The Morning We Saved Eleven Hundred Fish

Breakfast Gets Cold

I walked back up to the house and called Rodney’s cell phone. It rang five times and went to the message, the one where he says he is probably out in the truck and to try him later.

I called again. Same thing.

I walked across the dam to his place. His dump truck was gone and so was his pickup. The double-wide was dark.

A stack of paper sat on the porch rail under a rock, and the top sheet had the name of a highway contractor out of Salem printed across the top.

I did not read it. It was not mine to read. But I could see a number written in ink near the bottom, and the number was 9,000 with a dollar sign in front of it.

Later I would find out the rest. The state was rebuilding a stretch of highway east of town, and the contractor needed good clay for the embankment.

Somebody had told them the bottom of an old farm pond is about the best clay there is. Somebody had told them Rodney Fenske had one.

And Rodney was eight months behind on his child support. I did not know that then. Nobody in the family did.

He had kept it to himself the way he kept everything to himself, right up until the morning he opened that valve.

That is a reason. I have thought about it a hundred times since. A man in a hole will grab whatever rope is nearest.

But a reason is not the same thing as a right, and it was not his pond to kill.

I went back to the dam with a pipe wrench from my truck. I got the jaws on that bare stem and leaned on it with everything I had.

The stem was old and worn round at the corners, and the wrench slipped off it every time.

I tried for twenty minutes. I skinned two knuckles. I tried a set of vise grips. I tried wrapping the stem in a rag first.

The water just kept roaring out of that pipe and the ring of mud around the bank kept getting wider.

By seven o’clock the pond was down four feet. I could see the old stump in the middle that we used to dive off, standing up out of the water like a tooth.

Out past it, the water was starting to boil in places where the fish were crowding.

I stood on the dam and did the arithmetic. I could call the sheriff. I could call a lawyer. I could stand there and argue with Rodney when he finally answered his phone.

And by the time anybody settled whose half that pond was, every fish in it would be dead in the mud.

So I quit fighting the pipe and went to get my boys.