by Ava Finch
Before Hal has a chance to reach them, Cassi has cut in front, giving RayAnne a curious look. “Ray? Um, I think you should . . . there’s been a development.” She points up to the satellite truck, where a tall man with a familiar posture is talking to Randall, the camera guy.
She squints—from the back he could double as Big Rick. “No. That’s not my . . .”
“Yup.”
Not possible. Her father is supposed be on his way to Arizona this minute to reunite with Rita. He should be halfway through Iowa. If he’s spun another of the 180s he’s so famous for, she’ll smack him. Or maybe something is terribly wrong? She immediately thinks of Gran and swallows.
“Go find out what he wants,” RayAnne asks Cassi.
RayAnne pushes her hat down and steps out of Hal’s trajectory to clear the path to Norah. She scuttles across the picnic area and up the path leading to her RV.
She is inside less than five minutes when she hears Big Rick call her name, not a something-is-wrong tone, more in the lucky-you-I’m-here register. Peeking between the curtains she sees him on the path, Randall pointing in her direction. She drops the curtain.
Patience. She breathes in; she breathes out. Patience. Looking out again, she mutters, “He cannot be here. Can. Not. Be. Here.” She flattens on the couch so no shadow of her is cast. Eye of the storm, she thinks, like calm Ingrid. Eye of the storm. His knock is loud and persistent, as if he knows she’s there.
Just when she’s ready to cave, footsteps retreat.
Ten minutes later when Cassi raps on the door and steps in, RayAnne states, “He cannot be here.” As if saying it will make it so.
“I asked what he needed, if everything was okay; he said he was just passing by.”
“Passing by!”
“Well.” Cassi shrugs. “He’s here. You want me to tell him you’re not?”
“Yes. No. I’m sure he’s seen me.”
“I could say you’ve left?”
“My car is right there.”
“Should I tell him to leave?”
RayAnne considers it, then shakes her head. He’s driven six hours, more if he’d actually set off for Arizona then turned around. Maybe Rita redumped him by phone, or text. He wouldn’t drive this far for nothing.
As if reading her mind, Cassi shrugs. “He’s your dad, right?”
When she ventures to the catering tent, Big Rick has already made himself quite at home and is eating dinner with the crew. Most of them hang on his every word—he’s certainly found the right audience to regale with stories about his fishing show days. His broad gestures—like a white pine in a wind—along with the biblical volume of his voice are two sure signs he’s been drinking. The crew guffaw and chuckle at his stories, so well worn RayAnne could step in and finish them should he pass out. It occurs to her that not everyone can detect what she does; not only that he’s drunk, but to what particular degree. She hangs back at the door, observing like a human Breathalyzer for three minutes until deeming him to be at least two drinks beyond sensible and in no shape to drive. The person most glued to him is Amy the Grouper, scaling him with her gaze, as if figuring how to best climb him. RayAnne backs out of the tent and sits on a picnic table to wait, chewing a cuticle and glaring at the tent flap. When he finally comes out, she’s unable to keep the hysteria out of her voice. “Dad! What are you doing here?”
“Another helluva hello from my girl!”
“You were headed home.”
“I was.” He waves away her words. “But then, the Rita situation? You know. I thought about who needs me more, so I turned right around and drove up here.”
“Who needs you more? Dad! Not me.” Immediately regretting her tone, she adds, “You know what I mean, Dad. I don’t need you here.”
He blinks and gets that look, like his fatherhood has been dashed to the ground, stomped and kicked back at him. “Aw, RayBee, I thought you’d be happy to have your old man around, help you out here on this deal.”
“That’s the thing, Dad. This is my deal, and I don’t need help. Really. I’d ask if I did.”
“Right.” He squares his shoulders. “You’re right. You’ve got it covered.” He nods, pensive, for as long as it takes to worm himself another opening. “But that crew? Shit. They couldn’t find their own asses in the dark with both hands.” He aims himself back to the catering tent, following his chin, as if looking for better reception.
RayAnne watches his back, her jaw an open pot of words stewing. Incorrigible, infuriating, relentless. Her father is nothing if not relentless.
By dark, the wagon train circle of Winnebagos and pop-up campers housing the crew has budged open to make space for her father to pitch his own tent. From the booth in her galley kitchenette, she can’t make out individual words from around the campfire, only the ebbing and rising of laughter, making it evident Big Rick is providing a diversion, a good time, a yabba dabba doo time. Normally she would sit awhile with Cassi and the others, but now it would only seem to endorse Big Rick’s presence. She finishes her notes and prepares questions for tomorrow’s taping under the dome light. When laughter hoots, she finds the headphones for her iPod and cranks the volume of Serene Ocean Waves.
An hour later, Cassi brings a lettuce burrito and a report, having been asked by RayAnne to spy, just a little. It seems that though Big Rick has attracted the laserlike attention of Amy, he’s not reciprocating: Amy is batting her big Grouper eyelashes, but Big Rick is not batting back. Cassi also reports he’s arranged a poker game among the crew.
“Great.” RayAnne inhales. “Now someone’s going to lose their shirt.”
NINE
In the catering tent, Hal sidles into the breakfast line next to RayAnne with his tray. Neither has had coffee yet. She barely makes eye contact. “Did you get Norah off?”
He looks at her curiously. “Um, I dropped her off. At the airport.”
“Right, that’s what I meant.” Idiot.
Hal nods to where Big Rick has a number of the crew hanging on his every word. “So, your dad is Big Rick from Bi—”
RayAnne finishes, “Big Rick’s Bass Bonanza. Yup.”
“I watched his show when I was a kid.”
“You and dozens. It got canceled during the first season.”
“What happened?”
“What happened?” RayAnne frowns over the array of breakfast offerings. How is she supposed to lose weight when the caterers flaunt mac-and-cheese waffles and artisanal maple sausages? She settles for a feta and spinach egg-white omelet, taking the moment to stall in the face of Hal’s question. “Actually?” She decides to tell it straight up. “Actually, sponsors happened.”
“Oh? Oh.”
She inhales and it all comes out, seemingly in one breath: “I don’t remember every detail, just the plot—my dad, married, of course, to my mother—got involved with the wife of the CEO of TroutLocker. Apparently only one of his affairs. Anyway, Mrs. TroutLocker left her husband and pulled a Fatal Attraction and followed my mom and us around for a few weeks. There was a restraining order and all that. So, my dad got fired because of the scandal, and it made all the newspapers, and my mom went understandably nuts for a while. Dad sued TroutLocker and won, so naturally no underwriter would touch him after that. You know, the usual stuff.” Why was she telling him all this?
Hal’s mouth opens, as if wondering the same thing, then he recovers, grabbing a cream cheese pastry to offer her. She shakes her head, making her fat-cheeked fat-face.
“Ah, sorry.” He drops the pastry onto his own plate. “That must have been pretty rough.”
“Well, it was no trip to the so-dee fountain.”
“Pardon?”
“Sorry, it’s this scene in—”
“In Little Big Man.” Hal grins. “One of my favorite scenes, Jack playing with the elephant spigot while Mrs. Pendrake is in the storero
om getting . . . you know. But yeah, I see what you mean. Ouch.”
He has favorite scenes from her favorite film? Now she’s staring at him like she had that first day in the parking lot. The moment is interrupted when Amy walks up, dressed as if for an eighties disco instead of the backwoods. She reaches between them to grab a fork. They both turn to watch as she slowly sashays past Big Rick’s table to her own, where a fork is clearly visible. RayAnne and Hal exchange looks. He nods in the direction of an empty table and she follows.
Over breakfast Hal brings her up to speed on all the goings-on she’s been avoiding since Big Rick’s arrival. As she’d suspected, her father has indeed ingratiated himself to the crew, always there to tote some case or coil some cable. Hal reports he’s even shown Randall a few tricks for filming on big water, like how to anchor a Steadicam onto the oarlocks, jury-rigging this, devising that.
“Sounds just like him, always ready to lend a hand.” Always a hearty chuckle for everyone’s bad jokes, a refill, a buddy-thump to the back, another cold one. All with names dropped here and there from back in the day when he guided for the rich and famous.
Glancing over at her father, she strains to hear what he’s saying, while at the same trying to listen to Hal, who is talking about some pierogi or polka dinner at the Hatchet Inlet town hall. Big Rick is telling a story about taking RayAnne out on the circuit when she was a teen.
“Yee-up, thought she’d teach her old man a lesson.”
She swivels and coughs to make her presence known. Once she has her father’s attention, she dares him to go on with such a searing look, he stops midsentence and pretends to have something stuck in his throat. He may have finagled his way into Location, but family history, her history, is off-limits, especially some tired story about the day he was supposed to take Walter Mondale fishing but she’d superglued all the tackle boxes shut.
God forbid he’s around when they tape the segment on the Birkett twins, who for obvious reasons are known for never appearing on television or granting interviews. As it turns out, they’ve asked to be on the show—it seems both are crazy about fishing.
When she turns back at the sound of a scraping chair, Hal is already standing, lifting his tray. “Seems you’re kind of preoccupied.”
“Oh? Sorry, what were you saying? Wait.”
But he’s already backing away with an injured grin. “I think I was asking you out.”
Cassi’s fists are planted on her hips. “What do you mean? He either asked you out, or he didn’t.”
“Well, he started to, I guess.”
“Argh, Ray, why can’t you pick up on—”
“On what?”
“Signals. It’s like you’ve got two bars of reception when it comes to yourself—when it’s three feet away staring you in the face. Where’s your radar?”
“I’m not a bat.” RayAnne sulks.
“Bats use sonar. That thing you do so well with the guests?”
“What?”
“Listening. Give it a try, but like, to yourself?” Cassi checks her watch. “We better move; the twins are probably here.”
RayAnne faces camera two.
“Kira and Kit Birkett are happy, healthy twenty-four-year-old twins. Unlike other twins, they are irrevocably conjoined at the breastbone, sharing major vascular components. They will never be surgically separated. Having just finished their premed educations, they are preparing to intern in the fields of dermatology and plastic surgery.”
RayAnne had been jittery with a combination of anticipation and dread, worried about Kit and Kira’s arrival, how they might be regarded or treated by the crew. She was concerned enough about how they’d get around on Location, never mind getting aboard Penelope. She was also worried about her own potential missteps and reactions; what if she stared or asked the wrong question?
But she’d worried for nothing—Kit and Kira waltz around Location with more grace on four legs than she could on two. Still, though he’s hanging a respectable distance back, she’s convinced Big Rick will make some stupid remark, one of his brutishly honest slips, or worse, make some joke with the word “Siamese” in it or challenge them to a sack race.
But here they are, cheerfully reeling in small perch while discussing the challenges of their upcoming medical residencies. RayAnne asks how they will manage two at once.
They laugh. “We manage everything two at once.”
After twenty minutes in the boat, RayAnne has almost forgotten their uniqueness, possibly because Kit and Kira seem to think nothing of it and don’t consider themselves anything special. “You, know, besides the freak factor,” offers Kira.
Kit says, “We just have a different ‘normal.’”
Indeed, from their ribs up, they seem like average sisters with very different personalities.
“I’m night,” says Kira.
“And I’m day,” Kit finishes.
They debate about what to use for lures and wager bets over which of them will catch the biggest fish. They are quite competitive, they confess. “Our priority right now,” Kit tells RayAnne, “is to tackle med school.”
“We’ve even dumped our boyfriends.”
Before RayAnne can get her head around the idea of them having boyfriends, Kira leans to the camera as if sharing a confidence. “You think your love life is complicated?” She rolls her eyes Kit’s way. “My sister is the biggest dope about men.”
In response, Kit makes the universal gag-me gesture. “Gawd, the things I overhear!”
They tell her that, like a lot of people, they listen to loud music when they clean their apartment, but, since they have wildly differing tastes, each wears headphones. The result, Kit says, is something people would probably pay to see, them bashing about, mopping and scrubbing to different beats and dance moves, Kit swiping the mirror along to Trampled by Turtles while Kira lip-syncs Adele at a toilet-brush microphone.
Many of the questions RayAnne had planned to ask about the logistics of their lives fall away under their chatter—both are talkers, both opinionated and quite candid about their limitations and their advantages. “I always know where to find her,” quips Kit.
“I’m never lonely,” Kira adds.
RayAnne carefully poses her next question: “Do you ever want to be alone?”
They look at her as if she’s asked if the moon is made of Swiss cheese. Kit says, “Why bother wanting something—”
Kira finishes, “That you’ll never have?”
They appear to expect an answer, but RayAnne can only muse, “True.” Moving on, she asks, “Do you ever fight?”
“Do we ever fight?” They fold with laughter, batting at each other’s knees.
Other, deeper laughter sounds across a short expanse of water, and RayAnne turns, mortified to see Big Rick planted in one of the camera boats as if he belongs there.
Toward the end of the interview, there’s a more serious moment when Kira looks from her sister directly to the lens. “You see, neither of us are freaks until someone sees our difference as being . . . relevant.”
Kit nods in agreement. “I’m a freak when you decide I am, but that’s your deal.”
It’s a bit of introspection that seems very Dot-like to RayAnne.
“That,” Cassi says as the twins scramble out of the boat, “was awesome. Maybe one of the best segments we’ve ever taped.”
The twins insist on having their picture taken with RayAnne and Cassi—who seems to intrigue them both. Kit drapes an arm around RayAnne and Kira snuggles into Cassi. “Good thing we like attention, huh?”
Kit sweetly plants a peck on RayAnne’s cheek.
Her stupid grin lasts through the good-byes, and as they’re driven away by Hal, RayAnne’s fingers drift to where the girl kissed her. In the delight of the moment, it occurs to her she might just have the best job on Earth. Not even the shadow
of Big Rick in the periphery can dampen that. She makes a mental note to call Gran the next morning: Make sure you watch this one.
But, just as Gran says, where there’s a bloom on the rose, there’s usually a pile of horseshit nearby.
RayAnne is working over Penelope’s bow with a tin of paste wax and a cloth diaper when Cassi finds her. Since this morning’s news, she’s been avoiding the crew and staff, most gone apoplectic since the final scheduled guest of the season canceled at the last minute—the math teacher with the nose transplant, something about sinuses and airplanes. Now they are frantically scrambling to find a replacement so the show can wrap. As it is, the Grouper is already wound like a spring with Big Rick ignoring her. The season wrap party is slated for that evening, and a bunch of sponsors are due to converge on Location.
RayAnne had been totally prepared for the math teacher and her newly constructed nose—had voraciously read the notes and drafted questions into the wee hours. Rebecca Standish had been hiking in the Badlands in a lesser canyon with a Milky Way bar in her shirt pocket. When something huge stepped into her path, she’d barely known what hit her. The next thing Rebecca knew, she was sitting in her bra, her shirt torn away save a single sleeve, watching the rump of a grizzly shambling up the trail—the rest of her shirt stuck to the bottom of his rear paw like toilet paper. In shock, she began laughing uncontrollably, slow to realize her nose had been clawed into sections until her mouth filled with blood. Her laughter drew the attentions of a troop of Eagle Scouts, who thankfully had cell phones with GPS. A medevac helicopter team was able to land and lift her out before she bled to death. But while Rebecca was being rescued, there would be no saving the supermodel on the lip of a canyon only a few miles away. The model (whose name is well known, but for her family’s sake will not be mentioned in the interview) had just plummeted to her death during a photo shoot after the photographer’s assistant asked her to take just one more step back into better light. The model had been a donor, but with the impact of her fall, most working organs had been rendered useless. She had landed on her back, though, sparing her face.
