John Langan - The Fisherman

Despite myself, I said, “Marie?”

The thing’s features shimmered, as if I were seeing them through a layer of water across which a succession of ripples passed. They settled, and I was looking at Marie. “Abe,” she said, and stepped toward me.

“You stay right there!” I backpedaled, yanking up my jeans as I went. My heel caught a root, dumping me on my ass, yet again. When I stood this time, I had found the filleting knife where I’d slipped it into the pocket of my raincoat and had it out and unsheathed; although, to be honest, I’d never appreciated quite how small it was. Not to mention, I had no idea how to use it outside of cleaning a fish.

“Abe,” Marie — I didn’t know how else to think of her — said.

“What are you?” I said.

She didn’t answer.

“What are you!” The knife trembled in my grip.

“A reflection,” Marie said.

“Of what?”

She smiled, faintly.

I didn’t understand. I said, “You are not my wife.”

She didn’t answer that, either.

“Where are we? What is this place?”

“Dutchman’s Creek.”

“That’s — what about the fish?” I said. “The one I caught over there,” I flung my arm in the general direction of the pool.

“What about it?”

“What is it?”

“A nymph,” Marie said.

“I don’t — what do you mean?”

“You’ll have to come upstream to find out.”

Upstream reminded me of Dan, who had vanished from my mind the instant I’d recognized Marie. “Sonofabitch,” I said. If I had encountered Marie — or this thing passing for Marie — did that mean he’d found what he was searching for? Or that he thought he’d found it? “I came here with a friend,” I said.

“Yes,” Marie said. “Dan. Your fishing buddy.”

“I think — he wanted to go upstream. He was hoping he’d find—”

“His family, Sophie and their boys.”

“Did he?”

“Would you like me to take you to him?”

I could not conceive of any way in which accompanying Marie to wherever she had in mind could be a good idea. But what else was there for me to do? I swallowed. “I guess you’d better.”

“It’s this way.” She turned away from me and set off through the woods on a course roughly parallel to that of the stream. Keeping my knife in hand, I followed her, stooping to pick up my cap where it had fallen. I figured we’d be climbing and traveling the ridge I’d crossed to find the Creek; for the moment, though, our path ran more or less level. I used my free hand to stuff my t-shirt inside my jeans, but couldn’t button my shirt one-handed. I solved the problem by clenching the knife between my teeth long enough for me to button and tuck my shirt. Ridiculous as it sounds, I was worried about Dan taking one look at me and knowing I’d had sex with whatever Marie was. It was a way, I suppose, for me to keep from dwelling on our act in the leaves. I could not believe this shape picking its way through the branches and twigs strewn on the ground was not my wife. She lifted her leg, her foot pointing down like a ballerina’s, and I saw her stepping into the bath. The cheeks of her ass rolled up and down, and I was propping myself up on one elbow, watching her cross the bedroom to the dresser. What I had glimpsed of her other face had been as real as what was in front of me — or no more unreal, if that makes any sense — and if I pictured that Marie moaning underneath me, her mouth opening and closing like a bass gasping in the air, I had to fight the urge to run in the direction of the Creek with all due haste. But looking at the curve of her spine brought to mind all the times I’d pressed my thumbs into the muscles to either side of it, massaging away the day’s tension. Maybe it was the afterglow, or maybe, when you got right down to brass tacks, I wasn’t that much different from Dan, desperate for any chance to recover what I’d lost, no matter what I had to look past to do so.

Ahead of me, Marie stopped. I slowed, drawing up to her but maintaining what I hoped was a safe distance. In front of us, a road ran across the forest floor. Composed of rounded stones sunk into the earth beside one another, it reminded me of the cobblestoned streets workmen in Wiltwyck occasionally uncovered when they were repairing a city street. These stones, though, were much larger, a yard across, and had been worn flat. I’m not much of a geologist: they might have been marble, or they might have been another, whitish rock. Stalks of grass sprouted from the spaces between the stones, while the ground to either side of the road, which was clear of leaves, had a red tint I hadn’t encountered in these parts. This could have been an old country road, bypassed by newer and better routes and forgotten, but it didn’t feel like that. It seemed ancient, as if it had been supporting the footsteps of men and women for as long as they’d been around. Which was impossible for this area, I knew, where the Native peoples had not favored this type of construction, and where the European settlers who had succeeded them and who would have laid such a path had been present for only the last few centuries.

My impression of the pathway’s age, however, was buttressed by the pedestal situated on the other side of the road about twenty yards to the left. A simple column, four feet high or thereabouts, supported a statue carved in that idealized way that reminds you of classical Greece or Rome. More or less life-sized, the sculpture was of a woman wearing a plain, sleeveless dress that reached to her feet. The woman was pregnant, enormously so, on-the-verge-of-delivering-her-baby big. She cradled her belly in her hands, the way that expectant mothers sometimes do. She was also headless, her neck a smooth stump. From where I was standing, I couldn’t tell if the statue’s headlessness was intentional, or an act of vandalism. What appeared to be red paint, long faded to brown, had been splashed around the sculpture’s neck, but that could as easily have been dirt from beside the road someone had smeared on it.

“The Mother,” Marie said.

“What?”

“The statue you’re staring at. It’s of the Mother.”

“Who’s that?”

“A very old goddess.”

“Oh. What about this?” I pointed my knife at the road.

“That takes you to a city.”

“A city?”

“A city by the sea,” she said. “I don’t think you’d care to visit it.”

“By the sea?”

“It’s different here.”

“What does that mean?”

“You’ll see,” she said, and crossed the road. I went after her, but I continued to glance at the statue of the deity Marie had named the Mother, until the trees obscured my view of it.

Across the road, the forest floor was less crowded with dead leaves and fallen branches. Around me, the trees, mainly evergreens, seemed ranked in straight lines. I supposed we might be passing through a tree farm of some sort, or could be, it was a patch where the trees happened to grow like this. The rain was no longer falling — hadn’t been for some time, now that I thought of it. I wasn’t sure exactly how long, but since before we’d arrived at the road, anyway.

One of the trees Marie was walking to the left of caught my eye. It was unlike any of the local trees I’d come to recognize over the course of years spent wandering through them on the way to the day’s fishing spot. If anything, it resembled a young child’s image of a tree, a straight trunk crowned with a large ball of leaves. But, to carry the comparison a tad further, it was as if the kid who’d committed this tree to paper had used oil paint, while the rest of the kids in the daycare stuck to whatever used crayons they’d been given. The tree was so vivid you might have believed it wasn’t an actual, living thing but a sculpture cast in metal and lit from within. Had I not had a view of other, similar trees standing beyond it, I would have been tempted to such a view. The rough bark that wrapped the trunk held what light there was and shone a dull bronze; the leaves clustered above it seemed to pass different shades of green back and forth amongst themselves. As I approached the tree, a citrus smell, like oranges on the turn, saturated the air. The individual leaves were shaped like spearheads, their edges serrated. I held up my hand to touch one of them, and hesitated at the prospect of those jagged edges. When I lowered my arm, Marie, who had stopped a slight distance ahead to watch me, said, “That was the right decision. If you aren’t careful, the leaves will slice to the bone.”