By Tom Walsh

I thought about it all week, even practiced casting into a kiddie pool behind the garage. I watered the lawn at dusk and filled a milk carton with the night crawlers that emerged from their tunnels. Dad had never before asked just me to go fishin’; he’d taken each of the boys, Jay and Judd and Jack, on their own, but not his only daughter.

To be fair, I’m the youngest. 

Sunday morning, his one day off, finally came and we took the long ride to the Missouri; interstate to highway to rutted dirt road, then across a field with faded tire tracks through the tall, browning grass.

We unfolded two camp chairs next to the water, under a tremendous willow, the biggest I’d ever seen, on a patch of bare ground worn smooth by generations of fishermen. The whining buzz of heat bugs screamed August, the humid air rich with petrichor from a farmer’s newly turned field.

I unsnapped the poles from their rack in the pickup, grabbed the tackle box and the worms, and brought it all to the river’s edge in the willow’s shade. 

We’d taken a late start, which worried me because I always thought you were supposed to fish early. I didn’t know why, figured the fish must be hungry after a long night doing whatever fish do through the long nights. 

Dad wore a faded blue denim bucket hat that he’d stuck a dozen lures and flies into. I always worried he’d stab himself, but he said that kind of carelessness only happens once, and his happened long ago.

He lugged the Coleman cooler, set it between the chairs, and plunked into one. Strategizing, I assumed, pinpointing our approach. I asked if we’d start with worms or minnows, spinners or jigs, dry flies or nymphs. I laid out the case for each option, eager to impress. 

“First let’s sit here and watch the water a bit, see what they’re hungry for.” 

As he spoke, I heard a splash and saw a silver streak out the corner of my eye, about 10 yards offshore in a little eddy swirling around a fallen tree trunk just upstream. Excited, I asked if I should bait a line and use a bobber to catch that sucker or if he wanted to float a fly to it. 

I was anxious to show him I could catch something. But Dad just smiled and said to hold my horses and sit a spell. He popped open the cooler.

“Hungry?”

I was. I hadn’t eaten breakfast, and it was already lunchtime. From the faded green metal cooler, he pulled two cold BLTs wrapped in tin foil, a tinge soggy from the mayo and tomato.

“You eat these cold?” I asked. He nodded and took a big bite, said oops when a dollop of mayo dropped onto his shirt. He scooped it up expertly with his pocket knife, scraped it back onto the ragged edge of his sandwich, took another bite.

I wolfed mine down along with a bag of crinkle cut potato chips. Barbecue, my favorite.

He told me this was his father’s favorite fishing spot. I never knew my grandpa. Dad looked comfortable, showed no inclination to grab a pole. I was fidgety, but when I stood up, he told me to settle down, the fish weren’t going anywhere.

“It’s a hot one today. Beer?”

Now, being 16 in our little town, I was pretty sure he knew I’d drank beer before, but I felt like this was a trick, a test.

“Sure,” I said, as cooly as I could muster, thinking surely my brothers would have said yes to the offer. The ice cubes rattled as he dug his meaty mechanic’s hand into the bottom of the cooler and pulled up two wet, ice cold bottles of Shiner Bock. He handed me one, then twisted the top off of his. He wedged the quarter-sized piece of metal between his thumb and middle finger and snapped. The cap whizzed over my head, plunked in the water.

“How’d you do that!?”

He laughed and showed me. My bottle cap kept dropping harmlessly to the ground until, about the tenth time. It shot sideways from my hand, nicked his whiskered cheek and made a small cut, like the ones he’d put a dab of toilet paper over after shaving.

“There you go!” he guffawed, genuinely excited.

*

He asked me about school, about my job at Bert’s Groceries, about the Jeffries boy he’d seen me hanging around town with. I blushed, afraid he was going to give me “the talk” and tell me to be careful because boys only want one thing. But he just said they were a nice family and he’d known Bill Jeffries since grade school.

I forgot about fishin’ and asked how he met mom; I’d heard the story before, but only from her. I asked about his time in Vietnam, which he rarely talked about. I asked if he ever regretted not going to college, or getting married so young. Sitting under the willow beside the Big Muddy, drinking a beer, he answered everything.

He paused for a bit when I asked about grandpa, about if they ever went fishin’ together like this. 

“We fished, but not like this. He was quiet and we just fished.”

We talked all day and for the life of me I don’t remember if we ever did dip our lines in the river. It was late when we got home and I knew he had work early in the morning so I told him I’d put everything away.

My brothers came over to help, which surprised me to no end.

“Catch anything?” they asked.

“Not a thing,” I said.

                                                                       *   *   *

Tom Walsh writes these days from Cambridge, MA. His stories can be found in Emerge, Hobart Pulp, Lost Balloon, JMWW, Bending Genres, HAD, Flash Frog, West Word, and elsewhere. Say hi @tom1walsh.bsky.social.