In God we trust_ all others pay cash - Jean Shepherd [28]
“Hey, for God’s sake, Gertz, will ya tell me when you’re gonna pull your pole up!? Oh, Jesus Christ, look at this mess!”
There is nothing worse than trying to untangle seven cane poles, 200 feet of soggy green line, just as they are starting to hit in the other boats. Sound carries over water:
“Shhhhh! I got a bite!”
The fishermen with the tangled lines become frenzied. Fingernails are torn, hooks dig deeper into thumbs, and kids huddle terrified out of range in the darkness.
You have been sitting for twenty hours, and nothing. A bobber just barely visible in the dark water is one of the most beautiful sights known to man. It’s not doing anything, but there’s always the feeling that at any instant it might. It just lays out there in the darkness. A luminous bobber, a beautiful thing, with a long, thin quill and a tiny red-and-white float, with just the suggestion of a line reaching into the black water. These are special bobbers for very tiny fish.
I have been watching my bobber so hard and so long in the darkness that I am almost hypnotized. I have not had a bite—ever—but the excitement of being there is enough for me, a kind of delirious joy that has nothing to do with sex or any of the more obvious pleasures. To this day, when I hear some guy singing in that special drummer’s voice, it comes over me. It’s two o’clock in the morning again. I’m a kid. I’m tired. I’m excited. I’m having the time of my life.
And at the other end of the lake:
“Raaahhhhhd sails in the sawwwwnnnnsehhhht.…” The Roller Rink drones on, and the mosquitoes are humming. The Coleman lamp sputters, and we’re all sitting together in our little boat.
Not really together, since I am a kid, and they are Men, but at least I’m there. Gertz is stewed to the ears. He is down at the other end. He has this fantastic collection of rotten stories, and early in the evening my Old Man keeps saying:
“There’s a kid with us, you know.”
But by two in the morning all of them have had enough so that it doesn’t matter. They’re telling stories, and I don’t care. I’m just sitting there, clinging to my cane pole when, by God, I get a nibble!
I don’t believe it. The bobber straightens up, jiggles, dips, and comes to rest in the gloom. I whisper:
“I got a bite!”
The storytellers look up from their beer cans in the darkness.
“What …? Hey, whazzat?”
“Shhhhh! Be quiet!”
We sit in silence, everybody watching his bobber through the haze of insects. The drummer is singing in the distance. We hang suspended for long minutes. Then suddenly all the bobbers dipped and went under. The crappies are hitting!
You never saw anything like it! We are pulling up fish as fast as we can get them off the hooks. Crappies are flying into the boat, one after the other, and hopping around on the bottom in the darkness, amid the empty beer cans. Within twenty minutes we have landed forty-seven fish. We are knee-deep in crappies. The jackpot!
Well, the Old Man just goes wild. They are all yelling and screaming and pulling the fish in—while the other boats around us are being skunked. The fish have come out of their hole or whatever it is that they are in at the bottom of the lake, the beer cans and the old tires, and have decided to eat.
You can hear the rest of the boats pulling up anchors and rowing over, frantically. They are thumping against us. There’s a big, solid phalanx of wooden boats around us. You could walk from one boat to the other for miles around. And still they are skunked. We are catching the fish!
By 3 A.M. they’ve finally stopped biting, and an hour later we are back on land. I’m falling asleep in the rear seat between Gertz and Zudock. We’re driving home in the dawn, and the men are hollering, drinking, throwing beer cans out on the road, and having a great time.
We are back at the house, and my father says to me as we are coming out of the garage with Gertz and the rest of them:
“And now Ralph’s gonna clean the fish. Let’s go in the house and have something to eat. Clean ’em on the