THE GRANDMOTHER OF ALL TROUT

I was working the tomatoes, pinching the new growth that came from the armpits of the established branches, when Andrew Jackson found me. 

“You should let those grow,” he said.  “You’d get more tomatoes.”

“Armpit tomatoes,” I said.  “Armpit growth yields armpit tomatoes.”

I tried to remember if I had watered them the day before, but Andrew Jackson had come around then too and I had been drunk since lunch.  He wanted to take a canoe out on the Potomac and try out a new trout bait that one of his cavalry lieutenants in the Colorado mountains swore by.  The man claimed in a letter that humpbacked golden trout were “fighting each other for the chance to take the hook.”  When Andrew Jackson read the letter, he came hooting and hollering into the garden, demanding that we go immediately to Hal Topper’s shoe shop and discuss the implications of the impending trout war over Hal’s homemade moonshine.  He stunk of gin, but he hid it well under aftershave

“Gentlemen,” he said, “I need not remind you that with a fledgling nation such as ours, we can not have the wild beasts killing each other for the right to be killed.” His eyes were glazed, but he spoke serenely and without slur or stutter.  He sniffed, and then sipped at the gin in his glass.  He regarded it carefully and put it down.

“As chief executive officer of the United States, I have a certain obligation to see to it that certain moral and natural laws be adhered to whenever possible.  Thusly, I feel that it is the nation’s best interest to avoid any such murder of trout, golden or otherwise.”

“I don’t think ‘thusly’ is a word,” I said.

“Of course it’s not,” Andrew Jackson said. “Don’t insult your intelligence.  We’ve got to test this weapon, you see.”  He produced a small jar of yellowish mush, and set it on the table.

“There’s no trout here,” said Hal.  But Andrew Jackson had made up his mind.  We followed him out of the cellar and into the street.

“Hal, get a pole,” he said.  He stood erect, with his hands grandly on his hips.  He returned cordialities with the passers, and waved girlishly at small children, pausing one to have a short conversation about the weather.  But the president had been drinking Topper’s Violent Gin, and his movements were grossly misinterpreted.  Instead of a gentleman with polite hellos and pleasant bows, Andrew Jackson appeared to be a shouting, spasmodically bobbing madman who bared his teeth at children and shook his knotty fist at babies.  Mothers were caught between respect for their nation’s leader and the natural urge to flee from monsters.

“Washingtonians are certainly a complex species,” he remarked after a young woman sprinted away from him with a smile frozen on her face.  Hal returned with three willow rods, strung with filament and equipped with small brass barbs.

“Gentlemen,” the President said, “sometimes I dream about a weapon so powerful that it can control the desires of both man and beast.  This is the dream that wakes me up in a cold sweat.” He opened the jar and mashed the mush around the hook.  “Gentlemen.  I am afraid that what we hold in our hands is not simply a trout bait, but a universal tool of war.  If this can incite fish to a murderous frenzy, what is to say that it will not do the same to human beings?  If this is the case, it will be a terrible advantage to whatever nation possesses it.” 

He swallowed hard.

“Get ready to witness history,” he said, and flicked the line into the street.  It was a good cast, strong and straight.

The line drifted across an old woman’s path, and she quickly became entangled.  Andrew Jackson frowned.  He tugged gently at the line, and his pole bent and quivered under the woman’s frantic movement.  The more she struggled, the worse it got.  Andrew Jackson let out line quickly.  When he reached the backing, he tightened up, and guided the old woman toward the side of the street.  She had dropped her groceries and was thrashing around, swearing and jerking her old body.

Andrew Jackson looked utterly confused.  He played her well, reeling in slack and keeping a taut line, but I didn’t know if he really knew what to do with her.

“The grandmother of all trout,” he muttered.  Hal had come back with a knife, and was sawing at the woman’s bindings.  When she was free, she slapped him in the face and picked up a bag of cornmeal, and threw it at Andrew Jackson.

“Good god,” he said, “that woman just threw cornmeal at me.”

A considerable crowd had gathered around the old woman.  Andrew Jackson took off in the opposite direction at a brisk jog, hopped the privet hedge, and ran across the big lawn into the White House.