Lynch - Apparition & Late Fictions

A NOVELLA AND STORIES

W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

NEW YORK LONDON

Copyright 2010 by Thomas Lynch

All rights reserved

Love, We Must Part Now from Early Poems and Juvenilia by Philip Larkin. Used with permission from Faber and Faber Ltd. Love, We Must Part Now from Collected Poems by Phillip Larkin. Copyright 1988, 2003 by the Estate of Philip Larkin. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. I Would Like My Love to Die from Collected Poems by Samuel Beckett. Used with permission from Faber and Faber Ltd. I Would Like My Love to Die from Collected Poems in English and French by Samuel Beckett, 1977 by Samuel Beckett. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic Inc. Let It Be 1970 Sony/ATV Tunes LLC. All right administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing, 8 Music Square West, Nashville, TN 37203. All rights reserved. Used by permission. A Deep Sworn Vow and When You Are Old by William Butler Yeats. Used with permission from A.P. Watt Ltd.

For information about permission to reproduce selections
from this book, write to Permissions,
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.,
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lynch, Thomas, 1948
Apparition & late fictions: a novella and stories /
Thomas Lynch.1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-393-04207-8
I. Title. II. Title: Apparition and late fictions.
PS3562.Y437A87 2010
813'.54dc22

2009038981

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110
www.wwnorton.com

W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.
Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT

This book is for
Mary Tata

T HE THERMOS BOTTLE with his fathers ashes in it rested on the front seat of the drift boat. He was glad to have the mornings busywork behind him and to be in the river. The green thermos with the silver cap looked inconspicuous enough.

Neither the waitress at the All Seasons Diner nor the other guides meeting their clients over biscuits and sausage gravy had noticed it. Nor had the woman from the tackle shop with whom he had arranged a car spot for his truck and trailer. He told her hed be floating Walhalla to Custer and left her a set of keys. He took some twenty-pound shooting line, some ten-pound leader and eight-pound tippet, some split shot and a Snickers bar, some feathers and yarn. Hed been tying his own flies for years. On account, he told her, putting the gear on the counter.

Youll be a long way downstream from the other guides, Danny, she told him. Most of em are doing Green Cottage to Gleasons Landing. Salmon all over the gravel, they say. Or Gleasons to Bowmans or Rainbow to Sulac. No ones below Upper Branch but you.

That rainll push some fresh ones in, he said. Some steelhead and lakeruns, maybe. First of October. Its time.

Well, youll have some peace and quiet at least. Its a zoo up here with guides and canoes and walk-ins. Mind the bow hunters. Season opens today.

Peace and quiet, yes.

He gathered his supplies and left.

Only Enid, the woman with whom he slept some nights, who managed his website and kept track of his bookings and packed his shore lunches, had been curious.

Whats with the thermos? shed asked when he stood in the door in the dark with his waders and vest. She knew he only drank Mountain Dew.

A clients, hed said, and bent to kiss her.

Good luck, she whispered, and rolled over and returned to sleep. He pulled the quilt up over her bare shoulder. For a moment he wondered if he should stay.

AND PUSHING off from the Walhalla landing, in the first light of the first morning of the first October since his father died, with his lame dog Chinook curled in the boats bow, his fathers ashes in a thermos on the front seat, himself easing the oars into the downstream currentthe three of them adrift in the Pere Marquette, the forest on either side of which was ablaze with the changes of Michigans autumnhe thought it was nearly like taking his father fishing again and that the thermos bottle was a perfect camouflage and that he didnt know if such things ought to feel like weeping or like laughter. He loved the damp rotting smell of autumn, the breeze that bore it through the tunnel of the river, the pockets of fog, the marsh and mudbanks, the litter of fallen and falling trees, the unseen traffic in the woods, the distance his drift put between himself and all the other details and duties of ordinary time. He loved the snug hold of the river on his boat, the determination of its current, the certain direction, the quiet.

And though this time of year he could put sixty days of guiding togetherfrom late August to late Octoberand though his arms and shoulders would burn from the rowing and his hands blister from the oars and ache from the tying of knots and his fingers would sting with line cuts and fish bites and embedded hooks, it never really seemed like work. But it was his work. Three hundred dollars a day, less 5 percent for the lodge that booked the trip, less the cost of lunches and tackle and car spots, gas and gear, plus tipsthese were the heydays of the year when yuppies from the suburbs all over the Midwest would drive their SUVs to Baldwin to dress up in their designer fly-fisherman costumes and catch the biggest fish of their lives on the lightest tackle. Danny took their pictures, took their money, filled them full of lore and stories, and sent them back to what he imagined were their trophy wives and dreary day jobs, glad that he had passed on all of that to become a trout bum and live the life he figured God intended him to live. This time of year, the only days of rest came from cancellations. The sales rep from Akron, booked for today, had called to say he couldnt get away.

THE THERMOS had been his stepmothers idea. Though his father had been a minister all his life, and had officiated at hundreds of funerals, he had steadfastly refused to say what he wanted for his own arrangements. Youll know what to do, is all hed ever say when questioned on the matter. Bury me or burn me or blow me out of a cannonI dont care. Ill have my heaven. Its yours to do. Thats one funeral I wont have to preach.