The Fisherman

by John Langan

  As time flowed on, I refined my gear, moved from a spincast reel to a spinning reel (I never could master a baitcaster), learned how to use a lure to bring in my fish. I searched out other rivers, other streams, to fish. Although it was close, about twenty minutes’ car ride, I never was much for the Hudson. For one thing, for the longest time, you couldn’t eat most of what you caught, and that was a treat a fellow at work had introduced me to that I was reluctant to surrender: not so much bass, but catfish, walleye, and especially trout. For another thing, love the river though I do, and I do, the Hudson’s just too damn big. I prefer a smaller river, one that’s more intimate. I can’t do without moving water, either. I’ve fished lakes, and while I agree it is pleasant to while away a couple of hours floating around in a boat, I prefer being able to stand up and stretch my legs when I want to. So I tried out the Esopus, then the Rondout, and then I started driving up into the Catskills. I don’t know much—anything, really—about my part of the Hudson Valley. Pa had his roots in Springfield, Kentucky—his family was Kentucky Melungeon—although he’d moved around quite a bit as a boy; and Ma came from Scotland: from St. Andrew’s, where they have the golf courses. She stepped off the boat when she was eighteen, met and married Pa in Queens, and the two of them moved up to Poughkeepsie so Pa could take a job managing a bank there. Neither of them knew the area that well, and neither ever showed any inclination to make its acquaintance. Aside from that long-ago day Marie and I had spent at her friend’s brother’s, I’d never been to the mountains. This meant that, when I turned west onto Route 28 heading out of Wiltwyck that first Saturday morning, I was striking out into uncharted territory.

  Right from the beginning, I loved it up there. I don’t know if you’ve spent time in the Catskills. From a distance, say, the parking lot of the old Caldor’s (which became an Ames that became a Stop ‘N’ Shop) in Huguenot, they’ve always made me think of a herd of giant animals, all standing grazing on the horizon. Up close, when you’re driving among them with the early morning light breaking over their round peaks, they seem incredibly present, more real than real, these huge solid heaps of rock that wear their trees like mile-long scarves. You glance at them, trying to keep your eyes on the road, which is already pretty busy with people driving up for a weekend getaway, and somehow you wouldn’t be surprised if the mountain closest to you were to cast off its trees in one titanic shrug and start to lumber away, a vast, unimaginable beast. When you turn off onto whatever secondary road you need to take, and you’re following its twists and turns back into the mountains, and the ground is steep to either side of you, opening every now and then on a meadow, or an old house, you think, Here, there are secret places.

  Well, that’s what I thought, anyway. I fished as far west as Oneonta, and as far north as Catskill, taking fish from most of the streams between these towns and Wiltwyck. And while I was standing streamside on a Saturday morning, sunlight bouncing on the water as it tumbled over a small waterfall into a broad pool I was sure held a trout or two, and so had cast the spinner with the tri-hook and was watching the lure descending into the water, waiting to reel it in as I tried to decide if that shadow beneath it was just a shadow or a fish come to see what was for breakfast—I say, moments like this a kind of silence seemed to fall over everything. I could still hear the water chuckling, and the birds having their morning conversation, and maybe a car, far away, but I could hear this other sound, too, this sound that wasn’t one, that was quiet. It was like another space had opened up around me, and it was in that quiet, so to speak, that I came to believe I could hear Marie. She didn’t say anything, didn’t make any sound at all, but I could hear her just the same. I couldn’t have said if she were happy or sad, because I had realized that the moving shadow wasn’t a shadow but a trout, and a big one at that, and I had started winding the handle quickly, making that spinner leap forward through the water, my arms already tensed, waiting for the fish to strike and the struggle to begin. Maybe in another situation, another setting, I would have felt differently, the hair on my arms and neck might have stood straight up and my mouth gone dry. Holding on for that trout, though, whose mouth was about to close on the lure, there wasn’t more I could do about that strange silence than know it was there. Later, after I had helped the fish and a few of his friends out onto the ground beside me and was treating myself to a chocolate bar, I would think about what had happened, about that deep, deep quiet.

  Even then, I didn’t feel especially scared. The world’s always seemed a pretty big place to me, full of more things than any one body could know, and I’d be the last person to pretend to understand it all. After Marie died, I hadn’t believed there was anything more, but could be I’d been mistaken. Hell, yes, I wanted to be wrong. Who wouldn’t? Her watching me fish didn’t seem threatening, and, really, why should it have? What time we’d had, we’d had good, and maybe she missed me the same way I missed her and wanted to have a look and see how I was doing. I wouldn’t claim I felt her there with me at every river and stream. I can’t say she was always present when I sat at a particular spot, or came on a certain day. I felt her first and most often in the mountains. She was there once when I had worked my way from the Esopus up a little fast-moving stream whose name I meant to learn later but never did. She was there one afternoon when I returned to my spot on Springvale to discover I’d have to share it with two old women sitting on lawn chairs. I can’t say I was haunted, exactly—that sounds a bit too regular for what happened to me. But I did have a visit or two.

  II

  Rungs on

  the Ladder of Loss

  I reckon I could go on talking about this for the rest of today and tomorrow besides. You’ll have to excuse me: when I think back to what fishing used to be to me, I can almost forget what it became, so I’m inclined to linger on the memory. It’s a nice feeling to be able to look back on a time when I didn’t spend most of my day at the river wondering what exactly might be swimming up to take my line, and when my memory wasn’t full of images to offer as answers. A school of what might have been large tadpoles, except that each one ended in a single, outsized eye; a fish whose back boasted a tall fin like a dragon’s wing and whose rubbery mouth was hedged with long fangs; a pale swimmer with webbed hands and feet and a face that wavered as you looked at it: all of these and more were ready to set my palms sweating and my heart racing. What’s important right now is that you know the place fishing held in my life; it helps to explain why I started taking Dan Drescher with me.

  I knew Dan from work. He was two offices down going towards the water cooler. Tall fellow: that was the first thing I thought when he was introduced to me, and I suppose my reaction was typical. Dan was six foot seven inches, thin as the proverbial beanpole. After his height, you noticed Dan’s hair, which was bright orange and appeared never to have been introduced to the benefits of a comb. He kept it cut short, and I can’t imagine what those sessions at the barber’s must have been like. His face was sharp in a way that made you think of something struck from granite: sharp brow; big, sharp nose; round—but sharp—chin. He smiled a lot, and his eyes were kind, which diminished the sharpness some, but if you reflected on his appearance, you might have thought that his was a face made for fierceness.

  At first, Dan and I didn’t say much to each other, though what words we did pass were pleasant. There was nothing unusual in this. I was a good two decades his senior, a middle-aged widower whose favorite topics of conversation were fishing and baseball. He was a young man not that long out of M.I.T. who favored expensive suits and whose wife and twin sons were admired by everyone. Marie’s passing had been long enough ago for me not to feel a pang at the family portraits and snapshots Dan displayed on his desk. I’d been on dates with a few women in the last few years, even had what I guess you would call a relationship with one of them. But I never could bring myself to marry anyone else—just didn’t have it in me. A few months before we were married—this was when we were planning the reception—Marie
turned to me and said, out of the blue, “Abraham Samuelson, you are the most romantic man I know.” I don’t remember what my answer was. Made a joke out of it, most likely. Maybe she was right, though, maybe there was more of the romantic in me than I thought. Whatever the case, I was alone and Dan had his family, and at the time that seemed to make an unbridgeable gap between us.

  Then, one day, I believe it was a Tuesday, Dan didn’t show up for work. In and of itself, this wasn’t such a big deal, except that Dan hadn’t called in sick, which struck anyone who heard it as unusual. Dan had earned a reputation as an especially conscientious worker. At his desk every morning by eight twenty at the latest, a good ten minutes ahead of the rest of us, he took no more than a fifteen-minute lunch—if he didn’t work right through it—and when the rest of us left at four thirty, we waved to him on our way out, knowing that it would probably be another half-hour before he followed us. He was dedicated, and he was talented enough that his dedication counted. I assumed he had his sights set on early and rapid promotion, which, with those twins at home, I could appreciate. All of this is to say that, when Dan wasn’t there and no one knew why, we were inclined to feel a bit more uneasy than we would have otherwise.

  As we found out the following day, we’d had every right and reason for our concern. Some read it on the front page of The Poughkeepsie Journal with their morning coffee; others heard it on the radio as they drove to work; still others had it from Frank Block, who was a volunteer fireman and whose absence the previous day also had been noted, but not connected by anyone to Dan’s. There had been an accident. Dan was an early riser, you see, as were the twins. Sometimes his wife, Sophie, took the opportunity to sleep in a little, but yesterday, for whatever reason, she had risen with the rest of them. It was early enough, just a little past six, that when Dan suggested the four of them nip into town for a quick bite of breakfast before he left for work, the idea seemed reasonable. So they bundled the babies into their car seats, and set off. Dan drove, and he failed to fasten his seatbelt, which Sophie noticed. Dan shrugged. It was no big deal, they were only going a short way. It’s your ticket, Sophie said.

  The Dreschers lived off South Morris Road, which intersects Route 299, the main road into Huguenot, about three miles east of town. 299’s a fast road, has been for as long as I’ve lived on this side of the Hudson. There should have been a traffic light where Morris crossed it, instead of a pair of stop signs. Maybe the light wouldn’t have made any difference. Maybe the fellow steering the big white eighteen-wheeler would’ve had it up around seventy anyway. Dan said he saw the truck approaching from his right as he turned left onto 299, but it didn’t look to be moving as fast as it was. He pulled out, and that great white beast slammed into his Subaru like a thunderbolt. Dan was thrown through the windshield to, as it turned out, safety. Crushed together, car and truck skidded along the road, jagged bits of metal showering sparks as they went. Before they’d stopped moving, the car erupted in a fireball that was answered, a second later, by an explosion from the truck. By the time the first police car raced to the scene, it was too late. It had been too late, I suppose, from the moment Dan’s foot pressed on the accelerator, the car swept out onto the road. Could be it’d been too late the moment the idiot driving that rig had glanced at his wristwatch, realized that, if his morning delivery was to arrive on schedule, he was going to have to make up some time, and stepped on the gas, shifting up as he did. The fire took his life, which I wish I could say I felt worse about, and it consumed Sophie and the twins. Two days later, the coroner told Dan that, in all likelihood, his wife and children had been killed in the impact, and most likely hadn’t suffered much if at all. I guess the man thought that he was giving what consolation he could.

  Dan was polite enough to that coroner, but I think he still was wrapped in the same daze a cop had found him stumbling around the side of the road in. His face was bright with blood, as was the sweatshirt he’d pulled on for going out. At first, the officer wasn’t sure who this tall guy was. As he led Dan toward one of the ambulances that had arrived to find themselves useless, he assumed Dan was a bystander who’d been caught in the accident, an early-morning jogger hit by debris. It took a few minutes for him to sort out that this man had been the driver of the car that was so much fire and metal. When the lightbulb went off over his head, the cop tried to question Dan about the chain of events, but he couldn’t get much coherent out of him. Eventually, one of the EMTs told the guy that Dan was most likely in shock, and in need of the hospital.

  The fire took the better part of an hour and three fire companies to extinguish. Traffic coming into and out of Huguenot was delayed and diverted until early afternoon. Two weeks after the accident, a traffic light was hung at that intersection, which I reckon is what four lives is worth these days. Too late for the Dreschers, it became their memorial.

  A full six weeks passed before any of us saw Dan again. There was a memorial service for Sophie and the twins at the Huguenot Methodist Church, but it was small, for immediate family. By the time I walked in one Monday morning and, despite myself, jumped at the sight of Dan, back at his desk, his losses had faded from my mind, I’m ashamed to admit. I’d like to say this was because I’d been so busy in the interval, or because my own private life had been very good or even very bad, but I’m afraid none of that would be true. Not much more than out of sight, out of mind, I fear. It’s hard to hold onto any tragedies that aren’t your own for very long. That’s something I learned after Marie died. In the short term, folks can show compassion like you wouldn’t believe; wait a couple of weeks, though, a couple of months at the outside, and see how well their sympathy holds.

  Dan returned to work bearing the scar from his trip through his car’s windshield. After his height, that scar became the thing about him that caught your notice. Threading out from among his red hair, which he kept longer now, the scar continued down the right side of his face, skirting the corner of his right eye, veering in at the corner of his mouth, winding down his neck to disappear beneath his shirt collar. You tried not to look, but of course you couldn’t help yourself. It was as if Dan’s face had been knitted together at that white line. I was reminded of the times my pa had taken me walking round the grounds at Penrose College, which he’d liked to do when I was a boy. Without fail, Pa would stop to point out to me a tree that had been struck by lightning. I don’t mean a tree that had had a branch blown off; I mean one that had acted as a living lightning rod, drawing the spark in at its crown and passing it down the length of its trunk to its roots. The lightning’s course had peeled and grooved out a line in the bark from top to bottom that Pa would stand and run his fingers over. “You know,” he’d say every time, “the ancient Greeks used to bury anyone struck by lightning apart from the rest. They knew such people’d had a tremendous experience—a sacred experience—but they weren’t sure if it was good or bad.”

  “How could something sacred be bad?” I’d ask, but the only answer I ever received was a shake of his head as he ran his fingers over the channel a river of white fire had rushed through.

  Everyone did their best to welcome Dan back to work; even so, a good few months passed before I thought to invite him to come fishing with me. You might expect I would’ve been one of the first people into Dan’s office to talk to him, but you’d be mistaken. If anything, I tended to avoid him. I know how that must sound: if not heartless, then at least weird. Who was in a better position to talk to him, to understand what he was going through and offer words of comfort? We’d both lost our wives, hadn’t we?

  Well, yes, we had. The way we’d lost them, though, made for all the difference in the world. All loss is not created equal, you see. Loss is—it’s like a ladder you don’t know you’re standing at the top of and that reaches down, way down past the loss of your job, your possessions, your home; past the loss of your parents, your spouse, your children; down to the loss of your very life—and, I’ve since come to believe, past even that. In that awful
hierarchy, what I had undergone, the slow slipping away of my wife over the span of almost two years, stood as far above what Dan had suffered, the disappearance of his wife and children in less time than it takes to tell it, as someone who hadn’t lost anything at all stood above me. Marie and I had had time, and if a lot of that time had been overshadowed by what was rushing toward us, ever-closer, at least we’d been able to make some use of those months, take a road trip out to Wyoming before she was too sick, draw some good out of the bad. You can imagine how much someone in Dan’s position might envy me, might hate me for having what I had more fiercely than he might someone whose wife was happily alive. I could imagine that hatred, so kept what I intended as a respectful distance.

  Besides, there didn’t seem to be anything wrong with the guy. He didn’t go to pieces the way that I had. Sure, there were days when the shirt he was wearing was the same one we’d seen him in yesterday, or his suit was wrinkled, or his tie stained, but there were enough single men at the office about whom you could notice the same or similar things for such details not to strike you as too serious. Aside from the scar and the slightly longer hair, the only change I saw in Dan lay in his eyes, which locked into a permanent stare. Not a blank stare, mind. It was a more intense look, the kind that suggests great concentration: the brow lowered ever-so-slightly, the eyes crinkled, as if the starer is trying to see right through what’s in front of them. In that stare, something of the fierceness I’d seen dormant in his face came to the surface, and it could be a tad unsettling to have him focus it on you. Although his manner remained civil—he was always at least polite, frequently pleasant—under that gaze I felt a bit like a prisoner in one of those escape from Alcatraz movies the moment the spotlight catches him.