We sidled through weeds, carrying our poles toward a pond shaped like a mirror-image Oklahoma. Fish bones and plastic six-pack rings littered the bank. Wind winnowed through maples and oaks that circled the water’s edge, the sound like distant applause. It served as percussion for the bawling cows in the distance. I mooed back at them. My mother sighed and plucked a bass lure from the tackle box. It was the same box that Deborah and I had bought my father for Christmas years ago, the same he had abandoned. She held the lure toward the sunlight. It looked like a beetle coated with purple feathers, and my mother squinted at it as if it might suddenly spring to life. “There’s nothing like the taste of grilled widemouth bass,” she said. Crescents of sweat had already formed on her blouse.
“I predict there will be no widemouth bass in this pond,” I told her. “Perch, catfish, carp maybe”-I guided a wriggling night crawler onto my hook-“but no bass.”
I cast my line. I breathed in, and the confectionery air filled my nose. Kansas always smells great when summer has kicked into gear-damp, almost flowery, as if an exotic tea is brewing in each cloud. My mother and I sat on buckets of white plastic, the buckets we hoped would carry loads of fat fish by the day’s close. She chewed gum that smelled like apples. When I asked her for a piece, she tongued her fingers and wiped on her jeans. She bit her own gum wad in half, rolled it into a green ball, and dropped it into my open mouth.
My bobber floated in the center of the Erwins’ pond, and I examined it for the slightest movement, any ripple of water. Nothing. Beside me, my mother reeled in slowly, remembering what she could about the proper way to snag a bass. She hummed a melody I seemed to remember from some faraway time. Aisles of cattails rose from the incline behind her. Above her head, bobwhites overpopulated the oaks. A single meadowlark stared down from a tree limb, its black V a banner across its yellow chest.
Watching the pond’s surface made me queasy. The water was the sort where some faceless and neglected kid might drown, only to be dredged up years later. I waited ten minutes; when no fish nibbled, I lost patience. I reeled in and reached for the coffee can my mother had filled with worms and mud clods. That morning, she had stepped to the shade beside the back porch. She had stabbed her shovel into the ground, drawing out triangles of black earth. “Voilà,” she said. She pinched night crawlers from the mud and dropped them into the can.
I baited my hook with another cashewlike worm. The hook tore it in half, and it wriggled in the dirt, blindly searching out some earthly haven where it could perish in peace. I stared, humming, my mind drifting elsewhere. Avalyn, I thought. Her TV show was scheduled to air at nine o’clock that night. I couldn’t imagine how it would dramatize her UFO abduction. I planned to record it with the VCR my mother had bought last Christmas, to watch the program over and over. I wondered if Avalyn had fished in ponds around this area. Perhaps she had ponds of her own, centered in the fields that surrounded her farmhouse, the fields where they’d beamed their spotlights before whisking her into their ship.
My mother stood from her bucket. Her pole bent slightly, and I knew she had a nibble. She said “Shhh,” and I held my breath. The sun’s rays continued their heavy massage, and the wind paused. My mother reeled in slowly, teasing her fish, and in that silent space of time I realized how alone we were. Quite possibly there was no one within a mile radius, only us. I thought about the UFOs, the alien spacecraft that could suddenly stall over the barren fields. I thought of how, even in broad daylight, we could be taken, and of the utter simplicity of our abduction-how the aliens could beam us up just as they’d done to Avalyn. No one would see it, no one would suspect a thing.
The fish slipped away. My mother pulled her line from the water and frowned. “Must not have been a bass.” She sat back down, opened the tackle box, and began rummaging through the mess of lures and weights and hooks.
My thoughts moved to another abduction story, one I’d read about in books. In October 1973, two men, Charlie Hickson and Calvin Parker, were fishing near the town of Pascagoula, Mississippi, when a UFO landed near the lake. I always remembered this story-first, because it had happened almost exactly one year after I was born, and second, because the description of the craft-platelike, with blinking blue lights-resembled my own UFO. As I scrutinized my motionless bobber, I rattled on to my mother about this case as if she were my student. “The aliens were as short as dwarves,” I said. “When they came toward them, one of the guys fainted. But the other stayed awake, and unlike most people he remembered everything. They examined him on a silver table. There was a weird contraption, like a moving eye on the end of a rod. It gave his body a series of X rays.”
My mother played along with my lecture: “Then what happened?”
“Nobody believed either of them,” I said. “Even when they passed lie detector tests.” I wondered if Avalyn had taken such a test. I wanted to ask her a million questions.
“What would you do,” I asked my mother, “if a UFO came zooming over those trees right now and sucked us into it?”
Her mouth twisted into the half-smile of a disbelieving judge. “I’m not sure. When we saw that one before, all I wanted to do was stare. It was so odd, like a Ferris wheel floating through the sky. I’m sure there was some explanation.” The half-smile evened out, and I knew she was playing along. “But now, if one tried to take you away, I’d probably run for my gun. I’d blast them all between the eyes before they could harm you.”
“I doubt you’d have the chance. They’d be quick.” I paused. Sunlight needled through the trees, stinging my eyes. “Besides, they’d stun you or something. You wouldn’t know what hit you, and you wouldn’t remember it afterward.”
My mother rummaged through the tackle box. When she pulled her hand out, it held a green can of mosquito spray. She doused her forearms with it and threw the can to me.
I sprayed my neck, arms, chest, and legs, then asked, “What do you think about the fact I’ve been obsessed with UFOs and stuff like that all my life? Do you think that’s odd?”
She didn’t answer, so I continued. “That article about Avalyn Friesen. It’s made me think. There’s a specialist on the UFO abduction thing. He conducts hypnotic regressions of these abducted people. Anyway, he says that an unnatural preoccupation with UFOs may mean you’ve had some sort of past contact.”
“If you had gone to some other planet, surely you’d know something about that-” My mother stopped and stood again. The bucket tipped from behind her, somersaulting toward the water’s edge. “Bite, Brian,” she said. “A bite.” My bobber was shaking back and forth, its red and white now a pink blur. I gripped the handle of my pole. Whatever was under the pond paused, then took the bait, endeavoring to speed away with the worm. The bobber shot downward, purling the water, and I tugged at my pole, keeping the line tight as I reeled in.
By eight o’clock, the sun had slid beneath the row of oaks. The shadow spilled across our faces like an enormous veil. “Are we done?” my mother asked. She didn’t wait for an answer. “Then let’s leave.” She had snagged three perch, which she had tossed back, and one catfish, which she kept. I had caught a pair of keepable catfish. The second had a flat and loamy gray head as large as the ball of my foot.
We walked to the car. I sat and sandwiched our catch between my feet. My mother drove through the Erwins’ pasture, the foul-smelling water sloshing at each bump and splashing the seat’s burgundy vinyl. I thought of afternoons long past, when my family had chugged home in my father’s pickup from a day of fishing. I remembered Deborah and me lounging in the back of the cab, choosing our favorites from the fish that curled against one another in the bucket’s brackish water. My father, the experienced angler, had caught them all. He would gut and filet them. My mother would cook, and the whole family would eat.