Trembling With Fear 04/05/20

The Hook Up by Rob McClure Smith

The canal is different once the sun goes down. When darkness blankets the blue-black water strange night-sounds come out the trees along the riprap.  

Fishing the canal at nighttime you might not notice that. You’d be too busy thinking about whether to use live or chunk bait, or wondering whether it’s better to bounce a jig on the bottom of a gulley or swim a lure through a rip, or checking the baseball score from Fenway on your cell-phone.

The man has been fishing for two hours under these stars. Now he double clicks his phone’s calendar application. Yes, this day one year ago it was he took the 25-pound bass from the Big Ditch. He smiles remembering the feeling he had when he dragged the fish out of his landing net and smacked its head on the shaft. What a beauty it had been. The old canal cranked keeper stripers all last year. But this summer not so much. Tonight there is no night bite on the slack tide. It is as if the fish have taken a long vacation from their summer haunts.  

Nothing. Not. A. Thing.

The wind on the canal is soft and warm and ripples the surface of the water. The water in the canal is cold.

Suddenly something wallops at his recast and swallows the bait. The fisherman leans forward in the boat, excited. But it feels too big for a bass. Way too big for a bass. Must be an eel. His rod is curving fit to break.  

He says, ”Goddamn it to hell.” But there is no one on the canal to hear him curse.  

A pale and white thing is glistening down in the canal dark and now it rises slowly to the surface. The water breaks and the naked body of a young woman emerges. She floats facedown alongside the boat. Her yellow hair is spread out on the water, stranded.  

The fisherman sits back in the gunwale, shocked and disgusted. He looks at the pale body in the water and shivers. All he can think of now is how this catastrophe is going to ruin his night’s fishing. He has to report this. He has to get this body ashore. The rest of his night will be spent in town answering stupid questions from stupider policemen. He might even become a suspect in this woman’s death. That’s how it goes. It’s all too much. It’s upsetting.

And if he were to cut her loose just? Who would ever know? What if this pale corpse were just to float away like dandelion seed into the night? He didn’t ask to catch this. She is dead after all. There is no harm in it. His decision is made. She is beyond hurting.

As he commences disentangling his line from the girl’s body, all the while careful not to touch it, he sees to his horror how her back gently rises and falls, the pulse in the blue veins. 

”My God,” he says, leaning out of the boat and touching her back with his hand. ”Are you still alive?”

Her skin feels so strange to the touch. It is cold and knobby and pitted with pockmarks.  

The fisherman feels sick to his stomach, a gnarled knotting, but reaches and grabs her arms and hauls the comatose girl around to face him.  

She looks up and regards him curiously with fish pale eyes.  

This woman has no eyelids. His hook has pricked her black lips and those lips seep a stuff that is thick and stringy like blood. But this blood is not blood. And this woman is not a woman. She is making the same sucking sound that the fish make thrashing underfoot on his boat. He has heard for many years that same desperate gasping, their life leaking out.

Terrified now, he attempts to pull away from her, but now it is she who grips him. Her grip is strong and vice-like on his wrists.

”Let me go,” he says, hoarsely. ”Please.”

She pulls herself up and him down until she can stare him dead in the eyes. He notices that she has no nose. He sees the sharp narrow teeth and a thin black tongue like a worm.

”Please,” he screams at the black sky.

But he has now left the safety of his boat forever and is with her in the water. The canal is cold and dank and smells of oil and urine. She grips him tightly still.  He discovers how strong she is when she throws him flailing on his back and inches her tail slowly up to his groin. He is going under. Her tail feels sharp and sleek against him and dangerous as a sheet of iron. The water froths creamily around the deadly embrace. The fisherman opens his mouth to cry out and his lungs fill with water. His lungs fill and fill. And then they burst.

The boat floats empty on the night-tide.  Inside it a cell-phone buzzes rhythmically, but there is no one to answer the call. In the morning other men will come here and find the rod and the net and all the lures of the fisherman caught in the riprap. These other men will shake their heads and click their cameras and remark how strange sounds come out the trees along the riprap

They will tell themselves the canal is different once the sun goes down.