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Show A RLVER "That, and the damn telephone lines they run under the river. The lines kill more than anything else. Now my daddy, he used to catch some fish in this river. Some big fish." "Damn," I said, thinking about the Good Old Days. "Yep, there used to be fish that could swallow you whole and not even burp. But then, there might be fewer fish, but there's a lot fewer fishermen, too." "How's that?" "Son," said Fred, looking me square in the eye. "It don't do to be out in the river with all the towboats they've got now. Those towboats will kill you." Towboats, yes. I'd seen enough of towboats to make me uneasy. "If one of those things were to run you down, you'd be a dead man." I asked Fred how he sold his fish. He laughed. "Oh, I don't hardly sell any fish. The damnedest thing about the fish business is that when you're catching a lot of fish, everybody's eating hamburgers, but when they stop getting themselves caught, everybody wants fish." We talked and I drank my Blue Ribbon. "Y'know, I don't see many people going down the river this early in the year." I understood why. "The mosquitoes aren't so bad this time of year." "Yeah, they're all froze. Some boys come through here from up in Canada last December. Had a canoe. They were walking around saying how fine the weather was, in December." "You see a lot of people going down the river in the summer?" "All kinds. Lots of people come through on rafts built out of oil drums. I met some boys last summer who were going down in inner tubes." "Inner tubes?" - 9 - |