by Mark Slouka
“I’m sorry?”
“Whatever it is you’re always talkin’.”
“It’s Czech.”
“What’s that?”
“Not German.”
He cut the line with a pair of scissors, then put a fat rubber band on the spool to keep the line from unwinding. “Why don’t you just talk English, where people could understand you?”
“I am speaking English.”
He smiled and tilted his head a little like something hadn’t gone down right, then nodded toward the contest sign. “Open to anybody with a license,” he said. He picked up another reel. “Could buy himself a lifetime supply of those plastic worms.”
“Yes, he could,” my mother said, and the man looked up at her, took a drag, then turned back to his reel.
I WAS UP early that morning, like every morning, dropping the latch quietly behind me, stowing my gear behind the wooden seat, rowing with short, choppy strokes to keep the oarlocks from creaking till I couldn’t see the shore. The air wet my face and somewhere out in the fog some jays started up and then stopped and everything was still. I fished by ear, mostly, casting the weedless frog out into the mist, listening for a strike. Near the cabin where Matt used to live I got a 14-inch bass, the biggest I’d caught in a while, then nothing. It was strange seeing his dock and knowing he wasn’t coming back there, and I wondered if someone would think the same thing about me. I fished on. At some point, the mist began to yellow and the very tops of the oaks came out. When I looked again, a dark fringe of leaves floated high above the lake and the fog over my head had thinned to a cloudy blue like an old dog’s eyes.
I could make out bits of the shoreline now, and I cast my Amazin’ Weedless Frog out over the dark water toward the fallen trees, then hopped it back and cast again. And again. A quick, white sun lit the trees on the western shore, disappeared.
Not far from the four cedar boards that made our dam I cast the frog into the shallows, let it sit, then scurried it over the open water onto a plate-sized mat of ropy weeds. And then the water erupted and the mat of weeds disappeared into a red-gilled, rattling maw big enough to fit my head into, and I hauled back on the rod and set the hook.
How I managed to get that bass into the boat, I have no idea, but I did. It took a while. I had no net. Toward the end, shifting the straining rod to my left hand, I reached down into the water and pinned a huge clump of weeds to the side of the boat; inside it I could feel a gill plate wider than my hand. Disbelieving, I wallowed the monster, still encased in weeds, into the rowboat and started to scream.
My mother, hearing me yell, came running down to the dock, barefoot, holding her nightgown above the long grass. The bass, with its huge, underslung white belly, measured just under twenty-six inches long and probably weighed eight or nine pounds. We were laughing and yelling in disbelief, jumping around on the wooden boards of the dock, and then we looked at each other and we were in the car and Mom, still in her thin nightgown, was driving down Fairfield Drive where the American Nazi Party used to march long before I was born and I was sitting with the bass headfirst in a metal bucket of water, its tail slapping against the glove compartment.
We skidded into the gravel parking lot and I was out and running, hugging the sloshing bucket. I could hear my mother, slumped down in the seat, shouting encouragement out the window, cheering me on.
I can still see him, writing something by the cash register. He’s just opened up—another day on this sinking ship, which he never wanted in the first place, which was his brother-in-law’s idea—when the door flies open and that little Kraut kid comes staggering in carrying a bucket with a tail flopping a full foot over the rim. This isn’t possible. He’s got Pete with the picture all lined up to go.
I didn’t see him look up—I was working too hard carrying the bucket. He was writing something on a pad.
“Caught a fish, huh?” he said. There was no one else in the store.
I don’t remember what I babbled: “A huge one,” “The biggest fish I ever saw”—it doesn’t matter.
“Well, good for you.” He flipped the page, then flipped it back. I didn’t understand what was happening.
“So . . . what can I do for you today?”
“The contest,” I said, like an idiot. “The bass contest. I—”
He looked up from the pad, distracted, irritated.
“The bass contest,” I explained. “I thought—”
“You’re sayin’ you brought this fish to enter in the contest?”
I nodded.
“Got a New York State fishin’ license?”
“I don’t need one till I’m twelve.”
“Is that right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Sure about that?”
“Yes, sir.”
He looked at me. “Well, you’re just one smart fella, aren’t ya?”
I felt like I was going to cry but I didn’t know why. The bass’s tail flapped in the air.
He picked up the pen, clicked it. “So where’s that mother of yours today?”
“She’s waiting in the car,” I said.
“Didn’t feel like comin’ in, huh?”
“No, it’s just . . . she’s not feeling well.”
“That’s too bad.” He looked at the pad again, then flipped it closed. “Well—guess we better take a look.” Getting off the stool, he strolled around the counter to where I stood by the bucket, looked at the fish, then slipped his fingers under its gill flap and lifted the great gleaming bulk into the air. I just stared at it. In the store it looked even bigger than it had on the lake. It was barely moving.
“Nice fish,” he said. Carrying it dangling below his knee, he walked back behind the counter, then lay it out on the brass bucket scale.
The bass lay still, only its gills opening and closing. I could hear him sliding the weights this way and that.
“Three pounds, fourteen ounces,” he said. “Not bad—you’re in second place.”
I just looked at him. Every bass of that length I’d ever read about had weighed at least eight pounds.
“What?” he said.
I didn’t say anything.
“Somethin’ you want to say?”
I shook my head.
“Didn’t think so.”
He walked back around and put the fish back in the bucket for me, then said something about me coming back for plastic worms sometime. And I thanked him and I left.
MY MOM WAS hugging herself in her nightgown. How did it go? she said. She’d have given anything to see the look on his face.
I hoisted the bucket into the car. I didn’t know I was going to do it. “It went great,” I said, laughing. “You should’ve seen him—he could hardly talk.”
She glanced at me quickly, then toward the entrance.
“I’m in second place,” I said.
She hesitated for a long second, then smiled. “OK. Wow! That’s great!”
We sat there for a few seconds, and then she started the car. I looked out the window while she bumped across the lot.
“My God, look at it,” she said, almost to herself, as we waited at the road, and then: “Is it dead, you think?”
“Pretty sure,” I said. I leaned forward to see. “Yeah.”
“I just saw it breathe.”
“That’s just the water moving it around,” I said.
“There it is again—look!”
Barely covered by water the huge gills opened, then closed, like a butterfly on a hot day.
We looked at each other.
“We can try,” my mom said.
And we were off, back up 22, a hard right at the light, flying down the long, shady curves of Fairfield Drive.
“Is he still breathing?”
“I can’t tell—I think so.”
“Splash some water on him. Move him around a little.”
She ran the stop sign at the war memorial. A car honked.
“Doesn’t matter—is he still breathing?”
“I’m not sure.”
“We’re almost there.”
And then we were back on the dirt road and the cabin was there and she was running for the camera while I lugged the bucket down through the tangled grass to the lake.
She took a picture but it didn’t come out—I hadn’t yet learned how to present myself to the world, how to make my accomplishments seem larger than they are—and then I was wading straight into the lake, carrying it in my arms like a child, rocking it forward and back to send water through the gills. It tilted sideways, helpless, the white of its belly shining against the dark water, its half-dollar-sized eye staring up at the clouds. When I looked up my mother was standing on the shore with her hands hiding her mouth.
I see her there still.
And I felt the muscles flinch, felt it right itself slowly on its axis, and then it swam off my palm and disappeared against the bottom of the lake.
Conception
THEIR PICTURE FELL OUT OF AGEE’S A Death in the Family, I swear, two days after my father died, and I could hear him laugh: “My God, God’s an undergraduate. How about No Exit? Or Beckett’s Worstward Ho?” I’d been packing boxes, drinking, my eyes as red as a rabbit’s, when it slipped from between the loosened pages, cradled down, came to rest on my sock: Mom and Dad, half my age. Mom had been gone a while. Now he was too, and I was having a bit of trouble with that. How could you be—and then not?
In the picture they’re in their bathing suits, looking up from Adirondack chairs submerged in the uncut grass. It’s summer: that deep, grateful shade, tiny planes of light in the tall glasses—the ice cubes in their drinks haven’t melted yet. I can see it in the way they’re sitting, in the afternoon breeze blurring the zinnias behind my mother’s left shoulder—this is before me. My father’s just said something to the person with the camera; my mother, wearing a short terrycloth robe over her bathing suit, is looking down, smiling, like she can’t help it. Like they’ve just had an argument and she’s still angry but she can’t help it. They look happy.
“The truth is, you almost weren’t,” my father said to me once. “The summer your mother and I got married there were some misunderstandings; we took a wrong turn and it kept getting worse.” He smiled. “Hard to have a kid with somebody you’re not talking to.”
“So what happened?” I said.
“Who the hell knows?” he said.
HE’D WALK OVER to Elsa Durer’s cabin the summer before I was born, I heard years later. It wasn’t far to her place—you could see it from our dock: the roof and a bit of dusty window showing through the leaves, the air between quick with bugs that would show up as little corkscrews of light in old photographs.
I imagine her reading. She’d look up and see my father stepping over the poison ivy, his drink out for balance as if offering it to the trees, and wait until he’d walked into the curtain’s edge, then put down her book and go out the back and down the stairs her husband had built after fifteen years of nagging. She could still see him kneeling in the wet grass with a cigarette in his mouth, sawing the cross planks. His strong, thin shoulders. When he’d nailed them to the two-by-fours that morning, a second hammer had answered from the far shore.
My father would be standing by her tree-slab table in the heat. “You know, it’s worse when you move,” he’d say.
“Then we better not move,” she’d say.
“Reading?”
She’d sit in the wicker chair, light a cigarette. “The problem is, I really don’t care who done it,” she’d say, pushing the pack over to him. “You?”
He’d shake his head, sink into the other chair. “Christ. The air’s like cotton.”
“A heavy blanket.”
“Oppressive.”
“Stifling.”
“When it moves, it’s hot as an oven.”
Lifting her head slightly and pushing out her lower lip she’d let out a thin wall of smoke. “You know, it’s really not the heat, it’s the humidity.”
He’d smile, distracted, then reach for the pack. He looked like the actor Leslie Howard, she thought. That same air of confident uncertainty, that same troubled intelligence, like a slim knife in the brain.
SHE’D BE A good listener, the kind of woman who looks at you as you talk, her eyes moving slowly over your face. She’d be wearing a white summer dress, a small string of pearls. Her hair, still wet from the lake, would be pushed straight back, her legs bare. And they’d gossip about the neighbors, then meander from Dorothy Parker to party straws to the situation in Poland (the ice cubes all the while quietly clicking like miniature coconuts, shrinking into silence) until, suddenly frowning, he’d say, “I really should be getting back.”
“Of course. It’s getting late.”
He’d sweep some imagined crumbs off the table, then stand, reluctantly. “So, anyway, you’ll let us know if there’s anything we can do.”
“Don’t forget your glass,” she’d say, looking out over the lake. A hot breeze would move the leaves on her arms, her dress.
And that would be that, never mind the low light, the cicadas rising like a saw heard through a slowly opening window, her dampened hair—these only go so far. In 1958, you see, my father was thirty-one; Elsa Durer—already eleven years a widow—nearly eighty-two. So.
Still, when she died in November of 1969, my father went to the service on East Eighty-Third and York and sat there hunched forward, slowly rubbing his thumb over his knuckles. He’d called me to see if I’d come with him. When they were done I asked if he wanted to get something to eat. “It’s OK,” he said—then said it again.
He hadn’t heard the question. He wasn’t talking to me.
THE SUMMER THEY were married was hot, hotter than usual; he’d wake to the mosquitoes singing at the screen, and lie there, stupefied, trying to peel back the corner of the life he’d just had that he couldn’t remember anymore. She’d still be asleep, as far from him as the bed would allow. He’d been alone, trying to explain something. Nobody was listening.
The week before, New York had hit 103, DC, 106. It was like something had broken: The water snakes by the dam, gorged on dying fish, withdrew into the stones like retractable cords, their keeled scales rasping against the rocks; the lake looked like the glass in the windows of cast-iron stoves.
He read. His wife read. They talked. Would you like the front page? Some more coffee? Did you see the Lippmann piece? So polite. When their friends drove up from Queens for the weekend they’d sit around the card table in their bathing suits like colorful toads and talk over each other and he’d remember the bottom of the community pool in Rego Park, he and his sister miming surprise, then laughter, waving to imaginary friends as the forest of legs around them pedaled endlessly on—he didn’t know how long he could stand it.
They hadn’t made love in weeks. It had been nothing—a suggestion. In bed, a few drinks down. Nothing.
He pretended it didn’t matter, insisted—“Forget it, OK? Really. Just drop it.”—then let himself feel aggrieved, wounded. When she pulled back, angry because he wouldn’t talk to her, he let it run. After all, what did he have to apologize for? She was the one who’d made him feel ridiculous—let her come to him. She thought she knew him but she didn’t. She didn’t know him at all.
He glanced over the top of his newspaper now, wondering if she was really reading. Trapped in the oil-slick pools of her sunglasses, a bulbous head floated over a tiny body in a red bathing suit. Recognizing himself, he instinctively started to sit back to correct the image—then quickly leaned forward again. The hell with it. What did he care?
Sometimes, feeling like he was drowning, he’d go for a walk, carrying his drink through the overheated woods. And it really would make him feel better, just talking about Adlai Stevenson with someone who found him witty (and Stevenson too, for that matter), who didn’t get that look, then cover her mouth with three fingers, who listened to him like he was actually there—until, that is, he’d notice the time and, tr
ying not to seem like a tardy schoolboy jumping at the bell, stand—lazily, almost arrogantly—and with a last bit of wit, turn to go.
“Don’t forget your glass,” she’d say. She’d be looking out over the lake, not distracted, just listening the way old people will. And he’d wander back home past the water shadows wavering slowly up the trunks, the afternoon at a different pitch.
HE’D FIND HIS wife standing on the cool cement floor of the kitchen, stirring a tiny tornado into her drink. Or asleep in the hammock, frowning as if confused by something, her slim legs crossed at the ankles, a book roofed over her ribs. He’d walk up the path on the roots the runoff had laid bare and look at her, her right arm thrown back, her fingers knotted loosely through the ropes, then squat down on his heels and watch her sleeping. He’d look at her hair, her mouth, her breasts. Who was she, really? The question would make him uneasy. He could go. He could leave her. It was unthinkable—after four months his own voice sounded unfamiliar to him if she wasn’t there to hear it—but he could. Maybe he would.
He’d lean closer, trespassing now. Where the sun had worked its way through the leaves, beads had sprung up on her cheek like oil in a pan.
He missed how she used to look at him. He missed how he used to love her.
She was right there. Nothing had changed.
Everything had changed. She found him ridiculous. Everything had changed.
A fly lit in her hair, glinted green. He waved it away.
SOMEBODY WAS PLAYING “Summertime” on a record player that summer, and he’d hear their voices coming over the still waters of the cove, ironic and magnificent: Ella’s limpid control in the first verse, Satchmo’s cat-scratch caress in the second, the two of them coming together in the third, the melody drawing the words—Yer dad-dy’s rich, and yer ma iiis good-lookin’— down into the registers of regret. Ma was good-lookin’ all right, he thought; Daddy, alas for him, far from rich.
But it wasn’t that—though it might have become that in time. It wasn’t about the money. Or the play he’d been writing that he couldn’t write. It was what it always is: an inadvertent smile where passion was wanted, a moment’s hesitation. A whispered shame, dared at last—touch me, tell me, imagine him then—returned by fear, desire too quickly exposed. And now it was too late. Real shame had flowered like rot. It would go underground, spread and grow like those ant colonies scientists say underlie entire counties. Love has died of lesser things.
