Well, yes, we had. The way we’d lost them, though, made for all the difference in the world. All loss is not created equal, you see. Loss is — it’s like a ladder you don’t know you’re standing at the top of and that reaches down, way down past the loss of your job, your possessions, your home; past the loss of your parents, your spouse, your children; down to the loss of your very life — and, I’ve since come to believe, past even that. In that awful hierarchy, what I had undergone, the slow slipping away of my wife over the span of almost two years, stood as far above what Dan had suffered, the disappearance of his wife and children in less time than it takes to tell it, as someone who hadn’t lost anything at all stood above me. Marie and I had had time, and if a lot of that time had been overshadowed by what was rushing toward us, ever-closer, at least we’d been able to make some use of those months, take a road trip out to Wyoming before she was too sick, draw some good out of the bad. You can imagine how much someone in Dan’s position might envy me, might hate me for having what I had more fiercely than he might someone whose wife was happily alive. I could imagine that hatred, so kept what I intended as a respectful distance.
Besides, there didn’t seem to be anything wrong with the guy. He didn’t go to pieces the way that I had. Sure, there were days when the shirt he was wearing was the same one we’d seen him in yesterday, or his suit was wrinkled, or his tie stained, but there were enough single men at the office about whom you could notice the same or similar things for such details not to strike you as too serious. Aside from the scar and the slightly longer hair, the only change I saw in Dan lay in his eyes, which locked into a permanent stare. Not a blank stare, mind. It was a more intense look, the kind that suggests great concentration: the brow lowered ever-so-slightly, the eyes crinkled, as if the starer is trying to see right through what’s in front of them. In that stare, something of the fierceness I’d seen dormant in his face came to the surface, and it could be a tad unsettling to have him focus it on you. Although his manner remained civil — he was always at least polite, frequently pleasant — under that gaze I felt a bit like a prisoner in one of those escape from Alcatraz movies the moment the spotlight catches him.
When I finally did ask Dan to fish with me, I acted on impulse, a spur-of-the-moment kind of thing. I was standing in the doorway of Frank Block’s office, telling him about my struggle the previous weekend to land a trout. The trout hadn’t been the biggest I’d ever caught, but he had been strong. My efforts had been complicated by the fact that, when the fish struck, I’d been away behind a clump of bushes, answering a call of nature brought on by a cup of extremely powerful coffee I’d drunk not an hour before. My line had been quiet prior to the moment I’d felt the uncontrollable urge to visit the bushes, so I thought it would be safe to leave the rod wedged in between my tacklebox and a log whilst I did what must be done. Naturally, this was the moment the fish chose to take the fly and run. When I heard the reel buzzing, I started looking around furiously for some leaves. Then, with a clatter and a crash, the fish pulled the rod over and began dragging it toward the river. There was no time for me to do anything but rush from my improvised toilet, pants still around my ankles, and dive for the rod, which I just managed to catch. I staggered to my feet, and spent the next ten minutes working that fish, giving him a little line, drawing him in, giving him a little line, drawing him in, naked from waist to ankles as the day the doctor took me from my ma. When at last I hauled the trout from the water and stood there holding him up to admire, I noticed movement on the other side of the river. Two young women were standing across from me, the one with a pair of binoculars, the other with a camera. Both were pointing in my direction and laughing. I don’t like to think at what.
“What’d you do?” Frank asked, laughing himself.
“What else could I do?” I said. “I bowed to them both, turned around, and shuffled back up the bank.”
“You fish?” Dan asked. He’d come up behind me as I was talking. I must have been aware of him, since I didn’t jump ten feet in the air and shout, “Jesus!” I turned and said, “I do. I fish most days it isn’t raining, and some when it is.”
“I used to fish,” Dan said. “My dad used to take me.”
“Really?” I said. “What kind of fishing?”
“Nothing that exciting,” he said. “Lakes and ponds, mostly.”
“You ever catch anything?” Frank asked. He was one of those fellows who likes to talk fishing more than he does fish fishing.
“Some,” Dan said. He shrugged. “Bass. A lot of sunnies. My dad caught a pike, once.”
“No kidding,” I said. “Pike’s a tough fish to land.”
“You can say that again,” Frank said.
“It took us the whole afternoon,” Dan said. “When we got him into the boat, he was almost three feet long. It was a record for that lake. This was in Maine. My dad gave the fish to Captain Pete — he was the guy who ran the bait and tackle shop on the lake. We bought our bait from him, soda, too. He had this big cooler full of cans of soda. Anyway, he was so impressed, he had that fish mounted — you know, gave it to a taxidermist — and hung it up on one of his shop’s walls. He had my dad’s name and the date the fish was caught carved on the mount.”
“Wow,” Frank said, whether at the story or at Dan’s having told us it I couldn’t say. As far as either of us knew, Dan’s anecdote was the most he had said to anyone at work since the accident. I asked, “You fished since then, Dan?”
“Not for years,” he replied. “Not since before the twins were born.”
Frank looked down at his desk. I swallowed the lump that had formed in my throat and said, “Want to come with me?”
“Fishing,” Dan said.
“Uh-huh.”
“When?”
“How about this weekend? Say, Saturday morning? Unless you have plans, that is.”
He scowled, and I realized Dan wasn’t sure if I was mocking him. He said, “I don’t know.”
All at once, it was the most important thing in the world for Dan to come fishing with me. I can’t say exactly why that should have been. Maybe I wanted to prove my sincerity to him. Maybe I thought that fishing would do for him what it’d done for me; although, as I’ve said, I had no evidence to suggest that Dan’s life had collapsed the way mine had. Or maybe my motive was something less well-defined, something as simple as wanting to have another person to pass a few words with while I fished. I don’t know. Until that moment, I’d always done well enough fishing on my own. Whatever the reason, I said, “Why don’t you come along? I’ve got an extra rod if you need it, and more’n’enough tackle for the two of us. I was just planning on heading out to the Svartkil, so it won’t be that far if you don’t like it and want to leave. I go pretty early — this weather, I like to be set up and have my line in the water by sunrise — but you’re welcome to come whenever you can make it there. What do you say?”
Dan’s scowl wavered, then dissipated. “What the hell,” he said. “Why not?”
And that was how Dan Drescher and I started fishing together. I told him where the spot on Springvale was, and he was there waiting for me when I drove up in the pre-dawn dark. He’d brought his own rod and tacklebox, and from the sheen and smell of both of them, I knew they’d entered his possession in the last day or so. That was okay. It reminded me of myself, those many years ago. He’d brought a hat, too, a kind of straw cowboy affair that I later learned he’d purchased on a vacation in Arizona with his wife. We chose and attached our lures, cast, and as the sun burst through the trees across from us, were sitting waiting to see who might be interested in the early breakfast we were serving.