Going fishing with Marty Kincaid had as much appeal as a choice between a Brazilian butt lift and a hot-lead enema. Marty plus fishing was going to add up to one shitty Saturday.
“C’mon, don’t be a dick. The walleye are sticking the hooks in their own mouths and climbing into the boat. I gotta club ‘em to keep from capsizing.”
“Water looks rough today, Marty.”
“Did you say something? Sounded like ‘my pussy hurts.’”
Erie in autumn is a risk. The big ore boats still going up and down the Great Lakes, but bouncing through chop in Marty’s crappy bass boat wasn’t the same thing. Marty, his wife Beth, and I used to run across Flat Rocks on our way to the lighthouse as teenagers. This shithole town hadn’t changed, but we’re not the same except for Marty. Our high-school football star still thought he could hear the cheers from the stands. Even fishing for yellow perch or walleye was a blood sport. Beth and I, we let go of our dreams. Maybe that’s why we hooked up after Marty thumped her around once too often.
The risks we took to meet were stupid, and she had to be super-cautious. Marty wasn’t just violent, he was possessive about her and everything in his sphere of influence. Wikipedia has his name under the definition of “control freak.”
Beth’s dad and my old man worked in the same chemical plant. After high school, Marty and I played on the same fast-pitch softball team until I threw my shoulder out permanently. Marty said that was a good thing because I whiffed too much. Hitting a 90-m.p.h. fastball isn’t as easy as it looked. He was used to being spotlighted in the Herald Tribune as star center fielder for the Northtown Stealth Fighters, which ridiculous name went back to Northtown’s glory days as the producer of titanium for America’s stealth fighters. Now it produces cancer. Half the night-shift crew Beth’s father and my dad worked died of weird cancers after retirement. This town is the poster child for the superfund sites, although lawyers made off with most of that government money long ago.
My injury drew Beth and me closer. We sat in the stands cheering on the team. At the state championship in Columbus last year, we planned to stay overnight after the game, hit a few bars on Front Street near the OSU campus and return in the morning. I waited in my room for them to call; hours passed, the phone rang: Beth said Marty wasn’t feeling well and canceled out. He waved at tricky fastballs at the plate three times with men on. The Stealth Fighters lost 7-6. Saying Marty was a bad loser was like saying rain was wet.
She knocked on my door around one in the morning, the left side of her face swollen.
“He finally passed out,” she said.
I went into the bathroom to get a towel to wrap some ice in it. “Dumb idea,” I said to my reflection. Twenty minutes later, Beth was grinding down on my cock, and I was holding both her breasts in my hands.
Marty wore dark glasses and slept in the back seat on the ride home. Beth rode up front, but we didn’t speak the entire time. Once she reached over and squeezed my hand.
Two weeks passed before we spoke again. Marty was working nights.
“Can I come over?”
“Are you sure about this?”
By the time I thumbed off the connection, most of the blood in my body was surging south of the beltline.
Weeks passed before she’d call again. We told ourselves we were being careful, so the call to go fishing that Saturday wasn’t unusual—except for that shiver in the neocortex that nature planted back when human beings painting our faces blue and barked at trees. I should have paid more attention to it than to the worry Marty might become suspicious if I refused to go.
“What’s a good lure?”
“Spoons, crankbaits, jigs, poppers, gliders—”
“Twenty minutes.”
“ . . . paddle tails, bottom bouncers—I’ve got these shaky-head, soft-craw baits guaranteed to—”
“I said I’m coming.”
I convinced myself Marty’s ego would never let him see me as competition.
He yapped all the way to public access ramp at Lake Shore Park, still bragging about his touchdowns or walk-off homeruns in the long ago. I hummed “Glory Days” until he got the point, cursed me, and laughed.
“What did you do to your hand?” A flesh-colored bandage covered the palm of his right hand to his knuckles. I didn’t even see it until I noticed it while he maneuvered the tiller slantwise through the waves. He deliberately took a couple big waves at a bad angle so I’d get the brunt of the spray in my face. Clouds with gray, ragged shreds under their bellies were moving in from the northwest. One of those strange weather days when your skin prickled from the crazy mix of alternating warm and cold bands of air.
“Sheepshead fin stuck me as I was pulling out the hook. Got infected.”
“Bet you bashed in his head for that stunt.”
“Fuckin’-A, hillbilly.”
Hillbilly. The insult and phony Appalachian dialect were for my benefit. When we first met on the playground of elementary school, he mocked my West Virginia accent. We’d just moved up North when my dad’s coal mine closed. We fought after school that day. I lost, was left a bloody mess on the asphalt, but somehow I earned his respect. I caught him looking at me out of the corner of my eye. When someone knew you well, you found it hard to believe that person didn’t have your best interests in mind.
“We ought to stay near the harbor,” I said.
“You were a deckhand on the Great Lakes, right? You’re worried about a few ripples on the lake? Have a can of liquid courage, loser.”
He tossed me a beer from the stern.
Pulling his ballcap low, he gave the outboard full throttle, heading for open water past the lighthouse. His 16-footer had a 40 hp outboard—too much thrust for an aluminum boat meant for weed-filled coves. We plowed into the teeth of wind-driven waves. He liked to see how close he could come to tipping the hull to the sky and sinking the boat motor first.
“I know this sweet little spot near the cliffs.”
I tucked my hands under me on the folding seat for warmth. Canada lay 50 nautical miles off to port. In four or five weeks, Alberta Clippers would be hammering the northern Midwest states with Arctic cold and whiteout squalls.
A loose tarp in the bow flapped as we bucked along. A bat handle poked out.
“You’re using your softball bat to brain your catch? Overkill there, Marty.”
I shouted to make myself heard above the engine whine and the rhythmic thud of waves slapping the boat’s metal. I reached over and pulled the bat free. Not just any softball bat—Marty’s pride and joy, the Easton Ghost, the same bat he’d taken to the state championship playoff. A fastpitch softball bat’s 2¼ inch barrel diameter and width-to-length ratio varies as much as minus 13. Marty’s was barely regulation: 34-inch length and “heavy”—as heavy as regulation league play permitted. The humiliation of his strikeouts must have galled him to hate it. Just like Marty, a bully and a braggart, to blame his bat. Why else demote a custom-made $500 bat to a fish billy? Now pocked and dented, it looked like something from a shelf at Goodwill’s.
“Almost there . . . Almost . . . there.”
I read his lips; it seemed more like a prayer. Marty normally spewed out obscenities like candies out of a Pez dispenser. The boat swung hard to starboard, and I almost fell off my seat.
The lake had been high for years; new littorals were carved out of the shoreline by the pounding waves. It seemed unlikely deep-water game fish clung to the shoreline to feed—especially in these murky swells. When I was fifteen, a rogue wave, a rare Lake Erie seiche, came out of nowhere on a sunny day and knocked me off the breakwall while I fished for carp with my bamboo pole. I flew backwards over the massive granite boulders and landing in a stagnant pool. Coughing up dirty, sandy water, my lungs became infected. I spent a week in the hospital with bronchial pneumonia. Even sailing the ore boats, I was leery of deep water. Marty, on the other, hand bragged that he’d squeezed more water out of his socks than I sailed over.
“Better than working near the vats, right? Wearing that heavy gear.”
He meant our former union jobs that paid $30 an hour. Overtime up the ass with the Department of Defense contracts. Take a 90-degree day, a hot night, protective gear that included steel-toed boots, ear plugs, face masks with respirators, heavy firemen’s coveralls, add a steel kettle full of molten steel you couldn’t work by more than 15 minutes at a time, and you earned every cent. Our classmate Jimmy Catano fell off a catwalk into a molten vat and lived an hour, brain-dead but breathing through a respirator. I blocked my mind from thinking how he suffered from that 450-degree swim.
“You ever think it would turn to shit like this?”
“You did all right, Marty.”
“Yeah, I suppose. Better than you, ridge runner. Unloading trucks from Walmart like some brain-dead lackey—with a bum shoulder, too.”
No disputing that. My shoulder throbbed so much by the end of shift I drove home one-armed.
“That CBD oil work?”
“You know, I might have been born in West Virginia. That doesn’t make me a junkie.”
“I was you, hillbilly, I’d get me some Oxy. They call it Hillbilly heroin, right? Made for your kind. Put a snootful up your when you clock in.”
“My doctor doesn’t believe in drugs for pain management.”
We both knew that was a lie. I spent three years walking around Northtown in a drug-induced stupor. Lost two decent jobs and wound up working alongside a neo-Nazi, two alcoholics, and six college kids who sat together in the break room, ignoring us three “old-timers,” talking about the latest violent video game. I didn’t blame them.
“I like a little reasonable weed now and then,” Marty said. “Beth likes to fuck when she’s high.”
“We gonna fish or jawbone all day?”
The sky had darkened more since we left the boat ramp. Cobalt blue skies at the horizon with a slim belt of turquoise that reminded me of warm Caribbean waters in travel brochures—except you’d be lucky to last three hours this time of year if you went over the side. I recalled the emerald-green waters of Lake Superior from my sailing days. One third mate told me of a boating accident offshore Thunder Bay: “Pulled a couple men out treadin’ water. They died of heart attacks, lay there on the deck floppin’ like fish,” he said. “Boy, that water’s too cold to survive even in summer.”
Marty swung the boat into the waves and told me to toss the anchor. We were so close to shore I could see the tops of the bluffs and benches put there to watch sunsets in summer.
“No fish is going for bait this close. The water’s too roiled up.”
“Fish hang at the bottom, dummy. Toss your line and shut the fuck up. If I wanted someone to nag me, I’d have brought Beth.”
We fished awhile in silence. I felt Marty’s eyes on me the whole time.
That thought he might know was like a chunk of ice stuck in my esophagus——out here alone with a betrayed husband, no one in sight——
But that thought didn’t jibe with Marty bragging about his one-night stands, arranged for his out-of-town games with a hook-up app on his cell phone. Marty kept me around like the sidekick in a buddy movie, although I wasn’t chubby or shy. I was there, like Beth, to sing his praises. It swept over me like a foul aftertaste that I was assuming Marty would act like a sane, normal husband if he discovered his wife was cheating on him with his friend—and that was far worse under present circumstances.
“Fuck this, I’m changing lures,” he said.
“Give ‘em something brighter to see,” he said, interrupting my unpleasant reverie. “Where’s my tackle box? Hand me the bat, Steve, in case I get lucky.”
Nature gave us reptile brains for a reason. I was slow to use mine. My dad, for example, was a family joke because he was colorblind. Seeing him with unmatched socks was typical. But he had an uncanny ability to detect a dozen shades of beige or tan where normal-sighted people saw just one—a useful skill for primitive man hunting wild game in tall grass. The prickly sensation on my neck told me I had made one huge mistake coming out here with Marty this Saturday morning.
Swiveling my neck at the right moment, I glimpsed Marty with the bat upraised looming right over me. Trying to keep his feet steady in the rolling boat cost him a valuable second that saved my life. His face became a mask of pure rage, nothing I’d ever seen before, eyes narrowed to pig size, body tensed for a swing that would have split my skull open and sent part of my brains leaking through my nostrils.
The meat end of the bat clipped the reel in my hands sending metal pieces flying. I had no time to worry about the pain shooting through my hands and arms because Marty’s spit-flecked rage hadn’t subsided with a single swing.
“Moth-er-FUCK-ing TRAI-tor!”
Nearly flat on my back with my head almost hitting the underside of the transom doubler, his second strike slammed into the metal bridge where the painter bow eye was attached. The force of the blow dented it in half, cutting me in the forehead with a sliver of metal, opening a geyser of blood pouring into my eyes.
“You know I’m going to kill you, don’t you?”
Hovering over me while I was pinned to the hull bottom, he measured me for the killing blow. Pure adrenalin saved me. I bucked up from the floor as he took a small step closer, like a boxer trying to plant his front foot between his opponent’s, all to add torque to the coming blow.
Before he could level the bat, I planted both feet into his solar plexus and sent him stumbling backward, flopping onto the seat, but still holding the bat despite hand that must have rung like bells from striking the metal stanchion instead of my head.
That Marty grin, like rictus—Marty going into combat, the big game on the line, entering the batter’s box. Enjoying the moment before the kill. Me, the helpless prey.
“You shouldn’t have fucked her—”
“Marty, Marty—wait! Think what you’re fucking doing!”
“Motherfucker, I’m going to beat your brains into pulp, you white-trash fuck!”
I didn’t waste another second trying to talk him down. I heaved myself up and went over the side. The ice-cold water was a brutal shock to every nerve in my body.
Years ago, I’d gone into the drink fully clothed. I stole a raft from a boat being scrapped in the harbor in the middle of the river on a sunny day. I nearly drowned. My clothes—just shorts, a tee shirt, and tennis shoes—dragged me down into the murky green water. This was worse, like I had ankle and wrist weights attached.
Finally breaking the surface before my lungs burst, I started to swim for shore but seemed stuck in place, unmoving despite the strokes. Twisting my head behind to see where he was, it looked as though Marty were floating above the crests of the waves, magically walking over the waves, owing to the boat’s invisibility from my angle. I bobbed like a cork. Intestinal-twisting fear motivated me to ignore the pain in my shoulder and keep muscling through the cold, dense water.
Behind me, the engine started with a sputtering roar. Waves pushed me under whenever I tried to turn my head to see where the boat was. Weighted down by heavy clothing and shoes, rolling waves pushed frothy water into my mouth every time I opened it to suck in air. I didn’t have much time; it was drown or die from the churning propeller blades.
Kicking as hard as I could, I grabbed the water with cupped hands, still unable to make progress like one of those nightmares where you flee what’s pursuing you but it’s like running on a treadmill. Marty loomed closer, bigger than ever, every detail in his face exposed to my tunnel vision—his ugly grimace. Marty at the plate—my head the ball.
I dove under just as the boat bore down on me. Now, I couldn’t go down fast enough. A bubbled, green rectangle appeared over my head an instant later. A green vortex of rotating blades that missed me by inches, meant to churn my face to spaghetti.
With the air left in my lungs, I swam underwater, kicking toward the shoreline. I followed the frothy spume of crashing waves guiding me. Every time I stroked for the surface to gulp air, Marty found me and aimed the boat at my head. He lost me circling—no reprieve, however. Finally, near exhaustion, I dog-paddled the rest of the way in, hoping the waves kept me from being spotted.
Closer to the pounding surf, I couldn’t hear the engine until the boat was almost on top of me. Under once more, my hands clawed at the resistant water, pushing myself down, down.
I came up a final time to see the stern of the boat cutting a swathe, making another circle. Out of strength by that point, I was tempted to let the waters close over me—better that than getting run down by the propeller blades or having my head caved in by Marty’s bat. I drifted into the surf where Marty wouldn’t be able to negotiate the shallows without capsizing.
When I felt sandbar under my feet, I knew I was safe. The waves and gravity did the rest; the turbulent water pushed me the last few feet before the receding water could drag me backward. My eyes stung, my throat felt as if I’d swallowed razor blades, but the sound of waves breaking over the stones like marbles dropped into a bathtub was the sweetest sound I heard in my life.
I lay panting, helpless as a rag doll, sobbing from exhaustion. West Virginians have a saying: A wounded dog is the most dangerous dog. I crawled for shelter in a patch of cattails at the base of the cliff. Their waving fronds beckoned like flags. I flopped on my belly and curled up, out of Marty’s reach, breathing hard and gathering strength.
My limbs shook. My teeth started to chatter. Both bad signs: hypothermia. The blood rushed to my trunk. Getting to my feet, tormented by muscle fatigue in every limb, was the hardest thing I ever did.
No going up those sheer bluffs, a hundred feet straight up, no handholds even if I had strength to climb. The clay and siltstone of those cliffs would have crumbled like crackers in my fingers.
No choice but to follow the shoreline, one foot in front of the other. Some of the trek would require walking on sandy beach, some through knee- or waist-deep ice water. My legs felt as though lead weights had been attached.
To my left, a pitch-black terrain. People in the big houses overlooking the water couldn’t see me if they looked over their decks. Lake Erie’s crashing surf ensured my yelling couldn’t be heard. I couldn’t see a path through the foliage. The crescent moon appeared above the lip of the crimson Belt of Venus, my only light. No guiding stars. I walked, stumbled, fell to my knees, got up, put one foot in front of the other. Full night descended, the temperature dropped ten more degrees from what started as a chilly day. I stumbled on in my waterlogged shoes and wet clothes.
I barely traveled a half-mile in that condition. I thought I’d been walking all night and dawn would arrive any second. The feeling in my fingers and toes was long gone. I talked to myself, mainly to curse Marty. I noticed a firefly making small patterns in the blackness. Not a firefly, not this time of year—a tiny crimson light. Not a light: a cigarette tip. A smoker.
That smoker turned out to be a dancer. She’d just finished her set at Northtown’s sleazy strip club and was enjoying a quick smoke in the parking lot when she spotted what she thought was an animal on all fours coming toward her from the beach below. She flicked her cigarette at the beast, went inside, told the manager and some customers. Two men—brothers, both drunk—decided to get their 30.06 deer rifles from the gun racks in their pickups and bag themselves a coyote.
A cop later told me later that one of the men had already sighted on me before his brother shoved the barrel up. “Ain’t no fuckin’ coyote, bro,” he said; “that’s a got-damn human be-an.”
That quote got cleaned up in the Herald-Tribune the day after to this: “I said to Jim. ‘Jimmy Don, hold your fire! I think that is a person out there.’” The brothers Sizemore testified at my trial—for the prosecution.
My bad luck with Marty was offset by, of all things, that dancer whose double-D bra size was much touted by the bar’s patrons and which brought in three times the number of customers. If she hadn’t seen me, or I her, I might have kept stumbling along the shoreline until I dropped. She might have been the draw that night, but when the brothers Sizemore dragged me through the front doors, each with an arm around my shoulder, I beat her for sheer eyeball attention.
My memory is still cloudy to this day. I picture being surrounded by drinkers and a trio of bottled-dye blondes in orange and yellow thongs, citrusy perfume wafting in my nostrils, and The Tubes’ “She’s a Beauty” blaring from scratchy wall speakers at ear-bleed decibels.
Someone inside the bar knew how to treat hypothermia, and I wasn’t damaged by various arguments to the contrary proposed by a few drunks. After the ministering of my hands and feet, I was patched together, shoved into dry clothes that appeared from nowhere. I remember a dancer, not Miss Double Dee, coming into assist my numb fingers in the dancers’ dressing room.
One of the Sizemore brothers greeted me when I walked out. “Ha, lucky you them girls cain’t see your shriveled dick from that icy lake, bro, or you’d never get pussy again.” When my speech returned without that slurry, lockjawed numbness, I asked them for a ride into town.
“Better have you a drink first, bud.”
Someone poured me a shot, which I coughed up once the fiery liquid hit my gullet. Jimmy Don escorted me to his vehicle, gripping me by the triceps muscle as if I were blind instead of half-frozen. I rode “bitch”—little brother’s expression—in a dinged-up, Ford dually truck littered with empties and wadded packs of Marlboros. By then, I was coherent enough to add a few details to my story of having gone fishing alone in skiff and got overturned when the motor stalled.
The brothers took the soggy twenties I handed them and roared off. I stood in the street looking at Marty’s house. His Dodge Challenger sat in the driveway behind Beth’s Celica.
I looked in the windows but couldn’t see anything. I rang the bell and knocked—nothing. Their neighbors would know I didn’t belong by sight. Checking out the back of the house seemed as risky as what I decided to do. I picked up a decorative bench with a potted plant and tossed it through a porch window. I crawled through, calling out her name. No response—a quiet house, an immaculate house—not a dirty dish in the sink.
Going up the carpeted stairs to the upper floor, I headed down the hallway to the bedrooms.
Slapping at the wall for the light switch, I smelled it immediately—a coppery stench mixed with other, sharper odors. The light bloomed everything in that room into focus at once, searing the image into my brain. A room of red horror that’ll remain stuck in my neocortex until I die.
What was left of Beth lay across the bed, although distinguishing legs from arms wasn’t easy at first. Beth’s face in the carnage couldn’t be recognized. My brain struggled to make sense of what I was seeing. The amount of gore brought a sob into my throat. She was carved up. The walls and floor were spattered. Even the ceiling plaster was speckled with comets of cast-off blood where the weapon had been raised and plunged over and over. A clump of intestines tangled in a swirl of bedsheets was the final, hideous insult, and it sent me into the master bathroom to vomit up the whiskey I’d consumed. Wherever blood had pooled, it turned rusty at the perimeter. Marty killed her long before he picked me up. I thought of the bandage across his hand.
In a daze, I picked up the bloody filleting knife from the floor. I was still holding it in my hand, babbling nonsense, when the cops burst in, guns pointed, and threw me to the floor.
The M.E. was quoted as saying Beth had been almost “eviscerated”; he counted over 250 wounds, most post-mortem punctures but some slashes so deep they left jagged rips that exposed bones, ligaments, and tendons. At least twenty, he said, had penetrated through the body into the mattress.
Marty left me a message in the headboard: a Valentine’s Day heart with an arrow bisecting it. Beth’s and my initials carved inside.
Marty never came back. Investigators speculated I killed him, hid the body. Gossips who believed my version said he was out there living in hiding or else he died on Lake Erie.
I know better. Marty aimed his small boat toward Canada, knowing he couldn’t make the trip across even if he survived the big waves. When his engine died, he’d have sat there alone in the cold black night thinking about what he’d done and what he’d failed to do.
Of all the things Marty was not known one for, “regret” tops the list. He weighed his options while the boat pitched near the shoreline where he tried to kill me. He understood he’d failed in the saw way he understood he failed at the plate that day during the softball tournament, striking out at the plate—and probably with the same moral indifference. Then he calmly stepped over the side.
Cops wanted to arrest me for a double homicide. In the end, they had to settle for the stronger case and charged me with Beth’s murder. Charges were added and dropped one by one as the evidence to convict came up short. I spent five months in the county jail until they released me because the D.A. finally admitted he didn’t have enough evidence to convict in Beth’s case, either. Just like TV, I was told not to leave town when they escorted me out the door to do a second perp walk for the cameras.
***
Northtown is still divided on my guilt. Marty had powerful friends who refuse to believe he could do something so vicious. Social media never stopped discussing it. I quit reading their posts as soon as I realized that people who had never spoken two words to me were psychoanalyzing me: “He envied Marty his wife” or “Marty befriended him, the white-trash scumbag.” Strangers in public said they’ll “fuck me up” if they ever saw me in public. Death threats online and in the mails haven’t stopped. My car’s been vandalized so often the police told me to “deal with it.”
I keep my mouth shut, my head down, and don’t leave the apartment much. I stopped drinking in the bars on Bridge Street because Marty’s friends, and even some of Beth’s relatives, are supposed to be waiting for an opportunity to jump me. It would be easier all around if I knocked back a few boilermakers and stepped out the door some dark night and let it happen. I miss Beth. My dreams are terrifying and last past the point of waking.
Deep down, I knew there was a collision coming between Marty and me. Maybe my guilt wanted it to happen. Could I have saved Beth? I still don’t have an answer to the question Marty asked me that day in the boat: When did it all go to shit?
I doubt if I’ll ever know.
[Image Credit : Photo by Ahmed Zayan on Unsplash]
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