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by Samuel Milligan

It’s a bad day to be a fish on a ledge under Lake Sewell or an empty gas tank or a friend without a plan. I just found my old gloves, a coupon for free hamburger at Walmart, and twenty bucks. That puts me on the phone, the wall phone in the kitchen the color of softened butter, rallying the troops. Now I’m standing at the kitchen window with eggs frying and the smell of onions caramelizing hanging in the air like sweet smoke, like I’m going to have to keep the doors and windows closed forever just to keep it in. I’ll let the smell of onions in oil, just hot enough so they turn slippery and translucent and a little brown at the edges, soak into everything in my folks’ old house. The blue couch, the yellow walls, the mantelpiece covered in framed photos and statues of parakeets, the brown shag carpet they never got around to getting rid of, the boxes of my stuff stacked in the living room, my grandmother’s handmade kitchen towels that Mom never brought herself to use. It’ll be just me in this old house, me and the smell of onions, and maybe a little garlic. How beautiful it all is!

Roy and Mitchell are honking the horn in the truck out front but I don’t hurry. I’ve got eggs frying for them too, and I’ve got paper plates, and I don’t ride bitch, I ride in the back with the jigging rods, the tip-ups, the auger, the grill, the charcoal, and the winter air licking my eartips. Roy and Mitchell are old friends. Before I moved away, which was before I moved back earlier this year, we hunted turkey and fished and played basketball and swam and did all the other things kids with happy childhoods do. We sat in the margin woods on the east side of Mr. Hamilton’s farm – it’s a small town, so ask permission, my parents always told me – and waited for a rafter or a lone bird to flit and run across the field. Roy couldn’t hit a train with a beachball, but Mitchell always somehow snapped off just enough skull with his shot that the turkey would keep running a few yards after. Sometimes long enough that we all three swore and cracked our guns and punched ourselves in the kneecaps, saying: Damn! We just sat there all morning waiting for them! And then someone’d point over into the field, where the morning sun was just pushing the grey away, and we’d all watch together as the biggest bird of the group flopped dead to the ground, and we’d all know it was Mitchell’s.

Roy is driving. Mitchell slides the back window open and lays a finger on my shoulder. He yells over the wind. “You alright back there?” he asks.

“Peachy!” I scream.

“What?”

“Excellent!” I yell.

Mitchell slides the back window closed again. He and Roy are talking, something I can’t hear, and Mitchell gives me a thumbs up through the window.

“I’m great!” I shout and give a thumbs up. My biggest smile.

***

Roy eases the truck into a snowbank just before the dam bridge that controls the lake. In the summer, someone opens it up and water flows freely downstream and the fish can wriggle themselves to death trying to get to higher ground. Alewives, eels, blueback herring. Every once in a while a salmon comes by and fifteen thousand people want to come gawk at it, ask it questions – why it’s here? – count its eggs, all that. The fact of the matter is that the salmon will probably die alone, misguided in returning in the first place. I wonder if he gets back to his own spawning ground and sees it empty of all that he was going back for. I wonder if the salmon can regret his return.

Roy and Mitchell are arguing about how thick the ice is and whether they can get the truck out to the middle, where the fish sleep on underwater steppes eroded out of the lake’s bedrock. Already we can see hutches out on the ice.

“That doesn’t mean it’s thick enough for a truck,” says Mitchell.

Roy’s got the advantage here – it’s his motor vehicle. Neither of them asks me what I think. I haven’t been here in too long. I’d just be speculating. Mitchell looks out at the lake, back at the truck, out at the lake, back at the truck. I fold the grill up, cracking every cold latch into place so it doesn’t shake itself apart when we walk out. Or drive out. The eggs are long gone, slurped greasily down before we even got to the highway. I throw the hamburger, a big plastic-wrapped hunk of it, into the snowbank. It’s followed by buns. Mitchell looks over at me and bites his lip.

“You got yolk in your beard,” I say.

“Let’s test it,” he announces.

I take one of the augers and drill test holes on our walk. I measure the depth with a forearm thrust into the slick blue-white void. It is hard to judge the depth of an auger hole and I end up soaking my sleeve to the elbow. Roy and Mitchell walk alongside me and debate the merits and demerits of bringing the truck out.

“You want at least fifteen inches of ice,” says Mitchell.

“Twelve does us fine,” says Roy.

“You want to put your truck through? Whole lot more of a headache than just carrying the shit a few hundred yards we’ve already walked.”

“We might have fifteen anyway.”

“We don’t have fifteen. His arm’s wet.”

“Say, buddy,” Roy says and taps my shoulder with a gloved hand. I’m bent over the auger, twisting, stuck. The slushy shavings aren’t spitting out in all directions the way they should and I wonder if I’ve hit a rock. “How long is your forearm would you say?”

In the middle of the lake rests a mound of rocks and driftwood, a living pine tree, and a shack cabin with a porch swing. Signs of a different life in a different season. When we reach the island, Roy pisses on the corner of the structure. Vapor rises as he shuffles away. The ledges near the island are full of metalskulled green pike, fish with the shape and smarts of a gag champagne bottle, and we walk above them. A clouded sky of bubbly ice punctured at irregular intervals. Dark shapes moving in the heavens, descending offerings of shiny bobbling distractions. The thrill of the worm in midwinter, though some companions are lost forever. Extra space on the ledge.

“Well it’s good enough here, sure,” Mitchell is saying. “But you got to make it through the thin to get to the thick. Doesn’t matter how—”

He’s interrupted by a two-seat plane flinging itself over the tree line with the guttural roar of small engines. The plane turns three circles like a cat on a cushion and lands.

“I’m getting the truck out here,” says Roy, and he laughs.

***

Somehow, we know the gentleman in the plane. It’s Mike Luepke; he owned the bowling alley outside Auburn when we were kids. They kept the shoes fresh and the nacho cheese hot and everything smelled like cigarettes. It was the kind of place fathers took their kids to point at strangers and say: Don’t be like that, kiddo.

We drive out in the truck. While Roy and Mitchell auger our real-deal fishing holes, I set the grill up, the charcoal tucked inside, a flute of newspaper as firestarter. When our lines are set, there’s nothing to do but wait for an orange flag to spring and resist our natural impatience. It is cold, and we kick rocks that skitter like waterbugs across the almost metallic surface of the lake. It’s rained recently and the ice is clear of snow.

When we all three wander over to the plane, Luepke is sitting in a lawn chair with three lines set in a skinny triangle around the reach of the aircraft. He’s reading a book with winter gloves and I hear him scraping the pages over the sound of our boots on the ice.

“Why’s that hole set way over there?” Mitchell asks. 

He and Roy seem to know Luepke as adults, not just as a memorable character of adolescence. They’re past hellos in their relationship. Mitchell points to a yellow-flagged tip-up a ways off. Luepke’s other two lines are set maybe thirty feet from each other. I wonder if I could slide the distance on my belly with a running start.

“In case there’s no ledge under me, no fish. Basically just in case I royally screwed up with these two,” says Luepke. He tries to smile into the sun and turns his eyes on me. “You’re Colleen’s kid, yeah? Back for –” He traces a portal in the air with his little finger. “You know,” he says finally.

“Yeah, Colleen and Davy,” I say. “I moved back just about three months ago. Good to be home, you know? Back in the swing of things. Like a hand in an old glove.”

“Of course,” says Luepke. “I heard they did it up nice for them.”

I breathe a clod of white air back at him.

“Oh shit!” Roy squeals. He points back at our setup. An orange flag stands up and wiggles, blown side to side by the curling eddies of cool air that rush along the ice. Then another orange flag spits up out of the auger hole and the three of us are running, galloping, slipping across the ice away from Luepke. Roy and Mitchell to one, me to the other. I slide to a stop, my heel and hip and ass arresting my momentum just before my boot toe would have dipped into the open lake. I yank out a pike, toothy and thrashing, pulling the line out of the lake hand over hand. There is no dramatic struggle, no push and pull, no overcoming of the elements, no nothing. The fish is in the lake and then the fish is on top of the lake and I let it quiver while I reset the tip-up. I wonder if the pike knows what happened. I wonder if he’s tried and failed to breathe air before, if this is a new sensation. The pike is a solid green triangle. Water hisses quietly into steam off the edges of his flesh. In the sunlight, his eyes are burnt golden orbs of glitter and char pupiled by oblong black pebbles. They don’t change at all as Roy puts a knife behind the pike’s brain. The body heaves then settles into stillness. Across the lake, Luepke is back in his folding chair.

“Anything worth killing?” Luepke calls.

***

We stick the pike in a cairn of chipped ice for safekeeping. The day lolls open like a dog’s mouth. There is a fullness in the air. There is always something to do, a new hole to auger, a new rock to throw across the naked ice. I tend the grill and keep the charcoal smoldering. The sun saunters through cloud, periodically drifting through blueness to check on Mitchell and Roy and me. We are fine. We are where we are supposed to be and, for all the sun knows, since we drove here ourselves, where we want to be. It is easy to try and picture ourselves as younger, as if no time has passed, but we are all full of holes and cracks and fault lines. Puddles appear on the surface and press down heavier than they should. When the wind stops and there are no engines revving in the white distance, I hear the lake shifting under our feet. The ice settling, the unfrozen deep lapping and pushing and flowing where it can. Eventually, the stuff under our feet will melt back and lose its solidity. There’s no changing the seasons.

Roy is talking over with Luepke, two indistinguishable smudges in the pre-dusk light. Mitchell and I pack up the car. The fire is out. We have one tip-up, the one closest to the island shack, still set. There have been no fish since the first one, just talk and the grill. I dump the ashes onto the ice and they melt a shallow dip into the surface. It is good to think that once we are gone, someone would be able to trace our day. To know that we were here together. An auger hole, a rectangle of darkened water.

“You good?” asks Mitchell. 

We each take a tip-up, winding the line back into the spool. Orderly and clean.

“Of course,” I tell him.

“Must be quiet living you’re doing.”

“Getting out on the lake helps. Seeing you two, too.” I look away. Back at my parents’ place, onion skin and eggshells sit in the garbage disposal. The skillet on the stove is sticky with old butter and ringed in flakes of burnt eggwhite. “We should do this again sometime.” 

“For sure.”

“You got anything going on tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow? I mean…let’s do sometime. Not all my time’s free, that’s for sure. You got the twins needing to go back to school, and Ellie’s doing the big push for all the summer projects to be ready to launch. You know they’re planting these banks of oysters over in the bay?” Mitchell rubs his mouth. He’s thinking through his words and I busy myself with the tip-up pinned between my ankles like leg irons. There’s nothing worse than being looked at by the thing you’re pitying. 

“So yeah,” he says. “You’ll have some time for yourself. You know, we got a family Google Calendar now? So I’ll be at work and I’ll get the little email notification like ‘Invitation: Ellie Dentist Appointment Mitchell School Pickup’ and it’s for, no joke, next October. And I have to accept it so Ellie gets the notification saying yeah your husband’s going to pick the kids up from school one afternoon ten months from now. And some days I swear I’m home from work and then Ellie’s picking the kids up and then I’m driving them out. I told you, they’re doing this oyster thing in the spring, they did it last year too, before you were back up here, but they get to plan it out with a guy at the Bay Trust. And they’ll help pick the spots and then this guy has a friend with a boat and a friend that runs a junkyard outside of Yarmouth proper and they get together and tow a jalopy down to the shoreline and the boat hooks into it and yanks it out a little distance and they seed it with oysters. Because oysters’ll clean the water up, filter feeding, all that. But they need something big and dead and solid to hold onto or they can’t get re-established.” He finishes winding his tip-up line. “It’s just a lot to do with time that’s not your own.” 

“Well, I’ve got no one else to give the time,” I say quietly. Through another pair of lips, like someone else is speaking for me.

“Well, it’s a foot in heaven and hell at the same time then,” says Mitchell. 

When Roy returns, we wind up the last tip-up and load the truck. I ride in the front this time. Mitchell sits in the truck bed, elbows on his knees, like he’s catching his breath.

“Watch this,” Roy tells me, and the truck lurches shoreward wildly, fast and fishtailing. He watches Mitchell getting thrown back and forth. Roy laughs the whole time. I keep my eyes fixed on the rearview mirror. The sunset is perfectly framed, almost still, as the truck flounders, Roy running his hands over the wheel. Luepke’s plane passes through my eyes as a silhouette, a tiny, dark pill on the red tongue of the sun. If I don’t look at anything but the mirror, I can’t tell if the sun is coming up or going down. If I keep my eyes fixed there, there’s no clue which way we’re moving.

“Goddamn it,” Roy says. “We forgot to take the fucking fish!”

***

Sam Milligan (he / him) writes when he isn't playing pickup basketball or fishing his cat out the kitchen sink. He lives in Washington, DC, where he is getting progressively worse at parallel parking. His work has appeared in Rejection Letters, Roi Fainéant, Many Nice Donkeys, MidLvl Mag, and elsewhere. He is @sawmilligan on Twitter.