Holding Lies

by John Larison

  “Mostly a matter of getting the thing to fish right now. Course, that’s all it ever is.”

  Hank chuckled at the old man singing his old songs, and swigged his beer to hide it. Once, to prove that fly tying was an overglamorized and overemphasized craft, “yet another way for somebody to swipe dimes from your pocket,” Walter had tied a stick to a hook and rose a steelhead four casts later. As if this wasn’t proof enough, he switched to a leaf, caught another. Now, Hank said what Walter was about to: “A bloke can’t make a fly a fish won’t take.”

  “That’s it.”

  “But they take some patterns more than others. Can’t deny that, old man.”

  Walter looked up this time, cold faced. “Is that so?”

  “God’s truth.” Hank dropped the fly on the table. “Read it in an article.”

  Walter whip-finished the fly, pulled it from the vise, and put a file to its point. “Didn’t realize God was writing again.” He tested the point’s sharpness against his thumbnail. “And what’s your two cents?”

  Hank shrugged. “You know me. Fish now, think later.”

  “No,” Walter said. “About Morell. Natural or artificial?”

  Some of the blood had smeared, like he’d dragged something—a hand maybe—through it before going overboard. He could have been looking for fish when the oar hit a rock and clocked him. Stranger things had happened. Hank himself had been struck nearly unconscious by an oar some years back, though he’d been fighting heavy water at the time. Or, it was possible, someone smashed any number of objects—the oar, a rock, a beer bottle—against his head, lifted his feet, and dropped him overboard.

  But this was all overthinking the situation. What mattered was the boy was missing.

  Overthinking was a recipe for getting skunked, Hank knew that much for sure. Fishing had trained him to be a student of precedent more than theory, to trust what had happened before rather than somebody’s eager deductions to reveal what would happen next. “This would be the first murder in Ipsyniho. Well, if we’re not counting Mrs. Forman.” Who had stabbed her prick of a husband in the neck after he, again, took a hand to her. She’d been convicted and locked away for twenty to life. “Self-defense ain’t murder, no matter what the State says.”

  “Not true. Well, true enough about self-defense, the State doesn’t know an ass from an ear, but not true about the first murder. You’re forgetting your history there, lad.” Walter was pinning the finished patterns in his box. “Sixty-three I think it was, or sixty-four. The spring after Kennedy got it. Earnest Jackson, shot to death at Altitude Ramp.”

  Hank didn’t know this one.

  “Let me see if I can recall.” Walter finished his beer and looked to the ridge, summoning what must have been a nearly forgotten memory. “So Jackson was working the upper river, way high, taking clients to the redds.”

  “He was fishing the tribs?”

  “No, back then we still had the mainstem spawners. Probably about a thousand fish, winter fish, used the gravel around Altitude. They were some of the run’s biggest. Gone now, course. But then, Jackson was taking his clients up there, fishing big bare hooks in the tailouts. Killing a half-dozen a day. I saw him once, posted up on a rock, telling his dude to throw it long. There was a pair of spawners out in the middle, twenty-pounders if they were an ounce. Told the sheriff at the time, Dick ‘Cowboy’ Bullhouser. Did you know him? Bridge’s daddy. Good guy. Anyway, word got around what Jackson was up to. Didn’t take long until there was a fight between him and a few of the old guys, Abbot’s boys. Next thing you know, they find Jackson with a bullet hole in his throat. Assassinated.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Jesus didn’t have anything to do with it. That schmuck was exactly the kind of trash we should’ve run off his first season. Could’ve called it. Had photos of a dozen big dead fish, knew he was a wanker from the get-go. If he’d lived, who knows, the run might be extinct by now. Not that I’m saying he should’ve been shot, just that he deserved it.” Walter nodded at the cooler. “Grab that. It’s move-on time. I’m driving.”

  They drove Walter’s ’77 Chevy, which he’d painted sometime in the eighties to look like a Royal Coachman, upriver, all the way past both bridges, above the falls that all the magazine articles and books ever written about the river said stopped the fish, to a side road that climbed the ridge. They followed that for a quarter mile, until the rig was out of sight, and parked. Walter said, “You’re fishing. I’m sitting.”

  This place had been named Red Gate by the old-timers precisely because it was about as far as you get from the red gate. If a joe or young guide heard them talking about the place, decided to go looking for it, they’d only find the shabby pocket water near river mile 84. Many of the river’s best runs were named in this manner. Upper Bridge was fifteen minutes from any such overpass. Cougar Creek wasn’t near the creek with this moniker; it was near Boone Creek, where Mickie McCune had been chased by a tomcat. Misdirection was an essential strategy on the river.

  They waited until no cars could be heard, then hurried across the road. Once at the shoulder, a steep slope down through a thicket of poison oak, Hank offered the old man a hand—at which Walter swung his wading staff. “Keep your pity.”

  They didn’t speak about where they were going, how they would fish, which fly to use, or any of the things anglers usually discuss on the way to the water. They’d had those conversations decades ago. Now they were talking rods, as they had been most of the forty-minute drive, ever since Walter had surprised Hank by selecting from his vast quiver the seventy-one fifty-three, a fifteen-foot three-inch seven weight.

  “Sure,” Walter admitted now, “I’ll take the seventy-one thirty-three or the eighty-one thirty-four if I’m looking to cast a line, but Christ Hank, do I look like the kind of man who’s covering miles in a day? When you get to be my age, and god forbid you make it this long, you’ll learn. The bayou bait-chuckers, they got something figured right. Fishing’s best when you post up, flip out your junk, and crack a can. You can’t find a better flippin’ and crackin’ rod than the seventy-one fifty-three. Quote me on that.”

  “You just got to know where to post up.” Hank stepped into the water, about to wade onto the center rock.

  “Hold up there, eager beaver.” Walter opened the cooler that dangled from his neck like a creel, and passed over a new beer.

  “I’ll wait on that,” Hank said, thinking about the deep wade separating him from the midstream boulder that was this run’s established casting point. “Feeling a bit light-headed as it is.”

  “Shit. Where’d you buy your Subaru, Mr. Joe?”

  Hank took the bottle and tucked it down his waders, to the slot between fly boxes and belt, as was the custom among off-duty guides out fishing the evening light.

  *

  DRIVING BACK HOME, Hank nursed a bottle of water. The lack of sleep and the afternoon buzz had gotten the better of him, and now he made liberal use of the fishing pull-offs to allow the hurried lines of RVs and motorcycles and minivans to pass.

  From the road, he saw anglers in most every run, though he didn’t recognize but a couple of their rigs. It must be a Friday. Fucking weekends.

  For locals, real time—the personal and intimate metering of life— was recorded in large swaths, sprawling intervals that corresponded to specific and essential movements within the river. The New Year began in June, when the last of the winter fish had finished their spawning and were either rotting on the bank or gorging on sand shrimp in the estuary, and the early returning summer fish first began appearing in the fly water. The fish were few and far between, but always aggressive. This period was known as the “long and far” time, meaning if you wanted to catch fish, you had to throw your flies long and oar your boat far.

  Then came the summer routine, fresh fish trickling in with every freshet just as the older fish slipped up their natal tributaries, the number of steelhead in the fly water remaining more or less constant; this was also the
steady sweating sprint of peak tourist season, when a reputable guide could work every day if he wanted. The fishing during “the sprint” tended to be best during the day’s tired shoulders, meaning guides got very little sleep unless they went to a four-and-four sleep schedule, four hours between 11:00 and 3:00 a.m. and p.m. Then came the fall cooling, when the last of the summer fish arrived, usually in a big wave, and the chilly nights and warming days ensured the fish remained aggressive all day. These were the “glory days,” when the scenery was perfect, the fishing easy, and the clients perpetually in a tipping mood.

  The first blowout, usually within a week of Thanksgiving, marked a profound shift in the watershed, and began the “low and slow” period, as in to catch fish, you needed to fish deep in the water column and swing the fly as slowly as possible—a metaphor for winter life. With every freshet would come a new wave of fast-moving and large winter steelhead, their numbers few but predictably placed. Seven days from the freshet’s start to reach the fly water. Twelve days to reach the upper tributaries. Count the days, and fish accordingly.

  Last came the spawn, or the “holy days,” usually when the spring weather arrived and people donned their short sleeves for the first time since September. This was a favorite time for clients, and Hank probably could stay busy for two or three weeks straight if he had no scruples. But he, like all the river’s guides, left the fish during the holy days to their most essential business. Instead of running clients, they patrolled the spawning tributaries to ensure no dirtbags were snagging.

  Work time—what to joes and civilians would be the Monday through Friday workweek—was to Hank and the guides, a simple string of dates. Trips scheduled the fifth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, twelfth, sixteenth. Whether these days were Mondays or Wednesdays or Sundays hardly mattered. What did matter was if one of these dates was a Saturday.

  Come 3:00 p.m. on Friday and continuing more or less through dark on Saturday, the highways along the river slowed with honking traffic. During the summer, they were river enthusiasts mostly, anglers and rafters and those bizarre and largely aimless people in khaki who called themselves “bird watchers.” During the fall, they were blaze orange deer and elk hunters and tie-dye mushroomers. And during the winter, they were skiers and boarders and snowmobilers on their way to the resort in the headwaters. It seemed the whole world decided to spend their Saturday on the Ipsyniho. If Hank had a client scheduled, as he did tomorrow, the crowds would force him to change his routine, to run a different pattern. Walter had taught him a few tricks for beating the crowds when he was young, though what constituted a crowd then would constitute a Tuesday lull now. Hank had learned a few more of his own, and had, in turn, passed those onto Danny.

  Fairview, his home run, was empty, and he considered spending last light there, but instead turned right up his driveway and climbed the ridge to his cabin. He was too exhausted to back the boat under the carport and so parked the rig in the turnaround.

  Given the trip tomorrow, he needed to restock his fly boxes, lace up some new leaders, order lunch, call his sport—an hour’s worth of work and all he wanted to do was tip headfirst onto the couch and fall asleep to Cornell ’77. He’d attended a few dozen Dead shows in his twenties, and still had a pretty serious collection, but that show, more than any other, cut to the heart of it all.

  Hank’s house could have been a fly shop, had the carpet been clean and the air not smelled of wet waders. One entire wall held strung fly rods: single-handers, two-handers, switchers, their pieces held together by hair ties, which he bought in bulk from the beauty supply store in Eugene. There was also the fly-tying desk he’d built of salvaged oak, its shelves climbing the wall above. Another wall held five hundred years of literature, everything worth reading, from The Compleat Angler all the way to The Habit of Rivers. Any book ever written about steelhead, any book that had even contained a chapter on steelhead, was there. He’d spent years tracking down the volumes, and only after the emergence of online book sales was he able to locate the rarest titles, like Enos Bradner’s Northwest Angling. There were more books and tackle in back, but these were things he kept in the front room, the things that kept him going on windblown days.

  He’d never owned a television, but there was a laptop, which he opened now to check his bookmarks: the weather sites, the river levels, the current fish counts, Speypages. Sometimes he’d pull the computer from its home on the bookshelf to the coffee table and watch a DVD he’d rented, and he was considering doing just this when he saw the posting in a forum: “An up and coming star, lost.” It was about Justin Morell. Fifteen people had posted their own remembrances, their tributes. Hank read each of them, the ones from clients, from friends, the one from Danny. Some people anyway really liked this kid. Or maybe they were just being kind.

  He closed the window and turned on some tunes and was about to pick up the phone to call his sport when his fingers guided the cursor to the file named “Annie Now.” He’d seen these photos hundreds of times, and he knew each well enough to recall even the peripheral details, yet he fished out his reading glasses and spent two or three minutes studying the images, imagining what she would look like in this very room. Then he changed the file’s name, in case she used this computer, to “A.N.”

  It wouldn’t happen; she’d call him tomorrow or the next day and offer some airtight excuse. She couldn’t come. Work required she stay. A friend was going through a messy divorce and needed her. He should expect it. He shouldn’t get his hopes up.

  He checked the answering machine, two messages, but neither from her.

  It was a simple house, a cabin really, and she would feel uncomfortable here. He’d never spent much money updating the place—in fact, the total retail value of the rods on the wall probably equaled the house’s worth. But he had spent considerable time and expense perfecting the cooking arrangements, and maybe she’d appreciate that. He would explain that he’d paid for an external tank and piped in the gas specifically for the stove, which he’d found used in town. The vent hood and its lighting had come new from Eugene and they cost more than the refrigerator but were worth every cent. Dinner, like fishing, was too important not to do right.

  But tonight he didn’t have the energy to cook, so he found some water crackers and sliced some cold elk roast and unwrapped the wheel of aged cheddar he had asked the co-op to order special and poured a splash of cab. But he only managed two bites before stepping onto the porch for some big, slow breaths.

  Annie would hate the house. There was little he could do to help that—she would be used to so much more—but he could distract her with the cooking. He’d already spent a trip’s profit in wine and ingredients. Each meal was mapped out in the back of his fishing journal. They’d start rustic and simple, salmon with sweet potato au gratin and a chilled salad of spring greens and blue cheese and filberts and huckleberry vinaigrette. A shiraz seemed the right choice, or a zinfandel, he hadn’t yet decided. When she raved about the complexity of flavors, the crisp freshness of it all, he’d tell her every ingredient had been grown right here in the Ipsyniho Valley. There would be elk tenderloin the next night, bear burgers the night after. Malbecs, pinots, a bottle of tawny port. He’d show her there was more to this place than clear water and big mountains.

  He called his sport to confirm, then ordered the man’s lunch, and finally packed his own cooler. He kept it pretty bare out there on the river, so as not to be distracted by the flavors: string cheese, almonds, an apple, a bag of jerky, and a beer for the ride home.

  And coffee, of course, which was as important as his fly box. He measured a thermos-plus-a-cup’s worth of water into a pan and put a lid on it. Then he measured six tablespoons of his own homemade roast into the French press and cleaned his travel mug. In the morning, he’d turn on the burner first thing and would be drinking steaming brew ten minutes later on the drive to the ramp. Nothing perked up a predawn morning like a cup of mud.

  One benefit of Annie not coming would be tha
t he wouldn’t miss any mornings on the river. If she came, they’d stay up late and sleep in, and he’d miss all those dawns, the orange and pink pastels on the glassy tailouts, the secret promise of the day to come, the sipping rise of the unharried steelhead. Dawn offered its own rewards, and the year was too short as it was.

  She’d call him tomorrow and cancel, and he’d be glad for it.

  Chapter Five

  HE’D MET ANNIE’S mother, Rosemary, in ’77, on Bakke Island, a slab of forested land on the middle reach of the river. He’d just dropped his client at the ramp above, finishing his half day of work, and was pushing down to the island and a run called Barrier just below, a place that shifted to the shade just after 2:00 p.m., the first run on the whole river to find reprieve from the afternoon shine. Rosemary had pulled her kayak into the cove on the island’s bottom end, where she was sprawled out in the sand, nude.

  She was more than a bit surprised to see a boat, as was he to see a pair of breasts. She held her shirt to her chest and crossed her sandy legs, and called, “Guess there’s no place private on this river anymore.” He recognized the face—he’d seen her around town and on the river a time or two—but those were her first words to him.

  “Guess not,” he called back. “Sorry.”

  The problem, though she didn’t know it, was that he needed to anchor here, on that beach where she was now waiting for him to leave. If he pushed on, he’d be drifting over Barrier and would be forced through the rapid below, rendering him unable to wade back up to give the water a proper fish. He pondered his options. Quickly determined he didn’t have any.

  “I hate to be a bother, but this is where I need to be.”

  “Here?”

  “I hate to be a bother.”

  “Then push on.”

  “Sorry, I don’t have a choice.” He pointed to Barrier, explained the situation.

  “Fishing is always a choice,” she said.