Fishing the Jumps Read online

  Fishing

  the

  Jumps

  Fishing

  the

  Jumps

  A Novel

  Lamar Herrin

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  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations,

  and events portrayed in this novel are either products

  of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2019 by The University Press of Kentucky

  Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth,

  serving Bellarmine University, Berea College, Centre

  College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University,

  The Filson Historical Society, Georgetown College,

  Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University,

  Morehead State University, Murray State University,

  Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University,

  University of Kentucky, University of Louisville,

  and Western Kentucky University.

  All rights reserved.

  Editorial and Sales Offices: The University Press of Kentucky

  663 South Limestone Street, Lexington, Kentucky 40508-4008

  www.kentuckypress.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Herrin, Lamar, author.

  Title: Fishing the jumps : a novel / Lamar Herrin.

  Description: Lexington, Kentucky. : The University Press of Kentucky, [2019]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018042194| ISBN 9780813176826 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780813176833 (pdf) | ISBN 9780813176840 (epub)

  Classification: LCC PS3558.E754 F57 2019 | DDC 813/.54—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018042194

  This book is printed on acid-free paper meeting

  the requirements of the American National Standard

  for Permanence in Paper for Printed Library Materials.

  Manufactured in the United States of America.

  Member of the Association

  of University Presses

  What falls away is always. And is near.

  —Theodore Roethke

  CONTENTS

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  I

  I HADN’T TOLD THIS STORY in I didn’t know how long. The truth was, outside of the family, I couldn’t be sure if I had ever told it. So why tell it now? For one thing, I liked and admired and trusted the man I was telling it to, Walter Kidman, a poker partner for the last twenty years, a lawyer in town who took on his share of pro bono lost causes, ten years my junior, which meant he’d just missed the sixties, both the exhilaration and the exhaustion that I had lived through. For another thing, the setting was right, timeless in its way. We were in a lakeside cabin in the foothills of the Adirondacks, a cabin my friend had inherited, which had been built back in the WPA days. At first I’d understood that WPA workers had built it themselves, perhaps that it had even served as a sort of barracks for them, which probably hadn’t been the case. Walter was a big admirer of FDR, the nobility of his programs if not of his methods, but it was a modest little cabin, with a fieldstone fireplace, a screen porch, and a compact assortment of rooms, all with an ineradicable mustiness that took you generations back. And surely, maybe even most importantly, it was the lake itself, small enough to see from one end to the other, where motors were prohibited and the transportation of choice was canoes. Out over the water sounds traveled pure. A dog bark, the lakelong caw of a crow. A breeze crisped in the poplar leaves along the banks. One cabin up from Walter’s at five o’clock every evening an elderly man sat out on his dock and played his cello in the most meditative of registers, and that sound traveled too.

  And we did fish, that afternoon we arrived. Of course, it was the fishing. Walter rigged up two New Deal–era casting rods with tarnished spinners. We tried a few casts, then while Walter paddled, I trailed the spinner along behind us. I thought I’d hung up in weeds until I felt a live tug on the line, an abrupt muscular contraction. The fish never jumped. A bass would have, and then tried to swim under the canoe, while this fish simply resisted until it couldn’t anymore. Still, because bass was what I’d mostly caught when I’d fished as a boy, I was thinking bass when the fish became visible alongside the canoe. It was streamlined and long-snouted, with tiny saw-blade teeth. A banded dark-to-yellowing green. The answer came to me even as I asked the question.

  What is that?

  A little pickerel. You can’t eat them, but they’re fun to catch.

  So it was the quietness, the birdsong, the leaves in the breeze, the trembling reach of the cello we were drifting out beyond, the unruffled water and maybe the way the pickerel looked at me out of the unlidded bead of its eye.

  Here, Walter said, let me take him off the hook. You’ve got to be careful with those teeth.

  I watched as Walter took out a small pair of pliers, just as long-snouted, and worked loose the hook. But the fish never stopped looking at me, self-contained and seemingly still in its element. When Walter held it up for me to admire, I nodded, and when Walter held it out to me, I shook my head.

  He released it back into the water.

  There was a lingering trace of its scent, then the breeze took that away too.

  From his end of the canoe Walter was looking at me as he would from across the poker table, as though the bet were mine and sooner or later I’d have to tip my hand.

  I didn’t mind losing a hand every so often to Walter. He was a firm-principled man whose boyishness was genuine and engaging. Stocky in build, with a round, slightly inflamed face, small active eyes, and curly gray hair. I had always liked that little leap of pleasure in his eyes when he turned over a winning hand.

  So, as a contribution of some sort, a chip, say, that I held, I told him, There’s another way to fish, you know. It’s called “fishing the jumps.”

  I’ve heard of that, Walter replied, with his characteristic eagerness. What’s that all about?

  Pure counterintuitive chaos, I said.

  Chaos …, he repeated with a questioning turn, as though considering the appropriateness of the word itself, here at the cellist’s hour, on this noise-restricted lake. From end to end I didn’t see another canoe out on its waters. Most of the cabins were no less humble than Walter’s. Small and low-built with patchy screen porches, the screens like luffing sails, no longer taut. Other than the elderly neighbor who came out onto his dock at five every evening to serenade the fish and the birds, the lake seemed turned over to us. We had paddled about halfway down its length. It was surely then, as I shook my head, closed my eyes, and allowed my cousin Howie Whalen to visit me from forty years back, that the story I would tell later that evening took shape in me. Howie Whalen, “Little Howie” Whalen as I’d known him growing up, stood beside the motor in his outboard fishing boat, searching the waters of his boyhood lake for the telltale ripples of a school of minnows being run by a school of bass, all before the surface erupted in a boil as the bass closed in and began to feed. The instant the feeding started, Howie Whalen, still standing, fired his motor and, brandishing his spinning rod outfitted with a silver spoon, speeded into the area of eruption, casting as the boat roared in. He hooked a largemouth on his first cast, and had time to unhook it and throw it onto the floor of the boat, where it flopped, before he cast again into the still frenzied water and hooked his second. I had cast wildly, well beyond the tar
get area, and by the time I could retrieve my lure and cast again, the feeding had stopped. Suddenly we were once again in the center of a becalmed lake and Howie was back beside his motor, scanning the waters for another school of running minnows and another feeding area about to erupt. He resembled Horatio Hornblower in that moment, back there striking his pose. I might have laughed, but didn’t. He was the master, a cousin two years my junior, dead now these twenty-odd years.

  But it was the quietness, the glassiness of the water you looked out over until at the limit of vision you saw another school of minnows in a patch of sparkling ripples. Then, as the feeding began with the bass lashing their tails, you rushed in to join the commotion. Bass are territorial, Howie used to tell me; if you’re horning in on their action, they’ll feed that much more aggressively, until they’ve eaten their fill and the remaining minnows have escaped.

  Fishing the jumps.

  What will look like chaos to most mortals, I added, but not to this cousin I had.

  Some kind of wild man? Walter puzzled. Some nature’s child?

  I shook my head. I also steadied my nerve. Without warning, I felt my throat began to close. The last time I had seen Howie Whalen, his wife, in a flat and bitter voice, had declared, That man in there is not my husband. Then she’d admitted me to his sickroom.

  You fish for the bass when they’re feeding in a school of minnows, I told Walter Kidman. The minnows are jumping and the bass are thrashing. Yes, it can get wild. You get in there close. That’s really all I can tell you.

  But sitting on his screen porch that evening, with that evocative mustiness of rugs and pillows and daybeds and an ash-encrusted fireplace all around us, that smell of generation piled on generation, it all came rushing back. Sipping bourbon on the rocks, and with the bourbon the lingering echo of that cello spreading over the quiet water, a sound that should have corresponded to the solemn beat and flow of your blood as it circulated through your body if your blood weren’t, in fact, racing in a crazy rush as though to break free. I told Walter I’d had a family down there, down south, and had once, years ago, decades now, taken a friend with me on what was to have been a fishing trip, which had led to the two of us, this friend, a northerner, a New Englander, and me, being expelled. Expelled? Meaning hustled out of town? Ridden out on a rail? It might be funny in the retelling, I admitted to Walter, and it might even have been funny in an incredulous, drop-jawed sort of way at the time, but those were the sixties, years of such exaggeration that no detail was too insignificant to be politically charged, so even as you shook your head in disbelief it wore you out. A time Walter Kidman had not lived through, but I had.

  Walter reached out into the dark to pour me another finger of bourbon. Little Howie Whalen’s father, Big Howie, of course, had been a bourbon drinker and so, to keep up with him, had been my aunt Rosalyn. September in the Adirondacks was a world apart from September down south, but the northern coolness was clear, unfreighted, conducive to storytelling, and with no June bugs clashing against the screen or cicadas shrilling on ten frequencies at once, I didn’t have a lot of competition.

  This is a pretty tall tale, I warned my friend and host.

  Aren’t they all? Walter said, meaning down there.

  Actually, I said, this one starts in Cincinnati, where I was living at the time. On a hillside in a rickety apartment building with jerrybuilt back porches, which should have been condemned, looking over the Ohio River into Kentucky. And the friend I was going to take fishing with me—

  The New Englander, Walter interjected.

  —yes, Massachusetts, if I recall—had never been south of the Mason-Dixon Line.

  This elicited from Walter a skeptical snort.

  Except once, I added. His name was Phil Hodge, and on the drive down south he told me that as a paratrooper he had been stationed at Fort Campbell outside of Nashville, and during the Cuban missile crisis—1962, now—he’d been on and off a plane three times waiting to jump into Cuba. He and, I guess, his company or platoon had a specific missile site they were assigned to take out, and the plane’s motors never shut off for good until the whole operation had been scrubbed. We’d been that close, he claimed, three times on and three times off the plane, and I had no reason to doubt him.

  There was a period of very retrospective silence, reaching back to 1962 when Walter would have been … how old? Then Walter broke it, saying, What’s that got to do with fishing?

  Not much, I said. But it might have something to do with tall tales.

  To get Phil Hodge to come along on this trip down into Dixie, I had described for him fish all but jumping into the boat. That is, I’d told him about my cousin Howie Whalen and fishing the jumps. Maybe Phil Hodge thought he had to tell me a story about almost jumping into Cuba to even the score. But I doubt it. He was a pretty serious fellow.

  What did he do?

  To make a living? The same thing I did at the time. Try to teach some half-literate kids how to write an intelligible English sentence.

  Walter gave a sympathetic chuckle. He took a drink. I heard his wicker chair crackle as he shifted weight, assuming, I assumed, a more attentive position. For a moment I couldn’t see his face. I could see the wiry outline of the back of his head as he faced out along the dock. It occurred to me while he was turned away that I could beg off, that there was enough to occupy us in this sparsely sonorous night on the edge of the Adirondacks, I didn’t have to take it all down into that clamorous South of my youth, where, given the undertow in family histories, one thing would always lead to another. My friend Phil Hodge, whom I had not seen or heard from in the last forty years, had supplied enough of a story. Three times on and off a plane that had never shut down its motors. I remembered the anxious anticipation in his voice when he’d told me the story, no doubt the disappointment, too, and that hushed air of enormous consequence there were no words for. But, as I then recalled, Phil Hodge had not told me the story on the way south but on the way back, when we were lying out in a tent beside a lake three hundred miles north of the one we’d been barred from, with a stringer full of fish. All those fish, I reasoned to Walter, must have loosened his tongue.

  This trip south would be one of the last times I’d see my cousin Howie Whalen before he was diagnosed with a brain tumor and his head had swollen to the size of a lopsided melon. The loss—the family’s, the town’s—was incalculable. But Phil Hodge, of course, didn’t know that. When Phil Hodge met my cousin Howie Whalen, Little Howie was hale and whole and still the master of whatever game came within his sights. Fish the jumps? No one could do it with more winning small-town southern panache. And it was a revealing story I was about to tell Walter Kidman, but so predictable in its way that a social historian could file it away in a footnote. You could start with the great plantations, which had long ago disappeared, but since no small southern town, it seemed, could exist without its patriarch, in each town a textile mill had appeared to take the plantation’s place. The textile mills had given rise to apparel plants, which during World War Two had gotten rich by producing, in addition to soldiers’ uniforms, an abundance of duck cloth for such necessities as parachutes and pup tents. After the war, those plants quick to reconvert to the production of shirts and pants for ex-soldiers whose wardrobes needed to be replenished had gotten richer. Howie Whalen, Big Howie Whalen, had seen it coming every step of the way. With his florid jowls, his barrel-sized belly, and his quick and fluid little strut, he rescued the town and took his seat behind the driver’s wheel in a succession of black Cadillacs. At his side he had my mother’s youngest sister, a blue-eyed, black-haired beauty, Aunt Rosalyn, whose every utterance before she could reach the end broke up into laughter, and who made it her business to distribute Whalen largesse to the family at large.

  From the perspective of nieces and nephews and cousins by the score, the Whalens led fabulous lives, and growing up I had caught some of their luster. For eighteen years an only child, Little Howie Whalen had everything, including his
own private zoo which contained at one time, incredibly, a lion cub, as well as monkeys and llamas and armadillos and iguanas, along with a boa constrictor, and a pair of ponies, of course, followed by horses, which we rode along trails through the pinewoods every time my family visited their town. Little Howie even had his own groom, an ageless hunchback named Johnny, who responded to Little Howie as though he were Big Howie, and whom Little Howie treated with the proper grownup mix of condescension and concern. And, of course, the Whalens had houses, one on the ocean and another on that mountain lake, an hour’s drive away. Then, when a second lake was created closer to their town, with a three-state shoreline of twelve hundred miles, they had a house there too, and a whole flotilla of speedboats and houseboats and pontoon boats and Bassmaster fishing boats. They had a cabin cruiser that slept six in case they wanted to cruise those twelve hundred miles. Before my family and I left town after one of our visits, our last stop was always at the plant, where we’d be outfitted with shirts and pants, pajamas and windbreakers, and anything else that caught our eye for the year to come. Aunt Rosalyn would insist. We’d hold out our arms and she’d pile it on. There was no way to say no. Say no, say I can’t wear all of this, I can’t even carry it out to the car, and she’d laugh. Her laugh was a rich cascading contralto, and it became a sort of current we rode.

  Then, after Little Howie turned eighteen, Aunt Rosalyn gave birth to a daughter, Ellen Rose. There was no way to account for it—for years and years they’d tried—except to regard little Ellie as heaven-sent, meant to be the family’s crowning jewel.

  I’d touched on some of this on the long day’s drive down from Cincinnati. The day before we left for the trip, I’d visited the barbershop to get my hair cut and, while I was at it, the beard I wore neatly trimmed. I didn’t mention this visit to the barbershop to Phil Hodge, but I did to Walter Kidman. By the time Walter had come of age in the mid-seventies, the lumberjack look was in, and once clean-shaven, crew-cut America-love-it-or-leave-it bullies might wear scraggly beards and hair down to their shoulders.