Thumbsucker

by Walter Kirn

  “Neat trick,” Mike said. I was hoping that he’d notice.

  “Here we are,” I said.

  “Nothing to do but fish and talk.”

  “It’s nice.”

  “It is nice,” Mike said. He dipped Red Man from his chew pouch. I was waiting for us to start talking. I was braced for it.

  We went out fishing after we unpacked. The boat had a small slow leak we couldn’t find. Rusty water sloshed around our feet. In it floated uncrinkling balls of cling wrap from the Velveeta sandwiches we’d eaten. While Mike read a map, I organized the tackle box, untangling treble hooks and sorting sinkers. We’d been running into the wind for forty minutes, crossing bays and flying up narrow channels, but only now was Mike checking our location.

  “The legendary Trout Inlet,” Mike announced. He folded the map and slid it under his butt so it wouldn’t blow away.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Trust me. For once just trust me, Justin.”

  “Fine.”

  I let down the anchor—a cement-filled coffee can. The rope raced off the winch and spun the handle. The water was deep, the deepest I’d ever fished in.

  “Man’s age-old dilemma: worm or leech?” Mike said.

  “Leech, I think.”

  “I was afraid of that,” Mike said.

  He raised the bait bucket’s perforated lid. The leeches came out of the water long and snaky but curled into tight, leathery balls on our hooks. We fished them just off the bottom, attached to jigs, but nothing happened. A strikeless hour passed. Growing bored, we gave our leeches names. I named mine Leif for some reason. Mike named his Luscious. Eventually, we gave them voices. Leif was a male, a bully, and said things like: “Kiss my ass, you wimpy little walleye.” Luscious was a seductive female leech. “Hey there, killer,” she’d purr, “you want to dance?” Mike’s Luscious voice was funnier than my Leif voice.

  “Let’s change around,” I said after a time. “I’ll be Luscious now.”

  “Forget it, fella. I’m starting to feel lucky. One lucky lady.”

  I opened a bottle of ale from the cooler and drank while I bailed out water from the boat. Suddenly, Mike’s pole jerked down and bent. He brought up a walleye after a brief fight and whacked its head on the motor mount to kill it. Amazingly, his leech survived the battle. He pretended to kiss it before he cast it back out. He caught another fish immediately.

  “Now can we switch names?” I said. My jealousy of Mike’s success surprised me. I wanted him to share his lucky charm.

  “Sorry, tiger. Got a date,” said Luscious.

  I drained my ale and opened another one. Mike didn’t seem to notice how much I was drinking—catching walleyes had put him in a spell. The breeze blew our boat in circles around the anchor line. Finally, I said, “I’m chilly. Let’s go back.”

  Luscious said, “Leif is a quitter. What a pussy.”

  “We still have two days to fish,” I said. “I’m hungry.”

  “Pussy,” said Luscious. “It isn’t even dark yet.”

  I reeled my line in, unhooked my limp, dead leech, and flung it over the side. I hated fishing. I threaded a worm on my hook. I hated leeches. When Mike made another comment in his Luscious voice, I said, “Use your real voice. This is stupid. I thought the idea of this trip was that we’d talk.”

  “But darling, this is my real voice,” Luscious said.

  The cabin was sided in curling asphalt shingles and I could tell that only men had stayed in it. Enormous dead moths with outspread wings clung to the rusty window screens. The sofa was covered in cracked brown Naugahyde, its wooden arms heavily notched with cigarette burns. In the kitchen no two cups or glasses matched, and in the cluttered silverware drawer I found more bottle openers than forks.

  For dinner we had canned green beans and panfried Spork, a Canadian version of Spam. Mike flipped the pink, spongy meat with a spatula while I boiled the beans.

  “You said you weren’t feeling well yesterday,” I said, trying to start our long-awaited discussion. I was just drunk enough to want to have it now. “What’s been the problem? Woody? Is it just Woody?”

  “Pass the pepper, precious,” Luscious said.

  I handed Mike the shaker. “I mean it. Seriously. I’m asking how you’ve been feeling. I want to know.”

  Mike wiggled his hips and turned a slice of Spork. He sipped from his plastic tumbler of Black Velvet. “Set the table, honey. Be a dear. Luscious is almost ready to dish up.”

  Mike served the Spork and beans on paper plates that quickly soaked through with grease. We didn’t speak. We alternated bites of salty meat with long cold gulps of ale. Our stomachs rumbled. Mike had the smug, self-satisfied expression of a fisherman who’d caught his limit, and after we’d eaten dessert and thrown our plates away, I made one last stab at mature conversation.

  “I really like drinking. It worries me,” I said. “Did you drink much at my age?”

  Mike frowned and shrugged.

  “Sometimes I wonder if I’m going to make it. Is that how you felt after football? Unprepared? Like everyone else has a secret they aren’t telling you, or maybe you’re just too dense to understand it?”

  Mike took one of my Old Golds off the table. He lit it and blew out a smoke ring. He crossed his legs.

  “I know what you mean about hurting inside,” I said.

  “Darling,” said Luscious, tapping off her ash, “you have no idea.”

  It was raining when I woke up. The cabin was freezing. I looked down from my bunk and Mike was at the stove, scrambling eggs and frying up more Spork. Five minutes later he called me to the table and I noticed his voice had not returned to normal. He wasn’t Luscious anymore, thank goodness, but some other creature: weary, moody, put-upon. His strange high spirits of yesterday were gone.

  “I drank all the coffee,” he said. “I’ll make some more.”

  “I can make tea,” I said.

  “There isn’t any.”

  “Let me make the coffee.”

  “I don’t mind. I’ll do it.”

  After breakfast we put on rain gear and went out. The rain blew straight into our eyes in stinging pellets. Mike started the motor after several tries and steered us out into the lake. The rain was freezing. When Mike opened the bait bucket, the leeches lay slack and dead. He emptied the bucket over the side, said, “Fuck it,” and drove us back through the downpour to the dock.

  We changed our clothes, and I set up the Scrabble board. Mike had never been a fan of board games, considering them a waste of time, like jigsaw puzzles, but there was nothing else to do. Our big talk was not going to happen—that seemed clear to me. We set out a bowl of potato chips and pretzels and opened two bottles of ale. While Mike chose his letters I visited the out-house and rolled a joint with toilet paper. I held my hits for as long as possible, then dropped the roach down the hole.

  I went first. My opening word was dervish. My best words in Scrabble were words I’d never spoken, words that I was surprised I even knew.

  Mike examined his rack and rubbed his lips. He set down his letters deliberately. Dungeon.

  “Nice,” I said. I was finally enjoying myself. I spelled out hose, reconsidered, and put down hove. I counted my points out loud, then tripled them because I’d landed on a bonus square.

  Mike seemed unimpressed. He put down gloom.

  “That’s weird,” I said. “You ever notice that? A Scrabble board’s like a Ouija board sometimes.”

  “Explain,” Mike said.

  “It’s raining. Your word was gloom. It just seems odd.” I knew I was stoned and should probably shut up, although my point was sound.

  “Just odd to you.”

  I spelled exalted and Mike spelled loathing. It was his last big word for several turns. While I kept drawing scarce, high-scoring letters—Z’s, V’s, and Q’s and plenty of vowels to use them with—Mike drew nothing but common consonants. In round after round, the best that he could do was to add an s to an existing noun o
r form a puny its or if or let. Confidently, he’d reach for new letters, moving his hand around inside the bag as if he could distinguish the tiles by touch, but his fortunes didn’t change. It struck me that I might be smarter than him. The thought depressed me, and I pushed it down.

  I spelled out queries. “Sorry. Lucky letters.”

  Mike stared at his rack for a while, then spelled violate.

  “A few more like that one and you’ll catch up,” I said.

  Mike left the table and went into the kitchen and came back holding the bottle of Black Velvet. He stood and looked at the board. His face was red. He tipped the bottle up against his lips.

  “Let’s finish the game,” I said. “It’s getting interesting.”

  Mike shook his head. “This isn’t what I pictured.”

  “Come on. You’ve got momentum.”

  “This is sad.”

  I laid down my letters: sparkle. I hoped to win still. Mike never gave me a chance to win at things.

  “Two weeks ago I wanted to die,” he said. “I even called the doctor for some pills. My head wasn’t right. I felt paralyzed, defeated. I shouldn’t have joined this church. My business bores me. And I married far too young—I know that now. I married for sex and I should have married for friendship.”

  Mike’s confession didn’t move me. It seemed like an excuse to quit the Scrabble game. He talked about wanting to die quite often since the Montana trip, usually when he wanted to worm out of something.

  “Tough luck,” I said in a voice that wasn’t quite mine. “Spell a word. Quit whining.”

  Mike set the bottle down. “This trip’s a failure. I thought we’d finally get close up here. Push through all this bullshit that’s between us.”

  “Sit down and play.”

  “I should have known.”

  “Sit down and play,” said Leif.

  It was clear the next morning. We woke up late, hung over. Mike wound new line on his reel while I made pancakes. We doused them in syrup and slathered on the butter. The board from our abandoned Scrabble game was sitting on the table, its words intact, and I found myself idly reading them while I ate. I couldn’t believe that for a moment yesterday I’d found the words significant.

  We hit the lake. Above us, blue sky was piled up in layers all the way out into space. The sun was fierce. With our leeches dead and our night crawlers inert, we decided to troll with artificial lures. Mine was a silver Rapala minnow. Mike used a gold Meps spinner with a tail. We didn’t name them this time. It just caused trouble. We fished with a grim methodical intensity, trolling back and forth across the channels as though we were coastguardsmen dragging for a body.

  I caught the first walleye, a small one.

  “Good,” Mike said.

  He caught the next fish. A pike.

  “Nice job,” I said

  Courtesy and politeness ruled. We took great pains not to bruise each other’s feelings. When Mike lost the biggest walleye of the day by mistakenly letting his line go slack while fighting it, I praised his skill in hooking it in the first place. When I overweighted my line with sinkers and snagged a log and snapped my rod tip off, Mike blamed the rod’s manufacturer, not me. At one point, when I’d caught more fish than Mike and sensed him growing grumpy and discouraged, I switched to a lure that I knew fish didn’t like and let Mike even the count.

  It wasn’t a fabulous day, but we got through it. I learned that there’s nothing shameful about a standoff. It seemed to help things that we’d run out of booze—a three-day supply consumed in less than two.

  By midafternoon we’d caught our limit of walleyes. We cleaned the fish on the dock, flinging their guts and heads into the lake. Schools of minnows swarmed around the waste and a mink slunk down to the shore and dipped a paw in. We stored the cleaned fish in the propane-powered chest freezer. Afterward, Mike suggested a game of cards, but I begged off. “That’s probably smart,” he said. We lay on our bunks and browsed old Outdoor Lifes that someone had left behind in the cabin.

  “Listen to this one,” Mike said from underneath me. “ ‘A Wolverine Stole My Elk.’ It’s true, supposedly. This guy was in Wyoming on a pack trip, hunting above the tree line …”

  We took turns reading articles aloud. It wasn’t the same as talking. It was better. The tales of swarming hornets and charging grizzlies were utterly preposterous for the most part, and we read them in comic, exaggerated voices, adding music to create suspense. For the story of one young woman’s lonely trek across the Alaskan tundra in December, Mike used his Luscious voice. I laughed out loud. As Leif, I related the story of a duck dog so tenacious he swam across Chesapeake Bay pursuing a crippled goose.

  Then something happened: we switched characters. Halfway into a tale of hungry timber wolves, Mike became Leif. He sounded better as Leif. And I sounded better as Luscious, I discovered. She came naturally to me, her jadedness, her bite.

  We were still reading when we heard a plane. It buzzed the cabin. We went outside to look. It wasn’t supposed to arrive until tomorrow, but there it was, descending toward the lake. It landed and turned and approached the dock. The pilot waved out his window. We waved back.

  “There must be bad weather coming,” Mike said.

  There was. The pilot apologized for it as we packed. Afraid that the front would keep him grounded for days, he’d flown in early. He offered Mike a partial refund.

  “We’ll make it six hundred instead of eight,” he said. “I know it’s an act of God, but I feel bad for you.”

  “Couldn’t be helped,” Mike said. “You used good judgment.”

  We boarded the plane and took off over the island. That evening, during the long drive home from Canada, we talked as if we were deeply disappointed in having our trip cut short. “A shame,” we said. We complained about the fish we’d been denied, the night of fresh-air sleeping that we’d missed, the day of relaxing boating that never was, the hard-fought Scrabble game we might have finished. We agreed that the trip had just been getting good the moment it ended. “I liked that Spork,” Mike said.

  I told him I liked Spork, too. We laughed about it.

  We laughed because we were delighted by our good luck. We’d gotten off that damned island just in time.

  4

  A couple of months before my mission, when I would leave home to spread a religion I hadn’t chosen but couldn’t quite abandon, if only because I had nothing to replace it with, I joined a tour of Mormon holy sites. Two chartered buses idled outside the church, surrounded by dozens of teenagers in shorts. Adults with clipboards were giving out seating assignments. Elder Tinsdale, our leader, spoke my name and I stepped forward, carrying a suitcase.

  “Stow your stuff and climb on,” he said. “Bus two.”

  “I’d like to ride in back, if possible.”

  “The seating arrangements are fixed,” said Elder Tinsdale. “They’re the result of careful prayer. I’m sorry.”

  I climbed the steps of the air-conditioned bus and moved down the aisle, looking for my name tag. Boys were on one side, girls on the other. The chaperons sat up front, behind the driver. He was the only non-Mormon on the bus—a black man in a white shirt with silver epaulets. In his hand was a plastic no-spill coffee cup and in his shirt pocket I saw a pack of Camels. I wondered how far from the bus he’d have to go when he wanted to smoke one.

  My seat was an aisle seat halfway down the bus. I was grateful for it: an aisle seat made it easy to reach the bathroom. Lately, I’d been peeing more than usual, at least twice an hour. I blamed my medication. That spring, when word had reached the school psychiatrist that I’d been disrupting teachers’ lectures and flubbing easy quizzes, he’d upped my dosage.

  I stood up to let in my seatmate, Orrin Cord. He seemed preoccupied and didn’t speak to me, just turned his face to the tinted window and laced his fingers together on his lap. Orrin was our youth group’s leading skeptic, perpetually in crisis about his faith. His four older brothers had all been missionarie
s, in countries from Japan to Guatemala, and the stories they’d brought back of foreign cultures—of revolutions put down by brutal governments, of American factories that paid their workers twenty cents an hour to sew tennis shoes, of peasant families who sold their daughters as prostitutes—had bred in Orrin a bitter sophistication. It was an open secret that he drank tea, and he sometimes wore a beret to sacrament meetings. He’d warned me that he knew more about church history than anyone else on the tour, including the chaperons, and he swore he’d speak out if he caught them teaching lies.

  The trip hadn’t started but already I had to go. The bathroom was narrow, like an upright coffin. A deodorant pine tree dangled above the sink. I aimed, released, shook off, and zipped back up, aware that I had a long three days ahead of me. Part of me wished I could quit the Ritalin, but I feared the withdrawal symptoms I’d heard about: headache, irritability, mood swings, lethargy. The only time I’d missed my daily dose I’d slept for twelve hours and awakened in a rage, shaking so hard I could barely brush my teeth.

  The girl who had taken the seat across the aisle from mine smiled when I sat down. I smiled back. Opal Singer was Mormon aristocracy. According to Orrin, whose hobby was genealogy, she was a direct descendant of Brigham Young and his second-youngest wife. The blood of prophets ran in Opal’s veins. For her, our tour of Mormon sacred sites would be a kind of homecoming, a pilgrimage, while for me it would be an introduction.

  “Excited?” I asked her.

  “I am. I couldn’t sleep.”

  “What place do you want to see most?”

  “I can’t decide. What about you?”

  “Missouri. The Garden of Eden.”

  “You’re sure it’s in Missouri, not in Kansas?”

  We both looked at Orrin for help.

  “Missouri,” he said. “The Garden of Eden is definitely in Missouri.”

  In the first few months after my family’s conversion, all I’d seen were restrictions, impositions: no R-rated movies, no “hard” rock, endless services, monthly fasts. I imagined that my life would turn dry and boring and that I’d drop out eventually. What I hadn’t counted on, however, was the novelty of a religion whose sacred places—the farm in upstate New York where God and Jesus had appeared to Joseph Smith, the trail of exile across Nebraska’s plains, the promised land of the Utah desert—were located in America, close by, where a person could actually see them for himself.