Trout Fishing in America (6 page)

Dear Trout Fishing in America,

last week walking along lower market on the way to work saw the pictures of the FBI's TEN MOST WANTED MEN in the window of a store, the dodger under one of the pictures was folded under at both sides and you couldn't read all of it. the picture showed a nice, clean-cut-looking guy with freckles and curly (red?) hair

 

WANTED FOR:

RICHARD LAWRENCE MARQUETTE

     Aliases: Richard Lawrence Marquette, Richard Lourence Marquette

     Description:

26, born Dec. 12, 1934, Portland, Oregon
170 to 180 pounds
muscular
light brown, cut short
blue

     Complexion: ruddy
     Race: white
     Nationality: American
     Occupations:

auto body w
recapper, s
survey rod

arks: 6" hernia scar; tattoo “Mom” in wreath on
ight forearm

ull upper denture, may also have lower denture.

Reportedly frequents

s, and is an avid trout fisherman.

 

(this is how the dodger looked cut off on both sides and you couldn't make out any more, even what he was wanted for.)

 

Your old buddy,
Pard

 

Dear Pard,

Your letter explains why I saw two FBI agents watching a trout stream last week. They watched a path that came down through the trees and then circled a large black stump and led to a deep pool. Trout were rising in the pool. The FBI agents watched the path, the trees, the black stump, the pool and the trout as if they were all holes punched in a card that had just come out of a computer. The afternoon sun kept changing everything as it moved across the sky, and the FBI agents kept changing with the sun. It appears to be part of their training.

 

Your friend,

 

Worsewick Hot Springs was nothing fancy. Somebody put some boards across the creek. That was it.

The boards dammed up the creek enough to form a huge bathtub there, and the creek flowed over the top of the boards, invited like a postcard to the ocean a thousand miles away.

As I said Worsewick was nothing fancy, not like the places where the swells go. There were no buildings around. We saw an old shoe lying by the tub.

The hot springs came down off a hill and where they flowed there was a bright orange scum through the sagebrush. The hot springs flowed into the creek right there at the tub and that's where it was nice.

We parked our car on the dirt road and went down and took off our clothes, then we took off the baby's clothes, and the deerflies had at us until we got into the water, and then they stopped.

There was a green slime growing around the edges of the tub and there were dozens of dead fish floating in our bath. Their bodies had been turned white by death, like frost on iron doors. Their eyes were large and stiff.

The fish had made the mistake of going down the creek too far and ending up in hot water, singing, “When you lose your money, learn to lose.”

We played and relaxed in the water. The green slime and the dead fish played and relaxed with us and flowed out over us and entwined themselves about us.

Splashing around in that hot water with my woman, I began to get ideas, as they say. After a while I placed my body in such a position in the water that the baby could not see my hard-on.

I did this by going deeper and deeper in the water, like a
dinosaur, and letting the green slime and dead fish cover me over.

My woman took the baby out of the water and gave her a bottle and put her back in the car. The baby was tired. It was
really
time for her to take a nap.

My woman took a blanket out of the car and covered up the windows that faced the hot springs. She put the blanket on top of the car and then lay rocks on the blanket to hold it in place. I remember her standing there by the car.

Then she came back to the water, and the deerflies were at her, and then it was my turn. After a while she said, “I don't have my diaphragm with me and besides it wouldn't work in the water, anyway. I think it's a good idea if you don't come inside me. What do you think?”

I thought this over and said all right. I didn't want any more kids for a long time. The green slime and dead fish were all about our bodies.

I remember a dead fish floated under her neck. I waited for it to come up on the other side, and it came up on the other side.

Worsewick was nothing fancy.

Then I came, and just cleared her in a split second like an airplane in the movies, pulling out of a nosedive and sailing over the roof of a school.

My sperm came out into the water, unaccustomed to the light, and instantly it became a misty, stringy kind of thing and swirled out like a falling star, and I saw a dead fish come forward and float into my sperm, bending it in the middle. His eyes were stiff like iron.

Trout Fishing in America Shorty appeared suddenly last autumn in San Francisco, staggering around in a magnificent chrome-plated steel wheelchair.

He was a legless, screaming middle-aged wino.

He descended upon North Beach like a chapter from the Old Testament. He was the reason birds migrate in the autumn. They have to. He was the cold turning of the earth; the bad wind that blows off sugar.

He would stop children on the street and say to them, “I ain't got no legs. The trout chopped my legs off in Fort Lauderdale. You kids got legs. The trout didn't chop your legs off. Wheel me into that store over there.”

The kids, frightened and embarrassed, would wheel Trout Fishing in America Shorty into the store. It would always be a store that sold sweet wine, and he would buy a bottle of wine and then he'd have the kids wheel him back out onto the street, and he would open the wine and start drinking there on the street just like he was Winston Churchill.

After a while the children would run and hide when they saw Trout Fishing in America Shorty coming.

“I pushed him last week,”

“I pushed him yesterday,”

“Quick, let's hide behind these garbage cans.”

And they would hide behind the garbage cans while Trout Fishing in America Shorty staggered by in his wheelchair.

The kids would hold their breath until he was gone.

Trout Fishing in America Shorty used to go down to
L'Italia
, the Italian newspaper in North Beach at Stockton and Green Streets. Old Italians gather in front of the newspaper in the afternoon and just stand there, leaning up against the building, talking and dying in the sun.

Trout Fishing in America Shorty used to wheel into the middle of them as if they were a bunch of pigeons, bottle of wine in hand, and begin shouting obscenities in fake Italian.

Tra-la-la-la-la-la-Spa-ghet-tiii!

I remember Trout Fishing in America Shorty passed out in Washington Square, right in front of the Benjamin Franklin statue He had fallen face first out of his wheelchair and just lay there without moving.

Snoring loudly.

Above him were the metal works of Benjamin Franklin like a clock, hat in hand.

Trout Fishing in America Shorty lay there below, his face spread out like a fan in the grass.

A friend and I got to talking about Trout Fishing in America Shorty one afternoon. We decided the best thing to do with him was to pack him in a big shipping crate with a couple of cases of sweet wine and send him to Nelson Algren.

Nelson Algren is always writing about Railroad Shorty, a hero of the
Neon Wilderness
(the reason for “The Face on the Barroom Floor”) and the destroyer of Dove Linkhorn in
A Walk on the Wild Side
.

We thought that Nelson Algren would make the perfect custodian for Trout Fishing in America Shorty. Maybe a museum might be started. Trout Fishing in America Shorty could be the first piece in an important collection.

We would nail him up in a packing crate with a big label on it.

 

Contents:
Trout Fishing in America Shorty

 

Occupation:
Wino

 

Address:
C/O Nelson Algren
Chicago

 

And there would be stickers all over the crate, saying: “GLASS/HANDLE WITH CARE/SPECIAL HANDLING/GLASS/DON'T SPILL/THIS SIDE UP/HANDLE THIS WINO LIKE HE WAS AN ANGEL”

And Trout Fishing in America Shorty, grumbling, puking and cursing in his crate would travel across America, from San Francisco to Chicago.

And Trout Fishing in America Shorty, wondering what it was all about, would travel on, shouting, “Where in the hell am I? I can't see to open this bottle! Who turned out the lights? Fuck this motel! I have to take a piss! Where's my key?”

It was a good idea.

A few days after we made our plans for Trout Fishing in America Shorty, a heavy rain was pouring down upon San Francisco. The rain turned the streets inward, like drowned lungs, upon themselves and I was hurrying to work, meeting swollen gutters at the intersections.

I saw Trout Fishing in America Shorty passed out in the front window of a Filipino laundromat. He was sitting in his wheelchair with closed eyes staring out the window.

There was a tranquil expression on his face. He almost looked human. He had probably fallen asleep while he was having his brains washed in one of the machines.

Weeks passed and we never got around to shipping Trout Fishing in America Shorty away to Nelson Algren. We kept putting it off. One thing and another. Then we lost our golden opportunity because Trout Fishing in America Shorty disappeared a little while after that.

They probably swept him up one morning and put him in jail to punish him, the evil fart, or they put him in a nuthouse to dry him out a little.

Maybe Trout Fishing in America Shorty just pedaled down to San Jose in his wheelchair, rattling along the freeway at a quarter of a mile an hour.

I don't know what happened to him. But if he comes back to San Francisco someday and dies, I have an idea.

Trout Fishing in America Shorty should be buried right beside the Benjamin Franklin statue in Washington Square. We should anchor his wheelchair to a huge gray stone and write upon the stone:

 

Trout Fishing in America Shorty
20¢ Wash
10¢ Dry
Forever

 

London. On December 1, 1887; July 7, August 8, September 30, one day in the month of October and on the 9th of November, 1888; on the 1st of June, the 17th of July and the 10th of September 1889 . . .

The disguise was perfect.

Nobody ever saw him, except, of course, the victims. They saw him.

Who would have expected?

He wore a costume of trout fishing in America. He wore mountains on his elbows and bluejays on the collar of his shirt. Deep water flowed through the lilies that were entwined about his shoelaces. A bullfrog kept croaking in his watch pocket and the air was filled with the sweet smell of ripe blackberry bushes.

He wore trout fishing in America as a costume to hide his own appearance from the world while he performed his deeds of murder in the night.

Who would have expected?

Nobody!

Scotland Yard?

(Pouf!)

They were always a hundred miles away, wearing halibutstalker hats, looking under the dust.

Nobody ever found out.

O, now he's the Mayor of the Twentieth Century! A razor, a knife and a ukelele are his favorite instruments.

Of course, it would have to be a ukelele. Nobody else would have thought of it, pulled like a plow through the intestines.

“Speaking of evacuations, your missive, while complete in other regards, skirted the subject, though you did deal briefly with rural micturition procedure. I consider this a gross oversight on your part, as I'm certain you're well aware of my unending fascination with camp-out crapping. Please rush details in your next effort. Slit-trench, pith helmet, slingshot biffy and if so number of holes and proximity of keester to vermin and deposits of prior users.”

—From a Letter by a Friend

 

Sheep. Everything smelled of sheep on Paradise Creek, but there were no sheep in sight. I fished down from the ranger station where there was a huge monument to the Civilian Conservation Corps.

It was a twelve-foot high marble statue of a young man walking out on a cold morning to a crapper that had the classic half-moon cut above the door.