Читать книгу South of the Pumphouse - Les Claypool - Страница 15
ОглавлениеC’mon, Eddie boy! Lift her on up! Ha, ha!” Ed’s father boomed proudly. Ed’s mother loved photo ops, as she called them. Over the years, she must have owned and eventually worn out every kind of cheap portable camera on the market. That day, she had out her slim-line Kodak 110 with disposable flash cubes.
“Hell, that fish is bigger than he’ll ever be!” said Daryl, Dad’s favorite fishing buddy.
“C’mon, Earl. Help yer brother,” said Mom, waving her camera toward the fish.
Happy to be of service, Earl jumped in. Together, the boys lifted the biggest of the three fish.
“Aww. Isn’t that sweet?” said Mom, snapping away like mad.
The cleaning—or butchering—of these massive fish was always quite an ordeal. Ed’s father would take two sawhorses from the garage and, by placing a four-by-eight sheet of three-quarter-inch plywood across them, create a cleaning station. Many a time had Ed seen his father elbow deep in the guts of one of those “hogs,” blood washing down the driveway by the constant short flow of the garden hose. Whenever they returned from one of these trips, a handful of neighbors, mainly kids, would come by to admire the catch and watch the subsequent cleaning. Butchering a sturgeon was an art to Ed’s father, and he welcomed an audience when working the Ol’ Russell, as he affectionately dubbed his favorite filet knife.
Cleaning a sturgeon is no easy task. It all starts with the bleeding, which involves lopping off the tail and letting the fish drain. As with salmon cleaning, the next step involves cutting just behind the gill plate. With a sturgeon, however, the entire circumference of the fish is sliced down to the spinal column. The sturgeon is a boneless fish with a hard cartilage head and a cartilage channel that runs the length of its body, enclosing a spinal cord. Once the circumference cut is made, the butcher grabs the head and spins it, breaking it free from the spinal column. The head is then removed, pulling the cord from the spinal column and the entrails from the belly. What’s left can be quartered into loins. The leathery hide of the sturgeon is dotted with hard diamond-shaped studs, hence the nickname “diamondback.” These, along with the skin, can be removed either with pliers or by being sliced off with a good knife.
“C’mon, boys! If you’re gonna catch ’em, ya gotta learn to clean ’em!” their father shouted as they watched earnestly.
“Elch. That’s disgusting,” muttered Mom.
“C’mon, hon, it’s just some guts. Ha,” he laughed, holding out his bloody hand and a random piece of meat.
Daryl chimed in, “Hell, Penny, you’ve had to look at Bill’s horrible purple knob now for near ten years. A little sturgeon gut shouldn’t bother ya. Ha, ha!”
Daryl was a funny guy who fished often with the boys’ father. He could always get the boys to laugh, usually at their dad’s expense.
“Sheee-it. You’re one to talk, Daryl. Beth said your peter’s so small she thought it was a hair till it pissed.” Dad could get a good one in every now and again, thought Ed.
He was a happy sort of man, and his jolliness amplified when he was cleaning fish. The fishing weekends were quite cheerful, but there was a noticeable gloom to the general atmosphere whenever the family came home empty-handed. The boys’ father worked hard all week, and the majority of his weekends were spent fixing the house or helping Daryl or some other friend with a project. They only got to chase fish a few days out of the month at most, and their dad enjoyed the catching part of the game more than the fishing. Being somewhat self-employed—he was a partner in a local auto parts store—he would occasionally take a day off work if the fishing was hot and heavy. But because of their school schedule, the boys usually missed the trips during the week.
“Gaw’damnit! Someone get this cat outta here. Gaw’damn cat!” Ed’s father hated cats and always threatened to eliminate them. “I’ll be making me some new cat-skin gloves here in a minute.”
The boys laughed at their father’s threats—but their mother always stood by her cats.
“Bill, don’t you touch him.”
Stray cats always seemed to find their way to Ed’s mother. For years after the boys grew up and left home, she still maintained a collection of at least three, all of them one-time orphans.
“I’ll touch ’em, all right.”
“He don’t know any better. He just wants a piece of fish,” Mom argued.
Holding up the bloody sturgeon tail, Dad barked, “I’ll give him a piece of fish, all right. I’ll smack him upside the head with this. See what he thinks ’bout that.”
“Bill!!”
“I’m not gonna hurt your gaw’damn cat,” he howled, tossing the pet a small piece of the gut.
Ed’s father had never actually caused the cat any harm, though he did blast it with the garden hose while washing the family car on occasion, just to watch it jump. He was a man who would never hurt or kill an animal, unless, as he was accustomed to saying, it was “good eatin’.”
