The Human Stain

by Philip Roth

  “It’s way up on top of a mountain,” he said. “There’s no houses anywhere. No dwellings. There’s no cottages on the lake.” After each declaration, a brooding pause—declarative observation, supercharged silence. It was anybody’s guess, at the end of a sentence, whether or not he was finished with you. “Don’t have a lot of activity out here. Don’t have a lot of noise. Thirty acres of lake about. None of those guys with their power augers. None of their noise and the stink of their gasoline. Seven hundred acres of just open good land and woods. It’s just a beautiful area. Just peace and quiet. And clean. It’s a clean place. Away from all the hustle and bustle and craziness that goes on.” Finally the upward glance to take me in. To assess me. A quick look that was ninety percent opaque and unreadable and ten percent alarmingly transparent. I couldn’t see where there was any humor in this man.

  “As long as I can keep it secret,” he said, “it’ll stay the way it is.”

  “True enough,” I said.

  “They live in cities. They live in the hustle and bustle of the work routine. The craziness goin’ to work. The craziness at work. The craziness comin’ home from work. The traffic. The congestion. They’re caught up in that. I’m out of it.”

  I hadn’t to ask who “they” were. I might live far from any city, I might not own a power auger, but I was they, we all were they, everyone but the man hunkered down on this lake jiggling the shortish fishing rod in his hand and talking into a hole in the ice, by choice communicating less with me—as they—than to the frigid water beneath us.

  “Maybe a hiker’ll come through here, or a cross-country skier, or someone like you. Spots my vehicle, somehow they spot me out here, so they’ll come my way, and seems like when you’re out on the ice—people like you who don’t fish—” and here he looked up to take in again, to divine, gnostically, my unpardonable theyness. “I’m guessin’ you don’t fish.”

  “I don’t. No. Saw your truck. Just driving around on a beautiful day.”

  “Well, they’re like you,” he told me, as though there’d been no uncertainty about me from the time I’d appeared on the shore. “They’ll always come over if they see a fisherman, and they’re curious, and they’ll ask what he caught, you know. So what I’ll do . . .” But here the mind appeared to come to a halt, stopped by his thinking, What am I doing? What the hell am I going on about? When he started up again, my heart all at once started racing with fear. Now that his fishing has been ruined, I thought, he’s decided to have some fun with me. He’s into his act now. He’s out of the fishing and into being Les and all the many things that is and is not.

  “So what I’ll do,” he resumed, “if I have fish layin’ on the ice, I’ll do what I did when I saw you. I’ll pick all the fish up right away that I caught and I’ll put ’em in a plastic bag and put ’em in my bucket, the bucket I’m sittin’ on. So now the fish are concealed. And when the people come over and say, ‘How are they bitin’,’ I say, ‘Nothin’. I don’t think there’s anything in here.’ I caught maybe thirty fish already. Excellent day. But I’ll tell ’em, ‘Naw, I’m gettin’ ready to leave. I been here two hours and I haven’t gotten a bite yet.’ Every time they’ll just turn around and leave. They’ll go somewhere else. And they’ll spread the word that that pond up there is no good. That’s how secret it is. Maybe I end up tending to be a little dishonest. But this place is like the best-kept secret in the whole world.”

  “And now I know,” I said. I saw that there was no possible way to get him to laugh along conspiratorially at his dissembling with interlopers like myself, no way I was going to get him to ease up by smiling at what he’d said, and so I didn’t try. I realized that though nothing may have passed between us of a truly personal nature, by his decision, if not mine, we two were further along than smiling could help. I was in a conversation that, out in this remote, secluded, frozen place, seemed suddenly to be of the greatest importance. “I also know you’re sitting on a slew of fish,” I said. “In that bucket. How many today?”

  “Well, you look like a man who can keep a secret. About thirty, thirty-five fish. Yeah, you look like an upright man. I think I recognize you anyway. Aren’t you the author?”

  “That I am.”

  “Sure. I know where you live. Across from the swamp where the heron is. Dumouchel’s place. Dumouchel’s cabin there.”

  “Dumouchel’s who I bought it from. So tell me, since I’m a man who can keep a secret, why are you sitting right here and not over there? This whole big frozen lake. How’d you choose this one spot to fish?” Even if he really wasn’t doing everything he could to keep me there, I seemed on my own to be doing everything I could not to leave.

  “Well, you never know,” he told me. “You start out where you got ’em the last time. If you caught fish the last time, you always start out at that spot.”

  “So that solves that. I always wondered.” Go now, I thought. That’s all the conversation necessary. More than is necessary. But the thought of who he was drew me on. The fact of him drew me on. This was not speculation. This was not meditation. This was not that way of thinking that is fiction writing. This was the thing itself. The laws of caution that, outside my work, had ruled my life so strictly for the last five years were suddenly suspended. I couldn’t turn back while crossing the ice and now I couldn’t turn and flee. It had nothing to do with courage. It had nothing to do with reason or logic. Here he is. That’s all it had to do with. That and my fear. In his heavy brown coveralls and his black watch cap and his thick-soled black rubber boots, with his two big hands in a hunter’s (or a soldier’s) camouflage-colored fingertipless gloves, here is the man who murdered Coleman and Faunia. I’m sure of it. They didn’t drive off the road and into the river. Here is the killer. He is the one. How can I go?

  “Fish always there?” I asked him. “When you return to your spot from the time before?”

  “No, sir. The fish move in schools. Underneath the ice. One day they’ll be at the north end of the pond, the next day they might be at the south end of the pond. Maybe sometimes two times in a row they’ll be at that same spot. They’ll still be there. What they tend to do, the fish tend to school up and they don’t move very much, because the water’s so cold. They’re able to adjust to water temperature, and the water being so cold, they don’t move so much and they don’t require as much food. But if you get in an area where the fish are schooled up, you will catch a lot of fish. But some days you can go out in the same pond—you can never cover the entire thing—so you might try about five or six different places, drill holes, and never get a hit. Never catch a fish. You just didn’t locate the school. And so you just sit here.”

  “Close to God,” I said.

  “You got it.”

  His fluency—because it was the last thing I was expecting—fascinated me, as did the thoroughness with which he was willing to explain the life in a pond when the water’s cold. How did he know I was “the author”? Did he also know I was Coleman’s friend? Did he also know I was at Faunia’s funeral? I supposed there were now as many questions in his mind about me—and my mission here—as there were in mine about him. This great bright arched space, this cold aboveground vault of a mountaintop cradling at its peak a largish oval of fresh water frozen hard as rock, the ancient activity that is the life of a lake, that is the formation of ice, that is the metabolism of fish, all the soundless, ageless forces unyieldingly working away—it is as though we have encountered each other at the top of the world, two hidden brains mistrustfully ticking, mutual hatred and paranoia the only introspection there is anywhere.

  “And so what do you think about,” I asked, “if you don’t get a fish? What do you think about when they’re not biting?”

  “Tell you what I was just thinking about. I was thinking a lot of things. I was thinking about Slick Willie. I was thinking about our president—his freakin’ luck. I was thinkin’ about this guy who gets off everything, and I was thinkin’ about the guys who didn’t get off nothin�
��. Who didn’t dodge the draft and didn’t get off. It doesn’t seem right.”

  “Vietnam,” I said.

  “Yeah. We’d go up in the freakin’ helicopters—in my second tour I was a door gunner—and what I was thinking about was this one time we went into North Vietnam to pick up these two pilots. I was sitting out here thinking about that time. Slick Willie. That son of a bitch. Thinkin’ about that scumbag son of a bitch gettin’ his dick sucked in the Oval Office on the taxpayer’s money, and then thinkin’ about these two pilots, they were on an air strike over Hanoi harbor, these guys were hit real bad, and we picked up the signal on the radio. We weren’t even a rescue helicopter, but we were in the vicinity, and they were giving a mayday that they were goin’ to bail out, because they were at the altitude point where if they didn’t bail out they were goin’ to crash. We weren’t even a rescue helicopter—we were a gunship—we were just taking a chance that we could save a couple of lives. We didn’t even get permission to get up there, we just went. You act on instinct like that. We just all agreed, two door gunners, the pilot, the copilot, though the chances weren’t that good because we had no cover. But we went in anyway—to try to pick ’em up.”

  He’s telling me a war story, I thought. He knows he’s doing it. There’s a point here that he’s going to make. Something he wants me to carry away with me, to the shore, to my car, to the house whose location he knows and wishes me to understand that he knows. To carry away as “the author”? Or as somebody else—somebody who knows a secret of his that is even bigger than the secret of this pond. He wants me to know that not many people have seen what he’s seen, been where he’s been, done what he’s done and, if required to, can do again. He’s murdered in Vietnam and he’s brought the murderer back with him to the Berkshires, back with him from the country of war, the country of horror, to this completely uncomprehending other place.

  The auger out on the ice. The candor of the auger. There could be no more solid embodiment of our hatred than the merciless steel look of that auger out in the middle of nowhere.

  “We figure, okay, we’re gonna die, we’re gonna die. So we went up there and we homed in on their signals, we saw one parachute, and we went down in the clearing, and we picked that guy up with no trouble at all. He jumped right in, we dragged him right in and took off, no opposition whatsoever. So we said to him, ‘You have any idea?’ and he said, ‘Well, he drifted off that way.’ So we went up in the air, but by then they knew we were there. We went over a little farther looking for the other parachute, and all freakin’ hell broke loose. I’m telling you, it was unbelievable. We never picked up the other guy. The helicopter was gettin’ hit like you wouldn’t believe it. Ting ping ping boom. Machine guns. Ground fire. We just had to turn around and get the hell out of there as fast as we could. And I remember the guy we picked up started to cry. This is what I’m getting at. He was a navy pilot. They were off the Forrestal. And he knew the other guy was either killed or captured, and he started to bawl. It was horrible for him. His buddy. But we couldn’t go back. We couldn’t risk the chopper and five guys. We were lucky we got one. So we got back to our base and we got out and we looked at the chopper and there were a hundred and fifty-one bullet holes in it. Never hit a hydraulic line, a fuel line, but the rotors were all pinged up, a lot of bullets hit the rotors. Bent them a little bit. If they hit the tail rotor, you go right down, but they didn’t. You know they shot down five thousand helicopters during that war? Twenty-eight hundred jet fighters we lost. They lost two hundred fifty B-52S in high-altitude bombing over North Vietnam. But the government’ll never tell you that. Not that. They tell you what they want to tell you. Never Slick Willie who gets caught. It’s the guy who served who gets caught. Over and over. Nope, doesn’t seem right. You know what I was thinking? I was thinking that if I had a son he’d be out here with me now. Ice fishin’. That’s what I was thinking when you walked out here. I looked up and I saw someone comin’, and I’m sort of daydreamin’, and I thought, That could be my son. Not you, not a man like you, but my son.”

  “Don’t you have a son?”

  “No.”

  “Never married?” I asked.

  This time he didn’t answer me right off. He looked at me, homed in on me as though I had a signal that was going off like the two pilots bailing out, but he didn’t answer me. Because he knows, I thought. He knows I was at Faunia’s funeral. Somebody told him that “the author” was there. What kind of author does he think I am? An author who writes books about crimes like his? An author who writes books about murderers and murder?

  “Doomed,” he said finally, staring back into the hole and jiggling his rod, jerking it with a flick of his wrist a dozen or so times. “Marriage was doomed. Came back from Vietnam with too much anger and resentment. Had PTSD. I had what they call post-traumatic stress disorder. That’s what they told me. When I come back, I didn’t want to know anybody. I come back, I couldn’t relate to anything that was going on around here, as far as civilized living. It’s like I was there so long, it was totally insane. Wearing clean clothes, and people saying hello, and people smiling, and people going to parties, and people driving cars—I couldn’t relate to it anymore. I didn’t know how to talk to anybody, I didn’t know how to say hello to anybody. I withdrew for a long time. I used to get in my car, drive around, go in the woods, walk in the woods—it was the weirdest thing. I withdrew from myself. I had no idea what I was going through. My buddies would call me, I wouldn’t call back. They were afraid I was going to die in a car accident, they were afraid I was—”

  I interrupted. “Why were they afraid you were going to die in a car accident?”

  “I was drinking. I was driving around and drinking.”

  “Did you ever get into a car accident?”

  He smiled. Didn’t take a pause and stare me down. Didn’t give me an especially threatening look. Didn’t jump up and go for my throat. Just smiled a little, more good nature in the smile than I could have believed he had in him to show. In a deliberately light-hearted way, he shrugged and said, “Got me. I didn’t know what I was going through, you know? Accident? In an accident? I wouldn’t know if I did. I suppose I didn’t. You’re going through what they call post-traumatic stress disorder. Stuff keeps coming back into your subconscious mind that you’re back in Vietnam, that you’re back in the army again. I’m not an educated guy. I didn’t even know that. People were so pissed at me for this and that, and they didn’t even know what I was going through and I didn’t even know—you know? I don’t have educated friends who know these things. I got assholes for friends. Oh, man, I mean real guaranteed hundred percent assholes or double your money back.” Again the shrug. Comical? Intended to be comical? No, more a happy-go-lucky strain of sinisterness. “So what can I do?” he asked helplessly.

  Conning me. Playing with me. Because he knows I know. Here we are alone up where we are, and I know, and he knows I know. And the auger knows. All ye know and all ye need to know, all inscribed in the spiral of its curving steel blade.

  “How’d you find out you had PTSD?”

  “A colored girl at the VA. Excuse me. An African American. A very intelligent African American. She’s got a master’s degree. You got a master’s degree?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Well, she’s got one, and that’s how I found out what I had. Otherwise I still wouldn’t know. That’s how I started learning about myself, what I was going through. They told me. And not just me. Don’t think it was just me. Thousands and thousands of guys were going through what I was going through. Thousands and thousands of guys waking up in the middle of the night back in Vietnam. Thousands and thousands of guys people are calling up and they don’t call them back. Thousands and thousands of guys having these real bad dreams. And so I told that to this African American and she understood what it was. Because she had that master’s degree, she told me how it was going through my subconscious mind, and that it was the same with thousands and thousands of ot
her guys. The subconscious mind. You can’t control it. It’s like the government. It is the government. It’s the government all over again. It gets you to do what you don’t want to do. Thousands and thousands of guys getting married and it’s doomed, because they have this anger and this resentment about Vietnam in their subconscious mind. She explained all this to me. They just popped me from Vietnam onto a C-41 air force jet to the Philippines, then on a World Airways jet to Travis Air Force Base, then they gave me two hundred dollars to go home. So it took me, like, from the time I left Vietnam to go home, it took about three days. You’re back in civilization. And you’re doomed. And your wife, even if it’s ten years later, she’s doomed. She’s doomed, and what the hell did she do? Nothin’.”

  “Still have the PTSD?”

  “Well, I still tend to isolate, don’t I? What do you think I’m doin’ out here?”

  “But no more drinking and driving,” I heard myself saying. “No more accidents.”

  “There were never accidents. Don’t you listen? I already told you that. Not that I know of.”

  “And the marriage was doomed.”

  “Oh yeah. My fault. Hundred percent. She was a lovely woman. Entirely blameless. All me. Always all me. She deserved a helluva lot better than me.”

  “What happened to her?” I asked.

  He shook his head. A sad shrug, a sigh—complete bullshit, deliberately transparent bullshit. “No idea. Ran away, I scared her so. Scared the woman shitless. My heart goes out to her, wherever she may be. Completely blameless person.”

  “No kids.”

  “Nope. No kids. You?” he asked me.

  “No.”

  “Married?”

  “No more,” I said.

  “So, you and me in the same boat. Free as the wind. What kind of books do you write? Whodunits?”

  “I wouldn’t say that.”

  “True stories?”