Nothing good comes out of this river. Heavy steel killed this bend in the Tennessee. My father pours two bags of ice into the fish hold in the middle of the boat. He sinks a case of Coors Light into the ice, two cans at a time. We don’t keep the fish; my father throws his catch back. It’s just time in a boat, floating, pulling fish from the river next to the sagging frames of steel mills where the clouds of metal dust and slag flushed, for years, down worn, red banks and into the water. My father worked these mills, when their furnaces burned strong and bright orange throughout the night, when the glow of man-made lava poured from giant ladles and filled molds for railroad tracks. My father and I brought home fish from the river then. When we fished close to the locks, and my father told me “they pulled the stopper” when the water lowered for barges moving up river. When my father’s arms were rigid with muscle, when he first took me out in the boat and taught me to hook bait and cast close to the shore. I lost five crickets off the curve of my hook in as many minutes. My father tossed me into the current. “If you can’t learn to hook a cricket, this is the closest you’ll come to catching fish.”
My father digs into the ice and pulls two cans out. The cans drip sweat in this heat. The ssshhh-thwack slices the air behind me as he flips both tabs. He presses a cold can against the back of my arm; I jump, sending the boat rocking. “You’re going to scare the goddamn fish,” he says. He takes a drink. I keep my hat pulled low. The bandana filled with ice chips and tied around my neck steadily drips down my back. It will be dry soon. I won’t fill it with ice again. My father will be watching. He is unyielding in this kind of heat. “Must have caught the worst of his mother,” I once heard him say to Roy Hapburn as they drank beers on the back porch and cleaned fish they’d caught in Alabama.
It’s just a game. I watch my bobber. The white top rests on the surface of the water. The bobber dips and jumps to the surface. The tip of my rod bends to the water. I pray that my hook has caught a stopper on the bottom of this rusted river. My bobber is dragged under the surface, and as I fight with the reel my father springs to his feet. The weight of his steps pitches the boat side to side. Water slops against the aluminum hull. I feel his shadow cool the back of my neck. I imagine his arms around me, his hands on mine, his breath heavy with excitement. One strong tug, we could pull the stopper free from this riverbed.
Jonathan Kosik teaches people how to use very hot lights and very kick ass 16mm cameras to make movies at a film school in Orlando, FL. He is also in the second year of his MFA in creative writing. When he’s not busy battling the giant mosquito in his backyard he likes to go for motorcycle rides with his wife. He has work forthcoming from Burrow Press.
