First Fish
Fiction by John Vigna
Early morning. The light blue and cold, the jagged mountain peaks sprayed in pink as the sun crests the eastern horizon. A boy stands mid-stream in neoprene waders, wobbling against the water eddying and tugging at his knees, and casts upstream toward a small swell in the middle of the river. The water is low, gin clear, and midges flit against the surface. He’s using a blue dun, smeared with Gink, and the cast touches down softly just above the ripple so it floats over it. It’s been forty days since his father passed and the first time the boy has returned to the river that they had spent so much time on. His father and him had sat here together a year ago, one of the first times the man took the boy out. The fishing had not been good and they ate cheese sandwiches and his father stared upriver as if waiting for something or someone to come along and he told the boy that he sometimes felt scared, scared to die without having lived his life. The boy remembers his father’s eyes were damp and wished he could have said something to take that away. But he just stared at the water and eventually his father wiped his eye on his shoulder before digging into his pocket and handed the boy a butterscotch candy wrapped in gold foil. The boy carefully unfurled the wrapper, put the candy in his mouth, and returned the wrapper back to his father who smiled and slipped it into his pocket.
The morning might be described as quiet but quiet is a word used by those who haven’t spent much time in the wilderness. The boy remembers the taste of butterscotch, the tang of syrupy sugar flooding his mouth. He studies the fly undulating on the water and tightens the line. The river is one long static stretch of sound. Elk bugle downriver. Birds chatter in the trees along the river-banks. Rocks turn and tumble in the river and when he is still, standing hunched over his cast, his unblinking gaze waiting for a snout to rise, the boy sees and hears the fish in one tremendous splash of sound, smashing the blue dun. The boy yanks on the line, sets the hook, and begins to work his reel.
Although he hopes he is wrong, the boy can tell by the pull on the rod that it’s not a big fish and when he sees it leap over the surface of the water, twisting in the stark sunlight, he notes it’s coloured sides — it’s a rainbow — and he should be disappointed because it was browns he came to fish. But brown, rainbow, or Dolly Varden, he’s thrilled by his first hit of the day.
He works the screaming reel, letting the fish pull out a ways, reels him in, careful to keep him away from the riverbanks and from the small placid pool to the right of the ripple. A brown would attack, dive deep in the water, and head straight for the brush along the banks. His father had taught him that. But this rainbow is small, lacks fight, and a moment later, the boy reels it to his knees, the fish laying limp in the clear water.
It’s the first fish he has caught on his own. He won’t mention this to his classmates later that morning at school, already playing the part of the sport in exaggerating his catch, but he won’t be able to fib his mother. It’s small, perhaps five inches, small enough to toss back, and because he’s fishing in a catch and release stream, that’s exactly what he’ll do.
He reaches into the cold water and puts his small hand around the slender, slippery body of the trout. The fish twitches and the boy’s hand recoils, surprised by the strength still coiled in its body. He wipes his hand on his chest and reaches in again, more cautious; the fish is still. The boy teases it out of the water, reaches down for it, and can feel it thrum with life, the small bones of its body wimple in his hand. He can feel his own pulse rising up in his chest and into his throat where it catches. He doesn’t know how long he has until he removes the hook, it can’t be long, how long has it been? Is it too late? His father taught him these things but the words washed over him back then and now the boy can’t remember what to do. He reaches into his vest for his pointed pliers and pries open the fish’s mouth with his hands. The hook is set far back in its jaw, the teeth tiny razorous ridges. When the boy reaches to pull the hook, the fish thrashes violently, its teeth grazes the boys fingers, and the fish plops into the river and lays still for a moment, its gills fluttering in the current, and then runs for a few metres before, inexplicably, it stops. The boy reels him in again, shaken, his forefinger bleeding. He licks his finger and the copper taste of his own blood fills him with more resolve. He reaches down and swiftly picks up the fish. This time he grabs it tight, the fish’s pulse thrumming through his palm, and he pries open the mouth, gets the pliers in but the hook is at an odd angle, coming out through his skin at the back of his jaw. The boy curses to himself for not de-barbing the hook before casting and sees that to yank it out, he will rip out the side of the fish’s mouth. He begins to panic and looks around him, as if his father might appear and there was an answer in the fierce glow of the man’s face, or the sunlight caught on the peaks, the elk bugling, the song of a stellarjay on the riverbank. He senses there’s not much time, places the fish in the water at his knee, gives it an opportunity to get oxygen but the fish wimples slowly and without vigor before suddenly thrashing again. The boy tries again to remove the hook but the fish thrashes against him, its fine dorsal fin slices the boy’s skin between the thumb and forefinger.
The boy begins to cry. He doesn’t remember to cut the line, as his father had once told him, to 890/let the fish go and in time the hook will work itself out, and if he did, this is exactly what he’d do. Instead, he realizes how cruel it is to continue holding it and curses his bad luck that his first fish is one he cannot release. The fish gazes at him with sunlight and sadness in its eye and the boy feels the unbearable weight of what he must do.
The fish twitches in his hand when the boy places it on the rocks at the edge of the river. He lifts a rock and smashes the fish on the topside of the head but he doesn’t do it with conviction and the fish flips and flops over the shoals so the boy does it again and this time the fish stops moving. He doesn’t hit it hard, again, but it’s enough. He’s crying without restraint, cussing at himself for being such a coward, for not having the strength to kill a fish and he can almost hear his father’s low voice teasing him, chuckling at him from the grave and this makes him sob more, and the bawling makes him angry at himself, fills him with shame for being a disappointment to his father and to himself.
He cuts the line just above the hook and lays the fish on a dry stone. He pulls his rod apart and looks down. He considers leaving the fish on the shore like this but it’s a catch and release stream, and someone, he thinks, will find him out. He also fears it will be food for bears and that the fishing spot will be ruined although when he considers this the beginning of an idea, a truth, takes hold of him and he knows he will not fish again not here, not further upstream, not anywhere. He picks up the fish, limp and weighted in his hand, and he carries it to where his bike lays on its side in the grass at the top of the riverbank. He pulls out a plastic bag and drops the fish in it, takes off his waders, stuffs them in his backpack, slides the rod in the side, puts it on his back, and cycles back to town.
He doesn’t notice the elk bugling anymore, nor the birdsong, but it is quieter away from the roar of the river. The mountains are flushed in bright light now and the morning is warm. He pedals furiously down the gravel road, crying openly in the safety of the long stretch before turning at Blackstock’s into town. The plastic bag hangs from his handlebars and he glances at the bag and the road in front of him. At Blackstock’s, the road curves and ahead lies town, a small community centre and the fresh green flush of the baseball diamond with the sprinklers on, the graveyard to the left on a small rise above it all.
But then the bag twitches violently, as if the fish is trying to leap out onto the road. The boy pedals faster, crying again, belittling himself: “you stupid imbecile, dumb, dumb, dumbass.” The bag twitches once more and then is still. The boy rounds the bend and climbs the road to the left, drops his bike at the locked gate, and ducks under it clutching the bag. He strides across the tombstones, careful to walk around the graves instead of over them until he finds the one with his own name on it, next to his father’s and next to his mother’s. It’s a simple stone, Rest in Peace was all his father wanted, the date 1932-1964. His mother’s 1934-, and his own, 1958-. Plastic flowers lay on their side.
His father was a giant of a man; it seems implausible that he could fit anywhere but above ground, alive, the world bursting from his limbs, sunshine breaking free in one of his grins. One clear winter’s night, the boy’s father ran from the house in his boots, bare chested, the mercury at -40, and he saw the moon bright and full. He told the boy that the light had touched him and the sight was so spectacular that he believed right then and there that there was a god. His face shone with sweat, a fact that troubled the boy then considering the cold, and when his father said he would never get to see Him, the boy asked why and the man glanced at the house where his wife stood in the doorway and then at the boy and told him that he was weak, he had always been weak and despite his chances to do right, he had always done wrong. Then he wiped his eye with a knuckle and turned away from the boy and walked toward the house, his lumbering frame seemed to close in on itself as he shrank away from the boy and entered their home.
The boy picks up the vase and resets it so the flowers are upright, standing on his father’s side. He turns the bag and eases the fish out next to the flowers. Its mouth is bloodied but it’s lifeless and solid. The boy brushes it clean with his hands, the brine of fish and river fills his nostrils. For a few days over the last two months, when the moon hung full like a great white hole in the heavens, he saw his father, standing in a wash of light, bare chested, huge, and sad.
The boy turns around in the bright blaze of the morning, the land below open and soft and fierce in the flush of light, and takes off his pack, slides out the flyrod, and lays it next to the fish. He stands in silence, his head bowed, and wipes his eyes with his sleeve. Slips the pack back on, walks out of the graveyard, climbs on his bike, and pedals along the long dirt road toward home. His legs pump furiously, digging in with each rotation, marveling at the strength in the sinew of his thin legs, his lungs bursting, the wheezing coming out of him, a strange, feral sound, one that frightens him, unrecognizable. He slows down at the bend where the refuse dump sprawls across the flats littered with crows perched on fence posts and the ground, pecking away in the dirt, inches the pack off his back and holds it in his right hand, swings it around and around again before releasing it, turning over itself high in the august dome of the blank blue sky, filled with weight but lifting higher into the sunlight where the fishing flies he and his father had made together in the evenings sailed out and hung suspended in the air, floating like ash. The boy turns away, leans over the handlebars, and pedals, the clipped articulation of the chain powered by his own strength, each muscle tensing and releasing, the annunciation of his breath, a long, strained syllable, flowing in and out, profound and solemn in one that was now his own. »