Fiction by Bill Jirsa
I’m drinking beside an ichthyologist. I can smell the whiskey on his breath when he leans over to talk above the noise in the bar. He smells like a memory of my grandfather: fish and bourbon.
He’s asking me to help him check some lines. Yes, I say. Yes, because I want to be outside and see something that is not the inside of this bar. The invitation is not really for me. He fancies the woman across the table from us. She drinks Bailey’s, and she laughs at whatever we say. She is adorable and neither of us can have her, but the ichthyologist can ask her to come fishing, and if I go she might agree.
The midnight sun glistens off the sea ice. I’m walking above nine hundred feet of ocean as I go back to the truck to find tools. I see a child’s fishing pole in a duffle. He uses them to go for the smaller fish. None of the things in the bag look like what the ichthyologist described, and I return to the hole in the ice with a handful of tools I know he doesn’t want. Skuas chatter as they land nearby, waiting for us to drop anything.
I’m standing over a hole in the ice beside my grandfather. I’m holding his drink while he curses and toils at the bird’s nest of monofilament at the reel. It’s a cheap, kid’s pole, the kind you buy at the liquor and bait shop on the road to the reservoir. One cast and I need him to untangle it. We are both in love with my grandmother who is laughing in the truck with a cold bucket of fried chicken.
The smell of my grandfather fills my nostrils, like a spirit of fish and bourbon.
Bill Jirsa works at McMurdo Station for the United States Antarctic Program.
Image: Hole in Sea Ice, Alan Cambell
Fri 10 Feb 2006