The Human Stain

I hadn't to ask who "they" were. I might live far from any city, I might not own a power auger, but I was they, we all were they, everyone but the man hunkered down on this lake jiggling the shortish fishing rod in his hand and talking into a hole in the ice, by choice communicating less with me—as they—than to the frigid water beneath us.

"Maybe a hiker'll come through here, or a cross-country skier, or someone like you. Spots my vehicle, somehow they spot me out here, so they'll come my way, and seems like when you're out on the ice—people like you who don't fish—" and here he looked up to take in again, to divine, gnostically, my unpardonable theyness.

"I'm guessin' you don't fish."

"I don't. No. Saw your truck. Just driving around on a beautiful day."

"Well, they're like you," he told me, as though there'd been no uncertainty about me from the time I'd appeared on the shore.

"They'll always come over if they see a fisherman, and they're curious, and they'll ask what he caught, you know. So what I'll do ..."

But here the mind appeared to come to a halt, stopped by his thinking, What am I doing? What the hell am I going on about? When he started up again, my heart all at once started racing with fear. Now that his fishing has been ruined, I thought, he's decided to have some fun with me. He's into his act now. He's out of the fishing and into being Les and all the many things that is and is not.

"So what I'll do," he resumed, "if I have fish layin' on the ice, I'll do what I did when I saw you. I'll pick all the fish up right away that I caught and I'll put 'em in a plastic bag and put 'em in my bucket, the bucket I'm sittin' on. So now the fish are concealed. And when the people come over and say, 'How are they bitin',' I say, 'Nothin'.

I don't think there's anything in here.' I caught maybe thirty fish already.

Excellent day. But I'll tell 'em, 'Naw, I'm gettin' ready to leave.

I been here two hours and I haven't gotten a bite yet.' Every time they'll just turn around and leave. They'll go somewhere else. And they'll spread the word that that pond up there is no good. That's how secret it is. Maybe I end up tending to be a little dishonest. But this place is like the best-kept secret in the whole world."

"And now I know," I said. I saw that there was no possible way to get him to laugh along conspiratorially at his dissembling with interlopers like myself, no way I was going to get him to ease up by smiling at what he'd said, and so I didn't try. I realized that though nothing may have passed between us of a truly personal nature, by his decision, if not mine, we two were further along than smiling could help. I was in a conversation that, out in this remote, secluded, frozen place, seemed suddenly to be of the greatest importance.

"I also know you're sitting on a slew of fish," I said. "In that bucket. How many today?"

"Well, you look like a man who can keep a secret. About thirty, thirty-five fish. Yeah, you look like an upright man. I think I recognize you anyway. Aren't you the author?"

"That I am."

"Sure. I know where you live. Across from the swamp where the heron is. Dumouchel's place. Dumouchel's cabin there."

"Dumouchel's who I bought it from. So tell me, since I'm a man who can keep a secret, why are you sitting right here and not over there? This whole big frozen lake. How'd you choose this one spot to fish?" Even if he really wasn't doing everything he could to keep me there, I seemed on my own to be doing everything I could not to leave.

"Well, you never know," he told me. "You start out where you got

'em the last time. If you caught fish the last time, you always start out at that spot."

"So that solves that. I always wondered." Go now, I thought.

That's all the conversation necessary. More than is necessary. But the thought of who he was drew me on. The fact of him drew me on. This was not speculation. This was not meditation. This was not that way of thinking that is fiction writing. This was the thing itself. The laws of caution that, outside my work, had ruled my life so strictly for the last five years were suddenly suspended. I couldn't turn back while crossing the ice and now I couldn't turn and flee.

It had nothing to do with courage. It had nothing to do with reason or logic. Here he is. That's all it had to do with. That and my fear. In his heavy brown coveralls and his black watch cap and his thicksoled black rubber boots, with his two big hands in a hunter's (or a soldier's) camouflage-colored fingertipless gloves, here is the man who murdered Coleman and Faunia. I'm sure of it. They didn't drive off the road and into the river. Here is the killer. He is the one.

How can I go?

"Fish always there?" I asked him. "When you return to your spot from the time before?"