Hart & Boot & Other Stories (20 page)

Afterward, we lay together, and I felt full of magic again, and knew that I could contend with the difficulties that lay ahead. Kasan was still just a bad mood away from being a man-eating reptile, but now I was immune to his bite, which meant I had nothing catastrophic to fear, and I could help him find out what kind of man he should be.

There might be things for me to learn from him, too. I wondered if I’d been missing the point all these years, striving for immortality and godhood at the expense of being human. Kasan was trying to go in the other direction, which certainly made me question some of my assumptions. And all these long years of limiting myself to a month at a time with any given lover... maybe that was a mistake. Maybe there would be advantages to a longer relationship.

“Kasan,” I said, running a fingernail down his chest.

“Hmm?” he said sleepily. He might have been any of my lovers, then, sated, happy, and warm.

“Would you take me to the islands, where you’re from, sometime?”

“Sure,” he said. “We’ll go in a few months, when it’s summer there. It’s beautiful then.”

“I’d like that,” I said.

Bottom Feeding

Graydon sat in a lawn chair beneath a bedraggled weeping willow, by the pond where Shiteater lived. A canvas grocery bag rested in the mud on his left, bulging with his most prized possessions, carefully chosen that morning—a mason jar filled with smooth stones and sea glass that he’d gathered during childhood summers at the beach house; the copy of
Watership Down
his brother Alton had been reading before he died, tattered bookmark still in place; a twist of braided blonde hair Rebekah had given him to remember her by, the summer she went off to Ireland and met Lorrie; the program from the first play he’d ever directed in college. All the things he was finished with. All the things he had to trade.

Graydon sipped strong coffee from his thermos, and watched the sun begin its day’s climb up from the east. Graydon had been here for an hour already, mostly in the dark. He was crying a little, off-and-on, almost absent-mindedly.

A loaded speargun lay across his lap, bought two days before at a sporting-goods superstore in Atlanta for more money than Graydon had expected. The clerk had asked where he was going fishing, and Graydon said, “A pond behind my house.” The clerk had laughed, thinking it was a joke, and gone over the basics of handling the speargun with Graydon, who’d never used anything more complicated than a rod and reel before.

“All right, then,” Graydon said, wiping tears from his cheeks. He lifted the speargun in one hand and the canvas bag of treasures in the other. He waded into the murky green water, up to his waist, and upended the bag upon the water. The braided hair floated, as did the book and program, their pages darkening with water, but the full mason jar sank, ripples spreading around it.

A light rain fell, making more ripples, and thunder rumbled. Those were good omens for this kind of fishing.

“There’s your bait,” Graydon said. “Come on, Shiteater.” He held the speargun as the clerk had shown him, and waited for the thing he hunted to swim up from the depths.

***

The salmon of knowledge lived a long time ago, in the Well of Segais, where the waters ran deep and clear as rippling air. He swam there, thinking his deep thoughts, coming to the surface occasionally to eat the magical hazelnuts that fell into the water from the trees on the bank. Every nut contained revelations, but the salmon was not a mere living compendium of knowledge—he was a wise fish, too, and so chose to live quietly, waiting for the inevitable day when he would be caught and devoured. The salmon dimly remembered past (and perhaps future) lives, experiences inside and outside of time, from the whole history of the land: being blinded by a hawk on a cold winter night, hiding in a cave after a flood, running from a woman who might have been a goddess, or who might have been a witch.

The salmon did not look forward to being caught, and cooked, and eaten, but knowing what the consequences would be for the one who caught him, he had to laugh, insofar as fish (even very wise ones) are able to laugh.

***

Graydon started fishing the summer after he got kicked out of college. Lacking any other direction, still stunned by his brother’s sudden death, Graydon had returned to his hometown of Pomegranate Grove, Georgia, and rented a two-bedroom house with a fireplace, on the edge of town. He had a spare room full of Alton’s things, as he was the sole inheritor—their father was long dead, their mother in a nursing home, victim of early-onset senile dementia. Every day Graydon sorted through the piles of his dead brother’s things, touching objects both familiar and foreign, and one day he found a rod, reel, and tackle box. He and Alton had gone fishing often when they were children, and suddenly that seemed like the proper monument, a way to honor Alton’s memory and simultaneously pass the empty days, so Graydon made a lunch and took the rod and tackle out back, to the pond by the woods behind his house. It wasn’t much of a pond, maybe thirty feet across at its widest, with a few reeds in the shallows and one big weeping willow close to the water. These ponds could be deep, though, and it wasn’t trash-strewn or visibly polluted, so he thought there might be fish.

Graydon sat on the bank and put a flashy red-and-yellow lure on the hook. Probably all wrong for whatever kind of fish lived in this pond, if any, but he didn’t care if he caught anything—he just wanted to sit, and think, and hold the pole, and watch the red-and-white bobber float. That’s what fishing was about, he recalled. Actually catching anything was sort of an optional extra.

He cast the line out into the middle of the pond and settled down with his back against the willow tree, thinking about Alton, who’d taught him how to climb trees, and cheat at poker, and, when they were older, how to take a hit off a bong. Graydon hadn’t used any of those skills in a long time. Alton had taught him to fish, too, though neither one of them had ever been any good at it. Graydon wondered if the two of them had ever fished in this particular pond, and couldn’t remember—it was possible, as they’d tried little fishing holes all over Pomegranate Grove.

The bobber sank under the green surface of the pond, and the rod moved in Graydon’s hands. He reeled the line in slowly, wondering what kind of fish had been fooled by the flashy lure, but whatever had snagged on the hook didn’t move like a fish, or like anything alive. Something dark and round broke the surface, as big as a human head but smooth and shining. Graydon reeled it in the rest of the way and bent over the water to fish it out.

He’d caught a motorcycle helmet, a black one with a star-shaped crack on one side. The line was tangled around the chin strap, and Alton’s flashy red-and-yellow lure was gone.

Graydon turned the helmet over and let the water run out of it, into the pond.

Alton had died in a motorcycle accident, had lost control and smashed into a guardrail on a bridge, then gone flying off the bike into the shallow swamp-water below. He’d landed face-down, probably knocked unconscious, and though his head struck a rock in the water, the blow didn’t kill him—the helmet had protected his skull. Instead, Alton had died by drowning in two feet of water.

Graydon touched the star-shaped crack, then threw the helmet violently back into the pond. Remembrance was one thing, but pulling up something like that was too morbid by half. The helmet hit the water and floated, open end up, like a little plastic boat.

Something broke the surface of the water, mud-brown and slickly shining. It was a catfish, the biggest Graydon had ever seen. Its huge head stayed out of the water for a long moment, teacup-sized black eyes staring at Graydon. Long whiskers sprouted from around its mouth in nasty profusion. The catfish dove under the water again with a flip of its stubby fins, then reemerged beside the floating helmet, its gaping fish-mouth open wide enough to swallow a basketball.

The fish ate the helmet in one bite, and disappeared beneath the ripples.

Graydon whistled. He’d heard of catfish that big—they were the stuff of Southern rural legend. Huge catfish, decades old, and when they were finally caught and cut open, all sorts of things were found in their bellies. If this fish was big enough to eat a motorcycle helmet... well. Graydon wasn’t going to catch a fish like that with Alton’s old rod and reel. There was little chance of catching it at
all
. That fish was older than him by many years, probably, and had doubtless outwitted scores of better fisherman.

Still, that would be something, wouldn’t it? Catching something so big, so old, so wily. Even if he didn’t succeed, it would be fun trying.

And just like that, Graydon had a goal for the summer.

***

Here are some things that have been found inside the bellies of large catfish in the American South:

License plates, diamond rings, steel buckets, beer bottles, lugnuts, picture frames, doorknobs, alarm clocks, boots, credit cards, stolen hotel ashtrays, rubber duckies, cowbells, candles, dinner plates, floppy canvas fisherman’s hats, spectacles, wallets with money still inside, one-armed Teddy bears, other fish, snapping turtles, spark plugs, toy pistols, hubcaps, wheelbarrow tires, coffee cups, thermoses, roofing shingles, human hands, telephones, and screwdrivers.

Here are some things that have never been found inside the bellies of large catfish in the American South:

Solace. Hope. Lost ideals. True love. Things that smell nice. Glory. Everything you ever dreamed of having, but never received. A reason to go on living.

***

On Friday, the week he started fishing, Graydon drove into Atlanta to have coffee with his oldest and most bewildering friend, Rebekah.

Graydon arrived at the Pelican Café first, and took a table by the windows, beneath an art student’s painting of sinister mermaids fencing with human thighbones. He ordered a glass of chardonnay and sipped it, thinking of catfish, mostly, until Rebekah showed up, only fifteen minutes late, her honey-colored hair knotted in a profusion of small and not very tidy braids. She wore white shorts that showed off her legs and a pale-yellow blouse, open at the throat. Graydon had adjusted to the situation with Rebekah long enough ago that he no longer felt a pang at her loveliness, but he still noticed it. They’d grown up together in Pomegranate Grove and dated briefly, in high school, before Rebekah met Lorrie and realized she was a lesbian. After a few bumpy months following that revelation, the two of them had become friends again, though Graydon still had trouble warming up to Lorrie, with her sharp features and her New Age affectations, her astrology and proselytizing vegetarianism.

Rebekah apologized for being late—she might as well apologize for being Rebekah, Graydon thought—and spread her things out on the table. Textbooks, a notebook, highlighters, pens, a cup of coffee, a bottle of beer, all squeezing Graydon onto a tiny edge of the table, with barely room for his wineglass. Rebekah’s things always expanded to fill the available space, and her personality did much the same.

“How’s life?” Graydon asked.

Rebekah shrugged. “Schoolwise, I’m getting fluent in Old English, for what that’s worth. Chaucer’s never been funnier. The freshmen I’m teaching are functionally illiterate, and the professor I’m TA’ing for is more interested in my T&A than my ideas. Lorrie’s gone from vegetarian to vegan, and if I see another bean sprout I’m going to scream. I’ve been sneaking out to eat cheeseburgers for months now, and I’m getting tired of living a dietary lie. Lorrie says my aura’s getting all black and spiky, which I figure can’t be good. But mostly I’m too busy to worry about how I’m doing.” She smiled brightly. “You?”

“I’ve been fishing,” he said, and told her about catching the helmet and seeing the catfish, though he hadn’t seen the fish again in the three days since, despite spending hours at the pond each day.

“I’ve heard of that fish,” Rebekah said. “Dad told me about it. We used to live about a mile from your place, you remember that? At least, I guess it must be the same fish. I’m surprised it’s still alive. Dad said people have been trying to catch it since he was a kid. I think trying to catch that fish used to be a major pastime in the Grove, but I suppose that kind of thing’s gone out of style.”

“I blame video games,” Graydon said.

Rebekah ignored him. “The fish even has a name. Guess what it is.”

“Mr. Whiskers?”

“Sineater. Except when my dad told me about it, he
started
to say ‘Shiteater,’ I think, and then decided to protect my delicate ears from such profanity.”

“Shiteater,” Graydon repeated. “That’s charming. When I catch him, you can come over, and we’ll have a big catfish dinner.”

“I’m coming over anyway,” she said. “You’re going to let me stay the night next weekend, and I won’t take no for an answer. I’ve
got
to get away from Lorrie for a while. She won’t even eat fish anymore, that used to be our big compromise, but now she says it’s ‘morally repugnant.’ She only ever ate salmon anyway, she said everything else was too fishy-tasting. I mean, c’mon, it’s
fish
. What
should
it taste like?”

“Catfish is pretty bland, I guess,” Graydon said.

“It’s not bad, fried with the right spices,” Rebekah said. “So can I come over? You can cook for me, though I don’t think you’ll be feeding me Shiteater, as appetizing as that sounds. You’d need more than a rod and reel to pull him in anyway.”

“I don’t know,” Graydon said, thinking of the mess in his house, all of Alton’s things in the spare bedroom, also thinking of how hard it would be to sleep in the same house all night with Rebekah and not be able to touch her—he hadn’t had sex since a bad one-night stand at school in New York. Rebekah knew that, and she must know that he still had feelings for her; he hadn’t made it much of a secret. But it sounded like things were going badly with her and Lorrie, and Rebekah and Graydon
had
been lovers, before, in dim pre-college antiquity, so...

Rebekah snorted. “Come on. Like you’re too busy? You’ve got too much other stuff to do?”

Graydon didn’t answer, didn’t let any expression touch his face at all.

“Oh, hey, I’m sorry, Gray,” Rebekah said, reaching across the table to touch his hand. “I didn’t mean anything by it, you’re getting your head together, figuring out what you want to do, and that’s fine.”