South of the Pumphouse (4 page)
C
'mon, Eddie boy! Lift her on up! Ha, ha!” Ed's father boomed proudly. Ed's mother loved photo ops, as she called them. Over the years, she must have owned and eventually worn out every kind of cheap portable camera on the market. That day, she had out her slim-line Kodak 110 with disposable flash cubes.
“Hell, that fish is bigger than he'll ever be!” said Daryl, Dad's favorite fishing buddy.
“C'mon, Earl. Help yer brother,” said Mom, waving her camera toward the fish.
Happy to be of service, Earl jumped in. Together, the boys lifted the biggest of the three fish.
“Aww. Isn't that sweet?” said Mom, snapping away like mad.
The cleaningâor butcheringâof these massive fish was always quite an ordeal. Ed's father would take two sawhorses from the garage and, by placing a four-by-eight sheet of three-quarter-inch plywood across them, create a cleaning station. Many a time had Ed seen his father elbow deep in the guts of one of those “hogs,” blood washing down the driveway by the constant short flow of the garden hose. Whenever they returned from one of these trips, a handful of neighbors, mainly kids, would come by to admire the catch and watch the subsequent cleaning. Butchering a sturgeon was an art to Ed's father, and he welcomed an audience when working the Ol' Russell, as he affectionately dubbed his favorite filet knife.
Cleaning a sturgeon is no easy task. It all starts with the bleeding, which involves lopping off the tail and letting the fish drain. As with salmon cleaning, the next step involves cutting just behind the gill plate. With a sturgeon, however, the entire circumference of the fish is sliced down to the spinal column. The sturgeon is a boneless fish with a hard cartilage head and a cartilage channel that runs the length of its body, enclosing a spinal cord. Once the circumference cut is made, the butcher grabs the head and spins it, breaking it free from the spinal column. The head is then removed, pulling the cord from the spinal column and the entrails from the belly. What's left can be quartered into loins. The leathery hide of the sturgeon is dotted with hard diamond-shaped studs, hence the nickname “diamondback.” These, along with the skin, can be removed either with pliers or by being sliced off with a good knife.
“C'mon, boys! If you're gonna catch 'em, ya gotta learn to clean 'em!” their father shouted as they watched earnestly.
“Elch. That's disgusting,” muttered Mom.
“C'mon, hon, it's just some guts. Ha,” he laughed, holding out his bloody hand and a random piece of meat.
Daryl chimed in, “Hell, Penny, you've had to look at Bill's horrible purple knob now for near ten years. A little sturgeon gut shouldn't bother ya. Ha, ha!”
Daryl was a funny guy who fished often with the boys' father. He could always get the boys to laugh, usually at their dad's expense.
“Sheee-it. You're one to talk, Daryl. Beth said your peter's so small she thought it was a hair till it pissed.” Dad could get a good one in every now and again, thought Ed.
He was a happy sort of man, and his jolliness amplified when he was cleaning fish. The fishing weekends were quite cheerful, but there was a noticeable gloom to the general atmosphere whenever the family came home empty-handed. The boys' father worked hard all week, and the majority of his weekends were spent fixing the house or helping Daryl or some other friend with a project. They only got to chase fish a few days out of the month at most, and their dad enjoyed the catching part of the game more than the fishing. Being somewhat self-employedâhe was a partner in a local auto parts storeâhe would occasionally take a day off work if the fishing was hot and heavy. But because of their school schedule, the boys usually missed the trips during the week.
“Gaw'damnit! Someone get this cat outta here. Gaw'damn cat!” Ed's father hated cats and always threatened to eliminate them. “I'll be making me some new cat-skin gloves here in a minute.”
The boys laughed at their father's threatsâbut their mother always stood by her cats.
“Bill, don't you touch him.”
Stray cats always seemed to find their way to Ed's mother. For years after the boys grew up and left home, she still maintained a collection of at least three, all of them one-time orphans.
“I'll touch 'em, all right.”
“He don't know any better. He just wants a piece of fish,” Mom argued.
Holding up the bloody sturgeon tail, Dad barked, “I'll give him a piece of fish, all right. I'll smack him upside the head with this. See what he thinks 'bout that.”
“Bill!!”
“I'm not gonna hurt your gaw'damn cat,” he howled, tossing the pet a small piece of the gut.
Ed's father had never actually caused the cat any harm, though he did blast it with the garden hose while washing the family car on occasion, just to watch it jump. He was a man who would never hurt or kill an animal, unless, as he was accustomed to saying, it was “good eatin'.”
H
ONK!! HONK!!
Ed's thoughts were interrupted by a loud air horn from a big Chevrolet pickup. Ed looked in the rearview mirror and saw the grill looming close.
“Go around, you fucking cock,” he muttered into the mirror.
The pickup charged past on the left.
“Asshole.”
Ed pulled off the freeway at the San Pablo Dam Road exit and turned right, heading east. He hadn't gone very far when an object caught his eye, something that had never really struck him as significant until this moment. It was a big wooden sign that ornately proclaimed,
WELCOME TO EL SOBRANTE
. Weathered by time, the sign stared back at Ed like an old acquaintance, like a smell that was distinctly familiar but not reminiscent of any one thing in particular, evoking a broad range of memories and emotions. Ed knew that this was just the tip of the homecoming iceberg. More than likely, a plethora of old feelings, good and ill, would rush back over him during the course of the day.
Driving down Dam Road, Ed was intrigued by the look of his old hometown. Many things had changed, some more or less subtly than others. The old A&W was still here, though suffering from a bad makeover. Like most defunct franchises, this particular venue was merely a skeleton of its former self. Generic fast-food chicken nuggets and low-grade falafels and gyros now replaced the glorious root beer floats and burgers of Ed's childhood. Kitty corner to the A&W stood the Shell station where Ed had worked the last two years of high school, but like the rest of its kind, the “service” had been taken out of “service station,” leaving a pump-it-yourself gas-and-snack bar.
Further up the road on the right was the old Park Theater Cinema, long since turned into the Christian Life Center. When Ed and Earl were kids, their parents had purchased summer passes to the cinema for five dollars each. The package allowed the bearer entrance to the cinema every Wednesday afternoon. The films shown were mainly old “B” comedies from the '60s, many of which featured Don Knotts. Most of the town's parents took advantage of this day care value; the room was filled every Wednesday with nearly every kid from Ed's school, while the local taverns simultaneously experienced a large influx of house moms.
As he continued toward his destination, Ed was nearly overwhelmed by old sights and phantom memories. He passed the Jack in the Box where, on weekends, he and his friends used to hang out on the hoods of their cars and drink beer covertly through straws in cups labeled for soft drinks. He passed the Red Onion hamburger stand, in front of which a good friend of his had been killed in a motorcycle crash, just one year out of high school. He saw the old church parking lot where he and one of his high school girlfriends were caught naked late one night in his car by a particularly perverse officer of the law who made a habit of sneaking up on the local make-out spots with his headlights off. The Val-Market, Sonny's Hideaway, Fowler's Department Store, and Adachi's Floristsâeach location evoked multiple memories and experiences.
Ed realized that it had been some time since he had felt the slightest bit of nostalgia for his hometown. Perhaps enough water had finally passed under the bridge to dull the sharp pang that crept into his belly whenever he thought about his youth. Not that his past was filled with dreadful experiences; quite the contrary. It was a growing resentment of the town's overall conservatism that had eventually driven him away, not his actual childhood experience.
White guilt
, he thought. The recent passing of his father had compelled him to revisit some of these memories, and the trip to see his older brother now brought him back to the physical surroundings of his childhood.
Ed had never visited his brother's current home, but he knew the house itself. At the funeral, his brother had remarked to him that he had bought the old Ramsey house on the corner just two blocks up from their parents' place. The Ramsey house was somewhat infamous for the boys. In the late '60s and early '70s, it was widely known around the neighborhood as the house where the bikers hung out. Ed had first heard the term Hell's Angels in reference to the pack of leather-clad, longhaired men who regularly converged in the Ramsey's driveway to drink beer and tune their loud bikes.
As he drew closer to his destination, Ed realized that he was growing genuinely excited about the day and the adventures that an old-time sturgeon trip with his older brother might bring.
He pulled up to the house and parked behind Earl's pickup. Though he had never seen the truck before, he knew immediately that this particular vehicle, a well-kept, older-model Ford, belonged to his brother. On the bumper, bold black letters on a mustard yellow sticker proclaimed:
A WOMAN'S PLACE IS ON MY FACE.
E
d pulled open the screen and banged on the door. After a bit of time and no response, he knocked again, this time turning the knob and poking his head in as he cracked the door open.
“Hello?”
He stepped a single foot into the room.
“Hel-looow!” he shouted.
He heard music coming from inside. He had always liked traditional or classic country music, but this sounded like contemporary country, and he had no taste for any of the genre's music that had come along in the last decade or so. For Ed, country music still meant rugged yet stylized crooners like Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, and Hank Williams Sr.
Stepping the rest of the way into the house and closing the door behind him, Ed gazed across the room. The décor was a throwback to the '80s. The couch was the same one that his parents had offered him years ago when he got his first apartment. He had opted not to take it at the time, since his first place didn't have room for anything more than a futon and a desk. The couch had been a replacement for the big green flowered monstrosity that he and Earl had grown up with in the family home. The boys had built many a fort with its velvety cushions, fought many a wrestling match on its surface, and left many a chocolate milk stain on its fabric over the years.
Earl's house was surprisingly neat, a place that had been graced with what Ed's mom used to call a woman's touch. Though the empty beer bottles and other debris on the coffee table were a telltale sign of his brother, the random knickknacks and whatnot that dotted the shelves showed signs of Denise, Earl's sweetheart since high school and subsequent wife.
“Earl?” Ed called out as he wandered down the hallway toward the back of the house.
“Earl!”
Ed poked his head into the bedroom, spying the alarm clock on the nightstand, the source of the music. The room was empty and the bed was neatly made. Ed spun around, moving back down the hallway toward the kitchen. He heard more music coming from behind the door leading to the garage. Opening the door, he shouted again, “Earl?”
The garage was filled to capacity with automotive bric-a-brac. The space reminded Ed of his father. Every inch of every wall and shelf in his father's garage had held some type of tool, part, or random treasure. Forty years of continual, well-organized use had gradually transformed his father's garage into a veritable mechanic's paradise. Earl's garage showed the same markings. Not enough years had passed to fill each nook and cranny, but just like his father, Earl had a place for everything, and everything had its place.
In the center of the garage was Earl's '78 Trans Am. Ed remembered well the day his big brother pulled into the driveway with that big, aqua-colored muscle car. His father beamed proud, having co-signed the loan after Earl was made assistant manager of the local tire shop. Earl had kept it, and kept it well, after all of these years. The car was raised, sitting on jack stands, and Ed could see the shine of a hook light coming from underneath.
Over the music, Ed shouted again. “Earl!”
“Yo!” Earl rolled out from under the car on his creeper. “Eddy boy! You made it!” he said, wiping his hands as he got up.
“What the hell you doing working on this old piece of shit?”
Earl laughed. “Just tunin' her up, bro. Just tunin' her up. Givin' her a little lube there, bro. Got to keep her lubed up. That's the key to these women, I'm tellin' ya.”
They both laughed. Ed examined his brother's face, taking note of how old he looked. His face was gaunt, and his eyes appeared further set back into his head than normal. He was alert, a little bit too alert, by Ed's reckoning, for a thirty-six-year-old man at 7 o'clock in the morning.
“I see you got Mom and Dad's old couch.”
“Yeah, thing's not in too bad a shape neither. Denise keeps after me to get us a new one, but I tell ya, bro, lot of good memories on that couch. Besides, it's damn comfortable.”
