THE BRIDGE OVER THE CAHABA RIVER WAS A NIGHT meeting place for Ryder’s friends—all the bigs, the Exalted Cyclops, maybe the Imperial Wizard, Ryder’s closer friends, Dynamite Bob Chambliss, Tommy Blanton, Bobby Cherry. When they sat together on the riverbank, sometimes their cupped cigarettes flared in the dark like little handheld campfires. When a flashlight cast a slat of light, the large shadows of the men loomed behind them. But this sunny afternoon, the riverbank was deserted where Highway 280 crossed the Cahaba.
Ryder had a ten-cent-store bamboo pole over his shoulder and a Maxwell House coffee can full of earthworms. Little Bobby had dug the worms for him from the backyard and begged to come along, but Ryder had said no. Ryder smiled to think of his older son’s desperate whispering: “Tommy’s too little.” Bobby said they could slip off and leave Tommy in the sandbox. But Ryder wanted to be alone. He had wanted some peace and quiet, even from both his sons, carefully named for the men who were his friends.
The Cahaba was muddy and slow moving, but he’d heard you could get small catfish from it. He’d never been fishing as a boy. His father was too worthless to do anything with him. Once Ryder himself learned the tricks of fishing, he would take Bobby with him, and Tommy, too, when he was older. Maybe Lee and Shirley would pack a picnic, and they’d all come. She could bring the red-checked cloth they put on the kitchen table for Sunday dinner.
Since the riverbank looked muddy and a little slippery, Ryder moved back from the water and walked among the saplings edging the river. The rocks along the river edge were coated with slimy red-brown mud. No, there was a pretty flat one in the shade with moss on it. He’d heard you could catch fish on the quiet side of a big rock, that fish liked to rest there.
The whole woods were quiet down where he was. The car motors up on 280 sounded distant, as though they came from a world next door, not this one. Thick with their summer green leaves, the trees completely masked the road. There was a big sycamore close to the water, barkless and white from twenty feet on up toward the sky. He broke off one of the big, low-hanging flat leaves and laid it over the palm of his hand. The leaf was covered with a stiff fuzz. This green hand was bigger than his own hand, and he smiled a little, playing with it. The stem where it had detached from its twig had a clever little cup shape, very tiny.
Standing on the bank, Ryder tossed the leaf into the water and watched it float. It bumped along, getting caught occasionally on black, waterlogged sticks crusted with white scallops of decay. When the points of the sycamore leaf brushed a rock, they twirled the leaf back into the slow current, like fingertips pushing off from the wet stone. A film of water on one rock magnified a brush of gold otherwise indiscernible in the brown rock flank.
Ryder walked on and noticed the telltale three leaves of poison ivy climbing the tree trunks and springing through the sparse grass, but he had on long pants and work boots. No need to worry. As a boy, he’d never once caught poison ivy. The one time he went camping with the Scouts, they’d nearly all got poison ivy, but he was immune. The leader said Ryder must have a natural immunity, and everybody had looked at him respectfully. He had almost been embarrassed and had looked down at the wolf-head slide of his neckerchief. Reckon we’ll see any wolf? he had asked shyly, and the leader explained in a kind way that the wolves were all out west. Who knew? Maybe the troop would raise money and go west someday, to Yellowstone. All of us? Ryder had asked.
Despite the shade of the tall trees, Ryder was hot, and he took off his black cowboy hat and used it to fan his face. As he walked, he was careful to carry his humped, metal lunch box on the level. The can of worms was at one end, with wax paper over it held tight with rubber bands, and his ham-and-cheese sandwich was in the other end. He had some peanut-butter cookies, too—with the crisscross on top—that Lee had baked for the kids. For just a moment, Ryder missed Bobby, his older son. Maybe Ryder would get Bobby a little black hat like his own. He could see Bobby beside him, his face tilted up catching the sun. But suppose they didn’t catch any fish, this being the first time? Ryder hadn’t wanted to face how disappointed Bobby would be. Bobby believed Ryder could do anything. Bobby loved his mom, too. Devoted. He was a devoted child to his parents. Wild blackberries glistened black and inviting off in a sun-drenched clearing.
Here in the woods, by the brown river, Ryder could think about all that, about what was good in his life. Sometimes he used his fishing pole to push aside the poison ivy or to hold back a briar. Out in the water, he saw a green glass Coke bottle floating along. In the hump of his lunch box, held up by the wire clasp, he had a thermos of milk. He could almost taste it, good and cold, washing down the bread and mayonnaise. He liked hearing the sound of his own feet moving quietly through the underbrush—just him and the woods.
A large brown rock, big as an elephant’s back, lolled in the water, and Ryder decided he’d try standing there to fish. He took a giant step onto the rock and walked easily a few steps up its slope. Trash—milk cartons, brown sacks, even a muddy pair of navy pants—lodged against the far bank. From this height Ryder could see maybe an inch or two down into the brown water, and he saw a swarm of minnows, like big gnats, not too far out. The top layer of the water was a little more clear. He lifted the flap of his shirt pocket and took out the little brown envelope with three hooks of varying sizes in it.
Very carefully, he began to separate the hooks. It wouldn’t be fun to have to work the barbed tip of a hook out of a finger. Wait! He should have brought wire cutters—just clip off the head of the hook if he should need to, instead of drawing it back through the flesh. He pictured the wire cutters among the other tools, dark with grease, in the toolbox at the service station.
Yesterday evening, a woman had driven up and bought thirty-five cents worth of gas. She had said, Do you know why I buy gas at Texaco? It’s because you support the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts on Saturdays. Her friend beside her on the front seat, a girl with a short haystack haircut, had gulped with laughter. Crazy girls. The driver was so flat-chested she looked too young to drive. They hadn’t meant any harm. He’d pumped the thirty-five cents, cleaned the windshield, and said, “Will that be all, ma’am?”
Carefully, Ryder replaced two of the hooks into the envelope and slid it back into his flapped pocket. From the other bank, a blue jay started to scold. His father had always hated blue jays, but Ryder never could figure out why. Maybe it was because they screamed “Thief! Thief!” Ryder’s father could have left his last paycheck money on the table under the yellow sugar bowl—that was what Troy’s father did when he deserted his family—but he hadn’t. Not even spare change, not even any note. The jay jumped off a limb of a high oak and sailed above the water, his wings spread in two beautiful blue and white fans. A dragonfly, like a little helicopter, hovered over the water.
Ryder realized he was just standing on the brown elephant rock, remembering this and that, enjoying himself. But it was hot on the rock, and he put his hat back on. He needed to bait his hook. He set the metal box down, squatted beside it, and flipped up the shiny catches. He lay the cane pole on the rock and steadied it to make sure it didn’t clatter off into the water.
Nothing had spilled inside the box. He removed the wax paper and took a worm out of the sandy dirt in the can. Bobby had added a little sand to the mixture, as though he were making a special dirt recipe to keep his father’s worms happy. Ryder placed a worm on the rock and knelt to pierce one of the red segments with the barbed fishhook. Some men held the worm in their fingers, but he was wary of the hook, sharp as a needle glinting in the bright light. He noticed an old shirt swept against the near bank, and a wad of wet newspaper had caught there, too. Grains of dirt and sand clung to the body of the pierced earthworm as it roiled on the rock.
From his pants pocket Ryder took a nylon string and clumsily tied it to the upper loop in the hook. Then he tied the string to the pole. It had a groove to help hold the string. Standing on the lip of the rock, he dropped the string straight down toward the quiet place. The hook was hardly heavy enough to make it drop. Nonetheless, there was a still little pocket of water there, and the hook disappeared into it. Ryder jiggled the pole from time to time so a fish would think the worm was alive and wriggling. When he lifted the tip of the pole, he noticed the mud in the water was staining the white nylon line.
After a long time, Ryder’s feet began to hurt, and he decided to sit down on the edge of the rock. There were all kinds of birds in the woods. One was a kingfisher, the same ugly color as the river, with a coarse beak and a crest like a crazy sort of crown. When Ryder had been in the eighth grade, full of piss and vinegar because his class and everybody in it was top dog and about to graduate, the teacher had brought in a freckle-faced little kid from first grade who knew all the birds and gave a talk on them. He had drawn a picture of a kingfisher with chalk on the blackboard, down low near the eraser trough because he was too short for an eighth-grade blackboard. When the teacher said, “Darl, tell everybody how you learned about birds,” and the kid had answered “Cub Scouts,” Ryder had felt his heart drop like a stone. When the kid left, the teacher didn’t erase the row of birds outlined along the bottom of the blackboard. But who had taught him to draw like that?
It was too hot on the rock in the sun. Ryder was running sweat. This wasn’t a good place. Ryder wound the line around the pole, collected his stuff, and walked on. He walked deeper into the woods, where it was cooler, and sat down with his back against a big oak. He decided to eat his sandwich and drink some of his milk. It was cold, but not quite as cold as he wished. Milk needed to be very cold to taste good. He watched ants and black beetles and centipedes walk over and under the fallen leaves.
Suppose I just never left this spot, he thought. Suppose somebody found me years later, a skeleton, eaten by his own worms, him bony white, with his black hat still on his skull.
“That’s not going to happen,” he said out loud.
He went back to the river. He tried a number of spots; he tried a new worm, and then two worms at a time on a larger hook. He saw a mangy black and white dog slinking along. It just glanced at him once and kept going. As Ryder moved along the river, he saw more and more trash clogging the banks. People had tumbled down old iceboxes and cardboard boxes full of junk. His mother had been proud to have her icebox when he was little, and the iceman had been nice to him. He remembered his great, sharp, iron tongs. Finally Ryder found a rusted-out car with no wheels at the end of a dirt road. All the glass was shattered, and the metal was dented where boys had shot the car. Honeysuckle grew over the hood and around the doors, but he decided to yank open a door. After carefully inspecting the car seat for glass, he sat. He just sat and listened, looked at the late sunlight glinting like stars in the tiny spaces between leaves. He admired a hickory with its big leaves like beaver tails. He’d never seen a beaver, but he knew they still had them out west. At sunset, sitting in the car, he ate his peanut-butter cookies and drank the rest of his milk, even though it was quite warm now.
Suddenly he took his pole and broke it twice over his knee. He placed the fishhook envelope on the grimy dashboard of the car. The car had been green, and it already blended with the woods. He stood up beside the car and dashed the sandy dirt inside the Maxwell House can and the remaining worms out on the ground. With his heel he crushed first one side of the coffee can and then the other till it was almost flat. Then he sailed the misshapen metal into the Cahaba.
As he followed the river backward—he’d come a far piece—night settled into the woods. It was easy to imagine his friends there on the bank, up ahead, close to 280 and the bridge—Tommy and Bob, all the others, talking and laughing. Maybe passing the consoling moonshine that entered your throat and gut like a stab of fire. “Where you been?” they’d say when they saw him coming down the path out of the dark. “Been fishing,” he’d say.
It had been a good day, anyway.