The Secret Weapon
Hot, hot
summertime. Heat indexes had not yet been invented. People knew it was hot by
the old- fashioned method: You stuck your arm elbow-deep into the icy water of
the pop box down at the local gas station and fished around in there until you
found the coldest Nehi grape imaginable. You knew then, by comparison, what
“real hot” was.
Moe owned what were
then novel fishing “boats”, a couple of canvas covered float tubes. The devices
were perfect for fishing the tight little farm ponds of Seminole County. Throw
‘em in the back of the truck, and let’s go.
You got wet fishing
in them, way over your waist, but it was hot, remember, and nobody minded
playing the Nehi grape in much bigger, weedy, snaky, pop box.
Gimme’ some more of
that. Watch out for that snake. Is he headed our way?
We couldn’t have
bought a bass that day with a fistful of twenty-dollar bills. The sun was going
down, cherry red in the haze. The moon was already up, white as radium, high
over the east side of the pond. The bats were out, flickering black apostrophes
in a sky gone lavender. I swear I could smell bass, even if I couldn’t catch
one.
“Okay, that’s it,”
Moe said. “I’m goin’ to the secret weapon,” which was news to me. I had no idea
what “The Secret Weapon” was. Not only had I never seen it on our few fishing
trips together, I’d never even heard him mention it.
Every man has a
secret weapon, right? I was too young then to know that. Now I look for them
before they’re even pulled out.
Moe’s secret weapon
was a Heddon Baby Lucky Thirteen, wooden, and in his tacklebox who knows how
long and from what era. Originally, as I understood it, the Lucky Thirteen was
intended (growing up in the 1950’s I had never had enough money to own one, but
had seen them) as a topwater bait. Moe fished his like a crankbait, and caught
about a two-pound bass that evening on what I recall to have been his third
cast.
Moe snapped the
fish, our only one, on his chain stringer, and we started loading gear into the
back of his truck parked right there by the bank of the pond. Casually, as if
out of nothing other than heat-charged air, he had a question for me. It wasn’t
dark enough for flashlights, but it was getting there.
“Conrad, what’s
your plans?”
“ ‘Bout what?”
“Well, your
future.”
“I think I’m going
to be an English teacher.”
“I hated English,”
he said.
“Lot’s of people
do. Not many call it their favorite.”
“I got in trouble my
sophomore year in high school. That’d be about 1935. My teacher, Lucy B.
Sitton, had me stand in class and give the first person singular pronoun; you
know, he, she and it. It didn’t come out right. I ran it by her too fast.
Everybody laughed but her. I was on the way to the principal’s office in less
than thirty seconds.”
“She ‘larn’t’ you,
right?”
“Oh, yes. To her
credit, she taught me stuff she wouldn’t have guessed at. Some of it I still
remember:
‘So live, that when thy summons comes to join
The innumerable caravan, which moves
To that mysterious
realm where each shall take
His chamber in the
silent halls of death,
Thou go not, like
the quarry slave at night,
Scourged to his
dungeon, but, sustained and soothed
By an unfaltering
trust, approach thy grave,
Like one who wraps
the drapery of his couch
About him, and lies
down to pleasant dreams.’ “
“Moe, you still
remember that?”
“Yep.
‘Thanatopsis’. William Cullen Bryant. If ol’ Lucy B. could see me now. I had to
stand in front of the class and say it, or I woulda’ flunked ‘cause of the
other stuff.”
“Yes,” I remember
saying, “if she could only see you now. You got pond weed all over ya’, and
you’re standin’ here quotin’ poetry you learned... well, a long time ago.”
Yes, it was a
secret weapon. Moe’s memory, I mean. Not the Lucky Thirteen. You shoulda’ been
around to play him in a game of Hearts. He loved that card game.
He was a card
counter. What he could do with cards and numbers is illegal in Vegas.
He knew what
everybody else’s cards were practically before they did, where the “old lady”
was and how to get it. If you play Hearts you know the significance of that
last.
He would start
laughing just before he pounced. He loved the game. He just didn’t care much
for pronouns.
©
2016 and 2022 Conrad M. Vollertsen
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