Sullen's Fish House

photo by German Chocolate Ladies.

Northern lights flash across the sky like dust blowing over a car windshield. This place is no desert, though. Here we got endless snow and ice cruel as any desert could be, and the people who live here are as cruel as our winters. What pleasures to we enjoy as we wait for it to end? Sit on a frozen lake in a plywood box, staring into a dark hole, waiting for something to bite?

Sullen’s fish house is something else though, about three times the size of your average fish house, strung up with Christmas lights like a carnival drawing us in from the dark. Me and my brother Jay go out there to thaw out. Drink some Jim Beam and spark a bowl. Other bright shiny things draw us there, too; make us warm for a while at least. Then when they get cold we drop them down through the hole to come bobbing up again sometime in the Spring. Spring will never come though, we tell ourselves. It still hasn’t.

Mom don’t like us hanging out there. When we come home, me and my brother come through the back door and let in a drift of snow behind us. I stamp my boots off just inside the door, a pink slush of blood and snow. Jay come in behind me, slams shut the door and wipes his nose on his sleeve.

Mom stoops over by the wood stove, shoving in birch logs. “What you boys been up to? Sandy lake still frozen over?”

She knows it would be, but asks anyway.

“Yeah. Sullen’s fish house is all lit up. Nice. Like Christmas.”

“Sullen din’t light it up like that for Christmas, be damn sure of that. I don’t want you goin’ there.”

Sullen has been a buddy of mine since the third grade. Mom don’t like him much. Much of the town don’t like him much, nor his folks neither. The nice half of the town, that is. Then there are those like Jay and I. Something about Sullen makes you want to do what he does, look like he looks, talk the same. His whole family’s kind of like that. His folks’ place was the biggest in town once, but it’s falling apart now like some ruin. Last summer we’d go there to smash stuff in, with Sullen right there beside us, breaking up his own shit.

So I got friends like Sullen, right; I can deal with people like that. Dangerous people, some of them. Funny thing is, he isn’t the one to be scared of. I’d learn over the next several weeks what brought Sullen’s family down from the top.

“You got to watch what those Sullens do.” mom said. I’d learn that the ice and darkness didn’t keep to the lake, but spread from a place closer to hearth and home. ”Got to keep them in line,” she finished, almost to herself.

We knew who to be scared of, the one that called all of the shots and decided when winter and spring would come, when it was time for the ice to thaw, when Sullen’s Fish House would finally go dark and break through the thin ice, drift down through the dark and settle in the sediment.

Mom fed the last log into fire and slammed the stove door shut. “That should be just about enough, now. Spring’s coming.”