What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

by Raymond Carver

  On a long clear stretch he goes past. But he drives along beside for a bit, a crewcut man in a blue workshirt. We look each other over. Then he waves, toots his horn, and pulls on up ahead.

  I slow down and find a place. I pull over and shut off the motor. I can hear the river down below the trees. Then I hear the pickup coming back.

  I lock the doors and roll up the windows.

  “You all right?” the man says. He raps on the glass. “You okay?” He leans his arms on the door and brings his face to the window.

  I stare at him. I can’t think what else to do.

  “Is everything all right in there? How come you’re all locked up?”

  I shake my head.

  “Roll down your window.” He shakes his head and looks at the highway and then back at me. “Roll it down now.”

  “Please,” I say, “I have to go.”

  “Open the door,” he says as if he isn’t listening. “You’re going to choke in there.”

  He looks at my breasts, my legs. I can tell that’s what he’s doing.

  “Hey, sugar,” he says. “I’m just here to help is all.”

  THE casket is closed and covered with floral sprays. The organ starts up the minute I take a seat. People are coming in and finding chairs. There’s a boy in flared pants and a yellow short-sleeved shirt. A door opens and the family comes in in a group and moves over to a curtained place off to one side. Chairs creak as everybody gets settled. Directly, a nice blond man in a nice dark suit stands and asks us to bow our heads. He says a prayer for us, the living, and when he finishes, he says a prayer for the soul of the departed.

  Along with the others I go past the casket. Then I move out onto the front steps and into the afternoon light. There’s a woman who limps as she goes down the stairs ahead of me. On the sidewalk she looks around. “Well, they got him,” she says. “If that’s any consolation. They arrested him this morning. I heard it on the radio before I come. A boy right here in town.”

  We move a few steps down the hot sidewalk. People are starting cars. I put out my hand and hold on to a parking meter. Polished hoods and polished fenders. My head swims.

  I say, “They have friends, these killers. You can’t tell.”

  “I have known that child since she was a little girl,” the woman says. “She used to come over and I’d bake cookies for her and let her eat them in front of the TV.”

  BACK home, Stuart sits at the table with a drink of whiskey in front of him. For a crazy instant I think something’s happened to Dean.

  “Where is he?” I say. “Where is Dean?”

  “Outside,” my husband says.

  He drains his glass and stands up. He says, “I think I know what you need.”

  He reaches an arm around my waist and with his other hand he begins to unbutton my jacket and then he goes on to the buttons of my blouse.

  “First things first,” he says.

  He says something else. But I don’t need to listen. I can’t hear a thing with so much water going.

  “That’s right,” I say, finishing the buttons myself. “Before Dean comes. Hurry.”

  The Third Thing That Killed My Father Off

  I’LL tell you what did my father in. The third thing was Dummy, that Dummy died. The first thing was Pearl Harbor. And the second thing was moving to my grandfather’s farm near Wenatchee. That’s where my father finished out his days, except they were probably finished before that.

  My father blamed Dummy’s death on Dummy’s wife. Then he blamed it on the fish. And finally he blamed himself—because he was the one that showed Dummy the ad in the back of Field and Stream for live black bass shipped anywhere in the U.S.

  It was after he got the fish that Dummy started acting peculiar. The fish changed Dummy’s whole personality. That’s what my father said.

  I NEVER knew Dummy’s real name. If anyone did, I never heard it. Dummy it was then, and it’s Dummy I remember him by now. He was a little wrinkled man, bald-headed, short but very powerful in the arms and legs. If he grinned, which was seldom, his lips folded back over brown, broken teeth. It gave him a crafty expression. His watery eyes stayed fastened on your mouth when you were talking—and if you weren’t, they’d go to someplace queer on your body.

  I don’t think he was really deaf. At least not as deaf as he made out. But he sure couldn’t talk. That was for certain.

  Deaf or no, Dummy’d been on as a common laborer out at the sawmill since the 1920s. This was the Cascade Lumber Company in Yakima, Washington. The years I knew him, Dummy was working as a cleanup man. And all those years I never saw him with anything different on. Meaning a felt hat, a khaki workshirt, a denim jacket over a pair of coveralls. In his top pockets he carried rolls of toilet paper, as one of his jobs was to clean and supply the toilets. It kept him busy, seeing as how the men on nights used to walk off after their tours with a roll or two in their lunchboxes.

  Dummy carried a flashlight, even though he worked days. He also carried wrenches, pliers, screwdrivers, friction tape, all the same things the millwrights carried. Well, it made them kid Dummy, the way he was, always carrying everything. Carl Lowe, Ted Slade, Johnny Wait, they were the worst kidders of the ones that kidded Dummy. But Dummy took it all in stride. I think he’d gotten used to it.

  My father never kidded Dummy. Not to my knowledge, anyway. Dad was a big, heavy-shouldered man with a crew-haircut, double chin, and a belly of real size. Dummy was always staring at that belly. He’d come to the filing room where my father worked, and he’d sit on a stool and watch my dad’s belly while he used the big emery wheels on the saws.

  DUMMY had a house as good as anyone’s.

  It was a tarpaper-covered affair near the river, five or six miles from town. Half a mile behind the house, at the end of a pasture, there lay a big gravel pit that the state had dug when they were paving the roads around there. Three good-sized holes had been scooped out, and over the years they’d filled with water. By and by, the three ponds came together to make one.

  It was deep. It had a darkish look to it.

  Dummy had a wife as well as a house. She was a woman years younger and said to go around with Mexicans. Father said it was busybodies that said that, men like Lowe and Wait and Slade.

  She was a small stout woman with glittery little eyes. The first time I saw her, I saw those eyes. It was when I was with Pete Jensen and we were on our bicycles and we stopped at Dummy’s to get a glass of water.

  When she opened the door, I told her I was Del Fraser’s son. I said, “He works with—” And then I realized. “You know, your husband. We were on our bicycles and thought we could get a drink.”

  “Wait here,” she said.

  She came back with a little tin cup of water in each hand. I downed mine in a single gulp.

  But she didn’t offer us more. She watched us without saying anything. When we started to get on our bicycles, she came over to the edge of the porch.

  “You little fellas had a car now, I might catch a ride with you.”

  She grinned. Her teeth looked too big for her mouth.

  “Let’s go,” Pete said, and we went.

  THERE weren’t many places you could fish for bass in our part of the state. There was rainbow mostly, a few brook and Dolly Varden in some of the high mountain streams, and silvers in Blue Lake and Lake Rimrock. That was mostly it, except for the runs of steelhead and salmon in some of the freshwater rivers in late fall. But if you were a fisherman, it was enough to keep you busy. No one fished for bass. A lot of people I knew had never seen a bass except for pictures. But my father had seen plenty of them when he was growing up in Arkansas and Georgia, and he had high hopes to do with Dummy’s bass, Dummy being a friend.

  The day the fish arrived, I’d gone swimming at the city pool. I remember coming home and going out again to get them since Dad was going to give Dummy a hand—three tanks Parcel Post from Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

  We went in Dummy’s pickup, Dad and Dummy and me
.

  These tanks turned out to be barrels, really, the three of them crated in pine lath. They were standing in the shade out back of the train depot, and it took my dad and Dummy both to lift each crate into the truck.

  Dummy drove very carefully through town and just as carefully all the way to his house. He went right through his yard without stopping. He went on down to within feet of the pond. By that time it was nearly dark, so he kept his headlights on and took out a hammer and a tire iron from under the seat, and then the two of them lugged the crates up close to the water and started tearing open the first one.

  The barrel inside was wrapped in burlap, and there were these nickel-sized holes in the lid. They raised it off and Dummy aimed his flashlight in.

  It looked like a million bass fingerlings were finning inside. It was the strangest sight, all those live things busy in there, like a little ocean that had come on the train.

  Dummy scooted the barrel to the edge of the water and poured it out. He took his flashlight and shined it into the pond. But there was nothing to be seen anymore. You could hear the frogs going, but you could hear them going anytime it newly got dark.

  “Let me get the other crates,” my father said, and he reached over as if to take the hammer from Dummy’s coveralls. But Dummy pulled back and shook his head.

  He undid the other two crates himself, leaving dark drops of blood on the lath where he ripped his hand doing it.

  FROM that night on, Dummy was different.

  Dummy wouldn’t let anyone come around now anymore. He put up fencing all around the pasture, and then he fenced off the pond with electrical barbed wire. They said it cost him all his savings for that fence.

  Of course, my father wouldn’t have anything to do with Dummy after that. Not since Dummy ran him off. Not from fishing, mind you, because the bass were just babies still. But even from trying to get a look.

  One evening two years after, when Dad was working late and I took him his food and a jar of iced tea, I found him standing talking with Syd Glover, the millwright. Just as I came in, I heard Dad saying, “You’d reckon the fool was married to them fish, the way he acts.”

  “From what I hear,” Syd said, “he’d do better to put that fence round his house.”

  My father saw me then, and I saw him signal Syd Glover with his eyes.

  But a month later my dad finally made Dummy do it. What he did was, he told Dummy how you had to thin out the weak ones on account of keeping things fit for the rest of them. Dummy stood there pulling at his ear and staring at the floor. Dad said, Yeah, he’d be down to do it tomorrow because it had to be done. Dummy never said yes, actually. He just never said no, is all. All he did was pull on his ear some more.

  WHEN Dad got home that day, I was ready and waiting. I had his old bass plugs out and was testing the treble hooks with my finger.

  “You set?” he called to me, jumping out of the car. “I’ll go to the toilet, you put the stuff in. You can drive us out there if you want.”

  I’d stowed everything in the back seat and was trying out the wheel when he came back out wearing his fishing hat and eating a wedge of cake with both hands.

  Mother was standing in the door watching. She was a fair-skinned woman, her blonde hair pulled back in a tight bun and fastened down with a rhinestone clip. I wonder if she ever went around back in those happy days, or what she ever really did.

  I let out the handbrake. Mother watched until I’d shifted gears, and then, still unsmiling, she went back inside.

  It was a fine afternoon. We had all the windows down to let the air in. We crossed the Moxee Bridge and swung west onto Slater Road. Alfalfa fields stood off to either side, and farther on it was cornfields.

  Dad had his hand out the window. He was letting the wind carry it back. He was restless, I could see.

  It wasn’t long before we pulled up at Dummy’s. He came out of the house wearing his hat. His wife was looking out the window.

  “You got your frying pan ready?” Dad hollered out to Dummy, but Dummy just stood there eyeing the car. “Hey, Dummy!” Dad yelled. “Hey, Dummy, where’s your pole, Dummy?”

  Dummy jerked his head back and forth. He moved his weight from one leg to the other and looked at the ground and then at us. His tongue rested on his lower lip, and he began working his foot into the dirt.

  I shouldered the creel. I handed Dad his pole and picked up my own.

  “We set to go?” Dad said. “Hey, Dummy, we set to go?”

  Dummy took off his hat and, with the same hand, he wiped his wrist over his head. He turned abruptly, and we followed him across the spongy pasture. Every twenty feet or so a snipe sprang up from the clumps of grass at the edge of the old furrows.

  At the end of the pasture, the ground sloped gently and became dry and rocky, nettle bushes and scrub oaks scattered here and there. We cut to the right, following an old set of car tracks, going through a field of milkweed that came up to our waists, the dry pods at the tops of the stalks rattling angrily as we pushed through. Presently, I saw the sheen of water over Dummy’s shoulder, and I heard Dad shout, “Oh, Lord, look at that!”

  But Dummy slowed down and kept bringing his hand up and moving his hat back and forth over his head, and then he just stopped flat.

  Dad said, “Well, what do you think, Dummy? One place good as another? Where do you say we should come onto it?”

  Dummy wet his lower lip.

  “What’s the matter with you, Dummy?” Dad said. “This your pond, ain’t it?”

  Dummy looked down and picked an ant off his coveralls.

  “Well, hell,” Dad said, letting out his breath. He took out his watch. “If it’s still all right with you, we’ll get to it before it gets too dark.”

  Dummy stuck his hands in his pockets and turned back to the pond. He started walking again. We trailed along behind. We could see the whole pond now, the water dimpled with rising fish. Every so often a bass would leap clear and come down in a splash.

  “Great God,” I heard my father say.

  WE came up to the pond at an open place, a gravel beach kind of.

  Dad motioned to me and dropped into a crouch. I dropped too. He was peering into the water in front of us, and when I looked, I saw what had taken him so.

  “Honest to God,” he whispered.

  A school of bass was cruising, twenty, thirty, not one of them under two pounds. They veered off, and then they shifted and came back, so densely spaced they looked like they were bumping up against each other. I could see their big, heavy-lidded eyes watching us as they went by. They flashed away again, and again they came back.

  They were asking for it. It didn’t make any difference if we stayed squatted or stood up. The fish just didn’t think a thing about us. I tell you, it was a sight to behold.

  We sat there for quite a while, watching that school of bass go so innocently about their business, Dummy the whole time pulling at his fingers and looking around as if he expected someone to show up. All over the pond the bass were coming up to nuzzle the water, or jumping clear and falling back, or coming up to the surface to swim along with their dorsals sticking out.

  DAD signaled, and we got up to cast. I tell you, I was shaky with excitement. I could hardly get the plug loose from the cork handle of my pole. It was while I was trying to get the hooks out that I felt Dummy seize my shoulder with his big fingers. I looked, and in answer Dummy worked his chin in Dad’s direction. What he wanted was clear enough, no more than one pole.

  Dad took off his hat and then put it back on and then he moved over to where I stood.

  “You go on, Jack,” he said. “That’s all right, son—you do it now.”

  I looked at Dummy just before I laid out my cast. His face had gone rigid, and there was a thin line of drool on his chin.

  “Come back stout on the sucker when he strikes,” Dad said. “Sons of bitches got mouths hard as doorknobs.”

  I flipped off the drag lever and threw back my arm. I sent h
er out a good forty feet. The water was boiling even before I had time to take up the slack.

  “Hit him!” Dad yelled. “Hit the son of a bitch! Hit him good!”

  I came back hard, twice. I had him, all right. The rod bowed over and jerked back and forth. Dad kept yelling what to do.

  “Let him go, let him go! Let him run! Give him more line! Now wind in! Wind in! No, let him run! Woo-ee! Will you look at that!”

  The bass danced around the pond. Every time it came up out of the water, it shook its head so hard you could hear the plug rattle. And then he’d take off again. But by and by I wore him out and had him in up close. He looked enormous, six or seven pounds maybe. He lay on his side, whipped, mouth open, gills working. My knees felt so weak I could hardly stand. But I held the rod up, the line tight.

  Dad waded out over his shoes. But when he reached for the fish, Dummy started sputtering, shaking his head, waving his arms.

  “Now what the hell’s the matter with you, Dummy? The boy’s got hold of the biggest bass I ever seen, and he ain’t going to throw him back, by God!”

  Dummy kept carrying on and gesturing toward the pond.

  “I ain’t about to let this boy’s fish go. You hear me, Dummy? You got another think coming if you think I’m going to do that.”

  Dummy reached for my line. Meanwhile, the bass had gained some strength back. He turned himself over and started swimming again. I yelled and then I lost my head and slammed down the brake on the reel and started winding. The bass made a last, furious run.

  That was that. The line broke. I almost fell over on my back.

  “Come on, Jack,” Dad said, and I saw him grabbing up his pole. “Come on, goddamn the fool, before I knock the man down.”

  THAT February the river flooded.

  It had snowed pretty heavy the first weeks of December, and turned real cold before Christmas. The ground froze. The snow stayed where it was. But toward the end of January, the Chinook wind struck. I woke up one morning to hear the house getting buffeted and the steady drizzle of water running off the roof.