Catch & Release (24 page)

“Relax, Polly. You'll get your fish. Next stop after this is the dam and the fish hatchery,” says Odd, “Besides, I got a feeling we might see Troutzilla himself once we get out onto the bridge.”

“How'd he get here all the way from Butte?” I'm feeling a little fuzzy-headed and cotton-mouthed.

“Not Troutzilla the monster—Troutzilla the god. Stands to reason a person might see Troutzilla the god from the Bridge of the Gods,” says Odd, “And also, there's the optical illusion.” With that, he heads out of the parking lot toward the bridge. I don't want to follow. I'm not liking the idea of walking across this bridge. If I face the oncoming traffic the cars will be passing on my blind side. If I walk with my back to the traffic, cars will be coming up behind me. There is no way I can feel safe.

There is a tollbooth. I don't even go close enough to hear how much it costs, but Odd is waving his arms like he does when he's being friendly with strangers.

“Come on, Polly!”

When he calls, I duck my head down and slink past the toll station like a dog.

There's no sidewalk. We'll be sharing the lane with loaded trucks and speeding cars—and bicycles, oh, sure, just throw bicycles into the mix. A train is coming. It crosses under the road. I can't hear; I can't see. Perfect hell. Odd paid money to walk me straight into perfect hell.

Then it gets worse.

The pavement ends. The bridge is nothing but metal mesh and air. I take a couple of steps and then, “I can't do this!” I turn back.

Before I get away, Odd catches up, grabs my hand, and says, “Come on, Polly. It's great. I promise.”

“It's not fun, Odd. I'm scared. I think I'm going to throw up. You go . . . check it out.”

“It won't be fun without you,” says Odd.

“That's dumb,” I say.

“It might be dumb, but it's true.” He's giving me the full-on sad puppy.

“It makes me dizzy when I look down.”

“Don't look down.”

“If I don't look down, I can't see if I'm safe from traffic. There's no way this is going to work,” I say.

“You just hold my hand, and I'll do all the watching. You can look at my back or you can shut your eyes. Once you get out there a ways, you'll see. It's worth it,” says Odd. He still hasn't let go of my hand. When he pulls me gently toward the bridge, I follow. After a hundred steps, I open my eye and look down. I can see birds flying under my feet, but I do not see Troutzilla. I see Odd. He's smiling.

 

“You want to visit the dam or the hatchery?” asks the security guard on duty.

“Um, I thought they were both here,” says Odd.

“They are, but you go that way for the hatchery and this way for the dam.” The guard points. The road to the dam is blocked with a yellow-and-black-striped traffic gate. “You're free to visit the dam,” says the guard, “But there is a security check and some areas are restricted.”

I wonder if this guy and his gate could stop a terrorist. Or a pirate.

“I just want to see some fish,” I say.

“Alrighty then, hatchery it is,” says Odd.

 

When I check my phone, I have a message from my dad, “Call odds brother.”

“Im on it all good,” I tell Dad.

I delete thirty-three messages from Mom.

 

We didn't come at the right time to see the live spawning activity, but there is a looping video of fish porn in the big white building. All salmon die after spawning, says the film, but they are humanely euthanized prior to the artificial spawning process. The fish are bigger than my arm, silver and limp, when they are removed from the anesthetic tank. They are stunned with electroshocks. Electrocution kills the pain, I guess. Is it more humane than whacking them with a rock? It's tidier, anyway. Human hands grasp and bend the males and the milt pours out, streams of rich milk into a bucket. Human hands slit the girl fish right up the tender white underbelly and empty out the eggs. The valuable eggs. Then they toss the empty silver bodies onto a rolling steel conveyor. They will not be wasted. They will become food. Note that. That makes it all OK.

The blood of the mothers needs to be washed off the eggs to prevent contamination.

None of this troubles Odd in the least. He's not even watching the film. He's pushing buttons on an interactive map and watching the rivers light up, red, orange, and green.

Once upon a time, the fish followed the smell of the river to the place they were born. That was once upon a time. Now they journey to the ocean and then they return to . . . To what? To a white plastic bucket? To a hatchery like this one? They return to spawn and to die, because that is what they do. They spawn and they die. That is what we all do. You can dress it up in a romance novel cover with moonlight shining on muscles and folds of flowing pink silk, but spawn and die, that's what we do. That is what we all do.

 

There are pools full of rainbow trout. A handful of fish-food pellets costs a quarter. Odd is amusing himself by making fish bump into each other. It's not hard; there are so many fish and the pool is so small. The rainbows hone in on the pellets and slither over each other in a rush. I take a picture of Odd beside the trout ponds. I could push a few buttons and send it to Buck. He'd have absolute proof that his little brother is safe and happy this very moment. He could stop worrying, if he's worrying. I don't push any buttons. It might be the right thing to do, but Buck's happiness is not my problem. And Odd's happiness? It does belong to me, at least just a little bit.

A sign explains that the white spots on some of the fish are patches of fungal infection. The trout will be fine, says the sign. The water in the pond is medicated. All the water flows to the river, I guess, then to the ocean. When I look closely at the trout, I see fins that are ragged and rotten.

 

There is a little white house with a flight of stairs down into a room with big windows that look out underwater. It isn't an aquarium. It isn't a tank. There is a pond outside the windows that's deep and big enough for a ten-footlong fish to roam around in. Herman the Sturgeon comes and goes, gliding past the windows and then away, into the green murk of the water.

He has company in there. There are other sturgeon, puny ones, not much bigger than me. Three big rainbows swim in place by one of the windows. There must be a current there that they keep pace with, swimming constantly, going nowhere. And there is another trout, a hunchback. The front end looks normal, but the tail end points down instead of straight back. It is able to swim. It has coping skills and strategies for its unusual condition.

Herman is the star, though. He is a monster. He meets the qualifications. Size? Check. Ugly? Check. He looks armor-plated, but he has a vulnerability—a monster always has a vulnerability. When he slides by on the other side of the glass, I can see into his gills where little red balloons full of blood cluster like horrible berries. There's a taped narration on infinite loop . . . Herman's kind shared the planet with dinosaurs in the Jurassic . . . they are threatened with global extinction . . . a single female can produce half a million eggs in a single season and it's not enough . . . they can't fight their way past the dams to spawning grounds.

A monster floats by on the other side of the window. He has a gummy, old-man mouth and four white, whiskery barbels to feel around for rotting food on the bottom of the pool. I lean my forehead on the cold glass and another monster floats reflected in the window. It's me. I want to bang my bony head on the glass, but it would never break. And what if it did? I couldn't save what's on the other side. I don't have the strength of an angel. I can't lift a four-hundred-pound fish. I can't move the Bonneville Dam. Maybe I want the monster on the other side to save me.

 

Odd stood in line for ice cream, and now we are sitting on a curb by some roses. Bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers.

A few years ago all the honeybees were dying. Nobody understood it and it was a crisis, because if the bees disappear then all kinds of human food will disappear, like the peaches in my ice cream. There will be no more peaches if there are no more bees. But I don't know what happened. Maybe the bees stopped dying. Maybe they are still dying and we are moving closer every moment to a world without peaches. That seems more likely, that the bees are still dying, but the TV news turned its eye to a new place. That's the job of the news, to be new. So maybe the bees are still dying by hundreds and thousands, but what is new is sea turtles smothered in burning-hot crude oil or polar bears drowning because there is no ice. It's always something. And dead bees aren't very photogenic.