I splashed into the pool and plunged my hands into it, well back of the fish’s weird head and its sharp teeth. His gills were barely moving. I gripped the forward gill on either side of him and backed up. Ready for a fight, I moved fast, hauling his bulk most of the way out of the water before releasing my hold and falling on my ass. I had been expecting the edges of his gills to be sharp, and was prepared to chance the injury to my hands to secure such a catch, but the flaps of skin were rubbery, almost soft. When it thumped onto the rock, tremors shivering its bulk, its entire body gave the impression that it was less solid than gelid. Strange, yes, but no more so than this creature being in this pool in the first place. I could feel the grin splitting my mouth. I was in a position the envy of everyone who’s ever spent any time working the rod and reeclass="underline" I had my fantastic story, and I had the proof of it. Who knew what this would mean for me? My picture in the paper, an honored spot on Howard’s wall, at least. I turned to Dan, who had not relaxed his hold on the rod. “It’s okay,” I said, pushing myself to my feet, “we got him.” I held out my hand, and Dan returned the rod. “Thanks,” I said. “Couldn’t have done it without you, buddy.”
“Abe,” Dan said.
“Definitely not a carp,” I said. “Definitely, positively.” I was trying to figure out the best means for transporting my catch over the hills to my truck. Maybe if I took off my raincoat, we could fashion a sling out of it that we could hoist on a pair of branches. It would require some work, but—
“Abe,” Dan said.
“What?”
“I — that isn’t a fish.”
“Come again?” I glanced at Dan. His eyes big, he was staring past me at the fish. “That isn’t,” he said. “Look at it, Abe. Look at it.”
“Okay,” I said, “okay.” I did, and what Dan had seen slipped into focus for me. “Jesus!” I shouted, jumping back and colliding with him. “What the hell?”
The fish’s face, as I’ve said, was rounded, its eyes a pair of large, forward-facing sockets. No doubt, its resemblance to a human skull had factored into my initial shock at its appearance. What I’d been too concerned with bringing the thing in to realize was that the face wasn’t shaped like a skull, it was shaped around a skull. Imagine a good-sized fish, something like a salmon, whose head has been cut away. In its place, someone has set a human skull, stretching the fish’s skin over the bone to hold it there. Finally, whoever has performed this bizarre transplant has given his new creation a mouth, a slit at the bottom of its face whose bloodless gums are jammed with fangs like a drawer of knives. Behind its gills, a sizable pair of pectoral fins splayed on the rock, while a smaller set of ventral fins spread out nearer the tail, whose top lobe drooped to the left. The sight of it hurt my eyes to behold. I wanted to turn my head; the breakfast boiled at the back of my mouth. Maybe there was a natural explanation for what I dragged out of the pool, but if there was, I didn’t want anything to do with the nature that could fashion such a creature. At the same time, I could not stop looking at the fish, which blew out air through its forest of teeth in a tired grunt.
“It was in my grandfather’s fishing journal,” Dan said.
I had no response — had no notion what he was talking about.
“He was a fisherman, too,” Dan said. His voice shook with the strain of the sight before us. “He and my dad used to go fishing on weekends. Sometimes, they took me. Not too often, but sometimes. He kept a record of the places he’d fished. It was just a ruled notebook, the kind of thing you get for school. He was pretty thorough. For each spot, he recorded the date he went, the hours he spent there, the weather, the condition of the water, the lures he used, and the fish he caught. Once in a while, he’d add a comment underneath the data: ‘Good luck above dam,’ or, ‘Hooked huge catfish near 32 bridge but lost him.’ When he returned to a site, he updated the entry in different-colored ink. I never knew about his journal. He wasn’t exactly what you’d called a forthcoming man. It wouldn’t have mattered much if I had been aware of it. I liked to fish, but I wasn’t interested in that kind of exhaustive note-taking.
“Then, this past February, my cousin, Martine, came to visit with her family. I think I told you about that. Right at the last possible minute, as they’re loading the car for the trip back to Cincinnati, she reaches into her suitcase and comes out with Grandpa’s journal. ‘Here,’ she says. I had no idea what she was handing me. She’d had the book bound in leather, with ‘Fishing Journal’ embossed on the cover in gold lettering. I thought it was a blank book, and she was going to tell me to write my feelings in it. She teaches high school English, and we’d talked about that. Well, she’d talked about it, as what she called a ‘therapeutic exercise.’
“But no, it was our grandfather’s record of his fishing trips. Her mother had come into possession of it after Grandpa’s death, and she gave it to Martine. I couldn’t figure out what Aunt Eileen would have wanted with the notebook. From what I understood, she’d always been focused on religion, to the point she’d flirted with converting to Catholicism, so she could become a nun. No one had mentioned her being interested in fishing. She wasn’t, Martine said. Her mother hated fishing. She was jealous of it, of the time and attention Grandpa gave to it, and of him sharing it with my father. I had no idea; no one else did, either. I’m surprised she didn’t burn the journal, you know, take revenge that way. When Martine’s older son, Robin, was born, her mother passed the journal to her, for the baby. Robin wasn’t interested in fishing, though; neither was his younger sister. My cousin left the journal in her dresser drawer, said she’d practically forgotten it. Then, after,” his voice hitched, “everything happened with Sophie and the kids, and you and I started fishing together, Martine remembered our grandfather’s notebook. She dug it out from underneath the socks and underwear and decided it would be of more use to me than it had been to anyone in her family. She found a place to give the journal a nice binding, and here it was. ‘I hope you’ll find something in these pages that will be of help to you,’ she said.
“It was a while before I looked inside the notebook. To be honest, Abe, I wasn’t sure I wanted to keep fishing with you. No reflection on you: I wasn’t sure I wanted to continue fishing, period. You probably noticed, things with me got a little worse this winter. I know I kind of fell apart that night you had me over for dinner. As long as we were fishing, I was — I wasn’t good, not by any stretch of the imagination, but I was able to go from one day to the next. After the season ended, and I put away my rod and tacklebox in the spare room, everything became harder. It didn’t happen overnight. There were still the holidays and visits from family to distract me. But more and more, it seemed to me I was caught, trapped in a whirlpool that had swept me in the morning that truck — that truck…”
Dan shook his head fiercely, tearing his gaze from the thing in front of us. Focusing on me, instead, he said, “A maelstrom: that’s what they call an especially big and bad whirlpool, the kind of funnel in the ocean that could draw down a ship. I was in a maelstrom, spun around and around a cone of black water, my wife and my children somewhere in there with me, their screams and cries impossible to pinpoint. The longer it had hold of me, the harder it was to believe that there had been anything else, any standing beside the Svartkil talking about work and waiting for a bite. All of those trips, those days sitting on the bank of this stream or that, were a dream, a delusion I’d foisted on myself to escape that relentless spin. Do you know — where the accident happened, they put a light, there.”