The Last Fishing Trip

Mom cried when I told her Grandpa came home, and Dad punched me in the eye. Grandpa said he just needed to borrow the phone for a second to call his old war buddies down at the hundred and two. His pasty green khaki fishing jacket was wrinkled on the back, and a fine layer of red dirt smeared his hands and forearms.

I pointed out the red fingerprints on the phone after Dad hit me. This time, when he swung at my chin, I was ready –but I let the knuckle of his pointer and middle finger twist into the bottom of my jaw, a loud crack reverberating where the fist and chin connect. I do not fall over. A lily colored bruise is just beginning to open on my left eye, and blood and spit and fuck you, you son of a bitch is rocketing out of my mouth and I am still standing up.

My Dad isn't usually violent, he also usually doesn't cry, but whenever I mention Grandpa he does one of the two. Five years ago, we went on a fishing trip, three generations with nothing in common but a three-bedroom house. Dad supervised my knot tying and how I got the canoe on the Tahoe, and Grandpa supervised Dad supervising me. Dad yelled at me when I forgot the tin can with tiny perforations to hold minnows in, and he stopped the car and went back after an hours drive because I left the nail clipper we used to cut the fishing line. When he ordered me a number seven, grilled chicken sandwich, no mayo, with a Coke from Burger King, I knew that this was a litmus test for Dad just as much for me. The way he didn't touch his fries the entire way there, though he glanced at them every fifteen minutes or so, I knew he wasn't trying to make me happy, he was just trying to impress his Dad. I played with the car door, locking and unlocking it, listening to the whirr of the automatic mechanism somewhere deep down in the crevices of the car that simply did as it was told. Grandpa seemed unimpressed by Dad's ability to name the hawks flying above. Instead, he too played with the little lock on the door; moon shaped wrinkles forming on the side of a wry, child-like smile. I couldn't tell if Dad wanted to prove he was a father because he had such a great one, or because he never remembered Grandpa ever doing anything.

Grandpa was useless. When he got out of the car, we almost had to end the trip when he tripped on the wet, red mud outside. He landed like a feather into Dad's arms, falling at a pace so imperceptibly slow, it was as if they planned the entire movement to show me how to deal with old falling people. Grandpa had a thin patch of Irish red hair that he combed over from the left side of his scalp, and he didn't seem to mind the big gusts of wind that would blow it straight up like the lid of a trashcan. He had a cold marble nose that would be pink even when it was hot, and runny, even when it was dry. When he walked, he inched forward sheepishly, his loafers he refused to throw away, or take off (even in the tent) clumped large patches of mud in the front. Still, Dad spent the entire evening trying to impress Grandpa; he even started the fire himself.

When we woke up on the second day of the trip, and Grandpa was still smiling in his sleep at two, Dad began to cry. He said he could have done something if he knew, he should have heard, or felt, the slowing of Grandpa's heart. I told him that he couldn't hear the absence of sound, the soft and steady beat of eighty-two years coming to a gentle halt. When the ambulance came, Dad climbed into the trunk of the Tahoe and recited the traits of the peregrine falcon.