Hostages to Fortune

EARLY BIRD BOOKS

FRESH EBOOK DEALS, DELIVERED DAILY

BE THE FIRST TO KNOW ABOUT
FREE AND DISCOUNTED EBOOKS

NEW DEALS HATCH EVERY DAY!

Hostages to Fortune

A Novel

William Humphrey

To Dorothy

PART ONE

He stood with his eyes shut tight and covered by his hand, holding his breath while the icy insect repellent dried on his skin. He had sprayed himself down to the waist, avoiding the palms of his hands, for the stuff could take the varnish off a bamboo fishing rod. He was allergic to the sting of bees, wasps, and hornets and to the bite of deerflies, of which, now in June, the woods were full. Unlike other people, he did not absorb and shed the venom; in him it accumulated, and he had been stung so many times now he was full of it. More stings, maybe just one more, could prove fatal to him, his doctor had warned. After all he had come through, that would be a senseless way to go. The doctor's advice was that he not take up fishing again.

Anointed against his enemies, he opened his eyes and breathed deeply, and with things just assuming form from out of the gray morning mist, it was like regaining consciousness, waiting for your faculties to return to you. He had begun the day before the day had begun. That way you sometimes got the jump on it. There was not a sound, near or far. The world seemed to be just emerging from the primal void and he was alone in it, as solitary as Adam on his first day—more so, for Adam had not known then that he was alone.

The rain that had come in the night, beginning at half past ten, had stopped at half past two, not to come again. He had been awake to hear it come and go and not come again, although in the old days just to imagine he heard it pattering on the sheetiron roof of the clubhouse along with the trilling of the frogs had been enough to lull him to sleep, no matter where he was. Now the earth slumbered on under a blanket of gray ground fog. Vapor overhung the river, and the trees lining its course were trunks with neither roots nor tops. He plucked a tuft of dead grass and loosed it. Straight to earth it fell through the windless air. It was a good day for fly-fishing.

He opened the trunk of the car and took out the rod case. From the partitioned cloth sack inside the case he took the butt section and one of the twin tips of the rod. He lubricated the male ferrule of the tip by rubbing it on the wing of his nose, introduced it into the female ferrule of the butt and, sighting down the rod, rotated the sections to align their guides, then pushed them together. They mated easily, rather too easily, and giving the rod a flex, he detected a slight wobble in the joint. The fit of even the finest of them loosened with time and use. He would have to have the ferrules replaced during the winter, out of season. That was, if he did take up fishing again. Assembled, the rod came alive, became an extension of him, an antenna, its sensitive tip aquiver, amplifying the steady tremor of his hand.

He seated the reel and threaded the line through the guides. He clipped off the old leader and replaced it with a new one, gratified to find that despite the tremor of his hands he could still tie a blood knot.

“How we doing?” he asked himself.

“Doing all right but it's better not to ask,” he answered himself.

Come what might, for now, the fussy little ritual of readying for a day's fishing reined in the mind, kept it in a channel between narrow banks. He attached his landing net to its ring on his vest and slipped into the harness of his creel.

From the transparent plastic holder pinned to the back of his vest he took his last fishing license. According to it he was Benjamin Curtis of Blairstown, New Jersey, Age 48, Height 6-1, Weight 205, Eyes Brown, Hair Black. He tore it in pieces and let them fall. From between the folds of his wallet, as he spread it to get his new license, fell the unopened letter given to him last evening at the club. He picked it up and replaced it and returned the wallet to his pocket. The new license gave his address as Stone Ridge, New York, Age 50, Weight 170, Hair White.

Both licenses had been bought in the same place, Kelly's Sporting Goods Store in Chalfont, the nearest village to the club. His every fishing license for twenty years had been bought there. It had signaled the opening of trout season, stopping at Kelly's on the way in to buy their licenses. The occasion was made all the jollier by the sight of the Kelly brothers' faces, for twins tickle something in us, perhaps elating us with the feeling that for once nature has been tricked out of her stern rule that a person shall have but one lone self. There were two Kellys, but like the twin tracks that make a railroad, the brothers were indistinguishable and inseparable and their lives ran parallel. Rotund, redheaded, white-faced, they were as alike as two radishes. Time in its countdown did not differentiate them; the winter that had passed since you last saw them had put identical marks on both. Either of them could have gotten away with murder, his friend Tony had once said: no witness could have sworn which of them had done it. They made you feel like you were riproaring drunk and seeing double.

That was how it used to be, but those two licenses of his told how long it was now since he had last seen the Kellys, and told something of what the interim had done to him. The brothers were together behind their counter when he stopped at the store late yesterday afternoon. Their double-barreled smiles were for some stranger.

“It's Ben Curtis,” he had had to say.

It had taken them only a moment to recover themselves but for that moment they were aghast.
Aghast
: it came from the same root word as
ghost
, and that was what they both looked as though they were seeing. And so they were. He had become an embarrassment, a scarecrow, a specter. He frightened people, reminding them that not even the bond between two who had developed from the same egg could bridge over life's intrinsic loneliness. That image of himself mirrored in people's faces he had grown accustomed to in these past months; it was seeing it in duplicate that was so unsettling, hallucinatory. It was as though his eyes would not focus, like looking at a stereo picture whose halves refused to merge.

With one voice (on a tape recording they themselves could never tell which of them was speaking) the brothers exclaimed, “Ben Curtis!” trying to make their discomposure seem like unexpected pleasure. Ben Curtis, of course! It was the beard that had put them off. Then came their quick, their too-quick recovery: the facial readjustment, the forced smiles, the loss for words—the marks of illness-at-ease he had seen so often but now was seeing double. In their confusion the brothers sought each other out of the corners of their eyes. It was as though they were trying to become one again.

They could not know this, but the Kellys were as much of a shock to him as he was to them. There had been a time—the very time he was here now to try to forget—when everybody was twins to him, and, before that, a time when he himself was.

His reception at the club was the opposite of this, for having phoned ahead and been told that his membership had been kept active even though his dues had gone unpaid, he was expected there, and when he appeared downstairs in the bar it was evident that Eddie, the manager, had warned the other members what to expect on seeing him. Eddie would have done this with no more than an expression of the face accompanying the words “Ben Curtis is back,” or at most with a shake of the head, for the club's motto, etched in the mirror behind the counter, was “Thumbs Up!” and it was considered bad form to bring your troubles here with you or to remind others of theirs. A fisherman's luck was bad enough without some unfortunate bringing more. To this temple of the fish and the fly, people came for the weekend as though to a religious retreat, leaving behind them all worldly cares and concerns. “Think Trout,” said their bumper stickers. They spent their days alone on their own sections of the stream and when all assembled at the clubhouse in the evening the talk never strayed far from the sport. Touchy topics were avoided or were quickly dropped or were broken up by others. Should a dispute over politics, for instance, erupt at the bar, the disputants were served one on the house, and as he set them down Eddie pointed both thumbs up. It was a reminder and something of a reprimand, and it was all that was ever needed. Sometimes friendships developed that extended beyond the club, sometimes love affairs originated there, but for the most part members knew, or cared to know, little about one another except as weekend fishing companions. Perhaps the cheerful atmosphere of the place was owing to the superficiality of their involvement with one another. This was not a bar at which to pour out your troubles at home to the bartender or to the patron on the stool next to yours. Of him, most of his fellow club members knew little more than met the eye. To be sure, that in itself was enough now to put a momentary damper upon the customary conviviality of the place, but in keeping with the motto in the mirror it was also enough to stop them from inquiring into its causes. No condolences here. Sympathy could be taken for granted; meanwhile, a stiff upper lip was expected of all. Whether he could keep his stiff now remained to be tested, but the club's house rule, its code of conduct, had been a factor in his decision to risk a return. Studiously unnoticed, he felt like a ghost come back to the scene of its former life.

Time was when Eddie would have served him his usual without waiting for an order. But now Eddie had either forgotten what his usual was or he was leery of anticipating the wishes of a man so changed from what he remembered. It was as he served him his drink that Eddie gave him the letter. A year's yellowing and dust it displayed. He took a glance at the postmark and the date and put it away in his wallet unopened. That was the spirit! Eddie signified by giving him the old club sign.

Most members, like him, up for the weekend, had arrived within the hour and were still dressed for town, but now as day waned others dressed for fishing came in. There was a drifting in and out to the porch where, as their owners drew off waders and cranked wet socks through the old clothes wringer mounted on the rail, fish were laid out and admired. This was the season for the big hatches of mayflies, a different variety every few days, rising from the water at dusk as thick as the mist that would rise from it later, and these members had stayed out to fish the evening rise. The dinner hour was set late for them.