The summer of 1968 was far too much for the boy. He was not able to take it all in, to process all the new things. So, he went fishing instead. He picked up the cane pole his Dad had bought him for his birthday back in the spring, before everything. It was in two pieces, long and skinny, the color of cherry wood. There was a red bobber tied two feet from the sharp hook at the end of the line. He could hear them clicking against each other as he walked down the gravel road that led to the pond. It was about a mile from home and his Mother didn’t know where he was, only that he had promised to be back in time for dinner. Her last words to him as the screen door slammed shut were, “If you climb a tree then fall out and break your leg, don’t come running to me.” She always laughed when she said it, and she said it every single time he left the house on summer days in 1968.
It was his tenth trip around the sun. There was a birthday party for him in April. All his family were there and most of his friends. It was fun right up to the moment when one of his uncles announced that someone had been shot in Tennessee. All the adults gathered around the car radio and listened to the news while smoking cigarettes. The boy watched them from across the back yard and remembered the day when bus number 44 carrying his older brother and two sisters came home early from school because somebody shot the President. But this time the conversation coming from the grownups seemed different. Nobody was crying.
Someone said, “Its a terrible thing and all, but if you ask me the man was asking for it.” Then his mother shot back with, “That’s a shameful thing to say. He was a decent and brave man.” Then another, “This country is going straight to hell.” The boy heard this a lot, especially after dinner when his father turned on the RCA to watch the news. Everything was going to hell.
He didn’t understand any of it and didn’t care to. He liked it better when his parents were thinking about anything else besides the news. He thought about asking one of them what was going on in the world but each time the subject of “the country” came up, it would end up in shouting. So, the boy ignored the crackling static of the radio and the stern gray man with black rimmed glasses on the RCA.
When June came around it was his sister’s turn to celebrate a birthday. June 5th. Everyone gathered over at his grandparent’s trailer in the back yard of his uncle and aunt’s house. Everything was fun until his grandfather’s soap operas got interrupted by one of those “Special Reports” which seemed to be happening every other day. This time there was a shy, smiling man speaking into a microphone in a big room filled with cheering people. When he was done he walked off the stage and made his way through the crowds who all seemed to want to shake his hand. All the while a man was talking in the background. Everyone gathered in the tiny space of the trailer where grandpa smoked his pipe and watched his stories and strained to hear what he was saying. Then something happened and suddenly everyone was running and the man’s voice got louder but he was even harder to hear. The boy saw the grownups all lean in closer and cover their mouths with shaking fingers. Someone else had been shot. The shy smiling man. Then, there he was, lying on his back in a pool of blood. His mother began to cry and quickly led all of the kids back outside. He thought, is this going to happen at every birthday party now?
Then it was July and there were no birthdays in July.
The boy found the worn path that led down to the pond from the gravel road. He walked through weeds almost as tall as he was on either side before breaking into a clearing where he could see the blue water. The sky was bright and clear and it was early enough in the day before it got hot. He found the spot, a place worn down to dirt. Someone had laid a couple 2x6 planks at the water’s edge for people to stand, but today he had the place to himself.
He took his mother’s garden spade from his back pocket and walked along the pond’s edge to the soft soil where the earthworms lived. Three spade fulls of spongy soil yielded five fat night crawlers which he shoved down in the pocket of his shorts. He could count on hearing about it from his mother when she got around to doing the wash. He stood firmly on the wood planks and watched a couple of buzzards circling high above him. He would have given anything to be a bird, to be able to soar far above this strange new world.
After assembling the pole into one ten foot piece, the boy reached into his pocket and grabbed one of the squirming worms, held the slippery skin still enough to find a thick one inch piece, then bore down hard with his fingernails until the worm had been reduced to a bleeding mass in his hands. Then he slipped the still squirming piece onto the sharp point of the hook until the point was completely covered. In one smooth motion he slung the hook and bobber out into the water where it settled fifteen feet off shore. The ripples sent out from the entry of the line into the water settled down and soon the bobber lay still on the surface. Then he began the wait. It was why the boy so loved fishing—the waiting.
“Why do you like the waiting?” People would ask him.
“Because it gives me time to rest my head,” he would answer and all the grownups would laugh.
What they didn’t know is that his head needed resting. The thoughts in that ten year old head were colliding with a world where people shot each other out of the clear blue and everybody had something to say about it except him. News would come about people he didn’t know far away, people he had never met and nobody else had ever met. But the news would make people sad or angry and sometimes his mother and dad would cry. Something was happening that seemed a thousand miles from the little pond hidden behind the tall grass, under the giant power lines. He could hear them popping and hissing far above his head. They drooped slightly over the surface of the water from the giant metal monsters from which they were strung, one in the distance to the north and the other behind his head to the south half obscured by the tall oaks. They looked like silver stars with legs. His dad had told him that if it weren’t for those silver stars and the popping and hissing wires we would all be in darkness. It was the same thing the preacher always said about sin, how it always left you in darkness. It was one of the million things that the ten year old boy didn’t understand.
The waiting ended with the dancing of the bobber slowly across the water then the plop when it disappeared under the ripples. He tugged firmly upward, but not too firmly. His dad had taught him to be careful to not pull the hook out of the fish’s mouth too soon. But when he pulled, the hook was set and the tip of the long pole bent nearly in half under the strain. A yellow perch the size of his dad’s giant hands danced on the end of the line as it lifted out of the water. The sun reflected off its golden scales as it wiggled back and forth in the air. When he got it on the ground he removed the hook which was barely attached. He had been lucky not to lose him to all the wiggling. Then he slipped his thumb into his gasping mouth, picked him up and held it high for a closer inspection. It was a beautiful creature, this fish. His scales looked like a painting of a fish. Its spiky tail, a dark and dirty green color. He was fat around the middle and the large eyes staring at him gave off the impression that the fish considered the two of them equals, and at a crossroads. “Do you put me on a line or in a cooler and take me home to eat, or do you put me back where I belong?”
When the boy turned his eyes away from the fish and the sun he saw the splash of red in the tall grass near the earthworm patch. He hadn’t noticed it earlier. It was probably an empty bait container left behind by some kid too lazy to dig his own worms. He threw the perch back in the water, laid his pole on the ground and walked toward the red.
It was matted and and water-stained by rain. No telling how long it had been laying like this in the open. He picked it up. It was heavy, a magazine, the back cover facing up, an ad for a Corvette. He turned it over and saw a beautiful women wearing a red blouse smiling sweetly.
Playboy, May 1968.
He had heard of Playboy. All ten year old boys had heard of Playboy. The closest he had ever come to one was passing by the magazine rack at 7/11 on the way to the ice cream case in the back. But now here was one in his hands. He looked around to be sure he was alone and felt his heart beating faster in his chest. He slowly opened the swollen and moldy pages and saw an ad for Miller High Life. Then a thick page in the middle, more substantial and dryer than the rest. He took the thick page in his hands and noticed that it was more than one page. As he opened it, one page became three and the boy felt the heat of the day burning on the back of his neck. There was a woman holding a guitar in one hand, her other hand resting on her bare thigh. The sunlight reflected off the first two female breasts he had ever seen. They stood out above the guitar like ripe fruit and the boy wondered if he was in heaven or hell.
He knew enough about the female body to know that he shouldn’t be gawking at a naked one. He quickly shut the magazine and threw it back on the ground where he had found it. The image of the woman with the guitar would never leave him for the rest of his life. When he got back to the wood planks he was sweating and feeling warm and alive. His hands were shaking when he baited the hook. When he began the wait he looked up and saw three buzzards circling, lower now in tighter circles. The bobber was still and the boy’s head was no longer resting. All he could think about was how fast life had suddenly begun to move. People getting shot. Adults arguing. Women with no clothes and beautiful breasts smiling at him.
By the last week of August the summer had gotten dreadfully hot and dry. After Labor Day he would be back in school. The long summer was drawing to a close. Now the RCA was on and everyone was watching a big auditorium with tall signs with the names of the different states. The people under the signs wore crazy looking hats and looked to be having a great time even though they were crammed in the place like sardines. Then the screen cut to the streets outside where men with white helmets were swinging big wooden sticks at groups of wild-eyed angry people and carting them off in dark vans with the word POLICE on the sides in big block letters. His mother and dad were horrified and began praying that Jesus would return but this time not someday but today, right this very minute.
That night as he lay in his bed in the dark unable to sleep, his older brother was turning the dial of his transistor radio slowly, stopping each time he heard the new song he liked which seemed to be playing all over the dial.
“Do you think the country is going to hell?” The boy asked?
Across the room his brother answered, “I think the country is already in hell. We’re just trying to find a way out.”
Once again he found the song he liked and started singing along softly. The boy listened and thought about the woman and her guitar. He thought of the men in the white helmets and the violence raining down on the heads, backs and arms of raggedly dressed boys in the streets outside the auditorium.
Now the singer was screaming and sounding frantic. He asked his brother, “Is this song happy or sad? I can’t decide.”
“Listen to the words, you dope! ‘Take a sad song and make it better.’ There’s nothing sad about this song. It’s more like a celebration.”
“But, why is he screaming?”
“Go to sleep. You’re too little to understand a song this great.”
Just before the boy drifted off to sleep he wondered what it would be like to be able to understand the world like his big brother did. He wasn’t sure he would like it, this ability to understand. Maybe he would rather not know whether the country was going to hell or already there. Maybe he didn’t want to know why people shot each other out of the blue or why men with sticks beat people bloody in the streets. Maybe he just wanted to go fishing and give his head time to rest. He thought of the fat perch with the glistening scales asking the question about its fate. He needn’t have worried.
I always throw the fish back.
