Thumbsucker (14 page)

“Don’t pause,” Mike said. “Keep it moving, nice and even.” He guided my arm, too firmly for my liking. “Ten o’clock. Back to two o’clock. Repeat.”

“Let go of me,” I said.

“Don’t force it.”

“I’m not!”

Eventually, my casting improved and Mike let me choose a fishing vest from the Orvis display at his store. I filled the pouches with leaders, hooks, weights, clippers,
and various bottles of dressing meant to help the fly to float or sink. The finishing touch was a slim aluminum box containing flies Mike had tied over the winter: Pale Morning Duns, Royal Coachmen, Goofus Bugs.

“What makes these special,” he said, “are the materials. The ones you buy at the store use synthetics, but I tied these from natural materials.”

I already knew the secret of Mike’s flies. Now and then, while driving in the country, he’d see something in the road, pull over, get out, and toss a dead grouse or pheasant in the trunk. He stored his finds in the basement freezer and didn’t always bother to wrap them up, forcing me to confront their carcasses whenever I went for ice cream or a Popsicle. Once, when I threw out a woodcock he’d been saving, Mike went ape and made me dig through garbage bags until I found the bird.

I shut the fly box and tucked it in my vest. “Thank you.”

“You’re going to love this sport,” Mike said. “It isn’t like Joel’s tennis. You never master it. Every river is a whole new ball game.”

On summer Saturdays, rain or shine, we woke up at six and drove a hundred miles to the Winnikick River in southern Wisconsin. The river flowed through an Indian reservation and Mike had to buy a license from the tribe permitting us to fish. The tribe was poor. Hitchhikers in
surplus combat jackets trudged along the shoulders of the road, raising their thumbs when they saw our car approach and lowering them when they saw that we weren’t Indians. Instead of advertising cars and clothes, the billboards along the reservation’s main highway promoted suicide hot lines and nutrition classes.

Before we hit the river for the day, Mike always made a point of stopping in at the reservation trading post, which sold tax-free tobacco as well as sporting goods. I liked the store’s smell—old leather, pipe smoke, bait—but one day Mike ruined the place for me by buying chewing tobacco.

“I’ll take a pouch of Red Man,” he told the clerk.

Outside I said, “I can’t believe you did that.”

“If they didn’t want people to buy it, they wouldn’t stock it.”

“I saw the clerk’s face.”

“White sportsmen support that outfit.”

The Winnikick was a tricky river to reach. After parking our car at the end of a dirt road, we had to walk a mile through brushy swamps, aiming our rod tips between the trees and brambles to keep from snagging them. Mike lived in fear that I’d break the rod he’d bought me, an Orvis eight-footer so slim and delicate that wrecking it seemed to be just a matter of time. My bulky rubber waders weighed me down, and I was worn out by the time I reached the river, my hair snarled stiff with burrs, my hands scratched raw. Mike, who walked
faster than me and hated waiting, was usually in the river by this time, aiming elegant casts at the green banks.

I waded in well downstream from him that morning. The sudden squeeze of water around my calves felt like when the doctor took my blood pressure. I chose my fly—a fluffy deer-hair caddis made from a buck Mike had shot—and tried to tie it to my hair-thin leader.

My clinch knot unraveled. My neck muscles cramped solid. The same way certain people can’t learn to dance no matter how many lessons they receive, I couldn’t learn to tie fishing knots. They baffled me.

“Need any help back there?” Mike shouted. He knew from our previous outings that I did and that I’d say I didn’t.

Five minutes of frustration became fifteen. Behind me I heard a splash: a feeding trout. I twisted and looped the nylon line at random, hoping to tie a knot by accident.

“Got one!” I heard Mike shout around the bend. “Beautiful rainbow. Gorgeous. Come on up here.”

I slogged upstream, bent forward against the current. The rocks underfoot were slick with moss and seaweed. By the time I reached Mike he’d already landed the trout and released it back into the river.

“Any luck back there?” he said.

“I couldn’t tie my fly on.”

“You need more tippet.” From his vest Mike took a coil of line, measured out a section along his forearm,
and snipped it off with a pair of nail clippers attached to a retractable key chain.

“For joining two sections of line we use the blood knot. Remember the blood knot?”

“I think so. Show it to me.”

We’d tried this the week before. We tried again. Mike flipped up his clip-on Polaroids and guided my smooth white fingers with his rough brown ones as I overlapped the lengths of line. I felt a frustrated tension in his thumbs as I braided the sections together, threaded a loop, pulled the ends tight, and watched the knot undo itself.

Nearby I heard a trout jump. Then another.

“Go on and fish,” I said. “I’ve almost got it.”

“Like hell you do. Gimme.” Mike took the line from me. He joined the two pieces of leader, spit on them, and cinched the blood knot tight.

“What fly were you thinking of using?”

“A Royal Coachman?”

“I’ll put one on for you. Try to pay attention.”

By noon Mike had caught and released four trout and I’d caught none, though I’d had a couple strikes. The second strike snapped my leader and took my fly. I tried to tie on a new fly, failed, and chose to go on pretending to fish rather than pester Mike for help. I put on quite a performance for myself, casting, reeling in, and stripping line as though I actually stood a chance of hooking something with an empty line.

We ate our lunch in the shade of an oak tree. Acorns
plopped onto the ground, knocked loose by squirrels, and daddy longlegs high-stepped over leaves. Mike sliced a hard salami with his fillet knife and I squeezed cheese from a tube onto Ritz crackers. Mike ate the salami slices off the knife blade, which made me nervous.

“What’s wrong?” he said. “Tough morning?”

“Be careful, you’ll cut your tongue.”

“You’re mad at me. You wish you were studying drama with the rich kids.”

“I can’t tie knots.”

“You bear down too hard. Ease up some.”

Mike peeled his waders off after lunch and stretched out under the tree for a nap. I walked down to the stream to drink a beer I’d stashed in my fishing vest.

“Any luck?” a voice said.

I looked up. On the bank across from me two Indian men were fishing in a way I’d never seen before. Their poles were short and stout, like sawed-off pool cues, and were propped in the crotches of Y-shaped sticks.

“My father caught four,” I said. “He threw them back, though.”

“A purist,” one of the men said. “That’s too bad. A person should eat what he catches. It shows respect.”

“How about you two?” I said.

The second man reached his arm out to the side and hoisted a black plastic garbage bag off the ground. The bag looked heavy, about to split and spill, and the man only managed to lift it for a moment. What Mike had told me once was true, it seemed: the Indians fished for
food, not sport, and would empty the whole river if they could.

“What were you using?” I asked.

“Just crawlers. Want some?”

“My father says we have to fish with flies.”

“I think I know your old man,” the first man said.

I drank the rest of the beer. “How’s that?”

“I work at a store he comes into.” The Indian looked at his friend. “Mr. Red Man.”

The two of them laughed. I waved good-bye and left.

On the drive home Mike found a dead raccoon.

Mike tied his flies at a workbench in the basement. One end of the bench was strewn with spools of thread, boxes of hooks, and cards of colored yarn. The other side held stacks of pheasant wings, bundles of squirrel tails, and sections of furry deer hide. Sitting in front of his tying vise, listening to a Twins game on the radio, Mike would poke through his collection of remains, looking for the feather or tuft of fur that matched the photographs in his book of flies.

“You want to stand here and learn?” he said.

“I’m busy.”

“Fly-tying teaches attention to detail. Woody always said I had a problem there. Thank God I had someone to point out my deficiencies.”

“It never made you angry?”

“Sometimes, sure. But that’s where I got the energy
to improve myself. Men who don’t get angry, in my experience, tend to end up carrying other men’s luggage for them.”

While Mike wrapped thread around a tiny hook I sat on the floor with a fishing magazine containing an article on tying knots. It recommended practicing with rope. I went upstairs and found a coil of laundry line, cut off two equal pieces with a steak knife, and returned to the basement.

“Admirable persistence,” Mike said. “At some point you have to say ‘Hey, I’m on my own. It’s me versus myself. That’s all there is.’ ”

As I switched my gaze between diagrams and rope, trying to align them in my mind, it dawned on me that knots were not my problem but only a symptom of some deeper chaos. Basic issues of left and right had always been cloudy for me. When asked to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, I never knew which hand to cover my heart with.

After tying a few more knots that wouldn’t hold I dropped the rope and closed the magazine.

“Grasshopper season’s coming up,” Mike said. He opened the jaws of his tying vise and a deer-hair hopper dropped into his palm. “Even the beginners can catch trout then.”

“I don’t care if I ever catch a trout.”

“You will once you’ve caught one.”

I stared at the limp rope. “I want to fish with worms.”

“The easy way.”

“What’s wrong with things being easy?”

“I think you know.” Mike reached for a pheasant neck, plucked a feather off, and clamped another hook inside his vise.

“I
don’t
know,” I told him.

“Then I feel sorry for you.” He drew a length of red yarn from a spool and bit it off with his teeth.

That week we went fishing with Jerry, Mike’s attorney. Mike’s age, but without a wife or kids, Jerry was known for having young blond girlfriends and taking vacations in places like Aruba. We picked him up at his house in White Bear Lake, idling in his circular brick driveway while Jerry brought out his equipment load by load. His rod, his vest, and his waders were all brand-new, and when he’d finally arranged them in the car and settled in next to Mike in the front seat, he revealed that he’d never fished before by saying: “First one to catch a ten-pound trout buys drinks tonight.”

Mike told Jerry that ten-pound trout were rare, particularly in small midwestern rivers.

“Two five-pounders, then,” said Jerry. “The total’s what counts.”

I was glad to have another novice along. “You and me,” Jerry kept saying. “You and me, kid.”

Mike grinned at Jerry’s jokes and funny lines, but I got the sense that he looked down on him as someone
who didn’t take the outdoors seriously. When the talk turned to fishing, Mike was stern with Jerry, insisting that he release his trout and not tire them out by playing them too long.