Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 39, No. 6, June, 1994

I know what some folks would say, but this is not another Kenny Crawford fish story. I’ll be the first to admit I’ve added a pound and a few inches to a fish in the cause of good narrative, but what happened to my friend, Bobby Lee, happened exactly as I tell it. Whether he deserved it or not is up to you to decide.

Before I explain about Bobby Lee and his vanished wife, you need to know about the lake. The old duffers who pass the bluebird days on courthouse-square benches, the women who keep the telephone wires humming all afternoon between talk show station breaks, the children who swarm the playgrounds like riotous bands of monkeys — they’ll all tell you folks have been hauling strange things out of Owls Head Lake as long as anyone can remember. Ever since the summer of 1923, when the river was dammed in order to flood an entire valley. A carp with an extra toothy mouth below the first... a pair of struggling bass that tried to swallow each another and nearly succeeded... a Siameselike snapping turtle with a head poking out from either end of its horny shell. Stuff you’d expect to see in a carnival sideshow or read about in a supermarket checkout tabloid, the kind printed on cheap newsprint that leaves sooty ink on your hands. Freakish things to keep you awake on a breezeless summer night, wondering.

If I could plot all these events — the ones I know aren’t made up — on a calendar that stretched back through the seasons, I’d bet my last dollar they all fell on or near the Strawberry Moon.

Still skeptical? You could ask Gail Tinney, if he were still alive. Tinney boated a prehistoric, bony-legged horror of a fish back in June of ’64, when I was ten. Tinney, the town’s part-time philosopher and part-time drunk, claimed it was a coelacanth, a milky-eyed, scaly blue creature thought to have been extinct for millions of years before a live specimen was caught in South Africa in 1938. Lonny Banks, the sheriff’s lone deputy, urged Tinney to send the monstrosity to the state game and fish office or to the biology professors up at the U. Tinney deposited the fish-thing — which had a mouthful of sharp teeth and a hateful, soulless expression — in his moldy creel and made a beeline to the nearest tavern, where he cadged whisky the rest of the evening from patrons in exchange for a peek inside.

No state game warden or bespectacled ichthyologist ever laid an eye on the monster. The best part of that story — the part that made a ten-year-old kid grin and shiver — was that Tinney filleted and fried it up the next day, just as he did all the bass, catfish, and carp he hauled up from the depths of Owls Head. Some nameless tomcat probably made off with its head.

Tinney’s dinosaur fish was the most fearful oddity I’d ever seen emerge from the big reservoir — until the night last summer I went drift-fishing with Bobby Lee Griffin, the richest man in town.

This is what happened.

It was the third of June and the full moon — known in this part of the land by oldtimers as the Strawberry Moon — had slid behind a lone raft of clouds. The lake’s deep, clear waters were up and murky from a week of steady rain, so at first I wasn’t sure whether I’d hooked a deep-holding fish or the woody arm of a half-sunken tree limb.

I drifted the lake at night to relax, not to catch fish and listen to Bobby Lee discuss his problems and girlfriends, so I hoped I’d snagged a limb. Sometimes Bobby Lee rambled on about his wife Karla, who, townfolks commonly agree, had run out on him eight years before. She’d had a face like a cover model’s and a tongue like a bullwhip. The girls Bobby Lee eventually began dating were all hair stylists and secretaries from small nearby towns, and painfully youthful to gaze upon. But none of them could hold a candle to the beautiful ferocity of Karla. Perhaps that’s why Bobby Lee never escorted any of them to the altar, though he’d had the marriage legally dissolved after the state limit of seven years. He’d done that reluctantly, and only after having paid a lot of money to a slick looking private detective from Eugene who wore white button-down shirts and alligator boots.

If it had been a hunk of dead wood, I often think to myself, I would have lost nothing more than a two dollar spinner. But a tree limb doesn’t dive for cover to wrap your line around some handy obstruction or rocket to the surface in an attempt to throw the hook. My mood sank lower. Landing the poor creature would be Bobby Lee’s cue to sit up from his reclining position at the bow of my battered old aluminum V-hull, a familiar gleam in his blue eyes, and cast his line until he boated a larger fish.

And there are plenty of them down there, though they hold deep in summer. On those breezeless, starry nights I could almost see them gliding through whatever remained of the sunken town of New Haven like green ghosts. There’s a Methodist church down there, and a one room schoolhouse, a general store and dozens of stone foundations and chimneys half buried in silt and weeds. There are human bones, too, if you believe the local histories. When New Haven was sacrificed to the rising waters, folks say, a handful of stubborn, and armed, hillfolk and moonshiners refused to leave. No volunteers from the Army Corps of Engineers or local law stepped forward to venture into the woods and escort them out, and no one could have predicted the torrential rainstorms and flashfloods that hastened the formation of the lake.

Sure enough, Bobby Lee sat up like a target in a shooting gallery. “You going to reel in that fish or just drag him the rest of the night?”

“I might,” I said, annoyed.

My rod bowed deeper as the fish fought the steel buried in its mouth. I sighed and reeled in a thrashing fifteen inch bass. I lipped it at the waterline and removed the lure from its bony mouth while it stared at me with black, unblinking eyes. Packed with shad, crawfish, and anything unfortunate enough to fall into the water, its belly looked swollen, as if it had swallowed a softball. It reminded me of what Vince Snyder found when he cut open that fifty pound catfish he caught above the dam... but that’s another story entirely, and not fit to tell to children or the faint of heart.