Bob, or Man on Boat

by Peter Markus

  I can’t imagine Bob doing anything besides fishing for his fish.

  The river, without Bob out on it, in Bob’s boat, fishing for fish, the river, it wouldn’t be the same river.

  It wouldn’t be the same river that it is when Bob is out on this river fishing for his fish.

  The river, without Bob on it, fishing in his boat, the river, it wouldn’t even be a river.

  Now that I am imagining this, the river, this is what I believe would happen to it.

  The river, if Bob was not out on it, it would turn, first to mud, then to dirt.

  And the fish in the river?

  The fish would turn to stone.

  But that’s not going to happen.

  Not to this river.

  Not to Bob.

  Not to the fish that Bob is fishing this river for.

  Bob, when one day Bob finds and fishes out of the river that one fish that will teach him and tell him what to do next, what this fish is going to tell Bob, at least the way that I imagine it happening, is this fish is going to tell Bob to keep on fishing for fish.

  And this fish, for saying this, for telling Bob to keep on fishing for fish, the river, it will kiss this fish.

  This river, it will throw this fish back.

  Back into the river.

  Go fish.

  Oh, if you teach a man to fish.

  The river becomes his home.

  The dead man isn’t alone.

  There are other men who’ve fallen into, there are others who have drowned in this river that is ours.

  There are other men, too, who’ve gone down to the river, who have walked out into the river, and these other men some of the time did not come walking back.

  Even Bob can’t walk on water.

  Even Bob needs a boat if he wants to cross over to the river’s other side.

  Except in the winter.

  In the winter, when the river freezes over, Bob can walk across to the river’s other side.

  There are people in town who like to sit out in the cold out on the iced over river and fish for fish through the winter’s ice.

  In the winter, when the river freezes over, Bob walks out onto the ice by his boat and Bob digs a hole.

  Bob digs a hole into the ice.

  Through the ice.

  Into this hole, Bob fishes.

  Up through this hole in the river, Bob fishes up these winter river fish.

  Bob fills up his buckets with these fish.

  When the fish are fished up out of the river, fished up onto the ice, the fish, with the river still wet on them, they too turn to ice.

  In the winter, Bob grows a beard that is white.

  Some days, when it’s really cold, it looks as though Bob’s beard has grown six inches in a single day.

  Days like these, there are icicles hanging from the hairs of Bob’s winter white beard.

  There are other times, though, in the winter, when the ice on the river isn’t thick enough to hold a man the size of Bob up.

  Sometimes people fishing through the ice fall through the ice.

  Into the river they go.

  It’s not the river that does these people in.

  It’s the cold of the river.

  The heart, in this kind of cold, it freezes up.

  Sometimes, the bodies of those who fall through the ice won’t be found until springtime.

  In spring the river goes back to being a river again that not even Bob can walk across.

  Which is why Bob lives on a boat.

  A man on a river needs a boat.

  A boat to cross the river in when a man is fishing for fish.

  Which is why I bought the dead man’s boat off of the dead man’s wife after his boat was found by those two boys down the way a bit on that other river down in Ohio.

  O-hi-o.

  Down to Ohio, Bob has never been.

  Why go to some other river, down in Ohio, when there is a river right here for Bob to fish?

  This is the river where, on the other side of this river, this is where Bob saw and heard the fish that is the fish of all fishes.

  There are other fish to fish for in this river.

  But in Bob’s boat, in Bob’s eyes, there is only one fish for Bob to fish.

  Sometimes, Bob calls out to this fish by name.

  Bob calls this fish Brother.

  Brother, Bob whispers, out to this fish.

  Brother, Bob sings to this fish.

  Bob was born brotherless.

  I was born to a father who did not know that he was the father of a son.

  Which is what brings both Bob and me out onto this river.

  Two fishermen.

  Two fathers.

  One fish.

  I never did tell you what name I named the dead man’s boat.

  I named it Bob.

  Hold on, Bob, I say.

  Bob, I say, don’t quit on me now.

  Okay, Bob, just a little bit longer.

  Good job, Bob, I say.

  It’s like I’m talking to my father.

  Good, Father, I say, every time we make it back from the river’s other side.

  Bob, the boat, it never says anything back.

  It just sits, it just floats, here on the river.

  Just like Bob.

  Bob is sitting on his boat.

  Bob’s baits are not in the river’s water.

  Bob is, at the moment, just sitting there staring out across the river at what I do not know.

  Maybe this is Bob thinking.

  What is Bob thinking about?

  Fish.

  His fish.

  What if Bob never finds the fish that he is fishing for?

  Is this what Bob is thinking?

  Or is Bob thinking this:

  That the fish that Bob is fishing for, it is somewhere in the river waiting for Bob to find it.

  Bob is an optimist.

  If you teach a man how to fish, Bob knows, that man will fish forever.

  He will never go hungry again.

  Such a man is Bob.

  Bob is only hungry for one fish.

  The fish that is the fish.

  There are fish in the river that are considered eaters.

  This fish is not that kind of a fish.

  And there are other fish in this river that are the kind of fish that you throw back when you fish them up and into your boat.

  Come back when you’re older is what we say to these kinds of fish.

  And then there are the fish like the fish that Bob is fishing for.

  This kind of fish, I’m not sure what you’re supposed to do with this kind of fish.

  To fish this kind of fish up and out of the river, I can only imagine that this might be like coming up to the man who is your father and hearing this father call you his son.

  What do you do at a moment like this?

  You hold onto it is what you do.

  You hold that man in your arms.

  You hold your hands onto that fish.

  But how long can you hold a fish out of water before this fish starts gasping for breath?

  You only get one fish like this.

  You only get one father who is your father.

  You only get one son if one son is all you’ve got.

  There comes a time when you’ve got to let go.

  There comes a time when you’ve got to look this fish straight in the eye and then that’s it.

  It’s over.

  And the river keeps flowing and flowing.

  And so Bob goes home.

  Bob goes home to his boat that floats on the flowing river.

  Bob goes home to the river.

  Where Bob fishes for fish.

  I go home too.

  To be with my son.

  I am a father.

  My son is a fish.

  I like to tell my son stories.

  My son likes to hear me tell him these stories.

  In each story, there is always some kind of a
fish.

  In each story, there is a man in the story who is fishing for this fish.

  This man, I always call him Bob.

  The story always ends the same way, with Bob living happily ever after.

  After Bob catches his fish.

  What my son always says to this is, What happens next?

  What does Bob do after he catches the fish?

  That’s the part of the story, I tell my son, that I don’t know what happens next.

  What do you think happens to Bob next?

  Sometimes I ask my son this.

  My son says that he thinks that Bob, after he catches the fish, Bob gets eaten by the fish.

  Bob gets eaten by the fish? I say.

  I say to my son, Is that a happy ending?

  My son reminds me that this is what fish do.

  Fish eat, he tells me.

  Fish eat other fish.

  So in my son’s version of this, Bob gets eaten by the fish that he’s been fishing for.

  That fish must be a pretty big fish, I say to my son.

  It is, he says.

  It’s this big, he says, and he stretches his arms out as far as he can get them to stretch.

  It’s as big as the river is, he says.

  He says that this fish, it’s as big as from where our house is and it goes up all the way to the moon.

  That sounds like it’s bigger than a whale is, is what I say to this.

  It is, he says.

  It’s a moon-fish.

  This fish, my son tells me, it swam all the way down from where the moon is.

  That’s some fish, I tell him.

  I say, That’s some story.

  It gets even better, my son says.

  Tell me, I say.

  What happens next?

  What happens next is this.

  This fish, this big moon-fish, it has swum down all the way from where the moon is to eat up all the fish.

  To eat up all the fishermen.

  It won’t stop, it won’t swim back to the moon, until there’s nothing left for this fish to eat.

  So maybe I should stay away from the river, I say, if this fish is going to eat up all of the fish.

  It won’t be safe to be fishing the river if this fish is going to eat all of us fishing men up.

  And what my son then says to this is that he thinks that might not be such a bad idea.

  Three days later, I go out on the river.

  Out on the river that night, I see Bob’s boat tied up to its dock, but I don’t see Bob sitting up in Bob’s boat.

  I do not, at first, think that something’s gone wrong.

  I think to myself that maybe Bob has gone into town to pick up some gas to gas up his boat.

  But the river, without Bob sitting on it, there’s something big missing from this picture.

  That night, I fish more fish out of the river than I have ever fished out of it before.

  And I know why.

  I know that the fish that I am fishing out of the river are the fish that would be Bob’s.

  But because Bob is not fishing the river, I catch more fish that night—there are so many fish piled up on the bottom of my boat—that it’s hard for me to keep count.

  That night, I’m up half the night cleaning fish.

  The guts, that night, I don’t bury the guts the way I usually do out back in our backyard garden.

  I put the guts into two buckets.

  In the morning, I go with these two buckets of guts, down to the river, and I throw the guts in.

  I think about Bob and how Bob believes that the guts of the fish, when Bob gives them back to the river, the guts turn back into fish.

  I think about my son’s story about the moon-fish that is eating up all of the river’s fish.

  I think about the river and what would happen, one day, if the river ran out of fish.

  I think about Bob again and what would Bob do if the river one day ran out of fish before Bob fished from the river that one fish that he has for so long been fishing for.

  I think about Bob’s boat and the way that it looked last night without Bob in it.

  It looked just like the dead man’s boat must have looked when those two boys in Ohio first saw it sitting there in the mud on their river’s muddy banks.

  So I get in my boat.

  I go in my boat down the river to where Bob’s boat is.

  Bob’s boat is sitting there, rocking in the wake made by my boat as I motor up to it, to see if there is any sign of Bob.

  There is no Bob sitting there in Bob’s boat.

  Bob’s boat is just a boat.

  What I think now, what I know now, is that there is more than just something big missing from this picture.

  There is something wrong with this picture.

  The river, it is missing Bob.

  The river’s not the same without Bob out on it.

  There’s something wrong with this river without Bob fishing for the fish that live down in it.

  So I go back upriver, I go into town, and I start asking whoever I see if any of them have seen Bob.

  Nope.

  Not since last week.

  It’s been a while.

  I bought some fish from him last Friday but I haven’t seen him since.

  This is what the townspeople who know Bob have to tell me about not seeing Bob.

  When I go back out onto the river, to ask some of the fishermen and fisherwomen if any of them have seen Bob, they all say the same thing: nope, not since last week, it’s been a while since Bob’s been out on the river.

  But let me tell you this, they also tell me.

  The fishing around here, it’s never been better.

  I got more fish than I can eat, they say.

  I hate to say it, one fisherman says this to me, but this river is a better place without Bob on it.

  I give this fishing man a look.

  I want to take one of my fishing hooks and hook it through his lip.

  I want to take an anchor to this man’s head.

  I make a fist.

  Fish on, this man hollers.

  I watch this man set his hooks into the lip of a fish.

  This fish, I think, it could be the fish.

  It could be Bob’s fish.

  I pull away before I get a look at the fish that is about to be fished up into this boat that is not Bob’s.

  That night, I can’t sleep.

  All night long, I keep picturing Bob, walking along the bottom of the river, looking for this fish.

  It’s true that the big fish who live in the river like to be big fish in the river alone.

  It is also true that the littler fish who live in the river like to swim together in the river along with other little fish.

  This is true, too, about the people who fish for these fish.

  There are people who fish the river who like to fish close to where there are other boats fishing for fish.

  It’s believed that where there are fishing boats fishing for fish that beneath those boats there must be fish to be fished out of the river and fished up into these boats.

  Sometimes, this is true.

  But Bob, you will never see Bob’s boat anywhere near any of these bunched-up boats.

  Bob is like a big fish out on the river fishing for the fish that, like Bob, this fish likes to be a fish alone.

  Bob fishes the parts of the river that other fishermen and other fisherwomen believe are dead.

  Bob knows that no part of the river is dead.

  In Bob’s eyes, the river, every last piece of the river, it is alive.

  It is alive with fish.

  It is alive because of fish.

  Even the dead man knew this to be true.

  Like Bob, the dead man liked to fish alone.

  Like Bob, the dead man liked to fish at night.

  When the dead man fell out of his boat and into the river, if he’d been fishing close to some of the other boats fishing out on the river
that day, the dead man would have probably lived—the dead man would have been saved by some other fisherperson who was close enough to throw the dead man a rope to grab hold of, who was close enough to fish the dead man up and out of the river and then up into his boat.

  The only other fisherman out on the river that day who was close enough to notice that the dead man had fallen into the river was a fisherman by the name of Bob.

  But Bob was too busy fishing to notice that the dead man had fallen into the river.

  Bob had his eyes looking down into the river, at the fish that he was hoping would be his fish.

  It’s true that Bob did see the dead man’s boat not so far away from his own.

  The police and the Coast Guard spoke to Bob and asked Bob if he heard or saw the dead man out on the river fishing.

  Bob said yes, he did see the dead man’s boat fishing out on the river.

  Did Bob notice anything strange, they wanted to know from Bob, about the dead man’s boat.

  What Bob said he noticed about the dead man’s boat was that it was drifting out towards the lake.

  Did Bob think this was strange to see the dead man’s boat going out into the lake?

  There are fish in that lake, was what Bob said to this.

  When Bob said this, Bob turned and faced the lake.

  Bob fishes the lake when Bob isn’t fishing the river.

  There are people in town who believe that the big fish live out in the lake.

  But there are little fish, too, who live out in the lake.

  The fish in the lake sometimes come up into the river.

  The fish in the river sometimes swim out to the lake.

  Bob doesn’t care if he is fishing the river or the lake.

  Bob knows that the fish that he is fishing for doesn’t care if it is in the river or in the lake.

  To a fish, water is water.

  To Bob, water is water.

  The river flows out to the lake.

  The river turns into the lake.

  All that matters, to Bob, is the fish.

  Is the fishing.

  Is the fishing for his fish.

  Bob is the fish that I am fishing for.

  Is there a bigger fish for a man to fish for than the fish that is his father?

  I can think of only one fish that is bigger than the fish that is the father.