Fishing with Father

by Andrew Bertaina

Chris Boese

Once, when father and I were both on the cusp of middle age, he and I went fishing together in the foothills a few miles from his apartment. This was years after the invention of time travel, when the technology had become so ubiquitous even people like me could afford it. Elon Musk had already seen the birth of Christ and Jose Canseco at peak steroid use and related biceps. What was left now, were just the scraps for sad sacks like me.

As we drove towards the low green hills father listened to country on an oldies station, lost dogs, lost houses, lost wives. I looked at a line of purple stratus clouds running in lines across the trout’s belly of sky. Father and I didn’t talk much, except of sports, the way his baseball team was fading in the pennant race.

They’ve got to get a better pen, he said.

Ball point or gel?

We drove up through the foothills, live oaks spotting them in sparse arrays, forlorn as sheep forgotten by God. Vultures swung in lazy arcs on the horizon, scanning the roads for the remains of possum, deer, and perhaps my childhood.

The radio was mostly static now.

Do you mind turning it off? I asked.

What? He answered, my voice drowned out by his window, his static, his imperviousness to me.

I said can we turn it off? I think the guy has given up on his wife, his dog, and the fishing trip, and is just listening to white noise to try and sleep.

And though he didn’t listen I felt myself beginning to forgive my father, who had the decency to develop into a local conservationist who donated to causes that kept horses from being slaughtered, chickens from being caged, wetlands preserved, when so many men his age had become conspiracy theorists and proponents of a rugged individualism that blinkered reality.

I wonder what he saw in me. If he recognized beneath the crow’s feet, the slightly protruding belly, the son he’d left behind ages ago but for the occasional holiday. I wondered if I’d met him at the right time, chosen the moment that would allow us to connect as we never had before his death.

But you can spend your whole life wondering such things, chasing after lost marriages, lost houses, lost dogs, lost loves, distant rainbows, wondering if this was the thing that would bring you peace. Some people like me are stupid enough to keep chasing it, even through time.

The road curved through green fields, climbed up near a grove of trees so tall they formed their own little ecosystem of dark and quiet, like a really miserable couple fighting silently at dinner in public.

Why are you going to see him? She’d asked, lying on her back, light pooling on her stomach, showing the tiny hairs, the softness of her skin.

Is it because we’re unhappy? You can’t fix it you know? He’s dead.

Lucky guy.

Why would you say that?

Say what?

The thing about dying.

Were you not planning on it at some point too?

Perhaps she was right. Maybe I was gallivanting through time to get away from her, from the mess I’d created and had no intention of cleaning up. And now I was boarding one of those boats people used to, sailing across the Atlantic and the life they’d made towards the Northwest Passage.

Father parked the car in the lot, and we walked up the thin dusty trail to the river. When I was a child, father had never taken me fishing, but here we both were, making up lost time together quietly, like sad men in stories who couldn’t believe what they’d made of their lives. The collection of mistakes that hung at the edge of otherwise glittering dreams of men.

I wanted beer or whiskey or maybe my father to cradle my head in his arms, rock me like a child. I wondered if I should ask him about the kids or about my failing relationship, get the sort of fatherly advice I’d seen on television shows like Cosby before it all went to shit.

Throw the lure in there, he said, gesturing to a pool of water shrouded in the embrace of a willow, branches trailing through the water as elongated fingers.

I’d known my father at this age, and yet, he looked impossibly young, and I wondered if they’d botched the job, sent me into some cheap multi-verse where father was younger, happier, with a fuller head of hair and an appreciation for the value of good left-handed middle relief in winning the pennant.

What do you say to your father? Do you ask him if it was all a mistake? All of it, you, his mother, wonder if he too kept imagining another life, but he was brave enough to take it?

The clouds whirled overhead now, forming in the shape of a small dog slowly losing the top of its head. Or maybe there was nothing there at all, just clouds and a man standing by a stream searching for meaning.

The thing that’s always bothered me about Icarus, I say, trying to strike up conversation.

Remind me who Icarus is? When did we meet him?

Small bar, just south of La Jolla. Incredible pair of wings.

Father isn’t listening now or maybe isn’t father, just some dull recreation that I still want to love me. Maybe time is a dream. He tosses his lure into the water, squinting against the light.

He’s reflected back to me, doubled by the water, still four years away from leaving mother, three years away from my birth. A set of blackbirds pinwheel through the sky, doing those incandescent bird shapes that are artistic as Monet. The blackbirds of Giverny.

Time starts to pour threw me now as it grows short. The seasons starting to fly past, the years too, branches of trees suddenly barren and rocking in the wind, then turning various shades of green. At my feet, fish scales glitter on river’s bottom, the banks swollen, then suddenly shift into bones as the river runs dry, peters out into mere sand, time unstable as memory.

Father stoops to pick up his rod, the old man I know today, and as he rises from his slow bend, I see the cow lick and bulbous nose still there, perched on his nine-year-old face. He looks back at me, forlorn as the sheep, as the tree, as a child who’s father has left him for another life.

I know I’ll need to go back soon, travel those winding roads of time until I arrive in that bedroom where time is still moving forward, where she’s waiting still on a coward to end things.

He looks up at me, my father as a child, warm brown eyes, slightly scared, time folding through us both as water bends round a stone. I lean down, using the kindest voice possible, the warm voice I use with my own children on the rare weekends I see them. I put a hand on his frail shoulder.

It’ll be all right, buddy, I say. Just you wait and see. It’ll be all right.

It wouldn’t be of course. His father would still die young, his marriages would fail, and his children would resent him, and he’d die of a heart attack at the age of seventy-four, alone for two days with the heat.

But I loved being there for him in that moment, amongst the clicking insects and the distant croak of frogs, offering him the comfort he’d never given to me.

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Andrew Bertaina’s short story collection One Person Away From You (2021) won the Moon City Press Fiction Award (2020). His work has appeared in The Threepenny Review, Witness Magazine, The Normal School, Open bar at Tin House, and The Best American Poetry. He has an MFA from American University in Washington, DC. His work is available at andrewbertaina.com