Now it’s empty and quiet as Lake Champlain: old canny Natty Bumppo facing me in the stern and behind me Vergil Bon, the sure-enough Hawkeye of this age, one foot in the past with his old quadroon beauty and wisdom, yet smart as Georgia Tech; the other foot in the future, a creature of the nuclear age, the best of black and white. But is he? Good as he is, the best of black or white, does he know which he is? And who am I? the last of the Mohicans? the fag end of the English Catholics here, queer birds indeed in these parts.
It feels good pulling the oars, the sun on my back.
The uncle thinks he’s going fishing. He’s telling me about his rig.
“You see this little Omega spinning reel?”
“Looks like a toy.”
“That’s right! That’s why it’s light enough to cast a fly. This little sucker cost me two hundred dollars. You see this?” Tied to the line is a crude-looking wet fly weighted with a single shot.
“What kind of a fly is that?”
“That’s a no-name fly. You want one? I’ll make you one. I showed Verge, his daddy, this, and he said you can’t cast a fly on spinning tackle and I said the shit you can’t. So I thowed it out like this — but it’s got to be this light Omega reel — and he said, Well, I be dog. He thought he knew it all about fishing.” Vergil Junior behind me is silent. The uncle and Vergil Senior were fishing companions. “You see that gum tree there that’s fallen down in the water?”
“I see it.”
“You know what’s up under there, don’t you?”
“Sac au lait.”
“You right! White perch. You know what you do, you take and hold us off with a paddle about this far out, circle the tree, and I thow this little sucker right to the edge of the leaves and let it sink. It never misses. I ain’t had nobody to do that since his daddy got sick. We’d take turns holding each other off just right. You got to have another man with the paddle. You talk about sac au lait! But you got to have two. I mean shit, it’s hard to do it by yourself. You want to hold up here a little bit and let me hold you off and you try this little sucker?”
“He goes out fishing by himself now,” says Vergil behind me. “Ever’ day.”
The uncle’s only sorrow these days, I see, is that he has no one to go hunting and fishing with.
“We can’t stop now, Uncle. Maybe later. I’d like to go later. Right now I want you to show me that substation.”
“Shitfire,” says the uncle, disappointed, “and save matches. What in hail for?”
“I just want to see it. It’s important.”
“All right,” says the uncle, pretending to be grudging but in fact glad enough to be going anywhere with anybody. “Just go on up the lake to the narrows.”
A breeze springs up. The lake sparkles. It’s good to pull the heavy skiff against the wavelets. The lake narrows. I watch the uncle for directions, and presently we duck and slide under the fence which used to cross dry land before the old blind end of the lake, fed by the rainy years, began to creep back toward the river. The river is not as low as we thought. The rise from the northern rains has begun.
The uncle goes on about his fishing with Vergil Senior in the old days and the great hunts. He decides to get irritated with Vergil Junior, who, however, has said nothing.
“I mean, shit,” says the uncle. “I can’t even get some folks to go woodcock hunting with me, even when they the one going to get the woodcock to take to their daddy, and I’m telling you it’s the best eating of all, and right here in Tunica Island is the center of all the woodcock in the world. He don’t even like to eat woodcock after we taken him with us. You know why? You remember, Vergil, when you was little I showed you the woodcock — I had just shot him and he had worms coming out of his mouth — they do that — the woodcock is not wormy, he’s been eating worms, he’s full of worms, they swallow worms whole, and when you shoot them, hell, the worms going to come out, why not. Well, this boy takes one look at the worms coming out of the woodcock and ain’t ever touched a woodcock since. Ain’t that right, Vergil?” There’s an edge in the uncle’s voice which embarrasses me.
But Vergil is not offended. “That’s right, Mist’ Hugh.” I can tell he’s smiling behind me.
“The thing about a woodcock is, all you got to do is just graze him with one little bird shot and he’ll fall down dead— just brush him, like”—the uncle shows us, brushing one hand lightly against the other—“and that sapsucker will fall down dead.” The uncle frowns and decides to get irritated with Vergil again. He becomes more irritated. “Some folks,” he tells me, as if Vergil can’t hear, “get their nose in a book and they think they stuff on a stick. Ain’t that right, Tom?”
Past the fence, for some reason we fall silent. I look around. There is no one and nothing to see except the vast looming geometry of the cooling tower and a bass boat uplake and across, the fishermen featureless except for their long-billed orange caps.
“Pull in right here at this towhead.”
“Let’s get this thing out of sight,” I tell them. We pull the skiff onto a sandbar under the willows.
“Who you hiding from?” asks the uncle.
“I don’t rightly know.”
“Ain’t nobody going to bother you at this end of the island. I ain’t ever seen a guard but once and he was a fellow I knew. He knew I was after woodcock.”
“I wish you had your shotgun now.”
“Shit, they out of season, Tom. You want to get me in trouble?”
Just beyond the willows we hit an old jeep trail, one of the many that crisscross the island. It doesn’t look recently used. We’re trespassing. I’m thinking of patrols. Vergil hangs back, walking head down, hands in pockets. Perhaps he is offended by the uncle, after all.
The uncle looks back and moves close to tell me something. He is still angry with Vergil. His feelings are hurt because neither Vergil nor his father will go fishing with him anymore. “Do you know what you get when you cross a nigger with a groundhog?” He lowers his voice, but maybe not enough, I think, for Vergil not to overhear.
“No.”
“Six more weeks of basketball.” He gives me an elbow. Get it?”
“Yes. Uncle, do you know where we’re going?”
“Sho I know. I know ever’ damn foot of this island.”
We cross other jeep trails, one with fresh tire tracks.
Presently the uncle stops. We’re at another fence, an enclosure. In the middle of the weeds there is a nondescript structure, a concrete cube fitted with a hatch on top like a diving bell.
“There’s a sign here,” I tell Vergil. Fixed to the gate is a small metal placard, the standard NRC sign, warning: RADIATION DANGER KEEP OUT.
“I never noticed that,” says the uncle.
We gaze. There is nothing to see, less than nothing. It is the sort of thing, a public-service-utility-government fenced-off sort of thing to which ordinarily and of its very nature one pays not the slightest attention.
“This is what you wanted to see?” asks the uncle, his head slanted ironically, a dark blade. We could be fishing for sac au lait.