martini grasped in his large hands looking down and wishing his grandson luck.
The water had whitecaps, brackish two-foot swells that made the going slow and difficult in the small boat. Greg held onto the front with both hands, and by the curve of his back, Trey could see the other boy’s fear as he guided them around the larger clumps of weeds, both of them wary of getting them caught in the motor. Occasionally, they would pass a fish, held just under the water in the unrelenting grip of the weed, its eyes milky and rotten. The air was heavy with humidity, shirts and shorts already sopping with their sweat. The scent of honeysuckle drifted on the wind, mixing with the smell of rotting fish and the heady scent of the weed. Breathing was hard during any August in Tennessee, but upon the surface of the lake, it was near impossible as both boys alternately held their breaths against the foul smells of deadness and the sweetness of the surrounding forest.
Both boys had grown up on the lake, their summers filled with days where shoes and shirts were left indoors as they tried to become one with the sun and the water. When they weren’t fishing or mowing lawns for some extra money, they were swimming around the community dock. Their favorite sport was underwater tag, spending more time holding their breath under than they did playing above. During those long games, Trey often imagined he knew how a fish felt, chased and cornered by a fisherman. He could hold his breath for over two minutes and would slither in and around the old wooden pilings, propelling himself from one end of the dock to the other in his efforts to escape the touch of his friends. The only greater feeling was when he shot to the surface for that breath of air that was required for another dive.
Often, when his mother and father were fighting and he found himself down on the dock, crying and wishing to be someone else’s son, he would pray to the gods of the fishes. He would beg to be released from his human bonds and become one with the water; a true fish. Their lives were simple and he envied the pleasure of the water, imagining himself too smart for the hook, plumbing the depths and coasting with the current. Trey had often thought, of all the fishes to choose from, that he would wish to become a catfish. Their lives were spent on the bottom, gliding and discovering the cast-off treasures of their human hunters. They were stately and moved with the purposefulness of kings. They lived long lives and grew to be immense. He remembered the picture he saw in the Guinness Book of World Records, the jaw of the fish large enough to swallow a small boy.
And then there were the stories of Old Man Hassle. He wasn’t the only one who talked about giant fish, everyone had heard the rumors, but it was the old caretaker of the community dock who spoke of it more than anyone else. The lake was only about fifty years old. Still, divers would descend every few months to check the dam’s integrity, searching for any cracks or holes in the millions of tons of concrete that could threaten the greater part of Chattanooga, sitting as a magnificent southern gem, just downriver. During the years, old wrecks of cars and trains were dumped along the base to add to the dam’s width. These obtrusions were deadly to the divers, some becoming caught in the tangle of twisted metal as they inspected and pretended to be fishes. Even so, there was no end to divers who wanted to delve the lakes deepest depths. The pay was supposedly the highest of all and the list was long. Yet that list moved quickly as the divers went down, came back up and swore never to enter the lake again.
It was the catfish that sent them scurrying, arriving screaming and babbling as they surfaced. It was the catfish as big as Ford LTDs and Lincoln Towncars that swam up to stare at them as they inspected the aging concrete. People said it was all the old cars that bad been dumped down in the lake’s depths that provided them with their source of measurement and it was this single thing that made people believe the stories. It was also what had people coming from everywhere to catch the