Stories: All-New Tales

“Now I wasn’t always a catch-and release fisherman,” he said. “Way I saw it back in the day, why would a man go to all the trouble of catching a fish and then just throw it back? Way it looked to me, you catch something, you kill it. You kill something, you eat it. Pretty clear cut, wouldn’t you say?”

Wouldn’t you say? But she wouldn’t say anything, couldn’t say anything, not with the duct tape over her mouth. He saw, though, that she’d given up the pretense of unconsciousness. Her eyes were open now, although he couldn’t see what expression they may have held.

“What happened,” he said, “is I lost the taste for it. The killing and all. Most people, they think of fishing, and they somehow manage not to think about killing. They seem to think the fish comes out of the water, gulps for air a couple of times, and then obligingly gives up the ghost. Maybe he flops around a little first, but that’s all there is to it. But, see, it’s not like that. A fish can live longer out of water than you’d think. What you have to do, you gaff it. Hit it in the head with a club. It’s quick and easy, but you can’t get around the fact that you’re killing it.”

He went on, telling her how you were spared the chore of killing when you released your catch. And the other unpleasant chores, the gutting, the scaling, the disposal of offal.

He turned from a blacktop road to a dirt road. He hadn’t been down this road in quite a while, but it was as he remembered it, a quiet path through the woods that led to a spot he’d always liked. He quit talking now, letting her think about what he’d said, letting her figure out what to make of it, and he didn’t speak again until he’d parked the car in a copse of trees, where it couldn’t be seen from the road.

“I have to tell you,” he said, unfastening her seat belt, wrestling her out of the car. “I enjoy life a lot more as a catch-and-release fisherman. It’s got all the pleasure of fishing without the downside, you know?”

He arranged her on the ground on her back. He went back for a tire iron, and smashed both her kneecaps before untaping her ankles, but left the tape on her wrists and across her mouth.

He cut her clothing off her. Then he took off his own clothes and folded them neatly. Adam and Eve in the garden, he thought. Naked and unashamed. Lord, we finished all night and caught nothing.

He fell on her.

BACK HOME, HE LOADED his clothes into the washing machine, then drew a bath for himself. But he didn’t get into the tub right away. He had her scent on him, and found himself in no hurry to wash it off. Better to be able to breathe it in while he relived the experience, all of it, from the first sight of her in the supermarket to the snapped-twig sound of her neck when he broke it.

And he remembered as well the first time he’d departed from the catch-and-release pattern. It had been less impulsive that time, he’d thought long and hard about it, and when the right girl turned up—young, blond, a cheerleader type, with a turned-up nose and a beauty mark on one cheek—when she turned up, he was ready.

Afterward he’d been upset with himself. Was he regressing? Had he been untrue to the code he’d adopted? But it hadn’t taken him long to get past those thoughts, and this time he felt nothing but calm satisfaction.

He was still a catch-and-release fisherman. He probably always would be. But, for God’s sake, that didn’t make him a vegetarian, did it?

Hell, no. A man still had to have a square meal now and then.

POLKA DOTS AND MOONBEAMS

Jeffrey Ford

HE CAME FOR HER AT SEVEN in the Belvedere convertible, top down, emerald green, with those fins in the back, jutting up like goalposts. From her third-floor apartment window, she saw him pull to the curb out front.

“Hey, Dex,” she called, “where’d you get the submarine?”

He tilted back his homburg and looked up. “All hands on deck, baby,” he said, patting the white leather seat.

“Give me a minute,” she said, laughed, and then blew him a kiss. She walked across the blue braided rug of the parlor and into the small bathroom with the water-stained ceiling and cracked plaster. Standing before the mirror, she leaned in close to check her makeup—enough rouge and powder to repair the walls. Her eye shadow was peacock blue, her mascara indigo. She gave her girdle a quick adjustment through her dress, then smoothed the material and stepped back to take it all in. Wrapped in strapless black, with a design of small white polka dots, like stars in a perfect universe, she turned in profile and inhaled. “Good Christ,” she said and exhaled. Passing through the kitchenette, she lifted a silver flask from the scarred tabletop and shoved it into her handbag.