Into Woods

by Bill Roorbach

  Mike and I, we’re late for the party, which only adds to the drama. What a cheer as we pull the string of gutted blues from the back of my truck! We’re providers, triumphant! The emotions called forth are ancient! The males look maybe a little jealous, especially those guys in our band. My girl Juliet comes out of the house, glass of wine in hand, to see. She’s proud in a way that has nothing to do with winning a game, with sports. She puts her arm around me, claiming me. Mike and I take hugs, get kisses, hug each other for a photograph with fish. Everyone crowds to see them, twenty big goddamned fish. Bobby Robertini curses, wishes cheerfully pissed that he’d been with us and not out on the boat with his frigging brothers: one flounder, lost. Dad Robertini comes out ceremoniously with five sharp knives, and five of us squat down to make fillets. The smell is clean, of nature, glorious. Later, Mike and I will toss the heads and spines and tails and fins back to the sea: food for lobsters, food for crabs.

  Later still, he and I will fall out of touch.

  A drunken Robertini uncle melts diced onions in lots of butter and Jack Daniel’s; a cousin builds up the fire. Soon enough Mike and I are cooking fish, and soon enough again we all of us—everyone at that party—we all sit on the porch steps and on the bench by the volleyball net and in the warm kitchen and eat bluefish. That Jack Daniel’s sauce is astonishingly good. There is nothing like bluefish one hour out of the sea.

  Mike and I, we’re beaming.

  Duck Day Afternoon

  In Maine every morning Juliet and I take the boys for a walk, what we call the circuit, down through the woods to the Temple Stream, and often through the stream in bare feet to Charlie’s pasture, shoes back on, then up the hemlock hill and cross the stream again, hike back around on the tractor road through wildflowers in June, a grand loop, every day. We have a loop in Ohio, too, but that’s different, a city loop through the park, along the avenue, down a back alley full of dogs behind fences, back to our street and home, the boys on leashes, tugging at our arms.

  But in Maine Desi and Wally leap through the tall grasses like savanna animals, or even stop and graze like cows, in fact look like little cows, black and white both of them, Border collie crosses, our little herd of Holsteins.

  One hot August morning Juliet and the doggies and I varied it a little and instead of crossing to the far pasture walked in the Temple Stream, old sneakers splashing in the current, the two of us people wading along maybe knee deep—oops, crotch deep, bellybutton! Shit! Cold!—on the sandy or rocky bottom in clear bright water with the dogs splashing or swimming strongly ahead or leaping up the steep banks into the revolution-era pasture our neighbor has put into conservation.

  So I’m wet up to the chest, the dogs are soaked, Juliet’s laughing at me, but stumbles in the middle of her pretty, pretty, inward laugh and falls in herself. And up and splashing at me and we’re dissolved in laughter (seventeen years together!) and the dogs come to see and prance on the sandbar in an ecstasy of being with their people.

  Wally trots off and Juliet and I aren’t watching what he’s doing, but wringing our shirts, glad it’s hot as hell today. Suddenly, a duck comes flailing at us, just off the water, and here comes Wally following at a gallop, then Desi after Wally. Juliet yells and of course Desi-the-Well-Trained stops, but Wally, trained entirely by Desi (he’s a dog’s dog, that one), keeps going, and the duck seems injured, and immediately I think, well, Wally has hurt this bird. A female ... mallard?

  I scrabble up the deep intervale bank—it’s seven feet high right there—and into the pasture, expecting to see carnage, feathers flying, but what I see is the pasture. Wally is out of sight in the tall grasses. Faraway, a good, long Wally-sprint away, hundreds and hundreds of yards, I see the duck flying beautifully up out of the little patch of trees that surround a cow watering hole there. Then I know what’s happened—but didn’t know ducks did it—the female was faking injury to draw the dog off her nest. This is confirmed when she flies back into the stream cut where Juliet and Desi still stand, flies in low, lands on the water noisily. I slide back down the bank, just as noisily. The duck flies at Juliet, low, flies past her, wings braked hard. Well, that’s it for Desi. He’s off like an Olympic swimmer exploding from the blocks, off and around the bend, out of sight behind the slow—flying duck.

  So now both of the fellows are long gone, one decoyed to the middle of the old pasture, the other straight downstream, both hundreds of yards away from the duck nest implied by all this.

  Juliet and I continue our walk, soaked, wading upstream. “Decoy!” I pant. “She decoyed the dogs!”

  “The dogs are dumb,” Juliet says. Of course she doesn’t mean this. Our dogs are fission scientists, and Juliet knows it. She means I’m dumb.

  I hiss, “The nest must be in here!” Dumb as hell.

  As we come abreast of the spot from which Wally drew the duck out of the alders, mama duck comes back, low on the water, buzzes us from behind, rises up over our heads, flops down on the water in front of us, begins to thrash.

  “She’s hurt!” Juliet cries.

  But the duck is not hurt. She crashes her way upstream, flailing one wing piteously, speed slower than for the dogs, adjusted for bipeds. But Juliet and I just stand there. We’re ruining the duck’s ancient strategy, not chasing her, just standing still too near her nest (or, as an autumn inspection will reveal, too near the entrance to the path to her nest, which turns out to be about two hundred feet into the pasture up there).

  Wally has heard the commotion, and he’s back, takes the bait. The duck adjusts her speed, rounds the upstream bend and is out of sight, Wally momentarily behind. But then Wally has a brainstorm, wheels in the water and splashes back to the overgrown bank where the nest must be. I call him off a low opening in the raggedy thicket of drooping streamside alders, where he snuffles, excited as I am, and begins to push his way in. But finally he heeds (I have to growl at him to achieve this) and he splashes disconsolately toward us.

  Behind him, the male of the duck pair emerges from the alders, silently, and swims at us, beak agape, now quacking mockingly. It’s not a mallard at all. It’s that size but very plain and dark and I don’t know what to make of him. Later I’ll get a look in the many bird books around the house, and not be sure, later still describe it to my bird friend Bob Kimber who says “Black duck” right away and is right.

  The male turns sharply downstream, turns his left wing out, and more or less walks on the water, dragging that perfectly healthy wing, gracefully pulling Wally downstream and off the nest. Desi’s back, now, too, and our two proud pack members race downstream sticking to the sandbars till they are forced to swim. The duck eases into braked flight just above their heads, disappears around the downstream bend. The frantic dogs follow, and out of sight.

  Juliet and I take the tractor ford and leave the stream, continue on the circuit, more or less trot away from the site of the hidden nest, knowing the dogs will race to catch up with us and forget the ducklings that must be in there (in the coming weeks without the dogs I’ll get to count: nine ducklings, then eight, then seven, week by week, holding then at seven till they’re big enough to fly).

  I look to the sky and there are the two adult ducks, reunited, flying tandem in a tight, low circle overhead. They swoop in, finally, and land where we dogs and people had been standing, paddle in circles silently checking their success, then duck into the alders. The stream flows on, flows as if nothing had ever happened between ducks and dogs.

  And here they come, Desi first, Wally behind, full speed over the sandbars, leaping and splashing, ears flying, galloping right past the hidden ducks, heedless, not even looking that direction: our boys! They always maraud in the direction we’re headed. We do our best to protect the wild from what’s wild in them, usually leave them home. But the wild has its own wiles, it does, and the duck his day.

  Birthday

  My dad calls a couple times, but I’m out walking. He leaves messages (Well, happy birthday. Your mom and I wanted
to catch you and we’ll keep trying), and I love him even more for this and Mom too—they’re so dependable, like no one else in my life ever—100% dependable even at seventy-four years old, when they’ve got every excuse to forget. A birthday card has already come, a check inside it for a thousand dollars, a very lot of money still for Juliet and me, money which will go in the fund to buy a little more land, maybe, something permanent. And Pop has sent a tongue-in-cheek commercial e-mail card as well: my animated horoscope. It’s going to be a good year! So say the stars, and this goodness and hope is the message from Mom and Dad: A good year! You’re all right! Dad when he finally gets me on the phone next day says, “Well, what’d you do on your birthday?” And I say what he wants—twenty-two words: “Oh, you know, took a walk, went into town, had some friends over, one you’ve met, Barbara, remember? Had a nice time.” And he says yet another of the many great truths he has uttered in life, “Well, you’re forty-six.”

  Mom wants to hear about my garden, which I got planted late this year. The garden, I tell her, is catching up.

  Woke a bit groggy after strange dreams. One fragment is my standing in a country road and a car comes around the corner about to hit me. Flailing my arms in self-defense, I wake up pushing and flailing at Juliet. Who cries out, Hey!

  She is not a car. All is well. She gets up to pee.

  And then I lie there—3:30—sorting through the things of my mind (this is the watching time, as a scientist friend has told me it’s called in some Asian cultures, and being up an hour or two at night a perfectly good thing if you don’t call it insomnia and get panicked). What I seem to be thinking about are my careers both literary and university, such as they are, and various corners of what can only be called guilt. Juliet gets back to sleep quickly, her arm flopped over me. I’m thinking I should figure out how to leave The Ohio State University, leave Ohio, get back home to Maine all year. Couple more years. Pay my dues. Then come home.

  Next dream (unknown woman and I watch in horror as our dogs fall four stories because of a missing fire escape) is later in the morning, and the day has dawned, mutedly bright. I was born at 6:45 A.M. on August 18, 1953, so am now, August 18, 1999, officially forty-six years old. There is no going back, except to sleep.

  Wake again, and it is full morning and fully my birthday. How I used to love my birthdays! Only a very few years ago did this ticking of years become complicated for me at all. Still, I recall and nearly feel the old birthday glow. This is my day! I’m a Leo and it’s my month. I love summer and it is summer, the season of my birth. I love Maine and we are in Maine.

  Juliet remembers my pushing her in the night—finds this amusing now but with an edge of irritation. Beatles song goes through my head in paraphrasis: They say it’s my birth-day. We make love in our ingrained way but sideways across the bed for a change, already thinking about what’s coming, which is that we’re going to try to get pregnant in the fall. Detested condom, however, this morning. Except for that, all very comfortable, very conjugal. Diagonal across the bed turns out pretty good because the dip in our old mattress bends us funny ways that challenge what’s granted.

  I’m forty-six. Nah na na na nah-nah! For the first time I think how close to fifty that is. Jesus. Four years more and I’m fifty. And yet the past four years—think of all that’s happened, all I’ve done and not done. How fast those four each came and went, and how slowly. Very slowly. How long four years will be, how very long it will actually be until I’m fifty—a whole, entire high school career. A whole college career. Four years. The whole enormous gap of time between my big brother’s age and mine when we were little (a gap of but vestigial significance now). And think how long it took the presidents to change: four-year terms, some doubled, some aborted. My presidents so far: Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton. Happy Birthday to me, yeah!

  Regular breakfast, though for many years on my own I continued my father’s tradition of something special—French toast, pancakes, that sort of thing. Today, I eat my regular breakfast, one thick piece of toast (this from a nice loaf of oatmeal-molasses bread from Nezinscot Farm’s booth at the Friday farmer’s market set up in the Park ‘n’ Ride lot in town), one banana, one pint of water. Then I do a chore or two. Sweep up the porch. Fill up my various birdfeeders, suddenly remembering my own present to myself, arrived by FedEx yesterday but as yet unopened: a new tube birdfeeder from L.L. Bean. I leave it in the box for the time being—it needs to be borne ceremoniously to a place foreordained, and I haven’t figured the spot yet, just that it should be somewhere I can see it from my study window.

  Juliet has sneaked downstairs at some point in the morning or night and put up the cheerful HAPPY BIRTHDAY BILL banner she made a few summers back. She’ll have to go off to town to get some presents—that’s more or less how we do things in this little duet of ours: last minute.

  First bird of the day is a raven yelling in Dennis’s box-elder trees next door—that’s the land we’re hoping to buy, five acres to add to our six, including Dennis’s old barn, built 1820, but sagging and ready to fall. Dennis has moved his operation up the hill to a beautiful spread on high, the crest of Porter Hill. Second bird is a blue jay, also yelling. Nothing subtle this morning.

  Juliet and the dogs go on around the woods loop so that I can wade the Temple Stream without Wally and Desi, who will only disturb whatever birds I might spot and splash away all thoughts. The idea, after all, here on my birthday, is to think. Off in the woods I can hear Jules yelling at Wally—he’s chasing some animal or other.

  I slip down the old mud beaver ramp and step straight into the stream the way the dogs like to do and just keep going, wading slowly, looking into the water, remembering the things I’ve found here on birthdays past, thinking maybe I’d find something today, too, a pretty safe prediction, because I find something or other in the stream daily, potsherds from nineteenth-century dumps, stream glass. But on my birthday those couple of years back I wanted to find something special for being suddenly over forty, and so I looked hard and suddenly saw a blue-green stone, not a gem, perhaps only a chunk of old pot, but very unusual and very lovely and bright, meaningful in my hand, and, since I’d been looking for it, maybe magical. In possible proof of the magic I accidentally dropped this wee stone (size of a raisin—I have it right here in my writing basket of totems for luck and wisdom, which are all the more powerful for my not really believing in them: scale from some huge fish, French car-wash token, tiny clam shell, tiny dried starfish, chunk of fool’s gold, tiny pinecones, shapely driftwood chip from Quansoo beach in West Tisbury, mysterious Indian artifact from the Frying Pan River in Colorado, gas-station shirt-patch “Bill,” polished picture jasper, two pieces soapstone, Mexican arrowhead, skeleton key, and as many more odds and ends), dropped it five times, six, and kept finding it even underwater and in the tousled and layered hay of Dennis’s pasture, and finally, back home, and despite huge caution, dropped it on the porch and watched it roll and then fall between floorboards, so had to go underneath in the spider-webbed crawl space, where on my belly I recovered the thing and rushed it upstairs to my little basket, dropping it twice more on the stairs, then missing the basket from inches away—a lively stone.

  Then there was last year, my walking along very self-consciously in the stream on my birthday, thinking I shouldn’t think too hard about finding a surprise even as I was looking for my surprise, and suddenly there it was: a glowing marble in the stream, an old, old marble of blue and white with patches of brickish red, looking like the earth—tiny. Again, magical, mysterious, even though I don’t believe in such things. What I do believe in, I would say, is coincidence. And in keeping a record of coincidence by filling a joss basket on my desk. And I believe in what’s in the basket, all that stuff together by no coincidence (I rearrange it every time we move back and forth from Maine to Ohio): I believe at the very least that the basket is really there, the things in it really put there by myself.

  I ke
pt my fist on that marble like the earth, never dropped it, and now it’s in my little basket of lucky things, top of the pile where I see it every day.

  So I’m wading along on my forty-sixth birthday and not forty-six sloshing steps (I said not forty-six), not forty-six stream steps from the beaver ramp, there is an eel. A large, long, green, lovely eel, not long dead, maybe minutes dead. I’ve never seen an eel anywhere around here before, never caught one in fresh water, only seen some in brackish water, these swimming in on the estuary tide on beaches in Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard at different times. An eel, like a cosmic joke (I mean, come on!), when I’m looking for something special for my birthday in the stream. This eel is not something to keep, unfortunately—won’t fit in my fortune basket. I kick it up on the sandbar and just look at it. No marks to say why dead. Just dead. Barely. I pick it up and it twitches a little, the way fish do newly dead. An eel. Maybe someone had it for bait and tossed it in the stream? But this isn’t a bait eel. And you don’t use eels for bait up here. Maybe I just don’t know about eels in rivers? Have to look it up. So I bring it with me, for positive ID. It balances perfectly just at its vent, is very, very slippery, though as it dries out the slime gets tacky and holding on easy. I’m carrying an eel.

  It’s my birthday.