Hookmouth

Chapter 1

Jim Slade discovered the giant bass he called Hookmouth late one
evening in July. It was one of the long, hot summer days he loved. No school, chores all done by noon, and the rest of the day was his to do with as he liked. On rainy days he went over to his cousin Mike’s house and played video games, or stayed home and read if Mike couldn’t play. Most days, Jim fished.

The best place to fish was his uncle’s pond. Uncle Al and Aunt Susan had a little farm just a couple of miles outside the limits of the small city where Jim lived with his mom and dad. At thirteen, Jim was small for his age, but his dad declared that Jim had a good head on his shoulders, and so should be allowed to ride his bike to Uncle Al’s in order to fish in the pond there.

Uncle Al thought Jim had a good head on his shoulders, too. He let Jim use the tractor to keep the weeds mowed down around the pond, and he showed Jim how to leave a section of weeds growing high along the water’s edge.

“You got to give the fish enough bugs to eat,” Uncle Al explained. “It ain’t natural for ‘em to eat pellets. Bugs and other fish is what God meant ‘em to eat.”

Uncle Al had stocked the pond with bass and bluegill, and they had reproduced obligingly until the pond was full of fish. Jim loved to catch fat, shining bluegill with bulging, orange bellies. Sometimes, he kept a stringer of bluegill to fry. He measured the fish against his hand, being careful to throw back the ones that didn’t reach from the base of his palm to the end of his middle finger. Uncle Al taught Jim how to clean the fish, slicing each one open with a sharp pocket knife blade and pulling out the bright bloody red internal organs. Jim cut the stomachs open with his knife to find out what the fish were eating, and he found crayfish, worms, beetles, and little fish inside. The fish ate other fish only slightly smaller than themselves. Carefully, he sliced thin slabs of meat from the fish’s sides and rinsed them in the pond. He left the remains in a heap in the weeds along the bank, knowing that the next day he would find the heads and guts gone and the little hand and foot prints of raccoons and the prints of bird feet pressed into the mud. He took the fillets back to Aunt Susan’s kitchen, where she supervised as he dredged them in beaten egg from one of her chickens, then in flour, and then in cornmeal before he laid them in the big, black cast iron skillet where they sizzled in hot grease. The fish cooked quickly. Jim shared the meal with Uncle Al and Aunt Susan.

“There ain’t nothin’ better for supper than fresh-caught fish and home-grown tomatoes,” declared Aunt Susan, and they all agreed that nothing in the world could equal a meal of fried bluegill and sliced tomatoes still warm from the sunny garden.

After the supper dishes were washed, Jim walked down the dusty road that led to the pond.  He sat on a big log at the water’s edge and baited his hook with a fat nightcrawler he had gathered the night before. The best place to get nightcrawlers was on the bank behind his school, just after dark, when the ground was wet from an afternoon rain. He would approach softly, barefoot in the wet grass, treading gently so as not to spook the ‘crawlers. Moving the beam of his flashlight from side to side, he would spot a nightcrawler gleaming against the ground. When he grabbed the big worm it would pull hard, trying to slip from his grip and disappear into its hole. Jim knew how to hold on just tightly enough to avoid snapping the worm in two, waiting until it tired and he could slide the rest of it out of the ground and drop it in his bait box. Wiping slime from his fingers onto his jeans, Jim searched until his bait box was full enough for the next day.

He impaled the wriggling nightcrawler carefully on the hook, once through the heart and again below, just as Uncle Al had taught him. He cast his offering into the pond and waited, keeping his eyes on the red and white bobber that floated on the water. Blue sky and white clouds reflected on the pond’s surface. Jim could hear the frogs that lived on the margins of the pond. Their voices were infrequent now, but he knew that as summer progressed they would gather volume until the late afternoons and evenings rang with their song. He heard the ki-ki-ki-ki of a kingfisher from the river that ran along the edge of the farm. A pair of iridescent dragonflies droned along the water’s surface, then banked smoothly up to rest on Jim’s fishing rod. The sun was warm, and sweat trickled from under his green baseball cap and down the middle of his back. He smelled the sweet fragrance of the tall weeds and thought about the bugs that dropped from them where they leaned over the water, feeding the fish that swam beneath the pond’s mirrored surface.

His bobber jerked under the water, once, then twice. Jim pulled up sharply on the rod, setting the hook and feeling the line throb as the fish struggled against it. He reeled in his catch, watching for the moment when he would make out the dark shape finning in circles as he pulled it toward the bank. He had just spotted the bluegill when he saw the bass. It rose up from the depths, a huge, undulating shadow. Opening its enormous mouth, the bass sucked in the six-inch bluegill, then turned and dove for the dark, cool bottom of the pond. Jim’s line snapped, and he was left standing on the bank, frozen with surprise, the end of his line curling uselessly and blowing softly in the breeze. “Aw, hell!” he swore softly. The image of the huge bass was sharp in his mind’s eye. It was the biggest fish he had ever seen, at least eight or ten pounds of largemouth bass. A fish like that had been around a while, and it knew how to survive. It had even been caught before. When it rose up toward the surface and opened its mouth, Jim had clearly seen a rusty hook and spinner lodged in the edge of its lip. He named the fish Hookmouth, and he knew that from that moment on, until the day he pulled that giant fish from the water and held it in his hands, his life would be devoted to catching it.

Jim looked up and was shocked to realize that he was not alone. He locked eyes with a man who was standing far away at the other side of the big pond. The man had gray hair that curled from under a wide-brimmed, brown hat. He was holding a fishing rod and a tackle box. Who was he? How much had he seen?