The Wapshot Chronicle - John Cheever [83]
Leander got into the dory. He watched the Topaze ease off the rocks and start up the channel herself with the sea pounding at her stern; and derelict and forsaken she seemed, like those inextinguishable legends of underwater civilizations and buried gold, to pierce the darkest side of his mind with an image of man’s inestimable loneliness. She was heading through the channel, but she wouldn’t make it. As each wave pushed her forward, she lost some buoyancy. Water was breaking over her bow. And then, with more grace than she had usually sailed, her stern upended—there was a loud clatter of deck chairs knocked helter-skelter along the sides of her cabin—and down went the Topaze to the bottom of the sea.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Leander wrote to both his sons. He did not know that Coverly was in the Pacific and it took three weeks for his letter to be forwarded to Island 93. Moses didn’t get his father’s letter at all. He was fired as a security risk ten days after Beatrice left for Cleveland. It was at a time when these dismissals were summary and unexplained and if there was some court of appeal Moses did not, at that time, have the patience or the common sense to seek it out. An hour after he had received his discharge he was driving north with all his possessions in the back of his car. The anonymity of his discharge gave it oracular proportions, as if some tree or stone or voice from a cave had put the finger on him, and the pain of being condemned or expelled by a veiled force may have accounted for his rage. He was far from the green pastures of common sense. He was angry at what had been done to him and angry at himself for having failed to come to reasonable terms with the world and he was deeply anxious about his parents, for if the news should get back to Honora that he had been discharged for reasons of security he knew they would suffer.
What he did was to go fishing. It may have been that he wanted to recapture the pleasures of his trips to Langely with Leander. Fishing was the only occupation he could think of that might refresh his common sense. He drove straight from Washington to a trout pond in the Poconos that he had visited before and where he was able to rent a cabin or shack that was as dilapidated as the camp at Langely. He ate some supper, drank a pint of whisky and went for a swim in the cold lake. All this made him feel better and he went to bed early, planning to get up before dawn and fish in the Lakanana River.
He was up at five and drove north to the river, as anxious to be the first fisherman out as Leander had been anxious to be the first man in the woods. The sky was just beginning to fill with light. He was disappointed and perplexed then when a car ahead of him turned off and parked on the road shoulder that led to the stream. Then the driver of the car ahead hurried out of his car and looked over his shoulder at Moses in such agony and panic that Moses wondered—so soon after dawn—if he had crossed the path of a murderer. Then the stranger unbuckled his belt, dropped his trousers and relieved himself in full view of the morning. Moses gathered up his tackle and smiled at the stranger, happy to see that he was not another trout fisherman. The stranger smiled at Moses for his own reasons; and he took the path to the water and didn’t see another fisherman that day.
Lakanana Pond emptied into the river and the water, regulated by a dam, was deep and turbulent and in many places over a man’s head. The sharp fall of the land and the granite bed of the stream made it a place where there was nowhere a respite from the loud noise of water. Moses caught one trout in the morning and two more late in the day. Here and there a bridle path from the Lakanana Inn ran parallel to the stream and a few riders hacked by but it was not until late in the day that any of them stopped to ask Moses what he had caught.
The sun by then was below the trees and the early dark seemed to deepen the resonance of the stream. It was time for Moses to go and he was taking in his line and putting away his flies when he heard the hoofs and the creaking leather of some riders. A middle-aged couple stopped to ask about his luck while he was pulling off his boots. It was the urbanity of the couple that struck Moses