The Fisherman - Part 3
by
Joe Mancini, Jr. © 2005

IV.

August, 1975

Now, two months later, I am taking him with me in my Rabbit.  On its sloping hood, he had set the bucket of sand spikes and waited for me to emerge from the cellar. Unlocking the driver’s side, I get in, reach to open the passenger door, and stuff the gear he hands me into the backseat.  But he sets the lunches between us and extends the rods from the rear deck and between our seats to the dashboard.  With legs half extended, he sits where I have always sat in his Chevy.

“Where’re we going?”  I say.  He hunches his shoulders. “How ‘bout Fort Getty?” I say.  His lips curl inward.  As I turn the wheel, my borrowed trousers tighten around my crotch, and my forearm stretches out of the sweatshirt.  I am getting bigger.

His hand lifts to shield his eyes from the sun streaming through the windshield.  Unlike his Chevy’s narrower one, split by a bar into two sections, this windshield affords us unobstructed visibility.  With one hand steadying the wheel, I grab the lunches with the other and fling them into the backseat.  My hand returns with the broad-brimmed, red wool hat an ex-girlfriend gave me.  I nudge his knee with the brim, my hand hiding under the crown.  He takes it, looks blankly at the sweatband with the red-lettered words, “You are mine, forever,” and plops it on his head.  It falls over his ears.  Only the recently acquired black-rimmed glasses stop the hat from dropping over his eyes.  Immobile, he sags into the backrest, the hat with its collegiate look wiping out years of his life.  After a minute, he takes it off and smoothes back into place the hair that had stuck to the wool.  The hat flops where the lunches were, like one of those flat ones he would catch and throw back, his erstwhile keen eyes watching them through the water flap slowly away or bury themselves in the sand.

I reach back to a bag and pull out a sandwich wrapped in several layers of waxed paper and foil.  I hold it in the air over the rods between us.  But the back of his head has no mouth.  Recalling how he would do it, I partially unroll the wrapping to form a cup for the dripping ketchup soaking into the white Italian bread.  My teeth rip out a huge semicircle from the soft bread and proscuitto.  I swallow it in lumps.  She always told me to chew my food.

 “Ma…,” I say to the unobstructed windshield.  “Ma…can be a real…bitch, can’t she…it took…guts…balls…to keep that Playboy…good for you!”  The words, like sinkers, arch over the rods between us and drop into him, the accompanying hooks pulling at, twitching his shoulders.

And I dare to upset him, to take his erratic heart into my hands, to rip it open to reach him.  And me.

“You know….” I say, and his head begins to pan.

“You know…you…you know…I hated you.”

My sounds sink again into his gaping mouth, hooking down with them his nose, eyes, whiskers, cheeks, ears, everything until his face is effaced and there is nothing but water.

Everything drowns, even my own eyes.

And the salt lodges in the corners of my mouth, and I am lured into his heart, ripped open by my astounding hook.

“And…and…I love you,” I whisper, choking now on the red bubbles oozing slowly to the surface from my own heart wound. 

The windshield starts to clear.  As I unhook my fingers from his wrist, he draws his sleeve over the dribble from his nose.  I brake slowly for a red light.  But I have to plunge deeper: to our roots and the shit feeding them: 

“And you hated him—he did to you what you did to me.”

His jaw pulsates.  He says to the windshield, “I guess he did the best he could.”

In my invisible currents, something stirs. I  bob now just below the surface:“It wasn’t good enough” I say, “not for you, not for me…you made me invisible…dead…and I…I wanted you the same way…you should’ve told him…like I just did.”  But there’s more—from him—and it comes from a greater depth, its sickle tail slicing to the surface, its teeth gleaming like no sandpaper could.

“I can’t talk like you…I didn’t go to Harvard.”  His lips draw back from his teeth:  “I…I…I ain’t…I ain’t you.” 

“The light’s green,” he repeats.

It takes years for the wrist he has been jabbing to switch from first to second gear.  It shreds from the arm.  I am not him.  I am nobody. I am eaten.                       

“Go to the end of the road and park near the wharf.”  I obey as he searches the white caps beyond the wharf’s solid bulk.  “Maybe there’ll be a few left to catch,” he says; “Nobody’s here.”

Yes, I say to no one, nobody to hear any more.

As he shoulders the rods and lifts the bucket, I drop the lunches and the cake-box of worms into the blood-stained cooler.  I walk in his steps to the wharf.  At the edge of the walkway onto the wharf, he waits for me and then reaches into the cake-box, pulls out some squirming seaweed, places my rod on the planks, and walks to a distant position on the wharf. 

Nearby, the three uneven pilings are still steel-cabled into their mutual embrace.  I drop my exposed ankles over the wharf’s edge and search inside the cake-box.  I stretch a worm out of its tangle and lay it coiling on a plank.  After carefully threading the hook through its mouth, its tiny pincers clutching the steel shank, I wipe the blood on my sweatshirt, cast the rig, light a cigarette, and wait.

After a few drags, I flip the butt, tasteless, into my cone-shaped shadow undulating on the surface.  It hisses, whirlpooling its white body.  Food for the blind.  Just beyond and below my shadow, something flashes, catching the sun.  We couldn’t go anywhere without them: her lunches of loaves bulging with coldcuts and mozarella, of thick pizza without cheese, of homemade pepper biscuits, of polished Delicious apples with their tiny yellow spots.  They fed us and choked us.  Like trousers and sweatshirts.  Like rakes and hoes in a jewelry designer’s hands.  Food for the hungry blind.  A long slender shadow swims just below a trough and stupidly jabs the butt into bits of tobacco and paper.

Reaching out to the cooler, my bared forearm snakes into a bag and feels out an apple like the ones he and I used to bring home from Sunnydale Orchard in Scituate’s pine-covered hills.  Once, when he had refused me one from the bushel carried between us, I nearly broke my seven-year-old teeth on a pine cone I had angrily snatched from the stand’s decorations.  I leave the apple in the bag.  I am sick of apples.

The line tugs my finger.  My rod curves toward the water as I swing upward to set the hook.  When I turn the crank, the drag on the reel unwhines some  of the line I take in.  Whirlpooling itself against my pull, the shape soon loses its darkness to the sun.  I reach beyond the teeth into the gills and flap it into the cooler.  The styrofoam bounces along the planks.  I can hear, coming towards the cooler, the far-away clicking of his soles.

I have seen this before in another cooler.  I couldn’t cry then.  I can’t cry now.  The footsteps rap his heartbeat closer.  I will not look beyond the cooler.  I will not wipe my blood fingers on his trousers.  I am not expiring flesh in a cooler, or Ollie on the steps, or boots in the freezer, or my aunt into the ground, or plastered eyes in pine wood.  Or him.  I am only me, totally alone in my shadow.

Nearly behind me, his footfalls stop, and I see another shadow merge with that of the pilings supporting the wharf.  Then a long thin shadow splits away and moves toward my own.

He coughs.  My drowned eyes swim over the cooler to his soles and up towards his shoulders leaning against the cabled pilings.  One arm is hidden behind his back; the other points, palm outstretched, to the dead fish in the cooler. 

“You see,” he says.  “I told you they were here.”  I nod, squinting in the noon-day sun.  He pushes himself off the barnacles, and his worm-stained finger touches my shoulder:  “How ‘bout taking off that sweatshirt and putting this on.”  I look up into the hat’s red-lettered sweatband.

“It’s warming up, Joe.”

I touch his soiled finger with my own.

“Yeah, Dad, it is.”

Joe Mancini, Jr., Ph.D., M.S.W., M.S.O.D. is a therapist, hypnotherapist, teacher, group leader, business consultant and presenter, executive coach, and national workshop leader in many areas.  For 15 years, in various venues, he has facilitated workshops in men’s issues using many intensive modalities.  He has also written articles on topics relevant to men, including one on the spiritual meaning of the sword for Wingspan.  He is also the creator of RoundTable Theatre, a fun-filled and also serious modality using improvisation to help men and men find new possibilities of mind, emotion, body, and soul to get out of stuck places.  Joe’s father, Joseph Mancini, worked as a foreman in a jewelry factory for 35 years and died in 1987 at the age of 77

Copyright 2005 Joseph Mancini Jr., all rights reserved