“Is he a Fish and Game man?” I heard her ask Catherine. She reached in the sateen high school athletic jacket on her and pulled out a paper. She said overloudly to Catherine, that in case I was, here was the fishing license if I was looking for it. She said that it was paid for. He wouldn’t see it any other way, she said. Uncle Peter had paid for it. She hollered it out, so that if I knew the man — and I ought to know the man — I would know who bought the thing; hollering with pride. Then she began mumbling with Catherine, keeping an eye out for me. I saw Catherine’s forehead nodding. Then her mother flew into a shrieking declamation, which seemed to be her natural style.
“Royce — you know what he doin’? Yo daddy doin’? He said he saw a normost basst feedin’ on the toper thet water a piece out an’ yo daddy is wadin’ out on thet drop to catch in. He ain’t usin’ no minner. He usin’ a live brim on his hook that we caught when we was catchin’ all them little white perch. He sez he want to catch somethin’ big an’ this ud be a perfet vacation. I been a-tellin’ him git back in off thatere dropoff. He caint swimb atall.”
All this while Catherine, leaning backwards of her mother, was appealing to me with her hands and her eyes to please leave. I pretended not to understand her. I watched the old man.
He had something on the pole; he had something big, too; it was running back and out. The line was zipping around, and the pole bent like there was an automobile under the water. The man backed up, but the fish was too big to allow that. Then the man was pulled in, slipping down the grade of the pool to where his hips were underwater. He wanted the fish very much. His head bowed to the fish every time it moved. I wanted to see that creature myself.
The man lurched backward into the shallows in a decisive move. He fell backward all of a sudden, throwing the pole up in the air. His head hit a rock on the shore, and his back followed it, giving out a sundering thud you could hear over the sound of the dam. I saw that, but my eye was still on the pole. It hit the water, stood up like a limber weed, and was drawn down, waving in circles, until the butt itself went under. I waited for it to pop up, but it never did. The fishermen in the nearest boat paddled over to the spot where it disappeared. The pole did not come up again. The men in the boat looked over at us full of awed respect.
The old man lay with his feet in the water. There was blood on the rock under his neck. His wife and his daughter were over him on both sides. I walked down and knelt at his head. He was out cold, but he was breathing big and healthy.
“Hold one of his eyes open and let me look at the pupil,” I said. The wife did this and I saw that the pupil was dead to light; the tadpole didn’t jump. The man had a pretty face like a blind queen.
“Royce. Royce. Royce,” his wife repeated. Then she asked me, “You mean you are a doctor right here on the spot?”
“The man’s … serious,” is all I could stay. I was trying to make all the few facts I knew stick together into something. It was a disgraceful position to be in. From the facts I knew, I couldn’t come upwith anything.
She picked up his head in her arms. Catherine clutched one of his hands. He had groaned yet, even. Catherine hadn’t looked my way. I was glad of that. I didn’t care for her to see me again in the lab coat. She didn’t know I’d busted out of med school, of course; didn’t know I was a fraud right here on the spot, had come to prove that I must be remembered as something besides the tick I was that night in the car. To be mean, to be kind, to be anything else. I hung my head. The thought came to me that I had not touched the man.
“It could be a concussion,” I blurted out.
“You mean Royce he won’t know my face when he come out of it?” Mrs. Wrag was breaking down. She began singing “Won’t know my face!” as a refrain, and hugged Royce’s head up and down.
Then Catherine looked at me sadly and jerked her head toward the incline. She wanted me out of there. “Not necessarily amnesia,” I said, trying to save myself from inept-ness.
Catherine shrieked, in a voice very much like her mother’s, “Don’t sit there writin’ a essay about it!”
A speedboat rammed up on the rocks beside Mr. Wrag’s feet. It came in almost full blast. It was red and white and greasy. A concerned man scorched by the sun stood in the bow. “Doctor Ainsworth is fishing down in the river,” he shouted, pointing backwards, studying me. He and his buddy in the speedboat had scared the hell out of me. He crouched in the bow ogling Mr. Wrag shyly.
“Well, go get him, you dumb greaser!” I shouted, rising. He stumbled back in the boat, still eyeing my coat and beard as he fell. His buddy reversed the boat, and they blew down the river leaving a swath in the water like the river was jumping apart.
Mrs. Wrag had recovered a bit. “That man wudn’t a nigger. He was a white man with a suntan. He wudn’t a nigger.” She spoke rather carefully at me.
Mr. Wrag woke up. “I’ll kill you … you hawrble bitch. You come down there an’ trip me up, didn you? I’ll see you dead. You seen the fish I had, couldn you see? You come down there an’ trip me up.” He cut his words moistly — some of his teeth were missing — and struggled up toward his wife’s face. She still cradled his head in her arms. He fell back spent, and she looked beyond me cracked open with a smile of purple gums and brown teeth that barked and snapped for glee at the sky. Down the river, I saw the speedboat appear in the bend, wallowing and skipping toward us, with a third man in the, middle.
“You leave,’ said Catherine to me. This was easy to do. As I walked up the incline, I heard her shrieking, like her mother. “Who was you? Who was you? What did you think you was?” I wasn’t certain till I glimpsed back that she was shrieking at me.
In the parking place I leaned on the little new Volkswagen that Peter no doubt had bought for her. In the backseat were some overturned worm boxes. There was also a styro-foam picnic box; but in the driver’s seat there was a teacher’s manual with an Eskimo Pie stick marking the page to which she’d read. Getting ready for those slimy snappers in junior high. Incredibly, she’d graduated.
I looked down the hill and observed the tiny group of them. Royce was sitting up. The red and white speedboat idled and rocked out in the shallows, raising smoke like an old car. The doctor got Royce to his feet, and the four of them began creeping up the rocks. Catherine put her hand to her eyes. She saw me. She brushed her arm back and forth as if dusting me off the hill. I believe I heard her shriek again.
So in July I saw her the last time.
I still think about that — perhaps — two minutes, when I saw her arms slightly sunburned and covered with goose-pimples in the cool wind of the dam; the odd, sudden affection she had for me—“Honey”—and her shoulders in the lab coat draped on her, her hands crossing outside it, her pulling me nearer so I could hear what she said over the sound of the water; my own love for her delicate vulnera-bility reviving instantly, damn near tears. This surprising butterfly of sentiment with both of us — never mind what followed — I remember, even after the disasters, as one of the strangest interludes of my time.
I was absorbed for days in trying to forget the afternoon, forget them all, kick them off. I knew if I thought of it too much more, it would fall around my neck like a noose and hang me.
I had a letter to write. The old man, for one more semester of money. And I had to read the one he wrote back to me, and whatever the sum of the check enclosed, I’d bleed out the whole amount in pennies, nickels, and dimes of misery. Maybe I’d take a job and read books on the job. I had a way to go, had to take it. It seemed to be the last one.