No Bear, No Forest, Barry Rachin [freenovel24 .txt] 📗

Around two in the afternoon an olive-skinned girl wandered down to the lake and started skipping stones across the placid water. One of the rocks almost struck Lester McSweeney’s plastic bobber. “Would you please stop doing that?”
The girl scowled then came and stood next to him. She wore tan shorts and a crisp white blouse. The face was finely chiseled with a broad sweep of delicate, ebony eyebrows. “Catch anything?”
Lester reeled in, the line weighted down by a slimy tangle of vegetation. “Almost.”
“I don’t see any fish so I'll assume you’re having a crappy day.” The girl, who spoke with a thick guttural accent, turned and stared at him impudently. The way she sauntered about, hands on hips, one might have thought she owned Lake Winnipesauke, all the guest cabins and the humpbacked mountain range off to the east.
Lester adjusted the bobber so that the leader hung six inches lower. Having finished threading a fresh worm on the hook, he cast the line out over the water. The bobber skidded several times and came to rest near a patch of water lilies. A light breeze skimmed across the water nudging the lifeless bobber toward a rotted stump. If the hook snagged a submerged root, Lester would lose his gear, not to mention losing face with the obnoxious girl. “You see that cove off to the left?” He pointed to a curved section of shoreline fifty feet away. A ridge of emerald algae rimmed the water, which was dappled with a profusion of ivory water lilies. “I hooked a huge pickerel about twenty minutes ago, but he leaped clear of the water and threw the hook.”
The pickerel was the biggest fish Lester had ever seen—a foot longer than the blue fish he snagged in Buzzards Bay on the Cape Cod Canal. A veritable monster, Lester played him expertly with just the right amount of drag, understanding full well that to try and haul the feisty fish in without weakening him first would have been foolhardy. But, in the end, it didn’t matter. He lost the fish in the shallows no more than thirty feet from shore.
The girl scratched an earlobe. “So the fish got away?” Lester nodded. “No one else saw it?”
“Besides a collection of noisy bullfrogs and a painted turtle, no.” For the first time since the pesky girl arrived, Lester gave her the once over, eyeballing her up and down. Her hair was jet black and close cropped. The olive skin was darkened, deep baked in a permanent, year-round tan. Everything about her was clean, concise and economical. He couldn’t decide if she was modestly pretty or infuriatingly plain.
The girl smiled as though at some private joke, but it was not a particularly pleasant expression. “Lo doobim v’lo ya’ar.” Lester’s mouth fell open. “There was no bear and there was no forest,” the girl translated. “It’s a Hebrew expression.”
Lester wished the girl would go away. Far away. To another galaxy. Instead she prattled on in her coarse, mannish voice. “A fellow wanders into the forest and is attacked by a ferocious bear. He has no weapon—no gun, knife, not even a flimsy stick to defend himself. In desperation, he punches, kicks, bites and gouges until the wild beast finally runs away. Then the fellow hurries back to town and tells everyone who will listen about his magnificent adventure.”
“My name is Tovah Moshel. I am staying in Cabin 34B, if you care to visit.” Her pretty hips rocking from side to side, the girl sauntered off down the gravel path toward the guests’ living quarters.

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Later that evening the McSweeneys and Moshels sat at a rustic table in the main dining room of the Lake Winnipesauke resort. The girl had a younger brother, Ari, about the same age as Lester's sister, and the two children immediately struck up a friendship. Meals were served family style - bowls of mashed potatoes flavored with cheddar cheese, string beans and baked chicken spread out across the center of the table. Mr. Moshel, a thin, fair-skinned man with the wistful, far off look of a poet or anarchist, had trouble cutting his chicken.
“Did you remember to take your medicine, Moishe?” Mrs. Moshel asked. She was a pretty woman, dark like her daughter but with a warm, engaging smile.
“Yes, I took the pills.” The man’s hands were trembling badly as he raised a slice of chicken to his mouth. He chewed at an odd angle, his chin tilted to one side, as though all his inner resources were focused on masticating the meat without choking to death. When he finally swallowed, Mr. Moshel turned to Lester. “Very tasty, don’t you think?” Whatever was wrong with him physically hadn’t effected either his sense of humor or appetite.
All the while, Tovah ignored everyone; she cleaned her plate and took a second helping of beans and mashed potatoes. The girl said something to her mother in rapid-fire Hebrew and Mrs. Moshel replied, “It is impolite to speak in a foreign language when other people are present.” In response, her daughter spoke again in her native tongue. Her father smiled and shook his head.

Later back in their cabin Mrs. McSweeney said, “That poor Israeli, did you see how his hands tremble?”
Her husband wagged his head from side to side but had nothing to say. Lester was sitting at the kitchen table cleaning his spinning reel. His plan was to head out early in a small dinghy that was pulled up on the sand and look for the thirty-six inch pickerel. There was no bear and there was no forest. The Israeli girl's dismissive sarcasm stuck like a jagged bone in his craw. Just because no one was present to see the fish didn’t mean it didn’t exist. It was not like he lied, pretended that he actually caught it.
Mrs. McSweeney wandered to the screen door and stared out into the darkness. A powdery mother crashed into the wire mesh and flitted away. “I ran into Mrs. Moshel in the ladies’ room. She confided that her husband has this rare, incurable disease. The poor man! He can’t work or do much of anything these days.”
“Probably came here for medical treatment,” the husband added and took a sip of lemonade.
Mrs. McSweeney started straightening up the room. “Yes, I would imagine.” She came up behind Lester and watched as he smeared a generous glob of grease onto the main gear sprocket and began closing up the casing on his fishing reel. “The daughter’s pretty, don’t you think?”
“Not my type.” He eased the handle forward until the metal line guide clicked into place then continued to work the reel for another dozen or so revolutions. The action was buttery smooth.
“So what’s wrong with the girl?” his father pressed.
“Not my type,” Lester repeated dully and left the room.

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Setting the alarm for six, Lester was fully dressed and out of the cabin in less than half an hour. The row boat would surely be where he spotted it the previous day near the cove. If he could catch the pickerel - not just any respectable fish but that three-foot brute and mother-of-all-game-fish, Lester McSweeney would march right over to Cabin 34B and lay the angler’s trophy on the front stoop.
Yes, Tovah Moshel, there was a bear! Not that he had anything to prove, but the Israeli girl had figuratively tweaked his nose and the only reasonable response was probably lurking under a bed of water lilies fifty feet out in a scenic New Hampshire lake.
In May Lester and his father fished South Cape Beach in Mashpee. Lester bought a special lure for the occasion, a Rebel, Wind-Cheater Minnow. You didn’t just cast the six-inch Wind-Cheater and retrieve it like a conventional lure. Savvy fishermen used a special ‘rip and stop’ action to mimic the behavior of a wounded bait fish struggling to regain its swimming form. Surfcasting from the sandy beach, the youth hooked a four-pound striper that fought him like a demon. The picture his father took of Lester with the bass was framed and perched on his bedroom bureau.
Lester flipped his Red Sox baseball cap around so the visor was facing backwards. When he reached the water’s edge the rowboat was gone. Who besides a hard-core fishing enthusiast would be on the lake this early in the morning? He scanned the shoreline.
“Crap!” Thirty feet out in the cove the Israeli girl was rowing at a leisurely pace. “What a royal pain in the ass!” Lester decided to cut his losses and slink back to the cabin. Too late! Tovah Moshel was waving energetically. Pulling hard with both oars, the girl resumed rowing into the sandy beach.
“Were you planning to go out in the boat?”
“Well, sort of but ...” I didn’t want to commit one way or the other.
“It wasn’t a trick question. Either you’d like to use the boat or not.”
There it was again—that peremptory, autocratic tone. Lester didn’t know what he wanted anymore. This boorish girl confounded his brain, pulverized his thinking processes into mental mush. “Yes. I would like to use the boat, if you don’t mind.”
“Well, then, I’ll join you. Help you fish.”
Lester stared at her morosely. "Fishing is a solitary pursuit. It’s not like playing baseball or ballroom dancing."
"Of course not."
“Let me get my gear situated.” The plan was to row slowly back and forth as close to the lilies as feasible to entice the pickerel out. Conditions were ideal. The water was calm with early morning temperatures in the low seventies. It wouldn’t stay this cool for long, though. Tovah sat at the stern of the rowboat next to the rod. “It’s a good day to get a tan, don’t you think?”
“Yes I guess so.”
The girl sprawled out, her pretty legs askew and slender chin tilted up to catch the sun. Fifteen minutes passed. “Shouldn’t you have caught something by now?”
“It doesn’t work that way.” They had already made a full pass around the outer perimeter of the cove and Lester was directing the prow toward the deeper water nearer the center.
“What’s that?” The girl said, indicating a well-thumbed paperback wedged beneath a jumble of nylon leaders and lead weights. She reached into the tackle box and wriggled the book free.
The artwork on the cover depicted a band of cowboys riding through rugged hill country somewhere in the Midwest. A huge lake or river loomed in the far distance framed by a handful of scraggily pine trees. “Louis L’Amour,” Lester said. “He’s just about the greatest Western writer in the whole world.”
“Cowboys and Indians.” She tossed the book dismissively back into the box. “Shtooyoat!"
"And what exactly does that mean?"
"Shtooyoat!" she repeated with the same gruff insistence. "Childish nonsense!”
A person could blaspheme God almighty—spit in the face of the Virgin Mary—but, where Lester McSweeney was concerned, you couldn’t say a bad word about Louis L’Amour. He’d read the collected short stories and frontier tales from cover to cover plus all four Hopalong Cassidy novels. Lester was halfway through the saga of the Sackett clan, averaging a book a month.
Just about everything the boy knew about life—betrayal, greed, sacrifice, courage and cowardice—he’d gleaned from his cowboy books. Lester was trying his damnedest to think of something insulting to cut the snippy foreigner down to size, but all he could manage was, “Louis L’Amour’s the smartest guy I know. He’s my hero.” Almost before he opened