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Long live our friend the revolver !
Long live our friend the machine-gun !
--Israeli terrorist chant
One April morning in the sixth grade, we became, first by accident and then by premeditation, trout fishing in America terrorists.
It came about this way: we were a strange bunch of kids.
We were always being called in before the principal for daring and mischievous deeds. The principal was a young man and a genius in the way he handled us.
One April morning we were standing around in the play yard, acting as if it were a huge open-air poolhall with the first-graders coming and going like poolballs. We were all bored with the prospect of another day's school, studying Cuba.
One of us had a piece of white chalk and as a first-grader went walking by, the one of us absentmindedly wrote "Trout fishing in America" on the back of the first-grader.
The first-grader strained around, trying to read what was written on his back, but he couldn't see what it was, so he shrugged his shoulders and went off to play on the swings.
We watched the first-grader walk away with "Trout fishing in America" written on his back. It looked good and seemed quite natural and pleasing to the eye that a first-grader should have "Trout fishing in America" written in chalk on his back.
The next time I saw a first-grader, I borrowed my friend's piece of chalk and said, "First-grader, you're wanted over here."
The first-grader came over to me and I said," Turn around."
The first-grader turned around and I wrote "Trout fishing in America" on his back. It looked even better on the second first-grader. We couldn't help but admire it. "Trout fishing in America." It certianly did add something to the first-graders. It compleated them and gave them a kind of class.
"It really looks good, doesn't it?"
"Yeah."
"There are a lot more first-graders over there by the monkey-bars."
"Yeah."
"Let's get some more chalk."
"Sure."
We all got hold of chalk and later in the day, by the end of lunch period, almost all of the first-graders had "Trout fishing in America" written on their backs, girls included.
Complaints began arriving at the principal's office from the first-grade teachers. One of the complaints was in the form of a little girl.
"Miss Robins sent me," she said to the principal. "She told me to have you look at this."
"Look at what?" the principal said, staring at the empty child.
"At my back," she said.
The little girl turned around and the principal read aloud, "Trout fishing in America."
"Who did this?" the principal said.
That gang of sixth-graders," she said. "The bad ones. They've done it to all us first-graders. We all look like this. 'Trout fishing in America.' What does it mean? I just got this sweater new from my grandma."
"Huh. 'Trout fishing in America,'" the principal said. "Tell Miss Robins I'll be down to see her in a little while," and excused the girl and a short time later we terrorists were summoned up from the lower world.
We reluctantly stamped into the principal's office, fidgeting and pawing our feet and looking out the windows and yawning and one of us suddenly got an insane blink going and putting our hands into our pockets and looking away and then back again and looking up at the light fixture on the ceiling, how much it looked like a boiled potato, and down again and at the picture of the principal's mother on the wall. She had been a star in the silent pictures and was tied to a railroad track.
"Does 'Trout fishing in America' seem at all familiar to you boys?" the principal said. "I wonder if perhaps you've seen it written down anywhere today in your travels? 'Trout fishing in America.' Think hard about it for a minute."
We all thought hard about it.
There was a silence in the room, a silence that we all knew intimately, having been at the principal's office quite a few times in the past.
"Let me see if I can help you," the principal said. "Perhaps you saw 'Trout fishing in America' written in chalk on the backs of the first-graders. I wonder how it got there."
We couldn't help but smile nervously.
"I just came back from Miss Robin's first-grade class," the principal said. "I asked all those who had 'Trout fishing in America' written on their backs to hold up their hands, and all the children in the class held up their hands, except one and he had spent his whole lunch period hiding in the lavatory.
What do you boys make of it . . . ? This 'Trout fishing in America' business?"
We didn't say anything.
The one of us still had his mad blink going. I am certain that it was his guilty blink that always gave us away. We should have gotten rid of him at the beginning of the sixth grade.
"You're all guilty, aren't you?" he said. "Is there one of you who isn't guilty? If there is, speak up. Now."
We were all silent except for blink, blink, blink, blink, blink. Suddenly I could hear his God-damn eye blinking. It was very much like the sound of an insect laying the 1,000,000th egg of our disaster.
"The whole bunch of you did it. Why? . . . Why 'Trout fishing in America' on the backs of the first-graders?"
And then the principal went into his famous E=MC2 sixth-grade gimmick, the thing he always used in dealing with us.
"Now wouldn't it look funny," he said. "If I asked all your teachers to come in here, and then I told the teachers all to turn around, and then I took a piece of chalk and wrote 'Trout fishing in America' on their backs?"
We all giggled nervously and blushed faintly.
"Would you like to see your teachers walking around all day with 'Trout fishing in America' written on their backs, trying to teach you about Cuba? That would look silly, wouldn't it? You wouldn't like to see that would you? That wouldn't do at all, would it?"
"No," we said like a Greek chorus some of us saying it with our voices and some of us by nodding our heads, and then there was the blink, blink, blink.
"That's what I thought," he said. "The first-graders look up to you and admire you like the teachers look up to me and admire me. It just won't do to write 'Trout fishing in America' on their backs. Are we agreed, gentlemen?"
We were agreed.
I tell you it worked every God-damn time.
Of course it had to work.
"All right," he said. "I'll consider trout fishing in America to have come to an end. Agreed?"
"Agreed."
"Agreed ?"
"Agreed."
"Blink, blink."
But it wasn't completely over, for it took a while to get trout fishing in America off the clothes of the first-graders. A fair percentage of trout fishing in America was gone the next day. The mothers did this by simply putting clean clothes on their children, but there were a lot of kids whose mothers just tried to wipe it off and then sent them back to school the next day with the same clothes on, but you could still see "Trout fishing in America" faintly outlined on their backs. But after a few more days trout fishing in America disappeared altogether as it was destined to from its very beginning, and a kind of autumn fell over the first grade.
Richard Brautigan
Trout Fishing in America
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