by Tim Poland
A single, throaty bark emanated from the bed of the pickup parked by the trailer behind him. He walked to the truck, reached over the side panel, and released the dog from its kennel. A mongrel redbone leapt from the truck bed and ran to the edge of the firelight, where she squatted in the brush. After relieving herself, she trotted past the fire to a water bucket sitting by the trailer, into which she sunk her snout and slurped noisily.
He looked down at the dog, then stepped up into the trailer.
When he came back out of the trailer, he wore dark-rimmed glasses and a heavy flannel shirt and carried a large chunk of marrowbone thickly coated with shreds of raw meat. The dog sat quickly before him, and he gave her the bone.
The dog took the offered meal gently in her jaws and crawled under the trailer to eat. He walked to the edge of the fire pit and knelt on one knee, added a length of wood carefully to the blaze, and stared into the fire.
There had been no choice other than to shoot the man he’d collected from the roadside north of Sherwood. To remain off their maps, here in his sovereign land, no careless track could be left behind. The man was badly injured but still conscious. He may have seen enough to recall something later. There was nothing admirable in killing such a puny, pitiful man. It was merely necessary. He suffered no doubt, lost no sleep over it.
He buried the body in the floor of the storage cellar he’d dug into the hillside behind the trailer, where he kept his other meat—bear mostly, some venison. In the deep cool of the cellar, the dead man’s carcass would be secure, forgotten, protected from scavengers inclined to dig up the remains. There was nothing more to be considered. It was done. A thing of the past.
The payoff for the bear bladders and paws was good, as usual, so the business with the man’s body was a minor disruption with no damaging effects. Inevitably, there would be occasional problems to solve in this life outside restraint. He would continue to learn. Nothing he couldn’t manage.
He stepped to the seam at the farthest edge of firelight. From behind him, he could hear the dog gnawing at the bone under the trailer. He lifted his nose and breathed in the immensity of his solitude within the dark surround of the woods. Scenting the night, he drew in through his nose a series of staccato breaths. One. Two. Three, four, five. Yes, there would be the occasional adjustment to be made, irregularity to be dealt with, problem to solve. This grand solitude would not be among those problems.
5
RARELY, IF EVER, DID KEEFE FISH ANYWHERE AWAY FROM the headwaters of the upper Ripshin. For him, the quest for the fish was never a venture whose success could be calculated in pounds and inches, in the count of fish taken, in numbers of any kind. Keefe sought intimate contact with some sort of elemental condition he’d located in the headwaters, in the cascading streams and deep, glassy pools cradled in the stones boiled up out of and tumbling down the hillside. A fly rod, to him, was the language by which he could carry on a dialogue with that condition, and the native brook trout that had haunted these waters for centuries were his interlocutors. Over the past few years, Sandy had absorbed the nature of Keefe’s relationship to the headwaters and made it her own as well. Not only had she embraced this bond, but she now saw in it the answer to something for which she hadn’t, in fact, known she’d been searching. The answer had materialized before the question could be formed.
However, unlike Keefe, from time to time Sandy still felt the need for the heft and weight, the palpable thrill, of a big fish on the end of her line. She now knew something of what the headwaters could provide and how critical that provision had become to her. She could no longer survive without it. But one thing the headwaters could never provide was the thrashing leap of a large rainbow trout or the crafty, deepwater struggle of a big brown trout, both of which might shred her line and escape if she didn’t play them exactly right. To feed this occasional craving, she went to the tailwaters, downstream from the hydroelectric dam that marked the beginning of the lower Ripshin, just across Willard Road from her house.
A respectable caddis fly hatch had been on in the late afternoon when she returned from work, and she’d taken good advantage of the trout feeding on it in the two hours she had before the dam would begin to release water for power generation. She’d taken one decent brown trout and two rainbows by working her way upstream along the seam of the current. One of the rainbows, a wild, stream-bred descendant of the rainbow trout stocked in the river over the years, had brought to the contest the sort of weight and ferocity she sought. It had bent her rod and whipped her line frantically, tail-dancing across nearly the entire width of the river and back before she could put the fish in tow and bring it to hand. She held the caught trout by the tail with one hand and cupped its belly in her other. Before letting it loose, she assessed her prey—close to a pound and a half, at least sixteen inches long. The calculation felt good, as did the weight in her hand, and she allowed herself to enjoy the size of her prize for a moment before releasing it back into the stream.
Wading further upstream, nearing the path that lead from the river up to the road and across to her house, Sandy heard the warning siren from the dam. The siren announced that the release of water from the bottom of Willard Lake through the turbines of the dam was about to commence. In another nine or ten minutes a three-foot wall of water would arrive suddenly at her location downstream, making it dangerous, in fact impossible, to wade through the waters where she now walked. If she cast well, she would have just enough time.
During the winter, a dead hemlock tree up the riverbank had fallen, and the top thirty feet of the dead tree now rested submerged in one of the deeper, richer spots in the river. A snag like this would give both angler and fish the cover they sought. Sandy had yet to fish around this new feature the winter had deposited in the river. She’d saved it for last today. She knew there’d be a lunker holding somewhere down around the sunken branches.
Working herself slowly into position, Sandy set her feet and began to feed out line, sending her false casts away from her target until she had the right amount of line in play. When her line fit the distance to the snag, she shifted direction and delivered her cast, dropping her fly onto the edge of the flow folding around the fallen hemlock. She held her breath and only barely managed to resist the instinct to react when she saw the faint shimmer of gold move and shift within the pool. That gold would be the belly of a brown trout, and, from what she could see from her casting position, a big one. Maintaining her patience, she let the fly drift well past the snag before lifting her line and casting again. Her second cast brought the fly down onto the same fold of current, and the fish hammered it. Sandy set the hook and immediately leaned deeper into her crouch, arching her rod as far out to her right as she could to draw the fish into the middle of the river and away from the submerged snag, where it would surely tangle her line and break off. With the trout now moving into open water, she began a slow retrieve of her line while wading into more shallow water where her footing would be more stable. When the fish ran, she let it. When it dove and held, she retrieved it further toward her. Back and forth they went until the fish fatigued and Sandy drew it to her hand in the shallows.
As she had seen, the heavy belly of the brown trout glowed bright yellow. The gills were ribbed with deep grooves, and a slight hooked curve had formed in the fish’s lower jaw. A big one. An old one. A wise one. Easily three pounds. Twenty inches if it was a day. As the course of the fish had shifted during their contest, Sandy’s yearning shifted. Holding the big trout at the tail and belly, having bested an experienced, well-tested veteran of the river, she longed to kill it. Slip her thumb into the jaw and snap its neck. A tooth-lined jaw like this would likely cut the flesh at the base of her thumb, but not much before she could dispatch it. She might have the fish stuffed and mounted. It was certainly a prize most fishermen would consider worthy of that minor vanity. Or she might take her trophy to Keefe’s bungalow, gut it, and cook a trout dinner for two. A fish this size would provide a decidedly
sumptuous meal. Her arms still quivered from the fight as she held the fish at the surface of the water, cradling it gently in the current to replenish the oxygen it had lost in the struggle. Her fingers unfurled from the trout’s body. The fish held still for a second in the shallow water at her feet, then righted itself and rocketed away. Sandy’s eyes followed as the shining yellow streak of its belly disappeared in the depths.
Sandy reeled in her expended line as she waded across the river and climbed the bank up to the path. She walked four or five paces up the path, stopped, and turned to watch as the increased water level sent from the dam arrived. The gentle, riffled current of the river turned in an instant to a churning, deadly torrent. The same torrent that had consumed Vernon five years ago, but the scene did not replay itself for her now. That was finished. She thought only of the magnificent trout, stunned but free, holding in the depths under the surging flood.
MUD and brush kicked up along the path still clung to her damp boots and waders as she passed through the band of pines separating her place from the road and followed her narrow gravel driveway up to her little house. At the far end of the driveway, beside Sandy’s truck, lay the old tractor tire into which Stink often curled to sleep. He pulled himself out of the tire and sauntered a few steps toward Sandy to greet her.
“Such a fish I caught, sweetheart. Such a fish.” Sandy gave Stink a quick scratch behind the ears, then turned to the sound of Tommy Akers’s old red pickup emerging from the pines and rumbling up the driveway. She leaned her fly rod against the side of her truck and watched as her neighbor approached.
Tommy lumbered down from the cab of his truck, then reached back inside and retrieved a well-used plastic grocery bag. As he walked around his truck toward Sandy, Stink walked in a wide arc around him, stalking carefully back to his tractor tire, emitting a low, guttural growl as he moved. Once back inside the ring of his tire, Stink kept his eyes locked on Tommy Akers, his jowl flaps twitching with the growl he maintained.
“That damn dog just never has taken much of a shine to me.” Tommy looked at Stink, spit a thin brown stream onto the ground, and rested the palm of one hand on the great, protruding hump of his belly.
“Can you really blame him, Tommy?” Sandy said. “After all, you did shoot him once.”
“That much is true.”
Tommy Akers lived just up Willard Road from Sandy’s place on what he called the “skinniest” farm in the valley, an elongated stretch of land, somewhere less than sixty acres, wedged between Willard Road, the river, and what Tommy always called “that goddamned government dam.” He kept a massive vegetable garden and a couple dozen head of Angus beef cattle on the slender plot of land that had been in the Akers family for five generations. Tommy was, as he often said, the latest, and likely the last, in that long family line. There had been a son who’d enlisted in the army immediately after high school and was promptly shipped off to the first Gulf War, where he was promptly killed. In addition to his more conventional grief, his son’s death became yet one more proof to validate Tommy Akers’s suspicion of anything to do with the government. There was a daughter, too, but Tommy heard little from her these days. She lived in South Carolina with problems of her own.
“Now that I think of it,” Sandy said, “you took a shot at me once, too.”
“Oh Lord,” Tommy said, his round, stubble-covered, ruddy cheeks flushing still redder. “All these years, and I still feel just plumb awful about that.” Sandy had first encountered Tommy while fishing the tailwaters adjacent to his farm. He’d taken a hasty, poorly aimed shot at a groundhog raiding his garden. The spray of misguided birdshot had torn through the trees and splattered across the river right in front of Sandy.
“Good thing for Stink and me both that your aim isn’t better.”
“Looks like you been fishing.” Tommy nodded toward Sandy, still in her waders and fishing vest. “Do any good?”
“Little bit,” Sandy said. Her prideful response to the big brown trout had receded to the standard response.
Tommy had kept the family farm going with a fence-building business. A little over a year ago, he’d sold the business, planning to settle into a sort of retirement, just him and the wife, their garden and the cattle. His wife was dead before the summer was out. Sandy’s friendship with Tommy had most often been carried out away from his farm. Tommy would roll up the driveway in his red truck for one reason or another, or they’d talk window-to-window, their pickups stopped beside each other in the road, pointed in opposite directions. You could carry on a conversation from the cab of a pickup truck for a good long while on Willard Road. Sandy’d had only the most cursory encounters with Tommy’s wife. She was a quiet, retiring woman, marked, in Sandy’s estimation, by a certain timidity. According to Tommy, she’d never really rebounded from their son’s death, had withdrawn still further into the quiet of her house and garden. “Never could really dig out from under that one,” Tommy had said. “Not sure that she wanted to.” In keeping with her reticence, she’d kept whatever complaints she had to herself. By the time the cancer had been discovered, hospice was the only option. Sandy had come down to the farm to help from time to time, especially to tend to the delicate cleaning necessary for the failing body of a woman, which Tommy’s sausage-like fingers and broken heart could barely manage. Sandy had even helped some around the house and garden. She’d been out in the garden, on her knees, pulling weeds from around the cabbages, when Tommy stepped out onto the porch of his house. Sandy had seen the look before. Brushing the dirt from her hands onto her jeans, she’d walked to him and folded her arms around as much of his rotund body as she could, but all she’d been able to muster to say was “I’m sorry, Tommy.” She’d wished that Margie had been there then. At these moments, Margie knew exactly what to say. Always. At the funeral, Tommy had sat stunned, looking like a cow the moment after the maul strikes. Perhaps for the occasional help she’d given, perhaps because she’d been there at that moment, Tommy accorded Sandy a sort of reverential gratitude. Now and then, in his simple way, he brought her little offerings of that gratitude.
“What’s in the bag?” Sandy asked.
“Strawberries are coming in. I got more than I know what to do with.” Tommy held out the bag. Sandy took it and looked inside.
“Oh, they’re beautiful. And so many. Thank you, Tommy.”
“I got strawberries coming out my ears. Thought maybe you’d like some. Maybe bake a few pies. They’re mighty good for that.” Sandy had never baked a pie in her life.
“They look wonderful.” Sandy motioned toward her back door. “Come on in. I’ll get us something to drink.”
“Just as soon sit out here, if it’s okay with you.” Tommy lowered his girth into the one flimsy lawn chair behind Sandy’s house. “Spring’s fading out, and summer’s on the way in. Air’s too sweet to go in just yet. Would like a cup of that herb tea of yours. Gotten kind of partial to it. If you don’t mind.”
“It’d be my pleasure. Let me get a kettle on and get out of this gear. I’ll be right back.”
“Don’t take too long,” Tommy said, “or that damned dog of yours is liable to chew me all up.”
A few minutes later, Sandy returned, dressed in jeans and a dark green blouse with the sleeves rolled up to her elbows. She carried two mugs of chamomile tea. After giving a mug to Tommy, she settled onto the low concrete stoop at her back door. Tommy sipped at his tea and looked up the slope behind Sandy’s house to the twilight sky above the ridge.
“This stuff tastes like grass. And damned if I don’t like it. Spending too much time with them cattle. Starting to eat like them now.”
Sandy smiled and dipped her lips to her mug of tea. They sat quietly for a few minutes, drinking their tea, watching the darkening light in the sky, and listening to the faint snarl of Stink in his tractor tire.
“Haven’t seen you in a couple weeks,” Sandy said. “How have you been?”
“Oh, I been plumb crazy. Still just don’t k
now what to do with myself sometimes.”
Tommy wore the weight of his grief like a second belly heaped onto the already prodigious one that pushed his T-shirt to its limits.
“I keep the garden going, but mostly because she set such store in it. Like it’s, well, sort of part of her still there.”
Sandy held her mug in both hands and nodded as she listened.
“When the strawberries come in, she always put up a load of them in preserves. Best you ever tasted.” Tommy’s chest heaved as he choked back a sob. He washed it down with a swallow of his chamomile. “Thought it might be better if I made her preserves for her, do the things she used to do. Well, what a hell of a mess I made of that. Thought I’d best bring you some of the berries before I ruined the whole lot.”
Sandy reached out and softly squeezed Tommy’s forearm, all she could think to do. Again, she wished Margie was there to say something, the right thing.
“I just can’t get my head around it. She was always so quiet. Never made a fuss. Barely made a peep when she did talk.” Tommy sucked down a huge gulp of tea. “Her such a quiet woman and all, so how come the place is so all-fired noisy now that she’s gone?”
A hawk rode the air above the ridge behind the house, dipped into a wide spiral, then dropped behind the tree line. “There goes a red-tail,” Tommy said. “Hope he’s headed down to my place. Some days, seems I’ve got more rabbits and groundhogs than I do strawberries.”
SOME nights, if the weather was good, Stink would still sleep outside inside his tractor tire. But most often these days, he preferred to be with Sandy. And since the cow ticks on Willard Road seemed to have a special preference for Stink’s flesh and blood, Sandy had to check him regularly for the parasites. She hadn’t examined him in over a week, and she was certainly going to do so before he climbed up into bed with her tonight. Under the bright fluorescent lights in the kitchen, Sandy sat cross-legged on the floor and placed a lit candle and a square of tinfoil beside her. In her hand she held the forceps from her fishing vest.
