by Adam Johnson
Downhill was Eggers’ camp, and though I couldn’t make out the dark fur of his lodge, I could see a lazy strand of white smoke rising from it, which helped me locate Janis in the dark. Passing through some bare, knuckly tree trunks, I witnessed the quarry-black of my stepmother’s granite memorial slowly separate itself from the early black of morning. I came round to face her. A web of ice had formed across the bronze, and with my forearm, I wiped until I could make out her puffy cheeks and the line of her cat glasses.
I don’t know why I came out here and stood some mornings. I’ve seen other people speak to tombstones and urns and whatnot, and though the tears on their faces seemed genuine, it always left me feeling empty. But what else was there to do? What were my options?
“Hey,” I said to Janis’ plaque. Sometimes I told her how people were getting along now that she was gone, which more and more was “fine.” Today, I asked her, “What did you think of my lunch with Dad?”
It was cold out, quiet. To keep the blood flowing, I marched in place, the snow creaking under my feet. I looked around to see if anyone might be watching. How stupid I must look from a distance, a lone figure hunched and shifting, taking counsel with himself.
“He doesn’t seem to be making much progress,” I said. “If I have to, I’ll make like Aeneas, who slung his old man over his back and carried him out of the flames of Troy. Did I ever tell you that story?”
When most people spoke with the departed, they probably stuck to rhetorical questions, but I was trained to interrogate the dead, and it was hard for me to escape that, even if everything I asked was ridiculously stupid. But why ask questions that matter—Where are you? Can you hear me? Are you alone?—when the dead won’t even offer a fishing forecast.
I looked into the chilled bronze, trying to find some evidence of Janis, but those metallic eyes were fixed on the nowhere behind me. Where was the woman who made sure my father brought me souvenirs from wherever he traveled, the woman who helped me learn Latin, who fought my father over sending me to boarding school, who would never let him say a bad thing about my mother in front of me? Where was the woman who wouldn’t stop apologizing, there at the end, for leaving me?
I grabbed my bucket. “Your plants are looking pretty good,” was all I could manage without sounding too hollow to myself. “I’m going fishing with Farley, so I’ll ask how things are down at the courthouse.”
I turned into the snow, crossing the quad in just enough light to make out the edges of buildings. I passed the Liberal Arts Center, whose marble steps were worn by countless students, students whose hands had greased the rail a shiny black. I took no heart in the fact that they had all graduated and found their way in life. Rounding what was once the history building, I encountered a marble arch whose inscription from Santayana I’d read a thousand times: “Those Who Cannot Remember the Past Are Condemned to Repeat It.” The school once offered a graduate degree in history, but this was now the agri-business building. After World War II, people simply lost their thirst for the past. There was a day, though, when students roamed this campus with books underarm like Cradle of the Euphrates, The Last Days of Pompeii, and Knuutsen’s five-volume Maya.
Who today has read The Chief Regrets of Wali al-Qu’atar?
Herodotus, Aurelius—forgotten.
As I passed the empty hall, that Santayana quote began to make me angry. His words had once been my motto, but today they seemed a lie. I thought, Point to the book that will guide the way. Show me the story. Didn’t life’s real lessons come firsthand, and only once, so that, if you ever gained some wisdom, you’d never get another chance to use it? What man goes to war twice? Who has two mothers, dressed in blue, disappear into the snow, and who then loses two stepmothers? Can any person spend two lifetimes alone?
I turned the corner onto Central Green—there, beyond the final slope of campus, was the Missouri. Normally, white sheets extended far from the banks, so that it looked as if the snowy fields ran right out into the middle of the river, leaving only the creek of the central channel. But all the ice last night had indeed broken free, and this great bicep of water in the breaking light was sparkly black, as if the river cut through banks of pumice. The surface was flashing, roiled with eddies, enough that a stranger wouldn’t know which direction it flowed. And there was an odd tincture to the water, unusual for winter, somehow purplish and ruddy. The color had the oily maroon of the tallow smoke that bellowed from the stacks above Hormel’s rendering floors. The sight reminded me of a comet’s coma, of its sooty, smoking ice, and in the distance, standing before this meteor tail of a river, I made out a lone nude figure.
I trudged downhill toward the water, my boots leaving long tracks in the snow, but I knew already it must be Eggers. I stopped and looked around to see if other people inhabited this world. I searched for dorm lights turning on, for cars humming over the bridge trestle, even for the contrails of jets crossing the sky, but there was no one.
Out on the dock stood Eggers, half lit by dawn, the clump of his skins on the pier timbers beside him. I thought he might be doing some kind of experiment on exposure. Then he jumped into the water. A spray rose in the air, and a moment later came the muted sound of the splash. I waited for that great whoop of icy pain to follow, but it never arrived. Eggers executed a few strong strokes, swimming in place against the current, and then he grabbed a ladder, letting his body swing round in the pull of the river. I couldn’t make out the bar of soap he was using, but I could clearly see the milk of sudsy water that flowed away from him. Soap was a pretty clear violation of his nontechnology pact, but I understood his urge to scrub down. Killing that pig had made me feel dirty, too. I decided to leave Eggers to his own conscience. A morning of ice fishing with Farley, I hoped, would help me with mine.
The river trail is a path that originally linked USSD and Parkton College to Lewis and Clark Lake, a mile or so upstream, so students could shortcut up to swim and row. Throughout the summer after my mother left, I practically lived along the water’s edge: during the hot days, I’d race down this hill on blocks of ice, sometimes making it to the water, usually careening past couples who lay back in the high grass, shorts turning green as they lazily kissed and slapped mosquitoes from each other’s legs. Afternoons brought bowfishermen who stalked through the cattails along shore for the great carp who wallowed there, and groups of old people who pointed canes at particular birds before they all lifted their field glasses in unison. My mother would be coming home soon, I figured, and until then, I meant to run a little wild.
My mother would be coming home soon, I was told and told, and when that didn’t happen, Janis appeared, and the three of us would stroll down to the water’s edge after supper, Dad swinging a lantern whose mantles hissed the way. Photos from those days show my face fixed in a sour, sullen anticipation. The only thing that would lift my mood was when, in the evening, we bought a brick of fireworks and strolled down this path, waiting for the river to flash with sunset, after which we’d skip rockets off the water’s surface, bouncing Black Cats and Roman candles in knee-hops across the river, and occasionally depth-charging a floral mortar that would, before thumping up a smoky mist, flash yellow-gray below. Those were Janis’ favorites—that faintly glimpsed percussion, before the water shocked white, gave her more satisfaction than any spray of color.
But now, as I walked up the slushy path, everything seemed different. The trail gradually wandered from the river and rose with the levee toward the lake. Gone were elm trees that had lined the walk. Gone were the benches under them. Where was the spring I used to drink from, and the footbridge over it? The whole idea of a path seemed obsolete, meant for families that no longer existed.
Soon, the rush of the spillway was all you could hear, and to keep walkers from slipping into the outfall below, an epoxy-green handrail appeared, though now it was glazed with ice. I had almost climbed to the level of the lake, and there was now a view. From this height, the trail I was on looked more like a primitive
highway that connected a hog-processing plant, a prison, and an expanse of concrete that ran the last great North American river through the jackscrews of modernity. The irony was that these were the best spots to fish: the dam churned up all the rich nutrients from the bottom of the lake so that huge walleye and pike lurked just beyond the spillways, and downhill from Club Fed was the spot to cast for smallmouth bass, because the runoff from all the prison’s fancy fertilizers supported thick reed beds along the banks. And then there was Hormel, whose underwater pipes carried animal waste out into the middle of the Missouri. That’s where you caught channel catfish, otherworldly in size, some big and slick as stillborn calves.
But Farley and I were perch fishermen. The perch is a small fish that avoids the light and is only vulnerable in the delirium of winter cold, so you need to go out early, and run your lines deep. The perch weighs in around a pound, so there is no mythic “lunker” out there. In that way, fishing for them is a lot like spending your time flint-knapping Clovis points, the secret craft of which is long forgotten. Because no Clovis chipper has ever cried “Eureka” and no fisherman ever stuffed and mounted a perch, both endeavors foster a certain intimacy with failure. Fishing, anthropology, and indoor gardening seem to exist completely in this space between tedium and futility.
The climb became steeper, the trail more slippery. As I neared the concrete abutments, gusts of mist flashed over the cap-wall and raced down to frost my glasses. I stopped to puff my inhaler, and you could taste the ozone coming off the turbine generators. They used to repeat a story when I was a kid, a tale about a man who fell in the concrete while they were building the dam, and was entombed alive because for some reason they couldn’t stop pouring the cement. It was so-and-so’s father who fell in. No, someone else would say, it was so-and-so’s. I’m pretty sure the story was apocryphal, but when I looked at those deep, gray walls I always pictured that human bubble, caught mid-tumble within.
Looking down upon the town—the snow-plowed streets, a frozen Ferris wheel, the prison on a hill that would become my home—I became nostalgic, for everything, even the Hormel plant, whose furnace bricks would glow white-hot before the year was out. I can fall, as with the wave of a watch, this easily into the soupy stupor of reverie. I have come to believe, after a life of research and personal observation, that there are two fallacies to being human, one great paradox, and three crimes. The first crime against existence is hope. After that great savager of life, the second crime is nostalgia, generally a lesser offense. Anthropology will teach you there’s no such thing as the good old days, but hope—hope drives death’s getaway car.
I turned my back on this town and headed for the ice. I skirted the dam’s control room and climbed the cement stairs that led over the floodwall, then negotiated an embankment of stacked boulders—bucket out for balance—that led down to the Lewis and Clark Lake. I’ll tell you this: When the South Dakota wind kicks up, it’ll take your back and, with an elbow around your throat and heels in your kidney, it’ll ride you like a mule. But if that wind blows across miles of frozen lake, driving dry snow and blades of ice, it’ll first make a chump of you—whistling in your armpits, doing laps around your belly, snapping the back of your scrotum—before the real hurt begins: the dry cuts, tongue swell, lip peel, and eye freeze.
I set out across the ice, baby-stepping the slick spots and holding my arm up against sharp flurries of wind-driven snow that tail-chased my vision. Ahead was a village of wooden warming huts staggered along the ice, each strategically placed above what some fisherman believed must be a point of interest for fish on the lake bottom below. When I was young, you’d see men huddled around their holes as if warming themselves around campfires. Now you only saw fancy huts that men had towed out with snowmobiles, each one surrounded by a half-dozen ice holes with tilt-up fishing rigs. Through the wind, I made out my first glimpse of humanity, aside from Eggers, that morning: as I walked through the field of huts, men took turns emerging to scoop newly formed ice out of their holes, and in the flashes when their doors were open, I caught bits of country music and talk radio, saw men slouched toward the blue glow of televisions. One figure stared religiously into the pulsing screen of a fish finder.
Ahead, only one shadow sat exposed to the elements, and this was Farley Crow Weather, whom I’d known off and on nearly all my life, and who’d recently helped me settle my stepmother’s estate. There are only two things you need to know about Farley.
The first is that, in general, he is impervious to cold. It was a different story for me. The wind buffed my scalp to brass, then stropped my ears sharp. Walking amid the scramble of blowing snow, I dropped my head, observing that it was cold enough to freeze the ice clear and colorless—there was enough morning light now to illuminate clouds of lake algae glinting under the surface.
There used to be a fish out here called a white sauger, though they always looked pinkish to me. They loved the light and took little interest in people—if you walked clear patches of ice like this on a cold afternoon, you’d see their moony humps cruising the underside of the ice, occasionally stopping to pick at bits of food trapped in the crags beneath your feet. It was a dopey sort of fish, slow-moving, with fat cheeks and small lips, and when I was about eleven, a couple of jokers discovered that by lowering giant red lights through the ice they could net sauger by the bushel. In one season, they cleaned the lake out, and I haven’t heard of one since.
I was endlessly fascinated by this nightly scene, and I confess I wasn’t thinking about the fates of fish. Each night, after dinner, I’d bundle up and climb the flood levees to watch these fellows work. They coordinated all variety of pulleys and cords before lowering an immense assembly into the dark water, while I waited for the moment they hit the power.
I suppose there was a reason I was drawn to this sight. I was antsy for adulthood to begin. I hoped that when it did I would be dependent on no one, that the weak half of me—the half that needed, that felt something was always missing, that feared anything good could end, without notice or reason—would simply calve away. So I believed my father when he said my body would one day change, and after that, it was only a matter of following instincts. Life was something to squirm through until, easily and suddenly, a switch was thrown and a light came on. Sitting on a winter levee, I was never surprised by this moment. Instead, it felt both ancient and familiar: the entire lake would ignite a luminescent red, deep and glowing, crusted like lava, and it felt like proof of the primal scenes my science books had promised, as if I were witnessing the original cooling of the earth.
Farley hailed me. He was sitting on an upturned five-gallon bucket with an official fishing-derby entrant number pinned to his sleeve. There was an extra bucket sitting there. I’d brought my own bucket, and I wondered if he was expecting company.
“Hey, where ya been?” Farley asked in that accent of his. “Fish’re up.”
“Took the scenic route,” I told him. “How was your big date?”
“What, the other night? I don’t know what I was thinking, taking a court-appointed psychologist to dinner. That morning, when I had her on the stand, I thought we had some chemistry. I thought she was giving me more than testimony. But I spent half the night answering questions about my mother, and all I got in return was a dream interpretation.”
We sat side by side, staring at six holes, the derby limit, spread out before us. Each hole had a tilt-up reel that would raise a little flag when a fish was on the line. Every few minutes, someone would have to get up and ladle new ice out of the holes.
“You told her your dreams, on a first date?”
Farley shrugged. Below the promontory of his crew cut, his face was composed of subtle plateaus, capable of evoking a great range of emotion that you rarely saw. It wasn’t stoicism, but an acknowledgment that most of what people said was unimportant, and this endeared him to me. And, from time to time, amid some chitchat, the planes of his face would suddenly soften, and you’d realize you’d just sa
id something that mattered.
“Just the fish dream. I guess it wasn’t even a date, was how it turned out.”
Farley said this, then got up to clean holes. He scooped out the ice chips and dumped them on the icy mounds that formed next to each hole. It sounds like a routine chore, but Farley had his method. First, he’d place his feet wide and bend down, so his face was near the hole. He’d scoop, then peer deep into the water, scoop, then peer, as if he were removing a veil of less transparent water, skimming off the curds of the physical world, so he could behold a sweeter one below. This brings me to the second thing you need to know about Farley:
He believed the king of all fish lived at the bottom of our lake. This fish was small and either golden or orange, depending on the dream. It could speak, was full of wisdom, and would tell you your secret story, as long as you asked its permission before catching it. I didn’t quite know what to make of all this. It wasn’t a Native American thing, as far as I could tell. Farley said that when he was a boy his mother used to tell him the story of this fish, and after she left he started dreaming of it. I admit I like the idea that we have secret stories, that they might be revealed if we’re patient and polite. I asked Farley once, if we were living in another town, fishing on another lake, would his golden fish live there? After thinking about it, Farley said probably.
Farley moved to scoop out another hole, and I pulled my thermos out of the bucket. Unscrewing the metal lid made a dry squeak with each twist, sort of a haspy sound. Before I had it off, the crickets in Farley’s bait bucket were answering. They were inside a folded paper takeout carton, the kind with the wire handle you get at Chinese places, and for a moment, I played my thermos lid like an instrument, listening to them sing.
“Out of curiosity,” I said, “I was wondering, the other day, what are the laws on killing animals? You know about that stuff?”