by Ron Rash
We ain’t driving, he thought, I am. Lori read as he drove west a few miles, then turned onto the gravel road that led to Spillcorn Creek. Shank and the other guys Travis knew spoke of the future in vague generalities—joining the military or farming, a mill job in Asheville or Winston-Salem. You’d have thought a girl from Antioch, which was the back of beyond even in Madison County, would have done much the same, especially one who sat on the back row and said near nothing until forced to. Most folks would figure a girl like that wouldn’t have the confidence to plan much of a future, but Travis knew better now. Lori believed she could do most anything she put her mind to, and didn’t mind letting you know it. She reminded Travis of places on the French Broad where banks tightened and the water flowed quiet and the surface looked smooth, but once you stepped in the current ran so strong you couldn’t stand up against it.
Travis wanted to share some of that confidence, and because of his reading he’d begun to. He was learning in a new way, every reading assignment and every discussion linked to a single chain. Except chain wasn’t the right word to describe it, because chains held things close and what Travis felt was the opposite, a widening like ripples in a pond. Synthesis. That was what Leonard called this kind of connecting, and he claimed a lot of folks at college, including some who taught, couldn’t do what came naturally to Travis.
Starting to think you’re too good to get dirt under your nails. That’s the kind of thing his daddy would say if he heard such talk, finding fault because there was no pleasing him. Wednesday morning Travis had seen the old man’s truck parked in front of Pinson’s Feed and Seed. He’d finished putting groceries in the customer’s backseat but hadn’t rolled the buggy back inside, instead taking a few steps closer to the street. Travis now two months on his own when his daddy claimed he’d be back in a week. Travis had waited, his hand half raised to wave. But when the truck passed the parking lot the old man hadn’t even glanced his way.
Travis gripped the steering wheel tighter, the memory of how foolish he’d felt making his face burn. Next time he’d have a big rock in his hand. He’d throw it right through the damn windshield and see if the old man would notice him then. He remembered the slap, how it seemed the poison of the yellow jacket stings coursed from all other parts of his body into his left cheek. Somehow still there, like a brand. But he didn’t have to worry about not pleasing his father anymore. He could do what he wanted, work on a farm or in a grocery store or even behind a desk if he had a mind to. He could read a book and take that book apart the same way you might a car engine to see how it runs.
Yet when Travis glanced down at the purple sweatshirt, he couldn’t shake the notion that maybe not much had changed after all, that he was still trying to please someone other than himself and nothing he did was quite enough. When he’d told Lori about the GED, he thought it would finally stop her nagging about his returning to school, which was what she’d done pretty much nonstop since August. Getting the GED was something he wanted to do, but soon as he told Lori she started pecking at him about his going to Tech with her come fall. Leonard too kept bringing it up, not just A-B Tech but schools like Western Carolina and Chapel Hill. Wants you to have what he had and screwed up, Dena had claimed.
They parked beside the bridge. Spillcorn was low, surfacing enough sand and rocks so they wouldn’t get much more than their feet wet. First frost had withered the trillium and jewel-weed. On the stream’s banks sumac had blistered to a deep velvety red. But it was warm for late October, in the high sixties, the leaves of the trees thinned out enough that the sun laid a scattered brightness on the water. A sagging barbed-wire fence bordered the creek, and they eased through the strands, careful not to let the rusty thorns snatch shirt or jeans. A dead walnut tree rose on the other side, leafless, dry branches beneath. Travis saw a hole in the trunk, reached inside, and brought out a single butternut-colored feather.
He held it up for Lori to see.
“A yellowhammer feather,” he explained. “A man in Marshall makes trout flies out of them.”
He unzipped his vest’s side pocket and placed the feather inside. Having good luck already, Travis told himself as they stepped onto the creek bank. He tied on a Panther Martin, its treble hook wrapped in crimson thread, then bit off the excess line. He tested the knot and checked the drag.
“When I told Momma we were going fishing she said to bring some back to eat.” Lori smiled. “I think she wants proof we weren’t just looking for an excuse to get off by ourselves to do some sparking.”
“I’ll do my best,” Travis said.
They moved upstream, Lori hopscotching between sand and rock while Travis took a straighter path. The water seeping into his shoes was cold enough to have him do some hopscotching of his own, but he didn’t want Lori thinking he couldn’t stand a little cold water. Nearing the first pool Travis moved slower, hunched over to be less visible. He paused in the tailwaters. In the pool’s eddies red and yellow leaves laid a thin quilt on the stream’s surface. The more sodden leaves blackened the bottom, made hang-ups harder to see.
He aimed for the white foam at the pool’s head, but the cast was too long and snagged rhododendron. As Travis moved forward to free the lure, water rippled on the pool’s far side as a trout shot under the bank.
“I’m rusty,” he said.
He unhooked the spinner and they walked up the creek. His next casts were better, but it was only where the stream bowed and made a deep undercut that a strike made the rod flex and shudder. A flash of red and silver darted downstream, then threw itself against the air, the spinner dangling from its mouth. It was a big fish for a creek, fifteen, maybe sixteen inches. The trout turned back upstream and the reel’s drag made a zipping sound as the fish veered under the bank. A brown would have stayed there, trying to tangle the line up in a snag, but rainbows liked their fight in open water. The trout came out and jumped once more before giving up.
Travis knelt on the shore, pinning the fish so it couldn’t flop back into the water. The trout beat its black-spotted caudal fin against the sand, its body struggling under Travis’s palm like one long slippery muscle. He gripped a fist-sized rock and struck the fish’s head. It shuddered and went limp. His hands trembled as he laid the trout in the shallows and rinsed the sand off. For a few moments he just stared at it, the gold-ringed eyes and small head, the long red slash on the flank. He’d only caught a couple of trout this big, and it didn’t yet seem fully real.
Lori came up behind him. Travis hooked his index finger through a gill and lifted the fish so she could see it.
“This one ought to keep me on the good side of your mom.”
“I think so,” Lori said. “That one could probably feed near the whole family.”
Travis dipped the trout in water one last time and placed it in the deep pouch of his fishing vest. He pulled the vest back on, felt the trout’s damp weight between his shoulder blades. His hands were sticky with scales that glistened like slivers of silver. He washed his hands in the creek, keeping them in the cold water as long as he could stand.
Lori smiled at him.
“You worried I won’t hold your hand if it smells like trout?” she asked, which was exactly what he’d been thinking. He blushed and that just caused Lori to smile wider, like she’d got him good.
Travis had three more trout in the vest when they came to where the creek split. One smaller branch went into a meadow while the main stream disappeared into a stand of poplars. Travis took the meadow fork, the rivulet no more than two feet wide, in most places the water thin and clear. He and Lori walked thirty yards before Travis made his first cast into a pool no bigger than a truck tire.
“There can’t be a fish in there,” Lori said, but the spinner barely touched the surface when a six-inch trout shot out from under the bank and struck. Travis raised his rod and lifted the fish, set it down in the broom sedge. He dipped his right hand into the water before cradling the fish in his palm so Lori could see the gray-black back
, the red and olive spots on the flanks and deep-orange dorsal fins.
“It’s prettier than the others,” Lori said. She pushed her hair back and leaned closer. “What kind is it?”
“A speckled trout.”
“I’ve never seen one before. Are they rare?”
“Didn’t used to be.”
Travis gently freed the hook and eased the trout in the water. It surged from his hand and disappeared under the bank.
“What happened?”
“Browns and rainbows got stocked in streams. Speckleds don’t compete well. Plus they need purer water than other trout.”
“How’d you learn all this?”
“Read about it.”
“Probably in the school library when you should have been doing classwork,” Lori said, though not in a chiding way.
“The stuff we did in class was boring. Or at least the teachers made it boring.”
“But Leonard doesn’t?”
“No, he makes it interesting, even the science and math.”
A gray squirrel chattered in a big hickory across the meadow. Enough leaves had fallen to expose its nest wedged in the tree’s highest fork. Another squirrel answered deeper in the woods. Squirrel season was just days off, and Travis figured these two wouldn’t last very long.
“Does he have any idea when you’ll take the GED?” Lori asked.
“Maybe soon as April. He said it depends on how quick I get through the math.”
“That means we can start A-B Tech in the summer.”
Lori spoke matter-of-factly, as if it were already decided, and Travis knew how Shank and his other buddies would react if they were there. They’d wink at one another, talk later about how Travis didn’t have to make up his mind anymore because he had someone to do it for him.
Lori moved closer, leaned her head into his shoulder.
“I bought some new perfume.” She raised her hand and let it rest on his cheek. “Smell,” she said, pressing the back of her wrist to his nose.
Travis breathed in the perfume’s sweetness, and it gave him the same easy downshift into mellowness as a second beer. His aggravation seemed to settle on the rivulet’s surface and drift away.
The sun fell full upon them, a soft warming that made the whole meadow drowsy, the jorees silent, a big yellow and black writing spider motionless in its web. No hint of a breeze, as if even the wind had lain down for a nap. The cloudless sky like a painting too, its color a light but also denser blue. Cerulean, he thought, remembering the word he’d read last week, one he’d asked Leonard to pronounce for him.
“The sky’s cerulean,” Travis said.
“What does that mean?”
“Cerulean,” Travis said again, enjoying the way the word’s sounds moved from the closed front teeth, then up and down in his mouth and ending in the throat as though the word had to be bitten off, chewed, and swallowed. “It means a clear blue.”
It also means you don’t know everything, which maybe you ought to remember when you try to decide everything I need to do, Travis could have said, but he didn’t say those words because Lori had brought her lips to his and at that moment nothing else much mattered. So this is what all those songs are about, he thought, remembering nights he lay in the dark listening to radio stations, songs coming from faraway places like Chicago and New Orleans and Memphis, and pretty much every song saying the same thing—that love was near the only thing worth singing about. He wished he’d brought his transistor radio, because it would be like all those singers were singing just for him and Lori.
They sat down in the broom sedge, and the cooler ground reminded Travis that despite the warm sun it was October. Soon enough there’d be cold days after snow when the low sky turned a blue so dark that come dusk it would seep like ink, stain the white ground deep blue as well. Not long before such nights would be here. He thought about how good it would be to hold Lori once it turned cold, let the press of their bodies warm them as they kissed, maybe did more than kiss.
“Even when I was little I loved to find a place like this on a cold day,” Lori said, as if she too thought of the coming winter. “I’d close my eyes and it was like being inside a cocoon. That Christmas after Daddy left was a bad time. Not just Daddy being gone but Momma so upset. I went out and found a warm place in the pasture. I had me a couple of oranges, and feeling that sun and eating those oranges made things not so bad.”
“Were those the oranges Slick Abernathy gave you?”
“You remember that?”
“You held on to that bag like you didn’t want anyone to know what was in it, but I saw bulges so I knew it was fruit.”
“Did I hold it like I was ashamed?”
Travis was unsure how to answer.
“I don’t know, maybe a little.”
“I was, but not too ashamed to take them. About all any of us got that Christmas was those oranges.” Lori looked up at him, her hand shielding her eyes from the sun. “Which is why I’m going to Tech. That way I won’t ever have to do something like that again. Or ever be in the fix Momma was in.”
“You don’t want a good man to look after you?” Travis meant it as a joke but Lori did not smile.
“Momma and Sabrina taught me better than that. Momma says men are like cats. Don’t count much on them because they come and go as they please.”
“Not all men,” Travis said.
“That’s pretty much what I’ve seen until now.”
“I can show you different,” Travis said, trying to sound confident.
“If I didn’t think you could I wouldn’t be here right now.” Lori paused. “I remember something about you in school, what I remembered that first day I saw you in the hospital.”
Travis grimaced.
“I hope whatever it is ain’t too bad.”
“Mrs. Rodgers was checking out my library books when Mr. Abernathy came in and saw you in the magazine section. He asked Mrs. Rodgers if you were causing any trouble, and she said you were never trouble. She told him you were smart.”
“I guess Slick had something to say to that,” Travis said.
“He said he knew you were smart from your test scores but you’d never use your intelligence for anything except getting into trouble. Mrs. Rodgers said she didn’t believe that.”
Travis remembered how Mrs. Rodgers let him keep books he’d checked out longer than she was supposed to, let him read magazines before school when the library wasn’t officially open. She’d picked out books for him, taken them off the shelves herself and put them in his hands. Try this one, she’d say, and give him Jesse Stuart’s The Thread That Runs So True or Hemingway’s Nick Adams Stories. Books he’d never have picked up on his own but always enjoyed.
“She’s a nice lady,” Travis said.
“I told her last week about you getting a GED and she said one day you’d prove a lot of people wrong. I believe that too. I wouldn’t be here with you if I thought otherwise.”
Travis slipped off his vest. Lori lay on her back now, eyes closed as she let the sun settle on her face. He lay beside her, the sun like a warm dry rain, the broom sedge cushioning the backs of their heads.
“When you went to live with Leonard I almost decided not to see you anymore,” Lori said. “I thought he’d change you for the worse, have you doing what he does. But he’s never tried to do that, has he?”
“No,” Travis said.
“He’s doing bad things but he’s not a bad person. I’ve never known anybody like that.”
“Maybe he doesn’t see what he’s doing as wrong,” Travis said. “If they don’t get drugs and beer from him they’ll get them from somebody else.”
“Then how come he never gives you any or lets you buy them? You know it’s not the reason he says.”
“So what’s the reason?” Travis asked.
“Because Leonard’s like me. He cares about you.”
The broom sedge made a raspy whisper as Lori settled her head deeper. For a few minutes they lay
still. The sun’s light rose slowly up Sugarloaf Mountain, leaving a widening shadow beneath. Travis guessed one o’clock, then remembered to adjust for the end of daylight savings time. He knew he’d gained an hour but it didn’t seem that way. He felt he’d lost time, much more than just an hour, and he could never get it back.
Travis turned to Lori so they could kiss again. He felt her tongue on his, her arms against his back. They held the kiss a long time, Lori’s breasts flattening against his chest, her thighs and his pressed close. Travis slipped his hand under the sweatshirt, rubbed the small of her back with his palm. He let his hand slide upward and settle on her bra strap.
“Enough of that, boy,” Lori said, sitting up, brushing twigs and straw from her hair.
“Why?” Travis said. “It feels good, doesn’t it?” He tried to match her lighthearted tone but couldn’t. Three months and nothing but some kisses. It was another thing that Shank and the other guys would laugh at. He reached for her arm to pull her back down but she slipped his grasp.
“That’s the problem,” Lori said. “It does feel good. It felt good to Sabrina too.”
So I have to have the blue balls because your sister was stupid enough not to make some guy use a rubber. That was what he was thinking, but saying such words to Lori didn’t seem possible, anymore than showing her the rubber in his billfold. Travis felt ashamed just thinking about sex around her, which only made it more frustrating.
“We best be getting home,” Lori said. “I got to cover for Mandy and her shift starts at four-thirty.” She kissed him on the cheek, the same sort of kiss his aunt or grandma might give him. He put his fishing vest back on and picked up the rod.
“Don’t go getting sulky on me,” Lori said, telling him one more thing not to do.
WHEN TRAVIS GOT BACK TO THE TRAILER, LEONARD’S CAR WAS gone. Dena sat on the couch, an ashtray and near-empty bottle of Boone’s Farm strawberry wine balanced on the armrest. On the coffee table an array of pills filled a plastic baggie. The television was going, some show about doctors.
