“That wasn’t it,” Rudisell shouted. “The fish I seen could of eaten that rainbow for breakfast.”
Meekins smiled, showing a set of bright white teeth that, unlike Rudisell’s, did not have to be deposited in a glass jar every night.
“Then why didn’t it? That rainbow has probably been in that pool for years.” Meekins shook his head. “I wish you old boys would learn to admit when you’re wrong about something.”
Meekins rolled up his window as Rudisell pursed his lips and fired a stream of tobacco juice directly at the warden’s left eye. The tobacco hit the glass and dribbled a dark, phlegmy rivulet down the window.
“A fellow such as that ought not be allowed a guvment uniform,” Creech said.
“Not unless it’s got black and white stripes all up and down it,” Crenshaw added.
After ten days no other fish of consequence had been caught and anglers began giving up. The notebook was discarded because appointments were no longer necessary. Meekins’s belief gained credence, especially since in ten days none of the hundred or so men and boys who’d gathered there had seen the giant fish.
“I’d be hunkered down on the stream bottom too if such commotion was going on around me,” Creech argued, but few remained to nod in agreement. Even Harley Wease began to have doubts.
“Maybe that rainbow was what I had on,” he said heretically.
BY THE FIRST week in May only the old men remained on the bridge. They kept their vigil but the occupants of cars and trucks and tractors no longer paused to ask about sightings. When the fish reappeared in the tailrace, the passing drivers ignored the old men’s frantic waves to come see. They drove across the bridge with eyes fixed straight ahead, embarrassed by their elders’ dementia.
“That’s the best look we’ve gotten yet,” Campbell said when the fish moved out of the shallows and into deeper water. “It’s six feet long if it’s a inch.”
Rudisell set his spyglass on the bridge railing and turned to Creech, the one among them who still had a car and driver’s license.
“You got to drive me over to Jarvis Hampton’s house,” Rudisell said.
“What for?” Creech asked.
“Because we’re going to rent out that rod and reel he uses for them tarpon. Then we got to go by the library, because I want to know what this thing is when we catch it.”
Creech kept the speedometer at a steady thirty-five as they followed the river south to Jarvis Hampton’s farm. They found Jarvis in his tobacco field and quickly negotiated a ten-dollar-a-week rental for the rod and reel, four 2/0 vanadium-steel fishhooks, and four sinkers. Jarvis offered a net as well but Rudisell claimed it wasn’t big enough for what they were after. “But I’ll take a hay hook and a whetstone if you got it,” Rudisell added, “and some bailing twine and a feed sack.”
They packed the fishing equipment in the trunk and drove to the county library, where they used Campbell’s library card to check out an immense tome called Freshwater Fish of North America. The book was so heavy that only Creech had the strength to carry it, holding it before him with both hands as if it were made of stone. He dropped it in the backseat and, still breathing heavily, got behind the wheel and cranked the engine.
“We got one more stop,” Rudisell said, “that old millpond on Spillcorn Creek.”
“You wanting to practice with that rod and reel?” Campbell asked.
“No, to get our bait,” Rudisell replied. “I been thinking about something. After that fish hit Harley’s rubber worm they was throwing night crawlers right and left into the pool figuring that fish thought Harley’s lure was a worm. But what if it thought that rubber worm was something else, something we ain’t seen one time since we been watching the pool though it used to be thick with them?”
Campbell understood first.
“I get what you’re saying, but this is one bait I’d rather not be gathering myself, or putting on a hook for that matter.”
“Well, if you’ll just hold the sack I’ll do the rest.”
“What about baiting the hook?”
“I’ll do that too.”
Since the day was warm and sunny, a number of reptiles had gathered on the stone slabs that had once been a dam. Most were blue-tailed skinks and fence lizards, but several mud-colored serpents coiled sullenly on the largest stones. Creech, who was deathly afraid of snakes, remained in the car. Campbell carried the burlap feed sack, reluctantly trailing Rudisell through broom sedge to the old dam.
“Them snakes ain’t of the poisonous persuasion?” Campbell asked.
Rudisell turned and shook his head.
“Naw. Them’s just your common water snake. Mean as the devil but they got no fangs.”
As they got close the skinks and lizards darted for crevices in the rocks, but the snakes did not move until Rudisell’s shadow fell over them. Three slithered away before Rudisell’s creaky back could bend enough for him to grab hold, but the fourth did not move until Rudisell’s liver-spotted hand closed around its neck. The snake thrashed violently, its mouth biting at the air. Campbell reluctantly moved closer, his fingers and thumbs holding the sack open, arms extended out from his body as if attempting to catch some object falling from the sky. As soon as Rudisell dropped the serpent in, Campbell gave the snake and sack to Rudisell, who knotted the burlap and put it in the trunk.
“You figure one to be enough?” Campbell asked.
“Yes,” Rudisell replied. “We’ll get but one chance.”
The sun was beginning to settle over Balsam Mountain when the old men got back to the bridge. Rudisell led them down the path to the riverbank, the feed sack in his right hand, the hay hook and twine in his left. Campbell came next with the rod and reel and sinkers and hooks. Creech came last, the great book clutched to his chest. The trail became steep and narrow, the weave of leaf and limb overhead so thick it seemed they were entering a cave.
Once they got to the bank and caught their breath, they went to work. Creech used two of the last teeth left in his head to clamp three sinkers onto the line, then tied the hook to the monofilament with an expertly rendered hangman’s knot. Campbell studied the book and found the section on fish living in southeastern rivers. He folded the page where the photographs of relevant species began and then marked the back section where corresponding printed information was located. Rudisell took out the whetstone and sharpened the metal with the same attentiveness as the long-ago warriors who once roamed these hills had honed their weapons, those bronze men who’d flaked dull stone to make their flesh-piercing arrowheads. Soon the steel tip shone like silver.
“All right, I done my part,” Creech said when he’d tested the drag. He eyed the writhing feed sack apprehensively. “I ain’t about to be close by when you try to get that snake on a hook.”
Creech moved over near the tailwaters as Campbell picked up the rod and reel. He settled the rod tip above Rudisell’s head, the fishhook dangling inches from the older man’s beaky nose. Rudisell unknotted the sack, then pinched the fishhook’s eye between his left hand’s index finger and thumb, used the right to slowly peel back the burlap. When the snake was exposed, Rudisell grabbed it by the neck, stuck the fishhook through the midsection, and quickly let go. The rod tip sagged with the snake’s weight as Creech moved farther down the bank.
“What do I do now?” Campbell shouted, for the snake was swinging in an arc that brought the serpent ever closer to his body.
“Cast it,” Rudisell replied.
Campbell made a frantic sideways, two-handed heave that looked more like someone throwing a tub of dishwater off a back porch than a cast. The snake landed three feet from the bank, but luck was with them for it began swimming underwater toward the pool’s center. Creech came back to stand by Campbell, but his eyes nervously watched the line. He flexed his arthritic right knee like a runner at the starting line, ready to flee up the bank if the snake took a mind to change direction. Rudisell gripped the hay hook’s handle in his right hand. With his left he began wrapping bailing twine around metal and flesh. The wooden bridge floor rumbled like low thunder as a pickup crossed. A few seconds later another vehicle passed over the bridge. Rudisell continued wrapping the twine. He had no watch but suspected it was after five and men working in Sylva were starting to come home. When Rudisell had used up all the twine, Creech knotted it.