CONTENTS
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Raymond Carver
Dedication
Title Page
Epigraph
Author’s Foreword
Nobody Said Anything
Bicycles, Muscles, Cigarettes
The Student’s Wife
They’re Not Your Husband
What Do You Do in San Francisco?
Fat
What’s in Alaska?
Neighbors
Put Yourself in My Shoes
Collectors
Why, Honey?
Are these Actual Miles?
Gazebo
One More Thing
Little Things
Why Don’t You Dance?
A Serious Talk
What We Talk about When We Talk about Love
Distance
The Third Thing that Killed My Father off
So Much Water So Close to Home
The Calm
Vitamins
Careful
Where I’m Calling from
Chef’s House
Fever
Feathers
Cathedral
A Small, Good Thing
Boxes
Whoever Was Using this Bed
Intimacy
Menudo
Elephant
Blackbird Pie
Errand
A Note on the Text
Copyright
About the Book
Shortly before he died, America's laureate of the dispossessed made his own choice of his short stories, revised the texts and published them in this authorative edition. The stories in Where I'm Calling from are selected from the full range of the author's work including Furious Seasons, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, What We Talk about When We Talk about Love, and Cathedral and include all seven stories from his last collection, Elephant.
Where I'm Calling From, with the author's original introduction, is the essential Raymond Carver story collection.
About the Author
Raymond Carver was born in Clatskanie, Oregon, in 1938 and grew up in Yakima, Washington State. His father was a sawmill worker and his mother was a waitress and clerk. He married early and for years writing had to come second to earning a living for his young family, although he did manage to attend John Gardner’s creative writing course at Chico State College. During this period he worked as a hospital porter, a textbook editor, a dictionary salesman, a petrol station attendant and a deliveryman. These experiences and his own increasingly desperate domestic circumstances were frequently the subject of his poetry and fiction. Although he published a number of small-press books of poetry and one chapbook of fiction in the 1960s and early 1970s, it was not until the appearance of Will You Please Be Quite, Please? in 1976 that his work began to reach a wider audience. The following year his luck began to change: he gave up alcohol, which had contributed to the collapse of his marriage, and in the same year met the poet Tess Gallagher with whom he shared the last eleven years of his life. He began to write again and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1979 and the prestigious Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award in 1983. During this prolific period he wrote three collections of stories (What We Talk about When We Talk About Love, Cathedral and the new stories – published in Britain under the title Elephant – in the present volume), three collections of poetry (Where Water Comes together with other Water and Ultramarine – a selection of which appeared in Britain as In a Marine Light: Selected Poems – and a New Path to the Waterfall), and a collection of stories, essays and poems (Fires). In the last year of his life he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He died on 2 August 1988. His uncollected writings, No Heroics, Please, were published in 1991, and his uncollected poems, All of Us in 1996.
Also by Raymond Carver
Fiction
WILL YOU BE PLEASE BE QUIET, PLEASE?
FURIOUS SEASONS
WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT LOVE
CATHEDRAL
ELEPHANT
SHORT CUTS
Poetry
NEAR KLAMATH
WINTER INSOMNIA
AT NIGHT THE SALMON MOVE
WHEN WATER COMES TOGETHER WITH OTHER WATER
ULTRAMARINE
IN A MARINE LIGHT: SELECTED POEMS
A NEW PATH TO THE WATERFALL
ALL OF US: THE COLLECTED POEMS
Essays, Poems, Stories
FIRES
NO HEROICS, PLEASE
To Tess Gallagher
Raymond Carver
WHERE I’M
CALLING FROM
The Selected Stories
We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.
MILAN KUNDERA,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Author’s Foreword1
I wrote and published my first short story in 1963,2 twenty-five years ago, and have been drawn to short story writing ever since. I think in part (but only in part) this inclination toward brevity and intensity has to do with the fact that I am a poet as well as a story writer. I began writing and publishing poetry and fiction at more or less the same time, back in the early 1960s when I was still an undergraduate. But this dual relationship as poet and short story writer doesn’t explain everything. I’m hooked on writing short stories and couldn’t get off them even if I wanted to. Which I don’t.
I love the swift leap of a good story, the excitement that often commences in the first sentence, the sense of beauty and mystery found in the best of them; and the fact – so crucially important to me back at the beginning and even now still a consideration – that the story can be written and read in one sitting. (Like poems!)
In the beginning – and perhaps still – the most important short story writers to me were Isaac Babel, Anton Chekhov, Frank O’Connor and V. S. Pritchett. I forget who passed along a copy of Babel’s Collected Stories to me, but I do remember coming across a line from one of his greatest stories. I copied it into the little notebook I carried around with me everywhere in those days. The narrator, speaking about Maupassant and the writing of fiction, says: “No iron can pierce the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place.”
When I first read this it came to me with the force of revelation. This is what I wanted to do with my own stories: line up the right words, the precise images, as well as the exact and correct punctuation so that the reader got pulled in and involved in the story and wouldn’t be able to turn away his eyes from the text unless the house caught fire. Vain wishes perhaps, to ask words to assume the power of actions, but clearly a young writer’s wishes. Still, the idea of writing clearly with authority enough to hold and engage the reader persisted. This remains one of my primary goals today.
My first book of stories, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, did not appear until 1976, thirteen years after the first story was written. This long delay between composition, magazine and book publication was due in part to a young marriage, the exigencies of child rearing and blue-collar laboring jobs, a little education on the fly – and never enough money to go around at the end of each month. (It was during this long period, too, that I was trying to learn my craft as a writer, how to be as subtle as a river current when very little else in my life was subtle.)
After the thirteen-year period it took to put the first book together and to find a publisher who, I might add, was most reluctant to engage in such a cockeyed enterprise – a first book of stories by an unknown writer! – I tried to learn to write fast when I had the time, writing stories when the spirit was with me and letting them pile up in a drawer; and then going back to look at them carefully and coldly later on, from a remove, after things had calmed down, after things had, all too regrettably, gone back to “normal”.
Inevitably, life being what it is, there were often great swatches of time that simply disappeared, long periods when I did not write any fiction. (How I wish I had those years back now!) Sometimes a year or two would pass when I couldn’t even think about writing stories. Often, though, I was able to spend some of that time writing poems, and this proved important because in writing the poetry the flame didn’t entirely putter out, as I sometimes feared it might. Mysteriously, or so it would seem to me, there would come a time to turn to fiction again. The circumstances in my life would be right or at least improved and the ferocious desire to write would take hold of me, and I would begin.
I wrote Cathedral – eight of these stories are reprinted here – in a period of fifteen months. But during that two-year period before I began to work on those stories, I found myself in a period of stock-taking, of trying to discover where I wanted to go with whatever new stories I was going to write and how I wanted to write them. My previous book, What We Talk about When We Talk about Love, had been in many ways a watershed book for me, but it was a book I didn’t want to duplicate or write again. So I simply waited. I taught at Syracuse University. I wrote some poems and book reviews, and an essay or two. And then one morning something happened. After a good night’s sleep, I went to my desk and wrote the story “Cathedral”. I knew it was a different kind of story for me, no question. Somehow I had found another direction I wanted to move toward. And I moved. And quickly.
The new stories that are included here,3 stories which were written after Cathedral and after I had intentionally, happily, taken “time out” for two years to write two books of poetry, are, I’m sure, different in kind and degree from the earlier stories. (At least I think they’re different from those earlier stories, and I suspect readers may feel the same. But any writer will tell you he wants to believe his work will undergo a metamorphosis, a sea-change, a process of enrichment if he’s been at it long enough.)
V. S. Pritchett’s definition of a short story is “something glimpsed from the corner of the eye, in passing”. First the glimpse. Then the glimpse given life, turned into something that will illuminate the moment and just maybe lock it indelibly into the reader’s consciousness. Make it a part of the reader’s own experience, as Hemingway so nicely put it. Forever, the writer hopes. Forever.
If we’re lucky, writer and reader alike, we’ll finish the last line or two of a short story and then just sit for a minute, quietly. Ideally, we’ll ponder what we’ve just written or read; maybe our hearts or our intellects will have been moved off the peg just a little from where they were before. Our body temperature will have gone up, or down, by a degree. Then, breathing evenly and steadily once more, we’ll collect ourselves, writers and readers alike, get up, “created of warm blood and nerves”, as a Chekhov character puts it, and go on to the next thing: Life. Always life.
R.C.
1 The “Author’s Foreword” was originally published as “A Special Message for the First Edition” in Where I’m Calling from, The Signed First Edition Society (Franklin Center, Pa.: The Franklin Library, 1988).
2 Raymond Carver in fact published his first short story, “The Furious Seasons”, in 1960. See No Heroics, Please (Harvill, 1991).
3 “The New Stories” referred to here are the last seven in the present volume. They were first published in Britain as a separate volume under the title Elephant (Harvill, 1988).
Nobody Said Anything
I COULD HEAR them out in the kitchen. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but they were arguing. Then it got quiet and she started to cry. I elbowed George. I thought he would wake up and say something to them so they would feel guilty and stop. But George is such an asshole. He started kicking and hollering.
“Stop gouging me, you bastard,” he said. “I’m going to tell!”
“You dumb chickenshit,” I said. “Can’t you wise up for once? They’re fighting and Mom’s crying. Listen.”
He listened with his head off the pillow. “I don’t care,” he said and turned over toward the wall and went back to sleep. George is a royal asshole.
Later I heard Dad leave to catch his bus. He slammed the front door. She had told me before he wanted to tear up the family. I didn’t want to listen.
After a while she came to call us for school. Her voice sounded funny – I don’t know. I said I felt sick at my stomach. It was the first week in October and I hadn’t missed any school yet, so what could she say? She looked at me, but it was like she was thinking of something else. George was awake and listening. I could tell he was awake by the way he moved in the bed. He was waiting to see how it turned out so he could make his move.
“All right.” She shook her head. “I just don’t know. Stay home, then. But no TV, remember that.”
George reared up. “I’m sick too,” he said to her. “I have a headache. He gouged me and kicked me all night. I didn’t get to sleep at all.”
“That’s enough!” she said. “You are going to school, George! You’re not going to stay here and fight with your brother all day. Now get up and get dressed. I mean it. I don’t feel like another battle this morning.”
George waited until she left the room. Then he climbed out over the foot of the bed. “You bastard,” he said and yanked all the covers off me. He dodged into the bathroom.
“I’ll kill you,” I said but not so loud that she could hear.
I stayed in bed until George left for school. When she started to get ready for work, I asked if she would make a bed for me on the couch. I said I wanted to study. On the coffee table I had the Edgar Rice Burroughs books I had gotten for my birthday and my Social Studies book. But I didn’t feel like reading. I wanted her to leave so I could watch TV.
She flushed the toilet.
I couldn’t wait any longer. I turned the picture on without the volume. I went out to the kitchen where she had left her pack of weeds and shook out three. I put them in the cupboard and went back to the couch and started reading The Princess of Mars. She came out and glanced at the TV but didn’t say anything. I had the book open. She poked at her hair in front of the mirror and then went into the kitchen. I looked back at the book when she came out.
“I’m late. Good-bye, sweetheart.” She wasn’t going to bring up the TV. Last night she’d said she wouldn’t know what it meant any more to go to work without being “stirred up”.
“Don’t cook anything. You don’t need to turn the burners on for a thing. There’s tuna fish in the icebox if you feel hungry.” She looked at me. “But if your stomach is sick, I don’t think you should put anything on it. Anyway, you don’t need to turn the burners on. Do you hear? You take that medicine, sweetheart, and I hope your stomach feels better by tonight. Maybe we’ll all feel better by tonight.”
She stood in the doorway and turned the knob. She looked as if she wanted to say something else. She wore the white blouse, the wide black belt, and the black skirt. Sometimes she called it her outfit, sometimes her uniform. For as long as I could remember, it was always hanging in the closet or hanging on the clothesline or getting washed out by hand at night or being ironed in the kitchen.
She worked Wednesdays through Sundays.
“Bye, Mom.”
I waited until she had started the car and had it warm. I listened as she pulled away from the curb. Then I got up and turned the sound on loud and went for the weeds. I smoked one and beat off while I watched a show about doctors and nurses. Then I turned to the other channel. Then I turned off the TV. I didn’t feel like watching.
I finished the chapter where Tars Tarkas falls for a green woman, only to see her get her head chopped off the next morning by this jealous brother-in-law. It was about the fifth time I had read it. Then I went to their bedroom and looked around. I wasn’t after anything in particular unless it was rubbers again and though I had looked all over I had never found any. Once I found a jar of Vaseline at the back of a drawer. I knew it must have something to do with it, but I didn’t know what. I studied the label and hoped it would reveal something, a description of what people did, or else about how you applied the Vaseline, that sort of thing. But it didn’t. Pure Petroleum Jelly, that was all it said on the front label. But just reading that was enough to give you a boner. An Excellent Aid in the Nursery, it said on the back. I tried to make the connection between Nursery – the swings and slides, the sandboxes, monkeybars – and what went on in bed between them. I had opened the jar lots of times and smelled inside and looked to see how much had been used since last time. This time I passed up the Pure Petroleum Jelly. I mean, all I did was look to see the jar was still there. I went through a few drawers, not really expecting to find anything. I looked under the bed. Nothing anywhere. I looked in the jar in the closet where they kept the grocery money. There was no change, only a five and a one. They would miss that. Then I thought I would get dressed and walk to Birch Creek. Trout season was open for another week or so, but almost everybody had quit fishing. Everybody was just sitting around now waiting for deer and pheasant to open.
I got out my old clothes. I put wool socks over my regular socks and took my time lacing up the boots. I made a couple of tuna sandwiches and some double-decker peanut-butter crackers. I filled my canteen and attached the hunting knife and the canteen to my belt. As I was going out the door, I decided to leave a note. So I wrote: “Feeling better and going to Birch Creek. Back soon. R. 3:15.” That was about four hours from now. And about fifteen minutes before George would come in from school. Before I left, I ate one of the sandwiches and had a glass of milk with it.
It was nice out. It was fall. But it wasn’t cold yet except at night. At night they would light the smudgepots in the orchards and you would wake up in the morning with a black ring of stuff in your nose. But nobody said anything. They said the smudging kept the young pears from freezing, so it was all right.
To get to Birch Creek, you go to the end of our street where you hit Sixteenth Avenue. You turn left on Sixteenth and go up the hill past the cemetery and down to Lennox, where there is a Chinese restaurant. From the crossroads there, you can see the airport, and Birch Creek is below the airport. Sixteenth changes to View Road at the crossroads. You follow View for a little way until you come to the bridge. There are orchards on both sides of the road. Sometimes when you go by the orchards you see pheasants running down the rows, but you can’t hunt there because you might get shot by a Greek named Matsos. I guess it is about a forty-minute walk all in all.
I was halfway down Sixteenth when a woman in a red car pulled onto the shoulder ahead of me. She rolled down the window on the passenger’s side and asked if I wanted a lift. She was thin and had little pimples around her mouth. Her hair was up in curlers. But she was sharp enough. She had a brown sweater with nice boobs inside.
“Playing hooky?”
“Guess so.”
“Want a ride?”
I nodded.
“Get in. I’m kind of in a hurry.”
I put the fly rod and the creel on the back seat. There were a lot of grocery sacks from Mel’s on the floorboards and back seat. I tried to think of something to say.
“I’m going fishing,” I said. I took off my cap, hitched the canteen around so I could sit, and parked myself next to the window.
“Well, I never would have guessed.” She laughed. She pulled back onto the road. “Where are you going? Birch Creek?”
I nodded again. I looked at my cap. My uncle had bought it for me in Seattle when he had gone to watch a hockey game. I couldn’t think of anything more to say. I looked out the window and sucked my cheeks. You always see yourself getting picked up by this woman. You know you’ll fall for each other and that she’ll take you home with her and let you screw her all over the house. I began to get a boner thinking about it. I moved the cap over my lap and closed my eyes and tried to think about baseball.
“I keep saying that one of these days I’ll take up fishing,” she said. “They say it’s very relaxing. I’m a nervous person.”
I opened my eyes. We were stopped at the crossroads. I wanted to say, Are you real busy? Would you like to start this morning? But I was afraid to look at her.
“Will this help you? I have to turn here. I’m sorry I’m in a hurry this morning,” she said.
“That’s okay. This is fine.” I took my stuff out. Then I put my cap on and took it off again while I talked. “Good-bye. Thanks. Maybe next summer,” but I couldn’t finish.
“You mean fishing? Sure thing.” She waved with a couple of fingers the way women do.
I started walking, going over what I should have said. I could think of a lot of things. What was wrong with me? I cut the air with the fly rod and hollered two or three times. What I should have done to start things off was ask if we could have lunch together. No one was home at my house. Suddenly we are in my bedroom under the covers. She asks me if she can keep her sweater on and I say it’s okay with me. She keeps her pants on too. That’s all right, I say. I don’t mind.
A Piper Cub dipped low over my head as it came in for a landing. I was a few feet from the bridge. I could hear the water running. I hurried down the embankment, unzipped, and shot off five feet over the creek. It must have been a record. I took a while eating the other sandwich and the peanut-butter crackers. I drank up half the water in the canteen. Then I was ready to fish.
I tried to think where to start. I had fished here for three years, ever since we had moved. Dad used to bring George and me in the car and wait for us, smoking, baiting our hooks, tying up new rigs for us if we snagged. We always started at the bridge and moved down, and we always caught a few. Once in a while, at the first of the season, we caught the limit. I rigged up and tried a few casts under the bridge first.
Now and then I cast under a bank or else in behind a big rock. But nothing happened. One place where the water was still and the bottom full of yellow leaves, I looked over and saw a few crawdads crawling there with their big ugly pinchers raised. Some quail flushed out of a brush pile. When I threw a stick, a rooster pheasant jumped up cackling about ten feet away and I almost dropped the rod.
The creek was slow and not very wide. I could walk across almost anywhere without it going over my boots. I crossed a pasture full of cow pads and came to where the water flowed out of a big pipe. I knew there was a little hole below the pipe, so I was careful. I got down on my knees when I was close enough to drop the line. It had just touched the water when I got a strike, but I missed him. I felt him roll with it. Then he was gone and the line flew back. I put another salmon egg on and tried a few more casts. But I knew I had jinxed it.
I went up the embankment and climbed under a fence that had a KEEP OUT sign on the post. One of the airport runways started here. I stopped to look at some flowers growing in the cracks in the pavement. You could see where the tires had smacked down on the pavement and left oily skid marks all around the flowers. I hit the creek again on the other side and fished along for a little way until I came to the hole. I thought this was as far as I would go. When I had first been up here three years ago, the water was roaring right up to the top of the banks. It was so swift then that I couldn’t fish. Now the creek was about six feet below the bank. It bubbled and hopped through this little run at the head of the pool where you could hardly see bottom. A little farther down, the bottom sloped up and got shallow again as if nothing had happened. The last time I was up here I caught two fish about ten inches long and turned one that looked twice as big – a summer steelhead, Dad said when I told him about it. He said they come up during the high water in early spring but that most of them return to the river before the water gets low.
I put two more shot on the line and closed them with my teeth. Then I put a fresh salmon egg on and cast out where the water dropped over a shelf into the pool. I let the current take it down. I could feel the sinkers tap-tapping on rocks, a different kind of tapping than when you are getting a bite. Then the line tightened and the current carried the egg into sight at the end of the pool.
I felt lousy to have come this far up for nothing. I pulled out all kinds of line this time and made another cast. I laid the fly rod over a limb and lit the next to last weed. I looked up the valley and began to think about the woman. We were going to her house because she wanted help carrying in the groceries. Her husband was overseas. I touched her and she started shaking. We were French-kissing on the couch when she excused herself to go to the bathroom. I followed her. I watched as she pulled down her pants and sat on the toilet. I had a big boner and she waved me over with her hand. Just as I was going to unzip, I heard a plop in the creek. I looked and saw the tip of my fly rod jiggling.
He wasn’t very big and didn’t fight much. But I played him as long as I could. He turned on his side and lay in the current down below. I didn’t know what he was. He looked strange. I tightened the line and lifted him over the bank into the grass, where he started wiggling. He was a trout. But he was green. I never saw one like him before. He had green sides with black trout spots, a greenish head, and like a green stomach. He was the color of moss, that color green. It was as if he had been wrapped up in moss a long time, and the color had come off all over him. He was fat, and I wondered why he hadn’t put up more of a fight. I wondered if he was all right. I looked at him for a time longer, then I put him out of his pain.
I pulled some grass and put it in the creel and laid him in there on the grass.
I made some more casts, and then I guessed it must be two or three o’clock. I thought I had better move down to the bridge. I thought I would fish below the bridge awhile before I started home. And I decided I would wait until night before I thought about the woman again. But right away I got a boner thinking about the boner I would get that night. Then I thought I had better stop doing it so much. About a month back, a Saturday when they were all gone, I had picked up the Bible right after and promised and swore I wouldn’t do it again. But I got jism on the Bible, and the promising and swearing lasted only a day or two, until I was by myself again.
I didn’t fish on the way down. When I got to the bridge, I saw a bicycle in the grass. I looked and saw a kid about George’s size running down the bank. I started in his direction. Then he turned and started toward me, looking in the water.
“Hey, what is it!” I hollered. “What’s wrong?” I guessed he didn’t hear me. I saw his pole and fishing bag on the bank, and I dropped my stuff. I ran over to where he was. He looked like a rat or something. I mean, he had buckteeth and skinny arms and this ragged long-sleeved shirt that was too small for him.
“God, I swear there’s the biggest fish here I ever saw!” he called. “Hurry! Look! Look here! Here he is!”
I looked where he pointed and my heart jumped.
It was as long as my arm.
“God, oh God, will you look at him!” the boy said.
I kept looking. It was resting in a shadow under a limb that hung over the water. “God almighty,” I said to the fish, “where did you come from?”
“What’ll we do?” the boy said. “I wish I had my gun.”
“We’re going to get him,” I said. “God, look at him! Let’s get him into the riffle.”
“You want to help me, then? We’ll work it together!” the kid said.
The big fish had drifted a few feet downstream and lay there finning slowly in the clear water.
“Okay, what do we do?” the kid said.
“I can go up and walk down the creek and start him moving,” I said. “You stand in the riffle, and when he tries to come through, you kick the living shit out of him. Get him onto the bank someway, I don’t care how. Then get a good hold of him and hang on.”
“Okay. Oh shit, look at him! Look, he’s going! Where’s he going?” the boy screamed.
I watched the fish move up the creek again and stop close to the bank. “He’s not going anyplace. There’s no place for him to go. See him? He’s scared shitless. He knows we’re here. He’s just cruising around now looking for someplace to go. See, he stopped again. He can’t go anyplace. He knows that. He knows we’re going to nail him. He knows it’s tough shit. I’ll go up and scare him down. You get him when he comes through.”
“I wish I had my gun,” the boy said. “That would take care of him,” the boy said.
I went up a little way, then started wading down the creek. I watched ahead of me as I went. Suddenly the fish darted away from the bank, turned right in front of me in a big cloudy swirl, and barrel-assed downstream.
“Here he comes!” I hollered. “Hey, hey, here he comes!” But the fish spun around before it reached the riffle and headed back. I splashed and hollered, and it turned again. “He’s coming! Get him, get him! Here he comes!”
But the dumb idiot had himself a club, the asshole, and when the fish hit the riffle, the boy drove at him with the club instead of trying to kick the son of a bitch out like he should have. The fish veered off, going crazy, shooting on his side through the shallow water. He made it. The asshole idiot kid lunged for him and fell flat.
He dragged up onto the bank sopping wet. “I hit him!” the boy hollered. “I think he’s hurt, too. I had my hands on him, but I couldn’t hold him.”
“You didn’t have anything!” I was out of breath. I was glad the kid fell in. “You didn’t even come close, asshole. What were you doing with that club? You should have kicked him. He’s probably a mile away by now.” I tried to spit. I shook my head. “I don’t know. We haven’t got him yet. We just may not get him,” I said.
“Goddamn it, I hit him!” the boy screamed. “Didn’t you see? I hit him, and I had my hands on him too. How close did you get? Besides, whose fish is it?” He looked at me. Water ran down his trousers over his shoes.
I didn’t say anything else, but I wondered about that myself. I shrugged. “Well, okay. I thought it was both ours. Let’s get him this time. No goof-ups, either one of us,” I said.
We waded downstream. I had water in my boots, but the kid was wet up to his collar. He closed his buckteeth over his lip to keep his teeth from chattering.
The fish wasn’t in the run below the riffle, and we couldn’t see him in the next stretch, either. We looked at each other and began to worry that the fish really had gone far enough downstream to reach one of the deep holes. But then the goddamn thing rolled near the bank, actually knocking dirt into the water with his tail, and took off again. He went through another riffle, his big tail sticking out of the water. I saw him cruise over near the bank and stop, his tail half out of the water, finning just enough to hold against the current.
“Do you see him?” I said. The boy looked. I took his arm and pointed his finger. “Right there. Okay now, listen. I’ll go down to that little run between those banks. See where I mean? You wait here until I give you a signal. Then you start down. Okay? And this time don’t let him get by you if he heads back.”
“Yeah,” the boy said and worked his lip with those teeth. “Let’s get him this time,” the boy said, a terrible look of cold in his face.
I got up on the bank and walked down, making sure I moved quiet. I slid off the bank and waded in again. But I couldn’t see the great big son of a bitch and my heart turned. I thought it might have taken off already. A little farther downstream and it would get to one of the holes. We would never get him then.
“He still there?” I hollered. I held my breath.
The kid waved.
“Ready!” I hollered again.
“Here goes!” the kid hollered back.
My hands shook. The creek was about three feet wide and ran between dirt banks. The water was low but fast. The kid was moving down the creek now, water up to his knees, throwing rocks ahead of him, splashing and shouting.
“Here he comes!” The kid waved his arms. I saw the fish now; it was coming right at me. He tried to turn when he saw me, but it was too late. I went down on my knees, grasping in the cold water. I scooped him with my hands and arms, up, up, raising him, throwing him out of the water, both of us falling onto the bank. I held him against my shirt, him flopping and twisting, until I could get my hands up his slippery sides to his gills. I ran one hand in and clawed through to his mouth and locked around his jaw. I knew I had him. He was still flopping and hard to hold, but I had him and I wasn’t going to let go.
“We got him!” the boy hollered as he splashed up. “We got him, by God! Ain’t he something! Look at him! Oh God, let me hold him,” the boy hollered.
“We got to kill him first,” I said. I ran my other hand down the throat. I pulled back on the head as hard as I could, trying to watch out for the teeth, and felt the heavy crunching. He gave a long slow tremble and was still. I laid him on the bank and we looked at him. He was at least two feet long, queerly skinny, but bigger than anything I had ever caught. I took hold of his jaw again.
“Hey,” the kid said but didn’t say any more when he saw what I was going to do. I washed off the blood and laid the fish back on the bank.
“I want to show him to my dad so bad,” the kid said.
We were wet and shivering. We looked at him, kept touching him. We pried open his big mouth and felt his rows of teeth. His sides were scarred, whitish welts as big as quarters and kind of puffy. There were nicks out of his head around his eyes and on his snout where I guess he had banged into the rocks and been in fights. But he was so skinny, too skinny for how long he was, and you could hardly see the pink stripe down his sides, and his belly was gray and slack instead of white and solid like it should have been. But I thought he was something.
“I guess I’d better go pretty soon,” I said. I looked at the clouds over the hills where the sun was going down. “I better get home.”
“I guess so. Me too. I’m freezing,” the kid said. “Hey, I want to carry him,” the kid said.
“Let’s get a stick. We’ll put it through his mouth and both carry him,” I said.
The kid found a stick. We put it through the gills and pushed until the fish was in the middle of the stick. Then we each took an end and started back, watching the fish as he swung on the stick.
“What are we going to do with him?” the kid said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I caught him,” I said.
“We both did. Besides, I saw him first.”
“That’s true,” I said. “Well, you want to flip for him or what?” I felt with my free hand, but I didn’t have any money. And what would I have done if I had lost?
Anyway, the kid said, “No, let’s not flip.”
I said, “All right. It’s okay with me.” I looked at that boy, his hair standing up, his lips gray. I could have taken him if it came to that. But I didn’t want to fight.
We got to where we had left our things and picked up our stuff with one hand, neither of us letting go of his end of the stick. Then we walked up to where his bicycle was. I got a good hold on the stick in case the kid tried something.
Then I had an idea. “We could half him,” I said.
“What do you mean?” the boy said, his teeth chattering again. I could feel him tighten his hold on the stick.
“Half him. I got a knife. We cut him in two and each take half. I don’t know, but I guess we could do that.”
He pulled at a piece of his hair and looked at the fish. “You going to use that knife?”
“You got one?” I said.
The boy shook his head.
“Okay,” I said.
I pulled the stick out and laid the fish in the grass beside the kid’s bicycle. I took out the knife. A plane taxied down the runway as I measured a line. “Right here?” I said. The kid nodded. The plane roared down the runway and lifted up right over our heads. I started cutting down into him. I came to his guts and turned him over and stripped everything out. I kept cutting until there was only a flap of skin on his belly holding him together. I took the halves and worked them in my hands and I tore him in two.
I handed the kid the tail part.
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “I want that half.”
I said, “They’re both the same! Now goddamn, watch it, I’m going to get mad in a minute.”
“I don’t care,” the boy said. “If they’re both the same, I’ll take that one. They’re both the same, right?”
“They’re both the same,” I said. “But I think I’m keeping this half here. I did the cutting.”
“I want it,” the kid said. “I saw him first.”
“Whose knife did we use?” I said.
“I don’t want the tail,” the kid said.
I looked around. There were no cars on the road and nobody else fishing. There was an airplane droning, and the sun was going down. I was cold all the way through. The kid was shivering hard, waiting.
“I got an idea,” I said. I opened the creel and showed him the trout. “See? It’s a green one. It’s the only green one I ever saw. So whoever takes the head, the other guy gets the green trout and the tail part. Is that fair?”
The kid looked at the green trout and took it out of the creel and held it. He studied the halves of the fish.
“I guess so,” he said. “Okay, I guess so. You take that half. I got more meat on mine.”
“I don’t care,” I said. “I’m going to wash him off. Which way do you live?” I said.
“Down on Arthur Avenue.” He put the green trout and his half of the fish into a dirty canvas bag. “Why?”
“Where’s that? Is that down by the ball park?” I said.
“Yeah, but why, I said.” That kid looked scared.
“I live close to there,” I said. “So I guess I could ride on the handlebars. We could take turns pumping. I got a weed we could smoke, if it didn’t get wet on me.”
But the kid only said, “I’m freezing.”
I washed my half in the creek. I held his big head under water and opened his mouth. The stream poured into his mouth and out the other end of what was left of him.
“I’m freezing,” the kid said.
I saw George riding his bicycle at the other end of the street. He didn’t see me. I went around to the back to take off my boots. I unslung the creel so I could raise the lid and get set to march into the house, grinning.
I heard their voices and looked through the window. They were sitting at the table. Smoke was all over the kitchen. I saw it was coming from a pan on the burner. But neither of them paid any attention.
“What I’m telling you is the gospel truth,” he said. “What do kids know? You’ll see.”
She said, “I’ll see nothing. If I thought that, I’d rather see them dead first.”
He said, “What’s the matter with you? You better be careful what you say!”
She started to cry. He smashed out a cigarette in the ashtray and stood up.
“Edna, do you know this pan is burning up?” he said.
She looked at the pan. She pushed her chair back and grabbed the pan by its handle and threw it against the wall over the sink.
He said, “Have you lost your mind? Look what you’ve done!” He took a dish cloth and began to wipe up stuff from the pan.
I opened the back door. I started grinning. I said, “You won’t believe what I caught at Birch Creek. Just look. Look here. Look at this. Look what I caught.”
My legs shook. I could hardly stand. I held the creel out to her, and she finally looked in. “Oh, oh, my God! What is it? A snake! What is it? Please, please take it out before I throw up.”
“Take it out!” he screamed. “Didn’t you hear what she said? Take it out of here!” he screamed.
I said, “But look, Dad. Look what it is.”
He said, “I don’t want to look.”
I said, “It’s a gigantic summer steelhead from Birch Creek. Look! Isn’t he something? It’s a monster! I chased him up and down the creek like a madman!” My voice was crazy. But I could not stop. “There was another one, too,” I hurried on. “A green one. I swear! It was green! Have you ever seen a green one?”
He looked into the creel and his mouth fell open.
He screamed, “Take that goddamn thing out of here! What in the hell is the matter with you? Take it the hell out of the kitchen and throw it in the goddamn garbage!”
I went back outside. I looked into the creel. What was there looked silver under the porch light. What was there filled the creel.
I lifted him out. I held him. I held that half of him.
Bicycles, Muscles, Cigarettes
IT HAD BEEN two days since Evan Hamilton had stopped smoking, and it seemed to him everything he’d said and thought for the two days somehow suggested cigarettes. He looked at his hands under the kitchen light. He sniffed his knuckles and his fingers.
“I can smell it,” he said.
“I know. It’s as if it sweats out of you,” Ann Hamilton said. “For three days after I stopped I could smell it on me. Even when I got out of the bath. It was disgusting.” She was putting plates on the table for dinner. “I’m so sorry, dear. I know what you’re going through. But, if it’s any consolation, the second day is always the hardest. The third day is hard, too, of course, but from then on, if you can stay with it that long, you’re over the hump. But I’m so happy you’re serious about quitting, I can’t tell you.” She touched his arm. “Now, if you’ll just call Roger, we’ll eat.”
Hamilton opened the front door. It was already dark. It was early in November and the days were short and cool. An older boy he had never seen before was sitting on a small, well-equipped bicycle in the driveway. The boy leaned forward just off the seat, the toes of his shoes touching the pavement and keeping him upright.
“You Mr Hamilton?” the boy said.
“Yes, I am,” Hamilton said. “What is it? Is it Roger?”
“I guess Roger is down at my house talking to my mother. Kip is there and this boy named Gary Berman. It is about my brother’s bike. I don’t know for sure,” the boy said, twisting the handle grips, “but my mother asked me to come and get you. One of Roger’s parents.”
“But he’s all right?” Hamilton said. “Yes, of course, I’ll be right with you.”
He went into the house to put his shoes on.
“Did you find him?” Ann Hamilton said.
“He’s in some kind of jam,” Hamilton answered. “Over a bicycle. Some boy – I didn’t catch his name – is outside. He wants one of us to go back with him to his house.”
“Is he all right?” Ann Hamilton said and took her apron off.
“Sure, he’s all right.” Hamilton looked at her and shook his head. “It sounds like it’s just a childish argument, and the boy’s mother is getting herself involved.”
“Do you want me to go?” Ann Hamilton asked.
He thought for a minute. “Yes, I’d rather you went, but I’ll go. Just hold dinner until we’re back. We shouldn’t be long.”
“I don’t like his being out after dark,” Ann Hamilton said. “I don’t like it.”
The boy was sitting on his bicycle and working the handbrake now.
“How far?” Hamilton said as they started down the sidewalk.
“Over in Arbuckle Court,” the boy answered, and when Hamilton looked at him, the boy added, “Not far. About two blocks from here.”
“What seems to be the trouble?” Hamilton asked.
“I don’t know for sure. I don’t understand all of it. He and Kip and this Gary Berman are supposed to have used my brother’s bike while we were on vacation, and I guess they wrecked it. On purpose. But I don’t know. Anyway, that’s what they’re talking about. My brother can’t find his bike and they had it last, Kip and Roger. My mom is trying to find out where it’s at.”
“I know Kip,” Hamilton said. “Who’s this other boy?”
“Gary Berman. I guess he’s new in the neighborhood. His dad is coming as soon as he gets home.”
They turned a corner. The boy pushed himself along, keeping just slightly ahead. Hamilton saw an orchard, and then they turned another corner onto a dead-end street. He hadn’t known of the existence of this street and was sure he would not recognize any of the people who lived here. He looked around him at the unfamiliar houses and was struck with the range of his son’s personal life.
The boy turned into a driveway and got off the bicycle and leaned it against the house. When the boy opened the front door, Hamilton followed him through the living room and into the kitchen, where he saw his son sitting on one side of a table along with Kip Hollister and another boy. Hamilton looked closely at Roger and then he turned to the stout, dark-haired woman at the head of the table.
“You’re Roger’s father?” the woman said to him.
“Yes, my name is Evan Hamilton. Good evening.”
“I’m Mrs Miller, Gilbert’s mother,” she said. “Sorry to ask you over here, but we have a problem.”
Hamilton sat down in a chair at the other end of the table and looked around. A boy of nine or ten, the boy whose bicycle was missing, Hamilton supposed, sat next to the woman. Another boy, fourteen or so, sat on the draining board, legs dangling, and watched another boy who was talking on the telephone. Grinning slyly at something that had just been said to him over the line, the boy reached over to the sink with a cigarette. Hamilton heard the sound of the cigarette sputting out in a glass of water. The boy who had brought him leaned against the refrigerator and crossed his arms.
“Did you get one of Kip’s parents?” the woman said to the boy.
“His sister said they were shopping. I went to Gary Berman’s and his father will be here in a few minutes. I left the address.”
“Mr Hamilton,” the woman said, “I’ll tell you what happened. We were on vacation last month and Kip wanted to borrow Gilbert’s bike so that Roger could help him with Kip’s paper route. I guess Roger’s bike had a flat tire or something. Well, as it turns out –”
“Gary was choking me, Dad,” Roger said.
“What?” Hamilton said, looking at his son carefully.
“He was choking me. I got the marks.” His son pulled down the collar of his T-shirt to show his neck.
“They were out in the garage,” the woman continued. “I didn’t know what they were doing until Curt, my oldest, went out to see.”
“He started it!” Gary Berman said to Hamilton. “He called me a jerk.” Gary Berman looked toward the front door.
“I think my bike cost about sixty dollars, you guys,” the boy named Gilbert said. “You can pay me for it.”
“You keep out of this, Gilbert,” the woman said to him.
Hamilton took a breath. “Go on,” he said.
“Well, as it turns out, Kip and Roger used Gilbert’s bike to help Kip deliver his papers, and then the two of them, and Gary too, they say, took turns rolling it.”
“What do you mean ‘rolling it’?” Hamilton said.
“Rolling it,” the woman said. “Sending it down the street with a push and letting it fall over. Then, mind you – and they just admitted this a few minutes ago – Kip and Roger took it up to the school and threw it against a goalpost.”
“Is that true, Roger?” Hamilton said, looking at his son again.
“Part of it’s true, Dad,” Roger said, looking down and rubbing his finger over the table. “But we only rolled it once. Kip did it, then Gary, and then I did it.”
“Once is too much,” Hamilton said. “Once is one too many times, Roger. I’m surprised and disappointed in you. And you too, Kip,” Hamilton said.
“But you see,” the woman said, “someone’s fibbing tonight or else not telling all he knows, for the fact is the bike’s still missing.”
The older boys in the kitchen laughed and kidded with the boy who still talked on the telephone.
“We don’t know where the bike is, Mrs Miller,” the boy named Kip said. “We told you already. The last time we saw it was when me and Roger took it to my house after we had it at school. I mean, that was the next to last time. The very last time was when I took it back here the next morning and parked it behind the house.” He shook his head. “We don’t know where it is,” the boy said.
“Sixty dollars,” the boy named Gilbert said to the boy named Kip. “You can pay me off like five dollars a week.”
“Gilbert, I’m warning you,” the woman said. “You see, they claim,” the woman went on, frowning now, “it disappeared from here, from behind the house. But how can we believe them when they haven’t been all that truthful this evening?”
“We’ve told the truth,” Roger said. “Everything.”
Gilbert leaned back in his chair and shook his head at Hamilton’s son.
The doorbell sounded and the boy on the draining board jumped down and went into the living room.
A stiff-shouldered man with a crew haircut and sharp gray eyes entered the kitchen without speaking. He glanced at the woman and moved over behind Gary Berman’s chair.
“You must be Mr Berman?” the woman said. “Happy to meet you. I’m Gilbert’s mother, and this is Mr Hamilton, Roger’s father.”
The man inclined his head at Hamilton but did not offer his hand.
“What’s all this about?” Berman said to his son.
The boys at the table began to speak at once.
“Quiet down!” Berman said. “I’m talking to Gary. You’ll get your turn.”
The boy began his account of the affair. His father listened closely, now and then narrowing his eyes to study the other two boys.