Callan Wink - Dog Run Moon

The day before Terry had to report to Saginaw to start his sentence, he went fishing with his grandpa. It was late summer and the lake was choked with lily pads, the surface a near-solid mat of rubbery green. Terry rowed, and with each stroke his oars churned and uprooted the plants, the pads slapping the aluminum hull with a sound like a clapping crowd heard from a distance. It was hot and everything was shades of green — the pad-covered lake, the Russian olives and willows that crowded the bank, the flat, manicured carpet of his grandfather’s lawn sloping up to his house. Terry tried to get it all in his memory, each degree of green, the pitch and drone of the cicadas, the roughness of the oar grips, the sweat running into his eyes, the fetid smell of the lake. He tried to save it all up for a time not too far distant when he might need it. Terry rowed and he thought about two years, all the ways it could be figured — twenty-four months, seven hundred and thirty days, two trips around the sun, one-eighth of the total time he’d been present on the earth. Terry stared at his bobber and he was scared.

—

Terry’s grandpa had taught him when he was just a kid that the best way to catch bass — truly large bass — was to use a shiner minnow under a bobber. He showed Terry the proper way to rig the minnow, sliding the hook point just under the dorsal fin below the spine.

“Too deep you kill the minnow,” he said, “not deep enough and the minnow flies off when you cast. Now, you try it.”

Terry could still remember his first minnow-rigging experience, the shiner struggling in his hand, the slight crunch as the hook point scraped through the tiny ribs and passed under the spine. That crunch, something more felt than heard, gritty and uncomfortable, like chewing a piece of eggshell in your omelet.

Terry’s grandpa had taught him that when fishing for bass with shiners, you can tell if you are about to get a strike by watching the movements of the bobber. The shiner minnows were big, some of them five inches long, and although they couldn’t quite pull the bobber under, their movements would set the bobber bouncing. No movement meant you had a dead shiner; slight bouncing or jiggling meant the shiner was doing its thing, alive and swimming around calmly; violent jerks and dragging from side to side meant a bass had appeared and the minnow was agitated. This was when you had to get ready.

“A bass likes to inspect his meal,” Terry’s grandpa said. “He’ll sit underneath a minnow and just wait. The minnow will be up there going crazy and the bass will be sitting there trying to figure it out. He’s used to minnows fleeing. A minnow that stays put and just swims in circles is unfamiliar to him. So he waits and watches until either his predatory impulse overwhelms him or his innate caution sends him swimming off in search of food that acts the way it should. That’s all there is to it, really. You just present the bass with a choice, and he either takes it or he doesn’t.”

With fewer than twenty-four hours before his incarceration, Terry couldn’t concentrate on the fishing. The small rowboat was confining, and he found himself moving constantly, shifting his weight, repositioning his feet, making the boat lurch from side to side. They hadn’t caught anything. Terry’s grandpa said it might be because it was so hot. The bass, he said, had retreated to the deepest part of the lake and hunkered down until dusk, when things would cool off a little. Terry had sweat running down his back. He had to press down on his knees to make his legs stop jigging up and down.

“Pretty hot,” he said, squinting at his bobber.

His grandpa nodded and reeled in his rig. His minnow had died. He removed it from the hook and pitched it out to the lake where it landed on a lily pad with a wet slap.

“Let’s call it a day,” he said, “it’s hotter than two rats fucking in a wool sock out here.”

This made Terry laugh, and when he pulled up the anchor and began rowing back to the house, he felt a little better.

In the kitchen, Terry’s grandpa made tomato sandwiches, the tomatoes heavy and warm, fresh from his garden, liberally salted between two slices of soft white bread. There was a Tigers game on the radio. They ate and half-listened to Ernie Harwell’s gravelly play-by-play. When it started to cool down, they went out on the back porch to watch the nighthawks skim mosquitos as dusk came down over the lake.

“I didn’t mean for it to happen that way,” Terry said, eventually. “That counts for something, doesn’t it?”

Terry’s grandpa sucked in his cheeks as he worked at a piece of soft bread stuck to a molar.

“Going into a place like that, you are accepting a certain amount of risk. That’s how I feel. No one is a complete innocent or complete victim in a place like that. That guy had a wife and a kid. What was he doing there in the first place? It’s over and done now, of course, beating a dead horse here, but that bitch judge thought you needed saving, and she was the one to do it. Would have been better if it had been a man.”

“I think if my dad was the judge I’d have gotten the chair.”

“Fathers are always the harshest judges. That’s the way it’s always been. But still, there’s something in me and you that’s not in your dad. Sometimes these things skip generations. And I’m not saying it’s a good thing or it’s a bad thing, probably life’s a whole lot easier without it, whatever it is. But, how do I say this? Your father was a good boy and is a good man, but he could never fathom a situation such as the one you got yourself involved in. Something like that is as foreign to him as breathing underwater. Your dad can’t understand what you got yourself into and he can’t understand what going inside that place for two years is going to be like for you. I think I got an inkling and I know it ain’t going to be a trip to Candyland for damn sure. But you’ll do it, and you’ll get out, and you’ll find that there is a lot of life for you left, and you’ll have learned some things at a young age that take many men a hell of a long time to get figured out.”

It got dark and Terry’s grandpa went inside. Terry stayed out on the porch. He pulled two chairs together and stretched out on his back. Mosquitoes gathered around him in a droning chorus, and when Terry raised his bare arm a half a dozen clung to his forearm in a line, like pigs lining up at a feed trough. He swatted at them, creating a smear of blood, a process he would repeat innumerable times until the sun came up and his grandpa came out to get him for the three-hour drive down to Saginaw.

—

Terry had always been big for his age. That had probably worked against him in court. The judge looked at him and saw the broad shoulders, the large hands, the deep-voiced yes ma’am s and no sir s, the stubble on the cheeks that Terry had begun shaving when he was barely through middle school. Terry looked like a man, and he would have been judged like a man if it weren’t for laws about prosecuting minors. As it was, he got two years in the Saginaw juvenile detention center. Some said that was too much. Some said it wasn’t near enough. After all, there was a man who wasn’t ever going to return to his family — a woman without a husband and a boy without a father.

According to the police report read during the trial, Terry showed up alone at Hiphuggers Gentleman’s Club with a fake ID. He played three games of nine-ball and won all three. He had six shots of Ezra Brooks whiskey and chased each one with a draft beer. Some time before last call there was a scuffle and the patrons of the bar streamed out into the parking lot. The ones slow to get off their stools saw nothing but the aftermath. By the time they made it outside all there was to see was Terry standing — another man, on the ground, bloody, his body racked with seizures.