Fishing With Lee Marvin
The baby died in the bath water as the belly dancer shook her gut out on the dock. The baby’s mother ran out of my bedroom in hysterics, and the belly dancer shivered her way into bed with me.
All things considered, it was not a bad way to spend a Friday night. The next morning I left the belly dancer’s cottage with the mother’s half-brother, who bore a striking resemblance to a young Lee Marvin, with the intention of catching fresh rainbow trout for breakfast.
We took one of the belly dancer’s boats out on the sunrise-skinned lake, set up our lures, baited our huge hooks with terrified minnows, sent our lines into the water and started trolling. I handled the outboard while Lee sipped at the peach schnapps in his wineskin, occasionally spitting out slivers of leather lining that floated in the booze.
The sun bore down on us without mercy. Several hours went by without a bite. We peeled weeds off our lures and kept threading fresh minnows onto our hooks — the lake was full of clever fish that day. We missed all three squares and settled for crackers and cheddar cheese.
I stopped paying attention to where I was going and got us lost. When it was time to head back, I started guessing and taking chances, making things worse. The lake was vaster than I had expected, and every turn led us somewhere new. The sun was no longer ferocious as darkness shoved it gently down for the night and it flooded the sky with bands of ruby, tangerine, amethyst and heated pink that gave way to all the blues of the world, from baby right up to midnight. I immersed myself completely in that sky and forgot about being lost; I was vaguely aware of the outboard and the vibrations it sent along my arm as I steered it aimlessly. We were in a massive expanse of water, so I didn’t really need to worry about direction.
Lee’s voice smashed my trance, it seemed weighted with the day’s heat. “That was one helluva racket you two made last night,” he said
I nodded in silence. “You should head east,” said Lee.
“Which way is that?” I said.
Lee jutted his chin out to the left. I took his word for it and headed east.
After more silence, Lee said, “So, how was she?”
I kept my mouth shut. I didn’t want to have this conversation. Lee knew that she was good. Both the women were good. And there wasn’t a goddamn thing Lee could do with either of them.
The spokes of his collapsible wheelchair threw off a few vague sparks of reflected sunset. I missed the mother and ached for the belly dancer; I even felt a little bad about the baby. “Let’s reel in and get back home,” I said.
Lee grunted and said, “Where are all the damn fish?”
“Loosening their damn belts,” I said.
At night we could still hear that damn baby crying. All of us. The mother tossed and turned and wailed in Lee’s room, while the belly dancer shook her poetry in mine.
I don’t dream anymore, and there wasn’t a goddamn thing the belly dancer could ever do about that. My sleep was always on the rim of waking, no matter how good the drugs, in spite of all the booze. Sex made me want to run around the place in an Ontario thunderstorm, shouting at the sky and dancing in all its spotlights.
Let’s keep this under wraps
Talk of stars
Talk of body parts
Your construction
Your weather
Let’s keep this under wraps
Let’s keep you under straps
Let’s keep you
Let’s keep
The crying kept me up after the belly dancer stopped singing and went to sleep and woke up a moment or a lifetime later. I went down to the kitchen, where Lee was slouched at the table, turning a scaling knife with vehement speed and force between and around the knuckles of his right hand. His wheelchair spokes gleamed in the scathing glare of the halogen bars above him. The mess of scales, blood, and guts on the knife was fresh.
A couple of raccoons stood on the windowsill, growling over a hearty meal of fish head, tail, and guts, and a quarter filet. Lee nodded and wheeled himself over to the stove, where he was frying the rest of the fish.
“Hungry?” he said.
I shook my head and sat across from him. He’d cut himself while twirling the scaling knife, and that hadn’t been the first time — most of the time it got him as it came around the thumb. Both of Lee’s hands were a mess of pulpy torn skin and scabs and scars. He flipped the filet onto a plate perfectly, like a master chef, and wheeled himself back to the table.
As he was pulling up, the plate slipped off his lap, and smashed on the floor. One of the raccoons bolted into the kitchen and snapped up a huge chunk of warm pink trout steak, ran a mad shot through the window and out into the trees. The second one just looked in imploringly. Lee said nothing, just stared at his ruined meal. I threw the rest of the fish at the raccoon in the window. It ran off just as fast as its partner had.
“Fuck,” said Lee.
I lit a cigarette and passed it off to him. “Thanks,” he said.
I lit a cigarette for myself and searched the kitchen for a drink. There were bottles of cheap vodka and jars of ancient pickles in the pantry. I helped myself to one of each. The warm vodka was awful, and the pickles were like mush, but I drank and ate them anyway.
“Really, tell me,” said Lee, “how is she?”
I glared at him. The baby was still crying, I mean really pouring it on full on fucking CRYING CRYING CRYING and Jesus H. Christ I didn’t feel like having this conversation and CRYING CRYING why isn’t the vodka working the way it should CRYING vodka CRYING Jesus
“She’s incredible,” I said, “The best. Perfection. She curves to you immediately.”
Lee started turning that damn scaling knife up and down the ridges on his hands, never shrieking or even grimacing when the blades came down hard into ever-diminishing unmarked territory.
The vodka was not working. The mother was sleeping; she slept through everything after the bathwater incident. We could all see it coming. We did nothing about it.
Lee went to bed. I stayed in the kitchen, thinking about clever fish and trying to get drunk on bad vodka. I fell asleep in my chair.
I awoke as the belly dancer came swiveling into the living room. She swung over to me and kissed me full on the lips then lit a half-smoked cigarette I had left in the ashtray. She opened the refrigerator and it was full of fresh rainbow trout; so fresh that they were flopping about in death rattles. The fish leapt out of the fridge en masse and writhed and bounced on the kitchen floor. The belly dancer grabbed three of them as the sun worked its way into her blonde hair; little sparks of gold flashed off her head in slow motion in a bonafide big-screen way.
Shining, she smiled as she gutted them over the sink and sang another little song:
I never knew you
And that’s why I loved you
Baby, stop that crying
Baby, stop that crying
All the trees on the island shed their leaves and the smell of trout frying in new butter filled the house. The mother and the baby that had died in the bath water joined us.
We ate in silence, like strangers. After breakfast, I thanked the belly dancer, nodded at Lee, and gave my condolences to the young mother as her babe sucked trout-flavored milk out of her right breast. I’d had enough fish — it was the first day of moose season, and there was no way I was taking any of this lot out to the woods to go shooting with me.
