“I’M A FISHERMAN,” HE SAID.
These were not the first words he spoke to her. Those were, “Let me give you a hand.” He’d pulled up behind her just as she was about to put her groceries into the trunk of her car, and hopped out and offered his help. She smiled, and was about to thank him, but she never had the chance. He had a flashlight in one hand, three C batteries in a hard rubber case, and he took her by the shoulder and swung her around and hit her hard on the back of the head. He caught her as she fell, eased her down gently.
In no time at all she was propped up in the passenger seat of his SUV, and her groceries were in her trunk and the lid slammed shut. She was out cold, and for a moment he thought he might have struck too hard a blow, but he checked and found she had a pulse. He used duct tape on her wrists and ankles and across her mouth, fastened her seat belt, and drove off with her.
And, as patiently as he’d waited for her to emerge from the supermarket, he waited for her to return to consciousness.
Then, not long after he’d turned onto a secondary road, he sensed that she was awake. He looked at her, and she looked the same, but he could somehow detect a change. He gave her another moment to listen to the silence, and then he spoke, told her that he was a fisherman.
No reaction from her. But he was certain she’d heard him.
“A catch-and-release fisherman,” he said. “Not everybody knows what that means. See, I enjoy fishing. It does something for me that nothing else has ever done. Call it a sport or a pastime, as you prefer, but it’s what I do and what I’ve always done.”
He thought about that. What he’d always done? Well, just about. Some of his earliest childhood memories involved fishing with a bamboo pole and baiting his hook with worms he’d dug himself in the backyard. And some of his earliest and most enduring adult memories involved fishing of another sort.
“Now I wasn’t always a catch-and release fisherman,” he said. “Way I saw it back in the day, why would a man go to all the trouble of catching a fish and then just throw it back? Way it looked to me, you catch something, you kill it. You kill something, you eat it. Pretty clear cut, wouldn’t you say?”
“What happened,” he said, “is I lost the taste for it. The killing and all. Most people, they think of fishing, and they somehow manage not to think about killing. They seem to think the fish comes out of the water, gulps for air a couple of times, and then obligingly gives up the ghost. Maybe he flops around a little first, but that’s all there is to it. But, see, it’s not like that. A fish can live longer out of water than you’d think. What you have to do, you gaff it. Hit it in the head with a club. It’s quick and easy, but you can’t get around the fact that you’re killing it.”
He went on, telling her how you were spared the chore of killing when you released your catch. And the other unpleasant chores, the gutting, the scaling, the disposal of offal.
He turned from a blacktop road to a dirt road. He hadn’t been down this road in quite a while, but it was as he remembered it, a quiet path through the woods that led to a spot he’d always liked. He quit talking now, letting her think about what he’d said, letting her figure out what to make of it, and he didn’t speak again until he’d parked the car in a copse of trees, where it couldn’t be seen from the road.
“I have to tell you,” he said, unfastening her seat belt, wrestling her out of the car. “I enjoy life a lot more as a catch-and-release fisherman. It’s got all the pleasure of fishing without the downside, you know?”
He arranged her on the ground on her back. He went back for a tire iron, and smashed both her kneecaps before untaping her ankles, but left the tape on her wrists and across her mouth.
He cut her clothing off her. Then he took off his own clothes and folded them neatly. Adam and Eve in the garden, he thought. Naked and unashamed.
He fell on her.
BACK HOME, HE LOADED his clothes into the washing machine, then drew a bath for himself. But he didn’t get into the tub right away. He had her scent on him, and found himself in no hurry to wash it off. Better to be able to breathe it in while he relived the experience, all of it, from the first sight of her in the supermarket to the snapped-twig sound of her neck when he broke it.
And he remembered as well the first time he’d departed from the catch-and-release pattern. It had been less impulsive that time, he’d thought long and hard about it, and when the right girl turned up-young, blond, a cheerleader type, with a turned-up nose and a beauty mark on one cheek-when she turned up, he was ready.
Afterward he’d been upset with himself. Was he regressing? Had he been untrue to the code he’d adopted? But it hadn’t taken him long to get past those thoughts, and this time he felt nothing but calm satisfaction.
He was still a catch-and-release fisherman. He probably always would be. But, for God’s sake, that didn’t make him a vegetarian, did it?
Hell, no. A man still had to have a square meal now and then.
Jeffrey Ford. POLKA DOTS AND MOONBEAMS
HE CAME FOR HER AT SEVEN in the Belvedere convertible, top down, emerald green, with those fins in the back, jutting up like goalposts. From her third-floor apartment window, she saw him pull to the curb out front.
“Hey, Dex,” she called, “where’d you get the submarine?”
He tilted back his homburg and looked up. “All hands on deck, baby,” he said, patting the white leather seat.
“Give me a minute,” she said, laughed, and then blew him a kiss. She walked across the blue braided rug of the parlor and into the small bathroom with the water-stained ceiling and cracked plaster. Standing before the mirror, she leaned in close to check her makeup-enough rouge and powder to repair the walls. Her eye shadow was peacock blue, her mascara indigo. She gave her girdle a quick adjustment through her dress, then smoothed the material and stepped back to take it all in. Wrapped in strapless black, with a design of small white polka dots, like stars in a perfect universe, she turned in profile and inhaled. “Good Christ,” she said and exhaled. Passing through the kitchenette, she lifted a silver flask from the scarred tabletop and shoved it into her handbag.
Her heels made a racket on the wooden steps, and she wobbled for balance just after the first landing. Pushing through the front door, she stepped out into the evening light and the first cool breeze in what seemed an eternity. Dex was waiting for her at the curb, holding the passenger door open. As she approached, he tipped his hat and bent slightly at the waist.
“Looking fine there, madam,” he said.
She stopped to kiss his cheek.
The streets were empty, not a soul on the sidewalk, and save for the fact that here and there in a few of the windows of the tall, crumbling buildings they passed a dim yellow light could be seen, the entire city seemed empty as well. Dex turned left on Kraft and headed out of town.
“It’s been too long, Adeline,” he said.
“Hush now, sugar,” she told him. “Let’s not think about that. I want you to tell me where you’re taking me tonight.”
“I’ll take you where I can get you,” he said.
She slapped his shoulder.
“I want a few cocktails,” she said.
“Of course, baby, of course. I thought we’d head over to the Ice Garden, cut the rug, have a few, and then head out into the desert after midnight to watch the stars fall.”
“You’re an ace,” she said and leaned forward to turn on the radio. A smoldering sax rendition of “Every Time We Say Goodbye,” like a ball of wax string unwinding, looped once around their necks and then blew away on the rushing wind.
She lit them each a cigarette as the car sailed on through the rising night. An armadillo scuttled through the
