Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 39, No. 6, June, 1994
- Автор: Bashover Albert, Crawford Dan
- Год: 1994
- Язык: английский
- Год: Dell Magazines
- ISBN: ISSN: 0002-5224
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 39, No. 6, June, 1994». Краткое содержание книги:
Unlike the long-departed Mr. Tinney, filleting all the fish I catch was too much work for me, so I threw most of them back out of sheer laziness and not a sense of conservation. The bass disappeared into the depths with a quick glimmering ripple.
Bobby Lee selected a rod and reel twice as expensive as any I owned and from his shirt pocket produced an oddly shaped lure. It was shaped like a man caught in some pagan transformation to fish. I saw markings — or were they glyphs? — carved along its silver length. It looked like something obtained from an ancient Indian burial mound, not a bait-shop cardboard blister pack. Bobby Lee bit off his lucky scarred wooden plug and began tying it on.
“When did you start stealing your punk-rock girlfriends’ earrings?” I asked, pretending not to be curious.
Bobby Lee frowned. It was the anniversary of Karla’s disappearance, which explained why he’d insisted we go night fishing. He’d been drinking beer and reminiscing in the goblin-green glow of the lantern for what seemed like hours before falling silent.
“I almost forgot about this,” Bobby Lee said as he tied on the lure with practiced fingers. Beered up or not, he could tie loop knots, palomar knots, clinch knots without looking, as if his fingertips had eyes.
He wanted me to ask him about it, so despite my irritation, I bit.
“What happened to your last secret weapon?” I said, remembering the plastic box of manta-shaped lead jigs with rubber skirts like Tina Turner’s hair he’d bought through a cable TV offer.
“Oh, I swapped them for this,” he said, smiling.
“You traded a thirty dollar set of lures for an ugly earring?” That surprised me. Bobby Lee might have failed at romance, but he was shrewd when it came to money. Everyone agreed on that. He owned four convenience stores with gas pumps, a car wash, and a modest chain of laundromats. He’d owned a successful video arcade back in the eighties, but sold it right before Nintendo started selling millions of small gray boxes. It often irked me that Bobby Lee didn’t buy one of those swept-back fiberglass boats with a name like a jet fighter’s so we could drift in style instead of piling into my poor man’s boat.
“I’ve been hunting antique lures at the flea market in Porter,” he said. “Some of those old topwaters will bring five hundred dollars from collectors if they’re still in the original cardboard box. I even bought a book so I’d know which were worth dickering over.”
In the course of poking through old boxes and junk-cluttered glass displays he’d struck up a conversation with an old Indian peddler; said the guy looked like a mummy wearing a felt hat. The peddler told Bobby Lee the lure had belonged to a Creek medicine man. Fashioned of pure silver, hammered by hand, and endowed with special properties that might interest an angler.
Bobby Lee winked at me. “ ‘Fish it on the right night, and it will call them up.’ Those were his exact words, Pancho.”
A magic lure. I sighed. Fishermen are skilled liars, so you’d think we’d know when someone else is feeding us a line.
I stared at the gleaming lure turning slowly, almost hypnotically, on the end of Bobby Lee’s line. He grinned a slightly drunk grin, like a frat-house boy about to run some gal’s bra up a flagpole. That was when I realized the lure didn’t even have a hook; the original must have rusted away or broken off long ago. Bobby Lee remedied that, fitting on a large, sharp treble. Somehow it didn’t look like it belonged there.
Before I could comment on this, Bobby Lee cast his line over the dark water with a smooth, practiced flick of his wrist, sending the lure sailing through the air with a faint whirring noise, like a mechanical insect.
He hadn’t reeled it halfway back to the boat when something gave his line a terrific tug. Bobby Lee whooped and swept the rod high to set the hook, then started cranking line in as fast as he could, the drag on his reel protesting as line was pulled out. I swore in disgust at his luck. Bobby Lee shouted at me to grab the net and kept cranking.
The Strawberry Moon slipped free of the clouds at the same moment, and the water around us began boiling.
At least that’s what it seemed at first until I saw the fish. Thousands, perhaps millions, began breaking the surface in wild, gyrating flips and jumps. Perch, walleyes, bass, shad! Dumbstruck, I saw two inch minnows leaping alongside monstrous bottom-dwelling catfish. It sounded as if the sky were raining fish. Quite a few landed in the boat by accident. Moonlight glinted on a frothing sea of fins, scales, and eyes.
Just as suddenly, the fish abruptly stopped their frantic churning of the lake’s surface. A sudden, eerie calm descended.
Bobby Lee resumed cranking, his rod bent nearly to the breaking point. The Indian’s second-hand words floated in my head, and for a moment I believed, too. I stared at the point where his taut line disappeared into the lake’s shimmering black surface, mesmerized.
Then something broke the surface not a dozen yards away. Not another fish performing an acrobatic leap, but a man’s pale arm.
I’d never seen Bobby Lee look surprised or uncertain — much less terrified — even during our nightmarish year together in Vietnam.
He always knew what he wanted and how to go about getting it, and none of life’s unforeseen traps or deadly inertia ever stopped him. We grew up together, attended school together, played ball, dated the same girls, and dreamed the same dreams. Bobby Lee turned out to be the town’s success, and I didn’t. That this never bothered me — that it seemed perfectly natural — probably explains why I failed at nearly everything I tried. Karla often commented that I led a boring, uneventful existence, and she deeply resented the nights Bobby Lee and I spent drifting together on the lake. I think she felt excluded and could never be convinced we weren’t ripping down the county roads, guzzling beer and chasing women. Why would two grown men want to sit in a smelly, junk-filled boat all night swatting mosquitoes? I know they had some knockdown, drag-out fights over it.
One evening she made a playful pass at me while Bobby Lee lay passed out on a huge beanbag in the shag-carpeted rec room of their big fake Colonial house. She acted tipsy, though I doubted alcohol had the ability to dull her much. I pretended to miss it, proving again what a boring failure I’d become. I never mentioned it to Bobby Lee, though Karla probably did because that was her nature. After Karla pulled her vanishing act, I thought about that evening from time to time. I remembered her half-fierce expression and wondered what a night with her would have been like, but my imagination refused to fill in the blanks.
Now, hauling in part or all of a dead man, Bobby Lee looked plenty surprised.
As we watched, the arm grew a shoulder. When a head popped up, eyes open and mouth full of water, Bobby Lee groaned.
“Well, Bobby Lee, I threw mine back without measuring it, but I don’t think it’s going to be even close,” I said softly.
I tried to remember if I’d heard any reports of missing fishermen. Bobby Lee stopped cranking in line. His face looked as pale and green as the corpse, which didn’t appear to be clothed. I figured the body had been down long enough to bloat and rise toward the surface. Then Bobby Lee’s lucky lure had come along and snagged flesh. At that moment I wished mightily I’d stayed in my trailer, fading in and out of sleep watching HBO.
“Well, you going to drag him all night?”
Bobby Lee swore and started reeling, and his twenty pound line held. Then, not ten feet from the boat, the corpse’s other hand came out of the water and grabbed the line just above the Indian lure.
Bobby Lee yelped, and I dropped my rod in astonishment. I stood there like a fool as it sank without a ripple. I once saw an advertisement in a sporting goods catalogue for foam tubes that attach to your rod like a life preserver. I remember laughing and shaking my head when I should have been writing out a check.