Caterwaul

Blogger's Note: You may wish to start this story from the beginning, with Cattywhompus and Catastrophy. But you already knew that, didn't you?

The morning after landing, carving and grilling Cattywhompus, the Old Man was something of a celebrity around the campground. He didn't act any differently: rose early, made coffee, ate a breakfast of thick pancakes, cooked apples, pepperjack cheese and maple syrup with fried catfish scraps on the side, and headed back down to the water to take his seat at the end of the off-kilter dock. I shuffled down a short while later, bleary and yawning.

"Why dinja wake me?" I asked.

"Did," he said. "'Bout an hour ago."

"Any luck?"

"Not yet."

I walked down the boardwalk to the houseboat to fetch my pole. When I turned to head back, I saw two kids on bikes, with fishing poles, standing at the shore end of Dad's dock, urging one another to speak up. Finally, one said, "Hey mister! Catchin' any?"

Dad shook his head, but didn't turn.

"Boy, that was some catfish!" said the other.

No response.

"Whatcha fishin' with, anyway?"

"Minnows."

The boys look at each other, grinning. One says, "Uncle Paul's got shiners!"

"Nah," says the Old Man. "Not shiners. Sucker minnows. Big ones. Can't get 'em around here."

It's true, I thought. We brought ours from home, because the Hardy bait shops didn't have them. We set up two old steel laundry sinks in the shade beside the camper with a bubbler to keep them alive.

The boys faces fell, and they whispered back and forth. Then they headed down toward me, past me, to an empty dock and began casting with tiny spoons. I hooked a sucker minnow and sat at the end of a dock across the cove from Dad.

Before long the boys were bickering back and forth about who cast too close to the other and why the fish weren't biting. They got more and more animated, then finally hopped on their bikes and pedaled away.

Across the cove, I see the Old Man's shoulders slowly unravel and relax. I notice one of them has left a fishing pole in the weeds along the boardwalk.

Half an hour later, Mom comes down, hooked a sucker minnow and tosses it into the cove. It makes a flat splash when it hits the water.

"Dangit!" snaps Mom. "Well, that probably killed it."

She peers at her bobber for a couple minutes as it rocked listlessly on the water. "Come on, little fella," she coaxes. "Wake up."

The Old Man exhales deeply and adjusted the tilt of his broad-brimmed hat. I watched the water bugs skate across the surface and try to stay quiet. A soft breeze and the hum of dragonflies are the only sounds.

"Hun!" calls Mom. "Do you think I should change minnows? I think I killed this one."

His grunt is noncommital. "What, hun?" calls Mom.

"Hafta check'm, I guess," he replies.

Mom reels in and holds her minnow up before her clip-on shades. It wiggles violently on the hook.

"Oh!" she says. "Go, baby!"

She throws bait, weight and bobber back into the pond. It splashes hard again.

"Oh for Pete's sake!" Mom shouts. "Well, I'm sure that did it."

After awhile, Mom heads to the camper to find Sinister and work on lunch. As she heads up the hill, the two boys bike back down the hill and up the boardwalk—buddup-buddup-buddup.

"See!" shouts the first, pointing to the pole in the grass. "Told ya!"

"It's not mine!"

"Sure it is! I saw you—you were using it this morning!"

"So? It's not my pole. It's Uncle Paul's."

"Well, you were using it, so you should bring it back up," says the first boy.

"He's your uncle, too," says the second, and speeds off.

"Hey, wait up!" shouts the other.

Next, four teenage boys come down the hill, poles in hand, joking and laughing. One, carrying a massive tackle box, gestures toward Dad. "Hey!" shouts another. "Whatcha catch?"

The Old Man doesn't say. "Catfish yesterday," I venture. "Big one."

They hadn't seen me across the cove and scowl. They weren't talking to me. "Anything today, mister?"

Dad shakes his head once. One boy elbows another, and they all laugh. Then each takes a dock, ties on the biggest crankbaits in their arsenal and engage it what appears to be a casting competition, throwing out as far as they can with a tremendous splash, then reeling in as fast as possible, and jawing one to the other.

"Daryl!" comes Mom's voice from the top of the hill. "Lunch!"

The Old Man reels in and folds his chair. "C'mon, Dogbreath," he says. Across the cove, the older boys laugh and laugh.

We eat longhorn burgers and macaroni salad. The Old Man eats quickly, stands, stretches, and says, "That dock's playin' hell with my back."

He walks to the truck, rummages through his massive tool box and emerges with a small sledge hammer.

"What are you going to do?" asks Mom.

"Fix that dock."

He heads down the hill as we finish lunch. Moments later we hear it: CLANK! CLANK! CLANK!

I run to the steps that head down to the docks. The teenagers are gone. The Old Man's boots and socks are on the boardwalk; he is up to his waist in water, beating on the high corner of the aluminum dock with the sledge, trying to unjam it.

CLANK! CLANK! CLANK! With each hammer strike, birds scatter, and the cove gets quieter and quieter. Mom appears beside me. "What's he thinking?" she says. "Won't that scare the fish?"

As we clear the table and wash dishes, we watch our fellow campers stop and stare at the Old Man beating on the dock below. Young and old alike, they shake their heads: "He's gonna kill the fishing. Gonna scare all the fish."

A bit later, he comes up the hill in dripping jeans and a half-soaked t-shirt. "There," he says.

"It's level?" I ask.

"Yup," he says, "It's floating again."

"But won't all that racket scare the fish away?" says Mom.

"Maybe," he says, "maybe not."

He puts his tools away and heads back down to the dock, unfolds his chair, and tosses a minnow into the pond. Not a bite, not a ripple, not a sound, either. The Old Man sits peacefully by the water in silence 'til sundown.

Catastrophy

Blogger's Note: You may wish to start this story from the beginning, with Cattywhompus. But don't let me tell you what to do.

The Old Man’s trophy catfish was a source of great pride and discussion that summer. That he caught such a fish was something; that he caught it when no one else was catching much of anything was something else; and that he caught it from the campground docks was almost too much to be believed. People walked past the camper, whispering, for days afterward, “That’s the guy ... caught it from the dock! Yessiree, right down there!”

After I dragged the net into the shallows, he hoisted the fish up to admire it, brushed the silt and weeds off, then lowered it tail-first into a five-gallon pail of water to set about removing the hook. The bucket was far too small, and with his head and pectorals sticking out, ol’ Cattywhompus looked as if he were headed to the poorhouse wearing a barrel. The Old Man flipped open a set of needle-nose pliers from a pouch on his belt, grasped the hook and twisted it free from the monster’s mouth.

“Guess I better flip him over so he can breathe,” he said. He groped around beneath its head a minute, but failing to find an adequate fingerhold in its gills, he thought a moment, then wriggled his four fingers under the creature's toothless mouth, as if noodling. The mouth opened, and Dad grabbed the big fish by the upper lip. The fish closed its mouth as the Old Man lifted it from the bucket. I saw his bushy eyebrows arch noticeably as he did so.

“Bah,” he said. “On second thought, maybe I’ll just carry him up to the camper like this. Probably ought to clean him right away.”

The crowd of spectators who had watched the epic struggle between man and fish followed us up to the camper. A few attempted to make small talk, but Dad didn't say much, and they slowly dispersed. Yet even after the last of them returned to their campsites, Dad continued to lug that fish around.

“Are you going to take it into town and get it weighed?” asked Mom.

He tilted his head and hefted the fish, which hung from his hand like an extra appendage. “Nope,” he said through clenched teeth. “He’ll go about 21, 22 pounds. Now where’s my knife?”

They say there's more than one way to skin a cat, and I expect the same applies to a catfish. I can tell you for certain that I've never seen like what I witnessed that night, before or since. The Old Man found his knife and held it in his teeth. Then he placed an old pine board on the campsite picnic table with his free hand, and slapped the slimy creature down on top of it, on its belly, of course, because as a bottom-feeder, a catfish won't lay flat on it's side.

I rushed over with the hatchet and a polebarn spike from the pickup. “Gonna nail his head down to skin him, Dad?” I asked, recalling stories I'd heard of cleaning bullheads that way.

The Old Man's eyes bulged at the suggestion, and he took his knife from his teeth. “I reckon not,” he said. “Think I’ll hold him here, just like this.”

I guess that, having never caught a catfish, he had never cleaned a catfish and wasn't sure of its anatomy. At any rate, he seemed a bit anxious, and stabbed the fish several times along its body—to get a feel for its bone structure, I suppose. I couldn’t see the fingers of his right hand, which were still inside the fish’s mouth, but the thumb on the outside tapped double-time on its snout.

For the next half hour, he carved flesh from the flathead. The process was far more like butchering a hog than filleting a fish—and even more like chipping a stump. He filled two big mixing bowl with odd cuts of meat, and when the catfish's body was stripped to the bones, he started in on the head, too!

As I watched, something seemed odd to me. I’d seen the Old Man fillet or field-dress all kinds of critters before, and his knifework was never so awkward and unatural. In fact, the entire operation seemed backward to me, like reading in Chinese, or when Dad whipped our neighbor, Edsel, in ping-pong ...

Then it hit me. “Hey!” I shouted, “Quit showing off—you’re not left-handed!”

The Old Man was cutting close to twitching thumb, lost in concentration—and when I shouted he jumped. His knife jumped, too, removing a slab of catfish "cheek," clear to the bone. I could see the joint of the fish's jaw laid bare, and his fingers, pale and stiff, like dead men in the mouth of a whale.

The Old Man wiggled them and exhaled audibly. Then he pushed his hat back with the tip of his knife and peered at me over his wire-rimmed glasses. “No,” he said. “No, I guess I’m not.”

He placed the knife carefully on the table and braced his right hand against the board and table. With his left, he grabbed the big fish’s upper lip, and pulled its jaws open with an audible pop. He removed his right hand from the fish's mouth and regarded it with genuine affection, carefully examining it, front and back, and flexing it to be sure it still worked.

“Cut yourself?” asked Mom from the camper window.

The Old Man looked at me and raised one single, bushy eyebrow. "Almost," he said. "Eh, bud?"

I swallowed hard and smiled.

A bike rattled up the campground loop, then skidded to a stop in front of us. A girl a few years younger than me looked at the ragged carcass that had been Cattywhompus and the bowls of fish-flesh beyond with a mixture of awe and disgust. “Gross!" she said. "Whatcha gonna do with that?”

The Old Man skewered a chunk of catfish with his knife, closed his eyes, and sniffed it like a glass of fine red wine. Then he opened one eye and glanced sidelong at the girl's unbelieving face.

“We're gonna eat it, of course! Dogbreath, light the grill!”

Cattywhompus

Fishing was good in Littlefield, but now and again the Old Man load up Mom and me, the dogs, and my sister Jill (a.k.a. Sinister) and strike out for new water. Hardy Pond was a favorite spot when the walleye and smallmouth were biting. We would rumble into the quiet little RV park just above Hardy Dam in our 1969 Ford one-ton pickup, Creampuff, with a ton-and-a-half, Gypsy-looking camper on the back, complete with a roofed back porch and wrought iron railing, hauling our pontoon-turned-houseboat; back the whole top-heavy string down the crumbling concrete boat launch; and putter the houseboat up to last dock to tie up.

Next, Dad would unhook the trailer and lurch Creampuff back to the campsite to level the camper and unload the dogs. Jill and I would run them quickly across the gravel drive to an unmowed patch of trees, weeds and occasional poison ivy to relieve themselves. By the time we returned, the Old Man was usually seated on the deck of the houseboat, stringing fishing poles.

From a kid’s perspective, when the fish were biting no place was better than Hardy Pond. While fishing walleye, you might hook a smallmouth, a pike, a bluegill the size of your face, you name it. We’d even heard tell of monster muskie and catfish in those waters, both of which were on the Old Man’s short list of dream fish.

Usually the fish were biting on Hardy—but one summer they weren’t. After several luckless days on the river, the Old Man proclaimed we would spend a day at the docks, fishing pike in the weedy campground cove.

The day was sunny and not too hot, with a gentle breeze blowing into the cove. My folks sat on opposite sides of the little bay, drifting sucker minnows over the drop-off on big orange-and-white slip bobbers. I worked the shallows with a worm, trying to coax a panfish worth filleting out from under the bobbing boats. Sinister was, in theory, still in the lawn chair by the camper where we left her, reading while the dogs slept under the truck. I kept a weather eye over my shoulder, just in case.

The sun slipped by overhead, the quiet of the river interrupted periodically by a question from Mom’s side of the cove—“Should I reel in and throw him out again, Hun?” “Do you think I need a new minnow? This one isn’t swimming very much ...”—and grunts of affirmation from my father.

Mom sat on the end of her dock, a newer wooden construction, in a t-shirt and jeans with her flip-flops beside her, her pant legs rolled to her calves, and her feet cooling in the water. Her eyes were hidden beneath a white visor and clip-on sunglasses, but her mouth was set, determined. The Old Man wore jeans and a t-shirt too, but with leather workboots, a wide leather belt hung with a variety of tools, blades, and lights, and a broad ten-gallon hat low on his brow. He was seated in a blue canvas lawn chair on the most precarious dock on the river—an aluminum job on black rubber floats, rising and falling with the movement of the water. The deep end of this particular dock, however, was jammed in such a kittywhompus fashion that Dad’s lawn chair would have crab-walked sideways into the water were his weight not holding it down. Aside from his left leg, which was braced against the lefthand pole to keep himself from spilling over, the Old Man appeared relaxed and serene.

Toward evening, the fish began to bite, and as the sun sank behind the trees, we had two keeper pike and a few smallish perch. I inquired about supper, as boys will, but I was also getting nervous that I hadn’t seen or heard from Sinister in hours, and the light was fading. Mom began to reel in. Dad sat motionless, gazing at his bobber as he had all afternoon.

As if on cue, the orange float began to bob frantically. The Old Man responded as a predator might—with a heightened sense of alertness but no sudden movement. He watched the line spool off the reel and into the deep, his hand poised at the crank.

The line stopped and went slack. Slowly, slowly, Dad turned the crank, and the reel clicked. Softly, softly, he reeled in the slack, feeling his way to the fish, waiting for weight or a sudden tug. When he felt resistance, he snapped the pole upward to set the hook, stood, and cranked furiously.

I saw him, pole in hand, fighting the fish—a question mark against the blushing sky, his line gleaming in the golden light, pointing to the answer deep in the weedy cove. I saw his lawn chair skitter up against the back of his legs, cutting off his only avenue of retreat. I heard Mom excitedly asking impossible questions, “You got it, hun? What is it? What’ve you got?”

“Dunno,” he said as the drag whined in protest. “It’s big.” He pumped the rod, reeling on the downstroke. He grunted against the thrashing fish, and I could see the sweat gleaming on his forearms.

“Yeah. It’s big,” he said. Then he said four words I that filled me with dread: “Dogbreath! Get the net!”

I ran the length of the narrow boardwalk that circled the cove connecting a dozen docks—all the way to the very last dock, where the houseboat rocked on the evening waves, oblivious to the primordial struggle around the bend. As I ran, I reflected on the Old Man’s request and my immediate dread. I knew he had a smaller net with him, a wooden one handcrafted by Grandpa that was as old as I could remember. Nope, he wanted the big net, and that meant a lunker.

I grabbed the big net and hurried back. I could see my father straining still, leaning back at the waist, his rod bent into a semicircle. Mom was standing on her dock across the cove, cheering him on—“You got him, hun! Reel him in!”—and a crowd of kids and campers had gathered to watch the excitement.

“He’s in the weeds,” the Old Man muttered. The lawn chair appeared to have been kicked backward, halfway to shore. The Old Man shuffled his feet now and again for better purchase on the tilted dock, and I saw my doom unfold.

I had been thinking that the worst that could happen (and more than likely would happen) was that, in attempting to net the fish I would either A) knock the hook from its mouth and set it free, or B) drop the net and watch the creature carry it to the bottom of the cove. Now I saw with utter certainty that the reality was far worse—the added weight of boy and fish would suffice to free the jammed dock on its moorings, and when it leapt back to level, my straining father would end up in the water, losing fish, rod, net, and dignity—and in my case, any chance at another birthday.

“The net!” snapped the Old Man as he raised the pole high into the air. I took a deep breath, and stepped to the gallows.

Ten feet from the end of the dock something rolled to the surface, broad and black, trailing six feet of weeds. Dad registered his unbelief with a low whistle. “Not a pike,” he said under his breath. “Not a muskie.”

“Whatcha got?” shouted a kid on a bike.

“What is it?” yelled Mom. “Is it a keeper?”

“It’s a ...” hedged the Old Man.

A broad mouth gaped at me, black eyes stared from across millennia, weeds and whiskers and slimy black skin. “It’s a monster!” I yelled.

“It’s catfish!” hollered the Old Man. “Flathead! Go on, net him, now!”

I began to lower the big net into the water, and caught movement from the corner of my eye. Sinister! I turned to see her, smiling sweetly. “Dad?” she called, “can I help?” Her foot was poised above the dock; her eyes, fixed on me.

I turned back toward Dad, plunged the net into the water, and scooped it full of catfish. “Nope, I got it!” I shouted, dragging the net toward shore. “You stay there—I got him; I’ll bring him to you!”

The Old Man followed with the pole, and Mom hustled around the cove to meet us. The crowd was abuzz: “Ugly thing.” “Three feet if it’s an inch!” “What’ll that go, 20 pounds?”

Dad hoisted the fish from the net and held it up for inspection. “Flathead cat!” he said triumphantly. "Ol' Cattywhompus himself!"

“You always said you wanted to catch one,” said Mom.

“Nice job, Dad!” said Sinister. She elbowed me lightly in the ribs. “You, too, Germ.”

“Yeah,” said the Old Man, mussing my hair with a rough hand. “Nice job, bud.”