Again to Carthage, page 10
“I think so.” Roland was thoroughly into his scampi, but paying attention. “They had little feather things on the end. I think that’s what John Kern used one day to catch some little mangrove snappers for dinner.”
“Right, that’s really light tackle for catching smaller fish like those snappers, and also for going after blue runners and such for bait. You can buy different things at the marinas, greenies or look-downs and such, but we like to get our own. You use that little feather lure tied directly to the line, no leader or anything, and just cast it out around the rocks. There are usually schools of baitfish. It doesn’t take too long to pull in a few. It’s kind of fun. We’ve had new people go out with us who thought that was the whole trip. They’d get all excited pulling in a feisty little blue runner and say things like ‘I never knew deep-sea fishing was so much fun!’ They thought getting the bait was the fishing!”
“That would have been me, I’m sure. One of your basic tyros,” said Roland.
“Naw. You’ve caught your first barracuda head. You’re a veteran! Anyway, once you have a few blue runners swimming in your live well, you head out to sea, out to the Gulf Stream or a little beyond. You use a really big rig and you drag the bait behind the boat. You go kind of slow, and the speed is important. You lower the outriggers—those long antenna-looking poles—out to the side of the boat so that the bait is towed clear of the wake where the fish can see it. The line is just clipped out there with a clothespin thingie, so when a fish takes the bait the line falls down. Then it’s just you and the fish.”
“And then does a shark leave you just the head?”
Cassidy laughed. “No, not usually. For one thing, these are much bigger fish than barracuda, and they have their own weapons. And for another it’s farther out in open water, not in close-in places where predators usually hang out.”
“But in The Old Man and the Sea—”
“Aha!”
“What?”
“I knew it!”
“Knew what?”
“That you’d been reading Hemingway!”
Roland was indignant. “Certainly. Junior-year American literature seminar. Remember Smith Kirkpatrick? He was published himself, as I recall, and a navy man. I liked him quite well and he was the one who brought in Harry Crews. Anyway, he was gaga for Hemingway and I frankly did not understand the fuss. But that was a marlin in that story, was it not?”
“Yes, a blue marlin, I think.”
“And wasn’t the whole idea that the sharks got the fish in the end, much as mine was lost, despite a quotidian struggle?”
“Hmmm. I hadn’t thought of it that way. It’s just that in real sportfishing with a rod and reel out in open water, even if the fight takes several hours it’s usually over and the fish is either on the boat or gets away before any really big sharks can get into the act. Not that it doesn’t happen, but just not usually. Even after they’re hooked, they can still defend themselves, except right at the end when they’re completely exhausted. And then things happen pretty fast. You get them up to the boat and gaff them and it’s over.”
“So you’re saying it was built around a false premise, this Hemingway plot?”
“No, no. Not at all. It was a different situation altogether. The old man was fishing with a handline. That’s the old-timey way commercial fishermen did it for hundreds of years, from the Maritimes down to Key West, just a guy alone in a little wooden boat, usually out of sight of land, sometimes in the rain and fog, hauling in enough of these big old fish to make a living.”
Cassidy was lost in thought for a moment, eating his red snapper and picturing again the woodworking shop he’d visited in Shelburne where for nearly two hundred years they made those double-ended Nova Scotia dories, and still did. For tourist displays, now that the fishermen were long gone, and the fish too.
Roland recognized this look.
“Hearty souls, no doubt. And the old man not the least of them, I’m sure, but he still lost his quarry,” he said, trying to bring Cassidy back.
“Yes, he battled the marlin for I don’t know how long before he finally hauled him in. He was just huge, this fish. He wouldn’t even fit in this little boat the old man had, so he had to lash him to the side. After it was dead, I mean. It was only then that the sharks came on, and even then it was a while before they showed up. At least that’s the way I remember it. It’s a different situation altogether.”
“It’s coming back to me now and I believe you’re right.”
“Something similar used to happen when whalers would have a big one lashed up to their side and they’d have to hurry to strip off the blubber before the sharks got it all. Some guys would be bashing at the sharks with clubs while other guys cut the whale up. It could be a real donnybrook out there, Roland.”
“What do you mean ‘out there’? I’ve got a will contest coming into the office next week involving a corpus of about nineteen million, a young widow of short duration, and half a dozen grief-stricken nieces, nephews, and cousins. Sharks have nothing on these people.”
“And you represent … who?”
“Does it matter?” Roland said, signaling for the check. “Just one of the participants at the feeding frenzy.”
It was several weeks before Cassidy began to realize that something more basic than post-island ennui was at play. He assumed he would soon shake it off after a few days and get back into the mundane slipstream of everyday life, but it persisted. Roland noticed it and took to asking him if he was all right, the query accompanied by poorly disguised scrutiny.
Winkler noticed it too, but he had weathered many of Cassidy’s moods with equanimity and knew well how they came and went.
It was a do-nothing Wednesday evening when Cassidy jogged in from his run and walked around to the back of the house to hose off. He found Winkler already sitting on one of the lawn chairs in the courtyard, shirtless, towel around his neck, cooling off from his own workout. He had a net bag of Key limes in the chair next to him. Cassidy took off his shoes and ran the coolish hose water over his head for a few minutes. He was already drenched with sweat, so he couldn’t get any wetter. Then he moved the limes and sat down with a squish next to his roommate.
“Doing some picking?” Cassidy asked, squeegeeing water off with his hands.
“Mmmm. Tree’s loaded. Thought I’d do something useful. Loquats are in too, and the star fruit. But you got to draw the line. Get a good run in?”
“Not bad. Pretty humid, though. I ran up to the middle bridge and then across. Then back down on the other side. Almost got arrested for no shirt over there.”
“They still have that?”
“Yeah. A cop actually stopped me. He was nice about it and said it was just a warning. I told him to go ahead and write me up because I wasn’t going to wear a shirt and get heat prostration and that his ordinance was unconstitutional anyway.”
“What’d he say?”
“He laughed. Said how did I know. I said because Roland Menduni Esquire told me. Which he did. He’s pretty good on state constitutional stuff. Taught a course on it one summer at Stetson Law. Anyway, the cop said he didn’t know about that, and that normally he would be more than happy to give me the ticket, but that he was going on vacation in two weeks and he’d be damned if he was going to come back from fly fishing in Montana for court. I said I didn’t blame him.”
“He let you go?”
“What else could he do? I told him he could give me the ticket just about anytime, because I’d still be running and I’d still be shirtless when he got back. Hey, you want to get some dinner? The Crab Pot, maybe?”
“Think I’ll pass,” Winkler said. “I hit the weights pretty hard and I’m kind of pooped. And not particularly hungry either.”
“This is a first. How about we do something simple here? I’ve got some conch defrosted. We can do fritters.”
“Hmmm. That actually sounds pretty good.”
“What else?”
“We’ve got romaine, I could make a big salad. There are a zillion cherry tomatoes on the bush, and I think we’ve got black olives and croutons. Maybe use some of those limes with olive oil and wine vinegar for a dressing. We could do anchovies on the side. There’s feta, which I know you hate.”
“I don’t hate it, I just call it by its real name.”
“Flotation material?”
“Exactly.”
“Are there any of those hard rolls left?”
“I think so. There are more in the freezer. I thought you weren’t hungry.”
“I’m talking myself into it.”
The fritters took a few minutes, but it wasn’t long before they were eating on the little screened-in porch. Freshly showered, they had both dressed in clean running shorts and T-shirts, and were barefoot on the cool tile floor.
“I hadn’t thought about Mize in quite a while,” Cassidy said. “Then when I was running today I saw a little helicopter coming across the Intracoastal and it all came back.”
“He was a good guy.”
“I’ve still got some of his letters. They started out pretty optimistic, but you read them, you can see him getting down. He said most of the Americans were oblivious or downright hostile to the people there. He heard guys referring to the Vietnamese as ‘foreigners.’ Believe that?”
“Yeah, I believe it. I still don’t know why he wanted to go,” Winkler said.
“He didn’t want to exactly. He went in ROTC mostly because his old man and his uncles had been in the military, and plus he thought he was going to need some kind of deferment so he could stay in school. He redshirted his sophomore year with that fatigue fracture in his shin, so he had a year of eligibility he could have used to go to graduate school if he could keep from being drafted.”
“They would draft you out of graduate school?”
“In a heartbeat. Don’t you remember? As soon as you graduated, you’d get your preinduction physical notice and then you’d be right in the middle of ‘Alice’s Restaurant.’ Then they put in the lottery, and it turned out he got a pretty high number so he wouldn’t have had to go anyway, but by that time it didn’t make any difference to him. He was all gung ho. I tried to talk to him about it, but you know Mize.”
“Not really.”
“He disguised it pretty well. With his sense of humor and all you might think he was a kind of cynical guy, but he had a spiritual side. He had a lot of doubts about the war early on, but he still felt a sense of obligation. They were talking to him about the Army track team and he was plenty good enough. Lots of track guys we knew did that. Some of them never even went through basic training, just changed jerseys and kept running. But Mize turned it down and went to helicopter school in Texas. Said if he didn’t go, someone else would have to.”
“Man, I was never that gung ho,” said Winkler. “When they came to me with the team handball thing, I couldn’t sign up fast enough. I had my PE degree, so they said I could coach the women’s team, and if I made the cut, I could play for the men’s. And since nobody outside the military knew what the hell team handball was, they told us we’d probably all go to the Olympics. They were right.”
“Pretty nice gig.”
“Darn right. Despite all the smoke Cornwall was blowing, I’d have never made the team in the decathlon. I was only ranked eighth or ninth, and I just wasn’t ever going to vault much over sixteen feet, period. I couldn’t make up the points in the other events, so that was that.”
“Yeah, the competition for those three places is pretty fierce.”
“You ought to know.”
They ate in silence for a while.
“So what did you end up thinking?” Winkler asked.
“About what?”
“Mizner.”
“I don’t know, Wink. I can’t think of one good thing about it. It just seems like a giant waste, is all.”
“Is that the kind of thing you’re always writing about in your journal book all the time?”
“No. That’s something else.”
13
Orange-Scented Night
CASSIDY LAY FORWARD on the tank of the Vincent Black Shadow motorcycle with his chin just above the speedometer and bore on through the warm central Florida night, the hallucinogenic scent of orange blossoms ramjetting directly into his brain, making him dizzy with high school nostalgia. Soft chilly-warm spring evenings when your brow was fevered from sun and hormones and you were heading to the beach after the prom in David Harper’s Volvo 450 with a dark-skinned girl with very white teeth. You were all-state in basketball and the state mile champion and had college offers. You were something of a king bee, he thought, and all in all you felt very, very good.
It was all so remote from him now. Drive-in movies, the Big Game, fourth-period English, waterskiing at the lake behind Caldwell Smith’s house, what college you were going to pick.
It hit him like a bouncer’s slap: at one time there were hundreds if not thousands of grown-ups all around south Florida who were keenly interested in which college he was going to pick and which sport he was going to play. The most natural thing in the world at the time and now positively odd, like some abandoned religious ritual or discredited superstition.
It really wasn’t that many years ago, growing up in that crew-cut era. You could still feel the momentum from the Second World War; Korea was a hiccup and Vietnam a rumor they called “Indochina.” The future was all Mohawk carpeting and Amana freezers as far as the eye could see. Oh, it could all end in an atomic fireball at any instant, but you had done the drills and knew how to stick your head under your desk. There were neighbors with bomb shelters and people like Arthur Miller and Rod Serling hinted that there might be a dark edge to the American Century, but that was the minority report. Everyone else saw clear skies ahead, Cassidy among them. His yearbook held many inscribed references to things like opening ad agencies or working for “major corporations.” These weren’t condemnations; they were signals of unarguable success, the absolute brass ring. That, and raising a houseful of progeny.
He could hardly believe he had once looked at the world with such naïveté and he marveled that it took as little as an evening whiff of orange blossom to recall perfectly that innocence, that simple-minded happiness. And yet.
And yet he had been happy. He was sure of that. Everything he had done until then had been in preparation, a teeing up. His life was all possibility then, all good things to come. Maybe that is the false clarity that sports gives to the young, he thought. You did your running over the summer, you lifted weights, you did your layups. Then the season started and you won or you lost and the season was over and you went to the team banquet and slapped the guys on the shoulder and said, “Way to go, Joe” and “All right, Kent.” And then summer came and you did your running …
It seemed too good, Cassidy thought, and it was.
In high school he had thought of sports as a way of life, but years later when he finally left Kernsville with his two degrees, he had come to think of sports as a refuge—a welcome one—from life.
There were a lot of bugs out tonight and one with a particularly hard shell would occasionally pop him pretty good on the cheek or forehead. He thought about stopping and putting on the little butterfly windshield, or maybe the faceplate on his helmet, but they were buried in his saddlebags and it would be dawn soon and the bugs would go to earth as all things do.
Big Jim Pegram was dead. Cassidy would get used to it, he supposed, and it was a long way up to North Carolina and there would be time to think about it. Time for decisions and revisions. He had buried his best friend so recently he could still smell the freshly dug earth. Now he was going to bury his grandfather. He couldn’t shake the feeling that it wasn’t supposed to be like this, that there was something important he had forgotten to do that had caused everything to go wrong.
Is it possible, he thought, that getting older is a process of losing pieces of yourself along the way, and that it just goes on until there isn’t anything left?
A glint of mango dawn light was showing as he hit the Sanford exit for the diner where he was to meet Andrea. Well, here is a dusty carton from the attic, he thought.
14
Andrea
HIS HEART THUNKED just a little as he watched her get out of her car and walk to the entrance, and he was probably the only one who would have noticed the hint of anything wrong with her gait. It was the flawed-perfection thing that had rendered him helpless from the beginning. Her blond hair was in a fetching ponytail and despite the floppy green scrubs you could tell she stayed in shape. She wasn’t really all that tall, but the authority of her movement gave that impression.
He definitely was not the only one who watched her make her way to his booth, as several dozen seed corn and John Deere baseball cap bills swung around like radar wings and tracked her right to where he kissed her on the mouth briefly and held her a second too long.
A biker among truckers, he had been ignored up until then and now he was merely hated; you could cut the testosterone-laced hostility with a spatula.
“You,” she said.
“I’d like to drag you right under the table right now.”
“Always the romantic. What are you working on?”
“Just jotting down some notes.”
“Like a journal?”
“Sort of. So, how’re things?”
“Good. Busy. I’m operating this morning in fact.”
“How’s he doing?”
“He’s fine, Quenton. And he’s … He’s fine, Quenton.”
“Ah.”
“Come on.”
“No kids yet?”
“Quenton, we’re separated. We have been for almost a year.”
“You’re not serious.”
She just looked at him.
“Why didn’t you …” He was shaking his head at her, unbelieving.
“Sure. I’m going to call you up and say, Hey, guess what, Quenton? I’m available again.”
