Grampa caught a perch with his bamboo pole, but it swallowed the hook too deep and he couldn’t twist it out. He reached into his pants for his pocketknife so he could cut open the belly, which Grampa said was the only thing a man could do in a situation like this, and he felt each pocket three times, and I said maybe you left it in the cottage, and he said I never leave things in the cottage, and I said but maybe you did, and then he shrugged and said we might as well go back to the cottage and look for it, and that’s the whole reason we left the perch with its green stripes panting on the grass.
Grampa was the coolest human being who ever lived, that was my opinion, and it would be yours too if you ever met him. He lived all year round on a lake in Wisconsin. I’m not kidding. A whole island, all to himself. My mother said he shouldn’t have been living alone like that, but I thought that was crazy because Grampa knew everything there was to know about lake stuff. Like one time he shot a muskrat that was nesting in the boathouse and pooping fish scales on the dock. I bet your grandfather never did anything that cool.
It was called De Pier Island because his father and mother – my great grandparents – were the first people who ever discovered it. They paddled there in a canoe in the 1880s or some olden
days like that. A lot of kids don’t believe me when I tell them that story, but it’s true. I think. Most of it.
I always liked it when my mother let me spend a week in the summer with Grampa because De Pier Island was full of woods and secret trails and stuff, and Bannockburn, Illinois is such a boring, boring, boring place. You’d know what I mean if you lived there, but I don’t suggest you move there just to find out because, trust me, it wouldn’t be worth it.
So, anyway, we went around to the cottage, which was way over on the other end of the island, but Grampa still couldn’t remember where he left his pocketknife. Lots of times he couldn’t remember things. He was coughing a lot more, too, and sometimes he had to sit down and rest, but he still knew things nobody else knew, like the difference between squirrel and chipmunk, and what kind of owl made what kind of call at night, and how to avoid the game warden when you fished over the limit. He was my hero.
He finally found it in the top drawer of his captain’s desk, which was under the deer head with the big antlers and next to the giant grandfather clock that didn’t tick-tock-tick anymore unless you pushed the pendulum thing yourself, and maybe that’s where he should have started looking in the first place because his captain’s desk was where he always kept keys and coins and his pocket watch and valuable stuff like that, but it didn’t matter because he found his pocketknife and that was the important thing.
Well, long story short, by the time we went back out to retrieve the perch, it was gone. I mean gone, gone. The bamboo pole, the line, everything. Grampa blamed the two teenagers who were living at the Wilson cottage. They had bad friends and girlfriends and shouted bad words and didn’t care who heard, and Grampa said they played bebop music all night and it echoed clear around the lake so loud that decent people couldn’t hear themselves think. Grampa said stealing someone’s fishing pole for no good reason is just what no-goods would do. He cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted over the channel that they should all go back home and pick cotton, and I said maybe they already did because there was nobody over there now, and he said not to be smart, and then I just got quiet because what I said didn’t seem so super smart to me, it was just kind of well, duh.
But by then it was time for the baseball game. Grampa always listened to the Milwaukee Braves on the radio when they were playing in the afternoon because he said a real fan should stay loyal to his team no matter what, even if some greedy new owner was trying to move it away, but I thought maybe he just liked a reason to sit in his captain’s chair and smoke his big, stinky cigars. He got really excited when Eddie Mathews hit a homer after Hank Aaron popped out in the bottom of the ninth, but I just pretended to be happy because I was for the Cubs and I never wanted Braves to win, ever, even when they weren’t playing the Cubs. After that, we played cribbage and I won all three games, even though I didn’t know how to count all the points and I think Grampa made up some extra ones for me. And then he made chili for supper, which was very hot and spicy because that’s the way he liked it, and I said I liked it too, even though it burned my tongue and tasted kind of like gravel, and he let me dry the bowls and spoons after. To cool off he opened a Pabst Blue Ribbon, which he said was the only beer a man should drink, and then he pulled two more cans out of the refrigerator and lined them up in front of him just in case he needed more. I went back outside.
The sun was setting behind the pines, and shadows were spreading like someone poured oil on the water, and that was the best time to catch frogs. Grampa showed me how to cup them until they felt warm and secure. It got to where I could open my palm and they would just sit there without jumping or anything, but mostly I liked to hurl them as far as I could and watch them parachute all white belly and spindly legs and then plunk down in the lily pads. Usually they would breast-stroke right back into my hand – frogs are so dumb – but then every so often one would dive for the pebbly bottom or just stay out on his lily pad and be king of the frogs. Or sometimes a fish would get them with a snap of its tail fin. At first that last part bothered me because it was like luring them to their doom, but Grampa said that’s just the way nature is and I’d better get used to it.
When I squished my foot into the boggy grass to flush another frog, I heard this crash in the lake. It sounded like a rock or something had fallen from the sky, except there wasn’t any splash, just a crazy crashing in the cattails. Weird. Then I saw Grampa’s bamboo pole hanging in the air – hanging in the air all by itself and bobbing back and forth, and that really weirded me out. It was like a ghost or some invisible man was casting with it, and it was even spookier than that because the sunset behind the pole gave everything a red glow and the frogs were all croaking. To be honest, I was getting kind of scared, and I don’t mind admitting that because I bet you would have been scared too if you saw a bamboo pole fishing all by itself. Be honest.
I ran to the cottage to tell Grampa about the ghost in the lily pads, but he had been dozing in his captain’s chair and I’m not sure he really understood what I was talking about. At least that’s how he acted when I kind of led him outside by the hand and he walked kind of slow and had to stop once or twice for balance so it took a while to get back out there.
When we got to the spot, I pointed to the cattails, and the pole was still bobbing around, but not like anyone was fishing with it anymore. It was just kind of slashing back and forth like the ghost had started practicing sword fighting. Which, come to think, was even weirder than a ghost fishing all by itself.
Grampa smiled and asked me if I wanted to go on a little adventure. At first, I said no because I was still scared. But he said not to be a baby. It kind of hurt my feelings when he said that, so I said okay, let’s go, because I didn’t want to show that my feelings were hurt. Grampa said hurt feelings were for girls. But really, though, I wish he hadn’t said it because I was way too old to be a baby and it was kind of mean.
We went back to the boathouse and got in Grampa’s rowboat, which used to be my great-grandfather’s rowboat. The rowboat was about a million years old and it was all paint chips and creaky and it still had “A.E. De Pier” carved on the side. Grampa told me to crawl into the bow, which I did even though there were always spider webs and spiders and ants and stuff like that in the bow. I mean lake stuff is cool and spiders and ants are cool too, but not when they’re all creepy and crawly in the bow of a rowboat. If you’ve ever crouched in the bow of a rowboat that you didn’t know was full of spiders and ants, you know what I mean.
Grampa opened his pocketknife and handed it to me. He showed me how to hold it with the blade out, and I never had a knife in my hand before, and it seemed like it was two feet long, and it was a little scary. But I gripped the handle in my right hand and the paint-chipped side of the boat with my left hand, and the oars broke the water, and the bow swerved around, and I could see the whole lake sliding in front of me like a movie, the wind all blowing in my hair. I wasn’t worried anymore because you could always trust Grampa to know what to do when it came to lake stuff.
The ghost pole was hanging where we left it and the cattails shook underneath it like there were still spooks in there. Then I saw something that looked like a gray football, all soggy and shivering in the shallows, and I said hey, Grampa, look at that, and he said I see it. I said what is it, and he said that’s a heron, it must have swallowed my fish and when it tried to fly away, the pole got caught in the weeds. And I said what’s a heron? And he said it’s a kind of bird, a kind of bird that’s going to think twice next time it tries to steal somebody’s fish.
He sculled – that’s something Grampa knew how to do with the oars that made the boat go slow – until the bow was pointing right toward the heron. Reach down and cut the line, Grampa said, which I tried to do but the line was a tangled mess – maybe a foot or so from the spear-like beak – and I just fumbled around with it. The spear lunged, well, maybe it was more of a flinch. I flinched too.
It won’t hurt you, Grampa said. Don’t be a baby. Cut the line.
There was that word again. It wasn’t fair. That bird was scary. I was afraid to touch it. Who knew what she might do?
When the heron uncurled her snaky neck, long blue feathers rose above the skull like a dinosaur or an alien from outer space with an antenna on top. I looked into the eye on the side of her head. It was this yellow dot, a wild and crazy and panicky dot, that kind of rolled around on its own. The eye stared back at me.
Grampa said it can’t hurt you, and the heron uncurled her neck some more and slowly twisted around until her beak pointed directly at me. She lurched forward with a splash. And Grampa said stop monkeying and cut the line, it’s a helpless bird, and it’ll die if you don’t cut the line.
The heron inched and inched forward. It was like her beak was reaching out to me now, and I looked into that dot-eye again. This time it had a kind of pleading look and a strange feeling kind of came over me, a feeling I’ve never had before. I don’t know how to describe it exactly but it was like being connected, not just to the heron but to everything, to the water and to the sky and everything in the whole lake, like God or something was connecting everything all together in one moment. I thought for a second that maybe the heron was just as afraid as I was and that she understood that I was her friend and that I was there to save her.
Cut the line, damn it, Grampa shouted.
I grabbed it with my left hand, pulled the line taut to the heron’s mouth, right up close, and cut the line with one clean, upward stroke. When it gave, the heron splashed sideways and tried to leap but only thrashed her wings and spit and splashed again and shook her neck and fell back in the water. The oarlocks creaked as the rowboat backed away and I watched the heron fight and fight until she finally towed her herself into the air and thump thump thumped to a low glide over the lake.
She’s waving goodbye, I said.
I hope the sinker gives the bitch lead poisoning, Grampa said.
That fall when I was back at school in boring, boring Bannockburn, I told all my friends about how I saved a bird’s life, and they were all pretty impressed, well all except Kenny Hamilton who didn’t believe me, but that’s okay because he wasn’t really my friend anyway. I even told my teacher, Miss Rorummel, about it. She said I could write a report about it for extra credit. I always liked extra credit, I don’t know why but I always did, so I started one.
I looked up blue herons in the library for the background part. The encyclopedia said herons ordinarily rely on flight for defense but, when cornered, use their long beaks to gouge out the eyes of their enemies. I sat with that book open for a long time, even after the bell rang.
Peter Robbins’ work has appeared in The Great Smokies Review, Mountain Xpress and other venues. His latest story is forthcoming in Rock and a Hard Place.