The Fishing Man

Look at Miller. Knows the country he was in as well as any man alive, and had faith in what he believed was true. What good did it do him? And Charley Hoge with his Bible and his whisky. Did that make your winter any easier, or save your hides? And Schneider. What about Schneider? Was that his name?

-- Butcher’s Crossing, John Williams

If the good Lord’s willing and the creek don’t rise…

-- common folk expression with disputed origin (creek or Creek?)

Except for the general direction he took, he did not know where he was going; but he knew that it would come to him later in the day. He rode forward without hurry, and felt behind him the sun slowly rise and harden the air.

-- Butcher’s Crossing. John Williams.

He would go to see Lazarus first if he had a carp to unload. Andrews always tried to sell him one big carp and two catfish for a total of 50 cents.

The fishmonger’s real name was unknown to Andrews. As the story goes, Lazarus got separated from his company of men in a snow storm during a big game hunt in Nebraska. After a search party couldn’t find him in the coming days, he was presumed dead. Weeks later, he wandered into Omaha on foot; he had a white splotch on his nose from frostbite. He wouldn’t discuss what had happened.

Lazarus, a large man, was now a well-known and seasoned fishmonger in Kansas City, but it was hard telling when he would have a good collection of coins in his pouch, let alone good bills in his belt.

“Yes, well, see here…I am besieged by begrimed customers who insist on sniffing around for carp on the cheap,” Lazarus once told him, shaking his head. “They sell right off, the whole fish. What them guttersnipers see in those fish only God knows. Mud veins and bones. Take my oath on it, I ain’t never cleaning a carp myself. They have nigger lips, mind you. Hard to fathom how anyone got put on this Earth to rightfully eat a fish with orange nigger lips, not even a nigger.”

See the birds fly as they may.

Andrews came to Kansas City not because it suited him necessarily at first but because it was where people eventually backtracked to the edge of civilization after the buffalo were gone, unless they dared to stay out in Dodge City or went to Denver – or pushed further west or far north, some still in search of gold. Andrews never made it to the Pacific but he was definitely familiar with the western plains and high deserts, which were predictably dry and bone-ridden for months on end, and he had tried to memorize crooked trails that led deep into the mountains and seemed to go on forever. The distant territory was described by breathtaking scenery and bitter gloom: by snowy peaks and saline expanses, shrouded obsidian slopes and cold-blooded badlands, misty driblet spires and frozen lava tubes – the atmosphere and earth waiting to swallow up sanguine travelers who challenged the immensity and angry contours.

Now, when the gritty and self-reliant people of Kansas City looked to the west, they saw prairie as far as they could currently imagine an expanded horizon, forgetting the front range they once strained for but still haunted by droughts and, perchance, by the stench of long-rotted buffalo: some men swore they could still smell it in the wind. After cold winters, the citizens of the bifurcated city (and the immigrant dirt farmers on either side of it) started looking to the skies for signs of rain and indications of funnel clouds that had the potential to wipe out chosen sanctuaries on a whim. Kansas Citians – those who weren’t just passing through – were often cast as doubters, skeptical flatlanders, if only because they didn’t have time to listen to another story about paradise in California.

From Independence to Westport and spilling over the state line, the local region was already alive with peopled nothingness and weather, marked by unpredictable rivers. Extra energy for everyday activities was siphoned from somewhere near the West Bottoms, where deals that were nobody’s business were made in the dark. Here, two states were joined and divided. Festering disputes between Kansas and Missouri over concerns related to slavery – in addition to other provincial and political issues – had become violent and bloody in the recent past in the form of skirmishes, engagements, and massacres that helped to define the war west of the Mississippi.

The early pioneers had come to the newly settled frontier before the Civil War and kept going. Others, like Andrews, followed: they went west and, despite the awesome beauty they encountered, failed to discover something matching the myths in their imaginations. A lot of them discovered more than they bargained for; so they traced the trails and rivers back, not too long ago, back through the remains of Indian country, tugged toward the center as if recalled by spiritual magnetics they couldn’t comprehend and didn’t want to resist. Regardless, most settlers on either side of the border were not eager to pick up and move again. By and large, they were not interested in going too far forth or retreating any further from the dried dirt or muddy loam currently under their feet and the relative safety of the immediate numbers now in their midst, from the gravitational grip of something with growing substance in the middle. Many thousands of hardy and well-armed Americans, more than 100,000, had decided not to budge from this confluence where the Kansas met the Missouri, a solid enough place to make a stand, raise a family, and persevere, maybe prosper, unless or until something big carried them away.

Andrews didn’t have any kinfolk to speak of. He wasn’t provincial or political (or religious), and he wasn’t some huckleberry spoiling for a fight; he just preferred to live on the more densely occupied Missouri side, where the buffalo grass finally gave way to groves of lowland trees, where well-placed hillsides and river bluffs made orientation easier and new downtown buildings were being built above the bottoms on a hill for practical reasons that had to do with flooding and commerce and nothing to do with God – but also where, seeking redemption, lost souls from the underworld walked in the shadows.

He didn’t have a strong desire to go out west again – he had tested it twice – and he was dead set against going back east, even though he might have had an excuse, not even to St. Louis, which was the definitive gathering place for all of the country’s big river populations. He had made a life in Kansas City, slowly and without distinction. He still owed much of his living to a substantial amount of money he inherited more than 20 years ago, but he subsidized that wealth and conserved his resources by living poorly off what nature had to give in the heart of the fast-growing cow town. He did not think about Boston much. His hands were hard, now newly scarred by the semi-poisonous fins and spines of catfish that had a primitive and organic way of cutting like razors, in a way that really stung for a long time and left precise blood-lined scratches that no doctor had ever bothered to study or treat much.

Hooked into their stomachs, Andrews pulled them up and grabbed them in the mouth. The catfish would suck his fist hard, gnawing on him with sandpaper gums, as he hauled them into his old boat, where they flailed and flopped until they died naturally or until Andrews got sick of it and hit them over the head. He sold a lot of the fish to glorified Midwestern fishmongers in the city and to certain Negroes who, owing to circumstances, couldn’t get good red meat, loved pork and catfish, and had never tasted seafood.

As train transportation took hold and the first railway bridges over the Missouri were erected, the Kansas City Stockyards and slaughterhouses boomed – becoming second in size only to those in Chicago. Meanwhile, a powerful machine operated by Missouri politicians and gangsters was forming to take full advantage of situations on the ground, ensuring that Prohibition in the coming century would never amount to much in these streets. For now, there was definitely still a Wild West lifestyle in old Kansas City. Even hard working citizens and church going folk would confide in you with a hint of pride that the town was shady and corrupt, full of outlaws and hooligans. It probably still is. The key has always been to keep your head down – unless you wanted part of the action. Once, Andrews saw a body in front of a saloon as he was coming home from his morning routes. He just kept walking.

He didn’t talk much to strangers, dead or alive, unless he saw them frequently enough that he decided they were gaining traction within his world. Andrews was used to the vocabulary of the plains – the words and expressions were stunted and purposeful, at times colorful and amusing, and some of them had rubbed off on him. He was a loner by nature; but it was nice – sometimes – to talk to people in the city who really knew how to converse, educated or not.

Andrews had three years at Harvard College but he’d forgotten much of what was taught there. He tried Latin and philosophy. He read Adam Smith and Emerson. After that he had once gone six months to Colorado and back without a bath or change of clothes, sleeping on the ground, wrapped in rancid buffalo hides in the winter. He was used to not having a good woman to treat proper.

In the streets, he often passed by places where familiar prostitutes were looking out from the balconies of rusted fire escapes. Like Andrews, they had been up all night. Some of the young women knew his name and would call down to him. Andrews usually acknowledged them by looking up and nodding or smiling.

Witnessing this one morning from his window across the street, Crazy Jack shouted at him like Crazy Jack was wont to do: “Repent, you scoundrel!”

Andrews yelled something in kind that must have been mischievous, but the retort got drowned out by the clomping and jangling noises of a passing milk wagon or beer cart. Through the window, the old fool regarded him again and made an assessment of Andrews’ condition: “You look poor as Job’s turkey!”

Jack was a former cowboy. He had settled into city life as a professional drinker and amateur preacher who got on most everybody’s nerves. Skinner always said he was no count. “All hat, no cattle.”

But apparently Crazy Jack had been a learned man at one time, as was evidenced when he decided to shout in the direction of the girls now: “Get thee to a nunnery!”

“And Jesus wept,” Andrews muttered to himself.

He fished the muddy floodplain in the long shadows of the warehouses and stinking slaughterhouses on hot nights and could hear the foreign sounds of lights blinking and the straining of structures against the wind. He had learned the trade from Skinner, a weathered man he found down by the river. Andrews gave him the nickname because he could carve up a big catfish like a skilled butcher. Skinner fished at night with an old rod-and-reel. In addition to showing him how to clean what was caught he taught Andrews how to rig lines.

Skinner finally asked him directly why he walked so funny. “Horse threw me and I broke my shoulder,” Andrews said. “Horse got spooked by a rattlesnake and bolted.”

“Scared you, too, I reckon,” Skinner said.

“Hurt like hell,” Andrews said. “Hurt so bad I think I scared the doctor.”

His shoulder was technically healed now (as much as it ever would be) and he had regained most of his former strength when it came to lifting with his lower body. He compensated by relying more on his left hand and arm, but it was still difficult to reach up high or to swing anything heavy. To this day, he walked with his right arm tucked near his chest out of habit, subconsciously wary of any person or object that might bump him hard and make him crumble. His stamina was fine, especially recently, but his balance had become permanently precarious after the damage to the dominant side of his skeleton. He couldn’t really tell the difference anymore – but, to others, Andrews appeared to be walking uphill or downhill while pulled in an odd direction, no matter how even his footpath was. People often mistook him for a drunk. He avoided hard handshakes. He tried to be careful while fishing. Before getting into bed, he put his boots away, afraid of waking up and tripping over something. The shoulder wasn’t ever going to be fixed; that was okay. He could have broken his neck.

Andrews rigged his own trotlines and dug worms on late summer afternoons. So far, he had always found his small flat-bottom boat on the back side of a little sand levee where he stowed it – it wasn’t worth much, but he was known to leave dead snakes inside to successfully scare off thieves. He fished a side channel in escaped waters that washed up against the sedimental fringes of town and had a tendency to collect in pools. The heavy flows of the main river diverted catfish, sidetracking them in a steady stream through these more narrow passageways, where they stalled in backwater before swimming on out. The evening shade and decent depth were perfect for a catfish, which would try to eat a small chicken in a dark hole if it got a chance. This was Andrews’ general spot, for lack of trying another, staked out. The rivers were mixed here and various discharges of the Missouri ran past and probably underneath the downtown.

The catfish would eat anything but they were typically bottom feeders. They liked to roll around under big rocks and drown things in their mouths. They didn’t care about the hot weather or mind the city garbage, certainly didn’t mind the stink. Andrews was almost willing to bet he could catch them out of a city sewer if he had to. But they were an affordable meal for many Kansas Citians and had a reputation for tasting good – especially among consumers who didn’t have to go through the revealing processes of catching and cleaning them themselves. Unlike most fish in the river, catfish had rubbery skin and no scales. They made a gargling sound if you tried to cut into them while they were still alive.

When it wasn’t flooded, this lazy fork was only about 15 or 20 yards wide. Andrews made sure the rope was secured on both sides, using the boat to cross at an angle that pleased him. He doubled back to bait the hanging hook lines one by one and then he let the whole thing sink and sit.

Back on the other bank, a gravel bar, he waited for several hours as the night’s hidden colors refracted darkly on ripplets of water, sipping on whiskey and napping. Later, ideally under favorable moonlight, he would run the lines, pulling on the rope, feeling for the weight. The current was practically stagnant in spots, which was one reason why he caught so many catfish. If he re-set the trotline and checked for fish more than once, he could catch more than half a dozen channel cats in the neighborhood of five pounds or larger (much larger on occasion) on a good night. Every so often he hooked a flathead that thrashed heavily in the water, tore up his equipment, and was so hulking and grotesque as far as he was concerned that Andrews didn’t even know what to do with it other than to try to cut it loose – even though it would have been worth real money. These days, he was keeping some of the carp that accidentally ended up on his nocturnal catfish lines, but he put gar out of their freakish misery. Skinner offered to help him kill snappers, but Andrews was content to try to avoid them at all costs. It seemed like every creature in the river was so rough and prehistoric that God had chosen long ago to let them be in order to move on with other business.

Andrews had a leaking box made of wood in his boat and a long stringer on shore. Before dawn, he usually packaged the fish in newspaper whole. He lugged them in dragging feedsacks up the sandy gravel bar to an old cart with wheels nearby. He had managed to keep possession of this cart for months and he used it to transport his take along with his carefully gathered lines.

The dingy fish market was lined with rows of barking mongers and merchants who were preparing for the day’s usual activities. After checking on the going prices and perhaps selling a fish here and there, Andrews went from the bottomland and into the elevated part of downtown at daybreak, dodging buggies, peddling fresh catfish, and listening to the wit on the street, taking stock of the smells. The cobblestones were known to have shit in the cracks – predominantly horseshit – but everything eventually ran downhill and emptied into the river, where it was washed away to become, in theory, somebody else’s problem. This worked out best when it rained more than once in awhile.

Andrews rarely sold his entire inventory on hand to one trader or customer or sought them out twice in the same week. He normally got 20 cents apiece for the channel cats, sometimes as much as 50 cents if they had enough weight and the demand was high – but he regularly undersold the market, too, because he believed in his Unitarian upbringing.

LeRoy’s on 12th Street was his favorite out-of-the-way stop and Andrews made an exception for the owner by trying to keep his walk-up well supplied with catfish. One day a week, more often than not, it was Andrews’ only stop. LeRoy had relocated here from the East Bottoms after he lost his wife to pneumonia. She got weak from fever and congestion and then her system failed. LeRoy didn’t like to talk about it.

LeRoy knew how to clean a channel cat and cook a fried catfish dinner with a side of cornbread that made people stand on line. He had specials on Tuesdays and Fridays, until he ran out of fish, and customers could eat on the street. He refused to take carp even if people asked for it. But Andrews always gave him a discount on the catfish, and LeRoy wasn’t one to turn them down, no matter how early it was. In the spring, Andrews gave him the females that were carrying yellowish egg sacks, but LeRoy kept the eggs for himself. “The regulars prefer my cornbread anyway,” he said. “Ask anyone and they’ll tell you it’s the best in town.”

“It’s not from the benevolence of the butcher or the baker that we expect dinner,” Andrews told him. “It’s from their regard to self-interest.”

“That sounds like hogwash.”

Andrews laughed.

Even when he didn’t have fried catfish, LeRoy usually had a steamy kettle full of what he called his succutosh-goolosh. It contained black-eyed peas, lima beans, corn, and okra when in season. Onions, carrots, potatoes, tomatoes. He added shredded odds and ends of pork and cooked the ingredients slowly in a thick soup-sauce that possessed mysterious properties. If you had your own bowl, LeRoy would fill it for five cents.

He served blacks and some whites. He wasn’t too dark-skinned, which worked in his favor. Despite several small fires and a few hassles from the authorities, LeRoy had made a tight success of the little place. If he had to pay off a neighborhood man who came to collect on more than a meal once or twice a year, he did so reluctantly. He knew who got fat for free but LeRoy was also quick to recognize when friends or neighbors were down on their luck more than normal. For these reasons and others, Andrews liked him.

After his deliveries, Andrews would go to the market on Fourth and Walnut and pick up what he needed: beans, fruit, bread. He liked to walk, even though he wobbled. When he got to his building, he tried to hide the cart in the alley and then he would carry his supplies upstairs.

He lived in a squalid and worn down part of the city and he was aware of the fact that he smelled like fish a lot. He understood the simile: that he was like a catfish. The larger metaphor was, of course, flawed. Still, it was true that Andrews was uncomfortable with many human comforts. He slept on his left elbow. He didn’t own a pillow. He had been tossing and turning lately, having a hard time shutting down random thoughts that kept him awake, but the best day-sleeping always came with the sounds of loud thunder and heavy rain.

Andrews awoke on the hardwood. He couldn’t remember falling. His forehead was soaked with bubbles of clammy sweat. He sat up and was compelled to touch his face, his chin, with the tips of his trembling fingers. He felt the warm blood.

Incidents like this had happened before, when he was younger. Well, not like this. Usually there was a warning. This was the first time he had ever damaged himself without being able to recollect anything that happened. For as long as he could remember, when it started to happen, Andrews had been able to sense something wrong. He used to go off alone, if possible, to find a private place to lie down like a dog until he came around and felt better. The premonitions used to come and go like lightning and were gone for extended periods. In the past, he had seldom dwelt on the phenomenon much in between isolated spells. Now he was questioning himself. He couldn’t help but wonder if this new episode had something to do with getting shrugged from the horse.

He made it to the mirror and looked with trepidation, turning his eyes away as soon as he saw it: a horizontal gash down to the white mandible bone, surrounded by red. This was just what he needed. He needed to think. At least it wasn’t his shoulder this time. Andrews got out an old shirt and tore off swaths of the fabric material. He held a piece of cloth up to his chin and sat down on his bed, trying to convince himself he wasn’t falling apart or cracking up, thinking about what to do.

Skinner would know what to do.

Skinner’s solution turned out to be fish glue (of course). Without asking any questions about how Andrews had split his chin wide open, the old man cut up several catfish and showed him how to make glue from the membranes of their air bladders, using backwater chemistry skills and clinical know-how. After Skinner sterilized the wounded area with whiskey he applied the adhesive extract to the laceration itself and then told Andrews to put a new patch of moistened shirt cloth gently up agin the bottom of his jaw, where it stuck.

“Wash the wound and put more of the fish treacle on it of an evening or morning,” Skinner said. “Change out the dressing daily. You already ruined at least one shirt; just keep tearing those up, I s’pose. Or find something soft and clean that won’t anger the skin.”

Andrews stayed out of commission for a week or so while he was on the mend – the dressings on his chin looked ridiculous and it was hard to talk. But he did manage to catch three big catfish to take to LeRoy, who laughed at him. Andrews was able to laugh, too, although it hurt. He had decided to discount the disconcerting fall onto the floor as an anomaly.