GOIN’ FISHIN’
My name is Lionel Serbousek. I’m a high school senior, an artist and a swimmer, and I like to think, finally, a good friend. I’m also an orphan; I live by myself. I can tell no story about my life without telling this one first because it colors everything I do and everything I think.
I woke up on a bright Sunday morning almost three years ago to go fishing over in Lake Coeur d’Alene with my family, and everything was about as great as it could be. I was just short of fifteen—at the top of my age-group—and kicking ass in the hundred fly all over the Northwest. That summer I also sold three oil paintings for money; my father was beginning to respect my talent for the first time. Almost every week my name appeared in the Spokesman-Review for being either fast or weird. I won first place in the junior division of the Spokane Custom Auto Show for my Jeepster even though I wasn’t even old enough to drive it at the time. It’s a ’53 beauty, minus the top, painted fire engine red with an authentic full-scale World War I plastic machine gun mounted in the rear well and Iron Crosses gracing each door. Those who glimpse me in their rearview mirror take immediate evasive action.
I was ready to start my sophomore year swimming with Walker and Nortie and Jeff for Frost High School, where Max II Song would finally take over as coach. Max had been with us for two years in AAU, and we believed him to be the best coach alive in any sport because he treats you with the same respect no matter who you are, or how fast, and still works you so hard your muscles experience full meltdown every workout. You get fast if you swim for Max.
At the beginning of that day things couldn’t have been better, but by sundown I felt as alone as if I’d been hatched from an egg by the sun.
I think if human beings had even the slightest capacity to foretell the future, we’d be a completely different animal. In the moment that I helplessly watched my family’s death unfold before me, I wished I’d lived differently, done my chores on time, told no lies, eaten my vegetables, thanked my parents for giving me a room of my own, told them I loved them, been a better big brother for Kyle.
The person who killed my family was my best friend in fourth grade. He swam backstroke on our medley relay team and stayed over at our house nearly every other weekend; he learned to fish from my dad. His name is Neal Anderson. I still get a card every Christmas from his family, but I have avoided him like AIDS since the day of the accident.
Neal wasn’t supposed to be driving his parents’ boat that day. They have a summer place on the lake with a private dock and a rocket Sun Runner ski boat, and his parents were in Spokane. Neal and a couple of his buddies got into Mr. Anderson’s beer and decided they could take a few spins on the skis before his parents got back. Away from the water it was killer hot that day in late August, and boats dotted the lake like chicken pox.
My father was a head shaker. He was of medium height and build, with jet black hair that was receding toward the back of his head like a grass fire in high winds. He was one of those adults who believe that if you take time to tell your children things, they’ll grow up believing them and act accordingly. Anytime that failed to happen, Dad would simply shake his head slowly. With me, Dad shook his head a lot. I was a dreamer who didn’t take life seriously enough for his money, and I think that made him afraid for me. More than anything he wanted me to grow up rational. I think he judged himself as a father by the degree to which I could assess any given situation and react appropriately. I never saw much of a temper in him, but I always knew when he was mad at me. “You need to think,” he’d say. “If you’d just think.”
Mom would say, “He’s an artist, dear. Let him be.” You don’t get laid back much further than my mom.
If I’d known Dad was going to die, I’d have made a special effort to decrease the number of times a day he felt compelled to shake his head. But I thought I had more time. I thought I had all of time.
We set out early, around 4:00 A.M. The lake was about thirty miles from our house on the south side of Spokane, across the Idaho border. We were on the water shortly after 5:00. By 5:30 Kyle had lost his pole when he fell asleep and it dropped overboard. Kyle was five. I was going to let him use mine, but Dad forbade it. He wanted Kyle to know the natural consequences of falling asleep with your fishing pole in your hand.
Fishing was a metaphor for life with my father. It required all the best elements of what he thought one needed to put together a graceful life. It required patience, knowledge, and skill. It wasn’t frivolous, and on a good day you were rewarded immediately for doing it right, though certainly there were no guarantees. Guarantees or no, my dad could catch twenty-inch rainbow trout in an oil spill. You could kid around with him about some things, but fishing wasn’t one of them. I learned that at the age of six when we were fishing a slow, lazy river up near the Canadian border. It was my first time out with him, and I had looked forward to it for months. He showed me how to cast my line and watched me do it until I got it right, before moving a few feet along the grassy edge of shoreline to drop his own line in. I glimpsed a fish swimming in a little hole directly in front of my feet, several yards from where my line drifted with the current. In what seemed like a perfectly rational move at the time—and doesn’t look all that bad today—I quickly reeled in my sinkers and began swinging them at the water as if my pole were a bullwhip, in an attempt to knock Mr. Fish for a loop. After which I intended to reach in and throw his dazed floppy self onto the grass.
Dad had that pole out of my hand on the third swing, and we spent the next half hour discussing the conduct of a True Sportsman. I was not allowed to fish for the rest of that day.
It hurts to remember that the very last time I was with Dad, he was upset with me. Not in a big way, like the time with the socks, when I went to the first day of sixth grade without any—it was in vogue at the time—and they wouldn’t let me into school. I simply went back home and painted a pair on my legs—even lettered Adidas vertically down the ankles. I really am a pretty good artist, in fact, a hell of an artist, and that was one fine pair of socks; but they didn’t come off as easily as they went on, and Dad was pretty unhappy with me because my age-group swim coach wouldn’t let me into the water until all the paint was off.
It took a wire brush.
“You have to think,” Dad said, after midnight, on the way to make up the practice I’d missed in the pool at his club. Logical consequences, he said. Dad didn’t understand I had to think before I pulled boners like that. Plus I couldn’t understand why he was upset; they were my legs—my nerve endings.
That day—that last day—he was only irritated at me for fishing with poison berries. Irritated was a step removed from truly upset. I don’t even know for sure why I put them on my line; certainly I knew better. We were fishing just offshore, near thick bushes hanging over the water. I was at the rear of the boat, and the worms and salmon eggs were in front with Mom and Kyle, who were fishing together on one pole, unbeknownst to Dad. Mom wasn’t all that big on natural consequences when they meant her baby would be bored and whiny all day. I was just too lazy to move to the front of the boat to get the right bait.
“Reel her in,” Dad said. “Gonna shoot out to the middle and try for some deep ones.”
“I’ll leave my line in the water,” I said. “Troll a little.”
“Reel her in,” he said again. “You can’t troll at forty miles an hour.”
“Go ahead,” I said, knowing my dad could spot “what’s wrong with this picture” blindfolded with his eyes gouged out, and the second he got a peek at those berries, there’d be a serious discussion, much too serious for six o’clock in the morning.
“Reel her in,” he said again, and the argument was over. I tried to get him to start the boat moving while I brought the line in so he’d be distracted, but he waited.
“I have a theory,” I said when he spotted my hook near the surface.
“What the hell is that?” he said, ignoring my theory.
“What?”
&nb
sp; “On your line. What are you using for bait?”
I grimaced. “Berries.”
“Berries. What kind of berries?”
“Whatever was on that bush. Just those orange berries.”
“You mean poison berries.”
“I don’t know that they’re poison.”
“Would you eat them?”
I stared at the berries trailing my sinker toward us. “I suppose not. Want to hear my theory?”
“I want you to get those berries off that hook.”
I took them off and listened to the short version of Dad’s “You Got to Do Things Right” lecture for the umpteenth time that summer. I would be going into tenth grade. Things wouldn’t be so easy there. Teachers would expect more of me. Childish ways were to be left behind. It was time to think….
Dad missed my theory, which was being formulated as we spoke and went something like this: With all those fish in the lake, there have to be some smart ones and some dumb ones. Minnows who listen to their parents and teachers (they travel in schools, remember) and minnows who don’t. There have to be some fish in there with shaky upbringings who act just like kids with shaky upbringings. And there have to be a few, just a few, whose size is in inverse proportion to their fishy smarts, like Ed Janeczko on Frost High School’s football team—six feet five inches, 280 pounds, with an IQ just under his belt size. Now Ed is a pretty rough customer who fights with his mom on a loud and regular basis, and I’m pretty sure if she told him not to eat something, that would be reason enough right there to do it. So, if you follow the theory that all living things are in some ways connected, it isn’t too big a jump to figure if I’m patient enough with poison berries on my line, I’m gonna catch the Ed Janeczko of rainbows, and when that happens, I’ll surely have the lake record. In effect, I was doing it for Dad.
Neither Mom nor Dad ever got to hear that theory—or anything I’ve said since.
We were dead still in the middle of the lake in early afternoon, fishing deeper water, when Neal and his buddies, at least two six-packs into the afternoon, decided to take a quick spin in his dad’s Sun Runner. Nobody in our boat but me even saw them coming. I hollered; but Mom and Kyle were hauling in a fish, and Dad was shouting advice. They didn’t even look up.
And I jumped.
I jumped.
I’ve watched it over and over, always knowing if I’d stayed a little longer or yelled a little louder, I could have saved them. It runs in slow motion in my dreams, so there’s always plenty of time. Of course, in my dreams, no sound comes out of my mouth and my legs are filled with shot puts and they all turn to smile at me.
Neal’s boat cut ours in half. None of my family even bobbed to the surface. Kyle’s shirt floated near the wreckage, and I dived as deep as I could, only to be surrounded by blackness. The two guys in Neal’s boat were thrown clear—the skier cut off to one side—and they screamed and yelled and floundered in the water, trying, I think, to figure out what had happened. I didn’t know it was Neal at the time, but I got hold of him and did my very best to drown him. I held him under with both hands on his throat, and it took all the other two had, plus help from a guy who saw it all from a passing boat, to pull me off.
It’s funny. There is a feeling in that instant following some life-changing event—at least I think I’m not the only one who has it—that you can step back over that sliver of time and actually stop the awful from happening. But that feeling is a lie because in the tiniest microminisecond after any event occurs, it is as safe in history as the Civil War. Data in the Universal Computer are backed up, as it happens. There is no reverse, not even a neutral. It is that truth that haunted me at first because had I found a way to go back, even if I couldn’t have saved them, I’d have stayed in the boat.
Swimming saved me. Swimming and Max. And Elaine Ferral. I have no relatives on either my father’s or mother’s side, so the state tried to put me in a foster home. They tried eight before they quit. The longest I lasted before hitting the road was twenty-three hours. It was Max who got the Department of Social and Health Services off my back.
“He’s fourteen,” the caseworker said. “He can’t be out on his own.”
“He’s been on his own since you guys have been in charge,” Max said.
“But we can’t have it that way.”
Max said, “You can’t have it any other.” When the caseworker started to argue, Max put up his hand. “If you think of his age in years, he’s young. If you think of it in loss, he’s an old man.”
She opened her mouth again, and Max said, “And you’re making him older. Leave him alone. He’s fine. We’ll look after him.”
I took out my pain on the water. The louder the whine of the approaching Sun Runner echoed in my head, the clearer the sight of splintering fiberglass and flying bodies, the harder I swam. My teammates, particularly Walker and Jeff and Nortie, pushed hard beside me, as if they could absorb some of my pain, and slowly but surely the searing edge began to dull. I don’t know if time heals all wounds, but I know it at least slows the spiritual bleeding.
Elaine. Elaine swam with us in age-group, before deciding greenish blond hair and blood-red chlorine-infected eyes were a definite social stopper. Like any smart, evolutionally aware, upwardly mobile animal, she opted for dry land sports sometime in junior high. But she was the toughest of us all in her day. In eight years of swimming I never saw her back off once. Out of the water Elaine was the glue that held our group together. She was like a little parent, only smarter, settling minor disputes, helping us hold our course. There’s no rational explanation, but some people you just don’t mess with, and Elaine Ferral was one of them. And she was there for me always after the accident. She sensed when my loneliness was ready to smother me and would show up with food or friends or just her wonderful self. I never loved her, not like a girlfriend; but I cried with her, and I told her everything. Elaine Ferral knows my soul, and more than anyone, she walked with me through the land-mined terrain of my grief.
I really thought I had it all in perspective, but then, about a week ago, Neal Anderson showed up at my door. First, I should say my door isn’t an easy one to find. My place is best described by my friend Walker Dupree in an essay he wrote last year for junior English:
I said Lion was an artist at everything he does, but in his personal life-style that holds true only if you’re looking for Still Life of Swine. His so-called apartment is two condemned rooms above the Fireside Tavern with a bed, a hot plate, a sink that drains out onto an alley, and—the one really class item—a toilet with a seat belt. He’s got a seat belt on his toilet. Claims it keeps him from blasting off. There are no electric lights in this palatial suite, and the sole source of heat is an old electric reflector heater powered by a frayed extension cord running out the window and down to the outlet behind the bar in the Fireside. Artificial light, lest you think these quarters uncivilized, shines from a flashlight dangling at the end of a rope above his bed.
Mrs. Phelps, our junior English teacher, read that, gave Walker an A+, and sicced the Department of Social and Health Services on me again, which brought Max once again to the rescue. Actually I have enough money from my parents to live in a much nicer place, but somehow this one fits me like a glove, though Walker calls it Nouveau Tobacco Road.
Under any circumstances, Neal found me. Through some miracle of zoning, though we went to the same grade school and junior high, we don’t attend the same high school. Neal doesn’t swim anymore, so I haven’t seen him since the day he killed my family. And that’s a good thing, because when things are at their worst, and I want someone to blame, Neal’s my man. What the hell was he doing? Why didn’t he think?
I stared at him through my open door. “What do you want?”
“Can I come in?”
I barely recognized him, wouldn’t have if I hadn’t heard his voice. His dishwater brown hair was stringy and unkempt, hanging to his shoulders; his clothes were dirty and threadbare. I considered a m
oment and said, “No.”
He looked away, over the rickety banister surrounding the wooden landing outside my door, then back at me. I couldn’t see anything of the happy rich kid I knew in grade school. But it was Neal, it was Neal for sure, and I was instantly aware of my rage.
“Come on, man. I need to talk to you.”
“Anderson,” I said, “if I let you come in my house, I’ll probably hurt you. In fact, I might anyway. You must be out of your goddamn mind. What the hell are you doing here?”
He looked directly at me. “Trying to give myself a chance.”
“A chance to what?”
“To make it right.”
I gripped the doorjamb, all my resolve directed at stopping myself from pushing him over the banister into the alley. Three years, and his face brought back the rage like a broken dam. “Anderson, turn around. Walk down those stairs. If you see me on the street, cross it. If you see me at a dance, or in a pizza place, or even at a gas station, stop what you’re doing and run. I’ll let you know if it’s ever different.”
“Lion, c’mon…”
“You must not have heard me.”
He started down the rickety stairs, then turned back about halfway down. I noticed how thin he looked, how raggedy. All his athleticism, that confident gait he had in fourth grade, when he was the sixth-fastest hundred-yard breaststroker in the state, was gone. The Andersons are rich people. They aren’t well to do, or comfortably well off, or even upper middle class. They’re rich. Their lake cabin cost double what my parents’ house cost, and we lived in a nice place. But Neal looked like the poorest of poor kids. I mean, he was dressed bad and all that, but there was more. It was in his eyes. Neal was gone. I forced all those thoughts out of my mind.