Fiancées

Tater was well known to the trout clubs on Michigan’s Au Sable river. Early mornings or late afternoons fishing guests stood on the docks to watch him wade up and down casting, his loop as tight as a hairpin. Crystal drops fell from his line in the sun. His leader was so far out you’d hold your breath, his artful lunge while dropping a big rainbow into his net, balletic and graceful. Other fishermen studied him without seeming to—hoping later to imitate his style. 

Called Tater from some folly in his youth, he’d been a trout bum around Grayling since I was growing up. He was all of eighty by now. I first saw him on the river the one time my father took me fishing as a boy, and they stopped to talk. And when I finally got to know him, years later, I realized that he was fishing wise. He always had the right fly and appeared by instinct at the perfect hole or riffle.

We met probably about 1995. I was fishing on the North Branch of the Au Sable. The afternoon’s gorgeous light was more vividly memorable than Tater himself. Rolls of clouds from the West like great swabs of cotton angled in across the river. Each riffle of water as it passed a rock or log was thick, and hung before falling, gelatinous with light. Under the cedars shading the banks, the whisky colored river flowed over a sandy bottom. Several stiff-necked Canada goose families paddled by me on the current. Their new goslings, furry as dandelions, strung out behind them watching me cast, their eyes pert.

I already had a general idea of Tater from meeting up with him that day with my dad. His actual name was Bernie Bell, and he was a compact blonde guy, going silver even then, on the red-faced side, with a sharp nose and angled eyebrows. Style-wise he was pretty old-fashioned. He combed his hair up in little wings along the sides of his head, and he wore a wrist watch with a metal expansion band. But his casting was even now fluid and quick. 

I came on him in the shade changing a fly. I recalled how he’d been a hero to me from that first sight of him when I was with my father. I’d wanted to look just like him, completely at my ease, when I started going out on the rivers as a kid, for he was my ideal of a trout fisherman. I sloshed up to him to chat. I was tired and in need of a few minutes rest. 

“Doing any good?” 

“Nah, I think I need more color in this light. I had on an Adams but I’m going to a Sulphur,” he said, intent on his knot. Then, flipping the magnifier lenses on his glasses out of the way, he looked up, glancing at my flyrod.

“Cane, eh, what make?”

“A Thomas, Browntone.” 

“Nice,” he nodded appreciatively. For that, I offered to share the coffee from my thermos, and we both stood companionably in our chest waders, looking out on the afternoon, the light, talking about the stream and its habits, exchanging names. He remembered my father. In particular a big brown my dad had caught was legendary around there, I guess.

Most every spring afterward, we ran into each other on the water several times a week. So, once, after it got too dark to tie on flies easily, we returned to the North Branch Tavern for a beer and swapped histories. He said he was retired from a business in Detroit. He seemed to spend most of his time on the rivers, but what he did at the end of the trout fishing season was a mystery. He vanished like a vampire into his earth-filled coffin. I never saw him in town, at the supermarket or the drugstore.

Tater was divorced. When he told me, he also made cracks about women in general, and about his former wife in particular. “A fucking thief,” he called her, without going into it. Of course, after my dad moved out and finally left for Texas when I was fifteen, even he said such things and much worse about my mother on the few occasions when he agreed to meet up with me. It was just talk. I was used to it. 

I learned Tater had a grown kid who lived out of state, but he didn’t speak of him. Maybe they were estranged, something I knew well because it had been over twenty years since I’d seen my own father. It struck me I was going to be a middle-aged man soon and he’d never thrown me a ball.

 “Band-Aid,” Tater’d call me, after seeing me with one on my nose. I’d got hit by a springing alder branch while getting down to the stream. And he’d warn me about holes in a stretch of the Au Sable new to me or try to save me time in choosing a fly. I have to say we were pretty comfortable together, tight in a fishing way. But I knew in most other respects, he was closed off just like my father, a remote, inaccessible man, all performance, an outline casting into the evening sun. 

The thing you couldn’t miss about Tater was that he was always talking about women. About his conquests successful and not. Again, I was uncomfortable with this, as my father had been a destructive womanizer all through my childhood. 

Now Tater wasn’t the guy who was always ogling women on the street, shouting comments and whistling at them like a construction worker or drugstore loiterer as they passed by. Yet, spend any time with him and his talk would circle around to women eventually. The ones he was with, he’d call his “fiancées,” but he never spoke of marrying them. Indeed, he mocked marriage. Whenever I mentioned needing to be somewhere or to do something for my wife, he’d say “Well, Band-Aid, lucky you,” or something derogatory like “rattle those chains.” So, it was not clear if Tater even knew what the word fiancée meant.  

After I’d got to know him better, we’d often have a beer at Ray’s Fly Factory, an outfitter bar and grill in Grayling. Sitting there on the patio looking at the stream, we’d talk about the day. Time spent on the Au Sable, someone said, was like gold, and I believed it. But soon, I heard how Tater was in his Black fiancée period. He’d call them that, his Black fiancées. 

At some point, he’d tell me about his current woman, who always seemed to be buried far south in the housing projects of Detroit or Flint, hard to get to, and he’d show me a picture of her on his phone. They were urban, grandmotherly looking women, and to my eye, what you’d expect. He’d tell me about how sexy they were and then cock his head and look to see how I was taking it, if I was impressed. I couldn’t figure out how he even met them. 

His cellphone at this point was always chiming. I heard how one of these “gals” in her 70s, I had to assume, was hot for him, was texting him constantly. These women pictured on his phone puzzled me because Tater was a really WASPY guy. 

He had no feel for Black culture, did not like spicy food, and did not enjoy the blues when bands up from Saginaw played on the weekends at Ray’s. And he dressed in a really white-guy way, no-color clothes, chinos. Even his car was beige. If I was Black, I’d call him a cracker. He was not flashy, a spender, though he usually seemed to have money, and had good fishing gear as well. 

And I thought his line was corny and unconvincing, as if he’d gotten it from watching gangster movies. “Roberta,” he said once, when he had to pick up the call, “a woman like you, statuesque, I’ve seen you dance, beautiful. You have a real slide, a turn. Oh, come on. I know you think you’re pretty, a real Venus de Milo especially when you’re a little puffy from sleep, your hair all mussed.” And he would go on, talking to her like she was twenty. After the call, he admired himself a moment in the long mirror in back of the booths at Ray’s. He’d had a few. “What a profile,” he said, turning his head this way and that. “It’s just who you are. You’ve got sex written all over you. How could she refuse? Let her in, Band-Aid, let her in,” as if Roberta were standing right by the booth, seeking a place at our table. I wondered if Tater wanted me to admire, to absorb his cornball moves. I looked at him like he was up past his bedtime.

In this period, his stories—these Flint Robertas—always had a down side. Some of the women had kids needing to be bailed out, for drug stuff mostly. Or if it was not that he told me about how these fiancées were in trouble with Children’s Protective Services through some failure to provide for grandchildren or foster kids, needing money. “They came right in the living room while I was there to pick her up,” Tater reported, “and took the kid, Maurice, right out from under her. They handed her some court papers, all wadded up. Well. She was in no state of mind to come back up here with me then. Shit, Band-Aid, Flint is a sewer.”

Sometimes, the women traveled up on the Greyhound to Tater’s house to visit with a kid or two in tow, dragging along a big pile of stuff in black garbage bags, and then, after the weekend, after he’d put them on the bus, and paid their way home, or given them money for “incidentals,” he found things missing. Once, he mentioned his white golf shoes claiming they were worth a lot of money. 

I rolled my eyes at Tater; I was getting better at giving him one of the looks my wife Paula often gave me. “From where I’m standing, it’s a no-brainer,” I said, after listening to nearly an hour of him going on about these fiancées whose grandchildren had just been removed from the home by the state of Michigan. “If you’re gonna bang women on food stamps, women who see you as a meal ticket, what outcome do you expect? And you’re lucky you haven’t got your ass kicked— or even shot off— down there in the projects. Why not be a player here, hook up with women in town, women that you have things in common with, where the fit is better?” I knew this was smug just as soon as I said it, but for some reason I went on. 

“Find some flyfisher women by putting up a notice at one of the shops, or offer to guide at Ray’s. You’d surely meet someone. Maybe in the Fall join the snowmobile club in Lovells. That’d keep you from being lonesome in the winter when you can’t fish. Save you some trips to Flint anyhow.” Then I dropped it so as not to sound like Dear Abby. It was easy to talk when you had a wife. When you were going home to somebody.

“I’m glad, Mr. Matrimony,” he said, “that we are now having this talk about my love life.” “Yeah, well.” Still, Tater agreed with me, that it wasn’t working out with these fiancées. And so, it was the end of the women with the grandkids and black garbage bags. It seemed to be an easy end, too, as no one had ever reported seeing him with one of these women at any of the bars or restaurants. And it would have been the sort of thing people talked about. It was as if they were visible only to Tater maybe in his imagination.

+++  

Not long after this conversation we were having a beer at Ray’s after a good Saturday on the stream, waders, rods, and vests in our cars. At the bar I saw Verna Olsen from the Post Office. She was with a woman I also knew and they were leaning their elbows on the glossy wood, collecting their beers. She was fiftyish, roly-poly, with her hair wound around her head in old fashioned braids. I think she was a widow. Whenever Verna sold me stamps, I thought she had nice eyes, and she always had a pleasant word or two. Her friend was Tilly. I never got her last name or much information about her. She was streaky blonde, with some gold chains and a harder look, a smoker. This was a perfect chance for Tater to show everyone his moves, how he had “sex written all over him.” Anyhow, I called out to them, “Hey, bring your drinks over,” and I introduced Tater. 

Tilly tentatively put her cigarettes and lighter down on the table. “So, you guys been out fishing?” She asked, in a feeling-out way that echoed in the quiet of the near-empty dining room. “Doing any good?” Verna and I smiled at each other and looked around at the dusty deer heads high up on the walls, sipping our beer and watching the action at the table. 

Tilly and Tater made some conversation about his name. “Well, I won’t tell you the whole thing, but there was a bag of Idaho spuds involved,” he said teasing. Still, I didn’t get the sense he wanted her to ask more. For some reason, he wasn’t flirting with her.

He didn’t actually greet the women but was talking to every corner of the room, toying with some beef jerky to go with his beer, stripping off the cellophane wrapper, or looking down at the table, never at them. After some more of this, they thought I was probably too married for them and as Tater showed no interest, they took their glasses out to the patio. I gave him a ‘what were you thinking?’ look when they left, but he did not respond.

I guess Verna and Tilly weren’t what he fancied. Facebook chat rooms were where he contacted these fiancées in Flint. So, I let it go. Tater’s love life was not near as interesting as his lore about how to get close to really big rainbows at night, on which he always had plenty to say. 

 +++

Returning from Ray’s for dinner, I described Tater’s behavior to my wife because it was so strange, and she just made a face. A nurse at a rehabilitation center in Grayling, Paula has a low tolerance for male folly, and finds most of my fishing buddies tiresome. She thinks I spend too much time on the water when I could be doing more around the house. Since she sensed Tater was ironic about his married friends, she cared even less for him than for the others.

It was just before the Pandemic when Paula got so busy, I remember, that after work I was early season nymphing at Louie’s Landing on the Au Sable and getting nowhere. It was quiet and peaceful, on the chilly side. I could hear the whine of distant traffic on 72, and trucks rumbling like garbage cans being dragged across the bridge. Redwing blackbirds and tree swallows buzzed the banks but there were no insects for them to grab. I stood a while thinking whether to stay, go somewhere else, or give it up.

Just then, Tater walked down stream, stopping every so often, leaning on a wading staff I’d never seen him use before. I went over to chat for a moment right under the bridge. I knew Paula had a nurses’ union event that night so I invited Tater for dinner at the North Branch Tavern when it got dark. He didn’t look so good, but I couldn’t say how exactly. His face was drawn, and he was having trouble with his balance, bracing himself against the current with the staff. I remembered the grace I’d seen in him many times before.

Standing there knee deep with a riffle around him, he told me he had a dog now. Or it had him. It came up on his front porch, barking. He went out to look at the morning and as he opened his door, this dog walked in and settled at his house. 

A pair of demon paddlers, all shoulders, shot by us in a Kevlar Jensen, practicing for the 120 mile Au Sable River Canoe Marathon. I followed the streak of yellow down river till it vanished. This was a new side to Tater. A dog.

At the Tavern, while they were getting our food ready, Tater asked as proud as a new parent: did I want a look? We went to the parking lot where the dog sat on the front seat, a small tobacco brown rag mop, nose fogging the glass. Some type of terrier. But it was obviously glad to see Tater. He said it slept on his bed. I thought this sounded a whole lot better than what he’d been sleeping with, but I didn’t say it. 

He called this guy Digger because it dug up his back yard and all his carpet. He said the dog went nuts when he was gone a long time though, with what the vet had called “separation anxiety.” It was odd, he went on, because the dog did not mind him going fishing at all. It was only during the trips down South for “gals” that it behaved this way. As if it could sense the difference in the kinds of trips he made, apparently. So, he had a neighborhood kid come in to take care of Digger when he going to be gone longer on one of his expeditions.

A month or so after this Tater called me to tell me his neighbor could not deal with Digger. “Band-Aid,” he asked, “could you come over and let Digger out, feed him, play with him a bit? I’ve got to be down in Flint.”  

I said, “Sure, I can do this, help you out. Why don’t I come over and meet him, see where his bowl is, before you go?” I got the address.

It was a small board-and-batten and cinder block ranch with an attached garage, single crooked pine tree in front, over in the Industrial Park part of Grayling. It was the only house in a line of storage units and small warehouses. Digger greeted me in a torrent of howls and yips, snarling and snapping at my ankles as I stood on the porch. I looked at Tater.  

“Don’t mind him; he won’t bite. He just likes to make noise.” I reached down to pet him and after sniffing me once, he left. It looked like we were good. Tater gave me the key and told me when he’d be back, “with a gal.”

Then, stopping at the door and turning to me, he said “Band-Aid, you should see these nursing homes,” musingly, as if responding to some remark of mine. “This’s where the women are now.”  I looked at him. “These lonely women, they’ve outlived husbands. They want to get out and about. They’d welcome a new friend. They’re tired of each other, people they see every day. Some of them are horny, for something, anyway. And they are not too critical. I just tell them I love them. I surprise myself. The first hour or so, anyhow. I become the guy they want. Nursing homes, come on, Band-Aid, it’s obvious.” I was having a little trouble following all this and did not want to keep Tater from his trip. So, I wished him good luck and went inside to get to know Digger.

Tater’s place was pretty spartan, with the emptiness to the corners of rooms you associate with single guys. I saw a pile of old American Anglers stacked by the bedroom door. And he was not very domestic. In the living room the only decoration he had was a stuffed trout in a fighting pose sitting on a little pedestal. That was it.

 I expected to see framed pictures of his kid on the TV stand or sideboards, but nothing. Several photographs featured Tater grinning with a fish, but no people were in them. The frames hung at different heights on the wall, as if, when he hammered in the hooks, he never thought of someone on a couch looking up at the pictures. The place was clean and tidy enough, I guess. He clearly cared about that.

The floors were all carpeted with a beige pile which looked newer than the rest of the house, but Digger had done some work here and there, exposing fibers or yarns, whatever they were. I let him out and played ball with him for a while in the back yard, where along the fence the grass was all torn up, as if by racoons looking for grubs. 

                  +++

After dinner, I was helping Paula stack the dishwasher. I liked to regale her with full irony about some of the oddities of my bachelor friends, as it made her understand how much I enjoyed my life with her, and that, unlike my father, I didn’t yearn for anything different. I liked marriage and liked her. 

I told her how, when I went back to leave off the key, I heard scuffling and voices. Tater and his catch of the day had just arrived through a side door from the garage. 

“You wouldn’t believe this if you read it somewhere. Tater and a woman were standing in this little hall when I entered,” I told her. “She was outlined against a wall with faded, light-green paint peeling from the cinderblock like she emerged from it.”

 “This here’s Ruthie,” said Tater, pointing to the woman, and telling her my name. “And me and her are gonna party.”

“She was white this time, skinny in a really Appalachian way. Her collar bones jutted out at her throat. Arms like sticks. Straight ash blonde and gray hair fanned out over her shoulders from a center part. I think she wanted to look like Joni Mitchell from the 60s.” I drank some coffee and thought about it some more, recalling all the details, trying to lay out the full picture of Ruthie for my wife, make her see the woman standing in that hallway. 

“Her cheeks were sunken, like she was missing some back teeth; it made her lips flute out some, her eyes were blank like she didn’t quite know where she was.” 

Paula had enough. She interrupted me right then, waving a pot. “Shit, what care facility would let her out to come up here with this guy?” She asked sourly. “Is there some nursing home OKCupid where women troll for action with a ‘profile’ and all?” 

“I don’t know,” I told her. “I don’t inquire too much into this side of Tater.”

“It was hard to guess Ruthie’s age, but she was certainly over seventy. She wore one of those full-cut dresses I think you call it a muumuu—I saw you in one last summer—but Ruthie’s dress was in bright colors and looked too young for her. Over her shoulders she had a shawl, but it was so big it looked like a blanket. She seemed like the victim of a fire or an accident.”

I told Paula I just froze, watching this and wondering how I could beat it out of there. But I had to go on, and get to the worst part. 

“In one hand she held tight against her chest a slick blue vinyl zip bag with a loop handle. Like what you’d carry a bowling ball in. She leaned on an adjustable aluminum cane, the kind issued by hospitals. But her cane was covered with these little gold stick-on stars you give kids for good behavior on their report cards in kindergarten. They ran all up and down the cane, making it look like a Harry Potter wand.”

Paula’s face was getting icy. “So, I’m standing there mute, and suddenly, when Ruthie walked farther into the house towards the kitchen, Digger came charging out and started circling, doing his chain-saw thing, scaring her. He’s a needy little guy. Just like bigger dogs, he wanted something more than food and company and all of this was in his cries. I was about to tell Ruthie he was okay, he didn’t bite.

But as she backed away from him I saw pee running down her legs, wetting the carpet under her feet.

“Tater saw it too,” I went on. ‘Hey, what the fuck?’ he yelled. He bustled Ruthie towards the bathroom. I heard her say she had left her diaper at the nursing home because they had this big date. He shut the door then, but when they came out, he told me, ‘This won’t do. I’m taking Ruthie back where I got her.’”

 “‘But I just got here.’ She whined, then waved the cane at Tater, its stars flashing. I thought she was gonna smack him.

“‘Tough,’ he said, taking her arm, as if she hadn’t spoken, ‘you’re going back.’” Tater grabbed her elbow. 

“‘What kind a boyfriend are you?’ She wailed plaintively, clutching her bowling ball bag as he hustled her out to his car without another word. 

 I sat down and looked at my wife in wonder. “You can imagine how I wanted to be any place but in there. Still, I had to feed Digger and decided to take the key back later. I looked in the kitchen for some paper towels. I found some baking soda in the fridge and sprinkling a little of it on the carpet, I blotted and cleaned up what I could.”

+++

In the morning as I was leaving for work, I got a call from the desk at the Munson Grayling Hospital. A message from a Bernie Bell, asking that I stop in at the hospital? I said ‘Sure, I’d be there that afternoon after five.’

 I asked at the desk for Tater and was sent to a room on the second floor. He was sunk in the bed, covered with tubes, oxygen to his nose, IVs in both arms and a snake of pale urine in a clear tube coming out from the bed covers to a bag hanging at the foot of the bed. He looked pretty bad, beardy, his face yellow with dark patches around his eyes. He lifted a hand, waved at me weakly. “Hey, Band-Aid, thanks for coming by,” he said, taking a deep, ragged breath.

“Jesus,” I replied, standing at the foot of his bed, “what happened to you?” 

“That skinny hillbilly put a spell on me,’” he tried to laugh. His speech was garbled, but it appeared he had fallen out of bed and lain on the floor for a time. He couldn’t move for most of the night, trying with one arm to reach his phone, which was up on the bed. Eventually Digger grabbed the bedclothes playing tug, and pulled the phone down on the floor near him. He had, the doctors told him, “acute bacterial prostatitis.” It stopped him from peeing and messed up his kidneys, putting him in shock. He would have died in a few more hours. Telling me all this exhausted him and he slipped in and out of focus. 

I pulled a chair close to the bed. “When you were taking her back to Flint. did you uh, apologize, like try to soothe Ruthie’s feelings? I mean, it was pretty clear she had problems. You got her from a nursing home, right? She was there for a reason. And what happened in the hall wasn’t her fault.”

Tater raised his eyebrows in surprise. He seemed genuinely puzzled by my questions. I guess I saw something here he didn’t. 

“What you mean, apologize? For what? She made a mess of my place. And thanks for cleaning up, by the way. She knew the score. She’d been texting me for weeks, sent me a fake picture of herself. Younger, less wacky. She was looking for some action, to get out of there for an afternoon. Shit, she’s got some hard bark on her. She should apologize to me.”

I watched him lying there, his attention drifting away from me to his phone, one hand moving across it now, the fingers dragging. He was scrolling and there were pictures of women on the screen rolling by. He could barely hold the phone, but he was stopping every so often, to look closely at particular women, older ones, a lot of them with vacant faces, some watching TV, probably a couple more Ruthies among them.

Tater asked me to take care of the dog and bring him some fishing magazines from his kitchen. I went back to his house and got what he wanted. I put Digger and his food, bowls and bedding in my car, then stopped again at Munson, but did not go up. I just left the magazines at the desk for him. I was fond of Tater, but knew his one outstanding gift did not fit him for life, or love, or even close friendship. And I could do with less of the scrolling. 

When I got home I took Digger in to meet Paula, telling her it looked like we now had a dog, at least for a while. She took it better than I expected, just shaking her head and saying wonderingly “Fiancées, Flint.” She retreated to the kitchen, Digger following her.

I imagined Tater lying on the floor all night, his bladder bursting. What was he thinking about all that time, only feet from the streaks of Ruthie’s pee on the carpet, from where she had waved her star-covered cane at him, maybe witching him with a spell, as he had claimed. 

It was a long drive back to Flint. What had they talked about in the car? Or had they talked at all? Maybe he was just thinking he’d simply made a mistake with Ruthie and he should go back to women with a different kind of neediness. 

As Digger came trotting back into the living room, carrying one of my socks, barking at my feet, then jumping up on me, I realized suddenly why the sight of Ruthie’s blue vinyl bag struck me so powerfully. My dad had an identical bag. I remember it lined up with his other stuff in the hall one afternoon when I came home from school and he was moving out, everything he owned stacked in a long row against the wall, as though from an eviction.

A line in an essay I had read in college also lingered with me. “What is truth? Said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer.” I was not sure I understood it then and maybe no better now, but I knew I was to learn something important from Tater and Ruthie, something I needed to know. I should not let it slip by me as carelessly as many pieces of my own life had in the past. I knew how much Paula wanted a place with some land to garden, about how we really ought to have a kid, even though growing up I saw nothing good about fatherhood.

I remembered the beauty of Tater’s back cast the day I first saw him fishing the Au Sable with my father, the arc of the line snaking out over the river behind him. Of big trout rising to his fly. I sat for a long time with Digger on my lap, stroking his silky ears, thinking of fast water.