The Fisherman (7 page)

On top of that, the dream never recurred, and isn’t that what those psychic warnings are supposed to do, don’t they repeat themselves to prove their seriousness? I suppose it remained sufficiently clear in my memory not to need repeating; if I pondered it at all, however, it was as a curiosity of my own psyche, a peculiarity my mind had thrown up from its depths. I’d been a bit lax in visiting Marie’s grave that winter. I assumed the dream had more to do with that than any real place, or person. Nor, for what it’s worth, did I connect my dream of Marie with her visits to me while I was fishing; the thought never even occurred to me.

Dan’s appearance, his state of mind, that Sunday night were the first signs of a change that overtook him during the next couple of months. To this day, I’m not sure exactly what triggered it, but his grief, kept at bay so long, found a way to tunnel under Dan’s defenses, and, while he was otherwise distracted, seized the moment and fell on him, burying its dirty teeth deep in his gut and refusing to let go. Dan wore the same suit and tie for days at a time. A scraggly beard surged and ebbed across his face. His hair, longer still, frequently jutted out in strange configurations. His hours at work became erratic, to say the least. Some mornings he wouldn’t show up until nine or nine thirty; others, he’d be at his desk by quarter to seven. Even on those days he was in well ahead of the rest of us, he’d spend most of his time staring at the screen of the computer he hadn’t switched on yet. His stare, that look that I had felt wanted to pierce through you, worsened to the point it was next to impossible to hold any kind of conversation with him. He didn’t appear to be listening to anything you were saying, just boring into you with those eyes that had been turned all the way up, blowtorch bright. He never left work later than the rest of us, and it wasn’t unusual to walk by his office at the end of the day and find it empty.

Before long, his job was in serious jeopardy. He’d been team leader on a pair of important projects, one of which demoted him, while the other dropped him outright. The company had changed. This was not, as management had started trumpeting, your father’s IBM, which I guess meant it wasn’t my IBM. The notion of a corporate family that took care of its own and in so doing earned their loyalty was on the way out, evicted by simple greed. What this meant practically speaking was that Dan could not be assured of the same understanding and indulgence I had received more than a decade prior. That he didn’t much care if he kept his job or not at this moment didn’t mean he wouldn’t feel differently in the future, and I did my best to make him see this. He wasn’t much interested in what I had to say. His grief had taken him far into a country whose borders are all most folks ever see, and from where he was, caught up in that dark land’s customs and concerns, what I was worrying over sounded so foreign I might as well have been speaking another language.

If you’d asked me, after my second try at speaking to him, whether I thought Dan would be around when fishing season started that spring, I’d have told you flat-out, “No.” Frank Block had been unceremoniously let go the previous month, escorted from the building by a pair of security goons when he started to yell that this wasn’t right, he deserved better than this. My own manager, a young fellow whose chief qualification for his position must have been his smarminess, since it was the only quality he possessed in abundance—my manager had taken to dropping none-too-subtle hints that the company was offering exceedingly generous severance packages to those who were wise enough to take them. It wasn’t just the night of the long knives. Up and down the corridors of our building, it was days and weeks and months of management given leave to slice down to the bone and keep going. And in the midst of this carnage, here was Dan, laying his head on the chopping block and holding out the axe for anyone who was interested. I’d have been wrong in my prediction, though. Somehow, Dan held onto his job. No matter what shape he was in, Dan was a bright guy—graduated near top of his class at M.I.T.—and I guess he must have contributed enough for it to have been worth more to keep him on board than it was to throw him to the sharks.

I wonder, sometimes, if we’d have gone fishing that spring if Dan and I hadn’t been working together. He hadn’t returned to my house since that night in February. I’d invited him over a few times, but he’d always claimed to be constrained by this or that obligation—though their visits had fallen off from what they had been, both his and Sophie’s families still made sporadic attempts to visit him, which always seemed to coincide with my invitations to him. He never offered to have me over. I was pretty sure he was embarrassed about everything that had happened, yet I couldn’t see a way to tell him he shouldn’t be without stirring those memories up for him and making him uncomfortable all over again. My warnings to him about his job aside, I did my best to respect the distance he demanded.

With some measure of surprise, then, I returned from lunch one day about two weeks from the start of trout season to find Dan waiting in my office, perched on the edge of my desk like a big, skinny gargoyle. “Hi, Abe,” he said.

“Hello, Dan,” I said. “What can I do for you?”

“How long is it till trout season starts?”

“Thirteen days,” I said. “If you give me a minute, I can tell you how many hours and minutes on top of that.”

“Are you going?”

“Dan,” I protested, “how could you ask such a question?”

He didn’t smile. “Would you mind some company?”

“I’m counting on it,” I said, which wasn’t exactly true. I hadn’t been sure Dan would be joining me this year. Given his embarrassment over February, combined with his general remove from everyone of late, I’d assumed there was a better than likely chance he’d want to do any fishing he had in mind on his own, and so hadn’t raised the subject with him.

“That’s good,” Dan said. “Thank you.”

“Don’t mention it. Where would I be without my fishing buddy?”

“Can I tell you something?” he asked, shifting forward as he did.

“Sure.”

“I’ve been dreaming about fishing,” he said. “A lot.”

“I dream about it, too,” I said, “although most of my reverie occurs in the middle of meetings.”

Dan’s eyes, which had widened at the news of my dreaming, narrowed at my joke. “Right,” he said, the slightest annoyance curdling his voice. He stood from the desk and asked, “Are you going to the Svartkil?”

I nodded. “It’s where I kick off every season. Kind of a tradition, you know?”

“Fine, of course,” he said. “And after that? Are you going back up the Catskills?”

“Indeed I am. There’s a couple of new streams I’m looking forward to trying out.”

“Good,” he said. “I might want to suggest one myself—if that’s all right with you.”

“That would be great. Where did you have in mind?”

“Dutchman’s Creek,” he said. If this had been a movie, I guess this would have been the moment ominous music boomed on the soundtrack. As it was, there was only the din of people talking as they continued to make their way back from lunch. Dan continued, “Have you heard of it?”

“Can’t say I have. Where is it?”

“Up around Woodstock. It runs out of the Reservoir to the Hudson.”

“Sounds like a possibility, then. How’d you come across it?”

“In a book.”

As a rule, I am one of the worst people I know when it comes to sniffing out a lie. Throughout my life, my family and friends have exploited this almost limitless gullibility by playing an almost endless number of practical jokes on me, some of which would make you shake your head in pity. Right then, however, I knew Dan was lying. I can’t say how I knew, since it wasn’t as if he rubbed his hands together and shifted his eyes from side to side, but I was sure enough to say, “Really?”

“Really,” he said, frowning at my tone.

“Which book?” I asked, unable to figure why he would feel the need to lie about such a thing.

“Alf Evers’s history of the Catskills,” he said. “Do you know it?”

“No,” I admitted, “can’t say as I do.” Although I was certain Dan was lying, equally certain he’d named Alf Evers’s book because I’d told him I didn’t read much, and what did pass beneath my gaze tended to split between spy thrillers and Louis L’Amours, I couldn’t see how it made much difference where he’d found the name of this creek. Maybe he’d had it from a woman he met at a bar, and was ashamed to reveal such a source. As long as the stream was where he said it was and the fish were biting, what difference did it make? I said, “Well, then, we’ll have to add Dutchman’s Creek to our itinerary.”

My decision, minor though it seemed to me, pleased Dan past all measure. His face brightened, and he shook his head up and down happily, saying, “Yes we will, Abe, yes we will.” Our plans made, it was back to work. We agreed to meet at the usual spot on Springvale the Saturday after next. Dan volunteered to bring coffee and donuts.

That night, I sought out Dutchman’s Creek in my Ulster County Atlas, which took me longer than it should have, since the creek had no listing in the book’s index. This struck me as a little odd. In general, the Atlas is pretty detailed. I had to leaf through, find the pages mapping the Ashokan Reservoir, and search its borders. My finger passed over the spot where the creek flowed out of the Reservoir at least twice, but on the third try I found it. When I did, I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen the creek right away. It was hard to miss, a blue thread winding its way from the Reservoir’s south shore over to the Hudson, running well north of Wiltwyck, south of Saugerties. I traced its course with my index finger, something I like to do for a place I’m going to fish. Dutchman’s Creek kinked and twisted, almost looping back on itself a couple of times. I figured this would provide the fish a host of spots to congregate. As my finger followed the creek’s perambulations, I wondered where it drew its name from. All up and down the Hudson, from Manhattan to Albany, originally had been settled by the Dutch, and you still find a fair number of towns on both sides of the river whose names show it: Peekskill, Newburgh, Fishkill. I hadn’t studied the matter, of course, but it seemed to me that, while you found a lot of places named by the Dutch, you didn’t find many named for them. In fact, aside from this creek, I couldn’t think of one.
Who was the Dutchman?
I wondered, closing the Atlas.

I had an answer to that question two months later, while Dan and I sat at the counter of Herman’s Diner on Route 28, just west of Wiltwyck. Dan had wanted to stop there for a cup of coffee and breakfast on the way up to the creek, which he did from time to time. I prefer to eat before I leave the house or, if I’m hungry, to order my egg and cheese sandwich to go. On the occasions Dan wanted to stop for breakfast, he liked to sit down and study the menu, order a plate of something he hadn’t had before, the Greek omelet, the walnut pancakes. Had he done so too often, I suspect it would have become an issue. However, his requests that we sacrifice a half-hour at this or that diner were few and far enough between for me to say to myself,
What the hell. It’s been a while since I had any walnut pancakes, and maybe a side of sausage would be nice with them.
Besides, I guessed from my own history that Dan wasn’t eating as well as he should have been, so I figured at least he’d have one decent meal today.

This morning, there was no rush for us to arrive streamside. For the better part of the last week, the sky had been crowded with gray clouds that dumped so much rain on us I swear you needed gills to walk around outside. The rain had tapered off late the night before, but the clouds had not yet departed the sky, and I reckoned any stream we wanted to fish was going to be swollen and fast-running, dim with mud and debris. There are those fishermen who’ll tell you that, after the kind of downpour we’d had, you might as well wait a day or two till you cast your line, but I’m among the “a bad day of fishing is still better than a good day of just about anything else” crowd. I was then, anyway, which was why we had driven out west of Wiltwyck on Route 28 at the usual pre-dawn time, Dutchman’s Creek our destination. On the way, we’d stopped at Herman’s Diner.

Herman’s was off to the right-hand side of the road, the last building in a sequence that included a combination gas station/car wash, a furniture warehouse, and an ice cream stand. The diner sat at the center of an otherwise empty lot, one of those silver boxcars that you associate with the nineteen-fifties. It’s empty now, out of business for the last several years, which I can’t understand, because, while Herman’s was small, most times I went in, it was jumping. You never saw Herman. In fact, I’m not sure there was a Herman any more. There were Caitlin and Liz, who worked the counter and the single row of booths, and there was Howard, who did the lion’s share of the cooking, helped out by a pair of Mexican cousins named Esteban and Pedro. What I like about the place, what had kept me coming back after I first discovered it the second summer I fished, even more than the food, was the décor. The diner’s inside had been done up in early fisherman. There were rods and nets hung on the walls among what must have been thousands of snapshots of guys with fish. There were a few of those fish, too, stuffed and mounted in places of pride. As you walked in, a bulletin board tacked full of fishing cartoons greeted you, some of them freshly clipped from the paper, others yellow and brittle with age. The one I liked best was several years old, and showed a pair of man-sized cartoon salmon standing beside a stream, one smoking a cigar, the other holding a beer. Both fish have lines out and in the water, which is full of tiny people, dozens of them heading upstream, arms against their sides, faces pointed straight ahead. That was all: no witty caption, only that simple reversal that tickled my funny bone. Every time I strolled into that diner, I chuckled, and despite what happened later that day, thinking about that drawing now brings a smile to my face. Dan didn’t find it especially amusing.