The Longest Silence

Sons

BOTH MY PARENTS were Irish Catholics from Massachusetts. My father had had enough of the Harp Way and was glad to get out of there and move to Michigan. My mother never accepted it and would have been happy to raise a nest of Micks anywhere between Boston and New Bedford. Every summer she did the next best thing and packed us children up and took us “home” to Fall River. My father seemed glad to watch us go. I still see him in our driveway with the parakeet in its cage, trying unsuccessfully to get my mother to take the bird too so he wouldn’t even have to hang around long enough to feed it. At the end of the summer, when we returned from Massachusetts, the bird would be perched in there but it was never the same bird. It was another $3.95 blue parakeet but without the gentleness of our old bird. When we reached into the cage to get our friend, we usually got bitten.

We traveled on one of the wonderful lake boats that crossed Lake Erie to Buffalo, and I remember the broad interior staircases and the brassbound window through which one contemplated the terrific paddlewheels. I hoped intensely that a fish would be swept up from deep in the lake and brought to my view but it never happened. Then we took the train, I guess it must’ve been to Boston. I mostly recall my rapture as we swept through the eastern countryside over brooks and rivers that I knew were the watery world of the fish and turtles I cared so madly about. One of these trips must have been made during hard times, because my mother emphasized that there was only enough money for us children to eat; and it is true that we had wild highs and lows as my father tried to build a business.

Many wonderful things happened during my endless summers with my grandmother, aunts, and uncles in Fall River, but for present purposes, I am thinking only of fishing. Those original images are still so burning that I struggle to find a proper syntax for them. In the first, my father arrived and took me up to see some shirttail cousins up in Townsend. A little brook passed through their backyard and, lying on my stomach, I could look into one of its pools and see tiny brook trout swimming. It was something close to the ecstasy I felt when I held my ear against the slots of the toaster and heard a supernal music from heaven ringing through the toaster springs. The brook trout were water angels and part of the first America, the one owned by the Indians, whose music I’d listened to in the toaster. I had seen the old Indian trails, their burial mounds and the graves of settlers killed in the French and Indian wars. For some reason, I understood the brook trout had belonged to the paradise the Indians had fought to keep. I knew King Phillip — or Metacomet, as the Indians called him — had eaten them.

All this seemed to be part of a lost world, like the world I was losing as my father became more absorbed in his work. We had good times together only when fish were present, and those brook trout are the first memories. It was casually easy for us to get along fishing; the rest was a bomb. I think of the fathers-and-sons day at his athletic club with particular loathing, as it was an annual ordeal. Silver dollars were hurled into the swimming pool for the boys to vie for. Each father stood by the pool, gazing at the writhing young divers and waiting for his silver-laden son to surface. Rarely coming up with a coin, I was conscious of appearing to be less than an altogether hale boy and hardly worth bringing to this generational fête, with its ventriloquists and Irish tenors or more usually, the maniacal Eddie Peabody on the banjo. All of this was an aspect of the big dust we were meant to make in our mid-American boom town where sport of the most refined sort quickly sank into alcoholic mayhem. Steaks in the backyard, pill-popping housewives, and golf were the order of the day, and many youngsters sought to get their fathers away somewhere in search of a fish. Most of our fathers were just off the farm or out of small towns and heading vertically upward into a new world. We didn’t want them to go and we didn’t want to go with them.

I thought that if I devised a way to free my father from his rigorous job, we could fish more. I saw an ad for a Hart, Shaffner and Marx suit that said it was for the man who wanted to look like he would make ten thousand a year before he was thirty. (Remember, this was many years ago.) I told my father that he ought to make ten thousand a year, then ten thousand a year in eleven months, then ten thousand a year in ten months and so on, and with this properly earned free time, he and I would go fishing together more often. “With an attitude like that,” my father boomed, “you’d never make ten thousand a year in the first place.”

None of this mattered in Massachusetts. Across Brownell Street from my grandmother, between Main and Almy, lived Jimmy McDermott, an elegant Irish bachelor and his spinster sister, Alice. They seemed very sophisticated and witty, especially compared to their immediate neighbors, the Sullivans, who were unreconstructed Irish, with a scowling mother in a black shawl and an impenetrable brogue. Jimmy McDermott took me fishing and bought me my first reel, a beautiful Penn Senator surf-casting reel whose black density seemed to weigh coolly in my hands. Jimmy McDermott detected that I needed someone to take me fishing.

He thought it was crazy for a boy who loved to fish to be hanging around Brownell Street in Fall River in August, so he packed a lunch and we went fishing for tautog along some small and lonely beach with its granite outcroppings and sunshot salty fog and tidal aromas. We caught several fish on the fierce green crabs we used for bait and I heard about several more, because Jimmy was the sort of person who made sure at such a sacramental moment as angling that the full timbre of the thing must be appreciated by the recounting of such holy incidents in time, of striped bass and flounders, the gloomy conger eel who filled three skillets with grease or the rich sports in the old days who baited their bass rigs with small lobsters. A Portuguese family picnicked on the nearby strand, and in my somewhat more global view today I think of us amusing ourselves on that mare nostrum, the Atlantic Ocean, casting our hopes on those ancestral waters toward Ireland, the Azores, toward the Old World. The sea heaved up around our rocks, pulling a white train of foam from mid-ocean along with its mysteries of distance and language, drownings, caravels, unwitnessed thousand-foot thunderheads, phosphorous and fish by the square mile.

IT IS A GREAT TRIUMPH over something — biology, maybe, or whatever part of modern history has prolonged adolescence to the threshold of senility — for a father to view his son without skepticism. I have not quite achieved this state but at least have identified the problem. Therefore, when I stood at the airport in Cancún and watched my frequently carefree son emerge with several disintegrating carry-on bags and his shirt hanging out of his pants, I did not take this altogether as a sign of complete disorganization.

When we hugged, because he’s so much stronger, he rather knocked the wind out of me. And when we made our way to the small aircraft that would take us to Ascension Bay, I asked if he had practiced his casting. “Once,” he said.

“These aren’t trout,” I said. “A thirty-foot cast doesn’t get it.”

“Don’t worry about it,” he smiled. “I don’t expect to have any problem with bonefish.”

“How can you say that?” I asked. “You’ve never seen one before, you don’t know how tough they can be.” He smiled again, knowing exactly how to drive me crazy.

We had a comfortable, really wonderful cottage with cool concrete walls and a roof of thatched monkey palm. Birds were everywhere and the blue Caribbean breakers rose high enough that you could look right through them, then fell. Just past the line of breakers, the coral garden seemed like a submerged quilt.

Thomas was slow in getting ready to fish. He was bent over the sink, doing something and taking too long about it. I said we ought to hurry up and head for the boat. I said it twice and he straightened up from the sink holding a pale green scorpion he had just extracted from the drain. “In case you were thinking of brushing your teeth,” he said, and grabbed his rod.

Our guide was a Maya Indian named Pedro, a solid fifty-year-old of easygoing authority. I thought of a Little Compton voice of yester-year—“We’ve been here for generations”—Pedro’s family had been on the shores of this bay since thousands of years before Christ. As Pedro was a mildly intolerant man, all business, one soon learned not to pester him with trifles. I did ask if he had ever visited the United States.

“I’ve never been to Mexico,” he said coolly.

Walking to the boat, I was excited to see a lineated woodpecker who loves to eat Aztec ants from their home in the hollow pumpwood tree. A brave soul, he defends his nest against toucans. Ruddy ground doves scattered along our trail and we saw the splendid chacalaca on the edge of the jungle, noisy as a chicken in flight. When we set out in the skiff, mangrove swallows scattered across the narrow channels. My son explained to me that some birds had taken to flying upside down over New York City because “there was nothing worth shitting on.” Birds have much to tell us.

Pedro ran the skiff through the shallow water wilderness with the air he seemed to bring to everything, an absence of ambiguity. There was no scanning the horizon or searching for signs. If a tremulous ridge of tidal movement betrayed a shoal in our path, Pedro adjusted his angle of travel without ever looking in the direction of the hazard.

When we emerged completely from the congestion of cays, remarkably similar bands of pale blue, of sky and sea, stretched before us at a sublime scale, white tropical clouds reaching upward to heavenly elevations. A scattering of small islands lay in the distance.

I was still thinking of Pedro’s answer about never having been to Mexico. Quintana Roo was his country. In my minimal Spanish, I decided to pose a peculiar question. “Pedro, to us this is an extraordinary place, a beautiful place. But you have never been anywhere else. My question is this: Do you realize and appreciate that you live in one of the world’s great places?” He pulled his head back and, pursing his lips to state the obvious, said in an impassioned growl, “Sí, señor!”

Thomas was in the bow of the boat, line stripped out, and Pedro was poling along a muddy bank near the mangroves. A squadron of bonefish had come out of the light, our blind side, and flushed in a starburst of wakes. It wasn’t really a shot, so Thomas remained in the bow, ready. After a while, I felt Pedro kick the stem of the bow out to position him and declare, “macabi”—bonefish — in his quiet but insistent way that made it clear he expected no screw-ups. We stared hard, testing Pedro’s patience, then made out the bonefish about seventy feet away. He was feeding slowly, his back out of water at times and his tail glittering when he swirled deliberately in the shallows to feed. The fish came almost to a stop, faced right, then moved steadily but imperceptibly forward. The bonefish seemed to be staring at the skiff.

This seemed like a tough prospect: the water was much too thin, the fish insufficiently occupied; and since he was alone, his green-and-silver shape all too clear, I couldn’t imagine the bonefish would tolerate the slightest imperfection of technique.

Thomas was false-casting hard. Faced with such a good fish, his intensity was palpable throughout the boat. I told him he’d only get one shot at this fish, treading the parental thin line of reminding him of the present importance without exaggerating its difficulty. He released the cast. His loop reached out straight, turned over, and the fly fell about four inches in front of the bonefish.

The fish didn’t spook. The fly sank to the bottom. Thomas moved the fly very slightly. The bonefish moved forward over it. I looked up and the bend of the rod extended all the way into the cork handle. The fish burned off through the mangrove shoots which bowed and sprang up obediently. When the fish headed out across the flat, Thomas turned to look at me over his shoulder and give me what I took to be a slightly superior grin. A short time later he boated the fish.

We were actually fishing in the middle of the Sian Ka’an biosphere reserve, over a million acres of the coast of Quintana Roo, savannas, lagoons, and seasonally flooded forest. Our simple camp met the Mexican requirement of integrating human use while preserving the complex and delicate ecosystem whose uniqueness derives not only from the phenomenon of a tropic sea inundating a vast limestone shelf, but from long human history. Every walk that Thomas and I took brought us past earthen mounds that covered Maya structures. One superb small temple has been excavated and its inspired siting caused us, hunched under its low ceilings, gazing out on the blue sea with bones and pottery at our feet, to fall silent for a good while.

Since I have been unsuccessful in bringing any formality to the job of parenting, I wondered about the matter of generations, and whether or not this concept added much to the sense of cherished companionship I had with my son. And I thought of the vast timescape implied by our immediate situation and the words of the leader of the French Huguenots when the terrible Menendez led his band of followers into a hollow in the dunes to slaughter them. “In the eyes of God,” said the Huguenot, “what difference is twenty years, more or less?”

As we wandered through the barracks of an abandoned copra plantation, I saw a carved canoe paddle leaning against a wall — the kind of ancient design used to propel dugout canoes but probably the backup for an Evinrude. Inside, the walls were decorated with striking graffiti, ankle-grabbing stick ladies subjected to rear entry and the prodigious members of grinning stick hooligans, complete with rakish brimmed hats and cigarettes. There you have it.

MY ANXIETY about Thomas’s bonefishing disappeared. He did just fine. Less obsessive about fishing than I am, he had to be harassed into organizing his tackle, showing up at the skiff on time, and fishing instead of crawling around the mangroves to see what was living in there. We began to catch plenty of bonefish in a variety of situations: schooling fish in deep water, generally small, easy prey; small bunches lined up along the edge of a flat, waiting for the tide to come in and help them over; singles and small bunches, tailing and feeding, on the inside flats. Several times I looked up and saw Thomas at a distance, his rod deeply bowed and his fly line shearing an arc toward deeper water. We were happy workers on a big bonefish farm.

“Pedro, are there many permit, unas palomettas?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Have you had many caught from your skiff?”

“No one catches many palomettas.”

“How many?”

“Maybe six this year.”

Pedro stared in the direction he was poling, getting remarkable progress from the short hardwood crook with which he pushed us along. Florida guides with their graphite eighteen-footers would refuse to leave the dock with an item like this. Pedro had a faint smirk on his face, as though reading my thoughts; more likely he was feeling that the hopelessness of predictably catching a permit was his own secret. The look challenged you to try, but declined to subdue skepticism.

I feel, when searching for permit, as a bird dog must when the unsearched country ahead turns into a binary universe of sign and absence of sign. Now, I certainly couldn’t expect my son to feel the same way; here in the Sian Ka’an his attention was trained on all the wonders around us, the sea creatures scooting out in front of the skiff in response to Pedro’s skillful poling, the spectacular flying squid that sailed across our bow, the cacophonous waterfowl that addressed our passage from the secrecy of the mangroves, the superb aerobatics of frigate birds trying to rob royal terns of their catch. Graciously, Thomas offered me the first cast.

The little bay had a bottom too soft for wading. We were at a relatively low tide and the hermit crabs could be seen clinging to the exposed mangrove roots. A reddish egret made its way along the verge of thin water, head forward, legs back, then legs forward, head back until the sudden release, invisible in its speed, and the little silver fish wriggling crossways in its bill.

“Palometta,” Pedro said, and we looked back to see which way his phenomenal eyes were directed. A school of permit was coming onto the sandbar that edged the flat. Once noticed, the dark shape of the school seemed busy and its underwater presence was frequently enlarged as the angular shapes of fins and tails pierced the surface. I checked to see if I was standing on my line, then tried to estimate again how much of it I had stripped out. I held the crab fly by the hook between my left thumb and forefinger and checked the loop of line. Now trailing alongside the boat, that would be my first false-cast. We were closing the distance fast and the permit were far clearer than they had been moments before. In fact, if they hadn’t been so busy scouring around the bottom and competing with one another, they could have seen us right now. The skiff ground to a halt in the sand. Pedro said that I was going to have to wade to these fish. Well, that was fine, but the few permit I have ever hooked wading had spooled me while I stood and watched them go. Furthermore, the freshwater reel I was using had lots of backing but no drag. That I’d picked it for the sporting enhancement it provided now seemed plain silly.

I climbed out, eyes locked on the fish.

“Dad!” came my son’s voice. “I’ve got to try for these fish too!”

“Thomas, damn it, it’s my shot!”

“Let me give it a try!”

“They’re not going to take that bonefish fly anyway.”

How could I concentrate? But now I was nearly in casting position, then heard something behind me. Thomas had bailed out of the boat and was stripping line from his reel. He was defying his father! Pedro was celebrating three thousand years of Maya family life on this bay by holding his sides and laughing. For all I knew, he had suggested my son dive into the fray.

Once in casting range, I was able to make a decent presentation and the crab landed without disturbance in front of the school. They swam right over the top of it. They ignored it. Another cast, I moved the fly one good strip. They inspected it and again refused. A third cast and a gingerly retrieve. One fish peeled off, tipped up on the fly and ate. I hooked him and he seared down the flat a short distance, then shot back into the school. Now the whole bunch was running down the flat with my fish in their midst. Thomas waded to cut them off and began to false-cast. I saw disaster staring at me as his loop turned over in front of the school and his fly dropped quietly.

“Got one!” he said amiably as his permit burned its way toward open water. Palming my whirling reel miserably, I realized why he had never been interested in a literary career. Not sick enough to issue slim volumes from the interior dark, he instead would content himself with life. He seemed to be enjoying the long runs his fish made; mine made me ill. He was still in diapers when I caught my first permit but my anxiety over a hookup had never abated.

Pedro netted my son’s fish, his first permit, and waited, holding it underwater until mine was landed. Thomas came over with the net. When the fish was close, I began to issue a stream of last-minute instructions about the correct landing of a permit. He just ignored them and scooped it up.

This was unbelievable, a doubleheader on fly-caught permit. I was stunned. We had to have a picture. I asked Pedro to look in my kit for the camera. Pedro admitted that he had only had this happen once before. He groped deeper in my kit.

But I had forgotten the camera, and when Thomas saw my disappointment he grabbed my shoulders. He was grinning at me. All my children grin at me, as if I was crazy in an amusing sort of way.

“Dad,” he said, “it’s a classic. Don’t you get it?” He watched for it to sink in. “It’s better without a picture.”

The permit swam away like they’d known all along that we weren’t going to keep them.

Later, I stewed over his use of the word “classic.” It was like the day he buried a bonefish fly in the calf of my leg. My expression then was “timeless,” he had said. I would have to think about that.