How to Fish
by Andrew Careaga
Author's Note: I would describe "How to Fish" as a manual for attempting to hang on to boyhood friendships amid the choppy waters of transition to adulthood.
Jerry has this john boat, an eighteen-footer. It’s a beat-up old thing, long and narrow and a little lopsided, dull aluminum body pocked with dents and scratched to a mossy black on the bottom from years of running over big rocks, gravel bars, submerged branches and stumps. He’s had it since our high school days, a hand-me-down from his dad, and I don’t know why he doesn’t buy a newer model. It’s not like he can’t afford to. But he seems to love the boat like a favorite old family mutt that refuses to die, and he loves to put it out on the water. He’ll fish all day in it, leaned back, broiling himself to a tender pink that almost matches the faded red St. Louis Cardinals cap pulled forward to shade his eyes. He’ll have one hand on the trolling motor, the other on his fishing rod, and a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon in a koozie between his legs. Most Saturdays, I’ll join him, and we’ll cast our lines and reel them in, cast and reel, a slow, lazy motion of the wrists, and suck down PBRs while we grouse about our first wives.
Jerry and I became friends in high school, when we played football together. I was the starting quarterback on the junior varsity team and Jerry was my center. He was the blocker, a broad-shouldered bulldozer, the man I could count on to clear me a path when I ran with the ball. As the quarterback, and not bad looking, I was Jerry’s ticket to popularity. As the kid from a family with money, Jerry was my ticket to ride. He drove his dad’s Chevy Blazer to parties and the drive-in. When we had dates, Jerry and his girl would be in front. I would be in the back seat with mine, and we’d pass a bottle of Canadian Mist around and chase the shots with beer while Smoky and the Bandit played on the enormous screen. Jerry and I would try like hell to get our dates to put out. Sometimes we got lucky, but not often. Most of the girls we dated were honorable and semi-popular, with reputations to uphold. Some nights, when we had no dates, we went trolling for them at the concession stand. One night Jerry found this girl from a smaller town one county over. She wasn’t bad looking—dark hair, tan, maybe with some Indian or Mexican blood in her, but her eyes were weird, placed a little too far apart, like they were carelessly slapped onto her face. Jerry bought her a bucket of buttery popcorn and a Coke and coaxed her back to the Blazer, where he poured Canadian Mist into her soda. As his hands and lips worked on her, he whispered that he’d take her to the homecoming dance in the fall. “You’ll be my date, baby,” he said. She melted. “Gosh, do you mean it?” she said as Jerry moved in for the kill. “Do you really mean it?”
Jerry was terrible back then. We both were, to be honest.
We parted ways for a while after high school. I went off to college and he stayed behind, taking a job at his father’s brake-lining factory. His father made him vice president in charge of product development or something; it’s a job he still has. He’s supposed to be heading some research project to make asbestos-free brake liners for eighteen-wheelers, but whenever I stop in these days, he’s either roaming the cubicles, flirting with secretaries, the way he’s always done, or in his glass office high above the factory floor, playing computer poker.
We go fishing most Saturdays in the spring and summer. Jerry will pull up to the curb of my house about nine o’clock, and I’ll be out in the yard with Barbara, examining the growth of our maple trees or getting ready to take Barbara’s kids to swimming lessons. Jerry will be in his glistening red Dodge Ram, the junky gray john boat in tow. As the window on the passenger side slides down, he’ll shout, “Hey, college boy, let’s go catch some fish!”
I’ll turn to Barbara, who’ll be shooting daggers at me beneath a furrowed brow, and Jerry will grin to see me torn between my two loves. He knows which one will win.
“Don’t worry, Barbara,” he’ll say. “I won’t corrupt him. Not much.” And he’ll give her a snarky wink.
Barbara will turn toward me and sigh. “Don’t be gone all day,” she’ll say, and I’ll grab my gear out of the garage.
On this Saturday, like most of them, we stop at the liquor store for a case of beer, dump the cans into Jerry’s Coleman cooler, and drive out to Big Sycamore Lake. While we put in there, Jerry starts in on me, telling me I worry too much about what other people think. Meaning, what my wife thinks.
“You’re too much of a family man, college boy,” he says. “Getting to be, anyway. Whatever happened to the man I used to know?”
“I’m still me,” I say, preparing my rod and line, and Jerry lowers his head, moves it back and forth, back and forth, like a pendulum.
“No, college boy, you certainly ain’t.”
We both fall silent, ruminating, hearing nothing but distant blue jays and the plop of our casts into the lake. After a while, Jerry says, “Ain’t nothing biting here,” and switches on the trolling motor to hum us to another spot.
“Want to change lures?” he asks as he bites the rooster tail off his line because it isn’t working and replaces it with a rubbery spinner bait. “I think this’ll do better.”
“I’m fine,” I tell him.
“Naw, you ain’t. You ain’t getting nothing with that rooster tail. Might as well change.”
“Maybe later.”
“Suit yourself,” he says. “I’d change colors, at least, if I were you. Crappies don’t like that yellow.”
“They like yellow just fine,” I say.
“Suit yourself, college boy.”
We troll toward the scattered tree stumps on the south side of the lake, where Jerry thinks the crappie are bound to be, and kill the motor about fifteen feet from the first thickets. The late morning sun is heavy on our backs. We peel off our t-shirts, I dig out another beer, and Jerry begins his regular reminiscence.
“We were a hell of a team, college boy, I’ll tell you what. Till you split us up.”
“I didn’t split us up, Jerry. You’re the one split us up.”
Jerry tosses his head back to suck out the last swallows from his beer. I feel my rod quiver, a fish’s nibble. I reel it in and hold it up by its lip for inspection.
Jerry shakes his head. “My five-year-old’s dick is bigger than that,” he says; “toss it back, and toss me another beer.”
I unhook the fish and let it slide back into the water.
“Everything changed when you met Cindy,” I tell him, tossing him a cold PBR.
“Cindy,” he says, spitting her name out like a curse.
We start picking off crappie then. Jerry flings his catches angrily into the boat, ripping the hooks through their stiff bleeding lips and kissing them between their flat-dead eyes, his kiss of blessing, before tossing them back into the lake. “Come back next year when you’re grown up, boy,” he says. We snag our thumbs on the hooks and wipe the blood on our cutoffs. We feel no pain, anesthetized by the beer.
“Bitch got everything I had, except this boat,” Jerry says as he casts his line toward the craggy tops of dead stumps.
“Good thing she didn’t take this,” I say. “Then where’d we be?”
“Fishing from the bank, I guess.”
“Jerry,” I say, “why do you keep dwelling on her?”
He shakes his head again, the way he has of doing it, his head bowed sadly, almost reverently, bleary eyes hidden by the Cardinals cap. “I don’t know,” he says. “It’s like an ache, you know? A hole in my life. Like that old Police song. Remember that one?”
I nod and cast my line. “Don’t sing it,” I say. My head is light from the beer buzz and the warm sun as it climbs the blue sky toward its zenith.
Jerry pauses and shakes his head again. “To tell you the truth, I don’t know why the hell I keep thinking about her.”
“Well, man, you shouldn’t dwell on it so much,” I say.
“She’s like a presence. Always there. Like a ghost. A shadow.”
“Don’t think about it,” I say.
“I don’t understand it,” he says. “It’s like she’s haunting me.”
He sets his pole down among the pile of empty beer cans on the boat floor, digs out an empty, and starts bending it back and forth, wearing a fold into it until it splits in two.
“She can’t be haunting you if she’s still alive,” I say.
Jerry ignores me, looks down at the boat floor. “I guess I thought she really loved me.”
“Well, she didn’t.”
“Maybe she did,” he says. “Maybe she did once.”
“I don’t think so, Jerry,” I say, emboldened by the alcohol. “Don’t kid yourself. She loved your money. That’s all.”
He stares at me from under the bill of his ball cap, his eyes squinted, as though considering my argument. He picks up his pole and holds it steady over the water, like a divining rod.
“I miss her,” he says. “I miss my son. He ought to be out here with us, fishing with his old man.”
I nod, lips pursed, and say nothing.
“Man,” he says, “what a bitch she was.”
“Whoa!” I shout as my line goes suddenly taut. “I think I got a good one here!”
I pull in a three- or four-pounder, a good-sized catch for crappie.
“Whooey,” I say, yanking the fish into the boat. “What about this one, Jerry?” I show it off, holding it by the line before I drop it.
Jerry stares at the catch, watches it flop on the boat floor among the spent beer cans, glistening in the presence of the sun that bears down on us like a curse.
“Throw it back, college boy,” he says. “Why do we fish, anyway.”
*
A few weeks passed, and no sign of Jerry. No phone call, no drive by the house, nothing. Barbara noticed, of course, but wasn’t upset by his absence since it meant I was spending more time with her doing yard work and taking her kids to swimming lessons. On the fourth Saturday of no Jerry, I had to call him.
“Hey, where’ve you been, dirtbag? Did you find another fishing partner? Are you two-timing me?”
“I got rid of the boat,” Jerry said. His voice was steady and sober, serious, like the voice of a grown-up instead of the man-boy I knew.
“You sold it?”
“Nah, gave it to my nephew. And the trailer and all my fishing gear.”
“Wow. I never thought you’d get rid of that old beater.”
Jerry chuckled. “Well, things change, college boy. People change.”
He said the boat was too connected to his past; it was weighing him down. And although he didn’t say it, I could tell he was also saying I was a part of that past he was trying to leave behind.
A few weeks later, I ran into Jerry at the mall. I was with Barbara and her kids, shopping for clothes for the new school year. Jerry was with Jerry Jr. and his ex, Cindy. He and Cindy were holding hands. He looked content, a quintessential family man. He saw me from the far side of one aisle and nodded.
“Hey, college boy,” he said.
Andrew Careaga is a writer from Rolla, Missouri, whose writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Flash Fiction Magazine, Frazzled Lit, The Argyle, Burial Magazine, Club Plum, MoonLit Getaway, The Orange Rose, Roi Fainéant, and elsewhere. Find him on X/Twitter and Instagram at @andrewcareaga, on BlueSky at @andrewcareaga.bsky.social, and on his website andrewcareaga.com.
by Andrew Careaga
Author's Note: I would describe "How to Fish" as a manual for attempting to hang on to boyhood friendships amid the choppy waters of transition to adulthood.
Jerry has this john boat, an eighteen-footer. It’s a beat-up old thing, long and narrow and a little lopsided, dull aluminum body pocked with dents and scratched to a mossy black on the bottom from years of running over big rocks, gravel bars, submerged branches and stumps. He’s had it since our high school days, a hand-me-down from his dad, and I don’t know why he doesn’t buy a newer model. It’s not like he can’t afford to. But he seems to love the boat like a favorite old family mutt that refuses to die, and he loves to put it out on the water. He’ll fish all day in it, leaned back, broiling himself to a tender pink that almost matches the faded red St. Louis Cardinals cap pulled forward to shade his eyes. He’ll have one hand on the trolling motor, the other on his fishing rod, and a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon in a koozie between his legs. Most Saturdays, I’ll join him, and we’ll cast our lines and reel them in, cast and reel, a slow, lazy motion of the wrists, and suck down PBRs while we grouse about our first wives.
Jerry and I became friends in high school, when we played football together. I was the starting quarterback on the junior varsity team and Jerry was my center. He was the blocker, a broad-shouldered bulldozer, the man I could count on to clear me a path when I ran with the ball. As the quarterback, and not bad looking, I was Jerry’s ticket to popularity. As the kid from a family with money, Jerry was my ticket to ride. He drove his dad’s Chevy Blazer to parties and the drive-in. When we had dates, Jerry and his girl would be in front. I would be in the back seat with mine, and we’d pass a bottle of Canadian Mist around and chase the shots with beer while Smoky and the Bandit played on the enormous screen. Jerry and I would try like hell to get our dates to put out. Sometimes we got lucky, but not often. Most of the girls we dated were honorable and semi-popular, with reputations to uphold. Some nights, when we had no dates, we went trolling for them at the concession stand. One night Jerry found this girl from a smaller town one county over. She wasn’t bad looking—dark hair, tan, maybe with some Indian or Mexican blood in her, but her eyes were weird, placed a little too far apart, like they were carelessly slapped onto her face. Jerry bought her a bucket of buttery popcorn and a Coke and coaxed her back to the Blazer, where he poured Canadian Mist into her soda. As his hands and lips worked on her, he whispered that he’d take her to the homecoming dance in the fall. “You’ll be my date, baby,” he said. She melted. “Gosh, do you mean it?” she said as Jerry moved in for the kill. “Do you really mean it?”
Jerry was terrible back then. We both were, to be honest.
We parted ways for a while after high school. I went off to college and he stayed behind, taking a job at his father’s brake-lining factory. His father made him vice president in charge of product development or something; it’s a job he still has. He’s supposed to be heading some research project to make asbestos-free brake liners for eighteen-wheelers, but whenever I stop in these days, he’s either roaming the cubicles, flirting with secretaries, the way he’s always done, or in his glass office high above the factory floor, playing computer poker.
We go fishing most Saturdays in the spring and summer. Jerry will pull up to the curb of my house about nine o’clock, and I’ll be out in the yard with Barbara, examining the growth of our maple trees or getting ready to take Barbara’s kids to swimming lessons. Jerry will be in his glistening red Dodge Ram, the junky gray john boat in tow. As the window on the passenger side slides down, he’ll shout, “Hey, college boy, let’s go catch some fish!”
I’ll turn to Barbara, who’ll be shooting daggers at me beneath a furrowed brow, and Jerry will grin to see me torn between my two loves. He knows which one will win.
“Don’t worry, Barbara,” he’ll say. “I won’t corrupt him. Not much.” And he’ll give her a snarky wink.
Barbara will turn toward me and sigh. “Don’t be gone all day,” she’ll say, and I’ll grab my gear out of the garage.
On this Saturday, like most of them, we stop at the liquor store for a case of beer, dump the cans into Jerry’s Coleman cooler, and drive out to Big Sycamore Lake. While we put in there, Jerry starts in on me, telling me I worry too much about what other people think. Meaning, what my wife thinks.
“You’re too much of a family man, college boy,” he says. “Getting to be, anyway. Whatever happened to the man I used to know?”
“I’m still me,” I say, preparing my rod and line, and Jerry lowers his head, moves it back and forth, back and forth, like a pendulum.
“No, college boy, you certainly ain’t.”
We both fall silent, ruminating, hearing nothing but distant blue jays and the plop of our casts into the lake. After a while, Jerry says, “Ain’t nothing biting here,” and switches on the trolling motor to hum us to another spot.
“Want to change lures?” he asks as he bites the rooster tail off his line because it isn’t working and replaces it with a rubbery spinner bait. “I think this’ll do better.”
“I’m fine,” I tell him.
“Naw, you ain’t. You ain’t getting nothing with that rooster tail. Might as well change.”
“Maybe later.”
“Suit yourself,” he says. “I’d change colors, at least, if I were you. Crappies don’t like that yellow.”
“They like yellow just fine,” I say.
“Suit yourself, college boy.”
We troll toward the scattered tree stumps on the south side of the lake, where Jerry thinks the crappie are bound to be, and kill the motor about fifteen feet from the first thickets. The late morning sun is heavy on our backs. We peel off our t-shirts, I dig out another beer, and Jerry begins his regular reminiscence.
“We were a hell of a team, college boy, I’ll tell you what. Till you split us up.”
“I didn’t split us up, Jerry. You’re the one split us up.”
Jerry tosses his head back to suck out the last swallows from his beer. I feel my rod quiver, a fish’s nibble. I reel it in and hold it up by its lip for inspection.
Jerry shakes his head. “My five-year-old’s dick is bigger than that,” he says; “toss it back, and toss me another beer.”
I unhook the fish and let it slide back into the water.
“Everything changed when you met Cindy,” I tell him, tossing him a cold PBR.
“Cindy,” he says, spitting her name out like a curse.
We start picking off crappie then. Jerry flings his catches angrily into the boat, ripping the hooks through their stiff bleeding lips and kissing them between their flat-dead eyes, his kiss of blessing, before tossing them back into the lake. “Come back next year when you’re grown up, boy,” he says. We snag our thumbs on the hooks and wipe the blood on our cutoffs. We feel no pain, anesthetized by the beer.
“Bitch got everything I had, except this boat,” Jerry says as he casts his line toward the craggy tops of dead stumps.
“Good thing she didn’t take this,” I say. “Then where’d we be?”
“Fishing from the bank, I guess.”
“Jerry,” I say, “why do you keep dwelling on her?”
He shakes his head again, the way he has of doing it, his head bowed sadly, almost reverently, bleary eyes hidden by the Cardinals cap. “I don’t know,” he says. “It’s like an ache, you know? A hole in my life. Like that old Police song. Remember that one?”
I nod and cast my line. “Don’t sing it,” I say. My head is light from the beer buzz and the warm sun as it climbs the blue sky toward its zenith.
Jerry pauses and shakes his head again. “To tell you the truth, I don’t know why the hell I keep thinking about her.”
“Well, man, you shouldn’t dwell on it so much,” I say.
“She’s like a presence. Always there. Like a ghost. A shadow.”
“Don’t think about it,” I say.
“I don’t understand it,” he says. “It’s like she’s haunting me.”
He sets his pole down among the pile of empty beer cans on the boat floor, digs out an empty, and starts bending it back and forth, wearing a fold into it until it splits in two.
“She can’t be haunting you if she’s still alive,” I say.
Jerry ignores me, looks down at the boat floor. “I guess I thought she really loved me.”
“Well, she didn’t.”
“Maybe she did,” he says. “Maybe she did once.”
“I don’t think so, Jerry,” I say, emboldened by the alcohol. “Don’t kid yourself. She loved your money. That’s all.”
He stares at me from under the bill of his ball cap, his eyes squinted, as though considering my argument. He picks up his pole and holds it steady over the water, like a divining rod.
“I miss her,” he says. “I miss my son. He ought to be out here with us, fishing with his old man.”
I nod, lips pursed, and say nothing.
“Man,” he says, “what a bitch she was.”
“Whoa!” I shout as my line goes suddenly taut. “I think I got a good one here!”
I pull in a three- or four-pounder, a good-sized catch for crappie.
“Whooey,” I say, yanking the fish into the boat. “What about this one, Jerry?” I show it off, holding it by the line before I drop it.
Jerry stares at the catch, watches it flop on the boat floor among the spent beer cans, glistening in the presence of the sun that bears down on us like a curse.
“Throw it back, college boy,” he says. “Why do we fish, anyway.”
*
A few weeks passed, and no sign of Jerry. No phone call, no drive by the house, nothing. Barbara noticed, of course, but wasn’t upset by his absence since it meant I was spending more time with her doing yard work and taking her kids to swimming lessons. On the fourth Saturday of no Jerry, I had to call him.
“Hey, where’ve you been, dirtbag? Did you find another fishing partner? Are you two-timing me?”
“I got rid of the boat,” Jerry said. His voice was steady and sober, serious, like the voice of a grown-up instead of the man-boy I knew.
“You sold it?”
“Nah, gave it to my nephew. And the trailer and all my fishing gear.”
“Wow. I never thought you’d get rid of that old beater.”
Jerry chuckled. “Well, things change, college boy. People change.”
He said the boat was too connected to his past; it was weighing him down. And although he didn’t say it, I could tell he was also saying I was a part of that past he was trying to leave behind.
A few weeks later, I ran into Jerry at the mall. I was with Barbara and her kids, shopping for clothes for the new school year. Jerry was with Jerry Jr. and his ex, Cindy. He and Cindy were holding hands. He looked content, a quintessential family man. He saw me from the far side of one aisle and nodded.
“Hey, college boy,” he said.
Andrew Careaga is a writer from Rolla, Missouri, whose writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Flash Fiction Magazine, Frazzled Lit, The Argyle, Burial Magazine, Club Plum, MoonLit Getaway, The Orange Rose, Roi Fainéant, and elsewhere. Find him on X/Twitter and Instagram at @andrewcareaga, on BlueSky at @andrewcareaga.bsky.social, and on his website andrewcareaga.com.