RED AND SILVER LURE
It looks homemade. Something her father fashioned after much
time in the river. Enough time to think the river his. I can
imagine him standing in pale green waders some
chrome-and-butter sunset, upstate, late summer, casting this
lure into the water. Letting current take it as current
pleased, as he pleased, then slowly reeling it back. How it
floats in my hand, buoyant wood, New Year's Day. The red
enamel flecked, the silver brushed in a child's uncertain hand
so the tapered streaks are asymmetric along its length-wise
axis, a copper fitting pinched at its fluted tip to take the so
many pounds per square inch of a rainbow's thrashing. Was it
cut to wobble just so? Was it left fattened in the middle to
hump up and keep hidden that second chandelier of barbs? I
remember watching his cold hands slitting a salmon once like a
loaf of bread, opening the book of its flesh. Now and then
bringing his scale-flecked hand to retrieve his cigarette.
Flicking it, wrist-style. We talked -- about nothing, really, in
particular -- unaccountable joy perhaps, the pressure of business,
or that expertise of bamboo rods and pleasure men here take in
waiting-in-deep-woods or up-to-their-hips-in-rivers preludes.
And then he lopped the salmon's head clean off with crude,
admirable grace. There was blood and the stickiness of dying.
A torn gill. No one body owned the river. He waded in and was
imbued with otherness -- all that cold meat hurtling toward him in
the dark.
Dennis Hinrichsen
