Trout Eyes Page 6

  My job was rebaiting the pots. I liked digging my hands around in the tub of smelly fishheads and stabbing them through their eye sockets onto the metal hooks inside the wooden pots. It made me feel useful.

  After we finished hauling pots, we went fishing. Sometimes we dropped handlines weighted with big teardrop-shaped sinkers and baited with hunks of fish or clams into the deep water for cod and haddock and pollack and hake. As I remember it, we caught mostly dogfish. I got a kick out of feeling the vibrating little tugs from 100 feet down there and pulling up the line hand-over-hand, never sure what I’d find flipping around on the end. If it was one of those miniature sharks, Uncle Moze always grumbled and moved the boat.

  When the striped bass were in the river, the men trolled plugs off the stern. My job was to watch the plugs churning along in the boat’s wake and yell if I saw anything. I was too little to hold a rod. Uncle Moze would say, “You don’t want to get yourself drug off the boat.”

  Those stripers were almost as big as I was. They engulfed the plugs behind the boat in a boil the size of a bait tub. They made the stubby boat rods buck and bend, and they zinged line off the level-wind reels, and the men whooped and hollered and cursed and groaned as they tried to bring them in. I knew better than to ask, but there was nothing I wanted more in my young life than the chance to feel one of those muscular stripers on the end of my line.

  I liked catching dogfish on handlines, but striped bass were the fish of my dreams. I figured if I kept my mouth shut and did a good job rebaiting Uncle Moze’s lobster pots, my time would come.

  * * *

  The summer I turned ten I figured might be it. During the long drive to Marseilles my dad kept teasing me about getting drug overboard, and when we got to the toll bridge, he let my little sister give the man our dime. I took that as a hopeful sign. Paying the toll-taker was for little kids.

  When we arrived at Gram’s house, Aunt Glory, the youngest of my mother’s five siblings, was there. This was odd, since we’d gone to her wedding a few months earlier, and she had presumably moved into a trailer with her new husband, a pipe-fitter from Kittery named Norman who was quite a bit older than she. Aunt Glory was about seventeen that summer. She had curly black hair and blue eyes and a chubby face, and unlike my other aunts and uncles, she’d always treated me like an equal. We used to play Go Fish and Parcheesi and listen to rock-and-roll songs on Gram’s kitchen radio. I hadn’t seen Aunt Glory since she got married and moved in with my new Uncle Norman.

  On this day Aunt Glory was sitting in a rocking chair on Gram’s sunporch, just staring out the window. She was wearing a pink terrycloth bathrobe. Her arm was in a sling, and her eyes were red, and she was twisting a handkerchief in her hands, which were resting in her lap. Or, I should say, on her lap. Aunt Glory was quite pregnant. It looked like she was holding a big watermelon under her pink bathrobe.

  I said “Hi” to her, but she didn’t even look at me.

  A minute later my mother and father came out to the sunporch. Mom looked at me and said, “We want to talk to Aunt Glory for a minute, Sweetie,” which meant she wanted me to leave.

  I went into the other room, but I could hear the murmur of voices, my mother’s and father’s and Aunt Glory’s.

  Mom said: “He did that to you?”

  Aunt Glory: “Ayuh.”

  Dad: “Sonofabitch. He kicked you out?”

  Aunt Glory snuffled.

  Mom: “Because of that?” I imagined she was pointing at Aunt Glory’s belly.

  Aunt Glory: “He was drunk. Called me a whore.”

  Mom: “And when was this?”

  Aunt Glory: “Four, five weeks ago, I guess.”

  Mom: “You’re not planning to go back, are you?”

  Aunt Glory: “He’s my husban’. What’m I spose to do?”

  Mom: “You talked to him?”

  Aunt Glory: “Not since then. Moze and Jake went over a couple times, but Norman ain’t been home.”

  Dad: “You better get yourself a lawyer.”

  About then Gram called from the kitchen, said she had corn chowder with oyster crackers for lunch for me and my sister, so I didn’t hear any more about Aunt Glory. Gram’s corn chowder was my favorite food in the world.

  I was just finishing up my second bowlful when Uncle Moze came stomping in. He was a big man with a face like a hatchet. He was wearing black rubber hip boots folded down at his knees and blue jeans and a blue work shirt rolled up over his elbows. He said, “Hiya, Tiger,” and punched me on the shoulder. “Gonna help me haul pots?”

  “You bet,” I said.

  “Stripers’re in the river,” he said, “and the tide’ll be about right. Where’s your old man?”

  I jerked my head in the direction of the sunporch, and Uncle Moze went out there.

  I went outside and leaned against Uncle Moze’s pickup truck so they wouldn’t forget me, and after a while he and my dad came out. They were muttering to each other, and I heard Uncle Moze say, “Always was a good for nothin’ sumbitch.” Then he looked up and saw me and said, “Climb in back, Tiger.”

  So I hoisted myself up into the bed of the truck and found a place to sit amidst the tub of fishheads, the fistful of boat rods all armed with big plugs, the stack of old lobster pots with moss growing on them, the big coil of thick rope, and the case of Narragansett beer.

  When we got to the cove where Uncle Moze kept his lobster boat moored, we lugged the stuff from the truck to his dinghy, piled in, and rowed out to the boat, and pretty soon the powerful diesel engine was thrumming and we were chugging out into the bay. Uncle Moze’s lobster boat was broad-beamed and chunky and solid. It didn’t go very fast, but you had the feeling it would just plow straight through a hurricane.

  Pretty soon we came to the area where Uncle Moze put out his pots, and for the next couple of hours we were busy hauling them in, culling out the lobsters and crabs, rebaiting them, and pushing them back into the water. We ended up with an empty bait tub and two other tubs full of seaweed and lobsters and crabs.

  Then my dad picked up one of the rods, unhooked the plug from the first guide, dropped it over the side, and let it free-spool back until it was about a hundred feet behind the boat. Uncle Moze cut back the engine until we were barely moving.

  “Keep an eye out for birds,” he said to me.

  Maybe ten minutes later, while I was scanning the horizons hoping to spot a cloud of gulls diving at the water, my father grunted. I looked back in time to see the big hole in the water where the plug had been. Uncle Moze threw the engine into neutral, and Dad heaved up on the rod, lowered it, reeled up, and heaved again, and after a while the big striper came silvering alongside. Uncle Moze reached down with the gaff and levered the monster into the boat. It was close to four feet long.

  Uncle Moze and my father were grinning.

  Then, almost as fast as my dad could reel them in, there were four more of those three- and four-foot stripers flopping in the bottom of the boat. Fish were boiling and sloshing all over the river, and the air was alive with squawking, diving gulls and terns.

  Uncle Moze said, “Hey, Tiger. Git yerself a plug out there, why dontcha.”

  I glanced at my dad, and he nodded. “Don’t get drug overboard,” he said. “Your mother would kill me.”

  I made a muscle for him, then picked up a rod, and I was just about to unhook the red-and-white plug and drop it off the stern when Uncle Moze muttered, “Now what the hell?”

  I looked up. Another lobster boat had cut across our wake and was coming up beside us. The guy at the wheel was wearing yellow rubber overalls and a long-billed fisherman’s cap. He was waving his arms and yelling, but over the drone of the engines I couldn’t hear what he was saying.

  Uncle Moze said, “Keep that plug in the boat, Tiger.” He put the engine in neutral, and a minute later the other boat slid alongside. My dad reached out and held onto it.

  Uncle Moze looked at the guy in the yellow overalls. “Damn it anyway, Lyle. Wha
t’re you doin’? We was into stripers.”

  “Got us a floater,” said Lyle. “You ain’t got a radio, do you?”

  Uncle Moze shook his head.

  “Me neither,” said Lyle. “I’m gonna go git the Coast Guard. You better head over there and stay with the damned body.”

  “Well, shit,” said Uncle Moze. “They was bitin’ awful good.”

  Lyle went up on tiptoes and looked into our boat, where our five giant striped bass were laid out side by side like big hunks of cordwood. He whistled. “Damn,” he said. “Well, it cain’t be helped.” He pointed off toward the shore. “He’s over by them reeds. I tied a buoy onto him. Tide’s gonna start runnin’ pretty soon. You better git over there so he don’t git washed away.”

  Lyle put his engine into gear, gave us a wave, and headed across the river to the New Hampshire side where the Coast Guard station was. Uncle Moze steered us to where Lyle had pointed.

  He slowed down as we approached the reedy shoreline, and then my dad said, “Jesus Christ,” and then I saw it. I’m not sure I would’ve known it was a man’s body if Lyle hadn’t said it was. He was floating on his belly with his face in the water and his arms and legs sort of dangling just under the surface, so that just his back was out of water. He looked like a big white turtle. He was wearing a white sleeveless T-shirt and khaki-colored pants, and the skin on his neck and face and shoulders was shiny and swollen and white as lard. A crab had latched onto the side of his face, just under the water’s surface, and some seaweed was hooked around one of his legs. Lyle’s buoy was looped around the other leg.

  My dad leaned close to Uncle Moze and whispered something to him.

  “Ayuh,” I heard Uncle Moze say. “That’s fuckin Norman all right.”

  We idled there beside Uncle Norman’s body for a few minutes, and then Uncle Moze said to my father, “Tide’s takin’ him out. Better gaff him.”

  So my father picked up the long-handled gaff we used for bringing stripers aboard, reached out, and tried to hook it around Uncle Norman’s swollen leg. The sharp curved point sank right in, and I could see little pieces of flesh puff off and form a greenish-white cloud in the water.

  “Don’t look,” my dad said to me over his shoulder.

  Fat chance of that.

  We drifted in Uncle Moze’s boat with Uncle Norman’s dead body for nearly an hour before the Coast Guard boat came speeding across the river and pulled alongside of us. Uncle Moze seemed to know the Coast Guard men, and they talked for a while. Then my dad unhooked the gaff from Uncle Norman’s leg, and Uncle Moze started up the engine, and we pulled away.

  I watched over the stern as they dragged the bloated body over the transom of the Coast Guard boat.

  By then the tide had turned and the birds had disappeared. We trolled around the bay for a while—I got to hold a rod—but the fish were gone. So Uncle Moze headed in, and we moored his boat, loaded the lobsters and crabs and stripers into his dinghy, and rowed to shore.

  * * *

  I got a lot of attention when I told my friends back home about finding my Uncle Norman’s body in the Piscaquata River. In my version of the story, I was the one who spotted the floater, and it was I who rammed the gaff through his leg and held on until the Coast Guard arrived. The girls, especially, loved hearing my story.

  * * *

  My family didn’t get back to Marseilles, Maine again that summer, and the following summer when we went out to help Uncle Moze haul his pots, he said the stripers weren’t in. We trolled plugs around the river for a couple hours anyway, my dad and I each holding a rod, but we never had a hit.

  The next few summers when we went out with Uncle Moze, we handlined for cod and caught mostly dogfish. The stripers were pretty much gone, Uncle Moze said, and it was a waste of time to bother fishing for them.

  * * *

  My father explained it to me several years later:

  When the Coast Guard hauled Uncle Norman’s body onto their boat, they saw what appeared to be a bullet hole in his forehead. Forensic science wasn’t very sophisticated back then, and anyway, nobody had much tolerance for a drunk who’d break his pregnant wife’s arm. They never did catch whoever shot him.

  I remembered that Uncle Moze hadn’t seemed at all surprised when the floater turned out to be Uncle Norman.

  * * *

  By the time the stripers came back into New England waters, Gram and Uncle Moze had died, and Aunt Glory had moved to Florida with her third husband, and I had kids of my own. Whenever I took them out on a boat, I let them hold a trolling rod no matter how little they were. I figured it was better to risk them getting drug overboard than to miss the chance entirely. Besides, you never knew when a dead body would show up and spoil it all.

  PART III

  Flies and Gear

  “The most indispensable item in any fisherman’s equipment is his hat. This ancient relic, with its battered crown and well-frayed band, preserves not only the memory of every trout he caught, but also the smell.”

  —Corey Ford, “Tomorrow’s the Day”

  “. . . neither time nor repetition has destroyed the illusion that the rise of a trout to a dry fly is properly regarded in the light of a miracle.”

  —Harold F. Blaisdell, The Philosophical Fisherman

  “You can transform a wet fly into a dry fly by rubbing it briskly with a Turkish towel.”

  —Ed Zern, How to Catch Fishermen

  11

  The Pink Sarah

  I was sitting at my fly-tying desk tying PMDs and BWOs and Tricos for my summer trip, with frequent daydreamy pauses to gaze out the window at the snowy New England landscape. Montana seemed eons and continents away, but creating a dry fly and visualizing some fat spring-creek rainbow sucking it in made it feel closer.

  I don’t know how long Sarah had been there before I became aware of her. She’d dragged a chair up behind me and was sitting cross-legged on it, her elbows on her knees, her chin in her hands, watching me with those huge brown six-year-old eyes.

  I took the fly out of the vise, bounced it on my palm, and showed it to her. “What do you think?” I said.

  She poked it with her finger. “It’s very small,” she said. “What do you call it?”

  “It’s a Pale Morning Dun.”

  “That’s a pretty name,” she said. “Do you think a fish will eat it?”

  “I hope so. It’s supposed to imitate an insect that they like to eat.”

  She squinted at the little dry fly. “It doesn’t look like an insect to me.”

  “That’s because you’re smarter than a fish.” I patted my lap. “Want to make one?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know how.”

  “I’ll show you. We’ll make a big one for catching a really big fish.”

  She shrugged. “Okay.”

  She scrambled up onto my lap, and with my arms around her and my cheek touching her cheek and my fingers guiding her fingers, we wound some thread onto a big streamer hook. We tied on a marabou tail, we wound on some chenille, we palmered a big hackle feather over it, and we tied off the head with a few half hitches.

  I unclamped the vise and dropped our Woolly Bugger into Sarah’s hand. “Your first fly,” I said.

  She shook her head. “This isn’t mine. You mostly made it, not me. Besides, it’s black. I don’t like black. Black is boring. Can I make my own?”

  “Sure. The first thing to do is select the ingredients. Decide what you want your fly to look like.”

  “I want it to be pretty.” She rummaged through the piles of stuff on my desk and came up with a pink marabou plume, some orange chenille, and a chartreuse hen-hackle feather.

  I talked her through it, reminding her to keep tension on the thread, now and then showing her how to execute a step and then unwinding it so she could do it herself, and she managed to get everything lashed onto the hook more-or-less all by herself.

  When she was done, she unclamped the vise and held her creation in her hand
. She grinned at me. “Do you like it, Daddy?”

  It was, of course, misshapen and lumpy and asymmetrical, not even to mention garish.

  “Your very first fly,” I said. “I love it. It’s quite beautiful. You should give it a name.”

  She squinted at it. “It’s really kind of ugly,” she said, “except for the colors. I think I’ll call it the Pink Sarah.”

  “That’s a pretty name.”

  “Do you think a fish would ever eat it?” she said.

  “This Pink Sarah,” I said, “will definitely catch a fish.”

  * * *

  The smells—mothballs-and-feathers, tacky head cement, bluedun dye bubbling on the stove—are evocative for me still. So are the names junglecock and golden pheasant and peacock, tinsel and floss and chenille, bucktail and hare’s mask and marabou, badger and ginger and grizzly. After half a century, I still can’t sit down to tie a fly without remembering . . .

  In my family, the fly-tying season opened the day after the duck season closed, and it ended when the ice went out on Sebago Lake to signal the beginning of landlocked salmon fishing. Every year on New Year’s Day, my father set up his flytying bench in the living room. Dad tied flies just about every winter evening. When I was a boy, I liked to pull up a chair by his elbow to watch him tie while our old Philco radio played big-band music in another corner of the room.

  After dinner, he unpacked the materials for the evening from the big green breadbox he stored them in, and I soon learned that the brown bucktail and the skein of yellow chenille meant an evening of Dark Tigers, while the grizzly and ginger necks and the woodduck flank feathers meant that a couple dozen Nearenufs, Dad’s version of the Adams, would magically emerge from his vise. When he took out the big hooks and the deer hides, I knew it would be an evening of “hedge-trimming”—spinning and clipping deerhair bass bugs.