The Yorick of Yellow River

There's a tradition in Russian literature of short stories that allude to themes from Shakespeare. These include Leskov's harrowing "The Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District," Turgenev's "A Lear of the Steppes" and "Prince Hamlet of Shchigrovo," among others. Here is a satire in the same vein from my first book of stories, "The Story of My Universe."

The Yorick of Yellow River

Not since his wife stuck the wooden end of a paintbrush in the droopy flesh beneath his left eye (it was an “accident”) had Glaughte Blaugh winked. Such things can drain a guy of humor. Even puns now repulsed him. His universe shrunk to the insularity of withered tangerine pulp, he took up fly-fishing. Ducking the brightly-feathered hook each time it flew by was tedious, and more than once he’d worn the fabled “feather earrings.” 

He never caught anything larger than his middle finger, which, admittedly, was larger than most.

His wife Erma tagged along. The most famous female painter in the world, her work had made him rich. At least he had a decent allowance for his books, music, Japanese wood-block prints (loathed by Erma), and a gorgeous black whip of a graphite fly-rod that cost more than most foreign compact cars. Of her drippy, gooey, blotchy, sketchy oils, the critics said, “erotic!” “sensual!” “goatish!” “priapic!” “hot!” Camille Paglia called one canvas of an ovum being penetrated by a spermatozoa, “lickerish!” in an essay that placed Erma at the top of the entire history of female painters. “Big deal,” was Erma’s response.

No, she was no poacher in masculine disguise prowling the sacred hunting grounds of territorial males, like so many of her predecessors (Erma’s opinion), but a lithe, strong, fast, and fearsome predator who, like any self-respecting lioness, brought home the bacon.

The river was wide, fast, clear, with a stone bottom. After Glaughte had pitched Ermas’s black beach umbrella and dropped her Pabst Blue Ribbon (in his useless creel) in the water; after he’d jammed the legs of her easel into the clayey riverbank and thoroughly massaged all ten of her horribly deformed toes (she loved tiny shoes), he escaped into the cool, thigh-deep water to stalk the stubborn trout.

Struggling against the stiff current, his waders slipping on the treacherous rocks made him think of his past life as a headliner on the comic circuit. His specialty was pratfalls, which made Chevy Chase look like Nik Wallenda, and the kind of jokes nobody understood, not even Glaughte himself, but laughed at like gut-shot hyenas because of his facial distortions, including outrageous winking. Just as he recalled his crowning moment, tipping over a podium to land in the lap of the brother of the President of the United States, he tripped on the dangling weave of his landing net and plunged headlong into a shallow pool. Thank goodness Erma was out of sight beyond a bend. As his waders filled with water, he sank, twisting and thrashing on the river bottom. He opened his eyes and tried to scream, or laugh, he wasn’t sure which. Not two feet away, three huge trout—crimson-bellied, gold and silver spots flashing in the fractured sunlight—stared at him angrily from their left, champagne eyes. As though gripped by powerful and unseen forces, they swam slowly upstream, flicking their broad, dark green tail fins. As the air bubbled up from his tightening lungs, he thought not that he might drown but that he’d never seen fish as big as these. Their glaring at him made him feel like a naughty child who wants to steal a million dollars from his mommy’s purse. As they passed beyond his peripheral vision, all three trout pooped. It’s beneath this narrator to describe this desecration, but if you’ve ever seen a goldfish poop in his bowl, multiply that by 100 and you’ll get the idea.

Before he blacked out, a muscular hand grabbed him by the hair and yanked his face out of the water. He gasped, coughed, gagged, and swore. Then he fainted.

He awakened to the familiar sound of his wife’s singing from upriver (she always sang when she painted), a sound that resembled the shriek of wheel on rail when a locomotive brakes, which caused red-winged blackbirds to wheel and dive above Glaughte in silent confusion. 

His clothes were almost dry. His hat, fly-rod, net, and Bowie knife lay in orderly arrangement beside him. Even the inside of his waders seemed dry, though his groin ached. He felt exactly as he would after Erma had unleashed upon his small frame the unsublimate portion of her enormous libido.

The intense July sun had not progressed perceptibly across the sky, but Glaughte felt, from the dull dry pain between his shoulders that he’d been asleep on hard ground for hours. Limb by limb he thrust himself to his feet and gathered up his tackle. About to step back into the water, he remembered the three huge fish. He got excited. He pulled out the fly, still stuck in the cork handle of his fly-rod, and dangled above the current. 

The water exploded!

A long, crimson streak gashed the air, arcing two feet high, and disappeared in a fountain of water that splashed his face. The fishline ran screaming off his reel. In seconds, all three hundred feet of floating and backing line was out, and Glaughte was running upstream, dodging tall weeds and thick tufts of scrub oak, chasing the tremendous fish.

He ran for miles, the line leading him on, taut as a violin string, twanging and singing as it caught upon a tree limb and sprang free, or cut through rapids at incredible speed.

Most fishermen would have lost the fish by now, his or her leader being no more than a sporting 4- or 6-pound test; taking no chances, Glaughte used a stout 20-pound test that would take a shark to break.

As he ran, the sound of his wife’s singing grew softer, less harsh. He heard an actual melody for the first time, a lyrical and lilting song of love that was new and strange to him. Maybe she knows what is happening, he wondered. Maybe she wants me to catch this fish! The song threaded the air, the waving grasses, and the swaying tree limbs with a golden mesh. As it faded, growing ever sweeter, more plaintive and melancholy, Glaughte redoubled his determination to land this monster. With a last harsh note, almost like the bark of a huge, vicious dog, Erma’s song ended.

The fish led him on. The undergrowth slashed his canvas waders to shreds. All the little zippered pockets on his fisherman’s vest worked themselves open, and spools of monofilament, bags of hooks and sinkers, jars of fishes, cans of insect spray and floatant, and all the rest of his tackle flew about, leaving a trail that shouted, “A fisherman passed this way!” Was this to be the proudest day of his life? It could be, he thought. It has to be!

Still hung on his belt by an elastic band, the traitorous landing net, instead of tripping him, banged his heels as he ran, would catch upon a bush, stretch its elastic to its extreme length, then spring free and smack his backside. But it never tripped him up.

As the fish rounded another of the myriad bends in the river, Glaughte’s line went limp. Groaning and twisting, he waded into the river and clambered up onto a large flat boulder. Below him a great black pool, a backwater created by the boulder, swirled like Poe’s maelstrom. Away from its center the water grew calmer. His line spiraled in and out of the vortex, where the fish must have sought sanctuary. “Damn you!” Glaughte yelled, “you better still be hooked, you bastard!”

He reeled in the slack line, frantically working the reel’s little knob in furious circles. The tip of his fly-rod twirled, whipped and flipped, almost fouling the line. Finally, the line went taut again, aiming at the heart of the great charybdis.

Glaughte reared back mightily on the fly-rod. It doubled down, its tip rapping his white knuckles. The trout shot straight into the air. He could see its face, how, as though smiling and then laughing out loud, its jaw line stretched, and its mouth showed teeth. The fish threw the hook, which flew at his eyes. He ducked and it caught in his hat. Fishline coiled around him like baby snakes. Glaughte moaned and swore. Then something heavy and wet struck him in the face. He fell on his butt. As he watched, the fish panted its last pant, its eye a glazed glare.

“Well done!” someone said—a feminine voice, shimmering and lovely.

Ignoring the sound, he grabbed the fish, yanked open his vest, popping buttons, and tucked it under his left armpit.

“Don’t worry. It’s yours,” came the voice again.

Glaughte gave the still fish a bear hug just to be sure. Yes, it’s dead, he thought. He looked up where the voice repeated, “Well done!”

On a second flat boulder, across a narrow cataract, lay a naked woman. Sun-bathed, glistening with oil, every inch bronzed, her body stretched, stomach flat against the baking rock. Around her lay all of the paraphernalia of a fly-fisherwoman. Her large, round buttocks thrust up in shameless enticement.

“You deserve a reward,” she said and turned over.

Glaughte stood up. The fish slipped from his vest and flopped on the stone.

“So it was you,” he said, catching his breath, his voice like a bullfrog’s.

“Couldn’t let you drown, could I?”

He stepped to the edge of the boulder. He looked down at the roiling froth. The jump from his to hers was less than four feet.

“You can make it,” she said.

“Maybe I should walk around,” he said, staring at her peaked breasts, the pale delta between her massive, flat thighs, and the two rows of white teeth, closely set between her red lips.

“I might be gone before you could find a place to ford,” she replied with feigned coquetry. 

“I’m married,” he said.

“I am, too,” she answered and winked.

“Be right there.”

He stepped back to get a running jump as she moved to the edge of her boulder to give him room to land. He took three quick, deep breaths, feeling strong, sure, and wonderful. Then he ran. His right foot landed on the trout. He slipped and executed the most exquisite pratfall of his life. As he disappeared into the whirlpool, never to be seen alive again, his last thought was of those three mad fish.

Approximately 10 miles downriver from the place of Glaughte Blaugh’s tragic mishap stood a little hamlet known as Yellow River, which straddled the watercourse, as much a part of the river as the water itself. It was 10 years later that a young man of good family came upon a human skull wedged among some deadfall beneath the only bridge in the area. He quickly retrieved the skull and delivered it to the police, who theorized that it might be that of a drowned fisherman whose body had never been found.

Per protocol the skull was delivered to higher authorities. In time its DNA was tested and compared to that found in hairs in an old harlequin’s mask still in the possession of the former Erma Blaugh, now remarried to an iron magnate named Horace.

The skull, clean of flesh and polished by the roiling sand and waters of the river that took him, was indeed that of Glaughte Blaugh. Due to her stature as an artist, Erma was allowed to keep the skull for one month to make sketches before a proper burial. Eventually, her drawings of the skull—which were, unlike all her previous work, fine and precise drawings on a par with Leonardo DaVinci and Albrecht Durer—would be considered her crowning achievement.