May Storm
fiction by Tony Vinciguerra
"How the hell am I going to compete with that?" I asked myself aloud. Trout were rising all around me. It looked like a fish hatchery in the tiny stream. The whiteout of mayflies grew denser and denser. I looked down at my waders, which were brown the last time I checked. They were snow white now.
Out of habit I thought, There's just no way I'm going to catch a single fish with all of the food layering the surface of the water, but for the first time in my life, I didn't really care about catching a fish. In the past when I went fishing and came up empty, "got skunked," as my father would say, I felt wronged by the gods. I got angry. I often got angry. This time was different. It all seemed so insignificant.
Funny how something like death can change your whole perspective so quickly. One hears the phrase "the miracle of life" so often that it doesn't have any meaning. Now it seemed to make more sense. A second ago, there wasn't a single fish to be seen, and there wasn't an insect in the air. A second later I couldn't see the end of the seven-foot fly rod because the air was teeming with life. The stream was boiling with fish gorging themselves on that life, ending those lives to keep themselves alive.
The fly rod was my father's, but it was mine by this time. Just as the Chevy Blazer that was just 50 feet away, but out of site during the mayfly snowstorm, was mine by then. My father had just passed away. In fact, he was probably still lying in his hospital bed at that moment. Just then, I wondered if anyone had discovered him yet.
He died less than an hour before, while I was there, watching my father trying to muster the strength to speak. I was trying to muster the strength to say something meaningful, to say something a son should say to his father on his deathbed. I tried to put all the angry thoughts I always had about my father behind me. All the angry words came to mind so easily, without having to think about how to phrase them. While I was there, watching my father die, I couldn't come up with anything benevolent to say.
My father never did get enough strength to speak. Neither did I.
As my father passed, I just watched. I watched the spirit drain from the corpse. My first thought was to yell for the nurse. I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. Then I thought, Why yell? He's gone. What good is yelling? A nurse isn't going to bring him back from the dead.
I stood, and I walked. I was on autopilot. I didn't realize that I was in shock until much later. I strolled past the nurse's station. The head nurse, Dora, who I knew well by now, barely noticed me leaving. "Bye, Jack," she said. I think I waved to her, but I know I didn't say anything. I walked. I walked to the hospital parking garage. My dad's Blazer was easy to spot with its honeycombed undercarriage. The salt air from all those fishing trips on the beaches of Cape Cod and Martha's Vineyard had taken their toll.
I wiggled the key into the door lock. The copy I made of the keys never worked as well as the originals. I had to rock the ignition key into place too. The eight cylinders roared to life, and I drove. I drove away from the hospital where I was born, where my sisters were born, where my grandparents died. The place to where my parents and I drove in a blizzard to see my newborn nephew. Where I had driven this very vehicle day in and day out for the past three weeks since the ambulance brought my father here.
As I glanced in the rearview mirror, I caught another glimpse of the familiar tan fly fishing vest my father wore for the past 20 years. I'd never known my father to leave fishing equipment in his truck, but it was while he was packing the truck for a weekend trip to Cape Cod that he fell ill. He never trusted anyone. He wouldn't even trust his own son with his precious fishing equipment.
It hit me then that the fishing equipment was mine at that point. My sisters certainly wouldn't want it. My father laughed at the prospect of teaching a girl how to fish. Claiming that he had fully Americanized himself, he still carried the sexist views of the Old Country, as he referred to Italy.
Then next thing I remember, I was standing there, knee deep in my father's favorite stream, wondering whether anyone knew or cared that my father was dead. "Dad's got to have a white mayfly pattern in this vest somewhere," I said as I burrowed through the vest. I opened each tiny fly box carefully to prevent dropping any flies into the stream flowing just over my rubber-coated knees.
"Aha," I said as I found a fly that twinned the real ones covering the underside of the bill of my Red Sox cap, tied it on, and cast it gently into the fray of fish and flies in front of me. I felt a hit, but quickly realized that the trout was eating a real fly that landed on my line, far above the hook that is in my own mayfly, made of synthetic fibers and mallard feathers.
Moments later, the mayflies began to complete their circle of life, dying after mating and laying their eggs on the surface of the water. In minutes, white wings covered the water. I didn't have a prayer of seeing my fly in that sea of white. "How is a trout going to see it?" I asked no one. "This is useless."
I folded up the fly rod, struggled to pull each foot from the mud below the stream and walked back to the truck. I drove.
-- ASV