Red
Herring
As he was hauling in the gill net and
shaking herring onto the floor of the jon boat, he saw it like a light below
the water coming in with the net. With the next haul and shake of the net
it fell, flipping and bouncing indignantly just like the others, except it
stood out, scarlet, atop the silver mass of fish. He grabbed it quickly
and turned to his cousin. “Joey, check
this out!”
“Whoa, what is that a goldfish?”
“It looks like a
herring. You see this Uncle Joe?” he said holding the fish higher so his
uncle, smoking a cigarette back by the outboard, could see. The uncle
only replied with an uninterested “Yeah” and continued smoking.
“But why’s it red?” Phil
asked. “I never seen that before.”
“Yeah, I seen it,” his
uncle said, slowly assuming a sage-like countenance. “Thems one of the
red phase, pigment things. It happens.” He nodded and exhaled smoke, but then it
seemed his uncle remembered his true role. “Now are you gonna get them
fish in the fuckin’ box or jerk off all day with that thing?”
“Well, do I put it in
here with the others or?” He motioned towards the truncated dock barrel
in the center of the boat where they tossed the herring. His uncle paused
and said, “No. Throw’em in the chink
bag.”
For the previous two
years, he had helped his uncle and cousin during the spring herring run. The
uncle decided he could make some extra money with herring when he dubiously
procured some gill nets. Phil earned five dollars a trip while they
filled the barrel with herring, but he had no idea where his uncle sold them or
how much was earned. The bycatch (the
other fish that were unintended, illegal, or out of season) were kept over the
side of the boat in a grain bag weighted with a brick, so if any conservation
officers came by the rope could be cut and the bag would simply disappear.
The bag would be left on shore upriver before they took the boat out at
the launch because the Encon guys would wait there often, hidden with
binoculars. Later, they would drive down
a pitted, mucky track and pick up the bag.
His uncle would then sell the bass, sturgeon, walleye, decapitated
turtles, and anything else ensnared to the Chinese restaurant on the main
drag. His uncle was an outdoorsman only
in the literal sense of the term: he was a man who spent time out of doors.
Phil looked at the fish
jerking in his hand with sea-run strength, not slow and muscular like a
freshwater pike, but with quick, sputtering movements. It had the large
eye and broad iridescent scales of a herring, but it was a glorious scarlet tip
to tail.
“Phil, maybe you can
make a wish on it.”
He looked from the fish
to his cousin Joey. “Huh?”
“Ain’t there a chinko
story like that?” the uncle said, blowing smoke.
“I think it was,” Joey
said. “Some guy catches a magic fish and it gives him wishes or
something. We read it in class, in elementary school.”
Phil seemed to remember it, at least sensed the idea of it.
A magic fish. Gives wishes. “Did he kill it or let it go?” Phil asked his cousin.
“Well, why would it give
him wishes if he killed it?” Joey laughed.
“Put it in the fuckin’
bag and let’s get going,” his uncle Joe shouted. “And get them good ones
off the bottom of the boat.”
Phil leaned over and
pulled in the weighted sack. As he loosened the top, he made a silent,
secret pact with the fish and returned it to the water where it darted
unceremoniously downward into the blackened river. He closed the bag and
returned it without anyone noticing anything.
His uncle never brought up the missing fish after selling the contents
of the sack, probably because he forgot about the scarlet anomaly, eagerly
taking his cash and going into the smoky bar right next door to the restaurant.
Phil Durant was
seventeen years old at that time. He lived alone with his mother in the
bottom flat of a two-family house. His cousin Joey was his best friend
and they both worked in the produce department of the local Shop Rite.
They were quite similar in many respects, but Phil would not graduate
from high school on time with Joey because he had trouble with the English
Regent’s examination. Also, Joey had a father and Phil did not, and
depending on perspective, Phil may have been better off for that.
They spent their time
that year with weekdays in school, weekend nights at beer and weed parties in
the woods. Joey had inherited some of his father’s qualities as a creative
profiteer, so on weekend days they would check on his line of metal snap traps.
They ran up creek and all the way down to its mouth at the main
river. Phil enjoyed the hikes and the
time outside, scrambling over boulders and slogging through the marsh, but
hoped the traps would be empty when they encountered them. If they
weren’t empty, he hoped the animals were dead because Joey would dispatch the
living with his knife. Phil asked him
once if he felt bad and Joey said, “Nah.
It’s fine. Maybe sometimes. But my dad can get me three bucks for a
muskrat fur and four for a mink!”
The weekend after Phil
released the herring, a kid at school invited them to a house party. That
it was indoors rather than on soggy couches around a bonfire smoking with plastic
was appealing, but Phil was ecstatic when he realized Ellie Hansen from his
science class would be there.
At the party, she smiled
at Phil and it gave him a weird feeling in his stomach. Later, they ended
up in the pink bedroom of the host’s little sister. Phil lay with his head
resting on her smooth stomach, inhaling the powdery odor of her skin, while she
caressed his scalp lightly with her nails. He found himself nodding off,
so relaxed, and said, “You know, I made a wish this would happen.”
“Oh yeah?” She
leaned forward, arched her eyebrows and then leaned back on the pillow.
“Well, sort of.
Last weekend I threw back this weird red fish instead of bagging it.
And when I did, I kinda hoped this would happen. With you, I mean.” He turned his head to look in her eyes.
She chuckled. “You
made a wish on a fish for me?”
“I guess I did.”
“Well, what a good boy
you are,” she cooed as she pulled his face to hers.
Phil and Ellie were
together for seven years after that night.
As a fiddlehead pushes
through leaf mulch, rises, unfurls and expands, so Phil matured. When
Joey graduated and Phil was finished with school, they both landed summer jobs
with the city’s department of public works. Joey’s dad drove a garbage
truck for the city and got them in. They
maintained parks, mowing lawns and weeding beds. They pried up asphalt and dug holes for
faulty sewer lines. They removed fallen tree limbs and jackhammered
sidewalks, and eventually, they were taken on as permanent hires in
sanitation. The work was good, the pay
was good, Ellie was good, and life was good.
***
A few years later Joseph
Sr., went to prison. The Department of Conservation placed some decoy
deer in the middle of a farm field and waited at night in a sting operation.
Joe drove darkly out into the field, put his truck in park, prepped his
rifle and blasted his spotlights. He
fired four shots, emptying his clip. Cursing, he ejected it and flipped
it over, as he had another duct taped to it. He inserted the new clip and fired
the next four rounds. The deer had not
moved from either the sound or from being struck (which they were not.)
He pulled the rifle away from his face and stared at the motionless deer. He paused and thought. Then he heard a bull horn ordering him to
drop his weapon. When his truck was
searched, there was an unregistered handgun and a substantial amount of
cocaine. Joey was distraught at his father’s bad luck, but benefitted by
gaining his father’s position in the driver’s seat.
The boys had settled
into life as most young men do, like their fathers before them, although Joey
was less mercenary than his own. They worked hard mornings, took good
lunches, and rolled through afternoons.
They spent most evenings at Joe Sr.’s old haunt next to the Chinese
restaurant, Uncle Ben’s, where they ate hot dogs with Ben’s “famous” meat sauce
and drank Miller. The bar flagrantly profited from gambling. The bartender was the city’s largest bookie
and on Friday and Saturday nights the dining area was filled with round felt
poker tables. Phil had never been a gambler and was safe from the trappings of
Uncle Ben’s until the spring of 1989 when he was 24.
Now left to their own
devices, early May on the Hudson had changed from working season to recreation
season for the boys. The jon that was Joey’s father’s was now his and was
used for herring still, but the herring were caught with fishing poles and were
bait to catch the migrating striped bass amongst them. Smoking their own
cigarettes on a sunny Saturday and hauling up a thirty pound striper was more
satisfying than making five dollars hauling nets in cold rain. Ellie would marinate the heavy fish steaks in
Italian dressing and they would grill up beautifully. She would be so
happy when he came home with a striper, he began to associate it with a
bountiful future.
On a Saturday when the
lilacs were beginning to bloom, they were out beneath the immense expanse of
the Rip Van Winkle Bridge and were jigging up some herring for bait. Phil
released his bail and let his weighted rig sink to the bottom. When it hit, he clicked the bail and began to
bounce the weight on the river floor.
Within a minute he felt the familiar spastic tug of herring. He
reeled in smoothly and slowly hoping other fish would bite the additional hooks
on the rig. One time, Joey got five fish
into the boat at once. At the surface he
saw he had multiple fish and quickly lifted the rod and dropped them into the
boat, and to his amazement, bouncing and flipping amongst three silver herring
was another red one. “Holy fucking shit,” he said.
Joey turned, began to
gape but then caught himself. “Another one? We haven’t seen one of them in a while.”
“We only seen one.
Like ten years ago.”
“Naw. I think we
seen others. Anyway, they’re around.
It’s that red DNA thing or whatever. There’s not alotta them but
they’re there.” He took a drag from his
cigarette and exhaled as he looked up at the bottom of the bridge. Phil
grabbed the wriggling fish and looked at it closely. It was just like the last one, a completely
normal, wide-eyed, large-scaled herring, but a brilliant scarlet. It was
uncanny and he wondered if it was the very same fish from before. Joey saw him rapt. “You should put that out on a line. They say stripers can see’em better cause
o’the color.”
“Yeah…” He thought
of catching a giant striper with this lucky fish and Ellie’s excitement upon
his return with a record breaker. He began to think of their bountiful
future together: they had discussed marriage and buying their own house. If this fish was lucky, he thought, it could
net him a great catch. He didn’t believe the first one was lucky, but it
turned out his wish did come true. So
did he really want a big striper or did he want something more? He wanted a home and prosperity for Ellie and
himself. Killing the fish might destroy that and who says red fish
attract predators more than silver ones?
“Oops!” he said as the fish hit the water and shuttled itself into the
darkness. He caught no stripers that
day, but when he stopped by Ellie’s he told her they should try to get their
own house by the next year and she kissed him on his neck. Soon after,
they opened a joint savings account and squirreled away as much money as they
could.
***
Everyone in town was familiar
with the baddest man on the planet. Iron Mike was Kevin Rooney’s boy and
had lived and trained in town for years. Phil had seen him frequently out
running and he made Phil feel physically nervous. The man was a legend
and was world champion at 20 years old.
He made a lot of money and a lot of people made money on him. Many
people in Uncle Ben’s did as well.
One summer night, Phil
had drunk too much and he broke his no gambling rule and bet $500 on Tyson
while at Ben’s. The odds were 1-10 as at that point the champ had
thirty-six wins and zero losses, so when Tyson destroyed Williams in the first
round, the payoff was only $50. But it was free money because no one
could ever beat Tyson. That $50 went,
along with the original $500 to where it came from: his shared account with
Ellie. They were saving well that year
and would have enough for a downpayment on a house by the following spring.
That fall, Phil bet and won on the World Series and again that winter on
the Super Bowl. He didn’t tell Ellie,
but he put his winnings directly into their savings account. He knew she would get angry for taking those
risks. He joked to Joey about the magic
fish, but part of him, deep inside, attributed some of his luck to that May
occurrence.
On February 11, 1990,
Phil was turning 25. Ellie was working and he was celebrating at Ben’s.
He had lived the best year of his life.
Work was good, life was good, and Ellie and he were going to get a house
soon. Brimming with happiness and confidence, he drank and laughed with
Joey and others in the bar. It just so
happened that on Phil’s birthday that year, Tyson had his next match. The
only sure thing in the world was a win for Magic Mike. It was just a matter if he’d knock out
Douglas in the first round. The book was
stacked for Tyson even more for this fight. The champ was 37-0 and
Douglas was relatively unknown. He was
bigger and had 12 inches of reach on Tyson, but no one thought he had a chance. Except for the bartender at Uncle Ben’s, Jay
Hunter.
“One to fifteen?” Joey
asked after finding the odds. “I heard people got it up to thirty?”
“I’m tellin’ ya.
I’m not goin’ any higher an at. He could lose,” Jay
said. He cracked two more bottles of Miller and put them on the bar in
front of Phil and Joey.
“But he’s 37-0!” Phil
exclaimed. “Did you see what he did to Williams in the first round?
He crushed him.”
“I don’t know what
you’re fuckin’ complainin’ bout anyway. You bet on ‘em wit my odds you
got a betta payout.” Jay leaned forward
and spoke confidingly. “Rooney knows see.
The kids in shape but he’s fucked.
He’s runnin’ in Vegas doin’ all sortsa shit. He ain’t
focused. His mom’s dead, D’Amato’s
gone. Rooney knows, see.”
“But he fired Rooney.”
“He fuckin’ knows, see?”
Phil considered the
payout if Tyson lost, but remembered his luck and the purpose of these bets,
which was to get money for their house. The only sure thing in life was a
Tyson win and that was guaranteed money.
He thought of the herring and bet the entire content of their account,
$6,500, even though he knew, deep in his heart, he was going to lose it.
After the first round,
Douglas was still standing and Phil became nervous. “Alright, one round
not so bad. Wait for that uppercut in
the second,” he said.
After the second round,
Douglas was still standing and Joey said, “This is fuckin’ crazy.”
At the end of the eighth
round, when Douglas was knocked down and got to his feet in a count of ten,
Phil said, “Okay. Finally. Let’s do it!”
In round ten, an uppercut
snapped Tyson’s head back and was followed by four punishing head shots as he
fell to the canvas. When Tyson was disoriented, on his knees, trying to
put his mouthguard back in and the fight was called, Phil could only say, “No,”
while he began weeping.
He had never seen such
rage and hatred in someone’s eyes before Ellie told him she never wanted to see
him again. Phil would never have a serious relationship after that. He became a heavy drinker. The next year his mother died and he stayed
in the apartment alone. Years passed.
He continued to work in the Department of Sanitation until he was
forty-eight. He went on disability when
his right leg was badly crushed.
He developed the habits
of a lonely old man. He was balding.
He gained a lot of weight. At
noon every day, he would walk with his cane down to the park by the river.
He would sit on a bench and stare out at the water, looking up at the
immensity of the Rip Van Winkle. He’d
enjoy watching the women running on the path and pet the occasional passing
leashed dog. He even kept dog treats in his jacket pocket. When he got home at 1:30, Joey would come
over for his lunch and they would drink beer and talk about football and
hunting. Joey had a house and a family
by then and bought some acreage outside of Cairo for a hunting camp. He
and Phil would go up there during turkey season. Even with his lame leg, Phil was at least
able to lean back still against a tree and scrape a turkey call. He had a nice time those seasons of
hunting. They would fish in the late
spring as well.
In May of the year Phil
would turn 59, he and Joey were out on the river for stripers. Joey had a
new boat, a big center console with a 100 horsepower engine. While jigging up bait, Phil felt the familiar
spastic tug of herring. As he reeled in the fish, he saw the red flashing
rise to the surface. “Will ya look at
that?” he said to Joey as he hoisted the fish over the gunwale.
“Haven’t seen one of
those in a while,” Joey said.
Phil removed it from the
hook and held it in his hand. It looked exactly like the other two. “You think it’s the same one?”
Joey laughed.
“Well kill this one and if you get another you know it’s not.”
“I wish I could keep it.
You think they’d mount it over at Avery’s? How much you think
that’d be?”
“Greg ain’t gonna mount
no herring. It’s too small. Waste
of his time.” Joey thought for a moment.
“Hey, you know my kid’s making some extra dough in school putting shit in
lucite and selling it online.”
“What?”
“Nah, he got the idea in
some bio class. He takes shit, like frogs and insects and he casts them
in these clear plastic blocks. Then he sells ‘em. Makes some good money. He’s back from school now ‘till Monday. I’ll ask him to do the fish. I bet he
can.”
“That’d be great,” Phil
said.
Waiting for the
preserved fish to arrive that week, Phil thought a lot about the meaning of
three. Three times is the charm.
Three strikes you’re out. The
holy trinity. Death comes in
threes. Three ring circus. Ready,
set, go. The good, the bad, the
ugly. Three darts in a board. He tried to find meaning in the fish. Why him? Was this last fish special? Were the others? As all thinking has its value, Phil
mistakenly considered himself a poor thinker. But that week he
contemplated life, death, fate and purpose. Without the refinement
or jargon and with less articulation, he vaguely plumbed the same depths of
philosophy as Schopenhauer and Kant. He also drank a great deal and had
to be helped back into his house by his neighbors twice.
***
“Will ya look at that?”
Phil admired the encased fish. “Will ya look at that?” He held it at different angles to view it in
the sunlight of his front room. Joey had brought it wrapped in tissue
paper in a small white box and the two friends sat together, Phil verging on
ebullient.
“Yeah, he did a pretty
good job with it. He’s been nettin’ a lotta small fish in the stream,
even got some baby trout. Tole ya, he’s making some good money.”
“How much I owe?” Phil
said still smiling.
“Oh nothing. Nah,
nah, I took care of it.” Joey watched his old friend carefully with the
concern of a parent. Phil was in bad shape. His hands tremored, from under his denim
shorts his legs were the color of uncooked sausage and an abrasion on his wrist
had become a sore.
“Really?” Phil looked
from the fish to Joey. “Thanks, man.”
He kept the fish on his
mantle between two framed photographs. One was of his mother, a formal
Sears portrait of her in her forties sitting primly in a maroon floral dress,
with a bucolic horse farm backdrop. The other was a picture of him and
Ellie in their early twenties. He was
wearing a blue collared shirt and she a yellow sundress. They were posing in an embrace, almost as if
dancing, her cheek against his chest, her skin a healthy tan, delicate youthful
nose, bewitching eyes. He had the photo for years on his dresser, but now
had no reason to fear displaying it proudly.
When Joey had first seen it on the mantle, he picked it up and said
cheerily, “Hey, great picture.”
Days and months and then
years passed. As the mature fern that has weathered the first few fall
frosts begins to blacken at the edges and become mottled with mildew, so went
Phil’s vitality. He still made his daily walks to the park, sitting on a
bench near the river with the massive bridge in the distance. He still enjoyed giving milk bones to puggles
leashed to women in yoga pants. He’d still amble home with his cane,
stopping to catch his breath and ease the pain in his legs, have his lunch with
Joey, and watch the sports channel alone in the afternoon. Heavy drinking was part of his routine as
well, paying the guy next door to stop and get him a bottle of vodka from the
liquor store. Often, if anyone had ever looked, he could be seen through
his front window, standing, weaving slightly, staring dumbly at his
mantle. His prim mother. Himself healthy. Beautiful Ellie so vibrant and happy. The fish between them, still brilliantly
scarlet, its large eye staring lidless.
All eternally motionless.
On an arbitrary summer
day Phil had a stroke. Luckily, the upstairs tenant found him when she
came to his back entryway to inquire if the postman had left a package.
The television inside was blaring, so she opened the door and there he
was, in his recliner gasping and gesturing strangely. He survived but was
impacted badly enough that he had to live in a nursing home. Even though his new residence was a good 45
minutes from his old one, Joey visited him most Thursday afternoons. Phil
had so much trouble speaking it almost didn’t seem worth trying, but he enjoyed
his friend’s company and Joey did a great job of detailing the local news and
happenings, especially the ludicrous statements made in Uncle Ben’s.
After two months and it
was clear he’d never return, Phil’s landlord wanted to clear out the apartment
for a new tenant. When he finally got in contact with Joey, he invited
him to come over and take what he wanted, either for Phil or himself. “I
just gotta get someone in. I got someone
who can next week, but I need the place empty,” he said. Phil was a tidy person and there was almost
no clutter. He had all the clothes he needed at the nursing home. Joey gave Phil’s two shotguns and fishing
pole to his son and brought the two mantle pictures to Phil, who expressed his
gratitude and joy with a stammer and tearful, bulging eyes.
One Saturday, the fish
ended up on a collapsible table in the driveway. It was labeled for fifty
cents and lay between a pack of cards and an aluminum cooking pot. His
recliner sold for fifteen dollars and his bed frame for ten. Late that afternoon, when Phil’s landlord was
ready to close up the garage sale, two boys came into the driveway and perused
the meager leftovers. One picked up the clear block and examined the fish
inside. The landlord said, “Take
anything you want. It’s all going in the
garbage anyway,” as he shoved a camouflage jacket into an oversized trash bag.
“One fish...two
fish...red fish...blue fish!” he yelled as he hurled the block at his
friend’s back.
“Aah! You dick
head!” the friend yelled laughing as it bounced from his shoulder blades.
He turned quickly and grabbed up the block to retaliate.
“One fish...two
fish...red fish...blue fish!” After a few painful throws at each
other, the game had morphed into throwing the fish to one another. The
trick was to get the fish as high in the air as possible while making the catch
difficult, landing it near a fire hydrant, mailbox or bush. The two were
working their way home, throwing the fish as high as they could and laughing at
collisions or admiring daring catches.
The block was now chipped on its corners and scuffed and the red fish
would rocket upwards to the peak of its trajectory. Before falling, it
hung, suspended, the sunlight glinting on its scarlet scales and oversized,
lidless eyes.
“One fish...two
fish...red fish...blue fish!” The boys were on the bridge that
crosses the creek and were testing one another by having the block land as
closely to the opposite railing as possible. Finally, one of them
overestimated his skill and the fish fell over the railing, splashed into the
deep creek and sunk out of sight. “Aw
shit,” one of them said. They quickly decided to race each other to the
post office where they would part ways, each heading to his own home for the night.