Two Fish
- © Jeff Trippe
For almost every mystery, there is a method. I remember those Saturday afternoons when my father would come home from fishing trips with his two best friends, Fred Stokes and Bob Honeycutt, smelling of brine and fish guts and gas fumes. There was the dutiful unloading of coolers, the rinsing of his boat and gear, and then the filleting of the bass or the catfish, or if he had cruised north where the brackish St Johns River spills into the Atlantic, of redfish, done with precision and efficiency at the raw wooden cleaning table he had built in our back yard. Whatever had happened that day out on the river, whatever masculine conversations and rituals and indulgences had occurred, it all remained shrouded to me until a still-dark July morning, the summer after I had turned ten, when he ordered me out of bed.
“You’re going fishing today,” he said.
We picked up Misters Stokes and Honeycutt on our way out to Goodby’s Landing. They were nice enough men, though both a bit rough-edged at such an early hour; Mr. Stokes was a card, always ready with a joke and his smoker’s laugh, a manager at Turner’s Hardware Store whose real calling was that of a gifted raconteur. Mr. Honeycutt was darker in hair color and demeanor, but he knew how to enjoy himself as well; he had a very good-looking wife named Rowena, who would one day soon become the focus of my pre-adolescent stirrings. A few years after that, Mr. Honeycutt would get rich as a purveyor of pornography, at which time my dad “unfriended” him - not in the modern Facebook sense but in real, pre-pixilated life.
In any case, we arrived at the boat ramp, and in one sweet and tidy spinning of the station wagon’s wheel, my dad backed the trailer down into the water at just the right angle and at the right depth - a skill I would never learn to master. Mr. Stokes held the rope and the three of us stood there like pilings until Dad had parked the car and then walked back down to us and said,
“Get in.” We did.
He was exceedingly proud of that boat. It was made by the Borum company of Jacksonville, Florida - our town, as it happened, and even now I can feel its steady, sturdy hull under my bare feet, gliding across the slight chop in Goodby’s Creek like a breeze-borne paper airplane, and I hear the kick and whirring of the inboard motor, a small marvel of power and restraint. And the men are before me even now with their sun-rutted red necks and white tee shirts, Mr. Stokes nodding and smiling between discreet drags on his cigarette as we nosed steadily out of the narrow inlet and into the broad, coffee-colored river, cutting crosswise against a stiff north-flowing current and then moving with it toward what lay beyond and was as yet unknown in my experience.
We might have turned south and made our way into the wilder reaches of the river, where the water widened and the fish camps and Baptist churches were straggled along the banks like teeth in an old man’s gums, as we would do on many subsequent weekends, a couple of times even anchoring and sleeping on the boat in places as far away as Palatka and Hibernia. But this first time, I think, my father wanted to impress me with his knowledge of the busy northern reaches of the St. Johns and the stunning sunlight that poured unrelentingly from the vast sky and over us and over the downtown skyline, receding abruptly from the echoing darkness below the Acosta and Main Street bridges, where he was a master and commander among tugs and, after a few miles more, among shrimpers and trawlers as we neared Blount Island and the jetties and the Atlantic Ocean. He knew those waters well, the “lower” river around Mill Cove and the Timacuan Preserve, and his aim was to get us somewhere we might have a chance of landing some big red drum or speckled trout.
Soon we found a likely spot along the southern bank, where we were more or less out of the channel but still in a current swift enough to bring wayward fish within striking distance. This was relatively easy going, as it was a simple matter of running your line through a thick popping cork, baiting your hook (in our case, with some cutup crab that Mr. Stokes had prepared ahead of time), and then attaching a lead sinker. It was a nice, heavy rig, and after Dad and the other men had demonstrated proper casting for me, it came quite easily, and I soon found that I could hurl it out nearly as far as they could into the short, wind-snapped waves. Just like that, I was a fisherman.
Within a few minutes, Mr. Stokes’s cork plunged downward and disappeared into the water: sploosh! Adroitly, he set the hook in the fish’s mouth with one hand and flicked the ashes from his cigarette with the other, saying calmly, “All right, then, Harry Lee… Now we’re talkin’.” My father’s closest friends called him by both his first and middle names.
Within moments, even as Mr. Stokes was still reeling his catch in, it was my dad’s turn. A precipitous dunking of the popper indicated he had a big one on his line. “Now, watch, Jeff,” he said. “I’ll just bring him in slow. Red drum are not fighting fish. They’ll cooperate with you, just don’t get overanxious and break your line or tear the hook out. The mouth is pretty soft.”
“Yeah, baby,” Mr. Stokes crooned. “Swim to me.”
When both fish were in the bottom of the boat, thrashing out the last of their obliviously happy, watery existences, we all looked down at them admiringly. Of course, since Mr. Honeycutt had yet to have a strike, he offered a superficial congratulations to the other two men. This was my first exposure to the subtle psychology of conversation among anglers: “Well, boys, you two certainly are the shit, aren’t you? I probably won’t take a single one today.” Then, glancing at me: “Oh, sorry, son. Pardon my French.”
But his time was at hand as well. Suddenly his rod was whipped over into a sharp arch, and with his thick forearms flexing rhythmically, he hauled another red up to the boat. When he was laid along the gunwale, he measured nearly two feet - the largest one so far.
“It’s all about the luck,” Mr. Stokes said. My dad smiled at me and winked.
“Looks like we’re into ‘em, all right,” he said.
And so the morning went, each man taking a fish every few minutes or so, talking softly to it, or yelling sharply, moaning, laughing. At one point, Mr. Stokes broke into a velvety rendition of Hank Williams’ “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” drawing a Schlitz from his small blue cooler and cracking it open, his rod tucked into his armpit and froth spilling over his fingers. The glaring, unspoken truth, of course, was that my own cork had not budged at all. My father urged me to reel it in and check on the bait, and I did so; the chunk of crab dangled before us, still intact and firmly on the hook.
“Hm” Dad said. “Let’s change it out anyway. The meat could be bad.”
Even so, another half hour passed with no signs of life other than the ripples washing around my popping cork. Now a pall hung over the Borum, and the breeze died. The river flattened out, and I could feel the sweat collecting in the hair that clung to the back of my neck. Every time one of the other three scored a heavy strike, he would reel silently, gazing at each fat red drum as though it were an inconvenience, then with utter indifference, and finally with expressions of disavowal and denial, as though they had just been delivered with some intolerable news. Even the self-absorbed Mr. Honeycutt now scowled every time his bright orange cork was dragged under, until after his tenth fish, he decided to bum a beer from Mr. Stokes and take a break, settling on the bench along the starboard side. I doubt there has ever been a more pitiable group of anglers.
At last, around noon, King Neptune smiled upon me. It wasn’t much of a strike, but my cork suddenly dipped downward and then began to wobble on the surface. I yanked the rod, setting the hook as I had been instructed, and then reeling, reeling, beside myself with excitement. My hands vibrated: there is no more exalting sensation than knowing that the will of another earthly creature is at odds with your own, feeling his stubbornness, small though it may be, but remaining assured all the while that you are the dominant species and will, as such, prevail in the end. I brought him close and then drew him out and up for all to see; he was six inches worth of desperation, flipping about on the line like a twitching eyelid, and all three men grinned and nodded.
“There he is,” Mr. Stokes chuckled. “I knew he was out there.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“It’s a croaker,” my father said. “Listen.”
We grew quiet so that we could hear the fish’s croaking, a mournful grunt, a pitiful lamentation that said, over and over again, “Help me…help me…” A thin trace of blood bubbled from his mouth, ran down his glistening scales, and drifted to the water below.
Mr. Honeycutt remarked, “You know, a croaker is really better eating than a redfish anyway. You fry that thing up right and serve it with some cheese grits, and you’ll never have a better meal than that.”
My father reached out and grabbed the fish with his gloved hand. He quickly worked the hook out and then tossed it back into the water. I watched it go flitting away, a small white spark disappearing back into the mystery below. “You can do better,” Dad said.
He was right, at least in terms of size.
All of us returned to our business, patient monuments in the cascading, unending light over the river, Misters Stokes and Honeycutt resting their Schlitzes in the coasters my dad had screwed to the top of the gunwale (put there for their benefit, since he did not imbibe…and to avoid having beer sloshed around in the bottom of the Borum). My moment of truth came after about ten minutes: without warning, my cork suddenly plummeted like a torpedo aimed at the river’s bottom, and my rod lurched over into a horseshoe shape. It was as if one of those Saturday morning professional wrestlers I used to watch - and which I would actually have been watching were I not out fishing for the first time - had performed his fire-poker-bending trick before my very eyes. I was astonished by the power of whatever was pulling back at me.
“Dad…” I said.
“You’re fine. Just give him a little line.”
When I pressed the drag-release button on my reel, the line went screeching out as the fish made his instinctive attempt to escape.
“SHIT!” cried Mr. Stokes, slamming his own rod into the holder in the boat’s stern. “Crank it! Crank it!” I cranked, but the line continued to race out and away.
“Want me to take it?” Mr. Honeycutt asked, setting his rod down, too.
“No,” Dad said. “Let him do it. Put the drag back on and brace yourself.”
I did, and then it was all I could do to keep from being pulled overboard. Lucky for me, the timely Mr. Stokes grabbed the back of my belt and held on firmly. “Get the tip of the rod up,” my father said. Far easier said than done - my skinny ten-year-old arms pulled feebly against that tremendous willpower far below the dark river’s surface. I held on, though, and gave the reel a turn whenever I sensed the slightest sag, until finally I was able to turn it two times, three times, four in a row… The fish was tiring at last.
“Now,” Dad said quite calmly, “keep the rod up, but be careful you don’t break your line. You just have to try and feel it. If it feels like it might break, give him a little more. He’ll make one last try at running.”
“It must be a giant redfish,” I said.
“That ain’t no redfish,” Mr. Stokes said.
The beast’s final act of defiance ensued quickly. Just as my father had said, when it seemed he had completely surrendered and his demise was imminent, there was a final surge of musclebound will. He abruptly exploded downward and away into the depths, and I felt Mr. Stokes’s hand tighten on my belt once more. The rod bent double, and thinking that the line had reached its limit, I placed my thumb on the release. Then I felt him rising, rising, the line slackening, and we saw it.
A thick grey fin suddenly appeared above the water.
Mr. Stokes’s mouth fell open, and his cigarette dropped into the water and fizzled. Mr. Honeycutt muttered, “Shark.”
My dad nodded. “I thought so. Bring him over slowly. Lord knows we can’t bring him in the boat, but let’s have a good look at him.”
He was a bull shark, according to Mr. Stokes. With the very last of my energy, I wound him slowly up alongside us. He rolled over and showed us his length - about five feet, as long as I was tall. I could see where the hook had him solidly in the jaw, with the line taut between his teeth. His squinty, old-man’s eye was fixed on me. My dad produced the clippers from his tackle box and held them open, poised beside the line three feet above the shark’s mouth.
“I’d say he gave you a good little introduction to fishing,” he said. “You may never get into a fight like that again on this river.” Then he snipped the line, and the shark turned back over, his thick, strong back curving porpoise fashion, and in a smooth arc, he disappeared back into the mystery. “Time to head home.”
My father had been correct once again: I would nevermore have a fight like that on the river. We traveled up and down that broad, snaking, wild slash of dark water, taking fish from Black Creek and Doctor’s Inlet and even Lake George and the Ocklawaha, but we saved the lower river for those rarer occasions when we might seek the potential wonders wrought by the mixing of the freshwater with the salt of the Atlantic. Who knew what freaks of nature the ocean might heave at us?
I do not recall which of the three men caught the most reds that day. I knew that I had caught none. Nevertheless, lying on the floor at home in front of the television and listening to the spattering of the deep fryer and to my mother’s soft humming, I was certain that I had earned a king’s feast.