“These days you could say I don’t do much of anything.”
“Well, something tells me the former runner-up to Miss Flowering Dogwood has taken a shine to you, Berger.”
“Oh boy,” Darlene said, “here we go round the blueberry bush again.”
“Mulberry.”
Dinner at Vince’s Gulch was usually something to be endured. Steak fried grey to the core served with potatoes boiled past the crumbling point, followed by “homemade” apple pie from Delaney’s General Store, usually still frozen solid in the middle. But tonight a chef had been brought in from the Tudor Room of the Queen Victoria Hotel in Chatham. There was sweet corn and boiled lobster. Barney reached over to relieve Darlene of her corn—“More cellulite would be a real turn-off, baby”—and then called for another Scotch. Larry leaned forward so that Mary Lou could knot the napkin behind his neck. “Mercy bowcoop, Mummy.” And Rob lunged for the bread basket, stacking four hunks at his place, then swooping on the butter dish, appropriating it. He gathered his plate in, leaving his plump arm curled on the table, sheltering what was his by right. Lowering his head as if to charge, he decimated his first corn cob and started in to strip the next one.
Jim explained that at Vince’s Gulch the guides went out in the morning and again in the evening. There was no fishing in the afternoon. Everybody, he said, gets one turn at all the different pools during their three-day stay. He threw little twisted pieces of paper with the guides’ names on them into a hat and asked everybody to draw one. Barney, who went first, drew young Armand. Larry got Len, or Motor-Mouth, as he was known on the river, and Rob drew Gilles.
“Well then,” Jim said, “I guess that leaves me and Mr. Berger.”
“He’ll have the edge going out with the head guide, won’t he, boy?”
“We don’t call Jim or anybody else around here ‘boy’. Furthermore, it is not a competition.”
Barney accepted a large cognac and swished it around in his snifter. “I know you don’t drink, Berger, but are you a gambling man?”
“What did you have in mind?”
“You, me, and Larry here each write out a cheque for a thou and tack it to the bar. Come Thursday top rod takes the pot.”
“I’m an old hand, Barney. It’s more difficult than you think.”
“He’s been fly-fishing for years,” Darlene said.
“Okay. We’ve got a bet.”
Thick unyielding clouds lay overhead as the Logans waddled down the dirt track to the river laden with bug sprays and cameras and expensive-looking movie equipment. Rob lugged a portable radio and his Kleenex and a big bag of candy. Barney carried a bottle of cognac. As Darlene raised a long slender leg to sidestep off the little floating dock into their long canoe—Armand reaching out to help, his eyes on her panting bosom—Barney immediately knocked her off balance with a proprietorial whack on her bottom. “Oh, man, do I ever go for those buns!”
Allowing everybody else a head start, Moses lighted a Monte Cristo and settled into his canoe with Jim.
“What can I say, Moses?”
“Don’t come this week is what you could have said.”
Over the hum of the outboards, The Rolling Stones began to ricochet off the river walls, scattering the crows. Fortunately Rob was heading a good mile downriver to the Bar Pool.
Once Jim had anchored at their first drop, out of sight of the others, Moses started out with a Silver Doctor, went to a Green Highlander and then a Muddler without getting anything to rise. Things were no better on the second drop. On the third drop they saw a big salmon roll and another leap, maybe thirty feet out. Moses laid every fly he could think of over their heads, but they weren’t taking. Then there came a hollering and a squealing from the Fence Pool. “It’s probably only a grilse they got,” Jim said.
A half hour passed and then the deer flies came out and it began to drizzle. Covering the far fast water, stripping his line quickly, Moses got his strike. A big fish, maybe thirty pounds, taking so hard Moses didn’t even have to set the hook, his rod already bent double. Immediately the line screeched and the fish shot downriver, taking most of Moses’s backing before it paused and he started to reel in the slack. Jim lifted anchor and began to paddle gently toward shore, his net within reach. The fish came close enough to look at the canoe and raced downriver again, breaking water about fifty feet out. Flipping in the air. Dancing on its tail.
“Hey there, Moses. Hey there.”
The fish struck for the bottom and Moses imagined it down there, outraged, rubbing its throbbing jaw against the gravel, trying to dislodge the hook. It couldn’t, obviously, so it gave in to bad temper, flying out of the boiling water once more, shaking its angry head, diving, then resting deep, maybe pondering tactics. After Moses had played the fish for another twenty minutes, he heard and then saw the others in their canoes returning from their pools. Approaching Vince’s Hole, Gilles and Len both cut their outboards back sharply, as courtesy required, but not Armand, whom Barney had instructed to actually accelerate into the opposite bank before killing his engine. Frank Zappa bounced over the water at God knows how many decibels. Cursing, Moses reeled the fish in close. It was lying on its side on the surface now, panting desperately, but good for one more run. Moses vacillated only briefly before leading the exhausted fish toward the net. And that’s when Mary Lou stood up to take pictures, her flash attachment exploding again and again. Distracted, Moses didn’t notice his line tangling round the butt of his rod. The fish bolted, running his line taut and jerking free of the hook. Moses’s rod sprung upright, his line going slack.
“Well now,” Barney said, “like the old hands say: it’s more difficult than you think.”
Back in camp, Moses was told soon enough that Barney had killed two salmon, a total of twenty-four pounds, Larry had landed a five pound grilse, and Rob had lost a fish.
As the bartender had gone home it was an exuberant Barney who served the drinks, allowing Darlene another vodka and asking Moses whether he would like his soda straight up or on the rocks. Har, har, har. Moses, pleading fatigue, allowed that he would have just one and then retire to his room to read in bed.
“Didn’t I tell ya, Mary Lou? Moses is a real highbrow.”
“Well, I’ve read a whole stack of novels myself this year, both fiction and non-fiction. I never bother with TV.”
“In my humble opinion,” Darlene said, “TV is just one big waste of time. I only watch PBS.”
“Yeah,” Barney said. “‘Sesame Street.’”
Rob shook with laughter, retrieving a trail of snot from his upper lip with a lizard-like dart of his tongue.
“I’m going to turn in now,” a tearful Darlene said. “Will you be long, Barney?”
“I won’t be long here, but I sure will when I get there. So there’ll be no call for you to unpack your vibrator tonight, baby.”
The telephone rang, Barney scooping it up before Jim could reach it. “It’s for you, Moe.”
Jim rubbed his hands against his trousers. “You can take it in the kitchen,” he said.
It was London on the line.
“Lucy, is that you?”
“Yes,” a thick voice came crackling back.
It was, Moses reckoned, three o’clock in the morning in London. “What’s all that racket in the background?”
“I’m moving.”
“At this hour?”
“You’re such a nag, Moses.”
“Why are you slurring your words?”
“It’s my jaw. It’s still swollen. The dentist yesterday. Oh, you and Henry are both going to be sent some photographs. I don’t want either of you to open the envelopes. You are to put them right in the fire. Do you understand?”
“Are you in trouble again, Lucy?”
“Will you please do as I ask for once and not bother me with any stupid questions.”
“I will throw the envelope in the fire without opening it. Have you spoken to Henry yet?”
“Obviously you are more
worried about him than you are about me.”
“There’s a delicate sensibility at play there.”
“But not here?”
“No.”
“You think I’m disgusting?”
“Yes,” Moses said, hanging up. Then he dug a couple of pills out of his pocket and swallowed them without water.
Approaching the bedroom lodge some fifteen minutes later, Moses saw moths dancing in the cone of light coming from Darlene’s bedroom. Darlene was waiting on her side of the screen door, wearing a Four Seasons Hotel towel robe belted loosely over a wispy black negligee with a red lace trim. “You’re not a teetotaller,” she said. “You had to give it up, but you continue to nurse some secret sorrow. My daddy was a boozer too.”
Moses laughed, delighted with her. Darlene was sucking on a joint. Opening the screen door, she handed it to him. Moses inhaled deeply before passing it back, not letting go of her hand, but drawing her close and whispering a suggestion to her.
“Why, Moses Berger, you are a simply dreadful man,” she said, all twinkly. “But if he sees your car gone as well he’ll figure it out and go absolutely apeshit.”
The banging screen door of the dining-room lodge warned them of Barney’s unsteady approach. Darlene thrust the joint at Moses, hastily adjusting her towel robe, and then began to spray her bedroom with deodorant. Retreating to his own room, Moses collapsed on his bed, gratified that he was still capable of mindless lust. Then the bickering flared in the next room, Darlene declaring with some vehemence, “I’m not getting up to brush my teeth and rinse out again. If that’s what you want go find yourself a whore.”
Moses quit his room and headed for the dirt road to walk off his rage. He made it as far as the turnoff for Kedgewick before he started back. Once in camp again, he didn’t return directly to his room. Instead he slipped into the dining room and dialled Clarkson’s number in Montreal. Clarkson, he knew, was in Toronto. Beatrice answered on the seventh ring.
“I’m at Vince’s Gulch.”
“Moses, it’s one A.M.” She sighed. “Did Jim ask after me?”
“Possibly he hasn’t inquired because he has yet to catch me alone.”
“You mean to say you’re with somebody up there? It was our place.”
“Get into your cat and drive straight out here. You should make it by morning.”
“Don’t humiliate yourself, Moses.”
Stung, he didn’t speak again until he could trust his voice. Then he said, “What in God’s name can you see in him?”
“Solomon Gursky isn’t his obsession. I am. Oh, and this will amuse you. He thinks I’m intelligent.”
“Beatrice, he’s going to bore you.”
“I’ve had quite enough of not being bored. What you call boring would be refreshing. At least if he goes out to fetch a pack of cigarettes at ten P.M., I can count on his not being gone for a week or ten days without a word, me going out of my mind, and then you phoning to say I’m in Paris or back in the clinic again. Is it somebody I know?”
“What are you talking about?”
“With you there.”
“Yes. It’s somebody you know. Why not somebody you know?” he asked, slamming down the receiver.
Barney was waiting in the bar, a glass half-filled with cognac to hand, his eyes shiny and unfocused. “Pussy trouble?” he asked.
“Good-night, Barney.”
“A word of advice, buddy boy. You never should have let your hair go grey like that. Have it dyed. We’ve been together two years and she still doesn’t know my real age. I keep my passport hidden.”
“Did you see your father when you were in Montreal?”
“Take my advice and have it dyed. Pump iron. Look at you. Shit.”
EVERYBODY WAS AT BREAKFAST by the time Moses got there.
“Well,” a red-eyed Barney said, mopping up the eggs on his plate and shoving back his chair, “I’m for an early start, baby.”
“I’m not going out with you this morning. It’s going to be buggy as hell out there and I don’t want to pick any more hooks out of my sweater.”
“You worry too much about your tits springing a leak.”
“Maybe there are some folks who don’t know yet. Why don’t you put an ad in the newspapers or on TV?”
Mary Lou flung her napkin down on the table. “Come with me, Rob.”
“My eggs weren’t turned over easy like I asked,” Rob said. “I’m bitten everywhere.” He banged his radio down on the table. “And something’s wrong with my Sony. I told you we shoulda bought a Sanyo.”
“There are fresh batteries in the car,” Larry said.
“It’s not the batteries. It doesn’t work. It’s fucken broke. Shit. My asthma. I shouldn’t get excited.”
“There’s a Radio Shack in Campbellton that would probably fix it,” Moses said. “It’s not such a long drive.”
Rob lost another fish in the rain that morning. Larry didn’t bring back anything and Barney, who had to settle for what looked like a nine-pound fish but weighed in at eleven, waited impatiently at the dock to see how Moses had made out. But when Jim motored into camp he was alone in his canoe. Moses, he explained, had been invited to lunch with an old chum, Dan Gainey, at the Cedar Lodge; and then he held up a twenty-six-pound salmon for Barney to admire. Which was when Darlene came skittering down the hill to join them. “I need the car keys,” she said.
Barney grabbed her by the buttocks, driving her against him. “I know what you need, but I could do with something to eat first.”
“While you’re having your nap I’m going to drive into Campbellton and get Rob’s radio fixed.”
“Okay, okay,” he said, tossing her the keys, which were weighed down by a heavy brass disc bearing the initials B.G.
WHEN HE UNDRESSED HER Moses had no doubt that he would find a little cord with a catch on the end dangling from her back. He would yank it and she would blink her eyelashes and chirp, “What’s up, doc?” Meanwhile he settled in to wait for her in the dark of the Marie Antoinette Room of the Auberge des Voyageurs in Campbellton. Three sodden Micmacs, seated at the bar, were watching a wrestling match on TV. An hour passed. Moses was about to give up when Darlene flew into the room, arms fluttering, eyes signalling fire and flood and emergency exits, her full petulant mouth forming a huge startled O. “Surprise, surprise,” she shrieked. “You’ll never guess who’s here, MARY LOU!!”
Mary Lou, stumbling in the unaccustomed dark, couldn’t even find Darlene at first. Squinting, she finally got her bearings. “Why if it isn’t the highbrow,” she said.
“What a COINCIDENCE!” Darlene pleaded, eyes darting from one to another, settling on Moses. “She needs the powder room right now.”
Moses indicated the door marked COURTESANS and Mary Lou toddled off obediently. Darlene’s explanation came in a rush. “He took the car keys with him this morning I could have died. When he got back, it seemed like CENTURIES. I said I would drive here to get Rob’s radio fixed and she insisted on coming along. But she won’t tattle on us. Mary Lou and I belong to the same coven. In a previous incarnation she was my son and in ancient times, when I was king of Egypt she was my queen.”
“Obviously you’ve been through a lot together.”
“I’ll say. But what are we going to do now?”
“There’s a bottle of vodka sitting in an ice bucket in the room I rented for the afternoon here.”
“Oh, you are such a dreadful man!” She offered him a quick hug. “But I couldn’t go that far now. I’m too scared. Mary Lou is very sensitive ever since her first husband, blessed be, was lost in the mail.”
Moses doubted that he had heard right.
“It was a very severe blow at that point in time. She should have sued the post office for plenty is what I told her. Some Christmas. All the family was gathered together but it just wasn’t the same opening the presents without Lyndon there.”
“How was he lost in the mail?”
“Cheezit,” she hissed,
bashing his ankle under the table hard enough to make him wince.
Mary Lou settled into her chair, shed her glasses, and stared at Moses with big blue eyes as blank as Orphan Annie’s. “I can tell that you are a very well educated man just by looking into your third eye. If you ask me,” she said, her mouth puckered with suspicion, “your wife is a very lucky lady.”
“Actually, I’m not married.”
Making his excuses, Moses directed them to the Radio Shack. He retrieved Gainey’s Ford pickup and returned to the cabin on the river where Gainey kept watch over the Shaunnessy pools. Then he canoed back to Vince’s Gulch. Jim, standing on the shore, greeted him with a perfunctory nod. “What in the hell can you see in her, Moses?”
“She makes me laugh. Never underestimate that.”
Entering the dining lodge in search of a coffee, Moses found that Barney and Larry were being entertained by a deputy of New Brunswick’s minister of trade, an obsequious young man wearing a tartan jacket and canary yellow Bermuda shorts. The deputy had come equipped with information on local land and labour costs. Larry, taking notes on a legal pad, needed to know what kind of sweetener they could expect investment- and tax-wise from the provincial government. The deputy assured them they could expect New Brunswick to be generous, but he was not authorized to talk numbers. Barney didn’t like that. “The trouble with you Canadians,” he said, “is that you’re always sitting on the fence. Look at it this way, buddy boy, you can’t catch a dose pulling your meat, but it sure as hell ain’t as much fun as pussy.”
“I will certainly advise the minister of your feelings,” the deputy said, and then he reminded them that a lot of important people were waiting to meet them at the country club, but if they didn’t leave soon they wouldn’t be back in time to fish.
Barney called for another Scotch. “We’re waiting for the future Mrs. Middle-Aged Spread to get here.”
But when Mary Lou led Darlene into the dining lodge she was obviously in no condition to go anywhere. “I think I’d better lie down,” she said.
“Shit.”
“Shall we be off, then?” the deputy asked.
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