The Constant Heart (23 page)

“You're wife's in California, right?” Sara said.

“She went to find herself. Turns out she's a dope smoker.”

Sara turned back to the stream. The little bits of silk, which were the mayflies, floated along, and as they did they sometimes disappeared into the glare on the water, a silver smear that lay over the surface like a film. Overhead there was a hawk, braced there in a thermal, going around and around, just a cross against the blue.

The planes didn't go that far up, or maybe this terrain was the kind the pilots were interested in, because we heard that whistling again. This time, though, it seemed to be a little slower than before, as though the pilots were doing some kind of reconnaissance training rather than bomb training, or maybe it was just that they didn't want to go home. They came in low and slow, the blackness of the planes not shiny but flat, like a woodstove that has had all the blacking burned off of it. The pilots appeared in the canopies, too, figures that seemed to be all helmet, although one of them raised a hand to us as he went by. They were getting closer, and in the shrill, increasing sound of them, Sara looked up, her head back a little, the pale light on her face like makeup.

The noise got louder, the whistling blending into the shriek of the engines, and then the planes went away to the south, the
way we had come in, the whistling diminishing until all you could feel was a kind of trembling in the chest.

“Are we really going to catch some fish?” she said.

“Oh,” my father said, “we'll get some fish.”

She stopped and took his arm and said, “You know, I was told I could be anything. That all I had to do was focus. See? Well, here's what they didn't tell me. It's so difficult. So hard. And no one escapes being human.”

He started sweating again, and I reached into my vest for the bottle of pills. He must know what the best combination was, but he just waited. Did she want to talk now? He trembled. He always told me that a gentleman didn't make a big deal out of things.

“You promise about the trout? You promise?”

My father took her hand and they walked along. In and out of the shadows, which began to contract around the bases of the trees and then stretch out on the other side. The greens turned from a crisp, hopeful vernal hue to a darker color, and soon my father said, “Let's stop for tonight. Why don't you and Jake try the fishing here?” he said. “I'll sit on the bank for a while.”

We waded into the stream, but I thought, What is going to happen if she doesn't catch a thing? What are we going to do then?

Sometimes I think trout get moody and sullen, but on a day when the sun has been bright and there are puffs of clouds in the sky and then the shade moves across the stream like a thin, delicate film, they perk up. That's what I put my faith in. I hoped that they would stay active even when the sun was setting, as it was now.

My father and I traveled light, and so there wasn't much to do in the way of setting up, just two little tents, one for her and one for my father and me, and that was all we carried aside from a frying pan, a pot, some bacon, potatoes, and onions to go with the trout. My father had a plastic bag with some parsley in it, which he would chop up with his pocketknife to put on the trout and the potatoes.

Sara and I stood in the water at the head of a pool. The stream was a dark green with a streak of blue reflected in the middle, although the blue was tinged with pink. My father sat on a log and watched. As far as Sara was concerned, she had this show-me attitude, as though if there weren't any fish here, then all of this was just more bullshit and we knew what she thought about that, didn't we? So, I stood there in the cold water, looking through a fly box, but I was wondering why I thought it was such a big deal for her to catch something. Then I looked at her black eye.

Sara stood in her new waders that smelled like an inner tube and said, “The water is squeezing me. Even between the legs.”

“Here,” I said, picking a little brown nymph, a gold-ribbed hare's ear, and tying it to the end of her leader. Under these circumstances the simplest and sometimes best way to catch fish is this: You cast the nymph across the stream, in pretty fast water, and then you mend the line so that the nymph will sink and sweep along the bottom, and in that moment when it comes to the end of the line, it lifts from the streambed, just a quick rise toward the lighted and mirrorlike undersurface of the stream. It's that small movement, unexpected and sudden, that suggests something that is alive. Just a twitch. It happens
in water that is pretty fast, at the head of a pool, and the trout go for it.

The real mystery is how the shape, the stones, the chemistry of the stream have been imbedded in the genes of the insects and in the trout, too. This mystery makes me think of the Constant. And when I think of it, I am left wondering if there is some order and beauty that we haven't been able to see yet, but which will be comprehensible by unrelenting will and largeness of heart. Sometimes I scare myself by thinking, What if it is beyond understanding? What if we can't do it? All I ever felt or wanted was to be able to love someone. But here Sara and I were, damaged, hurt in ways we didn't even realize was happening, like all those glib things we were told about everyone is the same and that sex doesn't mean anything, not really, but we both knew now that when a man and a woman start sleeping with each other something changes, and this power, this change, is simply ignored, although it has the power, under the right circumstances, to change you forever. Another case of reality being wished away, at least until it comes back. As though we can make something be the way we want it to be just by saying that's the way it is.

What was more real than standing right here, trying to come to terms with everything—those men who were surely coming up behind us, my father's sickness, how things had gone wrong, the trout that had been here long before us and would be here long after we were gone? Sara gave me an innocent peck, nothing serious, just a peck, and said, “Thanks for letting me come along, Jake.”

It doesn't take much of a cast to fish this way. So we started, just flicking it out there into that silver-and-green water with
the pink tinge, then letting it sink and mending the line, and letting the fly drift along. The water broke up around her legs in the waders, making silver wakes on both sides.

“Oh,” she said.

“Did you feel something?”

“Yes,” she said. “A little grab. Is that one?”

“I think so,” I said. “Do it again.”

“Same place?” she said.

“Yeah. Then we will move down, because when a fish takes a whack at something it drifts downstream a little to think it over,” I said.

“Uh-oh, there it is again,” she said.

She pulled the line out of the water and looked at the glare and the green, undulant surface.

“I don't think I've ever been so excited,” she said.

It started with the line just being drawn into the water and downstream at the same time, and she held on with both hands, saying, “What do I do? What do I do? Jesus, please don't let it get away.”

My father looked over now.

“Get it sideways in the current,” he said. “It tires them out.”

“What the hell does that mean?” she said.

“Trout are designed to face the current,” I said. “Not to go across it.”

She started reeling in and working the rod, doing a pretty good job. The line went into a silver splash, and I got a look at the fish as it made a dark turn there in the water. It was all right. We got it in, and I picked it up, a brook trout with bright spots on its side, and squiggly marks on its back. Not a bad size, either, about as big as they get up here. She felt the
cool, wet thrill of it in her hand, a kind of refreshing touch of something alive and all muscle and from a different, honest world. She looked at it and then at me and she started crying there in the water, just holding the fish with her face screwed up and saying, “Can you believe it? Can you believe it?”

So the question was this: Should I kill it or let it go? I took it and killed the thing with a little flick on the back of the head and put it away and started again, Sara sniffling a little and saying, “Do you think there are more of them in there?”

“Yes,” I said. “I think so.”

I caught two more. We came up to where my father was sitting.

“Yes, they are pretty aren't they?” he said. “When you clean them, do so downstream a little so that the bears won't smell the guts.”

My father boiled some potatoes and cooked a few strips of bacon so he could sauté the onions he chopped. Then he put the potatoes in, the sizzling of them making a sound that seemed a little domestic, even up here. When the potatoes were brown, he sprinkled them with parsley. He cooked the trout in the bacon drippings, the fish squirming on their backs to get away, or so it seemed, from the heat of the pan. Sara sat there and watched, not missing a thing. The fish were pink and after we ate Sara said, “I can feel the wildness of them . . . ”

“Maybe we can find some mushrooms,” said my father. “That adds to it.”

“No kidding?” said Sara.

“Sure,” he said. “There is an old orchard up here. Sometimes mushrooms grow up there.”

“I was taught not to eat mushrooms that didn't come from
the store,” said Sara. “Although some of the girls at the Gulag ate some mushrooms. Boy, did they get sick. And they saw some odd things, too.”

“Sure,” said my father. “
Amanita muscaria
. I wasn't thinking about that kind of mushroom.”

It seemed like a good idea to leave the towel on a line that I strung up below the camp. Of course we didn't have to worry about grizzlies in the East, but there have been some cases of black bears killing people, and not for hunger, either, but for the fun of it. In fact, one of my father's papers, the one that had been translated into German, was about a bear that killed some people for what looked like fun.

The stars came out, and they seemed very bright up here, like mercury spilled on a black floor. I pointed at them and said, “There . . . that's Alpha Umi in Ursa Minor, that's Polaris, Centauri, the Pleiades . . . ”

“The look like they'll be there forever,” said Sara.

“But they won't be. It's all moving, flying apart . . . ”

“And that's what you're trying to figure out?”

“Yeah,” I said. “How things are about to disappear and why. What dark substance is pulling on them?”

As we sat there I tried to explain about the Constant, and Sara listened for a while, nodding her head, and saying, “Who would have thought? You mean you haven't got it figured out yet?”

She said in a sleepy voice to my father, “You see, that's why in my screenplay a woman is going to be the first pope.”

“You wrote a screenplay about that?” said my father.

“Yeah,” she said. “A woman would be pope because she doesn't want men even thinking about sex when she doesn't
want them to. The dirty dogs. Oh, the right bitter woman would make a great pope.”

“You mean like the woman at the library? What was her name?” I said.

“Mrs. Kilmer. Yeah. She was great pope material.”

“Too bad she didn't get her chance,” I said. “She's long gone.”

“I saw her obituary,” said Sara. She held up her fingers about two inches apart. “It was that long. Almost a haiku. Too bad we didn't get to see her clip it. Now that would have been something.”

“You know,” I said. “In the Inquisition they had a box. With adjustable sides. They put the person being interrogated into it and adjusted the sides so the person couldn't stand up and couldn't sit down.”

“Mrs. Kilmer in a nutshell,” said Sara. “She loved watching the women's prison. All that desire for men. No place to go.”

Down below, the trees against the stars didn't have that usual feeling of a wall, or of something impenetrable, a darkness that instinctively makes you think it is a good idea to sit still, to hide, to make a place to sleep. Instead, that darkness seemed animate, brooding, somehow ill-meaning, and all of us, Sara, my father, and I, turned the way we had come. Of course, we thought we saw movement, but whether we did or didn't was of no consequence.

“It's just a matter of time,” said my father.

O
N THE EVENING of the second day, just at the hour when dusk turned into dark, a tight beam of light came through the trees. And along with the light, which cut into the mass of darkness that appeared as the sun set, a sound not quite like a chainsaw approached, too. Three men altogether, but MD, his blond hair visible in the light of the all-terrain vehicle, was way ahead. The light from it swung back and forth through the woods, searching something out, probing. Like the beam from an ill-meaning lighthouse.

The machine stopped in front of us and the exhaust drifted into the light. On the back of the machine a cooler was tied to a rack with some red bungee cords. Not a good job, either.

“My associates are coming up behind me. They had to walk,” MD said.

We stood in the oily exhaust.

“There are two of them,” he said. “You saw them in my truck, right? Why, you'd think they are twins.” MD took a sip from the beer can he had been holding between his legs. “When you get down to cases, I guess they are. In certain aspects.”

“Well, all right,” said my father.

MD switched the engine off but he left the light on. He looked from me to my father and then to Sara.

“Well, I've been thinking,” he said to her. “All this effort over a simple question.”