Hart & Boot & Other Stories (21 page)

Graydon nodded, but he didn’t think Rebekah believed what she’d just said—for her, life
was
work, being active, moving forward. She wouldn’t be treading water if she were in Graydon’s position. Hell, she’d never have let herself get into Graydon’s position in the first place, blowing off classes, avoiding advisors, finally being “invited to pursue graduate studies elsewhere,” as he’d been. Rebekah didn’t have much patience for self-pity.

“Sure,” he said. “Next Friday?”

***

Salmon aren’t much like catfish. Salmon are beautiful, insofar as fish can be beautiful, with silver scales and graceful bodies. Catfish are ugly, whiskered, mud-colored, slow. Salmon are wiser than other fish, wiser than many people, wiser than some bears. Catfish are not wise, but they are wily. Salmon, it is said, eat hazelnuts. Catfish eat shit and garbage and dead things. Salmon are patient as gods, only hurrying to spawn. Catfish are patient as death, only hurrying to feed. The flesh of salmon is delicious. The flesh of catfish is bland as rainwater. Salmon sometimes grant wishes, when that seems the wise course. Catfish can grant wishes, too, but different wishes, for different reasons.

Salmon know more than catfish, but catfish remember everything.

***

That weekend, Graydon studied how to catch giant catfish. It was surprisingly uncomplicated, at least in theory, according to the books and websites he consulted, but the definition of “giant” seemed to be thirty or forty pounds, which he thought was far smaller than Shiteater. He looked further, and discovered that the largest catfish ever caught in the U.S. had come from a pond in Tennessee, and weighed one hundred and eleven pounds. Graydon had no idea how big Shiteater was, but he suspected it was bigger than that. The record-breaking fish had been caught with deep-sea tackle, but one trip to a sporting goods store showed Graydon that he couldn’t afford that kind of equipment, not with the dregs of his student loans running out.

Still, Graydon was hardly an expert on catfish, so perhaps he’d overestimated Shiteater’s size. Starting Monday he tried the recommended approaches for catching giant catfish from the shore, setting multiple poles and lines on the bank, with hooks set at various depths. He tried different baits, from small fish to rotten chicken and beef, but none of it worked, and the bait came out again sodden but untouched, and there was no sign of the big fish at all, not even a ripple.

Graydon didn’t catch
anything
, as if there were no other fish in the pond at all, which he supposed was possible. Shiteater could have eaten them all. By Wednesday Graydon had given up on catching the monster, already bored and frustrated by the effort. It had been hubris to think he could catch such a monster, just one more instance of his reach exceeding his grasp.

On Thursday he sat on the bank with his dead brother’s fishing rod jammed into the mud, line in the water, staring at the sky. The fishing rod was almost a formality now, just a prop, set-dressing. It justified his sitting by the water, in the shade, listening to the willow’s drooping branches sway in the breeze.

The rod fell into the water. The bobber was submerged—had Shiteater bitten the hook and pulled in the rod? Graydon splashed into the pond, up to his knees, going after the rod, which was already floating away.

He reached for the rod... and something passed before him, brushing against his legs. He looked down, and there was Shiteater,
far
bigger than one hundred and eleven pounds, as big around as a barrel. Shiteater took the fishing rod into its mouth, like a dog picking up a thrown stick, and dove with it, disappearing.

Graydon stared down into the water for a moment, then shouted and slapped at the water angrily. “You fucking fish! Bring that back!” Shiteater ignored food, it ignored everything, but it tried to eat his brother’s
fishing rod?
What kind of beast was this?

Graydon slogged out of the water and sat, dripping, beneath the willow tree, thinking dark thoughts about fishing with dynamite, or about blasting Shiteater with a shotgun, but he didn’t have dynamite, or any guns at all.

Something drifted on the surface of the water, eddying gradually toward the bank, until it floated just offshore in front of the willow. Graydon leaned forward to look at it.

It was a dreamcatcher, a wooden hoop threaded with string and hung with wet feathers. Alton had given one of those to Graydon years and years ago, after a trip he took to an Indian reservation in the Southwest. Graydon had lost it in one of his many moves, and he’d missed it, a little. Graydon reached into the water and lifted the floating dreamcatcher out.

It was the same. The same snapped threads, the same gray-and-white feathers, the same size, everything. It was the dreamcatcher he’d lost, the one Alton had given him, he’d almost swear to it.

Graydon looked at the pond for a while. He’d baited his hook, that first day, with one of Alton’s lures. He lost the lure, but found a motorcycle helmet. Now he’d lost Alton’s fishing rod, and found a dreamcatcher.

The thoughts that occurred to him were ridiculous.

But, on the other hand, they were testable.

Graydon went back to the house, and came back a bit later, carrying some of the things Alton had left behind.

***

There are myths about salmon, but catfish don’t warrant much more than folklore. Some say that catfish bite well when it thunders, or that they’re easy to catch when it rains; that catfish will bite a hook dipped in motor oil, or that you’ll be lucky fishing for them if your pockets are turned inside out. If an owl hoots in the daylight, the catfish are easy to catch.

All of those beliefs are true. But some of them confuse cause and effect.

***

By nightfall, Graydon had thrown almost all of Alton’s possessions into the pond, and received an equal number of things in return. Throwing in Alton’s class ring brought back one of his brother’s running shoes, his initials written in permanent marker on the inside of the tongue. Throwing in freshman algebra class notes brought back a sparkling geode Alton had used as a bookend, though Graydon had to fish that out with a net after Shiteater swam repeatedly over the spot where it rested, like Flipper the dolphin from that old TV show, trying to explain something to the stupid humans. Shiteater ate almost everything Graydon threw him. Graydon intentionally threw in a few things with no connection to Alton—a used paperback he’d picked up at a yard sale for a dime, a salt shaker that came with the house, a handful of change. Shiteater ignored those things, and nothing came back in return. After an hour of casting in and receiving back, Graydon sat by a pile of returned objects, all of them things lost for years before.

“Did you eat my brother, you fuck?” Graydon asked, but knew it was absurd. Alton had died in a body of water that was little more than a creek, miles from here. The connection between his brother and Shiteater was stranger than that, more complicated, more mysterious. Perhaps it would prove too mysterious for Graydon to understand. When it grew dark, Graydon started to gather the objects Shiteater had given him, or allowed the pond to give him, or whatever. But why would he want to keep those things? They were just lost things, some with a charge of sentimental value, most lacking even that. Graydon began tossing the objects into the water, as he’d thrown back the helmet that first day, and Shiteater rose up again and swallowed it all, wolfing the things down as quickly as Graydon could throw them in.

It was hard to tell in the dark, but Shiteater seemed larger than he had been before. Nothing new came floating out of the pond after Graydon finished throwing everything in, and Shiteater didn’t break the surface of the black water again once he finished eating. Graydon kept only the dreamcatcher—he suspected he might need it, as nightmares seemed inevitable— and trudged back to his house, thinking.

***

In psychoanalysis, “fishing” refers to a process whereby subconscious thoughts, feelings, and motivations are drawn up randomly, without any attempt to order or explain them until later. The process is poorly named, since it is more like dredging or using a dragnet than the precise efforts of an angler—it pulls up everything, garbage and treasure alike. It’s a technique that only a catfish could love.

A good fisherman, on the other hand, knows just what sort of bait to use, and where to cast his line.

***

Graydon woke early on Friday morning and decided to continue his experiments.

He threw in one of his mother’s good china cups and received a small jar, labeled with a piece of masking tape, that contained the gallstones she’d had surgically removed when Graydon was fifteen. He remembered visiting her in the hospital, remembered her telling him that the doctors were going to give her the gallstones, how she planned to throw them into the ocean next time they went to the coast. She was already starting to lose it, then, her mind beginning its slow unraveling, but it had seemed like simple eccentricity in those days, not the full-blown dementia it would become.

Graydon looked at the jar for a while. This was a valuable discovery. This meant the fish didn’t have anything to do with Alton, not specifically. Graydon threw the gallstones back into the water. Shiteater was—was—

He didn’t know what Shiteater was. Something to do with the dead, maybe. Or memory, or loss, or grief, or hope, or closure. Graydon couldn’t figure it out. It wasn’t like in stories, where things were neatly explained, where the mystery had a function, however obscure, where the operations of the supernatural could be explained. This was something else. Something magical, but incomprehensible, which was perhaps the nature of real magic. But Graydon couldn’t ignore it, couldn’t turn his back and go on living, forget about the pond, and the creature that lived in it.

There was a story about a magical salmon. Rebekah had told him about it, after her trip to Ireland, where she met Lorrie. There once was a wise salmon that lived in a pool, and ate magic nuts, and some great Irish hero caught the fish, and roasted it, and that was a pretty good deal, because whoever ate the fish would gain its wisdom.

What would happen if Graydon ate Shiteater? Would he gain wisdom? Or magic? The ability to call the dead, speak to the dead? Or the ability to
forget
the dead? There was supposed to be a river in Hell whose waters made you forget, and Graydon suspected that, if such a river were real, it would be inhabited by fat brown channel cats, just like Shiteater. What better fish to have the flesh of forgetfulness than a bland catfish, fed on garbage?

Hadn’t Rebekah said the fish was also called Sineater?

It didn’t matter. He’d never catch it anyway.

Graydon lay under the willow tree, and looked up at the sky, and after a while he fell asleep.

Someone nudged Graydon in the ribs. He opened his eyes, and there was his brother Alton, standing over him, wearing his motorcycle jacket, boots, and jeans. His hair was wet, even his stupid little goatee. “You’re more full of shit than that fish, bro,” he said.

“Alton?” Graydon said. The tree was making a low noise, like weeping, and the branches were moving despite the lack of wind.

Alton squatted down beside Graydon. “Oh, don’t get up,” he said ironically. “I’m not offended. I’m dead, after all. But
you’re
not.”

“Alton, I don’t understand,” Graydon said. That was the simple truth, and it almost made him burst out crying—he didn’t understand why his mother had lost her mind, why Rebekah had fallen in love with a woman, why his brother had died, why grad school had been so difficult, why Shiteater was eating the physical reminders of his loss without taking the memories themselves away.

“Nobody understands,” Alton said. “Maybe that’s for the best. Listen. You don’t want to eat that fish. I don’t know what would happen if you did, but it’s a big monster that eats dead things, it’s not shiny and silver and full of magic nuts. Let it go. Quit wallowing. Get your life back together, while you still have one.”

Alton had never been so blunt in life—he’d always been very live-and-let-live, but maybe death had changed that. “Shit, Alton, it’s
hard
, you don’t know what it’s like.”

“Nobody knows what it’s like. And just because it hurts your feelings when I say you’re wallowing, that doesn’t mean it isn’t
true
. You can’t go on like this.” The tree was moaning more loudly now, and night was falling quickly. “I have to go,” Alton said. “It’s getting late.”

“Alton, no, I still don’t—”

Someone nudged Graydon in the ribs. He opened his eyes. Rebekah stood over him, the sun behind her and a bottle of wine in her hand, looking down at him with a grin. “Have a nice nap? Shall I assume dinner isn’t ready?”

Graydon groaned and sat up. “I had a dream...”

“I bet,” Rebekah said. “Did it involve me and Lorrie and warm oil?”

Graydon grimaced. “Lorrie isn’t my type.”

“I thought all you guys got off on the idea of two women together.”

“I like it better when the women are interested in me, too.”

“Well, hey, it’s your dream,” she said. “Come on. I brought steaks.”