Beginners Page 17

  Three or four weeks later the fish arrived. I’d gone swimming at the city pool that afternoon and Father told me about it later. He’d just gotten home from work and changed clothes when Dummy pulled up in the driveway. With hands trembling he showed Father the wire from the parcel post he’d found at home that said three tanks of live fish from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, were waiting to be picked up. Father was excited too, and he and Dummy went down right then in Dummy’s pickup.

  The tanks—barrels, really—were each crated in white, clean-smelling new pine boards, with large rectangular openings cut on the sides and at the top of each crate. They were standing in the shade around at the back of the train depot, and it took my father and Dummy both to lift each crate into the back of the truck.

  Dummy drove very carefully through town and then twenty-five miles an hour all the way to his house. He drove through his yard without stopping, down to within fifty feet of the pond. By that time it was nearly dark, and he had his headlights on. He had a hammer and tire iron under the seat and jumped out with them in his hand as soon as they stopped. They lugged all three tanks down close to the water before Dummy started to open the first crate. He worked in the headlights from his truck, and once caught his thumb with the claw side of the hammer. The blood oozed thickly out over the white boards, but he didn’t seem to notice. After he’d pried the boards off the first tank, he found the barrel inside covered thickly with burlap and a kind of rattan material. A heavy board lid had a dozen nickel-sized holes scattered around. They raised the lid and both of them moved up over the tank as Dummy took out his flashlight. Inside, scores of little bass fingerlings finned darkly in the water in the tank. The beam of light didn’t bother them, they just swam and circled darkly without seeming to go anywhere. Dummy moved his light around the tank several minutes before he snapped it off and dropped it back in his pocket. He picked up the barrel with a grunt, started down to the water.

  “Wait a minute, Dummy, let me help you,” Father called to him.

  Dummy set the tank at the water’s edge, again removed the lid, and slowly poured the contents into the pond. He took out his flashlight and shined it into the water. Father went down, but there was nothing to be seen; the fish had scattered. Frogs croaked hoarsely on all sides, and in the overhead dark, nighthawks wheeled and darted after insects.

  “Let me get the other crate, Dummy,” Father said, reaching as if to take the hammer from Dummy’s coveralls.

  Dummy pulled back and shook his head. He undid the two crates himself, leaving dark drops of blood on the boards, stopping long enough with each tank to shine his light through the clear water to where the little bass swam slowly and darkly from one side to the other. Dummy breathed heavily through his open mouth the whole time, and when he was through he gathered up all the boards and the burlap mesh and the barrels and threw everything noisily into the back of the truck.

  From that night, Father maintained, Dummy was a different person. The change didn’t come about all at once, of course, but after that night, gradually, ever gradually, Dummy moved closer to the abyss. His thumb was swollen and still bleeding some, and his eyes had a protruding, glassy look to them in the light from the dashboard, as he bounced the truck across the pasture, and then drove the road taking Father home.

  That was the summer I was twelve.

  Dummy wouldn’t let anyone go there now, not after Father and I tried to fish there one afternoon two years later. In those two years Dummy had fenced all the pasture behind his house, then fenced the pond itself with electrically charged barbed wire. It cost him over five hundred dollars for materials alone, Father said to my mother in disgust.

  Father wouldn’t have any more to do with Dummy. Not since that afternoon we were out there, toward the end of July. Father had even stopped speaking to Dummy, and he wasn’t the sort to cut anyone.

  One evening just before fall, when Father was working late and I took him his dinner, a plate of hot food covered with aluminum foil, and a mason jar of ice tea, I found him standing in front of the window talking with Syd Glover, the millwright. Father gave a short, unnaturally harsh laugh just as I came in and said, “You’d guess that fool was married to them fish, the way he acts. I just wonder when the men in white coats will come to take him away.”

  “From what I hear,” Syd said, “he’d do better to put that fence round his house. Or his bedroom, to be more exact.”

  Father looked around and saw me then, raised his eyebrows slightly. He looked back at Syd. “But I told you how he acted, didn’t I, the time me and Jack was out to his house?” Syd nodded, and Father rubbed his chin reflectively, then spat out the open window into the sawdust, before turning to me with a greeting.

  A month before, Father had finally prevailed upon Dummy to let the two of us fish the pond. Bulldozed him might be the better word, for Father said he decided he simply wasn’t going to take any more excuses. He said he could see Dummy stiffen up when he kept insisting one day, but he went on talking fast, joking to Dummy about thinning out the weakest bass, doing the rest of the bass a favor, and so on. Dummy just stood there pulling at his ear and staring at the floor. Father finally said we’d see him tomorrow afternoon, then, right after work. Dummy turned and walked away.

  I was excited. Father had told me before that the fish had multiplied crazily and it would be like dropping your line into a hatchery pond. We sat at the kitchen table that night long after Mother had gone to bed, talking and eating snacks and listening to the radio.

  Next afternoon when Father pulled into the drive, I was waiting on the front lawn. I had his half-dozen old bass plugs out of their boxes, testing the sharpness of the treble hooks with my forefinger.

  “You ready?” he called to me, jumping out of the car. “I’ll go to the toilet in a hurry, you put the stuff in. You can drive us out there, if you want.”

  “You bet!” I said. Things were starting out great. I’d put everything in the backseat and started toward the house when Father came out the front door wearing his canvas fishing hat and eating a piece of chocolate cake with both hands.

  “Get in, get in,” he said between bites. “You ready?”

  I got in on the driver’s side while he went around the car. Mother looked at us. A fair-skinned, severe woman, her blond hair pulled into a bun at the back of her head and fastened down with a rhinestone clip. Father waved to her.

  I let off the hand brake and backed out slowly onto the road. She watched us until I shifted gears, and then waved, still unsmiling. I waved, and Father waved again. He’d finished his cake, and he wiped his hands on his pants. “We’re off!” he said.

  It was a fine afternoon. We had all the windows down in the 1940 Ford station wagon, and the air was cold and blew through the car. The telephone wires alongside the road made a humming noise, and after we crossed the Moxee Bridge and swung west onto Slater Road, a big rooster pheasant and two hens flew low across the road in front of us and pitched into an alfalfa field.

  “Look at that!” Father said. “We’ll have to come out here this fall. Harland Winters has bought a place out here somewheres, I don’t know exactly where, but he said he’d let us hunt when the season opens.”

  On either side of us, green wavy alfalfa fields, with now and then a house, or a house with a barn and some livestock behind a rail fence. Farther on, to the west, a huge yellow-brown cornfield and behind that, a stand of white birch trees that grew beside the river. A few white clouds moved across the sky.

  “It’s really great, isn’t it, Dad? I mean, I don’t know, but everything’s just fun we do, isn’t it?”

  Father sat in the seat cross-legged, tapping his toe against the floorboards. He put his arm out the window and let the wind take it. “Sure, it is. Everything.” Then, after a minute, he said, “Sure, you bet it’s fun! Great to be alive!”

  In a few minutes we pulled up in front of Dummy’s, and he came out of the house wearing his hat. His wife looked out the window.

 
; “You have your frying pan out, Dummy?” Father called to him as he came down the porch steps. “Fillet of bass and fried potatoes.”

  Dummy came up to where we stood beside the car. “What a day for it!” Father went on. “Where’s your pole, Dummy? Ain’t you going to fish?”

  Dummy jerked his head back and forth, No. He moved his weight from one bandy leg to the other and looked at the ground and then at us. His tongue rested on his lower lip, and he began working his right foot into the dirt. I shouldered the wicker creel and immediately felt Dummy’s eyes on me, watching, as I gave Father his pole and picked up my own.

  “We ready?” Father said. “Dummy?”

  Dummy took off his hat and, with the same hand, wiped his wrist over his bald head. He turned abruptly, and we followed him over to the fence, about a hundred feet behind his house. Father winked at me.

  We walked slowly across the spongy pasture. There was a fresh, clean smell in the air. Every twenty feet or so snipe flew up from the clumps of grass at the edge of the old furrows, and once a hen mallard jumped off a tiny, almost invisible puddle of water, and flew off quacking loudly.

  “Probably got her nest there,” Father said. A few feet farther on he began whistling, but then stopped after a minute.

  At the end of the pasture the ground sloped gently and became dry and rocky with a few nettle bushes and scrub oak trees scattered here and there. Ahead of us, behind a tall stand of willows, the first pile of rocks rose fifty or seventy-five feet in the air. We cut to the right, following an old set of car tracks, going through a field of milkweed that came up to our waists. The dry pods at the tops of the stalks rattled as we pushed through. Dummy was walking ahead, I followed two or three steps behind, and Father was behind me. Suddenly I saw the sheen of water over Dummy’s shoulder, and my heart jumped. “There it is!” I blurted out. “There it is!” Father said after me, craning his neck to see. Dummy began walking even slower and kept bringing his hand up nervously and moving his hat back and forth over his head.

  He stopped. Father came up beside him and said, “What do you think, Dummy? Is one place as good as another? Where should we come onto it?”

  Dummy wet his lower lip and looked around at us as if frightened.

  “What’s the matter with you, Dummy?” Father said sharply. “This is your pond, ain’t it? You act like we was trespassing or something.”

  Dummy looked down and picked an ant off the front of his coveralls.

  “Well, hell,” Father said, letting out his breath. He took out his watch. “If it’s still all right with you, Dummy, we can fish for forty-five minutes or an hour. Before it gets dark. Huh? What about it?”

  Dummy looked at him and then put his hands in his front pockets and turned toward the pond. He started walking again. Father looked at me and shrugged. We trailed along behind. Dummy acting the way he was took some of the edge off our excitement. Father spat two or three times without clearing his throat.

  We could see the whole pond now, and the water was dimpled with rising fish. Every minute or so a bass would leap clear of the water and come down hugely in a great splash, sending the water across the pond in ever-widening circles. As we came closer we could hear the ker-splat-splat as they hit the water. “My God,” Father said under his breath.

  We came up to the pond at an open place, a gravel beach fifty feet long. Some shoulder-high water tules grew on the left, but the water was clear and open in front of us. The three of us stood there side by side a minute, watching the fish come up out toward the center.

  “Get down!” Father said as he dropped into an awkward crouch. I dropped down too and peered into the water in front of us, where he was staring.

  “Honest to God,” he whispered.

  A school of bass cruised slowly by, twenty or thirty of them, not one under two pounds.

  The fish veered off slowly. Dummy was still standing, watching them. But a few minutes later the same school returned, swimming thickly under the dark water, almost touching one another. I could see their big, heavy-lidded eyes watching us as they finned slowly by, their shiny sides rippling under the water. They turned again, for the third time, and then went on, followed by two or three stragglers. It didn’t make any difference if we sat down or stood up; the fish just weren’t frightened of us. Father said later he felt sure Dummy came down there afternoons and fed them, because, instead of shying away from us as fish should do, these turned in even closer to the bank. “It was a sight to behold,” he said afterwards.

  We sat there for ten minutes, Father and I, watching the bass come swimming up out of the deep water and fin idly by in front of us. Dummy just stood there pulling at his fingers and looking around the pond as if he expected someone. I could look straight down the pond to where the tallest rock pile shelved into the water, the deepest part, Father said. I let my eyes roam around the perimeter of the pond—the grove of willows, the birch trees, the great tule bed at the far end, a block away, where blackbirds flew in and out, calling in their high, warbling summer voices. The sun was behind our backs now, pleasantly warm on my neck. There was no wind. All over the pond the bass were coming up to nuzzle the water, or jumping clear of the water and falling on their sides, or coming up to the surface to cruise with their dorsal fins sticking out of the water like black hand-fans.

  We finally got up to cast and I was shaky with excitement. I could hardly take the plug hooks from the cork handle of the rod. Dummy suddenly gripped my shoulder with his big fingers, and I found his pinched face a few inches from mine. He bobbed his chin two or three times at my father. He wanted only one of us to cast, and that was Father.

  “Shh-Jesus!” Father said, looking at us both. “Jesus Kayrist!” He laid his pole on the gravel after a minute. He took off his hat and then put it back on and glared at Dummy before he moved over to where I stood. “Go ahead, Jack,” he said. “That’s all right, go ahead, Son.”

  I looked at Dummy just before I cast; his face had gone rigid and there was a thin line of drool on his chin.

  “Come back hard on the son of a bitch when he strikes,” Father said. “Make sure you set the hooks; their mouths are as hard as a doorknob.”

  I flipped off the drag lever and threw back my arm, lurched forward and heaved the rattling yellow plug out as far as I could. It splatted the water forty feet away. Before I could begin winding to pick up the slack, the water boiled.

  “Hit him!” Father yelled. “You got him! Hit him! Hit him again!”

  I came back hard, twice. I had him, all right. The steel casting rod bowed over and sprung wildly back and forth. Father kept yelling, “Let him go, let him go! Let him run with it! Give him more line, Jack! Now wind in! Wind in! No, let him run! Woo-ee! Look at him go!”

  The bass jump-jumped around the pond and every time it came up out of the water it shook its head, and we could hear the plug rattle. And then the bass would take off on another run. In ten minutes I had the fish on its side, a few feet from shore. It looked enormous, six or seven pounds, maybe, and it lay on its side, whipped, mouth open and gills working slowly. My knees felt so weak I could hardly stand, but I held the rod up, the line tight. Father waded out over his shoes.

  Dummy began sputtering behind me, but I was afraid to take my eyes away from the fish. Father kept moving closer, leaning forward now, his arm reaching lower, trying to gill it. Dummy suddenly stepped in front of me and began shaking his head and waving his hands. Father glanced at him.

  “Why, what the hell’s the matter with you, you son of a bitch? This boy’s got hold the biggest bass I’ve seen; he ain’t going to throw him back. What’s wrong with you?”

  Dummy kept shaking his head and gesturing toward the pond.

  “I’m not about to let this boy’s fish go. You’ve got another think coming if you think I’m going to do that.”

  Dummy reached for my line. Meanwhile the bass had gained strength and turned over and started swimming back out again. I yelled and then, I lost my head, I
guess; I slammed down the brake on the reel and started winding. The bass made a last, furious run, and the plug flew over our heads and caught in a tree branch.

  “Come on, Jack,” Father said, grabbing up his pole. “Let’s get out of here before we’re crazy as this son of a bitch. Come on, goddam him, before I knock him down.”

  We started away from the pond, Father snapping his jaws he was so angry. We walked fast. I wanted to cry but kept swallowing rapidly, trying to hold back the tears. Once Father stumbled over a rock and ran forward a few feet to keep from falling. “Goddam the son of a bitch,” he muttered. The sun was almost down and a breeze had come up. I looked back over my shoulder and saw Dummy still down at the pond, only now he’d moved over by the willows and had one arm wrapped around a tree, was leaning over and looking down into the water. He looked very dark and tiny beside the water.

  Father saw me look back, and he stopped and turned. “He’s talking to them,” he said. “He’s telling them he’s sorry. He’s crazy as a coot, that son of a bitch! Come on.”

  That February the river flooded.

  It had snowed heavily throughout our part of the state during the first weeks of December, and then the weather had turned very cold just before Christmas, the ground froze, and the snow remained fast on the ground. Toward the end of January the Chinook wind struck. I woke up one morning to hear the house being buffeted by the wind, and the steady drizzle of water running off the roof.

  It blew for five days, and on the third day the river began to rise.

  “It’s up to fifteen feet,” Father said one evening, looking up from the newspaper. “Three feet over flood level. Old Dummy’s going to lose his fish.”

  I wanted to go down to the Moxee Bridge to see how high the water was running, but Father shook his head.

  “A flood is nothing to see. I’ve seen all the floods I want to see.”

  Two days later the river crested, and after that the water slowly began to subside.