The day was gray and calm. The river, a sheet of ripple-less obsidian, stretched before Alan and his stepson, Travis. Alan’s line was taught in the water, the pole pinned between two large rocks, while Travis’s pole laid between the fishermen as Alan fed line through the eyelet of a treble hook. Alan worked his thick fingers around each other with gentle precision a couple of times to complete the knot.

“Livers, please,” Alan said, studying the hook in his hand and giving it a tug to test the knot.

Travis extended the open container, Alan retrieving a slippery liver from the soup with a slurp.

“Closer ‘er up,” said Alan, massaging the treble hook into the liver, then calling for string.

Travis riffled through the tackle box before extending a spool.

“Cut me off a piece.”

“How big?”

“About a foot.”

Travis dug at his hip for the knife Alan had bought him that morning. While buying tackle, Travis had mentioned he liked it and that it was like the one Alan wore. Travis never saw him buy it, but Alan handed the knife to him in the truck and told him to get it on his belt.  Travis was excited to brandish it in front of Alan.

The sheath had worked behind Travis’ small waist. He slid it to his hip, retrieved the knife, and opened it, the sagging bellies of gray clouds reflected across the blade. The knife’s handle, thick and heavy, was a dalliance of swirled caramel and creamy ivory. For cutting a piece of thread, it was overkill. He handed the cut string to Alan, who threaded it in figure eights until the liver was bundled tightly to the hook and bulging on all sides, then cinched the remainder of the string into a knot.

“There you go,” said Alan, handing Travis the pole. “Just a small shot will do with the weight of all that liver.”

The boy studied the hook, then retrieved a small, plastic tackle box from his vest pocket.  Alan had told him, “You always want to carry a small tackle box with the necessities, that way you can move around the shore unincumbered.”

Travis fished out a small shot and closed the lid, then bit the shot to the line.

“That feels cool,” he said.

“What does?”

“The way the sinkers smash when you bite them.”

Alan exhaled and stared out over the water as Travis watched him, waiting for a response. “Yeah, I guess it does,” he said, finally.

Satisfied, Travis shifted the pole over one shoulder. The day before, Alan had taught Travis how to cast and critiqued his form until he heard Alan say, “That’s it, right there. Hear how that line purrs? That’s how you know. Now, do that one hundred times, and you’ll be ready,” and he did, as Alan drank a beer and watched from the porch.

Travis could still feel the good form in the soreness of his body brought on by all the casts. He steadied his feet on the rocks, tightened his stomach, and sent the line in a high arch out over the water, where it landed with a plunk.

“Was that the purr?” 

“That was the purr,” Alan confirmed, lifting his hat and resituating it on his head. The boy did the same, then followed Alan’s gaze back out onto the river.

Dusk bled into evening, all the while, Travis attempted to reel in every nibble, every bite. Alan encouraged him to be patient, to watch the tip of the pole, to feel the shaft bend and jerk, then he’d know when to set the hook. Travis tried. He watched the tip shiver and knock, a nudge here, a jerk there, but nothing seemed significant enough to be a fish attempting to swallow the bulbous knuckle of liver. Finally, Travis reeled in to recast, but when he pulled the hook from the water it was empty. The boy peered at Alan, who squinted at the tip of his own pole, a coil of smoke inching up from his cigarette. Focused, Alan did not inhale. He did not see Travis watching. Suddenly, the pole sliced forward, then to the right, as Alan yanked the pole and cranked the reel. He shot up and minced his feet in all directions as if in an intimate dance, the pole cutting the air like the wand of some cosmic conductor. The cherry of Alan’s cigarette flared as his lips worked around the filter.

“He’s got fight,” Alan proclaimed, releasing the drag, smoke trundling out around the words, the cigarette precarious between his lips. 

Travis watched Alan fight the fish for what seemed like an eternity. Finally, after pacing and releasing the drag and reeling, releasing the drag and reeling, after he sucked the cherry of the cigarette to the filter and spit it on the ground, Alan knelt and pulled the fish from the water.

“Woah! Look at that,” said Travis, who dropped his pole where he stood.

“Damn,” Alan Grumbled.

“What’s wrong? That thing is huge!”

“It’s a carp.”

“A carp?” asked Travis, leaning toward the fish.

“They’re big, and they fight, but they’re no good to eat.”

“Damn,” Travis parroted

Alan shot him a glance, and the boy looked down at the muddy bank. Then he pried open the fish’s mouth and worked the treble hook back and forth. Cartilage popped and snapped.

“He’s bleeding,” said Travis.

“The hook is stuck.”

Travis watched a bead of blood swell below the fish’s gills, then bloom across Alan’s knuckle. It thinned to a soft rust as it mixed with the water on Alan’s hands, then, like a river, weaved its way across the joint of his thumb until it vanished somewhere in the hairs of his arm.

Finally, the hook tore free with a grizzly snap and a spritz of blood. Travis flinched and stared the fish in its round, dark eyes, its mouth working open and closed, open and closed, before Alan threw it back into the river.

For Travis, the rest of the evening was more of the same, never setting the hook just right, never catching a thing. Alan pulled in three catfish by the time he called it, two flat heads and a yellow belly. Alan and Travis packed up, secured their poles, and headed back towards the truck. As they went, Travis watched a catfish roll its tail one way, then the other, trying to swim from the stringer, its body slick with a sheen in the moonlight.

At the truck, Alan dropped the stringer of fish in a five-gallon bucket he bungeed into the corner of the bed. He laid their poles beside it and unlocked the passenger door so Travis could get in and then did the same. With a twist of the key, the truck coughed to life, and once at a steady grumble, Alan worked it into drive and made his way along the tire lanes that cut through the field grass. The trail was over a mile from the county road and rough in places, so Alan took it slowly, the machine limping back and forth in a lethargic march. Travis was asleep by the time they reached the macadam.

It was early Saturday, a few hours from sunrise. The roads were empty. The fields, trees, and milkweed blitzed past Alan’s peripheral in fractured pieces. He thought about Travis. Alan remembered when he was in college, working on a degree he ultimately wouldn’t finish, something he learned in a biology class, something he’d thought about many times before. It was one of the only times he really learned something in school, the only time a concept stuck. The class was reading a book on evolution and sex. One of the chapters discussed why humans favored monogamous relationships yet still committed adultery. There was much Alan forgot, but the one thing he remembered was the mating practices of other mammals, especially apes and chimpanzees. Alan cast a glance at Travis, fetaled against the door, his breath crawling in a fog across the window and then fading before spreading again.

He didn’t love the boy. He might’ve cared but didn’t love. Alan believed if he played the role of a father he’d feel like one, but he didn’t. When Alan looked at Travis, he saw his wife, the boy’s mother, and not the boy’s father, which was important. What Alan remembered was that males of many primate species kill the young, sometimes their own and other times not, something some biologist, whose name Alan couldn’t recall, coined the Herod Effect. Alan still remembered that chimpanzees lived in clusters called fission-fusion groups. He remembered the term because it made him think of an atom bomb and how all chimpanzee families were waiting to explode. The chimps lived in large groups. The females mated with all the males to halt infanticide. Male chimps, Alan remembered, kill the young when not theirs. Because of the promiscuity, the males never knew for certain which child was theirs, so, to play it safe, they defaulted to father. The scientist knew this for certain because when the fission-fusion groups foraged for food and encountered other groups, the males attacked the females carrying young. They killed every child, all of them, in front of the mothers, the Herod Effect, atom bombs waiting to explode. The males never attacked childless females. 

Alan wished sometimes he didn’t know Travis was another man’s child and the son of an unfaithful wife. The thought made him sick. He wondered what kind a man he was, or what kind of man he wasn’t, when he wished such things, when he couldn’t love a boy that reminded him so much of his wife, who, despite her unfaithfulness when they were young, changed after Travis was born. He looked at Travis. Alan supposed it was the boy’s genes. They weren’t Alan’s, and he believed that his mind understood that somehow, that his body sensed it. It had to be something biological that pushed him away, the same thing that makes chimps kill babies that aren’t theirs, the same thing that spurs female chimps to copulate at every chance so their children will be spared, something ancient, prehistoric slivers of electric current deep in the white tissue of the brain. 

He didn’t want to kill the boy like the chimps. He didn’t hate him or dislike him. He didn’t think about another man when he looked at him. He only thought, why don’t I love that kid? What’s it going to take? What’s wrong with me?

– Mitch James