob knows best.
Bob is not a lake man.
Bob is a river man.
But even so, Bob knows the lake better than most.
Bob knows enough about fish to know that when the fish aren’t in the river, the fish are out in the lake.
And so, some nights, Bob in his boat will go, out into the lake.
Nights like those, the man in the lighthouse will light up his light and say to himself, because there’s nobody else there for him to tell this to, Look, there goes Bob.
Bob has been known to sometimes go out into the lake and not come back for days.
Days later, Bob will return to the river with his boat riding low in the river, his boat is so full of fish.
There are limits to how many fish a fisherman can fish out of the river and out of the lake.
There are people on the river whose job it is to count how many fish in a day one fishing man might catch.
Sometimes, on good days, for you to count how many fish there are in the bottom of Bob’s boat would be like asking you to count how many stars there are at night in the nighttime’s sky.
These people, because they know who and what Bob is, because they know that Bob lives on and lives off the river, they look the other way, to the other side of the river, to the other side of the sky, whenever they see Bob’s boat out on the river.
Like the lighthouse men, these men with badges shining on their chest, they say to themselves, There goes Bob.
There goes Bob to fish the fish, they say.
There goes Bob to talk to the fish.
There goes Bob, they say, to whisper whatever he whispers to the fish that he fishes out of the river.
There goes Bob, I say this too. But not just to fish, not just to talk, not just to whisper.
There goes Bob to sing to the fish, to sing them up from the darkness of the river’s bottom.
Once, on a visit to a big city, I saw a man on the street who was talking to himself.
I saw another man, too, there in that same city, who was walking down the same street singing.
I was told, by someone who lived at the time in that same city, that both of these men were nuts.
There are people in our town who believe that Bob, too, is a little bit nuts.
What I say to this is, Who among us in this town of ours is not?
Most of the people who I say this to, when I say this to them, they nod their heads to this yes.
Bob is not any nuttier than anybody else is.
It’s as simple as this: Bob knows what he likes. And Bob does it, what it is that Bob likes best.
Bob follows his heart.
Bob’s heart is a fish.
Sometimes, Bob comes walking into town, lugging with him, hanging from his hands, two buckets filled with fish.
Fish, Bob’s lips whisper.
Fish.
It’s all Bob has to say.
It’s as simple as this.
Fish.
Bob does not have to say it any louder than this.
Fish.
The people in our town who know who Bob is come running up to Bob to buy Bob’s fish.
In our town, Bob is known for catching fish when no other b
oats are catching fish.
A dollar a fish.
Two dollars a fish.
Fifty cents a fish.
When you buy one of Bob’s fish, you pay Bob whatever it is you think the fish is worth.
It doesn’t take long for Bob to run out of fish.
When Bob’s buckets are dangling empty from his fists, Bob turns and walks away, back to the river.
Back to Bob’s boat.
Sometimes, when Bob is hungry, Bob will wish that he had a fish left in his bucket for him to fry up for himself to eat.
Back in his boat, his belly as empty as his buckets, Bob will head back out onto the river.
To fish for himself more fish.
When I was a boy, I sometimes used to wonder, How can a thing that is made out of metal not sink? It seemed strange to me then that a metal boat would be able to float.
Most things made of metal do not float.
Most things made of metal sink.
Down to the river’s bottom.
Think refrigerators.
Think automobiles.
Think nuts and bolts and screws.
I also used to wonder, back when I was a boy, how it was that Jesus could walk on water.
Every time I tried to walk across the river the river rose up and swallowed me up.
It’s true that Bob’s father’s father was not a fishing man.
He was not a river man.
He was not a hot metal man.
What he was, Bob’s father’s father, he was a preaching man.
This is my great-grandfather—this man that I am right now talking about to you.
A preacher.
That’s what this man was.
This was the man who one day took Bob down to the river and told him the story about Jesus and the fish.
You know the one that says, If you give a man a fish, that man will eat for a day.
But if you teach a man to fish.
I picture this preaching man pointing his finger out towards the river.
That man will never go hungry again.
Bob’s grandfather, the preacherman, took Bob down to the river and he told Bob about this.
Some years later I learned that these words, they aren’t from the Bible as I had for a long time believed them to be.
It isn’t Jesus who is the one doing the talking.
These words, they’re from the Chinese, I think.
Or so I’ve been told.
Maybe it was a Chinese fisherman, or so I’d like to think.