The Killer Catfish of an Eerie Cape Cod Lake

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PROLOGUE - The horse-shoe shaped highway that runs from one end of Cape Cod to the other, is 64 miles long. Halfway down, is the town of Harwich. 
In the middle of Harwich, several miles past bumpy Bell's Neck Road, where a dense forest has morphed into a shallow, tree-stump pond; is a dirt road - really just a path - that leads to a small village called The Marsh. 
There's only one business building in the tiny 'throwback' settlement. It's a creaky, wooden two-story structure with faded red paint, that houses a general store - with pickles, ice cream, common crackers in a barrel, and canned goods inside. On the porch, outside, framing the entry way, are two wooden park benches. 
The one on the left is painted blue with white lettering on the slats of the backrest, saying "Democrats". On the right hand side, is a red bench, with the same white lettering saying, "Republicans". 
Most of the villagers will sit in either one. They might call themselves G.O.P., but they like the Kennedys - especially the war hero, Johnny who became President. 
Or they might be Democrats, but they like "Ike", the war hero who became President. 
A few old timers are gathered at the store on a warm summer day to sit on a red bench or a blue bench, depending on their mood; or where the sun is hitting. They talk, drink sodas, and and gaze across the street at a crystal clear lake with a sandy bottom and generous beaches. 
"That little kettle pond is nothing like Codfresh Lake," says the owner of the store, who has just walked out to chat with the only customers he's had for over an hour. He is an ancient, shrunken man who everyone calls 'AP'. 
"What's Codfresh Lake?" one of his companions asks. 
Using the question as an invitation; the wrinkled old man takes a pull from his Birch Beer in a glass bottle, and slowly eases into the Blue bench opposite his friends. He wears a faded Red Sox cap. With his old-fashioned handlebar mustache on top of a fluffy white beard, he looks like a skinny Santa Claus. 
Setting his soda down, he stares for a moment at the faded paint of the bench. It's cracking and blistering. He picks off a few blue chips, as if he were stripping little flakes of skin from a sunburn. Peeking out of the corner of his eye, he waits until he is sure he has the group's full attention.
Satisfied that he does, "AP" begins to tell a tale of a body of water so strange as to defy description. A lake compounded of equal but separate sections of fresh water, sea water, and an unearthly brackish stretch, reportedly inhabited by man-eating catfish. 
"Even stranger than that," he continues, "is that it was also home to a person who was more catfish than human. Few people know about Codfresh Lake, and even fewer about that fish-man, Jimmy Catfish. I saw him. I even knew him. The story ends here on Cape Cod but it starts out far across the ocean in a different cape, Cape Verde."