Fishing the Jumps

by Lamar Herrin

  I’d been used to having clothes—readymades—piled into my arms since I’d been a boy. The worker Doris came back, and Howie led me into his fitting room, where he produced a tape measure soft as a strip of chamois, and as skillfully as though he were feeding out fishing line in the quietest of coves, he took the measurements I shared with all other members of my species. Then he asked for my own specs, the little peculiarities that would distinguish me, say, from Roger Gold. I looked at Howie. I let my eyes linger on the blue of his longer, I suppose, than I’d looked at him before. I told him to surprise me, to make me the suit of clothes he thought I’d like or that I deserved or that best suited me.

  Before he let me go, we passed by one of the cutting rooms with its long tables of design paper stretched over fabric, where the parts of a man—legs, hips, chest, shoulders, arms—were sketched out in bright blue ink ready to be cut. One of the men doing the cutting had been there since Big Howie Whalen ran the original plant. He had a kindly face, reddened cheeks, eyes moist like hanging hazel pools, and a mouth slow to lift into a smile. Howie introduced us and waited while we shook hands. Then he told his perhaps oldest and most venerable worker to take a good look at me, because they were going to make me a suit of clothes that would last me the rest of my life.

  He made an impression on you, didn’t he? Walter said.

  Who, Howie? Of course, he always had.

  No, no, the plant’s oldest worker, the one with the hanging hazel pools for eyes. The one who cut the cloth to get it started.

  The suit, I told Walter, arrived a month later in the mail. It was made of a smoky blue worsted, unlike the bright aqua blue outlining the body parts there on the cutting table. I stood before a full-length mirror and didn’t have to view myself from every available angle to know that I’d never had a suit like this, and surely never would again. It fit so well I might not have been aware I had it on. It was as if I had stepped into an enveloping element, and when I went in search of those little individualizing peculiarities, I found none. There was no coin pocket, neither a tab nor a flap on my hip pocket. The belt loops were proportionately spaced. The jacket lapels opened on a flawlessly flared, clean geometrical angle, and the padding in the shoulders was so subtle as to be imperceptible. It was a tailoring masterpiece, so close to perfection it almost seemed abstract, and as an abstraction I knew it would serve me wherever I finally chose to live. I took it off as if I were removing a sacramental garment and hung it in the closet, off by itself at the end.

  I didn’t see my cousin again until he had exhausted every possible hope of curing his brain tumor—which included a clinic in Switzerland and treatment of some sort in Japan—and word had gone out to the family at large. And over the years I’d indeed been at large, locating and relocating in this enormous country of ours, staying clear of my hometown with the same silly foreboding I’d felt as a very young man. My mother still lived there. After my father died, I visited her more often than I had, but she was a strong woman who had her alliances and didn’t need a crutch of a son to lean on. And my sister and her family had remained close by. I drifted. Married for two years a woman far more anxious than I to disentangle herself from her family, and when that ended I found myself between a great river and a great mountain range, trapped in all that space. Of course, I thought of the Frenchman for whom I’d once worked, and his perhaps real, perhaps not, peregrinations out on the Great Plains. It wasn’t quite the age of Google, so short of a significant effort I didn’t know how I could find out if he’d ever made that movie of his. I thought of Ellie, Hollywood Ellie, elusive at the very core of her being, and there were days and weeks when I contemplated tracking her down. She would know what had happened to the Frenchman and his movie, and even if she didn’t, the mere act of cornering her would represent an accomplishment I could begin to build on. She’d be my trophy. I’d snag her out of the air. In the wake of a busted marriage and in all that hemispheric space, I’d lie in wait, and while I did, it was only natural that I’d wonder about the other Ellie, now a wife and a mother, and my cousin Ellie would give me my cousin Howie, and no sooner would Howie enter my mind than I’d see him taking on the role of ringmaster in one of those small, outsourced Latin American towns, wheels of the young, the middle-aged, and the elderly turning on themselves, festively promenading, making of their own centripetal pull a cause for celebration. I would gaze off into all that Great Plains space, with nothing to circle and nowhere to cohere, and say, of course, of course.

  And that was when word reached me at large and I quickly made my way back to the Whalens’ hometown.

  My first shock came not in seeing Howie, but Laurie. I stood before their house, their lakeside mansion, and she looked like a cleaning lady who’d gotten off her knees to come to the door. She wore a dark skirt with cloudy smears like detergent stains. A dull mustard-colored sweater. Her lips were dry, and the area under her eyes so washed out that the eyes themselves had a ghostly kind of calm. There was real anger, real bitterness in her voice, but the eyes invited you to stare through them.

  Laurie, I said, how are you?

  Me? You didn’t come all this way to see me.

  Both of you, I protested.

  It’s not Howie, Jim.

  I leaned in to kiss her. She stiffened and her cheek went cold. It was yesterday’s perfume, or the day before’s.

  What do the doctors say? I asked.

  She responded with a growling, vituperative laugh down in her throat.

  It’s okay, Laurie, I tried to soothe her.

  No, it’s not, Jim, she responded.

  Will he know me?

  Of course he’ll know you. You just won’t know him.

  She pointed down a long dark hall where they’d set up a room for him and a nurse was in charge. It was when I’d started down that hall that Laurie stated, as though for the record, flatly and bitterly plain, That man in there is not my husband.

  I paused in my narrative, as I had paused walking down that hall. And Walter intervened. He repeated what Laurie had said. Had he heard correctly? If Howie Whalen wasn’t her husband, then who was he? He was sick and dying and now she was disowning him? What could she possibly have meant?

  I said, I think in her despair she still meant that there were no words.

  And since there weren’t, Walter took up my train of thought, she could in effect turn him over to you? Trusting that you could supply the words?

  I took a long pull off my bourbon. I’d need to rectify something for Walter. At this late hour of the second evening, I’d need not to change but to adjust my course, which would represent a change, no disguising it, and which Walter, a lawyer alert to the slightest variation in any witness’s testimony, would recognize at once.

  There’s something you need to know, I said. I was fascinated by my cousin, and from a certain distance I much admired him. A huge success story, both in that town and as he took the town with him out into the world. But I was not close to him.

  And Walter surprised me by professing not to be surprised. I understand, he said, he was a childhood pal.

  No, not really, I said. Not even that. As a child he sat on a source of fabulous wealth, and he could do things other less favored children couldn’t do, but I’m not even sure I liked him, and half the time I didn’t believe him myself. He was handsome, he’d married a beautiful woman, but in many ways he was a joke who kept having all this business success so finally I had to conclude the joke was on me. And they loved him in the town.

  But you didn’t? Walter said.

  I don’t know. Maybe I did. I suppose I wanted to, if only for Rosalyn’s sake.

  And perhaps it was more for Rosalyn’s sake than Laurie’s or Howie’s or my own that I continued walking to the end of that hall, gave a courtesy knock on the door to alert them I was coming, and stepped into the room as the nurse finished wiping some pablum-like substance off the side of Howie’s mouth, in her haste leaving a small smear. Then the nurse left the two of us
alone. My cousin sat on a sofa. He had a grotesquely swollen head and an expression in his eyes of some animal wildness drugged into docility. He greeted me with a ponderous grin, which was like a boat capsizing along the line of his mouth. His real grin, his natural grin, had been one of his greatest assets. It had disarmed businessmen all over the world.

  My mouth must have fallen open, because he said, as though to reassure me, God has been good to me, Jim.

  I said, Howie, I wish there was something I could do.

  It’s in God’s hands now, he said. Then he added in a voice that was a weight-bearing crawl, It’s a good deal.

  His brows were shaggy, protuberant. He tried to wink.

  That man in there is not my husband.

  I tried—and failed—to keep Laurie Whalen’s bitterness out of my voice. Howie, I said, God got the best of the deal by far.

  The sinking grin and the anesthetized eyes—it was like looking through bars at some lethargic animal in a zoo. God’s a better businessman, he managed to quip.

  Don’t give up yet, Howie, I pleaded in a near-whisper. It was very quiet in the house.

  His smile was an uncoordinated bunching of muscles over the lower half of his face. I’ve seen too many doctors, he said. There’s not a cure left. He sat in a kind of bearish slump, which he tried to rouse himself out of. Time comes to talk to the preacher and face it. When you do that and add it all up—

  I cut him off, surprising myself. It doesn’t “add up.” Howie, Laurie’s not “facing it.”

  That stopped him. That took that groggy sublimity out of his tone and his heavy-browed eyes. I understood then why it was so quiet. He was off down a long hall, being attended to by a nurse, a mansion’s length away from the woman who refused to recognize him as her husband. He needed that distance. Without it, Laurie might burst in at any moment and demand from him a confession. And what would he have to confess? That he’d married her under false pretenses? That when the town turned out to see them wed, that when I flew in from LA to usher guests up the aisle, it would end like this, in disfiguring death halfway down life’s path, with money everywhere she looked, millions of it, currency from around the world, pesos, franks, yen, pounds, and none of it worth any more than a Confederate dollar.

  Talk to her, Jim. She’s lost her faith. Make her see … the large picture.

  I smiled. I shook my head. I placed a hand on one of his, wasted, inert, but not at rest. I had seen that hand catching fish and I had seen it stitching a hip pocket. With masterful sleight of hand, Howie had run a tape measure up and around and over my entire body.

  Reverend Crawly, he went on, won’t have any luck with her now. She doesn’t want to see his face.

  I’m not sure she wanted to see mine.

  Just talk to her.

  What am I supposed to tell her, Howie?

  A heavy swaying of the head. He was shaking it. You’re family, he said.

  I don’t deny it.

  Tell her it all adds up. Tell her to have faith.

  Faith in what?

  He made me wait. A beat, a second, a third. Then he uttered out of a cavernous quiet, Faith in God.

  The same God who did this to you?

  He didn’t answer my question. The figure who sat before me, hulking there, both smaller and larger than I remembered him being, might have belonged to another species entirely, even though the smile he gave me in that moment had a brightness about it, and a warmth, perhaps even a blessedness, once you got past the deformities of the flesh.

  I gave in to him. The tears came and I bowed my head. I told my cousin Howard Whalen I would talk to his wife and that I’d be back to tell him what she said. I hugged his sloping shoulders and peptalked him into holding on. I called him Little Howie, delayed just a moment until I was sure he’d heard me and perhaps brought to mind the children we’d been, then I turned and walked out the door.

  And down that long hall, Walter said. Let me guess. You didn’t see him again, did you?

  No, I said.

  Or his wife.

  Not until the funeral.

  Did you try?

  I didn’t go through the house looking. I did step into their living room. It looked as if it had never been lived in. The long glimmering drapes were closed and the tabletops free of dust. The cream-colored carpet looked pristine. The smell was of some mildly deodorizing wax. I could have stood there and waited for Laurie and the children to appear. Instead, I left.

  And failed to keep your promise.

  And spared Laurie Whalen that empty plea to keep the faith.

  You know, Jim, Walter said in that first brightening of the darkness that a late moon brings, I hate to judge her at this distance and after all these years, but your Laurie Whalen did not behave well.

  Not “my” Laurie Whalen, I said.

  The only one I know.

  She was devastated, what can I say?

  And the children were not really children by that time.

  Only Joey, the youngest. Maybe twelve then, thirteen.

  Did they even see their father? That man in there their mother no longer claimed as her husband. Just how long was that hall?

  Long, I said, and dark, with doors down its length, all of them closed.

  He had a brain tumor, for Christ’s sake! Walter erupted. It’s sad, it happens, tumors can leave you deformed, and all those attempts to burn it out of him—

  For those of us who’d known him before, I broke in, with no real hope of making myself understood, it was as though he were under attack by some higher power. As though the chain of being had been reversed and he were evolving backwards.

  Still, “That man in there is not my husband” is harsh. Could she have been referring to some sort of last-minute conversion, that he was transformed and deformed in that way?

  Walter, it’s late.

  I know it is. Don’t leave him unburied, don’t leave his widow and children stranded like that.

  Not to speak of the town.

  Or the town.

  But I’ve already told you. It wasn’t only family or the town. It’s just possible one man’s death might take a whole family down with it, a family might grieve and go into an irreversible decline, but in Howie’s case a certain portion of the world gathered to see him off. Closed casket, of course. No one had to risk losing their memory of the man.

  You’re forgetting Aunt Rosalyn and Big Howie.

  No, I’m not.

  Well …

  It is late, Walter.

  It killed Big Howie, didn’t it?

  Not at once.

  Walter picked it up. Big Howie had to go back to take his son’s place in the plant, but this time his son wasn’t off on a business trip, or taking a break to hunt long-horned sheep in the Rockies. The Rockies?

  What difference does it make? I said. The Canadian Rockies. I don’t know.

  Or fish for marlins on the high seas.

  We never talked about that.

  I’m trying to imagine the father becoming the son, that father and that son. I’m trying to imagine Big Howie Whalen, with all that girth and all that swagger, anywhere other than in their small town. Trying to drive his big black Cadillac, for instance, through the crowds of those promenading townsfolk down there in Bella Whatever-it-was.

  You don’t have to imagine. It never happened.

  Or even Big Howie Whalen back at the plant. After the workers had had a long, sweet dose of the son. Straying over into customized clothes. One pocket, one belt loop at a time. Roger Gold. Who the hell was Roger Gold? And what was Whalen Apparels’s oldest employee doing over there anyway? The one with the hanging hazel pools for eyes …

  On a lake this small, surrounded by towering spruce, a crescent moon like the one we had rising could cast little light, and that not for long. Walter Kidman was not looking at me but straight out at the water, peering into its luminous darkness as intently as Howie Whalen might have when he sought that filigreeing of ripples that told him the minn
ows were on the run and the bass were about to feed. For the thirty, forty seconds, for the minute the feeding lasted, there would be a lavish brocade of foam flashing in the moon before the moon passed over and the bass went deep. But this was a pickerel lake and Walter was hunting fool’s gold.

  I put a stop to it. I put it on the clock. The day before he died, I told Walter, Big Howie had a premonition. He called on Reverend Crawly in the church and described to him a general weakening all over his body, which he likened to a battery running down, but also to a not entirely unwelcome physical diminishment, a certain lightness on his feet and in his head, as if he were abandoning the outposts of his body and pulling in around the smaller-sized man he’d once been. Why hadn’t he gone straight to the hospital, a concerned Reverend Crawly wanted to know, and Big Howie told him because what he was describing felt more like a blessing than an affliction, more in a preacher’s line of work than an MD’s. Perhaps even a sign. We must become as children again. How small do you have to be to pass through the eye of a needle and into heaven? Yes, there were signs, and, yes, a lightening of the physical load we carry through this darkened world might be interpreted as a sign of the spirit rising, still, Reverend Crawly would later tell Rosalyn, he had urged her husband to check into the hospital to ease his way to the moment they both knew was coming, and after receiving the good reverend’s blessing, Big Howie assured him he would. He’d lost a son, a terrible blow, a son who had exceeded the founding father’s dreams for himself in every possible way, but Big Howie had reasons to live, a daughter he’d been given with whom he’d reprised his son’s upbringing and two little daughters of hers. If he pictured himself as a mountain, he had an apron of kinfolk spilling down on all sides. He had reasons to stand broad and stand tall. But it was such a blessed relief to pull in, to go small, that regardless of whether the lightness was in his flesh or only in his head, he couldn’t bring himself to sound the alarm.