Chapter 4: Unnamed

https://www.pond5.com/search?kw=moon-moonlight-moon-river&media=footage

     “A snag,” I whisper to Robbie who’s rolling a slice of white bread into a dough ball in the growing dusk.

“Change your angle,” he calls back, his voice booming across the deep pool below the confluence of the Raritan and Millstone rivers.

“It won’t pull free,” I echo back across the darkness after yanking to the left and then to the right.

“Try letting it float out,” he suggests as he casts his weighted line way out to the other side and reels it back to the pool after the splash.

“It takes up the slack,” I marvel, eyes bulging as the fifty-pound saltwater line tightens back up every time I let out a few spools. “There’s something on there.”

“Probably a tree in the current,” he proposes, setting his own pole into a Y-shaped stick he’s stuck into the mud. “Let me help.”

__________

     Nighttime fisher people in temperate regions had been experiencing this mystical sequence of realization from time immemorial: There’s something unimaginable on the other end of this line. When it strikes in freshwater above the tideline, first they hold on for dear life and then start counting off the rational options – catfish, big bass, escaped brown trout, buffalo carp. Then they consider the unlikely ones – muskie, sturgeon, river otter, rogue shark. As it persists with an impossibly strong pull, they arrive at the conclusion that it must be something more sinister reeling them into the depths.

__________

     “The line will snap if we pull too hard,” I whisper as the spool reaches its end and the thing keeps up a steady pull into the now shimmering pool in the moonrise.

“Give it a little leeway,” he hisses, pulling me along as he steps into the cold water up to our knees.

“Hace frio!” I cry as another tug drags us in up to our huevos.

“Hang on, we’ll tire it out,” Robbie yells as a steady pull on the line leans us into the current.

“I can’t swim!” I scream when my foot slips on a rock and I start to tumble, but someone bunches my sweatshirt and pulls me back.

“Dang, it snapped the line,” Robbie marvels as we wade back to the bank. 

“Nah, that guy reached over my shoulder and cut it.”

“What guy? It’s just me and you out here.”

“Robbie, I swear an old black man reached out and saved us.”

“You’re either plumb loco or seeing dad’s ghost,” he laughs, clapping me on the back as we catch the faint light from the sliver of a new moon on the trail for home. 

Chapter 3: Trestling

https://www.thenatureofcities.com/2019/04/26/crows-vancouver-middle-way-biophobia-biophilia/

     “Did you tell your mom we were going?” I ask Robbie when we meet at the bridge on Friday after school.

“Si si, senor,” he laughs, slipping under the bridge on the muddy slope. “I told her we were going down the park.”

“Good thinking, my friend,” I call, scrambling after him down a packed dirt path along the Middlebrook toward the railroad trestle.

“She still treats me like a little kid,” he complains, picking his way up the rocky scree to the tracks.

“Enjoy it while you can,” I advise, squatting down to place a hand on the rail. “Diay, it’s coming!”

__________

     Trestling had been a dare for Bound Brook kids in pre-internet generations. It was scary fun to stand beneath the tracks with fingers in ears as a freight train rumbled overhead with cathunk, cathunk, cathunk, cathunk. For Ernie and Robbie scrambling into the darkness beneath the tracks, it was a novel concept that they discovered accidentally, not wanting to be seen by passengers on the Raritan Valley Line.

     No one knew exactly how, but by the end of the twentieth century the little central Jersey town wedged between a bend in the Raritan River and the Watchung mountains had become the most densely populated place in the United States for Costa Rican immigrants. Downtown shops and restaurants, school sports teams, construction and cleaning jobs, and even the Codrington Park pool had become peopled with names like Hernandez, Hidalgo, Quesado, Vargas, and Zamora from the central highlands around San Jose.

__________

     “My mom takes that train,” I shout above the rumble. “She works at Minuteman Park.”

“What about your dad?” Robbie yells back, leaning back into the wall made of railroad ties.

“Some golf course in Bedminster,” I answer as the clanging and clacking subside into the distance. “He gets picked up by a van before dawn and doesn’t get home until after ten.”

“Jeez, you must never see him,” he proclaims as we jump back up the bank to the tracks.

“What about your dad?” I shrug as we step across the ties trying not to look at the brook down below. “Guys around town are afraid of him.”

“Yeah, he was some kind of football and war hero,” he calls back, picking out the remnant of a path heading toward the river as a stream of big black birds flaps far overhead toward First Watchung. “He never talks about it.”

“Well, he knows his way around these woods,” I exclaim as the sun dips behind the trees to the west. “There’s that fisherman’s trail he told us about.”

Chapter 2: Casado Americano

https://www.thekitchn.com/how-to-make-a-grilled-cheese-sandwich-cooking-lessons-from-the-kitchn-200972

    “More tomato soup Ernie?” asks Robbie’s mother as the boys lap up their bowls.

“Thank you Mrs. Reed,” I reply in my most polite English, stopping myself from using the Tico language that I grew up with.

“Get the boy another grilled cheese, won’t you Kar?” asks Mr. Reed who’s having trouble getting up out of his chair at their kitchen table.

“Only if it’s no trouble,” I smile into my bowl. “So how does one get to the point?”

__________

     By 1999 Blaine Reed and Karma Czarcinski had been married for nearly ten years. Though it was a marriage of convenience for old friends who happened to sleep together one New Year’s eve and wound up as forty-year-old new parents, they were, conveniently, loving partners and committed parents.

     To the surprise of his doctors, Blaine’s amyotrophic lateral sclerosis had stabilized into intermittent leg weakness except for the middle leg, which petered out not long after their son Robert was born. Karma had taken up the camera when Robbie was little, and her early conversion to digital along with being conversant in baseball landed her a job as Topps regional photographer soon after Robbie started school. Between her spring training assignments and Blaine’s twice daily therapy walks, their ten-year-old was given plenty of free reign to go fishing.

__________

    “Cross the brook at the trestle, then turn left and pick up the old fisherman’s trail along the river,” instructs Mr. Reed. “It’s out past the stadium.”

“Now Blaine, you know that’s a Superfund site and no place for boys, fish or no fish.”

“Just make sure the rail isn’t vibrating before you cross,” he winks, ducking as Karma flings a potholder at his head, “and steer clear of any colored pools.”

Chapter 1: Una Anguilla

https://thewalrus.ca/2008-12-environment/

     “That’s my fish, Ernie,” cries Robbie Reed as I back away from the dark pool dragging in something big.

He had tripped running for the pole and his bloody nose convinced me to grab the reel before it was pulled into the freshet of the Middlebrook running off of First Watchung Mountain.

“It’s yours,” I say with relief, handing over the rod as whatever is on the other end writhes in wild figure eights in the darkening waters of dusk.

__________

     We had decided to go fishing that spring when Robbie had gotten a rod and reel for his tenth birthday. On our next family shopping trip across the Talmadge Avenue bridge to Target I had shown my father a Zebco spincast set I was eying over in sporting goods. He inspected the sealed plastic pack and then led me over to a bargain rack.

“Tu quieres esto,” he commanded, picking out a saltwater rig and a little jar stuffed with salmon eggs.

The next day Bobby and I met up at the bridge after fourth grade at LaFollette School.

“What kind of rope do you have on that thing?” he laughed.

“It’s for big fish,” I lied, embarrassed by the thick tan line and extra-large hook.

“My dad says the big ones are down by the trestle,” he advised.

     Sure enough, we spotted a long green fish sitting in a pool beneath the railroad tracks. Bobby cast his plastic worm as I threaded my huge hook with bright pink eggs that went flying off with the first cast. I ended up dropping the baited line into the pool from up on the tracks in between Bobby’s casts under the bridge. That big fish just sat there with an occasional wiggle of side fins.

     “Try a bread ball on a baby pin,” advised my older sister Elena that night in the upstairs apartment bedroom we shared with four young cousins.

I did the next day and snagged one from a silver-sided school shimmering around the pin.

“That’s just a shiner,” laughed a teenager from up on the bridge. “A worm will get you a real fish.”

     A few nights later bare-footed Ellie came charging into the apartment from a spring shower with a big grin.

“Yuck, I squished something slimy out on the sidewalk,” she laughed.

We scrounged up a flashlight and found hundreds of night crawlers wriggling in the puddles. They were fast and slick but we managed to fill a milk carton before the flashlight died.

__________

     “Dios mio, a water moccasin,” I shout as a dark green thing thrashes over the rocks tangling itself in the line.

“Nah, it’s an electric eel,” proclaims Bobby, leaping back as it squirms up a white-barked sapling.

“It’s an eel alright,” calls Bobby’s father from up on the newly completed levy where he’s walking his yellow lab. “Just cut the line close to the mouth and it will slither back into the brook.”

     “Thanks Mr. Reed,” I smile after the snake-like fish disappears into the deep pool under the bridge. “I was afraid to touch it.”

“Those eels come all the way up from the Caribbean,” he marvels, “but they say there used to be a real monster at the point.”