Peter Markus - Bob, or Man on Boat

What he was, Bob’s father’s father, he was a preaching man.

This is my great-grandfather — this man that I am right now talking about to you.

A preacher.

That’s what this man was.

This was the man who one day took Bob down to the river and told him the story about Jesus and the fish.

You know the one that says, If you give a man a fish, that man will eat for a day.

But if you teach a man to fish.

I picture this preaching man pointing his finger out towards the river.

That man will never go hungry again.

Bob’s grandfather, the preacherman, took Bob down to the river and he told Bob about this.

Some years later I learned that these words, they aren’t from the Bible as I had for a long time believed them to be.

It isn’t Jesus who is the one doing the talking.

These words, they’re from the Chinese, I think.

Or so I’ve been told.

Maybe it was a Chinese fisherman, or so I’d like to think.

It was these words, whoever it was who said them, that taught Bob how to fish.

To be and to be a fish.

I once saw Bob, at dawn, standing up in his boat, facing where the sun was rising, and what Bob was doing, it looked like to me, it sounded like to me, was he was screaming, though what he was saying, what he was hollering, this I could not hear.

When I told this to a friend in town who is no stranger to Bob, what he said was that Bob was yelling at the sun, that he was telling it to stay where it was, for it to go away, because Bob didn’t want the night, and the night’s fishing, to come to an end.

The moon, that early morning, that late night, it was full and glowing in the sky.

It must’ve been a night of pretty good fishing, was what my friend pointed out, if Bob didn’t want it to end.

The sun, to Bob, it didn’t listen.

The sun is not a fish.

The fish, unlike the sun, listen to Bob.

When the fish hear Bob singing to them, singing to them through the darkness of the river, the fish can’t help but take a bite: of Bob’s song, of the bait that Bob is fishing with.

Sometimes, Bob takes his fishing hook and Bob digs out the eye of a fish to use this fish’s eye for bait.

Most of the time, though, Bob baits his hooks with mud.

Bob is a mud man.

Some men who fish for fish fish with minnows or worms.

We call these fishing men worm men and minnow men.

We call this kind of bait live bait.

But live bait never lives long.

Live bait usually dies before it’s eaten.

Which is why Bob fishes with mud.

Let me tell you a little bit about a man named Joe.

Joe, like Bob, is a man who lives off the river too.

Joe is a bait man.

Joe sells live bait.

Minnows and worms, leeches and crawdads.

The only kind of bait that Joe does not sell is mud.

If you ask Joe why doesn’t he sell mud, Joe will ask you, Who do you know who fishes with mud?

I don’t tell Joe about Bob and Bob’s mud.

Mud is Bob’s secret.

Until now.

This is something else that Bob does to catch more fish than the next fishing man who is fishing the same river as Bob.

Bob likes to spit in the river.

Bob likes to piss in the river.

For luck.

Some nights, the moon is a dead man dragging his hand across the skin that is the river’s.

One night, Bob snagged into something on the bottom of the river.

Bob spent fifteen minutes trying to work this snag loose.

This snag, it would not come loose.

After fifteen minutes, Bob was ready to cut his line when the snag finally came loose.

What Bob had snagged, what Bob had dragged his hooks into, there at the bottom of the river, was a man.

This man was dead.

Like Bob, this man was what we like to call, here in our river town, a river man.

This river man, most of us in town, we’d heard the story, how he fell out of his boat, into the river, some time the summer before.

It was now spring.

It was the wake from one of the big shipping ships that did it, that tipped it over, this dead man’s boat.

Some say that the dead man fell out of his boat, into the river, while he was doing what he had heard Bob liked to do for luck.

The dead man, before he was dead, he was a fishing man on a fishing boat who was pissing in the river.

Picture this man, this river man, leaning out over the side of his boat.

One hand on his rod.

His other hand holding himself steady.

Fishing for a little luck.

The dead man floated away, down the river, before Bob could fish him up into his boat.

The dead man got away.

Back to the river’s bottom.

The fish in this river, when they meet up with Bob, they aren’t so lucky.

When Bob gets his hooks into the mouths of these dirty river fish, these fish are soon to be dead.

When Bob cleans his fish, when he guts these fish, when Bob cuts off these fishes’ heads, sometimes these fish are still alive when Bob cuts the meat from the bone.

Sometimes, when Bob tosses the fish bones back into the river, to give this part of the fish back to the river, sometimes what is left of the fish will sometimes swim away.

It’s like the fish live.

For the river.

It’s like the fish live on.

Even when they are dead.

The dead man lives too.

In the river is where the dead man lives on.

Even though he is dead.

Memory is a river.

Bob knew who the dead man was.

Bob knew which boat on the river was the dead man’s boat even before the dead man was dead.

The dead man was a man who tried to sometimes talk to Bob, to get Bob to tell him how the fishing was, and what were the fish hitting.

These were the kinds of question people always liked to ask of Bob.

Sometimes Bob would lift up his head, up from the river, and sometimes he would nod.

Once in a while, Bob would whisper some color.

But most of the time Bob would not.

You were lucky if you got Bob to look up from the river.

The river, Bob only liked to talk to it.

To the river Bob told it all his secrets.

The dead man’s boat, like Bob’s, it was made out of metal.

When the dead man fell out of his boat, the dead man’s boat floated away.

The river took it away.

Down the river.

Out into the lake.

It ended up in a place Bob had never been.

Buckstown, Ohio.

On the riverbank of a town that, like ours, is a town that used to make steel.

Two boys, brothers, were the ones who found it, the dead man’s boat.

These two brothers didn’t know it, at the time, that the boat belonged to a man who was dead.