Sleep with the Fishes Read online

  So in effect, Sid had cut a deal with the prosecutors for a short sentence, with the Camuchis for eliminating anybody who would possibly come after him, and with the anglers on the parole board for the ability to relocate to a fishing outpost.

  Ballard Cabin was a simple affair—bedroom, living room, kitchen, and screened porch facing toward the river, out over an embankment. The outside was shingled and painted brown, with forest green trim. The inside was knotty pine adorned with paint-by-number oils, numerous floor lamps, and two resident examples of taxidermy—a pickerel and a deer head that tendered the eerily ingratiating leer of the Great Bear Transmission logo. The cabin was nestled under a stand of white pine, and from the embankment at the back porch, overgrown grass and saplings cluttered the sweep down to a stony shoal and light rapids. Abutments from a washed-out bridge stood on each shore just downstream.

  Sid sucked in the piney air and exhaled the prison stench. Now and again he took a sip of coffee as he admired the peaceful surroundings. But it wasn’t long before he heard a truck drive up the road and turn down his neighbor’s drive.

  An Eldorado with a “Semper Fi” bumper sticker was waiting for Russ when he returned to his trailer. Russ marshaled his cheeriest demeanor and pulled up next to his visitor.

  “How-do. I’m Russ Smonig. Ready to try for some shad?”

  Russ hopped out of his truck toting the white breakfast bag. The iguana-like man leaning on the Eldorado stepped forward.

  “I should say so! Been here twenty minutes. Was about ready to bug out. Don’t know why you had roll call so damned early if I was just going to come stand by this shed. And what’s this about trying for shad? By golly, Smonig, if you can get shad for that partner of mine, you’ll get shad for me.”

  Russ just kept smiling. “Now that’s the spirit! Well, we’re wasting time. The boat’s all loaded, down by the river.”

  The Iguana croaked, pushing up his sleeves. “Now hold it, Smonig. Seventy-five bucks for a half day, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “From the time we hit the water, I assume?”

  “O.K., yes, that’s right.” The cheery smile was withering.

  “Well, let’s get this thing organized first, d’ya mind? I got rods here an’ I need to know which weapon to take. And ammo—I’ve got salmon flies. But if I run outta bullets I expect you to resupply me at no extra cost.”

  “Excuse me.” Russ blinked. “You want to fly-fish for shad? It’s really a little early in the season for that. The water’s high. You’d need a full sink line and…”

  “Smonig, you shoulda told me that over the phone….”

  “Well, when your partner was here we used spinning tackle. I assumed you wanted to do the same.”

  “Smonig, I never, ever, use spinning tackle.”

  A squirrel small enough to fit in a coffee cup ventured forth from the nest in the porch rafters and spied on Sid for some time before drawing near.

  Sid sipped his instant coffee, viewed the river, and kept an eye on the inquisitive young squirrel. At the same time he monitored the tone of garbled conversation from his next-door neighbor’s, which was out of view beyond a stand of tall weeds, a serviceberry hedge, some bulrushes, and a lopsided willow. Fly reels whizzed and clattered, doors creaked and slammed, two men conversed in earnest. At long last the activity subsided.

  As Sid tried to figure where the activity had gone, he felt a tentative twitching on the shoulder of his bathrobe. Whiskers brushed his graying sideburn and a rapid wuffling filled his ear. The pup squirrel was searching his ear for pine nuts.

  Years of wariness, both in prison and the Newark rackets, had trained Sid to react slowly but no less definitively to prodding, whether the stimulus be the barrel of a 9 mm, a shiv, or a baby squirrel. He turned his head slowly toward the wee rodent, who grasped at his lobe in a vain effort to keep the ear from drifting away. But he was diverted by Sid’s stare. The squirrel’s huge black pupils stared back. He sniffed for a moment, put both forepaws on Sid’s nose, and began to look up his nostrils.

  “Cute lil’ mother.” Sid chuckled, just before two yellow incisors clamped on his nostril flange.

  A zap of pain shot Sid to his feet. The pup squirrel vaulted for the rafters, where he chattered a warning from the confines of the leafy nest.

  Sid held his nose, checked his fingers for blood, and looked up.

  “You’n me have to have a little talk sometime.” He squinted at the squirrel’s nest. But the gurgling snare of a distant outboard motor snatched his attention.

  Clawing through the pile of gear in the living room, Sid came up with trout-spotting binoculars and charged out the front door just as fast as his bedroom slippers would take him. With the agility of a kid scaling a fence, he hopped onto the portico’s wood rail, got a leg up onto the roof of the cabin, and scrambled on all fours to the limb of a white pine. Making his way along the limb to the trunk, Sid drew his red satin robe against the elements, tightened his sash, and trained the binoculars on a boat motoring down the rapids.

  The well-placed mole on Sid’s cheek vanished in the grin that worked up one side of his face, a row of even wrinkles blending into his nicely pleated crow’s-feet.

  A guy in a brown fedora stood at the stern working the boat backward through the rapids with practiced skill. Another guy stood in the bow waving his arms and pointing at the river.

  The outboard was silenced. On the river’s far side, Captain Fedora draped a claw anchor over the side and fed it rope. Line taut, the boat swung around smartly in the heavy current, putting the bow downstream. In what appeared to be a demonstration for a pupil, Captain Fedora stood and began false casting in luxurious brown loops that finally unfurled his fly forward and across the current. After letting it drift down current, he reeled up and sat back down.

  The pupil stood and prepared by slowly pulling line from his reel and looping it neatly in one hand. Captain Fedora cringed as his pupil’s fly zipped closer and closer to his head. But he didn’t interrupt Pupil, who finally let loose a noodly cross-stream cast. This was repeated for about twenty minutes. Nothing. Pupil started pointing fingers at Captain Fedora just as the latter weighed anchor and moved the boat fifteen feet farther downstream.

  Pupil shrugged and looked as if he wished he could hail a cab. But after some fussing and finger-pointing, he got another cast out.

  When his line snapped taut from the water, Pupil stumbled in surprise. Captain Fedora grabbed him by the jacket to steady him.

  Silver arced like a shard of glass from the water in a high, shimmering leap of fish. Pupil fumbled, then reeled up his slack line. The fish was gone.

  “Whoa.” Sid tugged thoughtfully at his ear. Except for a flounder outing off Sea Girt, New Jersey, Sid had never seen a fish caught, much less jump. His buddies referred to fluke as “doormats” for obvious reasons. Sid had dragged in his share of doormats that day, and some had fallen off the hook too. But here was a jumping, rocketlike fish—whatever it was—and it had gotten away.

  “Huh,” Sid muttered, bolstering his morale. “That rocket-fish had been my fish? It’d be in the boat.” Sid’s own bravado made him a little uncomfortable. As he adjusted his footing, he noticed something twinkling in the deep crease where the branch and trunk met. Crouching, he brushed away some needles, uncovering a handful of coins, jigs, paper clips, keys, buttons, and a Pabst bottle opener. He stood, shrugged off his mild curiosity, and retrained his binoculars on the river.

  An hour went by as the pupil hooked and lost one rocket-fish after the other. As soon as a fish was hooked, it blasted about thirty feet upstream and launched right out of the water, throwing the lure. Captain Fedora tried to make a few suggestions, but apparently Pupil didn’t care to be taught.

  Eventually, a fish was soundly hooked, played, netted, and boated. Pupil sat down and pointed toward shore. Captain Fedora shrugged and hauled up the anchor. The boat wended neatly through the rapids and disappeared from Sid’s view. And h
igh time. His shoulders and feet were worse for wear from the rough pine bark. Sid’s carpet slippers and satin bathrobe weren’t exactly lumberjack gear.

  He was startled by the sigh of air brakes behind him. He turned to see the Red Eft Trout Farms truck lumbering down his driveway.

  “Hey, neighbor. What ya doin’ up in that tree in your bathrobe?” A woman hollered from the cab as she brought the truck to a stop in front of Ballard Cabin. She jumped down from the cab. “Ya didn’t sleep up there, did ya? What are ya? An airline pilot? Ya like sleepin’ as close to the clouds as possible?”

  Sid blinked and set his jaw. She was wearing crimson hiking boots.

  “Yeah? And who the fuck are you?”

  “Nice mouth, neighbor!” She jerked a thumb back at the tanker truck and snapped her bubble gum. “Red Eft Trout Farms. I’m Jenny. Here to stock your pond.”

  “I don’t got no pond.” With the confidence of an alley cat, Sid made his way from the limb to the roof and made for the portico.

  “Sure ya do. What, didn’t them real estate folks show ya the pond? Nobody told ya ’bout the pond?” Jenny walked up to the portico where Sid was brushing pine needles from his robe. He found them sticking to his fingers. Sap.

  “O.K., so if there’s a pond, where is it?” He gestured broadly to his front yard, then rubbed his hands together to shoo away the pine needles. He only succeeded in rearranging them.

  Five minutes later, Sid was still in his bathrobe but sporting hip boots. Rubbing a paper towel over the sap on his fingers, he followed Jenny into the tall weeds and serviceberry thicket. A few paces in, Jenny stopped.

  “See? Now, do ya want trout in it or not?”

  Weeds and hedge, left unchecked, had conspired to obscure the long, narrow pond from view. A rapidly flowing, skinny creek merrily winding its way to the Delaware met an elfin earthen dam at the edge of the embankment. Outflow coursed through a pipe embedded in the dam, which doubled as a bridge. Sid estimated Ballard Pond to be four times the size of a bocci ball court.

  The prospect of owning a pond thrilled Sid almost as much as the prospect of Jenny’s red hikers, but you wouldn’t have known it to look at him.

  “You call that a pond?” He finally balled up the tattered paper towel and stuffed it in his robe pocket, his hands flecked with paper towel.

  “The Ballards did. And every year they had the farm come out and chuck in fifty twelve-inch brook trout. So whaddaya say, sport? Want your own lil’ trout pond?”

  “Could be there’s still some trout left from last year.”

  “Don’t think so, sport. Ballard died last spring, just after stocking. Kids were in all last summer catching ’em any way they could.” Jenny pushed past Sid, making for her truck.

  She just had the truck door open when she heard: “How much?”

  Jenny turned and handed him the pink invoice. Sid produced a wad of bills from his bathrobe pocket.

  “Damn, Smonig—that was some real frontline fishing. How much you think this roe shad weighs?” The Iguana was tromping in Russ’s wake through the high grass and toward the trailer. Hanging from his stringer was a shad that looked like a large startled herring.

  “Four, maybe going on five,” Russ lied. “Definitely the best one you had on.” Roe shad were commonly four to six pounds; buck shad rarely broke four pounds. The bloody critter the sport had bagged was just a bit better than three.

  The Iguana was quite pleased with his trophy, though, and when they reached the car and he had all his stuff packed up, he handed Russ the borrowed reel along with the seventy-five-dollar fee. And that was that. For a sport so well pleased, a tip is usual, but Russ was just glad they didn’t haggle over the fact that they’d only been on the water two and a half hours, even though it was the Iguana who insisted they head in after he had his fish.

  As soon as the Eldorado and “Semper Fi” disappeared up the drive, Russ stopped waving bye-bye and turned toward his trailer. It was Friday, Russ had his seventy-five bucks, and before you knew it, it would be Saturday night, when he would head over to the Duck Pond Bar for a beery respite. In the meantime, Russ’s choice of activities included finishing an article for Fly-Fishing Gazette, a complimentary tackle store rag for which he was compensated with a free three-line ad for his guiding services. Or he could tie a bunch of early season flies for the local tackle shop, a labor-intensive undertaking that netted him a whopping five dollars an hour. Or he could attempt to exorcise the demon from the International’s ignition, potentially making money by avoiding giving it to the mechanic.

  A truck’s backup beep sounded from behind the willow. The crunch of weeds and the snap of twigs followed. The seventy-five dollars tucked in his back pocket, Russ decided to see what was up on the other side of the hedge. He veered from the trailer, went past the barbecue pit, and came to a stop next to the willow at the edge of Ballard Pond.

  The serviceberry bushes parted, tiny white petals from their flowers snowing onto the red satin bathrobe of the guy in hip boots coming into view. Beyond him, red round taillights approached.

  “Hold it,” Sid barked, and the taillights went bright. The back tires of the truck were beginning to make ruts in the mud. The beeper stopped, the air brakes sneezed. Jenny came around the other side of the truck.

  “Yeah, that’s close enough.” Jenny disappeared for a second, then reappeared with a long-handled net. She scaled a ladder on the back of the truck to the top, where she opened a tank lid.

  “O.K., sport, here’s how we’ll count ’em. I pull up a net full—usually five fish—then I say ‘five,’ hold it down for ya to check, then chuck the fish into the pond, O.K.?”

  “Let’s get somethin’ straight, you an’ me. I’m no sport. You call me Sid, got it? Second, you’re not chucking anything. There’s a bucket on the side of the truck. I fill it with water, you place my fish in the bucket of water, and I will put my fish gently into the pond. Got it?”

  Jenny grinned. “Whatever ya say, sport. Uh, Sid. And ya can just keep calling me ‘lady,’ thank ya very much.” She already had the net down in the tank. Sid grabbed the bucket and filled it with water from the pond.

  On the first attempt, two fish catapulted out of the pail into the leafy underbrush, from whence Sid had to nudge the leaf-matted critters with his foot to the very edge of the pond. By the time they made it to the water they looked like squirming cigars.

  So Sid filled the next bucket only halfway, and there were no more escapes. Somewhere around the fifth bucket, he spied his Captain Fedora watching from the far bank, though he paid him little attention. Fifteen minutes later, all fifty trout were gently delivered and the truck was pulling out of the bushes. Sid took a last look and saw his neighbor was gone. However, when he got back to his driveway he found the guy exchanging a few words with Trout Lady.

  Sid walked between them and handed a twenty up to Jenny in the truck. “Here. Make sure you don’t tell nobody about my trout. I wanna keep the locals outta my pond. Got it?”

  Jenny snapped the bill taut, put it in her teeth, and wrestled the truck into gear. Through her teeth she said: “Neighbor, ya got a deal!” She pulled away, looking in the rearview mirror.

  Sid pulled an about-face.

  His neighbor put out one hand and jerked the thumb of the other back at the pond.

  “Nice to see you’re stocking the pond. Hi, I’m Russ Smonig, your neighbor.”

  As was his way, Sid considered the extended hand a moment before clasping it. Shaking hands, he stared into Captain Fedora’s eyes. Then his other hand swooped up and latched onto Russ’s shoulder.

  “Sponick?” Sid asked.

  “No, Smonig. Russ Smonig.”

  “Sid.” Sid gestured casually to himself. “Hey, Smonig, you know anything about kids comin’ in here swiping trout?”

  “Sure. Hard to stop ’em though. It’s just the way kids are, you know?”

  “Hm.” Sid supposed that was true enough. It seemed his entire childhood had rev
olved around swiping things, though certainly not trout. “These kids, do they, like, climb up that tree? That one, the sticky one over my house.”

  “Um, I don’t know, Sid. Why?”

  “Just curious. There’s a bottle opener up there, and a buncha loose change.”

  “Up in the tree? Up there? Where?” Russ took a sudden interest.

  “Why, you know who put it up there?”

  “It must be Reverend Jim. He’s been stealing stuff from me for years and I never knew what he did with—”

  “Whoa. You tellin’ me that your local padre climbs up that tree and puts your pocket change up there?” These yokels were a pisser.

  “Reverend Jim is a crow. You know, a bird. Kind of like a pet, sort of. He likes to steal shiny objects. Was it a Pabst opener?”

  Sid’s eyes widened. “I think so.”

  “Mind if I go up and…”

  “Sure, Smonig, g’head, knock yourself out.” Sid shooed Russ toward the porch as though it were a gag. Why would anybody climb all the way up there for a bottle opener?

  Russ had a dicey moment making it onto the roof from the portico railing, but did it without falling. Minutes later he was back on the ground, breathing hard.

  “I even found the keys to my padlock. I thought I’d just lost them. And there must be, let’s see, maybe three bucks in change. This is great,” he panted.

  Sid wondered if everybody in Hellbender Eddy was so hard up.

  “Uh, you move here with your wife?” Russ asked as he pocketed his goodies.

  Sid shook his head.

  “Nope. Just me.” He gave Russ’s shoulder a quick squeeze and pulled him a step closer. “Tell you what, Smonig. Whenever you see kids here, chase ’em off, wouldya? I’ll let you fish the pond all you want—catch an’ release, of course. I’ll even give you a brand-new bottle opener. Deal?”