David Means - Assorted Fire Events - Stories

Twice I’ve been consecrated by pure gestures — just twice if you discount the third incident. Once I took my late and long-lost son, Stevie, fishing up in Massachusetts; the Chesterfield River, rocky and hard-wading, day gone, faded, that blistering darkness pulling down midsummer slow over the water. We were holding out for the risers that were destined to come because there were spinners overhead, lowering themselves with the darkness like flecks of snow refusing to meet the earth. They were doing their copulation rite midair, and soon they would hit the water to lay their eggs. (I have not fished since that day, nor will I fish again.) Airfucks, we called them, one of those embarrassed dirty jokes between father and son that has a bitter taste now that he is gone and what was filthy between us is as dark as soot to my memory. It’s all memory, and perhaps that’s what makes the pain I caused him at that moment — just a sharp little barb in his wrist — stand out so acutely, and makes the gesture that followed his pain remain the cleansed and holy one (of the two), purified by time and memory and dust and all of that. He was working this deep oily pool that caught the night long before it fell, along a shale ledge, lounging his back against a large rock, casting and recasting while I worked my own pool along the other side. My backcast was caught by a single uprising of night breeze, the only one that night, as far as I recall, and to compensate I had to work my line sidelong, and then there was the sharp, startled sound of his voice cracking, returning to his child-voice, as I hooked him in the smooth white flesh of his wrist, not knowing I’d done so and thinking I was snagged, yanking thoughtlessly, just once, just once, but the pain I caused him is eternal and everlasting because and only because of his voice at that moment, mingled and mixed with the rabble of water over stone. You see, all this led up to the gesture pure and sweet, of his face, a large face, so much my face, smiling at the pain and flicking my fly back, swiping the blood from his wrist. Blood I couldn’t see and will never see. It was the flick and the smile, barely visible, maybe not visible at all to me in the falling darkness, shadow-laden, deep and brooding, the woods pressing in, the sides of the gorge seeming to swell up into the woods. I had caused him sudden and inexplicable pain, and he had flicked it off, a simple gesture that continued in one fluid motion to his cast and his line being laid out over that dark pool. Later, the trout rose to take his fly and spun him into that wonderful motion of working a fish, force against force — not a pure gesture (there were only two) but worth saving nonetheless. When I learned that my son had been killed in Vietnam, taken by pains that must have flowered and exploded from back to front, blood pluming out his chest where the bullet left, I imagined that flick of the wrist, and I smiled and vowed to worship it and perhaps one day equal it. I vowed to find just once more a motion as graceful, just once more, on the surface of this earth peopled by human souls going about their lives, to find a gesture that equaled that of my son in the stream a year and a half before he died, or that of his sweet little wet body in a tub, the scent of baby soap …

That day, now, returning to that day with the morning sky opening up and the white haze down near the edge of the river, having passed that man going into the antique store, the stoplight changing to amber, then red, with that strange slowness only I seem to notice. The police were on to me. They knew about my search and often pulled me over. There was nothing illicit in my circling route, down Broadway five or six blocks and then back around, close to the river, where the new housing developments hunched and cluttered. On some days I’d settle myself into the bench in front of the library to examine movements and gestures in a small quadrant: I’d see good things there occasionally, the passing motions and gestures of many, but rarely anything close to a pure gesture. Only once, almost, catching sight of two folks bedecked in khaki pants and matching navy polo shirts, working their way across the street with that retired stride you see up here, proud and purposeful lopes of the legs slightly bent and distorted by hidden pains and aberrations, bones brittle and weakening; these two were spry on their feet, and their gesture held me for weeks, sustained me in my search, filled my soul with bubbles of possibilities. She held him as they crossed, a light little clutch, her fine fingers curled around one of his, which one not mattering the least to me, because in a good gesture it is the gesture itself that demolishes and makes irrelevant the smaller details; the whole thing becomes a movement, a blemish, an act unto itself apart from the particulars. In the hopes of more, I thought about following them, but then I knew better. To hunt gestures you have to let them find you, blowing across the street like dead leaves: a man lingers over something in the window, his hands in his pockets in a particular way; a young child waves silently with a subdued manner to nothing at all as she passes in the back seat of a blue Chevy Nova, her eyes dogged and lonely.

That morning when the traffic light changed I made my way forward through the intersection, looking from one side to another, as is my habit. Just past the corner of Broadway and Elm, I felt that strange sensation one gets looking from a main street down a side street, a street leading down to the river, the haze of light as it bleeds from the water, the close proximity of the dusty brick walls, the loneliness that such side streets sing. Long ago, back in Illinois, I used to stop and pause at those places. It was as if the soul had lifted up from the town and left it a husk, empty and void. The breeze lifted ever so slightly the leaves of the one poplar in front of the library building, the benches empty. The police were behind me.

Did I say it was a strange day? Did I say the soul had lifted from the town, flung her wings over the confluences and diversions of the Hudson River? Did I say the dusty bones of the dead lay over the sidewalks like cleaned ash, the talc remains of chins and teeth and brows?

My search was going along fine as I passed the bookstore, where a mother pushed a stroller over the curb, working her elbows to get the front wheels up gently so as not to disturb the baby inside, a small white form floating amid blankets. Past her, at the bus stop, in front of the defunct playhouse, shredded posters quivering, two black women stood with that strange lonely anticipation I always see in those waiting for the bus to the George Washington Bridge: the hopelessness, their eyes gazing down the street with such longing. Past them, on the left-hand side, someone was hunched over, tying his laces with the slow deliberation of a child, as if learning the knot for the first time — certainly a fine gesture but over before I passed. He became a businessman in a long, lean, blue suit, straightening himself up, adjusting the fall of his pant cuffs, looking once to check his black polished oxfords.

To delineate the obvious, to consecrate that scene, the pure gesture, that before me appeared on the short narrow steps, three in all, leading into the front door of the funeral parlor, covered by the heavy shadows of the large pin oak growing out front: They were there out front of Olsen’s establishment. A man and a woman embraced by grief. Embracing. The man in a sports coat and blue jeans with that stooped expression, slightly bent beneath some gravitational weight of his own grief; the woman in a long violet dress tightening then loosening against her hips as the breeze rippled the fabric — those hips I’ll never forget, I suppose, jutting lightly against his own, as much a part of the embrace as anything. She bent and shifted with the great forces against her the way someone on the deck of a boat must adjust himself to a changing horizon — it was right there before me, the gyroscope of their pain holding the gesture, making it as pure as carved stone, petrified forever, the brass rails holding up the canopy overhead, green-and-white-striped. Suddenly a blinding purplish brilliance lit the front of the parlor afire. I was past. It was behind me. That beloved, graven gesture — near perfect — was gone, faded off into some infinite point along the lines of my life, dissolved by time and by the human movement. I felt then, acutely, and for the first time in years, the sorrow of my loss. I headed around the block, hoping the gesture would still be there when I returned. It was the kind of frail, stupid hope that can only betray. The man and the women by this time would have shifted into some other position. He’d be smoking cigarette against the brass rail; she’d have her neck bent as she studied the undersides of the leaves. Ah, the mutual sadness of loss, the dead and gone. I went around the block anyway.