by Peter Heller
“I wanna do it again,” she said.
“Again? What?” Jack said.
She turned and he could barely see her in the dash lights but he could tell she was making a face—her Am I talking to a frigging child expression. She unzipped her short wool jacket.
“The kissing thing.”
In the dim light he could see the curve of her breasts in the sheer blouse. She reached up and pushed her long hair back past her ear and now he could see the paleness of her neck, the silver earring, her collarbone, barely. He swallowed. He had sworn he wouldn’t unsettle himself now, not this close to everything that had happened; he needed just a little solid ground for just a little while. And he’d screwed it up in the bar. And he liked her more than he’d liked anyone for a long time.
“It’s not my M.O.,” she said. “I’m pretty shy that way and I like being in my own company a lot.”
“I get that,” he said.
“But…”
“But,” he said.
“There’s nothing on earth I want more right now than for you to scoot over here and touch me. I don’t really care how.”
She reached for his hand on the shifter and picked it up and placed it against her ear and he could feel the curve of her jaw and the heat of her neck and she kissed the inside of his wrist. And then she was kissing the soft parts of his palm and then his hand went into her hair and he leaned over and tipped her face up to his. And now there was no crowded pub, no men in black caps, just the two of them in the dark and he was falling. Almost as if into a rock pool from a great height, but it was all warm not cold and he was murmuring and breathing and she was all around him and he was still reaching for her, still falling, and he relinquished himself into her goodness and he went deaf and blind. And so he did not hear the passing car or see if it was a dark late-model Jeep.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Three things happened next that surprised him.
1. When he parked his truck inside the gate at the lodge and they walked down the sandy road to the cabins they did not hold hands or talk, but they walked slowly and their shoulders bumped in a genial rhythm and the aspen rustled. He felt easier in her company than he had in anyone else’s for a long time.
2. He slept like a log and dreamless until just before daybreak.
3. At very first light he coasted the cruiser bike down to the lodge. Just when he knew Shay would put out the first pot of coffee. And Cody was sitting on the edge of the porch, not in a chair but on the planks themselves, holding a steaming cup in two hands. He was lanky and loose-jointed even seated, and he had that air of a man squatting beside a campfire. Also he seemed to be listening to the daybreak breeze with his whole body. Jack had grown up with boys who could have been Cody’s cousins, or brothers, and he knew when a man was good to have in your outfit and probably dangerous otherwise.
“Morning,” Jack said.
Cody swiveled his head. Jack knew Cody had heard the crunch of the bike tires on pine needles, but he only looked up now. “Grab a cup” was all he said.
Jack did. Inside the lodge, no one was at the crackling hearth yet and the lights, the ones that were on, were dimmed. All but the standing lamp by the coffee setup. He liked the quiet. He went to the farthest of the three pots—he didn’t read the label, he was getting used to where they kept the dark roast—and he filled a mountain lion mug and walked back out to the porch, sat beside his colleague. The one whose truck had gone right through Kreutzer’s big security gate about sixteen hours before. Jack wanted to ask Cody how the fishing was yesterday afternoon, where he had taken the couple, etc., just to see how a kid like this would go about lying. But the wading boot in the spruce duff, the image of it, made him think twice. “Good day yesterday?” was all he said.
Cody shrugged. “Like every other pretty much.”
They were looking at the stocked fish pond ringed with aspen. No trout rose but a fat kingfisher sat on a dead limb almost over the water. It was a perfect perch and Jack wondered if the management didn’t cut it for a reason. Maybe it was entertaining to watch the bird hunt.
“You?” Cody said.
“Good. It’s good water.”
“About as fine as any mountain stream you’ll ever fish, I’d say. Except for Tomichi Creek, where you’re going today.”
“I am?”
“Yep. Jensen told me to tell you. Pack a lunch. Alison K marked it down for day three.” Cody stuck two fingers in the zip breast pocket of his Carhartt and fished out a key. It was on a marlin keychain, which seemed weird. But then Den probably had a fishing lodge in Barbados. The tail was a bottle opener. “There’s two gates, same lock.”
“What’s the opener for?”
“Mr. Den says it’s for cracking the Guinness when the client catches the biggest brown they’ve ever seen. I guess he never opened a bottle with the back of a knife.”
“Huh.”
From the same pocket Cody fingered out a folded slip of paper. “Here’s the directions. Simple but you’ll need to know the mileage from the turnoff. No cell service out there, either, so don’t bother mapping it. Also, there’s a new couple coming this afternoon. You’ll meet ’em at the bar before dinner.” Now Cody looked straight at Jack. The same flat gray eyes. Wolfish in their watchfulness. Dispassionate, and holding distances Jack bet no one had ever traveled. Cody said, “You haven’t been to happy hour much.”
“Just getting settled is all.”
Cody didn’t comment. He turned back to look at the pond. He sipped his coffee.
“Is Jensen gonna guide?” Jack said.
Cody winced. “Jensen?”
“Yeah. Is he gonna guide?”
“Jensen doesn’t guide.”
“Who’s gonna guide the new couple?”
Cody didn’t say anything. He watched the pond. After a while he said, “Maybe they don’t wanna fish. Some folks come just for the peace and quiet.”
Peace and quiet, Jack thought. Shots fired, and snarling mastiffs, and barn owls. But he kept his mouth shut.
Cody stood. “Refill?” he said.
“I’m good,” Jack said. “I’ll get one in a minute.”
He watched the pond. Gray green glass with tendrils of mist coming off the water. A spreading ring, now two, as of passing rain—the quiet feeding of a trout. The kingfisher held his perch. Jack heard the yaw of a screen door and he looked to his right, past the porch, and saw Shay come out of the back door of the kitchen carrying steel food trays, two stacked. She was wearing a maroon Arc’teryx softshell and a light knitted wool cross-country ski hat cocked jauntily on her forehead. She didn’t see him. She loaded the trays into the back of a golf cart parked there and pulled open the screen door again and disappeared inside. A moment later she came out with two more trays, loaded them on top of the others, then went back for two stainless insulated coffee urns like the ones inside, and a large carafe of orange juice. She packed those, too, climbed into the cart, and drove onto the track on the far side of the pond. The cart bumped silently on its electric motor up into the aspen. Jack knew that the cart path climbed the hill and passed behind the main office house and linked to the parking lot by the gate. On the far side of which were equipment and supply sheds. The carts were used by the housecleaning and maintenance staff, and apparently by servers like Shay.
Kingfishers are easily startled. Jack had fished with them all his life, and he liked how they would perch upstream and watch him work a creek—he liked to think it was one fisher observing another—but as soon as he waded up just a few feet to cast for new water they were off: a downward lilting arc with a swoop up to the next perch. And repeat. They were good company and he had fished with a single bird for miles. But Jack noticed that this bird did not even flinch as Shay drove the golf cart past his chosen tree: this was the bird’s territory and he must have watched her enact thi
s ritual every morning and he was used to her.
The trays were the steel flats used by caterers and schools and made to slide into racks. The same used at the Orvis fishing camp in the Adirondacks he and Wynn had worked before their Canada trip three years ago. He figured Shay had loaded at least a score of breakfasts.
Were they for staff? He doubted it. As he had geared up in the mornings he had heard the sounds of cars entering the gate for the day’s work and later noticed the dozen vehicles parked next to his. Most of the workers except maybe Jensen, who seemed to live on the property somewhere, arrived having eaten already. Huh.
Jack heard the latch behind him and the clomp of packer boots and Cody sat beside him again at the edge of the porch. Didn’t say a word. Ten or fifteen minutes passed. Two young guides enjoying their first cup and just watching the dawn drain the last pockets of darkness out of the canyon. What could be better than this? Jack said it to himself, his mantra, and he tasted the coffee and then watched as Shay in her cart reemerged from the trees on the far side of the pond and swung in beside the kitchen door. She lifted her hand to Cody and then did a double take as she noticed Jack sitting right behind him. And she waved again, but tentatively. Jack waved back.
Had Shay seemed startled? Yes. He noted it. Noted it along with every other messed-up detail and sign. Sign of what? He had no idea. But they were starting to stack up.
* * *
•
Breakfast was faster than usual. Cody ate with his golden couple out on the deck, beside the open fire. Jack glanced out there a few times and thought they seemed dulled again—no quick smiles and easy laughter, no spirited hand gestures of a caffeine-fueled story. She wore a long-billed fishing cap for the first time, pulled down low. Noted. Will and Neave ate at their table closest to the hearth, as far away as they could be from him and Alison K. They barely nodded a greeting, and they had dark circles under their eyes as if bruised, and again he thought they looked hungover.
He and Alison ate with gusto and didn’t say much. Not out of any awkwardness, but because they didn’t have to. He had never felt such easy concord with a woman. Not that he had a ton of experience. After he’d broken it off with Cheryl he’d been with a couple of girls at Dartmouth, but they were flings, he guessed. One was kindled on an outing club wilderness ski trip up in the college grant just before Christmas, a week of cutting cross-country ski tracks through deep woods and camping beside iced-over brooks. So cold even the ledge drops were frozen, and they’d used an axe to break the glass beneath them. She was Margaret, a generous-spirited New Hampshire girl who had grown up with horses as he had, and he thought he might love her. It had lasted into March, until she’d had to leave school for good to take care of her dying mother. Jack had never understood why she’d broken it off; he had a truck, after all, he could’ve driven over a couple of days a week. The other was pure spring fever, a senior who had chatted him up during a bluegrass hoedown at his friend Andy’s cabin. Andy was a nut—a hellacious rock and ice climber, banjo player, and brilliant engineer who did zero anything by the book. Jack had met him at the first outing club meeting he and Wynn had attended freshman fall. There were maybe forty students seated around this giant cedar table, and Andy started whispering to Jack French Canadian jokes told in accent. Jack the introvert had been charmed and responded with some of Uncle Lloyd’s cowboy jokes. They both laughed so hard they’d gotten kicked out. Andy’s truck was outside and he had a six of PBR on the front seat and they’d driven down to the river and polished it off and told the rest of their jokes and stories with appropriate levels of volume and were fast friends after that. Andy graduated that spring and got a job just upriver at the US Army’s cryogenic research lab and often invited Jack and Wynn out to his place for dinners and music nights. Usually seven or eight showed up with instruments and it was either bluegrass or old-time country à la Merle Haggard. The group was outside on a late April night playing “Ramblin’ Fever,” and Jack was leaning against the cabin wall with a Dos Equis, and the singers were lofting into the chorus when he heard a contralto to his right and he practically bumped into the prettiest girl he had seen since he’d left Colorado. Pretty like I’m-going-to-Duke-Medical-School-and-I-can-run-seven-minute-miles-through-hills pretty. That had lasted just over a month until she’d graduated.
But this was different. Very. Suddenly he wasn’t making an effort, not any at all, and he didn’t feel in her company like he was some stranger to himself.
They ate breakfast fast; threw his pack, a small cooler, and their fishing gear into the back of his truck and drove out to the bottomland ranch and the slow, winding blackwater creek.
* * *
•
They fished for four hours straight. Like many creeks that meander through the broader valleys of the West, the private upper stretch of the Tomichi twisted on itself and twisted back in a series of looping bites as if resisting with every turn its surrender to a larger stream. It would take its own sweet time and nose into every oxbow and never offer a view past the next tight bend. Jack thought it was like reading some of the South American novelists who drove him crazy and whom he couldn’t stop enjoying. How their stories twisted and mazed and got lost in themselves. On Tomichi, the same intractable spirit wound the stream through thick walls of willows and alders. The thinnest margin of gravel bar here and there, but mostly the brush was overhanging. It was hard wading and there was no place at all to stretch out a cast. It was as if God had designed a creek to harbor the balkiest brown trout on earth. Jack had heard stories of some truly great fishers getting skunked out here.
At least there was no wind to speak of. The clouds blew by on their own cold currents and striped the bends with shadow, but down on the water the dark pools were nearly glass. And the morning warmed fast and the hatches drifted up and sparked in sunlight; and with a few tips from Jack, Alison got her roll cast going and flipped her nymphs across the creek without snagging the brush.
She hummed, and he relished the professional distance he kept between them as she fished. Sometimes she sang to herself. And it was strange—her voice was so rich, and broke so sweet, and seemed to flow past itself in layers like sliding water—and there was so much truth in it, and pain—he felt that it wreathed him. He didn’t need to touch her. He stayed back the guide’s four feet and he enjoyed just watching: she kept a rhythm in her casts, and in the stripping in of line, and in her steps forward, as if she were using the music in her head to keep time.
They ate lunch in the sun on the one sandbar broad enough to sit on. He bit into the chicken salad on toast and inhaled the slow-water tannin scent of the creek. The light gleamed off the narrow leaves of the willows the way it does only in late August. They shared a bottle of ginger kombucha and then shared another.
In the early afternoon they saw the silent rings of the trout dapping the surface and after that she casted a single light dry fly. She flipped it backhand up under the branches and let the tiny pale tuft touch the water as if blown on the breeze.
“Pure,” she said over her shoulder. “Feels pure.”
“All fishing’s pure,” Jack said.
“Right, if it’s so pure we don’t need to get grandiose and talk about it.”
“What I was going to say.”
She caught fish. Not many, but one brown that seemed to fill the net with such muscular defiance Jack released it with relief and a quiet salute.
As the sun lowered over the Sawtooths they turned to each other and without a word they packed it in. They found a break in the brush and pushed through. They climbed over a sagging barbed-wire fence, and followed the ruts of a four-wheel track through sage and wheatgrass back to the truck. Warmer here than in the canyon. They sat on the tailgate and pried off the wading boots and then stood on the dirt and pushed and tugged off the waders one leg at a time.
“What could be better than this?” Jack murmured.
“What?”
“What I always try to tell myself. What could be better than this?” He was sitting on the tailgate and she was standing on one leg wrestling to get the wet neoprene sock of her wader over her heel. She glanced up at him and blew a strand of hair off her face and her greenish eyes were lit in the long sun.
“I like that,” she said. “Why do you have to try to tell yourself?”
Jack shrugged and reached beside him and pried off the lid of the cooler with one hand and dug a can out of the ice. “Hawaiian Punch. I’m sure there’s beer in here.”
“I’ll take it,” she said, and reached a hand out unsteadily, still on one leg like a heron. “Thanks. That was pretty special.” She raised the can. “And this is the hardest part of fishing, for sure—getting off the waders.”
“Hold on.” Jack hopped down. “I forgot my job.” He knelt beside her and she bent the wadered knee and held her foot back like a horse waiting to have her hoof picked, and he tugged on the bootie and almost pulled her off balance, and then he set a hand on the back of her hip and tugged again. She was wearing black workout tights and there was nothing underneath them. He pulled the wader down and off and then she turned around. The hand that had been on her hip slipped over the rise and fall of her pelvis as she turned, and he was looking straight into a pitch of black nylon and the sheen of it off the swell of her pubis, and then he felt her hand on the top of his head. He felt dizzy.
“Um,” she said.
“Um.” He wanted her, and he didn’t. She was a superstar celebrity. Wynn had dated into a celebrity family once and it had not gone at all well. Jack knew that he’d end up being out of place and a burden for Alison, and he didn’t want to be a burden to anyone. Ever.
She cleared her throat. “I…I feel…” Her voice was husky. “You…” She stopped. She tapped the top of his head and when he looked up she was smiling. “You are…well…I could write a song about you. More than one.”
