The Fisherman Read Free

keep me cautious about what I thought I’d felt between us. I’d like to say my hesitation owed itself to not wanting to harass a woman young enough to be my niece, if not my daughter, but it had as much to do with my fear of looking the fool. “No fool worse’n’ an old fool,” my pa used to say, and although I hardly considered myself old, set next to Marie, I wasn’t exactly what you’d call fresh off the rack.
    Another photo, and I leapt ahead to the following spring. Marie and I were standing knee-deep in a stream—well, it was knee-deep for me; for her, it was more like thigh-high. One of her friends had invited us to spend the day in the Catskills, where said friend’s brother had a weekend place that turned out to be nicer than I was expecting. It was located halfway up a tall, rolling hill, along a gravel road you had to ease your car over if you didn’t want to tear out the undercarriage. From the outside, the place resembled an abbreviated barn, taller than it was long. Inside, new wooden surfaces, stainless steel appliances, and a stone fireplace gathered under a cathedral ceiling and a loft. Apparently, the place had been built by a Manhattan lawyer who’d had to divest himself of it shortly after its completion; whereupon Marie’s friend’s brother, who worked for the Post Office, had picked it up for the proverbial song, and not a terribly long one, at that. We arrived at lunchtime, and passed one of the more pleasant afternoons of my life wandering further up the gravel road with Marie’s friend, whose name, I’m reasonably sure, was Karen. They had grown up beside one another. After maybe a mile, the road crossed a wide meadow, at the far side of which, a line of trees marked the course of a stream. It was a hot day, the air heavy with the sun, and the shade of the trees, the surprising cold of the water, were too much to resist. We tied our sneakers around our necks, and waded in. The stream bed was rocky, so you had to step carefully. Karen walked with both hands held up, as if she were expecting to fall at any moment. Marie stayed close enough to me that she could reach out to steady herself if necessary. I can’t recall what we talked about. What I remember is staring at the water’s surface, at those little bugs that skate across it—water-skimmers? Funny, I don’t know their proper name. There were dozens of them, sliding over the stream in a way that made its top seem more solid than my legs pushing through it told me it was. In the murk beneath them, trout whose size would have beggared their insect imaginations flitted amongst the rocks. Every now and again, a plop and a spreading ripple of rings would show where a water-skimmer had found himself swallowed by a great black cavern. I don’t suppose we waded more than a hundred yards downstream until we came in sight of a small dam. What we could see of it through the skin of water pouring over it showed it old, but there was nothing on the banks on either side of it to explain how or why it had come to be placed there. It seemed a reasonable spot to turn around, head back to the cookout Karen’s brother was preparing, but before we did, Karen snapped a picture of Marie and me in the stream. Her hair’s down in this one, and she’s wearing an oversized tie-dye that she’d found in one of my drawers and that had struck her as about the funniest thing ever. (“Mr. George Jones and Merle Haggard in a tie-dye?” she’d said, laughing over my protest that I listened to the Grateful Dead, too.) In her hands, she’s cradling the green bottle of Heineken that had accompanied us on our trek and would remain in her possession until we were ready to leave. She wasn’t much of a drinker, but she’d learned that if she carried an open bottle of beer with her, she could appear social. To our right in the picture, sunlight streams down, lighting the water. To our left, darkness gathers in the trees.
    Between that photo and the one before