The Red Jacket

How will I get home?

I remember what I want to forget, pre-dawn tones of black shade into blue, then sun shakes gold dust on lake water. Creel, nets and buckets rattle next to plastic boots.

I grip the cork handle of my light rod, dad steps in, rocks the aluminum fishing boat, sea legs sturdy in his muscle memory from loading the big guns in the Navy.

Without glancing at me (I shrink small on the wooden bench), he orders me to untie the ropes. I scramble onto the wet dock

and into the sun’s spotlight, tug on a thick, wet strand tied to a post green with algae. It won’t budge. Dad rages,

Navy anchor tattoo sunk deep in his pulsing neck muscles, he pounces onto the slick dock, dissolves me with a glare.

I squat, yank, fumble. He shouts a raging squall at me. I yank, pull, tug. I have something to prove.

He swats me aside. I slide across the wood, skin my knee, choke the tears. “Jesus Christ,” he snarls. “That was a clove hitch. Easiest knot to untie.”

Tears burn down my soul. I exist again. I try to claw into the unmoored boat. Dad grabs my red jacket, lifts me in the air, forces me to sit on a large rock under a pine tree.

My hand scrapes across stone, nowhere to hide from the rising sun. He tosses me a grimy towel to clean my knee, I refuse to dab my cuts.

Dad starts the engine that growls at my incompetence. Panicked questions and blame trail behind the boat, mix with the rainbow of colors shimmering on the slick of gasoline, oil and disdain.

The boat churns toward an islet and out of sight. How am I going to get home? If only I’d moved faster or known it was a clove hitch, easiest knot to untie.

The pine’s shadow stretches toward the bank. If I cry, there would be no shame because only the trees and the swaying boats would see.

I tap the patches on my red jacket, each representing a baseball team, recall the stats on baseball cards for each team’s starting lineup.

I pat emblems of the Tigers, Yankees, and Giants. How am I going to get home? I pat the Braves, the Astros, and the Cardinals. How am I going to get home?

I press my hand against the Pirates patch, imagine the poster of the Great One, Roberto Clemente, Arriba, a five-tool all-time great, taped on my wall.

I long to play alone in the backyard of my house, pretending to be Clemente making a nonchalant basket catch. I wish I were at the ballpark with a different dad

watching the Great One line a pitch off the outside of the plate into the gap in right center. How am I going to get home?

I stroke my hand across the jagged rock. Inside, I would become harder than that stone. Not even boats jostling against the pier would see me cry. How am I going to get home?

Time constricts, tightens to a clove hitch. The boat rounds the islet, returning toward the marina. My shoulders sag when I see my real dad.

The rest of the day, we fish dad’s favorite fishing hole. I cast a line into the shallow silence: reel in a trout. “Put it in the creel, son.

That’s a keeper, frying food.” I gently submerge the laker; prepare to release the trout back to untouched, deeper water.

I can’t do it. His glare is like a spotlight. I place the laker in the creel, gills sucking at the chill of dusk.