The Sturgeon at Trap Rock by Paul Stapleton

Stephen and his friend Farrell take an ill-advised raft trip on the Hudson River.

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The bank below the ballfield was steep, and with the beach in sight, the two thirteen-year-old boys became impatient with their careful, sideways clamber down the steep embankment overgrown with weeds, which in some places were overgrown into trees.

"Let's just slide down," Stephen said.

They landed feet first on the blackish sand of the beach. An old raft made of plywood nailed to a wooden skid was lying upside down on the sand. The sand was streaked with oil and tar, and its smell was dank and dirty like a gasoline station. The river was lapping at their feet. The tide was high.

Because of the pollution, all the parents told the kids not to swim in the river, but they still did, the river's power and mystery too alluring to keep them out. They lived in Dutchtown even though none of them knew anyone who was Dutch.

"Oh, man," Farrell yelled, "look at that!" He pointed down the beach. On its back, dead on the sand was a sturgeon. It was big, as large as a grown man, and motionless, but its deadened eyes remained wide open, its skin smooth and gray like a shark.

They kicked at it, and its weight was heavy.

"What is it?" Farrell asked.

"A sturgeon," Stephen said. He had seen one before with his grandfather, who used to take him canoeing on the Hudson. His grandfather had been a canoe champion when he was still a young man, when the river was not yet polluted. He told Stephen sturgeons could survive in the fresh water of the river but also in salt water, too. Sturgeons were naturals for the brackish waters of the Hudson before all the pollution turned it foul. The sturgeons were as ancient as the dinosaurs.

But now they were dying off.

His grandfather had been an outdoorsman.

"A what?" Farrell asked

"A sturgeon. I don't know, it's a kind of fish."

"I wonder if they bite?"

Its mouth was small, just a little crease, and even if it could bite, it could never take a chunk out of anybody. It had no teeth. It only swallowed things whole, Stephen knew, fish and crustaceans or whatever its prey, sucking them in like a vacuum.

Stephen kicked at it again. It seemed this wasn't the place for the sturgeon to die, rotting on the polluted sand. "Let's bury him," he said.

"I ain't digging no grave for a fish," Farrell said.

A smile spread across Stephen's face. "Let's bury him at sea."

They flipped over the old raft and threw it into the water to see if it would float, and when it did, they heaved the sturgeon on board. In the brush alongside the bank, Farrell pulled out a limb that had fallen from a tree, and Stephen found a piece of driftwood to use as a paddle.

They stepped onto the raft and pushed themselves from the shore with their makeshift oars. Farrell began to pole the bottom until they were a good distance into the river.

Farrell had been Stephen's friend ever since the summer after third grade when he moved to Dutchtown into the house next door to Stephen's. From that day on, Stephen and Farrell spent their days together, especially in the summers, playing pitch and catch, shooting hoops, swimming in the river. They slept over each other's houses, camped in each other's back yards. They were in cub scouts together and little league together. They walked the railroad tracks together, searching for treasures like the green glass insulators they would find scattered in the gravel beds below the telephone poles, which they stored in their bedrooms like trophies. They even wandered the paths below the neighborhood that led into the forest together, always spooked by the old stone walls of the hideout where supposedly Benedict Arnold the traitor had waited for Major Andre before he was captured and hung to death.

In the summer, sometimes they skipped day camp and instead searched the downtown streets of the village and the abandoned river shores where the dilapidated ruins of the old brick-making factories still stood. There was nothing Farrell was not willing to do, and that's what Stephen liked most about him. The only thing they did not do together was attend school, although they did walk downtown together, Stephen to the public school, Farrell to the Catholic school across the road by the playing field. Stephen's grandfather had said they were as thick as thieves, though they never really stole anything, except once in a candy store when they both had no money. But Stephen's grandfather didn't know about that. No one did, except Stephen and Farrell.

"Can't touch bottom anymore," Farrel said, poling his stick into the water as far as he could reach.

"Time to paddle," Stephen replied, and they began using their sticks to paddle the raft towards the middle of the river.

The river was so wide that every time they thought they were getting close, the middle kept shifting away from them like a distant horizon. They were already pretty far out from shore. Ahead of them, they could see one of the currents that always formed in the river rushing along in a choppy channel, a ten-foot band of choppy water hurtling downstream in the opposite direction of the rest of the river. When they came to it, Farrell stopped paddling.

"We shouldn't go into that current," he said. "It's moving too fast."

"Don't worry," Stephen said. "We can get through it if we paddle together at the exact same time. Push as hard as you can." He had done this with his grandfather in his grandfather's canoe.

They pressed their sticks into the water and paddled. The minute they hit the current, it felt as if someone had started up a motor, and the raft began speeding downstream. They kept trying to paddle, but it only caused the raft to turn in circles. The raft was no canoe.

Stephen thought quickly.

"We need to get the sturgeon off," he said, calculating that less weight might give them more control.

Together, they pushed the big fish off the raft. It plunged into the river and sank, the raft rocking from the carom of the splashing water. The boys knelt down to balance themselves and keep from falling in. The deadened eyes of the sturgeon seemed to keep its eyes on them until the carcass was engulfed by the current and disappeared, swept away beneath the waters as if swimming again with life. The boys began churning the river with their sticks but without any effect at all, until finally they gave up as the current carried them farther and farther downstream. Frustrated, Stephen chucked his useless stick into the water.

"Hey, what did you do that for?" Farrell asked.

"It was good for nothing."

They stared at one another, Farrell looking confused and even a little angry. Then he said, "Fuck it," and tossed his into the river, too.

They both began laughing uncontrollably as the raft continued its journey downstream. Then for a while, they sat in silence, trying not to think of the danger, the coolness of the air that hovered above the dark cold stream of the channel seeping into their flesh as the water rushed on. Soon they became chilled with goosebumps, anticipating what was going to happen next.

"How far is this going to take us?" Farrell asked apprehensively.

"I can see Trap Rock down ahead," Stephen said, "I was down there once with my grandfather." He remembered that the river widened below Trap Rock where the banks suddenly climbed into the steepness of Hook Mountain where there was no shore at all, just sheer rock green with slime.

"You scared?" Farrell asked.

"Not yet," Stephen lied.

"Let's say a prayer," Farrell said.

"You go ahead."

Farrell recited a Hail Mary.

"You really believe that stuff?"

"Yeah, I guess so," Farrell replied. "I believe we've got souls."

"Souls," Stephen repeated, thinking of his deceased grandfather. "Show me what a soul looks like."

Farrell offered no reply.

Stephen's grandfather had told him the idea of the soul was a myth, but a pretty good one.

"Especially if you've loved someone," his grandfather said. "We want so much for that person to stay with us. And they do. The memories never go away, and sometimes the memories even haunt us." He paused. "But are they still alive? Are their souls still with us, waiting for us? I suspect it's all a figment of the imagination."

Stephen often watched his grandfather as he peered into the distance of the river from the window in his house.

"Grandpa looks wistful," Stephen's mother would say. "Go cheer him up."

Stephen never really knew his grandmother, his nana. He was too young when she died to remember her well. Sometimes, he would wonder about her. He could remember her baking cookies for him, the smell so sweet from the kitchen that it would fill his grandparents' entire house, making the anticipation of the cookies as intense as actually eating them. That smell he could not forget. He could remember her smoking her cigarettes on the back stoop. And he could remember waiting for her to come home on the day she died, which of course, she never did, his aunt telling him she had gone to heaven. But that was about it for Stephen in terms of memories of his nana. Sometimes, he would look at old pictures in the photo albums and try to figure out what Nana was really like.

After her death, his grandfather had sold his hardware store and left the Bronx and moved into a little house in Dutchtown near Stephen and his parents, so he could canoe on the river, hike, and hunt in the forest.

As the raft approached Trap Rock, the enormous granite boulder grew larger and larger in the boys' sight. It jutted out from the bank into the river, so gigantic, it created its own inlet. They could see Hook Mountain looming above it like a god. The current continued to rush downstream steadily. The river seemed empty except for their raft, no sailboats catching a breeze, no barges filled with gravel, no ferries of waving tourists traveling to West Point. Stephen thought of the stories everyone used to tell about Hook Mountain, the rescue attempts, the dangers, the deaths.

Suddenly, he remembered there was another rock. The rock lay somewhere near Trap Rock, not on shore but in the river. He had seen it with his grandfather. He was certain he had. But with the high tide, there was no sign of any rock anywhere. He scanned the waters but saw nothing. If the rock was really there, it was hidden by the swollen waters of the river. Stephen began to wonder if he was just imagining he had ever seen it. It had been such a long time. The rock was nowhere to be seen, and he could not remember for sure. It was as if it did not exist, like a ghost rock.

Stephen felt himself beginning to shake, his limbs trembling, his insides turning. He recognized it as panic, like the day he first heard about his grandfather's accident. That day, he was told to breathe slowly and deeply to keep himself calm.

Stephen never learned the full story. He was ten years old when the accident happened. He just knew it was bad. His grandfather had a hunting rifle. Somehow it had gone off in the garage. Stephen later heard the rumors. But he didn't believe them. He loved his grandfather too much to believe them. Still, sometimes he doubted his own love.

They hurtled downstream, faster and faster.

His family had scattered some of his grandfather's ashes in the forest below the neighborhood, and Stephen sometimes imagined him still wandering there, and it frightened him, even haunted him.

He knew it was just his imagination, but it frightened him just as much.

"Let me know if you see anything," Stephen told Farrell.

"Like what?"

"Like anything."

Stephen kept his eyes riveted on the waters of the channel while Farrell searched the distances of the river for a motorboat to wave down.

Neither of them saw the rock until it came. Fully submerged, it must have been as big as the Trap Rock boulder. Stephen saw the flash of its white granite head beneath the ghastly waters, but it was too late. The collision happened so quickly, so suddenly, so violently that it capsized their little raft and sent them airborne. Stephen heard the wood of the raft crack, followed by a confusion of splashing. Farrell screamed. Stephen plummeted, careening against the unforgiving rock, tumbling in the darkness of the water, his bones smacking against the giant stone, scraping away his skin. He opened his eyes in the roiling water as his body continued to sink, and witnessed the daylight vanish into nothingness, the dark Stygian stream of the channel, its depths and its mystery, dark and suffocating.

When he emerged gasping for air, Stephen was surprised to find the raft nearby, as if by magic, so he lunged and grabbed hold of it while the water swirled around him. The pain in his shoulders was intense. The fractured raft, still somehow buoyant, was now floating much more slowly, but it still continued downstream towards the shadow of Trap Rock.

Suddenly, the current ceased, just stopped, no more choppy water, no moving channel, just a calm pool of still water overhung with ethereal shade in the crook of the giant Trap Rock boulder. Just like that, the raft settled into a dead stop. Holding on tightly, his arms shuddering with pain, Stephen searched the stillness for Farrell as the raft began to eddy slowly in the pool of the inlet. The shore around the inlet was bounded by a shady forest. Stephen did not know if he was dead or alive. He called out to Farrell but heard nothing.

"Farrell!"

Silence.

"Farrell!"

That's when the sturgeon popped out from the river like a cork, dead as ever, but fresh from its funereal swim. The ancient creature began to spin, its body motionless except for a slow turning, turning, turning, as if keeping time without end. In the deathly sunlight, the boy held onto the raft, uncertain of the surrounding forest where unfamiliar shadows wandered before him. Then with a kick, he let go and paddled himself to the shoreline as best he could, like a puppy dog, his shoulders and arms in too much pain to swim any other way. He crawled out of the water, tremulous for what awaited him in a land where he feared the dead still lived.

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