chin is steeply tucked into the skinny shoulder. His gloves are at the ready in the classic position — out in front as though loaded not merely with fists but with all the momentum of his one and a half decades — and each is larger in circumference than his face. One gets the subliminal sense of a kid with three heads.
She's something too, I thought, and found a clear plastic frame for the boy boxer and set him on my writing desk. The audacity of that family did not begin and end with Coleman. It's a bold gift, I thought, from a deceptively bold woman. I wondered what she had in mind by inviting me to the house. I wondered what I might have in mind by accepting the invitation. Strange to think that Coleman's sister and I had been taken so by each other's company — though strange only if you remembered that everything about Coleman was ten, twenty, a hundred thousand times stranger.
Ernestines invitation, Coleman's photograph — this was how I came to set out for East Orange on the first February Sunday after the Senate had voted not to remove Bill Clinton from office, and how I came to be on a remote mountain road that ordinarily I never take on my local back-and-forth driving but that serves as a shortcut from my house to Route 7. And that was how I came to notice, parked at the edge of a wide field I would otherwise have shot right by, the dilapidated gray pickup truck with the POW/MIA bumper sticker that, I was sure, had to be Les Farley's. I saw that pickup, somehow knew it was his, and unable just to keep on going, incapable of recording its presence and continuing on, I braked to a halt. I backed up until my car was in front of his, and, at the side of the road, I parked.
I suppose I was never altogether convinced that I was doing what I was doing — otherwise how could I have done it?—but it was by then nearly three months during which time Coleman Silk's life had become closer to me than my own, and so it was unthinkable that I should be anywhere other than there in the cold, atop that mountain, standing with my gloved hand on the hood of the very vehicle that had come barreling down the wrong side of the road and sent Coleman swerving through the guardrail and, with Faunia beside him, into the river on the evening before his seventy-second birthday. If this was the murder weapon, the murderer couldn't be far away.
When I realized where I was headed — and thought again of how surprising it was to hear from Ernestine, to be asked to meet Walter, to be thinking all day and often into the night about someone I'd known for less than a year and never as the closest of friends — the course of events seemed logical enough. This is what happens when you write books. There's not just something that drives you to find out everything — something begins putting everything in your path. There is suddenly no such thing as a back road that doesn't lead headlong into your obsession.
And so you do what I was doing. Coleman, Coleman, Coleman, you who are now no one now run my existence. Of course you could not write the book. You'd written the book — the book was your life. Writing personally is exposing and concealing at the same time, but with you it could only be concealment and so it would never work. Your book was your life — and your art? Once you set the thing in motion, your art was being a white man. Being, in your brother's words, “more white than the whites.” That was your singular act of invention: every day you woke up to be what you had made yourself.
There was hardly any snow left on the ground, only patches of it cobwebbing the stubble of the open field, no trail to follow, so I started bang across to the other side, where there was a thin wall of trees, and through the trees I could see another field, so I kept going until I reached the second field, and I crossed that, and through another, a deeper wall of trees, thick with high evergreens, and there at the other side was the shining eye of a frozen lake, oval and pointed at either end, with snow-freckled brownish hills rising all around it and the mountains, caressable-looking, curving away in the distance. Having walked some five hundred yards from the road, I'd intruded upon — no, trespassed upon; it was almost an unlawful sense that I had ... I'd trespassed upon a setting as pristine, I would think, as unviolated, as serenely unspoiled, as envelops any inland body of water in New England. It gave you an idea, as such places do — as they're cherished for doing — of what the world was like before the advent of man. The power of nature is sometimes very calming, and this was a calming place, calling a halt to your trivial thinking without, at the same time, overawing you with reminders of the nothingness of a life span and the vastness of extinction. It was all on a scale safely this side of the sublime. A man could absorb the beauty into his being without feeling belittled or permeated by fear.
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
“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
