Fishy Business

It was the summer of 1998. I was passing through Kentucky with no particular schedule and even less particular plans. I stopped outside Harlan County because someone at a gas station told me there was good fishing on a creek about two miles off the main road.

There was an old man sitting on a bucket at the water’s edge. Cane pole in the water. Hat pulled low. The kind of stillness that only comes from having absolutely nothing left to prove. He didn’t look up when I walked over.

“Fish ain’t biting,” he said.

“Sorry to hear it,” I said.

“Been that way all morning.” he said.

I sat down on a rock nearby. We fished in silence.

After a while he said “You know they had drunk fish in this creek once.”

I set my pole down. “That right,” I said.

“1923,” he said. “I was ten years old. Saw the whole thing.”

I wasn’t thinking about fishing anymore.

He talked for two hours.

This is his story. Best I can remember it.

–WiseGuy, The Speakeasy

HARLAN COUNTY, KENTUCKY. SUMMER, 1923.

My daddy was not a bad man.

I wanted to say that first because what comes next might make you think otherwise. He was a bootlegger. But in Harlan County in 1923 that wasn’t so different from being a farmer or a preacher. Everybody was something the government didn’t approve of. Daddy just happened to be something they could arrest you for.

He ran a small operation. Two copper stills hidden back in the hollow behind our property. Made good whiskey. Not the paint thinner some of them were selling in the cities. Real Kentucky whiskey. The kind that tasted like the ground it came from.

Every few weeks he’d fill two barrels and load them on the old Ford truck and drive them down to the creek where a man named Cecil would be waiting with a boat. Cecil would take the barrels downriver. Daddy never asked where they went after that. Cecil never said. That was the arrangement.

I’d been on exactly two of these runs before the day everything went wrong. Daddy brought me along because Mama said I needed fresh air. I think he just liked the company. He wasn’t a man who said much, but he liked having someone to not say it to.

We got to the creek just after dawn, but Cecil wasn’t there yet.

Daddy backed the truck to the water’s edge and cut the engine. Lit a cigarette. Told me to sit on the running board and be quiet. I watched a crawdad move along the bottom of the creek. I thought about nothing in particular the way only ten-year-old boys can.

That’s when we heard the cars. Three of them. Coming down the dirt road through the trees. Moving fast, throwing up dust.

Daddy’s cigarette stopped moving.

Three black cars stopped in a line at the edge of the creek bank. Men got out. Six of them. Dark suits. Ties. Hats. Shoes so shiny you could see the creek in them. I remember thinking those shoes were going to get ruined in the mud and feeling genuinely sorry about it. They were very nice shoes.

The man in front had a badge and a voice like a falling tree.

“Step away from the vehicle,” he said. Daddy stepped away from the vehicle.

I stayed on the running board because nobody told me specifically to move, and I was ten years old and ten-year-olds operate on very literal instructions.

Two agents went to the back of the truck. They opened the tailgate and looked at the two barrels. Immediately they looked at each other and then looked over to the man with the badge.

The man with the badge nodded.

What happened next took about thirty seconds.

They rolled the first barrel to the creek bank. Tipped it. The whiskey came out in a long dark wave that hit the water and spread out brown and gold in the morning light. It smelled like oak and corn and something warm that I couldn’t name, but that smelled like every Saturday night in our kitchen.

Then they did the second one.

One of the agents grabbed my arm and pulled me off the running board. Stood me next to my daddy. The agent was not unkind about it. He looked at me the way grown men sometimes look at children when they’re doing something they know is going to cause damage they can’t fully calculate.

“Son,” he said. “You shouldn’t be here.”

I didn’t say anything. I was watching the creek. Something was happening. The first fish turned sideways about two minutes after the whiskey hit the water. Just flipped on its side and drifted downstream a few feet. Then corrected, and then went sideways again. Then another one did it, and then three more.

Within five minutes there were fish rolling at the surface all up and down that stretch of creek. Not dead. Very much alive. Just — confused. Swimming in directions that didn’t fully commit to any particular destination. Bumping into rocks and then apologizing to the rocks by swimming away sideways.

One very large catfish came to the surface near the bank and just floated there looking at the sky. Like he was thinking about something profound. Like he’d just heard news that required considerable processing.

I walked to the edge of the creek bank. Crouched down. A small bass swam up to me and stopped about two inches from the bank. It looked at me. I looked at it. It had the expression of a creature that had recently made several questionable decisions and wasn’t entirely sorry.

Then it swam away. Sideways. Into a rock. Backed up. Swam sideways again in a different direction.

One of the federal agents appeared next to me. The young one. The one whose shoes were already ruined. We stood there watching the fish together. After a while he said “You ever wish you were a fish?”

I thought about it. “No sir,” I said. We watched a catfish float past on its back. Not a care in the world. “Me neither,” he said. We watched another one drift by. “Until today.” He cracked a small smile. Put his hat back on and walked back to the others.

Later I would hear that they counted approximately 1,700 fish affected in that stretch of creek. I don’t know who counted them or how. I only know what I saw. Which was a creek full of fish that had accidentally stumbled into the best morning of their entire lives and had absolutely no idea that anything was wrong.

Daddy got arrested that morning. Cecil was never found. The Ford truck was impounded, and we never got it back which bothered Daddy considerably more than the arrest.

But here’s what I remember most. Not the agents, nor the badges. Not Daddy’s face when they tipped those barrels. I remember those fish. Swimming in circles. Bumping into things. Floating on their backs looking at the sky. Not a care in the world.

Every one of them exactly where they were supposed to be, doing exactly what they felt like doing, with absolutely no awareness that anyone thought there was anything wrong with any of it.

I’ve lived 85 years since that morning. I’ve had good days, hard days and days that were neither. And sometimes — when the hard ones pile up — I think about those fish. They didn’t know they were supposed to be having a bad day. They just kept swimming.

The old man stopped talking. He picked up his cane pole. Checked the line. Set it back down.

“Fish still ain’t biting,” he said.

“No sir,” I said.

We sat there a while longer. The creek moved past us. Same creek. Seventy-five years later. Still moving in the same direction it always had.

After a while I stood up. Thanked him. Shook his hand.

He nodded and looked back at the water as I walked back to my car. That was in 1998. Twenty-eight years ago now. He would be over a hundred years old if he was still alive today.

I still think about him sometimes. Sitting at that creek, telling that story like it happened yesterday.

I never got his name.

I never went back.

Some stories you just carry with you.

-WiseGuy, The Speakeasy