“Big fish!” the man in the black suit cried in a guttural, greedy voice. “Oh, biiig fiiish!”
He snatched it away from me and crammed it into a mouth that opened wider than any human mouth ever could. Many years later, when I was sixty-five (I know it was sixty-five, because that was the summer I retired from teaching), I went to the aquarium in Boston and finally saw a shark. The mouth of the man in the black suit was like that shark’s mouth when it opened, only his gullet was blazing orange, the same color as his eyes, and I felt heat bake out of it and into my face, the way you feel a sudden wave of heat come pushing out of a fireplace when a dry piece of wood catches alight. And I didn’t imagine that heat, either–I know I didn’t–
because just before he slid the head of my nineteen-inch brook trout between his gaping jaws, I saw the scales along the sides of the fish rise up and begin to curl like bits of paper floating over an open incinerator.
He slid the fish in like a man in a travelling show swallowing a sword. He didn’t chew, and his blazing eyes bulged out, as if in effort. The fish went in and went in, his throat bulged as it slid down his gullet, and now he began to cry tears of his own–except his tears were blood, scarlet and thick.
I think it was the sight of those bloody tears that gave me my body back. I don’t know why that should have been, but I think it was. I bolted to my feet like a Jack released from its box, turned with my bamboo pole still in one hand, and fled up the bank, bending over and tearing tough bunches of weeds out with my free hank in an effort to get up the slope more quickly.
He made a strangled, furious noise–the sound of any man with his mouth too full–and I looked back just as I got to the top. He was coming after me, the back of his suit coat flapping and his thin gold watch chain flashing and winking in the sun. The tail of the fish was still protruding from his mouth and I could smell the rest of it, roasting in the oven of his throat.
He reached for me, groping with his talons, and I fled along the top of the bank. After a hundred yards or so, I found my voice and
went to screaming–screaming in fear, of course, but also screaming in grief for my beautiful dead mother.
He was coming after me. I could hear snapping branches and whipping bushes, but I didn’t look back again. I lowered my head, slitted my eyes against the bushes and low-hanging branches along the stream’s bank, and ran as fast as I could. And at every step I expected to feel his hands descending on my shoulders, pulling me back into a final burning hug.
That didn’t happen. Some unknown length of time later–it couldn’t have been longer than five or ten minutes, I suppose, but it seemed like forever–I saw the bridge through layerings of leaves and firs. Still screaming, but breathlessly now, sounding like a teakettle that has almost boiled dry, I reached this second, steeper bank and charged up.
Halfway to the top, I slipped to my knees, looked over my shoulder, and saw the man in the black suit almost at my heels, his white face pulled into a convulsion of fury and greed. His cheeks were splattered with his bloody tears and his shark’s mouth hung open like a hinge.
“Fisherboy!” he snarled, and started up the bank after me, grasping at my foot with one long hand. I tore free, turned, and threw my fishing pole at him. He batted it down easily, but it tangled his feet up somehow and he went to his knees. I didn’t wait to see any more; I turned and bolted to the top of the slope. I almost slipped at the very top, but managed to grab one of the support struts running beneath the bridge and save myself.
“You can’t get away, fisherboy!” he cried from behind me. He sounded furious, but he also sounded as if he were laughing. “It takes more than a mouthful of trout to fill me up!”
“Leave me alone!” I screamed back at him. I grabbed the bridge’s railing and threw myself over it in a clumsy somersault, filling my
hanks with splinters and bumping my head so hard on the boards when I came down that I saw stars. I rolled over on my belly and began crawling. I lurched to my feet just before I got to the end of the bridge, stumbled once, found my rhythm, and then began to run. I ran as only nine-year-old boys can run, which is like the wind. It felt as if my feet only touched the ground with every third or fourth stride, and, for all I know, that may be true. I ran straight up the right-hank wheel rut in the road, ran until my temples pounded and my eyes pulsed in their sockets, ran until I had a hot stitch in my left side from the bottom of my ribs to my armpit, ran until I could taste blood and something like metal shavings in the back of my throat, When I couldn’t run anymore I stumbled to a stop and looked back over my shoulder, puffing and blowing like a wind-broken horse. I was convinced I would see him standing right there behind me in his natty black suit, the watch chain a glittering loop across his vest and not a hair out of place.
But he was gone. The road stretching back toward Castle Stream between the darkly massed pines and spruces was empty. An yet I sensed him somewhere near in those woods, watching me with his grassfire eyes, smelling of burned matches and roasted fish.
I turned and began walking as fast as I could, limping a little–I’d pulled muscles in both legs, and when I got out of bed the next morning I was so sore I could barely walk. I kept looking over my shoulder, needing again and again to verify the road behind my was still empty. It was each time I looked, but those backward glances seemed to increase my fear rather than lessen it. The firs looked darker, massier, and I kept imagining what lay behind the trees that marched beside the road–long, tangled corridors of forest, leg-breaking deadfalls, ravines where anything might live.
Until that Saturday in 1914, I had thought that bears were the worst thing the forest could hold.
A mile or so farther up the road, just beyond the place where it came out of the woods and joined the Geegan Flat Road, I saw my
father walking toward me and whistling “The Old Oaken Bucket.”
He was carrying his own rod, the one with the fancy spinning reel from Monkey Ward. In his other hand he had his creel, the one with the ribbon my mother had woven through the handle back when Dan was still alive. “Dedicated to Jesus” that ribbon said. I had been walking, but when I saw him I started to run again, screaming Dad! Dad! Dad! at the top of my lungs and staggering from side to side on my tired, sprung legs like a drunken sailor.
The expression of surprise on his face when he recognized me might have been comical under other circumstances. He dropped his rod and creel into the road without so much as a downward glance at them and ran to me. It was the fastest I ever saw my dad run in his life; when we came together it was a wonder the impact didn’t knock us both senseless, and I struck my face on his belt buckle hard enough to start a little nosebleed. I didn’t notice that until later, though. Right then I only reached out my arms and clutched him as hard as I could. I held on and rubbed my hot face back and forth against his belly, covering his old blue workshirt with blood and tears and snot.
“Gary, what is it? What Happened? Are you all right?”
“Ma’s dead!” I sobbed. “I met a man in the woods and he told me!
Ma’s dead! She got stung by a bee and it swelled her all up just like what happened to Dan, and she’s dead! She’s on the kitchen floor and Candy Bill . . . licked the t-t-tears . . . off her . . .”
Face was the last word I had to say, but by then my chest was hitching so bad I couldn’t get it out. My own tears were flowing again, and my dad’s startled, frightened face had blurred into three overlapping images. I began to howl–not like a little kid who’s skinned his knee but like a dog that’s seen something bad by moonlight–and my father pressed my head against his hard flat stomach again. I slipped out from under his hand, though, and looked back over my shoulder. I wanted to make sure the man in the black suit wasn’t coming. There was no sign of him; the road