Big Red-Belly
By Tanya Sousa
Big Red-Belly was a small fish who seemed big in a little brook. He was named when I, about nine years old, and Jamie, a neighbor boy three years younger and adoring of my self-proclaimed wisdom, looked into the stream one day.
We’d scanned that area at least a thousand times before, Jamie squinting his dark eyes at water bugs skating across his reflection.
“Look,” I authorized, and pointed at the shadowy figure making his way through the deepest part. He wasn’t like the minnows we chased. Instead of darting, skinny-brown and terrified, he was nonchalant.
He seemed massive with his six- or so inch length next to the tiny minnows.
“Look at that big red belly.” Jamie’s eyes were riveted to the stranger in the stream. Finally, he turned to me. “Can you catch him?”
Could I catch him? I was the master, and Jamie knew it. Nothing could escape me, as the paranoid minnows and water gliders had come to realize.
I planned our strategy. We’d come equipped with an empty, washed-out Cool-Whip bowl. In the past, we’d snared many with that alone. “Start piling rocks over here,” I directed. Jamie obediently took larger stones from the stream’s bottom, and began constructing a dam across the shallow part. The water gurgled while we confidently set the trap.
It had worked before—build a dam across with a small opening in the center. There, I’d wait with the Cool-Whip bowl while Jamie herded the fish in by simply walking from the other end of the stream. It was brilliant. When the dam was built and I was in place, I told Jamie to begin. He was trembling, moving slowly, brown legs slipping through the water, knees hardly bending. Small mushroom clouds of mud poofed around his feet.
The minnows scattered. Big Red-Belly floated and slowly moved his tail, but he was swimming in the right direction. My heart was eager. He was moving closer. Come ON. Come ON, I urged in my mind. He drifted closer. Closer. Big Red-Belly stopped moving forward, floated in dreamy suspension, and then suddenly flashed away.
Jamie wailed and I splashed toward the bank where fish sometimes hid under overhanging sod. I thrust the bowl under it, but it was no use. He’d disappeared so fast neither of us could say for sure which direction he’d gone.
Jamie and I sat on the bank together, but something was different. I had never been outsmarted by a fish before. There was silence, and a hollow look in Jamie’s dark eyes. There was an unspoken agreement that Big Red-Belly wasn’t just a fish—he was a super-fish. And I had to have him.
Through the summer, we tried nets, larger bowls, dragging a board while herding, thinking and believing that Big Red-Belly wouldn’t be able to backtrack. We chased him wildly. We waited patiently, but came up empty.
It was at that point that I took Jamie to our rocky hideout and showed him what would hopefully catch Big Red-Belly once and for all: A hook.
Jamie’s face melted. Before, we’d always caught fish, watched them for a while, then let them go. They dribbled back out of the bowl and into the stream with a satisfying plop, swimming away.
Our feet crunched on the gravel road as we made our way to the stream, a quarter mile from our homes.
I wasted no time in baiting the hook and dropping it where Big Red-Belly was sunning. He swam toward the hook-shaped worm, slowly circled it—
“You got him!” Jamie cried out.
I hadn’t even seen him go for it. I pulled while Big Red-Belly fought a ferocious fish battle, jerking back and forth and splashing. He was flailing when I pulled him out of the water.
Big Red-Belly was finally mine.
He flopped on the shore, wriggling, terrified. Next to the tall ferns, he seemed dwarfed. “Let’s take the hook out and throw him back.” I reached for him, but my fingers kept slipping off his wriggling body. He flopped down the bank, until a rock broke his attempt to reach the water. Jamie tried to help, but he recoiled unwillingly from the slimy fish scales.
Big Red-Belly’s eyes began to glaze, his mouth gaped. Time was passing, and I couldn’t hold him long enough to wrest the hook. His struggles became weaker. I finally grasped him firmly and worked at the hook. I worked at it, but it seemed to know I’d wanted this prize, so it refused to let it go.
Big Red-Belly’s mouth was bleeding; a lump formed in my own throat. The fish’s eyes were going blank. “I can’t get the hook out!” His struggles grew still weaker.
“He’s dying,” Jamie said quietly.
“He’s not dying. He’s fine.” I snapped through the lump, pulling on the hook. “I just need to get him back to the water.” His mouth was barely moving. Finally, I broke the string and flung him back, hook and all. “Go on! You’re free.”
His namesake bobbed ever closer to the border of water and air.
I threw a rock near him. It splashed, but he didn’t try to swim away. I wanted him to swim. I wanted him to be unimpressed and sure. He stopped moving, something gone from him that I couldn’t give back.
I’d never cried in front of friends, but I sobbed then. Jamie sat beside me. When we finally walked home, I felt gratitude for his silence.
When I walk by the stream now, I realize how small it is. The deepest part is only a foot and a half, at best. The widest section is perhaps twelve feet from one bank to another. There are still minnows there, and water gliders flirting and flitting across the surface. There’s never been another Big Red-Belly, though. When I sit on the bank, I wish it all big again.