The Human Stain

"No, sir. The fish move in schools. Underneath the ice. One day they'll be at the north end of the pond, the next day they might be at the south end of the pond. Maybe sometimes two times in a row they'll be at that same spot. They'll still be there. What they tend to do, the fish tend to school up and they don't move very much, because the water's so cold. They're able to adjust to water temperature, and the water being so cold, they don't move so much and they don't require as much food. But if you get in an area where the fish are schooled up, you will catch a lot of fish. But some days you can go out in the same pond—you can never cover the entire thing—so you might try about five or six different places, drill holes, and never get a hit. Never catch a fish. You just didn't locate the school. And so you just sit here."

"Close to God," I said.

"You got it."

His fluency—because it was the last thing I was expecting—fascinated me, as did the thoroughness with which he was willing to explain the life in a pond when the water's cold. How did he know I was "the author"? Did he also know I was Coleman's friend? Did he also know I was at Faunia's funeral? I supposed there were now as many questions in his mind about me—and my mission here—as there were in mine about him. This great bright arched space, this cold aboveground vault of a mountaintop cradling at its peak a largish oval of fresh water frozen hard as rock, the ancient activity that is the life of a lake, that is the formation of ice, that is the metabolism of fish, all the soundless, ageless forces unyieldingly working away—it is as though we have encountered each other at the top of the world, two hidden brains mistrustfully ticking, mutual hatred and paranoia the only introspection there is anywhere.

"And so what do you think about," I asked, "if you don't get a fish? What do you think about when they're not biting?"

"Tell you what I was just thinking about. I was thinking a lot of things. I was thinking about Slick Willie. I was thinking about our president—his freakin' luck. I was thinkin' about this guy who gets off everything, and I was thinkin' about the guys who didn't get off nothin'. Who didn't dodge the draft and didn't get off. It doesn't seem right."

"Vietnam," I said.

"Yeah. We'd go up in the freakin' helicopters—in my second tour I was a door gunner—and what I was thinking about was this one time we went into North Vietnam to pick up these two pilots. I was sitting out here thinking about that time. Slick Willie. That son of a bitch. Thinkin' about that scumbag son of a bitch gettin' his dick sucked in the Oval Office on the taxpayer's money, and then thinkin' about these two pilots, they were on an air strike over Hanoi harbor, these guys were hit real bad, and we picked up the signal on the radio. We weren't even a rescue helicopter, but we were in the vicinity, and they were giving a mayday that they were goin' to bail out, because they were at the altitude point where if they didn't bail out they were goin' to crash. We weren't even a rescue helicopter —we were a gunship—we were just taking a chance that we could save a couple of lives. We didn't even get permission to get up there, we just went. You act on instinct like that. We just all agreed, two door gunners, the pilot, the copilot, though the chances weren't that good because we had no cover. But we went in anyway—to try to pick 'em up."

He's telling me a war story, I thought. He knows he's doing it.

There's a point here that he's going to make. Something he wants me to carry away with me, to the shore, to my car, to the house whose location he knows and wishes me to understand that he knows. To carry away as "the author"? Or as somebody else-somebody who knows a secret of his that is even bigger than the secret of this pond. He wants me to know that not many people have seen what he's seen, been where he's been, done what he's done and, if required to, can do again. He's murdered in Vietnam and he's brought the murderer back with him to the Berkshires, back with him from the country of war, the country of horror, to this completely uncomprehending other place.

The auger out on the ice. The candor of the auger. There could be no more solid embodiment of our hatred than the merciless steel look of that auger out in the middle of nowhere.