by bc woodsFingers clacking on keys, trying to edit the previous sentence while working on the next, and my mind moving forward to the next image to be written, I sat in my father's living-room working on Monday night's DDHM entry. I had driven down to see him Saturday morning, and hadn't had time to finish my latest story, so I was playing catch up.

"What are you doing?" Bryan asked.

"I'm working on the entry that goes up tonight."

"What's it about?" My entire family regularly reads my posts and while some are quite upset about it, my father and brother could care less.

"It's about the time Kathy wrecked her car and it was my fault."

"It was your fault, you fucker!" my father yelled from the kitchen. My father has the rather remarkable ability to yell at me without actually being angry or focused on what I'm doing. It's much like a doctor hitting a patient's knee with a small hammer. The insults completely pass over his conscious mind and come out without the hindrance of thought.

"I love you, dad!" I screamed back, feeling completely at home. It's my understanding that other families don't carry on conversations by screaming across the house. However, after sitting alone in my apartment for the past few months, the screaming was making me feel downright nostalgic.

"Hurry up and write your story, fucker!"

"Dogs that shit fast, don't shit long, dad!" I screamed back.

"Who told you that?" I could hear my father pausing, appreciating the wisdom of the sentiment.

"You did!"

My father paused again, smiling, I imagine, with pride at his own mental fortitude.

"How come you never write about the smart shit I say?"

"I will later!" Opening up a word-file I have to this effect, I made a note to do so.

"Well hurry up! We need to go to Jerry Neidelmeyer's house to catch some fish!"

After several minutes of shouting, my voice started to go out, because I hadn't been shouting at anyone in a long while, and I was out of practice. I learned that Jerry Neidelmeyer had a bog in his backyard that was, according to my father "teeming with koi." Jerry had recently sold the land, the new owners were going to fill in the bog, so he had told my father he could have all the koi he could catch as they would die anyway.

"How big is the bog?" I asked

"Twice the size of the back-room!"

"How are we going to catch them?"

"Don't worry! I've got it all figured out!" The last time my father had "figured it all out" every power-pole for two city blocks, around a roof we had been putting on had wound up tilting north five degrees off-center.

I sighed, which then caused me to cough, because my throat had gone raw from all of the shouting.

"You okay?" Bryan asked.

I coughed more in response. Bryan slapped my back consolingly as he changed the channel without looking at me.

When my father finally appeared from the kitchen, he was wearing a pair of thigh high hip waders, a small sailor's hat, and performing his signature move of scratching his left butt-cheek with his right hand. His other hand was popping tater-tots into his mouth like pez. "You guys ready to go?"

Bryan turned off the television, shouted "Fuck!" and walked to the car without waiting for anyone else. My father followed suit, looking very much like the "Gordon Fisherman" waddling behind my awkwardly tall brother. I saved my planned entry, closed my lap-top, and hoped I wouldn't be too late sending it to my editor.

The back of the truck held only a Coleman's Ice Chest and a tarp I assumed he had left there from his last roofing job. My voice, now scratchy, tolled out, "Where's all the stuff for catching the fish?" Aside from his rain-gear, my father had nothing remotely related to marine endeavors.

"Just you let me worry about that." He had said that before fucking up the power-poles as well. I sighed again.

My father crawled into the backseat of the truck, because as much as he enjoys driving, he enjoys it a thousand times more from the backseat. Bryan crawled behind the steering wheel, turned on some of his Celtic music to drown out the instructions of my father, and shouted "Fuck!" as he backed out of the driveway.

"You need to head out to Grayland!" my father shouted, barely audible over the back-seat speakers. Bryan gave no response at having heard, other than the ignition of his turn-signal.

"Is this the soundtrack to 'Celtic Woman?'" I asked.

Bryan nodded, simultaneously turning up a song about going to a fair and dancing before a battle. The entire thirty minute drive was filled with the sound of bag-pipes.

When we finally arrived at Jerry Neidelmeyer's, I could scarcely believe my eyes. The bog my father had described as being twice the size of the living-room was easily three-quarters the size of a football field, the color of blood, and over eighteen feet deep according to Jerry Neidelmeyer. I had a sudden epiphany, and looked over my shoulder to my father, standing in his Gordon Fisherman's outfit.

"The tarp in the back is for catching the fish isn't it?" He nodded.

"You realize there's a reason that nets have holes in them right?"

"Dogs that shit fast don't shit long," he answered solemnly.

"How does that even apply?"

In answer, my father laughed at my stupidity. "Just get the fucking tarp, BC."

After about ten minutes of explanation and work, during which I said "Really?!" no less than fifty times, we completed our apparatus. Tying four pieces of rope to each side of the thirty by twenty foot tarp, and lead weights to one side, my father had told me that we were going to dip it into the bog, and drag it forward.

I looked down at the thousands of gallons of reddish water. "God that makes me want to piss," I muttered.

Bryan hummed to himself, threw a rock in the red water and said, "It makes me want to menstruate." Rather than laughing, I felt nostalgic again. It had been too long since I had last heard my brother say something so profound.

"I love you, brother."

"I know." He nodded at the tarp, no expression on his face, and hummed.

"Just like that shrimping boat in Forest Gump, you two" my father called out, signaling that he wanted to begin.

"Dad... do you know how much water weighs? Seriously, trying to pull this is going to be like pulling ten thousand pounds." I figured it was probably more, but I knew he wouldn't believe me.

"Then we'll just try extra hard."

"It's not even a matter of effort. The ropes will just tear the tarp and come loose."

My father handed a pair of ropes to my brother, and put the other pair in my hands. "Stop trying to get out of work." He then waded into the water, and held his Ice-Chest in front of him like a shield. "Okay boys! Cast it out, and drag it back. I'll be here to catch all of the fish! Don't let any slip by you!"

Holding the ropes in our hands like chariot drivers from ancient Greece, my bother and I took our places on either side of the bog. The tarp, while massive, covered it no more than a thimble could clothe a naked giant. "Dad! How many koi are in here?"

"Ten!"

I did some quick mental math, comparing the area of the tarp to the area of the bog. If all of the fish were randomly distributed, we had approximately a seven-percent chance of catching one in our "net" even if the odds of the fish escaping our trap were zero. That was an estimate that ignored the depth of the pool. In reality, the chance was more like three-percent. I hung my head down and sighed, coughing again because of the strain I had previously put on my throat. I knew better than to argue.

Lowering the tarp gently into the water, my brother waited for my father's orders. He stood shin-deep in the water, holding his ice-chest opened, with a stance like a pro-football line-backer. Jerry Neidelmeyer, standing on the bank above my father, with a cigarette firmly in his mouth said, "Just wait for 'em Gary. I bet you'll get hundreds of fish in this sweep. You sure that ice-chest is enough?" My father hunkered down even more. "Jesus Gary, you expect a fucking shark to jump out at you or what?"

Ignoring all of this, my father suddenly shouted, "Pull!" like a quarter-back shouting "hike!" Bryan and I pulled on our ropes, our feet slipping out from under us in the wet bog mud. It was like trying to pull an open parachute in the middle of a hurricane. My blood pumped wildly throughout my body at the thrill of the all-out release. I could feel the beat of my heart in the intermittent pumping of the veins in my hands against the firm twistings of the ropes' strands. I pulled harder. Bryan made a wookie noise like a battle-cry. We might as well have been trying to push over the Hoover Dam with our shoulders. I didn't know who was dumber: my father for thinking it would work, or me for doing it knowing that it wouldn't. I had missed this feeling.

Bryan danced around the rope, like an angry dog, pulling it from every angle in the circle. Finally, digging his feet into the ground and pushing up, the rope tore out of the tarp, and he fell backward into a pile of bog mud. Letting go of my own ropes at the last instant, I barely avoided the same fate.

"Come the fuck on! Push it, you two!"

"The rope broke!" Bryan screamed, slipping as he tried to get back up out of the mud. My father threw his Gordon Fisherman rain-gear hat down into the water and cursed for ten minutes. Resigning myself to defeat, I pulled the tarp back out of the water, easy now that it lacked the water weight.

I had not been home in over two months. On my first full day back, my brother was covered in mud, my father was swearing while dressed like a sailor, standing in a bog full of blood-red water holding an ice-chest, and I was on the shore folding a tarp like an American flag.

At the end of it all, standing next to the truck as my brother held my father around the waist, and I yanked off his hip waders, I reflected on the fact that I had kind of missed the dysfunction. On the ride home, when my father asked what the story tonight was going to be about that night, I only giggled.

I love my father. He's like a son to me.

Posted by BC Woods at 10:48 PM

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