The Schernoff Discoveries (6 page)

Ernie knew better. Harold was still having trouble with just one alley. I nodded. “I’ll help him out.”

Ernie shrugged and went back up front. He viewed pinsetters as just another part of the bowling machinery, and as long as somebody worked the pits he didn’t care.

We went back to work and I was kept so busy I almost didn’t have time to worry about what would happen when Chimmer regained consciousness. I assumed it would be bad—figured on him at least maiming me—but the work was so demanding what with my two alleys and taking Harold’s extra one every other frame when he got behind that I didn’t have a moment to spare on concern.

The lights that shone down over the pins generated a great deal of heat and soon I had taken my shirt off and was swinging alley to alley like a sweaty monkey, stooping to grab balls, throwing them into the return chute, grabbing three pins in each hand, flipping them into the setting rack and swinging into the next alley. Then I came up only to see Chimmer sitting up on the bench holding his forehead.

Well, I thought, it’s been a good life.

“How long was I out?” he asked.

I shrugged, waiting for the blow. “Maybe twenty minutes.”

“That hurt. Where did you learn to hit like that?”

He hadn’t seen the pin. He thought my fist had put him out. “It’s something I read at the library.”

“About fighting?”

“Yeah. I’ve been reading up on it. You know, just in case.”

He smiled and I realized with a start that I had never really seen him smile before. “Can you teach me to do it?”

I’m not going to say we became friends. If I were to meet Chimmer right now I’d just as soon park a car on him as anything. I don’t think Chimmer could ever be nice—there were no such genes in his makeup.

But he did stop beating the pudding out of me and he never picked on Harold again because Harold was my friend. My life changed because of that night.

Harold summed it up as we wheezed home. It was winter and to go from the sweaty, driving labor of the pits into the thirty-below cold of the
outside always made us cough and have trouble breathing, especially Harold, who seemed so thin there couldn’t be much lung in there.

“I think what we witnessed here tonight proves Darwin’s theory of evolution.”

We were passing the pool hall below the drug-store and I thought that when I became older and much more cool I would buy a leather jacket and pull my Levi’s down to show the crack in my butt and go down there and shoot pool. “What do you mean?”

“Chimmer. Clearly you have started a step in evolution by nearly killing him.”

“
I
didn’t do anything. A pin came across and clobbered him.”

“Still, he thinks you did and that will have the same effect. He’ll get older and seek a mate and have young and teach his young not to hit people.”

“No. Chimmer isn’t that smart. But he might teach his young not to hit people when there are bowling pins around, if he ever figures out it wasn’t me but a pin that dropped him.”

“
Exactly
my point. That will make the next generation teach
their
young and then the next and so on. In time the Chimmers will become a peaceful species.”

“How long?”

“Two, perhaps three million years. Certainly not soon enough to help the world now.”

And we walked on. Later I would find that Harold was right, at least in one sense. While I don’t think Chimmer evolved, a change certainly began in
me
. I decided then that for the rest of my life I would always look for the bowling pin that would help me through the tough spots.

The truth is I never saw Harold really fail at anything except fishing. All the other times he got close to failure, came around the edge of it, bumped right up into it, but he always came out ahead in some way.

Except when it came to fishing.

It all started one summer night when we were setting pins. Ernie was going to close the bowling alley over the weekend—his slowest time—and sand and varnish the alleys.

“A whole weekend,” I said as we left the
bowling alley. I had almost four dollars saved and I thought of movies—there was a horror film showing on Saturday night—or maybe buying a stick model of a B-17 bomber that I wanted to make or just spending the whole time at the swimming beach down on Crooked River trying to work up the courage to dive off the high board when none of the girls was looking. Or be really brave and do it when they
were
looking. If they looked. Ever.

“I want,” Harold said slowly, “to go fishing.”

For a moment it didn’t register. “We could go to a movie.…”

“No. I wish to go fishing.”

“You mean fishing … like outside?
You?
”

“Wherever the fish are. That is where I want to go fishing. You are good at this, aren’t you?”

“But Harold, you don’t—”

“I don’t what?”

That stopped me. I was going to say that he didn’t do things outside. We had tried skiing and nearly died and as far as I knew he spent the rest of his time indoors working on his ham radio equipment or reading technical bulletins. I couldn’t even get him to go swimming in the town swimming area down on Crooked River.
He was no hunter, and the only times we bicycled anywhere together were just to get from one building to another. He got sunburned walking across the yard—and that was on a cloudy day.

“I don’t what?” he repeated.

“You don’t fish.”

“
Exactly
why I want to go fishing. To learn. It’s the manly thing to do and I want to be more manly.”

“Manly?”

“
Exactly
. You will teach me. The way you taught me the art of hunting.”

I winced, remembering. He had wanted to hunt. I used a .22 single-shot and let him try the .410 shotgun. We just went into the brush, a small stand where I had seen grouse earlier. Not over ten acres of trees and willows. Harold got lost four times, shot two stumps, a clump of newspaper, and just missed the end of his foot. He finally bagged a grouse so, in his eyes, he was successful. I can still hear his shot whistling over my head.

“But you don’t have any gear, anything …”

“So what do we need—a hook, some string? How hard can it be? People do it all the time.”

“Harold, fishing is … is more …” I thought
suddenly of early morning light, casting a plug out into lily pads close to the shore of the river for northern pike, of the slashing pull when they struck, of the line hissing through the water; of feeling for suckers and carp with a snap hook below the dam and eating them smoked in iron-wood smoke. “It’s just more.”

“Then that is what you’ll teach me. All about what makes it more.”

And because we were friends and he was the only reason I wasn’t flunking worse than I was, I decided to take Harold fishing.

I almost changed my mind when I met him in front of his house early the next morning. I’d brought two old spring-steel rods (this was well before fiberglass or carbon rods existed) with thumb-buster casting reels on them, all so ancient I’d bought them for a dollar at a garage sale. I had a small metal tackle box with some hooks, sinkers and bobbers, a couple of silver spoons in case we got to lure casting, a lard can half full of worms and dirt, all tied across my handlebars. I also had a sack with some sandwiches in it and two candy bars.

Harold came out of his house looking like a
wrinkled page from
Field and Stream
magazine. He was wearing an old felt hat, an older cotton vest covered with pockets and loops, and a wicker creel slung over a shoulder. He had an honest-to-God fly rod in a tubular cloth case.

He was also wearing hip boots, which he had tied to his belt at the top. The whole outfit was at least three sizes too big.

“Harold …”

“What?”

But I shook my head. “Nothing. We’re going north out of town to a backwater I know about—can you ride your bike like that?”

“Like what?” He threw a leg over his bicycle, held the fly rod case across the handlebars, tipped up the front brim of the felt hat and smiled at me. “Let’s go.”

It was perhaps two miles to the fishing spot, and he pedaled all the way in those hip boots. I thought I’d have to slow down but he kept up, and when we arrived at the river backwater he hopped off his bike ready to go. “All right, how do we catch fish?”

“We’re going to fish with worms.”

“Worms.” He shook his head. “I read in a magazine that fishing with worms isn’t sporting.
It’s too easy. We’re supposed to use lures, flies, plugs and things.”

“Those are too hard at first. We’ll do worms, then work up to other stuff.”

At last he agreed and opened the rod case he was carrying and pulled out an absolute beauty of a split-bamboo rod; handmade, hand-served, hand-varnished and so elegant it took my breath away. I had heard of such rods, read about them in magazines, but I’d never seen one and only knew them as something to dream about, to worship.

“Where’d you get that rod?”

“This old thing? It was in the garage, up in the loft, wrapped in a piece of canvas. I was up there doing research—”

“On rats, I know.”

“—on rats and I ran into it. Why—is it a good one?”

“Could I see it?”

He handed me the rod in four sections and I assembled it, oiling the metal ferrules on the side of my nose as I’d read to do in
Field and Stream
so they wouldn’t stick, flexing the rod, feeling the perfect balance. It felt alive, a kind of glowing life in my hand.

“Is it good?”

I nodded. “It’s good. Very good. Too good for what we’re doing. Let’s put it away and use mine, all right?”

I finally talked him into putting the rod back in the case and handed him one of the spring-steel junkers. I showed him the basics—how the reel worked, how to lock it and crank it, how to cast (more on this in a bit), how to attach a hook to the leader, then a sinker, then a bobber about five feet from the hook.

“We throw it out,” I said, “and watch the bobber. When a fish starts fooling with it the bobber will go up and down.”

“That’s it? That’s all there is to it?”

“Not quite. When you see the bobber go under good and solid, when you know the fish really has the hook in his mouth, you heave back a bit with your arms and set the hook. Use your thumb on the line on the reel to keep pressure and hold the fish back. Don’t pull crazy, just enough to set it. Here.” I held out the lard bucket. “Put a worm on your hook.”

“I am not acquainted with the procedure.”

“Oh—like this.” I took a worm and threaded it on my hook. “You want it to look good,
delicious to the fish. A great glop of good fish food.”

He nodded, took about a half pound of worms out of the bucket, and snagged the mess on his hook. “Like this?”

“Close enough—now follow me and do as I do.” I led him down to the edge of the water. The river made a large curve there, slowly meandering around a stand of oaks and high rocks, and where it pushed against the bank it had carved out a half-acre backwater. I knew it as a place full of sunfish and bullheads—both easy to catch and good to eat.

“Watch,” I said. I snapped the lock off my reel and cast the hook and bobber out about forty feet. The hook dropped in and the bobber skidded to the side and stopped over the top of it. “Like that.”

“Looks simple enough.” Harold nodded. He stepped to the bank, looped a long arm back and with a mighty heave whipped the end of the rod out in what would have been a perfect cast.

Except that he didn’t unlock the reel. The ball of worms couldn’t go out more than four feet and then all the energy of the cast went into the rod and whipped the whole mess back into
Harold’s mouth, which was slightly open in concentration.

“Yeaaack!”

Luckily the hook didn’t set or we would have had a merry time trying to clear his mouth. But he did get a full load of worms in there and spent most of the rest of the day spitting.

He was game, however, and on the next try he unlocked his reel, took another mighty swing and caught
me
in the back of the head. The hook hit bone and bounced out without setting and I used the best words I had learned in the bowling alley.

“Wait a minute,” I said when my head stopped feeling like it was on fire. I moved well to the rear, hunkered down in back of a bush with a good-sized oak between us, judged the wind and all the angles and then nodded. “All right—let her rip.”

I had explained the principle of backlash to him, but the whole process of controlling the reel with thumb pressure while the line spun out, stopping the spinning just as the hook hit the water, then letting up again—all of that while whipping the rod through the casting arc and aiming at where the bait was to go—all that was way too much for Harold at this stage.

It started well enough. The line whizzed out, the bait flew across the water at a great speed, and then a snarl backlash hit the reel so hard it stopped dead. The line slammed to the end of the tangle, hung for half a heartbeat and then headed back so fast it was impossible to see it move. It screamed past Harold’s ear, caught on the end of the rod and described three full circles while it wrapped around his head.