Seed Across Snow

My Thirteen-Year-Old Son, the Fisherman, Throws One Back

76 My Thirteen-Year-Old Son, the Fisherman, Throws One Back at the end of the buckled pier, my son flung far out his line which seemed imagined until lit by the sun. From time to time, I looked up from reading when commotion filled the frail pier. His reeling frame arched, rod bending, releasing its punishing whine. Five full days on the coast and he hadn’t caught anything worth keeping. How can you love it so much? I’d asked, watching him once again straighten and classify the plastic wriggling tackle. But I’d been told before and shouldn’t have had to wonder. It’s the possibility he loves, the imagined on the end of the line, those few moments when the hooked could be halibut or shark, though soon what surfaces is a channel cat or worse, a flat rubbery ray, slit mouth widening its ugly gasp. Later, on the beach, nearly naked girls romped nearby, tried hard to catch his eye. watching them throw back their long dark hair, I wondered how many of them were about to jump his line? How many swam just there, beneath the surface, promising 77 to be the long-dreamed-after silver bullet of hooked tarpon? at the water’s edge, that night I discovered the ray, moonlit, gashed, floating weakly in the black surf— only then would I recall how my son had glanced back at the girls, lifting his head in an aggressive nod, as I’d seen other boys do when they imagined themselves grown men. I had to admit too, how, that morning, like an assassin, he’d cut the line, then casually kicked the wounded creature across the pier, until it fell back into the ruffling, heart-colored upset of the sea. ...