Just Like Home(45)
Vera holds up the hook, which is secured to the line by a huge, clumsy tangle of a knot. Her father nods his approval before standing up and wading into the creek.
Vera hesitates—she isn’t sure if she should take her shoes off or not—but then her father turns and looks back at her, and his face looks like what are you waiting for? So she stands right up and puts the narrow imprint of her own sneakers in the big footprints his boots have stamped into the mud, and she walks into the water.
It’s colder than she expected, and murky. The silt of the creekbed swallows her feet right up. Mud fills her shoes in a way that isn’t entirely unpleasant, but which she knows will give her mother a fit. She wades in until she’s standing next to her father. The water comes up to the middle of his thighs; it rises just over the waistband of Vera’s shorts. Her belly sucks in of its own accord, and a strange, ugly shiver goes through her at the thought of that cold water filling her navel.
Vera’s father tucks his fishing pole under his arm, reaches into his pocket, and pulls out a little jar. It’s a jar Vera knows well: every time her father plans to go fishing, he hands it to her the night before, so she can go out to the yard and fill it up.
He opens that jar now and reaches in with a thumb and forefinger. With the deft ease of long practice, he pulls out one of the stretchy, sinuous nightcrawlers Vera dug up for him last night.
Vera mirrors his posture, tucking her fishing pole under one arm so she can grab the hook with one hand and accept the worm with the other.
She doesn’t hesitate. She slides the hook through the worm’s soft, pink, mud-speckled skin. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees her father smile, and she feels that same smile on her own face. The nightcrawler is squirming hypnotically, thrashing in a way that is nothing like the usual slow undulation its brothers make when Vera digs them up in the yard for her father.
It looks muscular. It looks furious.
Watching it, something in Vera begins to solidify. Usually, worms are boring, but this one—all it took was a poke to turn this one into something completely different, something fascinating. Something alive. A creamy kind of hunger Vera’s never felt before puts an ache in her jaw and a twitch low in her belly.
She doesn’t want to eat this worm, but she can understand why a big fish might.
When she looks up at her father, there’s a tightness around the corners of his eyes. “Are you ready?” he asks, and Vera almost says no, but she knows that the right answer is yes, so she nods. “Good,” he says. “Now, watch. Watching is the only way to learn.”
Vera nods again. She watches as her father casts his line. He lifts his arms high over his head, letting the hook dangle far behind him. Then he whips his arms forward, and a second later, the weight on his line drops into the water six feet away.
He nods to Vera. She cautiously raises her own arms.
“Careful the hook doesn’t catch you,” her father says. “Watch it close.”
She’s careful. She watches the hook with the worm on it as it arcs through the air in front of her, landing not far from the ripples of her father’s cast. She looks to him to see if she got it right, but his eyes are already on the little float that’s bobbing in the water in front of him.
“You have to keep the tip of your pole kind of straight out, like this, see?” He demonstrates with his own stick, holding it almost parallel to the surface of the water. “That way, when you get a bite, you can yank it up and set the hook. Watch that float there,” he adds, pointing at her float. It’s blue and white where his is white and yellow. “If it disappears, you’re in luck.”
She twitches her fishing pole up and down, smiling at the way the lightweight line rests on the surface of the water for a few seconds before it disappears. She wonders what the fish think when they see the line touch the water like that. But then she smiles to herself, knowing that the fish don’t think or feel anything at all. Probably ever.
After all, they’re only animals.
* * *
After an hour, Vera’s toes are the same temperature as the mud that fills her shoes, and her shoulders ache from holding the stick up at the proper angle, but none of that matters. Her father tells her jokes about elephants in trees, and she laughs even though she could roll her eyes, and twice he hands her the jar of nightcrawlers and tells her to change out the one on her hook because “nobody likes a soggy dinner, not even trout.”
Each time she presses her hook down into tender flesh—each time a worm turns into a tense thrumming fighting thing in her hand—she feels that same lush thrill. Here is something that she controls. Here is something that responds to her with the kind of frantic immediacy she’s always wanted from the world.
“Hey, Vera, why couldn’t the two elephants go swimming?” her father asks. Vera has heard this joke before, but she loves this exchange, her father producing jokes for the sole purpose of making her laugh, her laughing for the sole purpose of making him happy. She doesn’t love the jokes, but she loves that he tells them, so she always acts like they’re fresh.
But then, before she can say I don’t know, why couldn’t the elephants go swimming—the blue plastic circle of her fishing float vanishes beneath the surface.
What comes next is frenetic in a way she couldn’t have anticipated. Her father shouts at her to set the hook, and she’s not sure what that means but she’s so startled that she yanks her fishing pole up hard and feels a sharp tug and that turns out to be the right thing after all. She can feel the fish on the line under the water, trying to pull the stick out of her hand, it feels just like the yank she gets behind her bellybutton when her teacher catches her passing a note, like whispering the word bitch when that same teacher’s back is turned, like pressing her face to the bedroom floor. Her mouth is open and her eyes are wide and she’s looking to her father because she’s caught something, and she couldn’t possibly imagine what to do now that she has it.