Into the Twilight, Endlessly Grousing (18 page)

Well, lunch is ready and I'd better go eat. I hope we're not having huckleberries again.

Many beginning anglers are unaware of the proper procedure for undertaking a fishing trip. As a service to them, I will now describe a recent fishing trip engaged in by my neighbor Ernie Beckman and me. Beginners will no doubt appreciate my effort to keep the technical detail to an absolute minimum, so as not to confuse them.

A few words about Ernie are appropriate. He's about seventy years old and amiably cantankerous, although not sufficiently so to be admitted to the Patrick McManus Curmudgeon Club, of which I am founder and president. But he is working on it. In fact, several times during our fishing trip he appeared to be reaching curmudgeon status. As far as I can determine, Ernie has spent most of his life having fun. He has been inducted into three different motorcycle-racing halls of fame. For thirty years or so he
worked in television commercials, where most of his duties seemed to involve flying planes and cars, the cars at only a slightly lower altitude. So you would think Ernie's nerves would be immune to about any danger that might possibly occur. Had I thought differently, I certainly wouldn't have taken him along on a fishing trip with me.

Ernie and I have cabins on a river island upstream from a very big lake. Getting to the lake is no problem when the water is high. On this particular occasion, however, the water was low, very low, and in order to get to the lake it was necessary to follow the submerged and meandering channel out over the bar that has built up at the mouth of the river. This also is no problem, because I have memorized the half-mile-long meanderings of the channel.

“Remember,” I told Ernie the night before the fishing trip, “we want to get started at five sharp in the morning.”

“Okay,” Ernie said. “I'll be ready.”

What I forgot to tell Ernie is that experienced anglers like myself don't mean five sharp when they say “five sharp.” They mean “somewhere around eight, or maybe ten.” “Five sharp” is merely an expression used to impress inexperienced anglers or anyone who might be eavesdropping. It would sound terrible to say, “We'll head out somewhere around eight, or maybe ten.” Your fishing license could be suspended for saying something like that.

Ernie, although an experienced fisherman, is unfamiliar with the high-tech fishing terminology of the McManus school of angling. He was up and ready to go at five sharp. While waiting for me to show up, he sat in his kitchen and drank a whole pot of coffee. Thus, his nerves were in terrible shape by the time I arrived, a condition I strive to arouse in all my fishing companions, because it produces the sharpness of reflexes for setting a hook at just the right instant. But little or no thanks do I get for that effort.

We piled into my boat and made ready to cast off. I
started the 90-horse motor before tilting it into the water. This raised Ernie several inches straight up off his seat, apparently giving him the impression the boat was about to explode, or had exploded. A whole pot of coffee will do that to you. But I could see his reflexes were sharp.

“Lower the motor!” he bellowed.

Well, of course I had planned on lowering the motor, because otherwise the prop would be out of the water and we wouldn't get anywhere.

“You got everything we need?” Ernie asked, rubbing circulation back into his ears.

Ernie apparently had heard from some of my other friends that I have a tendency to forget some little thing. I ran through my mental checklist. Coffee. Cookies. Potato chips. Orange slices. Peanuts. Tackle box. Sodas. Jacket. Caramel corn. Sunglasses. “Yes, I've got everything. You don't want to believe all the rumors you hear about me, Ernie.”

“I should hope not,” he said.

We headed down the river toward the mouth. As we approached the submerged gravel bar, Ernie went up to the bow so he could watch for snags.

“There's no need for that,” I said, chuckling. “I know the mouth of this river like the back of my hand.”

“Stop! Stop!” cried Ernie.

“What now?”

“Better check the back of your hand and find where the water's deeper than six inches!”

I greeted this report with very little enthusiasm, for it meant that we had strayed out of the channel, a result of Ernie's distracting me by waving his arms wildly and shouting incoherently. If Ernie and channels would just stay where they are supposed to be, one would avoid this problem. Now we would have to make our way through uncharted waters.

An hour later we had made it into the deep water of the lake. By then Ernie was hoarse from shouting, “Stop! Stop! Left! Left! Snag! Snag!” and so forth. This bit of excitement burned up most of his morning infusion of caffeine, and when he finally returned from the bow and slumped in his chair, he seemed all but mellow, the facial twitches gradually subsiding into epidermal calm.

After a bit, he said, “I'd better set up the downriggers. Where are the weights?”

“Didn't you put them in the boat?” I asked.

“Me!” he shouted. “Why should I put them in the boat? It's your boat! They're your downriggers!”

“Well, we'll just have to go get the weights,” I said. “We can't fish today without downriggers.”

An hour later we had traversed the bar twice more, but we now had the weights. Ernie's voice had eroded to a low croak from shouting about rocks and snags and generally making a nuisance of himself.

“Okay,” he croaked. “I've got the downriggers hooked up. Hand me the rods.”

“The rods?” I said. “Why, they're back by you.”

“No, they're not!”

“They're not? Hey, Ernie, you're going to get a really big kick out of this. You know what?”

We made much better time crossing back and forth over the bar once again, and I felt I was starting to get the hang of navigating the mouth of the river at low water. I thought Ernie might even go so far as to compliment me on my nifty boat handling, but he merely slumped in his chair with a crazed look on his face. That's what happens when you drink too much coffee.

“Slow to trolling speed and I'll put out the lines,” Ernie said after a bit.

“Put out the lines?” I said. “I'll tell you what, Ernie, I'm getting a little hungry. What say we run across the lake
and have lunch at Dave's House of Fry? You know the place. It's got that sign that says, ‘Fine Dining and Bait.'”

“I could use something to calm my nerves,” Ernie said. “And I don't mean decaf. But we'd better not. Looks to me like there's a storm brewing off to the west, and we'd have an awful lot of open water to cross.”

I couldn't help but laugh. “Ernie,” I said, “you're talking to an old sea horse here. I can feel a storm in my bones, and I can tell you right now we have nothing to worry about.”

“If you say so.”

“I say so.” We made the long run across the lake in record time, right up to the last two hundred yards to the dock in front of Dave's House of Fry.

“I always check the gas gauge on my boat before I head out onto the lake,” Ernie said.

“Paddle a little faster,” I said. “It will help you work up an appetite.”

Dave's House of Fry was devoid of customers, except for Wolf Klaus, a huge logger we both knew. We chatted a bit with Wolf, who is a bit hard of hearing.

“How's Jake, Wolf?” I asked. Jake is his brother.

“The steak's fine,” Wolf said. “Just a little on the tough side.”

“Good to hear,” I said.

“Why am I here? Oh, the boss made me take this firstaid course this morning. Missed out on a whole day of logging. Dang nuisance if you ask me, but it's company policy. Now I have to spent all afternoon in the second part of the course.”

“Tell Ella I said ‘Hi,'” I said. Ella's his wife.

“Ain't that the truth!”

Ernie and I took the next table over. “That Wolf can be a hard person to carry on a conversation with when he isn't wearing his hearing aid,” I said.

“I know,” Ernie said. “Wolf sure is big. Got arms on
him like telephone poles. I sure wouldn't want him to get mad at me.”

We ordered the fried steak with fried potatoes, fried bread, and fried salad. “I haven't seen restaurant prices this cheap in years,” I said. “I wonder how Dave makes any money.”

“He makes it on the antacid tablets,” Ernie said. “Probably charges five bucks apiece for them and they sell like hotcakes—fried hotcakes!”

I noticed that Ernie's voice was even more raspy now, apparently from his reaction to the boat running out of gas.

“Your voice is getting awfully croaky,” I said.

“It's all your fault,” Ernie croaked.

“Maybe the waitress can find something to soothe your throat,” I said. “I'll ask her.”

“Don't!” Ernie said. “Leave well enough—”

“It's the least I can do,” I said, and then called out to the waitress. “Miss! Miss! My friend here is croaking! Could you—!”

“Choking!” shouted Wolf. “Good gosh a-mighty, Pat, he's probably got a chaw of meat stuck in his throat.” He charged around the table and swept Ernie up in his arms, chair and all.

“Help!” croaked Ernie.

Wolf then administered a powerful Heimlich to Ernie.

“Aaaakkkk!”
went Ernie.

“There!” cried Wolf. “Any meat pop out of his mouth?”

“Yeah,” I said. “His tongue. About six inches. Thanks much, Wolf. You cleared his throat.”

“You feel okay now, big fella?” Wolf asked.

“Aaakkk,” Ernie said, nodding his head and smiling tearfully up at Wolf.

“Good thing I took the lifesaving course this morning!” Wolf shouted. “Here I thought it was a waste of my time, and already I saved a life!”

We finished eating, bought $20 worth of antacid tablets, and went back to the boat. Ernie was wearing his crazed look again.

“Think of it this way, Ern,” I said. “It could have been worse.”

“How?”

“Wolf could have got to the part of the first-aid course that covers mouth-to-mouth resuscitation this morning.”

“Aaakkk!” Ernie said.

We gassed up the boat and headed back across the lake. We didn't bother to troll, because the wind had come up and the water was getting a little rough.

“I thought you could feel a storm in your bones,” Ernie croaked.

“I can,” I said. “My bones are aching like crazy. Now shut up and bail!”

We shot straight in over the bar at the mouth of the river, the prop kissing the gravel but without getting serious.

“Hey, I've got pretty darn good at navigating the bar,” I said.

“You should,” croaked Ernie. “You had a week's practice this morning!”

Ernie's wife, Marge, was waiting for us at their dock. “How was fishing, guys?”

“Didn't get a bite,” I said.

“No excitement, hunh?”

“Naw,” I said. “Just the usual. You want to go out again tomorrow, Ern?”

“Sure,” he said. “What time?”

“Five sharp.”

I heard the other day it's now okay for men to cry. Can that be true? Probably is. Seems as if every other week they change another rule on me. It's hard to keep up.

I can't remember the last time I cried, but it had to be sometime before I was eight years old. By age eight I had learned the rule that boys and men aren't supposed to cry. I think Crazy Eddie Muldoon and I picked up this rule from the movies. Roy and Gene and Hoppy never cried, no matter how much they got hurt. A whole herd of cattle could stampede over a movie cowboy and flatten him into a fair imitation of Pizza Supreme, and the pizza would look up and say, “Just a scratch.” If a movie cowboy got half his innards shot out, he'd say, “Just a flesh wound.” Then he'd climb back on his horse and ride over the top of the Rockies after a bad guy. Movie cowboys were tough. So were Eddie and I.

One day we were cutting steaks off a horse to take on one of our camping trips. Because the horse had been lying dead in the Muldoon pasture for several weeks, we were pretty sure Eddie's pa wouldn't mind if we removed a few steaks from it. We were using Mr. Muldoon's hunting knife, which Eddie had borrowed for the task while his pa was away from home. Had he been there, Mr. Muldoon no doubt would have said, “Why sure, boys, help yourself to any of my razor-sharp knives to cut some steaks off that dead horse.” But he wasn't home. Anyway, when it came time for me to slice off a steak, the knife slipped and cut my thumb to the bone.

Right away Eddie looked at my eyes, to see if I was going to violate the code and burst out crying. But I didn't. I wanted to say, “It's just a flesh wound,” but I knew that if I unclenched my teeth for even a second I'd go, “Waaaahhhh!” So I tore a piece off my grungy T-shirt, wrapped it around my thumb, and went home without so much as a whimper. Eddie was impressed—heck,
I
was impressed! Eddie was probably a little worried, too, because he knew for sure that no matter how badly he got hurt, at least around me, he could never cry, although, personally, I didn't think Eddie could kick the habit. I was finally one up on him.

Later that summer Eddie and I were playing Lone Ranger and Tonto, and the Lone Ranger got bucked off one of the Muldoon milk cows—Silver—and broke his arm. Tonto was pretty sure the Lone Ranger would have cried, if he hadn't also got the wind knocked out of him. How lucky can a kid get! Later, Eddie made a pretty good case that not crying over a broken arm was a whole lot better than not crying over a measly cut thumb. So he had his edge back.

I was eight years old when I cut my thumb, so I know that any crying I did had to be before then. My tough old
pioneer grandmother also put a damper on my crying. Whenever I ran in the house bawling about some injury, she'd say, “Why you big calf!” (Calves bawl—get it? I didn't until I was grown up, but even as a kid I still recognized it as a serious insult to my boyhood.) Womenfolk in those days wouldn't put up with whimpering males. But now, after all these years, they change the rules. When I think of all the times I could have burst out crying and how good it would have made me feel, why, it's just infuriating.