I didn’t think it was a good idea, but decided not to burst Tim Holst’s bubble that nippy spring day in Troy, New York. Ringling had a three day stand in town; Holst and I had been fishing from the banks of the Hudson in comradely silence. That morning our catch included some small perch and a few bullheads.
“Let’s take ‘em back to the train so I can put ‘em in the shower with Linda!” Holst suggested, the wild gleam of the newlywed in his eye. “She’ll love the joke!” Holst was now Assistant Performance Director, having usurped that position from Rhubarb Bob the year before. So he had a stateroom on the train, with its very own shower. Only the creme de la creme of circus folk had such a luxury. Although I knew nothing about the female species back then (and still don’t know diddly squat about ‘em today) I felt that such a shenanigan would not be conducive to increased harmony in Holst’s new household. But I held my peace as we wended our way back to the train. I waited outside the train car where Holst and his new bride resided, and it wasn’t long before he came rushing out, or, rather, was propelled out the vestibule by a partially dressed but fully angry wife.
“Didn’t appreciate the gag, eh?” I asked sympathetically.
“Never mind, Tork” he replied, squaring his shoulders and giving me that gung-ho grin all fishermen use when they’ve been skunked. “There’s another hour or two before I gotta get to the building, so let’s catch us some more bullheads!”
“You ain’t just whistlin’ Dixie!” I replied in the same hearty manner. And off we went to stalk the wily mud cat once again.
I came by my piscatorial predilection honestly, having grown up around a tribe of avid fisher folk in Minneapolis. My older brother Billy fished religiously up at the Lake of the Woods; my Uncle Jim had a shack he put on White Bear Lake each winter for ice fishing; even my dad, as inert as any sandbag, bought a plastic gallon of pickled herring every December; and my pals and I were cane pole samurai when it came to doing battle with the carp that swarmed around the sewer outlets on the Mississippi.
Joining the circus did not dim my hunger for fishing, nor do much to improve my veracity when it came to fish stories. I found some like-minded conspirators in Holst, Chico, and Roofus T. Goofus. Whenever there was a river or half decent lake near the train or the arena, we would break out our Popeil Pocket fishing gear and lose a serious amount of sleep by getting up way too early to catch whatever might be biting that morning. The one drawback to our fishing expeditions were the numerous and officious game wardens and deputies that kept pestering us for a fishing license. We didn’t need no stinkin’ fishing license, but we didn’t tell anybody in a Smokey the Bear hat that; instead we smiled politely and said sorry officer but we’re only in town for a few days with the circus so we didn’t have time to get one would you like some free tickets to the show for you and your lovely family? That usually did the trick. They’d look the other way when we slipped them a half dozen Annie Oakleys. Of course, as I stated earlier in this wayward narrative, Ringling was pretty chintzy about handing out free passes, so Chico had a cousin of his who ran a printing shop in Brooklyn run up some authentic looking passes on cardstock, and we would pass those out -- and then hope to god we didn’t meet up with that officer again before move out night.
And you haven’t lived until you’ve fished off of a train vestibule that’s parked over a river gorge in the Rockies or the Cascade mountains out West. On long trips, the circus train often stopped for an hour or more on a side track while waiting for an express to go past. Sometimes that meant we could dangle our hooks a few hundred feet down into a crystal clear trout stream and start hauling ‘em up. Most of them managed to wriggle off the hook before we could get them all the way up, but just having a brookie on my line for ten minutes was worth it. Besides, I don’t believe the cook in the pie car would have filleted and fried them up for me anyways.
What did I do with the fish I did manage to catch? Well, I didn’t throw them into anybody’s shower! Early in the season I discovered that after the last show at night the Romanian bareback riding acts loved to sit outside their train car if the weather were nice to boil up a communal pot of stew, drink wine, and sing the sad old songs of their motherland, accompanied by zither and zongora. Being a hospitable people, they often invited me to come stick my mitt in the stewpot. The smell was tantalizing, but I wasn’t too certain about what they were using for stock, so at first I politely declined. Swede told me that anytime an animal died on the show the Romanians showed up to butcher it and have it for dinner. When I caught my first mess of fish that season I asked one of the Romanian women if she’d like to have it. She smacked her lips and that night by the side of their train car I dipped my mitt into the pot because I knew it contained my fish. It was to die for. I partook of several helpings, and would have licked the pot clean but for the fact I found a fish eyeball floating in my last bowl of the evening. The Romanians believed in using every bit of the fish, including the head. After that, I was a little more discriminating when I accepted their invitation after bringing them my catch. They didn’t bother to fillet the fish very well either; it wasn’t unusual for a big husky Romanian man to run up to a child and indicate he needed to be punched in the stomach, after which he’d disgorge a fishbone that had lodged in the trachea.
Perhaps the best thing I ever did with some fish, at least the most satisfying, involved my vendetta against the lanky trainmaster after he found my bicycle in one of his storage closets, where I stored it on move out nights, and tossed it out while the train was moving. I paid him back with a large carp that I left to fester in his toolkit during our stay in Little Rock, Arkansas. By the time he discovered it, the bubbling mass of foul corruption was something straight out of an H.P. Lovecraft story.
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