The Founding Fish Read Online Free Page B

bloom of cellular phones. I had no way to tell her why I was late, and deliberately breaking off that fish never crossed my mind.
    Yolanda seems to remember the evening with total recall. For one thing, it was my turn to cook. “By nine o’clock, I was just plain mad,” she has said for the record. “You were dithering too long. I was waiting for my dinner. You were taking your sweet time, failing in your responsibilities.”
    Yes.
    â€œAt some point after that, I shifted from mad to concern. You had fallen out of the boat. Gone through the rapids.”
    The rapids, not far from the bridge, cross a diabase ledge and are tumultuous in spring.

    â€œIt was pitch black. Cold. I imagined you with hypothermia in the river. So I called Marian. I told her I was worried because your absence was ‘out of character.’”
    Marian must have marvelled that someone could seriously use a phrase like that about a husband. Marian said she would call back if she learned anything. After hanging up, she called the Lambertville police. She said her husband and son and a friend were out in a boat and had not returned “way beyond the time” she expected them. Would the police check the boat-launch parking lot and see if a green Jeep was there? The woman on the other end of the line said the police surely would.
    A while later, the police called Marian, and Marian called Yolanda, who continues the narrative: “While I waited, a tear or two actually squeezed out. I had let myself wander into the impossible. Perhaps I was madder at Ed than at you—who knows? After Marian called back, I was again spitting mad. She said, ‘They’re still fishing.’”
    Two hours, thirty minutes. At last the fish had come up enough in the river so that the people on the bridge caught glimpses of it as, now and again, it canted—silver flashing—and changed direction. We heard them go “Ooh!” We heard them shout, “Wow, what a huge fish!” When we, in the boat, finally got a glimpse of it, we thought it enormous, too. Toward the end, I kept pressing it, tightened the drag even more, a risky, foolish thing to do. I just hoped it would not make a sudden run. If it did so, at least I had turned off the anti-reverse button, and the reel could spin free. Buddy Grucela, page 22.
    The fish was close now. When it saw the boat, it dived. After it came up, and saw the boat again, it took off for the bottom of the river, slowly to rise once more. At some point in the last five minutes, Edmund tried for it with the boat net and missed. I finally worked it up to the side of the boat. It was still swimming, unspent. It did not roll over. It never gave up. On the second try, Edmund
got it into the net, and the dart dropped out of its mouth. He brought into the boat a four-and-three-quarter-pound roe shad.
    I still have the dart—secured with monofilament to a small piece of cedar shingle. It was only the second dart I had ever retired. On a bookshelf, I propped it up beside a dart of the same weight and colors, with which, on an upriver day the spring before, I had caught seventeen shad without changing or losing the lure. The chemically sharpened hook was a novelty I had succumbed to in a catalogue. That shipment of hooks was uneven, to say the least. Some of them were so weak they were bent out straight by the force of tugging shad. But not this one. Despite two hours and thirty-five minutes in the shad’s mouth, the curve of the black steel looked as it had when I made the dart and festooned it with bucktail in a vise. At home, I studied the fish with a magnifying glass. It had not been hooked on the top of the head or in any other place on the outside. It was not foul-hooked. It was hooked in the roof of the mouth, very near the front, slightly off the midline, to the right. I saw a narrow hole there, and I put a toothpick in it, which did not come through to the outside. The