by Tim Poland
“Stink. Come here, baby.” Sandy could hear a huff of expelled air from the dog’s lungs as he slid from the sofa in the living room and walked slowly into the kitchen. “That’s a good boy,” she said, and patted her thigh. Stink took two more steps and lay down beside her, resting his head in her lap. Sandy set the forceps on the floor and began to run her fingers meticulously through the dog’s fur, starting at the ruff of his neck. Right away, in the thick muscle and bone behind one of his ears, she found a particularly swollen tick. With her forceps, she pinched the tick at the head and tore it from Stink’s skin. The tiny tips of the arachnid’s legs wiggled around the edges of its distended, blood-sodden body. Sandy held the tick in the candle flame until the bloody bag of its body popped and shriveled to a charred nugget. She dropped it onto the square of tinfoil and turned back to her dog. “That’s one,” she said, and continued her examination.
Shortly after the hawk flew over, Tommy had finished his tea and followed it home, but the density of his grief had lingered with Sandy. Of course, as a nurse, she had seen the outpouring of grief on many occasions, but she’d always observed it from a well-schooled distance. The weight of loss that Tommy Akers toted around in his vast belly was nothing new to her. She’d seen his relentless pain before, felt genuine pity for him, but when she reached out to embrace him, to touch his forearm, she reached across an inviolable gulf. His loss was a private agony, and nothing of hers. Her own mother’s death had left no recognizable track. Where nothing had been given enough to leave a mark, there had been no hurt to heal. Tonight, something was different. As her fingers raked through Stink’s fur, Sandy felt that impassable gulf begin to shrink. She was afraid.
It had been a week since she and Margie had gone up to the headwaters for a day of fishing and intruded upon Keefe’s occasional ritual of fishing in the nude. She’d been a bit embarrassed for unburdening her fears to Margie the way she had on their drive up to the bungalow. Keefe had been fine that day. More than fine. He’d carried himself with unflappable poise as he walked naked before two young women—young women on the cusp of middle age, in fact, but much younger than he, one of whom was giggling openly. After getting dressed, he’d asked them both inside, had been gracious and hospitable, charming even. He served coffee, for him and Margie, herb tea for Sandy. They had sat around the coffee table, which he cleared off for their cups, and chatted while he stroked Stink’s head. Sandy’s dog was particularly fond of Keefe and lay on the sofa between him and Margie, his head in Keefe’s lap much the way he rested in Sandy’s lap now. Sandy sat in the armchair. Keefe had asked about their fishing plans for the day, recommended certain pools, suggested certain fly patterns, gave them each a few newly tied flies from his bench. Margie wouldn’t have known if the fly was properly tied or not, but she examined the offered flies closely and glanced surreptitiously at Sandy, who cautiously nodded confirmation. The new flies were perfect. Keefe asked after J.D., who had taken a class with him at the community college many years previous. He’d even shared with Margie anecdotes of her husband as an overly earnest young student. Noting with both affection and sympathy how disconcerted J.D. had become when Keefe suggested that he might try, in the essay he was laboring with, to be a bit more flexible with the rules of the five-paragraph essay, Margie laughed, almost snorted, and nodded in enthusiastic agreement. “Oh, don’t you know it,” she had said. “Some things never change, bless his heart.”
Sandy ran her fingers over the lump of encysted birdshot in Stink’s hind leg, checking to be certain that the cyst hadn’t grown in size. The carcasses of four scorched ticks lay on the tinfoil beside her. She’d go over him once more and that should do it.
The fishing had been very good that day, the brook trout rising eagerly to yellow stoneflies and several other patterns they threw at them. Even Margie caught several good fish.
“They really are so beautiful, honey,” she had said to Sandy. “Kind of little though, eh?”
Late in the morning, they’d taken a break, sitting on a flat seat of rock, their feet extended into the water. Margie lit a cigarette and smoked while Sandy tied on a new yellow stonefly. The one she’d had on previously had been chewed to shreds by the dozen or so fish she’d taken so far that day.
“You know, honey,” Margie said, “if there’s dementia setting in, I sure as hell couldn’t see any sign of it today. Except maybe for the whole fishing in the buff thing.”
Sandy nodded and clipped off the excess tippet from the newly replaced fly.
“You know how this sort of thing can come on,” Margie said. “It can be really intermittent, take a long time to develop, and it can be so different for different people.”
“I know. That’s the problem.”
“Sorry I can’t help, honey, but he seemed fine to me today. Lovely, really. Only way to know for sure is get him in for an examination.”
“Fat chance he’d ever agree to that,” Sandy said.
“Then let’s just hope you’re full of shit, like you said.” Margie draped her arm around Sandy and hugged her tightly to her side.
“Yeah, let’s hope.”
But the fly had been cast, and now it was riding on the current. Sandy would have to stay on the alert.
She had discovered only one additional tick in her final run over Stink’s hide. She blew out the candle, crumpled the burned ticks into the foil, and tossed it into the trash.
“All better now?” Sandy said, and opened the back door. “Better go out once more before bed.”
While Stink sniffed and peed around a few select spots behind the house, Sandy stood in the doorway, listening to the crickets, gazing into the black night.
The texture of Tommy’s grief still clung to her. She had never known a fear like this. Before coming to the Ripshin Valley, and to the headwaters in particular, she’d never been connected to anything closely enough to fear its loss so deeply. Loving in this way was too new for her to understand it yet. For perhaps the first time in her life she was able to love enough to fear losing what she loved, and it galled her she couldn’t take that fear into her hands and wring a straight answer out of it. And so much of this new loving, as Margie had said, had been wrapped around things so much older than herself. Keefe, Edith, even Stink, she thought, as she watched her old dog raise his leg against one of the trash cans behind her house, then waddle past her back into the house.
When she stood immersed to her knees in one of the crystalline pools and looked up the slope, taking in the exquisite cascade of the headwaters, she felt the thrust of time. The mountain, the stones, the water, they were all dying. One day the round world would be finished creating itself and shrivel to lifeless dust, but that followed according to the click of geologic time. Her brief, paltry life would not last to encounter a grief so crushing. But Keefe was a man, wrapped in aging flesh as vulnerable as any other man. Edith, like any other woman. Stink, like any other dog.
That day, after she’d taken Margie back to her car at the Damascus Diner, Sandy had returned to Keefe’s and spent the night. When they shared a bed, their occasional lovemaking was generally gentle, even-tempered. Pedestrian, by most standards. But that night Sandy had been ardent in her desires, leaving Keefe exhausted and not a little taken aback. She had pressed herself into him with fierce abandon, as if she could draw a diagnosis, an answer to her fears, directly from his body through her fingers and mouth, her belly and thighs.
Stink walked back to the bedroom, and Sandy picked up the phone and dialed Keefe’s number. She was grateful there’d been a telephone line already strung back to Keefe’s bungalow and that he’d finally relented a couple years ago when she asked him to have it reactivated. When he picked up, Keefe sounded muddled and disoriented.
“James. It’s me,” Sandy said. “Are you all right?”
Keefe took a moment to respond, but then his voice came over the line with more clarity. “Fine, my dear, fine.” Sandy always found herself oddly pleased by Keefe’s quaint, almost fo
rmal tone when he addressed her with terms of endearment. “Appears I fell asleep reading on the sofa again. What did you need?”
“Nothing. I haven’t been up there for a couple days, and I just wondered how you were doing.”
“Quite fine, my dear, though it seems I need to select more stimulating reading.”
Sandy smiled.
“Had a bit of excitement here earlier,” Keefe continued. “Something was up on the roof. By the time I got outside, it had bolted. Only just caught a parting glimpse of it disappearing into the trees. Bobcat, probably.”
“A bobcat? I haven’t seen one up there for at least a year.”
“Me either, but I can’t imagine what else it might have been.”
When Sandy hung up with Keefe, she breathed more easily. The weight of grief and fear that Tommy had left behind began to lift a little. Still, she would have to be vigilant. There was no other choice for her now.
Walking back to the bedroom, she stopped, returned to the kitchen, and picked up the phone again. Margie answered on the second ring. “Hey, honey. What’s up?” Sandy thought she might never get used to caller ID.
“I was wondering,” Sandy said.
“What? Shoot,” Margie said.
“I was wondering. Do you think you could teach me to bake a pie?”
Sandy smirked and hung her head, holding the phone to her ear while she waited for Margie to stop laughing.
Summer
Keefe at His Workbench: Black Caddis
A few turns of iridescent yellow at the hook end of the shank, to imitate the egg sac. Not a crucial component of the pattern. More a fanciful conceit, perhaps even an indulgence. A strand of impracticality laced into the weave of practical beauty—deepening the beauty, possibly; adding nothing to the practicality, for certain. A simulation of an outline. A shadow of a shadow. Fabricated to fall on the rippled surface in the late afternoon light, presenting a palpable fraud intended to hint at something barely there. Lay the hackle to the shank and hold it down, but loosely. At this juncture, form is no matter—scissors and thread will impose that in a moment. Look only at the raw bundle of hair, dark, thick, and disheveled like Alice’s in the wind on the cliffs that day the fog rolled in from the North Atlantic and enveloped us, dissolving us to shadowy outlines as the mist filled our mouths, coated our lips, her lips raised to my cheek. Hers was dark and thick like this hackle, not like . . . like her, this one who comes here so often now, at first an interloper but now . . . yes, now so welcome. Desired, even. She, this other one who fishes with such resolute elegance, her with the hungry eyes and starved heart, her hair is yellow and dun, not of this pattern. Call her yellow stonefly. Her hair is not so yellow as that, but it seems fitting to call her so. Until the name returns. Tie the hackle firmly to the shank, fluff it, clip off the excess at the tail and head. Form is executed. Finished. A bit whimsical with the tease of yellow glimpsed within the black, but perfectly practical. Beautiful.
6
SUMMERS IN THE RIPSHIN VALLEY, BECAUSE OF ELEVATION and the surrounding mountains, air temperatures rarely got much past eighty degrees. But most summers, usually somewhere during the first week or two of June, the valley would get hit by a brief heat wave, with several days of temperatures at ninety and above before the weather returned to its more moderate conditions. This heat wave was nothing out of the ordinary. Completely typical for this place at this time of year.
Sandy walked into the nursing home wearing a sleeveless yellow top, khaki cargo shorts, and a pair of wading sandals. Only midmorning, and it was already hot outside. The skin on her bare arms grew taut with goosebumps when she passed from the torrid heat of the parking lot into the air-conditioned lobby of the nursing home. Neither her house nor her truck had air conditioning, so the sudden shift of temperature sent a shock of chill through her.
Joyce Malden held court at the nurses’ station, filling the ears of two nurses’ aides. “Oh, I saw Rhonda Mullins up at the Walmart last week, and don’t you know she looked a fright, poor thing. Hair every which way, bags under her eyes, what a mess. And can you blame her, bless her heart, given all they’re saying about her husband now?”
Sandy gave Joyce Malden and the nurses’ station a wide berth, not wanting to get drawn into the orbit of Joyce’s gossip. She kept her eyes straight ahead, down the hallway. Edith would be waiting by now. Sandy had heard enough of the gossip here and there to know that the authorities and Randy Mullins’s wife didn’t have the first clue as to what happened to him. She had seen the flyers about the missing man, with photograph, phone numbers, and an offer of a reward for information. The flyers were plastered all over the Ripshin Valley, stapled to trees and utility poles, tacked up on public bulletin boards, taped in storefront windows and beside checkout counters. The flyers had grown tattered and faded with time and exposure to the elements. The ones on bulletin boards were being crowded out by more recent concerns and announcements. One man was missing, simply gone, and whether his absence was merely a curious news item or a loss that could etch its weight onto the face of a woman shopping for groceries at Walmart, the pulse of the valley beat on without him.
The lack of official clues and information in the case presented no obstacle to Joyce Malden. “No, really. His car was full of those awful movies. And it wasn’t just that. He was selling them, too. Had a place down in Bristol where he produced that horrible smut. And now they’re saying he was in cahoots with criminal types in Knoxville and owed them money. Well, doesn’t take much imagination to know how that would turn out. Poor Rhonda.”
Joyce’s voice faded out behind Sandy as she made her way down the hallway. As she expected, when Sandy reached her room, she found Edith dressed and waiting in her wheelchair. Not often, but on occasion, Sandy and Edith had taken outings like this before, and Edith was always eager to get started. She wore a pair of brown, soft-soled shoes, dark slacks, and a purple cardigan sweater. Her gnarled hands were folded over one another in her lap.
“It’s pretty hot out, Edith,” Sandy said. “Sure you want to wear that sweater?”
“Freezing in here with this air conditioning,” Edith said. “Besides, at my age, dear, the blood runs a good deal thinner than yours. I’ll be fine. Can we go now?”
“Are you sure you’re up for this today, Edith?”
“Of course I’m not up for it. I’m old as rope and can’t walk on my own damned legs. A better question would be, are you up for it?”
“Always,” Sandy said.
“Well then, good. Let’s get going, shall we?”
As Sandy pushed Edith toward the lobby and the front doors, both she and Edith could clearly hear Joyce Malden still holding forth, retelling her latest to another nurses’ aide and one of the maintenance men.
“Oh Lord, but that woman’s a gasbag,” Edith whispered over her shoulder to Sandy. “Get us out of here, please, dear. Don’t think I could bear another word, bless her heart.”
Sandy smiled and pushed the chair a bit faster as the two women passed out of the nursing home and rolled across the parking lot to Sandy’s truck.
Older than rope, Edith had said of herself. In fact, she was likely older than most rope still in service. Ninety-four, pushing ninety-five. Though her body had been fading for some years, her mind remained sharp, her will firm, and her desires unabated. More than anything, as far as Sandy could tell, Edith longed to be out of doors, her thin, nearly translucent skin in direct contact with the unhoused, natural world. And so, from time to time, if the weather was good, if Sandy was off work, and if Edith was up to it, which she most always was, Sandy would collect Edith in her pickup truck and take the old woman out for a few hours. Early on, Sandy had proposed various destinations for these outings, but she had long since learned not to bother. Their destination was always the same. On these rare and precious days that Edith got to leave the nursing home, she wanted to go one place, and one place only. The river.
Sandy pulled the truck into a gravel turnout on a
tight bend of the old river road, about three miles south of Damascus. About ten feet down the embankment from the road, the lower Ripshin fanned out into a wide pool, thirty feet across and twice as long. The pool was cut by twin currents produced by a boulder that split the flow of the river at the head of the pool. Gushing around the boulder, the two seams of current framed the deep, still center of the pool. At the base of the embankment a wide, flat ledge of rock bordered the river, jutting out over it slightly. It was no more than a quarter mile upstream from where Edith had grown up, from where she had lived most of her life.
“My special place,” she had told Sandy on one of their first trips here. “Funny, isn’t it? Called it that when I was a child, and now, old as I am, I can’t think to call it anything else.”
While Edith waited in the truck cab, Sandy began to unload their things and carry them down the embankment to the river. She slung her purse over her shoulder and slid her spare fly rod from behind the truck seat. On these days with Edith, her emergency gear was more than adequate. Edith’s wheelchair lay folded in the bed of the truck, and folded by it was the aluminum lawn chair that usually sat behind Sandy’s house. Along with the lawn chair, Sandy picked up a large tote bag that contained the lunch Sandy had prepared for them. Her load was light, and Sandy sidestepped down the slope of the embankment with ease. She set her rod and reel and the tote bag off to the side of the rock ledge, then opened the lawn chair and set it in the center of the ledge. Before heading back up the slope to get Edith, she gripped the arms of the chair and gave it a little shake to confirm it was situated securely.
