Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 39, No. 6, June, 1994

Strawberry Moon by Simon McCaffery

I know what some folks would say, but this is not another Kenny Crawford fish story. I’ll be the first to admit I’ve added a pound and a few inches to a fish in the cause of good narrative, but what happened to my friend, Bobby Lee, happened exactly as I tell it. Whether he deserved it or not is up to you to decide.

Before I explain about Bobby Lee and his vanished wife, you need to know about the lake. The old duffers who pass the bluebird days on courthouse-square benches, the women who keep the telephone wires humming all afternoon between talk show station breaks, the children who swarm the playgrounds like riotous bands of monkeys — they’ll all tell you folks have been hauling strange things out of Owls Head Lake as long as anyone can remember. Ever since the summer of 1923, when the river was dammed in order to flood an entire valley. A carp with an extra toothy mouth below the first... a pair of struggling bass that tried to swallow each another and nearly succeeded... a Siameselike snapping turtle with a head poking out from either end of its horny shell. Stuff you’d expect to see in a carnival sideshow or read about in a supermarket checkout tabloid, the kind printed on cheap newsprint that leaves sooty ink on your hands. Freakish things to keep you awake on a breezeless summer night, wondering.

If I could plot all these events — the ones I know aren’t made up — on a calendar that stretched back through the seasons, I’d bet my last dollar they all fell on or near the Strawberry Moon.

Still skeptical? You could ask Gail Tinney, if he were still alive. Tinney boated a prehistoric, bony-legged horror of a fish back in June of ’64, when I was ten. Tinney, the town’s part-time philosopher and part-time drunk, claimed it was a coelacanth, a milky-eyed, scaly blue creature thought to have been extinct for millions of years before a live specimen was caught in South Africa in 1938. Lonny Banks, the sheriff’s lone deputy, urged Tinney to send the monstrosity to the state game and fish office or to the biology professors up at the U. Tinney deposited the fish-thing — which had a mouthful of sharp teeth and a hateful, soulless expression — in his moldy creel and made a beeline to the nearest tavern, where he cadged whisky the rest of the evening from patrons in exchange for a peek inside.

No state game warden or bespectacled ichthyologist ever laid an eye on the monster. The best part of that story — the part that made a ten-year-old kid grin and shiver — was that Tinney filleted and fried it up the next day, just as he did all the bass, catfish, and carp he hauled up from the depths of Owls Head. Some nameless tomcat probably made off with its head.

Tinney’s dinosaur fish was the most fearful oddity I’d ever seen emerge from the big reservoir — until the night last summer I went drift-fishing with Bobby Lee Griffin, the richest man in town.

This is what happened.

It was the third of June and the full moon — known in this part of the land by oldtimers as the Strawberry Moon — had slid behind a lone raft of clouds. The lake’s deep, clear waters were up and murky from a week of steady rain, so at first I wasn’t sure whether I’d hooked a deep-holding fish or the woody arm of a half-sunken tree limb.

I drifted the lake at night to relax, not to catch fish and listen to Bobby Lee discuss his problems and girlfriends, so I hoped I’d snagged a limb. Sometimes Bobby Lee rambled on about his wife Karla, who, townfolks commonly agree, had run out on him eight years before. She’d had a face like a cover model’s and a tongue like a bullwhip. The girls Bobby Lee eventually began dating were all hair stylists and secretaries from small nearby towns, and painfully youthful to gaze upon. But none of them could hold a candle to the beautiful ferocity of Karla. Perhaps that’s why Bobby Lee never escorted any of them to the altar, though he’d had the marriage legally dissolved after the state limit of seven years. He’d done that reluctantly, and only after having paid a lot of money to a slick looking private detective from Eugene who wore white button-down shirts and alligator boots.

If it had been a hunk of dead wood, I often think to myself, I would have lost nothing more than a two dollar spinner. But a tree limb doesn’t dive for cover to wrap your line around some handy obstruction or rocket to the surface in an attempt to throw the hook. My mood sank lower. Landing the poor creature would be Bobby Lee’s cue to sit up from his reclining position at the bow of my battered old aluminum V-hull, a familiar gleam in his blue eyes, and cast his line until he boated a larger fish.

And there are plenty of them down there, though they hold deep in summer. On those breezeless, starry nights I could almost see them gliding through whatever remained of the sunken town of New Haven like green ghosts. There’s a Methodist church down there, and a one room schoolhouse, a general store and dozens of stone foundations and chimneys half buried in silt and weeds. There are human bones, too, if you believe the local histories. When New Haven was sacrificed to the rising waters, folks say, a handful of stubborn, and armed, hillfolk and moonshiners refused to leave. No volunteers from the Army Corps of Engineers or local law stepped forward to venture into the woods and escort them out, and no one could have predicted the torrential rainstorms and flashfloods that hastened the formation of the lake.

Sure enough, Bobby Lee sat up like a target in a shooting gallery. “You going to reel in that fish or just drag him the rest of the night?”

“I might,” I said, annoyed.

My rod bowed deeper as the fish fought the steel buried in its mouth. I sighed and reeled in a thrashing fifteen inch bass. I lipped it at the waterline and removed the lure from its bony mouth while it stared at me with black, unblinking eyes. Packed with shad, crawfish, and anything unfortunate enough to fall into the water, its belly looked swollen, as if it had swallowed a softball. It reminded me of what Vince Snyder found when he cut open that fifty pound catfish he caught above the dam... but that’s another story entirely, and not fit to tell to children or the faint of heart.

Unlike the long-departed Mr. Tinney, filleting all the fish I catch was too much work for me, so I threw most of them back out of sheer laziness and not a sense of conservation. The bass disappeared into the depths with a quick glimmering ripple.

Bobby Lee selected a rod and reel twice as expensive as any I owned and from his shirt pocket produced an oddly shaped lure. It was shaped like a man caught in some pagan transformation to fish. I saw markings — or were they glyphs? — carved along its silver length. It looked like something obtained from an ancient Indian burial mound, not a bait-shop cardboard blister pack. Bobby Lee bit off his lucky scarred wooden plug and began tying it on.

“When did you start stealing your punk-rock girlfriends’ earrings?” I asked, pretending not to be curious.

Bobby Lee frowned. It was the anniversary of Karla’s disappearance, which explained why he’d insisted we go night fishing. He’d been drinking beer and reminiscing in the goblin-green glow of the lantern for what seemed like hours before falling silent.

“I almost forgot about this,” Bobby Lee said as he tied on the lure with practiced fingers. Beered up or not, he could tie loop knots, palomar knots, clinch knots without looking, as if his fingertips had eyes.

He wanted me to ask him about it, so despite my irritation, I bit.

“What happened to your last secret weapon?” I said, remembering the plastic box of manta-shaped lead jigs with rubber skirts like Tina Turner’s hair he’d bought through a cable TV offer.

“Oh, I swapped them for this,” he said, smiling.

“You traded a thirty dollar set of lures for an ugly earring?” That surprised me. Bobby Lee might have failed at romance, but he was shrewd when it came to money. Everyone agreed on that. He owned four convenience stores with gas pumps, a car wash, and a modest chain of laundromats. He’d owned a successful video arcade back in the eighties, but sold it right before Nintendo started selling millions of small gray boxes. It often irked me that Bobby Lee didn’t buy one of those swept-back fiberglass boats with a name like a jet fighter’s so we could drift in style instead of piling into my poor man’s boat.

“I’ve been hunting antique lures at the flea market in Porter,” he said. “Some of those old topwaters will bring five hundred dollars from collectors if they’re still in the original cardboard box. I even bought a book so I’d know which were worth dickering over.”

In the course of poking through old boxes and junk-cluttered glass displays he’d struck up a conversation with an old Indian peddler; said the guy looked like a mummy wearing a felt hat. The peddler told Bobby Lee the lure had belonged to a Creek medicine man. Fashioned of pure silver, hammered by hand, and endowed with special properties that might interest an angler.

Bobby Lee winked at me. “ ‘Fish it on the right night, and it will call them up.’ Those were his exact words, Pancho.”

A magic lure. I sighed. Fishermen are skilled liars, so you’d think we’d know when someone else is feeding us a line.

I stared at the gleaming lure turning slowly, almost hypnotically, on the end of Bobby Lee’s line. He grinned a slightly drunk grin, like a frat-house boy about to run some gal’s bra up a flagpole. That was when I realized the lure didn’t even have a hook; the original must have rusted away or broken off long ago. Bobby Lee remedied that, fitting on a large, sharp treble. Somehow it didn’t look like it belonged there.

Before I could comment on this, Bobby Lee cast his line over the dark water with a smooth, practiced flick of his wrist, sending the lure sailing through the air with a faint whirring noise, like a mechanical insect.

He hadn’t reeled it halfway back to the boat when something gave his line a terrific tug. Bobby Lee whooped and swept the rod high to set the hook, then started cranking line in as fast as he could, the drag on his reel protesting as line was pulled out. I swore in disgust at his luck. Bobby Lee shouted at me to grab the net and kept cranking.

The Strawberry Moon slipped free of the clouds at the same moment, and the water around us began boiling.

At least that’s what it seemed at first until I saw the fish. Thousands, perhaps millions, began breaking the surface in wild, gyrating flips and jumps. Perch, walleyes, bass, shad! Dumbstruck, I saw two inch minnows leaping alongside monstrous bottom-dwelling catfish. It sounded as if the sky were raining fish. Quite a few landed in the boat by accident. Moonlight glinted on a frothing sea of fins, scales, and eyes.

Just as suddenly, the fish abruptly stopped their frantic churning of the lake’s surface. A sudden, eerie calm descended.

Bobby Lee resumed cranking, his rod bent nearly to the breaking point. The Indian’s second-hand words floated in my head, and for a moment I believed, too. I stared at the point where his taut line disappeared into the lake’s shimmering black surface, mesmerized.

Then something broke the surface not a dozen yards away. Not another fish performing an acrobatic leap, but a man’s pale arm.

I’d never seen Bobby Lee look surprised or uncertain — much less terrified — even during our nightmarish year together in Vietnam.

He always knew what he wanted and how to go about getting it, and none of life’s unforeseen traps or deadly inertia ever stopped him. We grew up together, attended school together, played ball, dated the same girls, and dreamed the same dreams. Bobby Lee turned out to be the town’s success, and I didn’t. That this never bothered me — that it seemed perfectly natural — probably explains why I failed at nearly everything I tried. Karla often commented that I led a boring, uneventful existence, and she deeply resented the nights Bobby Lee and I spent drifting together on the lake. I think she felt excluded and could never be convinced we weren’t ripping down the county roads, guzzling beer and chasing women. Why would two grown men want to sit in a smelly, junk-filled boat all night swatting mosquitoes? I know they had some knockdown, drag-out fights over it.

One evening she made a playful pass at me while Bobby Lee lay passed out on a huge beanbag in the shag-carpeted rec room of their big fake Colonial house. She acted tipsy, though I doubted alcohol had the ability to dull her much. I pretended to miss it, proving again what a boring failure I’d become. I never mentioned it to Bobby Lee, though Karla probably did because that was her nature. After Karla pulled her vanishing act, I thought about that evening from time to time. I remembered her half-fierce expression and wondered what a night with her would have been like, but my imagination refused to fill in the blanks.

Now, hauling in part or all of a dead man, Bobby Lee looked plenty surprised.

As we watched, the arm grew a shoulder. When a head popped up, eyes open and mouth full of water, Bobby Lee groaned.

“Well, Bobby Lee, I threw mine back without measuring it, but I don’t think it’s going to be even close,” I said softly.

I tried to remember if I’d heard any reports of missing fishermen. Bobby Lee stopped cranking in line. His face looked as pale and green as the corpse, which didn’t appear to be clothed. I figured the body had been down long enough to bloat and rise toward the surface. Then Bobby Lee’s lucky lure had come along and snagged flesh. At that moment I wished mightily I’d stayed in my trailer, fading in and out of sleep watching HBO.

“Well, you going to drag him all night?”

Bobby Lee swore and started reeling, and his twenty pound line held. Then, not ten feet from the boat, the corpse’s other hand came out of the water and grabbed the line just above the Indian lure.

Bobby Lee yelped, and I dropped my rod in astonishment. I stood there like a fool as it sank without a ripple. I once saw an advertisement in a sporting goods catalogue for foam tubes that attach to your rod like a life preserver. I remember laughing and shaking my head when I should have been writing out a check.

The dead man looked up at us, and I realized I could almost see through him, as if he were made of milky beach glass. His eyes looked like blind cat’s-eye marbles. He wore clothes after all — overalls and a work shirt — but they were as pale and translucent as the rest of him. His hollowed face was wreathed in a tattered beard, and his nose was flat and misshapen. I thought immediately of the campfire stories of the hillfolk who perished as the floodwaters roared through the long-drowned valley. One of the creature’s hands released Bobby Lee’s line and grasped the gunwale.

At the same moment the lake around us began to glow, as if a huge underwater bonfire had been lit on the lake bottom. And I saw more of them rising toward us like tailless mermaids; men, women, and children, their expressions a mixture of delight and desperation.

Bobby Lee must have spotted them, too, because he gave his line a mighty yank, pulling the lure free from the man’s wet grasp. It whistled up into the air and landed on the transom with a faint clank.

Suddenly the boat rocked and pitched. Several pairs of watery hands gripped the sides as the lake people — for what else could you call them — began struggling to climb aboard. The boat canted again, and I nearly lost my balance; the air filled with a strong damp odor of decay, far worse than the lake’s usual fishy smell.

“The lure!” I shouted to Bobby Lee. “Cast it out fast!”

Bobby Lee came to the same conclusion. The Indian lure had called them up, and they wanted it. He lifted his rod and cast the lure overhand as hard as he could, far out into the night.

Immediately the hands released the boat and disappeared below the surface. The bearded man, who had grabbed Bobby Lee’s right leg below the knee, let go and sank soundlessly into the lake like a film of splashing water run backwards. I caught a glimpse of him hurrying after the others like a man-shaped torpedo.

“Cold,” Bobby Lee moaned, clutching his soaked denim-clad leg. “That thing was freezing, Kenny.”

“Hurry and cut your line,” I panted. “Then start that damned engine.” My brain was having trouble sorting out what I’d just witnessed, but my blood sang with adrenaline.

Bobby Lee stared across the water to where his line disappeared, hyperventilating. His eyes looked jumpy and his hands trembled.

“Bobby Lee!”

I started back to the transom, stepping over tackle and the cooler, and then the line in Bobby Lee’s hand came alive again. He pulled back by reflex and started reeling.

“Cut the line!” I hollered.

“That damn thing’s dangerous,” he said grimly. “We can’t leave it here.”

I couldn’t believe what I’d heard, but I recognized that stubborn tone in Bobby Lee’s voice. Did he mean to sell the lure to someone else? Someone like the National Enquirer or one of those UFO TV specials? Or was he really afraid to let it sink into the lake?

Bobby Lee cranked furiously, his expensive reel spooling line in fast.

I reached down and fumbled open my tackle box. A fillet knife, slender blade almost gone from sharpening, lay in the bottom compartment in a plastic sheath. I pulled it out.

Bobby Lee didn’t even try to stop me. He’d probably never seen me move so fast. I grabbed the line just past his rod tip and cut it, but not before I felt a wild thrumming — and something that sounded like a chorus of garbled voices — telegraphed from the other end. It felt like they all had grabbed hold of that cursed lure.

Bobby Lee plopped back into his plastic swivel chair with a grunt. I sank into my chair and dropped the knife, shivering. We both saw his fishing line being drawn below the surface like a kid sucking down a long string of spaghetti. It disappeared quick.

“Sorry about that, Bobby Lee,” I said. “You can buy another from that Indian peddler, I guess.”

I didn’t mention that he’d be fishing it alone. I planned to start the outboard when I had my breath back, motor to shore, and never venture onto the lake again.

The boat lurched, and for a wild second I thought Bobby Lee had lost his senses and jumped in after that damned lure. Then I looked up and saw Karla, his hellcat of a wife, rearing up not a foot behind him.

She stood perched on the transom like a liquid emerald statue, smiling and swinging the lure like a hypnotist’s medallion. She looked not a day older than she had the week she disappeared, except there was a long dent in her skull above her left eye. Circling her wrists and long translucent legs were black tarnished bracelets of heavy logging chain.

Bobby Lee saw the expression on my face and slowly turned. His scream probably gave the loons nightmares for a year. It was still rolling across the water when the lake spirit that had once been Karla stepped down into the boat.

Bobby Lee leaped up like he’d touched a live power line. Moaning, he grabbed the wooden oar from the boat floor and swung at his dead wife’s liquid form. The paddle sank into her neck at the shoulder — and came to a syrupy stop.

The Karla-thing grinned her most ferocious grin and suddenly lost all human form, twisting up the oar handle and Bobby Lee’s arm. She flowed over him like some gelatinous monster from a drive-in flick, cutting off his final scream.

I turned to escape, to run across the water like one of those South American basilisks, and I stumbled on the tackle box. I saw stars and the pale, pocked belly of the Strawberry Moon, and then nothing at all.

So I swam to shore, clawed my way through the thick brush and cattails along the bank until I came to the launch ramp and my pickup, then barreled into town on the county road that runs alongside the south end of the lake.

At the police station I shivered and gulped hot coffee and told them what had happened to Bobby Lee and, sadly, where they’d find the remains of his missing wife — or at least a version they would believe. Drunk and guilt-ridden, I said, my friend had confessed and jumped overboard before I could stop him.

Oh hell, I wish I could tell you that’s what happened.

No storyteller likes to serve up an odd or unsatisfying ending, and fishermen are no different. But none of that Nancy Drew stuff happened. And it’s not so bad here beneath the lake’s green, concave sky.

You didn’t guess that I never made it back to dry land? Karla took Bobby Lee with her — oh yes, she’ll be giving him an earful from now until eternity — but I drowned, plain and simple. Must have hit my head on the side of the boat when I tumbled overboard. No life vest on, like they warn you about in all the safety advertisements. Glub-glub.

It’s at night that loneliness calls me from the cold depths, makes a small part of me yearn to rejoin those who still kick, paddle, and motor above the lake’s vast surface. Every so often a boat drifts silently by overhead like a slender dark cloud, and a flash of silver catches my eye as some midnight angler’s nickel-plated lure pulsates through the depths. A permanent resident of that drowned (but hardly deserted) village beneath the lake, I finally understand the ageless attraction that draws the deepwater fish closer to the surface. The glimmer of reflected moonlight; the muffled thrumming of hammered metal.

When the Strawberry Moon comes again, I’m going to grab myself one and give some old boy a good story to tell his fishin’ buddies.