“First thing every morning for me,” Wussy explained. “Can’t wait.”
When he was finished, he went back inside for his pants and shoes. I went over to where he’d stood, as if it were an officially designated area, and released my agony.
Wussy came out with the rods and his tackle box. “Better get our ass going and catch breakfast,” he said. “Your old man ain’t going to be no help. I see you got your shoe wet.”
“Fell in,” I admitted, surprised that I had been wrong about him not being the type to notice.
“River runs pretty quick out there in the middle,” he observed without looking at me, and I was suddenly sure he’d seen me out there, though he wasn’t going to say anything.
At the water’s edge, he attached the spinning reels to the rods and ran line through the eyelets all the way to the tips. I watched, full of interest. “Ever fish before?”
I shook my head.
“It’s about the best thing there is until you’re older and can do some other stuff, and it’s better than most of the other stuff too.”
I watched him tie on the hooks, and he did it slowly so I could see. He pointed to the little wing on each hook. “Called a barb,” he said. “So the fish can’t slip off once he’s on. Works the same way on your finger if you aren’t careful.”
We walked upriver about a hundred yards so that when my father woke up there’d be nobody around. “Serve him right,” Wussy said, without explaining what for.
When we got to a spot that looked lucky to Wussy, where there was a good safe rock for me to sit on, he handed me a rod. Then he opened up a can that looked like it was full of dirt, but when he fished around with his brown index finger I could see the bottom was alive and writhing. He pulled out an astonishingly long worm and hooked him three times until he oozed yellow and twisted angrily. I must have looked a little yellow myself, because Wussy baited my hook with two bright pink salmon eggs. Then he taught me how to release the bail and let the current carry the bait downstream, and how to reel in. “How will I know when there’s a fish?” I said when he started out toward the middle.
He said not to worry about it, I’d know, though that didn’t strike me as a satisfactory explanation. Then I was by myself with only the sound of the running water for company. The sun was high and warm and when I saw Wussy had taken off his shirt I did the same. I watched Wussy for a while, then studied the reflected sun on the water near the drooping tip of my rod.
I couldn’t have been asleep more than a few minutes when I felt the excited tugging. For some reason it was not what I had expected. The jerks came in short bursts, like a coded message to a sleepy boy: “Stay—Alert—There—Are—Fish—in—the—River.” Thirty yards downstream a fish jumped, but I didn’t immediately associate this phenomenon with my now frantic rod tip. Wussy had waded further upstream and did not hear when I shouted “Agh!” in his general direction.
I was not at all certain I wanted to reel in the fish. Every time I tried to, he seemed to resent it and tugged even harder. When he did this, I stopped and waited apologetically for the tugging to stop. I only reeled in when I felt the line go slack. When the fish jumped, or rather flopped onto the surface, a second time, he was much closer, and my already considerable misgivings grew. I was thinking I might just let him stay where he was until Wussy came back, whenever that might be. But then I got my courage up and reeled in a little more, all the time watching the spot on the surface where my line disappeared into the stream, beads of rainbow water dancing off it with the tension.
Then I saw the fish himself off to the side in a spot far from where I had imagined him to be. He was no longer tugging so frantically, but he darted first left, then right in the large pool of relatively calm water beneath my rock. Then he must have got a gander at me sitting there, because he was in full flight again. I stopped reeling and just watched his colors in the clear water. After a while he stopped trying to get away and just stayed even with the current, his tail waving gently, like a flag in the breeze. Then I looked up and Wussy was there and he had my fish out of the water and flopping in the green netting, cold water spraying on my knees. I examined the fish without pride as Wussy extracted him from the net and probed his gullet for the hook he’d practically digested.
“Well, Sam’s Kid,” Wussy said, “you’re about the most patient fisherman I ever saw. Nobody won’t ever accuse you of not giving a trout a chance. If I was him, I’d have had about three separate heart attacks.”
Tired of the fish’s uncooperative squirming, Wussy took out his knife and brained my trout with the handle. The fish shuddered and was still.
“There,” Wussy said to the trout. “Now you won’t have no more heart attacks.”
It took him a few minutes, but he finally got his hook back. Then he handed me the jar of salmon eggs, reminding me to be careful of the barb when I baited up. He slipped my fish onto his stringer next to a larger trout already dangling from it. “We got us our breakfast, anyhow. I guess we should catch one for the rockhead if we can.”
He watched me while I baited my hook and released the line into the current the way he’d taught me. “You’re a fisherman,” Wussy said. “A good, patient fisherman.”
We fished until the sun was directly overhead. I didn’t have any more luck, for which I was grateful, but Wussy’s fat worms located two more trout, and then we headed back downstream to the cabin. My father was standing in the doorway, scratching his groin. “Where’s the bacon and eggs?” he wanted to know.
“Back in Mohawk,” Wussy said. “Your kid caught a fish.”
“That’s good,” my father said, studying the stringer as if mine might be recognizable. “I could eat about three.”
“So happens I got some for sale,” Wussy said. “What’s three into eighty-five?”
“Your ass.” Then he studied me. “What’re you scratching about?”
“Itch,” I said. I’d been scratching most of the morning, first one spot and then another. For some reason one scratch just wasn’t enough, no matter how hard. After a minute or so, the itching would be even worse.
“You could go wash that pan in the river,” Wussy said to my father, “and keep from being completely worthless.”
“I had my fish on the line last night,” my father said. “Cleaned him too.” But he grabbed the pan and headed for the river. I followed him.
“Well?” he said, squatting at the water’s edge.
I shrugged. It was his favorite question, and I never knew what he meant by it.
“Caught a fish, huh?”
“Wussy taught me how,” I said, suddenly full of pride about the fish, my throat full, as if there was a hook in it.
“Wussy’s all right,” he said. “I’m the only one calls him that though. You better call him Norm.”
I said I thought Norm was a better name anyhow.
When the pan was clean, or clean enough so the flies weren’t interested in it anymore, we returned to the cabin. Wussy was cleaning the last of the fish, tossing its string of insides off into the bushes. My father found some oil in the cabin and before long the four fish were sputtering in the big skillet. Then we ate them right down to their tiny bones and drank from the icy river. Even my father had stopped complaining.
We fished some more that afternoon. Wussy was good at it. Between pulling them in, baiting up, stringing the catch, and tending to me, he was pretty busy. My father could have used some help too, but Wussy ignored him and my father, who claimed to know how to fish, refused to ask. They were always needling each other anyway, and my father didn’t want to ask the kind of stupid question about his equipment that Wussy could turn to advantage. Every time we looked at my father, he was either tying on a new hook, or rebaiting it, or trying to figure out why there was a big nest of monofilament line jamming his reel. After a while my father took his act up around the bend in the river where he could fight his gear in private. “With most fishermen,” Wussy remarked, “the contest is be
tween the man and the fish. With the rockhead, it’s between him and his reel.”
I caught two more trout during the afternoon and would have been among the world’s truly happy boys if I could have just stopped itching. In addition to my legs, my stomach and shoulders were now covered with angry red blotches. “Looks like you found some poison ivy all right,” Wussy remarked. “You’d be better off not scratching if you could avoid it.”
I couldn’t though, and after another hour of watching me dig myself, Wussy said he was going to fish his way upriver and tell my father we’d better head back before I drew blood. I reeled in, leaned Wussy’s rod up against the cabin porch and jumped from rock to rock along the river edge to where I found my father seated on the bank. Wussy was standing thigh deep in the river, about twenty yards away, calmly reeling in a trout and smiling, no doubt at the fact that my father was engaged in extracting a barbed hook from his thumb by swearing at it. Swearing was about the only thing he did that didn’t work the hook deeper into his thumb. To make matters worse, there was only an inch or two of line at the end of the rod, which kept falling off his knee, and further setting the hook. By the time he washed the blood away so he could see what he was doing, and balanced the rod on his knee, the bright blood was pumping again and he’d have to stop and wipe the sweat off his forehead. He looked like he was mad enough to toss everything into the woods, and he probably would have if he himself hadn’t been attached to it.
When Wussy had landed, cleaned, and strung his last trout, he came over and surveyed the situation. “Where you got all your fish hid?” he said. “There’s a little room left on this stringer.” He sat down on a rock out of striking distance, but close enough to observe what promised to be excellent entertainment.
My father didn’t bother answering him about the fish.
“Your old man looks like he could use some cheering up,” Wussy said. “Tell him how many fish you caught, Sam’s Kid.”
I wasn’t sure it would cheer him up, but I told him three, and I was right, it didn’t.
“Anything I can do?” Wussy said.
My father gave him a black look. “How you planning to get home?” he said weakly.
“I figure I’ll just sit right here till you pass out from loss of blood and then take your car keys. Somebody will find you along about Labor Day and that hook will still be right where it is now.”
“You better hope so, because if I get it out it’s going up your ass.”
Wussy ignored the threat. “Of course you know best,” he said slowly, “but if that hook was in my thumb, the first thing I’d do is release my bail.”
My father looked at him, not comprehending. I was close enough, so I leaned over and tripped the bail, releasing the line. My father flushed.
“Now you got room,” Wussy continued, “I’d bite that line in two.”
Humbled, my father did as he was told. Wussy picked up the rod and reeled in the slack.
“And?” my father said.
“And now I got the majority of my gear back,” Wussy said, turning back toward the cabin. “You can just go ahead and keep that hook.”
I think he would have chased Wussy, hook and all, except that he’d noticed me for the first time and it scared him so he forgot all about his thumb. I had been scratching nonstop and the patches of poison ivy skin were everywhere, including my face. “Look at you,” he said. “Your mother’s going to shoot us for sure.”
“Shoot you,” Wussy said over his shoulder. “Come with me, Sam’s Kid. Stay a safe distance from that rockhead. He’s a dangerous man.”
My father got back at him by refusing to carry anything out of the woods. I helped a little, but by the time we got back to the convertible Wussy was beat and trying hard not to show it. “What’s that streaming from your thumb?” he asked when we were back on the highway heading for Mohawk. The monofilament line took the breeze and fluttered like a cobweb from my father’s black thumb.
About that time I noticed the car smelling funny again, and my father pulled over onto the shoulder. He took two cans of oil from the trunk and headed around to the front via the passenger side. I stopped scratching myself when he held out his hand. “Let me see that thing a minute.”
I felt an awful chill. I could see the gadget in my mind’s eye and it was sitting on the last rock I fished from. I pretended to look for it. “I …” I began.
But he already knew. “What’d I tell you when I gave it to you?”
I tried to speak, but could only stare at my patchy knees.
“Well?”
“Don’t lose it,” I finally croaked.
“Don’t lose it,” he repeated.
I was suddenly very close to tears, even though all the way home I’d been feeling as happy as I thought it possible to feel. I had caught fish and peed in the woods and not complained about my poison ivy. I had felt proud and important and good. Now, having betrayed my father’s simple trust, it came home to me that I was a disappointment to him, just a worthless little boy to be taken home to his mother where he belonged. It might have helped a little if Wussy had said something in my defense, but he was silent in the backseat.
My father walked around to the driver’s side and kicked the convertible hard. “Let me see that knife,” he said to Wussy.
“You aren’t using my good knife to punch no holes in no oil cans,” Wussy said.
There was nothing to do but kick the car again, so my father did it. Then he did it five more times all down the driver’s side of the car. That was all right with Wussy, in as much as it wasn’t his car, but I began to cry, even though it wasn’t my car either. When he was through kicking the convertible, he said, “Come on, dumbbell. Help me find a sharp rock.”
Then he felt the monofilament line flapping in the breeze, wrapped it between the thumb and forefinger of his good hand, and yanked. The hook came out all right, and along with it a hunk of flesh. Fresh blood began to pour out of the wound and onto the ground. My father swore and flung the line and hook with all his might. It landed about five feet away.
We started looking along the shoulder for a jagged rock, my father kicking the round ones for not being pointed. When he was a ways up the road, Wussy came over to where I was crying. “Don’t pay no attention,” he advised.
Then he went back to the car and plunged his knife into the two oil cans. By the time my father got back with a jagged rock, Wussy was tossing the empty cans into the neighboring field and wiping the knife blade on his pants. My father dropped his rock and we all got back in the car.
“Hey!” he said, looking over at me before putting the convertible back on the road. “Smile. I’m the one with something to cry about.”
After his walk he wasn’t mad any more and he let me see his thumb. It really was an ugly-looking thumb.
When we pulled up in front of the house, my mother was sitting on one of the front porch chairs with a blanket over her lap, looking like she’d been there for days. Her face was absolutely expressionless. “Uh-oh,” Wussy said, and suddenly I felt awash in guilt for having enjoyed myself. Looking at her now, I realized how long the last twenty-four hours had been for her. “Don’t forget to take your fish,” Wussy said when I got out, probably hoping that a couple nice trout might appease my mother.
Let me try to view through her eyes what she saw when we pulled up at the curb that afternoon. First, she saw my father at the wheel, looking a tad nervous but far from repentant. Next, she saw a large man of indeterminate breed wearing an absurd hat full of fishhooks, just the sort of companion she imagined my father would select for his son. And finally, she saw me. My rumpled shirt and shorts were filthy, my hair wild from the ride in the convertible. My arms and legs were red and raw, my eyes swollen nearly shut from digging and crying. And she saw too that under the law she was completely helpless since, as F. William Peterson had that day informed her, a father could not be guilty of kidnapping his own son.
She did not get up at first. My father go
t out of the car to walk me as far as the porch steps, though he looked a little pale, even before he saw my grandfather’s service revolver, the same one that had already been stuck in his ear once. He stopped, his head cocked, as if listening for something as my mother stood and raised the gun. I heard Wussy say “Jesus!” and he slumped as far down into the backseat as his big body would allow. The first explosion surprised my mother so, she almost dropped the gun. After that, she did better. She shot my father’s car five more times, taking out the windshield and the front tire, neither of which she was particularly aiming at.
“God damn you, Jenny!” my father exclaimed when the shooting stopped. He had scooted behind the car and was now peering tentatively over the hood. “I think you shot Wussy.”
“Nope.” Wussy’s voice came from the floor of the rear seat. “Except for just the coronary, I’m okay. She isn’t reloading, is she?”
“Look at my car,” my father said. The glass from the windshield was all over the street, but for some reason he didn’t look as mad as he’d been when he discovered I’d lost his gadget, though a lot more surprised.
“Look at my son,” my mother said.
“Our son,” my father said.
“You can’t have him.” She was still aiming the gun in his direction, empty now, though she didn’t know it. She had just stopped shooting when it seemed she’d made her point.
My father was pretty sure she was through, but he couldn’t be certain. The neighbors had all come out on their porches, and he was feeling increasingly self-conscious about being pinned down behind his own ruined car. He’d been shot at before and guessed that my mother wasn’t really trying to hit him, but those were precisely the situations that got you shot. He knew from his experience overseas that if you only got shot by people aiming at you specifically, war wouldn’t have been nearly such a hazardous affair. He’d have felt safer if she’d been aiming at his skull. As things stood, it was the people on the porches across the street who he judged were most vulnerable. Since there was nothing to do but test the water, he slowly stood and when she didn’t shoot he got back in the car. Naturally, it wouldn’t start. “Jesus,” Wussy said from the floor of the backseat.