Ten years ago my dad went missing. It was right after he had that big walleye pike mounted above the billiard table in the basement. For a few days and nights, perhaps as long as a week, my dad enjoyed that big fish hanging there below the rafters. He caught it that winter. 36 inches, he told me. 19 pounds. It was an ugly thing, I thought. But my dad loved it more than he ever loved me. He never said that, but he never looked at me the way he looked at that fish. The way a man looks at a child he loves.

Dad gave the fish a name. He called it Little Willie, which made me laugh ‘cause it got me thinking of a small dick, not unlike my own. Then I’d scratch my head, wondering why I thought it was funny in the first place. It’s not like my cock is a laughing matter. I sure as hell hope the girls don’t think so. They haven’t laughed yet, but who laughs when they’re disappointed? And if they’re not disappointed, maybe they’re just being polite. In any case, it’s not my penis mounted above Dad’s billiard table, it’s a really big fish.

When I asked Dad why he called such a big fish little, he didn’t tell me. Not in words. Instead, he told me to get in the car, which I did without question because I was supposed to meet up with some friends for laser tag and mini golf at Grand Slam Family Fun Center and Dad was my ride. But he missed the on-ramp that would take us south to Coon Rapids. He took us north instead.

When I asked my dad where we were going, he said, you’ll see, Son. You’ll see, he’d always repeat when I asked him again and again, what must’ve been a dozen times or more in the four hours it took us to get to where we were going. To get to the answer to my first question.

I was at that age when a four-hour car ride with your dad could just about kill you. So when I got out of the car I was grateful but also fed up. My expectations were high. You don’t drive four hours without some sort of reward, some clear purpose, to justify the time.

Behold, Dad said, hands on his hips and a self-satisfied look that redefined pride. In honesty, there wasn’t much to look at.

A fish, I said.

A very large fish, Dad corrected.

Okay, can we go now? He didn’t seem to hear me. He just kept gazing, a twinkle in his eye. I missed laser tag for this? I thought. Then I saw the placard in front of the big tacky fish statue. ‘Willie the Walleye.’ And that’s how I got my answer to the simple question. A four-hour drive north to a small town on the Canadian border to take a look at an ugly, oversized plaster fish. My dad took the roundabout approach, I’d say.

There’s always a bigger fish, Son, Dad told me, his eyes on the road, twinkle unabated, his gaze aflame, full of verve. My own gaze was reserved for the world of white seen through the passenger window. To pass the time I counted the deer on the side of the road. I tallied the dead. I thought of girls, and I thought of Little Willie, the fish back home, not my own. The mystique of Little Willie, diminished. His origin story, laid bare. His beans, spilled. I wasn’t altogether impressed. But I had my answer. There’s always a bigger fish.

I may have savored that four-hour journey north a little bit more had I known it would be one of the last moments I’d share with my dad. I may have taken the time to soak in his presence, his few words and almost constant whistling, during our return southward after merely stretching our legs, staring a minute or two at that oversized embarrassment, that real kitsch piece of shit, the pride, probably, of whatever little town we had been in, had I known that the same time tomorrow my dad would be gone. That it would be just me and my sister and neither of us yet eighteen.

The last image I have of my dad is the early evening sun coming through the car window to paint his black-brown mustache amber and gold. His knuckles on the steering wheel. Always both hands, he’d preach. His wedding ring, which he still wore even after all these years since Momma had passed, how it sparkled, like magic, and how for the first time in hours, as if reserved for that pristine portrait of my dad, he stopped whistling, stopped tapping his hands to the song on the radio, and just drove. Sometimes I see an amber and gold flicker of light out of the corner of my eye. I turn to look but when I do it’s never there. But it leaves me smiling all the same. I think to myself that it must be Dad. Sometimes I even believe it.

It was weird for a while. That first week, that first month, and maybe a little longer, when my sister, Molly, and I couldn’t quite understand it, couldn’t yet accept it. That Dad was gone. And not just that Dad was gone, but that the where and the why of it was as empty as Dad’s bedroom, as lacking as any way there was to support ourselves, as free from resolution as that beer my dad drinks is of alcohol. Never did see the point of that myself.

It sure was a head fuck. My dad leaving like that. Not knowing if he quit on us, leaving me and Molly, fed up with being a solo dad, or maybe just fed up with living. Or maybe he went for a hike and tripped on a tree root, slipped on some ice, and fell hard, head impacting on rock, the wolves and bears, the ravens and the ants, the wind and rain, eating away, washing away his body. Maybe it was as simple as bad luck. Dad, he could be alive, he could be dead. Either way, he wasn’t here. He wasn’t around.

They found his car at Blue Water Lake. That time of year there is nothing blue about it. Everything is white. A sheet of ice, a blanket of snow. Even the sky was white, that day they searched for my dad. I remember the police giving me coffee to keep me warm. I observed through a veil of steam, an additional filter of white, the colorless world stretched out before me. The sad black upturned lightning bolts of leafless box elder and ash, stark against the overbearing light.

They didn’t find my dad that day. They, or anyone else, haven’t found him any other day since. Of course, no one is looking now. Except me, from time to time, when I see a glint of amber gold flash out of the corner of my eye. I look, but no one is ever there. Ten years and Dad is still missing.

College made for a good distraction. It got me out of town a ways. Took me away from home. I’d focus on my classes and I’d focus even harder on the girls in my classes. I did pretty well with my grades. I did pretty well with the girls too. All in all, it was a good four years.

University living took me away from the sad, weird world of a home without parents, living with my mom’s alcoholic brother, a harmless guy, but a useless one too. He was almost as missing as my dad, even though he was around. He’d be wading in empty aluminum cans or belching, maybe snoring, at the T.V. Mark! I’d shout. Hey, Mark! But once the guy was out there was no waking him until the morrow, sometimes well past breakfast. 

Mark moved in after Dad went missing. He came to look after his sister’s kids. He came to support me and Molly. He came to fill a void. But a roof over his head was more than he had before Dad’s disappearance. Did Mark come to free his niece and nephew? Or did he come to free himself? Did he come as a freeloader? Sometimes I wonder. Sometimes I don’t. I flat-out know. It doesn’t matter anyhow. Mark was useless. But he was also harmless. 

Nowadays, back home, having taken that teaching job at the same high school I went to not long ago, my old, familiar life seemed to creep right back into place and became, once again, my existence. Old vibes, stale and sad, games of pool in the basement with a beer, a 36-inch walleye pike watching me sink the 8 ball out of turn. I still focused hard on my classes, but I dare not focus hard, or even at all, on the girls in my classes. It wasn’t always easy. To look away, to ignore the bait laid out for me or hold back from laying my own. Sometimes, especially when the weather was warm, the layers were light, it was downright grueling, the effort of holding back from all that suntanned skin, those legs untested by time.

It’s a small town where I’m from. Not a lot of women my own age. Most people in their twenties, early-to-mid-thirties, they’d spend their days living down in the Twin Cities, or maybe Chicago. A lot of them would make it back, right back where they started. Why? To start their own family. But why back here? Familiar ground, I guess. Besides, who was I to judge? To say any damned thing about it? Here I am, too. And I’m here before the rest. 26 and feeling old already.

Something about Dad being dead for ten years. Something about that round, double-digit number, that milestone that earns a title: decade. Something about it made Dad’s disappearance seem fresh yet again. Like it had been ten days, not ten years. Like it was now. Like it was always. Always gone. Forever gone. His absence, oddly, left a lingering presence. A ten-year itch that now, after all this time, had to be scratched.

School was out for winter break. Christmas lights and frozen ponds, hockey rinks, lit up the freezing nights. White steam accompanied every breath, a misty vapor, like a ghost. With school out for two weeks, I’d have time to do what I felt I needed to. I’d visit Dad. Visit him as well as I could, not knowing where he was. I’d go out to Blue Water Lake.

I hired an ice shanty. A shabby old thing, paint worn, chipped, and faded. Even so, it was bluer than anything around Blue Water Lake. It, and the other ice shanties scattered across the vast blank canvas, was all the color to be seen. Everything else, the ice, the snow, the sky, the trees, laden with white. Everything white.

I didn’t think that I’d catch anything. That wasn’t the point. The plan was to sit, talk out loud, talk to Dad. I thought it would be nice, be cathartic. I don’t know, maybe offer some semblance of closure. I’d fasten the lure, hold the pole, and dangle the line down the hole. I’d let it drop through the ice, deep down into the lake. But it would just be a matter of course. I’d merely go through the motions, play the part. I had no real intentions of catching any fish, big or small.

Intention, it would seem, has little to do with catching fish. Some preach patience, some profess to secret, nuanced skill, and some use fancy fish finders, but most fishermen, I’ve found, speak of luck. Well, it was luck if anything that had me suddenly pulling hard on that line, pulling for my dear life, reeling in something maybe as big as Little Willie but not nearly so big as Willie the Walleye. I was working up a sweat, which was funny, really, cause I’m standing on a frozen lake and my beer has little flakes of ice floating in it from sitting in the trunk of my car. But I’m taking off layers with one hand, pulling on some freshwater leviathan with my other, panting hard, getting excited even though I’ve never been known to enjoy fishing, been known, actually, to avoid it, hate it.

Despite bygones, I felt myself smiling, battling what was feeling like it could be a porpoise, a mermaid maybe. Then I see something through the hole in the ice. Amidst the blue-green surface water, from out of the depths of black, an inky, waving serpent or seal or cloaked demon. It came my way. Weaved and billowed in the cold currents, closer, closer, then at the lip of the hole at my feet. One last tug, one last wide-eyed, bewildered frantic moment of exhalation meets fear meets curiosity and out of the hole Poseidon’s spawn spills, sprawled out at my ankles, Neptune’s daughter, crumpled and bereft of spirit.

Laboring to catch my breath, I took stock of reality. I looked at my ‘big catch.’ Old, sullied fabric. Torn trousers. Big, puffy snow pants. Out of the dark water, into the light and spread out over the ice, black is transformed to color, revealing badly faded, though once lively turquoise, slashes of pink and yellow. Snow pants, of any color, are an article of clothing at odds with the fashionable, yet even so, these ones laid out before me, soaked and sorry, garish colors evocative of the early 90s, take the cake in a world of unfashionable things.

I knew them straight away. I recognized them at once. They belonged to my dad. I recalled how when he wore them, shoveling the snow from our steps to our door, risking his neck removing the snow from our roof, he outshone even the Christmas lights, and the shiny presents under the tree. I confirmed that the snow pants were Dad’s when I pulled them close and read the inside label written in red Sharpie, still legible, my own handwriting from when I was a little boy. ‘Daddy.’ The two little ds scrawled in backward, y cut halfway short by the end of the fabric.

A salty tear fell through a hole into freshwater. Something nibbled at the surface. Something small. Then something came alive, wild and frantic, in Dad’s snow pants. Something big.

I screamed and shoved them to the wall of the tiny ice shanty. My dad or Dad’s ghost kicked wildly, one leg, back and forth, back and forth. Each kick sent the left pant leg flying upward. It looked like someone playing kickball in their sleep, soccer while they snoozed, a spasmodic, frantic dance. I was confused and frightened. I’m not overly fond of ghosts. But this was Dad. And I was crying now that he was back. I was wailing. Then I threw myself onto him. Hugged him like I never did while he was still around. I told him that I loved him. Said those words in earnest, with raw emotion, unlike any time before, unlike back when Dad was still alive.

Through tears and blurred vision, I watched the fish slip out of the left leg of Dad’s snow pants. A big fucking fish. A walleye pike. Maybe as big as Little Willie. Hell, maybe even bigger. The walleye slapped its tail, its belly, its whole self up and down, left and right. It was still on the hook so I knew it wasn’t going anywhere, but just in case, I kicked it away from the haloed aperture in the ice. But not before that big fish flicked its tail to the side and sent Dad’s snow pants down the hole, back into the cold, dark water.

I reached in but it was too late. My hand went numb and it smelled of fish. I watched my dad sink back down into the deep. The moment those snow pants slipped back into the black, lost from vision, lost to the lake, an amber gold glint sparkled from the deep depths of gloom. I watched it, head on. Then it vanished, and strangely, I knew it wouldn’t be back.

Turns out the walleye I caught was a real record book whopper. Biggest catch in the history of the state. 37.5 inches, 20 pounds. Big Willie, I called him. Made me laugh, ‘cause it got me thinking of a big dick. But I guess that’s not much funnier than a small one.

I don’t know if it was the taxidermist, a signature touch or perhaps a mistake. I don’t know if it was the fish itself, the way the hook pulled at its lip as it came up to the surface, came into my arms, how I tugged at the line and struggled to get the barb free from its mouth. I don’t know, could be the fish’s personality shining through, his winning optimism, following it out of the water, into the afterlife. Whatever the case  —I suppose I’ll never know—that fish, bigger than Little Willie by an inch and a half, heavier by a pound, hung on the wall above the billiard table in my basement, proud and eternal, and I swear on Dad’s life, that big old bastard was smiling.