One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey [111]
“George! Jesus, George, give us a hand!”
George wouldn’t have a thing to do with the pole; he grinned and told Sefelt to ease up on the star drag, keep the tip pointed up, up, and work hell outa that fella!
“But what if I have a seizure?” Sefelt hollered.
“Why, we’ll simply put hook and line on you and use you for a lure,” Harding said. “Now work that fella, as the captain ordered, and quit worrying about a seizure.”
Thirty yards back of the boat the fish broke into the sun in a shower of silver scales, and Sefelt’s eyes popped and he got so excited watching the fish he let the end of his pole go down, and the line snapped into the boat like a rubber band.
“Up, I told you! You let him get a straight pull, don’t you see? Keep that tip up…up! You had you one big silver there, by golly.”
Sefelt’s jaw was white and shaking when he finally gave up the pole to Fredrickson. “Okay—but if you get a fish with a hook in his mouth, that’s my godblessed fish!”
I was as excited as the rest. I hadn’t planned on fishing, but after seeing that steel power a salmon has at the end of a line I got off the cabin top and put on my shirt to wait my turn at a pole.
Scanlon got up a pool for the biggest fish and another for the first fish landed, four bits from everybody that wanted in it, and he’d no more’n got his money in his pocket than Billy drug in some awful thing that looked like a ten-pound toad with spines on it like a porcupine.
“That’s no fish,” Scanlon said. “You can’t win on that.”
“It isn’t a b-b-bird.”
“That there, he’s a ling cod,” George told us. “He’s one good eating fish you get all his warts off.”
“See there. He is too a fish. P-p-pay up.”
Billy gave me his pole and took his money and went to sit up close to the cabin where McMurphy and the girl were, looking at the closed door forlornly. “I wu-wu-wu-wish we had enough poles to go around,” he said, leaning back against the side of the cabin.
I sat down and held the pole and watched the line swoop out into the wake. I smelt the air and felt the four cans of beer I’d drunk shorting out dozens of control leads down inside me: all around, the chrome sides of the swells flickered and flashed in the sun.
George sang out for us to look up ahead, that here come just what we been looking for. I leaned around to look, but all I saw was a big drifting log and those black seagulls circling and diving around the log, like black leaves caught up in a dust devil. George speeded up some, heading into the place where the birds circled, and the speed of the boat dragged my line until I couldn’t see how you’d be able to tell if you did get a bite.
“Those fellas, those cormorants, they go after a school of candle fishes,” George told us as he drove. “Little white fishes the size of your finger. You dry them and they burn joost like a candle. They are food fish, chum fish. And you bet where there’s a big school of them candle fish you find the silver salmon feeding.”
He drove into the birds, missing the floating log, and suddenly all around me the smooth slopes of chrome were shattered by diving birds and churning minnows, and the sleek silver-blue torpedo backs of the salmon slicing through it all. I saw one of the backs check its direction and turn and set course for a spot thirty yards behind the end of my pole, where my herring would be. I braced, my heart ringing, and then felt a jolt up both arms as if somebody’d hit the pole with a ball bat, and my line went burning off the reel from under my thumb, red as blood. “Use the star drag!” George yelled at me, but what I knew about star drags you could put in your eye so I just mashed harder with my thumb until the line turned back to yellow, then slowed and stopped. I looked around, and there were all three of the other poles whipping around just like mine, and the rest of the guys scrambling down off the cabin at the excitement and doing everything in their power to get underfoot.
“Up! Up! Keep the tip up!” George was yelling.
“McMurphy! Get out here and