In God We Trust by Jean Shepherd Page A

everybody watching his bobber through the haze of insects. The drummer is singing in the distance. We hang suspended for long minutes. Then suddenly all the bobbers dipped and went under. The crappies are hitting!
    You never saw anything like it! We are pulling up fish as fast as we can get them off the hooks. Crappies are flying into the boat, one after the other, and hopping around on the bottom in the darkness, amid the empty beer cans. Within twenty minutes we have landed forty-seven fish. We are knee-deep in crappies. The jackpot!
    Well, the Old Man just goes wild. They are all yelling and screaming and pulling the fish in—while the other boats around us are being skunked. The fish have come out of their hole orwhatever it is that they are in at the bottom of the lake, the beer cans and the old tires, and have decided to eat.
    You can hear the rest of the boats pulling up anchors and rowing over, frantically. They are thumping against us. There’s a big, solid phalanx of wooden boats around us. You could walk from one boat to the other for miles around. And still they are skunked.
We
are catching the fish!
    By 3 A.M . they’ve finally stopped biting, and an hour later we are back on land. I’m falling asleep in the rear seat between Gertz and Zudock. We’re driving home in the dawn, and the men are hollering, drinking, throwing beer cans out on the road, and having a great time.
    We are back at the house, and my father says to me as we are coming out of the garage with Gertz and the rest of them:
    “And now Ralph’s gonna clean the fish. Let’s go in the house and have something to eat. Clean ’em on the back porch, will ya, kid?”
    In the house they go. The lights go on in the kitchen; they sit down and start eating sandwiches and making coffee. And I am out on the back porch with forty-seven live, flopping crappies.
    They are well named. Fish that are taken out of muddy, rotten, lousy, stinking lakes are muddy, rotten, lousy, stinking fish. It is as simple as that. And they are made out of some kind of hard rubber.
    I get my Scout knife and go to work. Fifteen minutes and twenty-one crappies later I am sick over the side of the porch. But I do not stop. It is part of Fishing.
    By now, nine neighborhood cats and a raccoon have joined me on the porch, and we are all working together. The August heat, now that we are away from the lake, is even hotter. The uproar in the kitchen is getting louder and louder. There is nothing like a motley collection of Indiana office workers who have just successfully defeated Nature and have brought home the kill. Like cave men of old, they celebrate around the camp-fire with song and drink. And belching.
    I have now finished the last crappie and am wrapping theclean fish in the editorial page of the
Chicago Tribune
. It has a very tough paper that doesn’t leak. Especially the editorial page.
    The Old Man hollers out:
    “How you doing? Come in and have a Nehi.”
    I enter the kitchen, blinded by that big yellow light bulb, weighted down with a load of five-and-a-half-inch crappies, covered with fish scales and blood, and smelling like the far end of Cedar Lake. There are worms under my fingernails from baiting hooks all night, and I am feeling at least nine feet tall. I spread the fish out on the sink—and old Hairy Gertz says:
    “My God! Look at those
speckled beauties!”
An expression he had picked up from
Outdoor Life
.
    The Old Man hands me a two-pound liverwurst sandwich and a bottle of Nehi orange. Gertz is now rolling strongly, as are the other eight file clerks, all smelly, and mosquito-bitten, eyes red-rimmed from the Coleman lamp, covered with worms and with the drippings of at least fifteen beers apiece. Gertz hollers:
    “Ya know, lookin’ at them fish reminds me of a story.” He is about to uncork his cruddiest joke of the night. They all lean forward over the white enamel kitchen table with the chipped edges, over the salami and the beer bottles, the rye