Free The Fisherman by John Langan

from this creek, I couldn’t think of one. Who was the Dutchman? I wondered, closing the Atlas.
    I had an answer to that question two months later, while Dan and I sat at the counter of Herman’s Diner on Route 28, just west of Wiltwyck. Dan had wanted to stop there for a cup of coffee and breakfast on the way up to the creek, which he did from time to time. I prefer to eat before I leave the house or, if I’m hungry, to order my egg and cheese sandwich to go. On the occasions Dan wanted to stop for breakfast, he liked to sit down and study the menu, order a plate of something he hadn’t had before, the Greek omelet, the walnut pancakes. Had he done so too often, I suspect it would have become an issue. However, his requests that we sacrifice a half-hour at this or that diner were few and far enough between for me to say to myself, What the hell. It’s been a while since I had any walnut pancakes, and maybe a side of sausage would be nice with them. Besides, I guessed from my own history that Dan wasn’t eating as well as he should have been, so I figured at least he’d have one decent meal today.
    This morning, there was no rush for us to arrive streamside. For the better part of the last week, the sky had been crowded with gray clouds that dumped so much rain on us I swear you needed gills to walk around outside. The rain had tapered off late the night before, but the clouds had not yet departed the sky, and I reckoned any stream we wanted to fish was going to be swollen and fast-running, dim with mud and debris. There are those fishermen who’ll tell you that, after the kind of downpour we’d had, you might as well wait a day or two till you cast your line, but I’m among the “a bad day of fishing is still better than a good day of just about anything else” crowd. I was then, anyway, which was why we had driven out west of Wiltwyck on Route 28 at the usual pre-dawn time, Dutchman’s Creek our destination. On the way, we’d stopped at Herman’s Diner.
    Herman’s was off to the right-hand side of the road, the last building in a sequence that included a combination gas station/car wash, a furniture warehouse, and an ice cream stand. The diner sat at the center of an otherwise empty lot, one of those silver boxcars that you associate with the nineteen-fifties. It’s empty now, out of business for the last several years, which I can’t understand, because, while Herman’s was small, most times I went in, it was jumping. You never saw Herman. In fact, I’m not sure there was a Herman any more. There were Caitlin and Liz, who worked the counter and the single row of booths, and there was Howard, who did the lion’s share of the cooking, helped out by a pair of Mexican cousins named Esteban and Pedro. What I like about the place, what had kept me coming back after I first discovered it the second summer I fished, even more than the food, was the décor. The diner’s inside had been done up in early fisherman. There were rods and nets hung on the walls among what must have been thousands of snapshots of guys with fish. There were a few of those fish, too, stuffed and mounted in places of pride. As you walked in, a bulletin board tacked full of fishing cartoons greeted you, some of them freshly clipped from the paper, others yellow and brittle with age. The one I liked best was several years old, and showed a pair of man-sized cartoon salmon standing beside a stream, one smoking a cigar, the other holding a beer. Both fish have lines out and in the water, which is full of tiny people, dozens of them heading upstream, arms against their sides, faces pointed straight ahead. That was all: no witty caption, only that simple reversal that tickled my funny bone. Every time I strolled into that diner, I chuckled, and despite what happened later that day, thinking about that drawing now brings a smile to my face. Dan didn’t find it especially amusing.
    The strangest thing in the diner, and it’s worth remarking if