out. ‘You can’t swim?’ he asks me. ‘Not a stroke,’ I say. For a long time the guy just looked at me. Sixty thousand dollars’ worth of education, and it all comes down to this one guy, what he’s going to do. ‘Okay,’ he says. ‘Get out of here.’ I couldn’t believe it.”
“Lucky break,” I said.
“Lucky? I should have killed the guy. Want to know what I did next?”
In truth, I could have done without the rest of the story, but I knew there was no stopping it.
“Marched straight down to the law school and signed up for the LSATs. Right on the spot I decided completely out of the blue to be a lawyer. My girlfriend and I had been planning to join the Peace Corps after graduation, thought maybe we’d go teach in Africa or someplace. I wanted to be a writer, too. I’d actually published some short stories in the campus rag.” He laughed miserably. “Can you believe it? Fucking short stories!”
Pete seemed a little young to mourn his life this way, and part of me, the generous part, would have liked to talk him out of this feeling, which was the worst kind of rabbit hole a man could go down on an otherwise promising afternoon. But I saw no chance of this. Streamside speeches on life’s disappointments were a staple of the trade, and I had heard enough of them over the years to learn my limits. It also seemed likely to me that it was the girlfriend he regretted losing most of all. He would misremember her completely, of course; she was the muse of his unlived, better life, and in the nostalgic fantasy he was laying out, she would appear as a figure of pure lost opportunity, as soulfully splendid as the Mona Lisa in a G-string.
“Looks to me like you’re doing okay,” I said, trying to move the day along. “Seems to me it was probably a good decision in the long haul.”
The lie was obvious, and he met it with a quick, correcting frown. “No offense, hombre, but that’s easy for you to say.” He gestured downhill, where the other three men were stringing up their rods. Bill was already wading out into the current. “You don’t work with these assholes.”
I decided not to point out that, technically, I did, at least for today; it was what I was supposed to be doing that very minute, instead of trying to talk Pete out of believing he’d wasted his life by not going to Africa to screw his girlfriend in a grass hut and write his fucking short stories.
“Oh, the hell with it,” Pete said finally. He slapped his knees and rose. “Let’s get this over with.”
EIGHT
Jordan
B ut in the morning, Harry Wainwright couldn’t fish. He couldn’t even get out of bed.
Hal found me in the dining room. His father had gone through a bad night, he told me, up for most of it, with Hal and Frances taking shifts. Hal hadn’t actually gone to bed at all, just grabbed a few winks tucked in a chair. We sat together by the big windows overlooking the lake and drank coffee while folks clomped in for breakfast. It was a little before seven; I was already keeping an eye cocked for the moose-canoers, though they usually didn’t come along till at least eight o’clock—way past the time they were likely to see any moose, though the canoers as a group were cheerful vacationers out on a lark, ready to have a good time, moose or no.
“Maybe it was the drive up,” Hal said, buttering a muffin. “Or not eating anything last night at dinner. Hell, maybe it’s just that he’s got cancer, for god’s sake. He doesn’t want to call a doctor, and he doesn’t want to leave.” He paused to chew, using the moment to take a fresh muffin from the basket on the table and pull it into moist halves. “This puts you in something of a bind, I guess.”
I drained my coffee and told him no, that under the circumstances I was happy to wait all day; when Harry was ready to go, I’d be the one to take him. But what we were both thinking was plain enough: that maybe Harry had something else up his sleeve, that a bad night passing into an even worse day was what he’d had in mind all along. My heart went out to Hal. He was a nice guy, every bit as