turn out the stars

From Jack Main, a work in progress

It was hard to catch the old man off guard, but the raven did it that night, in a dream. “I see you made it,” the raven said to his back. “Son of a bitch!” the old man said, and spun around. “You startled hell out of me.” “That’s what you said the first time.” The raven was eyeing him close. “Anyways. No offense. Just thought I’d check in with ya.” “None taken,” the old man said. There was an awkward silence. “Well, best be off,” the raven said. “That’s it?” the old man asked. “After all this time?” “How long’s it been?” the raven asked. “I don’t know.” The Wrangells. Alaska. Could have been yesterday. “Fifty years?” “Practically a lifetime.” The raven made a croaking noise, flapped his wings a couple of times, then, gathering himself, gave the old man a sidelong glance. “You still got the vest?” The old man, caught off guard for a second time, snorted. Had he—that thing Doc Aman had alluded to—stopped breathing in his sleep? Never mind, this woke him. It was past midnight. He tried to go back to sleep, but couldn’t. So he got up, dressed, and as he’d found himself doing quite often of late, went for a walk in the dark. Talk about the perfect setup. **** He was standing at the edge of Round Lake, a fair-sized mountain lake that filled the granite basin between lower and upper Tools Creek. He’d been walking without thinking about it, just putting one foot in front of the other as he negotiated the crisscrossing network of deer trails he’d been sharing, toll-free, all these years, until he found himself standing on the lake’s pebbly beach, about two mostly uphill miles from his cabin. “Where’d the time go?” he asked aloud. The night was brittle with stars, and the lake, black with the year’s first ice, reflected them. He was dressed for the weather, god knows, though the heavy coat, the hat with earflaps, the mittens and scarf—the bulletproof vest!—might have struck a neutral observer as bordering on overkill. “Snow’s coming—can’t you smell it?” That was the kind of question he might have asked, if there had been someone to talk to. He’d gotten where he enjoyed asking questions like that, if only to gauge the reaction. But he always appreciated getting a straight answer, because useful information—if life had taught him anything it was this—could be hard to come by. As for the lake, he’d caught a fish here as a boy, the first of any consequence he’d ever caught, and it was big. A giant cutthroat. Twenty-five inches, no exaggeration. He gave it to Nick down at the Evergreen, thinking Nick would want to cook it up, but Nick took one look at the size of it, and the colors—the bright red gills, the blood-red slashes under the jaw—shook his head, and went and had it mounted. It ended up on the wall behind the cash register. Nick said it would be good for business. Later, during what the old man would later speak of, mockingly, as his bonded servitude at the Feed and Grain, he ate at the Evergreen nearly every day. Sometimes, when he went to pay the check, and maybe there was a kid there buying penny candy, or one of the lodge guests thumbing through a magazine, Nick would think of it and say something: “You see this young man? You see this fish? A piece of local history for you.” But whether anybody said anything or not, he would stare at the mounted fish’s glass eye and remember the shock of the real fish in his hands: the iron hard grip, invisible, that made his pole curve like a hoop, and the worry that filled his mind, that the line would break. The old man’s memory had slipped, he knew it had, though he’d managed to hide it pretty well, he thought. Now, however, standing still as a cigar store Indian on the edge of Round Lake, this wasn’t an issue. He remembered that fish. **** Strong as he was for an 11-year-old, it had been a hard hike up to the lake with the small rubber raft strapped to his packboard. He worked odd jobs all over town, had been doing so from his first day in Hop Springs practically, when, at the age of 7, his parents, Hungarian immigrants, picked up and moved there from Pennsylvania, his father wagering that sawing timber had to be better than mining coal. With the money he saved, he bought the things he needed for his adventures, including his spinning rod and, most recently, that little raft. It being late summer, he needed some way to get a line out where the fish were, and a raft, he’d decided, would be just the ticket. Round as a coracle, it wasn’t the most navigable vessel, and if a wind were to come up, God help him. But he didn’t think about that. And anyway, once he’d managed to inflate the thing, blowing until he was dizzy, and, still light-headed, shoved off, the lake proved to be surprisingly calm. He found he was able to maneuver the tiny craft passably well, paddling on one side then the other. Before he knew it, he was out in the middle, where the deep water lay, solemn and dark, under the already lowering sun. He baited his hook with one of the earthworms he’d dug up the night before, reached back, and cast his line as far away from the raft as he could. Then he sat and watched the bobber. After a short while, he reeled in, and cast in another direction. He did this several times, renewing his bait as needed, then paddled to a new location. He must have moved four or five times altogether. He got one minor tangle in the line, nothing serious, just enough—his stern father, who grew up fishing for pike in “the homeland,” had taught him the basics—to make him glad to be alone, unjudged. Time passed. The sun inched toward the ridgeline. He started to worry he was maybe cutting it too close. His parents afforded him a good deal of liberty as long as there was daylight, but there would be hell to pay if he didn’t make it home before nightfall. His mind, which had been focused, like any fisherman’s, entirely on the present, now went to work on the future. He would give it another try in a week. He could stash the raft—that would make it easier, give him more time. Yes. Go back to shore. Stash the raft. Come back next Saturday, early. No sooner had this thought crystallized in his mind than … back to the present … the bobber disappeared. It was a visceral memory for the most part. He remembered the pull on the line, the power of it, and the long light shattering against the dark water, rippling now as the air around him breezed up against the sun going down. How he waited for that fish! He’d been taught what to do, in the abstract, and so he gave when it pulled, and took back what slack it afforded when he could, careful not to force it. The fish never jumped once. The first he saw of it was when it rose at last, hard by the side of the raft, and he reached with his net, and its white belly flashed, like the birth of something. After, he just sat there, shivering, the fish flapping between his legs, and his two hands were not big enough to go around it. He was giddy and babbling, and it was a minute before he heard himself. “Thank you,” he was saying, “thank you, thank you,” like a performer acknowledging applause, and with the same thing in mind: Please don’t stop, don’t ever stop. Then—Big John, a kid like him, but Indian, had showed him how—he gripped the fish by the gill plate, cradled it against his chest, bit into its brains, and killed it. **** At the edge of the lake, the old man stood, panting, his breath coming out like smoke. The lake, polished and black, was so noisy with stars he could barely tell where the sky left off and the lake began, and then he just forgot about it. When he stepped out on the ice, a great lightness filled him, like he had stepped off the dark earth and it was behind him now. On the ice, the stars were everywhere, over and under him, and he thought, as he shuffled along, here I come. The stars shimmered as he went to them, shimmered and waited.

Thomas Shane is a contributing editor for Arcadia. His story “Channel Surfing” can be found online at Per Contra, “The Catbird’s Cry” at Mount Hope. Other publication credits include Aethlon, American Way, Elysian Fields, Light, Other Voices, River Oak Review, Slippery Elm and Trajectory, and the anthologies Fresh Water and When Last on the Mountain: The View from Writers over 50. He has also been runner-up or finalist in a number of writing contests, including the Glimmer Train Fiction Open, the International Imitation Hemingway Competition, and the Dzanc Books Short Story Collection Contest.

For more work by Thomas Shane, visit his page at our Online Sundries site.

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