At once a gigantic fish broke the surface with a three-story splash and struck the bait before the shoe had a chance to hit the water. The horsehair line grew taut and the spool spun rapidly as the fish ran free with the beaver-felt lure. The resulting tug nearly pulled the cork grip from Oyzer’s hands, yanking him forward at a stumble into the shallow water as he tried to hang on to his rod. With only a rudimentary experience of the sport, he understood that he was seriously outmatched, giving up already the farcical misnomer of “fisherman”: a wretched smithy was all he was.
“Palm the rim,” came a harsh smoker’s voice from behind him.
Oyzer strained to look over his shoulder, where a pink-eyed rustic in a dusty sack coat was standing.
The man spat a stream of tobacco juice. “Palm the rim of your spool to give it some drag,” he said, gesticulating with his hand. “Use your thumb.”
The blacksmith applied pressure with his cudgel-sized thumb to the reel’s rotating spindle and felt a slight retardation of the big fish’s headlong run.
“Now play that sucker,” said another more nasal voice. “Click and pawl.”
Oyzer turned again to see that Pink-Eyes had been joined by a lantern-jawed gent in a battered straw skimmer.
“He ain’t got no clicker, Ethel; that’s a cheap-ass Alright reel.”
“Should of bought hisself a Orvis multiplier; them’s got a slide drag for easy retrieval of your got-dang game fish.”
“Myself,” said the original kibitzer, “I’m partial to the Pflueger direct-drive, which it’ll let you feather your line with a forefinger.”
“Had me a Pflueger oncet,” countered Ethel, “but the got-dang bird’s-nest device couldn’t keep the line from snaring.”
“You should try shometime the Koshmic quadruple,” came a third voice that Oyzer, facing forward again, recognized as his neighbor Alabaster’s, speaking as usual through a chomped cigar. “With the fifty-pound tesht I uzhe it, and alwaysh with the woolly booger lure.”
There commenced a heated debate concerning the virtues of woolly boogers versus mayflies, caddises, midges, and hare’s-ear nymphs, but by then the blacksmith wasn’t listening anymore. He was struggling to maintain some traction against the prodigious fish pulling with the might of a man-o’-war at the end of his line. Resigned now to contending with the fish not as an angler but as a stiff-necked Jew, Oyzer was able to draw again on some portion of the blacksmith’s strength. He’d managed to slow without halting the free run of the fish toward the channel outlet by applying pressure to the reel, but was unable as yet to summon enough force to reverse the clockwise revolution of the crank handle. As a consequence, leaning backward at an inordinate angle with his heels dug into the mud, the blacksmith was in a stalemate with the powerful fish.
He was aware that a growing number of spectators had gathered behind him, heard snatches of advice he ignored, knowing in his bones that he must bring in the fish on his own or not at all. The fog had lifted and the sun shone forth on a brilliant late spring (or early fall) day. North Main Streeters had ventured beyond the enchanted zone to mingle with a few gentile citizens alerted to the blacksmith’s struggle. As Oyzer gripped the handle of the still turning reel, the cane rod was nearly bent double from the tension, but miraculously it did not break nor did the line snap. Miracles notwithstanding, however, what was called for was simple brute strength. But while the veins stood out like cordage on his ham-sized forearms, Oyzer was unable to wind the spool in the opposite direction. He groaned aloud, his red face contorted in the anguish of his effort, but the handle on the reel would not be moved.
In describing the deadlock from the confines of his narrow room, Muni Pinsker evoked epic contests with legendary denizens of the deep, associations that lent velocity to his pen. But the thoughts of Oyzer Tarnopol, who shared no such associations, were elsewhere: he told himself that, had he interfered on that black day back in Hrubeshoyb, he could only have succeeded in getting himself murdered alongside his wife and daughter, thus leaving his son an orphan — and that, however, was finally no excuse. Meanwhile the blacksmith’s neighbors, Jew and yokel alike, had tied an anchor rope around Oyzer’s thick middle and hauled on it as in a tug-of-war to prevent his being pulled farther into the drink.
Morning gave way to afternoon then evening — the orange sky deepening to plum — then morning again, the first day; and still the blacksmith held fast in his struggle with the fish. Sweat streamed in runnels from his brow, tiny blood vessels bursting in the whites of his eyes, which he squeezed shut; he clenched shut his jaw, though he opened his mouth periodically to receive the chicken soup that Mrs. Rosen insisted on spoon-feeding him. The neighbors, heaving at the hawser that kept him from pitching forward into the bayou, spelled each other, comparing fish tales of their own as they rested before taking another turn. Then another evening and morning, the second day; and Oyzer’s neighbors began to show signs of fatigue and restlessness, some wondering why they’d left the scintillant waters of their canal to assemble by this noisome sump. Most of the goyim, grown bored with the marathon encounter, had begun to wander off, as what had they been waiting for anyway? The lunker, presumably stalled below the surface, had yet to reappear, which made one question whether it even existed. Most likely the big Yid had snagged his hook on a scuttled flatboat. By the third evening the blacksmith’s trunk-like legs were sunk to his thighs in the gumbo, so that he looked to have been planted there, more an immovable fixture of the landscape than a man.
Oyzer himself, his every sinew and nerve on fire, his brain an ember, wondered whether the fish remained on his line, or was it that — his thoughts unraveling — the dead he’d deserted were attempting to pull him under? How he’d resented his son for whose sake he’d refrained from taking his own life, though staying alive was surely the punishment he deserved. But with Hershel vanished, what reason was there not to surrender? Maybe it was time to follow the sins he’d flung into the bayou. Ever fewer of his neighbors now manned the rope that held him against the opposing tow, and the suction of the mud he was lodged in could scarcely offset the leverage he’d lost. Soon what strength he had left would fail him, his heart would burst from the strain, and he would be dragged into the water to perhaps become food for the very creature he battled with. It would be a welcome end. But in the meantime he owed it to the family he’d betrayed to prolong his agony.