Texas Summer Read Free Page B

soon!” then grinned crazily and nodded at Harold for confirmation. But Harold had just looked away, and said later: “Heck, I ain’t gonna back you in a dang lie — not after us gettin’ into it over you callin’ me one.”
    But regarding the existence of the great fish, there were witnesses to prove it. Harold’s Uncle Buck, on his mother’s side — an angler of such excellence and repute that he was habitually entered, and often highly placed, in “The Famous Lake Mead’s Big Texas Bass Tournament” — had driven over from Amarillo one Sunday and spent the entire next week trying to land the big fish, which he hooked three different times — with a loss of lures, lines, rods, and specially prepared flies. “Wal, ah’ll tell you one thing,” he had said in conclusion, over the chicken and dressing, hot biscuits, and giblet gravy at Sunday dinner before heading back for Amarillo. “That bullhead is a smart son’bitch!” He told how the hooked fish would burst up through the surface, raging and thrashing to a height of four or five feet above the water, then dive into the depths, head for the nearest stump, wrap around it, and snap the line. A proud and ethical fisherman, who preferred to play the fish, exhaust it, and outsmart it, he had begun by using a four-pound test line and a feather-light bamboo rod, then had gradually moved up to thirty-pound test and a rod made of some kind of new alloy. “Ah ever go after him again,” he said, unsmiling, at the dinner table, “it’ll be with a length of calf-rope or a goddam dog-chain.”
    When Harold had first told C.K. about seeing the great bullhead, C.K. had not doubted the fact, nor even questioned the size; instead he nodded solemnly and said: “He be back — we git ’im.” That was two years ago, and they had not seen the fish since — although both Uncle Buck and Harold’s grandfather had hooked it, on separate occasions, the latter as recently as two months ago. “Felt like I had a goddam hog on the line,” he had insisted, “and then he hit them stumps, and it was ‘Katy, bar the door!’ Snapped my rod, snapped my line, and that was all she wrote! Damnest thing I ever seen!”
    “Ah got me a feelin’,” said C.K. somberly now, as they gazed at the motionless split-corks floating on the water in front of them, about a foot apart.
    Harold gave him a skeptical glance. “Oh yeah? What kind of feelin’?”
    C.K. frowned. “Well, it ain’t that easy to say, but it’s like what you might call a church feelin’ — like somethin’ you might feel just ’fore you git ‘teched.’”
    “Are you crazy? Since when did you ever go to church?”
    But as C.K. prepared to expound on it, a remarkable thing happened: both corks began to move slowly toward them across the water — for about six inches before they were jerked under the surface, with such abruptness as to cause wide concentric circles to ripple out across the pond.
    “God dang,” said Harold, “that must be him!”
    “Snag up!” C.K. yelled. “Snag up, he done took both hook!”
    Almost simultaneously the two rods bent into hairpin shape, and the reels spun with a high singing whine as the lines unspooled.
    “Let out!” yelled C.K., quite needlessly. “Play the fish! Play the fish!”
    But there was to be no playing this fish; it had taken both baits in one wide-mouth sweeping rush, and when it felt the resistance of the two hooks, caught now between gill and the thick bone of its lower jaw, it went berserk. Turning, twisting, writhing, the great bullhead raged along the bottom — between rock, log, and clump of cattail reed, its body contorting crazily, like a kind of torpedo gone haywire.
    “He’s headin’ for the stump!” yelled C.K., as both their lines whined wildly out of the reels and snapped taut and quivering like two bowstrings.
    C.K. was now performing a veritable tarantella of panic. “Reel in!” he shrieked. “Reel in!”
    “The lines are gonna break