Waltz of Shadows (11 page)

I parked near the flagstone walk, got out, and listened to the gentle whistle of the wind in the bottle tree, as I had come to think of it. While I was getting up my nerve to go to the door, the big, yellow dog came out from under the steps and leaped through the lawn mower handle and barked at me.

I’d forgotten about him.

I got in the truck and closed the door. The dog ran up and jumped against it and barked at me through the window. I honked the horn a few times and the dog barked more fiercely.

After a moment, the double-wide’s door opened and Arnold came out. He stood in the doorway staring at me. He was wearing a grey, long-john shirt with an open red and black plaid shirt pulled over it. He had on long-john bottoms and thick grey socks with faded red toe tips. His formerly red hair was shot with grey and so was his thick beard. He had grown even heavier than I remembered, but his gut looked hard as an iron wash pot and his love handles seemed solid as a truck tire. His chest was like a barrel, and his legs were thick and slightly bowed. He towered well over six feet. He looked like a Viking elder ought to look. He turned his head and spat a stream of dark tobacco on the ground.

I rolled down my window a couple inches, and the dog jumped up and barked and slung slobber through the crack above the glass and onto my shoulder.

I leaned close to the crack and yelled, “Arnold, it’s me, Hank.”

A dog snout full of teeth flashed by and made me jerk back. I watched through the windshield as Arnold stepped onto the steps and called back to me. “I know who the hell you are. I know that truck better’n you. You selling something?”

“No… Course not. Could you call the dog off?”

“You gonna want to come in?”

“If I could.”

He thought about that a moment, fingered his chew out of his cheek and flicked it onto the ground and yelled at his dog. “Butch! Git under the goddamn house!”

Butch didn’t get under the goddamn house. He proved to be no better behaved than my children. He kept barking and jumping and flicking slobber on my window.

“Goddamnit,” Arnold said, coming down to the bottom step. “Git on back here. Butch! Git on back!”

Butch quit rearing up on the truck and throwing saliva. He growled and barked a time or two, and finally got under the house. He didn’t do it happily. He stuck his head out of the opening and barked some more dog words at me and Arnold slammed the palm of his hand against the double-wide and yelled, “Git on!”

Butch went silent.

Arnold lifted a hand and waved me toward him. “Well, come on.”

I got out of the truck carefully and walked toward the house. Arnold said, “You look older.”

“You look older too.”

The wind picked up and the bottle trees hooted. I turned and looked at the tree, then back to Arnold.

“Don’t pay that no mind,” he said. “Come on in.”

Inside the trailer was a mixture of what I expected, and a lot of what I didn’t expect. It was fairly neat, with old furniture that hadn’t come with the joint, and there was a new TV on the far side of the living room wall. Against another section of wall hung a huge black velvet cloth painting of Elvis holding a microphone to his mouth. There was a tacky silver tear dripping out of one of his eyes. Next to Elvis was a cheap particleboard bookcase. It was full of paperback books. I could see a few of the titles,
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Zen to Go, Zen and the Art of Archery,
a fistful of Western and detective novels, most of which looked pretty old.

“I got some photographs of the place, you want ’em,” Arnold said.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Just haven’t been here in a while.”

“Let’s see,” Arnold said. “You were here once before. About ten years ago, give or take a month or six. As I remember, last time you stopped by was a few days after Billy’s mother died. What the hell was her name, anyway?”

“Fran.”

“That sounds right. I had quite a bit of hooch that day, puked on one of our cousins. Let’s see. After the funeral I came back here and was moving a new chair inside when you came up. That right?”

“I don’t recall exactly.”

And I didn’t. I thought the funeral had been the last time I had seen him, but now it came back to me. I had totally blotted that event out, probably due to its awkwardness.

“Well,” Arnold said, “as I recall, you were here maybe thirty seconds. Told me you were sorry about Billy’s mom, and I said I was sorry about her too, though I didn’t know her from dick and you said, I got to go, and I believe that was about it.”

“You were pretty drunk, Arnold.”

“You did help me get the chair inside. Right inside the door, anyway. I pushed it from there. I don’t have that chair anymore. Some mice took up inside it and I had to burn it. I let the mice loose first. I’ll poison the little bastards, but I won’t burn them.”

“Arnold, I don’t know what to say.”

“What’s to say about mice?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean.”

Arnold went over and got behind the counter and sat on a bar stool. He put his big hands flat on the bar in front of him, and after a moment they crawled together. “Now you’re here, maybe it doesn’t mean a thing you’ve finally come around. I get this urge like I want to beat your ass, or hug you. I don’t know. I figure you’re here ’cause of something doesn’t have anything to do with me. I figure it has to do with you. You were always good for you.”

“That’s not true, Arnold.”

“In my case it’s true.”

“All right,” I said, “in your case it’s true. At least one time it was true.”

“That was one big time, little brother. Listen here. I’m going to do a little fishing. I was putting on some warm stuff when you came up. I don’t mean to be rude, but I’m still gonna do a little fishing. I’ve planned it all week. Just an hour or two, but I’m gonna do it. I go back to work tomorrow wrecking out a car for parts a fella needs, and I want to feel like I did what I told myself I’d do. I’m trying to do more for myself these days. I read about that in some books.”

“Yeah, sure,” I said.

“You want to talk about something, you can go with me to the pond, go out in the boat, and we can sit and fish and talk. That’s unless you just come over for another thirty seconds, thinking I might need to move another chair.”

“I came to talk.”

“I warn you, you’re gonna talk to me about something, I got something I’m gonna talk to you about, and you know what, so get yourself ready, or go on out of here and come back in another ten years. I’m not trying to be a bad ass here, I’m just saying how it is. If I’m gonna open this can of worms for us to chew on, I want to be sure you’re ready to digest them.”

His voice was very calm, thoughtful, not the way I remembered him at all, when everything that came out of his mouth seemed to be announced with a trumpet.

“All right,” I said. “I owe you that, and maybe I’ve got some things to say about that, too.”

He got his coffee pot and the fixings and put coffee on. He got a couple bottles of nonalcoholic beer out of the fridge and gave one to me and twisted the cap off the other for himself.

“I don’t drink the real stuff much anymore,” he said, swigging. “I get fat enough, way I eat. I switched over to this, I started losing a few pounds. I quit getting in fights too.”

“I prefer this,” I said. “I never drink to get drunk, even when I do drink a beer. Fact is, since that night, I’ve never been drunk again.”

He didn’t say anything. I thought it was an opening he’d take. I lifted the bottle and drank so I could hide some of my face from him.

“Coffee’ll be finished time I get dressed,” he said. He set his bottle on the counter and went into the bedroom, and after a few minutes came back. He was wearing jeans over his love handles, and had on high rubber boots and a thick coat, like the one I had in my truck.

“By the way,” he said, “that Elvis thing behind you there. I got to let you know, I think that’s a piece of shit. Gal that was living with me put it up there and I never took it down.”

“How long ago did she leave?”

“Couple of years,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said, “me too. I think she did for me what your mother did for Dad. Before I met her, I just thought I was a man. But I guess some of my learning came a little late.”

I didn’t know exactly what to say to that, so I changed the subject. “You use the cabin a lot?”

“Hardly go out there,” Arnold said. “Used to quite a bit. Not these days. I keep the electric paid up, but I’m not sure why… Before you come up with more small talk, come on and help me with my gear.”

Arnold got a thermos and an extra plastic cup and poured the coffee into the thermos, and we went out into the cold.

   Arnold walked out back and I went to my truck. I took off my coat and put on my Dad’s coat, joined up with him behind the double-wide.

I watched him gather his gear: a tackle box and a couple of stout rods off the carport, and a bucket of something out from under a tarp. A smell came from the bucket that made me think of highway kill.

Arnold gave me the bucket and a rod and reel to carry, and he got the rest of the stuff, and we started off walking toward the creek.

“What in the hell’s in this bucket?” I asked.

“Terminally spoiled chicken necks,” Arnold said.

“What for?”

“You forgot how to fish for channel cat?”

“Guess I have,” I said. “I don’t think I ever used any chicken necks.”

“I’m surprised,” he said, “that was Daddy’s way.”

“Me and him didn’t fish much,” I said. “When we did fish, we didn’t use chicken necks.”

“That might be because when you were growing up, he wasn’t working at the chicken processing plant where he could get ’em free.”

“I didn’t know he ever worked there,” I said.

“There’s lots of things you don’t know,” he said.

We crossed the junk yard, and I was amazed at all the cars.

“Ugly, ain’t it?” Arnold said.

“Yeah,” I said. “Pretty ugly.”

We came to the creek and worked our way carefully down the bank. Arnold stopped at the edge and watched the water run. It was clear and cold looking and not deep at all. You could see the sand and gravel beneath the water and minnows above that and hardy water bugs swimming about on the surface.

We strolled along the water’s edge, found a narrow place, jumped over, went up the bank on the other side and through the woods. We came to a clearing where the sun was bright and shiny on a pond the color of a dimming hazel eye, and it ricocheted off an aluminum boat turned over and pulled up in the weeds, made it flash bright as the little silver minnows we had seen earlier.

We turned the boat over and put our gear in it, got water sloshed in our shoes as we pushed it onto the pond and jumped inside. Arnold got a paddle out of the bottom of the boat and shoved us into deeper water. I took off my shoes and socks, poured water out of the shoes and wrung my socks out.

“Cozy yet?” Arnold said, as I slipped the socks and shoes back on. “Help me out here, would you?”

I got the other paddle and stuck it into the water and reached the bottom and pushed until there was no bottom to reach. The boat began to drift lazily, gave that strange feeling of being on top of the sky.

“Thing is, Arnold…” I started.

“Not yet,” he said. “Let me be doing something I like to do before you talk to me about something that might make me mad. That’s how it’s going to be, isn’t it?”

“I’m not here to make you mad. I need a little advice.”

“Advice?” Arnold said. “That’s rich. Thought you had decided I was a dumb redneck you ought to keep out of your life, lest your wife and kids think I’m kin to them. Which I am, I want to remind you. Just by half, I admit, but kin. You know, I’ve never seen my niece and nephew. Not even a picture. I’ve never had the chance to say more than three words to your wife, who, by the way, is too damn good looking for you.”

He opened the bucket of chicken necks and got one out. The smell was almost enough to make me want to jump and swim for shore. He stuck the chicken neck on the big double crappie hooks and cast it toward a grouping of reeds and water plants. The chicken neck and the hook went in with a heavy splash and sought bottom.

Arnold stuck his hand in the water and sloshed it around, then pulled out a pack of chewing tobacco, took a wad from it and poked it into his cheek. He chewed a few times, looked at me, said, “Go on. Fix up.”

I got the spare rod and looked into the bucket, holding my breath as I did. I didn’t want to get hold of one of those necks. They were a little green looking.

“Damn,” Arnold said. He got one of the chicken necks and fixed it up for me. “Think you can handle the casting part?” he said, “Or you want me to do that too?”

“I’ll do it,” I said.

“Don’t tangle my line,” he said.

I considered whopping him across the back of the head with the heavy rod, but I figured that wasn’t going to repair things between us.

I cocked the rod and flicked my wrist and let the reel spin. My line went way out, almost to the far side of the bank, into shallow water.

“Nothing there,” Arnold said.

“I know,” I said. “I just over cast.”

“Tell me about it.”

I reeled the line back until it was in deeper water, let it hang there. The boat drifted and the sun dipped and the air cooled and a cloud bagged the sun and turned the pond water dark.

“There’s people think fishing for cat is second best,” Arnold said. “Those people are full of shit. There’s people say the only place to catch a good cat is on the river, and they’re full of shit, too.”

“I’ve caught catfish before, Arnold.”

“But you don’t understand the spirit of catfishing, boy. You’re more of a bass man, or a trout man. That’s bullshit. The real stuff, the real essence of fishing is the cat.”

“These days, I’m more of a fish dinner at a restaurant.”

“Figures,” he said. “Thing is, catfishing is like Zen. It’s basic and clean and to the point. A catfish is like nature itself. It just is. It hasn’t got
any morals about itself, just blind persistence. It keeps on coming because it doesn’t know anything else and doesn’t understand what it does know.”