“Maybe it’s a mermaid,” Creech mused.
By late afternoon the bridge looked like an overloaded barge. Pickups, cars, and two tractors clotted both sides of the road and the store’s parking lot. Men and boys squirmed and shifted to get a place against the railing. Harley Wease recounted his epic battle, but it was the ancients who were most deferred to as they made pronouncements about size and weight. Of species they could speak only by negation.
“My brother works down at that nuclear power plant near Walhalla,” Marcus Price said. “Billy swears there’s catfish below the dam near five foot long. Claims that radiation makes them bigger.”
“This ain’t no catfish,” Rudisell said. “It didn’t have no big jug head. More lean than that.”
Bascombe Greene ventured the shape called to mind the pikefish caught in weedy lakes up north. Stokes Hamilton thought it could be a hellbender salamander, for though he’d never seen one more than twelve inches long he’d heard tell they got to six feet in Japan. Leonard Coffey told a long, convoluted story about a goldfish set free in a pond. After two decades of being fed corn bread and fried okra, the fish had been caught and it weighed fifty-seven pounds.
“It ain’t no pike nor spring lizard nor goldfish,” Rudisell said emphatically.
“Well, there’s but one way to know,” Bascombe Greene said, “and that’s to try and catch the damn thing.” Bascombe nodded at Harley. “What bait was you fishing with?”
Harley looked sheepish.
“I’d lost my last spinner when I snagged a limb. All I had left in my tackle box was a rubber worm I use for bass, so I put it on.”
“What size and color?” Bascombe asked. “We got to be scientific about this.”
“Seven inch,” Harley said. “It was purple with white dots.”
“You got any more of them?” Leonard Coffey asked.
“No, but you can buy them at Sylva Hardware.”
“Won’t do you no good,” Rudisell said.
“Why not?” Leonard asked.
“For a fish to live long enough to get that big, it’s got to be smart. It’ll not forget that a rubber worm tricked it.”
“It might not be near smart as you reckon,” Bascombe said. “I don’t mean no disrespect, but old folks tend to be forgetful. Maybe that old fish is the same way.”
“I reckon we’ll know the truth of that soon enough,” Rudisell concluded, because fishermen already cast from the bridge and banks. Soon several lines had gotten tangled, and a fistfight broke out over who had claim to a choice spot near the pool’s tailrace. More people arrived as the afternoon wore on, became early evening. Cedric, never one to miss a potential business opportunity, put a plastic fireman’s hat on his head and a whistle in his mouth. He parked cars while his son Bobby crossed and recrossed the bridge selling Cokes from a battered shopping cart.
Among the later arrivals was Charles Meekins, the county’s game warden. He was thirty-eight years old and had grown up in Madison, Wisconsin. The general consensus, especially among the old men, was the warden was arrogant and a smart-ass. Meekins stopped often at the store, and he invariably addressed them as Wynken, Blynken, and Nod. He listened with undisguised condescension as the old men, Harley, and finally the two boys told of what they’d seen.
“It’s a trout or carp,” Meekins said, “carp” sounding like “cop.” Despite four years in Jackson County, Meekins still spoke as if his vocal cords had been pulled from his throat and reinstalled in his sinus cavity. “There’s no fish larger in these waters.”
Harley handed his reel to the game warden.
“That fish stripped the gears on it.”
Meekins inspected the reel as he might an obviously fraudulent fishing license.
“You probably didn’t have the drag set right.”
“It was bigger than any trout or carp,” Campbell insisted.
“When you’re looking into water you can’t really judge the size of something,” Meekins said. He looked at some of the younger men and winked. “Especially if your vision isn’t all that good to begin with.”
A palmful of Red Mule chewing tobacco bulged the right side of Rudisell’s jaw like a tumor, but his apoplexy was such that he swallowed a portion of his cud and began hacking violently. Campbell slapped him on the back and Rudisell spewed dark bits of tobacco onto the bridge’s wooden flooring.
Meekins had gotten back in his green fish and wildlife truck before Rudisell recovered enough to speak.
“If I hadn’t near choked to death I’d have told that shitbritches youngun to bend over and we’d see if my sight was good enough to ram this spyglass up his ass.”
IN THE NEXT few days so many fishermen came to try their luck that Rudisell finally bought a wire-bound notebook from Cedric and had anglers sign up for fifteen-minute slots. They cast almost every offering imaginable into the pool. A good half of the anglers succumbed to the theory that what had worked before could work again, so rubber worms were the single most popular choice. The rubber-worm devotees used an array of different sizes, hues, and even smells. Some went with seven-inch rubber worms while others favored five- or ten-inch. Some tried purple worms with white dots while others tried white with purple dots and still others tried pure white and pure black and every variation between including chartreuse, pink, turquoise, and fuchsia. Some used rubber worms with auger tails and others used flat tails. Some worms smelled like motor oil and some worms smelled like strawberries and some worms had no smell at all.
The others were divided by their devotion to live bait or artificial lures. Almost all the bait fishermen used night crawlers and red worms in the belief that if the fish had been fooled by an imitation, the actual live worm would work even better, but they also cast spring lizards, minnows, crickets, grubs, wasp larvae, crawfish, frogs, newts, toads, and even a live field mouse. The lure contingent favored spinners of the Panther Martin and Rooster-tail variety though they were not averse to Rapalas, Jitterbugs, Hula Poppers, Johnson Silver Minnows, Devilhorses, and a dozen other hook-laden pieces of wood or plastic. Some lures sank and bounced along the bottom and some lures floated and still others gurgled and rattled and some made no sound at all and one lure even changed colors depending on depth and water temperature. Jarvis Hampton cast a Rapala F 14 he’d once caught a tarpon with in Florida. A subgroup of fly fishermen cast Muddler Minnows, Woolly Boogers, Woolly Worms, Royal Coachmen, streamers and wet flies, nymphs and dry flies, and some hurled nymphs and dry flies together that swung overhead like miniature bolas.
During the first two days five brown trout, one speckled trout, one ball cap, two smallmouth bass, ten knotty heads, a bluegill, and one old boot were caught. A gray squirrel was snagged by an errant cast into a tree. Neither the squirrel nor the various fish outweighed the boot, which weighed one pound and eight ounces after the water was poured out. On the third day Wesley McIntire’s rod doubled and the drag whirred. A rainbow trout leaped in the pool’s center, Wesley’s quarter-ounce Panther Martin spinner embedded in its upper jaw. He fought the trout for five minutes before his brother Robbie could net it. The rainbow was twenty-two inches long and weighed five and a half pounds, big enough that Wesley took it straight to the taxidermist to be mounted.
Charles Meekins came by an hour later. He didn’t get out of the truck, just rolled down his window and nodded. His radio played loudly and the atonal guitars and screeching voices made Rudisell glad he was mostly deaf, because hearing only part of the racket made him feel like stinging wasps swarmed inside his head. Meekins didn’t bother to turn the radio down, just shouted over the music.
“I told you it was a trout.”