[FICTION] Tail-Snared

By Christopher Lessick

Danny’s wife shoved off with his first mate long before dawn on a Sunday morning and left only a rolled-up note inside a wine bottle. Danny woke up and looked around, marked the slid-out drawers and open closet, and then saw the text message from his now-former first mate Roger Goodall, which had come in at 3:17 a.m. He trudged into the kitchen to make coffee and stared at the message on his phone. 

After reading it an eighteenth time, his coffee now brewed, he poured a cup to halfway and then topped it off with Jameson. That’s when he saw the wine bottle and the bled-through ink of LuAnn’s handwriting on the tube of paper inside it. His first reaction was to go outside and smash the bottle into a thousand shards.  But he’d have to clean it up eventually, and the note—undamaged by the violence and lying amid shattered glass all over the driveway—would stare at him, call for him to actually read it. From Roger’s text message, he could piece together the gist of what she’d hastily scrawled, probably beneath the work light on the stove a few hours earlier. Besides, reading it would only indulge her. 

Danny stood the bottle up on the counter and slid it over toward the canisters. He’d been left before, but not by a wife, and after seven years of marriage, part of him felt he should jump in the truck and chase them down. He felt as if he’d been bamboozled. After a gulp of coffee, he considered it another way: something akin to freedom. Still, freedom is supposed to be desperately desired and fought for, not just granted by some cursive on a notepad’s page slipped into a bottle in the middle of the night. And did he even want it? 

Since it was Sunday, Danny had a trip booked, and though he could handle a few tourists by himself—usually a set of overweight, past-their-prime brothers swagging a cooler of Coors Light and dragging a set of hellion kids that reminded Danny why he made customers sign waivers—he decided to cancel. 

When he turned down into Rudee Inlet in Virginia Beach at five, a bit early for most captains in the summer, he walked straight to his boat, unlocked the trunk in the corner, and rummaged through to find the bottles of Black Strap Rum from a two-week-long honeymoon in Key West, souvenirs from after their tour of the Hemingway Home. Next, he opened the small humidor the previous owner had installed in the boat—a definite selling point—and took out a fat Cuban cigar to let it breathe. 

The engine cranked up, Danny walked back through the maze of docks toward Rockafeller’s Restaurant to a recycling dumpster and snagged a flattened cardboard box. He cut off a large flap, and on it, he marked in big, black letters, Fishing Trip Canceled Today. Sorry. Roger Goodall has your refund. 

Once Roger’s cell phone number was on it, he duct-taped the makeshift sign to the piling behind his boat and set off for a day’s self-indulgent blues jam down toward the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Two bottles: one to help figure out what went wrong and the other to help decide what to do next. 

Nearly halfway through the first bottle and on his second cigar, Danny had navigated toward Hatteras Canyon—great tuna-fishing water—and since he’d gotten out so early, there wasn’t another boat anywhere. He killed the engine and figured to set out some lines, maybe hook into some fish to sell to Big Sam’s or one of the other restaurants when he got back in, to at least pay for his gas. He rigged a line and dipped it down to fetch some baitfish, the salt spray working its meditative force on his face and mind. 

The sun had just torched the flat horizon and now singed the cloud lines with reds, then oranges, then just brightness. He sat back and watched the top of the boat sway. A tinkling sound caught his attention—the stupid set of wind chimes LuAnn had hung a couple years back. She said the melody of the notes would give the boat some romance for nights spent on the water. He had effectively tuned them out for years, but now their clamor rose as a cacophony that threatened the tranquility of Danny’s inebriation. Climbing drunk came easy, so at fifteen feet up, he unhooked and tossed the wind chimes, watched the useless aluminum tubes twinkle down into the Atlantic. 

After a couple hours and a few mahi in the cooler to sell, the first bottle nearing empty, Danny believed he’d puzzled it together: LuAnn’s recent months of staying out late with her friends, those fortysomethings—single for a reason, he often pointed out—stuffing themselves into the outfits of twentysomethings to hit up happy hour at Big Sam’s or Chic’s Beach, then making their way to close down the 15th Street Raw Bar with all the restaurant workers after their shifts had ended; her running errands with Roger; Roger talking about getting his own boat, even asking Danny’s advice; putting off adding on to the house—LuAnn’s idea; and even her reasonable-sounding suggestion a while ago for them to start keeping separate bank accounts. All these signals—unperceived in a sober state for months—now rose like a foghorn of obliviousness, clear as the bottom of a bottle. 

A few boats dotted the late morning skyline now. If he had a literary bent, he’d pen a poem about LuAnn—the one that got away—and then fold it up, slide it into the bottle, and toss it out to sea. Instead, like a cliché drunk in a low-budget film, he took off his shirt, stood up on the chair, and bellowed nonsense. “A sucker born every minute—me again. Till death do us part. Death or money, eh, Lu?” He swung the bottle up to swill the last of the dregs. “Thanks, Dad. You were right.” Somehow proud of himself, the empty bottle held up against the blue sky, Danny called out, “You forgot something, Lu. You forgot the rum.” He laughed himself almost right over the side. 

The image of Roger’s boat sinking in some remote location gave him another laugh. Maybe they’d get caught too far off shore during a storm, end up the target of a Coast Guard rescue—one that would get called off because of bad weather. “Cheers, Roger, old mate. Ol’ Lu’s the deadliest catch. She’ll suck you dry.”  

Danny’s father had warned him not just of letting LuAnn run the books for the fishing business, but on a more cosmic scale. For years, he’d cautioned Danny of their family’s poor history with women. Danny’s mother Rita had run off with a country music singer she’d met before Danny could even walk. Dirk was his name—Danny’s father called him Dirt—and Dirt’s penchant for alcohol and drugs far outlasted any scent of musical talent he might or might not have had. Rita bounced around the Midwest, lived on the road with musicians a few years, but then stopped sending postcards by Danny’s fifteenth birthday. And that was his father’s third wife—the first had split with the plumber, and the second had already been married and swindled him for ten grand by conning him into buying nonexistent waterfront property. The grandfather had done only slightly better, losing his house, the cars, his motorcycle—but not his boat—in a late-in-life divorce that had come out of nowhere right after he retired. 

As for Danny, he prided himself years ago for not taking the bait and getting hitched, though deep down he had an urge for the calm, domestic life. “Watch yourself”—those were his father’s words. “Watch yourself,” he said every time a woman seemed to be hanging around for extended periods of time. But when LuAnn showed up, everything changed, felt right. She had charmed him, hooked him, tail snared him. And Danny didn’t fight it at all. 

After recovering from all the laughing, he crouched down and then cast the bottle with all the fury he could muster, which almost toppled him over the rail again. Sunlight glinted in flashes off the brown glass as it spun end over end on its way to a watery grave. “Bottoms up, Lu.” And with that, he flung the last of his mind’s labor on both of his exes, LuAnn and Roger. 

As planned, time for bottle number two, and to figure out what was next. The rum uncapped, a sweet maple scent wafted through the air. Despite the good amount of drink that had made it into his system—numerous sloshes having doused his shirt and the deck along the way—Danny felt pretty keen, had reached that level of clearheaded insightfulness that comes only after throwing back at least half a fifth. Scouring his memory for the bright parts along so many paths of what went wrong, he inventoried his marketable skills. Obviously his day job of fishing would keep him afloat financially, but he feared a deep pool of debt might be discovered once he got back and called the bank and credit card companies to cancel everything with LuAnn’s name on it. It might necessitate more than toting tourists out to sea to fill their coolers on weekends and spending the week burning fuel to net fish for restaurants. 

Besides intuition for locating and catching fish—he never even owned fish-finding gadgets though he did just as well as any other charter captain—his father had bestowed upon Danny the knowledge of how to fix practically anything. This ability—handiwork skills—had actually helped end several relationships. He dated a girl named Linda for about six months, and a few weeks after Danny added onto her house a four-season room, she dumped him, changed her number, and sold the place. Rose, a gem he’d met at a dinner party thrown by another captain, dropped him after he redid two of her bathrooms. Another girlfriend of a year designed and then cajoled him into adding on two hundred square feet to her bedroom—claiming the extra space would make for more romance for them—and then she promptly invited her ex-husband to move back into it. 

So the notion of becoming a contractor bobbed around in the back of his mind, but something inside him kept him dreaming of having a family—a couple of boys he could teach to surf and fish and maybe someday turn over the boat to continue the family tradition of commercial fishing. But at forty-six and newly single, it seemed like the closest he’d come to having a son would be calling the 800 number on one of those long commercials with the sad music to sponsor a child in some undeveloped country. He could include pictures of the boat with his forty cents a day.

Danny unwrapped another cigar and filled his cup. He remembered stowing some food on board last night before heading home and went into the cabin for the white box from Bergey’s Breadbasket, a little off-the-map country store he visited once a week. He climbed up to the top deck to eat. Cinnamon rolls, each the size of a softball, glazed over with white and maple icing, sweet and soft. He pulled one apart and devoured it chunk by chunk, licked the sugary frosting from his fingers. An idea came to mind, but one of the rods below bent over, and the reel screamed as line took off. 

The heavy rig—he forgot he’d set that one out—loaded with a fat slab of mackerel in the hopes of hooking into something big. Stupid idea. Should have stuck with the smaller poles. Now he had to get all of them in, too, and quickly. He swiveled around to the ladder and clambered down, one scraped shin for his swiftness. With a long, slow, and lumbersome pull, the hook felt set, so he hurried to reel in the other lines. He unhooked the gaff and slid it down by the chair and—the reel still running out—grabbed the cigar and the bottle.  

White-knuckled, a barnacle’s grip on the rod, he labored it into the holder. Tuna? Swordfish? Fifteen minutes and still no idea. A good hundred and fifty yards of line out. Stupidity. Maybe a medium-sized tuna could be landed by one person, but even that would be a stretch. Something bigger? No. He’d be an ass to try. 

Thirty minutes, the soggy cigar clamped in his mouth, his throat dry as a flag in the wind. He’d started sweating out the molasses from the first bottle of Black Strap Rum and could hardly stand his own scent. 

Still no sign of what it could be. Marlin would certainly have started its famous tail dancing by now. He took turns with each arm holding the rod, each cramping in turn. Dehydration sent slow shivers to his shoulders. Every five cranks and the line whizzed out again. Seven cranks this time. Then out again. The fish was winning. For Danny, a fish this large became a battle of will—whereas in this situation, any reasonable drunk would have cut the line.   

He adjusted the drag on the reel, a means of strategy. Not until he’d grown up did Danny appreciate his father’s odd philosophizing about fish. All the lessons about being “at one” with the fish. Nonsensical ramblings, Danny called it the product of too much time alone at sea. His childhood friends called his dad the Yoda of deep-sea fishing. 

But now, he replayed those conversations, even heard his father’s voice. Balance. The drag of the reel has to match the fish’s strength. The drag, the speed of reeling, and the pressure of the water—all of these must be in sync. Once all three come into harmony, it’s just a matter of time… The fish will know when his time’s up…

His father typically stood by, almost chanting these sentences, and watched as his son lost the fish. Afterwards, Danny would want to cry, knowing it’d be fare for jokes later—another one that got away. Dad would look out over the water and speak in a kind of Zen-like tone and repeat the harmony lecture. Then he’d clap a hand on Danny’s shoulder and command him to get the damn rod back in the water already. 

Ten more minutes passed. Somehow, he felt he’d struck that balance. Just give it time, he thought. If it was a shark though, he’d surely regret being alone, especially if it had real size. Although for the fish, after an hour of being jerked through the water by what it had thought was lunch, it probably didn’t matter how big you were—when you saw the person who dragged you two hundred yards by your lip, you’d want to kill it. 

A hard pull. Then it broke the water. 

Long, skinny fins broadcast from its sides. Yellow fins, blue topside. Atlantic bluefin. The world record was around 1,500 pounds. It slapped back down on the water like a barrel of rum dropped from a plane. With an hour invested already, and no signs of a poor hookset, Danny hoped he might get it in the boat in another half hour—if he could get it into the boat at all.

A half hour—maybe accurate with a full crew. Instead, he spent another hour pitched in battle, man versus fish. The two fought like Biblical characters. When the fish got close, he unstrapped himself from the chair, leaned over to gaff it. The beast just beyond arm’s length, Danny slid, stabbed, and pulled. But the hook plunged not into the belly of the monster, but into the abyss, an empty souvenir for the coral. 

Danny cursed the fish as in scenes echoed from Melville. It threatened to run beneath the boat. He guided it back. Goosebumps like scales on his arms now. Any level-headedness nearly drained. Behind him, he imagined his father shaking his head, preparing a life lesson. Now it was Roger he saw, and a young kid they’d hired last summer, both sitting on the bench, shaking their heads. 

“Get me the damn tail snare,” he yelled to the demon crew he imagined that stood idle behind him. He got back into the chair and cranked again. Ten cranks. Then five more. The colors of the fish flashed just a few feet below the deck. 

“Where the hell is it? Give me a rope—I’ll make one.” He looked back. No one there. A bottle of water stood pinned against the cooler, condensation dripping on the chrome bracket. He undid the belt again, stepped toward the water bottle, and grabbed at air. A chain of curses flew out as he turned back and saw another bottle of water. This one real, he emptied it in barely two swallows. 

Danny felt a moment of calm. Hands on the reel again, the fish thudded against the back of the boat. 

“Son of a bitch.” He kept the pole in the rig but had to maneuver it out slightly. Otherwise, the rod threatened to snap. He clamped it in his elbow. The reel pressed purple into his forearm. 

Danny readied for the landing. And then he puked. All the while dragging himself, six inches at a time, sliding one foot, then the other, along the side of the boat, eyes downcast on the swirl of water where the line entered, flickers of brilliant blue. The rod felt like a telephone pole, not just that heavy, but connecting an energy far beyond Danny’s grasp. 

Incoherence lured his mind again. “Follow me into hell,” he spat, continued toward the tail snare. “A watery grave…” The big eye stared up at him. Violent shakes just beneath the surface. 

Once close enough, Danny steadied himself to balance the weight of the rod. In a swift motion, he kicked at the tail snare, a long pole with a heavy loop on the end, and it fell from the hooks. But he crashed onto the deck too. Unwilling to let go of the rod to brace his fall, he landed on the opposite shoulder, and for a quick second, all he saw was red-black. 

“Wicked son of a bitch—I’ll have you if I have to go with you.” The rum—whenever it wasn’t spilling out of him—enlivened him. He’d pissed himself, out of necessity, twice now. The deck, already coated with a glaze of sea spray, now wore a topcoat of vomit and urine—a disgusting slurry that shifted as the boat rocked on the waves. 

Danny stood up on a knee and dragged the tail snare to the corner of the boat. One of two things would happen, he vowed—either the fish would get dragged in, or he would dive in and follow the line to the fish and reason with it. Or beat the thing into submission. 

More curses sparked into the empty and sunny day. No boats anywhere for hours now. Agony. He slipped the loop into the water. The rod pinned between his side and his nearly snapped forearm, he leaned over and worked the snare with his left hand. The fish rolled back, and with a quick swish, the loop caught, wrapped around the tail in a knot, and tightened. 

He dropped the rod onto the deck now and held the tail-snare pole with a devil’s grip. His laughter might have woken centuries-dead souls in the shipwrecks that littered the Outer Banks. He found the bottle, took a slug, and then poured a dram over the fish as a toast. 

But the brief spell of tranquility vanished at the prospect of bringing the fish on board. Black Strap Rum residue and the memory of a damn good cinnamon roll were all he had inside. He’d even sweated out the venom of being angry at LuAnn. Adrenaline spent. The only thing left was sheer strength—not the poundage he could lift, but will. 

Hand over hand, Danny inched his grip down the pole toward the fish. He breathed and measured out building exhalations and then let out a tremendous foghorn groan. A sun-starched fisherman, not one of those Scottish hulks who tossed telephone poles. Just a fisherman, he thought—who’d soon have a hernia. He groaned again and pulleyed the fish from the water, locked his feet in below the rail, leaned back, heaved. Again, closer. Just up to the lip of the boat deck. He heaved again, and the fish slid up and over, crashed onto his lap. 

The grapple won, pain the reward for his will, and now it barraged him in throbs and concussions. Shin, knee, shoulder, forearm, back. He didn’t know if he could get up if he wanted to, but right then, he just stared at his opponent, an Atlantic bluefin tuna—that had to weigh at least a few hundred pounds.

The fish, lying next to him, jerked only a little. Its eye—almost as big as Danny’s fist—probably envisioned a different, hoped-for version of the story—where it swam away with a belly full of mackerel. Danny realized life is full of different versions, some hoped for and hooked, others avoided but landed anyway, and so many more in between. 

That was it, wasn’t it? All the in-betweens you’re dealt, and then how you put them all together somehow—dodge one, take one, catch one, lose one. Some end up with a couple of boys to pass down family traditions. Others end up with a hook in their lip and their tail knotted in a rope. Sometimes you wake up and discover part of you has vanished, or you find a Dear John letter inside an empty bottle. However your version of the story goes, you keep on trying to figure out what’s next.  

Danny reached out and put a hand on a fin, felt the razor-like edge. He wished LuAnn the best, now knowing that her version of the story had parted from his. He fell into a long dehydrated sleep and woke a few hours later to rain falling on his face, and all around, a metallic smell. 

Christopher Lessick grew up in southwestern Pennsylvania and, after graduating from college, moved to Virginia to teach English and coach girls volleyball. He earned his MFA at Murray State University (KY) and has stories published in The Evansville Review and the Pennsylvania Literary Journal, an essay in the journal Teach. Write., another essay forthcoming in the American Fly Fisher, and a poem that won Honorable Mention in the 2019 Wergle Flomp Humor Poetry Contest. He lives in Chesapeake, Virginia, with his wife and two children, along with three dogs, a cat, nine chickens, and honeybees.