Walker Percy - The Thanatos Syndrome

“You going to a funeral, Doc?” asks James, his face like a stone.

“Why no.”

“You mighty dressed up for Saturday afternoon.”

I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror of the reredos, whose silvering is as pocked as a moonscape. It’s true. I’m dressed up in my Bruno Hauptmann double-breasted seersucker. Why do I remind myself of an ungainly German executed fifty years ago?

Leroy buys me a drink and pours himself one. I knock mine back. It feels even better, warmth overlaying warmth. His disappears in a twinkling, hand brushing nose.

Leroy feels better too. He leans over and tells me about his safari. He owns a motor home, and he and his wife belong to a club of motor-home owners, ten other couples. They’ve just got back from Alaska. Last year, Disney World. Year before, Big Bend.

“Tell you what you do, Doc. You need a vacation, you and the missus. Ya’ll take my Bluebird and head out west or to Disney World. Do you both a world of good. Take the kids. Here are the keys.”

“Thank you, Leroy.” I’m touched. He means it. His Bluebird is a top-of-the-line motor home, the apple of his eye. It cost more than his home, which is the second floor of the Little Napoleon. “I might take you up.”

I tell Ellen about the Bluebird. I know she’s listening because her head is turned, good ear clearing the pillow.

“Why don’t we get in Leroy’s Bluebird and drive out to Jackson Hole? The aspens will be turning. Do you remember camping at Jenny Lake?”

“I’m not going to Fresno alone.”

I didn’t think she was going to Fresno.

“We’ll drive to Fresno and then come back by Jenny Lake.”

“Not time.”

“Not time enough? Why not?”

“Fresno is — twenty-one hundred miles.” I look at her. I can see the slight bulge of her cornea move up like a marble under the soft pouch of her eyelid. “Jackson Hole is nine hundred miles northeast of Fresno.”

“I see.”

“Fresno is almost exactly in the geographical center of California.”

“I see.”

I turn out the light.

11. VAN DORN SHOWS UP bright and early Sunday morning, dressed in a Day-Glo jacket, a sun helmet in which he has stuck colorful flies. He’s wearing waders.

“You won’t need that jacket.”

“Right. The bream might mind?”

“Yes. And you won’t need the waders.”

“Why not?”

“If you try to wade in one of these bayous, you’ll sink out of sight in the muck. I’ll get you some tennis shoes.”

We spin down the bayou in my ancient Arkansas Traveler, a fourteen-foot, olive-drab aluminum skiff with square ends and a midship well. My twenty-year-old Evinrude kicks off first yank.

A bass club is having a rodeo. Identical boats, of new grassgreen fiberglass, nose along the bank. Fishermen wearing identical red caps sit on high swivel seats in the bow.

“You sure you want to fish for bream?” I ask Van Dorn.

“I figured you might know places those guys don’t know. I’ve been with them. They’re mostly Baton Rouge lawyers.”

Down the Bogue Falaya past country clubs, marinas, villages, bocages, beaux condeaux. I turn into the bushes, through a scarcely noticeable gap in the swamp cyrilla, and we’re in Pontchatolawa, a narrow meander of a bayou, unspoiled because there’s too much swamp for developers and it’s too narrow for yachts and water-skiers. It is not even known to the bass rodeo.

I cut the motor. Pontchatolawa hasn’t changed since the Choctaws named it. The silence is sudden. There is only the ring of a kingfisher. The sun is just clearing the cypresses and striking shafts into the tea-colored water. Mullet jump. Cicadas tune up. There is a dusting of gold on the water. The cypresses are so big their knees march halfway across the bayou. Their tender green is just beginning to go russet.

“My Lord,” says Van Dorn, almost whispering. “We’re back in the Mesozoic. Look at the fucking ferns.”

Van Dorn is busy with his tackle. I watch him. There is as usual in him the sense both of his delight and of his taking pleasure in rehearsing it.

There is a huge swirl of water under his nose. He gives a visible unrehearsed start.

“Good God, what was that, an alligator?”

“Probably not, though they’re here. Probably a gar.”

“Gators won’t bother you, will they?”

“No, gators won’t bother you.”

I try to place his speech. Despite its Southernness, the occasional drawled vowel, it is curiously unplaced. He sounds like Marlon Brando talking Southern.

We are drifting. I keep a paddle in the water.

“Can we try for bream?” Van asks.

“All right, though it’s late. The best time is when they nest in April and July. But some of them will be hanging around. You see those cypress knees over there.”

“Sho now.”

“You see the two big ones?”

“Yeah.”

“Just beyond is a bed. It’s been there for years. They use the same bed. My father showed me that one fifty years ago.”

“Well, I be.”

“You see that birch and cyrilla hanging out over it from the swamp?”

“Those two limbs? Yeah.”

“What you got to do is come in sideways with your line so you won’t get hung up.”

“Sho. But wouldn’t it be a good idea to cut those limbs off? That’s pretty tight.”

“Then all the sunfish would leave. You don’t mess with light and shade.”

“No kidding.”

Van Dorn has opened his triple-tiered tackle box. He takes out a little collapsed graphite rod and reel, presses a button, and out it springs, six or seven feet. He shows me the jeweled reel, which is spring-loaded to suck back line.

“Very nice.”

“You can keep this in your glove compartment. Once I was driving through Idaho, saw a nice little stream, pulled over. Six rainbows.”

“What type of line you got there?”

“It’s a tapered TP5S.”

His equipment probably cost him five hundred dollars.

“You not fishing, Tom?”

“No. I’ll hold the boat off for you.”

“You don’t want to fish!”

“No.” What I want to do is watch him.

He takes off his helmet and selects a fly. “I thought I’d try a dry yellowtail.”

“Would you like something better?”

“What’s better?”

“Something that’s here and alive. Green grasshoppers, wasps. Catalpa worms are the best.”

“Fine, but—”

“Wait a minute. I remember something.”

We drift silently past the bed and under a catalpa tree. The perfect heart-shaped leaves are like small elephant ears. A few black pods from last year hang down like beef jerky. This year’s pods look like oversized string beans. I stand up, cut a leaf carefully at the stem. “Hold out your hands.” I roll the leaf into a funnel, shake down the worms, small white ones that immediately ball up like roly-polies. “Sunfish are fond of these.”

“Well, I be. What now?”

“Take off that fly and put on a bream hook.”

“This little bitty job?”

“Right. Even big sunfish have tiny mouths.”

“How about just nigger-fishing with worms?”

“Earthworms are all right, but these are better.” It is hard to tell whether he is trying to say “nigger-fishing” in a natural Southern way or in a complicated liberal way, as if he were Richard Pryor’s best friend.

“Okay, you’re set,” I tell him. “You see the beds close to the bank, a dozen or so?” Bream beds are pale shallow craters in the muck made by the fish fanning the eggs.

“I see.”

Van Dorn is surprisingly good. He slings his hundred-dollar line under the cyrilla on second try. Even more surprising, he catches a fish. I thought they’d be gone. A big male pound-and-a-half sunfish feels like a marlin on a fly line.