Published in A Loving Voice, a caregiver’s book of read-aloud stories for the elderly
Fiction—1,245 words
FRIENDS, LINES, AND SINKERS
By
Lucille Bellucci
It’s not easy to like your friends all the time. Take Bill Carpenter. He has a great sense of humor, he’s generous, kind, and always returns anything he borrows. But he has one trait that drives me crazy. Bill knows everything, or else he’s done it better than anybody else.
Some evenings we’ll be having a quiet beer in the I-80, a tavern east of San Francisco where lots of truckers like to go and swap stories. We talk about tough stretches on the road and good or bad places to eat. A guy told us about ice on a mountain grade where no warning was posted. We look out for each other.
Then one of the guys says to me, “Did you hear about Jack Morelli catching a big striper on Sherman Lake?”
“No, how big was it?” I ask.
“As big as his wife. I saw it. There’s enough to feed them for weeks.”
Bill cuts in. “What’d it weigh?”
“Maybe thirty-five, forty pounds.”
Bill smiles. There’s a tilt on one corner of it that tells me what’s coming. Bill has told us about hunting bighorn in Wyoming, taking rattlers by hand in Texas, and landing record skipjack tuna on the East Coast. I think he once told me he’d had a pet baboon in the Sahara Desert someplace, but I could be mistaken. I was busy doing my income tax in my head at the time.
But then I remember him coming over to our house at two in the morning last week, scared to death for us. He’d heard on the radio about a fire on our block and drove ten miles to save our lives. Last Christmas he made presents for our kids that showed a lot of thought. His own kid is in another state with her mother.
Now he’s saying, “A little baby like that I’d throw back. I’ve hooked stripers that went to fifty pounds on a slow day.”
“Yeah,” the guy says and turns back to the TV over the bar. He knows Bill too.
“Hey,” Bill says to me. “Have you ever fished Point Pinole?”
“Never been there. I hear it’s a good pier, though.”
“One of the best,” he assures me. “You don’t need to go out in a boat to catch the big ones. Want to give it a try?”
I think about it, and decide it would be nice to spend a day out in the fresh air. We agree to go at eight o’clock next morning and I give him a ride home. As I let him out at his place, I ask if I can take his tackle box home with me because I have a feeling some of my stuff must be rusted solid. The last time I’ve done any fishing was five years ago. Later I’ll replace anything I take.
He says sure and gets the box. It’s a beauty, with three giant retractable drawers loaded with hooks, spinners, plugs, and even some fancy streamer flies. It’s a toy shop. “This is some rig.”
“Professional.” He nods, offhand. “Uncle Bill will show you some tricks tomorrow so’s you can take home a real fish to Sally. Leave the bait to me. You amateurs mess up from the start.”
At that, something snaps in my brain, but I keep my mouth shut and drive home.
In the morning, I pick him up and drive to Point Pinole, a pier nearly a quarter-mile long on the south shore of San Pablo Bay. San Francisco is just a smudge southwest of us. We take the shuttle from the parking lot and I enjoy the ride, the whole morning. A clean breeze—with just a hint of fish in it is fanning our faces. I’m feeling good, on top.
We are nearing the pier when it appears everybody has gone berserk. Then we see flocks of screeching gulls diving into the water, which is churning with anchovies. Below the anchovies, chasing them ashore straight onto the rocks, are huge striped bass. We can see them. Several as big as gasoline drums are already flopping on deck. People are throwing lines all over the place.
Bill whoops and jumps off the shuttle, with me following. We ease into a spot at the rail, next to a lady who’s got two big stripers lying at her feet.
He’s so exited he’s panting while he puts his rod together. We finish at the same moment, slap on bait and cast, but the lady’s elbow knocks his arm and our two lines go whing whing whing as they snake around each other. Bill glares at the woman but she doesn’t even look at him—she’s hooked into a monster. He shrugs, and we start unfouling our lines.
“Harold,” hollers the woman. “I got another one!” Next to her a man wearing a cowboy hat shouts back that he has one too.
I am ready to cast again but hold back because the rail is getting too busy and I’m afraid of an accident. But Bill throws his line and—neatly hooks the woman’s striper in the tail as it’s coming up. Now it’s her turn to glare, and Bill smiles apologetically, puts down his rod, and moves to help pull up the fish. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen him look uncomfortable.
“That’s my fish!” yells Mrs. Harold.
“I know!” yells Bill.
“Then let go of it!” screams Mrs. Harold.
Bill lets go of her line and the fish tears loose from both hooks and disappears.
“Aaaargh!” goes Mrs. Harold, looking at her empty line. Her face swells up, her eyes turn maroon. She takes a deep breath and opens her mouth. As if we are one person Bill and I pick up our gear and walk away. He hasn’t even reeled in his line; it drags behind us like a tail.
Farther up the pier, we set up again. Bill doesn’t say a thing, but he’s acting dislocated, makes three tries before he has the bait right. It’s like he never baited a hook before. Finally we both haul back and cast. Then a queer silence falls over the bay. The birds are gone, the anchovies have left, and Bill has cast his hook into my sweatshirt.
I keep my face straight as he works it free, his face like something you could barbecue a striper on.
Since that day, I haven’t heard him say one word about what a swell athlete and sportsman he is.
I’m still ashamed of what I did, even if he never did get his hook in the water. It’s all in the past anyway, finished, fixed up. I told him I wanted to clean the things I’d used and put them back properly in his tackle box, so he let me take the box home when I dropped him off.
And that’s what I did. I oiled the gears on the reel I’d used and shined it, rewound the line nice and even and put everything in the correct slot in the box. Then I did something else. I replaced all his hooks with new ones. The others, the ones I’d filed halfway through in a place he couldn’t see unless he looked really close, I threw away. After what I did to them, those hooks wouldn’t have held onto a three-inch minnow
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