John Langan: The Fisherman

“What’d you do?” Frank asked, laughing himself.

“What else could I do?” I said. “I bowed to them both, turned around, and shuffled back up the bank.”

“You fish?” Dan asked. He’d come up behind me as I was talking. I must have been aware of him, since I didn’t jump ten feet in the air and shout, “Jesus!” I turned and said, “I do. I fish most days it isn’t raining, and some when it is.”

“I used to fish,” Dan said. “My dad used to take me.”

“Really?” I said. “What kind of fishing?”

“Nothing that exciting,” he said. “Lakes and ponds, mostly.”

“You ever catch anything?” Frank asked. He was one of those fellows who likes to talk fishing more than he does fish fishing.

“Some,” Dan said. He shrugged. “Bass. A lot of sunnies. My dad caught a pike, once.”

“No kidding,” I said. “Pike’s a tough fish to land.”

“You can say that again,” Frank said.

“It took us the whole afternoon,” Dan said. “When we got him into the boat, he was almost three feet long. It was a record for that lake. This was in Maine. My dad gave the fish to Captain Pete — he was the guy who ran the bait and tackle shop on the lake. We bought our bait from him, soda, too. He had this big cooler full of cans of soda. Anyway, he was so impressed, he had that fish mounted — you know, gave it to a taxidermist — and hung it up on one of his shop’s walls. He had my dad’s name and the date the fish was caught carved on the mount.”

“Wow,” Frank said, whether at the story or at Dan’s having told us it I couldn’t say. As far as either of us knew, Dan’s anecdote was the most he had said to anyone at work since the accident. I asked, “You fished since then, Dan?”

“Not for years,” he replied. “Not since before the twins were born.”

Frank looked down at his desk. I swallowed the lump that had formed in my throat and said, “Want to come with me?”

“Fishing,” Dan said.

“Uh-huh.”

“When?”

“How about this weekend? Say, Saturday morning? Unless you have plans, that is.”

He scowled, and I realized Dan wasn’t sure if I was mocking him. He said, “I don’t know.”

All at once, it was the most important thing in the world for Dan to come fishing with me. I can’t say exactly why that should have been. Maybe I wanted to prove my sincerity to him. Maybe I thought that fishing would do for him what it’d done for me; although, as I’ve said, I had no evidence to suggest that Dan’s life had collapsed the way mine had. Or maybe my motive was something less well-defined, something as simple as wanting to have another person to pass a few words with while I fished. I don’t know. Until that moment, I’d always done well enough fishing on my own. Whatever the reason, I said, “Why don’t you come along? I’ve got an extra rod if you need it, and more’n’enough tackle for the two of us. I was just planning on heading out to the Svartkil, so it won’t be that far if you don’t like it and want to leave. I go pretty early — this weather, I like to be set up and have my line in the water by sunrise — but you’re welcome to come whenever you can make it there. What do you say?”

Dan’s scowl wavered, then dissipated. “What the hell,” he said. “Why not?”

And that was how Dan Drescher and I started fishing together. I told him where the spot on Springvale was, and he was there waiting for me when I drove up in the pre-dawn dark. He’d brought his own rod and tacklebox, and from the sheen and smell of both of them, I knew they’d entered his possession in the last day or so. That was okay. It reminded me of myself, those many years ago. He’d brought a hat, too, a kind of straw cowboy affair that I later learned he’d purchased on a vacation in Arizona with his wife. We chose and attached our lures, cast, and as the sun burst through the trees across from us, were sitting waiting to see who might be interested in the early breakfast we were serving.

That first morning — that first day, actually, since Dan stayed there with me until the sun had moved from our fronts to our backs and then left for the night — we didn’t say much to one another. Nor was there a whole lot of conversation the next day, when (somewhat to my surprise, since he hadn’t mentioned it the previous day, just thanked me as he was leaving) I pulled my car onto the side of the road and my headlights picked out Dan sitting on a tree stump, considering the contents of his tacklebox. He offered no explanation, nodding at me as I walked over and saying, “Morning. Weather report says there might be rain today.”

“You can still catch ’em in the rain,” I said.

He grunted, and that was pretty much that for the remainder of the day. The following weekend, we fished the Svartkil again and didn’t do too badly for ourselves. On Sunday night, as we were packing our gear, I said, “I’m thinking of heading up the Esopus next Saturday. Not too far: about forty minutes’ drive. You interested?”

“Yeah,” he said.

“Good,” I said, and meant it.

So we fished the Esopus the following weekend, and Frenchman’s Creek the weekend after that, and then I took him up to the Catskills, to the Beaverkill, up by Mount Tremper. Sunday night, on our way home, we stopped at Winchell’s, a burger place right on 28, just the other side of Woodstock. This was where I learned that Dan’s family hailed from Phoenicia, a town in the thick of the mountains, and that he knew the area and its history fairly well. He’d never fished it, though. In fact, he said as he wiped the ketchup off his plate with his remaining fry, he hadn’t been up here since before Sophie was pregnant, when he’d driven her out 28 so she could see where he’d grown up.

It’s always tricky when someone who’s lost what Dan had speaks about it, especially so soon after. You’re never quite sure what to say, because you can’t tell if the person’s only offering a passing comment, or if they’re looking to talk. I imagine this is how folks must’ve felt with me after Marie died. With Dan and me, there wasn’t the kind of long friendship or deep family bond that would allow you to feel you could risk making a blunder, since you could count on the other person knowing you were trying your best. This wasn’t the first such remark Dan had made in my hearing. It seemed he’d been voicing a few more of them each weekend; I suppose that was why I decided to chance it and said, “So, what did she think?”

“Who?” he asked.

“Your wife,” I said, already afraid I’d blown it, “Sophie. What did she think of Phoenicia?”

For the barest instant, long enough for it to be visible, a look swept across Dan’s face that was equal parts disbelief and pain, as if I’d broken into the private vault of his recollections. Then, to my surprise, he grinned and said, “She told me she understood me and my redneck ways a whole hell of a lot better, now.”

I grinned back, and the worst was past. For the rest of that summer, on into early fall, as we roamed the Catskills, fishing streams I’d fished on my own, trying some spots that were new to me, I learned a little about Dan’s wife, and about his family, too. He never said much at any one time. I don’t believe he’d ever been the kind of fellow to speak about himself for too long. As you may have noticed, that’s a condition that’s never afflicted me, and once I saw it was all right with Dan, I had no problem talking about my life, which I hadn’t thought was all that interesting, just long enough for me to have seen and heard a bit. I talked about Marie, some, though not about her dying. If there was one topic that was off-limits, it was our respective bereavements. This complicated my conversation, since, as I’ve said, she was sick for really all of our short marriage. I solved that problem by speaking about the way things had been before we’d married, during our courtship. I talked about Marie, and I continued to feel her occasional visits, often when Dan was sitting only a few feet from me. I don’t know that I ever got used to those moments — however regular they might become, I don’t know that a body could — but I continued to take an odd sort of comfort from them.