Trout Eyes Read online

We went to a flat where we’d spotted some permit the previous day. The wind chopped up the water’s surface, and the sky was low and dark. When Taku turned off the motor and climbed up on his poling platform, I said, “Lousy conditions, huh? We’ll never be able to see the fish.”

  “Conditions very good,” Taku said. “Me, I can see feesh. Feesh can’t see us.”

  It was my turn on the deck. I made a long cast, coiled the line on the deck, checked the sharpness of my hook. Adjusted my polarized glasses. Pulled down the brim of my cap. Ready to go.

  Taku poled. Andy stood up in the middle of the boat, shading his eyes with his hand. We all peered hard into the water. All I could see was the gray sky reflected on the riffled mirrored surface.

  Then Taku’s urgent whisper: “Feesh!”

  I looked around wildly. I saw nothing but reflection. “Where?”

  “Eleven o’clock, man. Three permit. Noses down.”

  “I don’t see them.”

  “Oh, jeez, I do,” said Andy. “They’re eating.”

  “Cast, man,” hissed Taku. “Ten-thirty now. Fifty feet. Cast!” I still didn’t see any permit, but I got my line in the air and dropped my Merkin at what I thought was ten-thirty, about fifty feet from the boat.

  “No, no,” said Taku. “Left, man.”

  I ripped my line from the water, false cast once, dropped my crab fly about fifteen feet to the left.

  “Right!” said Taku.

  I obediently picked up my line again and cast to the right.

  “No!” screamed Taku. “I meant . . . he got it! Hit heem!”

  I hauled back and felt the serious live weight of a big fish.

  “You got him,” said Andy. “Oh, wow. Big permit.”

  Permit don’t jump. What they do is, they put their big flat side against you and they swim away, and no amount of sideways pressure can stop them, and in a minute that permit had taken all my line, and it was cutting sideways across the flat. I went down and dirty on him, tried to turn his head, remembering my tarpon fiasco when I failed to fight the fish aggressively, and after a minute the fish turned. I got my backing on the reel, and the fish surged again, and I hung on, and we were slogging it out.

  Andy was laughing now. “When Taku said ‘right,’” he said, “he meant you made the right cast. The fish started after your fly. When you yanked it away from him, he went nuts, and when you dropped it to his right he shot over and grabbed it quick before it got away. That was pretty funny.”

  Funny was one word for it. But “unworthy” was the word that kept echoing in my brain. I didn’t deserve to catch this permit. I’d blundered and blown it, and the stupid fish had eaten my fly anyway.

  I desperately wanted to land this permit. For Taku. For myself. For redemption.

  After fifteen minutes, I’d retrieved all but thirty feet of line and the permit was near the surface, flashing his silvery side.

  “He’s beat,” said Taku. “You got heem, man.”

  That’s when my line went limp, and the permit righted himself and swam away.

  “What happened?” said Andy.

  I reeled in. “He’s gone.”

  I glanced back at Taku. He was sitting on his poling platform with his forehead on his knees.

  I looked at my leader, saw the tell-tale pigtail.

  “Bad knot,” I said. “That’s what happened.”

  ‘Oh, man,” said Andy.

  Taku wouldn’t look at me.

  * * *

  The next day, Andy landed a 14-pound permit. Taku was back in a tie for first place and smiling again.

  * * *

  A year later fishing out of Islamorada I brought two giant tarpon into the boat in consecutive days. They even announced my name on the local radio station.

  I couldn’t help thinking that I was a fraud.

  9

  The Line Storm

  “It sure don’t feel like fall’s ever going to get here,” said Keith mournfully. We were towing his Boston Whaler up Route 1, heading for the landing on the Kennebec to catch the turn of the tide. The back of Keith’s truck was loaded with 9- weight fly rods and big-arbor reels and plastic boxes full of Deceivers and Clousers.

  He flapped the back of his hand at the passing roadside. The birches and poplars were droopy and brown. In the swampy areas, the maples were turning the color of dead grass. “We got no pretty leaves,” he said. “No frost on the pumpkin. No little russet fellers twittering down into alders on the full moon. The other day I ran Freebie through that string of alders along the brook behind Mrs. Sucheki’s pasture? The mud was cement. No sign of a woodcock.” He shook his head. “It don’t even smell right.”

  “Bird season opens a week from tomorrow,” I said.

  “Wouldn’t be surprised if they closed the woods,” said Sam from the back seat. “I heard they might. On account of forest fires.”

  “Yeah, well, we could sure use some rain,” said Keith. The summer-long drought had continued into September. We’d had no significant rainfall since Memorial Day, and this was another in an endless series of cloudless days. “Anyway,” he said, “the good news is, the river’s rumored to be full of stripers comin’ down from Nova Scotia. The autumn migration. Maybe the fish know something we don’t know. Be nice to intercept a couple of them big cows on their way south, put an end to this damn fishing season and get on to shooting ourselves some birds.”

  We launched the boat and headed down the river toward the estuary. Sam and I rigged up our fly rods while Keith steered. Sinking-tip lines, big Clousers with dumbbell eyes.

  A minute later, Keith said, “Hey-lo.” He kicked the outboard up a couple notches and swerved into a cove.

  Sam pointed, and then I saw them. Swarming gulls and spurting water. We coasted up to the fish, and Sam and I both had our lines in the air. My first cast had barely hit the water when my fly stopped. “Got one,” I said.

  Then Sam grunted. He had one on, too.

  Schoolie stripers pull hard. We never sneer at them. But we weren’t after twenty-inchers. Sometimes big old cows lurk under the schools of smaller fish, and if the schoolies let a weighted fly to sink down to their grandmothers . . .

  By the time Sam and I released our fish, the school had gone down. Keith putted around the cove, looking for spurts or swirls or wakes, and Sam and I dredged the water. But they were gone.

  We headed back to the main channel. Now the tide was running hard up the river. Sam and I double-hauled our leaden sink-tips blindly against the rocks and along the dropoffs. The closer we got to the estuary, the harder the wind blew.

  We saw no breaking fish. We tried to cover the likely water, the holes and rips and channels and current convergences where baitfish stacked up.

  But it wasn’t happening, and gradually my fishing adrenaline stopped pumping and my attention began to wander and my shoulder got tired and my casting deteriorated.

  Two men throwing sink-tip lines and saltwater streamers tied on 2/0 stainless-steel hooks and armed with big lead dumbbell eyes into a hard quartering wind from a small boat is asking for trouble. An awkward double-haul, a sudden gust of wind, and my Clouser slammed into Sam.

  “Ow,” he observed. “You got me.”

  “I’m sorry, man. Damn. You okay?”

  “I’m not sure,” he said.

  I put down my rod and looked. My fly had impaled the fleshy part of his right ear. The hook was buried halfway up the bend. “It’s not bleeding,” I said. “How’s it feel?”

  “Oh, fine,” Sam said. “Pisser.”

  “Did you debarb that fly?” said Keith.

  “I always debarb my flies,” I said. I wiggled the big streamer that hung from Sam’s ear. “That hurt?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well,” I said, “it looks like I didn’t debarb this one. It’s in over the barb, and it’s not moving.”

  “Gotta push it all the way through, then,” said Sam. “Okay?”

  “Me?” I said.

  “I’ll
do it,” said Keith.

  It was hard to watch. Ear cartilage is tough stuff.

  “How you doin’?” I said to Sam.

  “Good,” he said. Then he grunted, and the barb broke through. I cut it off with fishing pliers, and Keith backed out the hook. Sam’s ear gushed blood. Keith poured some beer over the wound, then gave the bottle to Sam, who took a big gulp.

  “I’m sorry, man,” I said to Sam.

  He was holding an oily boat rag over his ear. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “It could just as well’ve been me nailing you.”

  “Nice try,” I said, “and I appreciate it. But I don’t buy it. I got tired and careless, and I should’ve stopped casting for a while. No excuse.”

  “Look,” he said. “It was stupid, both of us trying to cast at the same time. Sink tips and weighted flies in this wind? Dumb, both of us.”

  “I could’ve stuck you in the eye or the throat or something.”

  “Well, you didn’t. So forget about it.”

  “You guys gonna keep beatin’ your breasts,” said Keith, “or do you want to go fishing?”

  “You take the bow,” said Sam.

  “No,” I said. “You go ahead.”

  Sam shrugged and began to cast. I sat down, snipped off my fly, reeled up, and took down my rod.

  “What the hell’re you doing?” said Keith.

  “My arm’s tired. I’m going to watch Sam, maybe take some pictures.”

  He arched his eyebrows at me.

  I shrugged. “Okay, so maybe I’m just wishing fall would hurry up and get here. Fishing doesn’t feel right anymore. I’m ready to go hunting.”

  “Not if we don’t get some rain,” said Sam.

  Keith trolled and Sam cast and I watched until the tide turned. Nobody had a strike. Sam and Keith argued about whether the stripers were done for the season. Keith believed the year’s southbound migration had already passed through the Maine coastal waters. Sam thought there’d be some more fish coming along.

  I didn’t join the discussion. I had no opinion.

  * * *

  The next evening I washed all of my fly rods, cleaned all my reels and lines, reorganized all my fly boxes, and stowed everything away. Then I took my 20-gauge Winchester Model 21 from its case, assembled it, peered through the barrels, snapped it shut, mounted it to my shoulder, and swung on the imaginary woodcock and grouse that were flying around in my den.

  Then I wiped it off, disassembled it, and put it back in its case.

  I sat in my big chair. Burt, my Brittany, ambled over and flopped down beside me. I reached down, scratched his muzzle and told him he better start giving serious thought to bird smells. I told him how the stripers were heading south. All it would take, I told him, would be a day or two of wind and rain to bring the woodcock down from Nova Scotia. A line storm, we call it in New England, the big blow that comes every year out of the northeast to demarcate the line between summer and fall. It was overdue.

  And I told Burt how I’d impaled Sam’s ear with a 2/0 Clouser that I’d inexcusably forgotten to debarb, and how I took that as a sure sign that it was time to put fishing behind us and move on to the next season.

  That’s when the phone rang. It was Art. He lives on the banks of the Merrimack River. “The river’s full of fish,” he said. “Schoolies, mostly, but a lot of big cows, too. I was out this morning, and—”

  “No, thanks” I said.

  “Huh?”

  “No, I don’t want to go fishing. Far as I’m concerned, fishing season’s over. I nailed Sam in the ear with a big weighted Clouser yesterday. I already put my fishing stuff away for the winter. I’m ready to go hunting.”

  “Too bad,” said Art. “They were breaking all over the river. We were catching ’em on Gurglers. Some pretty big ones, too. It was better than that time back in June.”

  “Better than June?” I said. “That was a helluva good day.”

  “This was better.”

  “The fish were pretty much gone from the Kennebec.”

  “Sure,” said Art. “They’re moving south. Now they’re here.”

  “They were really breaking all over the river?”

  “Everywhere,” he said. “It was awesome. So whaddya say? Tomorrow morning?”

  “Keith shoved that hook all the way through Sam’s ear,” I said, “and he didn’t flinch. It must’ve hurt like hell. I could’ve put out his eye.”

  “Meet me at the ramp. Six-thirty.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I guess so.”

  * * *

  At six-thirty the next morning, black clouds hung low and dark and heavy over the Merrimack River in Newburyport. The air was still and moist and salty, and the water looked as flat and black as carbon paper. The muffled clang of a distant bell buoy echoed through the mist. I rigged up my seven-weight with a floating line and a debarbed Gurgler.

  “Watch out for me,” I told Art as we pulled away from the ramp. “I stick hooks into people.”

  “We’ve fished together for forty years,” he said, “and you haven’t stuck me yet. Anyway, I’m—hey!”

  He pointed to a swarm of gulls that were circling and diving a hundred yards ahead of us. Under them the water was spurting into the air.

  “Hit it,” I said.

  Art gunned the motor, then cut it, and as we drifted up to the melee of birds, bait and fish, I had my line in the air, casting over the bow, very aware of Art behind me in the stern.

  My Gurgler hit the water. I made it gurgle, and it disappeared in a swirl. From behind me I heard Art grunt. I turned. His rod was bowed. Doubles on our first casts.

  They were twin schoolies, not big, nineteen-inchers, but they pulled harder than any nineteen-inch rainbow or smallmouth and, when I released my fish and looked up, the air was full of birds and the water was bubbling with swirls and splashes as far as I could see. Every cast brought a slash and a strike, and we caught stripers steadily for two hours. Neither of us rammed a hook into the other guy’s ear, and we didn’t even notice when it started raining.

  The fish disappeared abruptly and without warning. We cast for ten minutes without seeing a swirl or getting a strike. It was raining hard.

  “It’s over,” said Art. “The tide turned, and that’s that.”

  “Good,” I said. I sat down, reeled up, and took down my rod.

  Art peered up at the sky. “Lots of rain coming,” he said. “Here’s our line storm. Cold front behind it. Yesterday it was summer. Day after tomorrow it’ll be fall, and the stripers’ll be gone.”

  “Bird season,” I said. “The woods will be wet. There’ll be water in the brooks. The leaves will color up, and there’ll be frost on the pumpkin, and the little russet fellers will come twittering into the alders on the full moon.”

  “Now you can stow away your fishing gear.”

  “I did that once,” I said. “Thanks for making me do it again. Now maybe I won’t have to think about Sam’s ear all winter.”

  10

  Stripers and Floaters

  A SHORT STORY

  My mother grew up on the Piscataqua River in southern Maine in the little town of Marseilles. They pronounced it “Mazell,” same as the Maine town of Calais came to be pronounced “Caliss” and Madrid was “Mad-rid.” Mainers did things their own way.

  Visiting my grandmother in Marseilles fifty-odd years ago, when I was a kid, meant a long hot drive from our house in the Boston suburbs north on Route 1, which meandered through a lot of more-or-less identical little New England villages in coastal Massachusetts and New Hampshire. We always stopped for ice cream cones at the Howard Johnson’s at the Portsmouth circle before driving over the Route 1 toll bridge into Maine. More often than not the drawbridge was up and we had to wait in a line of traffic for a tanker or barge to pass under. My father would let me reach out his window from where I sat in the back seat to put the dime in the palm of the toll-taker. It was always the same old guy, looking like he hadn’t shaved in a week. I figured he
lived there in his little booth, and I wondered where the bathroom was. He always said, “Thank you, suh,” to me. His hand was grease-stained, and I could smell his sour breath even from the back seat of our car.

  My mother’s name was Hope. She had three sisters. Faith, Charity and Glory. I guess my grandmother ran out of virtues by the time she got to Glory. Jacob and Moses were Mom’s older brothers. Uncle Jake and Uncle Moze. All of my aunts and uncles except Glory, the baby of the family, had many children—my cousins—and they all lived in Marseilles within walking distance of my grandmother’s house. My uncles drove trucks and bulldozers or had jobs at the Portsmouth Navy Yard. My aunts cooked and cleaned and raised their children.

  My mother was the only one in the family actually to graduate from high school. Her sisters all had to get married, and her brothers quit school as soon as they were old enough to get jobs so they could chase the Marseilles, Maine version of the American Dream: Owning their own lobster boats.

  Mom was the rebel. She went to college in Massachusetts, got her degree, and met my father, who had also gone to college. They got married two years before I was born.

  All that made my family objects of awe and suspicion among my aunts and uncles and cousins and their neighbors in Marseilles, and probably accounted for the fact that we didn’t visit my grandmother more often.

  As far as I was concerned, the best part of those trips to Maine was going out with my dad on Uncle Moze’s lobster boat. Uncle Moze brought along a big tub of old fishheads that he used for bait. We chugged around the broad tidal river spewing diesel fumes, and Uncle Moze and my dad snagged the buoys with the boat hook, looped the thick line around the power winch, and hauled up the pots.

  To me it was another kind of fishing. I liked anticipating what we might find inside the big wooden lobster pots. It wasn’t that different from seeing my bobber start to jiggle and wondering what kind of fish might’ve eaten my nightcrawler. I was seriously hooked on fishing of all kinds when I was a kid.

  In those days, lobsters were abundant, and Uncle Moze’s pots generally came up crawling with them. He groped around inside the pot, came out grasping a lobster around its middle, and quickly measured it with his steel lobster ruler. He threw the shorts overboard, and the keepers went into a tub filled with seaweed. He tossed the crabs into a separate tub for my mother. She loved crabs. I can still picture Ma and Gram sitting at Gram’s kitchen table cracking the shells and picking the meat out of a mess of boiled crabs and piling it in Gram’s big glass punch bowl, with “Stella Dallas” or “Our Gal Sunday” playing on the kitchen radio.