CRAZY IN LOVE

We were gutting the sunfish and crappies we’d caught earlier that morning on Medicine Lake, just north of Minneapolis. Something was gnawing at Wayne, I could tell from the way he kept his lips pressed together as he rapidly slit open each fish’s belly, scooped out the insides, shaved off the scales, and lopped off the heads with a cleaver. Maybe it bugged him that I kept the heads on, or that I hated gutting and thanked each fish for its sacrifice, or that I named aloud each organ: intestine, bladder, kidney, stomach, heart . . .

But no:

“You’re too young to think about marrying Rita,” he finally grumbled, “If you do get hitched at such a young age, you know what’ll happen to your life, don’t you?”

It’ll turn out better than it is now. But I bit my tongue. I hated how he tried to micro-manage me and Ma; it’s why I’d begged Ma not to marry him. “Would you rather we starved, Joey?” had been her knee-jerk reply.

I gazed mournfully at the pail of fish entrails. I wanted to get back in the boat and motor out to the middle of the lake, to absorb Nature’s April re-awakening. I wondered how Rita, so effervescent at social gatherings, such a queen of domesticity, would feel about my need to get away from people.

“You’ll be trapped, just like your mother with her first husband,” Wayne was saying.

“You mean, with my father.”

“Some father. Where do you think you’d be now if she’d stayed with that loser?”

In a happier place. Relieved as I was that Dad was out of my life, his sudden desertion had left me unmoored. I reached for a sunfish, gazed at his iridescent scales, his marbleized, astonished eyes and gaping mouth. “Yeah,” I said to the fish, “I can relate.” I sliced him open and dug out his insides with my fingers.

“Stop trying to talk me into breaking up with Rita,” I finally said.

Wayne coughed up a gob of phlegm. “Wanna learn your lesson the hard way, huh? Well, go right the hell ahead. Why should I give a crappie?” He barked a laugh and wriggled in my face the body of the fish he had just decapitated. Asshole.

He grabbed the pail, dumped the entrails and heads into the lake; then he scooped the gutted fish into the pail. “C’mon,” he grumbled, “We need to get back now or your mother will bitch her head off for us being gone so long.”

On the way home I rehearsed several scenarios for persuading Rita to go fishing with me, rejecting all of them. Wayne turned on his Classic Country station, lit a cigarette, and proffered the pack to me. He knew I’d stopped smoking (at Rita’s insisting); but I took one anyway, lit up, and inhaled deeply. Patsy Cline was singing a song about being crazy in love . . . I’m crazy for loving you . . .

Wayne and I joined in.