Holding Lies

by John Larison

  He’d been on the body boat before: the acrid smell of gasoline mixing with river water, the roaring splash of that engine chasing up behind them—it felt now as if he’d never quit searching.

  The ClackaCraft was right where Hank had left it, anchor down.

  “That’s blood,” Carter shouted.

  “Like I told you on the phone.”

  *

  ALL THE GUIDES converged at Millican Ramp, fourteen trucks towing boats, and highway traffic slowed to a crawl because of the rigs parked half on the shoulder, half in the lane. Everyone who could be reached was there. The new guys with their fish tattoos and stubby beards. The old guard including Walter Torse, who needed a wading staff just to navigate dry land these days. Caroline was there, pulling rods from her boat, locking them under her Tundra’s canopy. Andy Trib was the first one to the ramp—he hadn’t had a client that day.

  This was what they did for each other. They might bicker and shit-talk, might even backstab a little, but if a guy went missing, everybody dropped everything and committed.

  “Listen up,” Sheriff Carter bellowed. “You probably heard—we found Morell’s boat on the bar, blood on the seat.”

  Walter placed a hand on Hank’s shoulder, nodded his head. He’d been a tall man when he first took Hank in, or at least that’s how Hank remembered him, but now Walter was looking up. His eyes were sunken and gray as if he’d not been sleeping much, but with them he was asking a question basic enough not to require words: You all right?

  Hank spit: We’ll find this kid, this time we’ll get it right.

  They’d converged like this three other times in the years Hank had been working the river. Once when Mickie McCune’s heart gave out and he tipped headlong into Liberty Run. They’d pulled the body of the valley’s first guide from a sweeper four miles downriver sometime after midnight. A sad day, but an end that Mickie would have approved of, as happy probably as John Brown. There had been the client of Malloy’s, the radiologist, who’d drowned in front of his daughter. A tragic day, for sure. Malloy had fled the valley after that, gone. And of course there had been Patrick O’Connell, which never should have happened. His body didn’t turn up for a week, until a joe from Eugene spotted it wedged against a submerged boulder.

  Danny was on a cell phone, his thick shoulders turned against the crowd, his eyes on the twins scraping pictures into the pavement with stones. Even from here, Hank could tell Danny was trying to arrange child care. He and his ex traded weeks, half the time in Eugene, half up here. When the twins saw Hank coming, they waved him over. Miriam and Ruben, six years old now, and coming up riverfolk, sandal tans and water blisters. Hank took a knee, and Miriam explained what he should see in the faint sketches. “This is a bear and this is a salmon and the bear is swiping at the salmon—”

  Ruben finished the thought. “But he’s missing and the salmon is ducking between his legs. See?”

  Hank pointed to a circle a few inches over the bear. “What’s this?” It was pride he felt when near these kids, so bubbling with enthusiasm and creativity, pride for Danny because he was doing it right, despite that messy divorce. And there was gratitude too, because Danny wanted Hank involved. The twins called him uncle, and once not that far back when Danny was in a bind, he’d called, and Hank had dropped everything and rushed over to finish up dinner and put the kids to sleep. He’d read them The Emperor’s New Clothes until Ruben was sawing under the covers and Miriam was breathing slow and even, her head on Hank’s shoulder. He’d stayed just like that, unmoving, until Danny returned home—two hours of perfection. “What’s this?”

  “Ruben drew that,” Miriam said. She was always the first to speak.

  “It’s a . . . ,” Ruben was deciding, “a moon.”

  “Uncle Hank,” Miriam asked, “do you have any elk jerky?”

  He grabbed what was left in the Bronco, and they were reaching for the ziplock before he could even get it open.

  There was Caroline leaning against her truck. Their eyes met above the sea of sun-bleached baseball caps, and she lipped, You okay?

  Caroline knew him better than anyone. Even from this distance she could probably sense the tightness pinching in again. It was starting, like it always did, in his throat, and soon it would be in his chest too, pressing in, suffocating him. Tonight he wouldn’t sleep a minute; there would be the panic of drowning every time a dream took hold. He—no, they—had been living with this too long. He might have four or five nights of clean sleep, a break every two hours to piss, of course, but dreamless, and then two or three nights of endless drowning. Booze helped some. Pills didn’t.

  He needed to get past it. He needed to put Patrick O’Connell to rest.

  But his voice was still there, lonely and haunting, like it’d been in that first message on the answering machine: “Been dreaming about the Ipsyniho since I was a boy, and well, after my buddy passed on last summer, figured the only way to be sure you’ll get your trip of a lifetime is to take it presently.”

  O’Connell had come for a week of fishing from Flagstaff, Arizona, where he had worked fifty-hour weeks as an appliance repairman. Rented the cheapest motel in town and borrowed a car from a friend of a friend. He’d never hired a guide before; only flown once. Forty-seven years old, he was that summer; he should have turned fifty-one this year. That first morning on the water, he’d admitted, “I’m spending my savings this week. Putting it to good use, I figure.” It was then, or maybe even before that, that Hank found himself taking a little pity on the guy.

  Most of Hank’s clients where regulars. Guys for whom four hundred bucks equaled maybe a half-day’s wage. These were “sportsmen”; they owned shotguns that cost more than Hank collected in a year, talked of investments and dividends like they were rivers or friends. He had no trouble taking a check from these folks, or keeping the relationship distant and businesslike. But O’Connell was different.

  The first day he rose two fish, but didn’t hook either one. At the ramp, he said, “I’ve been told that forty dollars is a fair tip.” He was counting out five bills on the hood of the truck. Hank surprised himself by saying, “Save the tip until we’ve found you some fish.”

  A south wind arrived that night, the evening air actually warming from dusk to dawn, and the next day, the high temperature soared over a hundred degrees and the fishing went to shit. Hank found a dozen fish holding deep in tailouts and high in rapids, but not one that would so much as flick a fin at a passing fly. Normally, Hank would have subtly trimmed back the client’s expectations until eventually the day would be spent drifting the river and talking of fish as much as actually casting to them. But with O’Connell, Hank rolled up a bandana as a sweatband, cut the popper off the single-hander, and rigged up an indicator. He oared for hours in the hot sun, digging deep to slow the boat above holding fish and give O’Connell time for a few dozen presentations. This was steelheading at its dirtiest, and yet they still couldn’t turn a nose. He had other trips the next two days; otherwise he probably would have taken O’Connell out for free. He did lay out a program for O’Connell to follow the next couple of days, all warm-weather spots, and said, “You’ll get one, I’d wager anything.”

  It stayed hot all week, and the night before their last trip, O’Connell admitted he’d yet to hook a fish. “I knew steelheading would be hard, but damn, this is something else.” Hank could hear the disappointment in the guy’s voice, the disenchantment. Was this worth it?

  As a guide, he’d long ago learned how to temper a client’s hopes so as to keep the person as satisfied as possible. This meant offering the person some sort of narrative that explained it all, giving them—on a silver platter—the story they would tell their friends and colleagues. There was the “fish haven’t been grabby” story, the “hardly any fish in the river” story, the “lots of other anglers pressuring the fish” story. All of them usually ended with, “We’ll be lucky to get one.” Then when they got two, the client would be glowing with joy. That’s whe
n Hank would turn on the praise and write the story’s end. “Took some real skill to raise that last one.” “Only one in ten anglers could have made that cast.” “Wasn’t any luck in that.” Hank did this now without thought. It was a crucial part of the job, maybe more crucial in terms of tips and repeat bookings than tying on beautiful flies or fishing the right water. And he didn’t feel bad about it, not in the least.

  But O’Connell wasn’t a sport. He was just a regular guy who really wanted to catch a steelhead. He confessed on that first day that he didn’t like the idea of guides—“no offense”—because to him fishing was all about learning a river, discovering where the fish held and what they took. A guide dished all that up in easy servings. “Wouldn’t normally do this. But figure I’ll need all the help I can get fishing the Ipsyniho.”

  And so for O’Connell, Hank broke his routine a second time. Instead of fishing first light to midafternoon, they fished first light to midmorning, midafternoon to dusk, and that way maximized their low-light casting. He hated working late, especially when he had a trip to run in the morning, but he couldn’t have this guy going home fishless.

  And yet the river would offer them no slack. It wasn’t raining or cloudy or even cooler the last day. Instead, the high temperature rose to 108 degrees. Come 6:00 p.m., Hank told O’Connell to reel in. This was ridiculous. “I know a spot,” he said. “It’s bit dangerous, but the fish will be there, and it won’t have seen another angler all day.” He’d never taken a client to Froth, never even fished it with Danny or Walter or Caroline. But the time had come to play his ace.

  Froth was the hidden step between upper and lower Nefarious, one of the river’s most feared rapids. It couldn’t be accessed on foot because of the barrier cliffs upstream and down. And guides didn’t fish it because no one wanted to run their boat through Nefarious. The whole river pinched down to ten feet across, then dropped six or eight feet, widened over a boulder field, only to pinch together again and drop eight or ten feet more. What made this spot so dangerous was exactly what made it so fishy. The steelhead would tire in the first rapid and hold for hours or days in the boulders before attempting the second. During hot weather, the fish were in no hurry to leave because of the little ice-cold creek that converged just below Nefarious’s upper drop. When the flows and water temps aligned, as they had that day, Froth produced a fish about ninety percent of the time, a fact Hank would have withheld from most clients, but divulged to O’Connell.

  They ran the rapid first, after Hank tied down the gear and cinched on his own life vest: two big backstrokes to position them, then a series of tight forward strokes to balance them over the wonky hydro-logics at the base of the drop. Steelhead scattered as they went over the boulders. O’Connell cracked his nose on the gunwale during the second drop and, despite the blood staining his T-shirt, swore he was fine. “Let’s get those fish!” he said in a high nasal whine.

  They started by resting the run for thirty minutes, then swung a Lady Caroline through. Nothing. Then a two-ought Green Butt. Nothing. Then a fourteen Partridge and Orange below some T-14. Nothing. Rested it over an hour until last light. Tried three more approaches. Nothing. Hank handed O’Connell the single-hander, onto which he’d looped a glow-in-the-dark balloon as an indicator. If Caroline or Walter saw me now … “Stand on that ledge and dead-drift it through. Do or die time.”

  There was something else about O’Connell, something Hank could hear in his voice. Deference, that’s what it was. He’d said when booking the trip, “If you’ll take me,” as if others had refused, “If you’ll take me,” as if he might not be worth taking.

  He shouldn’t have put him on that ledge. It was wet and mossy and dangerous as all hell at high noon, let alone at midnight. And O’Connell wasn’t exactly agile. Hank should have known better. He had known better.

  What exactly happened, Hank never knew. One minute O’Connell was there, high-sticking the flies through, the rapids loud as hell, and Hank turned to light a cigarette. The lighter blinded him for a moment, and as his vision returned, he slowly became sure that the ledge was empty, that his client was gone. “Are you there?”

  *

  BY DARK, THE search for Justin Morell had turned up nothing. The fire department kept at it until 11:00 p.m., then called it for the night. “We’ll be back at dawn,” Sheriff Carter said.

  The guides, young and old, regrouped at the ramp, drank a beer, said this didn’t mean shit. A guy could get lost hiking up from the water, or take a swim and huddle on shore until morning, or a dozen other scenarios. Plenty of people had disappeared on the Ipsyniho only to be found hiking up the road the next morning.

  Walter leaned on his wading staff and said, “It’s all a matter of grace, of whether you’re in good with the river or not.”

  Eyes flashed to Walter, and there was a long silence. A beer opened. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  It was one of the younger guides, maybe the youngest, a guy Hank had met before but whose name was as memorable as his personality. Most of the youngsters came and went with the summer, here one season and gone the next. This punk was on the river come spring, Hank would invite him for a fish and buy him a beer. Until then, he was just another joe. A joe who was calling Walter out. “Watch yourself.”

  “It means,” Walter said, “if you’re clean with Lady Ipsyniho, you got nothing to worry about. Am I right?” Walter was asking Hank.

  Hank snuffed his cigarette. “Sure as shit.”

  Caroline was there too. She popped the cap off her beer with Hank’s lighter, then slipped it back in his pocket. They shared a glance, and for once he could tell what she was thinking. That boy is not coming back.

  “By that measure,” Danny said, sitting on the tailgate, the twelve-ounce bottle shrunk to eight by his big hands, “we’re all angels.”

  If Hank hadn’t broken his routine and taken O’Connell to Froth, the man would still be alive right now, and in the half lunacy of this long search, Hank felt sure that if he hadn’t been hating so hard on Morell just that afternoon, the kid would still be up and pissing people off now. He knew Morell’s disappearance wasn’t his fault, but it sure felt like he’d caused it. He tried for a full breath. Took two small ones instead. “Angels fix things. We don’t fix shit.”

  The last time he’d seen Morell, he’d had him by the neck against the side of the Bronco. Morell had deserved it, but still, that was no way to treat a person. And now, from the darkness, he thought he heard that gagging sound Morell had made. Hank turned toward the sound, but there was nothing there.

  “It’s late,” Caroline said. Somebody had to.

  Jimmy, an older guide, said, “Ain’t doing the kid no good here. I’m gonna get forty winks. Fresh eyes for dawn.”

  And then the guides started peeling away two at a time. Walter, Caroline, the others over fifty. Their trucks leapt to life and they shouted their good-byes from afar. Old fishermen weren’t built for late nights.

  In his mind’s eye, Hank could see O’Connell’s corpse clear as if he’d just touched it, see it ragged and submerged, its back pressed to a boulder, a limb jammed tight against its neck, its arms outstretched and flailing in the current, its mouth gasping for air. He’d called out to O’Connell that dusk, “Are you there?” He sure felt here now.

  “Fuck this,” Danny said. “I’m going back out. Who’s with me?” He was already pulling the battery from his truck to rig up a spotlight.

  All at once, the young guides finished their beers. Nobody was going home with Morell still out there.

  Hank heard his own voice, distant and strange in the darkness. “I’ll row.”

  Chapter Three

  THE NEXT MORNING, as Hank arrived at the diner just after dawn, he saw the town paper: “Local Guide Missing.” There was a picture of the fire department racing upriver on their sled when it was still new and didn’t have the gouges—a file photo. The paper was in the yellow circulation box outside the door, on the table near the waitin
g area, in everyone’s hands.

  He had stayed on the water all night, taking turns at the oars and on the spotlight, and he had worn out his voice calling the boy’s name. To see this paper now stunned him in his sleeplessness: How had the news made it all the way to town already? He hadn’t even been home yet.

  Caroline was eating huevos rancheros at the counter, a second order steaming beside her, and she looked up from the paper when he neared. He hadn’t said her name or even cleared his throat. She must’ve sensed him nearby. That was her way in this world.

  “Ordered for you,” she said. “Figured you’d be hungry. They say you ‘acted quickly in calling 911.’”

  “Not quick enough.”

  They didn’t kiss—they rarely kissed in public, or touched each other for that matter—but he took the seat beside her, and thanked her for the eggs, though he pushed them aside and ordered a coffee and a large milk instead.

  “Can’t be hard on yourself, Hank. This isn’t your fault.”

  “I know.” He lit a cigarette. “I was wishing he’d leave. Move to Alaska, be a body counter up there.” He pulled hard on the Camel, wishing now he hadn’t said “body counter.” He looked around. Only truckers within earshot, nobody looking.

  He reached for the ashtray; it wasn’t there.

  “I hope he doesn’t have any family,” Caroline said. “Damn that phone call.”

  Tommy, the server, poured Hank’s coffee. “Got to ask you to snuff that, Hank. New state law. Smoke-free workplace and all that.”

  Hank dropped the cigarette in his coffee.

  Tommy flipped over the clean cup at the next setting and filled it. “Sorry Hank. Ain’t my rule, you know that.”

  Caroline’s fork dashed at the eggs. She was wearing a black tank top, her back and shoulders lean and striated from years at the oars. Her skin wore a permanent tan, mahogany in summer, fading to oak in winter, a Z perennially stenciled on her sandaled feet. She’d been a raft guide for decades before the big-money nineties convinced her to switch to guiding fly anglers. But well before that, she’d been an institution on the fly water, “that woman” who appeared from the forest, stepped in above you, and rose a fish where you’d found none. Which shouldn’t have been all that surprising, seeing as she was the only child of Malcolm Abbot, the valley’s most legendary guide.