Sunday, April 17, 2011

Sunfish

There were just the three of us then. After she had died, the old man entered a miserable mood that held him fast, like a mouse stuck on a glue trap. Even months after the funeral, he swapped moments of silent sadness with moments of outright orneriness when he seemed to hate everything and everyone on the planet, especially my brother, Beau, and me. Maybe it was because we looked like her, constant reminders of what he had lost. Maybe it was because we seemed to get over her death so easily. Or maybe it was because he’d never thought his wife, who was so much younger than he, would die first and leave him to deal with two teenagers in his old age. It was impossible to tell, really; he didn’t talk much, but yelled most of the time, and when a person yells, he never says much.

About the only time he wasn’t glum or mean was when he took us fishing. The solitude of the activity seemed to quiet his mind and he became a tolerable human being.

We would climb into the station wagon, a squeaky beast so old people could hardly believe it still ran, and the old man would drive us up to the lake. If it had an actual name, no one ever mentioned it and we were never curious enough to ask.

When we reached the lake, the old man would go to the small shack, made of weathered boards, and buy live bait and rent a rowboat which leaked ever so slightly as often as not. After we climbed into the boat with our rods and tackle boxes, the old man always made a big show of grabbing the oars and rowing us away from the pier. When he grew tired-- which didn’t take long, since he was pretty old and had a couple infirmities he’d never mention and pretended not to have-- Beau, who was two years older than me and had quite a bit more muscle, would take over from the old man, who hemmed and hawed and said he guessed it was somebody else’s turn to row rather than to admit he was already exhausted.

The lake was not very large, but large enough. At its widest it was probably just over a half mile. It was pretty deep in some spots and it was generally believed that that was where the best catches could be made. The old man, though, always wanted to go to his favorite place, which was where the lake seemed to stretch out onto the land like a curled finger and form small cove. Here the water was thick with algae, patches of green floating motionless on the surface while under the surface particles moved with the rhythm of the tide. On the land hugging the water, towering trees grew wildly. A few had been felled by storms over the years, and their trunks lay rotting and grayish on the ground between the living trees. A couple trees grew so close to the lake edge that the relentless slapping of the water had eroded away the soil so that you could see the thick ugly roots which seemed to form claws that desperately clung to the earth.

It was not really a pleasant place. It felt long abandoned and appeared more than a little sinister. The old man enjoyed being there, though, and if that made him bearable, Beau and I would never complain.

One day we sat in the rowboat on the water so calm our white-and-red bobbers barely drifted away from the boat. Above stringy clouds were passing before the summer sun, and the shadows of trees appeared and then vanished in turn upon the water. We were using leeches for bait that day. Beau was deathly afraid of the black bloodsuckers, and the old man had yelled at him for cringing girlishly and rocking the boat as he baited his hook. Now, though, the old man sat there placidly, staring off into nowhere, not even watching his line, and you just had to wonder what was going through his mind. His face never showed anything at all. He could have been thinking of something happy or sad, and you could never tell which. That was what made him so dangerous, really; it looked as though nothing was wrong, and then, like out of the blue, he’d give Beau a good slap upside the head just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time while the old man was thinking the wrong thing. Beau always caught the brunt of these sudden rages more than me. I always tried to convince myself that that was because I was wiry and fast and good at ducking, but really it was just plain old-fashioned luck. Once the old man had grabbed Beau and thrown him down the front stairs so that he arm was broken in two places. That happened back when the cops didn’t get involved and there was no such thing as child abuse. Beau had been younger and smaller and hadn’t taken to lifting weights he’d made from empty coffee cans, cement, and old pipes. I doubted that the old man could do that now, and I always waited for the day when Beau would really clobbered the old man back. Although Beau never said a word about it, I always felt he was waiting for just the right moment. There is just so much cruelty a person can take before they have to give some back. So I watched and waited, like somebody looking up at the gray sky of a late autumn day and knowing the first snowflakes will fall sooner of later.

The old man’s line jerked, and he tugged up on his pole, a short, sharp tug, and started to reel in the catch. His reel made that clickety sound as the fish emerged from the murky water. You could see the bright color of the fish even before it broke the surface of the water and hung helplessly squirming at the end of the line. It was a large sunfish, mostly orange but with streaks of green, and the old man pulled it into the boat. He grabbed the line a foot above the fish, and paused to study it as its mouth opened and closed, as though grasping for air that wasn’t there. He paused like that for a long time, until I wondered whether there was something wrong with him. Finally he reached into his tackled box and found his little pair of pliers. He grabbed the wriggled fish in one hand and he stuck the pliers in its mouth with the other hand. He had some difficulty removing the hook from the roof of the fish’s mouth, and seemed annoyed that the fish wouldn’t stop wriggling and trying to break free of his grip. After he got the hook out, he stopped and stared at the sunfish before letting it fall back into the water, where the bright orange of its scales quickly melted into the murk. He rested his elbows on his knees, then, and leaned down to cover his face with his hands. His body started to jiggle, and I thought for sure he was crying. When he pulled his hands away from his face, I could see he was actually laughing. It was strange; I couldn’t recall the last time I’d seen him laugh. After he stopped he stared across the water, out past the mouth of the cove, where the water turned from gloomy green to light blue. The expression on his face seemed filled with bliss, and I wondered what memory the sight of the sunfish brought back to him. I wanted to ask him-- he seemed so accessible just then-- but I never had the chance.

Beau always brought with him a club just in case any one of us hook a big fish, which we never did because we always fished in such shallow water. It was not a club, really, but just an old baseball bat. He’d sawed a few inches from the top to make it lighter and shorter, now, just as the old man looked happier than he’d been in a very long time, Beau, faster and smoother than I would have thought possible, stood and brought the club straight down on the old man’s head. The old man grunted and pitched forward. When Beau brought the club down again, he hit the spot where the spine meets the back of the skull. There was a sickening snap, and I had no doubt the old man’s neck broken. A rush of breath came from his lungs, and he sat balanced there, folded over, his arms hanging so that he hand lay limply in the water that had accumulated in the bottom of the boat. Beau dropped the club, then, and bent over to grab the old man awkwardly and heave him sideways off the boat, which rocked wildly as the old man settled face-down in the water and Beau sat across from me.

I must have seemed dumbfounded. Never in a million years that I think Beau would do that. Sure, maybe exchange a slap across the face with him or maybe get into one of those mindless and clumsy wrestling matches with him, where both parties roll across the floor and very little damage is done.

Beau stared at me now.

“Don’t be surprised,” he told me. “You know it had to be done-- sooner or later.”