Issue 2, Spring 2024

Creative Nonfiction

Going Soft

by Paul Hertneky

I had been fishing for about an hour one cool April morning. Casting my Daredevle, a small flat lure, I hit a roiling hole in the lee of a rock and felt the first strike of the day. I half expected it, though, and waited for a second tug on my line before I tugged back, perhaps too forcefully, unable to contain my excitement. The fish leapt, breaking the surface, and I reeled it out of the hole, letting it work against me. I hopped onto a rock in the river, maneuvering the fish to meet me. I stooped and scooped it out of the water, a deep green brook trout with aqua squiggles and red speckles on its side. I could see that I shouldn’t have waited for the second tug. The lure hooked too deeply in its throat. I reached into my vest for hemostats and, with wet, cold hands tried not to squeeze the fish too hard while working to extract the hook. Once I worked it free, I exhaled and looked, though for only a second, into the bulging black eye staring up at me, helplessly.

After cozying the trout back into the stream, I bounded from rock to rock, back to the long grass on the bank. And I had to sit. A weight within my head pressed me down. It felt like fatigue but I kept seeing the fish’s eye. The image wouldn’t flee. I wondered if the fish would survive or if I had damaged it permanently. At the same time, a sickening feeling heated my gut. I looked at my watch and saw that I should be heading home; my wife and I had an appointment that afternoon.

From the day we met eight years earlier, Robbie and I fantasized about Spooner, an imaginary dog we would someday have. We figured her to be a yellow Labrador retriever who would come to our bedside in the morning, wagging her tail and urging us to get out of bed. Sometimes we would even roll to the edge of the mattress and pretend to pet the side of her face and scratch her ears.

But the time had never been right for a dog, too much moving from city to city, unfair living arrangements for the country hound we imagined Spooner would be. After enduring several cities, we moved to the mountains and found an entrance to rural life. Dogs were everywhere, in restaurants and offices and shops, so I began looking for a puppy who would need a home.

That Saturday afternoon, we crossed the bony track to a nearby farm where a litter of puppies had been born. The card on the bulletin board of the local veterinarian directed us to the owners, who guessed that their golden retriever had been visited by a rottweiler, a big black dog they saw trotting across the pasture one morning.

When we arrived at the barn of the King family, we were escorted to a walled off corner, where we were greeted by the golden mother and shown a teeming pool of black puppies. We noticed that three females wiggled among the litter of eight and that one wore a red ribbon. She had already been claimed. Another of the females lunged at us, trying to climb over the barrier. She was smaller than the others and skinny, too. We fished her out and ran her through a battery of behavioral tests, all of which she skittishly failed. Later, we would refer to her as “cocaine sister.” We looked hard for the third female and found her sitting patiently in a corner, wagging her tail against the straw-covered floor. She looked at us, but not directly, out of the corner of one eye—a black eye that drew me into its depth with its singular, imploring stare.

I stretched over the team of yapping pups and lifted her out of the maelstrom. She excelled at the tests, so we took her outside for a better look.

Instead of yellow, Spooner was black and softer than any puppy I had ever touched. We bought her for ten dollars, just enough to cover the shots and her share of food in the previous ten weeks. On the way home in the car, she puked an impressive bellyful of dog chow onto Robbie’s lap.

Her black eyes absorbed my soul while her gaze melted my skin and bones, and, along with them, my instinct to dominate, to establish power over her, to show her who was boss. Clearly, she would be calling the shots. In those first few days with her, a lump often twisted in my throat but I truly could not understand what was happening to me. I had grown up with dogs and litters of puppies.

One litter had been born prematurely while my father was at work, but he had told me what to do over the phone. Eight years old, I pulled open three discharged placentas, and extracted still blind puppies, cleaned them off, since the mother wanted to have nothing to do with them, and fed them warm milk through a nipple made for premature babies. Some of them died but I had seen that before with other litters, and I tended to the survivors while my father wrapped the dead in several sheets of newspaper and unceremoniously placed them in a garbage can.

I remember being unfazed, just as I had been when my father entered the chicken coop one Saturday morning with a hand axe and banged off the heads of a couple of white chickens before the neighbor’s dog ran inside the fence and halted his work. While the dog chased the bleeding, headless chickens around the yard, my siblings and I squealed and laughed and yelled at the dog, trying to shoo him away. But the scene didn’t bring a scintilla of sorrow or remorse. It had been exhilarating.

We were amused by the fun we had with animals and were, it seemed, no less amused by their deaths. We loved our dogs and pet rabbits and birds, especially the birds we found inexplicably flopping around, that we incarcerated and nursed back to health before releasing them. But we were also constantly torturing insects and salamanders and crayfish we found in the woods.

On summer vacations at a lake, we fished in our own way. Taking five- foot lengths of fishing line with a hook tied to the end, we pressed doughballs made of white bread and peanut butter, or even little balls we made from the wad of Bazooka bubble gum we were chewing, and formed the balls around the end of the hook. Then we dropped the hook through the slats of a dock where we had seen small bluegills or sunfish swimming around and tried to get the fish to take our bait. They bit, and we yanked the fish out of the water and kept drawing them up to the underside of the dock, banging their lips and heads against the planks, letting them wriggle and curl their tails. We pulled until they relaxed and we managed to slip the slim fish through the cracks. Then we removed the hooks and scraped the creatures back into the water. The sport amused us for hours at a time. Never once did I think about the cruelty we dished out, never once did an adult reprimand us.

When the brutality of summer gave way to autumn, the smell of burning leaves mixed with the scent of solvent my father used to clean his shotgun. And on a few weekends, he took his three sons to my aunt’s farm in Latrobe, a couple of hours away, in the heart of coal mining country, where he hunted with his brother and a group of friends.

The men assembled and went off just before dawn while we joined cousins for a day of playing and chasing and leaping from the hayloft. Once the shadows lengthened and the steam of chicken stew and dumplings rolled into every room, we could hear car doors slamming and all three dogs barking. In the failing light, the hunters laid out their quarry on a tailgate: majestic ringnecked pheasants, perhaps a few ruffed grouse, and a fluffy row of rabbits. All had been field dressed. That is, gutted and stuffed with grass. We kids looked on admiringly as the men popped open pony bottles of Rolling Rock straight from the icebox (these old-timers lacked a real refrigerator).

Twelve adults and six kids wasted no time getting to the dinner table. And, after dinner, my brothers and I clambered down the basement stairs, into a humus-smelling cellar dominated by the coal furnace. Black duct pipes sprouted out of the top of the massive cast iron orb, a warm glow beaming through slits in the oven’s door. We sat on a bench in the shadow of a single light bulb, leaning against the cool walls of stacked shale. Beside a washtub, my father worked deftly with a razor, first cutting off the cottony tail of a rabbit and reaching toward us with the gift. I had to pick it off his sticky, bloody hand. He used his knife to lop off the back legs at the knee. These, too, we collected, since nothing brought better luck than a rabbit’s foot. Then he peeled away the skin, revealing the muscle and sinew, and inspected the carcass for buckshot, which he flicked out with the tip of his knife.

While he finished skinning all the rabbits, my brothers and I stroked our new feet and blew tails into the air. Then my father draped a skin over each hand and shoved his index fingers up into the still-attached heads. He concocted dialogue, spoken in a small voice, between the two puppets, that gestured and nodded and regarded each other and us with glossy black eyes. We giggled and listened to their story, holding their severed feet, their blood dripping down my father’s forearms.

In this way, we separated ourselves from any act of cruelty; we became inured to the mess, and no ethical questions arose. We always ate the animals my father, and later, we, killed. If my mother complained about preparing the meat—she did not grow up with hunters—she found some joy in the eating.

Fish entered her kitchen pretty much the way they did when they came from the market. We had already finished the fatal tasks: reeling them in, slamming them in the back of the head against a rock, slitting them open to clean them and inspect their bellies for a quick study of their favorite foods. Their death never struck me as any more tragic than opening a can of tuna. I never thought of having dragged those fish by their lips, against all the resistance their muscles could muster, to my hands.

I know that a brook trout flashing me a pitiable look is an invention of my mind. What resides in my conscience that is triggered by that look? After all the animals I had cared for and killed, had the stare of a single fish and the beseeching gaze of a black puppy, to whom I immediately committed myself, planted a stake in my murderous heart? I don’t think so. But I have gone soft, I’m afraid. And in a few moments, when I walk to the edge of the lake beside my house, I’ll watch the mergansers swim across the surface and dive and I won’t resent them for taking my fish. I’ve gone soft toward mergansers, soft toward killing; if this keeps up, I’ll never again hear that satisfying snap of a mousetrap in the middle of the night.

Compassion has thrown a ray of light on suffering and on my casual savagery. I am not proud of myself for all the dying eyes I ignored, and I am not satisfied by suddenly noticing them.

Parting with cruelty means parting with power. To willingly surrender that power, to act with tenderness and mercy, can suggest a weakness and delicacy counter to manly forging of solid principles and convictions.

But as I grow older, I have come to admire supple minds, secure in their strength, always stretching for grace and flexibility. And, in the face of cruelty, I have begun to recognize my own face—my eyes now old enough to relinquish the conventions of masculinity and embrace compassion. To do otherwise would be cowardly.

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A Haunting Humidity

by Paul Hertneky

On this humid morning, the air sticks to my face, gathers between my fingers, and collects in the folds of my eyelids. Outside, haze shrouds optimism. The future hides behind a film better suited for reflection.  But the images diffuse like those on a mirror after a shower.  In it I see only an impression of the past, of the steamy days I survived, and relief.

After all, I’m not driving spikes into railroad ties with guys who slept in their clothes last night. I’m not stepping into greasy work pants, found in my locker at the steel mill, inhaling embedded solvents when my cheek brushes my thigh as I bend to tie my bootlaces. 

I remember the mill and the desperation of the labor gang.  My co-workers stacked up the days, counting their pay on their way to extended vacations, their bass boats, their next EKG, their retirement.

With every shift, my future plans and dreams wore thin.  Before long, I brushed them aside or winced when I’d find them smoking skinny menthols at the end of a bar. Like sleeping in two-hour stints, the scenes ran shallow. I knew the faces in the dreams; I had been to all the places, heard it all before. One night I hope something funny will happen, something thrilling, something horrible, something shocking. Falling off the boat, coming up with a fish in my pocket, coming up with a gun used in a murder, coming up with a winning lottery ticket, coming up with a way out.

Dreams hedged with self‑doubt and crushed by responsibility will shrink to the size of nightmares. How can I trust them? And why bother? Just keep working. Keep parking in long rows, walking through the gates, waving to my second cousin. He’s running the overhead crane and I hope he didn’t drink too much last night.

My mind wanders as I walk, picturing the rising price of gas at the string of stations I passed this morning and separating it from yesterday morning and the one before. Sensing a trend, a political opinion roils inside me. I unconsciously find the locker room, my locker, my cool greasy pants. And, hoisting them to my waist, I feel a comfort in their grime, pasted thick after three days of hard work. Today must be Wednesday. I’ll get fresh pants tomorrow and the weekend is only two days away. I won’t feel this shitty again for another week.

Tomorrow the gang’s stupid jokes that swirl and melt like snowflakes on a car hood will begin to stick. I’ll make plans to drink beer with my buddies, hoping one will say something profound, something bold, something odd, something I haven’t heard before. I look forward to spooning into the curve of my girlfriend’s back on Saturday morning, smelling her hair, and drifting off when the rattle and roar of my jackhammer explodes and wakes me in a start; I see its bit shining at the same angle I saw before my right leg punched through the corrugated roof two hundred feet above the furnaces on that sweltering summer day.

I will wear no socks today, no steel‑toed boots. I will return calls and edit a draft. I will walk my dog before the heat of the day. After that stretch in the mill, I vowed I would never return. Yet, here I am, sticky and clinging to the memory.