by Philip Roth
“Sometimes.”
“What? Romance?” he asked, smiling. “Not pornography, I hope.” He pretended that that was an unwanted idea it vexed him even to entertain. “I sure hope our local author is not up there in Mike Dumouchel’s place writing and publishing pornography.”
“I write about people like you,” I said.
“Is that right?”
“Yes. People like you. Their problems.”
“What’s the name of one of your books?”
“The Human Stain”
“Yeah? Can I get it?”
“It’s not out yet. It’s not finished yet.”
“I’ll buy it.”
“I’ll send you one. What’s your name?”
“Les Farley. Yeah, send it. When you finish it, send it care of the town garage. Town Garage. Route 6. Les Farley.” Needling me again, sort of needling everyone—himself, his friends, “our local author”—he said, even as he began laughing at the idea, “Me and the guys’ll read it.” He didn’t so much laugh aloud as nibble at the bait of an out-loud laugh, work up to and around the laugh without quite sinking his teeth in. Close to the hook of dangerous merriment, but not close enough to swallow it.
“I hope you will,” I said.
I couldn’t just turn and go then. Not on that note, not with him shedding ever so slightly a bit more of the emotional incognito, not with the possibility raised of peering a little further into his mind. “What were you like before you went into the service?” I asked him.
“Is this for your book?”
“Yes. Yes.” I laughed out loud. Without even intending to, with a ridiculous, robust burst of defiance, I said, foolishly, “It’s all for my book.”
And he now laughed with more abandon too. On this loony bin of a lake.
“Were you a gregarious guy, Les?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I was.”
“With people?”
“Yeah.”
“Like to have a good time with them?”
“Yeah. Tons of friends. Fast cars. You know, all that stuff. I worked all the time. But when I wasn’t working, yeah.”
“And all you Vietnam veterans ice fish?”
“I don’t know.” The nibbling laughter once again. I thought, It’s easier for him to kill somebody than to cut loose with real amusement.
“I started ice fishing,” he told me, “not that long ago. After my wife ran away. I rented a little shack, back in the woods, on Dragonfly. Back in the woods, right on the water, Dragonfly Pond, and I always summer fished, all my life, but I was never too interested in ice fishing. I always figure it’s too cold out there, you know? So the first winter I lived on the pond, and I wasn’t myself that winter—goddamn PTSD—I was watching this ice fisherman walk out there and go out fishing. So I watched this a couple of times, so one day I put on my clothes and took a walk out there and this guy was catching a lot of fish, yellow perch and trout and everything. So I figure, this fishin’ is just as good as the summertime, if not better. All you have to do is get the right amount of clothing on and get the right equipment. So I did. I went down and bought an auger, a nice auger”—he points—“jiggin’ rod, lures. Hundreds of different kinds of lures you can get. Hundreds of different manufacturers and makes. All various sizes. You drill a hole through the ice, and you drop your favorite lure down there with the bait on it—it’s just a hand movement, you just make that jig move up and down, you know. Because it’s dark down underneath the ice. Oh, it is dark all right,” he told me, and, for the first time in the conversation, he looked at me with not too much but too little opacity in his face, too little deceit, too little duplicity. In his voice there was a chilling resonance when he said, “It’s real dark.” A chilling and astonishing resonance that made everything about Coleman’s accident clear. “So any kind of a flash down there,” he added, “the fish are attracted to it. I guess they’re adaptable to that dark environment.”
No, he’s not stupid. He’s a brute and he’s a killer but not so dumb as I thought. It isn’t a brain that is missing. Beneath whatever the disguise, it rarely is.
“Because they have to eat,” he’s explaining to me, scientifically. “They find food down there. And their bodies are able to adapt to that extracold water and their eyes adapt to the dark. They’re sensitive to movement. If they see any kind of flashes or they maybe feel the vibrations of your lure moving, they’re attracted to it. They know that it’s something alive and it might be edible. But if you don’t jig it, you’ll never get a hit. If I had a son, you see, which is what I was thinkin’, I’d be teachin’ him how to jig it. I’d be teachin’ him how to bait the lure. There’s different kinds of baits, you see, most of them are fly larvae or bee larvae that they raise for ice fishin’. And we’d go down to the store, me and Les Junior, and we’d buy ’em at the ice fishin’ store. And they come in a little cup, you know. If I had Little Les right now, a son of my own, you know, if I wasn’t doomed instead for life with this freakin’ PTSD, I’d be out here with him teachin’ him all this stuff. I’d teach him how to use the auger.” He pointed to the tool, still just out of reach behind him on the ice. “I use a five-inch auger. They come from four inches up to eight inches. I prefer a five-inch hole. It’s perfect. I never had a problem yet gettin’ a fish through a five-inch hole. Six is a little too big. The reason six is too big, the blades are another inch wider, which doesn’t seem like much, but if you look at the five-inch auger—here, let me show you.” He got up and went over and he got the auger. Despite the padded coveralls and the boots that added to his bulk as a shortish, stocky man, he moved deftly across the ice, sweeping up the auger in one hand the way you might sweep the bat up off the field while jogging back to the bench after running out a fly ball. He came up to me and raised the auger’s long bright bit right up to my face. “Here.”
Here. Here was the origin. Here was the essence. Here.
“If you look at the five-inch auger compared to the six-inch auger,” he said, “it’s a big difference. When you’re hand drilling through a foot to eighteen inches of ice, it takes a lot more effort to use a six-inch than a five-inch. With this here I can drill through a foot and a half of ice in about twenty seconds. If the blades are good and sharp. The sharpness is everything. You always gotta keep your blades sharp.”
I nodded. “It’s cold out here on the ice.”
“You better believe it.”
“Didn’t notice till now. I’m getting cold. My face. It’s getting to me. I should be going.” And I took my first step backward and away from the thin slush surrounding him and the hole he was fishing.
“Good enough. And you know your ice fishing now, don’t you? Maybe you want to write a book about that instead of a whodunit.”
Shuffling backward a half-step at a time, I’d retreated toward the shore some four or five feet, but he was still holding the auger up in his one hand, the corkscrew blade raised still to the level where my eyes had been before. Completely bested, I’d begun backing away. “And now you know my secret spot. That too. You know everything,” he said. “But you won’t tell nobody, will you? It’s nice to have a secret spot. You don’t tell anybody about ’em. You learn not to say anything.”
“It’s safe with me,” I said.
“There’s a brook that comes in down off the mountain, it flows over ledges. Did I tell you that?” he said. “I never traced its source. It’s a constant flow of water that comes down into the lake here from there. And there’s a spillway on the south side of the lake, which is where the water flows out.” He pointed, still with that auger. He was holding it tight in the fingertipless glove of one big hand. “And then there’s numerous springs underneath the lake. The water comes up from underneath, so the water constantly turns over. It cleans itself. And fish have to have clean water to survive and get big and healthy. And this place has all of those ingredients. And they’re all God-made. Nothing man had to do with it. That’s why it’s clean and that’s why I come here. If
man has to do with it, stay away from it. That’s my motto. The motto of a guy with a subconscious mind full of PTSD. Away from man, close to God. So don’t you forget to keep this my secret place. The only time a secret gets out, Mr. Zuckerman, is when you tell that secret.”
“I hear ya.”
“And, hey, Mr. Zuckerman—the book.”
“What book?”
“Your book. Send the book.”
“You got it,” I said, “it’s in the mail,” and started back across the ice. He was behind me, still holding that auger as slowly I started away. It was a long way. If I even made it, I knew that my five years alone in my house here were over. I knew that if and when I finished the book, I was going to have to go elsewhere to live.
I turned from the shore, once I was safely there, to look back and see if he was going to follow me into the woods after all and to do me in before I ever got my chance to enter Coleman Silk’s boyhood house and, like Steena Palsson before me, to sit with his East Orange family as the white guest at Sunday dinner. Just facing him, I could feel the terror of the auger—even with him already seated back on his bucket: the icy white of the lake encircling a tiny spot that was a man, the only human marker in all of nature, like the X of an illiterate’s signature on a sheet of paper. There it was, if not the whole story, the whole picture. Only rarely, at the end of our century, does life offer up a vision as pure and peaceful as this one: a solitary man on a bucket, fishing through eighteen inches of ice in a lake that’s constantly turning over its water atop an arcadian mountain in America.
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