The Fisherman Read Online Free PDF

you looked at it: all of these and more were ready to set my palms sweating and my heart racing. What’s important right now is that you know the place fishing held in my life; it helps to explain why I started taking Dan Drescher with me.
    I knew Dan from work. He was two offices down going towards the water cooler. Tall fellow: that was the first thing I thought when he was introduced to me, and I suppose my reaction was typical. Dan was six foot seven inches, thin as the proverbial beanpole. After his height, you noticed Dan’s hair, which was bright orange and appeared never to have been introduced to the benefits of a comb. He kept it cut short, and I can’t imagine what those sessions at the barber’s must have been like. His face was sharp in a way that made you think of something struck from granite: sharp brow; big, sharp nose; round—but sharp—chin. He smiled a lot, and his eyes were kind, which diminished the sharpness some, but if you reflected on his appearance, you might have thought that his was a face made for fierceness.
    At first, Dan and I didn’t say much to each other, though what words we did pass were pleasant. There was nothing unusual in this. I was a good two decades his senior, a middle-aged widower whose favorite topics of conversation were fishing and baseball. He was a young man not that long out of M.I.T. who favored expensive suits and whose wife and twin sons were admired by everyone. Marie’s passing had been long enough ago for me not to feel a pang at the family portraits and snapshots Dan displayed on his desk. I’d been on dates with a few women in the last few years, even had what I guess you would call a relationship with one of them. But I never could bring myself to marry anyone else—just didn’t have it in me. A few months before we were married—this was when we were planning the reception—Marie turned to me and said, out of the blue, “Abraham Samuelson, you are the most romantic man I know.” I don’t remember what my answer was. Made a joke out of it, most likely. Maybe she was right, though, maybe there was more of the romantic in me than I thought. Whatever the case, I was alone and Dan had his family, and at the time that seemed to make an unbridgeable gap between us.
    Then, one day, I believe it was a Tuesday, Dan didn’t show up for work. In and of itself, this wasn’t such a big deal, except that Dan hadn’t called in sick, which struck anyone who heard it as unusual. Dan had earned a reputation as an especially conscientious worker. At his desk every morning by eight twenty at the latest, a good ten minutes ahead of the rest of us, he took no more than a fifteen-minute lunch—if he didn’t work right through it—and when the rest of us left at four thirty, we waved to him on our way out, knowing that it would probably be another half-hour before he followed us. He was dedicated, and he was talented enough that his dedication counted. I assumed he had his sights set on early and rapid promotion, which, with those twins at home, I could appreciate. All of this is to say that, when Dan wasn’t there and no one knew why, we were inclined to feel a bit more uneasy than we would have otherwise.
    As we found out the following day, we’d had every right and reason for our concern. Some read it on the front page of The Poughkeepsie Journal with their morning coffee; others heard it on the radio as they drove to work; still others had it from Frank Block, who was a volunteer fireman and whose absence the previous day also had been noted, but not connected by anyone to Dan’s. There had been an accident. Dan was an early riser, you see, as were the twins. Sometimes his wife, Sophie, took the opportunity to sleep in a little, but yesterday, for whatever reason, she had risen with the rest of them. It was early enough, just a little past six, that when Dan suggested the four of them nip into town for a quick bite of breakfast before he left for work, the idea