The Fisherman

As the years pass, Abe goes on a few dates but develops no lasting relationships, perhaps due to his failure to move beyond Marie. One day, an IBM coworker named Dan Drescher loses his wife and twin toddler sons in a car accident when he makes a left turn in front of a white 18-wheeler. Six weeks later, Dan finally returns to the office bearing a long, twisting scar on his face and a “permanent stare” in his eyes. On impulse, Abe invites Dan to go fishing sometime. Over the following year, the two of them settle into a weekly routine of fishing at various creeks and streams. To Abe’s relief, Dan never talks about his dead sons during these trips. (Abe doesn’t need the reminder that his own, late wife desperately wanted children.)

One night, Abe invites Dan over for dinner. After a few glasses of wine, Dan talks about his loss in greater detail, admitting that he often visits the intersection where his family was killed. He also describes being seized by a sense of unreality, a feeling that everything—people and things alike—are just masks: “All a mask, Abe, and the million-dollar question is, What’s underneath the mask? If I could break through the mask […] what would I find?” (29) Dan wonders if seeing through the mask might “destroy” people.

That night, Abe has a nightmare of hooking a large creature on his fishing line; it turns out to be Marie, but her warm brown eyes have become yellow-gold, like a fish’s “dead eyes.” Her body has also changed into a mass of slimy scales and “sharp fins,” and her lips, skewered by his fishhook, whisper something about a “fisherman” who “waits.” She follows this with a name, maybe foreign, sounding like “There fissure.” Then she says twice, “What’s lost is lost.” (33) Seconds later, Marie’s face splits apart, revealing something scaly and glittering beneath. In the dream, Abe, still clutching his fishing pole, finds himself yanked into the churning white water after her, falling headlong into “open mouths” bristling with rows of “white teeth.”

After the night of the two friends’ dinner, Dan begins to neglect his appearance and often comes into work unshaven and sloppily groomed, as if his long-simmering grief has finally dug its “dirty teeth” into him. Increasingly withdrawn and distracted, he can no longer focus on his work, and his neglect puts his job in jeopardy. Then, about two weeks before the start of trout season, Dan tells Abe that he has been having lots of dreams about fishing. He suggests that the two of them try out a place called Dutchman’s Creek on their next trip. Dan claims to have read about the creek in a book called Alf Evers’s History of the Catskills. Although Abe senses that he is lying, he agrees, and two months later, the two of them drop by Herman’s Café, near the Ashokan Reservoir, the source of Dutchman’s Creek. Unusually for that time of day, the café has no other customers, perhaps due to the torrential rain. The strangest thing in the café is a dark oil painting that is almost abstract in its nebulous shades, with a “long, curving, black blotch of something” (41) floating at midlevel. As narrator, Abe decides that he has finally solved the mystery, and that the blotch is a large fish that has been hooked.

Howard, the proprietor of Herman’s Café, turns deathly pale when he hears they are headed for Dutchman’s Creek. He says numerous fishermen have drowned there and adds that he doesn’t recall it being mentioned in Alf Evers’s book. To warn them off, he offers to tell them the story of how the creek got its name. Because no other customers come in over the next hour, Howard is able to tell his long story without interruption. Months later, as Abe writes down the story at home, he has the uncanny feeling that “the story had passed to [him], that somehow, Howard had tucked it inside” (46) him. As he writes, many more details of the story and its characters occur to him, and the narrative feels “familiar” and authentic, though he’s sure the source of these details couldn’t have been Howard.