The Life of Hope (32 page)

“This is great!” Esther said, dancing to the lake’s edge. “Moss-back!” she called. “Where are you?”

I pretended that I didn’t hear a little voice exclaim, Oh, boy! Company. After all, I probably didn’t.

Harvey and I assembled our gear. I did this with reasonable deftness, even gave the illusion of expertise. Harvey watched me with open interest. “Where did you learn all that stuff?”

I shrugged.

Esther was dabbling her toes in the water, her long arms held out sideways for balance.

“Don’t do that!” I bellowed.

Esther spun around, a hurt expression clouding her lovely face.

I patted the thin air desperately, asking my companions for quiet and stealth. “We are hunting the mighty Mossback,” I whispered loudly. “The mighty Mossback gets alarmed when he sees toes in the water.”

Hey, come on, take it easy on her.

I spun around, ready to bawl out Benson for defending his sweetie-pie, but when I saw Harvey working on his gear I realized he had not spoken.

“I’m sorry,” I told Esther.

“That’s cool,” she said, sitting down on a nearby rock.

Harvey got up and presented Esther with a light-weight spin-cast outfit. He and I were using heavier gear, our Hopers linked to high-test line with wire leaders.

Harvey then proceeded to give Esther a few pointers on the working of her equipment. She listened politely, nodding occasionally,
and then Esther stood up, assumed a fencing stance, and lightly tossed her lure into the middle of the lake.

Harvey nodded. “Something like that.”

Esther caught a fish on this first cast, a middle-sized bass that gave us a wonderful display of tail-dancing. Esther laughed gleefully. “Come on, baaay-beee!” she cackled. “Do that thing!”

Harvey and I were both standing beside her, ready to give pointers on how to land such a troublesome catch. Of course, Esther needed no such help. She gave the fish slack when his antics demanded it, otherwise she kept her line nice and tight. The bass was netted some minutes later. Esther pulled it up, her thumb and forefinger gripping its lower lip. “Three pounds,” she judged. Esther worked out the lure, tossed the fish back into Lookout and then slapped her hands together.

Harvey and I moved away quietly and began to fish.

After a while I muttered, “Boy, oh boy. My body temperature is something. I am talking really, really high.”

“Mine likewise,” agreed Harvey. He dug into his magic satchel and produced a bottle of Scotch.

Here we go again!

“Shut up,” I snarled at the water.

My buddy Jonathon drinks that stuff, too.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Tell it to the marines.”

“Paulie, who the fuck are you talking to?” Harvey was working his lure with concentration, so this question was shot out of the side of his mouth.

Fortunately, I was spared answering because Esther gave out with a spirited, “Hey-oh!” and began battling another fish. Harv and I went to stand beside her.

“This one’s bigger,” Esther informed us. “Feels like a pike.”

Esther let the fish play itself out, and then she cranked it in. It was indeed a pike, a rather smallish one, and when landed seemed lifeless. Esther plucked out the lure and then gingerly lowered the fish back into the water, her hands supporting its underbelly. “Poor thing’s all tuckered out,” she told us. Esther began to move the creature back and forth, forcing water through the gills. The fish remained stunned for six or seven of these passes. Suddenly life sparked. The pike slapped the water with its tail, wetting all three of us, a defiant gesture that
meant “Fuck youse” in no uncertain terms, and then the fish was gone.

“You guys having any luck?” Esther asked ingenuously.

Harvey and I went back to our spot, drinking heavily along the way.

I don’t get it, I don’t get it. It’s not like the human brain is a precision piece of equipment or anything to begin with and, boy, does that stuff ever throw it out of joint!

“Okay, Mossback!” I shouted. “Pipe down! You just better decide whether you want wild rice or tomato stuffing, because you are going to be our dinner!”

Get this guy.

“So, Paul,” said Harv—we both cast—we let our dissimilar Hopers drop deeply, then began the retrieval, “so, are you getting any work done on your second novel?”

“No, because I’m doing all this research.”

“Research about Hope and his followers and such like?”

“Exactly. Research about that.”

“You don’t think that’s maybe a waste of time?”

“No.”

“Paul, maybe you should come back to T.O.”

“Toronto?”

“Yeah. It occurs to me that maybe you want to come back to T.O. and move in with me. You could work in my study. I’ve got a word processor and everything. Then at night we could have fun and shit.”

“What I want to do, Harvard,” I said solemnly, “what I want to do for all my life is to hunt this fish. What I want to do with all my heart is to catch him.”

I stumbled forward as a furious force attached itself to the end of my line. Bracing myself, I jerked the rod tip backward, setting the hook. For a moment there was calm. The only sound in the air was that of my breathing, already quick and labored. Then the fish on the other end of the line began to move. I let him, trying to judge his size. “He’s big,” I whispered. “Sweet Jesus, he’s big.”

“I’ll get the net,” said Benson.

I cautiously brought up my rod tip, seeing what kind of battle I would provoke. The fish made an effort to get away, peeling
off a foot or two of line, and then it stopped dead. I cranked my reel, and the fish resisted briefly and seemed to throw in the towel.

Ugly, ugly, ugly!

What’s ugly?

That thing you’ve got on the end of your line.

It’s not you?

Well, thank you very much. As if I would behave like that wussy. If—and, mind you, this is extremely unlikely—if I ever chomp down on that whatever-it-is, you are in for the fight of your life.

I was reeling in freely, the only hindrance being the creature’s weight.

Both Harvey and Esther were standing beside me. “What is it?” whispered Esther.

“It’s ugly, that’s all I know.”

They exchanged glances.

Harved waded into the water with the net. He lowered his head and searched the water for the fish, and when he saw it he said, “Is it ever.” Benson slipped the net beneath the thing and raised it into our sight.

“Is it ever!” said Esther.

It was a ling, a prehistoric fish that hasn’t evolved one iota for the past few thousands of years. A ling looks like a single IQ point made flesh. This one was big, somewhere near ten pounds, and stupid, even for a ling. It had managed to gulp down the Hoper, and the lure’s barbs were imbedded in the thing’s throat. Blood leaked out of its gullet. This ling was a goner, not that the earth would ever notice its passing. I took out my fishing knife and dispassionately sank it into the ling’s brain. As a child, as a boy, perhaps as a younger man, I would not have been able to do such a thing. I hunkered down and watched as the ling, and something else, slowly died.

It was midnight at the homestead, and here’s what was happening. Harvey and Esther were upstairs in their bedroom, causing all of the furniture to rattle and move about. I was full of tequila and cocaine. I was deteriorating. The word had lost its sting. I was deteriorating, and I was even slightly proud of the fact. I considered having a T-shirt made up, the back of which would read DETERIORATING. Maybe I could even have DETERIORATING tattooed somewhere on my being. And on my tombstone, of course, it would be chiseled, STILL DETERIORATING.

Meanwhile my spirit was packing together its meager belongings. “Fuggit,” my spirit was muttering. “I’ve tried and I’ve tried, but there’s just no living with this asshole!” I climbed to my feet and stumbled over to the huge picture window. The night was there, looking like a page torn out of a cheap, black-and-white porno magazine. I was holding my bottle of tequila, my spirit was moving out (muttering all the while: “Nope, nope, I can’t hack it, I’ve tried and I’ve tried …”), the stars reminded me of Elspeth, and I only needed one thing to make me completely, and beautifully, miserable. I fired up the record player and put on the “Vocalise.”

It was hootenanny time. I tilted my head and howled the melody at the moon, back where it came from, and with my hands I conducted, orchestrating the movements of constellations and petty emotions. It was a bravura performance I put on, better than Leonard Bernstein could have done, because Lenny didn’t know or even care about Elspeth and Helmut.

At the end of the song, my spirit was long gone. (“And on top of everything else, there’s too much goddam
noise
.”) I turned
away from the picture window, away from the night, and then I started to scream.

When I say I “started to scream” I mean only that I initiated the physical process of screaming, opening my mouth and sucking in buckets of air, but the scream itself got tangled up in my tear-choked throat.

All I actually produced was an odd bird-like sound, sort of a cheep. Still, it was enough to alarm Louis Hope. He took three baby-steps backward, but they were too quick, not properly engineered, and Louis fell down. He fell down slowly, crumpling like a dynamited building, and it seemed like many moments later that Louis was finally a mountain of obscenely pale flesh covering my floor.

I was holding the tequila bottle high in the air, because I’d been using it as a baton, and that’s where it ended up at the end of Rachmaninoff’s “Vocalise.” Louis Hope’s good eye was fixed on the bottle, and the look in that eye was pitiful and terrified.

“Don’t hit,” whimpered Louis.

It took me many moments to realize what had taken place. First of all, Louis’s voice was a strange one, and sounded as if it came out through a mouthful of lopsided marbles. Secondly, I have never considered a booze bottle to be an offensive weapon (although God knows I’ve had just cause), but finally I connected the naked giant’s fearful quivering with the tequila in my hand. I lowered it slowly, sneaking a sip from it en route.

I said, “Hello, Louis.”

Louis Hope moaned something, very quietly—“Sowwy”—and then he covered his face with grief and shame.

“You like this music, don’t you, Louis? I do, too. It’s beautiful.”

Louis parted the fingers of one hand to reveal that his milky wall-eye was aimed at me. “Boo’ful,” he agreed.

“Don’t be frightened,” I tried to calm him. Then I had a good idea, as unlikely as that sounds, and I asked, “Do you want something to eat?”

Louis Hope parted the fingers of his other hand so that both eyes were pointed at me, albeit from two very different vantage points. “Eat?” he repeated.

The way to a 700-pound giant freak’s heart is through his
stomach, remember that. I dashed into the kitchen, and when I returned I had most of the refrigerator’s contents cradled in my arms.

Louis had maneuvered himself into a sitting position, his legs splayed out awkwardly. I deposited the food in this crook, and Louis began to eat.

Louis was quite naked, and every so often (if he had a free hand) Louis would reach down into his crotch and toy idly with his tiny dink. Louis Hope also kept one or the other of his eyes trained on me, ever wary. I needn’t go into detail about Louis’s eating habits, except to say that he got one point out of several thousand for table manners, and that one point was looking vaguely sheepish after producing a belch that registered on the Richter scale.

While Louis ate, I reset the needle of the phonograph, for the music seemed to tie things together, connect it all in some convoluted sense. Louis started to rock, slowly and almost in tempo with the “Vocalise”; he also produced quiet moaning noises that sounded as if animals were being butchered many miles away—this was meant to be singing.

After two or three repetitions of the piece, Louis was done eating. Most of his huge and off-putting body gleamed with chicken fat.

“Now what do we do?” I wondered aloud.

Louis considered the question. He cocked his head slightly to the left, then to the right, back and forth a couple of times, and then he threw his crooked shoulders heavenward. “Eat?” Louis suggested.

“No more food,” I told him.

Louis Hope was saddened. He pulled a smear of grease from his belly with his forefinger and sucked on it petulantly.

“How old are you, Louis?” I asked him.

“Twenty-two,” Louis answered succinctly—but then he kept going, and over the course of the next few moments claimed to be “3,” “107,” “54” and “406.”

“I’m thirty,” I told Louis Hope. He didn’t appear to care. The two of us simply stared at each other.

There is, in
The History of the Community at Hope, Ontario
, a daguerreotype that pictures most of the original Perfectionists all posed together on some lawn. It is an unremarkable
photograph—many of the subjects had become fidgety, and their images are slightly blurred—except for the fact that in the background, ducking down so that his massive head manages to get crammed within the frame, is George Quinton. This is the only known representation of George. Martha, on the other hand, managed to bully herself into all sorts of pictures, even into a posed painted portrait of Adam and Mary De-la-Noy. Of course, Louis bore an uncanny resemblance to George, you probably aren’t surprised to find out, as if someone had taken George’s face and simply rearranged the features a bit. But even I, demented and looking for black holes in the universe, didn’t conjecture that Louis was in any way the same person. This was because George Quinton’s death was the most thoroughly documented of any of the Perfectionists’, written up in countless newspapers, lavishly described in Rev. Dr. McDougall’s book
The Lecher
(wherein George Quinton is portrayed as a martyr in the name of all that is decent) and medically confirmed and validated by a court-appointed physician. I may not have known much, back in my early Hope days, but I sure knew that George Quinton was dead; he’d been hanged for the murder of Joseph Benton Hope.