Gordon Lish - Collected Fictions

SO HERE WE ARE, nostalgia fans, back behind the family garage with a piece of picket fence, about nine feet of chewed-up Venetian-blind cord, and a hook Satan had set out to do temptation's work there in a gutter-looker's gutter. But you're thinking crick, you're thinking where does the kid get a crick from? Well, it takes the kid about a half hour to walk it to the crick, an inlet (let in by the Atlantic Ocean) spanned by a little bridge you crossed to get to the beach clubs. We called this inlet The Inlet, and we called the bridge The Bridge — not unmindful of how Skippy and Bucky were always coming up with these really great names for things — it dawning on me that if you got yourself out there on a little poke of dock up on out there on the landward side (hello, Skippy! hello, Bucky!), you could drop a line down into something maybe liquid and deep enough.

Look, I can appreciate how knot-tying is probably a pretty big deal to most people, but for me there's never been much in it for me after the shoelace stage. So if you are wondering how I got the Venetian-blind cord stuck onto the piece of picket fence, do me a favor and save your worry for the hook.

Because the hook, jeez, the hook truly was a bitch. I mean, I tried a lot of very fancy thinking, but my brain could only handle in my mind the mental thought it definitely, the hook, could not be hooked to anything I had in my hands.

So I just dropped the line in, tossed the Venetian-blind cord in, hookless and wormless but serious-looking if you went by the principle of its having lifted up its share of slats.

YOU READY?

You're ready!

Because how else could this all come out but as a good and countervailing lesson for a boy who always waited for the worst?

I am not saying what happened converted an indoors type to an outdoors one. Please, I still get closest to God somewhere where you can control the light. All I am saying is I went ahead and pulled up no fewer than a dozen lunatic fish with that stick of picket fence — fish which just bit anywhere all at once on that Venetian-blind cord and which looked like they were not going to let go of it wherever they'd bit on a bet.

I did not take even one of them home to prove it, though. As a matter of fact, I did not try to yank even one of them off the line. I just dropped the stick and ran like hell, all twelve or so of those infectious things on there fastened to it for good.

You know who would have stuck around?

I bet you Green Harvey would have stuck around — the loon probably harvesting those evil-minded monstrosities just to pitch one through the window of every mother's son who ever had believed himself to be altogether more than far enough away from any undoing indoors.

But me, I had had my fair warning of what is sometimes under outdoor things.

Knew I'd never need to have another warning again.

IT WAS BETTER THAN THIRTY YEARS LATER, when I was turning the pages of a Ladybird Book for an indoorsy type of my own (a kid whose peaceable opinion of nature continues to treacherously thrive on an abundance of urban ignorance), that I found out what it was the Wheaties box had got me into back in the backward burnished days when my heart was brave and true — namely, the worst scare ever to chase me through all of the backward burnish of my youth.

It was just a blowfish.

They were just blowfish.

Every last one of them a blown-up certitude in and of itself.

Oh, it will bite on any fool thing, your natural blowfish will. But so, for that matter — hook, line, and sinker — will your friendly reader. I mean, since it is all the same in the end, and if it is all the same to you, give me human nature every time — and the equally metaphoric, equally dubious, equally muddled angling of men.

THE ONE LOVE of my life was Beatrice, a dog of some kind. As for her sentiments, it convincingly appeared Beatrice more than amply reflected the experience of my emotion. Goodness knows, whatever modest attention I might let be sent in her direction, the thing would answer with such a frenzy of delight one feared the exertion might do the creature in. But Beatrice lived and lived, and must have come to quite a great age actually, considering it was promptly on the accomplishment of my birth that she had been made over to me as a gift, this by Aunt Enid and Uncle Jack in an earlier century. I had always understood dogs to suffer — in arithmetic terms, of course — a more severe constraint within the natural precinct. It would, in this regard, have occurred to me I should prove to outlive Beatrice by a rather notable margin, all things being equal. But truly, truly, I ask you, when are they ever? For there I was, just managing to limp gingerly into the impressive decrepitude of a very latterly decade, yet there also was Beatrice, doubtless more ancient than myself — the ratio concerning this computation will be not at all taxing for even the most deficient reader — still continuing to conduct herself in the old manner. By what means, by what means, I put it to you, had my companion succeeded in eluding the penalty of the years? But just look at her, persisting with every vigor at the acquitting of those chores whose number Beatrice had obtained from Aunt Enid at the time of this person's having taken her absolute leave of us. I mean to say, it still happened I had only to glance up from my studies at any time of night or day to espy this good and earnest beast toiling away with the fiercest zeal as she sought the completions and perfections of the dwelling we had for so long an era shared one with the other. To be sure, it would have been quite inconceivable to me I should have permitted myself to slip into the last sleep without wondering aloud at the marvel Beatrice, in the mutt's mere being, revealed to me. And so it was that I, Gordon — Gordon! — touched Beatrice ever so lightly (it had become a rather unpleasant procedure for me to do much other than to read) upon the shoulder whilst this mysterious animal was making all speed past me in pursuit of her errands with whisk broom and dustpan.

"Dear dog," I said, "one sees you absorbed in labors for the common good, so please to forgive me for this interference and, too, for the impertinence which occasions it, but I should like to inquire of the heavens how can it be that every evidence of life keeps flourishing in yourself even as in me so slight a display of it threatens to endure."

Beatrice said, "Seeing that you ask, the answer is this — I am not what you see."

"Not what I see?" I said, too stunned to be quite at all comprehending of the event now in motion before me. "What, then, if not what I see?" I said, still construing myself as a figure deeply adream.

"A princess, but of course," Beatrice replied, conveying in her style of speech a certain impatience with my unrestrained amazement.

"Then an effect of magic has been worked upon you and you are, as a consequence," I exclaimed, quite beside myself with the triumph of my surmise, "an enchanted dog! Occult, occult!"

"Right!" Beatrice confirmed. "A curse, a spell, a charm — you name it."

"Was it," I asked, and none too bravely, I will admit, "Aunt Enid who did it to you?"

"No, no," Beatrice sighed, letting fall both dustpan and whisk broom in a show, I concluded, of no small annoyance with me for the tiresomeness of my interrogative, "not her, not the dame, but him — that fucker Jack, the motherfucker."

"Please, Beatrice, please!" I erupted, ashamed for the both of us at the intemperance of her diction. "I must beg you to realize I had not known to this very time that you could speak, nor either that you are, in truth, one transformed — and most assuredly not a household hound, it must be assumed, but a rather handsome woman, I expect the case must be, one who would very likely seek to amuse me in a fashion quite beyond my power to imagine — and of noble bearing, you say, of nothing less than noble bearing!"