The Bride Wore Crimson and Other Stories (13 page)

“You've got a bite!” I said.

He reeled it in. It was long, skinny and dark. “Rope bass,” he said.

Crappie fishing looked easy. The next time I came to Lake Texoma, I promised myself, I would have a license. I would be ready.

“There are 19 million crappie fishermen in America,” Ken Clary said. “And we're putting on 42 Crappiethons in 22 states this year. Seven of them are in Texas. We started in Florida in January, and go all the way up north. The last ones are in Minnesota and New York state in June.”

Mr. Clary is president of America Outdoors, Inc., of Decatur, Ala. Crappiethon U.S.A., a subsidiary of his company, sponsors the crappie tournaments and publishes
Crappie World
, the crappie fisherman's Bible.

“Forty thousand fishermen in Texas fished Crappiethon last year,” Mr. Clary said. “About 300,000 fishermen will enter Crappiethons this year nationwide. There are 20 national sponsors of the tagged fish, plus a lot of local sponsors. Crappiethon U.S.A. gets $4.75 of each $6 entry badge, and the local sponsor who sells it keeps $1.25. The 300,000 fishermen probably will catch about 15 percent of the tagged fish.

“But the 60-day tagged fish tournament is only one part of a Crappiethon. In the middle of it we have a one-day buddy tournament. Two-person teams pay $50 and fish for one day and turn in their top 20 crappie by weight.”

Top 20? Was it possible to catch 20 fish in one day?
More
than 20?

“The first prize is $2,000,” Mr. Clary said. “But the best part is this: The fishermen in the top three boats get to fish in the Crappiethon Classic in June. This year it's on Smithland Pool, near Paducah, Ky. Our company pays everything except travel expenses. Once the fishermen are there, everything—room and food and drink—is taken care of. It's a one-day tournament and a four-day party. First prize is $40,000.

“Across the country in these one-day tournaments, we'll probably have 9,000 teams, which is 18,000 fishermen. And of those 18,000 fishermen, there's probably 500 or 600 of them who fish in several tournaments, trying to get qualified for that classic.”

“What makes a good crappie fisherman?” I asked him.

“Patience,” he said. “Patience. And luck.”

I remembered clicking through the cable TV channels at odd weekend hours and zipping past guys standing up in boats, not wearing life jackets, holding rods, casting and talking. They caught something almost every time they cast. Bass. It was bass they always talked about. Maybe my neighborhood video store had something that could help me with crappie.

Bass. Almost a whole shelf of bass videos. Half a shelf about trout. Fly casting. Fly tying. Not so much as a snapshot about crappie. Same at the bookstore. Bass. Trout. Flies. Plus philosophical musings by guys wearing rubber pants and standing in crotch-high cold water. Not even a pamphlet about
Pomoxix annularis
and
Pomoxis nigromaculatus
, the two crappie members of the sunfish family, and how to catch them. Maybe patience and luck really were all there was to it.

That night I rummaged in the garage and found my old Zebco Centennial rod and my tackle box. The box contained a knife, my long-ago-expired fishing license, a jar of stink bait, three sinkers and two fishhooks, but with the lid shut it looked as official as anybody else's.

And the hooks were Eagle Claw brand. If I caught “Eagle Ernie” on one of them, I would win $2,000. However, neither hook was an Eagle Claw Automatic rotating hook, which would have paid me an extra grand.

At the first bait store I came to, I bought a new fishing license, then drove on down to Little Mineral Marina & Resort on Preston Peninsula, where I had reserved a cabin. I was signing the register when the guy behind the desk delivered the bad news: “Well, they caught ‘Tangle-Free Tom.'”

“No! When? Where?”

“About two hours ago.” He pointed out the window. “Right down there at our boathouses, just fishing off the dock.”

“Was the guy using a Johnson Country Mile Spin open-faced reel? Did he win the $65,000?”

The man laughed. “Naw, but he said he had one of those in his pickup. He still gets $5,000. I wouldn't cry about that.”

Mentally, I kicked myself. If I had arrived 2½ hours earlier, and if I had decided the Little Mineral boathouses were the place to fish, that $5,000 could have been mine. But now that the only two $5,000 fish in the tournament—“Tangle-Free Tom” and Ray Zipper's “Kmart Kid”—had been caught, I stood little chance of coming away from the Crappiethon with more than $1,000.

There was a wall full of fishing lures for sale near the registration desk. I sauntered over to see if any of them resembled the lures I had seen Ray Zipper use. “I need some, uh, jigs?” I said.

The man came over to help me. “A lot of people are using these yellow ones,” he said. “Some people like these pink ones, too, but I haven't had any luck with them.”

I bought two of each, and a couple of white ones. If nothing else, they would add color to my tackle box.

That night I went to the seminar for one-day tournament contestants at the Pottsboro School cafeteria. Tournament director Jim Climer read the rules to the standing-room-only crowd and announced more bad news. “The lake is six feet above normal,” he said. “Texoma is murkier than I've ever seen it. It doesn't even look like Texoma.”

Also, he said, eight of the big-money fish had been caught. He introduced Larry Arrington, the Dallas polygrapher who would administer lie-detector tests to the winners, then gave away several thousand dollars' worth of Crappiethon sponsors' products as door prizes.

After the meeting, I introduced myself to Cliff Hayes, the fellow who had yanked “Tangle-Free Tom” from under my nose. I asked him how he did it.

“Well, I got up this morning and went to my spot that I had in mind,” he said. “The fish weren't biting real good, but I caught four. The second fish I caught was tagged. Number 2201. I went ahead and caught a couple more, and then I decided to go check that one out. The lady looked in the book for the number, and it wasn't in the book. She called the Crappiethon headquarters in Alabama, and the lady there started asking me all these questions after she checked the number out. Then she said, ‘Well, I've got good news and bad news. The good news is, you caught “Tangle-Free Tom.” The bad news is, you weren't using the right equipment, so you don't get the bonus.' But I'll take what I got, for sure.”

I was sort of hoping he would ask me to be his partner in the one-day competition, but he said he was taking his 15-year-old son, Cliff Jr. So I asked him where they were going to fish.

Cliff Sr. and Jr. exchanged a meaningful glance. “We don't know yet,” Cliff Sr. said. “We haven't decided exactly what we're going to do.”

“Well, will you tell me what kind of bait you caught ‘Tangle-Free Tom' on?” I asked.

“It was a chartreuse jig,” he said.

Chartreuse was the only color I didn't buy.

I didn't shell out the 50 bucks to enter the one-day tournament. I didn't have the required partner, for one thing. Ray Zipper, averting his eyes, had told me his wife, Bea, was partnering with him. Anyway, I still doubted it was really possible for anyone—even two people—to catch 20 fish between 6:30 a.m. and 3 p.m., the hours of the tournament. But I was still determined to go fishing. I talked Ray's father, Pat Zipper, into hauling me about the lake in his boat.

I met Pat at 6 a.m. at his boathouse, next to Ray's. Pat and I followed Ray and Bea around the peninsula to a breakwater. Ray anchored, so we did, too. Pat's fish alarm was beeping like crazy.

“Hey! All right!” I exclaimed.

“It's nothing,” Pat said. “Just shad.”

I assembled my Zebco Centennial and baited my line with one of my new pink jigs. I would have added a minnow to the jig, as Ray was doing, but I had forgotten to get my minnow bucket out of the garage. That meant I couldn't use my Eagle Claw hooks, either.

“I sure hope they don't start biting that,” Ray said. “I don't have a thing that's pink.”

I tried to cast, but my reel didn't work. I opened it up. The workings had paralyzed during their years of non-use. I had no oil to free them. Pat probably did, but I didn't care for him to know the condition of my equipment. I surreptitiously unwound several yards of line by hand and dropped the jig over the side.

By 7:30 neither Ray, Bea, Pat nor I had so much as a nibble, so we moved on to the Little Mineral boathouses, where Cliff Hayes had caught my $5,000 fish. Nothing happened there, either, so Pat and I decided to split from Ray and try our luck elsewhere. At 10:30 we encountered William Bruno from Wichita, Kan., and his son Paul, from Durant, Okla. They had caught one fish so far.

“Was it worth the drive?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah,” William Bruno said. “I just came down to have fun.”

Sure. As if there's no water in Kansas.

At 10:55 we ran into Buford Greenwood from Denison and Dennis Reynolds from Sherman. For a while, they pretended we weren't there, so I hollered at them. “Having any luck?”

“Four, so far,” Dennis said. “Buford caught a two-pounder.”

I threw my jig over the side. Dennie and Buford hauled up their anchor and left, apparently with the only four fish in that part of Texoma.

“Patience and luck, patience and luck,” I kept repeating to myself.

By 12:30 I had had all the fun I could stand, so Pat headed his boat back toward his boathouse on the other side of Preston Peninsula. As we were speeding along, a familiar figure hailed us. It was Ray. His boat was broken down, dead in the water. We pulled alongside him.

“A boat is a hole in the water that you pour money into,” Ray said. He had caught only one crappie and was going to do the rest of his fishing at his own boathouse. He and Pat lashed their boats together, and we continued our journey.

“Fishing makes for a great marriage,” Bea said. “It gets you away from the kids, away from the phone, away from the TV. Sometimes Ray and I sit in the boat and discuss the weirdest subjects for hours.”

At 3 o'clock I motored over to the Preston Fishing Camp, where Jim Climer already was weighing in the returning contestants.

Buford Greenwood and Dennis Reynolds were disappointed. Their two-pound crappie weighed in at only a pound and a half. “We just put the big eye on him,” Buford said.

“But he looks two, don't he?” Dennis said.

Cliff Hayes Sr. and Jr. had just weighed in. Their best 20 crappie weighed 11.07 pounds.

“How many did you catch in all?” I asked.

“Forty-four,” Cliff Sr. said.

“Forty-four!”
I shouted. “Where in the world were you fishing?”

“At Little Mineral,” Cliff Sr. said. “Where I caught ‘Tangle-Free Tom' yesterday.”

“But
I
was fishing there!” I said. “I didn't get a bite!”

Cliff Sr. and Jr. exchanged one of those glances.

Louis Kubica of Duncanville and Murray Hatfield of Pottsboro won the $2,000 first prize with 15.40 pounds of crappie. Louis also won the $181.50 second prize in the big-fish pot with a 1.83-pounder. I asked him what makes a good crappie fisherman.

“Patience,” he said.

Barney Ross of Oklahoma City and Joe Jesmer of Kingston, Okla., won the $800 second prize with 14.79 pounds. “Patience,” Joe said. “Yeah,” Barney said. “Patience.”

Peewee Chandler of Gordonville and Bill Smith of Denison won the $500 third prize with 14.45 pounds. Bill also won the $423.50 first prize in the big-fish pot with a 1.93-pounder. This was the second year in a row they've qualified for the Crappiethon Classic.

“What makes a good crappie fisherman?” I asked.

“Well, concentrating,” Peewee said. “And using every little trick you know. You've got to concentrate and be dedicated.”

“And patience,” Bill said. “And a lot of luck.”

May 1990

TOWER AMONG FRIENDS

I disagreed with John Tower on almost every political question, but I always liked him as a man. He never beat around the bush with a reporter. He either answered the questions forth-rightly, sometimes bluntly, or he refused to answer at all. Although I wasn't eager to see him become secretary of defense in the Bush administration, I thought his confirmation hearings before the Senate Armed Services Committee were mean, treacherous, hypocritical, and a dishonor to the country. In 1991 Tower and his daughter, Marian, were killed in a plane crash
.

I
T
COULD
BE
A
HIGH
SCHOOL
HOMECOMING
. G
RAY-HAIRED
MEN
AND
women who haven't seen each other in a long time squeal with pleasure, hug one another, shake hands, slap backs and reminisce about the days not so long ago when the Republican Party of Texas could have been convened in a closet with room to spare. They marvel at how time has changed things. More than 200 people—some of them once-powerful pooh-bahs in the Democratic Party who sniffed the political winds and switched allegiance—have paid $50 apiece to gather in an Austin hotel banquet room on a sunny July noon to feel their Republican oats.

With hard work and a little luck and lots of money, they're saying they can capture the Texas House of Representatives in next year's election. If they do that, they'll be in charge when it's time to redraw the boundaries of the state's congressional districts after the 1990 census. And that would mean more Texas Republicans probably would be elected to Congress.

“It looks like we're going to have a fine slate of candidates next year,” says George Williford, who was chairman of the party when the outlook wasn't so rosy. “It's different than it used to be, when we had to dragoon people and hold a gun on them to make them run.”

The guest of honor is one of the dragooned, one of the rare ones who got elected. When John Tower entered the U.S. Senate in 1961, he was the first Republican statewide office holder in Texas since Reconstruction, and the first Republican senator popularly elected from a state of the old Confederacy. If the Texas Republican Party has a father, he's it.