Off the Track

for James McMurtry

The day before Terry had to report to Detroit to start his sentence he went fishing with his grandpa. It was late summer and the lake behind his grandpa’s house was choked with lily pads, the surface a near-solid mat of rubbery green. Terry rowed and with each stroke his oars churned and uprooted the plants and the pads slapped the aluminum hull. It was hot and everything was shades of green—the pad-covered lake, the Russian olives and willows that crowded the bank, the flat manicured carpet of his grand-father’s lawn sloping up to his house. Terry tried to get it all in his memory, each degree of green, the pitch and drone of the cicadas, the roughness of the oar grips, the sweat running into his eyes, the fetid smell of the lake. He tried to save it all up for a time not too far distant when he might need it. He rowed and he thought about two years, all the ways it could be figured—twenty-four months, 730 days, two trips around the sun, an eighth of the total time he’d been present on the earth. He stared at his bobber and he was scared.

Terry’s Grandpa had Taught him when he was just a kid that the best way to catch bass, truly large bass, was to use a shiner minnow under a bobber. He showed Terry the proper way to rig the minnow, sliding the hook point just under the dorsal fin below the spine.

“Too deep you kill the minnow,” he said, “not deep enough and the minnow flies off when you cast. Now you try it.”

Terry could still remember that first shiner struggling in his hand, the slight crunch—something more felt than heard, gritty and uncomfortable, like chewing a piece of egg shell in an omelet—as the hook’s barb scraped through the tiny ribs and passed under the spine.

His grandpa had taught him that when fishing for bass with shiners you can tell if you’re about to get a strike by watching the movements of the bobber. The shiners were big, some of them five inches long, and although they couldn’t quite pull the bobber under, their shimmies would set the bobber bouncing. No movement meant you had a dead shiner; slight bouncing or jiggling meant the shiner was doing its thing, alive and swimming around calmly; violent jerks and back-and-forth dragging meant a bass had appeared and the minnow was agitated. This was when you had to get ready.

“A bass likes to inspect his meal,” Terry’s grandpa had said. “He’ll sit underneath a minnow and just wait. The minnow will be up there going crazy and the bass will be sitting there trying to figure it out. He’s used to minnows fleeing. A minnow that stays put and just swims in circles is unfamiliar to him. So he waits and watches until either his predatory impulse overwhelms him or his innate caution sends him swimming off in search of food that acts the way it should. That’s all there is to it, really. You just present the bass with a choice and he either takes it or he doesn’t.”

With less than twenty-four hours before his incarceration Terry couldn’t concentrate on the fishing now. The small rowboat was confining and he found himself moving constantly, shifting his weight, repositioning his feet, making the boat lurch from side to side. They hadn’t caught anything. His grandpa said it might be because it was so hot. The bass, he said, had retreated to the deepest part of the lake and hunkered down until dusk, when things would cool off a little. Sweat ran down Terry’s back. He pressed down on his knees to make his legs stop jigging up and down.

“Pretty hot,” he agreed, squinting at his bobber.

His grandpa nodded and reeled in his rig. His minnow had died. He removed it...