by Dylan Thompson
On Yellowjacket Lake, the rippled reflections of tall ponderosa pines stain the glassy surface with the spilled colors of a bright desert morning: blues almost white and greens almost black. A mountain hovers over the water’s shoulder, bluer than anything else. It is a secluded spot – tucked away behind the Blue Range which rises all around like a coliseum with sagebrush seats.
The day after my grandmother died, my grandpa took me here to fish. Though I didn’t often fish with him, he remembered a time when I had, as if it was not long ago. He remembered me as a good luck charm for catching rainbow trout.
There were few clouds but the sun was gentle in high, crisp air. We rocked tranquilly in a small boat to a melodic soundtrack of cawing and chirping waterfowl – the buzzing crickets and flies, the gentle splashing of lapping water provided percussion that pushed us forward in time, but only slowly.
He propped a fishing rod between his legs; a silver thread attached him to the deeper part of the lake. He fiddled with the golden wedding band on his finger as if he knew there was space for something meaningful to say, but he was never a man for saying meaningful things, so he didn’t start now. Instead, he sipped from his Miller High Life. He offered me one, and I accepted.
My grandpa’s name was Tom. My grandma was Darlene. He went to fight in Korea, and when he returned, they met in Colorado. They moved out to Oregon in the late 60s, after Mom was already born. Smoking Winston 100 gold cigarettes all his life left his voice a deep harsh rattle like heavy boots on gravel; working in the sun had tanned his forearms into crispy liverspotted leather. He had a jowly chin that always sported ashy prickles of hair. He had honey-drunk bear eyes and droopy lids. He always carried a red handkerchief and preferred it for cleaning his nose. It was the same one he had used on my own snotty little nose – washed thousands of times by Darlene.
His children didn’t think he should fish the day after their mother died, but that’s what he wanted to do. He found the lake peaceful; it was easy to see why.
I brought a notebook and doodled bad drawings of funny sounding words. Words like “gesundheit” and “gazebo” and “gargoyle.” Some of these were his words. Grandpa watched me in silence waiting for something to stir. He didn’t seem sad, but that’s because he’d made it to where he was in life by enduring sadness and never showing it. It was how he had been taught to be a man. By the time I was a kid, my Dad taught manhood a little differently; and by the time I was a man, that little difference made me an alien to my Grandpa. His love was like the sun; I always felt it, but never too closely. I could only be close in the way his words formed at the end of my pencil. The only way I could try to know him.
So, I doodled, and he leaned back in his seat, rod propped between his legs and we did that for a quiet hour until expectedly but suddenly, his line tugged, his pole bowed obligingly, and his reel revved alive as it unleashed its slack. Expertly, Grandpa Tom rocked the reel to a gentle sleep before reversing the momentum and steadily pulling the trout toward the boat. Out of a long-learned habit, I grabbed the net and helped to scoop the glistening pink-green fish out of the lake, feeling his lessons acting through my body.
“We caught it!” I celebrated. He flashed me a sandpaper smile.
Like plucking a loose tooth from a child’s mouth, he yanked the barbed hook out of the trout’s cheek with a pair of pliers. He held it up to his head, squeezing its scaly cheeks to accentuate its pucker: a pose I had seen him strike many times through the years. Then, he tossed the fish back into the lake.
“Bad luck to keep the first fish, Sport.” He resumed his sturdy lounge, cracked open another Miller High Life. He laughed deep from his belly, but it also caught in his throat like a garbage disposal grinding on a metal spoon. Somehow, it was the most infectious and warmly pleasant sound I ever knew. I remember it echoing off the nicotine stained walls of his home as we played fingerpool on his miniature table, munching on pretzels and chocolate ice cream cones.
He continued not to tell me any story.
I tried to remember stories I already knew – little bits he’d dropped to lead me down trails. They came to me without any narrative, in eternal scenes, detached from any life before or after or sideways. I saw him as a young handsome fit man, after working hours at Denver Creamery, stripped to his white underwear, swimming with a friend in a tank of melted excess vanilla cream. I could not remember if the image came from his story or if I’d conjured it out of a different story. I dared not risk its loss. I saw him dancing with my grandma at a veteran’s dance. Though I’d seen faded photographs of both of them from when they were young, I only saw them young and alive and smiling and full of love when they swung in each other’s arms at an Elk’s Lodge sock hop. I imagined him in sharp green uniform; her in a pale blue dress.
I remembered a story from when I was very young. He talked about being in Korea. I remembered no plot points, but characters – fellow soldiers and Korean girls, and an impression of a great adventure. Thinking that perhaps he may welcome the opportunity to talk about something other than loss, I offered him conversation.
“Grandpa, can you tell me about being in Korea?”
He leered over at me suspiciously like I was trying to take something from him. He pouted his jowly mug, a hound sniffing out my bullshit.
“Why would you want to know anything about that?” He grumbled and harrumphed.
“It must have been hard.”
“All I done was drive Jeep for fancy officers,” he said, “Same as driving trucks round here. Same side of the road and everything.”
“I figure there must have been some crazy stories.”
He harrumphed again. “You want crazy stories about Korea, watch M.A.S.H.”
I took the cue for silence, and opened up the speechless space between us for the distant red hawk screeches and rattling crickets and the nearby water lapping against our boat in tranquil waves to fill. He seemed at ease to settle into the plotlessness of drifting in disconnected sound, and so I put myself through the process of accepting it. I tried to capture in my heart what it was like to sit with my grandpa in his favorite place. Then, he broke the silence.
“There ain’t a single part of me I left in Korea. Except a little blood from slicing my hand with a box cutter once. I wasn’t even there for the fighting. Just the keeping peace.”
There was a long silence but I didn’t dare interrupt. When he finally spoke, his voice cracked like tall timber so he took long pauses and intermittent sips of Miller to lubricate. “For sixty years, I fell asleep next to her and woke up next to her. And maybe we weren’t always happy with each other, but I was always happy about that. And I done it so many times that sometimes it felt like it was the only thing I ever did. Or the only thing I ever did that meant anything. And I done it so many times, I don’t know how I’m ever supposed to fall asleep or wake up again without her. That’s about the only story I got.”
He fidgeted with his ring again as if he were going to pull it off and condemn it to the bottom of the lake. Perhaps that was never on his mind. He twisted and spun it around his knobbed old man’s finger until it was time to occupy his hands with another sip of beer. The only thing I ever managed to say that felt right at all was “she was a great person.” He agreed she was and lived again a few memories that weren’t meant for him to share with anyone.
We didn’t catch any more fish, but rocked gently in the small boat for another two hours or so. When he decided to call it quits, he reasoned, “fishing ain’t about the fish anyhow, Sport.”
He drove us back into town in the ruddy Chevy S10 that he had been driving since I was a kid. The road back wound through a fire-ravaged forest of ash-black stumps, which I hadn’t noticed on the drive up. In gusts of wind, flakes of Douglas Fir cinder would flutter up above the dead, like snow. My grandpa told me there had been fires through those woods about every other year since they’d first moved up from Colorado when the kids were very little, and the trees seemed dead almost half their life, but they never actually died. Somehow, it’s the fires what keeps’em living. Something like cleaning out the sickness. Something like spreading nutrients around. Grow again to burn again. For years, my grandpa drove truck for the saw mill; gone through that forest a thousand times, but for the short remainder of his life, if I ever asked about anything from that time, the fires were the only story he had.
About the Author
Dylan Thompson is a fiction writer and singer/songwriter for the musical project, Oxenford Clerk. He was born and raised in the rural Eastern Oregon desert and now lives in Carrboro, NC with his wife, son and corgi, after recently earning his M.A. from UNC Chapel Hill in English and Comparative Lit. “On Yellowjacket Lake” is dedicated to his late grandpa, Jim Mues. His first published story was recently included in The Hooghly Review, Issue 2.