下载掌阅APP，畅读海量书库
立即打开
I could hear them out in the kitchen. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but they were arguing. Then it got quiet and she started to cry. I elbowed George. I thought he would wake up and say something to them so they would feel guilty and stop. But George is such an asshole. He started kicking and hollering.
“Stop gouging me, you bastard,” he said. “I’m going to tell!”
“You dumb chickenshit,” I said. “Can’t you wise up for once? They’re fighting and Mom’s crying. Listen.”
He listened with his head off the pillow. “I don’t care,” he said and turned over toward the wall and went back to sleep. George is a royal asshole.
Later I heard Dad leave to catch his bus. He slammed the front door. She had told me before he wanted to tear up the family. I didn’t want to listen.
After a while she came to call us for school. Her voice sounded funny—I don’t know. I said I felt sick at my stomach. It was the first week in October and I hadn’t missed any school yet, so what could she say? She looked at me, but it was like she was thinking of something else. George was awake and listening. I could tell he was awake by the way he moved in the bed. He was waiting to see how it turned out so he could make his move.
“All right.” She shook her head. “I just don’t know. Stay home, then. But no TV, remember that.”
George reared up. “I’m sick too,” he said to her. “I have a headache. He gouged me and kicked me all night. I didn’t get to sleep at all.”
“That’s enough!” she said. “You are going to school, George! You’re not going to stay here and fight with your brother all day. Now get up and get dressed. I mean it. I don’t feel like another battle this morning.”
George waited until she left the room. Then he climbed out over the foot of the bed. “You bastard,” he said and yanked all the covers off me. He dodged into the bathroom.
“I’ll kill you,” I said but not so loud that she could hear.
I stayed in bed until George left for school. When she started to get ready for work, I asked if she would make a bed for me on the couch. I said I wanted to study. On the coffee table I had the Edgar Rice Burroughs books I had gotten for my birthday and my Social Studies book. But I didn’t feel like reading. I wanted her to leave so I could watch TV.
She flushed the toilet.
I couldn’t wait any longer. I turned the picture on without the volume. I went out to the kitchen where she had left her pack of weeds and shook out three. I put them in the cupboard and went back to the couch and started reading The Princess of Mars . She came out and glanced at the TV but didn’t say anything. I had the book open. She poked at her hair in front of the mirror and then went into the kitchen. I looked back at the book when she came out.
“I’m late. Good-bye, sweetheart.” She wasn’t going to bring up the TV. Last night she’d said she wouldn’t know what it meant any more to go to work without being “stirred up.”
“Don’t cook anything. You don’t need to turn the burners on for a thing. There’s tuna fish in the icebox if you feel hungry.” She looked at me. “But if your stomach is sick, I don’t think you should put anything on it. Anyway, you don’t need to turn the burners on. Do you hear? You take that medicine, sweetheart, and I hope your stomach feels better by tonight. Maybe we’ll all feel better by tonight.”
She stood in the doorway and turned the knob. She looked as if she wanted to say something else. She wore the white blouse, the wide black belt, and the black skirt. Sometimes she called it her outfit, sometimes her uniform. For as long as I could remember, it was always hanging in the closet or hanging on the clothesline or getting washed out by hand at night or being ironed in the kitchen.
She worked Wednesdays through Sundays.
“Bye, Mom.”
I waited until she had started the car and had it warm. I listened as she pulled away from the curb. Then I got up and turned the sound on loud and went for the weeds. I smoked one and beat off while I watched a show about doctors and nurses. Then I turned to the other channel. Then I turned off the TV. I didn’t feel like watching.
I finished the chapter where Tars Tarkas falls for a green woman, only to see her get her head chopped off the next morning by this jealous brother-in-law. It was about the fifth time I had read it. Then I went to their bedroom and looked around. I wasn’t after anything in particular unless it was rubbers again and though I had looked all over I had never found any. Once I found a jar of Vaseline at the back of a drawer. I knew it must have something to do with it, but I didn’t know what. I studied the label and hoped it would reveal something, a description of what people did, or else about how you applied the Vaseline, that sort of thing. But it didn’t. Pure Petroleum Jelly , that was all it said on the front label. But just reading that was enough to give you a boner. An Excellent Aid in the Nursery , it said on the back. I tried to make the connection between Nursery —the swings and slides, the sandboxes, monkeybars—and what went on in bed between them. I had opened the jar lots of times and smelled inside and looked to see how much had been used since last time. This time I passed up the Pure Petroleum Jelly . I mean, all I did was look to see the jar was still there. I went through a few drawers, not really expecting to find anything. I looked under the bed. Nothing anywhere. I looked in the jar in the closet where they kept the grocery money. There was no change, only a five and a one. They would miss that. Then I thought I would get dressed and walk to Birch Creek. Trout season was open for another week or so, but almost everybody had quit fishing. Everybody was just sitting around now waiting for deer and pheasant to open.
I got out my old clothes. I put wool socks over my regular socks and took my time lacing up the boots. I made a couple of tuna sandwiches and some double-decker peanut-butter crackers. I filled my canteen and attached the hunting knife and the canteen to my belt. As I was going out the door, I decided to leave a note. So I wrote: “Feeling better and going to Birch Creek. Back soon. R. 3:15.” That was about four hours from now. And about fifteen minutes before George would come in from school. Before I left, I ate one of the sandwiches and had a glass of milk with it.
It was nice out. It was fall. But it wasn’t cold yet except at night. At night they would light the smudgepots in the orchards and you would wake up in the morning with a black ring of stuff in your nose. But nobody said anything. They said the smudging kept the young pears from freezing, so it was all right.
To get to Birch Creek, you go to the end of our street where you hit Sixteenth Avenue. You turn left on Sixteenth and go up the hill past the cemetery and down to Lennox, where there is a Chinese restaurant. From the crossroads there, you can see the airport, and Birch Creek is below the airport. Sixteenth changes to View Road at the crossroads. You follow View for a little way until you come to the bridge. There are orchards on both sides of the road. Sometimes when you go by the orchards you see pheasants running down the rows, but you can’t hunt there because you might get shot by a Greek named Matsos. I guess it is about a forty-minute walk all in all.
I was halfway down Sixteenth when a woman in a red car pulled onto the shoulder ahead of me. She rolled down the window on the passenger’s side and asked if I wanted a lift. She was thin and had little pimples around her mouth. Her hair was up in curlers. But she was sharp enough. She had a brown sweater with nice boobs inside.
“Playing hooky?”
“Guess so.”
“Want a ride?”
I nodded.
“Get in. I’m kind of in a hurry.”
I put the fly rod and the creel on the back seat. There were a lot of grocery sacks from Mel’s on the floorboards and back seat. I tried to think of something to say.
“I’m going fishing,” I said. I took off my cap, hitched the canteen around so I could sit, and parked myself next to the window.
“Well, I never would have guessed.” She laughed. She pulled back onto the road. “Where are you going? Birch Creek?”
I nodded again. I looked at my cap. My uncle had bought it for me in Seattle when he had gone to watch a hockey game. I couldn’t think of anything more to say. I looked out the window and sucked my cheeks. You always see yourself getting picked up by this woman. You know you’ll fall for each other and that she’ll take you home with her and let you screw her all over the house. I began to get a boner thinking about it. I moved the cap over my lap and closed my eyes and tried to think about baseball.
“I keep saying that one of these days I’ll take up fishing,” she said. “They say it’s very relaxing. I’m a nervous person.”
I opened my eyes. We were stopped at the crossroads. I wanted to say, Are you real busy? Would you like to start this morning? But I was afraid to look at her.
“Will this help you? I have to turn here. I’m sorry I’m in a hurry this morning,” she said.
“That’s okay. This is fine.” I took my stuff out. Then I put my cap on and took it off again while I talked. “Good-bye. Thanks. Maybe next summer,” but I couldn’t finish.
“You mean fishing? Sure thing.” She waved with a couple of fingers the way women do.
I started walking, going over what I should have said. I could think of a lot of things. What was wrong with me? I cut the air with the fly rod and hollered two or three times. What I should have done to start things off was ask if we could have lunch together. No one was home at my house. Suddenly we are in my bedroom under the covers. She asks me if she can keep her sweater on and I say it’s okay with me. She keeps her pants on too. That’s all right, I say. I don’t mind.
A Piper Cub dipped low over my head as it came in for a landing. I was a few feet from the bridge. I could hear the water running. I hurried down the embankment, unzipped, and shot off five feet over the creek. It must have been a record. I took a while eating the other sandwich and the peanut-butter crackers. I drank up half the water in the canteen. Then I was ready to fish.
I tried to think where to start. I had fished here for three years, ever since we had moved. Dad used to bring George and me in the car and wait for us, smoking, baiting our hooks, tying up new rigs for us if we snagged. We always started at the bridge and moved down, and we always caught a few. Once in a while, at the first of the season, we caught the limit. I rigged up and tried a few casts under the bridge first.
Now and then I cast under a bank or else in behind a big rock. But nothing happened. One place where the water was still and the bottom full of yellow leaves, I looked over and saw a few crawdads crawling there with their big ugly pinchers raised. Some quail flushed out of a brush pile. When I threw a stick, a rooster pheasant jumped up cackling about ten feet away and I almost dropped the rod.
The creek was slow and not very wide. I could walk across almost anywhere without it going over my boots. I crossed a pasture full of cow pads and came to where the water flowed out of a big pipe. I knew there was a little hole below the pipe, so I was careful. I got down on my knees when I was close enough to drop the line. It had just touched the water when I got a strike, but I missed him. I felt him roll with it. Then he was gone and the line flew back. I put another salmon egg on and tried a few more casts. But I knew I had jinxed it.
I went up the embankment and climbed under a fence that had a KEEP OUT sign on the post. One of the airport runways started here. I stopped to look at some flowers growing in the cracks in the pavement. You could see where the tires had smacked down on the pavement and left oily skid marks all around the flowers. I hit the creek again on the other side and fished along for a little way until I came to the hole. I thought this was as far as I would go. When I had first been up here three years ago, the water was roaring right up to the top of the banks. It was so swift then that I couldn’t fish. Now the creek was about six feet below the bank. It bubbled and hopped through this little run at the head of the pool where you could hardly see bottom. A little farther down, the bottom sloped up and got shallow again as if nothing had happened. The last time I was up here I caught two fish about ten inches long and turned one that looked twice as big—a summer steelhead, Dad said when I told him about it. He said they come up during the high water in early spring but that most of them return to the river before the water gets low.
I put two more shot on the line and closed them with my teeth. Then I put a fresh salmon egg on and cast out where the water dropped over a shelf into the pool. I let the current take it down. I could feel the sinkers tap-tapping on rocks, a different kind of tapping than when you are getting a bite. Then the line tightened and the current carried the egg into sight at the end of the pool.
I felt lousy to have come this far up for nothing. I pulled out all kinds of line this time and made another cast. I laid the fly rod over a limb and lit the next to last weed. I looked up the valley and began to think about the woman. We were going to her house because she wanted help carrying in the groceries. Her husband was overseas. I touched her and she started shaking. We were French-kissing on the couch when she excused herself to go to the bathroom. I followed her. I watched as she pulled down her pants and sat on the toilet. I had a big boner and she waved me over with her hand. Just as I was going to unzip, I heard a plop in the creek. I looked and saw the tip of my fly rod jiggling.
He wasn’t very big and didn’t fight much. But I played him as long as I could. He turned on his side and lay in the current down below. I didn’t know what he was. He looked strange. I tightened the line and lifted him over the bank into the grass, where he started wiggling. He was a trout. But he was green. I never saw one like him before. He had green sides with black trout spots, a greenish head, and like a green stomach. He was the color of moss, that color green. It was as if he had been wrapped up in moss a long time, and the color had come off all over him. He was fat, and I wondered why he hadn’t put up more of a fight. I wondered if he was all right. I looked at him for a time longer, then I put him out of his pain.
I pulled some grass and put it in the creel and laid him in there on the grass.
I made some more casts, and then I guessed it must be two or three o’clock. I thought I had better move down to the bridge. I thought I would fish below the bridge awhile before I started home. And I decided I would wait until night before I thought about the woman again. But right away I got a boner thinking about the boner I would get that night. Then I thought I had better stop doing it so much. About a month back, a Saturday when they were all gone, I had picked up the Bible right after and promised and swore I wouldn’t do it again. But I got jism on the Bible, and the promising and swearing lasted only a day or two, until I was by myself again.
I didn’t fish on the way down. When I got to the bridge, I saw a bicycle in the grass. I looked and saw a kid about George’s size running down the bank. I started in his direction. Then he turned and started toward me, looking in the water.
“Hey, what is it!” I hollered. “What’s wrong?” I guessed he didn’t hear me. I saw his pole and fishing bag on the bank, and I dropped my stuff. I ran over to where he was. He looked like a rat or something. I mean, he had buckteeth and skinny arms and this ragged long-sleeved shirt that was too small for him.
“God, I swear there’s the biggest fish here I ever saw!” he called. “Hurry! Look! Look here! Here he is!”
I looked where he pointed and my heart jumped.
It was as long as my arm.
“God, oh God, will you look at him!” the boy said.
I kept looking. It was resting in a shadow under a limb that hung over the water. “God almighty,” I said to the fish, “where did you come from?”
“What’ll we do?” the boy said. “I wish I had my gun.”
“We’re going to get him,” I said. “God, look at him! Let’s get him into the riffle.”
“You want to help me, then? We’ll work it together!” the kid said.
The big fish had drifted a few feet downstream and lay there finning slowly in the clear water.
“Okay, what do we do?” the kid said.
“I can go up and walk down the creek and start him moving,” I said. “You stand in the riffle, and when he tries to come through, you kick the living shit out of him. Get him onto the bank someway, I don’t care how. Then get a good hold of him and hang on.”
“Okay. Oh shit, look at him! Look, he’s going! Where’s he going?” the boy screamed.
I watched the fish move up the creek again and stop close to the bank. “He’s not going anyplace. There’s no place for him to go. See him? He’s scared shitless. He knows we’re here. He’s just cruising around now looking for someplace to go. See, he stopped again. He can’t go anyplace. He knows that. He knows we’re going to nail him. He knows it’s tough shit. I’ll go up and scare him down. You get him when he comes through.”
“I wish I had my gun,” the boy said. “That would take care of him,” the boy said.
I went up a little way, then started wading down the creek. I watched ahead of me as I went. Suddenly the fish darted away from the bank, turned right in front of me in a big cloudy swirl, and barrel-assed downstream.
“Here he comes!” I hollered. “Hey, hey, here he comes!” But the fish spun around before it reached the riffle and headed back. I splashed and hollered, and it turned again. “He’s coming! Get him, get him! Here he comes!”
But the dumb idiot had himself a club, the asshole, and when the fish hit the riffle, the boy drove at him with the club instead of trying to kick the son of a bitch out like he should have. The fish veered off, going crazy, shooting on his side through the shallow water. He made it. The asshole idiot kid lunged for him and fell flat.
He dragged up onto the bank sopping wet. “I hit him!” the boy hollered. “I think he’s hurt, too. I had my hands on him, but I couldn’t hold him.”
“You didn’t have anything!” I was out of breath. I was glad the kid fell in. “You didn’t even come close, asshole. What were you doing with that club? You should have kicked him. He’s probably a mile away by now.” I tried to spit. I shook my head. “I don’t know. We haven’t got him yet. We just may not get him,” I said.
“Goddamn it, I hit him!” the boy screamed. “Didn’t you see? I hit him, and I had my hands on him too. How close did you get? Besides, whose fish is it?” He looked at me. Water ran down his trousers over his shoes.
I didn’t say anything else, but I wondered about that myself. I shrugged. “Well, okay. I thought it was both ours. Let’s get him this time. No goof-ups, either one of us,” I said.
We waded downstream. I had water in my boots, but the kid was wet up to his collar. He closed his buckteeth over his lip to keep his teeth from chattering.
The fish wasn’t in the run below the riffle, and we couldn’t see him in the next stretch, either. We looked at each other and began to worry that the fish really had gone far enough downstream to reach one of the deep holes. But then the goddamn thing rolled near the bank, actually knocking dirt into the water with his tail, and took off again. He went through another riffle, his big tail sticking out of the water. I saw him cruise over near the bank and stop, his tail half out of the water, finning just enough to hold against the current.
“Do you see him?” I said. The boy looked. I took his arm and pointed his finger. “Right there . Okay now, listen. I’ll go down to that little run between those banks. See where I mean? You wait here until I give you a signal. Then you start down. Okay? And this time don’t let him get by you if he heads back.”
“Yeah,” the boy said and worked his lip with those teeth. “Let’s get him this time,” the boy said, a terrible look of cold in his face.
I got up on the bank and walked down, making sure I moved quiet. I slid off the bank and waded in again. But I couldn’t see the great big son of a bitch and my heart turned. I thought it might have taken off already. A little farther downstream and it would get to one of the holes. We would never get him then.
“He still there?” I hollered. I held my breath.
The kid waved.
“Ready!” I hollered again.
“Here goes!” the kid hollered back.
My hands shook. The creek was about three feet wide and ran between dirt banks. The water was low but fast. The kid was moving down the creek now, water up to his knees, throwing rocks ahead of him, splashing and shouting.
“Here he comes!” The kid waved his arms. I saw the fish now; it was coming right at me. He tried to turn when he saw me, but it was too late. I went down on my knees, grasping in the cold water. I scooped him with my hands and arms, up, up, raising him, throwing him out of the water, both of us falling onto the bank. I held him against my shirt, him flopping and twisting, until I could get my hands up his slippery sides to his gills. I ran one hand in and clawed through to his mouth and locked around his jaw. I knew I had him. He was still flopping and hard to hold, but I had him and I wasn’t going to let go.
“We got him!” the boy hollered as he splashed up. “We got him, by God! Ain’t he something! Look at him! Oh God, let me hold him,” the boy hollered.
“We got to kill him first,” I said. I ran my other hand down the throat. I pulled back on the head as hard as I could, trying to watch out for the teeth, and felt the heavy crunching. He gave a long slow tremble and was still. I laid him on the bank and we looked at him. He was at least two feet long, queerly skinny, but bigger than anything I had ever caught. I took hold of his jaw again.
“Hey,” the kid said but didn’t say any more when he saw what I was going to do. I washed off the blood and laid the fish back on the bank.
“I want to show him to my dad so bad,” the kid said.
We were wet and shivering. We looked at him, kept touching him. We pried open his big mouth and felt his rows of teeth. His sides were scarred, whitish welts as big as quarters and kind of puffy. There were nicks out of his head around his eyes and on his snout where I guess he had banged into the rocks and been in fights. But he was so skinny, too skinny for how long he was, and you could hardly see the pink stripe down his sides, and his belly was gray and slack instead of white and solid like it should have been. But I thought he was something.
“I guess I’d better go pretty soon,” I said. I looked at the clouds over the hills where the sun was going down. “I better get home.”
“I guess so. Me too. I’m freezing,” the kid said. “Hey, I want to carry him,” the kid said.
“Let’s get a stick. We’ll put it through his mouth and both carry him,” I said.
The kid found a stick. We put it through the gills and pushed until the fish was in the middle of the stick. Then we each took an end and started back, watching the fish as he swung on the stick.
“What are we going to do with him?” the kid said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I caught him,” I said.
“We both did. Besides, I saw him first.”
“That’s true,” I said. “Well, you want to flip for him or what?” I felt with my free hand, but I didn’t have any money. And what would I have done if I had lost?
Anyway, the kid said, “No, let’s not flip.”
I said, “All right. It’s okay with me.” I looked at that boy, his hair standing up, his lips gray. I could have taken him if it came to that. But I didn’t want to fight.
We got to where we had left our things and picked up our stuff with one hand, neither of us letting go of his end of the stick. Then we walked up to where his bicycle was. I got a good hold on the stick in case the kid tried something.
Then I had an idea. “We could half him,” I said.
“What do you mean?” the boy said, his teeth chattering again. I could feel him tighten his hold on the stick.
“Half him. I got a knife. We cut him in two and each take half. I don’t know, but I guess we could do that.”
He pulled at a piece of his hair and looked at the fish. “You going to use that knife?”
“You got one?” I said.
The boy shook his head.
“Okay,” I said.
I pulled the stick out and laid the fish in the grass beside the kid’s bicycle. I took out the knife. A plane taxied down the runway as I measured a line. “Right here?” I said. The kid nodded. The plane roared down the runway and lifted up right over our heads. I started cutting down into him. I came to his guts and turned him over and stripped everything out. I kept cutting until there was only a flap of skin on his belly holding him together. I took the halves and worked them in my hands and I tore him in two.
I handed the kid the tail part.
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “I want that half.”
I said, “They’re both the same! Now goddamn, watch it, I’m going to get mad in a minute.”
“I don’t care,” the boy said. “If they’re both the same, I’ll take that one. They’re both the same, right?”
“They’re both the same,” I said. “But I think I’m keeping this half here. I did the cutting.”
“I want it,” the kid said. “I saw him first.”
“Whose knife did we use?” I said.
“I don’t want the tail,” the kid said.
I looked around. There were no cars on the road and nobody else fishing. There was an airplane droning, and the sun was going down. I was cold all the way through. The kid was shivering hard, waiting.
“I got an idea,” I said. I opened the creel and showed him the trout. “See? It’s a green one. It’s the only green one I ever saw. So whoever takes the head, the other guy gets the green trout and the tail part. Is that fair?”
The kid looked at the green trout and took it out of the creel and held it. He studied the halves of the fish.
“I guess so,” he said. “Okay, I guess so. You take that half. I got more meat on mine.”
“I don’t care,” I said. “I’m going to wash him off. Which way do you live?” I said.
“Down on Arthur Avenue.” He put the green trout and his half of the fish into a dirty canvas bag. “Why?”
“Where’s that? Is that down by the ball park?” I said.
“Yeah, but why, I said.” That kid looked scared.
“I live close to there,” I said. “So I guess I could ride on the handlebars. We could take turns pumping. I got a weed we could smoke, if it didn’t get wet on me.”
But the kid only said, “I’m freezing.”
I washed my half in the creek. I held his big head under water and opened his mouth. The stream poured into his mouth and out the other end of what was left of him.
“I’m freezing,” the kid said.
I saw George riding his bicycle at the other end of the street. He didn’t see me. I went around to the back to take off my boots. I unslung the creel so I could raise the lid and get set to march into the house, grinning.
I heard their voices and looked through the window. They were sitting at the table. Smoke was all over the kitchen. I saw it was coming from a pan on the burner. But neither of them paid any attention.
“What I’m telling you is the gospel truth,” he said. “What do kids know? You’ll see.”
She said, “I’ll see nothing. If I thought that, I’d rather see them dead first.”
He said, “What’s the matter with you? You better be careful what you say!”
She started to cry. He smashed out a cigarette in the ashtray and stood up.
“Edna, do you know this pan is burning up?” he said.
She looked at the pan. She pushed her chair back and grabbed the pan by its handle and threw it against the wall over the sink.
He said, “Have you lost your mind? Look what you’ve done!” He took a dish cloth and began to wipe up stuff from the pan.
I opened the back door. I started grinning. I said, “You won’t believe what I caught at Birch Creek. Just look. Look here. Look at this. Look what I caught.”
My legs shook. I could hardly stand. I held the creel out to her, and she finally looked in. “Oh, oh, my God! What is it? A snake! What is it? Please, please take it out before I throw up.”
“Take it out!” he screamed. “Didn’t you hear what she said? Take it out of here!” he screamed.
I said, “But look, Dad. Look what it is.”
He said, “I don’t want to look.”
I said, “It’s a gigantic summer steelhead from Birch Creek. Look! Isn’t he something? It’s a monster! I chased him up and down the creek like a madman!” My voice was crazy. But I could not stop. “There was another one, too,” I hurried on. “A green one. I swear! It was green! Have you ever seen a green one?”
He looked into the creel and his mouth fell open.
He screamed, “Take that goddamn thing out of here! What in the hell is the matter with you? Take it the hell out of the kitchen and throw it in the goddamn garbage!”
I went back outside. I looked into the creel. What was there looked silver under the porch light. What was there filled the creel.
I lifted him out. I held him. I held that half of him.