Apparition & Late Fictions: A Novella and Stories (3 page)

“But they’re all just going to die,” one of his clients once protested when Danny released a thirty-pound hen.

“We’re all just going to die,” Danny told him, “sooner or later, a hundred percent.”

Danny washed the fish slime off his hands, poured another handful of his father’s ashes out, kissed the fist he held them in, and let them go into the dark water.

He sat with his dog on the bank for a few minutes, waiting for no particular reason, watching the salmon working the reds. Everything around him seemed a metaphor for his father—the leaf-fall, the clear water, the fish in their futile quest. He tried to remember when he first became aware that his father approved of him, his life, and whether it was a gift outright or whether he had earned it.

Early on they’d argued over church and Sundays. He’d quit after his mother died. He was ten when she had died of “complications” involving “medications” and “depression.” And though he would stand in the first pew on the left side of the church with his stepmother and siblings—for his father had married Margaret within the year—with a hymnal in his hand for a few years after that, he was never really “there” and didn’t really sing the songs or believe or understand the light that came through stained glass or how it had happened—how or why his mother had been removed from their lives. At thirteen he simply refused to go and gave his father and Margaret to believe that if forced he’d make a scene that would embarrass them more than his absence. He took to fishing Sundays at the dam below the park in town for bluegill and crappie and sucker and carp. He’d learned to like the quiet and the privacy and
the feel of fish on the other end of his line. And when he told his father years later that the river, the Pere Marquette, was his church and chapel and Bible and choir, that he felt closer to God there and closer to himself there and closer to his mother there and closer to life, his father had nodded, if not approval, then at least acceptance. “The Lord,” the churchman told his son, “has a fondness for fishermen.” This was near enough to forgiveness.

And there’d been issues over education. Danny had been a lackluster student. After high school he’d managed to get accepted to Central Michigan University. It was the nearest school to Baldwin and the Pere Marquette. He enrolled in a course of General Studies, but between the draw of the Indian casino on the edge of town and the Pere Marquette less than two hours away, nothing in the curriculum could keep his interest long. Whenever he could he’d drive to the river and float a stretch researching the pocket water, the structure and the habits of resident and migrant fish. Home for Easter that first year, Danny’s father told him he could not succeed by doing things halfway.

“Do something you’re really passionate about. What’s the worst that can happen? You’re young. You can afford to fail but you can’t afford not to
try
.”

This was permission enough for Danny. He quit school. Worked on a landscape crew for three months, and with the cash bought a tent, three new Orvis rods and Billy Pate reels, and moved to Baldwin in early August, with his drift boat outfitted, pitching his tent on the river, where he slept and tied flies when he wasn’t fishing. He’d begun hanging out at the PM Lodge and the local bars and tackle shops, picking up guide trips where he could. It wasn’t long before word got
around about his talents for putting clients on fish, for finding the right drift through difficult holes, for working the river in difficult conditions. Some fishing guides were taxi drivers. Rowing to some famous meat hole and sitting tight all day, then rowing out. Danny fished the slots and shoeboxes, the lesser-known pools where fish held on deep gravel or between difficult snags and stumps. He’d taught himself what shade did and rain did and the moon did to the habits of fish and the conduct of water.

When he climbed back in the boat, Chinook bolted downstream, then into the forest. Danny pulled the anchor up and felt the current’s slow embrace circle the boat and take it in. He dipped his oars. The thermos, now nearly empty, rolled slightly on the front seat.

As he approached Gus’s Hole Danny whistled for his dog. He anchored in the current and listened close. Sometimes his heart filled with the beauty and the silence of the place. Deep in the swamp, beyond the energies of other guides and walk-ins, the sense of isolation and privacy was comforting. And Gus’s Hole itself held few fish anymore. The current had changed enough over the years to widen and flatten out the confluence of water. Still the area was fishy and the air was full of the smell of rotting salmon and the sickly-sweet smell of some larger putrefaction in the woods. Danny reckoned it was a deer shot out of season by a bow hunter who couldn’t trail it through the swamp. In the distance he could hear Chinook howling. He whistled again and waited. After five minutes he could hear the dog approaching.

Danny wondered if the dog knew how close it had come to being killed in this place. It was to Gus’s Hole Danny had brought the dog two years before, after all the experts had
weighed in with their advice. They’d fished all day and Danny climbed the high banks to the oak ridge from which he and his father had first looked down on the curling braids of river that formed the swamp that winter years ago when he was eight. He had a field shovel and a pistol he had borrowed from a fellow guide. At the top, he began digging the dog’s grave, the work quickening with anger and slowing with sadness, the variable speeds of the labor like the division of his heart. He had the grave dug, the pistol loaded, the blanket he intended to wrap the corpse in ready. He whistled for the dog and called “Chinook!” He heard the dog bark and saw, from the high ridge, the dog emerge from a marshy island a quarter of a mile downstream. “C’mon, Chinook,” Danny called, and the dog ran the bank upstream fifty yards, then dove into the current, crossing to a sandbar in the middle, shook himself dry, then dove again, swimming upstream fifty more yards before coming to the base of the high banks. He shook himself dry again and bounded up the steep hill without slowing. At the top of the high banks he leapt into Danny’s embrace. This prodigious bit of cross-country swimming and sprinting and climbing, regardless of the crookedness of his leg, proved the dog well able for his habitat. It convinced Danny that he should not kill him, not now, not ever, unless he was truly pained or endangered by his handicap.

And when his father heard, he had approved. “Surely,” he had said, “we must tolerate some imperfections in the ones we love.”

Two years later the dog’s “imperfection” hadn’t held him back a bit.

Danny sat on the bank and shook the thermos. There was maybe a cup of his father’s ashes left in it. He wondered what
to do. The river had its share of him, working its way now, Danny reckoned, downstream to Scottville and Ludington and out into the big lake and maybe to the mouth of the Chicago River and into the Mississippi and through the middle ground of America into the Gulf of Mexico, to the larger amalgam of oceans that held the continents afloat on the globe.

He poured the remnant into the silver cap of the thermos. He dipped the thermos into the current and poured the cold water into the capful of ashes. With his knife he mixed the water and the ashes into a kind of gray paste, like thick oatmeal, and then he ate it with a spoon.

M
OST TIMES
the remembrance was triggered by color—that primary red of valentines or Coca-Cola ads—the color of her toenails, girlish and perfectly polished. He remembered her body, tiny and lifeless and sickeningly still as she lay opened and autopsied on the prep-room table. He could still bring to mind, these many years since, the curl of the knot in the viscera bag the pathologist had tied, with all of her examined organs inside, and the raw edge of the exit wound in her right leg and the horrible precision of the hole in her breast where the man who murdered her put the muzzle of the gun.

And he remembered the dull inventory of detail, the hollow in her mother’s voice the morning she called him at the funeral home.

“Elena’s been shot, Martin. Up in Baldwin. She’s at the Lake County Morgue. Go and get her, Martin. Bring her home.”

ELENA HAD
been only fifteen when her father died—the darkly beautiful daughter of a darkly beautiful mother and a man who’d had cancer. He was laid out in an 18-gauge metal casket. The funeral was huge. Martin could remember standing between them, Elena and her widowed mother, when they’d come to see the dead man’s body. He figured he was ten years older than the daughter, ten years younger than the mother. He had asked, as he’d been trained to ask, if everything was “satisfactory.” It was the failure of words that always amazed him.

“He got so thin.”

“Yes.”

“At least he’s not suffering anymore.”

“No.”

“Thank you, Martin.”

“Yes.”

And he remembered how Elena, after trying to be brave for her mother, after standing and staring at the lid of the casket as if she could tough it out, as if she could look but not see, had let her gaze fall on the face of her dead father and cried, in one great expiration of pain, “Oh Daddy! Please, no,” and nearly doubled over at the middle, holding her tummy, and how her knees buckled and how he grabbed her before she fell to the floor. And how she had pressed her sobs into his shirt and how he’d hugged her close and felt her holding on and could smell her hair and feel the form and perfect sadness in her shak
ing body and how he’d said that everything would be all right because he really didn’t know what to say. It made him feel necessary and needed and he wanted to hold her and protect her and make everything better, because she was beautiful and sad and though he could not fix it he would not let her go until she could stand on her own two feet again. And he thought that being the only embalmer in town was no bad thing when you stood among the widowed and orphaned and they would thank you for the unhappy work you’d done on their people.

FIVE YEARS
after that and it was Elena, killed by her husband with a gun.

Martin could not get his mind off how mannish the violence was, how hunter-gatherly, how very do-it-yourself, for the son-of-a-bitch, according to the coroner, to stand on the front deck of their double-wide out in the woods while she loaded the last of her belongings in the car—her boom box and a last armful of hanging things—how he must have carefully leveled the rifle, his eyes narrowing to sight her in. He put the first bullet through her thigh. An easy shot from fifteen yards.

He must have wanted to keep her from running.

“The way you would with any wild thing,” the fat pathologist, smelling of stale beer, had told Martin in the morgue, taking the cigar out of his mouth to hold forth like an expert. “You hobble it first, then you don’t have to chase a blood trail through the woods all night.” He warmed to his subject. “Bow hunters go for the heart or lungs most times. They don’t mind chasing through swamps and marshes after a wounded buck. It’s part of the sport to them. But shooters go for the head shot or the legs.”

And as she lay in the thick leaf-fall beside the car, bleeding from the severed femoral artery, he’d walked over, put the barrel to her left breast, and squeezed off another round.

“She’d have bled to death either way,” the pathologist said. The sight of that fat hand with the cigar touching the spot on Elena’s thigh where the bullet tore its exit out sickened Martin. And when the same hand pulled the sheet back to show the terrible carnage to her torso—the postmortem incisions very loosely stitched up and the black and blue and red little wound where her killer must have reckoned her heart would be, Martin quickly moved his stretcher beside the morgue tray, covered her body, and took charge before the pathologist carried his feckless lecture any further. He signed the logbook beside Elena’s name and case number, got the death certificate marked
Gunshot wounds to leg and chest
in the section that asked for the cause of death and
Homicide
where it asked for manner and had her name and date of death, all of it scrawled in the sloppy hand of the pathologist, and got her out of there.

All the way home he tried to imagine how it must have happened—if anyone could have heard it, the small-caliber outrage of it, as if she’d been a doe feeding among the acorns or come to the salt lick, her large brown eyes full of panic and stillness. He wondered if she knew he was dangerous. He wondered if she realized, after the first shot, that he was going to kill her. He wondered if she died with fear or resolve. He wondered if bleeding from the first wound, she might have passed out, and never saw the face of her killer or the barrel or the gun or felt it on her body or saw his eyes as he pulled the trigger.

Taken as a thing itself, considered within the broad range of human conduct, undistracted by his professional duties, Martin regarded the aberration of the dead girl’s body riding
behind him as utterly incomprehensible. How could someone kill someone so coldly, someone with whom you had made plans, had sex, watched television, promised love? It left him with a functional ambiguity. Martin tried to assemble a reasonable sentence in which the last phrase went like
and then he shot her, twice, because
…but he was always unsuccessful.

He looked in the rearview mirror at the length of the stretcher in the back of the hearse with its tidy blue cover under which Elena’s body was buckled in, her head on the pillow, a small bag with her bloodied clothes, her jewelry and personal effects beside her. He tried to connect this horror with his remembrance of a sad, beautiful girl sobbing at the graveside of her dead father a few years before, waiting for the priest to finish with his prayers. The morning was blue and sunlit, the buds of maples just busting loose, the men who’d been pallbearers lined up on one side of the grave, Elena and her mother and grandmother on the other. And all around, a couple hundred who’d come to pay their respects—women who worked with Elena’s mother at the real estate office, men who worked with her father at the shop, parishioners from Our Lady of Mercy and kids from the freshman class of the high school. And after the priest had finished, Martin had nodded to the pallbearers to remove their gloves and solemnly place them on the casket—a little gesture of letting go. And then, from the pile of dirt next to the grave, under the green grass matting, he’d given a small handful of dirt, first to the dead man’s mother, then to the dead man’s wife, and then to Elena; and at his direction, each stepped up to the casket and traced a cross on the top with the dirt that Martin had given them. He put a hand on their elbows as they stepped on the boards in a gesture of readiness and ever-vigilant assistance. And after
that, Martin made the announcement he had practiced saying out loud the night before.

“This concludes the services for Mr. Delano.”

He reminded himself to speak slowly, to enunciate, to articulate, to project.

“The family wishes to thank each of you for your many kindnesses—for the floral tributes and Mass cards and most especially for your presence with them this morning.”

He took a breath, tried to remember what part came next.

“You are all invited to return now to Our Lady of Mercy Parish Hall where a luncheon has been prepared in Mr. Delano’s memory. You may step now directly to your cars.”

At this direction, people began to move away, relieved at the end of the solemnities, talking freely, trading news and sympathies. Martin had been pleased with the performance. Everything had gone off just as he’d planned—a fitting tribute, a good funeral. The pallbearers walked away as a group, looking official. Someone assisted the grandmother from the grave. Elena’s mother, her eyes tired and red, took Martin’s arm as they walked to the limousine, holding the rose Martin had given her, the crowd of people parting as they made their way. And Martin was thinking this is no bad thing for people to see what a dependable man their new funeral director was—a reliably upright, lean-on-me kind of man—less than a year out of mortuary school, mortgaged to the eyes for the business he’d bought from the widow of the man who’d been here before, but clearly a responsible, dependable citizen, someone to be called on, night or day, if there was trouble.

At the door to the car Mrs. Delano stopped, turned toward Martin with a brave smile, tilted her head slightly, opened her arms, and Martin, sensing that she wanted him to, without
hesitation bent to embrace her. She was saying “Thank you, Martin” and “I could never have made it through this without you” loud enough for bystanders to hear and he was patting her back professionally, all caring and kindness as you would with any hurt or wounded fellow human, saying to her, “You did good, he’d be proud of you,” and she was patting his shoulders, and then, once the hug was over, holding the hankie to her eyes, she quickly disappeared into the backseat of the car in a rush of grief and relief and gratitude, and Martin straightened up and held the door.

Elena, who’d been following Martin and her mother to the limousine, holding two roses she’d picked from her father’s casket spray, paused at the car door and, perhaps because she was following her mother’s lead, perhaps thinking it was the proper thing to do, looked Martin in the eyes and said, “Thank you, thank you for everything,” and reached up to lock her hands around Martin’s neck, and just as Martin was starting to say, in a voice all caring and kindness, “You’re very welcome, Elena,” she rose on her tiptoes, pressed her body firmly against his, and kissed him squarely on the mouth. Martin could feel her chest on his chest, her small hands holding the sides of his face, and her soft mouth opening slightly and the wetness of it on his lips. He let go of the door handle and held her at the waist, first pulling her toward him, then, opening his eyes, gently pushing her away, and when she stopped kissing him, he could feel his face reddening and he was wondering if the priest and the pallbearers and the townspeople could see his blush and the flash of desire he could feel in himself and the wish beginning to form in his mind that everyone would disappear so that he could hold her and touch her and comfort her and have her and then, but before he could pat her on the back professionally,
before he could say, “There, there, everything is going to be all right,” before he had a chance to restore the air of solemnity and order, Elena proffered, with a brave smile, one of the roses she was holding. He took it from her and, as her mother had, Elena disappeared headfirst into the back of the long black Cadillac.

For weeks after that Martin had tried to figure that kiss, its meaning. Surely she could not have known how much he might have imagined, after holding her at her father’s casket, her sweetness and innocence and beauty and vulnerability and how much a man like Martin felt like protecting and consoling and holding and touching her. Surely he’d been discreet, during the long hours of visitation at the funeral home, standing at the back of the chapel watching Elena and her mother greeting the neighbors and family and friends who came. She could hardly have any idea of her own beauty, the perfect form, her small arms, her lithe body, her dark eyes, her breasts, the softness of her walking. Martin had been determined to look professional, caring, concerned. He had made an effort not to stare. Surely it was only that she was overwhelmed with the graveside duties, the deep emotions, or having seen her mother embrace Martin, and awkward about the currencies of thanks and the conventions of familiarity, she had overstated her gratitude, overpaid her sense of indebtedness. Or maybe in some way that Martin could not sort out entirely, the attachment to her father, torn apart by his untimely dying, was looking for another “male” attachment? Martin remembered a movie he’d seen in which a young widow whose husband gets killed in World War II takes a teenage boy into her bed, in her grief. Yes, love and grief, maybe something complex like that.

THERE WAS
a safety in dealing with only the parts—the arteries and chemistries, the closure of eyes and lip lines, the refitting of cranium and sternum, the treatment of cavities and viscera, the placement of hands, the suturing of wounds and incisions, the rouge and lipstick and nail polish, the dressing and hairdo and casketing. Duty had a way of separating Martin from what it was he was doing. Stuffing the opened cranium with cotton, fitting the skullcap back in place and easing the scalp back over the skull, thereby restoring the facial contours, and minding the tiny stitches from behind one ear to behind another was only part of the process of embalming; and embalming was only part of the process of laying out the dead, which was only part of the process of the funeral, and the funeral was only a part of the larger concept of a death in the family, and a death in the family was a more manageable prospect, more generic, somehow, than the horror—round and witless and recognizable and well beyond his professional abilities—of a lovely girl, grown lovelier as a woman, who leaned on him and counted on him and had kissed him once as if she meant it and who moved away and then got shot like an animal in the woods by a man about whom Martin knew next to nothing.

FOR MONTHS
after her father’s funeral, Martin kept an eye out for Elena. Her mother came to pay the bill, and pick up more holy cards and thank-you notes. And then she came to order a stone.
Beloved Husband and Father
, is what it said. Martin had advised her against a double marker. She was young and would surely remarry, he thought.