Hostages to Fortune (7 page)

Long before they saw them they heard the geese. They appeared over the mountaintops to the northwest. There must have been two hundred of them. They grew louder as the stately beat of their wings brought them overhead. If the ducks streaked over dipping and banking in formation like squadrons of fighter planes, these were bombers massed on a mission navigating a straight and steady course. Big Canada geese they were, recognizable even at that altitude by their white throat patch like a clergyman's collar. Tirelessly chanting their command, they were like a column of marching men in the regimented, plodding steadiness of their pace, and when one of them got out of line it quickly got back as a straggler among soldiers closes ranks. For a long time they stayed in sight before disappearing into the southern sky, and still for a long time afterwards their honking, more like baying, could be heard against the wind.

Small flocks, mainly mallards and teal, swooped down only to flare off. There was gunning now throughout the bay and the heavy boom of the big long-range magnums of gunners out on the open water of the river. They decoyed one flock of five and he singled and missed while Tony doubled. Then a distant whistle blew.

“Noon in Hudson,” said Tony.

A couple of minutes passed and another whistle blew.

“Noon in Catskill,” said Tony.

Another couple of minutes passed and another whistle blew.

“Noon in Germantown,” said Tony.

A fourth whistle blew and Tony said, “Noon here.”

They stacked their guns, rubbed the backs of their stiff necks, stretched themselves, and sat down on the bench. A hot toddy never tasted better than then, and was all the better for being limited to one—many a hunting friendship had been ended by a shooting accident in a duckblind. Tony uncorked the wine and tasted it and said, smacking his lips, “Why, be this juice the growth of God, who dare blaspheme the twisted tendril as a snare? A Blessing, we should use it, should we not? And if a curse—why, then, Who set it there?” To which he responded with, “I wonder often what the Vintners buy one half so precious as the stuff they sell.” In the hamper there might be a pate, a cold fried chicken, an avocado to share, cheese, fruit tarts with bitter black coffee. Ducks seen during the lunch break were usually seen too late and winged away unscathed. Neither minded. They were there not just to fill their game pockets.

It was in a duckblind that began a practice of theirs. It was one of the closest of the many ties that attached them to each other. It came about because of the nature of duck shooting. Much of the day in the blind is spent doing nothing at all. To be good, the weather must be bad: gray, misty, fogbound, with little to interest the eye, distract the mind. The shooting is best early in the morning and late in the afternoon. Throughout the long middle of the day the hunter scans the sky mainly because he has got nothing else to do; only seldom is he rewarded then by the sight of birds. It was during such a barren midafternoon stretch on one of their early hunts together that Tony had said, “You ought to bring along something to read at times like this.”

“And yourself?” In those days he believed that Tony had read everything.

“For this I've got something better than a book. I recite poems to myself. I've got a collection in my head and I add new ones to it from time to time. That way I've got something to occupy my mind without taking my eyes off the sky. I do it while I'm driving long distances, when I'm in the dentist's chair, when I'm doing any kind of still-hunting, like this.”

So, as they scanned the sky, they passed the time reciting to each other Shakespeare and Milton, Donne and Marvell, Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Hardy, Yeats—breaking off when birds appeared to wait them out if they came in range to fire. The once-great flights had dwindled. No longer did clouds of them darken the sky or settle upon the river thick as autumnal leaves that strow the brooks in Valambrosa, but on most days they bagged their limit.

The sun would have dropped below the clouds behind the blue Catskills, setting the sky ablaze, the mist would be rising off the water and lights shone from the windows of a northbound passenger train when they retrieved the decoys, for they would have stayed out late. So, always, would one last lone duck, now hurrying to rejoin its flock for the night. To it he said:

Whither, midst falling dew,

While glow the heavens with the last steps of day,

Far, through their rosy depths, dost thou pursue

Thy solitary way?

Vainly the fowler's eye

Might mark thy distant flight to do thee wrong,

As, darkly painted on the crimson sky,

Thy figure floats along.

He had not found in the flight of the duck the faith that Bryant had found, that

He who, from zone to zone,

Guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight,

In the long way that I must tread alone,

Will lead my steps aright.

But he had had his little flock then and knew how to find his way home to them in the dark. Then there had been no long way that he must tread alone.

He was casting better now, straightening line and leader, laying down the fly with better aim, more softly. The timing of it was coming back to him. When you had done a thing for many years you could put it aside and then take it up again, and seemingly, no matter what had befallen you in the interim, it came back to you. With fly-casting the thing was not to think about it. It was both subtle and simple and had to be done unselfconsciously. That was the hardest part for beginners to learn, not to think about it but just do it. Then it was as easy as a good man made it look, as natural as conveying food to your mouth. It had nothing to do with size or strength. Had it had then he would have been better at it than either Tony or Anthony, both of whom could outperform him any day. But then Tony was a natural and Anthony a perfectionist.

Slowly at first so as not to disturb the pool, then with a steadily accelerating lift of the rod accompanied by a downward pull with his left hand, he picked the line off the water. It came back to him showering droplets and went swishing past his ear. Rod held high, he paused, timing the backcast to lengthen and straighten itself, to flex the rod. A million casts had taught him just when to start the rod forward. The line rolled over in a hairpin loop, straightened, sending the leader and fly to the fore. He checked it, and the line fell lightly to the water. In a swirl created by a boulder near the pool's left bank the fly came to life. It looked more like a minnow than a minnow did. Through the clear water he could see its feathers pulse as though it were breathing. It looked like a finger-ling trout and the slash of crimson along its side like a bleeding wound. Easy prey for a hungry adult trout.
They made of their generation messes
.

The current swept the line slowly toward midstream. When it was straightened to its full length he began his retrieve. He let the fly drift back, retrieved again in short rapid jerks. He began his lift, then felt it stopped by a tug, the throb of a fish, his first in more than a year. Experience told him it was not a big fish but to him it felt big, assisted in its pull by a lifetime, a buried and resurrected lifetime of fish.

It would instinctively make its first turn for freedom upstream toward him. Out of old habit he put his feet together to keep it from going between them. Reeling rapidly to regain the slack line, he saw the fish in its dash past him. It was about a foot long.

Regulated by its drag, the reel yielded line to the fish. The rod, bent in a bow, quivered like a divining rod. The fish leaped, leaped again, then turned and bolted downstream, retaking line. He lightened the drag to compensate for the added pull of the current. The fish stopped, turned, balked, shook its head. To keep the rod from developing a set, a permanent bend, he turned it upside down. The drowning, desperate fish darted past him headed upstream again. He shifted the rod to his left hand and with his right hand reached for his landing net. He drew it to the full length of its retractable chain and dipped it in the water to inflate its bag. He waited while the tired fish floated slowly up from the bottom. The current brought it, spent, tail first to the net. He bent to scoop it up. His reflection in the water, blurred and indistinct at first, sharpened as he neared it. It was as if a corpse, drowned and bleached, was surfacing—his corpse.

The storm in the night had passed through like an army on the march and at half past two the distant rumble and the glare of its cannonade was faint and fast fading. The barroom barometer stood at 29.90 and was rising. That should bring fair weather and good fishing. The one reliable rule for when to go fishing, aside from the old saw about going whenever you could get away, was not to go when the cows were lying down. Cows lay down when the barometric pressure was falling, and so did fish. He had read that according to some researchers mental depression in people followed upon a lowering of the barometric pressure. If so, then in that, as in so much else, he was contrary. He had watched the one here on the wall rise for the past hour as, meanwhile, his own inner one steadily fell. His weather and the world's weather seldom accorded anymore, just as the hours he kept were the opposite of other people's. Fair days, when they were happy, emphasized that he was not. In gloomy weather he had the same excuse for his low spirits as everybody else. Now, with the contrariness that characterized much of his recent behavior, he chose this, always the low point on his chart for the day, to put himself to the most dreaded of the tests awaiting him here.

His half-drunk beer had long since gone flat. He went behind the counter, emptied his mug into the sink and rinsed the suds from it. He toweled it dry, then, turning to set it on the shelf, he saw himself in the mirror and the sight was so startling it was as though he had caught somebody watching him. He and his reflection stared first wildly, then searchingly, at each other.

“Thou comest in questionable shape,” he said to it, and it said the same to him.

Lots of old familiar faces had looked into his now unfamiliar one during these past few hours, with differing expressions of it but with universal shock and disbelief, or with evident effort to disguise it, and the progress he had made in getting used to himself had been undone.

All his old acquaintances had said it was the beard that had kept them from recognizing him. That was his reason for growing it, to give them that excuse. Or rather, that was one of his reasons. There were several. One was that he too needed an excuse for not recognizing himself. Another was that growing a beard had kept him from having to face himself in the mirror while shaving every morning. Actually, the beard had grown itself, as hair is said to keep growing on a corpse in its grave. He had found it there on his resurrection. White as the hair on his head now, it made him look more than ever like somebody brought back from the dead. Like his father's spirit, doomed for a certain term to walk the night.

Some of those old acquaintances of his had actually introduced themselves to him as though to a stranger. To those who had mistaken him for a new member of the club or for a member's new guest the embarrassment immediately afterwards had been acute. But there were those among them who knew him and who seemed to understand that a man who himself had changed almost out of recognition must have undergone something that would give him trouble in recalling their names. They were right. Though in many instances they were people whom he had long known, he had difficulty in recognizing them now. It was because they had changed so little. They were people from a former life. He looked at them with wonder equaling theirs for him. How could they have lived through the same year that he had lived through and been left so unmarked by it? Were these people all Dorian Grays and he the portrait in the attic? Contradictory as it was, while he could not accept the changes in himself he expected others to have changed as he had.

He raised his eyes to the club's motto etched in the glass, then looked again at his reflection. He raised his hand in a gesture of thumbs up and essayed a smile. The hoary old man in the mirror, his face a map of melancholy, stared past him, remote beyond reach.

Its walls covered with framed snapshots, the club's sitting room was in effect the family album of a very large family, souvenirs of holidays extending over three quarters of a century. It made the club seem like the ancestral estate of one of those close-knit, fun-loving large clans, all outdoor sportsmen, who come home at every opportunity and who amass photographs of their every get-together. They constituted a pictorial history of American fly-fishing, recording the fashions and their changes in outdoor clothing, tackle, the incursion by women into what was once exclusively a male domain, the changing concepts of sportsmanship and conservation, the displacement of the native brook trout by the hardier and more cunning brown trout imported from Europe. From one decade to the next rods shrank in size, waders appeared as the dwindling numbers of fish, caused in part by growing numbers of fishermen as travel eased, put an end to leisurely fishing from the bank. Quaint and amusing and all so long ago and out of date you found the people in these pictures, never for a moment reflecting that the time would come when the ones of you would amuse somebody in the same way.

From before the era of legal daily limits were pictures of bearded, portly men in plus-fours, tweed jackets and caps, posing alongside miraculous draughts of fishes. Because of the long rough train ride through the mountains to Chalfont, then by wagon and team the fourteen miles from there, no women were to be seen in these early pictures. Filterless, they lacked clouds in their skies also. Too long a trip for weekends then, it was for upwards of two weeks at a time that the men came. Their creels were the size of packhorse panniers and their rods the length of lances.

Family likenesses were traceable between the founders and the square-jawed young men with their hair parted down the middle, wearing yoke-collared sweaters and long knotted scarves. Having recently fought the war to end war and make the world safe for democracy, they now defiantly displayed bottles of bootleg bathtub gin. Detroit made its contribution to the look of all our yesterdays with open touring cars, phaetons, roadsters with rumbleseats, and the inclusion in the party now of women with bobbed and marcelled hair beneath cloche hats, short skirts with belts below the waistline.