Fiction: Trout for Dinner by Paul Luikart

He’d taken the day off to fish, and now the day was driving toward its end. He’d caught one shy of his limit of trout, and they hung in the water on the stringer with their mouths agape, flipping their tails. The water was cold and clear and chest deep in places and in those deep places it turned blue-green and all the rocks on the bottom kept the color of the water. He sat above a roiling chute where the water bowed to the boulders before it sprang past them into a flat pool on the other side.

On the opposite bank, the green overhang rippled in the breeze like arms that hung down and moved together in a sluggish dance. Everything moved together out here, everything was calibrated. Each branch in the wind, each scoop of water. And the constant sound of the water through the rocks—between a thunder and a gurgle—kept everything synchronized. He felt like an interruption.

It was a long hike back to the car and the day was still as hot as it had been at noon. He allowed himself to gaze at the water a little longer, losing himself in its rush. Hours went past. Days. Years. Barely more than a handful of seconds. Finally, he blinked and stood and stepped off the rock into the water up to his hips, and the cold braced him and everything suddenly appeared in stark relief. The boulders were carved from the air with surgeon’s instruments and colored with gray and sandy hues and nobody in the world had ever seen them quite so exactly.

He pulled up the stringer. The first trout he’d caught was dead now. The blood, no longer pumping through the fish’s body, had begun to pool in its belly. The cream-colored underside was splotched with maroon. He laid the stringer on the rock, away from the water, and a few of the fish contorted electrically into C-shapes.

He brushed the rock with the flat of his hand, sending pebbles and crusted lichen and bits of moss into the creek. From his backpack, he took his knife and a Ziploc still half-filled with homemade trail mix. He opened the bag, ate a last handful, and dumped the rest into the water. Then he shoved the empty Ziploc into his shirt pocket. When he was a boy, his father taught him how to clean fish and he saw his father’s bony fingers and the rusted blade and he heard his father’s steel voice. “Stick it behind the gill. Clear through. Slice along the backbone. You do it.”

He slid the first fish off the stringer and laid it in front of him with the spine away and thumbed up the pectoral fin so it pointed to the sky. He sat the blade against the fish behind the gill plate and when the knife would not break the skin, he pressed harder and sawed, but it still would not cut and the fish’s glinting scales came off on his hands. He sat up and ran the pad of his thumb across the blade. It was certainly sharp enough. He grabbed the fish again and jammed the knife into its body, and a red flow drained from the cut down the gentle slope of the rock and dribbled into the creek.

Each fillet he put into the Ziploc, and he tossed the heads and guts and spines and tails into the brush. Blowflies buzzed all around in quick arcs. When he was finished, he ladled up water with his hands and washed the rock. He squeezed the air from the bulging Ziploc and sealed it and, finding the deepest spot in the eddy, lowered the meat into the water and pinned it to the creek bed with a rock. It wasn’t as cold as a refrigerator down there, but it would do until he could land his last fish. Then he would fillet it, too, and hike out with the Ziploc buried deeply in his backpack. At the gas station, at the turn off to the access road, he would buy a small Styrofoam cooler and ice for the fish and when he got home, he would cook them for dinner and serve them with green beans.

His father would complain, his voice now raw-throated, and after dinner the old man would beg his grandson to find him cigarettes and whiskey. The boy—brand new to seventh grade—would absorb the old man’s words. How much could the expanding mind of an adolescent, this adolescent, his adolescent, take from an old man they both used to love? The boy would go to his room and shut the door, and the old man would fall asleep in his wheelchair in front of flashing infomercials. Then, he would wheel the old man to the den where they’d set up the home hospital bed and he’d lift him, light as a fawn, a bird, a fish, a leaf and undress him and wipe him and clean him and fix a diaper between his legs. He’d lay a hand on the old man’s forehead where the skin was thin as a bat’s wing and perpetually damp with cold sweat. Afterward, he would stumble back to the kitchen table and fall asleep, totally spent. At three in the morning, he would jolt awake with the feeling that something had snapped his bait, that his line was whizzing away, that he’d better start reeling right now if he hoped to land whatever it was that pumped away from him through the dark and moving water.

Paul Luikart is the author of the short story collections Animal Heart (Hyperborea Publishing, 2016), Brief Instructions (Ghostbird Press, 2017), Metropolia (Ghostbird Press, 2021), and The Museum of Heartache (Pski’s Porch Publishing, 2021.) He serves as an adjunct professor of creative writing at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Georgia. He and his family live in Chattanooga, Tennessee.