Looking Through Water Read online

  This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of accuracy and authenticity. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are from the author’s imagination and are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2015 by Bob Rich

  Illustrations copyright © 2015 by Craig Reagor

  Cover illustration copyright © 2015 by John Swan

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  Cover design by Brian Peterson

  Cover image by John Swan

  Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-0314-8

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-0315-5

  Printed in the United States of America

  For Yesterday is Already a Dream and Tomorrow is Only a Vision, But Today, Well Lived, Makes Every Yesterday a Dream of Happiness and Every Tomorrow a Vision of Hope.

  —Ancient Sanskrit Poem

  Contents

  Dear Reader

  CHAPTER 1 Loch Loon—2012

  CHAPTER 2 New York City—1976

  CHAPTER 3 Loch Loon—2012

  CHAPTER 4 New York City—1976

  CHAPTER 5 The Call

  CHAPTER 6 The Keys

  CHAPTER 7 Day One—The Bonefish

  CHAPTER 8 The Conch House

  CHAPTER 9 Mrs. Reno’s

  CHAPTER 10 The Turtle

  CHAPTER 11 The Casting Lesson

  CHAPTER 12 Day Two—The Tarpon

  CHAPTER 13 The Blood Knot

  CHAPTER 14 The Truth

  CHAPTER 15 The Confrontation

  CHAPTER 16 Day Three—The Permit

  CHAPTER 17 The Request

  CHAPTER 18 Cay Sal Bank

  CHAPTER 19 The Rescue

  CHAPTER 20 The Fishing Day Ends

  Acknowledgments

  For my grandfather from the British Isles, who loved being on deep water, and my eight grandchildren, each of whom let me join them when they caught their first fish. And for everyone who has gained self-awareness by looking through water.

  DEAR READER

  I am not a writer. I am a storyteller, who, by definition, hates long introductions a lot and long books more.

  • • •

  A loving and thoughtful grandparent can change a child’s life. If you have been blessed to have a grandchild, you have an obligation to become such a grandparent. This story is about just such a person.

  Within these pages, a grandson becomes a grandfather and reaches back into his past to share with his troubled grandson the events of a week that would forever change his life.

  William McKay was neither a sinner nor a saint, just a man trying to make sense of his life. He never set out to be a teacher but was thrust into the role, during which time he taught and learned as well.

  Looking Through Water is not solely a tale of adventure, a love story, or a chronicle of one man’s journey to self-awareness. It combines all of these elements to explore the dynamics of intergenerational family relationships.

  While a quick read, I hope this story will entertain and instruct and, for many, bring back long-forgotten memories of the bittersweet journey of coming-of-age.

  CHAPTER 1

  LOCH LOON—2012

  William McKay stood on the wooden dock by the fog-shrouded lake, listening to the plaintive cry of a loon as it pierced the morning silence. He cherished that sound, heard so often here from the time he was a young boy. Now approaching his seventy-third birthday, he retained the look of a former athlete, tall and slender, well tanned, with a full head of hair, now turned white. A three-inch diagonal scar on the left side of his forehead added an air of mystery to his handsome, chiseled face.

  As the morning fog lifted, he scanned the lake with bright eyes and his ever-youthful curiosity, then climbed into the small dinghy and pushed off from the dock with ease. He felt fortunate not to wrestle with balance like so many of his contemporaries. He began to row across the mile-wide lake as he had many times for more than sixty years—since he was a boy. Now that young boy had become the old man. So much had happened between then and now; he wished he could write that boy a letter telling him what to watch out for, but he knew that wasn’t the way things worked.

  The lake had for many years been known as Iroquois Lake, named after one of the many Native American tribes that had inhabited the region. Iroquois was one of those Adirondack lakes that people referred to as bottomless. Early settlers in the region had dropped 150 feet of coiled rope from a boat in the center and not hit bottom. Its dark water, usually calm and always cold, held an aura of mystery along with an abundance of fish.

  In the early 1900s, William’s grandfather, a banker named Angus McKay, had moved his family to New York City from Perth, Scotland, where he had gained a reputation as an accomplished investor with a penchant for gambling. He won the lake and surrounding land from another banker in a game of poker. Angus’s first order of business was to rename the lake . . . Loch Loon. Then he built a lodge at one end, setting up the entire property as a not-for-profit club and selling six pieces to Scottish American pals of his to build summer homes. He kept the choicest two lots, one on either side of the lake, for himself and, eventually, for his son. The transaction, like many of his others, gained him a handsome return and added to his reputation on Wall Street as a brilliant and daring entrepreneur.

  Some years later, Angus left the bank and founded a small brokerage firm, which he named McKay and Son in the hope that his son, Leod—William’s father—would come to work with him, and eventually he did.

  Angus was defined by his business, working long hours—six . . . sometimes seven . . . days a week. He was in that office so often that many of his protégés swore they never saw him enter the building in the morning or leave at night. Angus simply outworked his peers, while along the way developing an uncanny ability to recognize great investment opportunities. Some looked at it as a gift. Others said he was merely lucky. Angus just smiled, knowing that the harder he worked, the luckier he got. At any rate, his good stewardship of money made him a sought-after manager by many wealthy investors.

  If Angus did have an indulgence, it was Loch Loon. When his son Leod’s school year ended, he would see the boy and his mother off at Grand Central Station on a train bound for the Adirondacks, where they would stay at the lake until the Tuesday after Labor Day. He would join them for two solid weeks beginning with the Fourth of July and for as many weekends as he felt he could get away from Wall Street. His time at Loch Loon increased as he got older and his son came into the business.

  Fourth of July at the lodge was a special Scottish American blend of bagpipes and fireworks. In addition to the usual gathering of family for holiday fun and food, the men would gather for late-night card games and plenty of Angus’s personal favorite, Glenturret single-malt Scotch whiskey. The card games included two Scottish
favorites, Clobyosh (or Clob) and Bela, as well as five-card stud poker. Regardless of the game, the winner was usually the same. His neighbors used to joke that losing money on the card table to Angus was part of their tuition to this homey mountain refuge that he had created for them and their families. After winning their money on the card table, Angus invariably invoked an old Gaelic expression, “Mony a mickle makes a muckle”—pennies add up to dollars. It always got a laugh from the losers.

  William had never known his grandmother. In fact, he never even saw a photograph of her. She apparently had tired of the long lonely hours at home with her only child waiting for her husband to leave the office. Once her son had grown up and left for college, she left, too. If anyone knew where she went, they never said. Angus removed every picture of her from their New York apartment and the vacation house on the lake. He refused to talk about her or to let anyone else mention her in his hearing. Even William’s father was not allowed to talk about his mother.

  Some of William’s fondest memories were of summers spent as a child in the home on the lake that his grandfather had built for William’s father. While Leod had followed his father into the company, one of the first things the younger man did was to legally change his name from Leod to Leo. Whether he did it to denounce his Scottish roots or merely adopt the name most people called him anyway, this action hurt his father’s feelings. Like his father, Leo was now spending more time in Manhattan while Angus was winding down and spending more and more time at the lake with his grandson.

  William worshipped his grandfather, who always called the boy by a Scottish nickname, Willum. While he’d heard some stories of Angus’s tenacity and absenteeism, it was not the man he saw. William knew his grandfather as the man who first took him fishing, taught him how to swim, row a boat, play tennis, hit a golf ball, think, and express himself. His grandfather always made time for him and was there to teach him about life. His grandfather was more than patient with him and won the boy’s confidence and respect as well. Angus never talked down to his grandson and always treated him like a young man. William thought of his grandfather as God-like and wondered if there was anything the man didn’t know or couldn’t do.

  To young William, Angus seemed to be one with the lake itself, as if he drew inner strength from its deep waters and moved in harmony with its seasons. Angus seemed to know all of the lake’s secrets, which he revealed to the boy one at a time. He knew where the fish lived and how to catch them. He knew what creatures made their homes on the lake and how to protect them.

  Angus taught William that the lake had loud times, when the winds would stir up its surface, and quiet times, when, if you listened carefully, “you could hear your soul.”

  In the morning, grandfather and grandson would often row to the deepest part of the lake, lift oars, and drift in silence, letting their thoughts go where they would. Angus taught him what the old man called Scottish meditation.

  “Any thoughts are fair, Willum,” he said. “Memories of the past or dreams of the future. By becoming one with nature, you can find inner peace while turning problems into opportunities.”

  In William’s fourteenth summer, his relationship with his grandfather reached a new level. Many of Angus’s close friends were gone, and the old man spent more and more time on the lake with the boy. He also began talking Gaelic to his grandson, just as he had done with his friends from the old country, trying to pass the ancient language along to his only grandchild.

  That summer the old man, for the first time, turned rowing over to his grandson. He loved to sit in the stern of the little rowboat as the sun was setting. He told William that this was called the gloaming, “the tid o day when it is nae fell daurk thareout, but the sun is nae up.” Sometimes as William rowed, his grandfather would hum or sing some of the old Scottish songs, like “The Shores of Loch Lomond” or the old man’s favorite, “Roamin’ in the Gloamin’.”

  It was as if the old man felt an urgency to download things to his grandson that he felt the boy should know. He gave William endless advice on life and competition: “Failing means yer playin’” and “Gie it laldy,” which meant, do it with gusto.

  One night late in the summer, Angus broke the silence about his long-lost wife. “She was a bonnie lass, my Katie McBride. I loved her very much but took her for granted. She went away with a doctor friend of one of our neighbors. They moved to a town near Chicago. She left our forest lake for a new life in Lake Forest—can you believe it?” the old man said with a hint of both laughter and sadness in his eyes.

  “I couldn’t come to grips with my own role in her departure, so I just tore up her pictures and pretended she’d died.”

  “Do you still love her, Grandpa?”

  “Pride can be a bad thing, Willum, especially when it costs you something very dear to you. A wise man learns to keep his priorities in order.” The old man sighed. “I got a note from a friend telling me she died last winter.”

  “Have you told my father about Grandma McKay?” William asked.

  “Naw, laddie, jest ye,” Angus said. He gave the boy a stern look. “Remember, what’s said on the boat, stays on the boat.”

  “Yes, Grandfather.”

  The old man’s face softened again. “It’s gotten black as the Earl of Hell’s waistcoat and I’m pure done in now. Let’s go back to the dock.”

  Months later, on a late-winter day not long before he turned fifteen years old, William got a call at boarding school from his father. Angus had passed away.

  The boy’s first reaction to the shock and pain of hearing of his grandfather’s death was anger . . . anger at his father for being the bearer of this bad news. Then he went to bed that night praying to God that he would wake up in the morning and find out that it was all a bad dream. He cried himself to sleep.

  He awoke to find that it hadn’t been a bad dream. His grandpa was dead. He vowed then never to talk to God again.

  There was a stately service at Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church in Manhattan. As light snow fell gently outside, a large choir filled the magnificent sanctuary with Angus’s favorite Scottish hymns: “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” and “Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken.”

  There was a small reception at the Anglers Club on Broad Street, where the boy sat feeling lost and alone. He felt like crying, but his father had taught him long ago that crying was for babies and sissies, so he didn’t.

  That summer, William’s father moved the family into Angus’s house on the lake. On the Friday of Independence Day weekend, his father invited the boy to row out into the middle of the lake where, with the small boat shrouded in silence, Leo took out a small urn from a canvas boat bag and scattered Angus’s ashes on the still waters of Loch Loon. There were no prayers and no conversation, no words at all. William noted that his father didn’t seem to be spreading Angus’s ashes, but rather dumping them as if to get rid of him. Rowing back to shore, the boy turned his head so that his father wouldn’t see the tears running down his cheeks.

  The holiday weekend went on as if nothing had happened. No one said anything about Angus, so William didn’t, either. Unknowingly, the boy was learning the stoic and repressed self-discipline of his Scottish Presbyterian forbears. William didn’t pick up a fishing rod that summer or for many summers thereafter.

  Soon after Angus’s death, the club on Loch Loon was disbanded and the resplendent lodge sat vacant for many years until William, as a grown-up, had it remodeled and turned it into a comfortable restaurant that was now known as the Turtle, a favorite of the locals.

  William went on to college, then to the war in Vietnam, before finally joining the family business. A year later, his mother was dying and his father, taking after Grandma McKay, disappeared.

  Now, as William reached the middle of the lake, he thought how quickly time goes by. He was the “old man of Loch Loon.” He lifted his oars and listened to the lake as his grandfather had taught him to do. A parade of memories coursed through his mind before h
e settled on one: a day thirty-seven years ago, after William had taken over leadership of his family’s investment company, the first day of a week that had forever changed his life.

  CHAPTER 2

  NEW YORK CITY—1976

  William had always felt lonely. An only child packed off to boarding school when he was eight, losing his beloved grandfather as a teenager, followed by his father’s abandonment, his mother’s death, and a failed marriage: the old feelings returned to the grown man sitting behind his big mahogany desk in his eighteenth-floor corner office looking down on the busy downtown streets of New York City’s financial district. A glass of Glenturret single-malt Scotch, his grandfather’s favorite drink, in his hand, William gazed at the commuters scurrying to get home and the early diners and theatergoers trying to wave down one of the fleet of yellow cabs driven by a small army of swarthy men from other countries, most of whom could barely speak English and couldn’t have cared less.

  His dark-wood-paneled office spoke volumes about his success and prominence as interpreted by the tall, curvaceous, middle-aged interior designer whom he had retained and also slept with about five years before. Floor-to-ceiling windows created two walls that gave him breathtaking views of the city. The third wall was covered by bookshelves displaying his military medals, sports trophies, and assorted favorite books. The office was large but not cavernous and tastefully appointed with handsome antique furniture—old but sturdy. His visitors sat on brown leather armchairs, a large comfy couch, or one of six wooden armchairs arrayed around his small round conference table. A beautiful Persian rug appeared to have been made for its space. The focal point of his lair covered the fourth wall, a giant built-in saltwater aquarium. Inside the tank swam four sleek blacktip sharks, the largest of which was almost four feet long. The low backlighting of the aquarium and the slow rhythm of the circling sharks created an intimidating eeriness, heightened by the black eyes of the captive creatures keeping watch over the office and its occupant.