The Star Fisher Read online

  What is this story? I asked myself that as I wrote what was dictated to me. I could not figure it out. I saw that it is novel, poem and essay. And something else that I could not then nor now define. I plead you defend me for not possessing the brilliance required to best define the beauty she gave to him and the story that was whispered through him. As for her, he informed me she was forgiving and beneficent, and so I know she will give me her defense. So I wrote as well I could, with restive and poor authority, the words that were in his heart about her, and will not worry any longer that I do not possess the skill required to best represent her being and his estimate of it. It was a work that had to be done sooner than later, for the fire that once burned bright was quickly turning to coals and was soon to become the cold ash that blows in the north wind and so I gave his words as best a shot as I could and will let now the rocks and the stars and immortal time do all the greater things.

  Here are the secrets of two, which are no different than the secrets of all. And even though I wrote directly of the concealed heart, they could be read as writ and still not be understood directly. I give no secrets away, even though I write them in the open. That is the wonderful thing about a beautiful secret between beautiful souls: it can be spoken out-loud and directly in a room full of busybody, whispering gossip mongers, and will still remain all it is meant to ever be: a beautiful secret.

  The Star Fisher's biographer

  December 25, 2013

  The common room

  Green Acres nursing home

  The Flat tire

  1960

  He met her on September 23, 1960, as he was driving through the mountains. He was on his way to see the Pacific Ocean, but was taking sight-seeing detours as he went. He had heard of the beautiful mountains of Utah and wanted to see a few before he began his long trek across the desert. He was traveling down a country road when one of his tires popped and he stopped to fix it. He found himself in front of a cottage with a metal roof and walls made of grey sideboard. There were three trees beside the home and a swing in one of them. A blue picket fence was along the roadway and large boulders were set along the path leading to the home. On the western side of the house was a horse pasture that stretched back toward the mountains. There were two horses grazing in the field and as the sun set and he worked on his tire a woman came out of the house and walked toward him. He watched her as she came.

  She was a good height and her eyes were the color of Indian summer — they changed their shade three times during their first meeting, but they always stayed warm. Her hair was long and her form was athletic. Her breast were just enough to be no more or less than perfect and her hips flared slightly out of her jeans like two beautiful, curled-up, fang-less snakes. Her cheeks were fat and there was a dimple in her left cheek that if he would have put his pinky finger in it would have disappeared. Her face was the shape of a heart. He figured she was about his own age but there was something ancient and well-known to him about her. It was deja vu and he knew he had known her before, he was sure of it. He had seen, to that point, many beautiful women, but few to make him think of love at first sight. But this was not a first sighting. He was sure of that.

  He kept quiet. He had to think about this. Long before he had grown out of his natural shyness at facing down the feminine beast, but she brought it back out some. He remembered that they smell fear and feed on it so he decided he would not fear this fell and beautiful beast. He stood and faced her and spoke not a word, to hide the tingle of fear he would not feel, as the natural event of love's beginning caught his tongue and held it fast. She smiled and took the tire iron and finished loosening the lugs. This broke his spell and he reached to take the wrench and said,

  “A woman shouldn't be doing this, but I thank you.”

  She kept the iron in her hand and replied,

  “There is no work a woman shouldn't or couldn't do as well or better than a man.”

  He knew better than to argue with that and watched her finish loosening the lug nuts. He reached in the trunk and pulled out the tire and placed it on the car. She tightened back up the bolts and he let the jack down. As he put the flat tire in the trunk she asked where he was from.

  He told her and then she asked where he was going. He told her he was headed toward the Pacific, but until then was going nowhere in particular, just driving. He had heard the Mormon mountains were extra special and wished to see them up close. She said,

  “Well the best way to see a mountain up close is to walk it with your feet or ride it on the back of a horse.”

  “Huh. Guess I'll have to get me a horse.” He said.

  “I have one you can rent. He is an easy walker and will treat you as a gentleman. You are a gentleman?”

  He tipped his hat and said,

  “Well yes ma'am; generally speaking.”

  He asked, “How about you; where are you from?”

  She looked east and pointed, “I was born a few mountains over. As the crow flies it would take you about half an hour.”

  When she asked him what he did he told her he wrote obscure stories, but was now looking for a new line of work. When he asked what she did she winked and replied that she writes famous ones.

  As the sun slipped further west they stood and talked on the side of the road another hour and it seemed they had started up again a conversation that had ended long ago somewhere. There were no awkward pauses and each of them gave the other time to talk or to think, depending. They were old friends just met again. After the sun slipped into the invisible he thanked her for the offer of the horse ride and for the help with the tire and got in the car. As he looked out the window he asked,

  “When are we going on this horse ride?”

  “Come back whenever you can and if I can, we will.”

  “How much to rent the horse?”

  “How much you got?”

  “Not much.”

  “Bring a little more than that and that will be plenty.”

  And then, before he drove off, he did a thing out of character for him. He got back out of the car and apologized as he hugged her. He explained he had never thought to hug a stranger before, but he felt the need to do so with her and he hoped she didn't mind. Her answer was to return the hug in kind. It was as natural as if they had known each other all along. He pulled away from her, tipped his hat, and told her he would see her, then he drove off, but he looked back in the rear-view. She was standing in the middle of the road, watching him go. Her silhouette was darkened against the setting sun and he could make out the beautiful hip snakes. The faster he drove away the surer he wished to go back. He made sure to remember the road where love stayed at.

  He realized later, as he retired to bed, that he had never once asked, or thought to ask, her name, and she had never asked his. It was like names were pointless. They knew each other beyond names; as if they had known each other before names. That is what it seemed.

  She writes famous stories of wonder, he thought. She is one who is famous the world over, and yet he did not know her name. Her name to him, he thought, is like obscure clay beneath the hidden rock. But why need name what is on the wind everywhere? The winds name her. Who was she, really? He asked her that in their first conversation and she had said to him:

  “I am who and what you think I am not and not what and who you think I am. And if you can figure that out in relation to all things, then a wise and happy man you may become.”

  She was full of riddles and mystery in her speech and being. It is what drew her to him in the second place. The first place being something indefinable, like the amber glow of the setting sun. You might be able to see it with your eyes perfectly, but you could never give a perfect description of it with words.

  After telling him who she was and was not, she had said to him:

  “Give to me your eulogy. What would your best friend say about you, if you were dead?”

  He told her he would think on it and get back to her at their next meeting.
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  An Autobiographical sketch of

  The Star Fisher when Young

  1941-44

  I met the Star Fisher at the Green Acres nursing home when I saved up enough courage to go back. He was sitting in the common room, soaking up the summer sun that was streaming through the window. I sat next to him. There was no walker in sight and he was wearing khaki pants and a green corduroy blazer with tan elbow patches. He was well-dressed, but it was the grace about him that wore the best. There was an unmistakeable self-government about him I noticed right off, like he was a state of life and being unto himself, apart—yet also benevolent part of—all other governing bodies. He was wearing stylish glasses and a hearing aid was attached to his right ear. He looked old, but he didn't look very old. And he was nothing like broken. When he noticed me noticing him he said hello and asked me how I was doing. I replied I was fine and he then asked if I was visiting my parents. I said I was not and then asked him if that's what he was doing, visiting his parents. This brought a laugh from him and he said,

  “If my parents were still alive they would be approaching something of a record, I think.”

  “I wouldn't put you any more than sixty-five, if that.”

  He rared his head back, said “Ha!” and slapped me on the shoulder,

  “Young man, I am ninety-two years old. And what I am is an old, beached whale and waiting on the end.”

  I did a double-take; looked him back over. Ninety-two? There was no way. His back was straight. His eyes were clear. There were very few lines in his face, except when he smiled. He was a handsome old man. When the sun grew warm he had taken off his jacket and I noticed the muscles in his forearms bulged out like a young man's. I asked to see some identification, because I did not believe it straight off. He was pulling my leg. He reached in his back pocket and pulled out his wallet. I scanned the data. Sure enough, he was an honest man. The year of his birth was 1920. Ninety-two years and counting upwards gracefully. I handed the card back and said,

  “You must be the youngest looking nearly-hundred-year-old man I have ever seen. How do you do it?”

  “Nearly one hundred! Hush your mouth. That is nearly a decade away.” He smiled and patted my hand. “I have been lucky. It took me a long time to show my age. When I was forty people thought I was twenty-five. My mother said it was what she called the kept-dream that did it; the dream I had kept inside. Then came some years of struggle and injury where I caught up and far surpassed my age, and I felt then like a man who had lived a thousand years. Then I got it back and since middle age, nothing's touched me. Oh, there is not any one factor, I don't think, except maybe good luck and good genes. And I do a lot of stretching. People stop moving after a certain point and everything rusts away quickly from that point. You have to stretch the body, mind and spirit, son. Remember that and you won't need to remember anything else. Stretch your mind, body and spirit.”

  “I will remember that.”

  There was a call for lunch and he asked if I would like to join him. I said I would and we adjourned to eat. They were serving fried chicken with mashed potatoes, green beans and chocolate milk. He ate with a hearty appetite, not like most the old do, picking and going slow at it. After we ate and cleaned our places we sat down at the checkers table, where he beat me three games straight. I wanted then to play some other game so we hit the shuffle board. He beat me at that, too, and then we went to the outside garden. I needed a break. I had just been clobbered at three games of checkers and five games of shuffle board by a man who was nearly a century old and couldn't see or hear well, but he could sure play the hell out of shuffle board and checkers.

  I asked him to tell me about his younger self, as I knew now his older self quite well. He was competitive and full of young fire and energy. I wondered what he was like when he was actually young. He began talking and I sat back and closed my eyes and listened. His sing-song voice and composed retelling took me back many years. . .

  “I was 4-f'd from the war on account of my eyesight, which was no better than a bat's. And then there was my hearing, which was not near as good as a bat's. My starboard ear had been damaged at birth. I often thought it was because of my poor sight and hearing that I attempted to make up for it by seeing and hearing everything I could get my hapless eyes and ears on.

  “I was twenty-one when I decided to become an adventurer and so I absconded with the money sent me for commencement from the university—one semester shy of graduating—and traveled the world on my father’s dime. I first went to Africa and walked the ancient plains and then to Egypt, to stand beneath the limestone Pyramids. Then on to the Mediterranean, where along its shores I journeyed back to the beginning of the Western world, that Peloponnesian isle where the Western myth began. In Rome I trod where Caesar trod and carved with my fingers into the dust on a shop-keeper’s window the words Caesar spoke: Veni, vedi, vici: I came, I saw, I conquered. It is a peradventure the man never said that, but is also hearsay for over two-thousand years that he did—the expression has become as famous as he remains—and so its long historical precedence holds sway over whatever be true fact.

  “In the ruins of Rome I perambulated over the place where it is believed the conqueror lay for three hours after the conspirators stabbed him. None now know for sure where that place is but the educated-guessers believe it to be beneath a common road, in a nondescript part of town—somewhere deep within the sewage. The day I was there an old gentleman was selling flowers to tourists from a dilapidated wooden wagon a few feet above where Caesar once lay down to bleed awhile. I bought a dozen red roses and strew them about the gutters in honor of the fallen conqueror. But it could be some other place, for as I said, the place where Caesar died is not known anymore; it is mere estimation. I scooped up a parcel of dirt anyhow; same as I had from the other world-famous places.

  “After some years of travel and high adventure—and trying to forget—I came back to America with memories of hearsay-history so keen it felt I also had lived and loved, conspired and conquered, been conspired against and conquered; I also had left my life’s last breath in a forgotten place and been reborn and lived again. In those years I perused in leisure, as I walked among the ruins of the ancient world, the gossip of the last thousand generations of man. All of recorded and unrecorded history had come to be perceived, at least in parts, by me. I learned from a living classroom, not as the professor would lecture, but as the world would instruct. I learned the world of man is a moving map on the spinning globe of planet earth and all that once was still spins and all that is yet and will be moves and will yet move. I brought home in Korken glasses the dust of nations, as mementos that I had been to these places and had trod where the famous, great and dead had trod.

  “Dust. . . . It is what all of us and our nations become and is where we come from. I had wished to see the world while I had the eyes to see and hear the world while I had the ears to hear and to know the world first-hand while my knowledge and hands were yet set in stone about anything. I discovered the world is a big place—until you travel it—then it becomes a smaller place and no matter where you end you do not forget having been nearly everywhere there is to be and those places remain in you and they become all places you ever go—all places become one place and one place becomes all places.

  “When they found out I quit school and used the money for world-perambulation my parents disowned me but it was no big thing; I had never felt owned by them, anyhow. After globetrotting I eloped to California and married my dream: to write great works. It was a fair dream I affectionately named Happiness. But it was not to be a happy dream, at least not as I had hoped and planned.

  “By the time I was thirty-five I discovered Happiness was carrying on with others and not including me in on it. Don’t get me wrong, I am not an overly-possessive man and was glad that others found Happiness delightful and I was happy that Happiness found others delightful. But she could have included me. I did not wish to upset anybody’s delicate equilibriu
m with such a flaky dream and so I begged off. This was my own bed I had made and my own tale of woe. I set Happiness free to live her own life and went on without her. I had then a long tradition of unsuccessful living to look back on.

  “In the time since I first dreamt of happiness many laughing dreams had been sifted through my brain, leaving behind torn synapses and a fractured soul. I had become a card-carrying member of the demimonde club and we did not believe that happiness was for us, so after a long and rocky marriage Happiness and I decreed it impossible to live together. I saw her as a failed dream and she saw me as a failed dreamer. My conceit about Happiness is that she was a coy, bright-eyed flirt who fools and knows all along she is fooling. But I was young. It was, perhaps, mostly some of my fault.

  “That was the mind-set I was in after living toward my fourth decade on this blue, hard-boiled egg, one dipped in strong drink and speckled above with silver specks of salt. But for the silver specks of stars I would never have known what to do with myself. They have always been my beacons, onward and upward, and all fool dreamers who have come to the knowledge of the world must use the stars to keep their ship of dreams stable.

  “So I was given—and threw away—a fine education from a prestigious university on the business and philosophy of the world. My parents had a fortune in money but were misfortuned in love and I have not seen either of them since the egg of the world became boiled. Both now have been at peace for a very long time. Not that they ever raised hell nor that their deaths were a great tragedy; they were old and were able to live their lives exactly as they wished. They were given all they could handle and hold; and then, too, one cannot miss too much what one never knew. They were strangers I went through the early part of my life with and were it not for us sharing the same name I never would have believe we were related. Ghost-like memories they made even when alive, as if the sheen of living could not reflect off them and give radiance, but was absorbed by a sense of propriety that obfuscated all of their being. They were aged and letter-perfect and had me long after the era of my mother’s fertile age. In the early years they called me their miracle baby, but I was never like them, and so the possible miracle of my being was gradually lost to them. They were all business and I was all something else. I looked on the world with curious eyes and they looked on it with acquisitive eyes and so we never saw the same things the same way. It was long after their death that I learned I had been adopted.