All morning Jack was wringing his hands over the ashes. When would she bring the ashes? Was she coming with the ashes? Would she be crying or cursing the ashes? On and on.
My brother-in-law Mike was a big Scot from Colorado with chestnut hair and a red face rough as a gravel pit. When we were all kidding around we called him Ha Ha because when the fish started biting all he did was laugh–at least in the early years. It was a booming laugh like none of us had ever heard before. First time I heard it was 30 years ago on a bitter cold Thanksgiving morning. I’d gone along with Jack to fish the Calumet River down by the Cozzi metal scrap yard. Like the Chicago River, the Calumet runs backward, draining water from Lake Michigan. There, at its mouth, near a railroad bridge that descends from the sky for passing trains, you’ll find guys with everything from a bamboo pole to a G. Loomis, tapping into the soul of the big lake.
But spring came, and it bothered Jack that Mike was still stuck behind the lace curtains of a Pullman row house. Jack knew what it was like in there, the smell of Judy’s nail polish and hairspray, things closed up so tight your skin would crawl if it weren’t stuck to the plastic seat covers on the white furniture. She was one of those tidy smokers who liked everything just so, a blond beauty in her younger days with hair now piled high like cotton candy and stretch pants showing a few too many lumps.
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Mike treated her like an afterthought. But then maybe she deserved it. Any guy who was nice, she’d push around. She always had to take it to where they lost their dignity. She made the one before Mike go shopping with her. He had to watch her try on clothes every Saturday. I mean, once or twice a guy might be able to live with this, but Judy turned it into a sort of marathon. How long would the guy last? She wanted his buddies to know she was making him do it. She went out of her way to make sure their girlfriends found out.
There were guys you just knew didn’t care if they caught anything or not. They just wanted to be outside goofing off, playing like little boys. They’d be ducking out of household chores, spending rent money and even grocery money that was supposed to feed their babies. On top of making boat payments, they’d hand over hard cash for rods and reels and more bait than they could possibly use, every kind of live bait and lures of all kinds: spoon baits like the Swedish Pimple, jerk baits like the Walleye Assassin, even panfish jigs not really suited for fishing Lake Michigan but with catchy names like the Whip’r Snap and Luck “E” Strike Tickle. Some might even go hungry to have a day of fishing, and sometimes I’d tell them they’d be better off buying themselves lunch.
Mike never responded to her complaints, but after Jack’s warnings, he started sticking to the legal limits, and he donated the fish his family couldn’t eat to the American Legion.
Just across the Indiana border the floating casinos act like magnets, sucking money out of people’s wallets. Smoke shops do a good business since there’s no tax on cigarettes. Besides those businesses, there’s the Amoco Oil refinery, the Lever Brothers plant, a truck stop, some fast-food joints, a tattoo parlor, and a fruit stand operated by a Mexican family.
