Velociworld

BAD PROSE 401

God this is bad stuff. I wrote it in my early twenties, and it drips with Heavy Influence. The Herb Faulkner, or something. A snippet from a novella about drug smuggling and redemption in the South, which I share with you because I am beyond the embarrassment of the thing, and can laugh now. The original work was called, alternately, Ray's Playhouse and the Bacchus of Sandfly, depending on the whack mag I was submitting it to:

"Do you remember the last shark hunt?" They were reminescing.
"I do, said Russo. "The last one."
"Likely to be the last one ever," Bayer averred. "It was more than a hunt. More even than a last hunt. I don't know about you others, but that long blistering day that seemed to last forever has become more than a faded memory to me. Somewhere that afternoon we crossed the Equator, so to speak. It was a rite of passage. That illative moment when you realize you can no longer go back to the way it was before even if you wished to, because the line was crossed before you, any of us, realized it."
"It was Van," Russo said. "It was his fault."
"No. No fault to be laid on any one of us, least of all that asshole. It just happened."

It was a full moon wen we left. Still high enough to see the markers without the running lights. We had sardines and deviled eggs and bourbon for breakfast. You and me and Van and Rabago. We cut through Runaway Negro Creek and were at Hell's Gate by sunrise. By eleven o'clock we were twenty miles out, knifing through the ocean swells in Rabago's dope boat like Visigoths with swollen groins. And when we hit the Gulf Stream we were ready. You and I rigged the lines while Van ladled chum and Rabago got his bearings, cutting the swells at the perfect angle and watching the birds and currents for the prey with his mariner's eye. I remember the chum so vividly. A potent, stinking pile of guts he had fetched from the slaughterhouse. He ladled with his hand, and when he thought we weren't looking licked his fingers.

And then the mackerel hit and we laughed and cried "Further!" and headed out to the banks, you and I taking turns shooting each other's macks as we reeled them in, and not at trolling speed either but full tilt, and Rabago looking on in disgust. "Where's Van?" somebody asked. Down below, said another, with the trim. And it's a train? you asked and Rabago said we came to hunt shark and we're here now and I said nothing. We looked through the plasticine windows of the prow and there was Van, locked in love, ass-up, and plenty of noise and we became embarrassed and Rabago came down from the tuna tower and said to Hell with you both we came to fish and I said yes we did and you said yes we did and we left to catch shark me ladling the chum now.

Around three we heard the screams. You had that big bastard lemon on the line and I was readying the gaff. Rabago came down the stairs soundlesly, buttoning his frayed madras shirt, and you said fuck the shit, let him drag, and the sun was so hot and beautiful, scorching my bare back already burned, and Rabago burst the door open and we gaped.

She lay wraithlike, lacerated and tainted, bound to the bunk by a span of anchor line. Van Hedges held the object in his hand. He turned and proffered it. "Your turn." And then Rabago had hit him once, a coldcocking blow, and we untied her and poured bourbon on the wounds to cleanse them, her screaming, Rabago cursing, and the lemon still bouncing and slapping the surface, a degraded sacrificial beast.

See what I mean? If you read too many Southern writers as a youngster you will invariably drift into rites of passage, Christ allusions, degradation of women, drinking, and, above all else, fishin'!

I threw that old manual Royal typewriter away years ago. It's time to let this story go, too.

Posted by Kim Crawford at November 17, 2003 7:56 PM