SHELBY HAD TAKEN A PLACE ON THE RUE DU CHERCHE-MIDI—“ON personal, historical grounds,” as he put it—but he also claimed visiting rights at a fishing shack an old buddy maintained on a pristine stretch of the River Avre near Nonancourt. It was there that we repaired to prepare and brace ourselves on the eve of the funeral of Faria Duclos.
“I kept meaning to go see her,” Shelby said as we drove out to Normandy with the Jaguar’s roof folded down. He was wearing the old retro pilot’s helmet with its flaps and buckles and had somehow acquired a set of matching goggles since Faria Duclos presented him with the gift all those years ago. The outfit drew a lot of second glances from startled motorists catching sight of this latter-day Red Baron in their rearview mirrors, suddenly on their tail, coming out of the sun, and so forth. I couldn’t make my mind up whether he looked midlife goofy or just plain silly.
“But I didn’t. I wanted to keep it like it had been—not two old crips getting their sticks and zimmers and wheelchairs all caught up in an emotional train crash. What kind of metaphor is that? I wanted it like it was when we could both run for our lives. Which we did quite a lot, as I recall. And now I can’t go see her again. Ever. So there’s not much point in being pissed at her, is there? Or myself. If there’s a moral, Clancy, it’s to never put yourself in a position where you end up saying ‘if only.’ ‘If only’ are the two worst words in the English language.”
It wasn’t the whole truth.
Piecing together the little I could glean from the archives and conversations with HR types in a position to know, I had begun to feel fairly sure that there was a significant gap in Shelby’s CV between Beirut and Paris. His last report from Lebanon was a lengthy magazine article—“Farewell to the Orient” by Joe Shelby. Given the lead time for such self-indulgent pieces, it must have been written several weeks earlier, to be published around the time he left. Then, if Ivar Bild was to be believed, there was the question of a fire. And then, months later, Shelby had arrived in Paris. Between those markers, there were only questions.
“Wasn’t there something about a fire? In Beirut?”
He made as if the wind had whipped away my words and he had heard nothing.
With a nonchalant indifference to each one of the variable speed limits, he drove the Jaguar along the N12 leading out of Paris toward Normandy, slotting between the gears in the automatic six-speed box and flooring the throttle to get the thump in the lower back from V8 acceleration and the Le Mans rumble and roar from the twin exhaust pipes. In the passenger seat, I huddled down against the beige leather and reached for my hip flask rather than watch the roadside trees and the Paris-bound cars rush toward us like a movie on very fast rewind.
“What happened after Beirut?”
“Did you ever fish, Clancy?”
“Not even for compliments.”
“Fishing 101. Starts tonight.”
“Beirut?”
“History.”
No wind to steal his words that time.
“How come we are fishing when we are supposed to be mourning?”
Sentimentalism is to be avoided at all costs,” he said. “Faria never did approve of mawkishness.”
Or denial. I thought.
The fishing shack had a fairy-tale feel to it, with exposed external beams, brown against cream stone, and a small terrace. It was a tranquil spot, a two-bedroom cottage on its own grounds, including eight hundred yards of river, dimpled with rising trout below the low boughs of trees that cast deep shadows and shielded the fish from terrestrial predators. Shelby flung open the locked doors and shuttered windows. With some awkwardness, he shook charcoal into a barbeque, poured a liberal splash of lighter fluid, and tossed in a match.
“Trout on the barbie good enough for you?”
“Where’s the trout?”
“Right in there,” he said, pointing at the river. Beyond the stream, a flock of plump sheep grazed on the evening meadows—as round and white as those you see in classroom drawings by city children imagining rural life. Looking at them, then looking at Shelby as he struggled into a set of thigh waders, I had the feeling that there was about as much likelihood of carré d’agneau with all the trimmings as there was of grilled trout for supper.
He pointed toward a well-stocked drinks cabinet that looked as if it had been provisioned for an alcoholic siege, with at least a dozen bottles of scotch, bourbon, cognac, vodka, and gin.
“Don’t worry about running out,” he said. “There’s resupply in the car.”
I poured us both a jolt of Johnnie Walker Black on the rocks. “See this?” Shelby said. He was waving a tuft of feathers wrapped around a small hook attached to the end of a thin nylon leader, which, in turn, was bonded to the heavier strand of his fly-casting line. Before I could reply, he was deep into an explanation.
“Ordinarily, this would be called a Gray Wulff. It’s what Italian fishers call a cacciatore, a hunter. You cast it on the waters and old tommy trout can’t resist. Whatever other bugs may be flying around, he’ll go for this one. Out of curiosity, anger—who knows? Now, I’ve tied this one myself and it’s a slightly different pattern and I call it the Homepatch Hunter and I’ll explain the principle. You float this by a trout’s nose and the trout knows it shouldn’t but it can’t stop itself so it snaffles it and it’s hooked.”
“So why name it after a Graphic editing program?”
“You’ll see, old sport. You’ll see. Now tend the barbie while I hit the water. And one other thing: swans.”
“Swans?”
“Don’t piss off the swans around here. They say they can kill a man with a single strike from their wings. Probably some kind of old wives’ tale. Rural myth. But they don’t like intruders.”
With that he cranked himself almost upright and headed for the water, an old built cane fishing pole in one hand and a worn leatherseated shooting stick in the other. The light was still good, but you could feel the stealth of sundown on the air. The trout were into their evening rise, like gourmands nibbling at canapés to limber up the taste buds and flex the stomach for la grande bouffe.
Shelby’s illness had left him with an awkward weakness, mainly on the left side of his body, complicating what should have been a routine amphibious transition. He clung to a stout, overhanging branch with one hand, his fishing rod clenched between his teeth and his other hand steadying the whole operation with his shooting stick. He achieved this operation with a series of grunts and obscenities, but surprisingly little disruption to the smooth flow of the water.
Sitting on the patio area outside the cottage, nursing my scotch, I had a slightly uneasy feeling about the Homepatch Hunter but suppressed it. Just a joke. Just a Shelby joke, I thought, though a small inner voice kept on saying, Shelby jokes are the kind that cost careers. If he is comparing this trout fly to a plot hatched in the newsroom, it could only mean trouble. Swallowing another jolt, I tried to distract myself with the spectacle in the Avre ahead of me.
Once submerged to his thighs, Shelby began a laborious, crabbing maneuver with his shooting stick to gain a midstream position. Just below the opposite bank, I could see supper rising underneath a patch of nettles that provided a canopy of shade and cover, making Shelby’s looping casts of the fly line more challenging. Every few seconds, or so it seemed, the water would dimple as the trout rose to suck in a passing bit of winged insect or fallen bug or about-to-hatch nymph in the surface film of the water.
It had a hypnotic effect on both of us, and I quite forgot about the swans.
Shelby had begun to cast with an easy, gentle rhythm, feeding a little more line out every time he flicked his antique rod back and forth, building a curve into the line so that, as it landed on the water, the thin nylon leader bearing the Homepatch Hunter unfolded in a deft parabola designed to ensure that the fish saw only the tuft of feathers, not the line it was attached to or the unsportingly and—on this stretch of water—illegally barbed hook among them.
I had to admire the tactics. In this quiet corner of Normandy, Shelby was the silent hunter, infinitely patient. He had reached a midstream position and had lowered himself onto the seat on his shooting stick to take the strain off his bad leg. Twice the trout rose to the Homepatch Hunter. Twice it either turned away at the last moment or Shelby struck a fraction too early or too late. He gathered in his line, paused, fumbled in his fishing vest for a cigarette, and lit it. The light was beginning to fade, and I stirred the coals in the barbecue as they began to take on the grayish tinge that signals the perfect temperature for cooking.
Several hundred yards upstream, a swan was feeding on the abundant Ranunculus weed that unfurled in the river in long, dark mermaid strands. Several hundred yards downstream, another swan was looking back upstream, maintaining eye contact—I assumed—with its mate, like a couple at a party signaling across a crowded room that it’s time to go. Shelby was relocating himself, moving a little farther into midstream to gain a better casting stance on his shooting stick. Idly, as I poured a second—or was it third?—Black Label, I wondered if there was some kind of riverine code that said not to interpose yourself between raunchy swans. I racked my general knowledge data banks. I had heard, from Shelby himself, not to get in the way of a hippo and its calf, a lion and its cub. In fact, I thought of the times at crowded parties when I had become distressed when I lost sight of Marie-Claire across a chandeliered salon because some oaf had come between us. It seemed swans weren’t that different, after all.
Shelby was rapt now, in communion with his piscine target, close to the hunter’s perfect Hemingway moment when the prey’s foibles have been sussed and there is only the technical matter of the means of capture still to be achieved. I had watched him fiddling with a new fly tied to his leader—a Beeching Blunderbuss maybe, I thought, sniggering as I recalled an article I had once edited about the way the estrogen of the human female attracted certain other species so that women held records on mighty Scottish rivers for capturing enormous salmon. Whatever. It was only a matter of time before the plump, bloodily gutted trout would lie briefly above the hot coals to provide the first, last, and only course for supper: Shelby had not, as far as I knew, stocked up with any non-liquid provisions.
He began to cast.
The swans began to move.
The upstream bird turned downstream to look for its partner, or spouse, or whatever the parlance is for the conjugality of swans. Downstream, as if by some secret, arcane signal, its mate turned upstream.
Swans are always reckoned to look stately, and most times they do. They glide with their perfect downy white necks set in a haughty curve. They traverse smooth waters in silent, stately procession. But these swans were making bow waves.
“Shelby!”
“Shhh.”
I had gotten up from my folding director’s chair on the patio and tiptoed toward the water, still clutching my tumbler of Black Label. Shelby was making abrupt, impatient gestures with his hand, indicating that I should retreat.
“Shelby.”
“Back off.”
He was casting again now. The moment had come when the hunt and the timing and the waiting all coalesced into the perfect moment. It was inevitable that the trout would be hooked, the hunter would return with the prey, the supper would cook on the coals. The evening light had turned just a shade darker, and Shelby had taken off his UV fishing glasses, allowing them to swing from a cord around his neck.
He cast.
“The swans!” I hissed.
“The what?”
He swung his neck around.
The trout rose.
The swans stepped up the pace to attack speed.
The trout impaled itself on the hook of the Beeching Blunderbuss.
Shelby looked quickly up-and downstream. I had a feeling that it was like one of those moments he had shared with Duclos, when you hear the mortars landing that little bit closer, and the snappy whine of gunfire gets too intimate for comfort, and you figure that even your most faithful readers cannot demand the ultimate sacrifice of you—it’s time to split.
From both sides, the swans were closing in fast, paddling so furiously that they seemed to be rising up on their downy breasts, extending their Boeing-like wings for takeoff.
Shelby turned clumsily in the water, grabbing his shooting stick for support. The swans were getting much closer now—speeding through their own element where Shelby was an alien, ungainly intruder—their wings jutting like medieval weapons. What had Shelby said about swans killing a man with one strike of those bony leading edges? And now he was caught between two of them.
The effort of pushing through the thigh-deep stream was giving him trouble.
“Jesus, Clancy. Gimme a hand.”
It was no time to tell Shelby that I had never learned to swim and had a deep-rooted fear of water.
Shelby was pushing toward the bank, his shooting stick in one hand, his fancy cane pole in the other. The hooked trout was still hooked, indifferent to the drama of the swans and the fisherman and the whiskey drinker on the bank. Desperate for release from the barbed hook embedded in the hard corner of its jaws, it was performing pirouettes and leaps like a ballerina, skittering across the darkening surface of the water. For their part, the swans did not look like the kind of dancers that take their part in the Tchaikovsky opus related to their species on some Russian lake. They seemed to be making aggressive, hissing noises. They seemed to be very close.
Close to the bank, Shelby stumbled.
“Get the net,” he said, nodding toward a long-handled landing net he had left on the bank. I grabbed it, thinking he wanted to pull himself out of the river with it. I extended the handle toward him, trying hard to balance on the slippery bank, do my bit to help, and not spill my whiskey all at the same time.
“No, for Chrissakes. Net the trout.”
He had taken his angling pole back between his teeth and was pulling in the line hand over hand with the suddenly submissive trout on the end. I slid the net underneath it and raised it up, feeling a solid weight.
Shelby tossed his rod to me.
“Run, Clancy. Run for your life.”
I wondered if I should say something like “I won’t leave you, Sarge,” but running seemed the better option.
The swans were now only a few yards away, their fearsome wings extended and beating with intimations of extremely prejudicial intent.
Shelby turned toward them and waved his shooting stick at them as I retreated to the paved terrace area with the rod and the net and the exhausted trout. He backed out of the water, grasping at branches and undergrowth, making an awesome crashing noise like a rhinoceros lost in bushlands. Even the reunited swans seemed somewhat nonplussed.
“Get indoors,” he shouted to me as he slithered and slipped his way up the bank, then limped and hobbled with improbable alacrity across the lawn. Then he saw the other invaders.
“What’s that?” he cried, pointing at the cottage, where dark objects inside hurtled around a rustic wooden chandelier in a crazed frenzy.
The swans had come ashore, waddling and hissing toward him. But our safe haven had been overrun behind our backs by flying black rags, filling the air, flapping, squeaking.
“Bats,” I said.
“Bats? Did you say bats?”
The swans were crossing the lawn. One had its wings outstretched as if practicing some kind of a karate chop.
“You must have left the door open.”
“Me,” I said. “Why me?”
Even at that moment, the question took on a kind of metaphysical significance. Why me? Why me hooked up to this mad trout fisherman? Why me pursued by pissed-off swans? Why me locked in harness with an aging, limping hero who blamed me for everything that went wrong? It was like a bad marriage.
“Get them out,” he barked.
“Why me?”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Clancy.” Shelby pulled his wide-brimmed fishing hat down over his forehead and wrenched open the double doors of the main room leading from the cottage onto the terrace. “You hold off the swans. I’ll tackle the bats.”
Tackle?
He plunged forward, waving and flailing with clenched fists, bellowing a stream of obscenities that challenged the bats’ provenance, species, parentage, procreative abilities, and many existential points about their presence on the planet.
Facing the hissing swans, the bats and Shelby at my rear, I prodded toward the big white birds with the landing net.
“Shoo,” I said.
“The net!” Shelby bellowed. “Gimme the net.”
I became aware of small black things hurtling past my ears, whirling and twirling upward and over the still, darkening river.
I figured maybe fifty of them came by, like tossed gloves, ragged, venomous, sharp-toothed. Bats. Protected by law. Endangered species. Bats by the score. Vampires. Rabid. Every single mental association brought up rapid-fire images of Dracula, sinking teeth, pale flesh, rivulets of coveted blood. The bats swooping and circling until the swans themselves retreated toward their familiar element.
Thinking more of supper than of Shelby, I turned the net inside out and the trout flopped onto the patio, its gills quivering. Its body curled halfheartedly in a final attempt to flap its way back a habitat it understood. Then it became motionless, though it was unclear whether that was a result of a lack of waterborne oxygen or bewilderment at the turn of events around it or simple exhaustion—it had been a busy afternoon for all of us.
I turned back toward Shelby, offering him the net. He grasped it and, with the long handle fully extended, blundered and crashed around the living room, flailing at the dark, vile creatures that the French call chauves-souris—bald mice. One of the bats, particularly dogged or dumb, tried to hang upside down from the chandelier, like a dictator run down by the mob. Shelby netted it with the skill of a lepidopterist snaring a Red Admiral, then deftly turned the knotless mesh inside out to free the nasty little creature. Immediately, as if preprogrammed, it joined the crowd that jiggled and dived over the river until some lemming instinct among them carried them away toward a deserted barn that was soon to be colonized by their uninvited presence.
“All clear,” Shelby called out, and with some relief I turned and fled into the shelter of the cottage.
“Now I remember it, my buddy did say something about bats,” he said. “Something about not leaving the doors open.”
“So you knew! You asshole! You prick! Jesus. I can’t stand bats.” I shuddered. I did hate bats. My whole body shook with rage and loathing.
But Shelby turned to me with just the beginning of a smile, lost in the triggered memory of some greater battle fought and lost on foreign fields, and said: “Did I ever tell you about the time I covered the Romanian revolution and actually got to Dracula’s castle? In Transylvania. Not a bat in sight!”
Unsung, the last of the day slid effortlessly into night, and I had to acknowledge that, after the adrenaline that had substituted for the hors d’oeuvres, grilled river trout washed down with whiskey seemed a pretty good idea. It was not the most delicately cooked of fish, or even the most cooked of fish. The coals were still too hot, and the skin of the trout charred black around pale, tepid flesh not too far removed from sushi. It was a plump, tasty fish—three pounds, Shelby reckoned, so I knew it had to weigh considerably less. But it did not seem appropriate to challenge his estimate. And the scotch—by now we had located a fiery, peaty single malt from the Isle of Skye—promised preemptive purgation of any potential toxins, along with accelerated anesthesia.
So, with several immodest toasts to our valor and chuckles over the less glorious moments of the encounter, we celebrated a victory that had called forth the full gamut of our military skills—water-borne warfare followed by battle on land against swans that called in air strikes. Von Clausewitz would have been proud of us—though, as any real military strategist might divine, it was no more than a skirmish, a diversionary moment, a prelude distracting from the business that had brought us to this corner of Normandy.
“All your life you look for perfection,” Shelby was saying, refilling our glasses without bothering with ice or soda. “And while you look, you construct a version of life that will do for now, a humdrum shadow of what you know it could be but never is.”
“And it was yours for the taking.”
I assigned myself the role of sounding-board-cum-therapist, venturing into the private depths of Shelby’s soul, where I trod warily. I was not even sure I wanted to be there. He was somewhere way back, in Rwanda or Cape Town or Nairobi, long before illness overtook the both of them and they washed up in Paris, like separate items of flotsam far apart on a long and cluttered beach.
“I had perfection within my grasp. All I had to do was trust her. All I had to do was to have faith.”
“But you couldn’t do that, I guess.”
“As the Brits say, I bottled it. You see, with Faria, you were on the roller coaster, and if you said to yourself, okay, this is the ride and I’ll be fine, then you would be. But if you doubted, if you asked yourself where the ride was leading, if you asked for proof, then it would lead to disaster. And I couldn’t make that leap, any more than she could just be something she wasn’t. So, yes, in essence, we were perfect for each other. We brought each other joy. But we neither of us could take that step to make it permanent. If we had, we would have been together to the end, whichever one of us went first. You know, when I headed out with Eva, Faria waited. In all that time, I don’t think there was anyone else.”
“But you never went to see her when she got sick.”
“And she never came to see me,” he snapped back, but the anger soon fled.
“Look at this.” He reached for one of his leather-bound travel companions from his library of Nervalia. The paper was thin, frail; the binding scuffed. The gilt title, barely legible, said this was Aurélia—considered by many to be Nerval’s masterpiece in prose. The subtitle was The Dream of Life. When the poet died, the final pages of his manuscript were found in his pocket. I never figured why Nerval chose that moment to go, but his shrink was said to have observed, “Gérard de Nerval hung himself because he looked his madness in the face.”
I figured I did that every time I shaved—or met up for joe with Shelby.
Careful not to sully the page with charcoal-smeared fingers, Shelby directed me to a passage marked lightly in pencil.
“Read that.”
The French was a bit florid—I’d have cut it back pretty easily without losing meaning—but I followed it well enough. As I scanned it, Shelby leaned back, like a professor awaiting enlightenment to befall a slow student.
“At first I only heard that she was ill,” it said. “Owing to my state of mind I only felt a vague unhappiness mixed with hope. I believed that I myself had only a short while longer to live, and I was now assured of the existence of a world in which hearts in love meet again. Besides, she belonged to me much more in her death than in her life …”
“See what I mean?” he said, his eyes shining.
It occurred to me then that he had never imagined she would die first. And I was sure he never expected her to die the way she had, in a wheelchair, even less capable of determining life’s twists and turns than he was.
The way she had lived, the abandon with which she greeted danger, and her passionate embrace of risk all seemed to point one way—toward obituaries recording her final moment in some fire fight or air raid or land mine blast when her luck and trade-craft both expired in the enveloping red wetness of combat-zone departures.
“You’re right, Clancy,” he said. “I didn’t go see her. I guess I bottled that, too.”
The moon over the Avre caught a splinter of a tear in his eye. I still had not told him that I had visited her, that I was the bearer of her last message to him on this earth. And that I knew their story was nowhere near as simple as the legend he was trying to build.