by Lamar Herrin
I told her it was very neatly trimmed. I asked her if she wanted to speak to Phil Hodge to get an impartial outsider’s opinion. My mother didn’t know who Phil Hodge was, and I couldn’t tell her he’d been a paratrooper ready to jump into Castro’s Cuba because I didn’t know that yet. She asked to speak to her youngest sister.
Three-quarters, say, of Aunt Rosalyn’s expression was resigned. The remaining quarter was sporting, but there were times when Rosalyn did not feel entirely at ease marshaling all that Whalen wealth and prestige, so that her laugh, instead of rising from the mainspring of her being, could come out muddy and forced.
Finally I asked for the phone back. My mother said, I can’t understand why you’d want to stay there anyway. Then she asked if her sister and brother-in-law had been drinking, and I reminded her that they had given that up back before Ellie was born. By that time, my mother scoffed, they’d already drunk enough for a lifetime. They might still be drunk. She said, Why don’t you just come here? I asked if she’d forgotten I had this friend with me, and she said, Why don’t both of you come? I asked her if she could supply some spinning rods, some lures, some good strong line, a bass boat, an abundance of minnows, largemouth bass with mouths so large they could consume—and she cut me off. You need to get out of there, Jimmy. I wouldn’t stay another minute with that blowhard brother-in-law of mine. Remind my spoiled little sister I tried to talk her out of marrying him, and please tell your friend that not everyone in the family is like that. And cut off your beard. That may be the only thing Big Howie’s been right about in years.
I hung up the phone and pushed it back across the breakfast table toward Big Howie. I nodded for the high quality of his gamesmanship. Smiling, I said, Your sister-in-law said you were wrong about everything and have been ever since you married her kid sister, but you were right about one thing: I should cut off my beard.
Big Howie didn’t let a flicker of satisfaction cross his face. He asked his wife to bring me that tray of shaving utensils again.
I asked little Ellie if she wanted to stroke my beard one last time, the way kissing cousins are known to do.
She giggled and half hid behind her mother. Big Howie didn’t lose his composure, although I sensed that Phil Hodge thought some sort of confrontation was imminent. Phil Hodge had moved up beside me to let Big Howie know he had an ex-paratrooper to deal with now, one who had some fighting spirit left in him, Castro having escaped him with a beard considerably shaggier than mine—
Except. Walter didn’t have to say it, and he did me the courtesy of stopping short.
Duly noted, I said.
Walter sighed, deeply.
Noted again.
I continued. Phil Hodge un-bristled, and Big Howie let my very unseemly invitation to little Ellie pass. Big Howie announced he was off to the plant to join his son. If I ever got around to doing the necessary barbering, Phil Hodge and I could find him in his office where, in addition to getting the fishing plans straight, he’d be pleased to load us down with shirts and pants for the year ahead. He would be in his element and, our arms loaded with free merchandise, we would be in ours.
I asked him for a map of the area.
Aunt Rosalyn knew where the maps were kept, and Big Howie, offering no objection, didn’t even have to raise a finger or tilt his head.
With the map spread out on the table, little Ellie crowded in close, and her father didn’t motion his daughter away. I leaned in, too. Big Howie, freshly barbered with an aftershave lotion as sharp as smelling salts, placed the tip of an index finger over his hometown. The finger was fat and the fingernail half swallowed. But the nail was neatly trimmed. He said, We are right here, and then I added my fingertip to his and traced a tentative route south, where thin little squiggles of blue indicated that other streams had been dammed where other bass and minnows might have gathered to feed and be fed on. Big Howie waited until my finger had come to a stop, near a town called Barston, before moving his larger finger back north and dragging mine with it in the undertow. We went right by the lake with the twelve-hundred-mile shoreline and emerged in a state that certain politicians and their pollsters might classify as swing. And, indeed, there was a sizable squiggle there, bloated in the midsection. Big Howie thumped it with his fingertip three times. He’d heard some fellows had been catching fish up there, he said.
The road north was the road we’d come south on. I looked at my aunt Rosalyn, who’d gone missing behind an expression of she’d-told-me-so subservience, and when was I going to learn? Reverting to small talk, she asked, What in the world is Esther up to now, Jimmy? We really didn’t get a chance to exchange a word.
I shook my head. You know Esther, I said. All politics is local, and she’s in it up to her neck.
Not running for office, is she?
My mother was the most up-front behind-the-scenes power I knew—but local, at most countywide. She knew where her interests lay. Contrary to what she would now profess, she had once seen to it that her kid sister was thrown into Howie Whalen’s arms, even though she might have risked her own son’s welfare in the process. In effect, bartering her son for future Whalen wealth and prestige.
What? What’s that? Say that again, Walter said.
Another story, I said, but back before I can be trusted to give you a reliable account.
Let’s hear it. You, the precious little boy, a cupid whether you knew it or not, in exchange for a Big Howie Whalen?
Don’t you want to hear how this story ends first?
I assume it already has. Big Howie goes off to the plant although it’s Little Howie who is pretty much running the show. Aunt Rosalyn sits out under her cloud until the sun comes out. Little Ellie doesn’t forget, not entirely. When she’s a grown woman, she’ll stroke a man’s beard and remember yours and the time you stood toe to toe with her father, whom she will not have ceased to adore. And you and Phil Hodge will get the last laugh. A three-pound smallmouth—pound for pound the best freshwater fighting fish in the world, or so I’ve been told.
We drove north, out of Whalen country and into another state, a nice scenic two-lane road back then. The kudzu was still a sight to behold. And thanks to the kudzu, anything not fit to be seen wasn’t. We came to the crest of a hill. Down below lay a valley, which the road dipped in and out of. A police cruiser was parked down there. We had an excellent view. We watched as the patrolman slowed down the two cars preceding ours, waving both through. Us he stopped. A state highway patrolman—Which state, you ask? Did it matter? The sunglasses, the broad-brimmed hat, the square jaw, the thin-lipped mouth, the freshly shaved beard. The all-season weatheredness. With due deliberation the patrolman noted my beard and maybe Phil Hodge’s Yankee leanness of countenance. Where you boys from? We told him. Where you off to? Going back home. Plan to stop on the way, maybe do a little fishing? We said, Now, there’s an idea. The patrolman smiled and held it for a moment longer than you’d expect him to, just in case he decided to take it back. We smiled, too. Then he waved us through without inviting us—Y’hear—to come back, but an irreproachable pro nonetheless. We weren’t halfway up the hill when we saw him pull a U-turn and drive his cruiser back the other way, up his half of the valley and out of sight. To make his report.
You think so?
No doubt.
A state away? How many miles?
Doesn’t matter. Big Howie Whalen carried his weight.
Walter emitted a groaning, throat-clearing sound, as if a load had momentarily been lifted from his shoulders before being lowered back onto them. We were tired and it was getting late. The bourbon was half gone. Walter made an attempt to rise, only to fall back in a crackling of wicker. The crackling seemed to wake him up.
You know, Jim, he said, when all is said and done, that’s pretty much a shaggy dog story.
Befitting a beard, I said.
Neatly trimmed. You must have seen it all coming, and you must have seen the ending too.
If we did, I allowed, we didn’t fo
resee that stringerful of fish. I mean, we were casting up into some heavy brush and, that I remember, we never got hung. The bass tried to get back up in there after we’d hooked them, of course, but not one of them made it. One of those days.
Did you ever let Big Howie know?
Now that you mention it, I don’t think we told anybody.
I laughed under my breath. Settled back myself. Held out my glass, which Walter met with a precise clink, a perfectly struck note, which the night carried through to the end. I thought of that neighbor’s cello as it had lingered. Then of the bass we’d caught on that extraordinary day years after Phil Hodge had not jumped into Cuba. Muscle memory, the ratcheting reel, the bass dragging out line, but slowly, slowly giving way. Pull up. Lower the rod tip as you reel in. Pull up again. No thrashing, no minnows jumping. The bass might jump, flashing that forest green stripe they wore from gills to tail, but the bass were coming home. We didn’t lose a one.
My muscle memory. And Phil Hodge’s, wherever he might be. Not Walter Kidman’s, of course.
I said, Walter, I want to make it up to you—and I truly did, even though a small voice in my head advised me to call it a night—forcing you to sit through a shaggy dog story like that.
A short-haired dog story?
Well, as a matter of fact, that’s exactly what I want to tell you. How did you guess? A short-haired dog story.
Maybe when you were just a toddler, fresh out of diapers, but maybe not, and Big Howie—
Who was not so big then.
—came courting.
But you’ll have to cut me some slack. This goes way back, and I’m feeling my way.
And your mother was willing to do some fishing herself, and you, you little angel, were the bait.
No, Rosalyn was the bait, and the short-haired dog’s name was Bing. Named for Bing Crosby, my mother’s favorite crooner, mellow-toned, pretty bland-faced when you came to think of it, and the dog Bing was a Boston bulldog, with black and white markings, pointed ears held to a quiver, and milky black eyes that bugged. A belligerent expression on its face. There was a family photograph. Bing’s face seemed to emerge from a muff my mother carried or some sort of fur she wore. My mother was beautiful and, in spite of the photograph’s patina of age, radiant, her hair as long and soft and naturally waved as Bing’s was fiercely short. At that time Rosalyn was an exceptionally pretty, sparkling young woman, her suitor Howie Whalen equally attractive in a slicked-down, collegiate way. My father was long and lean, more spare-boned but not unhandsome himself. It was spring. My parents had bought some land, which had been expropriated by the state and was about to be converted into yet another lake. But there was time left for a stroll through woodland before it all went under. A path through the pines with that pine duff underfoot. I was … three, make it three and a half, but no more. And out of diapers. There was no doubt about that. A three-year-old toddling through woodlands with his diaper full of shit and the story makes no sense.
A story that had been told and denied many times, told and recast to suit the teller and the times. It was spring. It was the South. There were two pairs of lovers, one young and untested and caught up in a delirium of flirtation, the second not yet old but saddled with cares and anxious for a time and space of their own, and there was a boy and a dog. The path was soft. The day was warm, the breeze scented with pine. There was a freshly awakened chorus of birdsong and insect buzz. Overhead, between pine boughs, a hawk rode currents of air.
The mother and father, the sister and the suitor, the boy and the dog all strike out together. But with turns in the path and modest ups and downs, before long a certain spacing occurs. Rosalyn Pritchard and her suitor Howard Whalen come to a turn where they pick up their pace. Or, sister Esther and her husband Frank, with covert glances and knowing nods, slow their pace and deliberately fall back. Spring, and not just the smell of pine but, drifting in and out on a random breeze, jasmine and wisteria. Blackberry brambles back off the path, surely some banks of honeysuckle, too. The young lovers stride out ahead, the tested lovers, the proven lovers, gradually fall back. Spring. It is not the season for surveillance. Allow the flirtatious Rosalyn and that wooing machine named Howard Whalen to have their fun. Meanwhile the tested lovers, the proven lovers, can sample a bit of the season for themselves. They too stop to share a kiss. But the path is soft and the flower scents are sweet and that scent of pine is like a fresh sanctioning spirit overflowing the land, and the proven lovers may, in spite of themselves, fall to their knees, as the kid sister and her persistent beau have surely done themselves, many turns farther along.
At some midpoint on the path the boy toddles along after the dog. The dog Bing is as finely muscled as a skinned rabbit and makes projectile-like rushes at everything that moves along the path. The boy calls after him, “Bean! Bean!” and hurries to keep up.
It is then, with an unseasonable deep-in-summer dry-seed sound, that the snake strikes. A growling, lashing, hissing battle ensues. The little boy scoots back on the path, giving his dog Bean and the snake room. A smell like the thinnest of gray shadows falls over him. He hears a gnashing growl deep in his dog’s throat, a sound deeper and longer-lasting than a dog that small should be able to make. This goes on and on. Then, as if by mutual consent, the dog and the snake pause in their struggle before the growling and the lashing start up again, but fitful now and in slow enough motion for the boy to see that the dog has the snake clamped in his jaws and that the snake has its thick, scaly body, the color of old putty and winter leaves, looped around his dog’s lower half. The snake’s eye looks sleepy. There is a pearling of blood on Bing’s black hair, and the boy knows the snake’s fangs have been in his dog’s neck.
Only later, when the snake is still and the small dog is stretched out beside it, does the boy realize how large the snake in its dead weight is, and only then does that the full foul smell of the snake reach him, the under-porch, inner-earth odor of a cave, dry and damp, leaving him little air to breathe. His dog Bean sends him strange glittery glances. He begins a light, insufficient pant. Even at three, or three and a half, the boy knows he has witnessed a heroic deed.
It is at that point that his parents come strolling up the path to find him and Bing, and that his mother gives a choking scream, followed by a full-throated one that reaches his aunt Rosalyn and her beau Howard Whalen farther down the path and brings them to their feet. The boy’s father picks his son up and goes over every inch of his flesh, searching for the twin punctures and the pearling blood. He slows himself down, checking and double-checking, before announcing to his wife, who is panting herself now, No, nothing, not a trace, nothing! Rosalyn appears on the scene, accompanied by her Howard Whalen, prepared to go to battle himself, welcoming the screams as a chance to show his pre–Big Howie Whalen worth. Rosalyn gasps and runs to her sister. Howard Whalen, finding nothing to pit himself against, moves up beside his future brother-in-law and his son, the little blue-eyed and golden-haired boy, with his mother’s curls yet to be shorn, who has been their cupid up to now. How? Why? When? But with the small dog dying before them and the enormous snake stretched out along the ground, no one needs to ask a thing. Where were they when the snake struck and the dog leaped to the boy’s defense, intercepting, as the story would quickly have it, its mortal enemy in midair? Where were the boy’s parents and the boy’s aunt and the man who would woo her and win her hand? Forging ahead, or at a more than leisurely pace bringing up the rear. The path soft, the breeze sweetly laden with scents, the day long. Playing their parts, forming a family, circling their wagons around something like a primal secret, which, surely, each family must have. A short-haired dog story that the undergrowth would take under, or the kudzu would soon overflow—
Walter, silent until then, interrupted me. Didn’t you say that land was due to be flooded?
I did, I said, and it was. At least, I think it was. This was not a story certain family members wanted to dwell on.
Why not? The net result is
largemouth bass instead of rattlesnakes.
Don’t play dumb, I said.
All right. Answer this. You were there, but just out of diapers, three, at the most three and a half, you said. If you don’t remember it, who told you?
Now I played dumb, although the truth was I didn’t remember who’d told me. Except for me, all the participants were dead, starting with the dog Bing, and what was left behind was the story itself, like some founder’s myth enshrouded in the mists of time—or waves of kudzu, which were snaky, everybody knew that.
Walter’s next question caught me by surprise. Did you ever tell Elaine this story of when you were a little boy?
Elaine Sinclair had been my second wife. Walter and his wife Molly had introduced us. Elaine and I had remained close and still saw each other, frequently with Walter and Molly, but since the divorce we’d lived in our own private residences.
No, I said. I don’t think so. Why?
No reason.
Anyway, I remind you we were leaving the women at home this weekend.
You’re right. My mistake, Walter said. We were.
But, no, I repeated in a tone even I could hear as strangely hushed, vaguely amazed, I don’t think I’ve told this story to anybody but you for a long, long time.
Walter rose in a last crackling of wicker. He made the effort. He stretched. He yawned—it was all a bit of a show, as if he hadn’t heard what I had in the hush of my voice, or had not detected the pull of the story’s undertow and wondered where it might carry us from there.
Then, as he was about to pass by me on the way inside, he paused and appeared to entertain a recollection. A primal secret, he repeated thoughtfully, followed by, Something each family must have. Those were your words, weren’t they, Jim?
He knew they were. It was squarely in his nature, this need to pin it all down.
It’s always seemed, he went on, that in storytelling primal secrets can get a sort of poetic pass. Whereas in a prosaic court of law …
