In God we trust_ all others pay cash - Jean Shepherd [27]
ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZTTTTTTTTTTT
They love Coleman lamps. In the light they shed the mosquitoes swarm like rain. And in the darkness all around there’d be other lights in other boats, and once in a while a face would float above one. Everyone is coated with an inch and a half of something called citronella, reputedly a mosquito repellent but actually a sort of mosquito salad dressing.
The water is absolutely flat. There has not been a breath of air since April. It is now August. The surface is one flat sheet of old used oil laying in the darkness, with the sounds of the Roller Rink floating out over it, mingling with the angry drone of the mosquitoes and muffled swearing from the other boats. A fistfight breaks out at the Evening In Paris. The sound of sirens can be heard faintly in the Indiana blackness. It gets louder and then fades away. Tiny orange lights bob over the dance floor.
“Raaahhhhhd sails in the sawwwwnnnnsehhhht.…”
It’s the drummer who sings. He figures some day Ted Weems will be driving by, and hear him, and.…
“… haaaahhhhwwww brightlyyyy they shinneee.…”
There is nothing like a band vocalist in a rotten, struggling Mickey band. When you’ve heard him over 2000 yards of soupy, oily water, filtered through fourteen billion feeding mosquitoes in the August heat, he is particularly juicy and ripe. He is overloading the ten-watt Allied Radio Knight amplifier by at least 400 per cent, the gain turned all the way up, his chrome-plated bullet-shaped crystal mike on the edge of feedback.
“Raaahhhhhd sails in the sawwwwnnnnsehhhht.…”
It is the sound of the American night. And to a twelve-year-old kid it is exciting beyond belief.
Then my Old Man, out of the blue, says to me:
“You know, if you’re gonna come along, you got to clean the fish.”
Gonna come along! My God! I wanted to go fishing more than anything else in the world, and my Old Man wanted to drink beer more than anything else in the world, and so did Gertz and the gang, and more than even that, they wanted to get away from all the women. They wanted to get out on the lake and tell dirty stories and drink beer and get eaten by mosquitoes; just sit out there and sweat and be Men. They wanted to get away from work, the car payments, the lawn, the mill, and everything else.
And so here I am, in the dark, in a rowboat with The Men. I am half-blind with sleepiness. I am used to going to bed at nine-thirty or ten o’clock, and here it is two, three o’clock in the morning. I’m squatting in the back end of the boat, with 87,000,000 mosquitoes swarming over me, but I am fishing! I am out of my skull with fantastic excitement, hanging onto my pole.
In those days, in Indiana, they fished with gigantic cane poles. They knew not from Spinning. A cane pole is a long bamboo pole that’s maybe twelve or fifteen feet in length; it weighs a ton, and tied to the end of it is about thirty feet of thick green line, roughly half the weight of the average clothesline, three big lead sinkers, a couple of crappie hooks, and a bobber.
One of Sport’s most exciting moments is when 7 Indiana fishermen in the same boat simultaneously and without consulting one another decide to pull their lines out of the water and recast. In total darkness. First the pole, rising like a huge whip:
“Whoooooooooooooop!”
Then the lines, whirling overhead: “heeeeeeeeeeeeoooooooooo!”
And then:
“OH! FOR CHRISSAKE! WHAT THE HELL?”
Clunk! CLONK!
Sound of cane poles banging together, and lead weights landing in the boat. And such brilliant swearing as you have never heard. Yelling, hollering, with somebody always getting a hook stuck in the back of his ear. And, of course, all in complete darkness, the Coleman lamp at the other end of