Have you ever been out on a Southern bass lake in the middle of the night? It’s a scary place. As scary as any old house. It’s like the inviting, fun-filled lake you’re familiar with becomes another world after dark. Especially a big, Southern lake like Lake Guntersville. It teems with life, most of it seemingly involved in the massive, slithering convulsions you hear all around. You can’t tell how far away or how close most of it is. Sometimes things bump the sides of the boat. Other times you hear something in the air. Bats? Who knows? You’re unsure if a bat would be better or worse than what you’re imagining. You hope it’s neither. Guntersville is choked with aquatic weeds. This adds its own creepiness once the light of day is gone. The thought of falling into that choking, clinging mass can paralyze you with fear, any ideas of a cooling midnight swim long forgotten. Carp, big bass and other, mostly benign creatures are responsible for the majority of the noises, but in the darkness the human imagination can be a frightful, even deadly thing.

But there are bass to be caught. Big ones that don’t like to come out and play during the harsh summer sun of daylight. So lots of us fish the lake at night, or at least we did years ago. Back when I was a kid, there were nighttime bass tournaments that let out from the Mud Creek boat ramp every Tuesday night. My brother and I would sometimes fish with our dad. We would get lucky on occasion and win one, but mostly Bobby Hutchins won them all with everyone else fighting for second place. Bobby was a heck of a fisherman. He was a skinny, older fellow who was a legend among the local bass fishermen. Bobby always fished alone and always at night. He was extremely secretive about the lures he used and his favorite fishing holes. He was friendly enough, but the rest of us always got the feeling he was making fun of us somehow, especially at weigh-in time when he’d wait quietly until everyone else had weighed their fish. Then he’d pull the winning stringer out and pick up his check.

This didn’t bother me too much. I was just a kid, and I felt lucky just to be hanging around so many good fishermen. Plus, like I said, we’d occasionally win one of the tournaments anyway. By the time I got in junior high school, my friends and I didn’t fish the tournaments any more. Our dads got the crazy idea that we were old enough to be paying our own entry fees if we wanted to fish, so we just went out by ourselves in the little aluminum boat with wooden seats that we had christened The Hawgdaddy. We’d row the boat over to watch the weigh-ins, but mostly we decided that we liked the fishing better than the competing anyway.

Then one night Bobby didn’t show up at the weigh-in. They found his boat in McIntyre Slough, but they didn’t find his body until early the next morning. Officially his drowning was an accident, but there were some pretty rough characters who fished those tournaments. Characters who didn’t take well to donating their hard-earned money to Bobby every week, and who might have grown tired of Bobby’s smug attitude. We always figured some of them did Bobby in that night.

A couple years went by, and most people forgot about the whole thing, or at least didn’t think about it much. Us kids didn’t though. We’d go out fishing at night on the lake in the Hawgdaddy, and we’d scare each other with stories about Bobby’s ghost stalking the shores of the lake on the darkest nights, eternally searching for those who held his head under that black water. Like I said, Lake Guntersville at night is a scary place. It wasn’t hard to scare each other.

They kept holding the night tournaments, and things went along pretty well as you’d expect until big Bubba Dean disappeared. I don’t mean he drowned like Bobby. I mean he flat out vanished without a trace.

Bubba was a big, tobacco-sucking, profanity-spewing redneck of a man, and we’d long speculated that he’d had something to do with Bobby’s drowning. Bubba disappeared on the night of the first tournament of that summer. Bubba’s partner Jerry had to work that night, so he was alone. They found his boat near McIntyre Slough, close to where Bobby’s had been found. They searched for a week, brought in divers and blood hounds. Never found a thing. They drug the creek bottom first and then the main river channel. They drug up plenty of junk, but none of it providing a clue as to what happened to Bubba. Chances are, everyone figured, that he had a heart attack, fell out, and got hung on a snag or in that jungle of aquatic weeds in the murky depths to make a meal for the catfish and turtles. But then people started to wonder. People started to listen to us kids a bit. They started to whisper about a ghost stalking the shores of the lake at night.

Then to everyone’s horror, Jerry, too, met a strange end out on the lake while fishing the tournament one night. Jerry Hughes was another big man, but quieter and more shy than Bubba. And smarter. Or colder and more calculating, depending on how you looked at it, or who you listened to. He didn’t disappear. They found him in the bottom of his boat (once again near McIntyre Slough), pale as death, his hair turned white apparently in an instant, a look of shear terror on his face. At least that’s how my pal Jimmy told it. His dad was the coroner.

After Jerry’s death, they quit holding the night tournaments. Too much weird crap going on out there in the dark. But us kids didn’t quit going out. Mom didn’t like it, so we’d tell her we were just going to hang out at Jimmy’s house. Then we’d use Jimmy’s ATV to drag the old boat down to the water. At least, we kept going out until this one night near the end of that summer.

Jimmy, my brother David and I went out on the lake and decided to fish in McIntyre Slough. We weren’t scared, at least not enough to admit it to each other, and besides, we figured Bobby’s ghost wouldn’t hurt us. Why would it?

We’d been fishing a grass line on the drop off out from the point at the mouth of the slough for a few hours, picking up a few decent bass on large plastic worms when Jimmy said he thought he heard something walking around on the bank. David and I told him to shut up, we weren’t that easy to scare any more. But Jimmy kept insisting, and he was beginning to sound scared himself. So we kept quiet and listened. Yes, there was something. Then David said he could see it. Jimmy and I peered through the darkness. All we could see at first was the silhouette of the trees on the point against the starry sky. But then we made out something, something pale white, like a man but not really. It knelt down to the water as if taking a drink, then stood again. It walked on down the bank, stopping directly in front of us. Then it turned and stared right at us.

By this point, we were all beginning to panic, as I’m sure you can imagine. We didn’t know what it was, and didn’t want to. The old boat was fixed with a small 7 hp engine now, and I shakily tried to crank it. It always was an ornery thing, and it chose this time to give me trouble. I got it cranked three times, but when I’d throw it into forward, it’d die. Jimmy screamed at me to pump the bubble, which I did. I looked at the island, and the thing was wading out toward us. Finally the engine cranked and I tore out, but in my haste I forgot about the stump flat right in front of us. I drilled a stump, and the shear pin broke. The engine died. We all cursed, the boat slowed to a stop, and waves splashed out from us and disappeared into the darkness. Then it was all silent except for the slow, relentless sloshing of the thing headed our way. There was nothing we could do. We sat and waited for it. Then it was in the boat. We all cursed and screamed and scrambled for position. Then I had ahold of it, and it was a duck. Yes, a duck.

Now, we all knew that what we saw was bigger and shaped nothing like a duck, but that’s what we found in our boat. That was all we saw that night. By the time we managed to paddle the boat to shore and drag it back to the four wheeler, we all knew we would never go out on the lake again at night. I guess you can believe what you want. You can believe that Bobby’s ghost really was out there that night, once again stalking the shore in his eternal search for justice. You can believe that we were spared because we were indeed innocent of Bobby’s murder. You can believe he sent that duck instead of death just to frighten us a little. Or you can believe we were a bunch of kids, too easily frightened by our own imaginations. But we know that what we saw on that shoreline wasn’t a duck.

Or, you can believe this: That a few kids found a great fishing hole in McIntyre Slough and didn’t take too kindly to a few of the older men finding it, too. You can believe that kids can do things in anger that you’d never suspect. You can believe that when tested, the imaginations of young men can be put to frighteningly creative use. Either way, you should know that fishing is serious business, and you should stay away from McIntyre Slough on the darkest summer nights.

Happy Halloween
Nathan

Tags: fishing, Halloween, Lake Guntersville, night fishing

This entry was posted on Friday, October 30th, 2009 at 6:00 am and is filed under Fiction. The author is Nathan Kennedy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.