All That Is Left Is All That Matters

by Mark Slouka

  “I’m not the one who has to worry about being seen. And Kessler,” she said, after a moment. “Him I can’t understand.”

  “What would you have him do?”

  “Something. Anything.”

  Again they were quiet. I heard a page turn.

  “And for what?” she went on after a while. “Nothing.”

  “I don’t imagine she sees it that way,” said my father.

  “You don’t?”

  “No.”

  “How does she see it then?”

  “Differently.”

  “So you’re saying there’s nothing wrong with him sitting there reading like an idiot while his wife . . .”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Christ, you’re understanding.”

  “Am I?”

  “You go to hell.”

  I heard my father get out of the wicker chair, then whisper something I couldn’t make out: “I’ve never asked . . . little enough . . . to blame . . . fault.” And then I heard my mother crying and my father saying, “All right, there, come now, everything’s all right.”

  THE NEXT MORNING my mother woke me while everything was still cool and fresh. She had made a big plate of palačinky so light and thin you could see the bruise of the jam through the sides of the crepes. She’d set out two deck chairs in the middle of the old garden plot, she said, we could eat breakfast outside—a special treat. She put the palačinky on a tray with two cups of sweetened tea and together we walked up the steps away from the lake to the garden, where we sat under light blankets with the weeds and the thistles growing up all around us and ate with our fingers, draping the floppy crepes between our thumbs and pinkies so the preserves wouldn’t come out and feeding them into our mouths. We laughed about dumb things and pretended to call out to a waiter who stood in the old strawberry patch and to be frustrated when we couldn’t catch his eye.

  “What do you think he’s doing?” my mother said.

  “He’s not paying attention to us,” I said. I waved my arms wildly, as if signaling a boat far offshore.

  “Careful,” my mother said.

  I put my cup of tea on its saucer down on the ground, making a space between the long grasses. I waved my arms again. “Can I get some more jam?” I called out. “And some hot chocolate, please?”

  My mother was looking at the overgrown strawberry patch as though a man actually stood there in the weeds. “What do you suppose he’s thinking about?” she said, as if to herself.

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “I think he’s thinking about a girl,” my mother said. She was looking at the strawberry patch. A small breeze moved the patches of shade and sun on the ground, then returned them to where they had been. She laughed strangely. “I don’t think we can get his attention.”

  “Why don’t we throw something at him,” I said, and, leaning over, I picked up a short, thick branch and sent it flying through the air above the strawberry patch. It fell in the weeds at the far end of the garden. “Missed,” I said. I reached for another stick. “This time I’ll . . .”

  “He’s smoking,” said my mother. “Look at the way he brings it to his mouth. The way he stands with his elbows back on the bar.”

  I looked at her, wanting to follow her, to play on this new field she was making.

  “I bet he gets in trouble,” I said.

  She nodded slowly, agreeing with something I hadn’t said. “I don’t think he’s the kind of man who would care very much. I don’t think he’ll care at all.” She looked around the dead garden, then shook her head and smiled as if remembering an old joke. “So here we are. Nothing to do but call for the check.”

  My mother worked on her flowers all that afternoon, sitting at the wooden table in the shade, a cup of coffee and a cigarette next to her, cupping big handfuls of black soil with her hands from the small mountain she’d spilled on the wood next to her, packing the pots, then making a space for the root ball by pushing the dirt to the side with her fingers the way a potter shapes the sides of a vase. I went off to play for a while, then returned to find her sitting with her elbows on the table. She was holding the cigarette and the cup of coffee in her right hand as though just about to pick them up, and her head was tilted slightly to the side. She was looking at a spot on the grass a short distance away.

  I didn’t want to disturb her so I sat down quietly on the wooden steps to wait until she started working again. Everything was still. Far across the water a group of kids I didn’t know were jumping from the children’s dock into the water. Their little screams sounded strangely distant, as though I were hearing them from inside a closed room.

  My father spoke from the open bedroom window. “Can I get you something?” His voice was very close, but though I knew he was right there, I couldn’t see him: the angle made the screen opaque as a wall.

  “No,” my mother said. She didn’t look up.

  “Something to eat? A cup of tea?” In the other room, the children screamed happily. I could see them run down the hill and onto the slightly lopsided dock, then spear into the water. They looked like little white sticks.

  “No,” my mother said again. And then, after a long while: “Thank you.”

  IT WAS NOT long afterward—three days, maybe a week—that my father shot the dog. Harold Mostovsky and I heard it first while we were exploring along the brook one quiet, cloudy morning: a furious, concentrated thrashing in the underbrush. There was no other sound, I remember—no growling or snarling. When we came closer we thought at first what we were seeing was two dogs, then a shepherd with something around its neck. Only when it sank its teeth in its own tail and bayed in pain, then bit its own hind leg, did we realize something was wrong. And terrified of this thing trying to kill itself, we began to run.

  I never thought to ask him how he knew. Whether someone had called him, or whether he’d been walking in the area, or whether he’d somehow simply sensed it, the way parents sometimes will. All I know for certain is that he and old Ashby, who lived in a shack a mile away and who always wore overalls and a sleeveless T-shirt, were suddenly there, and my father was yelling, “Whose? Where?” then running for the old white Colby house, which stood on a little rise a hundred yards away. As Harold and I ran up behind them I heard my father ask, Do you know where he keeps the shells? then saw him tap the bottom right pane with his elbow and reach in and open the door. A moment later he was walking out with the shotgun. He brought it up to his face, studying it quickly, then broke it and chambered a red shell he took from his pocket. “Stay here,” he told us.

  The shepherd was still there. It was trying to get at its stomach. It had bitten off its own tail; the stub ended in a small, pink circle. It seemed to be trying to stand on its right shoulder. It had shit all over itself and the smell was terrible. My father walked right over to it, extended the gun, and shot it in the head. At the sound of the two-part crash the dog fell to the ground like a dropped rubber toy; I caught a glimpse of what had been its head—a grinning jaw of teeth, a mat of fur, something pink like a thumb—and then my father’s body blocked the view and he was turning us gently around. “Go home,” he said. “This is not for you. Go on.” And then, to Ashby: “Get the shovel. I would like to take care of this quickly.”

  And that was all, really. My father didn’t talk about it much, except to ask if I was all right and to explain that the dog had gotten into some poison some idiot had left out and that the thing had had to be done. He seemed strangely happy that week, unburdened. It started to rain that same afternoon, and when the water began to spill over the sides of the leaf-clogged gutter in long, wavering sheets that tore open to show the trees and the hill, then sewed themselves up again, he took off his shirt and shoes and walked hatless into the downpour and unclogged the pipe and dug at the mats of blackened leaves gathered against the back of the cabin with his hands and carried them against his soaking chest into the woods.

  It rained for three days. Soon after it stopped,
Mr. and Mrs. Kessler left the lake because Mrs. Kessler was in love with the man who lived in the cove and wouldn’t listen to reason. I never saw them again. The man stayed on for a while—we could see him row out to the dock and swim by himself in the evenings just before dark—as though he didn’t want to go or thought she might come back, but then he left too. My mother kept gardening, and for a time the south side of the cabin burst into color: waterfalls of blossoms cascaded against the wood and bouquets filled with air moved sluggishly in the afternoon heat, but by late August something had gone wrong and they began to die and my mother lost interest. My father made a halfhearted effort to keep them up but they died anyway, and one day he took the pots off the wall and dumped the soil out of them in a corner of the old garden then came back down and unscrewed the hooks out of the cabin wall and got a small brush and painted the white insides of the holes with dark stain so they couldn’t be seen. The sixteen pots of soil looked like cake molds, white with roots, and they lay there until my father broke them up with a spade and spread them out into the weeds.

  Justice

  IN MAY 1968, RUSSIAN TANKS HADN’T ROLLED into Prague yet, my mother hadn’t gone crazy, and out on Route 22, just down from the dairy farm that’s now a Carpet Warehouse, Sam’s Bait and Tackle held a fishing contest.

  I was ten and awkward in that first-generation, white-shirt-and-black-bread-sandwich way, my squareness reinforced by my every attempt to be hip, my brown Oxfords and no-nonsense crew cut redeemed, but only slightly, by a modest athleticism and a certain willingness to get beat up if the situation called for it. I didn’t like football, though I pretended to. I didn’t care about baseball, though I could pitch a little. I’d noticed girls but couldn’t talk to them. In the pictures I seem to be listening for something, wanting to smile but not sure I should.

  My great passion was fishing. Though we lived in Queens, my parents rented a cabin on a lake for the summers, and it was done. This wasn’t a hobby. I could tell you which part of China the Tonkin cane came from that craftsmen like Hiram Leonard and Jim Payne turned into split-bamboo fly rods I could never afford. I could tell you what size and pattern of terrestrial to use in August on the legendary Letort Creek in Pennsylvania, though I’d never been within a hundred miles of it. I read Ernest Schwiebert and Art Flick, pored over Field & Stream with Talmudic concentration, spent hours tying my own trout flies while listening to Cousin Brucie in the darkroom where my dad hid his vodka in rinsed-out bottles of fixative.

  And every summer I fished my heart out, lifting up the latch on the kitchen door and sneaking out into the morning fog, pouring water over my head at noon, flailing around after dark, a thousand bullfrogs roaring in my ears. If this was a kind of love, it was no sillier than most and better than many, and I devoted myself to it as I’ve devoted myself to few things in this life. All I had to do was keep at it, and things would come out right: the odds would kick in, the surface would shatter, and I’d know I’d summoned something extraordinary, something few others had seen or imagined. The knot would hold, because I’d earned it.

  What I’m saying is that fishing mattered to me then. Walking to PS 206 in the cold, the brown buildings of LeFrak City fading in the sleet, I’d imagine my Jitterbug gurgling placidly along a mossy log, the wake of something dark rising up behind it. All through December and January, February, and March I’d sit in my room with a plate of my mother’s bábovka, curled up like a moth in its chrysalis, dreaming. And then, just like that, the loaf-shaped hedges along Sixty-Third Road would be green and we’d be driving across the Triborough Bridge and up the Saw Mill River Parkway, winding back the season until, somewhere around Bedford, only the willows showed any color. There’d be a protocol. We’d always stop at the Red Rooster, where my father would buy me a strawberry milkshake while my mother stayed in the car, and coming up Doansburg Road, whichever one of us first spotted the Green Chimneys school, or Schlump’s mailbox, or the post office, would get to yell Školka!, or Schlump!, or Pošta!, and then we’d be there, pushing open the swollen door, breathing in that sharp, dank cedar smell, touching all the sleeping things, remembering ourselves to them.

  Most years we wouldn’t move out to the cabin until school let out, but that year my parents took me out of school a month early. Things were complicated, my mother told me. Daddy would probably stay in the city—he taught at Columbia—and come up on the weekends. Things were complicated there too—at Columbia—he needed to do what he could. But it was fine. Everything was fine. The two of us would be moving back home to Czechoslovakia that fall. She’d waited long enough, and though Daddy didn’t always agree, sometimes you had to take a risk, sometimes you had to take a chance at happiness because life just flew by and then it was gone and what was the point of it all if not to be happy and among your own? When we moved she’d show me the lakes she’d known as a little girl. Beautiful lakes. Full of carp and pike—huge fish. We had family there—aunts, uncles. I’d have so many friends there.

  DADDY DIDN’T HAVE the nerve. He didn’t believe in dubček, which I thought was a kind of luck. He didn’t know what it was like to slowly suffocate while he waltzed off to his classes to play the big man in front of all those graduate students in their miniskirts. But once we’d made the move, he’d understand, and join us. It would be like it used to be—maybe not perfect, but right.

  I’d been asleep in my room when their voices closed my dreams.

  “You know that’s not true,” I heard my father say—“I want this as much as you do.”

  My mother laughed—a short, sharp laugh like a cough.

  “You? It’s all the same to you—here, there . . .”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  I could hear the water, the touch and clink of dishes. My father, I knew, would be standing in the kitchen doorway; she’d be by the sink, her white arms disappearing in the long, yellow gloves.

  “Every day it’s take off your hat, read the paper, shovel your dinner—I could put ashes on your plate you wouldn’t know the difference.”

  “So this is about how I eat now? I’m just saying this isn’t some fairy tale you decide to believe in because . . .”

  “We’re going. I don’t care—”

  “Obviously—”

  “We never fucking said it would be forever, we—”

  “Keep your voice down, he’s—”

  “We’re going home, and you can come with us or sit here and . . . rot.”

  “Six months.”

  “No.”

  “That’s all I’m asking.”

  “No.”

  “If it holds—”

  Something smashed and a second later my door opened and my dad came in and closed it quickly behind him and came and sat on my bed in the dark. Had they woken me? It was nothing. I should go to sleep, everything would be fine. And he pet my head with his heavy hand until I pretended to be asleep. He smelled like smoke.

  AND SO MOM and I went to the lake before we moved to Czechoslovakia and Daddy stayed in the city. I don’t know if it was hard for him. When I imagine him then, I see him sitting up late in our apartment, the sweat quietly running down his back, listening to the drone of the expressway. Wondering if she was right.

  At the time, I didn’t think about him much at all. My best friend, Matt, had moved away that spring, and the lake was almost empty because people didn’t really come up till June, but Mom and I were fine. It was still cold so we made fires in the fireplace every night and slept under hills of blankets and talked through the wooden wall between our rooms and laughed. Mom kept a hammer and a knife under her bed just in case somebody tried to break in.

  I’d be up so early the lake would still be invisible, a mirror in the fog. I liked seeing how quiet I could be, pulling my jeans on slowly, not stirring the tea till I was outside. Mom would sleep in, then read in bed till noon. She was still Mom, then. The day would pass in a slow waltz, me off in the boat, Mom reading in the hammock in the watery shade, the two of us drift
ing together to eat, or to swim. The shadows would shrink into the eastern shore, the sun rise on its arc, the shadows grow from the west. Twice a day she’d come down to admire the fish I caught, which I’d pull up for her, their red gills flaring and closing in the heat, and I’d tell her about the one that had broken my line and she’d say I’d catch an even bigger one next time, and then we’d walk up through the long, knotted grass to the cabin. She was my best friend.

  IT WASN’T LONG after we came to the cabin that year that I saw the sign scotch-taped to the wooden counter at Sam’s. The contest was for the biggest bass officially weighed in by six p.m. on June 1, and the winning prize—there was no second or third—was two hundred dollars in store credit. I didn’t think about it much. This wasn’t for me—this was for grown-ups. Already the fish in the lead, a nineteen-inch trophy weighing four pounds, three ounces—caught by a man who looked like my math teacher, Mr. Wentzel—was three inches longer than the biggest bass I’d ever seen.

  I looked at the picture of Mr. Wentzel holding his fish out to the camera, then picked some five-cent plastic worms from the candy jars on the counter while the owner, a thin man with a big Adam’s apple who always seemed about to be angry, watched me over the top of the reel he was filling with monofilament by the cash register. “Back again?” he’d say whenever I came in to buy some worms, and I’d say, “Yes, sir,” and he’d say, “Just make sure you put all those back,” and go back to what he was doing.

  My mom, who’d been crying in the hammock when I came in for lunch that day, saw me looking at the picture. To je macek, she said, leaning in for a closer look: That’s a whopper.

  I nodded.

  Kluku, mělbys to zkusit, she said—You should try it, kiddo.

  I shrugged.

  “Don’t you think he should try it?” she said to the owner, who was winding the reel while holding a cigarette.

  He didn’t hear her.

  “I think he could win, don’t you?”

  “What is that, German?” he said.