Chapter 4: Unnamed

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     “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.”

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     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.

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     “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.