Jerome can’t think of children without thinking of eels. A whole skein of them, coiled around the end of his father’s fishing hook twenty years ago, when Jerome was ten years old. They’d spent the afternoon together on the Mississippi coast of the Gulf of Mexico, through which they shored in his father’s speedboat only to anchor and sit in the sun, the only sound between them the white noise hum of waves. By the time his father caught the eels, Jerome had already learned that nothing good could come from the water, though he screamed at the sight of their wiggly bodies anyway, and shrank only after he caught his father’s scowl. “Don’t be such a pussy,” his father said, and with two cool steps, leaned forward to snip the line, after which the eels splashed back below the surface and drenched Jerome’s sneakers with a cataract of water.
With his forearm, Jerome’s father peeled a layer of sweat from his forehead. His shirt was off, crumpled in a corner of the boat, and even then Jerome could see the similarities in their bodies. “Like looking into a goddamn mirror,” his father would always say. A cruel thing to say, but he wasn’t wrong. Jerome would have been a fool to deny that from him he’d inherited that knotty, bird-narrow frame. Only seventeen years older than him, Jerome’s father’s body was still unmarked by age or overuse, his lanky arms and legs afflicted with the same bulbous joints he’d passed on to his son.
Jerome’s father peered over the edge of the boat and spat out a cud of tar-colored saliva, which floated on the surface of the water. “There’s supposed to be a cove here where groupers like to scurry off to. I seen it on the map.” He pouted at Jerome as if for approval, a look at which Jerome could only nod. “We’re staying out here, damn it, till I catch at least one of these grouper ass sons of bitches.”
Jerome too peered over the gunwale. The water was not the blue of California postcards, but brackish and ugly, the sort of place it made sense you’d pull eels from. Jerome couldn’t fathom how, if the water contained something so ugly as eels, it might also contain anything his father might want to bring home.
For the rest of the day, his father’s wish for grouper continued to evade him. Instead, he reeled in an assortment of oddities: infant silky sharks, wire-mustached toadfish, luminous hakes glistening in their oily translucence. Each unwanted catch stoked his anger, and Jerome, already given enough reason to fear these bouts of rage, soon found that he couldn’t scoot further away from his father without jumping into the water. All the while, Jerome’s line remained unbitten. He was done up in a bright orange life vest, a confusion of plush rectangles with nylon cords pulled tight. Even over his skinny body, it was tight, and sweat dribbled down his forehead and off the tip of his sunburnt nose. He hated fishing.
Still, he reeled his line in from time to time anyway. Once in a while he secured a new worm to the hook at its end just to pass the time, though he hoped nothing would take it. The sun by that point had turned pink, and cast its glow on mud-brown water that refused to reflect it. His father, from the opposite end of the boat, mumbled a spree of swear words, his eyes on the bobber floating a few yards ahead.
When at first it happened, Jerome almost didn’t notice. It was only the slightest of tugs, after all, faint enough it might have been a tug of the wind. Besides, he didn’t know thing one about fishing. The second pull, a strong yank that just about shirked the rod from his hands, was unmistakable and rocketed Jerome to his feet. With nowhere else to turn, he locked eyes with his father. His heart bobbed under his life vest, and his shaky wrists made his rod tremble.
“Reel in the goddamn thing,” his father said. “Only you better not catch no grouper before I do.”
Jerome hardly heard his father over the pulses of blood in his ears, but still he hunkered his shoulders and reeled. The tip of his rod bent to its outermost pliancy, and Jerome was sure he would be pulled into the gulf along with it. A flame of pain sparked in his elbows and spread like wildfire into his shoulders and wrists. His line danced on the surface of the water, patterned with the hectic motions of the life that struggled underneath. With one final pull, and a briny throng of water, his catch breached the surface. The force of its exit knocked him backward and, as he fell, a kitelike shadow tumbled through his vision. Before he saw anything else, he heard the flop of a fish, his father swearing. When he turned, he let out his second scream of the day, and scooted away in terror. There it was, his catch: an angry-tailed stingray bustled against the boat floor. Seawater wicked a diamond of wetness into the bristly boat carpet around it.
The stingray was the dull gray of a morning shadow, but slimy and coruscating. About the size of a baseball plate, its paper-thin body rippled and revolted on the floor. It offered in its movements a peek of its underbelly, where its gills worked to breathe delicious water and then heaved with repulsion at the intake of air. A hillock of flesh mohawked down its middle, two probing black eyes stuck on either side. Jerome felt the adrenaline of fear stream through him, menaced as he was by the thing’s presence, and yet he couldn’t, despite his best efforts, make himself look away. More than anything, he wanted the thing dunked back underwater, as far from him as he could make it.
His father stomped through the boat and cut the line from the pole. He moved to grab at the stingray, but retracted his hand when its stinger curled upward. From a compartment in the floor of the boat, he grabbed a long, silver-handled fishing net and, using its butt end, prodded the stingray. In response, it flapped its pectoral fins as though slapping away a nuisance, and sloshed itself against the carpet in an angry, fleshy racket. Jerome’s father, with one hand woven into the net’s mesh, growled and attempted once more to push the fish up and over the gunwale, but sneered as he watched it sag downward. It landed back on the carpet in a glop, its stinger pointed skyward.
He stomped a foot near the stingray. “Get out of my boat, you son of a bitch,” he said, a vague threat the stingray met with a swish of its arm-length tail, which skimmed the outsole of his boot. His face florid above his narrow, sunburned torso, Jerome’s father turned the fishing net over in his palms to grasp it by the handle. He turned the loop of it sideways above his head and then whapped the stingray first once, then twice, then endlessly in a thwacking staccato. Defenseless, the stingray writhed and rippled its slatted gills in glissandos of pain. Flecks of blood spattered Jerome’s face and life vest and still his father didn’t cease banging the net against the animal till the strikes became clunky, at which point he had pierced through its body and hammered the boat floor. Even the boat picked up his angry inertia. It careened on the water, and knotted Jerome’s stomach in seasickness.
Violent as it was, the scene captivated Jerome, enthralled him. He had wanted the stingray gone, after all, and there his father was, granting his wish. He’d never seen his father’s violence from this perspective—always on the receiving end before—and to see it now frightened him, yes, but not in any of the ways he might have expected. Under the sun, each freckly tendon and familiar protuberance of his father’s lanky frame shone. Like looking into a goddamn mirror. If their bodies, Jerome realized, were unified in shape, in silhouette, so too must they be unified in utility. That’s what frightened him most when, covered in a strange cocktail of blood, sweat, and seawater, his father tossed aside the bloodied net. Still in a heap on the boat floor, Jerome expected to feel revulsion; but when he laid eyes on the stingray’s corpse—unrecognizable from its dozens of dents, folded over like dirty laundry—he felt only a sense of relief at it being gone. As Jerome took the sight in, his father kicked the stingray overboard and let out a loud whoop, his teeth bared for the first time all day. The sun pouring into his eyes, Jerome watched his father’s reaction. And as he did, it occurred to him, with dam-bursting immediacy, what uncanny tricks genetics will play on you. His father turned to him, his cheeks curled up into a grin, and when, by accident, their eyes met, Jerome could feel the distinct pressure of shame wobble in his joints.
Over the months and years that followed, that shame stuck with him, and charted a course for the onset of his maturity. Under its guidance, he felt his posture recede to conceal his height, heard his voice fade to a near whisper, felt all his buds of anger wither over time. And when, as a grown-up, he watched his father die under the fluorescent-bulb sting of a hospital room, as a ventilator sighed his final breaths into his lungs, Jerome could think only of the stingray. It was the second time in his life he’d felt glad to see something go. Under the ratty hospital blanket, with skin jaundiced and sunken from illness, his father’s body had never seemed knobbier—like a series of knots tied into a strand of rope. Jerome recognized the familiar odd angles of his ankles, the forward lean of his generous shoulders, those clunky, unattractive knees—all the things he’d spent so long inside himself trying to transform into meaningless, conjunctive nonsense.
.
Jerome can’t bring himself to share any of this with his husband, Garrett. The last time he did—two months ago now, back when Garrett first started begging to adopt a child—Garrett responded with, “I still think you’d be a wonderful father.” And then, he had pulled Jerome into a kiss and said, “You’re a different sort of person than all that.”
And that’s just the thing, isn’t it? Though it would pain Garrett to hear it, Jerome is more confident of what he has become than he’s ever let on, more aware of his most private self than he could ever express. Even in that moment, Jerome had kissed his husband back, though he sensed, just beneath the surface of their calm, a current of anger work its way through his chest. Garrett was wrong about him, and the desire to say so bubbled up near Jerome’s voice. But he had learned by then when to keep quiet, when it was better to follow his husband’s lead.
Right now, Garrett snores in bed beside him. For the second time this week, he’s fallen asleep reading a pamphlet from an adoption agency, which lies tented open on his chest. On its cover are pictures of toothy, multiracial families. Men and women cavort with happy children beneath words in a tacky font reading “START YOUR FAMILY TODAY!” When Jerome turns to look at his sleeping partner, all these memories of his father are made to dissolve like salt in his throat. He thumps the pamphlet and watches as it sails to the carpet with a papery splat. He thinks of what he might say the next time Garrett feels brave enough to broach the subject of children. Probably nothing, he is sure. But his silence will do nothing to change his mind. He can’t stand breaking Garrett’s heart, but he knows he doesn’t want children, knows he wants to snip his father’s influence where he can. He has never been surer of anything in his life.
He has become, though, so prone to capitulation.
Lit by dull, lemon-yellow lamplight, Jerome turns away from Garrett and secures himself beneath the covers. The thought occurs to him— frightening and real—that there’s a chance if he continues to stay silent and Garrett keeps pushing, what he wants might wash away over time.
Who knows—maybe the friction of their efforts will spark into something Jerome never saw coming, and they will adopt Garrett’s children: little Caleb and Puloma. Painful as it is, it isn’t so hard to imagine. Together, they could devise their own tenets of fatherhood. They will swing piñatas from oak branches on birthdays and bronze baby shoes as totems for the mantle. When the children discover new and visionary ways to hurt him, disappoint him, anger him, Jerome will wait for Garrett to come guide him through the difficult process of learning to love them. One day, while the children are still young, they might even take them to the aquarium. Followed by pinballing shoals of fish, Garrett and Jerome will push them along in their joint stroller through the arching, glass-covered hallways, their interlocked hands dangling between them. As a family, they’ll stare open-mouthed at tanks of pink jellyfish waltzing through spumes of water. When no one else is looking, Jerome might let the children tickle the flesh of a skate in a shallow pool, and delight as they recoil at its unexpected viscosity. And when the kids get tired and doze into naps, and Garrett is ready to go home, Jerome will ask forgiveness as he disbands from the group, as he pauses to look up at the expansive bands of brick-thick glass and marvels at all that inaccessible life laid bare before his eyes, squeezing past one another in disjointed, circular harmony—octopus, sturgeon, pipefish, barracuda.
Michael Williamson grew up in Mississippi and Kentucky. These days, he lives in Chicago with his wife and his cat.