Our Love Will Go the Way of the Salmon (10 page)

I was born a collector. From the ages of seven until about twelve, the heart of my angling fixation boiled down to one question:
Can it be mounted?
I wanted to hang a trophy on the wall beside my father’s ten pound bass and his pair of deep red Kern River rainbows. I collected action figures, football cards (at age ten, a list of mine was published in
Beckett Football Monthly
),
Goosebumps
books, and nearly anything else with the remotest collectability, so naturally I was also inclined to collect the fish kingdom as well. Sometimes my old collecting habit paid off. I convinced my father to drop thirty dollars on a hand-painted, hand-carved nine inch Castaic Lure Co. trout. That model, which ceased to be produced by hand in 1996, now goes for as much as three-hundred dollars. Mine remains in mint condition. My card collection, primarily consisting of rookie cards from the sixties through the early nineties, might be valued at several thousand dollars. And yet there was nothing I wanted to collect more than a trophy fish of my own to mount on the wall. In 1996, the same year as the value of my Castaic Lure Co. trout skyrocketed, my father made a promise he would soon regret.

We were fishing Buena Vista Lakes outside Bakersfield, California. Even though Lake Webb, the larger of the two lakes, was primarily known as a boating and jet ski lake, we tended to fish there instead because fishing pressure was lighter and the fish tended to be bigger and more plentiful. We spent innumerable days catching crappie and bluegill, brown trout and rainbow trout, largemouth bass and striped bass, blue catfish and channel catfish, with hardly anyone else fishing on Lake Webb. If we hiked around to the reed-lined far shore, we were pretty much guaranteed to have the shoreline to ourselves. We were doing just that one May evening in 1996. We walked along the bank, throwing six-inch white curly tail grubs between the reeds for largemouth bass. As daylight ran down, I pitched my grub out into the water and began retrieving it with subtle twitches. During the retrieval, a big fish boiled on top of it. The fish didn’t take, but that hardly mattered. I had its number now. I cast back out and almost as soon as the grub hit the water, the fish exploded on it. My rod buckled. The fight was on. I’d finally nailed it, a monster bass worth hanging beside my father’s bass. There was no way he could resist mounting it. The fish peeled line, making several impressive runs. We didn’t have a net, so my father stripped down to his underwear and waded out to his thighs. After several minutes, the fish tired out and resigned. My father stood in the water, ready to snatch up the bass of a lifetime. But when the fish finally surfaced, it flashed gold. It was a ten pound carp, not a ten pound bass. A beautiful fish, a hell of a fighter, and my first carp, but to a bass lover like my father, that’s the equivalent of catching a ten pound bag of dog shit.

“It’s just a big ol’ carp,” my father said.

“Can we mount it?” I said, hopeful.

“No, son. You can’t mount a carp.”

I pleaded. Look at the
size
of it. Look at the golden scales. Do fish get any prettier?

He’d always had a hard time telling me no, so he made me a deal.

“We’ll come out this weekend,” he said. “If you catch a bigger one, we’ll take it to the taxidermist.”

That sounded like a sweet deal to me, so we let my ten pound carp swim free. My father was a little pissed that he’d taken off his pants and waded out into the lake over a carp, but at least he’d avoided taking one home for the wall.

A couple days later, we returned with my stepbrother and my dad’s friend Harry, a diabetic with the flowing white hair of Gandalf. This time around, we fished with whole kernel sweet corn. We were getting serious about carp.

My stepbrother caught the first fish of the day. A five pound goldfish. After that, we caught a couple four to six pound carp, but nothing came close to dethroning the fish from the previous trip. Eventually, my dad grew bored of carp fishing and he and Harry wandered along the back shoreline to throw for bass, leaving my stepbrother and me alone in the pursuit of carp. We drank Pepsi and sat there sweating under the hot Central Valley sun. At some point, my pole popped out of the rod holder and smacked against the rocky shore, half in the water and half out. I ran over and started reeling. Something on the other end pulled back, something heavier than I’d ever felt. A minor population of sturgeon existed in Buena Vista Lakes, but I had never caught one, and I didn’t think they ate corn. All I knew was I had something big on.

I shouted for my father. He and Harry took their time returning, and by the time they arrived, whatever was on the other end of my line had stopped moving. My father took the rod from me and gave it a short, sharp jerk. “You’re snagged up,” he said.

“It’s a big one,” I said.

“Naw, it’s just a snag.” He attempted to free the rig from whatever rock or weed he believed it was caught on, and that’s when the fish made its first big run, burning off fifty yards in mere seconds.

He couldn’t believe it, and for a moment, neither could I. The fish was already halfway to the island in the middle of the lake. My father handed the rod back to me and rushed to clear the other lines to give me room to fight the goliath. A crowd gathered as the battle stretched beyond five minutes, then ten. A younger kid asked if he could net the fish if I landed it. We’d once again failed to bring a net, so we agreed. He ran off to borrow a net from some other fishermen, returning a short time later.

“Remember you said we’d get it mounted,” I told my father, confident that I was going to land this fish, and that it was bigger than my last.

“We’ll see,” he said.

Finally, twenty minutes after the fight began, we got a first look at what was on the other end.

A thirty-five pound carp, three and a half feet long.

The fish was netted and brought ashore. My father, my stepbrother, Harry, and I all took pictures with the big carp. I don’t think we caught another fish that day, but it didn’t matter. I’d gotten the fish I came for, the fish I could mount on the wall.

As we left the lake that day, a man offered me twenty dollars for the fish. He and his wife and three kids were out fishing for their dinner but they’d caught nothing. My father told him sorry, that I insisted on keeping it. “We’re getting it mounted,” I said.

That evening my father promised to call the taxidermist who’d mounted his bass and trout. The next time I was over at his house, I asked about the fish. “I sent it off to the taxidermist,” he said. “It’ll be a few months.”

I asked for updates every time I visited my father. I was relentless. Finally, after six months had passed, I received some news. “He’s having trouble with the eyes. Not many people mount carp, so he had to special order the eyes,” my father told me. That sounded plausible enough. Carp do have beautiful eyes.

Eventually a year passed. Then two. Sometimes my father said the carp was on its way, but it never came. I caught other big fish. Nice channel cats, monster crappie, fat rainbow trout, and yet I never gave much thought to mounting them because I knew my carp lay in a taxidermist’s workshop somewhere, and that if only I was patient, my fish would return to me, preserved to last a lifetime.

Years passed and we ceased speaking of the carp even though I still believed. Last year, while visiting my father, I finally asked him what really happened to the carp.

“I threw it in a field,” he said, with a laugh and a sheepish grin. “That was a big-ass fish. It was a shame to kill it. But you can’t mount a carp.”

Somewhere over the years, I lost my desire to mount a trophy on the wall. A hundred yards behind where I live now, a creek runs through the forest. Native cutthroats live there. I’m fine just watching them. I like to eat fish and nothing beats what you’ve caught yourself, yet many of the fish I catch are released without ever leaving the water. Sometimes, though, I think about that thirty-five pound carp and what it would’ve looked like above the fireplace. They say you can’t mount a carp, but someday, I think I will.

They hit Portland a little after sunrise, pull the car over in an industrial area and watch strange barges haul pyramids of dirt up and down the brown river that splits the green city in half.

Sarah sleeps beside Ryan. His arm is numb from her head resting on his shoulder.

“Wake up,” he says, “we’re here.”

She smiles at him through her sleepiness, lands a kiss on his scruff.

Even though they’re down to forty bucks and he’s still uncertain whether the mess they left behind in California will catch up to them or not, he decides right then that he’d go to hell and back for that smile.

He’d endure anything for this girl.

The first order on the agenda is to pawn the car. The second is to find a place to crash. After that, it’s just living. Staying on the down-low, earning money to live.

He has no idea if what they’re doing is the right thing to do. When he considers what they’ve done, all he feels is confused. He’d turn back now, to Bakersfield, if his bones didn’t ache with exhaustion—and if his future there promised to be any less bleak. He’d go to prison and she would too. At least here in Portland they stand a fighting chance at building a life together, if they can go undetected.

He drives, navigating the city streets like a bloodhound, seeking out a place where the car will merit question-free cash.

They strike gold on Southeast 82
^nd
.

A car lot tucked behind a gun and pawn shop offers one-hundred cash for it, no questions asked. It’s less than he hoped for, but he accepts. The car was a piece of shit anyway.

They walk down 82
^nd
Street, one-hundred forty dollars in his pocket.

It’s cold out.

The sky is like a gray egg yolk that seems to pulse, as if any second it will burst.

His mother used to tell him stories about gloomy Portland. It’s where she and his father lived before he was born. She talked of how she and his daddy were so happy here, so in love, that all the darkness seemed hopeful to them. Her stories are really the only reason why he chose this place. Hope that he and the woman he loves can find some of that same happiness.

It starts to rain.

Their clothes soak through in minutes and both of them are so beaten, with nowhere to go, they run inside the nearest establishment.

A hand-painted sign nailed to the side of the place reads FISH MARKET. They enter through a red door that creaks on rusty hinges.

Inside, they’re hit by an overwhelming fishy odor. He gags a little, the fishiness is so strong.

There’s a glass display case filled with a variety of whole fish. He grew up fishing in farm ponds and the California Aqueduct. His catch often provided the only food for his family for weeks at a time, so he’s familiar with some of the species in the case. The catfish and carp. But there are other kinds too. The one that catches his eye is long, gray, and plated, like some prehistoric amphibian. He has never seen a fish like this before and something about it scares him.