by John Langan
When I finally did ask Dan to fish with me, I acted on impulse, a spur-of-the-moment kind of thing. I was standing in the doorway of Frank Block’s office, telling him about my struggle the previous weekend to land a trout. The trout hadn’t been the biggest I’d ever caught, but he had been strong. My efforts had been complicated by the fact that, when the fish struck, I’d been away behind a clump of bushes, answering a call of nature brought on by a cup of extremely powerful coffee I’d drunk not an hour before. My line had been quiet prior to the moment I’d felt the uncontrollable urge to visit the bushes, so I thought it would be safe to leave the rod wedged in between my tacklebox and a log whilst I did what must be done. Naturally, this was the moment the fish chose to take the fly and run. When I heard the reel buzzing, I started looking around furiously for some leaves. Then, with a clatter and a crash, the fish pulled the rod over and began dragging it toward the river. There was no time for me to do anything but rush from my improvised toilet, pants still around my ankles, and dive for the rod, which I just managed to catch. I staggered to my feet, and spent the next ten minutes working that fish, giving him a little line, drawing him in, giving him a little line, drawing him in, naked from waist to ankles as the day the doctor took me from my ma. When at last I hauled the trout from the water and stood there holding him up to admire, I noticed movement on the other side of the river. Two young women were standing across from me, the one with a pair of binoculars, the other with a camera. Both were pointing in my direction and laughing. I don’t like to think at what.
“What’d you do?” Frank asked, laughing himself.
“What else could I do?” I said. “I bowed to them both, turned around, and shuffled back up the bank.”
“You fish?” Dan asked. He’d come up behind me as I was talking. I must have been aware of him, since I didn’t jump ten feet in the air and shout, “Jesus!” I turned and said, “I do. I fish most days it isn’t raining, and some when it is.”
“I used to fish,” Dan said. “My dad used to take me.”
“Really?” I said. “What kind of fishing?”
“Nothing that exciting,” he said. “Lakes and ponds, mostly.”
“You ever catch anything?” Frank asked. He was one of those fellows who likes to talk fishing more than he does fish fishing.
“Some,” Dan said. He shrugged. “Bass. A lot of sunnies. My dad caught a pike, once.”
“No kidding,” I said. “Pike’s a tough fish to land.”
“You can say that again,” Frank said.
“It took us the whole afternoon,” Dan said. “When we got him into the boat, he was almost three feet long. It was a record for that lake. This was in Maine. My dad gave the fish to Captain Pete—he was the guy who ran the bait and tackle shop on the lake. We bought our bait from him, soda, too. He had this big cooler full of cans of soda. Anyway, he was so impressed, he had that fish mounted—you know, gave it to a taxidermist—and hung it up on one of his shop’s walls. He had my dad’s name and the date the fish was caught carved on the mount.”
“Wow,” Frank said, whether at the story or at Dan’s having told us it I couldn’t say. As far as either of us knew, Dan’s anecdote was the most he had said to anyone at work since the accident. I asked, “You fished since then, Dan?”
“Not for years,” he replied. “Not since before the twins were born.”
Frank looked down at his desk. I swallowed the lump that had formed in my throat and said, “Want to come with me?”
“Fishing,” Dan said.
“Uh-huh.”
“When?”
“How about this weekend? Say, Saturday morning? Unless you have plans, that is.”
He scowled, and I realized Dan wasn’t sure if I was mocking him. He said, “I don’t know.”
All at once, it was the most important thing in the world for Dan to come fishing with me. I can’t say exactly why that should have been. Maybe I wanted to prove my sincerity to him. Maybe I thought that fishing would do for him what it’d done for me; although, as I’ve said, I had no evidence to suggest that Dan’s life had collapsed the way mine had. Or maybe my motive was something less well-defined, something as simple as wanting to have another person to pass a few words with while I fished. I don’t know. Until that moment, I’d always done well enough fishing on my own. Whatever the reason, I said, “Why don’t you come along? I’ve got an extra rod if you need it, and more’n’enough tackle for the two of us. I was just planning on heading out to the Svartkil, so it won’t be that far if you don’t like it and want to leave. I go pretty early—this weather, I like to be set up and have my line in the water by sunrise—but you’re welcome to come whenever you can make it there. What do you say?”
Dan’s scowl wavered, then dissipated. “What the hell,” he said. “Why not?”
And that was how Dan Drescher and I started fishing together. I told him where the spot on Springvale was, and he was there waiting for me when I drove up in the pre-dawn dark. He’d brought his own rod and tacklebox, and from the sheen and smell of both of them, I knew they’d entered his possession in the last day or so. That was okay. It reminded me of myself, those many years ago. He’d brought a hat, too, a kind of straw cowboy affair that I later learned he’d purchased on a vacation in Arizona with his wife. We chose and attached our lures, cast, and as the sun burst through the trees across from us, were sitting waiting to see who might be interested in the early breakfast we were serving.
That first morning—that first day, actually, since Dan stayed there with me until the sun had moved from our fronts to our backs and then left for the night—we didn’t say much to one another. Nor was there a whole lot of conversation the next day, when (somewhat to my surprise, since he hadn’t mentioned it the previous day, just thanked me as he was leaving) I pulled my car onto the side of the road and my headlights picked out Dan sitting on a tree stump, considering the contents of his tacklebox. He offered no explanation, nodding at me as I walked over and saying, “Morning. Weather report says there might be rain today.”
“You can still catch ’em in the rain,” I said.
He grunted, and that was pretty much that for the remainder of the day. The following weekend, we fished the Svartkil again and didn’t do too badly for ourselves. On Sunday night, as we were packing our gear, I said, “I’m thinking of heading up the Esopus next Saturday. Not too far: about forty minutes’ drive. You interested?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“Good,” I said, and meant it.
So we fished the Esopus the following weekend, and Frenchman’s Creek the weekend after that, and then I took him up to the Catskills, to the Beaverkill, up by Mount Tremper. Sunday night, on our way home, we stopped at Winchell’s, a burger place right on 28, just the other side of Woodstock. This was where I learned that Dan’s family hailed from Phoenicia, a town in the thick of the mountains, and that he knew the area and its history fairly well. He’d never fished it, though. In fact, he said as he wiped the ketchup off his plate with his remaining fry, he hadn’t been up here since before Sophie was pregnant, when he’d driven her out 28 so she could see where he’d grown up.
It’s always tricky when someone who’s lost what Dan had speaks about it, especially so soon after. You’re never quite sure what to say, because you can’t tell if the person’s only offering a passing comment, or if they’re looking to talk. I imagine this is how folks must’ve felt with me after Marie died. With Dan and me, there wasn’t the kind of long friendship or deep family bond that would allow you to feel you could risk making a blunder, since you could count on the other person knowing you were trying your best. This wasn’t the first such remark Dan had made in my hearing. It seemed he’d been voicing a few more of them each weekend; I suppose that was why I decided to chance it and said, “So, what did she think?”
“Who?” he asked.
“Your wife,” I said, already afraid I’d blown it, “Sophie. What did she think of Phoenicia?”
For the barest instant, long enough for it to be visible, a look swept across Dan’s face that was equal parts disbelief and pain, as if I’d broken into the private vault of his recollections. Then, to my surprise, he grinned and said, “She told me she understood me and my redneck ways a whole hell of a lot better, now.”
I grinned back, and the worst was past. For the rest of that summer, on into early fall, as we roamed the Catskills, fishing streams I’d fished on my own, trying some spots that were new to me, I learned a little about Dan’s wife, and about his family, too. He never said much at any one time. I don’t believe he’d ever been the kind of fellow to speak about himself for too long. As you may have noticed, that’s a condition that’s never afflicted me, and once I saw it was all right with Dan, I had no problem talking about my life, which I hadn’t thought was all that interesting, just long enough for me to have seen and heard a bit. I talked about Marie, some, though not about her dying. If there was one topic that was off-limits, it was our respective bereavements. This complicated my conversation, since, as I’ve said, she was sick for really all of our short marriage. I solved that problem by speaking about the way things had been before we’d married, during our courtship. I talked about Marie, and I continued to feel her occasional visits, often when Dan was sitting only a few feet from me. I don’t know that I ever got used to those moments—however regular they might become, I don’t know that a body could—but I continued to take an odd sort of comfort from them.
Consciously or no, Dan followed my lead, by and large sticking to the beginning times, to events far enough removed you had an easier time convincing yourself the pain you felt in your chest was nostalgia, nothing more. He never spoke about the twins, Jason and Jonas, and, to be honest, I was grateful for that. Marie had wanted children in the worst way, and it had been one of her bitterest disappointments to have to leave this world without having had at least one. She and I had spoken about the matter a fair bit, up until the morning of the day she died, in fact, and after she was gone I found I had trouble being around children, seeing Marie’s nieces and nephews at the family events I continued to be invited to. Seeing them, seeing any small child, reminded me of what Marie and I hadn’t had the chance to have that we had wanted to have, and that focused my hurt the way a magnifying glass does sunlight. Over the years, those feelings had silted over. I found it easier to cope with the presence of children. But I guess they weren’t as far off as I might’ve wanted. All it took was the strong wind of me talking, and there they were, a little dusty, but in one piece.
Still and all, I liked to believe that whatever slight discomfort I might’ve felt was worth it if our talking was helping Dan. In fact, when the fishing season was over that fall, I worried a little for him. I’d yet to find my winter substitute for fishing, you see—never have, to this day—so it wasn’t as if I could say to Dan, “Well, now that fishing season’s over, we’ll have to start practicing our curling.” After having fished and talked together as much as we had, we shouldn’t have needed that kind of excuse, I know, but, lacking an activity like fishing, I felt strange saying to Dan, “Hey, let’s get together this weekend and talk.” Stupid, yes. In any event, Dan was expecting company that first fishing-less weekend, his brother and his family. The first anniversary of the accident was rearing its hideous head, and his and Sophie’s families had decided that he shouldn’t be alone for the weeks to either side of it. He was busy well into the New Year.
Although I saw Dan every day at work, passed a few words with him here and there, it wasn’t until late February of that next year that I finally had him over for dinner. Despite its abbreviated length, February’s always struck me as an especially bleak month, at least in these parts. I know it’s not the darkest month, and I know it’s not the coldest or the snowiest month, but February is gray in a way I can’t explain. In February, all the big, happy holidays are gone, and it’s weeks and weeks—months, even—until Easter and spring. I suppose that’s why whoever decides these things stuck Valentine’s Day smack dab in the middle of the month, to help lighten its load. To be honest, though, even when I had a reason to celebrate the fourteenth, I still thought of the second month as a bleak time. I think this was part of the reason I invited Dan to join me in a meal, and why, when I opened the door that Sunday night and saw him standing there, unshaven and obviously unshowered, wearing an old track suit reeking of mothballs and mildew, I wasn’t as surprised as I might have been, especially considering that, when I’d seen him on Friday, he’d been his usual tidy self. I looked at him standing in the doorway, his eyes red-rimmed and bloodshot, and thought, Of course: it’s February.
They say that, for most people, the second year after you lose someone is harder than the first. During that first year, the theory goes, you’re still in shock. You don’t really believe what’s happened to you has happened; you can’t. During that second year, it starts to sink in that the person—or, in Dan’s case, people—you’ve been pretending are away on a visit aren’t coming back. This wasn’t what happened to me, but I guess that was because I’d been losing Marie for a long time before she was gone, and so had been using a lot of those same tricks on myself most folks don’t discover until much later. But the theory held true for Dan. He’d made a brave face of things through Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year, had done his best to be a good host to his various visiting relatives, and once the last of them—a cousin from Ohio—had been gone for going on a week, with no promise of anyone else appearing in the immediate future, the knowledge of how alone he was had crushed him like a truckful of bricks. Until this point, he’d been doing all right sleeping—not great, mind you, but not bad—and he’d been able to distract himself watching old movies on the VCR, one of his passions. Now sleep had fled, chased away by the memory of that huge white truck rushing toward him, its grill like a great set of chrome teeth grinning at him as it prepared to take a bite out of his life from which he’d never recover. When he tried to watch TV, his copy of Red River, say, or one of the late-night talk shows, whatever was on the screen was replaced by Sophie’s face, turning away from him to look at the roaring tractor-trailer, her expression sliding from early-morning fatigue to wide-eyed terror, her mouth opening to make a sound Dan never heard.
He told me this over the course of dinner, which was spaghetti and meatballs with garlic bread and salad, in answer to my asking, “So, Dan, how are you?” I didn’t interrupt him, confining myself to making sympathetic grunts. This was the most he’d spoken to me at one time, and the most about the subject of his loss, and once he’d started I knew better than to derail him. He took most of dinner to unburden himself, during which time he ate little—some garlic bread was all—but managed four full glasses from the bottle of red wine I’d set on the table. This was sufficient to start him swaying ever-so-slightly, and to pull his eyelids lower. Once I thought he was finished talking, I said, “Now, don’t take this the wrong way, but maybe you should talk to someone, you know, professional. Maybe that’d be a help to you.”
His voice slurring, Dan said, “No offense taken, Abe—Abraham. You want to know what helps? I’ll tell you. At about four in the morning, when I’m lying on my bed with my eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling, which is kind of like a movie screen hanging there above me, because it’s white, and because I can see everything that happened played out there on it, again and again—when it gets to be four in the morning, and I think, I’m going to get up in an hour and a half anyway, why not now? I haul myself out of bed, throw on some clothes, doesn’t matter what, make myself a cup of coffee to go—can’t miss my morning cup of coffee—and I go, take the car and drive out to the corner of Morris Road and 299. Morris has a wide shoulder there, so it’s no problem for me to pull off onto it and sit drinking my morning cup of coffee. There’s a traffic light there now, did you know that? Did you?”
“Yeah,” I said, “I did.”
“Of course you did: who doesn’t? It marks the spot where the Dre
scher family—where we—where the happy family of one Daniel Anthony Drescher was forever reduced. I sit at that spot—that historic spot, coffee in hand, and I look at that traffic light. I study it. I contemplate it. I watch its three glass eyes trade off commands. If it’s warm enough, or if it isn’t, I open my window and listen to it. Let’s say the light starts off green. There’s a buzzing, almost like an alarm clock, which is followed by a clunk, and the light is yellow. Another buzzing, another clunk, and it’s red. It’s like gates being opened and shut, like prison gates. The light stays red the longest, did you know that? I’ve timed it. This is looking at it from Morris. From 299, it stays green the longest. After red comes green, then yellow. Buzz, clunk. Buzz, clunk. Gates opening and shutting, Abe. Gates opening and shutting.
“I’ll let you in on a little secret, too. Looking at the light doesn’t help in the slightest. I don’t think, Well, at least some good has come out of this terrible tragedy. The intersection’s just another place to be. I can’t escape it. I can’t escape any of it. Myself am hell, right? So I might as well be at the spot where I took the plunge, so to speak, the place where I was cast out. I do feel calmer there. Strange, huh? I have the strangest thoughts lately. I swear I do. When I look at things—when I look at people—I think, None of it’s real. It’s all just a mask, like those papier-mâché masks we made for one of our school plays when I was a kid. What play was that? It seems like it must have been Alice in Wonderland, but I can’t remember. I wish I could remember that play. I wish I could. All a mask, Abe, and the million-dollar question is, What’s underneath the mask? If I could break through the mask, if I could make a fist and punch a hole in it,” his hand slammed the table, rattling the dishes, “what would I find? Just flesh? Or would there be something more? Would I find those things the minister talked about at the funerals? You weren’t there, were you? I guess we didn’t know each other so well then. Beauty, the minister said, the three of them were in a place of beauty, beauty beyond our ability to know. Joy, too, it’s a place of unending joy. If I could punch a hole through the mask, would I see beauty and joy? You would think, either it’s got to be heaven, because that’s what we’re talking about, right? Or it’s what it is, the mask is everything. But I’ll tell you, when I’m sitting at that intersection, watching the light go through its cycles, I think of other—other possibilities. Maybe whoever, or whatever, is running the show isn’t so nice. Maybe he’s evil, or mad, or bored, disinterested. Maybe we’ve got everything completely wrong, everything, and if we could look through the mask, what we’d see would destroy us. You ever feel that way?”
