For Zane

It was in 1938, on the muskeg side of Eagle Lake, as a fog sluiced through the pine trees and a thunderstorm took hold, that Joseph Widmark trolled his way back to the boat slip and the lake unraveled with his first and only muskie.  He was only eighteen then, a freshman in college, and although the fish weighed less than thirty pounds, he won the trophy and a check for $27 that they told him he could cash at any bank in West Ontario.

They drove along the highway in a rented Ford Granada.  Joseph was sixty-two now and his son, David, had heard the story many times.  In all the years since that first muskie hunt, Joseph Widmark had never hooked another.  He and his son had traveled to Wisconsin, Minnesota and Ontario.  They had caught their share of pickerel and pike.  But the only muskies they had seen were nailed up on the doorframes of old roadside motels, or gill-pegged by some fishing cabin, their prehistoric mouths alive with jagged teeth, their long, thick bodies ribbed with orange tiger stripes.

The muskellunge was like a dream to the old man, as wild and nameless as the forests and the prairies racing from the highway to the glistening horizon.

David had been planning this fishing trip for months.  His last showing in New York had been a great success.  He had sold a dozen paintings, gathered commissions, and the thick manila folder, which his father kept inside his cherry wood credenza for significant reviews, was growing tattered at the edges.

At first the old man had been reticent.  “I’m flattered but it isn’t a good time,” he’d said.  “I may be working those two weeks.  Besides, it’ll soon be Christmas.  Your mother’s been cooking round the clock.”

David looked down at his telephone, at the charged cream plastic line that ran into the wall, along the highways and the malls, and down into the rich New Jersey soil.  “I already talked with her,” he said.  “Come on, Dad, it’s only for a week.  You used to take me fishing all the time.  If it’s the money, I already told you.  My treat.”

“No, it isn’t that.  But won’t the lake be frozen?”

“I checked. They just held the Great Muskie Hunt ten days ago.  Winner caught a forty pounder.”

“We’d have to buy new line, you know.”

“I did.”

There was a pause that stretched across two states.  “How would we go?” the old man asked.

“We’ll fly into Duluth and rent a car.”

There was another pause and David heard his father cover up the mouthpiece.  He looked up at the pencil sketch of Windsor Castle that hung above the telephone.  It was a Judge’s reproduction, with chestnut trees and a brace of desultory cows.  Rising high above the foliage, the northern tower wavered like a flag.  It had been a present from his father on his fifteenth birthday, the year that he had won the Harrow Art Prize, the year that he had gotten drunk for the first time and lost his innocence in London, the year he’d realized that without his painting nothing seemed to matter.  Nothing.  “Dad, are you still there?”

“I’ll drive the rental if you knot my wire leaders for me.”

*   *   *

Yeager’s Fishing Camp could only be approached by boat, seaplane or a long-abandoned logging road.  The camp had been designed by Fritz Yeager himself, a man of legend throughout the Vermilion Range.  He had left the town of Ely as a boy, become a kind of hero in the War, and prospered as an architect until his ascendance to Ontario’s Premier in ’68.  In truth, the man had been a middling politician.  But the people didn’t care.  He was one of them.  And, when he finally retired to his camp, they welcomed him with a celebration of such opulence that it drew national attention and put the town of Ely on the map.

Fritz Yeager drank.  At night he sat out on the front porch of the Trading Post, pulling at a bottle whose label had been boiled off years ago.  He was out there every night, regardless of the weather, smoking Player’s Medium Navy Cut cigarettes and talking to the fishermen and hunters.  The camp was usually deserted by November.  A few still hunted moose throughout the winter but most observed the same internal timepiece as the birds, migrating south to warmer climes, retreating as the ice advanced across the lake.

The Trading Post was a massive clapboard structure with a hint of Maine design.  The dining room took up the western wing, the Yeagers the rest.  There was a kind of general store just off the dining area that featured fishing gear, thick rods the size of walking sticks and garish muskie plugs with feather, steel and rubber band attachments.  Behind the counter, a local high school girl named Daisy Leech ran through the merits of each lure with practiced salesmanship.  “They call this the Torpedo.”

Joseph picked up the jointed plug and flicked the stainless steel propeller.  It was at least six inches long.  “Do I get my money back if I don’t land a muskie by tomorrow?”

Daisy looked aghast.  “I’m sorry, Mr. Widmark.  I can only guarantee the plug, not your luck.”

“We’ll take it,” David said.  “Put it on my tab.  No, don’t bother to wrap it up.  I’ll eat it here.”

Daisy wrinkled her nose.  “Okay.  I guess.”

David and his father sidled off to their dining table, snickering like a pair of schoolboys.  “Eat it here,” Joseph repeated once they were sitting down.  He looked down at the muskie plug, curled up beside his fork like some gigantic hornet, bright yellow and chartreuse.  Daisy had forgotten to remove the price tag.  “Seventeen dollars,” he said tightly.  “That’s a bit steep, isn’t it?”

“Don’t worry about it,” David said.

“No, really,” Joseph answered.  “We don’t need another lure.”

David put his menu down.  “Dad, it’s alright.”

“I bet it cost them only fifty cents to make it.  I’m going to take it back.”

He began to stand but David reached across the table and held him by the shoulder.  “Dad,” he said, “for crying out loud, you’re embarrassing me.  I told you, it’s alright.  Maybe it’ll change our luck.”

For the rest of the meal they barely spoke.  Joseph stabbed at his stroganoff half-heartedly, while David talked about the northern pike which they had spotted on the north side of the lake.  The fishing had been disappointing.  For five days they had combed the shores of Eagle Lake, their fingers growing numb against the wind, the silence only broken by the sound of anxious errant fins and the stutter of their outboard motor.

Their coffee came, followed by a fifth of scotch, and the room began to warm.

“I’m sorry,” Joseph finally said.

“What for?”

“About the plug, I mean.  I guess I over-reacted.  It’s just . . . ”

David put his empty glass down on the table.  “How’s business, Dad?” he said.

“A little slow.  But it’s the holidays.”

“I talked with Mom.”

“What did your mother say?”

“She told me to ask you.  You know how she is.”

The old man smiled.  “Yes, I know how she is.”  He sighed.  “It’s just a little slow, that’s all, David.  It’s the recession.”  He slipped the bill for their supper under the tablecloth and glanced about the room.

David laughed.  “I think they’ll find it.”

“Next year, perhaps.  After they clear these dishes.  We’ll be long gone by then.”

It seemed to David that his father only came alive when he went fishing.  No, more than that; it was as if the journey from New Jersey to the camp had been along the temporal plain, as if the roads and air routes were mementos on a line of gradual regression.

David recalled a fishing trip to France.  He had been a boy, no more than ten, and they had motored on the Continent.  All those years in Europe had passed by in a snowstorm of discovery.  Joseph had still worked for US Express then, and his American salary had led them to believe that there would always be a little more next year.   David’s mother, Kirsten, came into her own.  Her business parties always drew the most outlandish personages – concubines and priests, film directors, media tycoons and ministers of state.  They lived in Italy, in England, France and Greece.  They summered in Dubrovnik, and wintered in Marrakech.

To Kirsten, it was what she had expected, a bright extension of her youth and the world which she had fashioned on the ceiling of her childhood bedroom late at night in Wellesley, Massachusetts, the daughter of an orthodontist.  But to Joseph it had come with patience and devisal, the product of hard work and the ethic he had learned in the storeroom of his father’s tavern in Cicero, West Chicago, stacking cases as a boy.

Their compact was a merger of ideals.  His duty was to bring the grist to mill, and hers was to refine it.

David had just been accepted to Harrow in England when his father informed him they were moving again.  The old man had been offered a position in New York, a new bank after more than thirty years with US Express, a new title, and a raise of such dizzying significance that he just couldn’t say no.  For four years, David traveled back and forth between boarding school and home on Trans World Airlines.

At first, the new job proved to be exactly to what Joseph had aspired.  Kirsten bought a house in Greenwich, Connecticut, and Joseph joined the Club.  It was expected.  It was the prize, the averment of success.  Then the go-go years were gone and the promise was rescinded.  The man whom Joseph had been told he would replace remained to fill the same space on the ladder.  Responsibilities were shifted and Joseph found himself one day with a Conrail monthly pass inside his wallet but without a destination.

For weeks he traveled to the city only to wander along the streets and avenues, confused and purposeless, unable to find work or the courage to tell Kirsten that the morning ritual – the kiss and car ride to the station – was a sham.

It was at college in Massachusetts that David first learned the family was in trouble.  His sister told him that the old man’s stocks, secured as options, had fallen in the slump, and that the bank for which he’d worked for years was calling in the loan.  The entrepreneurial schemes he chiseled late at night in his home office turned out to be unsuited to the times.  The market was going through disintermediation.  The family moved again, to a condo in New Jersey.  David was told to get a scholarship, and then a student loan that Joseph promised to repay as soon as things went back to normal.  Time passed, and with it all their savings.  Joseph tried to keep his courage up.  He still had faith in all the dreams his father had bequeathed him.  He still believed that if he worked a little harder, a little longer and a little faster, the prize would come to him again.

*   *   *

The boat moved silently across the surface of the lake.  They had turned the motor off and as they drifted through the inlet, they worked the shoreline and the weed beds carefully.  Concentric circles marked the ingress of their lures.  Beyond the dead brown cattails, spruce trees scrambled for a foothold in the rocky soil.

David hooked his spinner on the eyelet of his rod and stretched out in the stern.  He was cold, tired.  They had already caught their lunch and he was anxious to relax, to build a fire and fillet the walleye.  There was nothing like the taste of flaky white fish fried up in lard in a cast iron pan over an open fire.

He watched his father cast his spoon beyond the tree stump near the water’s edge.  It was uncanny how the old man timed his casts.  David had never equaled his precision, the smooth unhurried movement of his arm, the way he jigged the rod so that the spoon looked more realistic.

“What do you think?” said David as his father cast again.  “I’m starving.”

Joseph looked up at the sky.  Fat bands of imbricated clouds moved lazily across the sun.  “Some people go hungry for days in order to catch a fish,” he said.  “You’ll never hook a muskie if your line’s dry.”

David shrugged.  Across the lake, a flock of seagulls floated on the water.  “I got my share of pike,” he said.  “Besides, look at this place.  I don’t care if I ever catch a muskie.  It’s worth it just to be here.”

Joseph shook his head.  “There are two kinds of fishermen, David.  One is content to throw his lure out and see what happens.  The other one hunts muskie.”

David pulled his watch cap down below his ears.  “Jesus, Dad.  It’s just a fish,” he said.

Joseph hooked a finger around the line and cast his lure toward the shore.  It landed just beside the stump.  David watched his father work the rod.  He swept the tip from side to side, his left hand turning constantly, the line retreating to the spool.  Then, suddenly, his movements stopped.  The thick rod bowed and, in the distance, David saw the water swell.

The old man snapped the rod back violently to set the hook.  Once, twice.  There was a splash and David heard the nylon singing as the spool reversed itself.

“What is it?” David asked excitedly.

“Don’t know.”

David slipped his own rod against the gunwale and reached down for the landing net.  The fish was running for the rocks.  “Looks big,” he said.

Joseph twisted on his seat, swinging his line across the bow.  The fish ran once again, then slowed.  Joseph pumped the rod, the nylon shivered, and David saw a dark shape crack the water for an instant.

It was a northern pike, and judging from the movement of the rod, the way its dorsal fin had slashed the surface of the lake, he knew that it was huge.  “It must be twenty pounds,” he said excitedly.  “Or more.”

David felt his heart race as he slipped the net into the icy water.  Joseph turned the fish at last; it headed for the boat.  He pulled the rod up, trying madly to retrieve the line, to keep the nylon taut.  The fish drew closer.

David could see it clearly now.  Its body shivered in the deep.  The spoon was hooked clean in the upper corner of its mouth, forcing the pallid jaws apart.  “This way,” he told his father.  “Just lead it to me.”

“I’m trying,” Joseph answered with a smile.  “Tell him!”  He paused and suddenly the smile was gone.  “Jesus,” he said.  “What’s that?”

His son looked deep into the lake.  The pike had twisted to one side and, clamped across its back, primordial and huge, David could see the thorny jawbone of another fish.  There was a flash of golden stripes.  A splash.  The frigid water heaved.  The reel began to sing again and David saw the pike collapse upon itself, the massive body cut in half.  He pulled his hand into the boat reflexively.  The pike began to sink, its severed head concealed behind an amaranth of blood.  The second fish advanced.  It swam lethargically beside the boat, the jaws maneuvering the remnants of the pike along its bony throat, the hackled fins extended and blood discharging through its gills.

For a moment it was still, its left eye fixed upon the fisherman as if in recognition.  The fish was as long as the boat.  Then, slowly and deliberately, it sank into the depths.

David looked up at his father.  The old man’s face was ashen, but his eyes were clear, and his lips were pulled back in a grin.  He fixed his gaze on David and began to laugh.

“Muskie,” he said.  Then he began to reel his line in frantically.  “Well, don’t just sit there.  Fetch me that damned Torpedo.”

*   *   *

David woke to the sound of voices arguing.  Water shimmered in the moonlight outside the window, and for a moment he was sure the lake had frozen over in the night.  It certainly felt cold enough.  The Franklin stove glowed in the corner of the cabin but the air was crisp and cutting.  David glanced across the room and saw his father’s bed was empty.  The arguing grew louder.  “Shit,” he spat.  David pulled a sweater on and stumbled out the door.

From the porch, down the path that ran between the cabins, David could see the outline of the Trading Post.  The front door was open and Fritz Yeager stood in the entrance, illuminated by a light which flickered from within.  He was shouting at someone, or at something in the night but – from the cabin – David thought the jetty looked deserted.

Who’s he shouting at?  Then he saw his father on the path only a dozen yards away.

“What is it?” David asked him.  “Dad?  Dad, what’s going on?”

“It’s Yeager.  I think he’s drunk,” said Joseph.  “Go back to sleep.”  He started down the path.

By the time Joseph reached the Trading Post, Yeager had descended to the jetty where the fishing boats were tied up to a line.  He was staring at the lake, his hands set deep within his pockets.  Joseph idled up beside him.  “Good evening, Mr. Yeager,” he said casually, as if he’d just passed him on the way to supper.

David could see Yeager spin about.  His hair hung loosely in his face.  “Who’s that?” he said.

“It’s me.  Mr. Widmark.”

“Oh, the Widmarks.  Yes.  I know.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Never mind.”  Yeager paused and looked back out across the bay.  “It’s the lake,” he said.  “It was always her idea.  Eagle Lake, I mean.”

Joseph stamped his sides.  “It’s a little cold out here, don’t you think?”

Yeager laughed.  The moon appeared between the clouds, translucent as a lollypop.  “I don’t know why,” he said, “but Sarah just hates me.”

“Mrs. Yeager?  How can you say that?  I’m sure that isn’t true.”

“It was always her idea.  They all were.  I just wanted to build houses.”

“It’s late, Mr. Yeager.  Why don’t you go back up to the house, try and get some sleep?”

“It’s the lake.  You just don’t see it.”

“That’s right – the lake.  It’ll still be here tomorrow.”  Joseph took Yeager by the arm and led him up the jetty toward the house.

When they had reached the porch, Yeager turned on his heels without warning.  He put a hand on Joseph’s shoulder, leaned forward, his mouth to Joseph’s ear, and whispered, “It was here.  Before we came, long before.”  The words came slowly from his mouth.  “All of those dreams.  Under the water, in the stones and trees.  At the bottom of the lake.  Waiting for us.”

“Go to bed, Mr. Yeager,” Joseph said.  He pushed him gently through the entrance.  Then he let the screen door slam, and made his way along the path back toward the cabin.

David was still standing on the porch when he returned.

“Drunk,” said Joseph, entering the cabin.  “Dead drunk.”

“And we’re paying for his poison.”

“No, you are,” Joseph said.

David didn’t answer.  He closed the door.  They undressed and got back into bed.  Neither of them spoke for several minutes.  David could hear his father shivering in the bunk nearby.  “Cold out there, huh?” he said at last.

For a moment Joseph didn’t respond.  Then he said, “What I don’t understand is why a man like that would drink.  I mean, he has everything.  He was a Premier, for Christ’s sake.  He’s rich.  His wife is charming and attractive.”

“And a good cook to boot,” said David, trying to lighten the mood.

“He almost ran for Prime Minister,” Joseph continued, ignoring him.

David turned over onto his back and tried to fall asleep.  He thought about his work, the paintings yet undone, the showing his dealer had set up for January.  If sales continued as they had, by spring he would finally have enough to buy that loft in SoHo.  Just barely, anyway.  David pictured his easel by the windows, the southern light exploding through the glass.

But then, of course, there was his father.  If his mother’s fears were justified, everything would change.  The money would be needed to support his parents, and the loft would have to wait.  Maybe a year or so, at least until his father found a job.  But what if Joseph didn’t take the money?  No, thought David.  He’d have to.  What choice did he have?  It was just a question of positioning the offer.  David would say it was a loan, an investment in his father’s new consulting practice.  Damn his old-fashioned pride.  Why could they never talk directly?  Why did it always have to be oblique, so many metaphors behind symbols behind words?

David looked over at his father’s bunk.  It was almost dawn.  He could hear birds singing outside all around them.  Joseph was lying on his back, his eyes open, staring up at the ceiling.  “Can’t sleep?” David said.

“Just thinking.”

“Not about that damned muskie, I hope.”

“No, about Yeager.  He kept going on and on about the lake.  He kept saying . . .”  Joseph turned onto his side and looked over at David.  “He was talking about dreams,” he said.  “He just wanted to build houses.”

“Then, why didn’t he?”

“I don’t know.  Why does anyone try living other people’s dreams?  It’s different for you, David.  You’re another generation.  But, in some ways,” Joseph added, “I’m just like Mr. Yeager.”

“You’re not a drunk, Dad.”

“Not yet, you mean.”

“Not ever.”

The old man looked up at the ceiling once again.  “I want to be a producer, David.  That’s all.  Do you understand?  Not a consumer.  I just want to make something.”

“You will, Dad.  I know you will.”  David tried to think of something else to say, but the words seemed to float above him, out of reach, brittle as ice, like the sounds of the birds in the trees.

*   *   *

From the inlet on the muskeg side of Eagle Lake, near the stretch of water where in 1938 the old man had begun his journey, David heard the calling of a loon, a mournful echo of remembrance, a sound as solitary as the muskellunge his father hunted.  They worked the shoreline quickly, their casts meticulous and true.  But with each flick of the wrist, the sun slipped closer to the burnished lip of the horizon, the termination of their holiday, and the onset of their journey home.

Joseph was using the Torpedo.  He was casting it again and again, across the inlet to the stump where they had raised that fish before.  David watched him from the corner of his eye as he tossed his own plug through the twilight.  The stars were beginning to glow.  A gust of wind disturbed the surface of the lake, chilling his bones.  As they fished, David sent up a silent prayer for his father to succeed, if only to relieve the gnawing hunger which that first fish, years before, had planted deep within him like a seed.  But he knew that it was finished.  Joseph would have to wait another year, another fishing season to find whatever he was looking for.

David put his rod down in the bottom of the boat and lit a cigarette.  The taste was bitter and delicious.

As if sensing his impatience, his father said, “Five casts.”

David counted them off in his head, the last one landing on the water with a splash so loud, so ominous, that they both sat up and stared into the darkness.  It was nothing.  The fishing trip was over.

Joseph slipped his rod beneath his seat and David started up the motor.  Across the lake, the green light of the jetty glowed rhapsodically.  “I don’t imagine Daisy Leech will take it back,” the old man said with a half smile.

“There’ll be another trip.”

“Could be.  Probably.  It doesn’t matter.”

“It doesn’t?”

“Not really.  It was worth it just to be here.  With you, I mean.”

David smiled.  “Is this the same guy who defined the difference between fishermen and muskie hunters?”

The old man stuffed his hands into his pockets and stared across the darkling surface of the lake.  “Almost,” he said.