It was mere days after returning from Vietnam that my brother started to take me trout fishing on the Larmet River. And there, on the banks of that misty river, Michael told me all kinds of stories about the War. The people, the land, the food. I told him I had never caught a trout over nine inches long. He said that Vietnam was beautiful and that nine inches sounded about right considering I was just nine years old. Most beautiful place he\u2019d ever seen, he said. Perfect for getting blown to bits.<\/p>\n
He showed me Polaroids of him and his buddies. I scanned the far riverbank for a good spot to cast my line. They were always seated in a tavern, always with beers in hand, always Vietnamese girls perched on laps. Sometimes my bait got hung up in the trees. Always the same girl for Michael. We either had to wade over to untangle my line, or cut it off. Michael didn\u2019t want to get into the water too often after he got back, and I was too small to wade into a lot of the spots I was casting at. I was going after a lunker, which meant deep water. I looked at more of his pictures. We usually cut the line. The girl disappeared toward the end of the stack. His smile in the photos got different after that.<\/p>\n
I asked what her name was. Michael\u2019s eyebrows twitched up. A moment later, he lowered his gaze and looked away and said her name into some tall grass. There was a breeze and rapids and weeds swishing, so I didn\u2019t hear. I looked at the tall grass, too. The blades were bright green and beaded with ladybugs and dew.<\/p>\n
She was pretty. I never asked if he wrote to her. But I wondered.<\/p>\n
The war gore was constant, my eyes always huge as he told me about guys with arms or legs or parts of their face blown off. Michael walking around carrying someone else\u2019s arm or eyeball back. Jesus Christ, he\u2019d say, throwing his head back. The eyes, he said. Ya had to bring the eyes back. Eyes are what make a guy, ya know? Jesus Christ almighty.<\/p>\n
One day he told me about the bullets streaming down from the sky while I put a nightcrawler onto a size eight hook. Seriously like rain, he said. The nightcrawler squirmed between my fingers, impaled. Bullets missed whatever they were shot at way up on this one hill, and fell down and whacked the Quonset hut he and his Company all slept and ate in. Like hail, he said. Michael told me to be sure to leave some of the nightcrawler\u2019s tail wiggling free. You knot them up so much, he said.<\/p>\n
The bullets bounced off the Quonset mostly harmlessly, he said. But you still didn\u2019t want to walk outside into that. He told me not to walk so heavy on the river banks. I thought I was being stealthy.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s why you only catch the little ones, he explained. You scare off all the keepers. Foot-falls create sounds heard only by fish. Sound travels way faster under water, he said. He stretched his arms out wide and wiggled his fingers like ripples.<\/p>\n
Later he pointed to a nice undercut bank and held his breath, no doubt hoping that my cast wouldn\u2019t get hung up in the prickly ash bushes that bent into the river. \u201cPrickly ash\u201d is a really good name for those things.<\/p>\n
Next time on the river he told me about a huge boat they had him stationed on for a really long time. The size of a city block. There was not a whole lot for them to do while at sea. They were waiting for orders, he said. But one day they got to blow up an enemy ship. They split it in half with a deafening shell from over a mile away and watched it fold into the sea through a telescope. Otherwise, he said he got really fat on that boat. So fat he hoped he wouldn\u2019t get sent home because our dad had a thing about fat people.<\/p>\n
One morning it was really hot on the Larmet. Michael picked me up at 4:30. I remember him shaking me awake, his sour breath on my face, his gold chain swinging from his neck. I was sweating before the sun came all the way up. He parked and we split up for a while. The nettles were just tall enough and just prickly enough to make pushing a path along the riverbank very unfun. I was just about to ease into a new fishing spot I\u2019d found when I heard a distant whoop. Michael. Several whoops. A lunker.<\/p>\n
I made my way to him as fast as I could, but couldn\u2019t find him anywhere on the river. I finally went back to his car. Took forever. I pulled off my waders and looked around. His fancy wide-collared button-down shirt lay draped over the hood of his car. And there was Michael, sprawled out bare-chested and asleep in the back seat, a thick forearm shielding his eyes. His hands were black with river dirt, the knees of his white bell-bottom jeans soiled and stained a dark green.<\/p>\n
Michael? I said.<\/p>\n
He groaned and rolled onto a side. I said his name again but he didn\u2019t move. I pulled a can of Coke from his cooler. It was still morning, Mom would be mad, but I didn\u2019t care. I was boiling hot and itchy all over from fighting nettles.<\/p>\n
I was also really confused: Here we were trout fishing on the famous Larmet River, my brother had just caught a lunker, and he was sleeping through it. How could anyone possibly sleep through that?<\/p>\n
Michael nearly jumped out of his skin when I snapped the can open. He bolted upright and yelled and screamed something I couldn\u2019t understand. He knocked me over as he ran to the river and shoved his head in the water. I picked up my Coke.<\/p>\n
He walked back from the riverbank slowly. Pulled his wet hair back over his head. He was growing it out. He told me about arms and eyeballs again, and repeated the story about spent bullets hitting the Quonset huts. All the people on that ship they sank.<\/p>\n
I asked about the whooping.<\/p>\n
Oh, he said. That was me?<\/p>\n
I nodded.<\/p>\n
No kidding, he said. He rubbed the stubble on his chin and scratched at his lamb-chop sideburns. Huh, he murmured.<\/p>\n
He had this far-off look in his eyes. I knew not to say anything.<\/p>\n
Well, he said. I buried her.<\/p>\n
I shook my head. You what?! I yelled. You buried\u2014<\/p>\n
Tuyen deserved a decent burial, he said. He stared at the long wet weeds again and shrugged. She did, he insisted. He reached absently for my can of Coke. C\u2019mon, he said. Let\u2019s go to Mary\u2019s.<\/p>\n
I wanted to see that fish in the worst way. Something live and fleshy from the glossy pages of Field & Stream. We sped away, kicking up gravel.<\/p>\n
Michael ate two Specials. I figured he didn\u2019t get food like Mary\u2019s Caf\u00e9 while at the War. I ordered pancakes and eggs but couldn\u2019t eat the eggs because the cook made them sunny-side up. Michael laughed and ate my eggs for me. I told him about wanting to catch a lunker and having it mounted on my bedroom wall before he got back from Vietnam. Like a surprise. He scraped his plate and got coffee.<\/p>\n
After a while, he said we could dig it up and tell everyone I caught it. I didn\u2019t like the idea, but I said okay anyway.<\/p>\n
We parked in our usual spot by the Larmet. He parted the soil with his hands and lifted her carefully from layers of dirt and lush grasses.<\/p>\n
What Michael pulled from the black earth along the Larmet River that blistering-hot morning was pure magic. A gleaming twenty-four inch brownie that could only belong to another world.<\/p>\n
I gasped. So beautiful, I said.<\/p>\n
Yes, he murmured. I thought I heard his breath catch. She was, he whispered.<\/p>\n
He took me home going ninety. Kept saying to put the trout in the freezer right away, that you gotta freeze it properly before getting it stuffed.<\/p>\n
Michael dropped me off. Said he was headed to a barbecue. No need to stop by his place because, Heck, he said, I\u2019m already dressed!<\/p>\n
He laughed and laughed and peeled away, shooting gravel.<\/p>\n
I still had the trout clutched to my chest while the gravel shot up. I put Michael\u2019s lunker in the basement freezer and rode my bike to the ball fields and played with my friends until supper.<\/p>\n
That night, Michael buried her again in my sleep.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
My teenage sisters\u2019 crying woke me really early the next morning. I stumbled out of my room straight into a wall. Hay fever sealed my eyelids shut during the night. I had to press water into the gunk over the bathroom sink to get them open. I wobbled toward the kitchen, eyes all gauzy, and saw two police officers sitting on living room chairs. Dad leaned against the big hi-fi by the picture window, motionless, and stared out at the dawn piercing the trees. My tall sisters with long messy hair and flowing nightgowns leaned into each other on the couch. They choked and gasped and moaned. I thought I\u2019d awoke in someone else\u2019s house or was still asleep and had wandered from my dream into a different person\u2019s. I filled a glass with water while my mom sat on the floor against the wall of the living room, knees pulled to her chest, rocking beneath the slurred murmurs of cops.<\/p>\n
The room got real quiet when I walked in from the kitchen. The doorbell rang. Everyone turned their head.<\/p>\n
I was the only one up, so I answered the door. A priest on the other side peered through the screen. Felt like Confession, him on the other side of that mesh, so serious, forehead wrinkled into rows of eyebrows. Rosary beads swung from a Bible pressed to his chest, and clacked. I didn\u2019t recognize him. He was older. But he wore the same clothes, and had the same waxy skin, and same stale breath of our regular priest.<\/p>\n
After a pat on my head and a cup of my chin, he crossed over to my mom. She lowered her fists from her eyes and crumpled onto her side and sobbed.<\/p>\n
I\u2019d never seen Mom like this. I backed into the kitchen and set down my water. The priest crouched beside her and placed a hand on her side and spoke softly.<\/p>\n
Mom sprang up and shrieked. Don\u2019t you tell me he\u2019s in a better place now! When he was just starting to\u2026 to smile again. He just\u2026 He… she choked. He just\u2014<\/p>\n
Bought a puppy, for Chrissake! Dad cried, and threw up his hands. And now\u2026 this?<\/p>\n
I ran away downstairs and slammed into the chest freezer. I had to get away. The horrible wailing, the strange men in our house. Seeing Mom like that. But I also knew I had to make sure Michael\u2019s trout was okay. Tuyen. Maybe get back into my dream\u2014if I\u2019d even left it\u2014to be sure. I raised the lid on the freezer and gazed at that frozen magical fish. Its golden frosted sides, the bright white belly. And the crimson and black spots that lit up beneath my touch. Gorgeous brown trout. I couldn\u2019t believe I\u2019d forgotten about her while at the ball fields the day before, the way Michael said her name while unearthing her from beneath those weeds: Tuyen.<\/p>\n
I pulled her from the freezer and sat down and placed her between my legs. Like I would a pail of ice cream. I stared. But not for long. I didn\u2019t want to have to re-freeze her before Michael came by to head over to the taxidermist.<\/p>\n
I pressed my thumbs onto her dark eyes, melting the layer of frost until they glowed fleshy beneath my skin. I curled up on my side next to her. Tuyen\u2019s eyes shone before me, looking up at Michael as he lifted her from the soil, opened her nest of fresh blades of grass. I saw her rise and sit on Michael\u2019s lap, Michael murmuring her name, and Tuyen saying it wasn\u2019t his fault, not his fault, her deep wet eyes easing mine closed on the basement floor beside Michael\u2019s Larmet lunker.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Jesus Christ, he\u2019d say, throwing his head back. The eyes, he said. Ya had to bring the eyes back. Eyes are what make a guy, ya know? Jesus Christ almighty.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":18251,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[3005,3006,142],"class_list":["post-17913","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fiction","tag-larmet","tag-lunker","tag-vietnam","writer-steve-fox"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17913","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17913"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17913\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18252,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17913\/revisions\/18252"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18251"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17913"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17913"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17913"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}