THIRTEEN
In time Emma faded from view, a woman waving, a dot, then gone and the river turned. The child tired of waving long before her mother, and settled against the plastic seatback, feigning calm, trailing a scooped hand in the water as children in boats invariably did, while the other hand gripped the gunnel, knuckles white.
She smiled at him, he smiled at her. They had nothing to say as yet.
Flynn attended to the dull slap of the chop against the aluminum hull. It was calm and clear and a bad day to fish with the river at a high stage after the rain. He was heading to Atlantis, and thence along Oak Island and up to Goose Bay, to Marsh Island and the inlet of Cranberry Creek, thinking to fish there and then work around Point Marguerite.
"No day's a bad day if you know where the fish are."
It was what his father said, he would not say it.
The silence was a gift. Molly wore tight corduroy Levi's and a denim shirt, stylish rose framed and rose-tinted sunglasses; she seemed a copy of her mother, a miniature, as she watched her hand trail the water.
He opened the throttle up a notch and she viewed him with abstract eyes. She wants to see if I am trying to frighten her.
He waved a hand toward the gingerbread houses, and she settled back again. A stretch of river to cover, something had made him come down to the landing at Chippewa Bay, rent there rather than the more familiar places upriver. Thinking no one here would remember Joe Flynn, thinking once I saw children here, a pedalboat along the near channel, a coil of yellow rope.
The rental was an unwieldy thing, squared off like a jonboat but with a severe little crimp for the keel running below them like a gutter, curving up into a blunt hatchet, high prow. Foolproof, tourist-proof, a good boat for a scared girl on a clear day.
Maybe run up to Fisher's Landing and show her the skiff.
No.
Four jets, tan and green Canadian Forces camoflage, screamed over low, the noise trailing behind them like Molly's hand through the water, arriving in a roar, popping behind them. They were heading south-south-east; Wolfman east.
She pressed her hands against her ears, screamed into the roar. Shouted it again as they trailed off into silence.
"ASSHOLES!"
Flynn viewed her wryly, one eyebrow cocked high, nodded. It was not a shock really, not after years of hearing them in the stands, even the teenyboppers shrill. "Hey faggot! you're washed-up, faggot!"
"Fucking assholes," she amended it, again testing.
He viewed her likewise.
"It's so goddman bogue," she sighed, "Don't you just detest the fact that all our lives will end that way?"
"What way?" asked Flynn.
"Nukes...the bomb... whatever." She yawned, as if weary of her own sophistication. There was a hint of pink lipstick on her mouth, she had snuck it back on sometime during the loading and embarkation. It surprised him, not that she had successfully spited her mother, but that she had been so deft with it that he had not noticed.
For one reason or another things had not gone well between Emma and daughter this day. They were either weary from the sleepless night of the storm, or wary of each other on their first time out together with him. Neither really wanted to fish, but when Emma so obviously did not, Molly accepted the invitation to press an advantage.
They had arrived at Chippewa Bay glumly. Flynn aware that each of the two of them saw him as patronizing Molly with this outing. Emma and daughter each aware of his obvious excitement about the project. Emma noticed the lipstick as soon as they crawled out in the sun of the lot by the boat rental.
"No," she said.
Flynn hadn't an eye for the subtleties of this sort of stand-off, he hadn't an idea what Emma was saying.
"You want to go somewhere else?" he asked.
The two ignored him.
"Oh crap, mom," Molly complained.
"No."
It was small-minded and sulking, Flynn thought, whatever the dispute. Molly spit into a tissue and rubbed off the lipstick with exaggerated gestures.
"Maybe if you did something with the circles under your eyes, you could keep a boyfriend..."
Emma grabbed the girl's wrist overly hard.
"Listen," she hissed, "I have nothing to prove to Jack, and I won't have you exploit his kindness."
Flynn had said he would go in and see about the boat. When he returned they were overly courteous and simmering with tensions.
Emma did have tired rings under her eyes, like the hazy halo of ice around the moon which portends rain. She didn't tell him until they had the boat loaded and Molly had clambered aboard. Flynn was bent steadying the boat against the dock, straining against the girl's shifting weight with his nearly useless right arm, and waiting for Emma to get in.
"I'm staying here."
"Shit," he muttered and Molly smiled. He straightened up and the boat drifted out on the rubber-covered painter chain. Molly shrieked, she was afraid of floating away.
"Damn," he said and pulled the painter in. His back hurt terribly. "You could have told me," he said, "before..."
"Go ahead, darling," she said, "I have reading to catch up on. I'll sit and watch the water."
Bitch, he thought, that "darling" wasn't fair. It was a first usage, and used against Molly. So he got into the boat. The hell with her, the hell with both of them.
He unlatched the painter from the pipe of the dock and pushed the boat outward. They floated in a slow, half-circle out six feet from the dock, Flynn not yet putting his hand to the starting cord.
He missed her, six feet away and floating in a circle, and he missed her.
"Emma?"
"Yes, Flynn?"
"I miss you."
They laughed so hard he thought they would each fall into the water, one from the dock, the other over the side. He grinned foolishly and started the motor, if only to drown out their hysterical laughter. Emma shouted something into the noise. He nodded to her, as if he had heard.
"She said she loves you."
Flynn nodded to the girl.
They nosed out of the inner channel and into the river. Molly was waving mechanically, mockingly.
"Actually she said she would clean the fish if you cook them," she said.
"Do I need this grief?" he teased her.
"Do you?" she had said more seriously.
They skirted Oak Island at something more than trolling speed, bouncing in the slight, constant chop from all the boats out on this crystal day. The 35 horse Evinrude on the rental had a pleasant, pedestrian growl to it; a smell of gas and an irridescent trail of oil in the churn of the wake betrayed the overly rich mix. It was a nice boat, really, you could imagine children in it, warily studying their father as he checked himself against his memory of operating these things on vacations past, see them sitting there bundled in their orange rental life jackets like waifs in a storm. The rods would be jammed under the thwarts, bobbers flailing madly as he made the first unsuccessful pulls on the starter cord before remembering to move the throttle grip to the start position. One last pull of the cord and this motor would hum, sending off a spew of waste oil, then settling in as he engaged the gear and they abruptly jolted off, the children holding on for dear life.
The river was full of such families today, each of them collecting memories and photographs. "We rented a boat and went fishing one or two days." The other days we spent in the accordian folds of the camper, or bobbing between the floats at the roped off beach, or driving into Clayton or Alex Bay for ice cream and souvenir daggers with huge plastic rubies at the hilt.
"You really think it will end that way?" he asked her.
"What?"
She had tired of swirling her hand in the water, he upped the throttle two more notches.
"The world."
She laughed brightly, her mother's laugh.
"I thought you meant you and Emma," she said, "I thought you were asking me how I thought that would end."
He nodded. A fool in an inboard with a loud chrome engine cut a broad swathe across their bow, sending up a half-hearted roostertail, setting them rocking in his wake as he sped back upriver. Asshole, Flynn thought.
"Don't you?" she asked.
He hadn't thought of it in a long time. Some things you learned not to think of. He said this.
She looked at him blankly. "Everyone I know figures there will be one," she said, "Sometimes I even dream how it will be."
"How?" he asked.
"First a blinding light, like thunder, but lasting a real long time, then everybody screaming because of the blood and all that yuk. And the houses melting, you know, and then..."
She shrugged her shoulders. It was a precise and gentle gesture, the world slipping off her in a tired heap. Flynn thought of the memorial at Hiroshima. When he was playing the exhibition tour in Japan, they had taken them there on a huge air-conditioned Mercedes bus with plush grey seats and earphone jacks. Inside the memorial there were the photographs: a blinded woman wailing in the midst of the rubble, one hand tearing at her hair, the other outstretched in a gesture of unconsolable grief, as if she was begging for something; and the one he remembered most, the dark silhouette of another woman, folded between and wall and the street, the silhouette itself actually a part of the two surfaces, printed there by the heat of the blast. She had been blown into thin air, her shadow remaining as an endless witness.
Esther also witnessed now.
"Are you afraid of dying, Flynn?"
You could read the depth of the water in the differing slaps and pings and low tom-tom bongs of the water against the hull. You could map the surface of the bottom with a jig at the end of a long line. You could see where fish were likely to be by reading the weed beds and the holes.
"Yes," he said, "I suppose I am. Everybody is, in a way."
"But why?" she asked, "You did a lot already. You were famous once."
It was charming to see how she wished now to protect him from what she had said. She literally snatched at the air as if to take the remark back, then covered over her mouth in embarassment, giggling helplessly while her dark eyes studied him for hurt.
"Like Ulysses at the ships," he said, then, "It's alright, really, I know what you meant, I do. Anyway it's true. It was once."
Once.
(Flynn seems jittery, and mumbles the response.) Did you say once?
Yes.
When?
When everything happened, in 1970, I really considered hanging 'em up then. It looked like a long, long tunnel then, with little light at the end. (His voice catches, for an amazing moment it seems as if he will cry.) My brother...(he clears his throat, starts again) My brother had his accident that year, when they found him the lights were still working, you know. I mean, the car was upsidedown in the river and the lights were still shining. Somebody said that the firemen, when they were trying to get him out of the seat, they could see all these little crappies swimming in and out of the lights...
I'm sorry. Maybe we should shift to...
I remember times with my father, out at night, he'd hold a lantern over the side of the boat, down near the surface of the water, and you could see them there, sliding in and out of the glow. Sometimes there'd be a big one, you know, a northern or muskie or some damn thing, like a big dark bullet, a shadow... I remember another time, just a few years ago, I was up at a camp in Northern Michigan, you know, it was this grand old place some clients of mine had, a corporation. They kept it for their executives, only no one went there. This grand lodge built of pine logs -- even the door latches were pine dowels, the size of a kid's arm, you know-- it was like the old camps up in the Adirondacks, what do they call them? I think they call them that, Adirondack Rustic or something. The whole place was hand built, in other words, and I show up there with this woman, and it's like we're the only people to ever use it for twenty years or so. I mean the folks who were the caretakers, this couple from Ishpeming -- I'll never forget the name of that town -- they are so happy to see us they can hardly stay away, you know.(\laughs\) And, well, I didn't exactly go there for company, you know. I mean, I took the invitation thinking this lady and I could be alone, if you know what I'm saying.
Yes. Go on.
Anyway, there's this incredible lodge, and a boathouse, and a great dining hall, and little cottages out on the islands in this lake. And the lodge and cottage have all the beds made up, you know, in crisp linen sheets. And there's birch canoes, for christ's sake, and golf clubs! Wooden nibbies or nubbies or whatever the hell they call them! Wooden-shaft golf clubs! And fly rods and wicker creels, and god knows what else, a whole paradise there, fully furnished, and no one goes there except these two people from Ishpeming, who keep the beds made and polish the golf clubs and all...And so we're out there on this little island, skinny dipping, you know -- this is after we've convinced the two caretakers they don't need to babysit us, they don't need to cook, although they insist on bringing picnic baskets out each day-- and this lake is so isolated, so ignored, that the fish don't pay you any mind. I mean there's five, six, and seven pound trout just swimming around your legs, you know, pecking at your pecker. (laughs) I thought of my Dad and the lanterns then too, swimming in this emerald water, watching golden bubbles shoot from the nude body of this woman, knifing through the water from the dock, and swimming toward me in slow strokes, you know, all honey flesh and tan and leaving a golden trail that the trout swim after...
(All the time Flynn has been telling this story, his eyes have the well-known intelligence, the searching quality, about them. There is the feeling that he is toying with his listener as in other times he toyed with batters, setting them up for the pitch he wants to make. It is marvelous theatre, in its way, the work of an intelligent, connective man; and yet it follows so quickly upon his almost breaking that you can't help wonder if the theatre isn't for his own benefit.)
I thought of my Dad and all he wanted for me, for each of us... It was one of those times, you know, when the world seems a simple and golden place-- like certain games I remember, in real baseball weather, when you're out there on the mound under a high sky, feeling the sun warm you, and hearing the noise.(Without warning, his tone turns again; this is theatre.) Not five minutes after, we're standing on this dock, towelling off, you know, when this jet comes SCREAMING over the trees, not more than ten, fifteen feet up from the treetops, screaming over us and then gone in an instant, flash!, the noise trailing behind it like a bloody scarf, and the whole sky exploding with the boom. (pauses) Without knowing it, I hit the deck, I mean I threw myself down on the actual deck. It was the goddamndest thing! Here we were in the middle of nowhere, in an impossible magic place, and this machine comes over! It rips right through us, and there was no way of knowing that it wouldn't take off your head, you know, that it wouldn't crash right there. I thought maybe that was it, you know. I thought the war had started and the bomb was coming and we were going to find out this way, away from radios and teevee, away from everything in creation....
What did she do, your friend?
(Flynn ignores the question, he has come to a place he set out for some time before.) My brother, see, he had these jets in his ears all the time. They were always flying low for him, always right behind him. Screaming after him... It took me that long, you see, it was three, four years after he had died, and I finally understood that it wasn't just me that drove him into the water. I told him he had death on his brain, and he ended up trapped upsidedown with the lights still on and the radio playing and the crappies swimming in and out of the glare, and it wasn't just me that sent him there...
(Again his voice cracks, but this time there is no question of him breaking. The vehemence in his eyes, the pure, cold fixation of them, makes it clear that he has seen some horror and he will not break. It seems certain that the interview, if not over, is in his hands. He knows this also, and obligingly, typically, he changes mood again, laughs, although even this laughter is laden and chilling.)
It was funny in a way, but also very scary, what she did...She pissed on herself... while I was hitting the deck, she was having her bladder let go, you know, it was an hysterical reaction. She pissed on herself and she swallowed her tongue. I had to literally save her life, you know, reach down to her tonsils and pull it up and out so she could breathe.... Needless to say, the goddamn jet spoiled the weekend, but the Ishpemingers said it happened all the time, you know... These planes came down across the wilderness screaming.
1970 I was six and seven, twenty seven years old, finished only one game all year and that a loss. My brother died that year, Nixon was in the White House surrounded by busses and bombing Cambodia while a half a million of us walked the streets... I mean just add it up, I bottomed out, you know. It's funny in a way. It wasn't Jimmy drowning that got me -- like I told you, that took a couple years to really hit me -- and it wasn't even when Wolfman got shot...What it was was a combination of things. McClain's troubles, Bouton's book, and Gibson winning the Cy Young. Isn't that bullshit, though? Your real life doesn't touch you, but a game does?
Explain. How did that combination...?
(laughs) Nothing made sense, you see. It was all meaningless. Bouton made that clear in a way you couldn't deny inside, no matter what the clubhouse philosophers and the Commissioner had to say. McClain proved that, you know, someone that good getting done in by an absurd set of circumstances. It was a Watergate in a way. (laughs loudly) But with real water, a bucket of it, and a real smoking pistol... And meanwhile there's Gibson, thirty four years old, and he goes 23 and 7 ... And there was Bunning back with us...(Flynn fixes his eyes again in the testing stare.) I really started to think about death then, you know. I mean, I had seen Bunning three years before, at 35, tear up the world, and a year after that seen him fade and get traded away, and then seen him come back again that year and damn near lead us with ten wins; and so I knew the pain, you know, I knew the possibilities, but I was damned if I could tell if it was worth it. Not unless you were Gibson, you know, one of the gods-- not unless you could just keep on daring them, and mowing them down. It was either that or what Jim did -- Bunning, I mean -- making the rounds, pushing yourself up that hill again and again and always aching afterward. And I didn't know if it was worth it, you see, to find yourself always on the edge of your life ending -- seeing it end! -- at thirty five or so. Or earlier... like in the case of Koufax, at 30, pitching down the stretch with no rest, the elbow going, a World Series game lost to errors, and then gone, retired, an old man at thirty, arthritis. I couldn't see it...I had three years to thirty and the game didn't make any more sense than the world did, you know? A radio playing underwater made more sense...I thought a lot about death. Life seemed all shallows, full of crappies in the dying light...
And does it seem any different now? Now that you are giving it up? Are you an old man at 35?
Once.
Flynn dug through the tacklebox and found an old wooden bobber, shellac peeling, the green paint of the stripes chipped away in places. It looked like an antique toy.
"My father made this."
Molly hummed a kind of assent.
"My father makes wooden things too. But I bet she already told you weird things about him, didn't she?"
"Didn't have to, he did some work for me."
Molly ignored the ambiguity of his remark and settled in on the impression he had intended.
"Well, fuck-a-duck!" she said, "My whole damn family knows you and I'm the last one to know... Figures."
"I wish you wouldn't talk like that," he said, "I'm afraid I'm old enough to be embarassed by it, even if I know everybody talks like that. It's just that..."
"I'm a girl," she said, "That's it, isn't it? You want me to wear a nylon dress and anklets?"
"Horseshit," he said.
He'd show her the skiff, he thought. The bobber was his father's, the tackle box was Jim's. Bertie had known that when she told him where to find it; the rods and the tacklebox were Jim's, his initials were scratched into the inside of the metal cover, a schoolboy's cursive "J. J. F." Jim detested the river all his life, and yet there was a sheath-knife at the bottom of the box, an oriental knife with a straight chrome blade and bamboo hilt, the leather of the sheath elaborately engraved with dragons and the single word, "Vietnam."
"You have a mind full of death, and you're killing her, you bastard. You're the reason she's sick, you junkie motherfucker!"
It wasn't true. He must have put the knife in the box after he came back from Nam, and so it wasn't true. You couldn't keep death in your mind and go out fishing on the river. You couldn't...
And for a moment Flynn felt him there, under everything, like a lost self, a naked and golden presence swimming under them on this gentle afternoon, swimming through the dying light and the submerged music.
They were all there, a family given to water, each there on different planes. Above them his mother, a creature of air; and below them Jim--a grunt, whose element was mud--freed now. His father was the membrane between them, a man of surfaces, the guide.
It was a foolish thought, he knew, something too simple.
The girl squealed delightedly as he pulled the crappie from the water at the end of her line. She wouldn't let him throw it back, she wanted to show her mother.
The crappie's eyes had a milky clarity. Esther's eyes. This was the fourth plane, neither depth nor surface nor sky. The plane he shared with her. It thrashed for a moment on the bottom of the boat, sliding down into the scum of the keel gutter, until he snared it, slipped the stringer through it's gill and let it slide back into the water, tethered but momentarily free to range its small circle.
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