Catch and Release by Stacey C. Johnson

It’s easy to get used to certain things, like aching shoulders and a sense of floating outside your life, looking down. A person who isn’t prepared to lose what’s gone will do whatever they can to hang on until the line breaks.

When we used to go to the aquarium, Pa would announce, “There’s ten thousand fish in here!” with a wild expression of deliberate amazement. This was on Sundays after Ma died and he quit church.

He would name the species, proclaim their numbers. His announcer’s voice meant he was trying hard to make room for magic.

My older sister, Janie, loved Parakeet Point, its signs announcing, “Treats for Tweets!” Beneath the macaws in the rainforest, she said, “Oh. To be a bird.” Pa’s favorite was Gulf of Mexico, with its replica of an offshore oil rig and King Midas, the great sea turtle. Mr. Bill, the world’s most famous sawfish, swam among hundreds of sharks and stingrays, his snout like a chainsaw.

Everyone loved the penguins, and our favorite was Patience, an African black-footed. I drifted toward the jelly gallery. These required special circular tanks with no corners, as jellyfish tended to bruise.

Then Janie moved away to school, and it was just me and Pa.

“Storm’s coming,” he said, a few days before it hit. In a soft voice he added, “You know I can’t leave.” Ma’s ashes were in the house. Plus, “I didn’t put thirty years into the force to desert when the going gets rough.” A person can’t help but latch onto the most available logical explanation, especially when none will do.

After Janie graduated high school and headed up to Shreveport for college, the aquarium became another one of those things that we used to do, like dinner at the table or listening to Ma hum under her breath.

Until that last year before the storm, when Pa came home with a pair of year-long premium membership passes he had won at a Christmas party raffle.

“Hey,” he said. I was sitting on the couch. “What’re you watching?”

The TV was off. 

“Well,” he said. “Look here. They even come with free parking.”

When you live with someone, it’s easy to think you’re seeing the same person every day. He held out the passes and I looked long enough to read what they were for and then I tilted a bit on my hips to look at his face and that’s when I saw how a man can be old and a boy all at once. The lines of his smile were deep like dried up gullies and his brown eyes were shining like stones at the bottom just before the water was gone for good. 

“Remember?” he said, but it wasn’t a question. 

That was the year I knew I was leaving but I couldn’t say it yet, so we went on his off days and wandered around staring through the glass. Maybe Pa was doing what I was doing, which was trying to connect the person I was becoming to the person who used to be able to lose track of time staring at the bodies of fish moving through kelp.

That last year, he never had to catch me on my shoulder and tell me it was time to go home. We’d just catch each other looking around like we were trying to figure out where to look and one or the other of us would say, “Hungry?”

And one or the other of us would answer, “I could go for a bite.”

I took a flyer from the info booth on our last visit, so for the last summer before the storm I had a job working concessions. Somewhere during that time, I reached a point where my stomach turned at the smell of the French fries we used to share. 

Before Janie left, we used to stretch out together in the low branches of an enormous tree that stretched from the park behind our home into the back yard. We watched the light in the leaves and wondered which of the birds might be Ma. “Tree of life,” she had called it.

When I left to stay with Janie in Shreveport, Pa said, “see you when this blows over.”

A body just can’t help itself, wanting to hold onto what’s going, or gone. 

Aquarium officials were prepared for a big storm. After it hit, when the power switched off, the backup generator kicked on like it was supposed to. This kept the air and the filters going and there was a skeleton crew on site, hunkered down with snack bars and peanuts, keeping watch. 

But when the levees broke and flooded the department headquarters, Pa was one of a half-dozen officers sent to set up a temporary station in the aquarium. The generator held out for another few days before Pa got pinned under a bridge while wading towards a body he thought might still be living. It wasn’t. The bridge looked sturdy enough, his partner had said. It collapsed anyway. He didn’t suffer, they told us.

The fish, on the other hand, suffocated when the back-up generator went out. Thousands of bodies floated belly up. Mr. Bill, the celebrity sawfish, was among them. So were most of the sharks, angelfish, seahorses, and jellies. Without the air conditioning, the Rainforest exhibit had heated up to hundred and forty degrees. The macaws almost didn’t make it. The penguins did. So did the otters, and so did King Midas, the green sea turtle who used to swim in the Gulf of Mexico with Mr. Bill. The stench was awful, and a crew spent days scooping out the bodies.

Pa loved a riddle. After the memorial service, driving west on I-10, I couldn’t help asking the empty seat, “Hey Pa, which leaves first: home or the person who lived in it?”

The answer was enough miles to change my concept of land and my place on it. The land itself looked entirely foreign after East Texas, when the greens of my childhood were replaced by mile after mile of desolate sand and asphalt with no cushion between dust and sky. My dried-out skin peeled off in sheets and the mountains in the distance looked to be holding some collective verdict. I didn’t want to know what it was.

The air conditioning gave out somewhere in New Mexico. Then I rolled down the windows, tied a bandanna over my head, and drove until I couldn’t anymore. I would stop to find a motel and a sandwich and a Bottle of Boone’s and sing Ma’s hymns over the guitar, waking to the sense of oncoming headlights.

Drive into sunset long enough and eventually the land runs out. I parked in a lot above a cliff to stare at the water with the sun falling into it. The sky purpled like a bruise, and no one nudged me to go home.

The new place felt like a movie world. I walked around squinting. The Agua Vida apartments were the same tan stucco as most of the other placed I’d seen, only cheaper. It took a few months to understand why, and soon after, I moved in with J.D.

I was on a break from my shift at the Java Hut when I met him. Across the street was one of those large bookstores I liked to wander through. I found it calming to be moving anonymously among people who were also looking. I had grown so accustomed to feeling invisible that his direct address startled me.

“You like fishing?” 

I was in the discount aisle, holding How to think Like a Fish and Other Lessons from a Lifetime of Angling. J.D.’s wide face turned red against his dark hair, and he smiled like he was serious about the question.

I had wondered about it. “One day, maybe.”

Some things take on a life of their own as soon as you say them out loud. Live long enough and its possible to look back and see these moments when there is a tiny bridge between the person you mean to be and the one that you are. But when the waters rise, so many of the bridges are gone. Until that happens, it’s easy to forget how long it will take to get back when they go.

In every lost-at-sea movie I have ever seen, a storm of Biblical proportions leaves one or several people hanging on to a raft in the middle of the ocean, absorbing the gravity of their situation by degrees and then all at once. Almost every time, just when somebody’s about to give up any hope of rescue, a big ocean liner appears in the distance and something in the audience clenches, ready for relief. But then you realize it’s only twenty minutes into a feature length film and there’s no way they get rescued so soon.

Fishing was a big deal for J.D., although he didn’t seem to like it very much. Over ten years, we only went on two occasions. The first time, I watched him grunt and pace restlessly, checking the line to see if the bait had been stolen.

“Are you bored?” he asked. 

I said no but made a note to bring a book the next time. By 11 a.m., I didn’t think I could drink anymore, but J.D. kept going. It was mid-afternoon when he said “C’mere,” and pulled me to his hips. I floated above the image of this woman, straddling this man beside a cooler, and tried to connect, but she looked otherworldly and remote, like a fish behind glass.

He shopped for lures, bait, a new tackle box. We couldn’t go through Wal-Mart without looking at the poles. Eventually, it became clear that the reason for this interest was because it was something his dad had taught him.

“Then he loaded up the truck and never looked back.” J.D. was seven at the time.

His dad went back to the country roads he knew and left J.D. and his mom in a suburb near enough to mountains to make it possible to imagine imminent lakeside outings and hikes, with the ocean thirty miles west and its vast sunsets suggesting anything was possible. But the area itself was strip malls and low riders, chicken farms and autobody shops, surrounded by the mansions of rapid gentrification, and J.D. couldn’t seem to decide how he fit. In many ways, this was his most endearing quality, and on this level, I could understand what pulled him to fishing. It seemed like a way into some unknown life, which if it could just be accessed, might fix something. One fishing trip was enough for me to learn that it wasn’t, but by the time I met J.D., he’d invested too much time and money into pretending to love it, and he wasn’t about to admit otherwise.

He meant to be a good man, and he said so many times. I believed his intention, but what he meant for me varied considerably. Whatever it was, my arms were so often bruised that I took to wearing long sleeves in August heat and avoiding eye contact with the mirror. I learned how to use concealer on Google, yellow on purple and green over red. For someone who didn’t wear makeup, I spent a small fortune on Rite-Aid cosmetics.

It was easier when he was working. He would come home and we would watch a reality show over beers––something stupid like Real Housewives or Project Runway while the pizza cooked. We would laugh at a lot of the same parts and when the buzz was just right, I think we could each see it, that other life we meant to hop into, somehow. When he got in a mood, I could usually wait him out until he fell asleep, and then he would go to work again before sunrise.

The last time we went fishing was almost ten years after the first time, and he showed me how to bounce the lure against the bottom. 

“You look bored,” he said, more accusation than question. By then he had been laid off for over a year, and the fishing trip was something he thought about when he realized it had been a year since his childhood friend had died of an overdose, which happened a few months before J.D.’s father died. I wasn’t clear about my role in this trip.

“You’re reading?” he said, shaking his head. I closed the book, trying to look engaged in whatever else he thought I should be doing. I noticed he was placing catfish in a five-gallon bucket instead of releasing them like he usually would because he said he didn’t want to go to the trouble of cleaning them.

The ride home was mostly quiet. When we got back to the apartment, he pulled out the cutting board, set it on the counter, and set one of the catfish on the board. 

Handing me the knife, he said, “Your turn.”

He put my left hand on the tail. “Hold tight,” he said. The fish flopped and twisted.

“Do it,” he said, gravel in his throat.

I held the knife in my right hand, frozen.

“Right there,” he said. “Start with the gills and go down like I showed you. Then run it along the spine.”

After the next pause he said, “Dammit!” and grabbed the knife.

He opened the fish, peeled back the skin, and handed back the knife.

“It’s still moving,” I said.

“Goddamit.”

He did not ask me to go again, and fishing became another thing we mostly didn’t mention. Every few months he would say, “I think I’ll go fishing tomorrow” like he meant it, but most of the time he just stayed asleep. 

A year or so after we married, we flew out to Tennessee to visit his father, who was undergoing chemo by then, for lung cancer. He had a new wife named Judy. As we sat at the small kitchen table sipping coffee, I felt Judy studying my face. Travel created extra stress, and there wasn’t enough makeup to mask the purple on my face in certain lights. I saw the look.

“The alarm clock,” I told her. “I yanked the cord in my sleep, and it fell.” 

The obvious follow-up would have been a question about whether the clock was made of cast iron or if it fell more than fifty feet, but this was polite conversation and Judy knew the code. I had noticed a similar purple-black stain on her right cheek. If I hadn’t known better, I would have asked. We sipped coffee and waited while the men sounded like fighting. But it wasn’t a fight, really. J.D. was shouting and his father coughed for a long time before he gave up trying to respond.

J.D. would never see his father again, and a few months later when the plant shut down, he would be out of work. The last time we went together for fishing supplies was on a night in August at a nearby Walmart, and I stood beside him while he surveyed various brands of high impact monofilament fishing lines, tackle bags, and various lures. He was weighing the benefits of a heavy-duty fast-action rod and reel combo. It was easy to see that he wanted it.

“Why not?” 

“I’d need to get a separate license for ocean fishing.”

It was one of those maybe-anything-is-possible moments. He wouldn’t lose his job for another month, and we had just learned that the baby was coming. We went to the check stand with his new fishing rod, a few quarts of motor oil, a case of Bud Light and two terry-cloth bibs. One said, “I Luv Mommy” and the other, “I Luv Daddy.” The bibs were his idea.

When the baby died two months later, there was nothing to bury but those bibs and a St. Michael’s medal we had ordered online. We put those things in an old wooden box he’d been keeping his father’s coins in. The box was dark wood lined with red felt, and it resembled the music box Ma had given me before she died. I would rest my chin on my hands and stare as I moved the lid: open, closed, open, closed. Tinny splices of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” broke through every time I dared to lift it.

We didn’t own any land, so we drove out to an oak tree near a lake where his father had taken him to fish on one or two memorable occasions. You had to hike to get there. J.D. wore a backpack with his folding shovel inside and I kept watch while he dug the hole. No one came.

We put the box in the hole and moved a stone over it and said what words we could find. After that, if we ever found our sentences starting to walk off in the direction of The Baby, whomever was talking would stop, often mid-sentence.

By way of addressing the sudden silence that followed, he would sometimes shake his head and say, “I thought I was gonna lose you.” 

The last time we went fishing he didn’t catch anything.

“Four hours,” he said, “and not one bite.”

The disappointment would make for a long night.

“And you,” he said. “You just sat there, looking bored.”

“I was reading,” I said. “I thought it was nice.” That didn’t help.

Later, when I thought of him driving on that road, tackle box in the passenger’s seat, the central feature I remembered was his sad brown eyes squinting ahead, like someone scanning the horizon after the last hope of rescue has evaporated.

Until the night after that last fishing trip, there was only one other time that I tried to escape. That was a year before we got married. I was driving the truck because he’d been drinking. We’d been over at a Fourth of July party given by a friend of a friend from work.

It was the first time we’d ever attended an event together. It would also be the last. Late in the evening, I was out on the porch, happy-buzzed but not drunk when something happened in the kitchen between J.D. and one of the Marines. I should have known when I saw the Jäger come out. The cops were called and then we had to leave fast and somehow J.D. got it in his head that I should drive straight through the night up the I-15 to Vegas. He seemed to think we could live there happily for an unspecified amount of time. I had to work the following Monday, and I wondered where he thought we’d be living once his casino points ran out.

That was the first time since I’d known him, where I found myself imagining a life that that wasn’t mine and felt something in me snap back, saying, “Hell, No.” 

It took another mile to sink in. I checked that he had gas and his wallet and there was water in the back of the cab. Then I pulled over to the shoulder, left the keys in the ignition, and I ran south along the shoulder, in the opposite direction of the traffic. 

“What the hell’yre doing?” he called.

I pumped my arms fast and kept going. I didn’t even have proper shoes on, only slippers which flop-flop-flopped along the asphalt. I hadn’t run with that kind of focus since I was playing chase in pigtails in those moments when I could feel someone closing in about to strike and a fist would clench, and I would concentrate my energy around a single intention, looping like a drumbeat with every step: Away, away, away.

I ran to the next exit ramp south but that was still thirty miles away from home. I crouched among some manzanita shrubs west of the freeway. I watched his truck come off the ramp.

Before that moment I had only imagined that there was a cry like that inside him. It was strange to hear it attached to my name. Something collapsed as I heard his voice break, and I watched the taillights of the truck disappear beneath the overpass. 

My phone buzzed and buzzed. The battery was almost dead. I waited until the truck was out of sight, and I took the phone from my pocket to turn it off. 

It was in the quiet in the night when I heard him circling that I knew I would go back. I knew he would eventually forget the idea of going to Vegas, just like he tended to forget a lot of other things. I knew we would never go to another party again, that we would drink or not drink according to his moods, in the apartment with the shades drawn. I knew that every few months he would make some mention of going out fishing.

Who knows why it wasn’t time? I could not begin to explain why I did or did not do anything, in those days. Who knows why the first possible rescue ship always goes past? 

You watch the ocean liner get so close at the same time you’re noticing the movie just got started, and you just know, not yet. 

There are plenty of people eager to have you believing there’s no problem too big to solve outright if you’re smart enough and have the right tools. Then there’s a big something else with no name, in defiance of measurement, holding at the bottom of a breath.

This was in the days when phones like the one I had were only good for calling, so now that I had left him with the truck, I had no way back but my feet. I breathed eucalyptus and sage in the quiet of a mesquite bush. I waited until he circled again.

The next time I heard him shouting into the night, I let him pass. Then I waited a few more minutes while my phone powered up. I hit the call back button.

“Help,” I said. “I got hurt.”

“Where are you?” he said. I told him.

He would be mad as all-get-out unless I gave him something else to feel, and I didn’t have the energy for all that rage. All I wanted to do was sleep. If I wasn’t so frightened of snakes, I probably would have just slept in the mesquite bush.

I took my Swiss army knife out of my pocket. The blade itself wasn’t very sharp so I used the point. I found a place on my forehead, right below my widow’s peak. I pressed the tip of the knife and drew it across to my right ear, then turned about forty-five degrees and followed until it fell off my chin. I held the tremble and disgust like I held it when I had gutted the fish a year or so earlier on the cutting board while he shouted, “Do it!” and “C’mon already!”

 I needed enough blood to cause alarm but not so much to warrant a hospital visit. 

I was starting to realize a thing about people. When the going gets real, a body is liable to reach for anything but the thing itself. It’s just too much, sometimes, when it comes all at once. 

Until one day, it isn’t anymore.

I walked to the gas station and waited in the shadows to the left of the parking lot. I didn’t need any good Samaritans inquiring about my face. I kept it turned away from the light. I waited until I saw the body of his truck turned toward me, headlights like a face, and I held my right hand up like a pledge.

“What the hell happened to your face?”

“It got cut when I fell.”

“With what?”

It was a silent drive home. I think on some level we both knew then, what would eventually come. But the knowing was still too much.

I could have put the rubbing alcohol on my own wound but doing it himself gave him a useful outlet. I waited, staring at the row of lightbulbs in the bathroom. 

“Get some rest,” he said. I took three Tylenol PMs and slept through the next day and night.

Then I got up, heated the frying pan, pulled the sliced bread out of the freezer, and found the butter. He was still on the couch.

“Want some eggs?” I asked him. My stomach was scraping against my ribs. I ate slivers of butter while I waited for the eggs to fry. In the silence against my near-floating head I was saying, “Wait, wait.”

Ten years passed and I nearly floated belly up more times than I can count. But the point is what came next. 

On that last fishing trip, I tried to explain myself to J.D. so he would know I wasn’t really bored when I got that look. I tried to tell him how when it came to fish what I really did best was watch them. I tried to tell him about the aquarium.

“Something about me just wants to float, I guess. Like a fish.”

“Woman,” he said. “Fish swim. They don’t float ‘til they’re dead.”

I left on a Tuesday morning. Since the last fishing trip, I had been keeping a duffle bag of would-be Goodwill clothes and my Swiss army knife, some coolant, and water in the trunk. I spent years loading a pencil case with emergency cash. It was mostly $1s and $5s by the time I made my move, but it was fat. I left a month’s worth of baloney sandwiches in the freezer, and I had taped directions for making coffee on the fridge, just beside the pot.

It wasn’t like I thought he’d come looking. When he woke that last morning, he would see the wreckage in the kitchen and wonder for a moment where the pistol went but eventually, he would find it in his bottom drawer under his old t-shirts.

I had a bathing suit tucked deep into the back of my underwear drawer. I put it on in the dark in the bathroom before I left. I had worn it maybe twice since I moved West and had shrunk so much since then that it hung like a mini cocktail dress on my now-skinny frame. 

I parked the car in the same lot where I’d first parked, facing out, but now it was white clouds of an overcast June morning. Color would bleed over the hills soon.

I walked half a mile south, barefoot along the shoulder of the 101, before I found the beach access. I didn’t care who honked or how my feet hurt. I ran down the path and I ran across the sand and the cold water was a shock against my legs and I ran until it reached my hips. It was glass-still as a calm morning on the Gulf. I shudder to think how different things might be now, had the swell been up and the waves too much to take. 

Water hit my hips and I ran until I dove. I opened my eyes underwater and stretched my arms wide and kicking hard until I surfaced. Then I powered my arms forward spitting water until I felt something break. 

I kicked over to my back and stared at the sky. The sun had started brimming through the clouds. I spread my arms out to feel the water lift and drop me with each swell, just like I used to wait in The Tree of Life with Janie. When I finally picked my head up to look back, I was far from shore. 

The silver-white body of a fish jumped through the surface, and something shot through my core. I put my head down and swam until I hit the whitewash and then I stopped moving and turned my face back toward the sky, floating as the waves crashed over me until I felt sand against my back. I walked back to the car, pulled a towel from the trunk, and wrapped it around my waist. Then I pulled out and headed toward the wild-bright orb just breaking over the hills.

I stopped at a gas station to change into a dry sundress and get a cup of coffee. I got an extra-large, with extra sugar and cream, and a donut. I let the sugar rush to my head as I drove up through the mountains beyond the lake and down into the valley that would carry me back across the desert and back into green. There wasn’t a home to go back to, but I knew I could stay with Janie while I figured things out.

I would wake up early to drive a few hours before sunrise and I would stop for coffee only when the sky started turning purple. I got mine extra-large and extra sweet every time, and in the hour that followed, with the sky shuddering from purple to pink, I turned the music loud and felt it run through me. I breathed in deep, holding the knot at the bottom until the pressure broke. I don’t remember what I sang, but I did it at the top of my lungs with a sense that there was something right there. It wasn’t a ship to save me but something else entirely. 

Stacey C. Johnson writes and teaches in San Diego County. Her work appears in a variety of journals and publications, and her poetry chapbook Flight Songs is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press (February 2024). You can find her at staceycjohnson.com and on Twitter @StaceCJohnson.