Gone to Tahiti

Every Saturday morning, Fred Deegan bought a bag of worms at Mike’s Spin & Reel on Main Street. I know that for a fact, because I lived next door to him. Just Like clockwork, every Saturday morning he would walk down his front steps, wave hello to me while I sat on my porch reading the paper, and head off in the direction of town. An hour later I’d see Fred coming down the sidewalk with a Mike’s Spin & Reel bag in hand.

“Hey Fred, what do you have in the bag?” I’d ask.

“Worms,” he’d reply, “I’m going fishing.”

He would climb up his front steps, wipe his feet on the doormat, and disappear through the front door. Fred was a slight, balding man in his late fifties. He lived alone and worked at the post office Monday through Friday. He always had Saturday and Sunday off and on those days he usually puttered around in his garden, or did his food shopping. He had a small aluminum boat that sat on a trailer in back. The name of the boat was ‘Gone to Tahiti’, which I thought was an uncharacteristic name for a boat belonging to a man like Fred. On occasion, if I caught him outside, I’d ask him how the fishing was going.

He’d look at me quizzically and say, “Well, I don’t know, I haven’t gone yet.”

The Repertoire River literally ran through our town, so it seemed to me Fred had every convenience and opportunity to put his boat in the water and use up some of those worms. Despite the proximity of the river, I never once saw him load his boat up with fishing gear and drive to the town ramp. This often made me wonder what he did with all the worms he had hoarded over the years.

I figured that if Fred bought a dozen worms every Saturday for five years, then 3,120 worms had passed through his doorway while I sat on my porch reading the paper. Of course, I had only lived next door to Fred for five years and had no idea how long Fred had been at that address. What if he had been there for ten years? That would mean 6,240 worms had passed over his threshold in that time. Suppose he had lived there twenty years? Thirty years?

Every once in a while the mystery of Fred’s worms would take hold of my imagination and I found it very difficult to think of anything else. Much to my disgust, I often found myself on my belly, my hands cupped over my eyes and my face flattened against the basement windows of Fred’s house after he had gone to work. I don’t know what I thought I would see in the dim filtered light of the basement, but nothing remarkable ever appeared.

One day I finally ask him. “Say, Fred, what do you do with all those worms? I never see you go fishing.”

“They give me hope,” was his reply, as he wiped his feet on the doormat and disappeared into his house with the Mike’s Spin & Reel bag in hand.

Now, that was mind-boggling. How in the world could a bunch of worms give a person hope? Hope for what?

Never once did I see a fishing rod, tackle box, waders, or anything even remotely related to fishing on my peeping-tom excursions. His tidy basement held nothing to arouse suspicion, and nothing to justify the need for the thousands of worms he had purchased over the years. Nothing was ever amiss. Fred plodded along through his life, just as I plodded along through mine.

One Saturday morning, I looked up from my paper to see Fred returning from his weekly trek to town. There was something different about the way he walked. He seemed almost jubilant as he approached his walkway. When he saw me, he held the bag of worms up over his head and said, “Going fishing today, yes indeed!”

While I pondered this unusual display of glee, he backed his car up to the boat trailer and hitched up the ‘Gone to Tahiti’. I watched as he loaded the boat up with new fishing equipment, price tags still attached. He then added a duffle bag and a box of cookies. I waved and watched as he drove down the street, happy that he was finally having his day with the hopeful worms. I was looking forward to his return and hearing if he had caught the ‘big one’ on the Repertoire River.

Saturday passed and Fred did not return. Sunday morning I picked my paper up off the porch and sat down with my cup of coffee. I glanced over at Fred’s house, but his car was not in the driveway. It was none of my business, but I was getting a little worried about Fred. I put my feet up on the railing and opened the paper. The headline, ‘BANK ROBBERY,’ jumped off the page.

“Witness sought in Avondale Bank Robbery.” I read on. “A lone fisherman may be the only witness to the daring robbery of the Avondale Bank on River Street...”

The Avondale Bank sat alongside the Repertoire River, as did many of the buildings in town. According to the paper, a small masked man had entered the bank at noon on Saturday just as it was closing. All the customers were gone at the time. At gun-point, the robber collected a duffle bag containing close to $775,000.00 and then disappeared into thin air. While waiting for the police to arrive on the scene, the bank manager walked outside in hopes of catching a glimpse of the robber in flight, but all he saw was a man fishing the river in a small boat. By the time the police arrived, the boat was nowhere in sight.

I sat dumbfounded. Could it be? Had mild mannered Fred Deegan been planning a bank robbery all these years? After the robbery, the police had followed the river for several miles in either direction in hopes of finding the fisherman, but to no avail. I scoured the paper every day for news, but the witness, the bank robber, and my neighbor Fred had all vanished.

I should have called the police with my suspicions, but I knew they would show up at my door sooner or later. When they did, it was not in the capacity I had expected. They were searching for a missing person, a Fred W. Deegan, whose car was found abandoned in the A & P parking lot. He had not shown up at his postal job for one full week and his employer was concerned. They asked me if I had any idea on his whereabouts, and I felt quite confident when I gave them my reply.