Catch and Release

Catch and Release

When you spent enough time fishing, you got so you knew the waters. You had certain spots that had worked for you over the years, and you went to them at certain times of the day in certain seasons of the year. You chose the tackle appropriate to the circumstances, picked the right bait or lure, and tried your luck.

If they weren’t biting, you moved on. Picked another spot.

He was cruising the Interstate, staying in the right-hand lane, keeping the big SUV a steady five miles an hour below the speed limit. As he passed each exit, he let up on the gas pedal while he kept an eye out for hitchhikers. There was a string of four exits where they were apt to queue up, college students looking to thumb their way home, or to another campus, or wherever they felt a need to go. There were so many of them, and they were always going someplace, and it hardly mattered where or why.

He drove north, passed four exits, took the fifth, crossed over and got on the southbound entrance ramp. Four more exits, then off again and on again and he was once more heading north.

Taking his time.

There were hitchhikers at each exit, but his foot never touched the brake pedal. It would hover there, but he always saw something that made him drive on. There were plenty of girls out there today, some of them especially alluring in tight jeans and braless T-shirts, but they all seemed to have boys or other girls as companions. The only solitary hitchhikers he saw were male. And he was not interested in boys. He wanted a girl, a girl all by herself.

Luke, 5:5. Lord, we fished all night and caught nothing.

Sometimes you could drive all day, and the only reason you’d have to stop was to fill the gas tank. But the true fisherman could fish all night and catch nothing and not regard the time as ill-spent. A true fisherman was patient, and while he waited he gave his mind over to the recollection of other days at the water’s edge. He’d let himself remember in detail how a particular quarry had risen to the bait and taken the hook. And put up a game fight.

And sizzled in the pan.

When he stopped for her, she picked up her backpack and trotted up to the car. He rolled down the window and asked her where she was headed, and she hesitated long enough to have a look at him and decide he was okay. She named a town fifty or sixty miles up the road.

“No problem,” he said. “I can just about take you to your front door.”

She tossed her pack in the back, then got in front beside him. Closed the door, fastened her seat belt.

She said something about how grateful she was, and he said something appropriate, and he joined the stream of cars heading north. What, he wondered, had she seen in that quick appraising glance? What was it that had assured her he was all right?

His face was an unmemorable one. The features were regular and average and, well, ordinary. Nothing stuck out.

Once, years ago, he’d grown a mustache. He had thought it might give his face some character, but all it did was look out of place. What was it doing there on his lip? He kept it there, waiting to get used to it, and one day he realized that wasn’t going to happen, and shaved it off.

And went back to his forgettable face. Unremarkable, unthreatening. Safe.

“A fisherman,” she said. “My dad likes to go fishing. Once, twice a year he’ll go away for the weekend with a couple of his buddies and come back with an ice chest full of fish. And my mom gets stuck with cleaning them, and for a week the house totally smells of fish.”

“Well, that’s a problem I’m spared,” he told her. “I’m what they call a catch-and-release fisherman.”

“You don’t come home with a full ice chest?”

“I don’t even have an ice chest. Oh, I used to. But what I found over time was that it was the sport I enjoyed, and it was a lot simpler and easier if the game ended with the fish removed from the hook and slipped gently back into the water.”

She was silent for a moment. Then she asked if he thought they enjoyed it.

“The fish? Now that’s an interesting question. It’s hard to know what a fish does or doesn’t enjoy, or even if the word enjoy can be applied to a fish. You could make the case that a fish fighting for its life gets to be intensely alive in a way it otherwise doesn’t, but is that good or bad from the fish’s point of view?” He smiled. “When they swim away,” he said, “I get the sense that they’re glad to be alive. But I may just be trying to put myself in their position. I can’t really know what it’s like for them.”

“I guess not.”

“One thing I can’t help but wonder,” he said, “is if they learn anything from the experience. Are they warier the next time around? Or will they take the hook just as readily for the next fisherman who comes along?”

She thought about it. “I guess they’re just fish,” she said.

“Well now,” he said. “I guess they are.”

She was a pretty thing. A business major, she told him, taking most of her elective courses in English, because she’d always like to read. Her hair was brown with auburn highlights, and she had a good figure, with large breasts and wide hips. Built for childbearing, he thought, and she’d bear three or four of them, and she’d gain weight with each pregnancy and never quite manage to lose all of it. And her face, already a little chubby, would broaden and turn bovine, and the sparkle would fade out of her eyes.

There was a time when he’d have been inclined to spare her all that.

“Really,” she said, “you could have just dropped me at the exit. I mean, this is taking you way out of your way.”

“Less so than you’d think. Is that your street coming up?”

“Uh-huh. If you want to drop me at the corner—”

But he drove her to the door of her suburban house. He waited while she retrieved her backpack, then let her get halfway up the path to her door before he called her back.

“You know,” he said, “I was going to ask you something earlier, but I didn’t want to upset you.”

“Oh?”

“Aren’t you nervous hitching rides with strangers? Don’t you think it’s dangerous?”

“Oh,” she said. “Well, you know, everybody does it.”

“I see.”

“And I’ve always been okay so far.”

“A young woman alone—”

“Well, I usually team up with somebody. A boy, or at least another girl. But this time, well...”

“You figured you’d take a chance.”

She flashed a smile. “It worked out okay, didn’t it?”

He was silent for a moment, but held her with his eyes. Then he said, “Remember the fish we were talking about?”

“The fish?”

“How it feels when it slips back into the water. And whether it learns anything from the experience.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Not everyone is a catch-and-release fisherman,” he said. “That’s probably something you ought to keep in mind.”

She was still standing there, looking puzzled, while he put the SUV in gear and pulled away.

He drove home, feeling fulfilled. He had never moved from the house he was born in, and it had been his alone ever since his mother’s death ten years ago.

He checked the mail, which yielded half a dozen envelopes with checks in them. He had a mail-order business, selling fishing lures, and he spent the better part of an hour preparing the checks for deposit and packing the orders for shipment. He’d make more money if he put his business online and let people pay with credit cards, but he didn’t need much money, and he found it easier to let things remain as they were. He ran the same ads every month in the same magazines, and his old customers reordered, and enough new customers turned up to keep him going.

He cooked some pasta, heated some meat sauce, chopped some lettuce for a salad, drizzled a little olive oil over it. He ate at the kitchen table, washed the dishes, watched the TV news. When it ended he left the picture on but muted the sound, and thought about the girl.

Now, though, he gave himself over to the fantasy she inspired. A lonely road. A piece of tape across her mouth. A struggle ending with her arms broken.

Stripping her. Piercing each of her openings in turn. Giving her physical pain to keep her terror company.

And finishing her with a knife. No, with his hands, strangling her. No, better yet, with his forearm across her throat, and his weight pressing down, throttling her.

Ah, the joy of it, the thrill of it, the sweet release of it. And now it was almost as real to him as if it had happened.

But it hadn’t happened. He’d left her at her door, untouched, with only a hint of what might have been. And, because it hadn’t happened, there was no ice chest full of fish to clean — no body to dispose of, no evidence to get rid of, not even that feeling of regret that had undercut his pleasure on so many otherwise perfect occasions.

Catch and release. That was the ticket, catch and release.

The roadhouse had a name, Toddle Inn, but nobody ever called it anything but Roy’s, after the man who’d owned it for close to fifty years until his liver quit on him.

That was something he would probably never have to worry about, as he’d never been much of a drinker. Tonight, three days after he’d dropped the young hitchhiker at her door, he’d had the impulse to go bar-hopping, and Roy’s was his fourth stop. He’d ordered a beer at the first place and drank two sips of it, left the second bar without ordering anything, and drank most of the Coke he ordered at bar number three.

Roy’s had beer on draft, and he stood at the bar and ordered a glass of it. There was an English song he’d heard once, of which he recalled only one verse:

The beer was watery, to be sure, but it didn’t matter because he didn’t care about beer, good or bad. But the bar held something to interest him, the very thing he’d come out for.

She was two stools away from him, and she was drinking something in a stemmed glass, with an orange slice in it. At first glance she looked like the hitchhiker, or like her older sister, the one who’d gone wrong. Her blouse was a size too small, and she’d tried to cope by unbuttoning an extra button. The lipstick was smeared on her full-lipped mouth, and her nail polish was chipped.

She picked up her drink and was surprised to find that she’d finished it. She shook her head, as if wondering how to contend with this unanticipated development, and while she was working it out he lifted a hand to catch the barman’s eye, then pointed at the girl’s empty glass.

She waited until the fresh drink was in front of her, then picked it up and turned toward her benefactor. “Thank you,” she said, “You’re a gentleman.”

He closed the distance between them. “And a fisherman,” he said.

Sometimes it didn’t matter what you had on your hook. Sometimes it wasn’t even necessary to wet a line. Sometimes all you had to do was sit there and they’d jump right into the boat.

She’d had several drinks before the one he’d bought her, and she didn’t really need the two others he bought her after that. But she thought she did, and he didn’t mind spending the money or sitting there while she drank them.

Her name, she told him repeatedly, was Marni. He was in no danger of forgetting that fact, nor did she seem to be in any danger of remembering his name, which she kept asking him over and over. He’d said it was Jack — it wasn’t — and she kept apologizing for her inability to retain that information. “I’m Marni,” she’d say on each occasion. “With an I,” she added, more often than not.

He found himself remembering a woman he’d picked up years ago in a bar with much the same ambience. She’d been a very different sort of a drunk, although she’d been punishing the Harvey Wallbangers as industriously as Marni was knocking back the Gandy Dancers. She’d grown quieter and quieter, and her eyes went glassy, and by the time he’d driven them to the place he’d selected in advance, she was out cold. He’d had some very interesting plans for her, and here she was, the next thing to comatose, and wholly incapable of knowing what was being done to her.

So he’d let himself imagine that she was dead, and took her that way, and kept waiting for her to wake up, but she didn’t. And it was exciting, more exciting than he’d have guessed, but at the end he held himself back.

And paused for a moment to consider the situation, and then very deliberately broke her neck. And then took her again, imagining that she was only sleeping.

And that was good, too.

“At least I got the house,” she was saying. “My ex took the kids away from me, can you imagine that? Got some lawyer saying I was an unfit mother. Can you imagine that?”

The house her ex-husband had let her keep certainly looked like a drunk lived in it. It wasn’t filthy, just remarkably untidy. She grabbed him by the hand and led him up a flight of stairs and into her bedroom, which was no neater than the rest of the place, then turned and threw herself into his arms.

He disengaged, and she seemed puzzled. He asked if there was anything in the house to drink, and she said there was beer in the fridge, and there might be some vodka in the freezer. He said he’d be right back.

He gave her five minutes, and when he returned with a can of Rolling Rock and a half-pint of vodka, she was sprawled naked on her back, snoring. He set the beer can and the vodka bottle on the bedside table, and drew the blanket to cover her.

“Catch and release,” he said, and left her there.

Fishing was not just a metaphor. A couple of days later he walked out his front door into a cool autumn morning. The sky was overcast, the humidity lower than it had been. The breeze was out of the west.

It was just the day for it. He got his gear together, made his choices, and drove to the bank of a creek that was always good on this kind of day. He fished the spot for an hour, and by the time he left he had hooked and landed three trout. Each had put up a good fight, and as he released them he might have observed that they’d earned their freedom, that each deserved another chance at life.

But what did that mean, really? Could a fish be said to earn or deserve anything? Could anyone? And did a desperate effort to remain alive somehow entitle one to live?

Consider the humble flounder. He was a salt-water fish, a bottom fish, and when you hooked him he rarely did much more than flop around a little while you reeled him in. Did this make him the trout’s moral inferior? Did he have less right to live because of his genetically prescribed behavior?

He stopped on the way home, had a hamburger and a side of well done fries. Drank a cup of coffee. Read the paper.

Back home, he cleaned and sorted his tackle and put everything away where it belonged.

That night it rained, and did so off and on for the next three days. He stayed close to home, watched a little television.

Nights, he’d lean back in his recliner and close his eyes, letting himself remember. Once, a few months back, he’d tried to count. He’d been doing this for years, long before his mother died, and in the early years his appetite had been ravenous. It was, he sometimes thought, a miracle he hadn’t been caught. Back then he’d left DNA all over the place, along with God knew what else in the way of trace evidence.

Somehow he’d gotten away with it. If they’d ever picked him up, if he’d ever attracted the slightest bit of official attention, he was sure he’d have caved immediately. He’d have told them everything, confessed to everything. They wouldn’t have needed trace evidence, let alone DNA. All they’d have needed was a cell to lock him into and a key to throw away.

So there had been many, but he’d ranged far and wide and little of what he did ran to pattern. He’d read about other men who had very specific tastes, in essence always hunting the same woman and killing her in the same fashion. If anything, he’d deliberately sought variety, not for precautionary reasons but because it was indeed the spice of life — or death, as you prefer. When I have to choose between two evils, Mae West had said, I pick the one I haven’t tried yet. Made sense to him.

And after he’d changed, after he had in fact become a catch-and-release fisherman, there’d been a point when it seemed to him as though he’d had a divine hand keeping him safe all those years. Who was to say that there was not a purpose to it all, and a guiding force running the universe? He’d been spared so that he could — do what? Catch and release?

It hadn’t taken him long to decide that was nonsense. He’d killed all those girls because he’d wanted to — or needed to, whatever. And he’d stopped killing because he no longer needed or wanted to kill, was in fact better served by, well, catching and releasing.

So how many had there been? The simple answer was that he did not know, and had no way of knowing. He had never taken trophies, never kept souvenirs. He had memories, but it had become virtually impossible to distinguish between recollections of actual events and recollections of fantasies. One memory was as real as another, whether it had happened or not. And, really, what difference did it make?

He thought of that serial killer they’d caught in Texas, the idiot who kept finding new killings to confess to and leading the authorities to more unmarked graves. Except some of the victims turned out to have been killed when he was in custody in another state. Was he conning them, for some inexplicable reason? Or was he simply remembering — vividly, and in detail — acts he had not in actuality committed?

He didn’t mind the rain. His had been a solitary childhood, and he’d grown into a solitary adult. He had never had friends, and had never felt the need. Sometimes he liked the illusion of society, and at such times he would go to a bar or restaurant, or walk in a shopping mall, or sit in a movie theater, simply to be among strangers. But most of the time his own company was company enough.

One rainy afternoon he picked a book from the shelf. It was The Compleat Angler, by Izaak Walton, and he’d read it through countless times and flipped through it many times more. He always seemed to find something worth thinking about between its covers.

God never did make a more calm, quiet, innocent recreation than angling, he read. The line resonated with him, as it always did, and he decided the only change he could make would be to the final word of it. He preferred fishing to angling, fisherman to angler. Stephen Leacock, after all, had observed that angling was the name given to fishing by people who couldn’t fish.

On the first clear day he made a grocery list and went to the mall. He pushed a cart up one aisle and down the next, picking up eggs and bacon and pasta and canned sauce, and he was weighing the merits of two brands of laundry detergent when he saw the woman.

He hadn’t been looking for her, hadn’t been looking for anyone. The only thing on his mind was detergent and fabric softener, and then he looked up and there she was.

She was beautiful, not young-pretty like the hitchhiker or slutty-available like Marni the barfly, but genuinely beautiful. She could have been an actress or a model, though he somehow knew she wasn’t.

Long dark hair, long legs, a figure that was at once athletic and womanly. An oval face, a strong nose, high cheekbones. But it wasn’t her beauty he found himself responding to. It was something else, some indefinable quality that suddenly rendered the Tide and the Downy, indeed all the contents of his shopping cart, entirely unimportant.

She was wearing slacks and an unbuttoned long-sleeved canvas shirt over a pale blue T-shirt, and there was nothing terribly provocative about her outfit, but it scarcely mattered what she wore. He saw that she had a long shopping list she consulted, and only a few items already in her cart. He had time, he decided, time enough to wheel his cart to the bank of cashiers and pay cash for his groceries. That was better than simply walking away from the cart. People tended to remember you when you did that.

He loaded the bags of groceries back into his cart, and on the way to his SUV he turned periodically for a look at the entrance. He stowed the bags in back, got behind the wheel and found a good spot to wait for her.

He sat there patiently with the motor idling. He wasn’t paying attention to the time, was scarcely conscious of its passage, but felt he’d be comfortable waiting forever for the doors to slide open and the woman to emerge. The impatient man was not meant for fishing, and indeed waiting, patient passive waiting, was part of the pleasure of the pastime. If you got a bite every time your hook broke the water’s surface, if you hauled up one fish after another, why, where was the joy? Might as well drag a net. Hell, might as well toss a grenade into a trout stream and scoop up what floated to the surface.

Ah. There she was.

“I’m a fisherman,” he said.

These were not the first words he spoke to her. Those were, “Let me give you a hand.” He’d pulled up behind her just as she was about to put her groceries into the trunk of her car, and hopped out and offered his help. She smiled, and was about to thank him, but she never had the chance. He had a flashlight in one hand, three C batteries in a hard rubber case, and he took her by the shoulder and swung her around and hit her hard on the back of the head. He caught her as she fell, eased her down gently.

In no time at all she was propped up in the passenger seat of his SUV, and her groceries were in her trunk and the lid slammed shut. She was out cold, and for a moment he thought he might have struck too hard a blow, but he checked and found she had a pulse. He used duct tape on her wrists and ankles and across her mouth, fastened her seat belt, and drove off with her.

And, as patiently as he’d waited for her to emerge from the supermarket, he waited for her to return to consciousness. I’m a fisherman, he thought, and waited for the chance to say the words. He kept his eyes on the road ahead, but from time to time he shot her a glance, and her appearance never changed. Her eyes were shut, her muscles slack.

Then, not long after he’d turned onto a secondary road, he sensed that she was awake. He looked at her, and she looked the same, but he could somehow detect a change. He gave her another moment to listen to the silence, and then he spoke, told her that he was a fisherman.

No reaction from her. But he was certain she’d heard him.

“A catch-and-release fisherman,” he said. “Not everybody knows what that means. See, I enjoy fishing. It does something for me that nothing else has ever done. Call it a sport or a pastime, as you prefer, but it’s what I do and what I’ve always done.”

He thought about that. What he’d always done? Well, just about. Some of his earliest childhood memories involved fishing with a bamboo pole and baiting his hook with worms he’d dug himself in the backyard. And some of his earliest and most enduring adult memories involved fishing of another sort.

“Now I wasn’t always a catch-and-release fisherman,” he said. “Way I saw it back in the day, why would a man go to all the trouble of catching a fish and then just throw it back? Way it looked to me, you catch something, you kill it. You kill something, you eat it. Pretty clear cut, wouldn’t you say?”

Wouldn’t you say? But she wouldn’t say anything, couldn’t say anything, not with the duct tape over her mouth. He saw, though, that she’d given up the pretense of unconsciousness. Her eyes were open now, although he couldn’t see what expression they may have held.

“What happened,” he said, “is I lost the taste for it. The killing and all. Most people, they think of fishing, and they somehow manage not to think about killing. They seem to think the fish comes out of the water, gulps for air a couple of times, and then obligingly gives up the ghost. Maybe he flops around a little first, but that’s all there is to it. But, see, it’s not like that. A fish can live longer out of water than you’d think. What you have to do, you gaff it. Hit it in the head with a club. It’s quick and easy, but you can’t get around the fact that you’re killing it.”

He went on, telling her how you were spared the chore of killing when you released your catch. And the other unpleasant chores, the gutting, the scaling, the disposal of offal.

He turned from a blacktop road to a dirt road. He hadn’t been down this road in quite a while, but it was as he remembered it, a quiet path through the woods that led to a spot he’d always liked. He quit talking now, letting her think about what he’d said, letting her figure out what to make of it, and he didn’t speak again until he’d parked the car in a copse of trees, where it couldn’t be seen from the road.

“I have to tell you,” he said, unfastening her seat belt, wrestling her out of the car. “I enjoy life a lot more as a catch-and-release fisherman. It’s got all the pleasure of fishing without the downside, you know?”

He arranged her on the ground on her back. He went back for a tire iron, and smashed both her kneecaps before untaping her ankles, but left the tape on her wrists and across her mouth.

He cut her clothing off her. Then he took off his own clothes and folded them neatly. Adam and Eve in the garden, he thought. Naked and unashamed. Lord, we fished all night and caught nothing.

He fell on her.

Back home, he loaded his clothes into the washing machine, then drew a bath for himself. But he didn’t get into the tub right away. He had her scent on him, and found himself in no hurry to wash it off. Better to be able to breathe it in while he relived the experience, all of it, from the first sight of her in the supermarket to the snapped-twig sound of her neck when he broke it.

And he remembered as well the first time he’d departed from the catch-and-release pattern. It had been less impulsive that time, he’d thought long and hard about it, and when the right girl turned up — young, blonde, a cheerleader type, with a turned-up nose and a beauty mark on one cheek — when she turned up, he was ready.

Afterward he’d been upset with himself. Was he regressing? Had he been untrue to the code he’d adopted? But it hadn’t taken him long to get past those thoughts, and this time he felt nothing but calm satisfaction.

He was still a catch-and-release fisherman. He probably always would be. But, for God’s sake, that didn’t make him a vegetarian, did it?

Hell, no. A man still had to have a square meal now and then.