by Lamar Herrin
Not even a man like Big Howie Whalen could lay claim to all the fish in the sea—or a mountain lake.
So what did it “depend” on, then?
Naturally, what I decided to do with those whiskers of mine.
Oh, right, right. Of course. How did I forget about the “whiskers”?
Neatly trimmed—
You know, Jim, I’m sitting here trying to picture you with a full beard.
—by a professional barber, I continued. Hair nice and short, too. I’d gone for the haircut—the beard trim was an extra.
I assume you and Phil Hodge took it as a joke. Big Howie Whalen sounds like a man who loves the sound of his own bluster.
Until the next morning we did. A very tiresome joke. But then my aunt Rosalyn appeared in our bedroom, which had been Little Howie’s bedroom when he and I were boys, and stood at the end of my bed holding a tray with barbering instruments on it—a silver tray with different-sized scissors and razors and lathering brushes and a lathering bowl—and said, You know, Jimmy, Big Howie is serious, just like I told you he’d be. And for once in her life she didn’t laugh.
She didn’t plead her husband’s case, either. She stood there with that tray in her hands like a maid come to serve us breakfast in bed. She wore a sheepish smile, really a resigned and powerless look on her face, except, of course, a Whalen was never powerless.
So I laughed for her. I raised up on my elbows in bed and looked over at Phil Hodge, also up on an elbow, looking at Rosalyn and then looking at me, and I laughed. The sun was shining through the window, you could hear the birds, this was a room I’d slept in many times before, when a world of plenty awaited Little Howie and me out there, or so it had seemed.
I said, Rosalyn, what a way to wake a man up. Unless I’m still dreaming. Am I dreaming, Rosalyn?
And she said, Big Howie said you terrified little Ellie with that thing.
Really? Terrified her? And what did Ellie say?
Why don’t you just cut it off, Jimmy? You’ll look a whole lot better, you know you will, and then the two of you can go out and catch all those fish.
Terrified her?
Because if you don’t …
For the first time she glanced over at Phil Hodge. Her shoulders slumped, and for an instant I thought she was going to drop that tray. She shook her head. Then she sighed, one of those sighs in which you might hear a lifetime, or a single life-changing event along the way.
I should have gotten out of bed and held her. I played the big laughing incredulous card instead and told her not to worry, to leave the tray, I’d take care of it, and we’d get the day off to a fresh start.
Cautiously, as though it held fragile objects and not shaving cream and razors and scissors and a mortar-like lathering bowl, she placed the tray on what had once been her son’s boyhood desk, and when she’d left the room I lay back, arms extended, and said, Can you believe it?
Phil Hodge mulled the question.
That was my favorite aunt, I said.
Phil Hodge continued to mull the scene.
And I terrified my little niece. I struck terror in that poor child. Terror! I repeated, marveling at the word.
Finally Phil Hodge said, What are you going to do?
This from a man who’d been poised to jump into Castro’s Cuba and take out a Soviet missile that could have blown the world to kingdom come.
Which you didn’t know yet, Walter was quick, too quick, to remind me. Not until three hundred miles farther back north.
And I was quick to fire back, What would you have done, Walter? But Walter didn’t rise to the bait. He quietly clinked the bottle against my glass, then against his own.
Call Big Howie’s bluff? I said.
Is that what you told Phil Hodge? Walter asked, and I said no, that I lay there and worked out a whole scenario in my head in which the northern-looking Phil Hodge and I, a brazenly bearded turncoat, reeled in fish after fish in both of Big Howie’s lakes, so many fish in so shameless a fashion that the word began to get around, to the point that one of the town’s cronies actually felt compelled to step up to the man himself and, speaking not just personally, no, but for countless others as well, to say, Big Howie Whalen, what in Sam Hill is going on with those Yankee kinfolk of yours?
All Phil Hodge would say was, It’s your call. Don’t worry about me. I’m along for the ride.
But I did worry about him. We’d driven four hundred miles the preceding day. I had made certain promises, amounting to a boast. Come four hundred miles with me and I’ll show you a real land of plenty.
Oh, what the hell! I said. I can always grow the damn thing back. We can go up in the mountains, fish all we want, and never have to see Big Howie Whalen’s face again.
I roused myself and took the tray with me into the bathroom. Snip it as far down as you can with the scissors, I told myself, then lather up and shave the rest of it off. Here and there a few white hairs had sprouted in the brown, and I wasn’t even thirty years old. Shave them off too. But I looked at myself in the mirror, searching for some comic relief, and ended up shaking my head. Big Howie Whalen was a rich man and a bully, and in that moment my sole possession, all I had to my name, was my beard.
I walked back into the bedroom, returning the unused tray of instruments to my cousin’s boyhood desk.
I couldn’t, I told Phil Hodge. Came close. I made a glum little laugh.
And Phil Hodge said, So where do you think Little Howie Whalen stands in all this?
Wondered that myself, Walter Kidman said from his dark portion of the screen porch, where to counter a cool breeze coming in from the lake he continued to sip his bourbon. In that moment I heard a distant, waterborne wail, a little otherworldly. A loon? I said.
You know, Walter said, I never got where that expression “crazy as a loon” came from.
Lonely, I said.
It’ll go under, come up, call out again, and if no other loon answers, it’ll pack it up and go home alone.
Some very good advice, I said. Maybe it’s time to go to bed.
Give me a little Little Howie Whalen first, Walter replied. How many diapers can a man change?
Little Howie had had two children in quick succession. So two times however many diapers a toddler goes through in a day. And in the near offing he would have a third. Finally, a fourth. Fathering children as fast as he could catch bass, throwing each fish onto the floor of the boat before casting out for more? Whalens on top of Whalens, as if there were no end to the minnows of the world?
We dressed. When Aunt Rosalyn reappeared at the door of our room, I shook my head and handed her back the tray. Couldn’t do it, I said, smiling. Man’s gotta stand up for something, I went on, trying to raise a laugh. I’m going to call Big Howie’s bluff, Rosalyn.
She shook her head. It was as if I’d just robbed her of a lifetime’s worth of merriment, such a depleted expression she wore. But she was not on the verge of tears. She wanted to say, You just don’t know, you think you do but you don’t, at which point I would have said, Well, why have you been leading me on all these years? Why didn’t you say a day would come when there’d be an end to the handouts, no more?
And Little Howie? I said. What do you think he’ll say when he hears about all this?
Tired, more tired than angry or disappointed or confused—certainly not confused, for the terms of her life had never been clearer—my aunt set the tray of shaving instruments, surgical in their way, back on Little Howie’s desk. She said, He’s sitting at the breakfast table in the sunroom right now waiting for you. He’s dying to see you and meet your friend, too. He’ll tell you where the fish are biting and how to catch them.
Suddenly, I felt touched and relieved. I’d been sleeping in Little Howie’s boyhood bed, I’d smuggled in an outsider to sleep where I had slept as a boy. It wouldn’t be too much to say that momentarily I felt honored. Thank God I had Phil Hodge there to keep things in a sane perspective.
And so, Walter began,
and then paused to see if I’d resent anything resembling a takeover. And so you and Phil Hodge sat down at the breakfast table in the sunroom, with some palmettos, maybe, or some deep-notched banana-leafed plants, you took one look at your cousin, he looked at you in your beard, and he might as well have been Big Howie himself sitting there. Little Howie had nothing more to say.
Not exactly, I said.
No?
He was there to talk fishing.
And not to offer a little sympathy? This was the sixties, remember, with that famous generation gap, your generation and Little Howie’s versus his father’s. Some advice? Here’s how to please Big Howie and do an end run?
No, the part he was there to play was to make it even harder to give up all those fish.
Walter gave it a moment’s thought. He’d been right, we’d heard the loon call a second time and then no more. Either the loon had gone under and stayed there or it had gone home.
My cousin, who was being groomed to take over the plant, and would be a great success at it, welcomed Phil Hodge, gave me a grin, never appeared to see my beard past what the grin had registered, never even blinked, showed no sleep-deprived, diaper-changing wear and tear, remained the handsomest and healthiest man in town, and just as his town might come to be thought of as a prototype for other towns down there, so Little Howie Whalen himself might come to be regarded as the South’s exemplary young man, with or without a shotgun, rifle, fishing rod, or football in his hand.
He didn’t even mention the beard, his father, the ultimatum, none of that?
In the near dark of the screen porch I shook my head.
Nothing more personal? Walter persisted. Nothing that might have made you want to go up to him and say, Damn, Howie, look at yourself! You look great! Sorry it’s been so long.
It wasn’t that simple, I said. I had Phil Hodge to think about.
Phil Hodge had a front row seat. I can’t imagine Phil Hodge complaining.
We had just driven four hundred exhausting miles.
And Phil Hodge had all that kudzu to bask in.
Kudzu gets old fast. It browns out and looks like sludge mud after a flood.
So, let me get this right, Walter said. You sat there and had breakfast with your cousin and not once did you mention the beard and the ultimatum or any of that?
Only at the end. Up to then Little Howie probably thought it was too trivial to waste words on.
So fast forward, Walter said, and I said at the end I did tell Little Howie what was going on, but I didn’t call him Little Howie, not with Phil Hodge sitting there. I said, You know all of this is kind of beside the point, because if I don’t cut off these whiskers of mine, Big Howie’s not going to let us fish in his lakes. I meant to say, use his boats and his boat-houses and his tackle, and sleep in his beds, all of that, but Little Howie knew what I meant.
If I’ve been hearing you correctly, Walter interjected, what you really meant was relive your boyhood memories and through Phil Hodge pass them on north.
I suppose so, although it never seemed as … contrived as that.
Or as childish? Hold on to something you should have let go long before? And this friend of your childhood—this cousin of plenty—what did he do?
Little Howie? He just chuckled and shook his head.
He didn’t take any of it seriously? Those were the sixties, the riots, the civil rights marches, the Vietnam War.
The reason Howie didn’t mention the beard was probably because he considered it as good as gone. Why not indulge Big Howie? Every time you did, Big Howie became a bigger and bigger joke and slipped that much farther back into the past.
He didn’t say that?
No, for Little Howie that beard didn’t amount to any more than a frown. Don’t trouble yourself. Change it to a smile and go out and catch fish. You could see why he made such a good businessman.
Did he?
Before it was over he was doing business in Europe and Japan, and he opened plants in the Caribbean.
Outsourcing?
True, but expanding in his own town, too. He created a line of custom-made clothing that became his pride. He’d begun to take orders from all over the world.
And all this for not saying no to his father …
I should have said to Walter, No, for learning how to play his father like a fish. For knowing when to give him line and let him wallop the water and make a big splash and when to reel him in closer to the current day.
I said instead, It’s much more complicated than that. Big and Little Howie were stages along the way. There was something like a script—
But the long and the short of it was that Little Howie cut the line and let you sink.
If you want to see it that way, I said. And then Little Howie got up and walked off into a spring morning when half the world was in flower, and Phil Hodge and I sat there in the sunroom and watched his car wind up the drive. You hate to see someone like that disappear into a spring morning when you’ve got to stay inside.
With a mess on your hands.
It was as if Big Howie and Aunt Rosalyn and even little Ellie were waiting in the wings. I can only guess they’d held off so that Little Howie could work his magic before they stepped in. Back at the breakfast table Phil Hodge had said, So that was the master of the jumps, and I’d said, Among many other things. You know, Phil Hodge went on, he could have given you a hand with his father. He could have vouched for you. Could have said, In spite of his beard, our cousin Jim is no commie infiltrator, no drug-taking free-love advocate, no violator of everything that moves. No hippie hell-raiser, no Vietcong sympathizer …
Phil Hodge said all that? He’s barely uttered a word.
He has a story to tell, I said. Maybe he was just warming up.
That, Walter didn’t tire of reminding me, was later, after all those fish got his juices flowing.
So it was.
Did you ever ask Phil Hodge straight out, Do you want to stay here and fight it out or do you want to go back?
No, not exactly in those terms.
So, he’s got to be getting tired of this … what? “Predictable” was one of your words, Jim, which may be putting it mildly.
I saw where I’d gone wrong. Two Yankees, I’d invited Walter Kidman to view things through Phil Hodge’s eyes and, as right-minded as I viewed him to be, Walter was a much more disputatious man than the laconic Phil Hodge. The story was not done—not by a long shot. But the loon had gone home and Walter’s interest was wearing thin. Or the bourbon had ceased to do its job.
And neither Walter Kidman nor Phil Hodge was family. Certain family stories never got old.
So, picking up the pace, I told Walter that no sooner had Little Howie’s car—not a black Cadillac, which for all I knew might have been out of production by then—disappeared up the drive than Big Howie, Aunt Rosalyn, and little Ellie, whom I’d terrified—or was it traumatized?—walked into the sunroom. Big Howie sat down across from me, took a quick look at the beard and shook his head. Quickly I shook mine. Can’t do it, Big Howie, I said. It wouldn’t take much, Jimmy, Big Howie replied. I wouldn’t know how to start, I claimed. What if I went uptown to the barbershop and had them do it there? Big Howie shook his head again. No, we don’t want that. A professional, I insisted, who knows what he’s doing. I looked Big Howie in the small, flesh-embedded eye. I had to remember that, on his own terms, no one had been more generous. Don’t they have experience uptown cutting off beards? I asked before answering myself, No, I don’t guess so, hard to see how they would. Maybe, I tried a different tack, we should head on south and look for another lake. Big Howie sat back and smiled. Wouldn’t recommend that either.
Turn around and head back north?
Probably a better bet.
Even though the fish are bigger down here?
Even though.
We sat and looked across the table at each other. This was not an unfamiliar face-off, only more consequential, and I hoped Phil Hodge was taking no
te. I looked at Aunt Rosalyn, who many years ago had taken her vow and with a heavy heart was now standing by her man. Little Ellie was on guard but very alert, and later, I knew, I would want to know just how much of this she remembered. Terrified? Traumatized? I drew a deep breath and entertained the thought that this was the moment when the branch of the family tree I occupied was about to crack. Then I played a hole card, which until that moment I hadn’t realized I’d been holding.
A hole card? Walter said. It sounds to me like you were playing with a stacked deck.
I think I’ll call Esther, I announced to the table at large, and see what she has to say about all this.
I heard Aunt Rosalyn draw a breath but not release it. Big Howie seemed to set his jaw and harden his jowls. Ellie took a cautious step forward.
I said to my littlest cousin by far, My mother, your aunt Esther, has always been a little bossy, but we still love her. I turned to my youngest aunt. Don’t we, Rosalyn? She’d hate to be left out of something like this.
To his credit, Big Howie barely hesitated before setting a phone on the breakfast table, lifting the receiver, checking for a dial tone, then moving it across the table to me.
Walter said, That’s a poker play if I ever heard of one. I see a man calling your bluff. And I see a man moving his chips to the center of the table. All in.
Big Howie, I said, was never “all in.”
A black Cadillac held in reserve?
My mother, who could have gotten mad at me for failing to inform her I was making a trip south, held her fire until she had Big Howie on the phone. It wasn’t hard to imagine her face. Its outstanding feature was her widely set blue eyes. So widely set that whichever way you feinted in an argument with her, you couldn’t escape the feeling you’d been outflanked.
Big Howie’s only point, which he didn’t tire of repeating, was that, sorry, Esther, they just didn’t do that the sort of thing in his town. Flank him and outflank him again, Big Howie was a fortress unto himself.
I repeat, Walter said: It’s a bluff.
My mother asked to speak again to me. Jim, why in the world did you wear that thing over there? What are you growing a beard for in the first place? I thought you had better sense.
