Лоуренс Блок - Catch and Release

And went back to his forgettable face. Unremarkable, unthreatening. Safe.

“A fisherman,” she said. “My dad likes to go fishing. Once, twice a year he’ll go away for the weekend with a couple of his buddies and come back with an ice chest full of fish. And my mom gets stuck with cleaning them, and for a week the house totally smells of fish.”

“Well, that’s a problem I’m spared,” he told her. “I’m what they call a catch-and-release fisherman.”

“You don’t come home with a full ice chest?”

“I don’t even have an ice chest. Oh, I used to. But what I found over time was that it was the sport I enjoyed, and it was a lot simpler and easier if the game ended with the fish removed from the hook and slipped gently back into the water.”

She was silent for a moment. Then she asked if he thought they enjoyed it.

“The fish? Now that’s an interesting question. It’s hard to know what a fish does or doesn’t enjoy, or even if the word enjoy can be applied to a fish. You could make the case that a fish fighting for its life gets to be intensely alive in a way it otherwise doesn’t, but is that good or bad from the fish’s point of view?” He smiled. “When they swim away,” he said, “I get the sense that they’re glad to be alive. But I may just be trying to put myself in their position. I can’t really know what it’s like for them.”

“I guess not.”

“One thing I can’t help but wonder,” he said, “is if they learn anything from the experience. Are they warier the next time around? Or will they take the hook just as readily for the next fisherman who comes along?”

She thought about it. “I guess they’re just fish,” she said.

“Well now,” he said. “I guess they are.”

She was a pretty thing. A business major, she told him, taking most of her elective courses in English, because she’d always like to read. Her hair was brown with auburn highlights, and she had a good figure, with large breasts and wide hips. Built for childbearing, he thought, and she’d bear three or four of them, and she’d gain weight with each pregnancy and never quite manage to lose all of it. And her face, already a little chubby, would broaden and turn bovine, and the sparkle would fade out of her eyes.

There was a time when he’d have been inclined to spare her all that.

“Really,” she said, “you could have just dropped me at the exit. I mean, this is taking you way out of your way.”

“Less so than you’d think. Is that your street coming up?”

“Uh-huh. If you want to drop me at the corner—”

But he drove her to the door of her suburban house. He waited while she retrieved her backpack, then let her get halfway up the path to her door before he called her back.

“You know,” he said, “I was going to ask you something earlier, but I didn’t want to upset you.”

“Oh?”

“Aren’t you nervous hitching rides with strangers? Don’t you think it’s dangerous?”

“Oh,” she said. “Well, you know, everybody does it.”

“I see.”

“And I’ve always been okay so far.”

“A young woman alone—”

“Well, I usually team up with somebody. A boy, or at least another girl. But this time, well...”

“You figured you’d take a chance.”

She flashed a smile. “It worked out okay, didn’t it?”

He was silent for a moment, but held her with his eyes. Then he said, “Remember the fish we were talking about?”

“The fish?”

“How it feels when it slips back into the water. And whether it learns anything from the experience.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Not everyone is a catch-and-release fisherman,” he said. “That’s probably something you ought to keep in mind.”

She was still standing there, looking puzzled, while he put the SUV in gear and pulled away.

He drove home, feeling fulfilled. He had never moved from the house he was born in, and it had been his alone ever since his mother’s death ten years ago.

He checked the mail, which yielded half a dozen envelopes with checks in them. He had a mail-order business, selling fishing lures, and he spent the better part of an hour preparing the checks for deposit and packing the orders for shipment. He’d make more money if he put his business online and let people pay with credit cards, but he didn’t need much money, and he found it easier to let things remain as they were. He ran the same ads every month in the same magazines, and his old customers reordered, and enough new customers turned up to keep him going.

He cooked some pasta, heated some meat sauce, chopped some lettuce for a salad, drizzled a little olive oil over it. He ate at the kitchen table, washed the dishes, watched the TV news. When it ended he left the picture on but muted the sound, and thought about the girl.

Now, though, he gave himself over to the fantasy she inspired. A lonely road. A piece of tape across her mouth. A struggle ending with her arms broken.

Stripping her. Piercing each of her openings in turn. Giving her physical pain to keep her terror company.

And finishing her with a knife. No, with his hands, strangling her. No, better yet, with his forearm across her throat, and his weight pressing down, throttling her.

Ah, the joy of it, the thrill of it, the sweet release of it. And now it was almost as real to him as if it had happened.

But it hadn’t happened. He’d left her at her door, untouched, with only a hint of what might have been. And, because it hadn’t happened, there was no ice chest full of fish to clean — no body to dispose of, no evidence to get rid of, not even that feeling of regret that had undercut his pleasure on so many otherwise perfect occasions.

Catch and release. That was the ticket, catch and release.

The roadhouse had a name, Toddle Inn, but nobody ever called it anything but Roy’s, after the man who’d owned it for close to fifty years until his liver quit on him.

That was something he would probably never have to worry about, as he’d never been much of a drinker. Tonight, three days after he’d dropped the young hitchhiker at her door, he’d had the impulse to go bar-hopping, and Roy’s was his fourth stop. He’d ordered a beer at the first place and drank two sips of it, left the second bar without ordering anything, and drank most of the Coke he ordered at bar number three.

Roy’s had beer on draft, and he stood at the bar and ordered a glass of it. There was an English song he’d heard once, of which he recalled only one verse:

The beer was watery, to be sure, but it didn’t matter because he didn’t care about beer, good or bad. But the bar held something to interest him, the very thing he’d come out for.

She was two stools away from him, and she was drinking something in a stemmed glass, with an orange slice in it. At first glance she looked like the hitchhiker, or like her older sister, the one who’d gone wrong. Her blouse was a size too small, and she’d tried to cope by unbuttoning an extra button. The lipstick was smeared on her full-lipped mouth, and her nail polish was chipped.

She picked up her drink and was surprised to find that she’d finished it. She shook her head, as if wondering how to contend with this unanticipated development, and while she was working it out he lifted a hand to catch the barman’s eye, then pointed at the girl’s empty glass.

She waited until the fresh drink was in front of her, then picked it up and turned toward her benefactor. “Thank you,” she said, “You’re a gentleman.”