Pier

When my mother and father and I moved into a little cinderblock house in Oldsmar, Florida, we discovered a couple of fishing poles in the carport junk left behind by the previous tenants. My father lifted one and while practicing a casting motion promised we’d go fishing. This did happen, right at the end of our time there. My father was a horse trainer and we’d come to Florida from Alorton, Illinois. Back in Illinois, his horses had been racing at Cahokia Downs, but he wanted to try for more purse money with them and everyone liked the idea of getting away from Alorton for the winter and possibly forever. However, it didn’t work out. His horses were never close to winning a race in Florida, and, near the end of the meet, he sold them all for coins on the dollar to a trainer leaving for West Virginia. After that, he decided to give up training, though I didn’t know that at the time. We headed back for Alorton, where it only took him a few days to find work at Cargill Grain.

About a week before we were to leave Oldsmar, while he was changing the oil in the Impala, I sat out in the yard watching him. I picked at blades of grass or whatever and after he closed the hood of the car, he wiped his hands on a rub-rag he’d once used at the stables and his eyes started traveling around the neighborhood, going from one house to the next. One of the neighbors had a fenced-in yard with a German Shepard named Fuzzy who barked all day long. We’d gotten used to that. My father turned partway, noticed the two rods propped against a section of the cinderblock wall. He said, in my direction, Hey, how about that fishing we talked about? What do you think? I wasn’t in school and there weren’t any more horses for him to take care of. He usually answered his own questions, that was one of the things about him. You just waited for him to do it. He said, Go in there and see if your mother wants to. My mother was kicked back on the sofa in the little living room, she had a radio playing. She liked Glen Campbell and I remembered her calling the Tampa station once to request “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” by Joan Baez. Maybe she could see in my face that I wanted to go fishing. She said she’d like that, too. And in no time at all, we were driving for the causeway.

The pier we found had a lot covered in chunks of white gravel and there might’ve been a pick-up or two parked on it. As we walked for the bait shop, it felt too hot to be fishing and I knew we wouldn’t catch anything. My father bought hooks and a little cardboard container with a half-dozen live shrimp. We headed out to the far end of the pier, and it felt like we had the ocean to ourselves. He said he knew something about catching bluegills and crappie, but he was telling us these reels were a little different, so we’d need to practice. It took some time, but finally we had two lines going down to the water below. It was quiet out there, that’s another thing I remember. In my mind, I can see the sunlight glittering across the water, can hear the little waves slapping around the pilings. I guess we all had a sinking feeling. Things were not going to go well from here on. Moving to Florida to race horses was something they’d always talked about but he’d only wanted to do it when he felt he had the right ones. That had been this winter.

She was the one who hooked something, and she wanted me to feel it so she switched rods with me, and my father got cross and said the fish would get away but I kept turning the handle of the reel and finally it came up out of the water. It would stay still and then flap furiously. I swung the rod around to get the fish on the deck. In a measured way, my father laid his boot on top of it. A brownish fish, somewhat circular-shaped with a long row of fins that looked like a giant’s eyebrow. The fish was flattish and had both eyes on the same side. My father said something like, Is it deformed? He seemed keyed up; he reached for a section of the line, then he raised the fish doing that, so he could see the underside, which was whitish and eyeless.

He said, There’s something wrong with it. Look! It jerked some more, tried to get free. We ought to put it out of its misery, I recall him saying that. Just throw it back, she said. Just put it back.

He seemed reluctant to work the hook from its mouth, but she kept saying Go on, go on, free it. It made him mad and once the hook was out, he stood, he whirled around, hurled the fish like a discus thrower. The fish flapped in the air, kind of like an injured bird, and I lost sight of it as it fell to the surface of the water. He wiped his hands on the sides of his workpants. Goddamn thing, did it fin me? He flipped his hands so we could see them too. What was wrong with that fish? he said to my mother. The ocean is being poisoned, he said. You’re the one who’s been telling me that, he said, in her direction. What was wrong with that fish? Honey, she said. I don’t know. That poor thing, she said.

 * * *

We’d gone down to Oldsmar in early winter 1970 and returned to Alorton in early spring 1971. My father worked at Cargill and my mother had a host of jobs, including working at a rubber band factory in East St. Louis, as a cashier at a truck stop and at the information desk of the Fairmont City Library Center. As a rule, they didn’t talk much about that winter in Oldsmar. When my father mentioned it, he’d say something to the effect that it wasn’t any kind of life, worrying so much about the result of a horse race, counting on the type of great luck that only came to wealthy people. They didn’t shed a tear when the Cahokia racetrack was torn down in 1980, along with the neighboring Cahokia Drive-In, which had been notorious for showing porno movies. I went to college at Wichita State and earned a business degree. I wound up being a salesman of industrial chemical cleaners and got relocated a few times in order to help my company open new markets. I lived in Des Moines, Louisville, Columbus. I relocated to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania in 2010 and have been there ever since. My parents moved out to Arizona in 2014, to a retirement community. They live in a trailer and have their own car. A couple of years ago, my mother was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s.

Recently, it was just last week in fact, I was sent by my company to a sales seminar in Baltimore and I asked my friend Bailey Monroe if she wanted to come along. Since the start of COVID, she’d been working at home, teaching her classes at Harrisburg Area Community College online. She agreed. It was pretty much a straight shot down I-83 and we arrived there on a Thursday morning. The company put us up at the Tru Hilton at Baltimore Harbor, an easy walk to the convention center. While I attended meetings and presentations on Thursday and Friday, she ran her classes from our hotel room. For dinner, we picked restaurants in nearby Little Italy and then messed around a little in the room when we got back.

On Saturday morning, I met up with a couple of the other salesmen at the Dunkin on Fleet Street. We’d had our vaccinations and the Dunkin didn’t seem to have any requirement for face-coverings. We took a table that looked out to an empty parking lot. We talked a little about the seminar, what we were worried about market-wise, and how far the Delta variant would set everything back. Of course, we didn’t know. And like we joked, it wasn’t as if we knew how to do anything else. I brought Bailey two doughnuts, a jelly-filled and one with chocolate icing, and when I opened the door to our room, I saw that she was sitting up in bed, under the covers, her hair tousled, laptop resting on her knees. I could tell something was up and she said if it was all right with me, she’d rather stay in bed for a little while longer. We had tickets (at $39 per) for the National Aquarium at 11, but I said all right, no problem. I’m not ready for a bunch of obnoxious kids, she said. I said I understood, and I did.

From outside the front entrance of the hotel, I looked toward the blue-green sky and could see the pointed tip of the glass pyramid of the aquarium building. I walked a couple of blocks, crossed over a short pedestrian bridge, and went straight for the ticket office. I wanted to see about a refund for the one we weren’t going to use, even though it said No Refunds right on the back. On the front of the ticket was an octopus against a dark background and the caption said, The giant Pacific octopus has three hearts. I felt like pointing this out to the guy working behind the glass. Anyway, he said there was nothing he could do.

As I approached the entrance, I wanted to get in the right mood for appreciating things. Inside, I stood at the first exhibit, a long rectangular tank holding Chesapeake trout. They hung in the water like something from a painting. Then it was on to Black Tip Reef, where the sea life swam in huge open tanks. There were stingrays, grouper, sea turtles. Dozens of fish varieties, some with Wes Anderson-type names like Pajama Cardinalfish, Magenta Dottyback, Panther Grouper. Then, it was on to Shark Alley. A floor up brought me to the Atlantic Coral Reef exhibit. The pavilions were noisy with human chatter, and I wondered about the silence that fish knew. I read one of the info panels that described the Southern Flounder, and I might’ve smiled when I started to read that, or maybe it was a grimace or a wince. I don’t know. When the flounder came by, there were two of them, perfect specimens, I guessed. Nice-sized, healthy fish. It was like somewhere along the line they’d been folded longways, then flattened out again. The eyes were vertical, like an invention of Picasso. I don’t know how long I stayed in the same spot, but it was for a few minutes at least and it seemed like any number of things were happening to me. But the main thing was that I felt a bit overwhelmed. Before I knew it, more flounder were swimming by.

After I left the exhibit, I went up another floor, where the theme was Surviving Through Adaptation, Living Seashore. There were all these kids standing by the glass at the exhibit that held puffins. They pressed their tiny fingers against the glass. I want to pet one! a kid said. And I smiled at that. A level higher, I tried to get interested in the waterless aquariums that featured colorful, highly poisonous frogs. Every exhibit was crowded, and room was made so that children could stand right at the glass, and everyone was grinning because it was all for them.

When I left the aquarium, it wasn’t even noon. The sunlight was terrific and almost felt like too much. I decided to take a walk along Pratt Street, in the opposite direction of the hotel. Of course, I was thinking of my parents by this time. That memory of us fishing, that just snapped into place, right before me. But I didn’t understand why I felt the way I did.

I aimed west, heading for nowhere in particular. When had I learned that flounder had both eyes on the same side? Sometime after I’d gone fishing that one time with my parents. I couldn’t remember talking with them about it and when I learned about it, I must’ve been old enough to understand some things, anyway. The sun was shining, and I could feel the perspiration on my neck. I hadn’t brought any sunglasses. My parents were farm kids with high school diplomas. After Florida, they went back to Alorton and lived their lives, and I grew up to live mine. I’d come up with a plan, the plan a lot of people came up with. Go to school, get a profession, find someone to marry. I had been married once, for eleven years. Then engaged another time after that. The point was to live in the moment. I understood that I’d have my time to take in the world, to feel the world, and then one day that would be over.

I approached a little park in McKeldin Square. A young couple wearing matching blueberry-colored tracksuits were seated together on the wooden bleachers facing in the direction of the aquarium. A set of empty bleachers were in the shade of a black cherry tree. I sat down heavily on the bottom row and faced out to Pratt Avenue. A moment later, I was staring at the screen of my phone. No messages, not that I’d been expecting any. I wanted to call my parents out in Arizona. My mother, she could still make a little conversation, but in the middle of saying something, she’d stop, and it would be quiet until my father came on. About the only time she left the house was when he helped her out to their little front yard, where she could sit out in the sun on a fold-out chair. I’d been out there to visit them in the spring, just a few months ago. My mother didn’t say a lot, and when she spoke to me, she did call me “Sonny,” which had been her nickname for me when I was little. She lost a tooth while eating a bowl of oatmeal. She must’ve felt it come loose, and she placed her hand to her mouth. She held it out for my father and me to see. Then, it looked as if he were about to get emotional. When I was there, my father wore the same clothes every day, a white t-shirt, black sweatpants. One afternoon, while she was taking a nap on the couch, he and I sat in their little kitchen sharing N/A beers which was all he drank any more and I asked him if he’d been over to see the track in Phoenix, which was called Turf Paradise, and he said he hadn’t had the time.

The grass under my feet was wet. Had it rained last night? Maybe the sprinkler system needed attention. I didn’t feel like I had inside the aquarium. But for a moment there, I’d wanted to call my parents and say something like, We had to try. I’d say we even though during that winter in Oldsmar I hadn’t done much of anything and I was only a child. I tried to imagine how my father would answer. Is everything all right, son? I knew that I wouldn’t say anything about the flounder at the aquarium.

In a while, I noticed the young couple from the other set of bleachers had left. Then, I felt the phone vibrating in my hand; Bailey’s name was on the screen. Before I answered I cleared my throat. Bailey and I, we didn’t do a lot of drama. Hey, I said. She wanted to know where I was, and I told her, and she said she’d had half of one of the donuts, but it was past noon and she felt ready for a drink.

How about a Grapefruit Crush at Phillips? she said. That far from you?

I said, I can see the façade in the distance. Meet you out front in twenty minutes.

She said, Sounds great.

I could sit in the park for a little while longer because Phillips was closer than twenty minutes away. I just looked straight ahead at the office building across Pratt. It was made of beige-colored bricks, looked like something from the sixties or seventies, it might’ve been empty, abandoned. In the sunlight, it seemed that way to me. Overall, I liked Baltimore, it wasn’t consistently crowded, and you had plenty of room to move around and do a little thinking. I rubbed my forehead. I tried to remember the names of the horses my father had brought from Cahokia down to Florida. A Letter to Harry, that was one of them. It had been a pretty good horse for us at Cahokia, had won three or four races. It had a chestnut coat and a coppery, wild-looking mane my father refused to trim. The horse had a slim indention near the base of its neck. My father said the indention was called Allah’s thumbprint. The legend was that any horse with a marking like that was from a bloodline that could be traced all the way back to horses owned by the prophet Mohammed. The thought was that it was a sign of good fortune. My father could fit his thumb right in the indention. A Letter to Harry was the best horse my father had ever raced. We could’ve taken it back to Cahokia for the spring and summer and it would’ve done all right. But I guessed he didn’t want to get his hopes up like that again.

At Oldsmar, whenever my father had a horse running, my mother and I would watch the race from the parking lot because in Florida children weren’t allowed inside the racetrack. After a while, she stopped taking me. For A Letter to Harry’s last race down there, she and I had stayed at home. They’d taken me out of school for the winter, but by then she must’ve known we were going back, and she’d been working with me on my spelling and math. The horse finished last of seven, my father reported this after he returned home that evening.

When we got back to Alorton, my mother took me to the elementary school and explained our situation to the principal. The three of us sat right there in his office. It was just some crappy elementary school, and the principal was good enough to have been aware of this. He said all I’d need to do was take a test to see that I was ready for second grade. I remembered the test as being ridiculously easy. And when fall arrived, I was right there in the classroom with the other kids my age, like I hadn’t missed a thing.