Adam Johnson - Parasites Like Us

I asked, “Did your paw-paw teach you the Old Way?”

“No,” Farley admitted.

In the distance, a flag went up near one of the fishing huts, but no one came out. And far beyond that, I saw a Corvette, its yellow paint bright against the snow, appearing and disappearing as it negotiated the turns and switchbacks in the hills between town and the marina.

“So what was the interpretation of your dream?” I asked.

I reached for my coffee cup, but it had frozen to the ice.

Farley answered. “She said my dream was easy, that it was about litigation. The fish is the jury. I have to lure the jury on, persuade it to take the bait, and then it will speak the truth. The fish is gold because I value the law.”

“What do you think?”

“She wasn’t for me.”

My eyes followed the Corvette. Sure enough, it was making its way past the fish hatchery, past Mr. Chippy’s Fish Ship, and finally to the marina, where it drove down a steep boat ramp and out onto the ice. Lifting a hand against the glare, I tracked my father as he raced across the lake, leading a spinning tunnel of snow.

The tires drummed over old ice-fishing mounds, rocking the chassis back and forth, making the motor sound breathy. The wheels stopped spinning a hundred yards away, yet the car floated, tires brooming snow off the ice, all the way over to us. I’d bought that car, the classic ’72 with the huge spoiler, to celebrate the publication of The Depletionists , and now, as it careened to a halt before me, making the ice crinkle and talk, the ironies were too much to take.

Dad revved the engine before killing it, and as he was climbing out, he grabbed a motel bedspread off the passenger seat. He wore the same mustard vest as he had yesterday.

“Jeez, you look like hell,” Farley said. “You sleep?”

“Christ, it’s cold,” Dad said. He draped the bedspread over his head and bundled up, so only his face and black dress shoes showed from under the gold floral pattern.

I studied my car, beyond extravagant on the ice. Now we looked like all the other convenience-addicted jerks out here. Plus, there’d be an oil stain on the ice when we left. There were several empty bottles of airplane liquor visible on the dash. “You didn’t hook up with a stewardess, did you?” I asked.

Dad didn’t answer. He grabbed Farley’s extra bucket and dumped all the tackle out, including the carton of crickets, which fell open. Upturning the bucket, Dad took a seat as a hundred black crickets sprang from us. They got about three hops before they paused and then froze in place.

“Great one,” Farley said.

Dad grunted at Farley. “Shouldn’t you be defending freedom about now?”

Farley said, “I’m taking the Tribe to court this afternoon.”

I looked at Farley. “I thought you wanted to go to work for the Tribe?”

“I do,” Farley said. “But they don’t want some Indian defending them. They want hotshots from New Jersey, white guys in tight suits.”

“So you’re suing the Tribe?”

Farley bent to grab his scooper off the ice. “I got to get their attention,” he said, and walked over to the holes, quiet and serious.

Dad said, “What’s your case about?”

“It’s a good one,” Farley answered, scooping. “There’s this older woman, in a motorized wheelchair. Every day she rides it over to the casino to gamble — slots mostly, and some keno. Fortune is with her, and she wins most every day. People start rubbing her wheelchair for luck before they play. It’s just superstition, but the casino gets nervous about these things. Anyway, she up and dies, and her grandson gets this chair. So he picks up right where she left off and starts driving this thing to the casino. The Tribe’s like, No way, you’re no cripple, and they won’t let him in the door. It’s a clear civil-liberties violation. My opening remarks to a white jury will be about a once-proud people and so on. Those Jersey lawyers are going to shit.”

“Sounds like the story of Senival,” I told them.

Dad and Farley were quiet. I couldn’t tell if this was out of reverence for the stories I sometimes told, or an effort to not encourage me.

“Senival was a warrior king, and before the third and final battle for Scali, he asked the oracle what sacrifice was needed for victory. In those days, wars took years, and soldiers brought their wives, kids, goats, everything. Senival brought his mother, who got sick on the way, and she was like this bad omen. Her wails filled the camp, and the moaning was driving everyone crazy. A cloud of death hung over the campaign, and the oracle was clear: Senival had to—”

“Oh, don’t tell me,” Farley said. He meant it.

Dad said, “He had to kill his mother?”

We all shook our heads in disbelief.

“What happened?” Dad asked.

“Senival was victorious, of course. He enjoyed a long and prosperous life and turned out to be a pretty good king, too. But when Dante and Virgil visit him in the fifth circle of the Inferno , Senival’s torment is to drag his ancestors into hell with him, connected by a chain of umbilical cords.”

I paused while Dad and Farley tried to wrap their heads around that picture.

“Where does the chain end?” Farley asked.

“It doesn’t,” I told them. “It goes mother-child-mother-child, all the way to infinity.”

Farley’s face slumped, and I immediately felt bad. It struck me that I hadn’t been thinking how his mother had left them when he was young. He’d been raised by French Catholics who, in the way of life skills, taught the girls to sew, trained the boys to fix shortwave radios, and provided them all with Canadian accents.

Farley said, “It would be something, though, to see all your ancestors lined up like that. You could see what manner of people they were, who you took after.”

An ironic smile crossed Dad’s face. “So the fathers didn’t go to hell, huh?”

“Not because of their sons,” I told him.

Eventually, a little flag popped up, and Farley went over to reel in the fish. I had sunk into a mood, and I started to feel bad for that fish. I imagined its point of view — feeling the draw of a silver hook on an unseen line that pulled toward a circle of light. What perch wouldn’t contemplate the afterlife: Farley’s face, appearing walrusy, gleams down through a hole in a sheet of blue, broken only by the great shadow of a golden, winged vehicle, waiting amid a field of deliciously helpless crickets to whisk you away.

While Farley reeled in the tugging line, I tried to imagine the afterlife of crickets, but, looking at their black husks lying crisped on the ice or flipping in the wind, I couldn’t come up with anything. I stood and picked up my bucket. I didn’t have to teach just yet, but I suddenly didn’t want to be around when Farley landed that fish and, before the skin froze solid, scaled it alive.

“I’ll see you guys,” I said.

“Take ’er easy, eh,” Farley said.

My father, nodding off in the cold, perked up. “I’ll run you back.”

A man couldn’t look sadder than sitting on a bucket, wrapped in a gaudy, snow-dusted motel blanket, making a spectator sport of ice fishing. How pathetic his hours must be since Janis died if this counted as living. “No thanks,” I said, “I’ll just catch you later.”

By the time I’d climbed below the dam, I was sadder than I’d been all day. I stopped again at the spillways, the green safety rail now dripping in the morning sun, and I turned to regard the dam. The wall of concrete stood giant and blank as a drive-in movie screen, and I imagined the dam was made of ice, that instead of cement there was a curving window of ice, clear as glass, and my vision could penetrate straight into the lake. I looked deep into the standing water, ice-hued and shot through with beams of light from fishing holes, my eyes swimming like fishes that roved the dark channels.