The Fisherman

by John Langan

  The police, though, did not let go of questioning me that easily. I suppose it is fortunate for them that I was stuck in a hospital bed, taking one step forward, two back in my contest with an infection whose diagnosis changed every few days. I could have requested a lawyer, and had I been in more of my right mind at the outset, I might have. By the time this occurred to me, the detectives had pretty much lost interest in me as anything other than the fellow victim of a fishing mishap that had almost certainly claimed my buddy’s life. At some point when my sickness was still causing me to see Dan, Sophie, and the twins silhouetted on the curtain that hung around my bed, I realized that neither of the men who continued to ask me what had happened the morning Dan and I went fishing would—or could—believe what I was telling them. In my fever, it was an insight I resisted, but eventually, I began crafting a story that sounded like something they would, and could, accept. I sometimes wondered if they were aware of my ploy, but if so, they let slip no sign of it. Maybe they were grateful for what I was doing, fashioning them a story that would account for most of the details they had to reckon with.

  Much of my narrative of that morning, I left unchanged. As my pa used to say, If you have to concoct a lie, be sure to mix in as much of the truth as you can. I told the police about picking up Dan at his place in the pre-dawn hours, about stopping off at Herman’s Diner for breakfast, about the story Howard recounted to us after we informed him of our destination. Of course I didn’t believe Howard’s tale, I said, but it seemed to work to powerful effect on Dan, so that by the time we were at Dutchman’s Creek and fishing, he admitted that his reason for selecting this spot was what he took to be a hint from his grandfather’s fishing journal that he might meet his dead wife and children here. Didn’t I think this was, well, crazy? one of the cops asked. Yes, I said, but we were already at the creek. All I could do was try to reason with Dan, and when that failed and he set off to find his family upstream, follow him. The creek was in flood, the shore slippery; a couple of times, I almost fell in. Dan refused to wait for me. I lost my balance one time too many, and went into the stream. Right away, I struck my head on a rock, and that was about as far as my memories went. Frankly, I was surprised to be among the living. Did I have any guess as to what might’ve happened to Dan? the detectives asked. I did not. I had fallen into Dutchman’s Creek, but I had a few years on Dan. All I could say was, the last I’d seen of him, he was walking upstream.

  Useful though it might be, neither detective appeared especially happy with my version of events; whether because they sensed me holding back, or because their occupation had made them suspicious of everyone, I couldn’t say. How did I explain the cuts on my arm? they wanted to know. I didn’t, I said. I was in the water with all kinds of debris. Who knew what I’d run into? They asked what had happened to my fishing rod. I said I wished I knew. That rod had done well by me; the detectives would not have believed some of the fish I’d hooked on it. I supposed it had been carried away by the creek, or maybe by a fellow fisherman with an eye for value and flexible morals. The two of them did their best to determine how I’d felt about Dan, which was to say, whether I’d had the urge to murder him, but I could answer without any dissembling that Dan had been about the best friend I’d had, and the prospect of not seeing him again filled me with grief.

  And for a long time after that, I did mourn Dan. My bruises and cuts healed, the rib I’d cracked knit, and my immune system got the upper hand on the infection long enough for me to be discharged, finally, from the hospital. While I was recuperating at home, my manager stopped over to visit me; though his purpose had more to do with business than solicitude. Technically, I was already supposed to have decided if I wanted to take early retirement and the one-time payout being offered to incentivize it, or if I preferred to stay with the company and risk being laid off. Because of my accident, my boss had convinced his boss and those above him to grant me an extension. He never came out and said so, but there was no doubt in my mind that, were I not to choose to exit my job under my own steam, I would be shoved out the door. It’s funny: with all I’d been through, you would expect that this would have appeared, in comparison, of little consequence. Yet I was furious, so much so that I stood from the kitchen table, asked the young fellow to excuse me, and walked out into my front yard.

  I’ll say this to my manager’s credit, he let me go. My head abuzz, I stalked around the bungalow Marie and I had intended for a starter home. I don’t suppose my sentiments were any different from those of the thousands of others who’d been in this spot before me. This isn’t right. I’ve given years—decades—of my life to this business. I’ve done my part to make if the success it has been for so long. I’ve been genuinely proud of it, to count myself among its employees. Hell, I wouldn’t have met my wife without it. This isn’t fair.

  All of which was true, as far as it went, and none of which made the least bit of difference. I flirted with telling my boss I’d take my chances, only I knew there’d be no chance involved. Nor was there any point to remaining outside. Before I could second-guess myself, I returned inside, thanked my manager for his patience, and told him I’d decided to take the buyout. He seemed relieved.

  Like that, I was without my job, without my closest friend, and without the activity that had organized the most recent part of my life, and that I had anticipated structuring my retirement around. Gone fishin’, right? I tried to return to it, the following year, after a winter spent watching too much TV and eyeing the liquor cabinet. I outfitted myself with good gear, not quite the top of the line, but not too far removed from it. The first day of trout season, I pulled out of my driveway with the moon tucking itself under the horizon, headed for a stream on the other side of Frenchman’s Mountain where my luck had held more often than not. I was the first one at what I thought of as my spot; although a group of other, younger guys in a jeep with Pennsylvania plates parked behind me five minutes later. We exchanged nods as they walked past me sitting in the cab, sipping coffee from my travel mug, and we acknowledged one another again in the mid-afternoon, as they made their way back to their vehicle. I was in the driver’s seat, still, from which I’d moved only to relieve my bladder. During the sixty seconds I’d spent outside my truck, I had listened to the water splashing on the other side of a line of maples, and had thought that it would be very easy for me to stroll down to it for a look. Then I’d climbed into the cab and locked the door. The light was draining from the sky before I admitted defeat and started the engine.

  My next attempts were no more successful. The drive to and from whatever point on the map I’d selected presented no difficulty. To a certain extent, neither did sitting beside whatever stream or river I’d chosen. Any effort I made to approach the water for purposes of fishing sent me straight to the truck, do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars. There was no particular emotion associated with it, no upwelling of panic, or terror; my body simply refused to entertain, much less obey, my brain’s commands.

  The panic and terror were reserved for my dreams, which would replay and remix the images and actions of that Saturday for years to come. My lost fishing rod in my hands, I reeled in the large fish Marie had called a nymph; only, when I hauled it out of the water this time, its front end encased not a skull, but Dan’s head, his eyes gone, his mouth open in a bloody scream. A traffic light hanging amidst the trees overhead, Marie’s feet rose from the forest floor, her skin peeling off in ribbons and streamers, her hair streaming around her head like water grass. His face rigid with anger, Dan lifted a rock that through some trick of perspective was also the boulder to which the Fisherman was tied and brought it crashing down on my head. The vast eye of the Fisherman’s catch opened, and black water spilled from the great crack of its pupil in a flood. If I slept during the day, in the sunlight, I found the dreams weren’t quite as bad, so I spent much of each night channel surfing and paging through whatever books I’d checked out of the library, trying to keep myself awake until the
eastern sky began to forecast the sun’s arrival.

  When I wasn’t trapped in terrifying dreams of him, I grieved for Dan; though my grief, as you might expect, was a somewhat complicated affair. I fancied I understood the desperation that had led Dan to Dutchman’s Creek, and the Fisherman, and whatever the exact deal he’d struck with that being. I knew first-hand the exhilaration of finding your dearly departed—or a nearly perfect approximation—waiting for you, and I could appreciate what a motivation Sophie and the boys must have been for Dan. As bad a state as I’d witnessed him in at work—and as he’d confessed himself to be, circling his maelstrom—he must have felt as if he’d been thrown a life-preserver, pulled back from ruin by the very figures whose deaths had spun him towards it.

  The problem was, there must have been a moment when Dan had seen Sophie and the boys for what they were, had glimpsed their true faces, if only for a second. He must have realized that, even if these creatures were what remained of his wife and children, they had been changed, transformed by their passage out of this life into something else, something fundamentally different from him. He must have known that he was buying into a scenario that was, on some level, a lie, and he had been willing to sacrifice the reality of friendship, however mundane, in favor of that lie. I reckon I shouldn’t sound as surprised as I’m sure I do; the world’s full of folks who’ve done the same, if not in as dramatic a fashion. It’s just, you think all those hours sitting beside one another, watching the water of this stream or that slide by, waiting for a fish to take our bait, making small talk and occasionally bigger talk—you think all of that would count for something, that the fact of it would weigh against the fantasy that tempted him.

  But I guess it didn’t. Not enough, anyway. I missed Dan’s company, and the memory of his end filled me with horror, but no matter how kind or generous my recollections of Dan Drescher were, a certain bitterness flavored them. To be honest, the week Dan’s cousins were around to dispose of his house and possessions, I was nervous they might request a visit with me, which I didn’t see how I could refuse, but which I couldn’t imagine how I could go through with—at least, in a way that didn’t leave them confused and angry. Fortunately, the phone never rang.

  The years that unwound after this, I spent trying to occupy myself. Earlier in my life, if you’d asked me how I envisioned spending my retirement, my answer would have centered on Marie, the children I projected us having. Maybe we would drop in on them at their colleges, or tour some distant country, like India, or do one of those stereotypically old-people things, like board a cruise to Alaska. Later, after she was gone, I would have pictured post-employment taken up by fishing, with Dan, once he started to accompany me. Absent Marie, Dan, and fishing, I cast about for things to do. I visited family, met former co-workers from IBM out for a beer and a burger. I saw a lot of Frank Block when his wife left him for their dentist, but those meals were more therapy sessions for him than actual conversations, and they tapered off pretty soon after he took up with one of his neighbors. I did what I could to renew my interest in live music, driving into Huguenot or up to Woodstock to listen to whoever was playing the local clubs. Most of what I heard was earnest, if unexciting, but every now and again, a singer would lean into the mic, draw her fingers down the strings of her guitar, open her mouth, and I would lean forward in my chair, attentive. I hadn’t anticipated my retirement consisting of this much empty time to fill; though I chalked that up to my having entered it at least a decade ahead of schedule, and in pretty good health, too.

  As for everything I’d seen, heard, touched—everything I’d learned, or thought I’d learned—on that last fishing trip: most of the time, I didn’t dwell on it. It was there, the great mass of it was always there, wherever I was, whatever I was doing, but short of returning to Dutchman’s Creek to see if I could find my way back to the black ocean, there wasn’t much for me to do about it. On and off, I did a little bit of digging around, opening the family Bible, rereading portions of Genesis and Job, checking books on comparative mythology out of the library, but none of it added up to anything resembling sense. When the internet became widely available, I put it to work interpreting my experience, but the only site that looked as if it might be of use crashed each time I consulted it. The problem was, my desire to know did not exceed my desire to allow sleeping dogs to enjoy their dreams. Could be, if there had been any hope of such information serving a practical purpose, such as easing my nightmares, my sentiments might have been different. But it was hard to conceive how the things I’d witnessed could have been salved by anything I might learn about them, so in the end, I let my investigations, such as they were, stop.

  Something similar, a kind of parallel process, returned me to fishing. About three years ago, now, a young family moved into the house next to mine. Father, mother, and two girls, one fifteen, the other ten and every bit the outdoorswoman. Within a day or two of their arrival, I saw the younger girl, Sadie, striking out across her backyard, a fishing rod in one hand, a tacklebox in the other. A quarter-mile or so in back of both our properties, there’s a small stream that descends from Frenchman’s Mountain and winds its way to the Svartkil. I guessed this was Sadie’s destination, and while I wasn’t sure how wise it was for a child her age to go tramping off into the woods on her won, I was more sure how it would appear were her older male neighbor to run after her. I had a pair of binoculars Marie had used for bird watching in its case in the hall closet; I dug them out and used them to keep a discrete eye on Sadie for the couple of hours she spent at the stream.

  Later that night, I made sure to be out wheeling my garbage can to the end of the driveway when Sadie’s dad, Oliver, was setting out his trash. I’d already introduced myself to the family, offered what assistance was mine to give should they require it. I called hello to Oliver, asked him how he and his family were settling in. Pretty well, he answered, which gave me the opening I needed to remark that I thought I’d noted one of his daughters with her fishing rod out. He laughed and said I must’ve seen Sadie, on her way to check the stream behind the house. Oh, I said, did he fish, too? Not as much as he used to, Oliver said, but Sadie more than made up for him. His younger girl was obsessed with fishing. Is that so? I said. I used to do a little fishing, myself, from time to time. If he or his daughter had any questions as to what they might catch where, I’d be happy to share what I knew. Oliver thanked me, but with a reserve that suggested maybe I’d overplayed my hand.

  The next day, however, there was a knock on my front door, and when I opened it, I found Sadie and her mom, Rhona, standing there. Rhona was carrying a plate layered with freshly baked chocolate-chip cookies. She was so sorry to bother me, she said, but Sadie’s dad had told her I knew about fishing this area, and ever since, his daughter had been insisting she had to come over here and talk to me. Rhona would have called, only their phone hadn’t been turned on yet, and anyway, they didn’t have my number. She was hoping she could offer me a bribe of cookies to answer a couple of her daughter’s questions.

  Plus, you want to check out the old man who lives on his own next door, I thought but did not say. I took no umbrage at Rhona’s prudence, which struck me as entirely reasonable. Apologizing for the messiness of my house, which wasn’t that untidy, I held the door wide and invited them in. Sadie’s dad hadn’t been kidding about her passion for fishing. For the next hour and change, she alternated detailed questions as to what varieties of fish I’d hooked in the local waters with accounts of her exploits with the rod and reel in their previous home, in Missouri. Rhona let her daughter ramble on until we’d cleared about half the cookies from the plate, when she announced that it was time for her and Sadie to go, they still had a lot of unpacking to do. Sadie protested, but I told her to mind her ma. I wasn’t going anywhere; we could talk some more later on, once she and her family were properly settled.

  As far as these things go, it was a pleasant visit. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed our conversation. Trading stories
with Sadie about what we’d caught, and how, and where, it was as if I’d found my way back to the part of my life that had been closed off since that distant Saturday—to speaking about it, anyway. I don’t know if this’ll sound odd, but it was almost like what happened to me after Marie died. For the longest time, talking about her—thinking about her—was an exercise in agony, because I couldn’t separate my wife from the fact of her death. Then, gradually, that stopped being the case. My memory relaxed its grip on Marie’s death; although it felt more as if her dying loosened its hold on me. The myriad of experiences that had composed our time together became available as more than prompts to grief. Her mouth still full of a generous bite of her mother’s cookie, Sadie asked me what kind of catfish swam the waters around here. She intended to catch a catfish in every state in the union, if she could, and since she was living in New York, now, she supposed she should start finding out about its catfish population. Well, I said, the trout was my fish, but I’d pulled my fair share of bullhead and even one or two channel cats out of the Rondout and the Svartkil—and that was that; I was off; I had raced across ice I wasn’t sure would take my weight and it had held.