Beyond the Bedroom Wall

by Larry Woiwode

  "Well, now you've gone and lost him for good!" Lionell said. "If you're going to be that slow and clumsy and womanish and lackadaisical about it, then I don't know what the Sam Hill you're doing out here!"

  And then Charles saw, over Lionell's shoulder, about ten feet out, homing in toward him with a spoon in its maw, the largest northern he'd ever seen on a line, and before he could say anything the fish finned up and started tearing up the water around the boat.

  "Holy Jesus!" Lionell cried, and came in rocking strides toward the bow. He grabbed Charles's line and pulled it in hand over hand, and just as he jerked the fish up out into shining reality, it came unhooked, and Charles had to duck his flying spoon, which splashed with a jingle on the other side, but he felt something foreign strike the boat itself and saw the fish back in the stern, beating against the bottom as though it would break it.

  Lionell stunned it with his heel and held it up lengthwise, laughing, and said, "Holy Jesus! It's got to be a five-pounder, at the least!"

  "Charles, I won't congratulate you this time," Father said. "That was to be my fish. I was there before you."

  "What kind of a spoon are you using now?" Lionell asked.

  It was the same spoon Charles had used all day, a Daredevel, and now Father and Lionell had Daredevels attached to their leaders as they trolled around the peninsula and a ways up a muddy shore beyond, where shadows were forming, and then stopped in a shallow bay and cast along a stand of cattails; and then along a stand of high, greenish-beige water weeds with a blue channel winding deep into the mass of them. The next time Charles hooked up he kept tension on the line and played the fish, as Lionell had told him to, but when he got it close to the boat and was about to land it with the net Lionell handed him—where did this come from?—it took such a sudden plunge he was pulled off-balance and might have gone overboard if Father hadn't grabbed hold of his belt from behind. Lionell said that that's for God's sake why you sat down in a boat, was that clear now?

  With the tip of his rod underwater, where the northern had pulled it—it was another northern, about the size of the first—Charles reeled in until his spoon struck the end guide and again led the fish back to Lionell, who landed it and went forward and put it on the stringer before Charles had a chance to really look at it, and threw the stringer overboard with a clattering splash.

  "Is that a new trick of yours?" Lionell asked.

  "What?"

  "Holding the end of your rod underwater, for God's sake, and leading the damn fish around like it was a dog!”

  "They don't seem so scared that way," Charles said. "Are you? Could you handle one if it was? Can you walk straight?"

  Charles went back to the bow and as he sat, with bather shielding him, he started to laugh, and though he knew he might be bringing on bodily harm by doing it the harder he tried to stop, the worse it got. They trolled up and down the lake until after five o'clock, and then Father suggested they try their original spot, where Charles had got the three. "Reel in, then," Lionell said, and raced off across the lake at bolt-shuddering, shattering speed, the foamy spume fountaining high behind and widening into the white-edged furrow of their darker-colored tapering wake, and then they sat pitching on their ripples the shore returned to them, casting into different areas of the cove. Charles went at it halfheartedly, afraid he'd catch another one.

  "Would you quit that goddamn cackling up there?” Lionell said. "You'll scare away every other fish you haven't already pulled out of this place! What's the matter with you? Do you need change for two-bits m your pipsqueak life? Do you want to be locked up in a zoo?"

  Father reeled in and rested his rod across his knees. "Lionell, I don't usually do this, but I'm going to give up skunked. It's not our day. Are you?"

  "No, it's not, or I'm not, or it's godawfuled hot, or a screw's loose, or it's not loose, and the worst news is that we're both screwed, or piss in the pot." He threw his rod in the bottom of the boat and jerked on the starting rope.

  "Just a second," Charles said.

  "Oh, holy Jesus, another hot-damned moldy dick again!"

  "No," Charles said, and his stomach was seized with pain and anti-relationships to the comedy of this he tried to control. "It's just a—! It's still that same snag!" He angled his rod down, took hold of the line and tugged on it, and fifty feet away a shimmery-jacketed fish came catapulting up out of the water, arching its head toward its tail in an unencumbered shimmy through the air, whipping his line into swirls of language, and skipped once on its side before it dove down.

  "It's a trout!" Lionell cried. "It's a brown trout!" He stood and stared in a rocking step toward Charles. "Here, let—" And then his control came over him and he sat. Charles was grappling with the rod to keep it from going overboard, and when he finally got the handle in his hands the line went out with a snap and backlashed across his reel. He pulled at the snarled loops of it, freeing or drawing tight the worst of them, and reeled in beyond their fluttery whorls until he felt a tautness, which he tested with a slight tug, and the trout came breaking up above the surface again, flinging spatters over the water as though shedding its inner life, and sent a font of spray splashing as it fluttered along the surface refusing to dive.

  "Whoopeee!" Father cried.

  "Give him the business!" Lionell yelled, as the fish went down. It was a big fish and a fighter from the feel of it, the fish of the day, perhaps, and the first trout Charles had ever had on his line, and he didn't feel he deserved it. The boat rocked as though over a precarious world he'd summoned out of himself that could soon dissolve.

  "Aw, Charles, do it!" Father cried. "This time, too! You've caught them all because you're so purrre in heart!"

  Charles fought the fish for what seemed forever, a few minutes more than he felt he'd be able to, and then had to swing the line over Lionell's ducking form, to keep contact with the shuddering tenseness that thrummed up the line and through the rod in a way he'd never felt before. 'Lionell," he said. "Do you want to take him?"

  "Nope." Lionell was staring out over the lake.

  "I'm sort of tired."

  "You hooked him. You bring him in."

  It took some time before it was close enough to land, and then Lionell skimmed it out with a flick of the net. "About three and a half pounds, I'd guess," he told them. "And I'd say it lost about a pound in fright." He took the fish from the net and laid it out on the bottom of the boat and stared at it awhile, then reached down and ran his fingertips over the gloss of its spotted side. He looked up at Charles in the bow with a sober face. "Chuck, it's a beautiful fish," he said. "I don't give a damn which of us got it, you hear?"

  Then they went back at the same bolt-shuddering speed to the other shore, where the ladies were waiting in the lawn chairs with their cane poles leaning into the branches of a birch bloodied by the low sun. After their wash went, and they'd tied up, Wilhomena said in her whining, fluty voice, "I got tree sunfish and Missus Jones here, she’s better wit the waroms, she got five sunfish and tree crap-pie, I think. Hee hee." She smiled with a catlike pull to the corners of her curved-up mouth, her broad arms on the arms of the chair like a sphinx's, as if too content with herself to move.

  "How'd you guys do?" Charles's grandmother asked.

  "A big fish apiece for the five of us," Father said, and turned to Lionell, who held the stringer up with a fisherman's pride.

  "Who got what?" she asked.

  "Well, the boy got them all," Father said.

  "Really!" she cried.

  "Well, I at least got a great big old long granddaddy of a thucker'' Lionell said. "I've never been so under mortified in my life. Sheesh!"

  "Where is it?" she asked him.

  "With Davy Jones, Ma."

  "Auf, Lionell, don't joke like that! They're not bad eating, you know."

  "Ya, ya, shure, if you got a day or tuuu, like ole Unca Einard says, to sit there and pick out all of them diddly-poop, goddang bones, a hoo hoo!"

  "Oofda, you! With two ladi
es, a priest, and a child here, Lionell? Shame on you!"

  "We've already settled our score about that, Ma. Outta strikes tonight!"

  "He got them all?" she said. "That big one, too?"

  "Yup!" Lionell said, and his voice echoed across the lake and came back through the trees again.

  She started to laugh in the tone Charles had been laughing in, and it seemed that she, too, couldn't help herself or stop, slapping her thighs with fast hands as her false gums showed. "Yuck it up!" Lionell cried, and grabbed the motor and brought it in banging steps toward the bait shop, while Father went to the trunk of his car. Wilhomena took up a blanket draped over the back of her chair, and she and Charles's grandmother spread it in a fluttery sinking square down out on the grass, orange-pink over the green, and began to unpack the picnic dinner together. Charles wasn't sure whether it was better to be with the women or the men, since both had their separate pleasures, and saw his grandmother's sunbonnet, inverted beside her chair, filled with blueberries she must have picked from the woods, which were now spilled over the hat's brim and down onto the ground in a dark and miniature galaxy. Father and Lionell came from the car carrying the cooler in concord between them, and set it beside the birch supporting the two cane poles, and then Lionell dragged another lawn chair down for himself, drew it next to his mother's, and sat back, and Father started breaking open beers. "Come, come on, everybody," he said. "We have to drink a toast to our fisherman. Hurrah!"

  "None for me," Charles's grandmother said.

  "Ah, Mrs. Jones, you must, for today, as I predicted, has been a special one!" He poured a few teaspoonfuls of foam into a paper cup and handed it to her. "I take all the sins this brings on you onto my own head. Now let's drink to Charles, our boy!"

  "If she does, it'll be the first time in her life," Lionell said.

  "Oh, you!" she cried. "What do you know about me or anything of the sort to begin with?"

  "You mean you've been deceiving me. Ma?"

  "I mean I've maybe been holding back a lot more than you might know about, or that you and another might not be old enough to hear, and to by-jing with the rest of it!”

  "Oh, yeah?"

  "Yeah."

  "This, Charles, is for you," Father said, and handed over the nearly full bottle he'd given his grandmother a taste from.

  "Should he have that much?" she asked.

  "Oh, of course. He's a grown boy, Mrs. Jones, and he s also our herrro right now." Father raised his bottle. "I propose a toast to Charles, the fisherman of the day, maybe the summer, even, and a nice boy, too."

  Everybody murmured and their heads went back and Charles blinked at a blur, moved, and was surprised to see Wilhomena drinking out of the bottle. He tipped up his own and tasted the gaseous-smelling Liquid, with its hint of bread dough and acetic fruit, and knew at the taste that this would be involved in his life m some way, and was alcohol.

  "Without further ado," Father said, and tucked a towel into his collar, sat on the ground at the edge of the blanket, and began to eat. Charles sat beside him and the others brought food on paper plates back to their chairs; besides the cold chicken, there was liverwurst, summer sausage, corned beef, pumpernickel and rye, sliced onions and tomato wedges, lettuce and mustard and mayonnaise and pickles, sauerkraut, chunks of three different kinds of cheese, baked beans, potato salad, a watermelon kept cold in the cooler, fresh apples and pears—Wilhomena had also brought along a thermos of coffee and one of tea—and Charles had an intimation of the quiet meals at Father's house. The day was so calm even the birch leaves were silent.

  The filamentlike vessels below Father's cheekbones turned darker as he ate and drank, and it seemed to Charles that he and Lionell were related in some way. Father finished a drumstick and sighed, and then nibbled and licked and sucked his fingers clean, and there was a familiar convulsion inside Charles that came out m the laughter from the lake. . „

  "Oh, for God's sake," Lionell said. "Not that again. "It's the beer," his grandmother said. Charles's bottle, giving out conelike beams from its top and bright edges, lay empty beside him.

  "Ach, it's good for him," Father said, and gripped Charles's shoulder and gave it a shake, and then said in a different voice, "Before I forget, before the light goes, we must have a picture of this day, for us and for Grandpa to see, too." He tossed his towel down on the blanket, strode away to his car, and came back carrying a camera with a big protruding lens, pushed back his hat, lifted a lid on the camera's top and looked down, aiming it in their direction, and then retreated toward the lake and made some quick screwing adjustments of some kind.

  "Be happy!" he cried.

  There was a clash of the camera's internal mechanism.

  "And now our hero alone. You must take your fish and go out on the dock. I want to show the lake, too."

  Charles stood and the rare-colored blanket rose and trembled and heaved up as he stood and then fell with a sigh. The grass was an unnatural green to him. He headed toward the lake, where Lionell had left the fish, and discovered that his left leg was longer than the other, so he adjusted to compensate for the difference and then his right leg grew longer. The ground gave way and collapsed under every other step he took.

  "He's drunk!" his grandmother cried.

  "Naw, he's just feeling his oats. Ma!" Lionell said, and laughed in his high hee hee hee.

  Charles felt himself part at the beltline and his legs go rambling ahead on their own, clad, for some reason, in his grandfather's goatskin chaps, but with no jeans beneath, dark hanging down, and the ground rose above his waist, as if viewed through his grandfather's bifocals, and enfolded within itself and flowed back from his ears in drumming surges that rose in pitch and kept gaining in ominousness of tone. And the strangely colored green of the grass was wavering tales underneath and in front of him: You are Father's hero. You've caught five fish. They were guided to your line, A feast has been spread because of you. Your close and only friends have shared in it. They've toasted you. They're laughing at the pleasure you've given them, Lionell respects you now. These are your fish.

  He saw the rainy array of their scaly sides on the underwater side of his reflection, the beads of their eyes, the metal spike holding the stringer in place, and leaned for them and nearly fell, and at that heard his grandmother's girlish laugh go off soaring with the laughter of the rest of them, and realized she'd allowed her photograph to be taken without protest for the first time he was aware of (because of him?), and then walked onto the dock dragging his catch, twenty or so pounds, over the rough-cut slabs of board behind, and heard their slap and clatter like ungainly footsteps catching up to him, and turned. And had to jam one foot to the side to hold the dock in place.

  "Lift the fish high now!” Father cried. "And look proud!"

  He was too weak to lift them above his waist. He looked up again. The camera was aiming in at him. Bulking behind it was Father Schimmelpfennig, who embodied all that was pleasurable about his days in Hyatt. He'd always wanted to be a hero to somebody, and especially Father if he had his choice, and now was, by Father's word, and Father had also called him pure, which was what he'd needed to hear, for some reason, since the night his mother died; and through the mist caused by his laughter and the beer, his grandmother was his mother back again, free of the grave, Lionell was his father beside her, white wings wide, one of those women laughing was his grandmother from both or either of the family's sides, his grandfather hovered near Father's bulking form, rocking back, too huge to retain now. North Dakota unfurled in the distance behind them, his past was intact, he was healed and whole once more, and he'd never again be alone in his life, he was convinced of that.

  "High, Charles!"

  Charles lifted stiffened arms and there was a clash: Charles is caught in the upper right-hand corner of the gray-and-black photograph, on a dock shown all the way to its end, where a kerosene smudge pot sits, a dark boat hanging in back of him, while he stands wearing a T-shirt and blue jeans that are rolled
up in the style his Uncle Lionell favored that year, one of his shoes turned on its edge and his hips swung out in a big curve, as if to brace himself against the weight of the fish, which draw the whitened line stretched between his hands into a deep downward bow, and reach from his chin to his groin. The smile on his face, unself-conscious and transfiguring, can be found in most of the photographs dating from his childhood, and will never again appear in any photograph of him after this point in his life. Above him is the sky. Behind, of the same gray as the sky and stretching off for as far as the camera can see is the infinite stillness of the lake.

  *

  "Becky, come see the fish I got," Charles says, and his four-year-old daughter, scrambling up over his farmer's overalls, a somewhat costume, is in his lap as quick as his cat, called "Dad's cat" to distinguish it from her Siamese, would be.

  "Uh-huh. You holded them nice, Dad."

  "I was a boy then," he says, and rubs his palm up over the bristly stubble on his chin.

  "I know, I see," she says, and her voice is Susan's in his mind again. She puts a fingertip into the cleft of his chin. "Did I know you when you was a little boy. Dad?"

  "No, hon, I'm afraid not."

  She drops her finger and grabs his hand and measures and touches it with hers as if weaving a charm or a prayer over its safety in their known world.

  "But you're here now, and so am I," he says. "I'm with you. I'm here."

  "I'm getting big," she says, but not with her usual conviction, in a voice that sounds tellingly close to the emotion that comes over her when there's something she can't understand.

  "Oh, I know. I know, little Becky, sweet one," he says, and presses her head to his chest and rocks her from side to side, and feels they'd plummet out the bottom into the vitals of the earth in an instant, if he weren't so stubborn and turtlelike and didn't have her and her mother, and if her fingers didn't grip him so hard.