The Constant Heart

by Craig Nova

  From time to time my father said, “Look, see that?”

  “What?” said Sara. “I don’t see anything.”

  My father pointed at some bear sign. Scat, the same color as that black ash from those pill-like fireworks we used to set off on the Fourth of July. Not solid, though, which meant they were new.

  “The bears are out. I bet they still have cubs now,” he said.

  “Now you’re trying to scare me,” said Sara.

  “Yes, that’s it,” said my father.

  “Now you’re really trying to scare me,” said Sara. “But, you know, you come to a limit about that.”

  My father turned, looked at the sky and the water, and then back to Sara’s green eyes.

  “That’s right,” he said. “You begin to accept it.”

  He put his hand on the side of her face, where the shiner was, the touch as delicate as I have ever seen, and she said, “I’m sorry.”

  The trail went along the stream, which was a collection of riffles and pools, fast water and slow water, and here and there a boulder stuck up. The usual flowers grew along the stream and in the woods, or what was left of them in the early fall, little white flowers I never learned the name of, but which looked like somebody had left a trail of torn paper along the path.

  Beads of silver appeared along Sara’s upper lip and on her forehead. After we had walked for a couple of hours, she said, “You know, they’re going to come after me.”

  “I should have kept my mouth shut to Judah,” I said. “I shouldn’t have told him where we were going. They probably followed us there.”

  “You get used to that, too,” said my father. He touched his back and wiped his brow. “Having something follow you.”

  We stopped for lunch and had the sandwiches my father took out of his pack. Turkey on white. He split his in half and gave it to Sara, and she said, “Won’t you be hungry?”

  “No,” he said.

  The mayflies started to hatch, some small fall ones with gray wings and pink bodies. They just floated on the surface of the water like small sailboats, and after a while, when their wings were dry, they took off. Then they hung in the air over the stream and a couple of them blew into Sara’s hair. She had a short, rough cut, and the mayflies clung to the bushy strands and flapped their wings. She turned and looked at me and laughed, saying, “What the hell are these things?”

  After we had walked a couple of hours more we sat down to rest, and when we did some black military jets flew up the stream. The first thing you heard was a long, low whistle, just like in the movies when a bomb is being dropped, but the whistling got louder and even the ground began to tremble. Just then, when you were unsure as to what was happening, or just when you thought it was an earthquake, the jets came in, black, sleek, going right along the terrain. They were training here where there were hills and streams, coming in low, hugging the ground the way they would in Russia or Bosnia. Or Afghanistan or Pakistan. Or Iraq or Iran.

  As the jets went by, I thought I saw a fish rise out of the water, taking one of the mayflies on the surface, but I didn’t say anything because the best fishing was farther up, and if we stopped here we’d never get up to the pools where there were brook trout of good size. Twelve and thirteen inches and fat.

  We walked for another hour, and my father fell behind, so we waited for him in some pines that seemed to be planted in rows, but this was just the way they grew, each tree equidistant from the ones around it. My father appeared between the even trunks, their formality making him seem frail. Sara said to him, “So, do you mind if I ask what’s wrong?”

  “No,” said my father. “You think I want to hide something at this stage of things?”

  “What is it? Where are you sick?”

  “It’s pretty much everything now,” he said. “It was one of those cancers that is hard to see in the beginning and so by the time you know you’ve got it, it’s everywhere.”

  “Oh,” she said. “I didn’t mean to be nosy.”

  “That’s OK,” he said. “Be as nosy as you like.”

  The gray mayflies drifted on what seemed to be an almost visible current of air. He pointed at those gray shapes.

  “Something that beautiful doesn’t have to be noticed or praised or anything. What can you add to it?”

  “Nothing,” said Sara.

  “Let me rest for a minute, OK?” he said.

  “You said you came up here to think something over,” she said.

  I have never seen her with less guile. Maybe, after all, they were facing the same thing. Maybe her end would just be more sudden.

  “Oh,” he said. “That.”

  “Under the circumstances,” she said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Circumstances.”

  “So what were you thinking?” she said.

  “I don’t know . . . ”

  “No?” she said.

  “It’s just not the way I wanted the end,” he said.

  “And what’s that?”

  He shrugged, touched his back.

  “Somehow I didn’t think I’d be ashamed,” he said.

  “No one should be ashamed of being sick,” she said.

  “I don’t mean that,” he said.

  The lines of space were open between the trees, the way you can see rows in a vineyard.

  “Somehow I, well, the thing that makes it harder is to die when people think . . . ”

  “When people think badly of you?” said Sara.

  “Yes. Like Frank Ketchum,” said my father. “Jake, you remember Ketchum?”

  “You mean the guy who got the job you wanted and then he died in a motel room with a hooker?”

  “Yeah,” said my father. “See? Somehow, if one asshole does that, a lot of men are sort of smeared . . . ”

  “Or maybe you get blamed if your wife goes crazy,” said Sara.

  “She wasn’t crazy,” said my father. “She just wanted to be a potter.”

  “Same thing,” said Sara. “When you mix in macramé, weaving, shiatsu massage . . . ”

  “It’s the age. Self-realization. Being creative.” He turned to me. “So you’ve told Sara about your mother. But did she try massage, too?”

  “Maybe it was just feng shui,” I said.

  “It’s just a feeling of not belonging. Sort of banished,” said my father. “That’s what makes it hard. Maybe you think you should just try to do the right thing, you know, and you don’t dismiss what you have to do. You don’t ditch your kids, but yet somehow you end up feeling smeared. You’re not cool. So you die feeling guilty.”

  “Is that the way it seems to you?” said Sara.

  “I’m thinking it over,” he said. “Feeling the contours of what’s coming. It’s hard to explain. But you end up feeling like something left over at a fire sale.”

  “But you’re not alone,” said Sara.

  “I’ve got Jake,” he said. “And I guess I’ve got you, too.”

  “You won me over with the chocolate soufflé,” said Sara.

  “The recipe is in the Egg Cook Book at home,” said my father. “Jake will show you where it is.”

  The wind moved through the trees with a kind of chant, a hiss of leaves, a slight squeak in the trunks, all coming to a variety of sigh.

  “You’re wife’s in California, right?” Sara said.

  “She went to find herself. Turns out she’s a dope smoker.”

  Sara turned back to the stream. The little bits of silk, which were the mayflies, floated along, and as they did they sometimes disappeared into the glare on the water, a silver smear that lay over the surface like a film. Overhead there was a hawk, braced there in a thermal, going around and around, just a cross against the blue.

  The planes didn’t go that far up, or maybe this terrain was the kind the pilots were interested in, because we heard that whistling again. This time, though, it seemed to be a little slower than before, as though the pilots were doing some kind of reconnaissance training rather than bomb t
raining, or maybe it was just that they didn’t want to go home. They came in low and slow, the blackness of the planes not shiny but flat, like a woodstove that has had all the blacking burned off of it. The pilots appeared in the canopies, too, figures that seemed to be all helmet, although one of them raised a hand to us as he went by. They were getting closer, and in the shrill, increasing sound of them, Sara looked up, her head back a little, the pale light on her face like makeup.

  The noise got louder, the whistling blending into the shriek of the engines, and then the planes went away to the south, the way we had come in, the whistling diminishing until all you could feel was a kind of trembling in the chest.

  “Are we really going to catch some fish?” she said.

  “Oh,” my father said, “we’ll get some fish.”

  She stopped and took his arm and said, “You know, I was told I could be anything. That all I had to do was focus. See? Well, here’s what they didn’t tell me. It’s so difficult. So hard. And no one escapes being human.”

  He started sweating again, and I reached into my vest for the bottle of pills. He must know what the best combination was, but he just waited. Did she want to talk now? He trembled. He always told me that a gentleman didn’t make a big deal out of things.

  “You promise about the trout? You promise?”

  My father took her hand and they walked along. In and out of the shadows, which began to contract around the bases of the trees and then stretch out on the other side. The greens turned from a crisp, hopeful vernal hue to a darker color, and soon my father said, “Let’s stop for tonight. Why don’t you and Jake try the fishing here?” he said. “I’ll sit on the bank for a while.”

  We waded into the stream, but I thought, What is going to happen if she doesn’t catch a thing? What are we going to do then?

  Sometimes I think trout get moody and sullen, but on a day when the sun has been bright and there are puffs of clouds in the sky and then the shade moves across the stream like a thin, delicate film, they perk up. That’s what I put my faith in. I hoped that they would stay active even when the sun was setting, as it was now.

  My father and I traveled light, and so there wasn’t much to do in the way of setting up, just two little tents, one for her and one for my father and me, and that was all we carried aside from a frying pan, a pot, some bacon, potatoes, and onions to go with the trout. My father had a plastic bag with some parsley in it, which he would chop up with his pocketknife to put on the trout and the potatoes.

  Sara and I stood in the water at the head of a pool. The stream was a dark green with a streak of blue reflected in the middle, although the blue was tinged with pink. My father sat on a log and watched. As far as Sara was concerned, she had this show-me attitude, as though if there weren’t any fish here, then all of this was just more bullshit and we knew what she thought about that, didn’t we? So, I stood there in the cold water, looking through a fly box, but I was wondering why I thought it was such a big deal for her to catch something. Then I looked at her black eye.

  Sara stood in her new waders that smelled like an inner tube and said, “The water is squeezing me. Even between the legs.”

  “Here,” I said, picking a little brown nymph, a gold-ribbed hare’s ear, and tying it to the end of her leader. Under these circumstances the simplest and sometimes best way to catch fish is this: You cast the nymph across the stream, in pretty fast water, and then you mend the line so that the nymph will sink and sweep along the bottom, and in that moment when it comes to the end of the line, it lifts from the streambed, just a quick rise toward the lighted and mirrorlike undersurface of the stream. It’s that small movement, unexpected and sudden, that suggests something that is alive. Just a twitch. It happens in water that is pretty fast, at the head of a pool, and the trout go for it.

  The real mystery is how the shape, the stones, the chemistry of the stream have been imbedded in the genes of the insects and in the trout, too. This mystery makes me think of the Constant. And when I think of it, I am left wondering if there is some order and beauty that we haven’t been able to see yet, but which will be comprehensible by unrelenting will and largeness of heart. Sometimes I scare myself by thinking, What if it is beyond understanding? What if we can’t do it? All I ever felt or wanted was to be able to love someone. But here Sara and I were, damaged, hurt in ways we didn’t even realize was happening, like all those glib things we were told about everyone is the same and that sex doesn’t mean anything, not really, but we both knew now that when a man and a woman start sleeping with each other something changes, and this power, this change, is simply ignored, although it has the power, under the right circumstances, to change you forever. Another case of reality being wished away, at least until it comes back. As though we can make something be the way we want it to be just by saying that’s the way it is.

  What was more real than standing right here, trying to come to terms with everything—those men who were surely coming up behind us, my father’s sickness, how things had gone wrong, the trout that had been here long before us and would be here long after we were gone? Sara gave me an innocent peck, nothing serious, just a peck, and said, “Thanks for letting me come along, Jake.”

  It doesn’t take much of a cast to fish this way. So we started, just flicking it out there into that silver-and-green water with the pink tinge, then letting it sink and mending the line, and letting the fly drift along. The water broke up around her legs in the waders, making silver wakes on both sides.

  “Oh,” she said.

  “Did you feel something?”

  “Yes,” she said. “A little grab. Is that one?”

  “I think so,” I said. “Do it again.”

  “Same place?” she said.

  “Yeah. Then we will move down, because when a fish takes a whack at something it drifts downstream a little to think it over,” I said.

  “Uh-oh, there it is again,” she said.

  She pulled the line out of the water and looked at the glare and the green, undulant surface.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever been so excited,” she said.

  It started with the line just being drawn into the water and downstream at the same time, and she held on with both hands, saying, “What do I do? What do I do? Jesus, please don’t let it get away.”

  My father looked over now.

  “Get it sideways in the current,” he said. “It tires them out.”

  “What the hell does that mean?” she said.

  “Trout are designed to face the current,” I said. “Not to go across it.”

  She started reeling in and working the rod, doing a pretty good job. The line went into a silver splash, and I got a look at the fish as it made a dark turn there in the water. It was all right. We got it in, and I picked it up, a brook trout with bright spots on its side, and squiggly marks on its back. Not a bad size, either, about as big as they get up here. She felt the cool, wet thrill of it in her hand, a kind of refreshing touch of something alive and all muscle and from a different, honest world. She looked at it and then at me and she started crying there in the water, just holding the fish with her face screwed up and saying, “Can you believe it? Can you believe it?”

  So the question was this: Should I kill it or let it go? I took it and killed the thing with a little flick on the back of the head and put it away and started again, Sara sniffling a little and saying, “Do you think there are more of them in there?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I think so.”

  I caught two more. We came up to where my father was sitting.

  “Yes, they are pretty aren’t they?” he said. “When you clean them, do so downstream a little so that the bears won’t smell the guts.”

  My father boiled some potatoes and cooked a few strips of bacon so he could sauté the onions he chopped. Then he put the potatoes in, the sizzling of them making a sound that seemed a little domestic, even up here. When the potatoes were brown, he sprinkled them with parsley. He cooked the tr
out in the bacon drippings, the fish squirming on their backs to get away, or so it seemed, from the heat of the pan. Sara sat there and watched, not missing a thing. The fish were pink and after we ate Sara said, “I can feel the wildness of them . . . ”

  “Maybe we can find some mushrooms,” said my father. “That adds to it.”

  “No kidding?” said Sara.

  “Sure,” he said. “There is an old orchard up here. Sometimes mushrooms grow up there.”

  “I was taught not to eat mushrooms that didn’t come from the store,” said Sara. “Although some of the girls at the Gulag ate some mushrooms. Boy, did they get sick. And they saw some odd things, too.”

  “Sure,” said my father. “Amanita muscaria. I wasn’t thinking about that kind of mushroom.”

  It seemed like a good idea to leave the towel on a line that I strung up below the camp. Of course we didn’t have to worry about grizzlies in the East, but there have been some cases of black bears killing people, and not for hunger, either, but for the fun of it. In fact, one of my father’s papers, the one that had been translated into German, was about a bear that killed some people for what looked like fun.

  The stars came out, and they seemed very bright up here, like mercury spilled on a black floor. I pointed at them and said, “There . . . that’s Alpha Umi in Ursa Minor, that’s Polaris, Centauri, the Pleiades . . . ”

  “The look like they’ll be there forever,” said Sara.

  “But they won’t be. It’s all moving, flying apart . . . ”

  “And that’s what you’re trying to figure out?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “How things are about to disappear and why. What dark substance is pulling on them?”