The Thanatos Syndrome

pocked as a moonscape. It’s true. I’m dressed up in my Bruno Hauptmann double-breasted seersucker. Why do I remind myself of an ungainly German executed fifty years ago?
    Leroy buys me a drink and pours himself one. I knock mine back. It feels even better, warmth overlaying warmth. His disappears in a twinkling, hand brushing nose.
    Leroy feels better too. He leans over and tells me about his safari. He owns a motor home, and he and his wife belong to a club of motor-home owners, ten other couples. They’ve just got back from Alaska. Last year, Disney World. Year before, Big Bend.
    â€œTell you what you do, Doc. You need a vacation, you and the missus. Ya’ll take my Bluebird and head out west or to Disney World. Do you both a world of good. Take the kids. Here are the keys.”
    â€œThank you, Leroy.” I’m touched. He means it. His Bluebird is a top-of-the-line motor home, the apple of his eye. It cost more than his home, which is the second floor of the Little Napoleon. “I might take you up.”
    I tell Ellen about the Bluebird. I know she’s listening because her head is turned, good ear clearing the pillow.
    â€œWhy don’t we get in Leroy’s Bluebird and drive out to Jackson Hole? The aspens will be turning. Do you remember camping at Jenny Lake?”
    â€œI’m not going to Fresno alone.”
    I didn’t think she was going to Fresno.
    â€œWe’ll drive to Fresno and then come back by Jenny Lake.”
    â€œNot time.”
    â€œNot time enough? Why not?”
    â€œFresno is—twenty-one hundred miles.” I look at her. I can see the slight bulge of her cornea move up like a marble under the soft pouch of her eyelid. “Jackson Hole is nine hundred miles northeast of Fresno.”
    â€œI see.”
    â€œFresno is almost exactly in the geographical center of California.”
    â€œI see.”
    I turn out the light.

11. VAN DORN SHOWS UP bright and early Sunday morning, dressed in a Day-Glo jacket, a sun helmet in which he has stuck colorful flies. He’s wearing waders.
    â€œYou won’t need that jacket.”
    â€œRight. The bream might mind?”
    â€œYes. And you won’t need the waders.”
    â€œWhy not?”
    â€œIf you try to wade in one of these bayous, you’ll sink out of sight in the muck. I’ll get you some tennis shoes.”
    We spin down the bayou in my ancient Arkansas Traveler, a fourteen-foot, olive-drab aluminum skiff with square ends and a midship well. My twenty-year-old Evinrude kicks off first yank.
    A bass club is having a rodeo. Identical boats, of new grassgreen fiberglass, nose along the bank. Fishermen wearing identical red caps sit on high swivel seats in the bow.
    â€œYou sure you want to fish for bream?” I ask Van Dorn.
    â€œI figured you might know places those guys don’t know. I’ve been with them. They’re mostly Baton Rouge lawyers.”
    Down the Bogue Falaya past country clubs, marinas, villages, bocages, beaux condeaux. I turn into the bushes, through a scarcely noticeable gap in the swamp cyrilla, and we’re in Pontchatolawa, a narrow meander of a bayou, unspoiled because there’s too much swamp for developers and it’s too narrow for yachts and water-skiers. It is not even known to the bass rodeo.
    I cut the motor. Pontchatolawa hasn’t changed since the Choctaws named it. The silence is sudden. There is only the ring of a kingfisher. The sun is just clearing the cypresses and striking shafts into the tea-colored water. Mullet jump. Cicadas tune up. There is a dusting of gold on the water. The cypresses are so big their knees march halfway across the bayou. Their tender green is just beginning to go russet.
    â€œMy Lord,” says Van Dorn, almost whispering. “We’re back in the Mesozoic. Look at the fucking ferns.”
    Van Dorn is busy with his tackle. I watch him. There is as usual in him the sense both of his delight and of his taking pleasure in rehearsing it.
    There is a huge swirl of water under his nose. He gives a visible unrehearsed start.
    â€œGood God, what was that, an alligator?”
    â€œProbably not, though they’re here. Probably a gar.”
    â€œGators won’t bother you, will they?”
    â€œNo, gators won’t bother you.”
    I try to place his speech. Despite its Southernness, the occasional drawled vowel, it is curiously unplaced. He sounds like Marlon Brando