The Fish Fry I Held on the Road

The First Fillet

The oil hit temperature a little before five, and the first basket of walleye went down into it with that sound, that hard clean sizzle, and the smell rolled up the road the way it does, and I swear it was not three minutes before the first set of headlights turned in.

It was the Vogels, bean salad and four lawn chairs. Then the Ellises, all six of them, the kids spilling out before the van stopped. Then Pete with his fryer, and old Cliff in his good cap, and the Sorensons, and a family from the next road over I barely knew who had heard it from somebody and come anyway with a pan of brownies.

I fried walleye on the tailgate of my truck until the light went gold and then blue over the harvested corn. Golden fillets coming out of the basket, cornmeal crisp, steam going up off them in the cold air.

Pete set up his fryer beside mine, and the two baskets going at once sounded like rain on a tin roof. We got into a rhythm. He pulled, I breaded, Eli plated.

I lost count somewhere past the fourth basket.

There were maybe forty people on my lane and more coming, sitting in a loose ring of lawn chairs and pickup gates, paper plates on their knees. The kids ran the ditches in the near dark the way kids are supposed to.

The food kept coming out of nowhere, the way it does. A bean salad. A pan of brownies. Mrs. Vogel’s dinner rolls still warm in a towel. Somebody set up a card table just for the dishes people brought.

Nobody had asked for any of it. That is a gravel road for you. You put out a sign and light a fire and the road fills in the rest.

Eli worked the plate line the whole time.

He stood on an overturned milk crate at the tailgate, and as I pulled a basket and let it drain, he laid the fillets on the plates, two to a plate, and handed them down the line. “Careful, it is hot,” he told every single person, because I had told him to say it, and he said it to grown men three times his size with total seriousness, and they took their plates from my eight-year-old and said thank you to him like he was running the whole show.

Because he was. That was the thing nobody at the club had understood. Give that boy a job that mattered and he was the steadiest hand on the road.