The Human Stain

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.”

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 thick-soled 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?”

“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 draff 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