Holding Lies

by John Larison

  “Funny how death changes the way you think about a guy.” Hank was thinking of that photograph he’d taken from Morell’s corkboard, the one still in his shirt pocket.

  “Didn’t change the way I think of him. Once a douche, always a douche.” Andy blew some snot from his nose. “What do you think, somebody kill him?”

  “Just a matter of respect, really,” Hank muttered. When a person died, they could no longer defend themselves; the living had a responsibility to give them the benefit of the doubt. And some of the living, the indebted ones, had a moral imperative to fight the dead’s battles. That’s how debts could be repaid. Of this much, Hank was sure. Or pretty sure, anyway. But why did he feel indebted to Morell? Was that what this feeling was? “He was doing the best he could.”

  Andy shook his head. “Maybe. But I think somebody killed him.”

  “No,” Hank said. “Nobody killed him. He was just a kid, for fuck’s sake.” But to be honest, the more times someone asked him if he thought Morell might have been murdered, the more he began to think the answer could be yes. Had to be yes.

  “Didn’t realize you were taking this so personal.”

  “I’m not.”

  Andy shrugged. “O-kay, boss.”

  Hank was just about to apologize for getting snappy when two men, one nearly obese, the other as thin as a binge tweaker, stepped up on the road. Neither wore a shirt. They threw their fishing rods in the bed of their truck, and the thin one hollered, “Fuck all y’all. Fucking, fairy-faggot fuckers. Yeah, you heard me. You want some of this, bitch-fuck?” He was beating his fists now against his chest, hard enough to leave bruises, which to Hank seemed somehow emblematic of all this guy’s problems.

  The scrawny one had halved the distance between them and was still coming. “I seen you prancing around in your fly costume, stroking off your big ol’ sticks. Well I’ll take that big ol’ stick and bust it over my knee and ear-fuck your skull with it, yeah, you heard me. My daddy’s daddy been fishing this river since your kin was still learning to wipe their prissy eastern asses, and I’m done with y’all coming in here and actin’ like we’re a bunch of off-reservation Injuns. We own this place, who the fuck are you?”

  The blimpy one threw a fountain drink at them, which exploded on the road at their feet. “Yeah, motherfuckers.”

  Hank cleaned some dirt out from under his fingernail. He really needed to clip these before Annie arrived.

  “What? You too pussy to stand up for yourself?” Scrawny was just a roll cast away now.

  Andy stood from the tailgate. “Why don’t you get in your truck, and drive back to your cave, and beat your dog—or whatever it is you do.”

  “Whoa, whoa,” Scrawny said, his hand into the air like he had a question. “You hear that, Pin?”

  “Sure as shit.”

  “Low Blow here thinks he can big-dick us out of our own spread.”

  Andy was taking the bait. He’d already turned his baseball cap around and spit out his dauber and was walking up to the fight. Hank laid a hand on his shoulder to stop him.

  Then, Hank walked up the road and right past Scrawny without so much as looking at him. He had his eye fixed on Blimp, who had never left the protective lee of their pickup, and as he expected, Fatty faltered at the sudden challenge and took a step toward the driver’s seat. This is what Hank had learned in his years of observing machismo posturing, that if you came at them in just such a way that they couldn’t determine whether you were about to throw a punch or a kiss, you could fracture their momentum. And then you had them reacting, and reacting is losing. Now he picked up one of their fishing rods from the bed of the truck and studied the terminal end. “Huh. You were fishing black corkies through there?”

  No answer.

  “Why the treble hook?” He was directing his questions toward Blimp, who was one foot in the cab now.

  “It works,” he muttered hesitantly.

  “So you throw it upstream?”

  Blimp nodded.

  “And tickle the bottom on the dead-drift, then swing it around?”

  “Don’t talk to him!” the scrawny one shouted. He’d come rushing to the edge of the truck, and now he grabbed the rod from Hank’s hand. “What game you playing, Big Beard?”

  “Just talking fishing,” Hank said. “What pound test is that leader?”

  Blimp’s eyes flashed between his buddy and Hank.

  Between the hook and the weight was almost six feet of monofilament—enough to floss fish and drive the hook into the side of the face. “Will they move far for a black corkie?”

  Scrawny threw the rod in the bed of the truck and shouted, “Fuck this, Pin. These fairies are afraid of a little round a’ round.” He climbed into the cab and slammed shut the door, and a moment later, the truck jumped to life.

  By the time Walter and Danny made it back to the road, the pickup was throwing gravel and jumping up the hill.

  “Snaggers,” Hank said.

  “Yep. Flossing. They had two wild fish on shore. Tweakers, it’s like kicking at a rattlesnake.”

  Walter cracked a Pabst while Hank, Andy, and Danny pulled on their wetsuits, spit in their masks, strapped on their weight belts. By the time they were double-checking the leashes on their spears, Walter had finished the can.

  “I’ll honk if Johnny rolls up,” he said.

  Danny grabbed his fins. “Don’t fall asleep on us, old man.”

  “Haven’t slept in years. Don’t figure I’ll start now.”

  They did it like they always did it. At least once a month during the summer and fall they came to this staging pool to clean it of hatchery-bred fish. The wild steelhead had for millennia collected in this deep pool, awaiting ideal ascension conditions for the tributaries nearby, where they would spawn come early spring. But for the last thirty years, the State’s hatchery program had been releasing genetically deficient clone fish into the river. Now those steelhead gathered here too. If they weren’t removed, they would end up spawning with the wild fish, further jeopardizing the future of the wild stocks.

  Of course, if a state cop found them here, they’d all be arrested or at least fined well into the four digits. But, as Walter was fond of saying, “state laws are there to protect the State. Somebody’s got to protect the fish.” To Hank, driving a metal rod through a genetically modified steelhead seemed as ethically clear-cut as putting a sick dog out of its misery. Plus, they ate pretty fucking great.

  “My turn to float,” Andy said.

  So Danny took his place at the end of the pool, Hank took his place at the top, and Andy floated its length. Almost immediately, Hank could hear the aquatic clank of their spears hitting rocks, and then in a sudden wave, the fish were darting toward him. From the fuzzy limits of perception, gray ghosts turning, dodging, disappearing. He held still against the ledge, not breathing, not moving, his gun aimed at the boulder in the center of the channel. Then, as always, a fish pulled up behind it, a fish missing its adipose fin. Hank focused on the red of its gill plate and fired, his spear severing the creature’s spine and rendering it stiff as a thirty-inch two-by-eight.

  *

  BACK AT THE truck, Walter helped them load the eighteen fish into three coolers. Once filleted, there would be about ninety pounds of finished meat. “Andy,” he called, “looks like you’re low man again.”

  “Fuck that,” Andy said. “I’m always low man.”

  “Be grateful you’re man at all,” Walter retorted. Which is exactly what he’d said to Hank thirty years back when Hank had complained about having to clean all the fish. What he meant, of course, was be glad you were invited in the first place.

  Andy sighed. “Should I drop the fillets off at the shelter?”

  Hank gilled a fish out of one of the coolers and slipped it into a plastic sack. Annie used to love steelhead. “One less to trouble you.”

  Walter handed Andy an opened beer. “No, bring whatever you don’t want by my place. I know some folks who could use ’em.�
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  Chapter Eight

  HANK HADN’T SEEN Caroline since he left her spread in a huff the morning after Morell went missing. She hadn’t called, which was her style—a show, he assumed, of how little he meant to her. Finally, he’d broken down and dialed her. He acted as if they’d left on good terms and asked if she wanted to go out for dinner. “Why don’t you come up here?” she said.

  So he came with an elk roast, which he’d patted with sea salt and cracked pepper and Bragg’s and vacuum-sealed to speed the marination. It would take a good hour and half on her barbecue, which would give him plenty of time to lay out his proposition.

  She didn’t come out to greet him when he arrived, though Samson and Delilah did, barking at first, then licking. He gave them each a piece of jerky, which he’d brought especially for the purpose, and pushed through the back door.

  Caroline was on the phone with a client, the standard night-before call: sunscreen, plenty of water, rain gear just in case. Though there was as much chance of it raining tomorrow as there was of it snowing, no guide who’d experienced the misery of being stuck in a sixteen-foot boat with a wet and cold and bitching sport would ever again leave it to chance. Precisely the reason Hank kept an emergency poncho in his first-aid kit.

  “Sorry,” she said when she hung up. Whether she meant for the phone call or for the other day, he didn’t know. She wrapped him in a tight hug, and pressed her body against his in that way of hers, feet, thighs, hips, belly, chest, neck, all of it pressing, seducing. She smelled of homegrown tomatoes.

  “You’ve been in the garden.”

  She kissed him. “You’ve been smoking a lot. What you nervous about?”

  He showed her the roast. “Tenderloin. Thought I’d test my recipe.”

  “All that for us? I dragged down some manzanita from up on the ridge. Figured you could cut it. Jeez, Hank,” looking again at the meat, “that’ll take hours to cook. We’ll never get a session in.”

  He left the meat on the counter and fished out the Stihl from the shed, gave it a dose of bar oil, and sectioned the manzanita into four-inch lengths. The wood was prime: It gave off that resonating ping when tapped. He dumped in just enough charcoal to get some heat going and just enough lighter fluid to bring it to flame. Then he was back inside and she was handing him a cup of tequila. Caroline had a thing for top-shelf tequila.

  “Any word on the kid?” she asked.

  He didn’t want to talk about Morell.

  Caroline was wearing her sandals and her peach skirt and a low-cut tank top, and summer sweat had dampened the hair on her temples, and when she turned, he saw it glistening between her shoulder blades.

  Hank had long felt his life was missing something, some key ingredient, like salt maybe, and without it, the meal of his existence, though still flush with the right flavors, was lacking its foundation. If grilling could teach you anything, it was that salt didn’t emphasize flavors so much as it highlighted underpinnings—salt revealed qualities you otherwise would have missed. He kissed Caroline now, right where she glistened.

  It was how she made him feel: He wanted to brag about things, do a backflip, cast all the way across the pool and into the woods on the far side. She made him feel like he was twenty-five again, like life was an expansive plain of possibilities and passion and attainable wisdom. When things were good between them, he felt a wildfire within him casting light in all directions. When things were wrong, that wildfire reverted to arctic whiteout. He both hated and relished being so dependent on her.

  But it was more than that too. Hank had lived with a half-dozen women in his life, and he’d felt close to all of them. But with each of those women, he had felt the divisions that separated them; they were two people sharing space, sharing bodies, sharing time. Two people, always, no matter how passionately they united. When things were right with Caroline, though, divisions vanished. Somehow, in his mind’s eye, their two became one. They might be holding hands on a bridge or soaking in a hot spring or eating breakfast, but in those moments he felt a communal warmth he’d only known once before. With Riffle, in those first years.

  He felt lucky to have Caroline at all. She kept to her established circle, mostly the valley’s artisans, gourmands, and recovering hippies. Even after thirty-something years working the river, she didn’t socialize much with the other guides. “They all think they know the way to do just about everything. Too much ego for too little ability.” If it hadn’t been for his flat tire at the ramp that winter dusk, and her feeling obligated to help, they might never have connected in the first place.

  What she didn’t have were intimate women friends, and he’d known her long enough to know why: Underlying her wit and smile and good graces was a thinly veiled competitive streak. She did her best to repress this element, but there is only so much a person can do to obscure their disposition. Her need to compete all but rendered her incapable of becoming close with other women, especially women her own age. After they caught on to her one-upmanship, they’d close up, take a step back, check their watch. She might reach out—ask if they needed a hand with this or that, or invite them out for coffee or wine—but her efforts were rarely reciprocated. He’d seen it happen time and time again. Women didn’t accept, didn’t authenticate or otherwise reward, such confrontational behavior within their own ranks. Men, on the other hand, barely noticed.

  On the river, she didn’t have to obscure anything; in fact, it was this very competitive edge that made her such a competent angler and busy guide. It was one of the things Hank loved about her, that she never deferred.

  But there were things that worried him too. He knew the precedent; she had a long history of selecting a partner from within her circle of male friends. There would be a one- to two-year coupling, during which he would occasionally spend the night but never move in. Dinners shared, rainy or starry nights observed, a few of life’s tribulations weathered. And then, based on some contrived excuse, she’d end it. This winter, if they made it, would mark their third year together.

  Hank had never left a woman; they’d always ended it with him. He’d gotten good at sensing “the talk” coming.

  It was in part because of this feeling of imminent termination that he’d selected tonight to proposition her. That and recent events had once again revealed life’s fragility, its whimsical turns and drops. This moment was as good as any other—and better, because it was now. But, if he was perfectly honest with himself, he’d have to admit he’d chosen tonight for another, less romantic and more utilitarian reason: Annie was coming in three days, and having a woman would go a long way toward demonstrating his worthiness.

  “You should throw that meat on,” she said.

  “I’m about to.” This was the moment. Now. Kiss her neck, she’ll turn, take her in your arms, and explain it to her. Make her love you.

  He grabbed the elk. “Be right back.”

  At the barbecue, he found the coals not yet ready. He stirred them, restacked them, blew a few streams of air, then lit a cigarette. And fingered the ring in his pocket.

  He’d never been married before, a bachelor for almost sixty years— was now really the time to change things? He never felt lonely when he was with Danny or Walter. What would they say? This better not affect your fishing.

  But yes, it was the right time, because he’d sensed a shift in Caroline in the last months. She was rising from the bed too quickly after they finished. She was waiting longer to call him back. They were seeing each other less frequently. Pretty soon, she would produce some bogus excuse, and that would be it. He’d lose her for good, the one woman who’d ever really known him.

  Caroline left her men when she felt lonely in their presence, and she felt lonely with them, Hank suspected, when she felt stymied by their proximity. She liked to act tough and untouchable, but Caroline, like anyone, was precariously balanced between contentment and desperation. Someone’s expectations, and her unwillingness or inability to meet them, could tip that balance and
send her stumbling. In those moments, she would be overcome by the loneliness she otherwise kept at bay. It was the guy’s gaze that did it. She would see behind his vision a judgment about her, and that would make her feel small and isolated and trapped, and it was in that moment that she would strike. End it. Hand the guy his remaining things and say, “It’s been fun.”

  The ring, then, was a signal. She would see in it his total acceptance of her. That he would never judge her. That with him she would for-ever be free to be whoever and whatever she wanted. She would know that he appreciated her charities and her flaws equally.

  Of course, he understood the risk. After her previous marriage, she told Hank early in their relationship, she had sworn off the institution as “an archaic social control” whose benefits were nil but whose risks were profound. That relationship had ended traumatically, and just before it was annulled, she found herself pregnant—a surprise she never revealed to the father. When the baby came, she had already made adoptive arrangements, and that was that. Her daughter was gone, to an established middle-class family, somewhere in the western half of the continent. That’s all she knew. In the years that followed, she fought first on her own and then with an attorney to meet her daughter, but both she and the adoptive family, through their agent, had originally agreed upon a closed arrangement. All records were sealed, even from her.

  Hank now saw Caroline’s silhouette through the window, as she worked at something in the kitchen. That was something else they had in common, regrets.

  The dogs, who’d been leaning their muzzles against his legs hoping for another stick of jerky, roared to life and raced around the edge of the house. Then Hank heard it too, the low rumble of a pickup in the distance. He started to walk around the corner of the house, to look toward the road, then realized that Caroline might prefer he stay back. This was her spread after all.