The Human Stain

Almost midway out on the ice there was a solitary figure in brown coveralls and a black cap seated on a low yellow bucket, bending over an ice hole with an abbreviated fishing rod in his gloved hands. I didn't step onto the ice until I saw that he'd looked up and spotted me. I didn't want to come upon him unawares, or in any way look as though I intended to, not if the fisherman really was Les Farley. If this was Les Farley, he wasn't someone you wanted to take by surprise.

Of course I thought about turning back. I thought about heading back to the road, about getting into my car, about proceeding on to Route 7 South and down through Connecticut to 684 and from there onto the Garden State Parkway. I thought about getting a look at Coleman's bedroom. I thought about getting a look at Coleman's brother, who, for what Coleman did, could not stop hating him even after his death. I thought about that and nothing else all the way across the ice to get my look at Coleman's killer. Right up to the point where I said, "Hi. How's it goin'?" I thought: Steal up on him or don't steal up on him, it makes no difference. You're the enemy either way. On this empty, ice-whitened stage, the only enemy.

"The fish biting?" I said.

"Oh, not too good, not too bad." He did no more than glance my way before focusing his attention back on the ice hole, one of twelve or fifteen identical holes cut into rock-hard ice and spread randomly across some forty or so square feet of lake. Most likely the holes had been drilled by the device that was lying just a few steps away from his yellow bucket, which was itself really a seven-gallon detergent pail. The drilling device consisted of a metal shaft about four feet long ending in a wide, cylindrical length of corkscrew blade, a strong, serious boring tool whose imposing bit—rotated by turning the cranked handle at the top—glittered like new in the sunlight. An auger.

"It serves its purpose," he mumbled. "Passes the time."

It was as though I weren't the first but more like the fiftieth person who'd happened out on the ice midway across a lake five hundred yards from a backcountry road in the rural highlands to ask about the fishing. As he wore a black wool watch cap pulled low on his forehead and down over his ears, and as he sported a dark, graying chin beard and a thickish mustache, there was only a narrow band of face on display. If it was remarkable in any way, that was because of its broadness—on the horizontal axis, an open oblong plain of a face. His dark eyebrows were long and thick, his eyes were blue and noticeably widely spaced, while centered above the mustache was the unsprouted, bridgeless nose of a kid. In just this band of himself Farley exposed between the whiskered muzzle and the woolen cap, all kinds of principles were at work, geometric and psychological both, and none seemed congruent with the others.

"Beautiful spot," I said.

"Why I'm here."

"Peaceful."

"Close to God," he said.

"Yes? You feel that?"

Now he shed the outer edge, the coating of his inwardness, shed something of the mood in which I'd caught him, and looked as if he were ready to link up with me as more than just a meaningless distraction. His posture didn't change—still very much fishing rather than gabbing—but at least a little of the antisocial aura was dissipated by a richer, more ruminative voice than I would have expected.

Thoughtful, you might even call it, though in a drastically impersonal way.

"It's way up on top of a mountain," he said. "There's no houses anywhere. No dwellings. There's no cottages on the lake." After each declaration, a brooding pause—declarative observation, supercharged silence. It was anybody's guess, at the end of a sentence, whether or not he was finished with you. "Don't have a lot of activity out here. Don't have a lot of noise. Thirty acres of lake about.

None of those guys with their power augers. None of their noise and the stink of their gasoline. Seven hundred acres of just open good land and woods. It's just a beautiful area. Just peace and quiet.

And clean. It's a clean place. Away from all the hustle and bustle and craziness that goes on." Finally the upward glance to take me in. To assess me. A quick look that was ninety percent opaque and unreadable and ten percent alarmingly transparent. I couldn't see where there was any humor in this man.

"As long as I can keep it secret," he said, "it'll stay the way it is."

"True enough," I said.

"They live in cities. They live in the hustle and bustle of the work routine. The craziness goin' to work. The craziness at work. The craziness comin' home from work. The traffic. The congestion.

They're caught up in that. I'm out of it."