by Tim Poland
They’d both laughed it off and thought no more of it. It could be nothing. Nothing at all. A moment of distraction. Could happen to anyone of Keefe’s age. Anyone of any age, for that matter. But she’d keep a closer eye on him now, watch for the signs.
Sandy put the defective flies in her fly box, along with one more of the good ones. Stink continued to lick the squirrel tail as she gave his ruff a quick scratch, picked up her rod, and left the bungalow. She crossed the clearing to the streamside footpath and turned upstream, in search of the yellow stonefly hatch, brook trout, and Keefe, in that order.
Keefe at His Workbench: Yellow Stonefly
Unwinding from the spool, each turn of the yellow drubbing thread tight and contiguous with the turn it follows. Turn after turn along the shank, beginning to hint at a body, accumulating into a simulation of the thorax of Suwallia pallidula, so favored by Salvelinus fontinalis. Tiny shock of hair from a squirrel tail, bleached and dried, every bit as good as elk hair, more fitting for being native to this place. The strands are bound to the body, ragged and unshaped, then tufted and trimmed to the swept-back likeness of the translucent double wings. Different strands, divergent shapes, various textures, wrought into an alternative configuration. A believable shape to tell a truthful tale in a fraudulent form. A practical beauty. A beautiful lie. An aggregate woven around that which gives it reason and function, woven around the . . . around the . . . the thing . . . What is the name? Must it have a name? Did it ever have a name? Woven around the thing that carries the shape yet is at the same time the core and purpose of the shape. The thing . . . it must have a name, somewhere in its delicate curve. The thing that anchors the design crafted to duplicate and deceive.
3
THOUGH THE SUN WAS WELL BEHIND THE RIDGE, THERE remained more than enough light filtering through the newly leafing trees, and the cooling air still held much of the day’s warmth. The stonefly hatch was largely spent. Here and there, a few stragglers remained on exposed rocks or flitted through the air around Sandy, their tiny yellow bodies floating within the blur of their four translucent wings. She’d made it just in time to cast her simulated yellow stonefly into the dissipating flurry of real stoneflies. The trout would still be stirred up.
Sandy moved from her observation blind behind one of the larger boulders along the stream and stepped in a half crouch into the shallower water at the edge of the pool. She waded in with a seamless grace her gait could never match on land, barely stirring the water from its natural course. Stripping only a few feet of line from her rod, all that was required, she targeted the back of the pool. A single slight flick of her wrist set the line in motion and dropped her fly on the tongue of current feeding into the tail of the pool. The tiny yellow fly rode the surface of the water for barely a second before the fish hit it. As brook trout will do, the fish took the fly hard and fought fiercely. Time and familiarity had not diminished Sandy’s awe and respect for these small creatures. This degree of ferocity in a larger species of trout could have snapped her line handily, and Sandy never forgot that. Her rod bowed in a deep arc, and Sandy held it high, leading the scrappy fish quickly but smoothly into the shallower water around her legs. Cupping the fish in her hand, she slid her hook from the trout’s bony upper lip. Its speckled back glistened a deep blue-green across her wet palm; the bright orange of its abdomen and ivory-tipped belly fins would be brighter still during the fall spawning season. Sandy released the fish back into the stream, where it disappeared instantly into the safety of deeper water.
The pool was alive and responsive. This she had learned, yet she limited her disturbance to the tail of the pool. Now she could move to the head of the pool, to the churning chute of water pouring in from the pool above, to the swirling back eddies under the overhanging rock ledges where the bigger fish waited.
Slowly, cautiously, keeping to the left of the current, she waded toward the head of the pool and set her sights on the back eddy to the right of the chute. The rushing water cut through the opening and fanned out through the pool. The back eddy formed behind the more agitated water. Beneath a huge hump of stone that bent to the water, the back eddy swirled around a circle of calmer water where a brook trout could hold outside the main current, saving its energy, protected by the ledge of rock above, while the river brought food to it. That small circle of water was Sandy’s target. Here the bigger fish would be. She’d taken fish in this pool many times, but getting them out of the back eddy was always tricky. She’d have only one chance.
Gauging the distance across the seam of current, she fed a little more line from her reel. Success would count on two things. She would need to bounce the yellow stonefly off the rock hanging over the eddy, to make it act like an insect that had bumbled from its perch into the water. That she could do easily. The harder task would be to keep her line from collapsing into the current between her and the eddy, which would then jerk her fly suddenly downstream, startling her prey and sending it so deeply into hiding under the rock ledge that she’d never entice it back out today. Her gaze turned for a moment up the slope, following the cascading course of the stream from pool to pool, through forest and stone. In her enlivened flesh she felt the implacable heft of centuries that lifted these mountains and forged them into this watershed, spilling the rush of time and water down into this pool where she stalked her prey. She had learned the language of trout. She could speak with the waters of this pool, and the fish it held, in a tongue intelligible in the wild world of water and stone. Here, on this evening, she spoke fluently. Rod and arm, like a single thing, held high over the slicing current, she shot her fly out to the rock overhanging the eddy. It bounced from the stone and dropped into the eddy, barely disturbing the surface. The fly sat the surface of the eddy, hardly moving. For a moment it shone forth, a shimmering dot of blazing yellow on the dark, still water, before the fish struck.
Under the throbbing bow of her rod, the brook trout spun and dove into the depths of the pool under the churning current. The tension in her arm hummed with the song in her tight line as she knelt in the shallows and drew the fish to her. Freeing the hook from its lip, she cupped the big brook trout in her hand for only a moment, relishing the weight of this native fish that draped well over both sides of her palm. Among the descendants of the brown and rainbow trout stocked in the controlled waters of the lower Ripshin, a fish of this size would be typical, worthy of no special note. Here in the wild reaches of the Ripshin’s headwaters, an indigenous brook trout such as this one was a prize beyond account. The fish slid smoothly from Sandy’s hand, held for a moment to collect its senses, then vanished into the depths of the pool, in search of its haven under the hump of stone.
Sandy shook the water from her hand and reeled in her line. She’d arrived in time for the yellow stonefly hatch and made the most of it. The well-made fly had told the story it was intended to tell, and she had delivered the tale well. It was enough for the day. The late afternoon light in the ravine was growing dim. She waded around the tail of the pool, stepped out to the footpath, and followed the path a few yards to a break in the rhododendron. Ducking through the opening, she climbed up the embankment to where the fire road cut out of the forest and curved along the riverbed at this point. It was time to find Keefe. Sandy turned downstream.
A few hundred yards down the fire road it didn’t surprise Sandy to find Keefe at the old Rasnake homestead. Old-timers in the valley called it that, and so did Keefe on occasion. Up a slight rise from the fire road, the dense trees opened out into a clearing. In the clearing were the tottering remains of three fieldstone chimneys, all that remained of three humble cabins that housed the extended Rasnake family when they first moved into the valley after the government ran the Cherokee out. The clearing was a regular retreat for Keefe, and Sandy found him there often, especially late in the afternoon when the sun had dropped behind the ridge. Keefe’s rod leaned against one of the old chimneys, and he sat on the worn hearthstone, now caked with moss. He stared straight a
head at the other two chimneys across the clearing, his elbows on his knees, his hands hanging limp between his legs. He appeared startled when she walked up into the clearing, but immediately his face relaxed and he sat up from his slump and greeted her with the angler’s standard salutation. “Do any good?”
“Little bit,” Sandy replied, the angler’s standard response.
Keefe looked up at her from under the brim of his battered brown fedora, a grin dimpling into his face.
“That answer may be adequate for some other fool you meet on the stream. I think I merit a bit more detail, my dear.”
Sandy smiled, leaned her rod against the chimney next to Keefe’s, and sat down beside him on the mossy hearthstone. She rubbed her hand a few quick strokes across his back, as if trying to warm him if she had done it more vigorously. She left her hand on his shoulder and leaned lightly into his side.
“Well?” he said.
“Upstream, the pool down from where the fire road cuts above it. The big hemlock down on the far bank.”
Keefe nodded knowingly. “A few of the big ones in the back eddies there.”
Sandy nodded as well. “Bounced my fly off the boulder to the right, couple feet above the cutaway. Got one of those big ones.”
“Wonderful. On a yellow stonefly?”
“Yeah. I took a few from your bench. I was out.” Sandy made no reference to the flawed flies, but she looked tentatively at the side of Keefe’s face, searching for a readable sign.
“Good. That’s what they’re for,” he said.
Sandy stood and stretched, arching her back. “I’m hungry. You have anything to eat back there?”
Keefe pushed himself up from the hearthstone, took his rod, and handed Sandy hers. “I think we may be able to stir up something.”
Keefe walked a half step behind Sandy as they stepped out of the clearing onto the fire road. Sandy turned immediately downstream, and as she turned, she saw from the corner of her eye that Keefe seemed to hold back, for no more than a second, and that he expelled a shallow sigh before he turned down the fire road in step with her. Any other time she’d have noticed nothing in this moment, but now, after finding the botched stoneflies on his bench, she was on the alert. Had he found his haven in the clearing, but then not known how to return to the bungalow from there? In this place he had lived for over twenty years, this place he knew so intimately, had he been lost? For now, she would say nothing, only continue to watch for the signs that might form a pattern. Sandy took Keefe’s hand, something she rarely did, and held it close as they walked the fire road back to the bungalow. Keefe’s hand firmly returned the press of her grasp.
4
OPPORTUNITIES FOR SANDY TO GET TOGETHER WITH HER friend Margie Callander were occasional, at best, for all the usual reasons of work and family obligations. Margie worked as a nurse in the intensive care unit of the hospital up in Sherwood and did her best to manage two young sons from her first marriage, encroaching on their teenage years, and her husband of the last four years, J. D. Callander, the good-natured but overworked game and fish warden for the Ripshin Valley. That she and Sandy would both have a day off at the same time was rare, indeed. Margie agreed readily to Sandy’s proposal of meeting for breakfast at the Damascus Diner, followed by a little fishing up in the headwaters afterward.
“Oh, hell yes,” Margie had said when Sandy called. “I need a day away like you can’t believe. J.D.’s been spitting piss and vinegar for days now, and these boys will be out of school for the summer in a couple of weeks, at which point they’ll really start to drive me nuts.”
Damascus was a tiny patch of human congregation collected at a bend of Route 16 along the lower Ripshin, the road most locals referred to as the old river road. Midway between Sherwood to the north and Willard Lake to the south, it survived as a point of convergence for people driving north to jobs in Sherwood, if they were lucky enough to have them, and for fishermen towing their bass boats south to Willard Lake. Other than a few modest houses and mobile homes stretched along the bend, the meager social and economic life of Damascus emanated from two places, the Citgo station and the Damascus Diner. The Citgo station was an amalgam of gas station, convenience store, and bait shop and managed to make a go of it selling fuel, beer and cigarettes, lottery tickets, and incidentals to the locals who inhabited the homes and farms in the fields and ravines spread through the hills around Damascus. It sold more fuel, more incidentals, and tubs of night crawlers to fishermen passing through. For anything not available at the Citgo, which was quite a lot, folks drove the twelve miles up the old river road to the Walmart in Sherwood.
The Damascus Diner, the other half of community life in Damascus, sat across the road from the Citgo. A refurbished squat cinder-block building that had once been a welding shop, the diner sat in the middle of a fan of asphalt that provided space for parking. An oversized glass window where the garage door of the welding shop had once been fronted the diner; the rear of the diner reached within a few feet of the bank of the river. A large plywood placard hung over the front door. On a background of dark green paint, in meticulously hand-painted white block letters, “Damascus Diner” was written above a rudimentary outline of a fish around an equally rudimentary cross. The diner was operated by the women from the commune tucked in the ravine off Wilson Hollow Road. Furnishings inside the diner were of a simplicity in keeping with the sign. Scarred, thickly painted wooden booths sat around tables covered with red and white checkered vinyl tablecloths. On the walls, generic watercolor prints of rustic scenes interspersed with varnished wooden plaques engraved with Bible verses. The food was oily and heavy, ample and inexpensive, making the diner a popular spot with both local residents and those just passing through. The women who cooked the food and waited on the tables all moved through the grease-heavy air of the diner in their informal uniforms of straight, modestly restrained hair nearly as long as their ankle-length denim skirts.
Margie thanked the waitress when she topped off her coffee. Sandy held her hand over her cup and shook her head gently. She rarely drank coffee and when she did, only a little of it.
“To tell you the truth,” Margie said, “I have to wonder how a guy like that ever got through med school and residency. Such a priss. One of those, oh, what to call them? Sort of, the overgroomed type, if that makes sense. Every hair in place. Thin little beard, all so carefully trimmed. Always a tie on under his lab coat.”
Sandy grinned, nodded, and dabbed at the pool of egg yolk on her plate with a half-eaten piece of toast as Margie continued.
“I don’t know, there’s just something off with someone who spends that much time and effort fussing with himself. One time he’s in with a patient, and the woman’s having a reaction to the antibiotics he’s got her on. And while he’s examining her, well, she hurls all over him. Oh god, he goes running out of the room, tearing his lab coat off, screaming for a towel, and gagging like he was going to barf too. All I could do to keep from laughing. If I hadn’t been busy trying to take care of that woman, I’d have been rolling on the floor, howling. I swear, he shrieked like a little girl. Seriously, how does a weenie like that get through medical school?”
“I’ve come across a couple like that,” Sandy said.
Margie slid a forkful of home fries into her mouth and pointed her fork at Sandy’s plate. “You gonna eat that bacon?”
“It’s for Stink,” Sandy said, and glanced out the diner window to see Stink in the truck cab, his nose sticking through the three inches of open window. “But if you want it, go ahead.”
“No, no. Wouldn’t want to take food out of your child’s mouth. Besides, I’m getting fat and stuffed enough as it is. Not used to these big, greasy diner breakfasts.”
“Something to last you through a day of fishing.”
“More like last me into next week.”
Sandy smiled and wrapped Stink’s bacon in her paper napkin.
“Really, honey,” Margie said, “I’m so glad you called. You
r timing was perfect. Not to mention it’s been weeks since I’ve heard from you.”
“Well, busy with work. The usual.” Sandy shrugged, even winced with a bit of guilt in her face, knowing full well she shouldn’t run the risk of falling out of touch with the only real friend, other than Edith, she had.
“We all have work and other shit to attend to. We do, if we’re lucky these days. That’s not what I worry about. I worry about you reverting to a wild state, spending so much of your life out there in the wilderness, just you and James and your smelly dog. I half expect to hear that you’ve been found wearing animal skins, living off raw meat you’ve killed with your bare hands, keeping house in a cave.”
“Oh, stop it,” Sandy said. She chuckled, but knew the image had a certain appeal to her as well.
Only rarely did Sandy ever see anyone other than herself and Keefe up along the headwaters. Perhaps an occasional pair of day hikers or particularly ardent bird-watchers, only once that she could recall, another fisherman willing to trek up the rugged slopes for such small fish. No practical place to park outside the fire-road gate. The fire road itself, steep and badly rutted. The trail along the river, little more than an old game trail, snarled with exposed tree roots and stone outcroppings. Forbidding terrain for the casual visitor. Margie was closer to the truth than she might have imagined.
“It’s not a wilderness and you know it,” Sandy said.
“Pretty close. Plus it can get a little weird out there in places. Some spaced-out back-to-nature hippie commune or these toothless fucks out there in their so-called hunting camps.” Margie formed quotation marks in the air with her fingers. “J.D.’s told me about coming across that sort of kooky shit from time to time.”
“Nothing like that up near us.” Sandy startled herself by speaking of her and Keefe in the first person plural. She wondered if Margie had noticed and quickly moved the conversation on to cover her odd phrasing. “You afraid to go fishing up there in the wilds today?”
