Holding Lies

by John Larison

  He watched while Caroline walked out to meet Sheriff Carter, who repositioned his cop belt as he swaggered toward her. Muffled by the distance, he heard, “Is Hank around?”

  He couldn’t hear what she said.

  “Come on. Hank Hazelton.”

  Caroline turned and looked back, and Hank stepped into the evening sunlight. “Figured I might find you here,” Carter called.

  *

  CARTER HAD COME to ask Hank about “this altercation” that had happened between him and Morell at Millican boat ramp, an event Hank recollected as completely and honestly as possible.

  Carter admitted he’d found something in the boat that made him suspect foul play. He hated to “come knocking on doors like this” but felt “obligated by the facts.” When Hank pressed, Carter explained that a pool of diluted human blood had been standing at the boat’s lowest point. “Like someone had used the bailer to wash Morell’s blood from the boat.” But let the blood on the seat remain? Hank asked. It seemed like an overbaked deduction. “Maybe the person missed it. I don’t know. We need that body to turn up to know anything.”

  Caroline locked the front door, which she never did, and watched out the window as Carter closed the gate behind his rig, some two hundred yards across the meadow. “Somebody killed that kid, didn’t they?”

  Hank picked up a knife now and halved a zucchini. “Had bad blood with just about everybody.”

  “Hardly the time for puns, Hank.” Caroline checked the oven, the sweet potato fries sizzling inside. “Was he worth killing?”

  Hank put the knife through the flesh of the zucchini and was overcome by the memory of a smell: the oily musk wafting up from O’Connell’s body bag that afternoon when Carter unzipped it and asked for an identification. “People have died for less.”

  *

  AFTER DINNER AND another sipper of añejo, they drove his truck down to the river and parked up an overgrown skid road. Guides had to be careful to hide their rigs when they fished lesser-known places. Joes would spot guide vehicles, remembering them from boat ramps or past trips, and venture down to see where and precisely how they were fishing. Precautions had to be taken if secrets were to remain secrets. Caroline sometimes joked that she would someday buy a second car, “a total joe rig like a Forester,” to use on her free time.

  They didn’t bother wadering up, just grabbed their rods and followed the trail to the hourglass-shaped pool below, Time Traveler.

  Hank had always believed that an astute observer could learn most everything about a person by watching that person fish. There were those who hurried between pools or swore after a botched cast, revealing a fundamental insecurity about their own abilities, their own worth. There were those who forced the forward strokes and rushed the backstrokes; these were the literal thinkers who had little use for intuition or any of its incarnations. There were those who always threw long casts even when the water was better matched to short casts; these were the self-involved people, the ones who failed to ask the right questions, always intent on their own answers. But Caroline’s angling had for years stumped his best attempts at analysis.

  Of course, there was the competitiveness. Normally, when two anglers reached a section of water they both wanted to fish, a ritualistic “no, you take it” occurred, during which both anglers secretly hoped the other would decline more potently and, hence, allow him to fish first without feeling shabby. But with Caroline, the ritual was condensed to non-existence: “You gonna take it?” already stripping out line.

  “I’m happy watching.”

  But then came the mysteries. For one, there were the flawless casts, which, in their lack of glitch, revealed so little. No rushing, no lingering. She brought the line around, the rod continuously loading, and stopped: the fly and its line landing precisely where they should, every time. The casts were leisurely, effortless, efficient. Walter had said once, after watching Caroline fish Sawtooth, “If the contest was to expend the least amount of energy and still deliver the fly, that lady would win all day, every day.” Was the fishing lazy? No, it was smart. Power applied only when and where it was needed. And there was her approach to fishing the run: Instead of fishing the entire length of Time Traveler, one cast for each two steps downstream, she fished four small places, a dozen casts to each. These four places weren’t random; they were the bucket, the seam, and the two ledges that regularly held fish. Was this a form of hurrying? No, she spent as much time on the run as Hank or Walter or Danny.

  She rose one on the first ledge, the steelhead taking in a silver swirl.

  And then there was how she fought a fish: brute bullying, for the most part. She used heavy leaders and broke a rod or two a year. After the initial run, during which the fish might peel a hundred feet of line, she leaned from the hips into the rod so as to magnify her own mass. When the fish wanted to go upstream, she made it turn and go down. When it wanted to go down, she made it turn and go up. Hank might have been inclined to dub this a sign of her penchant to manhandle those in her control, but then she also knew just when to give the fish slack; she intuited the fish’s next move and responded preemptively. When it jumped or wrapped around a boulder, her rod tip was down before Hank could think that it should be. It wasn’t manhandling, it was pure empathy, pure persuasion.

  “Shit this hen’s heavy!” She laughed now as her reel squealed out bursts of line.

  Did she treat the men in her life like she treated the fish? Would it be so bad if she did?

  Because there was the tenderness once the fish was within her hands. The empathy becoming genuine intimacy. Whereas most anglers, even the experienced, would rush to tighten a fist around the fish’s tail joint so that it could not flee before they were done admiring it, Caroline only touched the fish with the backs of her wet fingers, a glancing caress down the silver side. If it splashed away, that was its right. Her other hand held the fly, and when the fish seemed eager for release, she’d turn the hook and unpin it from the jaw. The fish wasn’t a trophy, wasn’t a show of her abilities or an object of her control. The fish was an equal partner in an intimate dance.

  “Twelve pounds? Thirteen?” Hank offered her a hand up from the water’s edge.

  She climbed up herself. “Did you see her explode on it?” An ear-to-ear smile. “Fuck me, that never gets old.”

  He touched the back of his fingers to her cheek, and she slapped his ass.

  “Your turn, cowboy.”

  *

  DURING THE AFTERGLOW of that fish would have been the perfect time for the ring. But Hank had stumbled, unsure of himself, of the moment, of how Caroline would react, and then they were back at the house, finishing the tequila and laughing, and Caroline insisted they go for a walk. So up the trail they went, through the hanging valley and the old pastures, past the leaning pole barn her grandfather had built, past the moonshine barrels her grandmother had kept, past the markers where they’d both been buried, and to the top of the ridge. The stars were hot and close against that Malbec sky, the horizon dimming by the second. Far, far below, a second sky was mirrored on the river. That was the way with the Ipsyniho, the heavens and the land refracted and contracted until the two became one.

  “Do you ever wonder if you’ll live anywhere else?” Caroline said suddenly.

  The nagging loneliness that often kept him up at nights rose as suddenly as that fish. She was an arm’s length out, but five miles away. He would’ve traded everything to understand her.

  She turned her back to him, tucked her hands in her fleece coat. “I want to talk to you about something.” So this was it, the moment she would break up with him.

  “Listen,” he said, but then faltered. What could he say to change her mind? Had he ever persuaded her of anything?

  “What?” she said.

  He reached for the ring in his pocket and raised it between them. He’d planned to be on one knee, he’d planned to do it right.

  But in the darkness she didn’t see it, and she said, “I hope you
and Annie will come stay with me. Will you? I want to get to know her. I want to learn this part of you.” She wrapped her arms around him and laid her head against his chest. “Will you?”

  Hank took a breath, finally. “That part of me doesn’t like me very much.”

  “She asked to fly out here and stay with you, didn’t she?”

  “I haven’t gone to visit her in fourteen years,” Hank heard himself say. Was it possible? Fourteen years? It felt like fourteen weeks, and forty years. “I haven’t called her but once in the last year.” He wrapped his arms around Caroline. “She’s been busy,” he said. “I didn’t want to be in her way. I didn’t want to be a burden.” Excuses, and lame ones. “She doesn’t need me.”

  “Not true.”

  “It is. I lost her years ago.”

  “No.” Caroline pinched him. “You never lost your daughter.”

  The memory of a winter night a couple years back, the anniversary of her own daughter’s birth: She’d wept then, “I’ll never know her name.”

  “Whatever happened between you two,” Caroline whispered now, “don’t waste this chance because of some stupid grudge.”

  “I’m not holding any grudges.”

  Chapter Nine

  ANNIE ARRIVED AT the cabin as scheduled, just after five on Wednesday evening. Hank heard her rental car pulling up the hill and quickly dried his hands on the kitchen towel, lit the two candles he’d placed on the dining room table, and switched the stereo from Cornell ’77 to some sophisticated Portuguese music he’d bought for this moment.

  He’d also bought Dockers and a button-up shirt, paid forty bucks for a haircut, and all but rebuilt his home in the last few days. He’d stocked the refrigerator with stuffed olives, sparkling water, soft cheese, prosciutto—a hundred and fifty dollars’ worth of what seemed to him posh, East Coast, Ivy League sustenance. He felt like a foreigner in his own home, like a fish who was one minute holding behind a rock and then next minute pressed by gravity against that rock, gasping for breath in a waterless world. This is ridiculous, he thought at the last second, I should have bought the green Dockers.

  Annie stepped from the car, a wide smile under a pair of enormous sunglasses, sunglasses so big they made her face look, proportionately anyway, like a mayfly’s. “Hank,” she said. “Look at you!”

  He wanted to lift her and spin her, feel how much she weighed, throw her in the air and hear her giggle like she used to, hear her say, “Daddy again, again Daddy.” He wanted to kiss her cheek, her forehead, her nose. He wanted to tickle her soft sides, the back of her knees, the bottom of her feet. But there she was, a woman every bit as tall as he. A woman wearing expensive shoes and windy cotton pants and a tank top and a necklace that looked like it cost more than his best rod. So he extended his hand, swallowed.

  Thank god she pushed it aside and wrapped her thin arms around his neck and said, “Oh, your beard! I missed it. My mountain man father. Tell me everything.”

  *

  HE GAVE HER the penny tour and demonstrated how to flush the broken toilet and helped her move her luggage into what would be her room, and smiled inwardly when she said, “Oh, I love the music.” Surely this was a comment for his benefit, one quite divorced from fact, but even so it gave him a sudden rush of confidence, and he showed her the refrigerator. She didn’t say anything about the provisions.

  “When did you get this place?” she asked.

  It had been a year or two after she’d left the last time, during his great binge of self-improvements. He’d gathered his emergency money, a few thousand dollars he’d been tucking away in twenty- and forty-dollar increments, and put a down payment on the place. For a couple years, the monthly payments had nearly drowned him, but then he refinanced and found a cheaper supplier of his liability insurance, which gave him the couple hundred extra a month he needed.

  They sat on either side of the small island that functioned as counter space and as a divide between the living room and the kitchen. She was picking at a bowl of filberts and sipping from the chardonnay he’d poured for her. He was so distracted by the woman that was his daughter that he only partially followed her stories.

  Her hair was longer in front than in back and curved down to her chin and was shiny and clean, hair he’d only seen in photographs. He was stunned a bit, as if a celebrity was sitting in his kitchen. She was wearing mascara, her only makeup, or rather the only makeup he could detect, and it lent her eyes a compelling vivacity; it was hard to look elsewhere. And there was her perfume: vanilla and warm. And she slouched in a new way, in a manner refined but casual. Now both her elbows sat on the table, just a couple inches apart, her hands up and feeding her mouth, which chewed and spoke at once, her face suspended there, unflappable. That’s what it was about her: Her whole aura was slender and majestic, a whitetail doe in summer—so unlike the puffy, clumsy pubescent who’d come to stay with him last. Whereas she used to remind him of an overdressed Wooly Bugger, now she was a low-water Lady Caroline.

  She was waiting for him to answer.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I’m just so shocked that you’re actually here.”

  “So am I.”

  He didn’t know what to say, how to respond.

  She broke the silence. “Can we sit outside? I love that there’s no humidity here.”

  He nodded. Whatever she wanted. His daughter, with him again.

  *

  THEY SPENT THE late afternoon at the house, on the small porch that extended from his bedroom. From there, they could hear the highway below, and between cars, the rustle of the river. A woodpecker was deconstructing the dead oak just down the hill. And honeybees buzzed in and out of their woody cavern.

  She worked sixty-hour weeks, she told him, and had been surprised by how fulfilled she could be in the “private sector.” She spoke fast, and he listened intently; no one around here spoke like this. “In graduate school, they lead you to think an academic position is the only option. They’re pushing you in that direction, helping you carve out a niche of your own, but not just any niche, you know; it’s got to be a marketable niche. Doesn’t matter if you’re doing something innovative, say arguing to reframe the discussions of Heidegger, if your cutting edge isn’t part of the new collective direction, you won’t find a position. I was deep into Buber, which was my problem. Or so my advisor said. Buber, all of existentialism really, is passé. There is so much that is passé now. You have to be doing something in environmental, feminist, or language to find an academic job these days. Even logic is dead. Imagine that: a philosophy department without a logician. Amazing!”

  “I can’t imagine.”

  “But the private jobs? They’re booming. Especially these ethicist gigs. Everybody needs an ethicist now.”

  “So, what is it you do exactly?”

  “Preempt disputes, prepare for disputes, advise disputers, construct policies that will avoid future disputes. Really, pay me now and I’ll save you millions in attorney fees later. That’s what it boils down to. That and everybody wants to lunch with a philosopher; nobody wants to lunch with a lawyer.”

  She frequently pulled a device from her purse, checked it, pushed some buttons, tucked it back in her purse. Only later would Hank learn she was actually communicating with her associates back at the hospital. She was working.

  “Like right before I left. A surgeon did something he shouldn’t have, and now I’m helping reconstruct the hospital’s policy to cover its ass in the future—and ensure the policy remains ethical, of course, whatever that means. It’s part politics, part law, part common sense. Mostly, what I do is find the best bad option.”

  “Do you like what you do?” He couldn’t believe that anyone in the entire universe—especially his own progeny—would like to spend her days doing this.

  “I do. I love it. I love how busy it keeps my mind. There’s always something to think about, a problem to work out, a question to answer. It’s its own universe, this job, and that’s what I love about it
. A whole system of thought and code and significance. I could spend my life wrapped up in it.”

  “Huh.”

  “Hey,” she said suddenly. “I want to take you out for dinner. Someplace nice. My treat.”

  He nodded at the kitchen. “I’ve got something marinating.”

  “Can it wait until tomorrow? Let’s have somebody else do our cooking. My treat.”

  *

  SO, HE RINSED the marinade off the meat while she freshened up in her room, and they drove the twenty-two minutes to the four-star Campwater Lodge, to the restaurant there, and asked the exquisitely tailored host for seats that overlooked the river. The Lodge, as it was known locally, had an international reputation among anglers, and drew legions of high rollers every summer. Most of Hank’s clients stayed there. A few of the especially gracious would invite him for dinner after the trip, an invitation he usually accepted, so long as he didn’t have plans with Caroline. “This is the only gourmet restaurant in the world that lets you wear studded boots inside.”

  “What’s a studded boot?”

  Their table overlooked some of the most storied steelhead water in the world, runs that Hank fished infrequently these days because of all the joes that swarmed there. He pointed out an osprey and they watched as it tucked its wings and dove into the green pool. “Wow,” she said.

  “This place is in your blood,” he said. “I’m a transplant, but you’re a native. Did I ever show you where you were conceived?”

  “Jeez, Hank.”

  “No, it’s a beautiful place. You’ll appreciate it. You’ve got legacy here.”

  She checked the device in her purse, pushed a couple buttons. Sipped her water. Pushed more buttons. “Sorry,” she said. “I’ll shut this thing off.” But then she didn’t.

  The server came with a napkin over her arm, and held a bottle of wine for them to see. Annie barely acknowledged the person, but nodded at the wine. After a test pour, Annie sipped it and said, “Leave the bottle.” She didn’t say thank you.