Without characters, a writer has nothing.
One of my favorites is a frequent fishing buddy from back in my Oklahoma days. We were in the same Sunday school class at Nicoma Park Baptist Church, and we bonded over our shared passion for bass fishing. He was a senior non-commissioned officer at Tinker Air Force Base, and I called him Sarge.
Sarge was a consummate military man. His garage was full of fishing gear, but it was all labeled and stowed in hand-crafted shelves.
His Ranger bass boat was custom built to his specifications. Its fiberglass hull gleamed, as did the leather seats. There wasn’t so much as a trace of stain or dirt on the carpet. At the end of every fishing trip, we spent nearly 40 minutes toweling off the boat and trailer.
Stern and pious, Sarge didn’t have much of a sense of humor. At least, not for my kind of humor. This made him even more fun because he didn’t know how to process my stream-of-consciousness fishing banter and bawdy singing. It perplexed him because he outranked most of the people in his life and they all followed decorum. I wasn’t disrespectful. I respected him immensely, so he tolerated my irreverence.
Sarge was disciplined and orderly even when he fished. Every cast was purposeful and machine-like. The childlike joy he got from catching fish was the only crack he ever allowed in his armor.
Despite our differences, we had a strong chemistry on the water that made us formidable fishing partners. We visited a different lake every weekend, and we smoked the bass everywhere we went. We celebrated afterward with chili cheese dogs with onions and tater tots from Sonic. He paid for the fuel, and I paid for the gas, so to speak.
We smoked ’em everywhere except Lake of the Arbuckles, near Sulphur, Okla. It’s a gorgeous lake in the heart of the Arbuckle Mountains in south-central Oklahoma. It reminds me of Lake Hinkle near Waldron, except it’s much bigger. Deep and clear, it contains some of the biggest largemouth and smallmouth bass in the Sooner State.
The fishing was slow the morning we visited. Sarge started by losing one of his favorite crankbaits, and then he missed a couple of strikes in deep water on a Carolina rig. We flailed away fruitlessly at the best looking banks, and we probed the deep points and humps with no effect. Eventually, we pulled our lines from the water and cruised around trying to glean some clues from what was usually an outstanding fishery.
We ended up in a cool, shady cove. We didn’t catch any black bass there, either, but a giant school of white bass erupted on the surface all around us. They call them sand bass in Oklahoma, and they broke across more than an acre of the surface. You don’t always fish for the fish you want, but for the fish you have, so we pounced. We cast small spoons amid the school and got strikes immediately.
Sarge continued to struggle with his timing. I caught and released three big whites before he finally caught his first. As Sarge tried to subdue the thrashing fish with a thumb hold, it pounded the lead spoon against the hull of Sarge’s beloved Ranger like a trip hammer.
“Quit it! Quit it!” Sarge screamed, capping the order by taking the Lord’s name in vain. I was shocked. I’d never heard him utter a hint of profanity, and he was just getting started.
He finally hoisted the fish into the boat. It threw the hook and fell on the floor where it emptied its stomach on his spotless carpet, but not before it rammed one of the barbs of the treble hook into the leather seat.
That was just too much. Sarge came unhinged.
“I never have any fun!” he yelled. “Sometimes I feel like I oughtta divorce the wife, sell all my s*** and just, just go away!”
I was in the front of the boat working the trolling motor. I didn’t dare look behind me, but I could feel Sarge’s searing glare on my heaving shoulders. A deathly silence settled over the cove. The white bass sounded, so I reeled in my spoon and buried the hook in the cork handle.
I finally turned to face Sarge. He stood like a glaring sphinx, his bulging arms crossed across his barrel chest.
“You ’bout ready to go?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said sheepishly.
He slid silently into the driver’s seat, started the engine and drove to the ramp.
He didn’t even wipe down the boat. Nary a word was ever spoken about that trip. It was like it never happened.
Sports, Pages 28 on 03/30/2014