The Cooler
21st annual tamarack award winner
By John Bresland
(page 2 of 4)
NOTHING—NO MATTER HOW DEFTLY THROWN, catapulted, launched, lobbed, chucked, or heaved—nothing flies with the grace of a lure cast right. After my bamboo rod accidentally broke in half and disappeared down a sewer grate, I set out to perfect my cast on dry ground with the genuine article, my father’s telescopic Shimano rod and spinning reel with the Dyna-Balance rotor and ported handle shank. Do not fuck with me, I hissed at the trees, hooking balled-up socks strewn about the backyard and reeling them in. I plunked lures into spaghetti strainers from across the yard, then across the street, farther and farther away. For serious distance, I tied nuts and bolts to the line and cast them down the street. A hailstorm had dinged up most of the cars on 165th Place, so it didn’t matter much when I plunked one on somebody’s hood.
When dad took me out to a little bass lake in Ludington, it was like getting called up to the majors. We loaded up the boat in the pre-dawn dark and whispered over the electric motor hum as we glided into North Bayou. We had the lake all to ourselves. I landed my first cast amid a cluster of lilies, depositing the lure directly onto one of the floating lily pads—then ruined the beauty of it by turning to see if Dad had noted how masterful a shot it was. He said nothing, though his forehead puckered a bit while he busied himself with his own rig.
“All right then,” he said, blowing into his hands and rubbing them, though it wasn’t cold. “Here we go. Here we go.”
He gave a little laugh. The man loved to fish.
Dad liked to use Hula Poppers, a bass lure that resembles a frog in a grass skirt. The frog floats on the surface, hopping every now and then when you give the rod a sharp tug. If you’re a bass, the Hula Popper looks like breakfast served on a lily pad. Of course, hidden underneath its grass skirt are about nine thousand barbed hooks. In my father’s Muppet universe of a tackle box, the Hula Popper was my favorite. “Can you imagine,” Dad said once, as I ran my fingertip across its sparkling green skin, “some guy in a factory painting these lures all day. All I can say is get an education.” In the winter, I liked to smuggle Dad’s lures and hoard them in my underwear drawer. Hula Poppers. Meps spinners. Rapala minnows. The magic fluorescence of eight-pound test line. If neither imported beer cans nor the translucent paper wrapping of Japanese firecrackers heralded my awareness of beauty in this world, then it was fishing tackle for sure.
The moon over Hamlin Lake was the color of a fresh red penny. You had to keep quiet out there because the smallmouth heard everything, even the crickets—which they sometimes ate, my father said, along with mice and birds if they got hungry enough. The idea of a bass eating a sparrow seemed implausible, but it excited me. I gave the rod a little jolt to pop the lure. There was slack in the line, so I cranked the reel some more, then tried again. Still the line was slack—I was reeling in air. Something wasn’t right. My father was tying off his lure, paying no attention. I wondered. I wanted to ask. Had my knot failed? Had the lure flown from the line during the cast? It couldn’t have—we both saw it land. We heard the rubbery slap of the lure against the lily pad. We saw the water ripple around it.
Then I see it. A coil of moonlight spiraling down from the tip of my rod into the water like a stretched-out Slinky. My line—tracking slowly toward the boat. Right about when it dawns on me that fishing lures can’t swim, the Slinky hammers down like piano wire. The rod comes alive in my hands. It’s running a hundred thousand volts. The world goes white. I hear the Shimano screaming. It’s zipping out drag. Droplets of water hitting my face. A fish.
“Dad. Dad. Dad.”
“Goddamn,” he says. “Set the hook.” His voice is thick, unrecognizable.
“Dad?”
“You got a fish. Set the hook.”
“Set what?”
TO SET A HOOK TAKES A FRACTION OF ONE SECOND and requires little in the way of high motor skills. Yet of all the steps required to land a serious fish in an honorable way—without using a drop net, say, or a stick of dynamite—it is the one most frequently botched. A proper hookset, according to The Ultimate Bass Fishing Resource Guide, goes down like so:
Upon feeling the strike, turn to face the fish. Drop the rod tip quickly and snap the slack out of the line with a fast overhead strike. This will pound home the hook point the same way a hammer pounds a nail into a board.
Precisely as my father advised. My problem was that the bass didn’t strike. It snuck. It snuck the lure and headed straight for the boat, causing the line to double back upon itself. The lack of tension made setting the hook impossible. The bass swallowed the lure. So instead of setting the hook into his jaw when I finally reeled out the slack, I set the hook into the lining of its stomach. Instead of playing the fish for sport, I muscled him into the boat hard and fast, disappointed by the ease of it, as yet unaware that I had shred its internal organs into strips. This became clear when Dad netted the fish and peered into its mouth, saying, not quite under his breath, “Shit. Shit. Shit.” It was the language he reserved for the lost cause, the hopeless situation that nevertheless required massive amounts of concentration.
“Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.” With his free hand he rooted though the tackle box in search of the de-hooker, a sort of needle-nose pliers designed for extracting swallowed lures, then inserted the tool deep—impossibly deep—inside the fish’s gullet. But the most he is able to extract is a thick wet sucking sound, and if I am not yet certain that this fish is doomed, my father’s chatter, “Fucking mother of fuck,” takes on a religious quality that doesn’t bode well one bit.
The bass continues to wiggle and fight. And when the wiggling stops and the bass hangs limp, Dad ceases his digging and pulls the fish through the water to revive it, repeatedly, every minute or so. Each time the bass revives a little bit less than the time before and eventually not at all. Then Dad begins to force. You hear the sound of tissue and tendons snapping, not unlike the sound of weather stripping getting ripped from the trunk of a Buick. When at last he frees the lure, Dad holds the bass in his hands with the delicacy of a newborn and begins pulling it gingerly through the water, back and forth, sluicing water through the gills while I inhale and exhale, back and forth, until he finally pushes it away, the shadow of the world’s greatest fighting fish gliding down and disappearing beneath a ripple of dawning light.
STUCKEY AND I LIKED TO SIT on the roof of his garage, where we enjoyed an unobstructed view of Mary Hobbs’s bedroom window across the alley. If we gave it enough time, Stuckey said, we’d see something hot, some teenage girl-on-girl, some bare tit. Some unobstructed Mary Hobbs. But we never did. Mostly we just tore up roofing shingles and threw them at Thor, a vicious dog that belonged to the Berseaus, two doors down. Stuckey reacted sympathetically when I disclosed my fear of fish.
“Your problem makes sense,” he said. “Everything you describe—the puking, the dizziness, the feeling you’re gonna pass out. It’s actually pretty common.”
I was about to unload another shingle on Thor, and balked when Stuckey so readily understood my predicament.
I said, “You’ve heard of this?”
“Absolutely.”
Relief surged through me like adrenaline. I launched a shingle high and wide. It hooked toward the beast then veered off, missing by a hair. I thought, of course. Who wouldn’t be affected by the sight of a sleek beautiful fish gasping for air, its rainbow colors turning black from suffocation? At the very least, at the absolute bare minimum, I told Stuckey, why not kill the fish as soon as it’s caught? Why not saw their heads off as soon as we get them in the boat? At least then they wouldn’t die so slowly.
“Has your mom told you the medical terminology for your problem?”
“She doesn’t know my problem. How come?”
“We did a unit on the brain once. I think I might be able to explain this.” Stuckey peeled a fresh shingle from the roof and sidearmed it. A lovely throw, snaking through treetops, cutting down maple leaves as it flew across the Berseaus’ yard and scored a direct hit. The dog shrieked. “In layman’s terms, JB, I believe you are what’s called an‘unbelievable pussy.’”
“Fuck you, Stuckey.”
“Or, if you prefer, Vaginous Gigantis,” he said. “I believe that’s the medical wording. Ask your mom if you want, because my Latin’s a little rusty.”
Jeffrey James Stuckey: age thirteen. Around the neighborhood we were best friends. At school he tended to forget who I was. If on Sunday I stayed overnight at his house playing Atari, by Monday he passed me over at the lunch table. He was four years older than me but, on account of a growth hormone deficiency, looked right about my age. Supposedly the illness had taken a toll on the size of his business; some of the kids at school had begun referring to him as Señor Micropenis. I had yet to confirm this. Though perhaps this explained why Stuckey had lately taken to wearing a padlock inside his underwear and was always daring me to punch him in the balls.
“Fuck off.”
“See there, JB? That’s your sickness talking. Vaginous Gigantis, or, if you prefer, your gigantic gaping vagina. Be strong. You can beat this thing.”
“Fuck you.”
Stuckey ringed his mouth like a fish and pretended to gasp. “Poo-see… poo-see…,” folding his arms inward like little fins, swimming around the rooftop. “JB, you are the essence of pussy,” he said. “You are a frozen can of concentrated cunt juice.”
