I
THE ISLAND CLUNG to the mainland by a spit of sandbar as low and shingled as a manicured walk and could not therefore be properly called an island. Still we called it that, ‘the island,’ and at times, when the ocean cycles and planets aligned, the perigean king tide with its liquid cargo brought the water up over the lip of that persistent littoral, briefly severing all tie to the shore and bringing the fact of the land into sympathy with its name.
The day hung over the great bay and to the west with a patience as mild as the still waters beneath it. These were so flat they might have been a living metal smelt from worn verges and outcroppings in this wild land. The waves tapping at the shore seemed accidental, emerging at the last instant and rising only ankle-high before collapsing on the broad sandy flats. It was that moment of spring when the nip in the air has not caught up to the lengthening in the evening light, and this light appears to outstay its time and swap a silvered clarity into hours meant for shadow and dream.
We were four—Frank, Izzy, Quentin, and Schmitty—four men and Izzy’s collie, Chance, and all around us were the signs of stirring life. The dry brush snapped with creatures roused from winter’s sleep. Birds flitted in the trees. Out on the southern rim, where the island turned back toward the tidal marsh and the sedge rose from the brackish fringe like ridges of spiked hair, a pair of duck blinds watched the lagoon. No, none of us hunted, and we had not been together on the island, where Frank’s brother owned a house, in close on a decade; and yet as men committed to a veneer of the most unimpeachable typicality, and men, beyond that, engaged in a deeper and more elusive type of hunt, we regarded those drab half-hidden boxes with a mix of envy and disdain. How simple their task seemed in comparison to ours, how neat and negligible its moral lines!
We were journalists, you see, newsmen at a time when the fate of civilization seemed gifted us like a distant uncle’s unsalable folly. Everyone else had seen their jobs gather at the spigots of excess until, like stone basins, they grew deformed by what they existed to receive. Everyone in government showed the strain and impress of so many shifting agendas that even the crusaders hardly knew what urgency they served; and everyone in business, needless to say, had a pair of shareholders on his shoulders rubbing their fingers. That left us. And since we worked in a dying industry, one that had been cutting back so long its dissipation bore the inevitability of a thermodynamic law, there was no god to worship but the hopeless, romantic mission of it, in service and loyal to one master: truth.
We may have seen ourselves as the descendants of noir detectives—proud, pathetic disheveled men, as prickly and sardonic on the outside as we were hopeless Manichaeans within. We believed in clarity, the disinfectant properties of sunlight, and the irrepressible triumph, in time, of fact. If the world was venal and fallen, we thought the proper response was still greater allegiance to principle. Our martyrdom and sacrifice were givens, after all, the very terms of our grueling careers, and since so many of us had quit or been laid off, those who remained made up the furthest gone of true believers, a reality we endured only by investing great cynicism and coarseness in our words. Oh, we would give them hell, the officials, the representatives, the magnates, the CEOs. Not because we were better than them, but because it was our nature, and beyond that our job. We were the bloodhounds and they our quarry. And what we believed, with fervor that flirted with the religious, was that a single, knowable reality existed and that it was every last person’s right to know what this reality was.
That makes the work sound grander than it is. Much of it felt like correcting someone’s garbled math, scribbled in a purposefully illegible hand. We read a lot: financial reports, public disclosures, white papers, declassified documents. Thank god we had been at it long enough to leave the burnout beats that shave one’s shoe-leather within a broadside’s breadth of the pavement and made our way to editorial desks and their comfy chairs. Izzy ran a southern newsroom and penned stylish features now and again about alligators and methamphetamine and the feckless part-time criminals in that part of the world, whose dreams encompass a poignant share in the human comedy. Schmitty wrote an opinion column once a week, alongside his editorial duties, and mostly he said the reasonable, measured things you’d expect, calibrating his outrage at a simmer and upholding the grammatical prescriptions of a different age. Frank was the news-desk editor at a major paper, and that was Frank through and through.
Quentin was the only one of us still grinding out the hard investigative stuff, and for that we loved and pitied him. We had all grown plump in middle age, the consequence of long hours at our desks, keeping pace with the torrents of what we had been trained to call content, glutting the arteries of knowledge like plaque. Quentin alone had stayed thin, and even looked smaller with age, as if the lifestyle ate away at his unnecessary flesh—as if someone so driven by the hunger to be undeceived suffered a double appetite that consumed him in body and spirit alike. The toll of living without myth or illusion is unbearable for most; the simple truth is myth and illusion get us by.
Someone of Quentin’s reflexive stubbornness and pitilessness would not have acknowledged his own needs if he had wasted down to the stripped spirit of witness itself. It therefore fell to Schmitty, who bumped into him at a legislative presser, to write the rest of us to say that Quentin looked like a de Chirican shadow of himself, poking out from behind a column. He seemed like he could use some cheering up. And it was true that ever since his fracas with the administration over a story the Beacon had caved on and pulled, Quentin’s byline had been scarce. These five days, then, back on the island after a decade, had all the choked elegiac flavor of old friends, whose intimacy lay buried in a receding past, returning to the site of a closer moment in hopes of digging up the capsule of their affection from the sunbaked earth. The love we bore one another had little fuel left but its own endurance, we knew, the fading image on a retina of an extinguished flame.
Naturally, Quentin didn’t mistake the purpose of our reunion. He had the coy attitude of one who knows you mean to do him a good turn but who wonders whether he might not do you one himself by indulging this desire. He seemed all right, after all. And it struck us, when we had arrived and finished unloading, that in spite of his drawn look, our friend smoldered with an acute force that made the rest of us appear shiftless and blurry by comparison. He stood by the shore smoking a cigarette, watching the wading birds that came in low through the evening skies and the small fishing craft that made for harbor in the last of the day’s light, and we wondered, struck as we occasionally are by the way a situation of our own devising turns, like a tide, leaving us the passenger of a larger force, whether we had not gathered to learn from him some forgotten chapter in the soul’s purpose.
Chance barked. The day repossessed itself, a poured light tumbling over the bay and collecting so slowly that our eyes adjusted before it dimmed. The sky gathered and diffused the brilliance, giving no sense of its source, and clouds, contrails, and other markings in the heavens ran to the vertical, seamed with light. To the north, far beyond the bridge at the edge of view, lay the capital. The smudge of rain or exhaust that claimed its space in the sky disclosed a hard reality the island brought us clear of but could not entirely obscure. The engine of industry churned out the black smoke of an old mistake, and even here, where you could almost squint and work back to the beginning, four hundred years before, when the first small crofts dotted these shores, as beige and dun as the lifeless vernal grass and bare trees, even here the price of this peace lay written in that sooted signature of men with an iron desire for a power that human shoulders couldn’t bear.
I was fishing, Quentin remarked. It was not unlike him to start a tale at some far corner and begin shading in, so that details and people emerged faster than the gist and the whole image did not coalesce until the very last accent line brought out the critical connection where, as a listener, one’s attention sought all the while to alight. It had been his habit since as far back as our time together in journalism school, and it betrayed the epistemology of a reporter, who knows that truth always inheres partly in the manner it is arrived at. We had joined him and were sitting backed into the diminutive escarpments that scalloped the shore above the beach. The assembled driftwood and fallen sticks of an unlit bonfire stood before us, and we sipped our beers, looking west, while Chance rooted in the sand after rotting crab shells and the fetor of decomposing life.
Fishing, Quentin continued. Well, you know me, fellas, I did not do the fishing myself. I knew a guy, Roland, who did a bit of amateur angling off a retaining wall upriver from the boathouses. You know the ones I mean? Almost in the shadow of the bridge by St. Augustine’s? Roland did not strike you as a homeowner, let’s just put it that way. No, I never asked what else he got up to. The fish he caught, snakehead and pike, looked deranged and half-dead to begin with, like they had had it with life and he was their exterminating angel. He tossed them in a five-gallon bucket where they twitched briefly and let go.
I wasn’t there for the sport of it, trust me. Quentin paused before continuing, Fishing is one of those meditative activities that enhance the powers of attention, like driving nowhere on country roads. And complex as our world has grown, and it is complex, sometimes it’s worth asking those who keep quiet what they see. You can learn a lot about a city by attending to its respiration. What goes in and out. Roland saw more traffic on that stretch of river in his day than Charon, I’d wager, and my own sort of fishing (I’d brought him coffee and a bagel) worked well enough with his.
This was around the time Cy left me, Quentin said, just after my fights with Haig’s moral heavyweights at the directorate. I had a lot of time on my hands and for the first stretch in many years no task to put it to. I can’t say I was shaken—no, not looking back and knowing how far down the path of an enveloping blackness I had to go. But I felt empty. Blank. Cleared out of passion and fight. I wondered, as I had never done, whether there was really a point. We all wonder, I know, but I don’t mean the idle questions we entertain in a glum moment. My deepest sense of purpose had deserted me. I felt like the boy with his finger in the dike, fighting the elemental tide of larger powers to a lousy equilibrium. I thought, why should I have the thankless task of interposing my poor finger? The tide would win in the end.
The tide always wins, I guess. Or so I thought looking out over the glassy river while Roland cast his line. It was a hot day, getting on toward high summer. Roland was in one of the few oil-stained white T-shirts he wore, which hugged his body like snakeskin.
‘How’s our old friend?’ I asked. He knew I meant the writhen waters before us and said, ‘Oh, she’s swimming in it. Drunk to the gills.’ He held a hand to shade his eyes and pointed across the river. ‘See those rocks?’ A few pebbles seemed to glint in the sun, no bigger than a turtle’s back. ‘Normally, you could picnic on ’em, dangle your feet down and not even wet your toes. College girls like to sun themselves over there.’ He ventured a shy grin. ‘Not that I notice…’
‘Course not,’ I agreed. ‘Family man like yourself.’
‘Look at the foot of the bridge.’ He removed a hand from the rod to point at a patch of ground, torn up and grassless.
‘Repairs?’
He glanced at me like I knew about as much as a walleye. ‘Erosion,’ he said. ‘More water’s flowing through.’
‘Rain?’
‘Hasn’t been much rain.’ He looked to the sky as if to make sure the heavens weren’t about to contradict him. ‘Besides, those algal blooms … It’s not dilute. You know what that means?’ I didn’t need to shake my head. ‘More sediment’s coming down too. More nutrients.’
It was early June, long past the season of snowmelt, and peering into his near-empty bucket, I said, ‘Seems like it might have helped you more.’
‘Doesn’t work like that.’ He sighed with his body. ‘Volume wrecks the deep spawning grounds. See the dead brush along the bank? The table’s dropped too. The plants can’t get water.’ I asked what it meant. ‘I had to guess,’ he said, ‘I’d say they’re running a small flood through the dam up in Minersville.’
Copyright © 2023 by Greg Jackson
