The fish open their mouths and close them, which is about all they do. You can’t tell by looking at them, but they’re poisoned. Like, if you eat too many, you go blind, or crazy, or you become sterile or some shit. They’ve got signs at the pier and boat ramp, no more than two fish a week. It’s the fishes’ revenge, I guess, even though it’s really the big power plant that sits on the side of the lake that does it.
“Fish don’t need hassling,” my stepfather says to no one, meaning me.
I close the lid.
Usually, whenever my stepfather wants to tell me something, he’ll make some general comment or filter what he’s got to say through my mom instead of just talk to me. Not that I’m complaining.
I go sit behind the steering wheel and look at the screen mounted there. It shows how deep the lake is below the boat, and the size of any fish passing below. I wonder if it would show a dead body, if there’s a picture programmed in it for that. See, son, a dad’ll say, tapping on the screen, that’s a child. We only need the small net.
“Monster off the port bow!” I shout when a large fish swims on-screen, to be helpful.
My stepfather ignores me.
My mom reads her book.
The fish swims away.
I don’t like to fish. I just don’t. Maybe it’s genetic. My dad never fished, and we were never big on any of the typical father-son stuff. Like the one time I dragged him outside to play catch, the ball missed my glove on the first throw and bounced off my skull and over the fence.
Instead, my dad used to take me to Civil War battlefields, reenactments, history talks where Minié balls and pottery shards were passed around the audience of old people and us. He left three years ago, when I was nine. He got a new job in Shreveport and told my mom he needed to start over in the city. Which is pretty funny. I mean, have you been to Shreveport?
Once, before I discovered I don’t like to fish, I was baiting my hook with a cricket. A live cricket. I, who was never one of those boys that likes torturing insects or cats or anything, could not get around the central fact of this action: the sticking of the hook through the cricket’s (live!) abdomen. The cricket jumped in my fingers, twitching its legs. I brought the hook to its side, pushed a little, then my fingers loosened and the cricket got away. Chasing it, I knocked over the carton of crickets, a dozen more got out, and the one I was chasing jumped into the lake. So there you go. Drowning versus impaling.
If given the choice, I think I’d do the same.
A while back my stepfather was cooking dinner when he told me to drop a piece of chicken into the Fry Daddy.
“Gotta learn how to cook,” he said, and so like an idiot I went over and took a drumstick and dropped it in. When the oil popped I jerked my hand back and he said, “Scared?”
Right then I knew I’d screwed up, that I should have just kept walking out of the kitchen. He hummed something menacing — a hash-up of Jaws—and grabbed my wrist, forcing my hand to the hot oil until it was just an inch from the fizzing surface. When I finally pulled my hand loose, he said, “Lighten up.”
I didn’t say anything, just laughed like I’d been in on the joke from the beginning.
There’s still a round brown scar on the back of my hand from where the oil spattered.
My stepfather moves the boat over to the bridge to fish for perch. From here you can see the dam. Little orange buoys mark where you’re not supposed to cross. I imagine a boat accidentally drifting in there, its outboard burning against the strain, a whole family with their rods and lunch-meat sandwiches being pulled in, under and through the turbines.
“Kids, I’m so, so sorry,” the father says, on his knees.
“I’m sorry, too,” the mother says.
“We are full of regret,” they both say as they weep.
My mom says, “Why don’t you fish a little?” She puts down her book and picks up her rod.
I tell her there’s no way I’m putting another cricket on a hook.
My stepfather casts his line out. He and my mom married two years ago. When he came into the family, it’s like he saw us as a bunch of softies he needed to toughen up. “Y’all need to get outside more,” he’d say. “See the sun.” But where he tanned, we burned, and even though he took us camping and fishing and paid for us to go on horse rides, none of it stuck. My stepfather must have been surprised when he got me. All along he must have wanted a son to teach all this crap to, and there I was — a chubby kid who’d rather watch The Price Is Right while downing a bag of Cheetos than gut an animal. I can’t say I blame him for being disappointed.
“Put a worm on it then,” my mom says.
I say okay and get one of the rubber worms from the tackle box. I pick a green one with sparkles. Then I cast and the line actually goes out a respectable distance. I take my time reeling it in, stopping and starting the line in erratic jiggles to make my worm more lifelike. It probably makes my worm look like it’s got epilepsy. All part of the plan, I say half aloud. What fish could resist the easy prey of an epileptic worm?
While I’m reeling in, I watch the lake. It’s pretty new, only about ten or fifteen years old. There aren’t any real lakes in Texas — they’re all built with dams. People used to live on the bottom when the lakes were still farms and ranches. It must be awkward for their ghosts, I think. To find fish swimming in and out of where they used to sleep.
My science teacher, Mr. Homeniuk, says Texas was covered by a sea in prehistoric times. So maybe all these new lakes do belong here. Maybe we’re the ones in the wrong place.
At school, I get good grades. Like, really good grades. I mean, I’ve still got five years to screw up, but my grades are good enough that some of my teachers are already talking college.
In math class I don’t have to listen too much because the work comes easy. One day I was bored and playing around with my textbook and accidentally marked one of the pages with my pen. So I took my pencil and — careful, hiding what I was doing from Mrs. Pickett so I wouldn’t get into any trouble — erased the pen mark. It came off, but so did the lower half of a fraction. Where the ink and denominator had been, there was just blank page. I erased the other numbers. They disappeared. Without a trace.
At first I was scared. This was tampering with school property, the thing our principals are always getting angry about. But then it was like, hey, they’ll never catch me. They still don’t know who set the practice field on fire.
During class I erase more numbers. Not too many — not enough to tip off the next poor kid who gets the book, whose little world won’t add up. And you have to do it right. Like if the number’s 14, you don’t erase the 4. That’s just stupid. You erase the 1. Sometimes I turn to the answers and erase a couple numbers there, too.
A month ago we were at a barbecue at one of my stepfather’s friends’ houses. These people bred Rottweilers in their backyard, and while we were there the barking never stopped. “You get used to it,” my stepfather’s friend said. He was a short man without a neck, like a movie gangster, and he called all of the dogs Beauty. He was showing them off when one of the dogs, Beauty number 4, bit at me through the cage, her teeth snagging my shirt.
I could already hear my stepfather’s comment. “Guess she likes fat.” So I acted like I didn’t even notice and picked up a stick and poked at the dog through the cage’s wires, just to mess with it, to show I knew which side of the cage I was on. It was the kind of thing my stepfather would do, I thought, but before I could even touch Beauty’s side he came and grabbed the stick out of my hand and asked what the hell I was thinking. Then he shook his head like I was stupid and walked away.