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A good spot on the bank for fishing.  Jack had gotten there just as a woman and her young son packed up and moved, so he unfolded his chair on the flat rock at the bottom of the hill that led down to the lake from where he’d parked.  It was a community lake, more of a pond, but named Bonnie Lake, like a girl’s name, like somebody he might have known in elementary school.  Except he’d never known anyone named Bonnie.  It was in the middle of a ring of houses that surrounded a narrow road, and the road was around a path where people walked or jogged.  Trees bordered the side Jack was on.  Before he settled down, he collected bait containers, soft drink cans, and a purple candy bar wrapper, thinking of his father who had been annoyed, sometimes angered, by trash at his fishing holes.  He used to reprimand Jack for littering Coke cans and chip bags in the lake and mud or in the surrounding woods.  Jack never liked to go fishing back then.  He went only because his dad roused him from bed and practically carried him to the car pre-dawn.  Jack climbed the hill and tossed the litter he’d gathered into a trash barrel near a covered picnic table, then careful on the slope, tottered down again, baited his hook and whipped the line out onto the gray-green surface of the lake.

It was still early morning, springtime, the sky lightening but overcast, with heavier, darker clouds forming over the houses across the way.  Two old men walked on the distant stretch of the path and a woman in florescent pink shorts lightly jogged past them.  He wondered if he’d hook anything before either passed in front of him again.  Porch lights were haloed in fog across the lake and Jack found their reflections in the water.  A honking group of geese flew down and skidded onto the surface, wrinkling the lights.  Jack watched his pink bobber bob.

By the trash barrel, which overflowed with Popeye’s and Krispy Kreme boxes, shattered glass from somebody’s car window warned that vandals and thieves preyed around here.  He glanced back to the top of the hill.  He could see his car’s blue roof.  He lived nearby, and he drove by the water often, but this was his first time joining the population who fished here.  Few out with poles this morning.  Soon, the bright pink shorts passed again on the other side of the lake, and Jack felt his line pull taut.  All right, Jack thought.  He reeled a plump dark fish to the bank, scooped it wiggling into the net.  Just then, a man came skidding down the slope, dispersing pine needles and dirt, coming to a sitting position beside Jack’s rock.  The fish flopped in the net on the ground, a blue shimmer on its scales.

“You got you one,” the man said.  “That’s good size, I mean for this water.  It’s a good one.  You gonna eat it?”

Jack looked at the man but didn’t say anything.  He thought the man might be a little off, or working some con, the way he barreled down the hill and talked too loudly, too friendly, too suddenly.  He had come from nowhere, as Jack hadn’t noticed him when he’d looked back for his car.  He hadn’t left any valuables on the seats.  He put the struggling fish into his Styrofoam cooler and closed the lid

“That’s a bluegill.  They got bass in there, too.  How about giving it to me,” the man said.  “Now, before you say you can teach me to fish, I already know how.  I just ain’t got a pole, or line, or a hook, or bait.  Looks like you got the whole hook, line, and caboodle.”  He tapped the red tackle box on the rock beside the chair.

The man wore soiled jeans, black canvas shoes, and a green long-sleeved T-shirt with four black x’s across the chest.  He had a bald gleam in the middle of his scalp and a sparse beard that dotted his jaw like scattered BBs.  His face was shiny with sweat, despite the cool air.

Jack said, “What kind of bait would you use?”

“Hell, any kind.  Worms.  Bread.  Crickets.  Flies.  I don’t care.  Let me just say again, I wouldn’t mind having that fish you put in there.”

Jack chuckled.  “You’re making me think about it.”  What Jack thought was that if this were a fairy tale, or a fable, or a myth, there would be something special about the fish.  A magic reason the man wanted it.  It would have a ruby inside it.  Or it would grant wishes.  Or it could sing.  He heard a thump from the cooler.

“I mean, mister, I got a lot on my plate,” the man said, and then laughed. “I don’t have nothing on a real plate.  I’m hungry.  Hongry!  Alcohol don’t help.  Naw, it don’t.” He said the last bit as if to himself.  “But I might not never drink no more, you believe me?  I hope I don’t.  ‘Cause I smoked crack for twenty years, and then I said I’m just gone quit.  Maybe a year ago.  You know, basically, I just stopped walking into that hole every day.  I heard that idea at a meeting.  I didn’t like the meetings.  But I was drowning like.  I was in way over my head all the time, but also the world down there was interesting, you know what I’m saying?  I met people.  Lawyers.  Doctors, of course.  Artists.  Musicians.  Cool dudes.  Beautiful women.  Well, pretty.  Or ugly, but sexy.  Too skinny, maybe.  Bad skin.  Dull eyes.  Like mine, I think.  And I was telling myself I was in a fight.  Competing all the time, it felt like.  But now I drink too much.  I mean, crack, man.  I still get me a little taste, I admit, but then that’s still no good, ‘cause it don’t help neither.  You wake up in the morning and you got the same situations.”  He leaned back on his elbows and looked out at the lake.  “How about you give me that fish.”

Jack wondered why he was the one the man approached.  The lady and the little boy sat way off to the right on a mound of grass, while two people fished together on the opposite bank from Jack.  They were dark lumps on low chairs and wore white cowboy hats.  He hadn’t seen them catch anything.  Fog floated on the water over there. 

Jack said, “This is my only fish.  I might not get another one.  Why don’t you ask somebody else.  They might even have a spare rod and reel and bait to share.”

“Yeah, that’s a smart idea.  But you got the fish I want.  And you’re shorting yourself, betting against yourself, lacking confidence.  Why don’t you believe you can catch another one?  Don’t you deserve to?  Ain’t you got good worms?  Ain’t you any good?” 

How to respond to that?  They looked at each other.  Jack had learned from his dad that a good day of fishing was about luck, intuition and preparation.  Patience, too, perhaps above all.  Did one also have to be somehow good?  His dad used to bask in or bemoan his luck, depending on what he did or didn’t catch.  Big chested and good natured, he trusted his instinct about where to drop his line.  Jack had felt lucky to get the flat rock to camp on, arriving just as the lady and the boy were leaving it, and he was lucky that a fish swam by and bit his bait just as the bright pink jogger shorts passed.  And he had prepared, too.  Had resolved to be patient.  Had cleaned and strung the rod and reel, bought bait, gone to bed and gotten up early, cast his line at an angle he sensed was appealing to the fish.  But now this guy was at his side.  He had not prepared for company.

He heard his fish flop against the ice. 

Jack was out here only because when his father died, he got his fishing gear, which he had brought back to Georgia after the funeral in Mississippi.  He had flown back with it, having checked the zipped bag of six rods and reels at the oversized and oddly-shaped luggage counter where others checked golf clubs, cellos, and skis.  Strangely, while he waited at a bar near his gate, there was a man who looked like his father seated near him.  He had his father’s large brown head and the same receding hairline and gray sideburns, plus his elegant nose, thin mustache, thick round shoulders, and paunch.  It was uncanny, and freakish, the physical resemblance, while the style was so drastically different.  The man nursed a martini and was dressed in a black shirt with the collar open to show a flat gold necklace.  He used an earpiece to talk on his phone about overs and unders.  He wore two gold rings on one hand, one ruby ring on the other, a large blue-dial watch, and brown suede loafers.  For his dad, there would have been no jewelry besides a silver wedding ring and a leather-banded Citizen watch, and the shirt would have been plaid.  Plus, never loafers.  At best, chunky wingtips which he wore to church along with the brown suit and burgundy tie he’d been outfitted with in his coffin.  It was like sitting in a dream, seeing the man, and Jack wondered why his dead dad would show up in the guise of a gambler at the airport bar. 

When, as a kid, Jack had accompanied his father to fish, he was almost always bored, and he had squinted with disgust when his father whacked a fish against a rock or a tree to kill it, and later scraped off the scales, cut off the head, slit the belly, scooped out the guts.  On bountiful days, he slipped fish back into the water or gave some to neighbors.  Long after Jack moved from home, freed from pre-dawn fishing, his father kept at it until he got too sick.  What, Jack wondered, during the flight home with the rods and reels in cargo, had his dad thought about during those pensive, patient, water-side hours.  He couldn’t remember much of what his dad had talked about, other than his reprimands about Jack’s unfisherman’s behavior–the rock throwing, the litter, the running around.  Yet, his dad was joyful to have caught anything, proud if Jack caught one, too.  Jack was now about the age his father had been when Jack, complaining, was born. And now, Jack’s wife was pregnant, and his father had not lived to meet his grandchild, or to see Jack become a father.  This morning he had planned to channel his dad, to try think his dad’s thoughts.  Before the interruption, he had felt that the sky, the light, the fog, and the geese were getting him close.

He had planned to clean and cook whatever he caught, using the inherited tools.  He’d drink cheap vodka like the kind his dad had kept in the trunk of his Taurus, the pint bottle with a lightning bolt slashed across the label.  Then take a nap.  Maybe that’s all his dad thought about.  Catching, cleaning, cooking, drinking, and sleeping.  Or maybe he thought about Jack’s growing up and finally coming to this moment of imagined communion.  Maybe he had fished and mused on what to name unborn Jack.  Maybe Jack’s baby could be called Bonnie, for this lake that linked them to his dad, even though his dad had never fished here.  Maybe his dad had once fished on a Jack Lake somewhere.  In Jack Cove, in Jack County, on Jack Road.  He didn’t know why he had his name.  He should ask his mother.

The man said, “I could really use that fish.  You know, people used to be fish.  And fish used to be people, too.”

“Ok,” Jack said. “You might as well throw some rocks, now.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

This guy was gumming up Jack’s plan to think his dad’s thoughts.  But then Jack had to wonder, had his dad sent or shown up as this cracked-out alcoholic?  And when Jack died, would he haunt his own child, maybe Bonnie, as yet floating in his wife’s uterus like, well, a minnow?

“With fish and people, there’s a symbolic relationship.  What’s the word?”

“Symbiotic?” Jack said.

“Right.  You ever dream you was flying?  That’s really just a deep old memory of gliding in water.  We go back and forth.  From people to fish.  My mama told me.”

“If you say so.” 

“I got you thinking about that fish in that box, don’t I?  You wondering why I want it so bad.  You starting to think it’s special?  Maybe it used to be somebody I know?  Or maybe it has a diamond inside it.  An emerald?  A sack of sapphires and red rubies.  Maybe if you rub it right it will give a bellyful of wishes.  Or maybe I’m a genie and I need my fish partner back, ‘cause I lost it when I changed from a fish to a man, and the more I smoke crack, and the more I drink, you know, the more I stay fucked up, the harder it is to get it back.  But I woke up this morning, and I said, ‘Fool, let’s stop all this bullshit.  Let’s go get your fish.’”

“Wait,” Jack said.  The morning’s story was not his anymore.  The man had hooked it and reeled it in for himself.  To tug it back, Jack said, “What if it’s not your partner, but somebody I used to know.  What if it’s my daddy?”

The man fell back onto the slope and kicked his feet in the air, laughing, turning his head side to side, twisting around and sliding his hands up and down his body as if invisible fingers tickled him.  He finally said, “Whew!  Bro, you sound like you on crack.”

Jack felt tricked.  He’d let this man set him up to be whacked on the head, so to speak.  Still, where was his father now?  What was he?

“What’s your name, anyway?” Jack asked.

“Jiminy,” he said.

“Seriously?  Like the cricket?”

“Yeah.  I’m the bait, motherfucker.”  He laughed.  “What’s your name, bro?  I should have asked that first, before I asked for your fish.”

“Jack.”

“Like the beanstalk guy?  Like Jill’s partner?  Like Sprat?  The giant killer?  Like the candlestick guy?  Like little Horner in the corner?”

“All that,” he said. 

“What a good boy,” said Jiminy, sullenly. 

The wind picked up, and rain began to fall, quickly harder, stippling the lake.  Jiminy pulled at the wet T-shirt sticking to his chest.  “It’s raining,” he said. 

The couple across the lake opened black umbrellas.  The mother and son hurried to a nearby truck.  The bright pink jogger and old men on the path had not come back around again.  They must have ducked inside a car or a house.  Jiminy closed his eyes and opened his mouth, catching the rain.  He sat up and spit.  He said, “Even if it is your daddy, it’s still a fish.”

“All right,” Jack said, shrugging in his dad’s old fisherman’s vest.  “You can have it.”  He imagined that’s what his dad would have done.  He didn’t need the fish.  He didn’t even want it.  Anyway, his dad was a little less of a mystery now, but also a little more.  Jack would probably be more or less a mystery to little Bonnie, too, as she was a mystery, too, and would be. 

Surprising relief sluiced over him, rinsing away tension he hadn’t known he felt.  You can only figure out what you can figure out, he concluded.  Thanks, Dad, he thought.  He reeled in his line, folded his chair, packed the gear, abandoned the cooler, said goodbye to Jiminy, and trudged up the slick hill.  From under the cover over the picnic table, he watched Jiminy peer into the cooler.  Jiminy seemed to be still talking in the downpour, apparently to the fish. 

When the rain slowed and the sun shone, the scene sparkled.  Drizzle flashed in the wind.  The lake glittered.  Silver rivulets rushed over the beads of shattered glass. 

Jack stored the chair and gear atop the vodka in the trunk.  Alcohol don’t help.  He got behind the wheel.  Watery light poured through the moon roof and the rain-streaked windows.  He could no longer see Jiminy with his fish, and he would never see his dad again.  Not really.  He couldn’t see anything clearly beyond the tendrils of rain on the glass.  He tried to focus on shapes and shifting light and the surface green tint.  He imagined he saw as fish see, unblinking, like a fish.  It was pretty.  The world repeatedly winked.