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I
Jinsing and Eddie went fishing all the time when it was warm enough. Usually, they only caught bluegills and catfish, but this one day Jinsing was after a big lazy bass that he could see moping just below the surface of the water.

The two boys were standing in the water, but the water was over their heads. The floods had been particularly bad that spring and everyone's yards and basements were filled with water.

Jinsing and Eddie were fishing in the lake to the east of the housing complex, just over the hill. From that distance you couldn't see the houses for the trees.

Jinsing cast a line underwater and laid it right across the bass's back, but the bass never moved, it only hovered just below the surface, fanning its fins to cause fresh water to flow across its gills.

"J," Eddie said. (He never called him Jinsing, which was a nickname given to him by the other boys. Neither of them liked the name. The others didn't like J, so they called him Jinsing because they thought he was bitter and because they couldn't spell. So Eddie called him J because his real name was Ganja.)

But Jinsing couldn't hear so well under water.
"J," Eddie said more loudly. "What kind of fish is that?"
"It's a bass," Jinsing answered. "But it won't take the bait."
He was using chunks of ham left over from the previous night's dinner.

Jinsing twisted the rod back and forth beneath the water trying to maneuver the bait in front of the fish. Suddenly, probably because he had stimulated an instinct that it could not resist, the fish sprang to life and engulfed the piece of ham. But just as quickly, the fish became inert again.

Jinsing had expected a fight, but as he reeled in the fish, he felt disappointed. The fish allowed itself to be hauled through the water like a small log, or like the contents of a dream after you awaken, no longer active.

Eddie and Jinsing crawled out of the water with the fish. Eddie talked about the fish as if it were his, and Jinsing felt a little bit envious toward him, until he realized that all along he had been using Eddie's rod and reel.

Then he didn't feel so bad, because the reel had been underwater and Eddie would have to take the time to take it apart and dry and clean it to prevent it from corroding. But even though Eddie felt the fish was his, he let Jinsing keep it. That is, he didn't take it home with him. Jinsing did.

After they got the fish out of the water, they saw that it was not a bass at all, but a bright-colored fish, white and orange, not gray and fat and long like it had looked under the water, but broad and high and flat, like a sunfish, only much bigger and thicker. Neither Jinsing nor Eddie had ever seen a fish like it before.


On the way home, after Eddie had departed, while walking through the woods, J heard noises off to the south that sounded like thunder ripping through tree branches. Since he could see the sky, clear and blue through the green treetops, he detoured toward the noise to see what had caused it.

Beyond the southern ridge he came across a group of men who were felling the huge trees that grew there. Just as the men came into J's view, they began to shout out words he couldn't understand, and a huge tree about two feet in diameter began to fall toward the west.

J felt that they shouldn't be there cutting down the trees. He felt violated. He had known these trees all his life and now already most of them were gone. All that was left were trees less than a foot in diameter. All that was left of the biggest tree of all was a huge, four-foot wide, irregularly shaped stump. He felt as if he'd lost a friend. But he guessed that the men had the right to fell the trees or else they wouldn't be there.


At home in his soggy backyard, J showed the fish to his cousin David. But the fish had come to life and began to swim away in the air. David grabbed it by its lower jaw like you would grab a bass, preventing it from escaping.

All the way home the fish had lain perfectly still so that J thought it was dead, but he had never smacked it on the head like he would have if it had been flopping around.

With a bit of difficulty, since he had to put his fingers into the fish's mouth while his cousin's were in there also, J grabbed the fish by the lower jaw and took it from David. But he had a hard time holding onto it because the fish kept biting down hard on his thumb. Finally though, he managed to get a grip on the jaw that prevented the fish from biting. But still, it continued to wriggle. J's fingers scrapped a piece of flesh from the underside of the fish's jaw by trying to hang on too tightly while he was losing his grip.

At the other side of the yard where J had walked, he finally lost hold of the fish, which fell to the ground and began to crawl away. It crawled up the small hillside toward the neighbor's yard. But J's father, standing nearby, knocked it back down into the wet grass, and J picked it up again.

J's father had been dead for years, but since he never complained about his death, everyone let him hang around. "Look," J said to his father, pointing. "There's another fish. And another. And another!" Smaller fish of the same variety as J and Eddie had caught were floundering in the swampy grass.

"Yes," J's father said. "They came up through the storm sewers with the floodwaters." J gathered up the little fish in a metal bucket. They all had the same coloring as the fish that now lay limp on the wet concrete porch, except that they were thin and narrow instead of broad and flat.

"I'll put them into the lake," J said.
He wanted them to grow bigger so that he could catch them again.


Inside the house, J gathered clothes together for the next day's fishing trip to the bigger lake beyond the mountains. He found his baggy, heavy canvas, Nixon shorts in his mother's laundry basket, along with a pair of heavy white cotton socks. And lying on the kitchen table, he found the sheath for his six-inch boning knife. But the knife wasn't in it.

Instantly, he knew his brother had taken the knife. He hurried back outside to inquire of his mother where the knife was, more as an excuse to blame his brother than as a genuine inquiry.


II
When Jinsing and Eddie went away to school a number of years later, Eddie always got top grades. Jinsing did all right, but not as good as Eddie. Eddie was graduated with honors, but Jinsing didn't finish. The Dean of English, a severely anal-retentive man who dressed in a shit-brown suit, called him in one day and told him he would not be allowed to graduate. J didn't think too much about it until later in his life. At the time, he felt it was a typical roadblock of the type he had been experiencing all his life. He didn't care, really---and the Dean knew this, without asking. But later, as he thought back on it, he realized he had been wronged. As long as he had attended school, they took his money fast enough without asking any questions. He had to pay back the loans for years afterwards. And no one seemed to express any interest at all in providing him any guidance, not that he ever wanted any. But someone should have been assigned to counsel him. He never received any warnings beforehand that he might not be allowed to finish. It was all the Dean of English's doing. One day he arbitrarily decided that he must be the guardian of the academic standards of his department and he summarily dismissed J without concern or care. J hadn't been a bad student. He had a B average and had passed all but three courses (which he subsequently made up) due to a bad time he was having with some personal problems and difficulties with his army draft deferment. But he'd got it together again and was on his way toward completing his requirements, having only one more semester to complete, when the dean informed him of his decision. He could have warned him earlier. But then, if he'd quit, they wouldn't have gotten all his money. This was his big fish. The one that almost got away. He finished college and got his degree on the GI bill after he got out of the army. Even deans of colleges don't fuck with Uncle Sam.


III
Terrorist kids who were all volunteers killed all the pigeons in Rashita's neighborhood.

At work, Rashita told everyone that she and Jinsing were just married and were going to honeymoon in Paris. After the long weekend, when they returned to work, everyone thought they made a lovely couple. So Jinsing quit his job because he couldn't keep up the pretense.

At her home, when Rashita's secret husband returned, Jinsing and the terrorist kids' leader snuck out through the basement and escaped into the neighborhood where all the dead pigeons lay.

J wrote out the entire history of his life in his basement under the computer table because the computer emitted brainwaves that polluted the stale, dank air.

No one understood the stories that Jinsing wrote about his life because the pigeons whispered all the secrets to the terrorists before they died.



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