The Shell Collector

by Anthony Doerr

  Belle has reclaimed her hands and is pointing somewhere far off, somewhere over the horizon. Home, she signs. You are going home.

  A TANGLE BY THE RAPID RIVER

  Mulligan gathers his things: his fly rod, a coffee-browned thermos, Ziplocs plumped with potato sticks, deer jerky, ginger-snaps, extra socks in a knapsack. A fly box from the basement. Breakfast: sausage sizzled in oil, two slabs of pumpernickel slathered with margarine, coffee in a chipped mug. He chews in the worn door frame between the kitchen and bedroom and watches his wife sleep. Her bulk rounded under blankets. Her gray undergarments on the wooden chair. Ever since their first night she has slept like this, like an ox. Since that fine and giddy wedding night, when he held her long after she slept, and told her things and she did not wake up. He told her once that it was as if some huntsman with his hounds comes to drag her into the night and hold her until dawn. Some wraithy night huntsman with slaverous hounds on tethers. Mulligan says her name. She sleeps her hard vacant sleep. Before he leaves he stokes the fire.

  In the lane, above the walnut trees, the moon floats halved and white, a cold-bleached fossil. Shreds of cloud scud out to sea. Overnight, it seems, autumn was ridden out of the trees, the branches stripped, the yard buried under leaves. Mulligan chews a stalk of brown grass, unlocks the frosty truck cab. This, he thinks, might as well be winter: stony skies, crows tearing apart old trees, the ravening questions of owls, the round faces of ponds filmed with ice. Soon the trout and salmon will retreat to deepest pools and hang over the pebbled bottoms, motionless, unblinking, while the river kinks in ice-bound channels and freezes above them. Mulligan will retreat too, putter in his basement, tie flies by lamplight.

  The truck moves sluggishly, the fuel thick, the high beams yellow and feeble. The highway is wet and shadowed. The long slow splashing and headlight glare and the wet severed trunks on the bed of a lumber truck grinding up the highway are the only things about, and a family of starlings, wing to wing on a split rail. One of them on one leg. Their eyes calm in the sweep of headlights.

  At Weatherbee’s Convenience by four-thirty, Mulligan stands in the harlequin light amid stacked glossies, shelved candy, cigarette packs, lotto tickets in silver rolls, discount milk signs. Little bells ribboned to the door jingle. The slushee machine makes its slow pink churn. He fills his thermos with Weatherbee’s stale coffee, sets a newspaper and coins on the counter where Weatherbee sleeps on his elbows.

  Weatherbee blinks, dry-eyed, coming back from a long way off.

  You?

  Mulligan nods.

  Like a goddamn alarm clock.

  When you get to be my age, Mulligan says, sleep is not so different from being awake. You just kind of shut your eyes and you’re there.

  Weatherbee grinds his palms into his eyes. Fishing the Rapid again?

  Thought I’d try.

  You go up there every day. With a newspaper and a coffee.

  Mulligan shrugs, his eyes already out the door. I don’t know. Most every day. I’m going today.

  Weatherbee wipes the counter and yawns. I thought retirement was for sleeping, he says. The door levers shut behind Mulligan.

  The post office is dark, the windows shut, one short light, a fragile filament cast across rows of brass mailboxes. A lumber truck splashes down the highway. Mulligan walks to a post box, unlocks it and peers inside. One letter. Thick paper, and smooth. He slips it into his shirt pocket. From a zippered pocket in his jacket he takes another letter, addressed with his own tiny printing. He sets this letter in the post box, closes it and goes out.

  He points the truck into the hills, the flanks of naked tree slopes, the fallen leaves beginning their slow slide into the earth, a few stars fading behind ropes of cloud. The pocked and mudded logging roads—four unmarked turns, fording a stone-choked creek and the truck gurgling, warming, pressing over slick clay, beneath the clear-cut hillsides, stacks of limbless birch in bound rolls on the road flanks and hacked from the dim tangle of woods, savage mudferns and rust-stalked blackberry—end in a small clay clearing, where the noses of granite boulders peek from the earth, where fishermen park. His is the first truck.

  He pulls on his waders, fits his rod and reel, and leans it against the truckcab. He stuffs his knapsack with the Ziplocked jerky, gingersnaps, potato sticks, extra socks, and the newspaper. He zips the fly box into his vest, pulls a wool cap over his head. Then he sits a moment, breathes, and his breath fogs the windshield. A cloud stretches over the moon.

  His fingers find the letter in his shirt pocket, the thick paper, the smooth envelope. He puts on his reading glasses, opens the letter, finds a flattened flower. In the stale cablight, the ignition buzzing, he reads the round cursive:

  Dearest Mulligan,

  It could hardly be more confusing. You say you feel the same way as I, yet you glide along with your life, your fishing—and her—as if all was well and good and this were normal. But all is not well! This secrecy wears at me. These letters we trade in a post office box, the harried days when she thinks you are fishing, when half of you is at the river anyway, these are not enough, not nearly enough. I am addicted to you, I think. Maybe I am greedy, maybe wanting you all for myself is selfish. Isn’t love real, Mully, or was that a lie, too?

  Oh, I don’t know, maybe I will wait forever, you do make me happy. You and your quiet shyness. Your thoughtfulness. I am feeling so poorly and there was only your letter that said you are really going to the river today and now I think I know what longing truly is. My body aches. It is time you made a choice.

  P.S. If you married me and left to go fishing, would you really go fishing?

  He folds the flower into the card and the card back into the envelope and slides the envelope into the newspaper inside his pack and locks the truck. He walks to the river then, plunging along the mazed and moss-bottomed trail through thickets, weeds, brambles, fungus-wrapped trunks, down a sodden ravine where the earth sucks at his boots and flings round drops of mud onto his wader legs. The carpet of the forest is clotted with leaves; more sail down as he steps. There is rhythm to it: the tip of his fly rod jouncing, his boots stepping, spent leaves drifting, the river’s whisper from the depths of the woods.

  Mulligan plunges through a last thicket. On the bank, beside the Rapid River pouring along, sleek and glazed and black, he feels an old feeling, the irresistible tug of moving water and his blood trundling with it and a kind of joy splits his lips. He stands on the bank, his breath tossing clouds, and by penlight reads the letter again, fingers its edges, slides it back inside the folded newspaper. The clouds have piled up in the west, and soon the last stars are gone. The blotted moon offers a film of light. He ties a Hairwing to his tippet, wades into the river and fishes.

  Before long he sees the penlights of other fishers, upstream, over his right shoulder, but it is not so hard to pretend he is alone. With numb fingers he keeps his line tailored so that his fly does not skate or slide but simply drifts and he runs his fly where few fishermen can.

  Daybreak comes silently and simply with no more than a thin hem of pink and he is a little disappointed in it, because there is none of the glory of an August sunrise and soon the light around him is gray and day is begun. The tea-colored river purls around his waders, thick and clingy, the way river water gets when it is cold. Upstream the other fishers work their stretches of river, roll-casting to the opposite bank, a bearded man with a cigarette on his lip and another farther up.

  But there is plenty of water, Mulligan thinks, and plenty of fish. He works carefully downstream, takes his time, casts to each pool, runs his fly around every boulder, searches under branches and in eddies across the river. He knows where every golden and weeded stone is placed and how the river threads over it.

  But he doesn’t. There are places he doesn’t know, new places, innumerable tiny changes: a clot of submerged timber, a place where the river has undercut the bank and caved it. Clumps of leaves in several spots where he thought the water ran faster. He has not
been here in weeks and it hurts him to know the river has poured on without him.

  Around eleven the clouds thin slightly, and the sun tracking in its blue and windy space angles in weakly and lights the hills and muddy clear-cut to the east. The wind heaves; the birches rattle. Mulligan steps numb-legged out of the river and kicks each foot to warm it. He opens his knapsack and pours himself some of Weatherbee’s coffee. He chews a gingersnap awhile, but it is dry and the coffee is much better. He unfolds his newspaper and sits against the lichened trunk of a birch to read, but instead sits and feels the coffee warm his stomach and watches yellow leaves shuttle downriver and makes wagers with himself about which leaves will pass him first and which will be trapped in eddy or snag. It brings him pleasure when the river funnels a leaf well and quickly, delivering it downstream without complication. Everything runs into the river, he thinks. Not just the leaves, but beetle corpses and heron bones and expired worms. Everything that starts on the hills eventually slides into the river. And the river spills it into the sea. Only the fish do it backward and he loves them for it.

  He shivers a bit. The air is thin, cold, hard to breathe. It smells like beaten tin, like snow. It is early for snow and it makes him uneasy. He sits against the tree and crosses his wrists in his lap. A swallowtail, born too late, alights frantically on a thistle and pauses, flexing its wings. Mulligan blows gently and it flies, wandering dangerously low over the river, and is gone.

  There are the tiny splashes and sucks of the river and he drifts into a shallow kind of sleep. The river threads over the stones and the wind breathes through the moss-mantled branches and the clouds skate over the hills in heaps. In his sleep he does not dream but on the underside of his eyelids he sees his wife, fisting bread dough and planting it in a buttered bowl. His wife bends, and he sees her wide back, her rotten ankles, her floured wrists. She covers the dough with a towel so it can plump.

  When Mulligan looks up two people are standing over him.

  Hey, they say. How is it, Mully?

  Nothing yet. I can see them. Mostly undercuts. They aren’t eating a whole lot. Maybe it’s too cold.

  The others nod. One is the bearded man with the cigarette. He looks into the river, squints, scratches his cheek. The other is a woman, thick and with a hard look to her. She is the niece of Mulligan’s wife. A woman who fishes, hunts and gambles.

  No maybes about it, she says. Her voice is loud and it makes Mulligan wince, a voice like that echoing along the river. She squats beside him, pries open one of his Ziplocs and tears herself a sinewy strip of jerky. My damn feet are froze.

  The bearded man nods. Frost this morning, he adds. Snow tonight.

  The niece chews jerky, runs her big-pupiled eyes over his things.

  Did you see the swallowtail? Mulligan asks.

  Swallowtail?

  The butterfly. I saw a swallowtail.

  The bearded man gives the niece a look.

  How’s my aunt? the niece barks. There is jerky in her teeth.

  Mulligan wants to be rid of them. Well, he says. Fine.

  The niece grabs the bag of gingersnaps. And you, Mully? How’s retirement?

  Fine. Fine and good.

  I thought I’d see you here every day. You fishing somewhere else? Or my aunt putting you to work?

  I don’t know.

  You’re a softie, Mully, she says. Always have been.

  You can have the cookies. If you want.

  Her eyes fix him. The bearded one lights a cigarette. You don’t want them? she asks. Her hand roots in the bag.

  Mulligan shakes his head, looks down at his vest, runs a zipper on a pouch up and down. He wishes hard that they would leave him. The niece takes up the newspaper, folds a page back and says, Just need to see about the races. Mulligan is cold. They didn’t believe him about the butterfly but he saw it.

  Take that too, he says.

  I just need to look for one second.

  Take it. I’m not gonna read it. Mulligan wishes they would leave. It was nice sitting against the birch trunk and he does not like the smell of cigarettes or the loudness of the niece’s voice.

  We’ll probably try below Middle Dam, the bearded man says. Mulligan nods, will not meet their eyes. The niece stands, rubs her palms along the thighs of her waders, then folds the newspaper into a rough square and wedges it under her arm.

  Through half-chewed gingersnaps she spits, We’ll holler if we get something.

  Okay.

  Something worth hollering about.

  All right.

  The bearded fisherman exhales smoke and gives a wave as they leave, ducking along the trail downstream, their boots shaking the moss knitted over the undercut roots of trees. Riddance, Mulligan faintly mumbles. He sits against the tree and sips his coffee, which has gone cold. He feels a bit unsteady. He thinks he can maybe feel the entire planet making its slow turn, and the roots of trees scrabbling around bedrock, and the clouds curling over the hills. Finally he takes his rod and wades back in.

  It is afternoon, three or four, and he has been casting awhile, alone except for a pair of ravens who sweep and shout over the trees, when he gets his first fish. It is a sluggish strike, on a beaded nymph Mulligan had run through the same gravel pool ten times or more. The fish fights for its life, makes one jump and then Mulligan nets it, wets his hand and holds it. A red-flecked salmon, male, with a mean blunted head, black-eyed. The lower jaw beginning to develop its breeding hook. Its body jackknifes in his hand.

  Mulligan holds it in the river, strokes its flanks and releases it. The fish sinks, turns over, then bursts away. Mulligan checks his knot and feels the energy run out of him, that tightness that always comes when he has a fish. It is not until he begins to cast again that he remembers, with a jolt, the letter tucked into the newspaper that he no longer has.

  He splashes onto the rocks and the river pours off his waders and with trembling hands he snatches his knapsack and begins to stumble-run along the tangled riverbank. The blood is all out of his face. His feet are numb and they betray him, lifting too slowly over roots, thudding into fallen and rotten logs. It is like running with weights lashed to his ankles. He scrambles into the ravine and falls; his fists disappear in black mud. He struggles to his feet but wells of peat clutch his boots. Brambles grab for his waders. Seed thistles explode across his shins. He runs up the trail and the deep wood grasps at him, turns on him, fattens his terror, the tiny and once-lovely kingdoms now black and terrible, thin needles slipped through his ribs.

  The path unspools much too slowly. His fly rod snags on brambles, the fly line is suddenly, immediately, miserably tangled, how do such things happen, how do such horrific tangles suddenly emerge from thin straight lines? He stops and blood howls in his ears. He pulls at his reel, but the line only cinches down more tightly and it seems the line is wrapped around an entire snarl of blackberry; plump thorns like the teeth of sharks hold it fast.

  His shoulders slump. He squints ahead into the inscrutable thicket. Then he sits in the cold mud of the narrow fishermen’s trail and works at the line, easing it free of barbs one by one. The heaving of his rib cage slows. The line begins to come free, loop by loop. All around him orange and yellow leaves spiral to earth.

  When the line is untangled he spools it back onto his reel. He looks up through the branches at the clouded sky a long time. There is the sounding of the river, behind him, clucking and murmuring, voicing old notes. The front of his throat is white and stretched; his whiskers are silver.

  Finally he wheels and plods back to the river. The first snowflakes sink from the sky and aim for the bronze coils of the Rapid River.

  It is well after dark and snow sifts through the thickets and Mulligan stands half frozen in the river and fishes in the feathered darkness. His hands and feet are numb; his back stings from ceaseless casting. Delicate flakes expire on the sliding water. He fishes on.

  It is near midnight and the boughs sag from the weight of snow, and flakes fall still when a
fish takes his fly and charges downstream, hauling from the reel in singing bursts and making it very clear who is in charge. Soon it runs the line to the backing. The blood in Mulligan’s chest waxes, heats. His reel screams. The fish leaps once, twice, five times, a dim bullet twisting a yard above the river, beautiful, terrible, and then it is around a shallow bend and Mulligan can only hear it thrashing, panicking, yanking out the backing by the yard, its splashing mingled with the splashing of the river and the wind in the trees and the luminous descent of snow. The tide of blood in Mulligan’s chest mounts and mounts until it seems he must burst.

  The fish runs all the backing from the reel. Mulligan fumbles for the line with his bloodless fingers; the fish races on. The backing comes free, it was not tied on—who would think a fish could run out sixty yards of backing?—and the line slips through the guides on Mulligan’s rod and he lunges for it and catches it between his palms, the line free of the rod altogether and the fish swimming far downriver pulls at the line between Mulligan’s hands and he can feel the fish yard down against its tether, rise up and leap and smack the water, and the line slips through his hands and the fish breaks free and Mulligan is left, hands outstretched, a penitent, an imploring gesture.

  The fly line floats slack upon the water. He shivers. His fly rod and emptied reel rest nose down in the gravel. The mute indifference of the woods is all around him. There is only the ceaseless suck of flowing water where the river glides endlessly through the forest and the snow, makes its faintest sliding whispers.

  Mkondo

  [mkondo, noun. Current, flow, rush, passage, run, e.g., of water in a river or poured on the ground; of air through a door or window, i.e., a draft; of the wake of a ship, a track, the run of an animal.]