The Thanatos Syndrome

talking Southern.
    We are drifting. I keep a paddle in the water.
    â€œCan we try for bream?” Van asks.
    â€œAll right, though it’s late. The best time is when they nest in April and July. But some of them will be hanging around. You see those cypress knees over there.”
    â€œSho now.”
    â€œYou see the two big ones?”
    â€œYeah.”
    â€œJust beyond is a bed. It’s been there for years. They use the same bed. My father showed me that one fifty years ago.”
    â€œWell, I be.”
    â€œYou see that birch and cyrilla hanging out over it from the swamp?”
    â€œThose two limbs? Yeah.”
    â€œWhat you got to do is come in sideways with your line so you won’t get hung up.”
    â€œSho. But wouldn’t it be a good idea to cut those limbs off? That’s pretty tight.”
    â€œThen all the sunfish would leave. You don’t mess with light and shade.”
    â€œNo kidding.”
    Van Dorn has opened his triple-tiered tackle box. He takes out a little collapsed graphite rod and reel, presses a button, and out it springs, six or seven feet. He shows me the jeweled reel, which is spring-loaded to suck back line.
    â€œVery nice.”
    â€œYou can keep this in your glove compartment. Once I was driving through Idaho, saw a nice little stream, pulled over. Six rainbows.”
    â€œWhat type of line you got there?”
    â€œIt’s a tapered TP5S.”
    His equipment probably cost him five hundred dollars.
    â€œYou not fishing, Tom?”
    â€œNo. I’ll hold the boat off for you.”
    â€œYou don’t want to fish!”
    â€œNo.” What I want to do is watch him.
    He takes off his helmet and selects a fly. “I thought I’d try a dry yellowtail.”
    â€œWould you like something better?”
    â€œWhat’s better?”
    â€œSomething that’s here and alive. Green grasshoppers, wasps. Catalpa worms are the best.”
    â€œFine, but—”
    â€œWait a minute. I remember something.”
    We drift silently past the bed and under a catalpa tree. The perfect heart-shaped leaves are like small elephant ears. A few black pods from last year hang down like beef jerky. This year’s pods look like oversized string beans. I stand up, cut a leaf carefully at the stem. “Hold out your hands.” I roll the leaf into a funnel, shake down the worms, small white ones that immediately ball up like roly-polies. “Sunfish are fond of these.”
    â€œWell, I be. What now?”
    â€œTake off that fly and put on a bream hook.”
    â€œThis little bitty job?”
    â€œRight. Even big sunfish have tiny mouths.”
    â€œHow about just nigger-fishing with worms?”
    â€œEarthworms are all right, but these are better.” It is hard to tell whether he is trying to say “nigger-fishing” in a natural Southern way or in a complicated liberal way, as if he were Richard Pryor’s best friend.
    â€œOkay, you’re set,” I tell him. “You see the beds close to the bank, a dozen or so?” Bream beds are pale shallow craters in the muck made by the fish fanning the eggs.
    â€œI see.”
    Van Dorn is surprisingly good. He slings his hundred-dollar line under the cyrilla on second try. Even more surprising, he catches a fish. I thought they’d be gone. A big male pound-and-a-half sunfish feels like a marlin on a fly line.
    â€œWell, I be goddamned,” says Van Dorn, landing him, his pleasure now as simple as a boy’s. We gaze at the fish, fat, round as a plate, sinewy, fine-scaled, and silvered, the amazing color spot at his throat catching the sun like a topaz set in amethyst. The colors will fade in minutes, but for now the fish looks both perfectly alive yet metallic, handwrought in Byzantium and bejeweled beyond price, all the more amazing to have come perfect from the muck.
    But the beds are mostly empty. Van Dorn catches a couple more bream and a half dozen bass. “For y’all,” he says. Y’all? Hudeen will be pleased. Into the ice well go the fish, out comes the beer.
    It is getting on to noon and hot in the sun. We drink beer and watch the gnats swarm. The cicadas are fuguing away. I watch him.
    â€œThat was sump’n, cud’n,” says Van Dorn.
    Cud’n?
    â€œYou want to know something, Tom?”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œI’ll make you a little confession. I think at long last I’m back where I