Fishing the Jumps

by Lamar Herrin

  What are you getting at, Walter?

  Something “fishy” about your chronology there, Jim, he advised. According to the calendar most of us go by, the Howie Whalen you and Phil Hodge drove four hundred miles to see, this bassmaster cousin of yours two years your junior, should have been toddling through those soon-to-be-flooded woods with you. In which case, Big Howie and Rosalyn would have been man and wife, and Little Howie’s diaper probably would have been full of shit. Lovers up the path and lovers down the path, but if it’s sweet smells you’re after, you’d better double up on the honeysuckle and the jasmine and the wisteria …

  Straight talk, Walter, I said.

  But he chose to be cryptic. A primal tale for a primal secret, he said. And a poetic liberty, courtesy of the court. But one helluva short-haired dog story, Jim.

  Then, stifling a yawn, he announced, I’m going to take your flirtatious Rosalyn and her “wooing machine” of a husband to bed with me, for something, he implied, as incidental as a little bedside reading. If you don’t mind.

  His hand fell on my shoulder as he passed beside me, lightly, but the effect was to hold me down. Did I mind turning Big Howie and Rosalyn, Little Howie and little Ellie, whose life had been a disaster for the last twenty years, over to Walter Kidman? As mischievous as he might enjoy being, I trusted Walter, he was a good friend and a good lawyer—and, in matters of confidentiality, a good lawyer was the next best thing to a priest—but in fishing the jumps there comes a moment when an insatiable hunger rises up in you and everything turns wild. Hard to imagine that now, sitting before a lake as quiet as this one, with the fish bedded down and the loons gone home and the ghosts of WPA workers asleep in their beds.

  II

  THE NEXT MORNING WALTER wanted more. He’d slept on it, he said, and as far as he was concerned, Big Howie Whalen was over and done with. Hadn’t he seen him and his black Cadillacs before? And his strut? And his barrel-sized belly? And, sad to say, maybe his wife Rosalyn was done with, too—I myself had made that clear, hadn’t I? Rosalyn had taken her vow and, in honoring it, become who she was. But Little Howie Whalen, who looked forward and looked back and was really performing a sort of straddling act, as, Walter supposed, most young men of his generation had had to do, North or South, sixties or not, nothing particularly remarkable about that, he realized, but still, to have made a success of it and then to have had his life cut short …

  I held Walter off.

  I’d woken up before he had, not at all hung over but with a pleasant sort of vacuum in my head, and taken the canoe out before the sun began to beat down. I’d paddled out to the center of the lake, then floated. To see how long I could nurse that little clearing in my head along. A hawk or buzzard tacked overhead for a while, a frog or two croaked, a pickup passed on the lakeside road with something quietly rattling in its bed, and then, from down the lake, I heard the voice of a child. A boy’s voice, excited, asking for somebody to come out and look at something he’d found. Something from the natural world, I assumed, that the night before when the boy had gone to bed had not been there. Finally, though, a boy who’d begun to whine when nobody came out to share his discovery. It occurred to me I could paddle down the lake and get him to show me whatever it was. But the effort it would take to reach a whining child put me off. I lay back and closed my eyes again and, as the sun rose higher, sculled the canoe closer to the shore and the shade of the tree line, until the sun found me there too.

  Walter had prepared us a full breakfast. He’d awoken with a big appetite, I with less of one. I nibbled on the sausage and the pancakes sweetened with maple syrup from a farmer’s market up the road and kept that empty spot in my head unoccupied as long as I could. There was a town nearby called Easley’s Falls that Walter thought I might find a curious, quaint remnant, so at midday we drove over there and had lunch in the bar of all that was left open of an old hotel, which looked across the main street in town to what had been a first-class trout stream back before acid rain reduced the fish population in almost all the Adirondack lakes and streams. The Highland House, this ex-hotel was called, and the man who waited on us, in answer to a comment Walter made about a possible revival of the town, responded that that pendulum had better swing back fast, because they were counting the days around there. A man with no identifying marks—no tattoos, no scars, no earrings or piercings or any adornments of any memorable kind—and with what looked to be an irreversible pallor to his face. Walter had a clear memory of a fine chili served in this hotel down through the years, and when our orders arrived he found no evidence of a falling off there. As Easley’s Falls and the Highland Hotel had gone into decline, Walter might even go so far as to say that the chili had become that much more aggressive, as if throwing up a last defense.

  After lunch we stepped back out onto Main Street, where by my count there were five antique dealers within a single block. They looked closed but, Walter assured me, all you had to do was pound on the door and someone would come out from in back. There were still bargains to be had. These stores had been picked over in the more prosperous years, then abandoned to their own devices, and through some strange biogenesis had managed to keep their floor space crowded and their shelves stocked. Walter mentioned a dumbwaiter table his wife had discovered in one of them—he spoke her name, Molly—then pantomimed a slap on the face and begged me to pardon him again. Through the clouded show window we were standing before, I saw a mule collar leaning up against a copper tub. I might have gone in and bought the mule collar as some thing to be hung around the neck of the last person to speak the name of his wife or his ex, the dubious prize you took home with you, but in that moment I realized that north of the Mason-Dixon Line I couldn’t remember even seeing a mule. These were southern animals, hardworking and unprocreating dead ends, so that when they were gone, the mule collars were all that was left.

  The WPA had not touched this curious and quaint town. Or perhaps they had built it in its entirety and here it still stood.

  Except for a small hexagonal clay-colored brick building. That Andrew Carnegie had had built to house the town’s library. It stood out by itself, as resolutely closed as a missile silo from the Cold War.

  Did I want to look around some more? And there were a couple of other towns nearby.

  I had a memory of Walter’s neighbor, the cellist, out at the end of his dock, playing not a lament, as I recalled it now, but a sort of salute to the evening. I told Walter that I was not averse to looking around at other towns, but by five I wanted to be seated there when his neighbor struck his first chord.

  Walter laughed knowingly, as if I was not the first guest of his to be seduced by that sound. The cellist’s name, he informed me, was Byron Wainwright. Nothing very mysterious about his story. Had sold insurance all his working life, Walter believed. A widower or probably divorced. Children or somebody that age had visited, with children of their own, but then the visits had stopped. At first his music-making had been entertaining—perhaps, given Wainwright’s lonely circumstances, “endearing” was the right word—but finally it had gotten to be something that in a small way you came to dread, that same sawing back and forth every evening promptly at five. Walter said, I would say go up and tell him how much you like it, but encouragement may be the last thing he needs.

  I clarified my position. I didn’t exactly say I liked it. I said I wanted to be there when he struck that first chord, then maybe the second and third. Everybody needs to have a chord struck for them to get an evening under way. Don’t you agree, Walter?

  Walter cocked his head in a studied frown, an expression I’d seen him make at the poker table when he had every reason to believe he was being tempted into a call, or being cajoled into folding a winning hand. But by five we were sitting in a pair of Adirondack chairs on a little terrace built above Walter’s dock, bourbon back in hand, waiting for the music to begin. I calculated the distance at some hundred feet up from Byron Wainwright’s dock, which would locate us at a hard angle
back over Wainwright’s left shoulder were Walter’s neighbor to sit out at the dock’s end. And there were some lakeside bushes that partially obscured us. We were in no real danger of being observed observing him. I glanced at my watch and gave Wainwright a grace period of five minutes, or conceded that I might have been five minutes fast. But it was only when I stopped counting and closed my eyes that, coming out of that motor-free lakeside noise of bird chirp and insect buzz and of tiny waves lapping the shore, I heard, like a gathering breath, the first chord being bowed, and then the second, like the sound of that breath being expelled, and the evening was under way.

  I told Walter Kidman that I had made it cross-country to Los Angeles before Howie Whalen, Little Howie Whalen, summoned me back. Why LA? The lure of permanent summer? The showbiz capital of the world? A combination of the exotic and of mainstream America as it had poured in? An unreal world for those of us who hadn’t settled on a reality yet? I didn’t know, but I could tell Walter one thing, which might sound like the most hackneyed thing going: where I was brought up, if you hung around town after you graduated from high school, not to speak of college, you were committing a vaguely shameful act. Implicitly, you were confessing to something, a lack of manly fiber, initiative, or to a willingness to plow ground that somebody else had cleared, to take refuge from the seasons in somebody else’s shadow. If you never left town, already you could find a marker in the cemetery bearing your name with only the death date left blank. The continent had been settled, the West had been won, but if you were at all sensitive to that sort of thing, some ancestral something still pulled in your blood. So you packed up and set out for somewhere out there.

  Even though Howie Whalen had stayed put, Walter reminded me.

  That was Howie Whalen and that was the Deep South. The Deep South couldn’t afford any loss of manpower. The Deep South was still in a defensive mode. The young men might have felt like cowards if they left, sneaking out of the fort at night, that sort of thing. And anyway, Howie Whalen couldn’t leave if he wanted to. It all depended on him.

  As long as the lakes didn’t get fished out.

  I listened to Byron Wainwright play his cello for a while—still getting under way, a stumbling, searching sort of serenade—then said, We’ve left the fishing behind, Walter. I was twenty-three. I had answered an ad and taken a job with an independent film producer, a Frenchman I thought was mostly made up and couldn’t really believe in, but who had money and was looking for scripts. Then he had a script about the outbreak of the Korean War, about a South Korean soldier and a GI and a Korean girl caught in between, and was looking for the actor to play the GI, an unknown he could launch. At a sort of skeptical remove, I got caught up in the search. Apparently the Frenchman had known a GI during World War Two back in France, somebody from the heartland, but rangy like a Texan or a long corn stalk, who might or might not have survived the war, but who served as a prototype for the actor he had in mind. And he had money, this Frenchman, he claimed to have come from a titled family back on the Continent, and he had assembled a modest little team. There was a girl I took up with, a team member, short-haired, short and slim-hipped, with an androgynous air and a will-o’-the-wisp way of turning up here and there. We both had office duties and gofer tasks to perform, but I knew, whether my employer did or not, that you couldn’t count on her from one day to the next. She was like a spirit-waif of the business. She may have been the only girl I knew out there who had no interest in getting in front of the cameras. The Frenchman picked up on something in her, though. If anyone was going to find him his heartland man, she was. The rest of us went through the motions, brought in sheets of photographs, composites, eight-by-eleven glossies, newspaper photographs and clippings we’d happened on. We arranged a few interviews—I wouldn’t call them auditions—but nothing clicked. I admired to the point of incredulity the Frenchman’s patience. World wars had been fought where he came from, civilizations had risen and fallen, and here he was in Hollywood, California, precisely on Sunset Boulevard, waiting for us to bring him his man. At times he could make it seem like a joke—a sort of burlesque of a life’s goal—then look at you with sad and soulful eyes and all but plead, as if his life was in your hands. Which was another sort of theater that maybe only my friend, my sometimes girlfriend and his employee, understood—

  Did she have a name, this spirit waif? Walter interrupted, which in the pause that followed allowed Byron Wainwright’s cello to climb from a mostly gloomy brooding toward a less encumbered, more aspiring sound, if you were willing to overlook the crudely bowed notes and the instrument’s general deterioration.

  I’m sure she did, I said.

  Which you are withholding for dramatic effect?

  No, because I keep thinking her name was Ellie, and I wonder if that could be true.

  Why not? It’s not that unusual a name, and you were a continent apart.

  Not for long. It was about then that Howie called me and asked me to come back and be in that wedding of his. He had barely turned twenty-one. He would marry his high school sweetheart. Since junior high they had hardly been out of each other’s sight, if you forgot about the times Howie had been off fishing and hunting and playing football with those town buddies of his. Or the times he’d been off with me when as a boy I’d been brought to town. You see what I’m getting at, don’t you, Walter?

  I see how you’ve set it up.

  It’s how it was, I said. The continent was drifting, tilting toward LA. Titled Frenchmen were showing up looking for heartland war buddies or someone to play them. There was a mix of identities on display out there—

  Including two Ellies.

  The Cuban missile scare had come and gone, but it would be another two to three years before I’d appear in their town sporting a full beard. The key now is to try to imagine what it was like to leave behind a world where almost everybody was looking over his shoulder to be sure a camera from some production team was tracking every step he took, and return to one where people performed their roles as though by birthright, and not according to some crazy script.

  Did you ever really read that script?

  An American GI at the outbreak of the Korean War training his South Korean counterpart, only to fall in love with the South Korean’s girl and then to nobly give her up—No, I never read it, Walter. I knew of its existence only as bait. It was a wonderful contrivance. The New World, the Old World, and an Older World yet. What actor, what wannabe, wouldn’t—

  Rise to the bait? You’re fishing again.

  You’ve got to remember what was still going on back then. Do you think John Wayne, Gary Cooper, Burt Lancaster, all that crowd were trained at Juilliard? They were discovered. Working the oil fields or performing circus tricks. At one time the Frenchman hinted that he’d had some keepsake from his American to return to his family somewhere out on the Great Plains, which could mean anywhere from Texas to the Dakotas. Even that he’d gone there and spent time, futile months and years, looking for—what? The right homestead? I never really believed him, although he might have believed himself. Europeans love all the Great Plains myths. They picture themselves escaped from their Old World binds, wandering around in all that space. He wanted you to believe his American had died as a hero liberating France, but he also wanted you to hold on to the possibility that his American had survived and returned to his Great Plains and that that keepsake, whatever it was, a medal of some sort, or something whittled, say, out of mesquite, would serve as a kind of homing device and they’d link up. I know he was late in getting to Hollywood, so he must have spent a lot of time out there on the Plains. If the whole thing wasn’t made up. But by the time I joined his little team, actors were being trained at Juilliard or in acting schools out there. There were still plenty of young hopefuls parking cars and striking poses for producers, or driving down the Strip in convertibles with a windblown look sprayed into their hair, but things were about to change in a big way, the Frenchman knew it, and—

  G
ive me a name, Jim. Not just a Frenchman. You’re forcing me to picture Maurice Chevalier strolling down the Champs-Élysées.

  Charles Millesaints, I said. His name was Millesaints. Does that sound aristocratic enough for you?

  De Millesaints?

  Short, forget your lithe, worldly Old World aristocrat, but short, burly, ruddy and pebbly in his complexion, as if he had been wandering around the Great Plains for years and the elements had taken their toll.

  But he wouldn’t give up.

  Not while I knew him. But you’re missing the point, Walter.

  Which is?

  All that sad and silly flux out there, sad because it was so silly, versus—

  What you came back to when your cousin summoned you, to represent the family, to perform the role you’d had written in since birth, in exchange for all the handouts and all the fish you’d caught, to be a groomsman of his.

  All it took was an airplane ride and I was standing in a small-town church whose distinctive smell probably still came from those hymnals fitted in the back of each pew, in spite of all the flowers, the perfume and cologne, and Big Howie—

  —the best man—

  —was standing beside his son, both in dark suits with white carnations in their lapels, and Little Howie was looking up the aisle, waiting for the bridesmaids to work their way down before his bride appeared. I saw Little Howie in profile, which, as they say, was nothing less than Greek, and when his wife-to-be appeared—

  What could it hurt, before you go any further, to give her a name too?

  —when Laura Kingston appeared on the arm of her father, when “Here Comes the Bride” sounded and there she came and I put the two of them together, Laura Kingston and Howard Whalen, Laurie and Howie, and they stood side by side, that was when I almost broke out laughing at the colossal silliness of that world I’d left in LA. That Saturday afternoon in a First Christian Church in a small town in the South, there was more beauty on display—real beauty, Walter, unfabricated beauty, beauty as natural as the buds to the trees—than had ever paraded up and down Sunset Strip or through all the soundstages in Hollywood. When my cousin and his wife-to-be took their vows, you could hear all the parts fitting together, you could hear the deeply satisfying sound of a whole being formed. A simple ceremony, a single take. No cut-and-print except what you printed and kept in your mind.