“You don’t get it,” Sugar Bear told him. “I like it that she talks to bugs. I like it that she’s a nut. That stuff don’t bother me. It’s actually kind of cute.”
“Long term?”
“Sure, long term. But girls who talk to bugs must be conning themselves, because you sure can’t con a bug. If I ask her, she’ll maybe con herself. Then I get busted…”
“I been missing my dog,” Petey said. “Is he okay?”
“What the hell does that mean?” Sugar Bear seemed ready to apologize, or fight, or run and hide.
“You can’t predict what will happen ten minutes from now,” Petey told him. “You’re trying to arrange her whole life, and your whole life forever. And I thought I could hustle.”
The fisherman slid off the hood of the truck. “Get off your back pockets and propose, or take her to a movie, or something.” Music from Beer and Bait sobbed, lonesome as a lost man in a desert, sitting beside his dying horse.
“I’m feeling sort of fatalistic.”
“I’m not sure,” the fisherman said thoughtfully, “that Annie’s the biggest kid in these parts. And you, a full-grown man.”
The three men watched the forest go dark, while at their backs a little light still lay across the Canal; light reflected from high clouds, and from trees and buildings on the far side. A couple of outboards piddled along like moving specks, but the surface of the Canal lay otherwise deserted and calm. Sugar Bear slid from the hood of the pickup, seemed uncertain whether to go inside Beer and Bait, or head for home. Petey slid down to stand beside him. “I really do miss my dog,” he said to Sugar Bear. To the fisherman he said, “You comin’ in?”
“I’ll be there directly,” the fisherman told him. The fisherman watched as Petey and Sugar Bear trudged across the lot, and the fisherman thought neither one looked like a man with a happy thirst. If he had to choose a word to describe them, he thought, that word would be “beleaguered.”
And no doubt the fisherman felt beleaguered as well. As Petey and Sugar Bear disappeared through the open doorway of Beer and Bait, and as the music changed to twanging sobs because some guy’s lady ran off in some other guy’s Peterbilt, the fisherman walked to the side of Beer and Bait, hesitated, then moved slowly to the bank of the Canal.
Perhaps he only came to watch the show, as water humped and carried on. It may be he wondered why the thing that humped out there never bothered with anything on the surface, and he surely wondered why it did not bother police divers. As darkness slowly descended over the face of the Canal, the fisherman, accustomed to deep water, and accustomed to not thinking of their depths—because sailors don’t—surprised himself by thoughts of coldness, darkness; the eternal night lying at the bottom of the Canal.
He shivered, but not with cold or fear. He knew about cold, having spent a good deal of his life offshore. He knew about fear, because there are things that happen offshore so scary that no witchery on the Canal could equal them. In his day, the fisherman’s long lines had brought from the depths colorful creatures, gasping and strange. The lines snagged an occasional carcass, sea lion, or seal, or other things. Since much of this happened in mist, and since mist is ghostly, the fisherman (like most of his clan) had seen many-a-thing walking across the water, some of those things vaguely human. A little problem like water humping on the Canal would not occupy this fisherman for long.
Something bothered him, though. It may be… it just might be, that although Annie scared him, this fisherman also had a thing for Annie. It might be that the studly talk that goes on aboard boats or in bars does not actually tell much about the boldness of the average guy; although, of course, this fisherman thought of himself as higher-than-average.
And so he probably asked himself why, if weird things of the sea did not scare him, and the thing in the Canal did not scare him, how come a pretty girl had him tied in fearful knots?
Because, he told himself, the whole deal was hopeless. Even if he had a “sort of a thing” for Annie, he somehow knew Annie was infatuated with Sugar Bear. Besides, the fisherman told himself, he was probably too old for her, anyway. Still, the whole deal made him about as sad as a cynical guy can allow himself to get.
He turned toward Beer and Bait, while at his back, water began to hump and spread. He figured everything was working out about the way it should. Annie was almost surely a stay-at-home type, and would rather hang around boilerplate in a warm shop, than sit in a small house waiting for a man who made his living at sea.
Annie
During the first two weeks of August a heat wave descended. Temperatures of eighty degrees cooked the forest, and while eighty is thought mild in many places, we’re not acclimated. Around here, summer visitors from the midwest usually wear sweaters, talk polite, and shake their heads in private. Sixty-five degrees and drizzling is considered ideal.
Heat brings dryness. Moss on roofs turns from green to black, and shrinks into little patches. Dust gathers golden on windshields because people aren’t in the habit of washing them. As hot day follows hot day, steam from the forest diminishes. Conifers take a grayish, sick look, and leaves of maple and alder show patches of yellow. Trees do not drop leaves until October, but drought speeds them up. When Annie walked in the forest, as she often did in August, the mat of needles from fir and pine no longer felt spongy.
She watched from behind the cover of trees like a small girl playing hide-and-seek. Police patrolled the road. One cop—who looked like a movie actor dressed up to play a cop—seemed to run the show. This cop cruised the road until divers found another wreck. Then he hustled in more cops and a crane. The cops closed one lane and shuffled traffic past in the other. Cars backed up, drivers sweating and disgusted. Little kids, who couldn’t hold it any longer, had to make quick dashes into the forest. People were kept from work, or from errands. The amount of cussing that went on would peel the paint off a steeple.
In the midst of it, Annie felt unsettled. She did not know that Petey thought of himself as going through a phase, but she knew she was. Vague thoughts never bothered Annie. Vague emotions did. Vague dreams made her scared. She felt, somehow, that life passed her by. She felt aimless, adrift, and with nebulous hankering to be of use to the world.
True, she battled satellites. The things flew overhead with never a by-your-leave. They interrupted the natural flow of the heavens, so when you first looked up and thought you had discovered a new star, it was only a peeping piece of tin.
Since leaving high school, and retiring in the woods, to the relief of her well-to-do family that lived in the housing project, Annie could look back on a few years of accomplishment. Certain herbs in the forest needed weeding to survive. When baby birds awkwardly left their nests in the spring someone needed to keep an eye on them, because housecats roamed the forest. Annie cast enchantments on submarines, and the enchantments worked since the subs always returned to base without discharging missiles. And sometimes, when no one was around to see, Annie arranged leaves and sticks and ferns in small displays, like artworks in a closed museum: for art is necessary even if not understood, and especially necessary if no one knows to look.
That Annie possesses talent cannot be denied. It is her loss, and ours, that her talent was never liberated through training. The talent came through the genes of a Greek grandmother, who, when Annie was a little girl, talked to trees. The trees always answered, and held odd, tree-like opinions; but Annie never really learned the language.
Annie was vaguely aware, in early August, that if she wanted a man, she could have her pick from half the unmarried guys in the neighborhood, and ninety percent of the married ones. The problem was not getting a man, but getting the right man; and the right one was Sugar Bear. In her imagination she saw herself in Sugar Bear’s kitchen which she knew well, and which would now be their’s. She saw herself weeding the garden, or sitting in the warm shop while Sugar Bear worked. Sometimes an occupied cradle sat near by. At other times she thrilled with the thought of the two of them hiking to the crest of a high ridge, and looking onto the Canal while feeling alive and free.