Beyond the Bedroom Wall

by Larry Woiwode

  *

  They pulled up to a gray-black weathered bait shop covered with soft-drink advertisements made of tin; one of them held a huge thermometer; it was close to ninety degrees. Fifty yards ahead lay Height of Land Lake, and the air around, stained blue-gray from the expanse of it, smelled of pine pitch and fish scales and some sort of subterranean mold. Father sidled through a stand of beanpole birches, their webwork of light sliding over his clothes, and stopped at the water's edge, planted a foot, placed his fist at his belt, throwing back a flap of his jacket, and gripped his cigar tighter in his teeth, and Charles remembered his father looking up from a book, and saying, "I'd like to see Father portray one of Shakespeare's kings onstage sometime; he has the right face for it, his manner is so courtly and European, and he has the presence of a King, and Charles's mother had smiled in her way that meant this was meaningful, and said, "He'd make a perfect Henry VIII."

  Lionell and Charles went out on spongy grass beside him, the unruffled blue of the lake reflecting the cloudless sky, as though blue were being distilled over the surface in front of them. A band of pine and fir encircled the blue with green. It was a Wednesday and there was only one boat, a single-manned rowboat, on the whole of the large lake. "Lovely," Father said. "I'm sure there are fish here but it’s nearly enough just seeing it, Lionell. I feel some-thing s m store for us. Thank you for thinking of here. Now"—he clapped his hands and rubbed and wrung them —"we'll need a boat."

  "They rent them at the bait shop, Reverend." "You pick one out for us, then, and I’ll go take care of It, and we'll be off!"

  Charles followed Lionell onto a narrow dock, where green-painted rental boats were tied up and rocking on either side of them, and Lionell stepped down into one, sending it off in a lazy glide, and started checking its oarlocks. Charles went out to the end of the dock and saw a cage of wire mesh fastened to a post of the pier there. A big bluegill was finning from corner to corner in quick flits, m a continual and abstracted restlessness, rootless here, and Charles saw himself walking the boundaries of the farm, and felt the constriction and smallness of all he did and the meagerness of its effect within his known world. Lionell was hard on him, to make a man of him, Lionell said, and expected him to be at his side whenever he worked, and, lately, when he went to bed; there he made Charles masturbate him until he came spattering off flopped over on his side, folded into himself, and fell asleep, and what was Charles to do with his tingling bat-swinger alone in the black dark? More often than not, to keep from waking Lionell by going whacking away to work at it, he wanted to cut it off where it got a good start. "Yours is too little to get a hold of," Lionell said to him.

  Lionell borrowed a wide-wheeled Farmall Cub from a dirt-poor, skinnily T-shirted, electric-eyed Fundamentalist, Leon Flisher, to use for cultivating corn, and since there was no room for Charles on the hitch or near the seat with the cultivator attached, Lionell had him sit at the front of the tractor, on the support and tie bar that ran out to the right wheel: "This way, if you fall off, I'll see you before you get cultivated under," he said. Charles sat rigidly balanced, his feet skimming only inches above ground and ticking down some of the flappily flowing and unfolding corn crop, hill by hill, afraid to show fear, the bucking tractor jolting him closer to the hypnotizing tire, and then on one sharp turnaround at the end of the rows, as he grabbed out to keep from falling or hitting the barbed-wire fence that came in three spraddling springs through the green-tinted air toward him, his thumb got crushed in a steering knuckle. Before he could pull it out or get Lionell stopped by his scream ("Hell, I thought you were just jacking around up there," Lionell said), it was torn open down its length to bluish-white bone with blood-spotted cords parted over it. Lionell took him on his shoulders on a run back home, and they showed the wound to Charles's grandmother, who was in the garden in her broad-brimmed summer hat, and asked what she thought. "Soak it in Lysol," she said. "Then see how it looks."

  Lionell soaked it in Lysol, and then took out a pair of sewing scissors—"Does that hurt?" he'd ask with smiling irony—and trimmed off all the ragged pieces of skin and flesh he could find, shaming Charles for behaving like a child. Which reminded him of lying underneath this floor at nearly the same spot, at a screened-in foundation vent, with La Verne Flisher, who had his father's eyes and a baldish sort of head with hair pulled out in spiky patches, and while they studied one another and whispered probing talk, smoking one of the rare long butts from Lionell's fairly well concealed (enough to satisfy his mother) cigarette habit, Charles asked the kid, at least a couple years younger, why he pulled out his hair that way, and Flisher said, "My ma says it's because I'm not one of the Chosen." Just that afternoon his mother had come into the house with a collation of dates and of the numbers in Revelations which proved, she said, that eternity would come during this year, perhaps in a matter of hours. "But she just says that when she's mad at me. I think she really thinks I'm some kind of new savior or something. Just when I nail her with a thought, she blinks. One time I went out and hid in the woods and got cut up bad and she bawled about it for days. I pull it out because I can't keep up with the hours, or something. You know. Or else there's electricity coming out of my ears. Or something in there is itching to get loose. I don't know. I've thought about it a lot, for hours."

  Now the purplish-white scar along the inside of Charles's thumb stirred with sympathetic currents at the memory, and he rubbed it and began humming a song with uneasiness, out of tune, he supposed, as Lionell would soon tell him. One of his chores was to let the cows out of the barn after each milking, kicking at those that wanted to stay behind and hump up to leave a good dribbly mess; he was too short to reach the lock at the top of the stanchions, so he stood on the edge of the manger to manage the task. There was a sulky Brown Swiss with big curved horns, Yokie, a hater of children, and one evening when he released her—she was always the last he let go —she lunged out and hooked him with a horn near the heart, and sent him flying into the manger. For a while his wind was gone and his voice wouldn't work; a coil of flesh ached along his left side and seemed to swirl up into the air. He started crying for help and kept crying out until it turned dark. He stumbled through frames and currents of a daze up to a white house and lay down on a porch. The cream separator was slowing down in that deeper and loosening wobble that touches around on all the edges of equilibrium, about to settle on a center so like an infinity. Lionell came out the screen door in yellow light and asked what was wrong, so Charles told him, Yokie, and said he thought at least two ribs were broken and he better be taken to the hospital, and Lionell said, "For God's sake," and carried him in in so much pain they might have been broken, and laid him on the couch; and later, when Charles was half asleep in the honeyed parlor of semiconscious pain, he heard Lionell say to her, "He's a sissy, for Jesus' sake, a baby-face! He stubs his toe and it's T want to see a doctor! I want to go to the hospital I' You'd think he grew up in one."

  "Yes, I know," she said, and gave a great sigh of weary disillusionment. "I think his mother coddled him too much. Yup." With her tongue she gave two clucks.

  The bluegill tacked and finned in spurts from corner to corner, and Charles thought that the only time he'd received any special attention from his mother, if ever, was when he'd had pneumonia, and at that moment felt a presence behind him.

  "You making friends with the fish?" Lionell said in a squeaky voice. "You think it'll help you? If you fish the way you talk, it'll be like a man with a paper ass and cardboard teeth."

  A screen door slammed and Father came out of the bait shop with a big smile, holding a cane pole upright in each hand.

  "Oh, for holy Jesus' sake," Lionell cried under his breath. "Don't tell me he expects to niggerfish!"

  "Ladies! Ladies!" Father called. "I have the perfect solution for you for when you get bored. These!" He handed them each a pole and gave Wilhomena a paper cup which contained, Charles was sure, angleworms, and gestured to Lionell; they went back into the birches, where
white wooden lawn chairs were sitting like wide-open wings, and dragged two of them down to the water's edge. "There," Father said. "Now you even have thrrrrones to sit and fish from! All we're missing now is the motor."

  "Motor?" Lionell said; he'd often mentioned they should have a motor, so they could cover more of a lake, and troll, but wasn't ever able to afford one.

  "I've rented us a motor," Father said. "I thought we'd need it to move around more, and troll. If you'd get it, Lionell, I'd be grateful. I started to, but—" He indicated his suit with a downsweep of his hands and wrinkled his nose. "They're oily, Lionell."

  Father led Charles to his car, unlocked its trunk, handed out Lionell's tackle box and their two rods, and then leaned into the dark cavity, pulled aside some burlap bags, and brought out a tall, tinnily shining tackle box of aluminum, opened a top compartment, took out a belt-wide elasticized band dotted with the feathery tufts of fishing flies, and slipped it on over his homburg, then shook translucent shafts, sections of a fly rod, out of a cylindrical case, and started fitting the lengths of them together.

  Lionell came up and leaned the motor against a tree. "Uh," he said. "I don't think you'll need ail that fancy stuff."

  "Oh?"

  "Naw. We just use a rod and reel with a spoon. Maybe a jig or two if you've got one. 'Tarred ob libin' and feeeeerd a-dyin'!' "

  "You're the boss," Father said. He put away the elasticized band, pulled out a bottom drawer of the tackle box, which was self-contained and had a handle on its top, and unsheathed a springy bluish spinning rod from a velveteen case.

  "You're a real fisherman, huh?" Lionell said.

  "Ach! I've hardly had time to go since I've been in the States, and I haven't been in Minnesota once. Otherwise, I'd be boss." He looked out with his appraising eyes over the top of his bifocal-indented lenses. "Do you like beer, Lionell?"

  Lionell glanced in the direction of his mother, and then stepped up to Father and said from behind his hand, as if to confide. "To tell you the truth, Reverend, I'm a swine for the stuff."

  "Would you be unhappy if it was warm?"

  "Any old way is fine with me, gluck gluck!"

  "Good." From the trunk Father pulled out a carton that contained six bright-green bottles not quite full to their tops and beaded inside with fine foam. "We'll take this much out in the boat, then," he said, and clinked the carton against a cooler in the trunk. "All the rest of this that's on ice, well, we'll save that for later, until after we've all got our limits, right, boys? Ahem!"

  *

  They'd been on the lake for nearly an hour and not one of them had even had a strike. The day was dead calm and the temperature kept climbing higher into the nineties. Four of the beers were gone. They'd fished several areas where Lionell and Father both felt the terrain and atmosphere were right, and now sat lightly rocking in a high-banked cover where reflected firs formed a shadowy-green sawtooth around them. Lionell opened the fifth beer and the hiss of its bubbles was audible in the miniature-seeming stillness. "Well, should we pull out?" he said, generally, and Charles heard a noise that vied with fingernails on slate; his ratchet was on; he punched at it with his thumb, not sure whether it should be on or off, but startled by the sound, and then his line swayed way off to the left and appeared to speed backward over the water toward him as it was drawn under in a dive.

  "Don't worry about that lock!" Lionell cried. "Let him take it out if he wants! Don't give him any slack! Set your hook!"

  Charles was in the bow and felt he couldn't turn fast enough to keep up with the sidewise, weighted, and erratic course of the line as it crossed and recrossed toward the boat's opposite side, so he lay back on the gunnel, letting the rod pass over his face in a lateral exchange, and as he sat again had to release one hand to get his balance straight. The tip of the rod went underwater in a bulge.

  "Oh, for God's sake!" Lionell cried.

  Charles stood and reeled in, leaving the rod where it was in a sorrow-beyond-any-amenities pose, and saw, just behind his flashing spoon, a fish that looked the length of his leg, a northern pike trailing a rusty streak of blood from its sharp-pointed undershot jaw. "I’ve got something," he said, trying not to tear off a scream, and, with the rod underwater, led the fish, which seemed tame and attentive to him, past Father in the center seat, to the stem, where Lionell reached under, grabbed it by the gills, and lifted its water-flinging length onto the seat beside him. He got loose the treble hook with some shedding of scales. "Well, it's not quite according to Hoyle, but would you look at that?" he said, and held the fish up for Father. "It must be about four pounds."

  "It's a beauty, Charles," Father said. "My congratulations to you." He cast in a wide backhand to where Charles had hooked up. "And now I'll get one as big. Watch."

  They sat for another half hour and Charles got a medium-sized bass—"Enough to make my day," Father said—and Lionell a sucker over a foot and a half long; he stomped on its head and threw it overboard, and murmured, "Rough fish. They'll ruin a lake before you know where they got off. Or in it. Yup."

  Father removed, first, his double-breasted jacket, revealing that the black shirt beneath was actually a dickey held around his waist with an elastic band. "Hoooo!" Lionell cried. "This heat, hunh?" Father took off his homburg and mopped his head, then took off the dickey and his white collar, too; against his skin was a sleeveless garment with a scooped neck, made of a coarse-looking, granite-colored cloth. He broke open the last beer and fanned his face with his hat, and Charles was surprised to see knotty muscles bunching in his upper arms. "I'm ready to start prrraying," he said, and handed the beer across to Lionell.

  Lionell threw the stringer of fish forward to Charles, and cried, "Tie these up there, so they don't get chopped into mincemeat by this eggbeater of a boat-loader of a motor, boy! Heigh! We're going to troll!" He was getting juiced. The back of the boat swung out to one side, turning Charles toward the open lake, like a sea to his eyes, and he felt ready for a long, fast ride.

  "Whoop! Whoop!" Father cried. "It's my turn now!" His rod was arched toward the water and its end plunged down in sudden dips as he reeled in. He drew back on it, reeled, drew back again, and the boat began to slip in his direction. "Ach," he said. "A snag."

  Lionell lifted loose an oar and rowed over while Father reeled in until his line went straight down, and then pulled up so hard his rod bent into a trembling omega, and weaved it from side to side, making the line sing, but still his hook held. "Ach," he said, and took out a gold-colored cigar clipper and snipped the line. "One must expect losses, too, if there is to be a gain today, don't you agree, Lionell?"

  "All I know is that now we're going to troll," Lionell said, and got the motor going a speed higher and guided the boat toward a pine-studded peninsula where long-legged birds ran on a ray of sand like a wisp of sun, and then Charles cried, "Wait! Hey, you guys, hey, Lionell, wait up!"

  Lionell looked over his shoulder and cut the motor with a slap. "For God's sake, why didn't you pull in till we were clear of this place? You're hooked up in the same spot he was, goofball."

  There was a feathery flurry of water at the spot, flying spray and ripples that shattered surrounding reflections, and then Charles's line went fleeing off his reel in a flight he tried to slow with his thumb, but it began to burn without having any effect and the mechanism shook in his hands. He looked for the button of the lock but couldn't get at it for the tugging upheaval in his hands, and then stood and pulled back to set his hook, and the line took a slack arc and floated over water.

  "Do one thing at a time!" Lionell cried. "If he's hooked up and wants to take it out, let him, play him, goddamnit!" His head dropped and he glanced up at Father from penitentially lowered lids. "Pardon me, sir."

  "We're all men out here, Lionell, not convent sisters, and we're after these fish. Is he gone, Charles?"

  "Yes, I guess."

  "What do you mean, you guess?" Lionell said. "Of course he is. You know that. You're too damn impatient, is what'
s the matter with you. You make too much noise! You've got to learn to play him and tire him and let him go his own way at times. You can't expect to land him the minute you get a hook into the sonofabitch! Damnit, Reverend, you'll have to forgive me! I've spent so much of my life around a gutter, my mind is always in one, among the cow flop and—"

  "This isn't the confessional, Lionell."

  Charles felt he'd done well with his second fish and hadn't, in his handling of it, received any of Lionell's usual sour critical disdain, and was reeling in with sadness over the loss of this one, perhaps a big fish, when there was such a muscular surge at the end of his line he jolted the boat to get his leg braced; the boat dipped and yawed in that direction and in a few seconds his line was far out beyond where he'd hooked up. The reel crank was knocking against his knuckles and he could see the gleam of the spindle begin to appear below the unraveling, crisscrossing rolls of line. Lionell started the motor and eased the bow of the boat around in the direction the fish had taken, heading toward open water in a zigzag course close to the surface—a fin would sometimes trail willowy streamers—and then it swung to the left and dove hard. Lionell cut the motor and Charles cranked wildly to catch up, his line soaked and beaded and water flying back at him, until his blurred reel below was almost full, but there was no more tension on the line. He reeled in slower.