Apparition & Late Fictions: A Novella and Stories

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Catch and Release

Bloodsport

Hunter’s Moon

Matinée de Septembre

Apparition

THESE STORIES
have been improved by the scrutiny of early readers including Mary Tata, George Martin, Tommy Lynch, Heather Grace Lynch, Nick Delbanco, Bret Lott, A. L. Kennedy, Keith Taylor, Richard McDonough, Sejal Sutaria, Pat Lynch, Dan Lynch, Michael Heffernan, George Bornstein, and Margaret Lazarus Dean, and by the guidance and good counsel of my editors, Jill Bialosky and Robin Robertson. For these and for the assistance of Mike Lynch, Ken Kutzli, and Sean Lynch, I am permanently grateful, as I am to the editors of the following journals where these stories first appeared, sometimes in different versions:

T
HE THERMOS BOTTLE
with his father’s ashes in it rested on the front seat of the drift boat. He was glad to have the morning’s busywork behind him and to be in the river. The green thermos with the silver cap looked inconspicuous enough.

Neither the waitress at the All Seasons Diner nor the other guides meeting their clients over biscuits and sausage gravy had noticed it. Nor had the woman from the tackle shop with whom he had arranged a car spot for his truck and trailer. He told her he’d be floating Walhalla to Custer and left her a set of keys. He took some twenty-pound shooting line, some ten-pound leader and eight-pound tippet, some split shot and a Snickers bar, some feathers and yarn. He’d been tying his own flies for years. “On account,” he told her, putting the gear on the counter.

“You’ll be a long way downstream from the other guides,
Danny,” she told him. “Most of ’em are doing Green Cottage to Gleason’s Landing. Salmon all over the gravel, they say. Or Gleason’s to Bowman’s or Rainbow to Sulac. No one’s below Upper Branch but you.”

“That rain’ll push some fresh one’s in,” he said. “Some steelhead and lakeruns, maybe. First of October. It’s time.”

“Well, you’ll have some peace and quiet at least. It’s a zoo up here with guides and canoes and walk-ins. Mind the bow hunters. Season opens today.”

“Peace and quiet, yes.”

He gathered his supplies and left.

Only Enid, the woman with whom he slept some nights, who managed his website and kept track of his bookings and packed his shore lunches, had been curious.

“What’s with the thermos?” she’d asked when he stood in the door in the dark with his waders and vest. She knew he only drank Mountain Dew.

“A client’s,” he’d said, and bent to kiss her.

“Good luck,” she whispered, and rolled over and returned to sleep. He pulled the quilt up over her bare shoulder. For a moment he wondered if he should stay.

AND PUSHING
off from the Walhalla landing, in the first light of the first morning of the first October since his father died, with his lame dog Chinook curled in the boat’s bow, his father’s ashes in a thermos on the front seat, himself easing the oars into the downstream current—the three of them adrift in the Pere Marquette, the forest on either side of which was ablaze with the changes of Michigan’s autumn—he thought it was nearly like taking his father fishing again and that the ther
mos bottle was a perfect camouflage and that he didn’t know if such things ought to feel like weeping or like laughter. He loved the damp rotting smell of autumn, the breeze that bore it through the tunnel of the river, the pockets of fog, the marsh and mudbanks, the litter of fallen and falling trees, the unseen traffic in the woods, the distance his drift put between himself and all the other details and duties of ordinary time. He loved the snug hold of the river on his boat, the determination of its current, the certain direction, the quiet.

And though this time of year he could put sixty days of guiding together—from late August to late October—and though his arms and shoulders would burn from the rowing and his hands blister from the oars and ache from the tying of knots and his fingers would sting with line cuts and fish bites and embedded hooks, it never really seemed like work. But it was his work. Three hundred dollars a day, less 5 percent for the lodge that booked the trip, less the cost of lunches and tackle and car spots, gas and gear, plus tips—these were the heydays of the year when yuppies from the suburbs all over the Midwest would drive their SUVs to Baldwin to dress up in their designer fly-fisherman costumes and catch the biggest fish of their lives on the lightest tackle. Danny took their pictures, took their money, filled them full of lore and stories, and sent them back to what he imagined were their trophy wives and dreary day jobs, glad that he had passed on all of that to become a trout bum and live the life he figured God intended him to live. This time of year, the only days of rest came from cancellations. The sales rep from Akron, booked for today, had called to say he couldn’t get away.

THE THERMOS
had been his stepmother’s idea. Though his father had been a minister all his life, and had officiated at hundreds of funerals, he had steadfastly refused to say what he wanted for his own arrangements. “You’ll know what to do,” is all he’d ever say when questioned on the matter. “Bury me or burn me or blow me out of a cannon—I don’t care. I’ll have my heaven. It’s yours to do. That’s one funeral I won’t have to preach.”

So when it happened, it was Margaret, his stepmother, who had decided that, after the wake and funeral, the body would be cremated. When Danny’s sister and brothers had questioned her, suggesting that he’d rather be buried at the family lot next to their mother, Margaret said it would make their father portable and divisible and, after all, he loved to travel and never got to do enough of it, and he always had tried to be fair with them all.

Thus, to his youngest son, the artist, she gave a portion of the ashes, which he mixed with acrylics and oils and began a series of portraits of his father. To his middle son, who was the associate pastor at the Presbyterian church, she gave a portion to be buried in a bronze urn under a tastefully diminutive stone in the local cemetery with his name and dates on it, next to his first wife. The graveside service, like the wake and funeral, was widely attended by fellow clergy, local Presbyterians, and townspeople. To his daughter she gave a portion sealed in a golden locket with an emerald on it which could be worn as a pendant or ankle bracelet in Ann Arbor where she practiced law. And to Danny she’d given the thermos—an old green Stanley one that looked like something carried by construction workers—and said, “Why don’t you take your father fishing?”

DANNY REMEMBERED
his father taking him fishing, that first time in the river, when he was a boy, how the water tightened around his body, the thick rubber of the Red Ball waders constricting in the current. It was late March. It was cold and clear and he wondered how his father ever found this place, hours from home, driving in the dark to get to the river at first light. How they stood overlooking the river from the top of the hill, its multiple interwoven channels his father called “the Braids” because it was in this area the river split and turned and coiled around itself before returning to its orderly flow between two banks below Indian Bridge. He remembered his father saying they were going to a secret spot, back in the swamp, called Gus’s Hole, named for the man who had discovered it and told someone who told someone who told Danny’s father. Then hiking down the oak ridge with their rods and net and gear. His father held his hand as they stepped into the river and he could feel, for the first time, the weight of the water moving, something urgent and alive; and how his father held his hand high in the air, like dancers doing twirls through the deeper water, the boy he was then bobbing in the water, his father holding him aloft to keep the river from rushing over the top of his waders.

They fished hardware then—Little Cleos and Wobblers and other spoons that looked in the water like wounded baitfish. Or clattering plugs that nose-dived in the current and jiggled just above the bottom. Later they would graduate to long poles and lighter tackle and various spinners. His father always swore by Mepps #4s with little egg-colored beads and copper blades. For steelhead they’d roll spawn bags through holes behind logjams and fallen trees and finally they gave up their spinning
gear for fly rods and reels and the slow perfections of their own patterns—caddis and stoneflies and hex nymph variations—of preparation, presentation, catch and release.

But that first time Danny remembered nothing so much as the slow tug of the lure in the current, the fresh sensation of the river’s bottom and the current’s ways as he worked it through snags, over gravel, around stumps, and into the dark pools where his father told him fish were waiting. And he remembered the first fierce hit of the brown trout, how it rose in a fury and leapt and ran upstream, then downstream, taking line from the reel, and his father’s calm counsel behind him, “That’s it, Danny, that’s it,” and the beauty of it in the net and the mystery of it and the sense that he had of having been chosen by the fish because he had made the long trip in the dark, endured the cold, and the long walk through the swamp to stand in the right spot and cast to the right place, and listened to his father’s instructions and let the lure sink and work its way until it brought the eight-pound fish and the eight-year-old boy together.

Every winter, spring, and fall since then he’d fished the Pere Marquette—from mid-August to mid-October for the salmon’s spawning run, until late December for the steelhead that would follow them to feast upon the eggs, then March and April for the spawning brown trout and steelhead. And long before Danny knew that the river had been named for a dead Jesuit missionary who’d died a couple of centuries before where the river emptied into Lake Michigan, long before he’d learned the names of birds and trees, waterfowl and wildflowers, he’d learned the habits of the river, its eddies and sluices, backwaters and rapids, its clay banks and sand and gravel bottoms, and the habits of the fish who spawned and lived
and died in it. He knew the names of every hole and pocket and pool and gravel that was known for fish, from the Birch Hole to the Trestle Hole to Alligator Alley and the Aquarium, Hole 9, the Sand Hole, Wadels and the Highbanks, Beaver Den, the Improvements, the Maples, Stumps Lodge, and a hundred more, a fair few of which, unknown to anyone before himself, he had named. After a lackluster college career and half-hearted efforts in the working for General Motors as a driver at the Proving Grounds, he had taken his father’s free advice to do something he was “really truly passionate about.” He moved from the small house he shared with some high school friends to Baldwin, in western Michigan, near the river’s headwaters, and resolved to be a trout bum. He guided in the fall and spring and went to Alaska or Montana in the summers and guided there. All winter he tied flies which he sold to the local outfitters and private buyers. He taught workshops for visiting executives, field-tested new gear for the manufacturers, worked his website and fished alone, studying the river, whenever he didn’t have a client. It was enough to keep body and soul together. He was not yet thirty, never going to be rich, but was, nonetheless, among the most respected guides on the river, well known for what he knew that no one else knew better.

And though his father had given up winter fishing over the years, and would find excuses about the spring runs, they had shared the salmon and the autumn for twenty years. When his father loaned Danny the down payment on the cabin and ten acres of scrub pine west of town, he took in trade what he called a “Life Lease” on the third week of September—the height of the season by his calculations.

This was the first year he never showed.

This was the September he had died instead. Something
“acute” and “myocardial,” the doctor had called it when Danny’s father woke in the early morning, walked into the bathroom, and lay down on the green tile floor and died.

“He never said a word,” Danny’s stepmother said, “not a word. Never called out. Never made a sound.” Here she would pause and take a breath. “It was as if he didn’t want to disturb anyone, as if he knew it was his end.” She’d catch her breath again. “A glass of water on the counter, a bottle of aspirin open, him on the floor, he never made a sound.”

THE DRIFT
boat in the river never made a sound. Even the oars in the oarlocks were quiet. Danny could hear the fog lifting, the breeze and the leaf-fall, the wing flap of a heron lifting off. He could hear the water over the downed limbs of trees, under the riverbanks, the curl of a muskrat into the current. He could hear the winter oak and sumac and tag-elder and the air and his dog breathing and the perfect silence in the thermos. He wanted to scream.

He wanted to fill the elements with his heartache and anger—to shake a fist in the face of creation and ask God what exactly he had in mind that made his father die too soon. Why, when he was just at the point in his life when he could begin to enjoy it, after all the years of working for the church, out in the middle of the night when someone died, up in the morning to visit the sick or counsel the heartsore or balance the books, evenings with the deacons and the session, all those Saturday nights huddled in the office over his homily, lunching with locals, glad-handing the politicos. Why, after all those years of mortgage and tuition and car payments, always behind the eight ball on a churchman’s stipend, always worried about the
salvation of souls, the brick and mortar; why, when he could finally begin to relax a little? Why now, why his father, why, goddammit. Why?

But Danny shouted nothing into the woods. He only pushed the oars and worked the water to the first bend in the river, where he eased to the south bank, dropped the anchor, and stepped out of the boat. Chinook jumped from the bow into the water, up to the bank, and disappeared into the woods. The badly twisted left leg—he’d been hit by a car as a puppy—never slowed him down anymore. He’d learned to run with it and run without it when he turned up deer bedding in the forest and chased them through the woods or rooted for voles in the undergrowth.

Danny pulled out his father’s rod case, assembled the ten-foot eight-weight rod, attached his father’s ancient reel, ran the line through the guides, and began to tie his terminal tackle.

“Your father would want you to have it,” is what his stepmother had said, taking Danny to the basement back at home where the gear was kept. “And he’d want your son to have it, if you ever have one.”

Danny couldn’t imagine being a father. But for the first time it occurred to him that if he ever became a father, his children would never know their grandfather. This seemed wrong.

Danny had known
his
father’s father. And had loved and admired the man who occupied his youth like a force of nature. He wondered if getting to heaven meant you got to ask these reasonable questions. Why? How? When? Why not?