Philip Roth - The Human Stain

“Still have the PTSD?”

“Well, I still tend to isolate, don't I? What do you think I'm doin' out here?”

“But no more drinking and driving,” I heard myself saying. “No more accidents.”

“There were never accidents. Don't you listen? I already told you that. Not that I know of.”

“And the marriage was doomed.”

“Oh yeah. My fault. Hundred percent. She was a lovely woman. Entirely blameless. All me. Always all me. She deserved a helluva lot better than me.”

“What happened to her?” I asked.

He shook his head. A sad shrug, a sigh — complete bullshit, deliberately transparent bullshit. “No idea. Ran away, I scared her so. Scared the woman shitless. My heart goes out to her, wherever she may be. Completely blameless person.”

“No kids.”

“Nope. No kids. You?” he asked me.

“No.”

“Married?”

“No more,” I said.

“So, you and me in the same boat. Free as the wind. What kind of books do you write? Whodunits?”

“I wouldn't say that.”

“True stories?”

“Sometimes.”

“What? Romance?” he asked, smiling. “Not pornography, I hope.” He pretended that that was an unwanted idea it vexed him even to entertain. “I sure hope our local author is not up there in Mike Dumouchel's place writing and publishing pornography.”

“I write about people like you,” I said.

“Is that right?”

“Yes. People like you. Their problems.”

“What's the name of one of your books?”

“ The Human Stain. ”

“Yeah? Can I get it?”

“It's not out yet. It's not finished yet.”

“I'll buy it.”

“I'll send you one. What's your name?”

“Les Farley. Yeah, send it. When you finish it, send it care of the town garage. Town Garage. Route 6. Les Farley.” Needling me again, sort of needling everyone — himself, his friends, “our local author”—he said, even as he began laughing at the idea, “Me and the guys'll read it.” He didn't so much laugh aloud as nibble at the bait of an out-loud laugh, work up to and around the laugh without quite sinking his teeth in. Close to the hook of dangerous merriment, but not close enough to swallow it.

“I hope you will,” I said.

I couldn't just turn and go then. Not on that note, not with him shedding ever so slightly a bit more of the emotional incognito, not with the possibility raised of peering a little further into his mind. “What were you like before you went into the service?” I asked him.

“Is this for your book?”

“Yes. Yes.” I laughed out loud. Without even intending to, with a ridiculous, robust burst of defiance, I said, foolishly, “It's all for my book.”

And he now laughed with more abandon too. On this loony bin of a lake.

“Were you a gregarious guy, Les?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I was.”

“With people?”

“Yeah.”

“Like to have a good time with them?”

“Yeah. Tons of friends. Fast cars. You know, all that stuff. I worked all the time. But when I wasn't working, yeah.”

“And all you Vietnam veterans ice fish?”

“I don't know.” The nibbling laughter once again. I thought, It's easier for him to kill somebody than to cut loose with real amusement.

“I started ice fishing,” he told me, “not that long ago. After my wife ran away. I rented a little shack, back in the woods, on Dragonfly. Back in the woods, right on the water, Dragonfly Pond, and I always summer fished, all my life, but I was never too interested in ice fishing. I always figure it's too cold out there, you know? So the first winter I lived on the pond, and I wasn't myself that winter — goddamn PTSD — I was watching this ice fisherman walk out there and go out fishing. So I watched this a couple of times, so one day I put on my clothes and took a walk out there and this guy was catching a lot of fish, yellow perch and trout and everything. So I figure, this fishin' is just as good as the summertime, if not better. All you have to do is get the right amount of clothing on and get the right equipment. So I did. I went down and bought an auger, a nice auger”—he points—“jiggin rod, lures. Hundreds of different kinds of lures you can get. Hundreds of different manufacturers and makes. All various sizes. You drill a hole through the ice, and you drop your favorite lure down there with the bait on it — it's just a hand movement, you just make that jig move up and down, you know. Because it's dark down underneath the ice. Oh, it is dark all right,” he told me, and, for the first time in the conversation, he looked at me with not too much but too little opacity in his face, too little deceit, too little duplicity. In his voice there was a chilling resonance when he said, “It's real dark.” A chilling and astonishing resonance that made everything about Coleman's accident clear. “So any kind of a flash down there,” he added, “the fish are attracted to it. I guess they're adaptable to that dark environment.”

No, he's not stupid. He's a brute and he's a killer but not so dumb as I thought. It isn't a brain that is missing. Beneath whatever the disguise, it rarely is.

“Because they have to eat,” he's explaining to me, scientifically. “They find food down there. And their bodies are able to adapt to that extracold water and their eyes adapt to the dark. They're sensitive to movement. If they see any kind of flashes or they maybe feel the vibrations of your lure moving, they're attracted to it. They know that it's something alive and it might be edible. But if you don't jig it, you'll never get a hit. If I had a son, you see, which is what I was thinkin', I'd be teachin' him how to jig it. I'd be teachin' him how to bait the lure. There's different kinds of baits, you see, most of them are fly larvae or bee larvae that they raise for ice fishin'. And we'd go down to the store, me and Les Junior, and we'd buy 'em at the ice fishin' store. And they come in a little cup, you know. If I had Little Les right now, a son of my own, you know, if I wasn't doomed instead for life with this freakin' PTSD, I'd be out here with him teachin' him all this stuff. I'd teach him how to use the auger.” He pointed to the tool, still just out of reach behind him on the ice. “I use a five-inch auger. They come from four inches up to eight inches. I prefer a five-inch hole. It's perfect. I never had a problem yet gettin' a fish through a five-inch hole. Six is a little too big. The reason six is too big, the blades are another inch wider, which doesn't seem like much, but if you look at the five-inch auger — here, let me show you.” He got up and went over and he got the auger. Despite the padded coveralls and the boots that added to his bulk as a shortish, stocky man, he moved deftly across the ice, sweeping up the auger in one hand the way you might sweep the bat up off the field while jogging back to the bench after running out a fly ball. He came up to me and raised the auger's long bright bit right up to my face. “Here.”

Here. Here was the origin. Here was the essence. Here.

“If you look at the five-inch auger compared to the six-inch auger,” he said, “it's a big difference. When you're hand drilling through a foot to eighteen inches of ice, it takes a lot more effort to use a six-inch than a five-inch. With this here I can drill through a foot and a half of ice in about twenty seconds. If the blades are good and sharp. The sharpness is everything. You always gotta keep your blades sharp.”

I nodded. “It's cold out here on the ice.”

“You better believe it.”

“Didn't notice till now. I'm getting cold. My face. It's getting to me. I should be going.” And I took my first step backward and away from the thin slush surrounding him and the hole he was fishing.