Unfinished Tales from Arkansas

-One-

My face glowed intermittently; with each puff, an orange glow grew and disappeared in the dark woods. Without the sun or clouds for a blanket of warmth, cold rained from the heavens down onto my little Arkansas cabin. I was sitting under a maple, though you couldn’t tell. The leaves had long since migrated south, and the bark was blacker than the night sky. Only a memory of the tree allowed me to know it.

The English tobacco tasted like peat, and the old pipe burned hot in my hands. Across the valley, lights dotted the mountain. Yellow dots meant warm houses, while the white incandescent lights marked the industrial chicken houses. In this part of the country, you see a lot more white lights. On top of the mountain, a yellow light reigned king, peeking through the valley. 

I leaned back in my chair and looked at the stars. The last time I had done that was in Hampi, and I could feel that warm stone again, rough against my back. They looked the same then as they do now: like glitter strewn across the inside of a black bowl. The devilish fingers of the maple clawed at the sky, and broke apart the constellations. I couldn’t recognize anything until the sky rotated just enough around the branches, and revealed Orion. I flashed to a place very far away from my hermitage in the woods.

Sometimes memories can be too painful, so I was glad when the maple took the belt away again.

I looked around for other familiar faces in the sky, when a plane crested over the roofline of the house. It blinked red and white, and floated away towards a distant city. It moved without sound at first, but then seconds later a low rumble ran across the valley, like the tail-end of a thunder clap.

The sound was interrupted by the barking of a dog.

“Ehh,” I mumbled through the smoke. It was probably Kevin; the neighbor’s dog was a menace of sound, barking loudly into dead nights. I didn’t actually know his name, but Kevin seemed to fit pretty well.

The leaves rustled in the distance behind me. I knew that’s what the dog had been barking at, but now could only wait to see what the darkness would bring. Was it a squirrel? A raccoon? An escaped convict with a penchant for cold-blooded murder? My mind raced as I peered into the forest.

The rustling approached. Slowly, a shadow took shape. It was taller than I expected, ruling out rodents. As the shadow left the tree line and entered the grass behind me, the intruder became clear: a sleek and silent doe had joined me.

As I remained motionless, the deer didn’t notice me as it ventured forward out into the field, and eventually the moonlit valley. I suppose we respected each other’s night of solace and contemplation. 

-Two-

My lips were falling deeper into the amber ale, and it was slowly disappearing. The brown bubbles had to travel a shorter path with each sip. The glass was thick and cool. I bought this one with three dollars, and left a couple more for the eyes behind the counter.

When I returned to my godforsaken table, she was saying something about what she planned to do with her psychology degree. I had stopped listening after her rant on homework.

“I seriously just hate school!”

Her tirade began and my attention stopped.

As her words fell on top of me, her eyes darted around the room, and her hair bounced with a calculated bob. She wasn’t there for me, I wasn’t there for her, and maybe we both knew it.

I scratched my thumb over the table. It was the same table in every college-town bar in America. It was small, deep brown, and coated with a veneer that behaved like a wax. As my thumbnail ran across it, it clumped and accumulated under my nail.

Great, I thought, I get to keep a part of this shit bar with me.

“I mean, right?” Her lips curled around the blue straw, and her eyes waited for my response. The crudely mixed vodka and cranberry travelled up into her word machine, and her eyes began a smile that her newly cooled mouth completed.

“Ha,” I laughed, “yeah I guess that’s true.”

She jumped back into her vain monologue.

I didn’t want to be there. I didn’t want to be in that bar, in that city, or in that country. As I sat there and pretended to be interested in a dead conversation, my mind was still racing through the Mumbai streets. She flashed her eyes, but I saw her eyes. The beer was a local Arkansas craft, but all I could taste was Kingfisher.

In my car across the street, leather gloves sat in the passenger seat. They were crusty and stiff, dried out from the wet ditch I had dug earlier in the day. The front windshield was cracked, but I didn’t have the money to fix it. I just let the frost crawl inside on cold mornings. The floor mats were covered in dirt; Arkansas clay that had finally dropped from my boots.

Inside, at the beginning of the evening, I had tried to convince her that I was helping run the family business. But the reality of my car and thrice worn shirt showed otherwise. I was a young Ivy League graduate who had failed to take on the world, and now I sat in a bar with a crusty blue collar in mid-America.

Just a few months ago, I was on a rooftop bar in the urban heart of the frontier land. I was where my home was nothing more than a whisper on my own lips, and on no one else’s mind. With an old fashioned in my hand and a Banana Republic tie around my Chanel flavored neck, I was explaining how I could seduce a leading Bollywood actress. The lights of a city growing at a breakneck pace dotted the space between my colleagues’ heads, and a sea breeze from the Indian Ocean cooled the sweat forming over my body.

Now, I held a craft beer in my blistered hands. I wasn’t talking, and was listening to a girl complain about the price of salmon at Sam’s Club. Around us there were countless conversations, none of which went deeper than that, nor further away. India was less than a whisper on someone’s lips, because I was too sad to say it. The world outside the bar ended at the state line of Arkansas.

“So I was thinking that I’ll be a human resources person when I graduate.” She waited for my impressed approval.

“Oh yeah? That’s awesome. I think you’d be good at that. You can certainly talk to people.”

“Aww thanks! Yeah I don’t know, talking makes me happy.” She twisted her head and curled around the blue straw again. I think it was supposed to be cute.

Where was I? 

An Ode to Fishing in the Dark

On late summer nights, stretching long into the forbidden September doldrums, Lake Somerville removes itself from time. The black skyline outlined by a yellowing moon sits like a prop on a cosmic stage, and the creak of the marina slips out sound like the tuning of an orchestra. Once set, the curtains part, and the play begins:

An Ode to Fishing in the Dark.

We walked down the steep plank-way leading to the marina store, rods and reels in hand, along with a six pack of Shiner Blonde. The woman at the front of the park, sitting under yellow light swating bugs away from her purple mascara, had told us:

“There’s a ten dollar fee for fishing in the campground, hun.”

She didn’t look up from her long nails clicking away at a small phone, her words navigating their way around the gum she had been chewing for hours. We were instructed by the bored and tired woman to find the marina store to pay the fee.

The store was a floating structure near the shallow eastern end of the lake. The lights outside buzzed, partly from the tired chemicals depleted after years of use inside the bulbs, and partly from the armies of gnats and moths bravely burning on the hot glass. Signs were plastered on the outside walls, earnest attempts at fishing puns that fell flat on inexperienced eyes.

Inside, the store bulged with a dusty inventory that had waited patiently for years to be touched by the hands of guests. Lures, artificial worms, candy bars, maps, knives, hats, extra-large t-shirts, and beef jerky filled the beige metal shelves. The entire family of the operation sat behind the counter, eager for interaction. Engrossed by the scene, I didn’t notice my tall pole approach the hanging pole light-bulb, and it hit with a violent metal clang.

“Oh oh, I’m sorry,” I said apologetically.

“Eh, don’t worry about it,” the apparent proprietor said. He was wearing a teal t-shirt that hugged his bulging belly, and a hat with the brim tilted just slightly off center. His glasses were thick and hung low on the bridge of his nose, so that part of the frame hid his eyes and highlighted the top of his cheekbones.

“Well, here.” I leaned the poles up against an adjacent counter, to continue the conversation sans the light-bulb offender.

“Alright,” I looked back to him, “Hi!”

“Howdy,” he said with a smile.

“So I was told to come to the marina to pay to fish off the dock. Is that alright?”

“Yup yup, it’ll be five dollars a person,” he said, somehow squeezing the word ‘eye’ into ‘five’

“Alright.”

His wife was sitting at the register, aged more, but with deeper wrinkles where smiles lived.

“Do you go to A&M?” she said, looking at the logo on my shirt.

“Yup, I do. Just started grad school.”

“Oh good!” she smiled, “Did you get to go to the game today?”

“No, but I might be okay with that. Seemed like a hot day to be sitting in a stadium.”
“Oh yeah! That’s true, too hot for a game.”

“So what was the final score? Forty-something to twenty…”

“Yeah it was something like that,” the husband interjected, “Wasn’t really a game.”

“Well have we really played any games this year?” I said, conscious of the fact that I had referred to the team as ‘we’ for the first time.

The husband and wife both chuckled, and the husband slipped the ten dollars in the register.

“So,” I continued, assuming their concurrence on my last comment, “we can fish anywhere off the dock?”

“Yeah,” the husband replied, suddenly serious, “You can fish anywhere on the dock, and over on this end is the crappie house where they’re really bittin’.”

Nelson and I left the shop, and found a dark side of the dock near the gas pump. The wood planks under our feet shifted within the rusting metal frame, and sent occasional cockroaches up to the surface to inspect the disturbance. The spot we settled on was just outside the ring of light cast in a cone on the edge of the dock. Here, we were safe from the bugs.

Had it been a year since we had last seen each other, from the comfort of our little yellow Sabita? Or, had it only been a year? We talked once of the possibility of meeting in Texas, if I ever made it there, but the thought was as brief as fresh Bandra air. And yet here we were, talking again of life and its absurdity.

The worms we had purchased at Walmart sensed their oncoming doom, and when I opened the top of the thin plastic container, they dove into the clumpy black dirt, desperate to survive. I moved one clump to the side, and pinched a pulsating body. It flung about as I threaded it onto the needle, green ooze seeping out of its body. I don’t ever say it out loud, but I feel bad for the poor worms. Yet the regret is never enough to dissuade me; the promise of fish is far greater.

The first cast felt perfect. The pole started behind me, and as I flicked it forward and released the line, the catapult motion of the arch coupled with the snap of the pole and sent the pink hook soaring into the blackness of night. For a brief moment, it all disappeared, and I waited for its return to earth. Finally, with a plop 30 feet in front of me, the worm began its first free dive.

Across the lake, two headlights were bouncing along a dirt road. High energy country music bounced across the lake, and my ears strained to catch the song. The creak of the dock and the lapping of the waves were determined to keep the song from me, and so it remained a muffled clump of notes.

Between casts and sips of Shiner, we tried to fill the gaps left by a year of distance. We cast hooks and words out into the distance, and reeled in what we hoped would be success.

There’s a calming peace about fishing in the dark. The task becomes more abstract, and your eyes, desperate for something to look at, point to the stars. The same stars that fought through Bombay smog were now raining on our weary shoulders, on the side of a quiet lake in Texas. There were no rickshaws, no vada pav, and no traffic jams here. Just a couple of guys who held those memories, and spoke of them into the night. For the first time, Lake Somerville heard of the far away mystical town of Bandra, and the adventures we had there.

Maybe the fish were mystified too, because they didn’t bite.