Slimy, raw fish just too much for Bubba
"I want to go fishing with you this weekend," Bubba told me as we sat at the large round corner table in Doreen's 24 HR Eat Gas Now Cafe.
The attending Hunting Club members snickered as they stared into their coffee or looked out the window.
I eased into the conversation, remembering back a few months the trouble we'd had with Bubba.
"Uh, let me remind you that in order to fish, you have to touch the fish at some point," I said. "No matter how hard you try, you'll finally have to get fishy if you hook something."
"Not the way Rev fishes," Doc said. Everyone except me laughed.
All 6-foot-6 and 250 pounds of Bubba failed to make eye contact.
"I didn't have too much trouble during dove season," he said.
"But you wouldn't touch the dead dove," I reminded him.
"I went out there and found them for you."
"Didn't need to. They were falling in a bare field."
"Well," he said, sounding defensive and a bit huffy.
"And then I had to walk out there in front of everyone and pick up the bird while you stood there and watched."
"There was blood and feathers. I thought I could pick it up until I saw it was dead."
"You would have gotten it if it were alive?" Wrong Willie asked.
Bubba failed to muster an answer.
"And you wouldn't help me clean the birds," I said. "So how are you going to fish?"
"How do you do it?" Bubba asked. "I mean, how do you pick up those slimy things?"
"I just lip them if they're bass or crappie or grab them behind the fins if they're catfish. Or I'll hold them behind the gills if I'm catching trout."
"You haven't caught a trout in so long you'd probably lip it," Doc said, causing more riotous laughter.
Ignoring the lame insults, I continued to work on Bubba. "So do you think you can hold a fish?"
He thought about it for a long moment, then shook his head. "They're slimy."
"Yep. So are the salmon filets you cook on the grill. How do you get them out of the package?" Woodrow asked. Bubba is always grilling at Woodrow's place in the woods.
Bubba dug into his back pocket and produced a pair of blue surgical gloves. "You carry those with you?" Doc asked.
"You never know when you need to pick up something nasty, like raw fish or maybe a dead dove. That's what it is, you know. They're raw. I don't like raw stuff."
"You didn't think so the other day," I said, waiting for the inevitable.
"What are you talking about?"
"You ate ceviche at the restaurant. Do you know what ceviche is?"
"Kind of a fish pico de gallo."
"Except the fish is cooked with lime juice, so some folks say it's like sushi. The Cap'n says it's all technical, and the fish is still raw. According to him, you ate raw fish."
Bubba blanched. "But you said it was cooked!"
"I said it was chemically cooked, in lime juice. They just pour the juice on the fish, and when it turns white, it's done."
He blanched. "You didn't tell me!"
"Did too. You didn't listen."
The guys snickered while Bubba digested the news. Then he brightened. "Maybe you can bring along a lot of lime juice, and I can pour it over the fish when we catch them. Then they'll be chemically cooked and won't be slimy when I touch them."
"We try to practice catch-and-release," Youngster said. "You don't want to release a limed fish."
"It might work on trout," Wrong Willie thought aloud. "Most of the time we just catch a few trout and eat them, so it might remove a step."
"Naw," Woodrow chimed in. "They're so slimy I can barely stand to touch them myself after they've been in the cooler. Sometimes they slime so bad it looks like a cooler full of really thick snot."
Three people in the booth behind us went white. Forks clattered onto barely touched plates. The quick slap of plastic, some rattling change, a quick signature and they were out of there.
"Guys, just be reasonable," I pleaded. "Bubba, to fish, you have to touch them. Period. Now how good are you at knots?"
"You have to tie them up?"
"You have to tie hooks onto the line. You'll need to practice ...."
"You made me eat raw fish," he said and looked around the table as if hoping to organize a riot.
"This isn't going to be easy," I said to the assemblage.
"What about raising kids is easy?" Woodrow asked and stared at my large, thirtysomething, unofficially adopted son. "The problems just get bigger and bigger as they get bigger and bigger."
"Ceviche is raw fish?" Bubba asked, then called out an order across the cafe for a really well-done burger.
• Reavis Wortham's e-mail address is r.wortham@tx.rr.com.
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