Sundown, Yellow Moon

by Larry Watson

  Once the slain politician’s son actually goes to the bathroom, he believes he understands his uncle’s warning. The toilet flushes with such swirling force and the water pours into the washbasin so swiftly that it’s a temptation to linger, turning the water off and on, filling the sink and watching it drain, listening to the way the toilet’s formless whoosh contrasts with the train’s rapid but still rhythmical rush. He feels as though he’s on the edge of a discovery about the essential difference between liquid and machine, but remembering his uncle’s words, he returns to his seat. By the time he next visits the restroom, his sorrow and self-pity have returned, and he no longer has any interest in insights or discoveries.

  When he disembarks in Wisconsin, he is met by a tall, sunburned, redheaded young man, a counselor from the camp who already has in his company a boy who rode the very same train as the slain politician’s son. Jimmy Hogan boarded the train in St. Paul, but unlike the slain politician’s son, Jimmy is an experienced traveler and he roamed from one car to another, searching for boys he remembered from his previous years at camp. The slain politician’s son saw the fat boy repeatedly waddle down the train’s aisle, but the slain politician’s son was too shy to speak to anyone.

  Once they are in the station wagon that will take them the thirty miles to Camp Way-Tah-Ga, Jimmy Hogan suggests to the counselor that in the future the camp should send special caps to campers, something that the boys could wear on their way to Camp Way-Tah-Ga and in that way identify their common destination to one another. The counselor, a high school senior or college student, the slain politician’s son guesses, doesn’t acknowledge Jimmy’s suggestion. Instead he lights another Camel, which he keeps bouncing between his lips with his vigorous gum-chewing.

  Into the silence, the slain politician’s son cautiously says to Jimmy, “That’s a good idea. The caps.”

  And with that, the two boys become friends. For the rest of the ride, Jimmy tries to educate the slain politician’s son about the camp’s culture and conventions. He begins, of course, with the food. The hamburgers might look good, but they’re usually dried out and barely warm. The macaroni and cheese is okay if you get a serving from the middle of the tray. The best breakfast is French toast. The best dessert is the butterscotch pudding. He advises the slain politician’s son to arrive at the archery range early when they have target practice, or else he’ll get one of the bows that’s so tight he’ll hardly be able to pull the string back.

  Don’t get in a canoe with the thirteen-year-olds because they won’t even let you paddle. Don’t sit on the side of the campfire where the big trees are because the wind always blows sparks and smoke in that direction. “Chapel” means the same thing as “church.” “Hike” and “nature walk” mean pretty much the same thing. Don’t wear shorts to play baseball or you won’t be able to slide. And whatever the slain politician’s son does, he should make certain he doesn’t piss off Castle, the oldest counselor at the camp. Castle is always in a foul temper, but no one is quite sure why. Some say it’s because he’s a junior high teacher during the year, and by the time summer rolls around, he’s sick of kids. Another theory has it that Castle is an alcoholic who is kept from drink during the camp sessions. A more forgiving, romantic explanation of Castle’s dark moods suggests that he once had a beautiful wife who was killed in an automobile accident. As Jimmy finishes his list of admonitions, he glances up at their gum-chewing driver, who says only, “Yeah, Castle’s a prick.” The obscenity delights the boys.

  The slain politician’s son soon learns, however, that because of the way the camp is set up, he and the redoubtable Castle are unlikely to have much contact. Castle works mostly with the younger boys, and the slain politician’s son belongs with the Wolverines (the ten-and eleven-year-olds), a group with whom he quickly grows quite comfortable. Thanks to Jimmy, the slain politician’s son is assigned a bunk in Jimmy’s dormitory, and Jimmy introduces the slain politician’s son to the other boys their age and makes sure he is always gathered into the group before any activity—flag races, hikes, swim instruction, candle making, or woodworking—begins. The slain politician’s son becomes so close to these boys that he wonders if he should revealto them how he is different from every one of them and always will be. Finally he decides against it. He won’t share with the Wolverines his unique history, one that includes newspaper headlines and reporters in the kitchen extinguishing cigarettes in his mother’s coffee cups. Indeed, though the slain politician’s son is the only Wolverine who has never before attended Camp Way-Tah-Ga, his family owns a cabin on a small lake in North Dakota, and in his mind the slain politician’s son substitutes those experiences for the not dissimilar ones the other boys have had in previous summers. Ironically, it is Jimmy Hogan who believes he has an identity unlike anyone else’s; Jimmy is not only fat, he is left-handed and he has had his appendix removed.

  Most of the boys have been looking forward to the day when they’ll be allowed to fish in the swift-flowing waters of the Goose River. Since they arrived in camp they’ve been allowed to fish only in the lake, and even then only with bamboo poles, tiny hooks, red worms, and bobbers. They never catch anything but crappies, bluegills, and sunfish. Today, however, they’re being driven to a location where the river suddenly straightens its course and runs fast and frothy over and around a series of big rocks. There the boys will be handed real fishing rods with artificial lures and treble hooks and given instruction on how to cast their lines into the pools and eddies where the big fish—bass and walleye and northern and even muskie—lie. But before any of them can wet a line, they must sit through fishing lessons, even if they’ve been doing this kind of fishing for years.

  On that day, the Wolverines are divided and assigned to other groups, and the slain politician’s son is placed with five boys who will have—oh, shit!—Castle as their teacher. They gather near the pilings of a railroad bridge. The river there has shrunk back from the tree line, and they have a wide beach on which to line up and listen to their teacher’s advice. The sand the slain politician’s son sits upon feels simultaneously warm, soft, and damp, a new and peculiar sensation, and he adds it to the collection of never-felt-before that he has been compiling for the past seven months.

  As it turns out, Castle, in spite of his profession in the non-summer months—it’s been verified; he is a junior high school teacher—has no aptitude for or interest in instruction. He simply tells the boys, “Watch how I do it.”

  Next he performs a series of movements so rapid that none of the boys understands exactly what he’s doing or why. He clicks something on the reel—the bale? Did he lock the bale back? Did he do something with the drag? He brings the rod back, then flings it forward, and the lure—a spinner with a tuft of fur attached to its end—whirs out across the water. Did he have a target in mind? How did he direct it there? Almost immediately after the lure splashes down, Castle reels it in swiftly, straightening the rod’s tip from time to time. “The action has to be like this,” he says, “so the fish will want to hit it.”

  The last thing the slain politician’s son wants at that moment is to be handed the rod and reel and told to duplicate the instructor’s act, but he doesn’t have to worry. Castle has apparently forgotten both his charge and his charges. He’s just a man fishing on a summer day, casting over and over again to that boulder-blocked expanse of water where the river seems to back up on itself.

  Suddenly there is a small eruption right where Castle’s lure splashes down. It looks as if sunlight has not just spangled the water’s surface but burst up from beneath it. Castle jerks back on his rod, and then it’s plain—he’s hooked a fish and the fish is leaping into the air.

  Castle hasn’t addressed the boys, but even without being asked, they all rise from the sand and stand behind him. From the expressions on their faces it’s obvious that none of them believed that today’s lessons could truly lead to an outcome like this. That’s a real fish, large enough to bend the rod and create its own wake
as it fights across the current, the line, and Castle’s strength.

  The fish must lose of course, and by the time Castle has reeled it in close to the shore, it can no longer leap clear of the river or even shake itself on the line. And why, the slain politician’s son wonders, would the fish try to escape in the first place by leaving the water for the air, the element it can’t survive in?

  One of the boys steps forward with the net, but Castle brushes him aside. Holding the rod in one hand, he steps into the river, bends down, and pulls the fish from the water. To the slain politician’s son it appears that Castle grabs the fish by the lip, but that can’t be. Fish don’t have—Then he sees. Castle has hooked the fish again, this time with his finger, right under the fish’s mouth.

  A boy more knowledgeable about fish than the slain politician’s son whistles softly and says, “A walleye!”

  “What a pig!” Castle says. “That sonofabitch has gotta be twelve pounds.”

  The fish twists and wriggles so slowly in Castle’s hand it seems as if it might be moving in the breeze rather than by its own muscle and will. Castle quickly and deftly unhooks the walleye, sets down his rod and reel, and holds the fish aloft with two hands. Its pale belly sags as if it were weighted with stones. Its eyes look as though they have been cut out of aluminum foil. “You pig,” Castle says again, this time almost affectionately.

  Castle finally acknowledges the boys who have been gazing at him as if he had been enacting a play for their entertainment. “One of you want to put him in the catch bucket?”

  Like the other boys, the slain politician’s son raises his hand and jumps into the air. He is sure that only he, however, has no interest in the fish. Instead he wants to do what no other boy has been able to do—to win Castle’s approval and esteem.

  And it is that purity of motive, the slain politician’s son believes, that separates him from every other ten-year-old bouncing up and down on the sand, and that causes Castle to reach the fish out toward him and say, “Hold him tight. And watch out for the fins. They’re sharp as razors.”

  Once the slain politician’s son holds the fish, with its heft that doesn’t match its light silver slickness, he can smell it, and that odor brings back his past—the family cabin, the heat that seemed to rise every morning from the lake’s algae-choked shoreline, the grown-ups with their skinny pale legs bare the way they never would be in town, and their loud laughter, the hollow thunk of oar and boat, and the little panfish strung on a line as if they were beads run through with a sewing needle, and smelling like, like, like nothing else. . . . Is that past only a single summer removed from the slain politician’s son? Is that possible? The memory seems as if it has to struggle an exhausting distance back to him. The walleye’s gill yawns open so slowly it must be for the last time. For a moment the slain politician’s son glimpses the fish’s blood-red interior, and the sight appalls him so that by a laborious process—he slides the fish slowly across his shirt front—he shifts the walleye to his other hand and now holds the fish backward, its head and dead eyes and awful starving gills facing the other way.

  While he wades into the water and opens the lid of the catch bucket, the slain politician’s son has to squeeze the fish tightly but not too tightly, because he can feel how with just a little more pressure it could squirt from his hand.

  The river water inside the bucket looks like weak tea, and for an instant the slain politician’s son wonders if he is making a mistake. No, he is doing exactly what Castle asked of him, and there is no other way to gain the man’s favor. He lowers the fish into the bucket.

  It all happens so fast that afterward the slain politician’s son can’t be sure of the precise sequence—did Castle first cry out, “Not tail first! Not tail first!” or did those shouted words come after the fish, instantly revived when the cold water washed over it, with one sudden sinuous effort, burst from the bucket and escaped into the river’s current?

  No matter what the chronology, the consequence is unchanged. The walleye, a flashing golden shimmer, swims away, and Castle grabs the slain politician’s son by the collar of his T-shirt and pulls him backward with such force that the boy lands heavily on the sand, his breath flying out of him so completely that he might as well have been shoved underwater.

  “That was a trophy fish!” Castle shouts. “A goddamn trophy fish!”

  He looms over the slain politician’s son, who believes that the physical threat from Castle hasn’t passed. The boy rolls across the sand until he can be certain Castle can’t reach him, even with a kicking foot.

  But Castle isn’t interested in pursuit. He simply stares down at the slain politician’s son in disgust. “Can’t even put a fish in a bucket,” Castle says. “Jesus. What a moron. What a little moron.”

  And then the slain politician’s son makes the situation worse. He laughs, though his lack of breath soon causes his laughter to change into a fit of coughing.

  It is the laughter that provokes Castle into grabbing the slain politician’s son by the hair, shaking him, and then throwing him back toward the sand. It is the boy’s helpless coughing fit that convinces the camp authorities that Castle’s harshness can no longer be tolerated and that the man must be dismissed from working at Camp Way-Tah-Ga.

  After the incident, the slain politician’s son explains to his new friends why he couldn’t keep from laughing. That was the summer of the “little moron” jokes—Why did the little moron throw his alarm clock out the window? Because he wanted to see time fly. Why did the little moron put his father in the refrigerator? Because he wanted cold pop—and when Castle insulted him with that very phrase, laughter bubbled uncontrollably from him.

  In truth, the slain politician’s son’s laughter came from the sudden realization, insofar as such a thing can be realized by a ten-year-old boy whose bony ass is denting the sand of a river beach, that he had no special standing on this earth and that he was therefore subject to the same vagaries of reward and retribution as every other human being. He was no different from any other Wolverine.

  This story came into being from an assignment of sorts. A friend, to whom I had been complaining of a personal publishing drought, suggested that maybe I needed to try writing fiction that was removed from my own life, times, and circumstances. “The Slain Politician’s Son,” which appeared in The Stopped Clock Review, was my attempt to follow that advice, and while it may not have seemed to most readers like such a radical divergence from my usual concerns, it was. I knew that Monty Burnham, like Raymond Stoddard, had a son, so I tried to invent a life for him. Believe me, any turn that took me away from the murderer’s existence—and Keogh Street—and toward the victim’s was a radical one.

  I had ample opportunity to observe Diane Burgie in the aftermath of Bob Mullen’s death because I was in two of her classes, biology and psychology, at Bismarck Junior College. But while she chose to stay close to home because her guilt-ridden, grief-stricken state left her too weak to stray far, I attended a community college in order to be close to Marie Ryan. By the end of summer 1962 she and I were going steady, and since she had a year of high school left, I decided that enrolling at the university in Grand Forks could wait. I say “I decided,” but really, there was no decision to be made at all.

  In fact I sometimes wondered why, since we were in classes together, Diane Burgie and I weren’t used for an academic demonstration. The biology or psychology teacher—the demonstration would have worked for either subject—might have displayed both of us in front of the classroom and said to the other students, “Look closely at these specimens. They illustrate what love can do to a human being.” Pointing to Diane, the professor might have noted the hair, once blond, bright, and shining, now lusterless and lank; the complexion, pocked and sallow; the expression, dour and despairing; the entire being, enervated and drawn inward. I, on the other hand, could have been used as an example of love’s power to vitalize, to fulfill, to bestow happiness and hope. In fact, had my state of bliss not b
een so complete, Diane Burgie’s doleful presence might have made me a little embarrassed over my great good luck.

  Marie’s broken collarbone did not require surgery, but it was slower in healing than originally projected. Not until the end of July was she able to remove for good the sling and elaborate webbing that had held her body tight to itself. By that time J. C. Penney’s had assigned her to work in their credit department, so her temporary handicap didn’t affect her ability to do her job. It did, however, have a strange effect on our burgeoning relationship.

  It should go without saying that I could not get enough of Marie Ryan, yet her physical condition, coupled with my timidity, imposed a restraint on what we could do. While I could kiss her for hours, because of her Ace bandage binding, there was no possibility that we could go beyond kissing (or so I believed; I had a very clear notion of what should be the natural progression of sexual intimacies). Furthermore, she could put no more than one arm into an embrace, and my own passion had to operate with a governor on it—squeeze too hard or press too close and she might flinch with pain.

  The eventual removal of the wrap and the sling freed Marie in ways that went beyond the ability to raise her arm or twist her torso or draw an unencumbered deep breath. After those weeks of control, her ardor could suddenly match mine.

  The night of the day the doctor pronounced her healed we were parked on a hill west of Bismarck. The sun had barely gone down when the moon, full and antique yellow, rose to claim the sky. If we looked out Marie’s side of the Studebaker, we could see the dark reflection of the Missouri unspooling itself far below. If we looked out my side, we could see the random cluster of the city’s lights. Over the entire town the capitol building towered, each of its four sides presiding over a compass point. But notice I say “If we looked out, we could see . . .” Our eyes were fixed on nearer things. For the first time we were able to embrace with all the strength we owned, and we pressed ourselves together as if we were determined to seal our bodies to each other in spite of the resistances of clothing, skin, muscle, and bone.