The First Light Fishway sat just upriver of a hundred-foot-tall hydroelectric dam. It consisted of a small brick open-air shelter and an underground viewing room. Descending the staircase into that room could feel, if you were in the right frame of mind, like a sacred passage. There, in the dim greenish light and the silence, three large windows gave onto a pool carved out of the Connecticut River. This pool was the top “rung” of a fish ladder built to allow passage further inland for fish returning from the Atlantic. Six days a week for six weeks, from eight to five-thirty, Charlie and I presided in our bright blue polos, trying to induce appropriate levels of wonder, respect, concern, and pride. We looked at people looking at fish. We pointed toward forms that passed behind windows. Tracy, our ever-encouraging supervisor, used to say we were paid to promote perception. We were paid $5.50 an hour.
Not that I was complaining. I was 22 and new to the area and trying to be on the side of life. I lived ten blocks away in a studio apartment in the basement of a rowhouse built for millworkers in the 1850s and hardly updated since. I’d moved halfway across the country in pursuit of a woman I barely knew. I never got a chance to know her better: she left on a round-the-world trek with her fiancé a few days after I arrived. Fiancé? Having no reason to go elsewhere, I stuck around, nursing my little tragedy, a little proud of it, waiting to become—something.
An interpretive guide? That was the job title Charlie and I shared. Charlie, a retired elementary school teacher, had earned it over sixteen seasons. In my case it masked a near-total ignorance of the subject we were charged to interpret. Luckily the migration was running late this year, which kept the crowds away and gave me time to read up on the four species of fish that journeyed up the river each spring: sea lamprey, eels, Atlantic salmon and—by far the most numerous—shad.
Born in rivers in late spring or early summer, shad spend their first four to six months in fresh water, feeding on tiny translucent animals whose beauty lies beyond the power of our vision. When the orbiting earth chills the water to 60 degrees (more or less—sources, characteristically, disagree) juveniles that have managed not to get eaten alive swim en masse to the ocean, where they join galactic schools of adult shad on their annual southward winter migration. For the next three-plus years they remain at sea. They grow to between one and two feet long, and weigh between four and seven pounds. Their diet now consists of marine zooplankton—copepods, euphausiids, mysids, zoobenthos. They are ocean fish leading ocean lives. Jellyfish, octopi, dugongs, whales pass through their vision like dreams. Their world is enormous. And then something inside them clicks and they are heading home.
“How do they know where to go? Do they have maps?” So went one of Charlie’s favorite taunts, typically delivered as he shuffled toward his victim (some unsuspecting visitor to the viewing room) in a wide-eyed, shrugging caricature of bafflement. Before our guest had a chance to answer, Charlie would already have begun shaking his head as if in great disappointment and bringing his white-bearded, jowly face in close to say, with extreme gravity, “No one knows. No. One. Knows.” The point of this routine was less to celebrate mystery than to demonstrate Charlie’s superior knowledge—he knew no one knew, and you did not—which made it just like all his other routines.
And yet it was true no one knew how shad rediscovered the rivers of their birth. There’s a lot of talk about smell in the literature, but the word seems to slip in and out of metaphor. Celestial and/or magnetic forces may come into play. What we can say with close to certainty is that there is some molecular correspondence—some part of the chemical makeup of the fish matches up with the chemical makeup of the waters that shaped the first few months of its life—and that the transition from salt to fresh water accomplishes itself by means of an inner reversal: the shad’s gills, which have been secreting salt, now begin to pump salt into its body. Presumably—once again, no one knows—this improbable osmoregulatory shift takes place at exactly the moment it becomes necessary to the migrating shad’s survival. Is it a moment? A phase? A poem? A dream? In this story, the familiar estuarial ambiguities of real-life metamorphoses hold.
◆
Charlie and I took turns in the viewing room, while the other stood on the platform upstairs, greeting visitors and preparing them for what they would or wouldn’t see. One day before the migration had begun in earnest, I was staring at the glaucous, sunshot water behind the underground windows. Bubbles went by. Sediment. Leaves. A stick got stuck in a metal grate, and I watched it for a long time with that primordial boredom indistinguishable from fascination.
“There’s a crack in the window. See it? Up there in the corner?”
I didn’t respond. I’d learned to recognize when Charlie was practicing one of his routines and didn’t expect me to answer.
“That’s not a crack, it’s a stick.” He was playing the part of a visitor now.
“You sure about that?” he continued his conversation with himself. “Whatever you say. I guess you and I see different things. Just don’t blame me if the window breaks and the river comes in and we all drown.”
The routine was over. He paused for effect.
Then, “People love that stuff,” he said. “You gotta keep ’em entertained when there’s nothing to see. You play with it. You’ll learn.”
By this time I had concluded that if I had anything to learn from Charlie, none of it would come through his well-intentioned efforts to impart wisdom. Charlie was for me a source of both annoyance and fascination. He brought to our job a ritualistic devotion touched with self-regard. No matter how early I arrived in the morning, he was already there. He’d have set up the folding table and arranged the pamphlets on it, watered the flowers that lined the path to our building, changed the fun fact on our whiteboard, swept, checked the river temperature and current, and cleaned the two single-toilet unisex restrooms. Charlie took a lot of pride in our restrooms. One day a woman thought to tell us that ours were the cleanest public restrooms in Massachusetts, and he repeated the line so often it became a sort of slogan. I say “ours,” but he always said “my”—just as he said “my fish,” “my ladder,” “my river,” “my windows,” “my watershed.”
One morning we were standing together in the shelter, watching wavelets scatter the low sunlight and dissolve reflections of the houses and trees that lined the river. Most days, before we assumed our respective stations we’d look out at the water together, and sometimes Charlie would take these opportunities to confide in me the great regrets and dreams of his life. It was one of these mornings I learned he’d always imagined he’d spend his retirement not as a seasonal fishway interpretive guide, but as an itinerant campground host in our country’s national parks. He had a model for this sort of lifestyle in that of the man he always referred to, touchingly, as his best friend, a retired landscaper who spent his summers in Denali and his winters playing Chip the Chipmunk at Disney World. “Denali and Disney,” Charlie used to intone, as if they lay just beyond the hills. The only thing that stood between Charlie and his dream—so he told me—was his wife. She was an elementary school teacher, too, but refused to say when she’d retire. Maybe never. Charlie had stopped asking about her plans. “I learned a long time ago what is and isn’t permitted.” In Charlie’s stories, his wife was always the villain, and his best friend always the hero. “Can you imagine? Denali and Disney.”
Our first visitor that morning, as almost every morning, was a man about Charlie’s age (I guessed) who, by strange coincidence, shared Charlie’s first and last name. Helpfully, he went by Charles. “Charles!” Charlie would say, and “Charlie!” Charles would say, as the latter limped down the path to our shelter in hooded sweatshirt and sagging jeans. Charles was a downcast, red-faced man with no teeth and disquieting pinkish glassy eyes. When he spoke, which wasn’t often, his voice seemed to struggle to escape his throat.
“Any fish?” he asked.
Not yet, we told him, and as if to make sure we looked down into the pool below us. But the fish were rarely visible from above, and so as Charles and Charlie and I stood there looking down, our thoughts soon drifted to other places.
“Did you know I used to be a champion bull rider?” said Charlie.
“Get outta here,” said Charles.
“It’s true! And you know what else? You used to be one, too.”
“Get outta here.”
“It’s true. I’m telling you.” He began to explain. Whenever a second listener was present, I allowed myself to recede from Charlie’s stories, so that I heard them as if through speakers or as if I were reading from a page or screen.
Charlie had gone to Colorado with his son. You ever been to Colorado? Beautiful. Beautiful state. You gotta go. You gotta go to Colorado. And what you do is you go down to the Rodeo Hall of Fame, down there in Colorado Springs. Nice city. You go down there, you’ll see a statue of a bull rider—big old statue, lifesize: big—and next to the statue you’ll see a plaque. And the plaque’ll say—you know what the plaque will say? The plaque’ll say, Charlie Giffert, World Champion Bull Rider, 1992-1995. No kidding! That’s what it’ll say. I saw it. I was down there with my son a few years back. Charlie Giffert! We laughed and laughed. Charlie Giffert. So now back at the front desk, I say to the lady, I say, Hey, you shoulda let me in for free! She looks at me like I’m nutso. (Guess what? I am.) You shoulda let me in for free. You know why? Because I’m Charlie Giffert. I am! Now, understand, I wasn’t always this big. I’ve put on a lot of pounds in the last few years. Anyway. I’m Charlie Giffert! No you’re not! I am too! I pull out my driver’s license. Look! There it is. I’m Charlie Giffert! It’s on the card! Sir, she says, you are not Charlie Giffert. What do you mean, it’s right there on my driver’s license. Sir, I have met Charlie Giffert, and you’re not him. I am too! I’m Charlie Giffert! Look! Woman looks me up and down. Says, Charlie Giffert is five foot two and Black.
Charlie laughed, and Charles grunted softly, and as I recalled myself to the scene I managed to summon a smile. “Now, I didn’t become Charlie till sixth grade. Before that I was Chuck. My aunt called me Chucky. Now my best friend, his brother is Chuck. Chuck Landell. Military guy . . .” At some point Charlie’s monologue was interrupted by the arrival of another visitor. Charlie pounced and took the woman down to look at nothing.
“He’s a talker,” Charles said after a while. I laughed and nodded and we leaned against the railing. I scanned the view for something to say, but I was always at a loss with Charles. And yet I saw something of myself in him. Maybe it was that both of us always seemed to be at a loss.
“They should cut off his dick,” he said with sudden violence. “Make him a woman. Women know how to talk.”
Charles spit into the water. I felt myself recede. Time has erased what I said in response, but it hasn’t erased the river in the morning light, its reflections and sudden flashings, its layered sheens, its shadows, its depths, its slow-motion flickerings, all of it shifting constantly in patterns just beyond perception. Soon Charlie and his captive emerged from the viewing room and Charles, who’d apparently been waiting for Charlie, made his way toward the exit. “I’ll probably be back later,” he said. “Nothing else to do.”
“You don’t got any TV shows these days? You’re not watching ‘Jeopardy?’ ” Charlie said.
Charles said the only game show he watched anymore was “Wheel of Fortune.”
“Yeah, but”—Charlie’s voice turned conspiratorial—”the only reason you watch is so you can see Vanna White turn the letters.” He leaned in toward Charles. “Right?”
Charles smiled and shook his head.
“Right? Am I right? Look at that smile. Look at it. That’s right, Charles! That’s right!”
I was still unsettled by the morning’s conversation as I walked to Second Street Bakery for lunch, and the dilapidated, vacated townscape I moved through did little to ease my mind. As I passed by a block of low brick rowhouses even more rundown than the one I lived in, it was easy to imagine, behind a set of crooked blinds, Charles reclining on a musty couch and watching the ageless, ever-smiling Vanna conjure word after word.
Second Street Bakery was not, as Charlie had advertised, a “New-York-level bakery,” except in the sense that New York has its share of mediocre bakeries. But this was before I’d even been to New York, much less found work washing dishes and clearing tables at arguably the best French bakery in Manhattan, and so I didn’t know not to enjoy the gargantuan muffins and scones, the dry croissants, the day-old jalapeño cornbread and apple pie bars and “peanut butter reverie cheese cake.” The bakery seemed the source of the day’s considerable heat; a collection jar for air conditioning sat empty on the counter. The only other customer was a permanently scowling man—he was there almost every time I went in—who chewed his food slowly and gingerly, as if he were in terrible pain. As I waited at a table for my veggie Reuben I tried to trace the series of actions through which I had arrived in this inferno, far from home, looking forward to nothing in life so much as glimpsing a single fish. I had gone skiing: that’s how it started, or that was one place you could say it started. I suppose that little outing had been an attempt to reclaim the activity that had been my life, and its undoing.
By this point more than two years had passed since I’d been diagnosed with the heart condition that forced me to withdraw from the 15k at the 1999 Nordic Skiing National Championships, and later to release the hope that I would ever ski competitively again. The dark months in my parents’ basement that followed now seem to me the photonegative of my abandoned dream—once within reach, according to my coaches—to medal at the Salt Lake Olympics. I have little memory of how I spent those days, though I know I watched a lot of TV—daytime talk shows, soaps, cartoons, game shows, cooking shows, old sitcoms, the History Channel . . . My favorite was that show that’s always on about an ill-matched couple wandering the world in search of shelter. This was in St. Paul, where I grew up. Eventually, with the help of my kind, patient parents and Doctor Lisa Kitamura, I gathered the wherewithal to understand I needed a change of scene. Having no idea where to go or what to do, my thoughts turned soon enough toward Patricia, a skier I’d spent a night with almost two years ago at a training camp in Big Sky, Montana.
Two months later Patricia was in Laos and I was in her hometown, on Northfield Mountain, arguably more of a biggish hill. I’d been planning to take it easy but the old competitive urge rose up in me, absurdly, as if my body refused to accept that skiing could be something besides racing or training. Keep going, keep going, I involuntarily repeated to myself, and, Where? Here. Where? Here—mantras I don’t doubt will continue to echo in my skull for a long time after I die. I was, I’m sure, pushing my heart rate beyond what my cardiologist had deemed safe levels. Afterwards, sweating in the warming hut, I shuffled through a stack of pamphlets and newsletters I’d found on a nearby table. I read about First Light Energy, which owned the mountain, and its various regional operations. Deep inside the mountain, I was surprised to learn, lay a cavern the size of a football stadium in which four colossal turbines pumped water from the Connecticut to a reservoir at the summit. Water was released from the reservoir at strategic intervals, passing it back through the turbines to the river, thereby producing energy for the grid whenever it was needed. As I tried to understand the sleight of hand by which First Light turned a profit from this process, my attention was caught by an insert in the pamphlet that advertised a “unique job opportunity.” I wasn’t qualified to be an interpretive guide at a fishway, but it sounded like a chance to learn something, and so that evening when I got home I filled out the application. Since my background was in neither the natural sciences nor education nor really anything—I hadn’t been to college and my only work experience was a summer scooping ice cream at Baskin Robbins—I can only assume I got the job because one of my interviewers, an ectomorphic, stoical man, knew enough about the world to have heard of the Holmenkollen 50k in Oslo.
That, in one sense, was how I’d gotten here, and yet somehow it seemed to explain nothing.
My Reuben arrived, finally, with a dismal side of chips. As I wolfed my soggy sandwich in the heat, I perused the local weekly paper, trying to distract myself from the gloomy thoughts that threatened to overtake me. I read articles on stormwater management plans and selectboard meetings and cable contracts. The Cat of the Week was James Monroe Junior. The 34th annual Bee Fest was next weekend. The police log featured multiple black bear sightings, and one of an elusive mangy fox. Last Wednesday, an “Arts and Living” front-page teaser told me, the local high school welcomed Ray Charles’s son-in-law for an inspirational talk. In need of an inspirational talk myself, I turned to the article:
When Tony Raye, husband of Sheila Raye Charles, was in high school—a long, long time ago, he told the students—he’d been a three-sport athlete with a 3.5 GPA and multiple scholarship offers. But the summer before his senior year, he gave a ride to a man he knew by sight, not suspecting that after he dropped him off, the man would rob a store at gunpoint. Raye spent seven years in prison as accessory to armed robbery. When he got out he couldn’t imagine a future for himself; he started doing drugs and hanging out with the wrong people and ended up back in jail. It was during this time that Raye “started reaching out for something positive. He became humble about his real situation and what it would take to save his life from the dead end where it had unfortunately stalled. He had lost everything but he still wanted to survive. Several times he offered rapt students this thought: A vision is already a reality.” After bringing his story to its happy conclusion, Raye sang a few of his father-in-law’s songs, and then, with the entire roomful of students, “This Little Light of Mine.”
◆
The windows were a triptych whose pictures moved and were made of water and light. The fish were shadows in the shape of fish, momentary intensifications of their medium. There were two, a third, a fourth, none. They came like memories in the middle of night, fading if I tried to cling to them. Just when I was sure I hadn’t seen them, one wandered up against the glass, a strangeness, all there in all of its movements. I thought I recognized it. It bore a message. Motion merged into sense, sense into motion, in its lucent, fusiform body. There it was. And yet it seemed very far away. Only when I learned to empty myself of the knowledge it was my job to convey would I see in the forms before my eyes embodiments of what I had known. Then the fish could swim into the new spaces within me, where they became conduits of energy, vital links, knots of figured time. They had eyes.
The first few shad arrived in mid-May, and over the next few days the windows filled with pulsating, silver masses, loosely surging. Gradually I began to notice subtle differences in size, shape, color, and other features, and I saw the fish less as specimens than as individuals, with particular behaviors and personalities. There were the males and the females, to start with, the latter usually identifiable by their bulging, egg-filled bellies. Some shad were more brightly colored than others, or shinier, or had less scale damage, and these differences often seemed to coincide—though how exactly I could never say—with differences in strength, agility, sociability, and even qualities like courage or valor. I envied them, as anyone would. It is right to envy creatures that dissolve past and future in a halo of the ongoing moment. Our proximity—we shared a room—suggested some sort of intimate relation.
Salmon were a different story. The only salmon I—or anyone—saw was the taxidermied specimen floating above an informational placard in the viewing room. “What a biological success story it will be, to have the Atlantic salmon re-established in the Connecticut River and its tributaries!” said the placard. In fact, the three-decade restoration effort had recently been declared a failure. Once, the river had been so thick with salmon you could net a dozen with a well-timed swipe; now, if any remained in the river, their numbers were negligible and their chances of passing through our fishway next to none.
Explaining to visitors that this was the case didn’t stop them from claiming to see them. Usually what they saw were shad, and I would gently correct them. But occasionally someone would shout “Salmon!” with such excitement—people love to see what they’ve been told they will not see—that I half-believed they were right. They weren’t. Proof of their error came in the form of daily footage from a motion-detecting video camera: no salmon. It was official.
“Got a new neighbor,” Charles said one morning in his hollow, self-swallowing voice. Again it was just the three of us—Charles, Charlie and I—on the platform, looking out over the river. The day was gray, but the water was bright, as if it held its own lights.
“Bodacious body,” Charles said.
I hadn’t heard the adjective in years.
“Not a bad face either,” he added.
I felt myself receding as Charlie said, “Face, body—sounds like the whole package.”
“You got it, Charlie.”
“No, you got it, Charles!”
After that morning Charlie started bringing up Charles’s neighbor at every opportunity. He called her his girlfriend. “Hey Charles, how’s your girlfriend? You make her a big pot of coffee this morning?” Or, “Morning, Charles. Late night with the girlfriend?” And Charles would laugh an almost silent laugh and say, “That’s right, Charlie.”
Then one day Charles brought his neighbor to the fishway. She was a short athletic-looking woman maybe in her mid-thirties and you could see immediately she’d come out of pity. She shook my hand and said, “Erin, pleased to meet you.” I said I was pleased to meet her and, after a pause, she asked where all the salmon were. There were no salmon here, I explained, and she said, “What! No salmon? Charles!”
Charles said, “You don’t got any salmon today?”
“We never have any salmon, Charles.”
He laughed as though I were teasing him. He’d come to the fishway every day it was open for the past decade at least, Charlie had told me; the three of us often talked about shad, almost never about salmon. And yet, I realized now, with faint sadness, for Charles the shad weren’t shad but salmon, and likely always would be.
“Got a whole bunch of shad, though,” I said, and I led him and Erin to the viewing room, where Charlie was lecturing a woman and her small child about the inverse relationship between striped bass and blueback herring populations in the Connecticut.
“There they are,” I said, my opening line, sometimes my only line.
“They’re beautiful,” Erin said after watching them for a while. “I didn’t expect them to be beautiful.”
“A hundred and twenty-two miles from the ocean to get here,” I said.
“Is that right?” Erin said.
“Against the current.”
“No kidding. Wow.”
“And they don’t eat that whole time.”
“No. Really?”
“It’s true. They’re very focused. All they want is to get upriver to spawn. That’s all they care about anymore. And then they die.”
“Can you imagine?”
I said I couldn’t.
“And they’re just here. In the river. Like five blocks from my apartment.”
I nodded.
“Beautiful,” she said again.
And a few moments later, “Beautiful,” Charles said, as if he’d never really seen them before.
◆
When I try to summon the next few days, what I see is a constant stream of people and fish, not only shad now but eels and lamprey, which almost everyone continued to call eels even after Charlie or I explained the difference, and in my memory our human visitors were mostly hunched men with stunned faces half-hidden by Red Sox caps, members of some ancient tribe. Their T-shirts said “Nice Rack” or “Ketchup” or “Patriots.” Flame tattoos ran up their calves. Look closely and you saw they were missing teeth. They kept their children—they had children—on leashes. Their wives—they had wives—were silent. The men left when they got hungry or needed a smoke, trailing their uncomprehending families. “You ready?” they’d say as they turned to go, or sometimes just, “Let’s go.” Their children’s shoes flashed red as they climbed the stairs, transmitting secrets or warning signals.
Then it was June and the migration was almost over, and with it Charlie’s solace and my livelihood. The two of us leaned against the iron railing, looking out at the river. It was a lovely sunny day and light shot from the water in variegated, piercing darts, and Charlie, who for some reason was cradling in each arm an enormous container of instant coffee, was telling me about how he wouldn’t be joining his wife and her sister in Nova Scotia next month. He’d always wanted to go to Canada, he told me—as though it were some distant land—but he never traveled with his wife anymore, not since what happened five years ago. I’d only been half-listening, as usual, but now I felt Charlie’s significant pause applying uncomfortable pressure against my brain, and I found myself unable to keep from asking what it was that happened five years ago.
What happened was he went on a big road trip with his son. They drove from Massachusetts to California and back, taking a southern route on the way out and a northern one on the return. An epic vacation. The longest vacation he’d ever been on, Charlie said, and the best time he’d ever had with his son. But he had to back up a bit to explain.
Originally, he said, the plan had been for his wife to come on the road trip too. Well. Let’s just say she removed herself from the equation. He’d been saving up for three years, clipping coupons and eating beans and rice and riding his bike to work, to save on gas. This was back before he got so big; he hadn’t always looked like this, he said—it was a side effect of drugs he started taking for his heart. He used to be able to ride twenty miles, without so much as breaking a sweat. Here Charlie paused and looked down at the floor and shook his head at the memory. Anyway, he went on, recovering, he’d saved and saved. The only extravagances he allowed himself were extra materials for his first-grade classes—watercolors, compasses, stuff like that. He didn’t skimp on his students, he said. They deserved the best. The best. But in all other areas he scrimped and saved, and most months was able to deposit some money in an account he’d set up specially for the trip.
Then, a month before they were set to leave, he checked the account and there was nothing. Nothing. At first, his wife denied all wrongdoing, but finally he got her to confess. Bad day. The worst thing was, Charlie told me, he wasn’t even surprised. She’d done some pretty awful stuff over the years.
“Like what?” I asked, but Charlie waved off the question with the back of his hand. He couldn’t let her have what she wanted, he said, and what she wanted was for him not to get his vacation. The vacation he’d been planning for the past three years. With his twelve-year-old son, whom he loved. Well. He was going to have his vacation. Fuck her. (“Excuse me,” Charlie said. “It still makes me so mad.”) So he took a bunch of money from his retirement account and borrowed a little more from his best friend, and went on the road trip just as he’d planned it, minus one thieving wife.
And it was wonderful. He loved road trips, Charlie told me—his gaze becoming more abstracted and his voice shifting into a loftier register—loved watching the world pass by, loved the feeling of just moving. Everyone said the great thing about road trips was the freedom, the open road and all that, but no. No. What was great was the lack of freedom—nothing to do but to keep on going, keep on driving between the lines. That’s where the freedom comes in (he tapped his head): road trips free your mind. Things look different. You notice things you wouldn’t normally notice. Transitions. From North to South, plains to desert, corn to soy, whatever. I was over there, now I’m over here. How’d it happen? Magic. And the other thing that happens is that the littlest things take on this big significance. You know what I’m talking about: a black bear in the Smokies, a milkshake in Natchez, whatever it may be. A conversation with strangers at a rest stop in Wyoming. A sunset reflected in suburban office park windows. The way the mist hangs above some field—the list could go on, Charlie said. Each of these things meant more to him than entire years of his life. “It’s not about experience,” he said, “it’s about experiences. Did I ever tell you the story about visiting the Rodeo Hall of Fame?”
Before I had a chance to answer—I was disturbed to feel myself starting to say he hadn’t told me the story—Charlie said, “Charles loves that story. I better wait till Charles gets here to tell it.”
But Charles didn’t show up that day, nor the next day, nor the next, nor the following week. He must be sick, Charlie and I decided, and then we didn’t talk about him for several days. We were both a little worried, I think, and wanted to avoid imagining the worst. The river warmed, the migration slowed. Without Charles there to inaugurate them, the days seemed longer, less real. On the third-to-last day our doors were open, Charlie offered me the two containers of instant coffee I’d seen him holding several days earlier. “Brought these in for Charles,” he said. “But now . . . ” He trailed off, shaking his head. I didn’t drink coffee but the occasion seemed too solemn, Charlie’s gesture too generous, to reject them.
That afternoon I walked to Second Street for lunch. The man who was always there was there, scowling his way through a cream cheese brownie. The woman at the register guessed my order, and I felt like a local. While I waited for my sandwich in the suffocating heat, I read the latest edition of the weekly paper. “Town Ousts Squatter From Bank-Owned Property.” “Summer Diaper Drive is Under Way.” Among the usual banalities of the police log—”loose cow reported in Stop n’ Shop lot”—an entry from the previous Sunday caught my eye: 4:05pm Arrested Charles Giffert, 48, for open and gross conduct, disorderly conduct, and annoying/accosting a person of the opposite sex. The alley where the misdemeanor was committed was less than a block from where I lived. A part of me said it couldn’t be our Charles, our Charles was much older than 48, and he was too gentle, or too beaten down, to commit such a crime. But even as that thought passed through my mind, I could see the tawdry incident play out as I imagined Erin must have seen it: the ugly, drunken man descending with all his force upon her; his fleshy lips moist with spittle and booze; his tongue forming half-articulate sounds of pleading, anger and desire . . . I didn’t, of course, know what really happened, nor did I ever find out. And I still don’t know whether to trust my hunch about the “unidentified man” in another article, seen by two witnesses the previous Thursday evening leaping off the French King Bridge into the river (the body had not been recovered). Maybe it was Charles, maybe it wasn’t. I did and didn’t want to know. I folded up the paper and scanned the bakery in search of an answer to my questions. The scowling man was gone, and the table where he’d sat was covered with brownie crumbs.
Charles never returned to the fishway that spring, nor, for that matter, did Erin. I never mentioned my suspicion to Charlie, who spent those final days at the fishway lost in a constant sulk. But I thought of Charles, more vividly than usual, on my final day on the job, when I caught a glimpse in the viewing room of a fish far too big to be a shad. The motion-detecting camera didn’t catch it, but I knew what I had seen. At the time, it gave me a flicker of hope that salmon might return to the Connecticut after all. But I’ve since learned that hope was misguided: the salmon are gone. It doesn’t matter what I saw. They’re gone. Charlie died of heart failure the following winter. All this happened two decades ago. And yet I still spend my days behind windows, waiting for the miraculous arrival.