by John Larison
Hank’s forearm brushed the side of Caroline’s—he wanted nothing more than to touch her, to be touched by her. That’s what he needed right now, the warm wash of her body against his, the pulse of her breathing in his ear, a moment of contracting reality so intimate not even the Ipsyniho could budge its way in. Only there could he take a full breath.
She reached for her coffee. “Not here, sweet.”
It’d been like this between them for a while now. Hank assumed Caroline was just being cautious. She’d carved a career for herself—a traditionally male career—not in small measure by avoiding becoming fodder for the rumor cannon. Guiding, or really scoring clients, was all about reputation, and hers was carefully calibrated. Strength, competence, self-reliance, all things that a romantic relationship might undermine. Just look at how she behaved when they moved through town together: she opened her own doors and carried her own groceries. Hank knew the truth: that under that coarse veneer she was as fragile as anyone, and as lonely too.
“I take it you’re not working today?” he asked.
“Half-day trip, rearranged it for the evening.” She finished her coffee, tossed him a glance. The glance.
“Tommy,” Hank called, as Caroline walked out the door and climbed into her truck. “Can you wrap up these eggs?”
*
HANK FOLLOWED CAROLINE up Steamboat Creek, crossing the small tributary of Echo, then another called Sunshine, where they turned up a thread of a county road, roaring up the ridge to a hanging valley. This was hers, all of it.
He’d met Caroline years before, when he first arrived in the valley. She’d been a college girl then, spending the year down in California and returning to run splash-and-giggle trips during the summer months. He remembered seeing her, before he even knew she was Malcolm Abbot’s daughter, cinching down her raft at a ramp or joking with friends at Upstream Runs, the guide’s preferred bar at the time. She was a mystery to him then, that girl with the bellowing laugh and the strong arms, the one who never wasted an oar stroke in even the wildest rapids. Her hair was brown then, and she kept it back in two cute braids. You could recognize her by those braids a couple pools away, enough time to lose your confidence and bumble the hello. There were plenty of women on the river then as now, but none who seemed so at ease on the sticks. Hank had been taken by her instantly. He’d never had trouble starting conversations with women—he’d been raised the little brother to two older sisters. But this woman was different. She seemed at peace with herself then, and it was hard not to be intimidated by a person like that, man or woman. His infatuation became near obsessive one August day some thirty years back when she called from her raft, “Keep the fly broadside through that bucket.” She was running a group of clients and he was fishing on a day off. He hadn’t realized she knew anything about fishing. “With this light, the fish can’t see your junk.” Only later did he figure what she meant: the sun was slightly upstream, and the fish couldn’t see the thin profile of the fly with so much light in their eyes. Keeping the fly broadside would, and did, make the difference. He’d asked Walter that night and discovered the mystery girl’s name. “Ah, Carrie? She caught her first fish when you were still shitting in your drawers.”
Then one June, the same year Annie was born, Caroline didn’t return to the Ipsyniho. He heard through the grapevine that she’d married some rich guy and gotten pregnant. For once, the rumors were true.
“When men go looking for a wife,” she had quipped once about that marriage, “they’re really looking for real estate.”
They passed along the fence with a No Trespassing sign nailed to every fifth post, then turned into her driveway. She held open the gate for him, and as he pulled through, her two Rottweilers leapt at the open window, roaring and biting. He blew each a kiss and pulled around the back of the house, where Caroline liked him to park. By the time the dogs came racing around the corner, he was on one knee, a hug for each of them. They licked his eyes and mouth and beard savagely.
This property had been Caroline’s grandparents’. They’d bought it after the First World War when western property values, like so much, plummeted. Now, she had two thousand acres all to herself. The house sat a hundred feet or so above Sunshine Creek, its patter the familiar sound track of her deck. To some—to most, maybe Hank included— living here as Caroline did would have been a desolate prospect. An entire valley with no one else in it. But Caroline wasn’t made lonely by being alone.
From the outside, the house looked weathered and a generation past its prime. A look, Hank figured, she had cultivated. On the inside, she had opened the ceiling, constructed a loft (which was where they cuddled and watched movies on rainy nights), wired track lighting and surround speakers, revamped the kitchen, added a bathroom. Hank’s favorite addition was in the corner, a two-hundred-gallon aquarium complete with a current, which the trout dodged with cobbles Caroline had hand plucked from the river. He stood before the aquarium now, and watched Charlie, a four-inch cutthroat, rise and take something on the surface.
For years Caroline’s free hours had been devoted to improving this house, but for the past weeks she had been devoting those hours to Hank’s place, helping him ready it for Annie’s arrival. “Can’t have your daughter staying in squalor.”
“It’s going to be a hot morning,” Caroline said now. “I might take a look at the creek.”
They descended the trail, leapt the two logs that had fallen last winter, and emerged in the morning sun along the clear steam. A moss-drenched cliff towered against the far bank, while just downstream the land fell away at the edge of a waterfall. If they walked over and looked down, they’d see the blue hole twenty feet below, and maybe an otter lounging along the edge. Upstream, the water descended the serpentine vertebrae of the valley, polished boulders gleaming in the early sun. Hank knew of few places on this earth that felt more removed than this one.
And yet, he’d brought them with him. “Do you think Morell lost the boat in Whitehorse?”
She took off her sunglasses and tossed them into the shade. “I don’t think we’ll ever know.”
“But what do you think happened?”
She pinched him. “I dreamt about you last night.”
“Dreamt?” He’d forgotten that she’d come home and slept. “What did you dream?”
She unzipped his pants. “This.”
They ravaged each other there on the sunbathed beach with the wet passion of young idealists, or the newly grieved.
Afterward, she tiptoed naked onto the top edge of the waterfall, peered over quickly, and turned to face him. She was backlit, and her body seemed to be steaming there, a creekside apparition. It was a mossy world, a world of ferns and firs and dank little nameless mushrooms, and yet there she was against all this, glistening like an olive, refined and salty. He could still taste her, like he could still feel the bites she’d left, and even though she was all the way over there, she was right here with him, her moans in his ears, her heels on his ass. He shut his eyes so as not to lose her. “Shake it, sugaree.”
“We should bring Annie here, when she comes,” Caroline called from the edge of the waterfall. “Wouldn’t she love it?”
And it was gone, all of it. Replaced by a surge of sobering regret: first the girlish image of Annie as he last saw her, then of a male corpse contorting in the merciless current. He sat up and gasped, “Come back over here I’m not done with you.”
A light wind was blowing up the creek now, and she pulled her silver hair from her eyes and smiled at him. She was still smiling when she backflipped off the edge and out of sight.
*
HANK AWOKE IN the bedroom, where they’d napped the midday away, to find the sheets bare. In the kitchen, Caroline was busy making the boat meal for her trip that evening. She was listening to some Spanish guitar, a CD she’d snagged at a show in Portland. Hank preferred buying a sack lunch from the diner, picking it up on the way to meet the clients, but Caroline said she didn’t mind the tw
enty minutes of extra preparation. It gave her a chance “to tighten her knots,” which was her way of saying screw her head on straight.
“Mind if I crash here a little longer?” Hank asked. The exhaustion hadn’t abated with the sleep. In fact, if anything, it had become as destabilizing as a sudden fever. He needed to stay here and sleep, watch the aquarium, be away from all that awaited him at home. This is what he told himself, and it was true enough, but there was something else too. Despite all that had happened last night, she’d pulled her arm away this morning at the café. As if anyone would have seen. And so what if they had?
He’d had enough sneaking around; it’d been years of this now. Either she wanted him outright and in total, or she didn’t want him at all. “Just need another hour or two.”
Caroline didn’t look up from her sandwiches. “I’d rather you go, if it’s all the same. Just simpler.”
“Simpler?” He turned to Charlie in the fish tank, watched him tuck into the lee behind his favorite cobble. “How about I take Samson and Delilah for a walk? I could do these fucking dishes.” He hadn’t meant to swear. Now she’d know what was really going on. She could read him with a glance, like she could the holding lies in a tailout. And yet, try as he might, he could rarely decipher a damn thing about her. “I can have dinner ready when you get home.”
“I’d rather you go, sweet. You know how things stand.”
What did that mean? “No, I don’t think I do. One minute we’re loving and the next—”
“Hanky.” She looked up now, pulled a tendril of hair from her mouth with a pinky, and said, “You really want to do this now?” Then, after a long moment, “You’re pulling at your beard again. You only pull at your beard when you’re feeling trapped.”
“I’m about as trapped as a … as a leaf blowing around your pasture up there.” He looked around for his pants and shirt. He’d been standing here this whole time in his skivvies.
She was looking out the window. “I kinda like that image.”
He stepped into his pants and tightened his belt. “You know what, Carrie? I guess I am trapped.”
“You have exactly what you want. You’re perfectly free to do whatever.”
He hipped open the front door while pulling on his shirt. “Guess that’s what I mean.”
Chapter Four
GOING HOME WAS the last thing Hank needed. So, while still towing the boat, he turned right on River Road and came up to speed. He would go pay a visit to Walter, who would probably be sitting at his picnic table, tying up some flies for the evening fish.
If it wasn’t for Walter, Hank would never have stayed in the valley. It was Walter who’d taught him to run rapids, to keep clients happy on fishless days, to skate dry flies. They’d first met on a run called Time Traveler when Hank had just moved to the valley. Walter had cursed at him, told him to cut his hair and get a real job and “hire a guide ’cause that’s the only way a joe like you will ever find fish.” The next time they saw each other, Walter threw a rock at his water, told him to go home, take up golf. But the third time, Walter asked to see his fly box, then said, “Why you wasting your life casting this bullshit? I’ll show you a steelhead fly.”
Hank passed the turnoff to Rennie’s Landing and looked in time to spot Justin Morell’s truck and trailer, that champagne Tacoma and the galvanized Baker. The pair sat in the sun where Morell had left them the morning before, all alone, forsaken, awaiting a driver that would never return.
Hank turned up the music.
It wasn’t that Justin Morell was all that different than Hank had been at the start. Once upon a time, Hank too had been consumed with proving he could catch more fish than anyone else. It was strictly a game of numbers then, of fish caught versus hours angled. He considered that the definitive proof of ability, and ability was everything in this world of too many people. But eventually his egotism had ebbed, then faded, drawn out by the gravitational pull of maturity and better sense. Catch rates were a concern of dudes; if the river taught anything, it was that economy is a delusion for those who can’t see ecology. Justin would have—would still—arrive at that conclusion too. He would regret all this posturing, this aggression, those articles. But would the older anglers forgive him as they had Hank? Or would the fallout, from those articles especially, haunt Justin and relegate him to a second-class status among the river’s more senior keepers?
The river had appeared in print countless times, dating all the way back to Zane Grey’s Rivers of a Forgotten Coast. Since then, luminaries like Roderick Haig-Brown and Trey Combs had written about it. And Hank had a stack of no less than twenty-two magazine articles that had featured the Ipsyniho. Maybe Morell’s largest sin had been assuming himself qualified enough, seasoned enough, to speak for the river.
Of course, Morell’s articles constituted the largest stride over that thin red line separating public and private knowledge anyone living could remember. Not only did Morell reveal the secret flies of several local guides, no small sin, he included the river’s most guarded pattern, one that had been passed down and enhanced like an old-world song through four generations of career guides. This was the fly they never fished with clients, the one they cut from their lines when mixed company approached. And Morell had included the recipe and photos with his first article. Who had given him the pattern remained a mystery.
More than this, though, Morell had included photos of the river’s best runs with color-coded circles and ovals revealing where, precisely, the fish were prone to hold. Some of these spots weren’t exactly secrets, the bucket in Raspberry for instance. But others, the invisible ledge at Fox Creek or the forgotten seam in Middle Williams, were among the guide’s most treasured, most guarded confidences. Morell hadn’t found these places on his own. He’d been shown them.
There was also the new style of flippancy among the younger generations. When Hank was young, he’d worked for years proving himself before the older guides would even toss a nod his way. It wasn’t the time spent fishing that mattered, though that was part of it; it was the risks taken protecting the fish. Walter didn’t take him in until Hank snuck into the hatchery by the cover of darkness and poisoned the smolt tanks. It was this selfless act, an act aimed at protecting the river’s wild fish, and that earned Hank acknowledgment—tenure, really—among the old guard. Walter had, a generation prior, earned his own tenure by detonating the irrigation channel built by the State, a crime he repeated three times until the State grew tired of rebuilding. But now, the Morells of the world were granted entrance into the circle simply because of their technical proficiency: They fished custom rods, built innovative lines, tied new flies—and caught fish. Morell had proved his devotion to steelheading, but had he really proved his devotion to steelhead?
It was the Internet, Hank knew, that had catalyzed the shift in guide culture. Whereas river knowledge used to be seen as the product of years of on-the-river observation and experimentation—and hence, the valley’s most valuable commodity—now it was seen as just a few mouse clicks away, its value on par with all the random facts available on Wikipedia. These young kids had divorced information from the time required to gather it. To them, information wasn’t passed between generations, it was passed between computers.
The guides of Danny’s generation were responsible for letting Morell in too soon. They were the transition generation; they’d learned the secrets the old way (Danny, that hothead, had firebombed Cherry Creek Timber’s regional office), but some of them had failed to keep those secrets properly guarded. This infuriated Walter. Just a year back, he put a brick through a young guide’s window. Hank and the other senior guides were done sharing their secrets—and they still had plenty—with anyone who couldn’t remember where they were the day Kennedy was shot. Except with Danny himself of course, who had been more or less raised by the guides and so had proper appreciation for a secret’s incalculable value.
*
WALTER WAS RIGHT where Hank expected to find him,
sitting on the picnic table out back of his small one-story home, spinning moose hair. He lived here alone, and had since his wife left him some twenty years back. When Walter saw Hank approaching, he opened the cooler at his feet and produced an IPA from the Salmon Tail Brewery thirty-two miles downstream. Walter still traded with the brew master, flies for cases, trips for kegs.
“Figured you’d drag your ass up here at some point.” A small pair of reading glasses hung from the tip of Walter’s nose. He clipped a clump of hair, and the hot breeze carried the loose fibers over the lawn. There, in the grass, sparkled fragments of tinsel and floss and pink hackle, a summer’s worth of trimmings. “Were you out all night?”
“Didn’t do a lick of good.”
“I heard.” Walter clipped another clump. “Bet you ten he’s a floater and they find him in tidewater next week.”
“Not much of a gamble at this point. Seems the real wager is in how he lost it.”
“Natural or artificial causes?” Walter had yet to look at Hank. They often spoke to each other like this, as if they were speaking to themselves. “You’re the only one of us that got a look at that bowl of glass he oars.”
Hank picked up one of the finished patterns on the table. A sphere of tightly packed moose hair at the front, a red floss body, a half-dozen strands of silver tinsel streaming back an inch past the hook. “Still fiddling with it?”
