Up the Creek

By John Skow

BLOOD SPORT

by ROBERT F.JONES 255 pages. Simon & Schuster. $7.95.

From what Great or Dismal Swamp in the American male psyche flows the Big Two-Hearted River? Where is the root of the city man's bloody compulsion to prowl the Big Woods and kill the beasts that live there? It is uncertain whether the source of that compulsion is the nature of man or the nature of boy, but it is explored with splendid eccentricity in this energetic first novel by Robert F. Jones, a senior writer for SPORTS ILLUSTRATED.

A man and his son, Jones supposes in all apparent innocence, undertake a hunting and fishing trip up the Hassayampa River. It is "a burly stream with its share of trout," which--what's this? --"rises in northern China, meanders through an Indian reservation in central Wisconsin, and empties finally into Croton Lake not a mile from where I live in southern New York State." The novel's epigraph, the reader notes with a sense of having been sandbagged, is a whimsy of the trout-fishing sage, Sparse Grey Hackle, who says that the water of the Hassayampa "renders those who drink it incapable of telling the truth."

Yes indeed. Father and son shoot some grouse and a small mastodon, as the father recalls later, hook a 250-lb. fresh-water marlin, and reject as unworthy of their time and skill a unicorn whose horn is not made of gold.

In summary, such goings-on may sound hopelessly elfin, self-indulgent or absurd. But Jones' surrealist fragments produce in the reader's mind the same edgy excitement and slight disorientation that a suburban householder feels upon entering wild country. It is a delicately calculated trick, but it works. Easy slashes of cruelty cut the airy imagining. " Try this,' I told my son. I handed him a two-ounce, slightly chewed Yellow Cab with a treble hook mounted on the front bumper ... Inside a minute, he had three wiggling pedestrians on the hook ... One was a girl in a patent-leather suit, hooked lightly through the lip, so we released her. On the next three casts, we added a spade pimp, an elevator inspector, the club-footed editor of a monthly insurance company newsletter, and three prostitutes...

" 'I don't know if we should keep the hookers,' my son said.

" 'We'll boil them,' I told him."

Poisoned Flies. On the upper reaches of the Hassayampa, a dark region of the mind, lurks Ratanous, called Ratnose. He is ageless and probably deathless, a one-eyed bandit leader, hunter, torturer, demon and figment. (An anagram of Ratanous, possibly relevant, is "our Satan.") The father has confused memories of skirmishes with Ratnose in the days when he fished the Hassayampa as a young man. His mind is seized and shaken by the mad notion of stalking Ratnose once more, beating him down, killing him.

Yet it is the son, not the father, who finds Ratnose, joins his band of scruffy swaggerers, and is initiated into easy cruelties and easy sex. Then the father, stung by this challenge to his manhood (or beasthood), hangs rationality on a tree limb and goes after Ratnose, hulking through the forests like a bear-god. There is frightful destruction of minor characters, a confrontation and a duel with fly rods and poisoned flies across the vortex of the Hassayampa's most fearsome whirlpool. The hero is hooked and stunned (yet does not die). The villain is snaked into the suckhole and drowns (yet lives).

Half liar, half believer, spinning yarns out of racial memory and the L.L. Bean catalogue, Jones has created the great rarity--a new myth. What is surprising, considering the opportunities he has given himself to waft off into artiness, is that he has also written a good boots-in-the-mud hunting story whose textures are as natural to the touch as the worn stock of an old rifle.

John Skow

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