The Fisherman

I. How Fishing Saved My Life

Don’t call me Abraham: call me Abe. Though it’s what my ma named me, I’ve never liked Abraham. It’s a name that sounds so full of itself, so Biblical, so…I believe patriarchal is the word I’m after. One thing I am not, nor do I want to be, is a patriarch. There was a time I thought I’d like at least one child, but these days, the sight of them makes my skin crawl.

Some years ago, never mind how many, I started to fish. I’ve been fishing for a long time, now, and as you might guess, I know a story or two. That’s what fishermen are, right? Storytellers. Some I’ve lived; some I’ve had from the mouths of others. Most of them are funny; they bring a smile to your face and sometimes a laugh, which are no small things. A bit of laughter can be the bridge that lets you cross out of a bad time, believe you me. Some of my stories are what I’d call strange. I know only a few of these, but they make you scratch your head and maybe give you a little shiver, which can be a pleasure in its own way.

But there’s one story — well, it’s downright awful, almost too much to be spoken. It happened going on ten years ago, on the first Saturday in June, and by the time night had fallen, I’d lost a good friend, most of my sanity, and damn near my life. I’d come whisker-close to losing more than all that, too. It stopped me fishing for the better part of a decade, and although I’ve returned to it once again, there’s no power on earth, or under it, could bring me back to the Catskill Mountains, to Dutchman’s Creek, the place a man I should have listened to called “Der Platz das Fischer.”

You can find the creek on your map if you look closely. Go to the eastern tip of the Ashokan Reservoir, up by Woodstock, and backtrack along the south shore. It may take you a couple of tries. You’ll see a blue thread snaking its way from near the Reservoir over to the Hudson, running north of Wiltwyck. That was where it all happened, though what it all was I still can’t wrap my head around. I can tell you only what I heard, and what I saw. I know Dutchman’s Creek runs deep, much deeper than it could or should, and I don’t like to think what it’s full of. I’ve walked the woods around it to a place you won’t find on your map, on any map you’d buy in the gas station or sporting-goods store. I’ve stood on the shore of an ocean whose waves were as black as the ink trailing from the tip of this pen. I’ve watched a woman with skin pale as moonlight open her mouth, and open it, and open it, into a cavern set with rows of serrated teeth that would have been at home in a shark’s jaws. I’ve held an old knife out in front of me in one, madly trembling hand, while a trio of refugees from a nightmare drew ever-closer.

I’m running ahead of myself, though. There’s other things you’ll need to hear about first, like Dan Drescher, poor, poor Dan, who went with me up to the Catskills that morning. You’ll need to hear Howard’s story, which makes far more sense to me now than it did when first he delivered it to me in Herman’s Diner. You’ll need to hear about fishing, too. Everything’ll have to be in its proper place. If there’s one thing I can’t abide, it’s a poorly put-together story. A story doesn’t have to be fitted like some kind of pre-fabricated house — no, it’s got to go its own way — but it does have to flow. Even a tale as coal-black as this one has its course.

You may ask why I’m taking such care. Some things are so bad that just to have been near them taints you, leaves a spot of badness in your soul like a bare patch in the forest where nothing will grow. Do you suppose a story can carry away such badness? It seems a bit much to hope for, doesn’t it? Maybe it’s true for the little wrongs, you know, the kind of minor frustrations that you’re able to turn into funny stories at parties. For what happened at the Creek, though, I doubt there’s such a transformation waiting. There’s only transmission.

And there’s more to it than that. There’s the tale Dan and I heard in Herman’s Diner. Since Howard told what happened to Lottie Schmidt and her family, some ninety years past, I’ve been unable to shake it. You could say his words stuck with me, which would be the understatement of the year. I can recall that tale word for word, as could Howard from the minister who told it to him. Without a doubt, part of the reason for the vividness of my memory is the way that Howard’s story seems to explain a good deal of what happened to Dan and me later that same day. That tale about the building of the Reservoir and who — and what — was covered by its waters, prowls my brain. Even had we heeded Howard’s advice and avoided the creek that day — Hell, had we turned around and headed back home as fast as I could drive, which is what we should have done — I’m convinced what we heard would still have branded itself on my memory. Can a story haunt you? Possess you? There are times I think recounting the events of that Saturday in June is just an excuse for those more distant events to make their way out into the world once more.

Again, though, I’m running ahead of myself. There will be a time and a place for everything, including the story of Lottie Schmidt, her father, Rainer, and the man he called Der Fischer. Let’s back it all up. Let’s begin with a few words about my life’s great passion — well, what I used to think of as my life’s great passion: a few words about fishing.

It wasn’t something I’d learned as a child. My pa took me once or twice, but he wasn’t much good at it himself, so he concentrated on teaching me the things he knew, like baseball, and the guitar. One day, it must have been twenty-five, thirty years after pa and I had spent our final Saturday morning subjecting a bucketful of worms to protracted drowning, I woke up and thought, I’d like to go fishing. Scratch that. I woke up and thought, I need to go fishing. I needed it the deep-down way you need that tall glass of water with the ice cubes clinking around in it at three o’clock on a blistering July afternoon. Why I needed fishing, of all things, I don’t know and can’t say. Granted, I was at a bit of a rough patch. My wife had just died, and us married not two years, and I was living the clichés you watch in made-for-TV movies and listen to in country songs. Mostly, this meant drinking too much, and since pa wasn’t much with the liquor, either, this meant drinking badly, half a bottle of Scotch followed by half a bottle of wine, followed by extended sessions of holding onto the toilet as the bathroom did a merry dance around me. My job had gone all to hell, too — I was a systems analyst over at IBM in Poughkeepsie — although I was fortunate in having a manager who put me in for extended sick leave, instead of firing my ass, which is what I deserved. This was back when IBM was a decent place to work. The company approved three months with pay, if you can believe it. Almost the entire first month I spent looking up out of the bottoms of more bottles than I could count. I ate when I thought about it, which wasn’t too often, and my meals were basically a steady stream of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches interrupted by the occasional burger and fries. The second month was pretty much the same as the first, except for visits from my brother and my late wife’s parents, none of which went well enough to bother relating. All of us were suffering. Marie had been something else, like no other girl. We felt her loss the way you’d feel it if someone reached into the back of your mouth with a pair of pliers and tore out one of your molars; it was an open wound that ached all the way through you. The same way you couldn’t stop testing that spot where your tooth used to be, probing it with your tongue until you felt the jolt of pain, none of us could help poking around our memories until we made everything start hurting all over again. By the time the third month was half done, I was sitting in my underwear on the couch with the TV on, sipping from whatever was closest to hand. I had learned a little, you see.

I had these shoeboxes full of photos I’d never gotten around to placing in albums, and when the alcohol in my blood hit the right level, I would fetch those boxes from the bedroom closet and surround myself with the archive of my marriage. Here was Marie when I’d first met her — when I first talked to her, I should say, since we’d been introduced at work at the beginning of the summer, when she’d joined the company right out of college. We were connected to two of the same projects, so we saw each other in passing throughout July and August, though we didn’t pass more than a couple of pleasantries back and forth at any one time. That September, there was a Labor Day party at someone’s house — I want to say Tim Stoffel’s — and we wound up sitting next to one another at one of the card tables set up around the yard. Marie had come with Jenny Barnett, but Jenny had disappeared with Steve Collins, and of the remaining party goers, I was the one she knew the best. She always denied it, but I’m reasonably sure that, when she asked me how I was doing, she was just killing time until she could finish her plate and make for home. You’d expect that conversation would be burned into my brain, but damned if I can remember much more than the pleasure of learning she was a fan of Hank Williams, Sr., too. Truth to tell, I was too busy trying not to pay too close attention to the bikini top she was wearing with a pair of cut-off shorts and tennis shoes. Typical guy, I know. We sat there talking until Tim was standing on the opposite side of the card table from us, telling us we didn’t have to go home, but we couldn’t stay here. We did go home — I mean, each of us went to our own home — but our time together had left me with a feeling — once we’d gone our separate ways, everything seemed a bit less bright than it had while we were sitting together.

Even so, an hour or two of pleasant talk does not guarantee anything, and I might never have come into possession of that photograph Jenny had taken of Marie, her hair done up in a single ponytail, her eyes and a good portion of the rest of her face concealed by a pair of enormous sunglasses, the yellow and white straps of that swimsuit top making her summer’s tan look darker still. I had a good fifteen years on her, and that was sufficient distance to 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 it, there was the better part of a better year — one of the best years. If I had searched the shoeboxes around me, I could have put my hands on pictures of most of its highlights, from the Christmas dinner I’d eaten with Marie’s family to the Halloween party that had been our third date — and that we’d attended dressed as Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton — to the early spring weekend we’d taken up in Burlington. I don’t know if, deep down, all stories of falling in love are the same. Some days, it seems to me that, once you duck your head beneath the surface details, you find yourself in pretty much the same sequence of events. Other days, I think, No, it’s those details that are the point. Either way — or both, even — that was what happened to us in the space between those pictures. We’d fallen in love, and shortly after that second photo was taken, I was down on one knee, asking her if she’d marry me.

There was another year and a half from that picture to the next one. In that time, the darkness that had thickened the spaces among the trees in that second photo had gathered about us, swallowed us the way those trout had consumed the water-skimmers. The week after we returned from our honeymoon in Bermuda, Marie found a lump in her left breast. From the start, things were bad. The cancer was pretty well-advanced, already storming her lymph nodes, and it resisted the radiation and the chemo like some kind of unstoppable beast in a low-grade horror film. I’m not sure when we knew that Marie wasn’t going to survive this, or when we accepted it. Maybe a month before the end, a change came over her. In a way it’s hard for me to describe, she became calm; I don’t know if I’d say peaceful so much as still. It was as if she’d moved into the lobby of the long, dark house she was heading towards. She wasn’t morbid, or listless — if anything, she relaxed, laughed more than she had in months. I didn’t see what was happening. I thought the difference in her might be a sign that things were turning around, that she was finally getting the upper hand on the creature that had rampaged through her system. I went so far as to float this idea past her, one Saturday afternoon. I’d driven her down to the Hudson, to a little park she liked a few miles south of Wiltwyck. We’d found it one of our first weekends together, when we’d gone for a drive just to have another way to spend time together. This day, there was a breeze off the river, which made it too cold for her to leave the car, so we sat watching the water and I ventured that maybe her recent improvement was an indication that things were looking up. Did I sound as desperate as I fear I must have? Marie didn’t answer; instead, she took my right hand in her left, lifted it to her lips, and kissed it. I told myself she was too overcome with emotion to reply, which I guess she was, just not the one I thought.

The third picture was taken right around that time. In it, Marie’s leaning forward on the kitchen table, looking up and to her right, where I’m standing with the camera, telling her to smile, which she is, but there’s a year and half’s struggle behind that smile, a deep weariness eighteen months in the making. She’s wearing a kerchief around her head, dark blue with white flecks. She was never happy with the wigs they provided her. Her skin has pulled tight against the bones of her face, her arms; it’s as if she’s aged at an accelerated pace, as if I’m getting to see what she would have looked like had we seen our thirtieth anniversary. Behind her, the morning sun is spilling through the windows over the sink, outlining her in gold.

Two weeks after that photo, she was gone. In a matter of two days, the bottom fell out from beneath us; there was barely enough time to rush her to the hospital bed she died in. What followed: the endless phone calls to tell people she’d passed, the visit to the funeral home (which we’d both put off), the wake, the funeral, the reception at the house afterwards, all of it was like some strange play I’d been cast in, but for which no one had provided me the script. I guess I did all right; however you judge such things. And when everything was over, the door shut on the last guest’s departure, there was the liquor cabinet, freshly stocked by a number of the friends and family who’d come to see Marie off. That cabinet, with its rows of bottles, and more shoeboxes full of more pictures than I’d expected.

So there I was, in, I don’t mind saying, a bad place, my wife gone and me doing what I could to join her. It was, you might say, a cold February in my soul. And then one morning my eyes pop open and waiting for me is this thought, I need to go fishing. I wish I could make you understand how powerful it was. I lay there for a while, waiting for it to go away. I lay there for a good long while, and when it was still there, glaring in my mind like a big neon sign, I decided I would give in to it. What the hell, right? I found a shirt and pants that weren’t too dirty, fished my car keys out of the toilet (don’t ask), and set off in search of fishing gear.

As you may have guessed, I had no idea what I was doing. From my house out towards Frenchman’s Mountain, I drove into town, to Huguenot Hardware, because I had this notion that a hardware store would be the place to go for your fishing tackle. I’d like to blame it on the booze, but it was just ignorance. Fortunately for me, the sales clerk there was kind enough not to send me on a wild goose chase, and pointed me across Main Street to what was then Caldor’s. For less than twenty dollars (I can’t remember exactly how much I spent; I want to say twelve fifty, but I’m not sure that’s right — wasn’t a lot, anyway), I was able to set myself up with a rod, reel, line, tacklebox, and net. Hat, too. When I told her I was planning a day of fishing, the checkout girl insisted I run back to men’s clothing and fetch a hat. She didn’t specify what kind of hat, just said that after having grown up with a father who was a fisherman, and an older brother who was a fisherman, and knowing a bit about fishing herself, she could say with confidence that if there was one thing I didn’t want to be caught without, it was a hat. Her advice sounded good, so I hurried to the men’s department and grabbed a Yankees cap that I still wear.

The same checkout girl told me I needed to see the Town Clerk for a fishing license, and suggested a spot off to the side of Springvale Road where she and her family had fished the Svartkil River on occasion. I thanked her for her good advice, and hurried out to take it. Springvale’s a narrow road that runs parallel to 32, the main north-south route in and out of town. For the first part of its length, the road hugs the west shore of the Svartkil, which is only about fifty yards across there, and fringed with maples and birch that hang out over the water. The checkout girl’s spot was a steep bank across the road from a horse farm and across the river from the town golf course. What a sight I must have made, a couple of hours later, sitting by the side of the river in my dirty slacks, wrinkled white shirt, and baseball cap, holding my new fishing rod like it was a strange tool I hadn’t the faintest idea how to use. I suppose it was. I’d broken open the tacklebox and taken hold of the first lure I laid my eyes on, a red and black number with a double set of triple hooks whose barbed points seemed as likely to snag a fish as anything. Cast after cast, I sent out that same lure, with nothing to show for it. It wasn’t until I’d been fishing for a good two weeks — and catching the handful of bluegill I’d pulled wriggling up from the water through as much dumb luck as anything — that an old man with a long gray ponytail who’d been fishing beside me passed me a plastic cup full of fat, muddy worms as he was leaving and suggested I might find one of these of more use.

Yes, I’d gone back. Even though that first day had been fruitless, not even a ghost of a nibble, just five hours of sitting on the riverbank watching the slow current carry my line past me, as well as of tangling my line in the trees overhanging the river a half dozen times; even though all I had for my efforts was a slightly stiff neck, I went back the next day. And the day after that. And the third day. And so on. Each day, I pulled into the spot on Springvale Road a little earlier, left it a little later, until my entire day was taken up with fishing. When I was done, which was to say when the last trace of daylight had seeped out of the sky, I packed up my gear and drove not home but into town, where I stopped at Pete’s Corner Pub for a burger and fries and a beer. I quickly became enough of a regular at Pete’s that the waitresses knew both me and my order, and, instead of wasting time bringing me a menu, brought me my beer — Heineken, in a tall glass — and checked that I was having the usual, which they’d already called into the kitchen. After I started back at work, I discovered I could still squeeze in a couple hours of fishing at the end of the day if I were organized and brought my rod and reel with me in the car. As I say, it was around that time that I switched from my lure to worms, and all of a sudden, my line was singing. The Svartkil, I learned, was full of fish: besides the bluegill, there were pumpkinseed sunfish, smallmouth bass, bullhead catfish, even a monster walleye that snapped my line before I could bring him all the way on shore. Since I didn’t know anything about cleaning and cooking fish, I threw back everything I caught, but that didn’t matter.

I realize all of this must sound like some kind of inspirational story, “How Fishing Saved My Life,” or the like, and I don’t mean it to. For a long time after that first day at the river, especially once fishing season was over that fall, there were more than enough nights I rode to sleep on a wave of Scotch. The house stayed a mess, and my meals at Pete’s, which remained a daily habit, were the best I ate. Sitting on the couch or lying in bed thinking of Marie, I felt as bad as I ever had, maybe worse, because each day that passed was another reminder of how far away I was from her. Fishing was no miracle cure.

When I was at the river, though, if I didn’t feel any better, at least I didn’t feel any worse. Perched on the bank, I was visited by feelings that had been keeping their distance since Marie breathed her last — since she first found the lump in her breast, really. There was satisfaction, which came with a good cast, with watching the hook arc out overhead, listening to the reel unspooling, finding the spot where the line plunked through the water. There was joy, which came but rarely and never stayed long, at pulling back on the rod and watching the green length of a smallmouth break the river’s skin, twisting as it hit the air. Mostly, there was calm — I might even call it peace — which came from sitting watching the brown water slide by, on its way from a lake down in the mountains of western New Jersey up to its destination in the Hudson. Those hours on the Svartkil were breathing room, if you see what I mean, and it’s hard for me to say what would have been my fate if I hadn’t had them. Maybe I’d have been all right, anyway. But when I was fishing, I usually didn’t drink as much at night, since, after having stopped at Pete’s, it was already pretty late and I was already pretty tired by the time I pulled in the driveway. And although, as I said, the house stayed a mess, I found that if I kept it a little less so, I could locate things like my shoes more easily, which let me get to fishing all the more quickly. My nightly burger and beer were the highlight of my day, culinarily speaking, but after the second day of fishing I started stopping at different delis in town for a sandwich, bag of chips, and a soda. The sandwiches were things like baloney and American cheese on white with extra mayo, or salami and provolone with mustard and onion; the chips left a shiny layer of grease on my fingers; and the soda coated my teeth with sugar; but it was a meal, and it was more regular eating than I’d been used to.

So fishing was no miracle cure but, on balance, I guess it did save my life. I’ll let you in on a secret: for the longest time, I thought I had been, well, led to fishing, if you know what I mean. It was the only explanation I could come up with for why this activity so far outside my everyday routine had caught me up. I didn’t think so at first. At first, I just thought it was dumb luck, chance, something I hadn’t remembered watching on TV that had snagged on my brain. The more time passed, however, the less that explanation convinced me. Fishing felt too right; the fit was too close, which I discovered the second year I fished, after a winter of trying to find something to fill that space fishing had occupied for me. I won’t say I tried every sport and hobby known to man and woman — I never made it as far as fencing — but I went through a good many of them, and none hit the mark. It wasn’t until I was back at my spot on the side of Springvale, Yankees cap on my head, rod in my hands, trying something new, a green and white jitterbug lure, that I felt myself unclench, like a fist you’ve been making so long your fingers have forgotten they ever knew how to stretch, and then, all at once, your hand opens. From talking to people at work, comparing notes, I’ve learned that not many men or women feel this way, this passion so strong you can completely relax in it, about much of anything. To say that I’d stumbled into it by accident seemed, the more I reflected on it, harder to believe than that something, or someone, had brought me to it, someone who knew me well enough to know that this would be perfect for me.

Of course I mean Marie. In the months after her death, I hadn’t had any of those experiences you hear people babble on about on the afternoon talk shows. I hadn’t felt her touch, hadn’t heard her voice, hadn’t seen her. She’d been in my dreams, every one I could remember, but I thought that was no more than what you’d expect. I hadn’t sensed her, so to speak, in any way; although when her sister stopped in to visit one afternoon, she told me she was positive she’d heard Marie’s voice singing a song they’d sung as children outside the kitchen window. When she ran outside to look, the yard was empty. I didn’t feel especially bad that I hadn’t seen or heard Marie. She’d suffered much, too much, and I didn’t begrudge her her rest. I’m not really much in terms of religion. I was baptized Catholic, and went to C.C.D. until my confirmation, but neither of my parents was all that religious. It was more something they felt they had to do to me until I was a certain age, when they could stop. They stopped, I stopped, and that was that. I never gave much thought to God, heaven, or any of that stuff. Marie and I were married in a church, but that was because it was important to her. For the same reason, I made sure she had a funeral mass, with her favorite priest on the altar. When she was dying, when she was gone, all sorts of folks, from close family to fellows I barely knew at work, talked to me about religion, about faith. They told me that I needed it, that a creed would be a help to me. I suppose it might’ve been. I just didn’t seem to have it in me, if you know what I mean.

This one night, my cousin, John, who’s a priest, a Jesuit, stopped by with the intent, it’s safe to say, of making a convert, or whatever it is they call it when you go back to the Church. At one point, I remember him talking about death, asking didn’t I find it terrible to think about ending, about just dying and that was that. Didn’t I think it was terrible that Marie had died and it was all over, that she’d gone and I’d never see her again? I told John it didn’t bother me, which was the truth. She’d been sick a long time, all our marriage, and she’d put up a good fight, and I was the last one was going to deny her a little peace. Tell the truth, I liked the idea of her at peace, at rest. It seemed a lot nicer, a lot more charitable, when you came right down to it, than any busy heaven where she’d be flitting here and there like an oversized hummingbird.

During that second year of fishing, though, I did start to wonder a bit. Maybe it was all the stuff my cousin had said. Those Jesuits are supposed to be clever, aren’t they? And he’d certainly given me the works. With each year that passed, I came to ask myself if Marie might not have gone out of this world so much as gone more deeply into it. From being wrapped up in earth, maybe she’d made her way out into it, into the soil, the water, until she was part of things. Maybe she’d found a way to lead me back to her.

As time flowed on, I refined my gear, moved from a spincast reel to a spinning reel (I never could master a baitcaster), learned how to use a lure to bring in my fish. I searched out other rivers, other streams, to fish. Although it was close, about twenty minutes’ car ride, I never was much for the Hudson. For one thing, for the longest time, you couldn’t eat most of what you caught, and that was a treat a fellow at work had introduced me to that I was reluctant to surrender: not so much bass, but catfish, walleye, and especially trout. For another thing, love the river though I do, and I do, the Hudson’s just too damn big. I prefer a smaller river, one that’s more intimate. I can’t do without moving water, either. I’ve fished lakes, and while I agree it is pleasant to while away a couple of hours floating around in a boat, I prefer being able to stand up and stretch my legs when I want to. So I tried out the Esopus, then the Rondout, and then I started driving up into the Catskills. I don’t know much — anything, really — about my part of the Hudson Valley. Pa had his roots in Springfield, Kentucky — his family was Kentucky Melungeon — although he’d moved around quite a bit as a boy; and Ma came from Scotland: from St. Andrew’s, where they have the golf courses. She stepped off the boat when she was eighteen, met and married Pa in Queens, and the two of them moved up to Poughkeepsie so Pa could take a job managing a bank there. Neither of them knew the area that well, and neither ever showed any inclination to make its acquaintance. Aside from that long-ago day Marie and I had spent at her friend’s brother’s, I’d never been to the mountains. This meant that, when I turned west onto Route 28 heading out of Wiltwyck that first Saturday morning, I was striking out into uncharted territory.

Right from the beginning, I loved it up there. I don’t know if you’ve spent time in the Catskills. From a distance, say, the parking lot of the old Caldor’s (which became an Ames that became a Stop ‘N’ Shop) in Huguenot, they’ve always made me think of a herd of giant animals, all standing grazing on the horizon. Up close, when you’re driving among them with the early morning light breaking over their round peaks, they seem incredibly present, more real than real, these huge solid heaps of rock that wear their trees like mile-long scarves. You glance at them, trying to keep your eyes on the road, which is already pretty busy with people driving up for a weekend getaway, and somehow you wouldn’t be surprised if the mountain closest to you were to cast off its trees in one titanic shrug and start to lumber away, a vast, unimaginable beast. When you turn off onto whatever secondary road you need to take, and you’re following its twists and turns back into the mountains, and the ground is steep to either side of you, opening every now and then on a meadow, or an old house, you think, Here, there are secret places.

Well, that’s what I thought, anyway. I fished as far west as Oneonta, and as far north as Catskill, taking fish from most of the streams between these towns and Wiltwyck. And while I was standing streamside on a Saturday morning, sunlight bouncing on the water as it tumbled over a small waterfall into a broad pool I was sure held a trout or two, and so had cast the spinner with the tri-hook and was watching the lure descending into the water, waiting to reel it in as I tried to decide if that shadow beneath it was just a shadow or a fish come to see what was for breakfast — I say, moments like this a kind of silence seemed to fall over everything. I could still hear the water chuckling, and the birds having their morning conversation, and maybe a car, far away, but I could hear this other sound, too, this sound that wasn’t one, that was quiet. It was like another space had opened up around me, and it was in that quiet, so to speak, that I came to believe I could hear Marie. She didn’t say anything, didn’t make any sound at all, but I could hear her just the same. I couldn’t have said if she were happy or sad, because I had realized that the moving shadow wasn’t a shadow but a trout, and a big one at that, and I had started winding the handle quickly, making that spinner leap forward through the water, my arms already tensed, waiting for the fish to strike and the struggle to begin. Maybe in another situation, another setting, I would have felt differently, the hair on my arms and neck might have stood straight up and my mouth gone dry. Holding on for that trout, though, whose mouth was about to close on the lure, there wasn’t more I could do about that strange silence than know it was there. Later, after I had helped the fish and a few of his friends out onto the ground beside me and was treating myself to a chocolate bar, I would think about what had happened, about that deep, deep quiet.

Even then, I didn’t feel especially scared. The world’s always seemed a pretty big place to me, full of more things than any one body could know, and I’d be the last person to pretend to understand it all. After Marie died, I hadn’t believed there was anything more, but could be I’d been mistaken. Hell, yes, I wanted to be wrong. Who wouldn’t? Her watching me fish didn’t seem threatening, and, really, why should it have? What time we’d had, we’d had good, and maybe she missed me the same way I missed her and wanted to have a look and see how I was doing. I wouldn’t claim I felt her there with me at every river and stream. I can’t say she was always present when I sat at a particular spot, or came on a certain day. I felt her first and most often in the mountains. She was there once when I had worked my way from the Esopus up a little fast-moving stream whose name I meant to learn later but never did. She was there one afternoon when I returned to my spot on Springvale to discover I’d have to share it with two old women sitting on lawn chairs. I can’t say I was haunted, exactly — that sounds a bit too regular for what happened to me. But I did have a visit or two.

II. Rungs on the Ladder of Loss

I reckon I could go on talking about this for the rest of today and tomorrow besides. You’ll have to excuse me: when I think back to what fishing used to be to me, I can almost forget what it became, so I’m inclined to linger on the memory. It’s a nice feeling to be able to look back on a time when I didn’t spend most of my day at the river wondering what exactly might be swimming up to take my line, and when my memory wasn’t full of images to offer as answers. A school of what might have been large tadpoles, except that each one ended in a single, outsized eye; a fish whose back boasted a tall fin like a dragon’s wing and whose rubbery mouth was hedged with long fangs; a pale swimmer with webbed hands and feet and a face that wavered as you looked at it: all of these and more were ready to set my palms sweating and my heart racing. What’s important right now is that you know the place fishing held in my life; it helps to explain why I started taking Dan Drescher with me.

I knew Dan from work. He was two offices down going towards the water cooler. Tall fellow: that was the first thing I thought when he was introduced to me, and I suppose my reaction was typical. Dan was six foot seven inches, thin as the proverbial beanpole. After his height, you noticed Dan’s hair, which was bright orange and appeared never to have been introduced to the benefits of a comb. He kept it cut short, and I can’t imagine what those sessions at the barber’s must have been like. His face was sharp in a way that made you think of something struck from granite: sharp brow; big, sharp nose; round — but sharp — chin. He smiled a lot, and his eyes were kind, which diminished the sharpness some, but if you reflected on his appearance, you might have thought that his was a face made for fierceness.

At first, Dan and I didn’t say much to each other, though what words we did pass were pleasant. There was nothing unusual in this. I was a good two decades his senior, a middle-aged widower whose favorite topics of conversation were fishing and baseball. He was a young man not that long out of M.I.T. who favored expensive suits and whose wife and twin sons were admired by everyone. Marie’s passing had been long enough ago for me not to feel a pang at the family portraits and snapshots Dan displayed on his desk. I’d been on dates with a few women in the last few years, even had what I guess you would call a relationship with one of them. But I never could bring myself to marry anyone else — just didn’t have it in me. A few months before we were married — this was when we were planning the reception — Marie turned to me and said, out of the blue, “Abraham Samuelson, you are the most romantic man I know.” I don’t remember what my answer was. Made a joke out of it, most likely. Maybe she was right, though, maybe there was more of the romantic in me than I thought. Whatever the case, I was alone and Dan had his family, and at the time that seemed to make an unbridgeable gap between us.

Then, one day, I believe it was a Tuesday, Dan didn’t show up for work. In and of itself, this wasn’t such a big deal, except that Dan hadn’t called in sick, which struck anyone who heard it as unusual. Dan had earned a reputation as an especially conscientious worker. At his desk every morning by eight twenty at the latest, a good ten minutes ahead of the rest of us, he took no more than a fifteen-minute lunch — if he didn’t work right through it — and when the rest of us left at four thirty, we waved to him on our way out, knowing that it would probably be another half-hour before he followed us. He was dedicated, and he was talented enough that his dedication counted. I assumed he had his sights set on early and rapid promotion, which, with those twins at home, I could appreciate. All of this is to say that, when Dan wasn’t there and no one knew why, we were inclined to feel a bit more uneasy than we would have otherwise.

As we found out the following day, we’d had every right and reason for our concern. Some read it on the front page of The Poughkeepsie Journal with their morning coffee; others heard it on the radio as they drove to work; still others had it from Frank Block, who was a volunteer fireman and whose absence the previous day also had been noted, but not connected by anyone to Dan’s. There had been an accident. Dan was an early riser, you see, as were the twins. Sometimes his wife, Sophie, took the opportunity to sleep in a little, but yesterday, for whatever reason, she had risen with the rest of them. It was early enough, just a little past six, that when Dan suggested the four of them nip into town for a quick bite of breakfast before he left for work, the idea seemed reasonable. So they bundled the babies into their car seats, and set off. Dan drove, and he failed to fasten his seatbelt, which Sophie noticed. Dan shrugged. It was no big deal, they were only going a short way. It’s your ticket, Sophie said.

The Dreschers lived off South Morris Road, which intersects Route 299, the main road into Huguenot, about three miles east of town. 299’s a fast road, has been for as long as I’ve lived on this side of the Hudson. There should have been a traffic light where Morris crossed it, instead of a pair of stop signs. Maybe the light wouldn’t have made any difference. Maybe the fellow steering the big white eighteen-wheeler would’ve had it up around seventy anyway. Dan said he saw the truck approaching from his right as he turned left onto 299, but it didn’t look to be moving as fast as it was. He pulled out, and that great white beast slammed into his Subaru like a thunderbolt. Dan was thrown through the windshield to, as it turned out, safety. Crushed together, car and truck skidded along the road, jagged bits of metal showering sparks as they went. Before they’d stopped moving, the car erupted in a fireball that was answered, a second later, by an explosion from the truck. By the time the first police car raced to the scene, it was too late. It had been too late, I suppose, from the moment Dan’s foot pressed on the accelerator, the car swept out onto the road. Could be it’d been too late the moment the idiot driving that rig had glanced at his wristwatch, realized that, if his morning delivery was to arrive on schedule, he was going to have to make up some time, and stepped on the gas, shifting up as he did. The fire took his life, which I wish I could say I felt worse about, and it consumed Sophie and the twins. Two days later, the coroner told Dan that, in all likelihood, his wife and children had been killed in the impact, and most likely hadn’t suffered much if at all. I guess the man thought that he was giving what consolation he could.

Dan was polite enough to that coroner, but I think he still was wrapped in the same daze a cop had found him stumbling around the side of the road in. His face was bright with blood, as was the sweatshirt he’d pulled on for going out. At first, the officer wasn’t sure who this tall guy was. As he led Dan toward one of the ambulances that had arrived to find themselves useless, he assumed Dan was a bystander who’d been caught in the accident, an early-morning jogger hit by debris. It took a few minutes for him to sort out that this man had been the driver of the car that was so much fire and metal. When the lightbulb went off over his head, the cop tried to question Dan about the chain of events, but he couldn’t get much coherent out of him. Eventually, one of the EMTs told the guy that Dan was most likely in shock, and in need of the hospital.

The fire took the better part of an hour and three fire companies to extinguish. Traffic coming into and out of Huguenot was delayed and diverted until early afternoon. Two weeks after the accident, a traffic light was hung at that intersection, which I reckon is what four lives is worth these days. Too late for the Dreschers, it became their memorial.

A full six weeks passed before any of us saw Dan again. There was a memorial service for Sophie and the twins at the Huguenot Methodist Church, but it was small, for immediate family. By the time I walked in one Monday morning and, despite myself, jumped at the sight of Dan, back at his desk, his losses had faded from my mind, I’m ashamed to admit. I’d like to say this was because I’d been so busy in the interval, or because my own private life had been very good or even very bad, but I’m afraid none of that would be true. Not much more than out of sight, out of mind, I fear. It’s hard to hold onto any tragedies that aren’t your own for very long. That’s something I learned after Marie died. In the short term, folks can show compassion like you wouldn’t believe; wait a couple of weeks, though, a couple of months at the outside, and see how well their sympathy holds.

Dan returned to work bearing the scar from his trip through his car’s windshield. After his height, that scar became the thing about him that caught your notice. Threading out from among his red hair, which he kept longer now, the scar continued down the right side of his face, skirting the corner of his right eye, veering in at the corner of his mouth, winding down his neck to disappear beneath his shirt collar. You tried not to look, but of course you couldn’t help yourself. It was as if Dan’s face had been knitted together at that white line. I was reminded of the times my pa had taken me walking round the grounds at Penrose College, which he’d liked to do when I was a boy. Without fail, Pa would stop to point out to me a tree that had been struck by lightning. I don’t mean a tree that had had a branch blown off; I mean one that had acted as a living lightning rod, drawing the spark in at its crown and passing it down the length of its trunk to its roots. The lightning’s course had peeled and grooved out a line in the bark from top to bottom that Pa would stand and run his fingers over. “You know,” he’d say every time, “the ancient Greeks used to bury anyone struck by lightning apart from the rest. They knew such people’d had a tremendous experience — a sacred experience — but they weren’t sure if it was good or bad.”

“How could something sacred be bad?” I’d ask, but the only answer I ever received was a shake of his head as he ran his fingers over the channel a river of white fire had rushed through.

Everyone did their best to welcome Dan back to work; even so, a good few months passed before I thought to invite him to come fishing with me. You might expect I would’ve been one of the first people into Dan’s office to talk to him, but you’d be mistaken. If anything, I tended to avoid him. I know how that must sound: if not heartless, then at least weird. Who was in a better position to talk to him, to understand what he was going through and offer words of comfort? We’d both lost our wives, hadn’t we?

Well, yes, we had. The way we’d lost them, though, made for all the difference in the world. All loss is not created equal, you see. Loss is — it’s like a ladder you don’t know you’re standing at the top of and that reaches down, way down past the loss of your job, your possessions, your home; past the loss of your parents, your spouse, your children; down to the loss of your very life — and, I’ve since come to believe, past even that. In that awful hierarchy, what I had undergone, the slow slipping away of my wife over the span of almost two years, stood as far above what Dan had suffered, the disappearance of his wife and children in less time than it takes to tell it, as someone who hadn’t lost anything at all stood above me. Marie and I had had time, and if a lot of that time had been overshadowed by what was rushing toward us, ever-closer, at least we’d been able to make some use of those months, take a road trip out to Wyoming before she was too sick, draw some good out of the bad. You can imagine how much someone in Dan’s position might envy me, might hate me for having what I had more fiercely than he might someone whose wife was happily alive. I could imagine that hatred, so kept what I intended as a respectful distance.

Besides, there didn’t seem to be anything wrong with the guy. He didn’t go to pieces the way that I had. Sure, there were days when the shirt he was wearing was the same one we’d seen him in yesterday, or his suit was wrinkled, or his tie stained, but there were enough single men at the office about whom you could notice the same or similar things for such details not to strike you as too serious. Aside from the scar and the slightly longer hair, the only change I saw in Dan lay in his eyes, which locked into a permanent stare. Not a blank stare, mind. It was a more intense look, the kind that suggests great concentration: the brow lowered ever-so-slightly, the eyes crinkled, as if the starer is trying to see right through what’s in front of them. In that stare, something of the fierceness I’d seen dormant in his face came to the surface, and it could be a tad unsettling to have him focus it on you. Although his manner remained civil — he was always at least polite, frequently pleasant — under that gaze I felt a bit like a prisoner in one of those escape from Alcatraz movies the moment the spotlight catches him.

When I finally did ask Dan to fish with me, I acted on impulse, a spur-of-the-moment kind of thing. I was standing in the doorway of Frank Block’s office, telling him about my struggle the previous weekend to land a trout. The trout hadn’t been the biggest I’d ever caught, but he had been strong. My efforts had been complicated by the fact that, when the fish struck, I’d been away behind a clump of bushes, answering a call of nature brought on by a cup of extremely powerful coffee I’d drunk not an hour before. My line had been quiet prior to the moment I’d felt the uncontrollable urge to visit the bushes, so I thought it would be safe to leave the rod wedged in between my tacklebox and a log whilst I did what must be done. Naturally, this was the moment the fish chose to take the fly and run. When I heard the reel buzzing, I started looking around furiously for some leaves. Then, with a clatter and a crash, the fish pulled the rod over and began dragging it toward the river. There was no time for me to do anything but rush from my improvised toilet, pants still around my ankles, and dive for the rod, which I just managed to catch. I staggered to my feet, and spent the next ten minutes working that fish, giving him a little line, drawing him in, giving him a little line, drawing him in, naked from waist to ankles as the day the doctor took me from my ma. When at last I hauled the trout from the water and stood there holding him up to admire, I noticed movement on the other side of the river. Two young women were standing across from me, the one with a pair of binoculars, the other with a camera. Both were pointing in my direction and laughing. I don’t like to think at what.

“What’d you do?” Frank asked, laughing himself.

“What else could I do?” I said. “I bowed to them both, turned around, and shuffled back up the bank.”

“You fish?” Dan asked. He’d come up behind me as I was talking. I must have been aware of him, since I didn’t jump ten feet in the air and shout, “Jesus!” I turned and said, “I do. I fish most days it isn’t raining, and some when it is.”

“I used to fish,” Dan said. “My dad used to take me.”

“Really?” I said. “What kind of fishing?”

“Nothing that exciting,” he said. “Lakes and ponds, mostly.”

“You ever catch anything?” Frank asked. He was one of those fellows who likes to talk fishing more than he does fish fishing.

“Some,” Dan said. He shrugged. “Bass. A lot of sunnies. My dad caught a pike, once.”

“No kidding,” I said. “Pike’s a tough fish to land.”

“You can say that again,” Frank said.

“It took us the whole afternoon,” Dan said. “When we got him into the boat, he was almost three feet long. It was a record for that lake. This was in Maine. My dad gave the fish to Captain Pete — he was the guy who ran the bait and tackle shop on the lake. We bought our bait from him, soda, too. He had this big cooler full of cans of soda. Anyway, he was so impressed, he had that fish mounted — you know, gave it to a taxidermist — and hung it up on one of his shop’s walls. He had my dad’s name and the date the fish was caught carved on the mount.”

“Wow,” Frank said, whether at the story or at Dan’s having told us it I couldn’t say. As far as either of us knew, Dan’s anecdote was the most he had said to anyone at work since the accident. I asked, “You fished since then, Dan?”

“Not for years,” he replied. “Not since before the twins were born.”

Frank looked down at his desk. I swallowed the lump that had formed in my throat and said, “Want to come with me?”

“Fishing,” Dan said.

“Uh-huh.”

“When?”

“How about this weekend? Say, Saturday morning? Unless you have plans, that is.”

He scowled, and I realized Dan wasn’t sure if I was mocking him. He said, “I don’t know.”

All at once, it was the most important thing in the world for Dan to come fishing with me. I can’t say exactly why that should have been. Maybe I wanted to prove my sincerity to him. Maybe I thought that fishing would do for him what it’d done for me; although, as I’ve said, I had no evidence to suggest that Dan’s life had collapsed the way mine had. Or maybe my motive was something less well-defined, something as simple as wanting to have another person to pass a few words with while I fished. I don’t know. Until that moment, I’d always done well enough fishing on my own. Whatever the reason, I said, “Why don’t you come along? I’ve got an extra rod if you need it, and more’n’enough tackle for the two of us. I was just planning on heading out to the Svartkil, so it won’t be that far if you don’t like it and want to leave. I go pretty early — this weather, I like to be set up and have my line in the water by sunrise — but you’re welcome to come whenever you can make it there. What do you say?”

Dan’s scowl wavered, then dissipated. “What the hell,” he said. “Why not?”

And that was how Dan Drescher and I started fishing together. I told him where the spot on Springvale was, and he was there waiting for me when I drove up in the pre-dawn dark. He’d brought his own rod and tacklebox, and from the sheen and smell of both of them, I knew they’d entered his possession in the last day or so. That was okay. It reminded me of myself, those many years ago. He’d brought a hat, too, a kind of straw cowboy affair that I later learned he’d purchased on a vacation in Arizona with his wife. We chose and attached our lures, cast, and as the sun burst through the trees across from us, were sitting waiting to see who might be interested in the early breakfast we were serving.

That first morning — that first day, actually, since Dan stayed there with me until the sun had moved from our fronts to our backs and then left for the night — we didn’t say much to one another. Nor was there a whole lot of conversation the next day, when (somewhat to my surprise, since he hadn’t mentioned it the previous day, just thanked me as he was leaving) I pulled my car onto the side of the road and my headlights picked out Dan sitting on a tree stump, considering the contents of his tacklebox. He offered no explanation, nodding at me as I walked over and saying, “Morning. Weather report says there might be rain today.”

“You can still catch ’em in the rain,” I said.

He grunted, and that was pretty much that for the remainder of the day. The following weekend, we fished the Svartkil again and didn’t do too badly for ourselves. On Sunday night, as we were packing our gear, I said, “I’m thinking of heading up the Esopus next Saturday. Not too far: about forty minutes’ drive. You interested?”

“Yeah,” he said.

“Good,” I said, and meant it.

So we fished the Esopus the following weekend, and Frenchman’s Creek the weekend after that, and then I took him up to the Catskills, to the Beaverkill, up by Mount Tremper. Sunday night, on our way home, we stopped at Winchell’s, a burger place right on 28, just the other side of Woodstock. This was where I learned that Dan’s family hailed from Phoenicia, a town in the thick of the mountains, and that he knew the area and its history fairly well. He’d never fished it, though. In fact, he said as he wiped the ketchup off his plate with his remaining fry, he hadn’t been up here since before Sophie was pregnant, when he’d driven her out 28 so she could see where he’d grown up.

It’s always tricky when someone who’s lost what Dan had speaks about it, especially so soon after. You’re never quite sure what to say, because you can’t tell if the person’s only offering a passing comment, or if they’re looking to talk. I imagine this is how folks must’ve felt with me after Marie died. With Dan and me, there wasn’t the kind of long friendship or deep family bond that would allow you to feel you could risk making a blunder, since you could count on the other person knowing you were trying your best. This wasn’t the first such remark Dan had made in my hearing. It seemed he’d been voicing a few more of them each weekend; I suppose that was why I decided to chance it and said, “So, what did she think?”

“Who?” he asked.

“Your wife,” I said, already afraid I’d blown it, “Sophie. What did she think of Phoenicia?”

For the barest instant, long enough for it to be visible, a look swept across Dan’s face that was equal parts disbelief and pain, as if I’d broken into the private vault of his recollections. Then, to my surprise, he grinned and said, “She told me she understood me and my redneck ways a whole hell of a lot better, now.”

I grinned back, and the worst was past. For the rest of that summer, on into early fall, as we roamed the Catskills, fishing streams I’d fished on my own, trying some spots that were new to me, I learned a little about Dan’s wife, and about his family, too. He never said much at any one time. I don’t believe he’d ever been the kind of fellow to speak about himself for too long. As you may have noticed, that’s a condition that’s never afflicted me, and once I saw it was all right with Dan, I had no problem talking about my life, which I hadn’t thought was all that interesting, just long enough for me to have seen and heard a bit. I talked about Marie, some, though not about her dying. If there was one topic that was off-limits, it was our respective bereavements. This complicated my conversation, since, as I’ve said, she was sick for really all of our short marriage. I solved that problem by speaking about the way things had been before we’d married, during our courtship. I talked about Marie, and I continued to feel her occasional visits, often when Dan was sitting only a few feet from me. I don’t know that I ever got used to those moments — however regular they might become, I don’t know that a body could — but I continued to take an odd sort of comfort from them.

Consciously or no, Dan followed my lead, by and large sticking to the beginning times, to events far enough removed you had an easier time convincing yourself the pain you felt in your chest was nostalgia, nothing more. He never spoke about the twins, Jason and Jonas, and, to be honest, I was grateful for that. Marie had wanted children in the worst way, and it had been one of her bitterest disappointments to have to leave this world without having had at least one. She and I had spoken about the matter a fair bit, up until the morning of the day she died, in fact, and after she was gone I found I had trouble being around children, seeing Marie’s nieces and nephews at the family events I continued to be invited to. Seeing them, seeing any small child, reminded me of what Marie and I hadn’t had the chance to have that we had wanted to have, and that focused my hurt the way a magnifying glass does sunlight. Over the years, those feelings had silted over. I found it easier to cope with the presence of children. But I guess they weren’t as far off as I might’ve wanted. All it took was the strong wind of me talking, and there they were, a little dusty, but in one piece.

Still and all, I liked to believe that whatever slight discomfort I might’ve felt was worth it if our talking was helping Dan. In fact, when the fishing season was over that fall, I worried a little for him. I’d yet to find my winter substitute for fishing, you see — never have, to this day — so it wasn’t as if I could say to Dan, “Well, now that fishing season’s over, we’ll have to start practicing our curling.” After having fished and talked together as much as we had, we shouldn’t have needed that kind of excuse, I know, but, lacking an activity like fishing, I felt strange saying to Dan, “Hey, let’s get together this weekend and talk.” Stupid, yes. In any event, Dan was expecting company that first fishing-less weekend, his brother and his family. The first anniversary of the accident was rearing its hideous head, and his and Sophie’s families had decided that he shouldn’t be alone for the weeks to either side of it. He was busy well into the New Year.

Although I saw Dan every day at work, passed a few words with him here and there, it wasn’t until late February of that next year that I finally had him over for dinner. Despite its abbreviated length, February’s always struck me as an especially bleak month, at least in these parts. I know it’s not the darkest month, and I know it’s not the coldest or the snowiest month, but February is gray in a way I can’t explain. In February, all the big, happy holidays are gone, and it’s weeks and weeks — months, even — until Easter and spring. I suppose that’s why whoever decides these things stuck Valentine’s Day smack dab in the middle of the month, to help lighten its load. To be honest, though, even when I had a reason to celebrate the fourteenth, I still thought of the second month as a bleak time. I think this was part of the reason I invited Dan to join me in a meal, and why, when I opened the door that Sunday night and saw him standing there, unshaven and obviously unshowered, wearing an old track suit reeking of mothballs and mildew, I wasn’t as surprised as I might have been, especially considering that, when I’d seen him on Friday, he’d been his usual tidy self. I looked at him standing in the doorway, his eyes red-rimmed and bloodshot, and thought, Of course: it’s February.

They say that, for most people, the second year after you lose someone is harder than the first. During that first year, the theory goes, you’re still in shock. You don’t really believe what’s happened to you has happened; you can’t. During that second year, it starts to sink in that the person — or, in Dan’s case, people — you’ve been pretending are away on a visit aren’t coming back. This wasn’t what happened to me, but I guess that was because I’d been losing Marie for a long time before she was gone, and so had been using a lot of those same tricks on myself most folks don’t discover until much later. But the theory held true for Dan. He’d made a brave face of things through Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year, had done his best to be a good host to his various visiting relatives, and once the last of them — a cousin from Ohio — had been gone for going on a week, with no promise of anyone else appearing in the immediate future, the knowledge of how alone he was had crushed him like a truckful of bricks. Until this point, he’d been doing all right sleeping — not great, mind you, but not bad — and he’d been able to distract himself watching old movies on the VCR, one of his passions. Now sleep had fled, chased away by the memory of that huge white truck rushing toward him, its grill like a great set of chrome teeth grinning at him as it prepared to take a bite out of his life from which he’d never recover. When he tried to watch TV, his copy of Red River, say, or one of the late-night talk shows, whatever was on the screen was replaced by Sophie’s face, turning away from him to look at the roaring tractor-trailer, her expression sliding from early-morning fatigue to wide-eyed terror, her mouth opening to make a sound Dan never heard.

He told me this over the course of dinner, which was spaghetti and meatballs with garlic bread and salad, in answer to my asking, “So, Dan, how are you?” I didn’t interrupt him, confining myself to making sympathetic grunts. This was the most he’d spoken to me at one time, and the most about the subject of his loss, and once he’d started I knew better than to derail him. He took most of dinner to unburden himself, during which time he ate little — some garlic bread was all — but managed four full glasses from the bottle of red wine I’d set on the table. This was sufficient to start him swaying ever-so-slightly, and to pull his eyelids lower. Once I thought he was finished talking, I said, “Now, don’t take this the wrong way, but maybe you should talk to someone, you know, professional. Maybe that’d be a help to you.”

His voice slurring, Dan said, “No offense taken, Abe — Abraham. You want to know what helps? I’ll tell you. At about four in the morning, when I’m lying on my bed with my eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling, which is kind of like a movie screen hanging there above me, because it’s white, and because I can see everything that happened played out there on it, again and again — when it gets to be four in the morning, and I think, I’m going to get up in an hour and a half anyway, why not now? I haul myself out of bed, throw on some clothes, doesn’t matter what, make myself a cup of coffee to go — can’t miss my morning cup of coffee — and I go, take the car and drive out to the corner of Morris Road and 299. Morris has a wide shoulder there, so it’s no problem for me to pull off onto it and sit drinking my morning cup of coffee. There’s a traffic light there now, did you know that? Did you?”

“Yeah,” I said, “I did.”

“Of course you did: who doesn’t? It marks the spot where the Drescher family — where we — where the happy family of one Daniel Anthony Drescher was forever reduced. I sit at that spot — that historic spot, coffee in hand, and I look at that traffic light. I study it. I contemplate it. I watch its three glass eyes trade off commands. If it’s warm enough, or if it isn’t, I open my window and listen to it. Let’s say the light starts off green. There’s a buzzing, almost like an alarm clock, which is followed by a clunk, and the light is yellow. Another buzzing, another clunk, and it’s red. It’s like gates being opened and shut, like prison gates. The light stays red the longest, did you know that? I’ve timed it. This is looking at it from Morris. From 299, it stays green the longest. After red comes green, then yellow. Buzz, clunk. Buzz, clunk. Gates opening and shutting, Abe. Gates opening and shutting.

“I’ll let you in on a little secret, too. Looking at the light doesn’t help in the slightest. I don’t think, Well, at least some good has come out of this terrible tragedy. The intersection’s just another place to be. I can’t escape it. I can’t escape any of it. Myself am hell, right? So I might as well be at the spot where I took the plunge, so to speak, the place where I was cast out. I do feel calmer there. Strange, huh? I have the strangest thoughts lately. I swear I do. When I look at things — when I look at people — I think, None of it’s real. It’s all just a mask, like those papier-mâché masks we made for one of our school plays when I was a kid. What play was that? It seems like it must have been Alice in Wonderland, but I can’t remember. I wish I could remember that play. I wish I could. All a mask, Abe, and the million-dollar question is, What’s underneath the mask? If I could break through the mask, if I could make a fist and punch a hole in it,” his hand slammed the table, rattling the dishes, “what would I find? Just flesh? Or would there be something more? Would I find those things the minister talked about at the funerals? You weren’t there, were you? I guess we didn’t know each other so well then. Beauty, the minister said, the three of them were in a place of beauty, beauty beyond our ability to know. Joy, too, it’s a place of unending joy. If I could punch a hole through the mask, would I see beauty and joy? You would think, either it’s got to be heaven, because that’s what we’re talking about, right? Or it’s what it is, the mask is everything. But I’ll tell you, when I’m sitting at that intersection, watching the light go through its cycles, I think of other — other possibilities. Maybe whoever, or whatever, is running the show isn’t so nice. Maybe he’s evil, or mad, or bored, disinterested. Maybe we’ve got everything completely wrong, everything, and if we could look through the mask, what we’d see would destroy us. You ever feel that way?”

“Not exactly,” I said.

“That’s all right,” Dan said and, leaning back in his chair, promptly fell asleep.

Recalling Dan’s words now, it’s hard for me not to shudder, to wonder, How did he know? They say extreme states of mind can push you to — a visionary state, I guess you’d call it. Could be that’s what happened to him. Then again, I have to remind myself that what transpired that day at Dutchman’s Creek: what we heard; what we saw; God help me, what we touched; that all of that doesn’t necessarily bear out Dan’s words. It feels a lot like special pleading to say that, though. Actually, it feels more like flat-out, Pollyanna, pie-in-the-sky denial. But there are some things, no matter if they’re true, you can’t live with them. You have to refuse them. You turn your eyes away from whatever’s squatting right there in front of you and not only pretend it isn’t there now, but that you never saw it in the first place. You do so because your soul is a frail thing that can’t stand the blast-furnace heat of revelation, and truth be damned. What else can a body do?

Since he wasn’t in any shape to drive home, I gave Dan my bed and I took the couch. It was no fun trying to get him out of that chair, maneuver him through the living room and down the hall, and guide him into the bedroom. He kept wanting to stop and lie down, and it’s no small task convincing a big man drunk on wine and exhaustion not to decamp in the middle of the hallway. Despite everything Dan had said, I had no trouble sleeping. Later that night — technically speaking, it must have been the next morning — I had a nightmare, the first since Marie died. As a rule, my dreams had been of the mundane, this-is-what-I-did-today variety. Seldom, if ever, did my mind conjure any strange, exotic dreams, any dream-like dreams. I’ve always been this way. Truth to tell, I used to sort of envy those folks who dreamed they were on great adventures, or having passionate love affairs, or dining with famous people. To me, those dreams seemed like starring in your own private movie. This dream was no happy Hollywood extravaganza. It was the kind of film you want to turn off but can’t, because switching it off would mean standing up from the couch and crossing the living room, and you’re literally too scared to do that. It seems like a tremendous risk. But that’s not all, no. You’re fascinated, too. So you sit there, unable to stop watching, knowing full well you’ll regret your failure to change the channel later, when you’ve pulled the bedclothes up over your head and are praying that the creak you heard outside the bedroom door was the house settling, not a footstep.

In the dream, I was fishing. I want to say it started out normally enough, except that isn’t true. I was standing beside this narrow, winding, fast-moving stream. When I say it was fast-moving, I mean the water was frothing, the way it does after a torrential storm. I couldn’t see into it at all. To my left, the stream descended from a steep hill. To my right, it foamed on level for a dozen yards before dropping away. In front of me, across the stream, the other shore rose steeply to a dense line of evergreens. Behind me, the ground also sloped up to a heavy cluster of trees. Overhead, the sky was pure blue, the sun dazzling. Despite the sunlight, the trees across from me — not only the spaces between them, but the trees themselves — were dark, not simply in shadow, but truly dark, as if they’d been shaped out of night itself. Standing there at the edge of that raging stream, rod in hands, line cast, I could not take my eyes from those trees, those dark trees, even though looking at them gave me the most intense vertigo, as if in looking over at them I were looking down a great distance, into a deep chasm. What was worse, I could feel myself being watched, could feel the eyes of things at the edge of the trees, and of things much farther in, which I somehow knew were bigger, much bigger — I say I could feel those eyes, their gaze, like a swarm of insects crawling all over me. A scream was building in my throat. I was on the verge of tossing my gear and bolting, when something took my line.

The rod bowed with the force of it. Line started to run out, and run out fast, faster than I’d ever seen, making the furious sound you hear on one of those shows about deep-sea fishing, when a marlin or a swordfish takes the bait. It ran out fast, and it ran out long, as if the fish I’d hooked had decided to dive straight down, down much deeper than I thought a stream this size could be. Afraid to grab the handle in case the line snapped, (and wondering if that would be such a bad thing), I held the rod. My catch dove ever-deeper; the line sizzled out. Abruptly, whatever I’d hooked stopped dead. I hesitated, waiting to see if it was only pausing. Nothing. I started turning the handle. For what seemed like hours, I wound that line back in, drawing in more of it than I could have had. Even in the depths of the dream, I knew this. Apart from a brief tug, which immediately stilled my hand, until I’d determined I wasn’t going to have a fight on my hands, and went back to winding the reel, my catch was limp, passive. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out what kind of fish I’d caught. I’m no expert, not by a long shot, but I’d never heard tell of a fish that took your line, dove straight down with it until, apparently, it exhausted itself, then allowed you to draw it in with no further struggle. For the matter, I’d no idea what stream this was, that let my mystery fish dive so deep. The landscape resembled the Catskills, but where in the mountains, I didn’t recognize.

I can’t say how exactly I knew what I’d hooked was drawing closer, since I couldn’t see through the seething water, but know I did, and along with that knowledge came the sense that all those things in the trees around me were holding their collective breath, eager, anticipating what, I didn’t know. As what was on the other end of my line broke the water’s froth, time slowed. I saw something dark, swirling in the water like so many snakes. No, not snakes, more like some kind of plant, seaweed. No, not seaweed, more like hair, like a headful of hair. It was hair, thick and brown, soaking, hopelessly tangled. The hair parted to either side of a high, pale forehead, and long, narrow eyebrows arching over closed eyes. I knew, at that moment, even before I saw her high cheekbones, her sharp, almost pointed nose, her mouth that was the only feature out of proportion on her face — two sizes too small, I’d teased her — her mouth, through whose upper lip the barbed hook of the fly had slid and from which my fishing line now dangled. There was no blood. Instead, black, viscous liquid smeared the wound. I stood there, looking at my wife, at my poor, dead Marie — I still knew she was gone from me — I stood on the side of that dream-stream holding onto that rod tightly, desperately, because I couldn’t think what else to do. Half of me was so terrified I wanted to fling that rod away and run, no matter if it meant finding out what was waiting in those evergreens. Half of me was so heartbroke I wanted to fling myself into the stream and grab her, hold her before she could slip back to wherever she’d risen from. I might as well have lost her five minutes ago, the pain was that sharp. Hot tears poured down my face like there was no tomorrow.

Then she opened her eyes. I whimpered, that’s the only word for it, this high-pitched noise that forced its way out of my mouth. Marie’s eyes, her warm, brown eyes, which had held so much of passion and kindness, were gone, replaced by flat, yellow-gold disks, by the dull dead eyes of a fish. As she stared impassively up at me, I was suddenly seized by the conviction that, if I were to haul her out of the raging stream, I would find the rest of her similarly transformed, her lovely body given over to rows of slime-crusted scales and sharp fins. My arms and legs, and everything in between, were shaking so badly it was all I could do to keep standing where I was.

Her lips parted, and Marie spoke. When she did, it was faint, as if she were simultaneously calling to me from across a vast distance and whispering in my ear. “Abe,” she said, in what I recognized straight away as her voice, but her voice with a difference, as if it were coming from a throat that wasn’t used to it anymore.

I nodded to her, my tongue dumb in my mouth, and she went on in that same distant-close way. “He’s a fisherman, too.” Her words were slurred, from the hook piercing her lip.

Again, I nodded, unsure whom she was referring to. Dan?

“Some streams run deep,” Marie said.

My lips trembling, I mumbled, “M-M-Marie?”

“Deep and dark,” she said.

“Honey?” I said.

“He waits,” she went on.

“Who?” I asked. “What do you mean?”

I couldn’t understand her answer, a word the hook tugging her lip wouldn’t let her get her mouth around. The word, or name, collapsed in the saying, a mess of syllables that I thought sounded German, or Dutch. “There fissure”? That was what it sounded like. Before I could ask her to repeat it, Marie said, “What’s lost is lost, Abe.”

“The who?” I said, still trying to piece together those syllables.

“What’s lost is lost,” Marie said. “What’s lost is lost.”

From the spot where my lure pierced her lip, a deep gash raced up her face into her hair, splitting her skin. As I watched, horrified, the edges of it peeled away from each other, revealing something shining and scaled underneath. I cried out, stumbling backwards, and without a backward glance Marie dove beneath the rushing white stream. The fishing line, locked in place, tightened, pulling me headlong toward the water, my hands unable to release their grip on the rod. A half-dozen lurching steps, and I was at the water’s edge, which bubbled and danced like a thing alive. I knew, with dream-certainty, that under no circumstances did I want to venture any nearer that stream. I was dizzy with fear, of Marie, of whatever was in there with her, of the very water itself, which chuckled and laughed at my desperate struggle to avoid it. I fought furiously, digging my heels into the sand as I was dragged forward. For a moment, the line relaxed and, fool that I am, so did I. This meant that when the next big tug came, I flew headlong into the white water and open mouths full of white teeth, rows and rows of white teeth in white water, and beyond them—

Sitting bolt upright on the living room couch, I woke, mouth dry, heart pounding.

III. At Herman’s Diner

With the benefit of hindsight, I find it difficult not to see that dream as an omen. To be honest, I can’t see now how I could have taken it for anything else. That’s the problem with telling stories, though, isn’t it? After the dust has settled, when you sit down to piece together what happened, and maybe more importantly how it happened, so you might have some hope of knowing why it happened, there are moments, like the dream, that forecast subsequent events with such accuracy you wonder how you possibly could have been deaf to their message. Thing is, it’s only once what they were anticipating has come to pass that you’re able to recognize their significance. The morning after I’d had that dream, while the sight of that raging stream, Marie’s face opening up, were more than fresh in my memory, if you’d asked me what I thought the dream signified, I imagine I would’ve said it was expressing my fear that I’d replaced my wife with fishing. I reckon we’ve all seen enough pop psychologists on this TV program or that for a lot of us to be able to offer convincing interpretations of their dreams. Had you asked me if I thought the dream a caution, a prophecy like you read about in the Bible, I’d most likely have given you one of the looks we give to characters we’re pretty sure are pulling our legs and asked you what you’d been drinking. After all, even if I were the kind of person who believes that dreams can tap into what’s waiting for us down the road, what was there for me to fear in fishing?

On top of that, the dream never recurred, and isn’t that what those psychic warnings are supposed to do, don’t they repeat themselves to prove their seriousness? I suppose it remained sufficiently clear in my memory not to need repeating; if I pondered it at all, however, it was as a curiosity of my own psyche, a peculiarity my mind had thrown up from its depths. I’d been a bit lax in visiting Marie’s grave that winter. I assumed the dream had more to do with that than any real place, or person. Nor, for what it’s worth, did I connect my dream of Marie with her visits to me while I was fishing; the thought never even occurred to me.

Dan’s appearance, his state of mind, that Sunday night were the first signs of a change that overtook him during the next couple of months. To this day, I’m not sure exactly what triggered it, but his grief, kept at bay so long, found a way to tunnel under Dan’s defenses, and, while he was otherwise distracted, seized the moment and fell on him, burying its dirty teeth deep in his gut and refusing to let go. Dan wore the same suit and tie for days at a time. A scraggly beard surged and ebbed across his face. His hair, longer still, frequently jutted out in strange configurations. His hours at work became erratic, to say the least. Some mornings he wouldn’t show up until nine or nine thirty; others, he’d be at his desk by quarter to seven. Even on those days he was in well ahead of the rest of us, he’d spend most of his time staring at the screen of the computer he hadn’t switched on yet. His stare, that look that I had felt wanted to pierce through you, worsened to the point it was next to impossible to hold any kind of conversation with him. He didn’t appear to be listening to anything you were saying, just boring into you with those eyes that had been turned all the way up, blowtorch bright. He never left work later than the rest of us, and it wasn’t unusual to walk by his office at the end of the day and find it empty.

Before long, his job was in serious jeopardy. He’d been team leader on a pair of important projects, one of which demoted him, while the other dropped him outright. The company had changed. This was not, as management had started trumpeting, your father’s IBM, which I guess meant it wasn’t my IBM. The notion of a corporate family that took care of its own and in so doing earned their loyalty was on the way out, evicted by simple greed. What this meant practically speaking was that Dan could not be assured of the same understanding and indulgence I had received more than a decade prior. That he didn’t much care if he kept his job or not at this moment didn’t mean he wouldn’t feel differently in the future, and I did my best to make him see this. He wasn’t much interested in what I had to say. His grief had taken him far into a country whose borders are all most folks ever see, and from where he was, caught up in that dark land’s customs and concerns, what I was worrying over sounded so foreign I might as well have been speaking another language.

If you’d asked me, after my second try at speaking to him, whether I thought Dan would be around when fishing season started that spring, I’d have told you flat-out, “No.” Frank Block had been unceremoniously let go the previous month, escorted from the building by a pair of security goons when he started to yell that this wasn’t right, he deserved better than this. My own manager, a young fellow whose chief qualification for his position must have been his smarminess, since it was the only quality he possessed in abundance — my manager had taken to dropping none-too-subtle hints that the company was offering exceedingly generous severance packages to those who were wise enough to take them. It wasn’t just the night of the long knives. Up and down the corridors of our building, it was days and weeks and months of management given leave to slice down to the bone and keep going. And in the midst of this carnage, here was Dan, laying his head on the chopping block and holding out the axe for anyone who was interested. I’d have been wrong in my prediction, though. Somehow, Dan held onto his job. No matter what shape he was in, Dan was a bright guy — graduated near top of his class at M.I.T. — and I guess he must have contributed enough for it to have been worth more to keep him on board than it was to throw him to the sharks.

I wonder, sometimes, if we’d have gone fishing that spring if Dan and I hadn’t been working together. He hadn’t returned to my house since that night in February. I’d invited him over a few times, but he’d always claimed to be constrained by this or that obligation — though their visits had fallen off from what they had been, both his and Sophie’s families still made sporadic attempts to visit him, which always seemed to coincide with my invitations to him. He never offered to have me over. I was pretty sure he was embarrassed about everything that had happened, yet I couldn’t see a way to tell him he shouldn’t be without stirring those memories up for him and making him uncomfortable all over again. My warnings to him about his job aside, I did my best to respect the distance he demanded.

With some measure of surprise, then, I returned from lunch one day about two weeks from the start of trout season to find Dan waiting in my office, perched on the edge of my desk like a big, skinny gargoyle. “Hi, Abe,” he said.

“Hello, Dan,” I said. “What can I do for you?”

“How long is it till trout season starts?”

“Thirteen days,” I said. “If you give me a minute, I can tell you how many hours and minutes on top of that.”

“Are you going?”

“Dan,” I protested, “how could you ask such a question?”

He didn’t smile. “Would you mind some company?”

“I’m counting on it,” I said, which wasn’t exactly true. I hadn’t been sure Dan would be joining me this year. Given his embarrassment over February, combined with his general remove from everyone of late, I’d assumed there was a better than likely chance he’d want to do any fishing he had in mind on his own, and so hadn’t raised the subject with him.

“That’s good,” Dan said. “Thank you.”

“Don’t mention it. Where would I be without my fishing buddy?”

“Can I tell you something?” he asked, shifting forward as he did.

“Sure.”

“I’ve been dreaming about fishing,” he said. “A lot.”

“I dream about it, too,” I said, “although most of my reverie occurs in the middle of meetings.”

Dan’s eyes, which had widened at the news of my dreaming, narrowed at my joke. “Right,” he said, the slightest annoyance curdling his voice. He stood from the desk and asked, “Are you going to the Svartkil?”

I nodded. “It’s where I kick off every season. Kind of a tradition, you know?”

“Fine, of course,” he said. “And after that? Are you going back up the Catskills?”

“Indeed I am. There’s a couple of new streams I’m looking forward to trying out.”

“Good,” he said. “I might want to suggest one myself — if that’s all right with you.”

“That would be great. Where did you have in mind?”

“Dutchman’s Creek,” he said. If this had been a movie, I guess this would have been the moment ominous music boomed on the soundtrack. As it was, there was only the din of people talking as they continued to make their way back from lunch. Dan continued, “Have you heard of it?”

“Can’t say I have. Where is it?”

“Up around Woodstock. It runs out of the Reservoir to the Hudson.”

“Sounds like a possibility, then. How’d you come across it?”

“In a book.”

As a rule, I am one of the worst people I know when it comes to sniffing out a lie. Throughout my life, my family and friends have exploited this almost limitless gullibility by playing an almost endless number of practical jokes on me, some of which would make you shake your head in pity. Right then, however, I knew Dan was lying. I can’t say how I knew, since it wasn’t as if he rubbed his hands together and shifted his eyes from side to side, but I was sure enough to say, “Really?”

“Really,” he said, frowning at my tone.

“Which book?” I asked, unable to figure why he would feel the need to lie about such a thing.

“Alf Evers’s history of the Catskills,” he said. “Do you know it?”

“No,” I admitted, “can’t say as I do.” Although I was certain Dan was lying, equally certain he’d named Alf Evers’s book because I’d told him I didn’t read much, and what did pass beneath my gaze tended to split between spy thrillers and Louis L’Amours, I couldn’t see how it made much difference where he’d found the name of this creek. Maybe he’d had it from a woman he met at a bar, and was ashamed to reveal such a source. As long as the stream was where he said it was and the fish were biting, what difference did it make? I said, “Well, then, we’ll have to add Dutchman’s Creek to our itinerary.”

My decision, minor though it seemed to me, pleased Dan past all measure. His face brightened, and he shook his head up and down happily, saying, “Yes we will, Abe, yes we will.” Our plans made, it was back to work. We agreed to meet at the usual spot on Springvale the Saturday after next. Dan volunteered to bring coffee and donuts.

That night, I sought out Dutchman’s Creek in my Ulster County Atlas, which took me longer than it should have, since the creek had no listing in the book’s index. This struck me as a little odd. In general, the Atlas is pretty detailed. I had to leaf through, find the pages mapping the Ashokan Reservoir, and search its borders. My finger passed over the spot where the creek flowed out of the Reservoir at least twice, but on the third try I found it. When I did, I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen the creek right away. It was hard to miss, a blue thread winding its way from the Reservoir’s south shore over to the Hudson, running well north of Wiltwyck, south of Saugerties. I traced its course with my index finger, something I like to do for a place I’m going to fish. Dutchman’s Creek kinked and twisted, almost looping back on itself a couple of times. I figured this would provide the fish a host of spots to congregate. As my finger followed the creek’s perambulations, I wondered where it drew its name from. All up and down the Hudson, from Manhattan to Albany, originally had been settled by the Dutch, and you still find a fair number of towns on both sides of the river whose names show it: Peekskill, Newburgh, Fishkill. I hadn’t studied the matter, of course, but it seemed to me that, while you found a lot of places named by the Dutch, you didn’t find many named for them. In fact, aside from this creek, I couldn’t think of one. Who was the Dutchman? I wondered, closing the Atlas.

I had an answer to that question two months later, while Dan and I sat at the counter of Herman’s Diner on Route 28, just west of Wiltwyck. Dan had wanted to stop there for a cup of coffee and breakfast on the way up to the creek, which he did from time to time. I prefer to eat before I leave the house or, if I’m hungry, to order my egg and cheese sandwich to go. On the occasions Dan wanted to stop for breakfast, he liked to sit down and study the menu, order a plate of something he hadn’t had before, the Greek omelet, the walnut pancakes. Had he done so too often, I suspect it would have become an issue. However, his requests that we sacrifice a half-hour at this or that diner were few and far enough between for me to say to myself, What the hell. It’s been a while since I had any walnut pancakes, and maybe a side of sausage would be nice with them. Besides, I guessed from my own history that Dan wasn’t eating as well as he should have been, so I figured at least he’d have one decent meal today.

This morning, there was no rush for us to arrive streamside. For the better part of the last week, the sky had been crowded with gray clouds that dumped so much rain on us I swear you needed gills to walk around outside. The rain had tapered off late the night before, but the clouds had not yet departed the sky, and I reckoned any stream we wanted to fish was going to be swollen and fast-running, dim with mud and debris. There are those fishermen who’ll tell you that, after the kind of downpour we’d had, you might as well wait a day or two till you cast your line, but I’m among the “a bad day of fishing is still better than a good day of just about anything else” crowd. I was then, anyway, which was why we had driven out west of Wiltwyck on Route 28 at the usual pre-dawn time, Dutchman’s Creek our destination. On the way, we’d stopped at Herman’s Diner.

Herman’s was off to the right-hand side of the road, the last building in a sequence that included a combination gas station/car wash, a furniture warehouse, and an ice cream stand. The diner sat at the center of an otherwise empty lot, one of those silver boxcars that you associate with the nineteen-fifties. It’s empty now, out of business for the last several years, which I can’t understand, because, while Herman’s was small, most times I went in, it was jumping. You never saw Herman. In fact, I’m not sure there was a Herman any more. There were Caitlin and Liz, who worked the counter and the single row of booths, and there was Howard, who did the lion’s share of the cooking, helped out by a pair of Mexican cousins named Esteban and Pedro. What I like about the place, what had kept me coming back after I first discovered it the second summer I fished, even more than the food, was the décor. The diner’s inside had been done up in early fisherman. There were rods and nets hung on the walls among what must have been thousands of snapshots of guys with fish. There were a few of those fish, too, stuffed and mounted in places of pride. As you walked in, a bulletin board tacked full of fishing cartoons greeted you, some of them freshly clipped from the paper, others yellow and brittle with age. The one I liked best was several years old, and showed a pair of man-sized cartoon salmon standing beside a stream, one smoking a cigar, the other holding a beer. Both fish have lines out and in the water, which is full of tiny people, dozens of them heading upstream, arms against their sides, faces pointed straight ahead. That was all: no witty caption, only that simple reversal that tickled my funny bone. Every time I strolled into that diner, I chuckled, and despite what happened later that day, thinking about that drawing now brings a smile to my face. Dan didn’t find it especially amusing.

The strangest thing in the diner, and it’s worth remarking if for no other reason than that I studied it each time I ate there, was a large oil painting that hung above and to the left of the order window as you sat at the counter. This painting was so old, so begrimed with the smoke of a thousand omelets and hamburgers, that only by diligent and careful study could you begin to develop an idea of its subject. The canvas was such a mess of masses of shades and shadows that I half-suspected it was some kind of giant Rorschach Test. Where it hung wasn’t especially well-lit, which didn’t help matters any. You could make out a long, curving, black blotch of something hovering in the middle of the picture over a pale patch, with a wavy white line in the upper right-hand corner. You might think I would’ve looked at the painting, seen that I couldn’t make head or tail of it, and let that be that. But there was something about it, this quality, that I don’t know if I have the words for. The picture fascinated me; I guess because it was so close to showing you what it was, so close to revealing its meaning. Maybe it was a big Rorschach Test. I saw a different scene each time I sat down at the counter. Once, it must have been the first time I stopped at Herman’s, I saw a bird swooping down out of the sky, a crow, maybe. Another time, I thought it might be a bat. Then, since the rest of the diner was done up in fishing memorabilia, I decided the painting must be a fishing scene. Throughout these deliberations, I received absolutely no help from the diner’s staff, who told me they weren’t sure where the painting had come from. Howard had an idea it had been purchased from an inn somewhere in New England — out Mystic way, he seemed to recall — but didn’t know any more than that, except that nobody could tell what the hell it showed. Liz and Caitlin refused to be drawn into discussing it, despite my best efforts.

That morning, when Dan and I sat down at the counter and ordered our coffees, with no help from anyone else I saw a fish in the black blotch at the painting’s center, something long, serpentine, a pike, say. The fish had been hooked, and was twisting as it fought its fate. The more I looked at the painting as I sat there drinking my coffee, the more sure I was that, at long last and after much cogitation, I had solved its mystery. In my solution, I saw a good omen for the day of fishing ahead. I was seized by the momentary impulse to tell somebody my discovery, share my success, but Dan had just stood to visit the facilities, and the rest of the diner was empty. By the time Dan returned, the impulse had released me.

As I glanced around the diner, looking for someone to decode the painting to, I noticed the air outside, which had been lightening with the first traces of a weak dawn, dimming; the first drops of rain spattered the windows a moment later. I didn’t groan, but I felt like it. I’ll fish in the rain — Hell, I’d fish in the snow — but that doesn’t mean I especially care to. I suppose a light drizzle isn’t so bad, but the kind of rain that was crackling on the diner’s roof, the hard, driving kind that soaks you through in under a minute and then keeps on going, that is not my idea of fun. Maybe it would turn out to be a passing squall. But by the time Liz set my corned beef hash and scrambled eggs down in front of me, if anything, the rain had strengthened into a wall of water.

While we were sitting over our breakfasts, Howard emerged from the kitchen to pour himself a cup of coffee and chat with us. I’d seen him do this from time to time: I’m pretty sure that he owned the diner, and I think this was his version of customer relations. I’d had a brief conversation with him two or three years prior, though I wasn’t sure he remembered. We hadn’t done more than exchange pleasantries about the weather, which was warm and sunny, and how the fish were biting, which they were. After that, he’d nodded whenever he saw me, but I noticed that he nodded at pretty much everyone who walked into the diner. He was a tall fellow, Howard, with long arms that ended in oversized hands. His face was what my ma would have called unhandsome. It wasn’t that he was ugly, exactly, more sort of homely. He had a lantern jaw that made him look as if he were perpetually holding something in his mouth that was too hot to swallow. His skin was pale and had that worn look you see on someone who’s been a steady smoker for most of their life. His voice was low and rumbling, and from conversations I’d overheard him having with other guys, I knew he was reasonably sharp, enough so for me to wonder what he was doing cooking in a diner. I never did find out the answer to that one.

Anyway, Howard stood there, the chunky white coffee cup swallowed in one of his enormous hands, the dingy white chef’s hat he favored tilted back on his head, and wished us both a good morning. When we returned the greeting, he went on, “Some weather we’ve been having.”

Dan grunted from his cup. I said, “You can say that again. Streams’ll be running pretty high, I imagine.”

“Lot of flooding,” Howard said. “Pretty bad in places. You fellows planning on fishing?”

“We are,” I said.

Howard grimaced. “Can’t say it’s the day for it. Where you headed?”

“Dutchman’s Creek,” I answered. On impulse, I added, “Ever hear of it?”

Probably, I could count on one hand the number of times something I’ve said has caused a person to turn pale. Most of those cases would hail from my childhood, when I told one or both of my folks a particularly worrisome piece of news: that I had stepped on a nail in the basement; that kind of thing. Well, add that Saturday morning in early June to the list. Howard’s pale skin went paler, as if you’d poured a glass of milk over a bowl of oatmeal. His eyed widened, and his mouth opened, as if whatever he kept in there couldn’t believe its ears, either. He raised his coffee cup to his mouth, finished its contents, and went for a refill. I looked at Dan, who was staring straight ahead as he chewed a mouthful of Belgian waffle, his face formed to an expression I couldn’t get a purchase on.

Howard poured a generous helping of sugar into his refill, and, without stirring it, turned back to us. His voice calm, his face still pale, he said, “Dutchman’s Creek, huh?”

“That’s right,” I said.

“Not many folks know about the creek anymore. How’d you hear about it?”

“My friend here read about it,” I said.

“Is that so?” Howard asked Dan.

“Yeah,” Dan said, chewing his waffle.

“Where would that have been?”

“Alf Evers’s book on the Catskills.” He did not look at Howard.

“That’s a good book,” Howard said, and I noticed Dan’s back stiffen. “Good history. I don’t recall anything about the creek in it.”

“It’s in the chapter on the Reservoir,” Dan said.

“Ah — that’s where it would be, wouldn’t it? I must’ve forgot,” Howard said, the tone of his voice telling us there was no way he’d done any such thing. “I’ll have to have another read of old Alf’s book. It’s got some good stories in it. Since my memory obviously isn’t what it used to be, maybe you can tell me what else Alf says about the creek. Does he tell how it got its name?”

“No,” Dan said, finishing his waffle. “He doesn’t mention that.”

“What about the fellows who died there. Does he mention them?”

Dan’s head jerked up. “No.”

“Hmmm,” Howard said, rubbing his jaw with his free hand. “I guess Alf Evers wasn’t as thorough as I thought.”

“Died?” I asked.

“Yes,” Howard said. “Been a few folks met their maker up at the creek. Seems the banks are steeper than they look, and the soil’s pretty loose. On top of that, the creek’s deep and fast-moving. All of which means it’s easier than you’d think to take a tumble into the water and not come up again.”

“How many have drowned?” I asked.

“Half-dozen, seven or eight, easy,” Howard said, “and I’m just talking about in the time I’ve been here,” he gestured to the diner with his mug, “say, in the last twenty years or so. I don’t know what the exact total is beyond that, but I understand from some of the old-timers that the creek’s taken enough men to put much bigger streams to shame. Mostly out-of-towners, folks from down the City come up here for the weekend. The locals tend to know better than to try the creek, though every now and then some high school kid’ll decide to prove how brave he is to his friends or some girl and go tempting the waters. When he does — well, the creek isn’t all that discriminating. It’ll take whatever’s on the plate, if you know what I mean. The old-timers say the creek’s hungry, and from what I’ve heard, I’d agree.”

“How did it get its name?” Dan asked.

“Beg pardon?” Howard said.

“You asked if we knew how Dutchman’s Creek got its name,” Dan said, “so I assume you do. Right?”

“That’s right,” Howard said. “It’s quite the story. Some’d call it local legend, but there’s more to it than that. It is long…longer than you’d think.”

“I’m curious,” Dan said. “I’m sure Abe is, too. Aren’t you?”

I was — curious enough, anyway. Howard’s warning had made me wonder what all the fuss was about. I was curious as well about the currents I felt flowing between him and Dan. Not outright hostility, exactly: it was more like Dan was afraid Howard was going to reveal something he wanted kept hidden, and Howard was annoyed at Dan for whatever that secret was. At the same time, we had come up here to fish. A glance back over my shoulder, though, showed the rain continuing. I sighed. “I suppose so,” I said. “I’m always happy to hear a good story, legend though it may be. But we don’t want to keep you.”

“I guess Esteban and Pedro can manage for a few more minutes. Besides, it’s not as if we’re all that busy.” He nodded at the diner, but for us, still empty. Caitlin and Liz sat together at a booth, Caitlin smoking, Liz reading the paper. “Strange, for a Saturday. Even with the rain, there’s usually some folks come in for breakfast.” He shrugged. “Almost like I’m supposed to tell it to you fellows, isn’t it?” The tone of his voice was casual, but I was suddenly aware of a tremendous, heavy urgency behind it, as if the story he had promised were heaving itself towards us. For a moment, I was possessed by the almost irresistible urge to flee him and his tale, to throw whatever money was in my pocket onto the counter and run out into the downpour. Then he said, “Understand, I can’t vouch for any of this,” and I was caught.

What Howard told us next took the better part of an hour, during which the diner was as still as a church, sealed off from the world beyond by the wall of water pouring from the sky. His story was long, certainly the longest I’ve had from one man at one time. While he was telling it, I couldn’t believe how much he’d remembered, how many details of speech and act, of thought and intent, and a little voice inside my head kept whispering, “This is impossible. There’s no way anyone could have a memory this accurate, this precise. He’s inventing this. He has to be.” And although I’d had some strange experiences myself, the events Howard related made the weirdest of them seem plain as a cup of coffee and a slice of apple pie.

Funny thing is, while he was telling his tale, I believed much more than I would have guessed likely. Only once his voice had stopped was I convinced I’d just been buried under the greatest load of horseshit anyone ever had shoveled. Yet even after Dan and I had paid for our meals and left the diner and were continuing our drive to the creek, it was as if I were still listening to Howard’s voice, as if I were inside his story, looking out at everything, as the story uncoiled around me.

If I say there was more truth to Howard’s tale than I first believed, I don’t suppose it’ll come as much surprise. What I find almost as remarkable is that I can recall pretty much everything Howard said, verbatim. Given what was to happen to Dan and me, maybe that isn’t such a surprise. But I can recall everything Howard didn’t say, as well:

Some months after all this, when the summer turned hot and dry, I sat down at the kitchen table, a pen in one hand, a pad of legal paper in front of me. Howard’s story had been gnawing at me for weeks, and I had decided to write down what I could remember of it. I expected the task would take me an afternoon, maybe a little longer. How long could it take you to write down an hour’s worth of talking, right? I’ve never been much of a writer, and I spent as much time lining things out as I did putting them down, but I wanted to copy down everything I could recall of what Howard had said, get all of it exactly right. By the time the first night had rolled around, my hand was still moving that pen across the paper. For the next four days, I wrote. I wrote and I wrote and I wrote, and I understood that the story had passed to me, that somehow, Howard had tucked it inside me.

In the process, it had brought details with it Howard hadn’t included, enough that they would have stretched what he told us through the rest of the morning and right through the afternoon into the evening. All sorts of tangents about the figures whose stories he was relating, Lottie Schmidt and her father, Rainer, as well as stories about men and women he hadn’t mentioned, at all, like Otto Schalken and Miller Jeffries, crowded the pages. And yet, at the same time, every last detail I wrote down seemed familiar. I had the maddening sense that, even though Howard hadn’t related anything like the complete story to us, I had carried it with me out of the diner all the same, had known it — or maybe been known by it, folded into its embrace.

I offer that much longer version of the story here, when and where we were first introduced to its principle players. Doing so means stepping away from my own tale for a lot more time than I’d like. Without what I can’t help calling Howard’s story, however, everything that happened to Dan and me, all that badness that found us out and chased us down, makes far less sense than it does with it. Maybe that isn’t saying so much. You might imagine Dan and me sitting somewhere off to the side of the drama that’s about to debut, while Howard points out to us who’s who and what’s what. Or maybe you should imagine us walking the margins, watching the story unfold across the page.

This is what I received from Howard, whose last name I never did learn: