Justin Cronin - The Summer Guest

But if you’ve been around the sport awhile, and learned it from someone who mostly understood it as an interesting way to catch fish-in my case, my stepfather Vince, an agent for the Maine Department of Conservation-then you understand the nonsense for what it is: one more way for difficult people to be difficult. This is half the fun for them, and since my job is, more or less, to keep everybody happy, far be it from me to object. If you want to fish in period costume, I’ll be the first one to fetch your knickers at the cleaners.

Still, Harry’s insistence on fishing only dry fly had me stumped. To be sure, the dry fly/wet fly debate is the oldest aesthetic fistfight in the sport, and nearly every year some joker writes an article in one of the trades defending the “purity” of dry fly and generally insinuating that fishing with a nymph or streamer is just one step above putting a chunk of Velveeta on a diaper pin. But Harry was never one to care about such things. It’s possible to like both well enough, as Harry always had, letting the fish, the water, the weather, and the time of year make his choice for him-allowing circumstances to give shape to his pleasure, always the best way to go in my view, and probably the closest thing I have to a philosophy of life. That Harry wanted to go trout fishing one last time, but do it all wrong, amounted to a kind of dare. Maybe all he wanted, away from the drugs and the doctors and even the cancer itself, was one last, nifty stroke of luck before the curtain came down.

Harry and his family weren’t the only guests at the camp; we were pretty close to full up, and taking a whole day off to guide him would require a little planning. After we’d gotten their gear to the cabin, Kate and I went to the office in the main lodge to sort through the list of duties for the next day. It was going to be a squeeze; we had two parties checking out and three new ones coming in, and half a dozen folks from the Lakeland Inn, the only hotel in town, arriving in the early A.M. for breakfast and a moose-watching canoe-float down the river, picnic lunch included. This was a regular Saturday staple for us, and a money loser at thirty-five bucks a head, but with a healthy payoff at the back end, since half the folks who took the trip fell in love with the place and returned the next year for a week at full price.

A word or two about Kate. I had known Kate for eight years, since she was thirteen and I first came to the camp, and apart from one awkward, early summer, there’d been no nonsense between us. You could say there was a certain logic to the idea that we might eventually take a personal interest in one another, but there were also lots of reasons not to. I got along just great with Joe and Lucy, who treated me like family, and I knew that they’d borrowed up to their necks to send her to tony old Bowdoin and had hopes for her life that probably included a bright young anesthesiologist or management consultant in Boston, not some up-country hermit like me.

But the truth was, and despite my better judgment, I’d begun to think about her differently-think about her all the time. What I mean is, I’d begun to see her not just as Joe and Lucy’s daughter but as a person in her own right, and I missed being near her, the sound of her voice and the way she tucked her hair behind her ears and the feeling these things gave me, like the world wasn’t such a big place after all, and I was someone in it. The last winter away from her was like a kind of cold storage, and for a couple of snowbound weeks in February, I’d even gotten it into my head to drive the Jeep down to Bowdoin, surprise her at her dorm, maybe whisk her off for a weekend down the coast or holed up in Boston, totally rearranging my life and, if I were lucky, hers. This, of course, was the loneliness talking, and naturally I didn’t do it; I knew she had boyfriends at Bowdoin, and I sensed I belonged to one compartment of her life and could not easily pass into the other. What could I do? I put the idea aside like a book I knew wouldn’t end well and stayed put.

All of which guaranteed that by the time Kate returned to the camp in June, I had it something awful for her. I was so worried that she would detect my feelings (or worse, that her parents would) that I barely set foot from my cabin until the Fourth of July, leaving only to do my chores and then running like a rabbit straight back to lie on my cot and brood away the hours. I could tell Lucy was on to me; she kept asking me if I were coming down with something, and once or twice hinted that Kate was worried too. The only thing I could think to say was that maybe the winters had started to get to me. The truth was, I had decided the only proper thing to do-a funny word, but the right one-was quit at the end of the summer. But where I’d go and what I’d do, I hadn’t the faintest idea.

In the meantime, we had a day’s chores to plan, and in the cluttered office, Kate and I went over the schedule. We were pinning our hopes on a staggered arrival for the moose-canoers; if push came to shove, we could delay a group or two in the dining hall so that Kate would have time to drive back from the put-in point, five miles upstream and a forty-minute round-trip, going like a comet. We had just about put everything together when Joe came in, with Hal in tow. I wasn’t surprised; clearly there was a pow-wow brewing, and I had a few questions myself about Harry, since I had figured out by then that any fishing we might do would be a total fabrication. Hal gave my upper arm a solid pat and asked how I was doing, but his face was creased with worry. He said hello to Kate, asked her in a chummy way how things were going down at Bowdoin (Hal was a Williams grad himself, and to look at him, probably a letterman who had banged Bowdoin heads aplenty), then let Joe show him to the old plaid sofa.

“Let’s all sit,” Joe said. “Kate, why don’t you stay too. This concerns you as much as anyone.”

We arranged our chairs in a circle, while Joe did the next, obvious thing, which was to produce a half-full bottle of very old single malt from the rolltop. He took four coffee mugs from the shelf above the desk, gave each one a hard blow to clean the dust out before pouring the Scotch, then passed the cups around. I swirled the Scotch under my nose, and it smelled just like its color: the luminous brown of old, old wood.

“Am I to take it,” Kate said, looking into her mug, “that this means something is up?”

Joe shushed her with a frown, sipped from his drink, and nodded in my direction. “Jordan, Hal here has something to tell you.”

Hal set his drink down on the table to his right and gave his knees a little slap. “Well. I guess the upshot is, my father is dying. The particulars aren’t important, Jordan, but the doctors say he’s very close to the end. It makes no sense at all for him to be here, and I tried to talk him out of it, but he’s fished here thirty years and that’s what he wants to do. He was actually in the hospital until yesterday morning, when the doctor called and told us he was checking himself out. He’d pretty much decided what he wanted to do, and there’s no law saying you have to stay in the hospital if you don’t want to. Sally’s out of town, so it was all I could do to get January at the day care and hightail it up here.” Hal paused and rubbed his face, dusted with a day-old growth of silvering beard. “ Frances is in a state, and I can’t blame her. But I can hardly blame my father either. It’s an awful place to die.”

“I’d feel the same,” I said, thinking: Attaboy, Harry. Hang a sign on the hospital room door, a silly picture of some old geezer bagging carp, and the words Gone fishing. “If it were up to me, I’d say let him do it.”

Hal took his Scotch from the table, seemed about to sip, then stopped. “I’m not sure, Jordan, that you know how important you are to my father. But a lot of this actually has to do with you. He needs something from you, something I can’t quite put my finger on. Maybe I don’t have to, and in any case, it amounts to this: tomorrow, you need to take him out, and do what you need to do to make sure he has a good time, the last good time. If that means he catches anything, great. If not, I wouldn’t worry about it too much. Make sure he’s comfortable, and if there are any problems, come straight back here. He’s very sick, so don’t tackle anything you can’t handle.”