She arced skyward in one last effort to escape the ozone doom below, stretching upward, as to the sun, body writhing at the peak before the descent, hanging there in the halcyon equilibrium of forces, stalemated to the sky, creamy undersides exposed.  Joe would have had her if it weren’t for the surprise, the eruption from the water, the assent upward against all logic, her lithe body rising full in our eyes, choking our stare.  In an instant she was sinking back to earth, dipping her svelte sides back into the water.  But there was chemistry in the water that day, and none escaped the water’s electric seduction, our probes hanging out on either side of the boat, stainless-steel fingers groping low.  She twisted, lurched deep, and lost control, drifting over on her smarmy sides.  Her pale belly wavered almost a meter below, and Joe was thrusting the net deep now, compensating for the refracted light, netting her with a heave, twisting to capture her full, pulling her out from the water in a slow, straining move.

When the fifteen-minute run was up, I pushed the pole down hard on the kill switch, waited for it to choke and die, curse its last backfire and rest in the aftermath of stale smoke.  That’s when Joe went to work.  Each wavering form he groped out of the live well with deft force, his hands firm about their girths.  He would slide them up the measuring-board in an easy, single-handed caress, their stomachs rubbing on the smooth wood, their noses butting firm to the head-board, mouths forced shut.  The little ones he let flap about a second in a desperate vim-flipping before he slid them in place.  And then he called out their name and length and tossed them back into the water, the whole process so fast he earned the name “Joey: fish god.”  At first I thought him careless and ignorant, a country boy who just liked to shock fish, calling out random names on a hunch because he was too lazy to key them out.  But Joe had an eye for fish, possessed the “gestalt,” could just see a fish and know.  Looking at the body shape of a Rosyface Shiner, he murmured why it wasn’t the sister Mimic; brushing back the gills of the genre Lepomis, he whispered their species cyanellus; massaging the lips of suckers, gently rubbing the tongues of bass, tickling the fins of darters, he came to this knowing, would call their names in this Zen-Latin chanting: Lepistosseus osseus, Etheostoma sterillium, Labidesthes sicculus..  I would question his judgement, rub off microscopic scales to get a count, tear fins to get at the rays, bust up gills with fat slimy thumbs.  But he was always right.  I wondered what he had or had done to acquire the gestalt, to give him this vision of fish.  Maybe it was his photographic memory; maybe he sat for hours at home reading about them; maybe he had just seen so many that they became more to him, more than fish, more than suckers and shad, carp and crappie, more than, even, specific species—he saw what it meant for them to grow old, become gravid with eggs, grow green with disease.  He possessed the gestalt and so he knew their spirits; he knew their spirits and so possessed the sonar babble of their Delphian tongues.

He could see them from nearly two-hundred yards off, make out their shape, their smooth moves through the hazy day, their sides sleek and waving, skirts tight to their hips like scales.  From the distance of a dozen leagues he not only aged and sexed them, but also uncovered their hair color, qualified their weight, and even estimated their bust size.  And he was always right.  Like he could smell their pheromones from a mile off and know the quality of her genes.  It became a game for him to make me look at them, their lean legs meandering down the sidewalk, up their skirts.  I would try to restrain, part out of respect, part out of fear of being seen looking.  That is not to say I didn’t look sometimes, but there was always this hidden voice in me that revered them with an inarticulate fear, that didn’t want to face them up close.  But Joe was all fight and no flight.  So it was that on a few occasions I found myself looking into the eyes of one peeked madtom lurching forth with frilled fins and a purse with mace.  Joe would just make gurgling, slurping sounds, like he was the fish, making some snap, but most just blushed and darted away.

He told me many times how they liked it, but I didn’t believe him.  Joe, however, always proved a man of his word--despite the occasional jerk of detest, most only tugged at his assessments with a demur smile, lashes down, a warm blush.  Some would smile back directly.  Still others sized him up!  I tried to pass it off as the “bad girl” syndrome, or the “girls like jerks” phenomenon, but something more was nudging me, making me stroke the question mark of curiosity.  What was it that William Joseph Oliver had that girls wanted?  He wasn’t particularly gorgeous, didn’t have great clothes or a Mustang, didn’t love poetry or picnics.  He was gruff and unrefined: a man of barbells and gills, a man of teeth and scales, a man with the self-spoken commitment to “never deny his biology.”

He taught me once about their proportions, how the swell of the breast, the curve of the hips, must be just right, how a man will be attracted to a good-breeding woman, how pheromones draw in the perfect genetic match.  But it wasn’t the pheromones I lacked.  It wasn’t even the women.  Joe had something more I couldn’t understand—something I coveted and feared.  The gestalt, I think.  But the gestalt wasn’t what made the women love him.  The gestalt was how he loved them, worshiped them, and that faith seemed to make him strong.  But how did he attain his faith?  From where did one seek the gestalt of salvation?  The baptism of the knowing?
 

She was in the boat now, in the live well, shifting.  Joe’s hands sunk deep in the water, snuck full around her girth, fingers pushing into her yielding stomach as she braced and bowed.  She came alive in his hands—fins out, lips pouting, eyes black pearls.  He laid her hard on the board and she became frightened, panicked in an arcing and twisting.  His hands paused for a second, mid-air, assessing her position, then came full over her, pushing her firm against the wood.  His hold was deliberate, a long bold minute, even after her strain began to soften.  And that is when his hands came alive, began to shift and slide, counting each scale, opening the gills, fanning the fins out wide, forming his hand around her body, like he was forming her, reliving her creation.  Or was it that she was forming his hands now, giving them the under-belly sense of touch, the quivering, new-born grasp, the first placental gasp for life?