Crash Gordon and the Mysteries of Kingsburg (31 page)

Gordon tries to hand the apple back to her, but she won’t take it. She gives him a finger-wag bye-bye instead.

“Thanks for the tip!” Jimmy says to her with a used-car salesman’s grin. When she bends over to pick up her bucket, he makes an exaggerated show of checking out her bony old ass. As she totters up the steps, wishing them luck, Jimmy whispers to Gordon: “Not exactly what we were hoping for in the nude sunbathing department….”

“Not hardly. What the hell are hellgrammites, anyway?”

“Hell if I know. It could be a made-up word. That old lady’s probably nuts.”

They walk to the far end of the boulder and sit down on a ledge that juts out over the water like a stone sofa. Two fat, somnolent trout hang motionless in the glass green depths just beneath them. Gordon looks out over the two pools, noting the beauty of the shimmering, soft-focus reflections of boulders and trees along their edges and the chute of waterfalls in the near distance. It’s the closest thing he’s ever seen to Paradise–not counting his out-of-body experiences.

Jimmy opens his creel and they get down to business. He shows Gordon how to thread a barbed brass hook along the inner skin of a salmon egg, so the entire hook follows the egg’s curvature and is buried inside it. “That way, they can’t steal the bait,” he says, admiring his own handiwork. “If a trout wants the egg, he has to swallow this, too. Then you just yank on your line and the hook snags right in that fucker’s throat.”

“So violent!” marvels Gordon. “I wonder if that’s what Jesus was thinking when he told the disciples he’d make them fishers of men.” In his mind’s eye, Gordon sees the twelve disciples out on the shore of a big lake, each of them with a surfcasting rod bent almost double from line-tension. They’re cursing in Aramaic as their reels whine and screech. Out on the water, naked men explode from the green surface like marlins. Their feet splash like powerful tails as they thrash in midair, trying to shake free of the hooks snagged in their bearded jaws. It all takes place under a soaring, flamingo-colored sky with Jesus watching from a lifeguard tower. A transistor radio in the Son of God’s lap is tuned to a tinny version of “Spinning Wheels” by Blood, Sweat & Tears–even though that can’t be historically accurate. And why is the Easter Bunny playing volleyball against the Three Wise Men? And shouldn’t they be wearing something more than just leopard skin bikinis?

Jimmy, to his astonishment, imagines
exactly the same thing
–right down to the Easter Bunny–but he doesn’t tell Gordon about it, so they’ll never know their minds were linked.

They cast their lines out into the pool. For a while, nothing happens. Gordon’s mind starts to drift. He makes an associative leap to the opening lines from the first book he ever read,
McElligot’s Pool
by Dr. Seuss:

“Young man,” laughed the farmer,

“You’re sort of a fool!

You’ll never catch fish

In McElligot’s Pool!”

He thinks about fishing as a metaphor for hauling up wisdom–and monsters–from the depths of the imagination; the little pool of the individual psyche connected by an underground river to the vast ocean of the collective unconscious.

“If I wait long enough,

If I’m patient and cool,

Who knows what I’ll catch

In McElligot’s Pool.”

Gordon looks down at the two grey trout still hanging suspended in the gently undulating water below the ledge. A dark hole is off to their left below the rocks, a cavern large enough to house an underwater grizzly bear. What sort of razor-toothed demon trout or man-eating catfish might be lurking in there? Gordon starts thinking he should drop his line right in front of the cave’s entrance. At least he might catch one of the two trout, if not something stranger. But then that old Nietzschean fishing adage comes into play:
Stare long enough at fish near an abyss, and the fish or the abyss will stare back at you.
Both trout shudder and dart away toward the shadowy depths.

Bored, Jimmy reels in his line. Gordon does the same. The pink salmon eggs are still there, looking a little pale and waterlogged now on the ends of their hooks. Just to give themselves something to do, they replace the eggs with fresh ones and cast again. Hours pass–or so it seems. The fish aren’t biting.

Finally, out of frustration, Gordon ties the glittery chrome and red striped Number Two Dang Samuel Gill-Buster to the end of his line. Jimmy says dismissively, “The only thing you’ll catch with that is weeds.”

“Screw you…” Gordon tells him, “this Number Two Dang Samuel Gill-Buster is a totally bitchin’ lure. Trout can’t resist it.”

As if to prove him right, almost as soon as Gordon casts the lure, a trout strikes it.

“Snag him! Snag him!” Jimmy shouts, practically jumping out of his pants.

“He’s already snagged!” Gordon shouts back at him.

“Reel it in! Reel it in!”

“I’m already reeling!”

The end of Gordon’s fishing pole is bent in a parabola, the taut line quivering like a plucked harp string. It feels as if he’s been leashed to a dachshund-sized torpedo. Even as he tries to reel in, the drag wheel lets out more line with a crotchety shrieking.

Out in the pool, a pale triangle of water travels up the line as it shears across the surface like a shark’s fin. The line swerves toward the far shore, then races back in a powerful arc. As the line slackens, Gordon reels it in for all he’s worth. In a swath of sunlight illuminating green water over a sandy bottom, the boys get their first glimpse of the fish. It’s not the swift, grotesque lake monster Gordon was hoping for, but instead a very large Rainbow Trout–which for eating purposes is probably better.

As the initial burst of adrenaline dissipates through Gordon’s nervous system, the trout, too, seems to tire a little. It swims closer to the ledge and Gordon is able to reel it up to the surface and toward him. It arrives skip-flapping frantically across the top of the water. Jimmy grabs the end of the line and hoists the big trout hand-over-hand the final distance.

It’s a magnificent fish. There’s something even noble about it, with its moss green back and silver flanks awash in pink and blue streaks dappled with pewter. Gordon’s first impulse is to put it back in the water. He thinks about how long such a fish must have survived to reach its length of almost eighteen inches. He sees it navigating secret creek channels, eating delicious flies and mudworms, maybe composing trout haiku by night beneath swaying stalks of moonlit cattails–only to die at the hands of two hick kids from Kingsburg.

“I can’t wait to eat this fish,” Jimmy says. Addressing it directly, he squeals: “You’re gonna be so yummy!”

“Maybe we should let it go,” Gordon suggests.

“No way!”

“It’s my fish. I caught him.”

“You wouldn’t even be here if it wasn’t for me. Anyway, look… his lip is broken.”

Gordon looks. Torn by the lure’s treble hook, the lower section of the trout’s translucent white jaw hangs halfway off its gasping face. How did he miss that? It makes him feel sick to look at it. Worse, it reminds him of his last vision of his father: a torso strapped to a pilot’s seat with his tongue hanging loose where his chin should have been. Gordon feels his arms going limp at his sides. He has to sit down quickly so he doesn’t fall into the water and drown. As his vision narrows to a dark tunnel and all the sounds of nature blur into one gigantic crystalline humming, Gordon feels the cool surface of the boulder pressing against his shoulders, steadying him. Narcolepsy won’t have him this time. A few moments pass and he returns to his senses.

“He can’t feed himself that way,” Jimmy is saying. “We should put him out of his misery.”

“Okay,” Gordon says. He forces himself to watch as Jimmy takes a knife and saws open the trout’s belly from its gills to its dorsal slit. Digging two fingers deep inside the quivering fish, Jimmy scrapes out a mess of pink entrails and flings them over the ledge.

“Don’t worry,” Jimmy says. “They don’t feel pain like we do.”

“Yeah, right. If that fish could talk, he’d be calling you a motherfucker.”

Jimmy motions for him to take a closer look. “See this channel of blood here, along the spine? You have to scrape that out, too, or the meat will go bad. Then you just wash everything out with water real good and you’re all set.”

So now Gordon knows how to properly gut and clean a trout. He’ll have a deeper understanding of his Mrs. Paul’s Frozen Fish Sticks the next time his mother serves them for dinner.

Jimmy pinches off the torn piece of trout lip from the Number Two Dang Samuel Gill-Buster and tells Gordon to cast again. “You just got lucky,” he says. “I can’t believe any self-respecting fish would go anywhere near that shiny piece of junk.”

Again, as soon as the lure touches water, another fish strikes. This time Gordon doesn’t meet quite so much resistance while reeling it in. It’s a more normal-sized trout, about nine or ten inches. “Perfect for pan-frying,” says Jimmy. “It’s a keeper!”

Gordon swallows hard and guts the fish himself, trying to regard all that slimy viscera as just one quick step toward a nice pan-fried trout dinner. He does it to avoid looking squeamish in front of his best friend. He also sincerely wants to please Jimmy’s parents. After all, they’re the ones providing him with this fabulous vacation. He can at least supply their dinner. If a few fish have to pay with their lives for that experience, then so be it.

In that same spirit of gratitude, Gordon offers the magical lure to Jimmy, saying, “Here. Go ahead and cast it a few times. I’ll open up the cheese-flavored eggs and see if they like those any better.”

By noon, the Number Two Dang Samuel Gill-Buster has provided both boys with their legal limits of ten fish apiece.

They ascend the steps like victorious gladiators, their fishing poles held aloft like pikes impaling the invisible heads of their enemies. Gordon counts the steps along the way up. Feeling worthy for a change, he manages the climb without having to stop and wheeze for air. Another triumph.

At the top, where the campground road meets the forest path, a bearded man in a black leather jacket rides toward them on a customized Harley-Davidson. The big chrome motorcycle with its slung-back handlebars chugs past them in a slow, echoing roar, then pulls over just a few yards ahead of them. Muscular legs in faded jeans plant themselves on either side of the bike and push it backward with an awkward hop. Suddenly, Gordon and Jimmy aren’t feeling so much like gladiators anymore. The winged, grinning skull patch on the back of the black jacket identifies the rider as a member of the Oakland chapter of the Hells Angels.

“You boys been doin’ some fishin’?”

The Midwestern drawl reassures Gordon a little, reminding him of his friendship with Johnny Hoss. But according to newspaper accounts he’s read, the Hells Angels are the most vicious and violent motorcycle gang in America. They knifed that guy at the Rolling Stones concert in Altamont. They snort crystal meth and shoot guns at each other just for the wild frontier fuck of it. They even kicked the crap out of one of Gordon’s literary heroes: the fearless gonzo journalist, Hunter S. Thompson. So he’s somewhat anxious when the Harley rolls up next to them and he sees Jimmy’s reflection in the black teardrop gas tank and his own in the Hells Angel’s brown-tinted aviator shades. Gordon says, “We, um, fished for a few hours this morning. We did okay.”

“We both caught our limits!” Jimmy brags. And it wasn’t even his lure! Acting like a spazz, Jimmy opens his creel and holds it up to the man’s shaggy face.

“Whoa! That’s some fine-lookin’ fish you got there!” the Hells Angel says, jerking his head back as if dazzled by their bounty. He takes off his sunglasses. He has the craggy good looks of a character out of the old West–a hard-working blacksmith, maybe, or that guy from
Grizzly Adams
.

“Do you want some?” Gordon asks, opening his own creel to show more trout neatly stacked like fat, silvery cigars. “We’ve got more than we need, really.” He tries to make it sound like a magnanimous offer to share, rather than an act of sheer, simpering cravenness.

“Yeah, take a few,” Jimmy chimes in, his voice a little higher than usual. “We’ll just catch more tomorrow.”

“That’s mighty generous of you boys. Nothin’ I like better than pan-fried trout.” Not shy, the big man takes two from Jimmy’s creel, and three from Gordon’s, holding the trout delicately between his thick fingers. The skin of his hand is elaborately traced with spidery veins of black motorcycle grease.

“D’you have somethin’ to carry ‘em in?” Jimmy asks, unconsciously slipping into a Midwestern drawl of his own.

“I’ll just stick ‘em in my jacket here. Won’t make it smell any worse.”

As the jacket’s pockets are being stuffed with trout, Jimmy points to the patch on the back and asks, “Are you a real Hells Angel?”

“Yep! Came down from Oakland on my bike here. We’re all havin’ us a little summer get-together. Name’s MacDuff.” MacDuff smiles, showing surprisingly good teeth. He reaches over to shake their hands.

“I’m Gordon.”

“Jimmy.”

“Well, I’m mighty obliged, boys. Tell you what. We’re havin’ us a wingding over at the Trail’s End Tavern tonight. Why don’t you come on by? Jus’ tell ‘em you’re friends of ol’ Duffy. They’ll let you right in.”

“Okay!”

“Cool!”

MacDuff gives them a thumbs-up. Then he rides off on his Harley with a stuttering thunder that seems to shake every pine needle in the forest. Gordon and Jimmy just stand there staring after him, astonished and impressed. For them, it’s like having the Norse god Thor as a new friend.

□ □ □ □ □ □ □ □ □

The Trail’s End Tavern is a ramshackle one-room cabin with a bar, a jukebox, and a knife-scarred pool table. It sits at the far end of the campground overlooking a section of Dinkey Creek that passes through a deep ravine. Gordon and Jimmy walk there while it’s still light out, after a festive trout dinner. Jimmy’s parents had complimented them on their catch several times throughout the day and now seemed inclined to let them go anywhere, although Jimmy decided not to trouble them with the knowledge that he and Gordon were off to a party with the Hells Angels. They were supposed to be roasting marshmallows with some other kids down by the creek.