The Constant Heart

by Craig Nova

  “What are you looking at?” said Sara.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  I carried Sara’s waders and the rest. A basic fly rod in a tube. A reel and a fly line. My father hesitated every few minutes at the fly case, not reaching to his back or now to his hip as well, but he wanted to. Then he went back to the flies.

  “That’s about it,” I said.

  “No,” said Sara. “Wait.”

  She left me with an armful of new-smelling rubber and the slick hiss of the nylon cover of the sleeping bag when it rubbed against itself. That hiss. The aisles were so filled with shirts, hats, shoes, sandals, wading staffs, and other things, such as doe in heat lure, bright red hunter’s hot seats, that she seemed to vanish into the clutter. My father went through the flies in an orderly way, from the top left, across the top, then back to the next row, as though the little squares of flies were words and he was reading.

  The rifles were in a rack as in an armory, and the handguns were under glass. Stacks of ammunition in the green-and-yellow Remington boxes. With Sara and my father out of the way, I considered the pistol that the man in the Hawaiian shirt had. I’d need a holster, ammunition, but I couldn’t buy that without my father saying to me, “Jake. I don’t think that’s a good idea.” Of course, I wasn’t convinced of that.

  Sara held a package that looked like a meal ready to eat, but she tucked the label to the side. She had a plastic bag to put it in.

  “All right,” she said.

  The items we had picked out came to $835 and change.

  When Sara saw the amount, she took out her credit card and shoved it across the counter. “Doesn’t hold a candle to my commissions.”

  The store had an indoor fountain that was about fifteen feet across and in which there were some big fish, brook trout mostly, although I guess there were some rainbows in there, too.

  My father went into the bathroom, where he could rub his back if he wanted and his hip, too, and we sat down next to the pool. For fifty cents you could get a handful of food, just little pellets, to throw in. The trout made the water boil, eating that stuff like it really tasted good when it was just oil and some kind of grain mixed together and pressed into something that looked like a dried-out deer turd. Still, we went over there and got a handful and started throwing it in while the clerk wrapped the stuff up. The trout ate the pellets that Sara threw in.

  “Those things back there,” she said. She rolled a shoulder toward the firearms section. “I don’t think they’d help. Somehow I’m in deeper than that.”

  “Like all real trouble,” I said. “I guess.”

  “Oh, there’s no guessing,” she said. “Look at those trout, swimming around, eating pellets. What a life.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said.

  “It’s hard for me to say . . . ”

  “I know. It’s hard to say how scared you are.”

  “Yeah,” she said. She threw some pellets into the pond and the trout snapped them up. A little click like someone smacking his lips. “And when you’re that frightened you don’t feel it like a shake in your hands, but a deeper ache. Just an ache. But can I say something, Jake, and you won’t get mad?”

  “You can’t make me mad,” I said.

  “You want to bet?” she said with that look in her eyes. I was glad to see that.

  “No. I’ve had enough bets with you.”

  She moved closer. The smell of trout came off the water. She still had that meal ready to eat package, although now it was in a plastic bag that said Outfitter’s North in type that looked like logs.

  “That ache won’t go away. But it makes me feel close to your father. Should I say something to him?”

  Those trout smacked their lips and churned the water when Sara gave them more pellets, but she was almost out of them. The pool looked like a washing machine when the trout were eating.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “You sure?”

  “I’m sure,” I said.

  My father came out of the clutter where the bathroom was, walking with an upright, braced gait. Sara put one of her last pellets into the pond and then another. The clerk kept coming around so he could see the black eye and he brought someone else to look at it. Then my father said, “Do you have a problem?” and then the clerk said, “No, no,” and went away.

  “Don’t you see, Jake?” she said. “When we were young we were just teenage cynics. Here’s what I didn’t know: It can be self-fulfilling.”

  My father sat next to her.

  “You’ve got all your stuff?” said my father.

  “Yeah,” said Sara. “I’m loaded for bear.”

  “Good. That’s a good rod you bought,” he said. “It’s got black guides, not silver ones, so it won’t reflect the sunlight and scare the trout.”

  “I want to talk to you,” said Sara.

  “Sure, Sara,” said my father. “You could always talk to me.”’

  “You know I’m in trouble,” she said.

  “Sure,” said my father. He shrugged. Who wasn’t in trouble? “A good time to go fishing.”

  “Jake said it was OK,” she said. “To say something.”

  “Fine,” said my father.

  The trout made the water in the little pond green.

  “I’m so scared it aches,” she said.

  “Yes,” said my father.

  “It makes me feel close to you,” said Sara.

  My father closed his eyes. Sara opened the plastic Outfitter’s North bag and removed a package of freeze-dried chocolate ice cream, ripped it open, and broke off a piece. She gave a piece to my father, one to me, and then took one herself. My father put it in his mouth, closed his eyes again to concentrate on the taste. Then he swallowed.

  “That helps me,” he said. “It probably wasn’t easy to say it. A lot of people are frightened to say anything to a dying man.”

  Sara shook her head and broke off another piece of freeze-dried ice cream.

  “Are you scared?” she said.

  “Even if I lived a thousand years, I’d still come to the end. I’d arrive at this moment.”

  “Does that make it easier?” she said.

  “Yes,” said my father.

  That was him all over. He meant it.

  On our way out, Sara stopped in front of a pile of jars of honey, the golden cylinders piled up in the shape of a pyramid against the wall. The label on the jars was a picture of a bear tearing into a beehive and removing the honey with a large clawed paw, the bees obviously angry and flying around, their paths marked by little cartoon lines. Sara took a jar and held it upside down, and the bubble inside rose to the bottom. Then she turned it up right again and opened it. “Here,” she said and held it under my nose. “Take a sniff.”

  Even there, under the fluorescent lights, the smell from the honey suggested apple blossoms, or orchards when they are white with flowers, or pear trees and wildflowers, the sweetness of the honey having an obvious smoothness, and maybe a little bitterness, too, which made it all the more attractive, like the first, distant smell of the ocean.

  My father strung up Sara’s fly rod in the lighted parking lot and we started practicing. Some cars came in and men got out of them and watched for a while and mostly they didn’t say anything, although one or two said, “Stiffen your wrist.” And one came over and showed her how to work her line hand, although he gave me and my father a funny look when he saw her black eye. She was pretty good. A couple of times she made a little warm-up motion before she tried to cast, a little two-step, but after a while she stopped that and just felt the fly rod as it loaded.

  “It gets heavy there for a minute,” she said.

  “That’s it,” I said. “That’s what you want.”

  “I’ll be damned,” she said.

  Inside the building a coffee urn, a big silver thing, sat by the door like a Buddha, and I filled up the thermos we always brought with us. Then we got into the car, and I put the thermos between my legs. The lights from trucks on
the road were shaped like megaphones.

  Sara curled up on the seat behind us and went to sleep. My father started in as he usually did on this part of the drive, talking about something that required a certain amount of thought to make sense of it. Like those moments in a high-energy accelerator when time seemed to flow backward. I told him that CERN was doing some interesting stuff and that some bumps in the data at certain energy levels were intriguing. He nodded and said, “Sounds good.”

  But in the same tone of voice that he used when he spoke of studies, of chaos theory, and of the populations of animals, he said, “That took a lot of guts. For Sara to talk to me. It’s funny, but I don’t feel so alone.”

  Then he went back to driving. Everything was going to be fine, if he had anything to do with it, even under these circumstances.

  The land was flat and dark, although every now and then, when we were far enough out, away from Danville and Albany, we passed a farmhouse with a light on in the living room. The atmosphere of these places was domestic and filled, or so it seemed to me, with the suggestion of intimacy: the scent of dinner lingering in the rooms, towels that had been dried on a line and had the whiff of the outside about them, and the quiet miasma that goes along with people who have decided that they are going to go on living together no matter what. The lights in these windows made me think of the sweet-sour odor of Gloria’s breath when she was sleeping, and just as the ache for the emotional warmth of these rooms sunk in, the houses slipped away.

  After a while we began to climb, and now all we passed was just an occasional gas station that had a light on to discourage burglars. Then even these places slipped into the darkness, and we could smell the woods, especially the first part where some logging had been done, and there the faint urine scent of recently cut oak hung in the air, the clean perfume of pine, and the oddly reassuring smell of newly cut ash, out of which they made baseball bats and which still suggested, even here, just off the stump, those fields of green grass, white lines, and white bases. Beyond those places that had been logged we finally got to just the woods, which had from the damp leaves of the floor an odor like ammonia. Mixed in with everything else was the dampness that came from the dew.

  I guess it was near ten thirty when we got to the end of the dirt road where there was a sandy lot, which was just a place where people had parked so often that the grass doesn’t grow anymore. It was cold, and we left the heater running to get the car warm before we slept. My father sat there, looking out through the windshield, which misted over with our breath and through which the stars appeared as purplish blurs. Still haunting though, and as we faced that blur, the fact that people are continually surprised by them, when they get a chance to see the stars, was more obvious then usual. That, I guess, had to do with the silence of my father as he concentrated on them and then seemed to take an inventory in the same way he went through the fly cases, moving from left to right, as though the sky were just another thing to read. “It’s a nice idea, Jake, that we are made out of them.”

  AT DAWN WE all got out, our breath making little trails of mist, all of them going in the same direction, and all of them a little frail, just shreds of mist. The sun rose and appeared yellow, like an enormous grapefruit. The first light covered everything with a golden film. It lay across Sara’s face, and the sun existed in each of her eyes as a dot. We drank cold coffee from the thermos top, passing it around.

  We all stood there with the golden film on us, and I thought, Well, maybe the fishing will be good. Maybe. It often is when the weather is clear and the sky doesn’t have a cloud in it. A truck went by once and then stopped and turned around and then went by again, and Sara took my arm. “That’s MD.”

  Two other men were in the truck, too, both with bleached-blond hair and acne, who almost looked like they were identical twins, but weren’t, just the same size, the same bleached hair, the same acne, and the same gestures, too, which looked as though they had learned them on a TV show or in a commercial, a sort of swagger, as though they were pitching snuff to bull riders. Mostly, though, they stared through the window of the truck.

  My father and I got our things out of the back of the car, through the hatch, but Sara walked across the parking lot, and as she stood next to MD’s door, he opened it and stood out in the cool air, too. Every now and then an insect flew, its wings like golden tissue. My father and I rolled our waders up and tied them with the safety belt so we could carry them, and we put the vests and the food we had brought, some fruit and a couple of power bars, along with a water filter, into a backpack with a couple of jackets and Sara’s stuff, too.

  MD’s hair made the golden light look cheap, and he leaned in Sara’s direction, as though he were her boyfriend or something, and while it wasn’t insulting, not exactly, she looked as though she were trying to stand up to a current or a wind or something that pushed against her in a way she didn’t like. Then he leaned forward and whispered in her ear, pushed her hair aside as he did so. She stepped back. The insects flew in the air above them, their paths describing chaos itself. Sara stood there as though she had been spit on: more surprised than hurt. The air was perfectly still, not a bit of movement, nothing at all aside from the sound of my father’s labored breathing. MD spoke again and as he did, I took another fentanyl out of the bottle and handed it over, and my father took it and went right on standing in that calm air.

  “What kind of trouble is she in?” he said.

  “I don’t know anymore,” I said.

  “Have you got another one of those?” he said. He held out his hand and I put another fentanyl into it.

  “It hurts in the morning the most,” he said. “They say you want to stay ahead of the wave.”

  “All right,” I said.

  “Have we got enough for me to take as many as I want?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “We’ve got plenty.”

  “Don’t lose them,” he said.

  “No,” I said.

  “Good. Then we’re all set,” he said.

  SARA WALKED BACK through that golden light, her figure in her new jeans and blue shirt, her red hair, even her freckles pale now, paler than before, and as she came she looked right through me, my father, and, for that matter, the landscape itself, as though she could see into some deeper, more ominous realm.

  She came right up to me and put her arms around me, just like that, in a way she had never done when we were kids or any time since, and as she pulled on me, as she pressed her small figure against me so that I felt a warmth in the cool morning air, she said, “MD wants an answer for that business proposition. That’s why he’s here.”

  “What’s that?” I said. “What does he want you to do?”

  “Oh, Jake. Oh, Jake,” she said.

  “Let’s get going,” said my father. “There’s always time to talk.”

  “Is there?” said Sara. “And what would you say, Mr. Brady?”

  “Jason,” he said.

  “Jason,” she said. And swallowed. “What would you say?”

  Their faces were opposite one another, and her skin had a sweet fragrance in spite of being up all night and sleeping in the back of a car.

  “Anger is never dishonest,” he said.

  She nodded and went right on staring at him.

  “And?” she said.

  “Let’s just worry about right now,” he said.

  “That’s enough?” she said.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  MD and the other two with the bleached hair dug around in the bed of their truck, took out a tent that must have weighed eighty pounds, a cooler, and began to work on a black tarp that looked like it was covering a dead animal, like a small elephant.

  “What are we waiting for?” she said.

  “The rate of absorption,” my father said. “It works best on an empty stomach.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Sure.”

  MD unzipped his pants and took a long, slow leak as he stood on the other side of the truck, but he kept
his eyes on Sara.

  “But I think we should go,” said my father. “There are two kinds of drugs. One makes you not feel the pain. The other makes you not care that you have it.”

  “Which are you taking?” said Sara.

  “I like to mix them,” said my father. “But then I’m not so alert. So I’m staying with the one that makes me not feel it so much.”

  The two men with the bleached hair unloaded cases of beer.

  “And you want to be alert?” she said.

  “Don’t you think it’s a good idea?” said my father.

  Sara swallowed and took his hand.

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “They don’t look like they’ve spent a lot of time in the woods,” said my father. “Of course, they’re going to try to follow us, right?”

  “Yes,” said Sara.

  My father rubbed his back and hip.

  “Is it working yet?” said Sara.

  “Some,” he said. “Jake, you can carry the pack, right?”

  THE TRAIL CROSSED a suspension bridge made out of metal cables and pieces of wood, and when you walked on it the whole thing swayed up and down. Perfect wave phenomenon. I remembered this bridge as being almost new, but then that was another distortion. A lot of time had passed. It had been years since any work had been done here, and the cables were frayed at the U-joints where they were fastened to a couple of half-rotted posts, but even so, Sara stood in the middle of it to feel that swaying, as though the danger here replaced some other one. The U-joints that held the cables at the bank made a long, slow sigh, as though about ready to give up. The water here was tea-colored, although it had a tint of something else, like snake venom, and she hung there, swaying in the moist air, as though if she could just stay there, even if the bridge was coming apart, everything would be fine. I guess it was just her testing something like will. She had changed on one side of the car in the parking lot of Outfitter’s North while we waited on the other side of the car, and she wore blue jeans, a shirt, and boots in a way that looked like she had always worn them. She appeared so cheerful it broke my heart. She had a small pack, too, that my father kept in the car. Her stockings, for the soccer mom outfit, leaked out of it, and when I came up behind her the scent of baby powder hung in the air. The tea-colored stream was still overwhelmed by the sky, and it looked like a tongue of blue paint ran down the middle, and tongues of green liquid, from the reflection of the trees on the bank, ran along that cobalt blue.