The Cooler
21st annual tamarack award winner
By John Bresland
(page 3 of 4)
THE MOST FISH WE EVER CAUGHT IN A DAY was five, six, maybe seven tops. Eight by some tragic miracle. By my own worst-case estimate, Dad’s new cooler was big enough to hold fifty or more, its capacity equal to that of a kiddie pool. Since our boat itself was not much more than a kiddie pool with a motor bolted to the stern, Dad and Uncle Billy had to rip out the back seats to make room. We stood by and watched them do this, Stuckey and me handing off tools as needed. It was Memorial Day weekend. The Harvester strike was by now the longest strike in U.S. history. When Dad called out for the reciprocating saw, I knew he was rushing the job. Word had gotten around. Vast schools of perch, millions and millions of them, hitting bare hooks about three miles off Lake Michigan’s south shore. Between the four of us, Dad said, and the cooler, we stood a good chance of nabbing every last one of them.
HAD YOU ASKED ME IN THOSE DAYS what was the more complicated task, putting a manned space capsule into orbit or backing a boat trailer into Lake Michigan, I would have hesitated. When my father prepared to launch the boat, the air got charged with strange particles, a bad energy that buzzed in your head. The man couldn’t back up a boat trailer. He grew tense just thinking about it, just as soon as the lake came into view as we motored northward on Lakeshore Drive. You saw it in the way he kept checking his blind spot, the fabric of his T-shirt binding up around the shoulders and neck while cars sped past. At the southside public access ramp on Lake Michigan it was worse. The place was overrun with people like us. Hundreds, thousands of us, our inbound fish coolers stocked with aluminum-flavored beer and geometrically shaped sandwiches. We were desperate for leisure—yet willing to take time out of our day to observe someone else’s disaster.
When Dad prepared to launch the boat, adults who didn’t know better liked to volunteer their services. They wanted to be hand-signal givers. They wanted to gesture and point as we backed into the water. Because mirrors and headchecks alone weren’t enough. You wanted human agency. You wanted someone who’d been drinking since dawn to guide you and your family, encased in two tons of steel and glass, backwards into the water. One time, shortly after returning from the war, Uncle Billy felt up to the task. His experience signaling medevac landings under enemy fire qualified him, he felt, to guide my father’s boat trailer into a standing body of water. Neither Billy nor my father ever disclosed what happened next. All that’s known is that my father somehow missed. And now Billy, who survived two tours of Vietnam more or less intact, refuses to get out of the car until the boat is safely afloat.
Billy hunched down in the passenger seat while Dad plotted his course. Stuckey and I sat in back. From here you could see the largest steel plants and oil refineries in the world, where my father and uncle worked, rising from the shore like black windowless cities. Behind us, at the bottom of the textured concrete incline, was the same lake water they pumped through the plants to cool them. The water was the color of mustard, rumored to be flammable. While my father made his final frantic headchecks, Uncle Billy turned to Stuckey.
“We’re gonna need a little help back there, little man. Think you can flag us in?”
Stuckey said, “Sure,” and bolted from the car without so much as asking how one would do such a thing.
I thought, Sure Stuckey. You do that.
Stuckey’s disease made him fearless. He shied from nothing, and always freely ventured out of his league. It irritated me. Because of his small size, because of his hormonal deficiency, the world bore its weight a little lighter on Stuckey. If he took a risk and failed—hogged the basketball, say, and chucked a low-percentage shot from the three-point stripe—hey, no big deal. It was the disease that failed. Not Stuckey.
The Buick rocked when Dad shifted to reverse, his eyes watery and wide in the rearview mirror as we commenced our lurching descent.
I find myself eager to observe Stuckey’s form. I want to mark the precise instant his breezy hand signals break down to a flailing animal panic. The Hand Signal Givers always begin casually. They start by waving us back, back toward the water as if it couldn’t be easier. At least until my father’s abrupt heel-toe style kicks in—the way he compensates for uncertainty in the outside world by acting with extreme decisiveness behind the wheel. But Stuckey, it turns out, doesn’t wave casually. He doesn’t wave at all. Instead, he looks down the ramp to check that it’s clear, then gives my father the thumbs-up. That’s it. That’s all he does. When Dad hesitates, Billy tilts his passenger mirror inward and I can see a little fisheye version of Stuckey reflecting back.
“He says you got a clean shot, Brother.”
The brake pedal clunks loose and we are moving down. At the halting speed of a silent movie, the water rises to meet us. On any given day, here is where the trailer veers into a jackknife. Here is where a beach ball blows into our path and causes massive overreaction on Dad’s part. But not today. Today the boat plunges straight into the lake, the rear bumper of the car hovering out past the waterline when Stuckey hops onto the hitch and rides it another couple of feet. Just when I think we’re about to be carried off by Lake Michigan, Stuckey draws his fingers into a fist and pops it on the lid of the trunk. Thunk. Like it couldn’t be easier.
OUR BOAT WAS AN ALUMINUM STARCRAFT. It was small and light, and you were likely to see as many of them floating on Lake Michigan as alewives gone belly up. What set it apart was the 140-horse Johnson outboard. It was the same engine they used to drive double-decker houseboats up the Mississippi. Holstered in our little Starcraft, that Johnson was obscene in all the right ways. The guy at the marina refused to install it. He said it would be like strapping a jet engine to a motorcycle. I thought, Why not? Why not do that? My father seemed to agree, and did the job himself. He crammed all those horses into our little boat, just as he crammed The Cooler, effectively transforming the Starcraft into a high speed fish receptacle. On account of the engine’s heft, the boat floated unevenly, ass-down, nose-up, and passengers were invited to ride up front for ballast. So equipped, the boat’s top speed was unknown, just a tantalizing theoretical number beyond the reach of the speedometer. And that, my father said, was real top speed. The speed you didn’t have the guts to go.
Dad steered us north by northeast, until what surrounded us was a grey-blue sky that we drew a line through the middle of. On the boat we pissed into a rusted Folgers Coffee can, then dumped it into the lake. I gotta go to the can was the joke, and the coffee can was the custom. I was good at the can. Pissing inspired in me a competitive rigor, and I liked to time my leaks to coincide with dramatic conditions—the boat short-hopping whitecaps, say, or cracking the whip on a waterskier. Adults had difficulty with the can. Women tended to squat nervously above it, as if they’d been led into some kind of trap. Uncle Billy kneeled delicately. Dad held it up to himself as if it were a doll house commode, always somehow surprised when the piss ricocheted off the metal onto his clothes and hands.
When it was my turn for a go, Dad cranked the wheel to throw me off mid-stream. Even as I stumbled, homing in on that can was easy. There was a certainty to pissing in the can—even as it skidded across the deck. If I were a better person now or then, more caring or compassionate regarding our fresh-water friends of the deep, I might have found less enjoyment in all of this. After all, that big cooler was waiting in back to be filled with ninety-nine dead perch. That’s how many fish we would catch today and suffocate: ninety-nine. Fourteen of which would be caught and subsequently filleted by yours truly. And yes—this would bother me. But there are other forces at work here. The speed of the boat. The rush of the blood. The hammering wind. Let’s face it: if you want to look backward and learn something, you’ve got to keep your childhood traumas in perspective.
WHEN DAD THROTTLED down the Starcraft we feathered the water and slowed to a celestial drift. Gone were the Wicker Park sunbathers to the west and the steel plants to the south—though you could still make out the smoke stacks floating in the distant haze, feeding into the clouds. Dad reminded us that it wasn’t pollution: “If the smoke’s white, it’s only steam.” Over a quarter century later, as I write this, I can’t say for certain whether he was correct—that dark smoke is poison and white smoke only steam—or if his statement pretty well sums up one of the greatest lies in modern history.
Much of what the man said was implausible. He said that fish can’t feel pain. He said it with conviction. His brother backed him up, and Stuckey piled on, too, stating the facts as they occurred to him: “It’s commonly known, JB, that fish can’t feel pain. They adapted this wondrous trait over billions of years in order to withstand vicious lamprey attacks.”
“Stuckey, how could you even know something like that?”
“It’s called history. Try it sometime.”
I was never able to match wits with Stuckey. Even if what he possessed wasn’t actual knowledge, he nevertheless knew how to use it, whatever it was.
We replenished our beverages, baited our hooks, dropped our lines. Today’s venture bore little resemblance to our
solemn hunt for bass. Perch weren’t bass—not by a long shot. Perch were smallish, flat, crappie-like. They had pluck, sure. They were spunky. But no man in the history of the world ever told a fish story about a half-pound lake perch. Instead of the priestly reverence my father observed while bass fishing, today he flipped on the transistor radio and did his best Gordon Lightfoot, manually wiggling his larynx with his fingers while he sang, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”
Uncle Billy proposed that we pass the time with a few rounds of Better Than Honky. It was a word game we played until the fish started biting.
“Nephew—you go first.”
The object of Better Than Honky was to come up with a word, any word, that insulted white people as much as nigger insulted blacks. So far, nobody had ever come close.
“Super Fat Honky,” I said.
“Too wordy. Go Brother.”
“Cracker,” my father said. Everybody laughed.
Billy pointed his beer can at Stuckey and crushed it. “You. Go.”
“Heinous…white…ness.”
“I like that. Original. Nephew, go.”
“Mud shark?”
“Sorry. That’s for women only.”
Another of Dad’s implausible facts: babies born to mixed-race couples emerged from the womb with bright orange hair.
“It’s just sad,” he said, shaking his head. “These babies are marked from birth. And I’ll tell you what. I feel sorry for them.” In reality, the only orange hair baby I’d ever met was Rusty McCune, and Rusty was Irish like us. Dad had also maintained that the real nutrition of a potato was stored entirely in the skin. He said that what mom peeled off and tossed into the trash was, in fact, the essential thing we needed to live. The fact that fish don’t feel pain was in this league of implausibility.
