by John Larison
Hank said it for her. “What would you like to do while you’re here?” Meaning: anything else besides looking at that device?
She tucked the thing back in her purse. “I’d love to hike and raft and do all those outdoorsy things that I never get to do back home. And I’d really like to fish with you one day, you know, a guided trip, like I am one of your clients.”
“Nah. We can definitely fish if you want but—”
“No,” she said. “I want to see you in action. I want to know who you are when you’re at work. Thad, my … my friend, he’s a pediatric surgeon, and he has no idea who I am at work. It just seems strange. How could we think we know our intimates if we never see them at work, where they spent most of their waking energy?”
The inclusion here of Thad had seemed forced to Hank, almost as if she had been awaiting a chance to mention him. Hank tossed her a bone and asked about this Thad fellow, how long they’d been together, what they did together, all questions disguised as being about Thad when really he was just trying to elicit more information about her. But she was categorically restrained on the subject, providing bland and factual information that did little to color in his impressions of their lives. Like she was keeping something from him.
“Do you live together?” he asked bluntly, his suspicion getting the better of him.
“We do.”
“Good,” he said, though he hadn’t the foggiest idea whether it was good or not. “People rush into marriage too frequently these days.”
She glanced down at her plate, hiding her eyes, and he should have guessed what she would say next. But he didn’t, and it rocked him. “Actually Hank, we are married. We got married in May.”
The river, the osprey, the breeze through the firs. “Oh, I see.”
She put her hand on his. “It wasn’t a big service or anything. We had it at this tiny bed-and-breakfast in Thad’s hometown, in North Carolina.” She was awaiting his reply.
“I’m so happy for you. Congratulations. Really. Was your mom there?”
She nodded.
He nodded too, looking down at the water but seeing nothing. “Wow. Married. My daughter. How wonderful.”
“But it was a tiny service and it was on short notice. It was a weekend whim, really.” Then, the killer: “I was thinking of you the whole time.”
He leaned back in his chair, tried his best to smile naturally. She would feel shabby for not inviting him, so he said, “No way I could’ve made it anyway. May is a busy time.” A lie. May was the slowest month of his guiding year.
“That’s what I thought.” She hid her mouth behind the wineglass.
He’d never felt more alone, more pathetic, more undeserving. She hadn’t wanted him there, that was the only explanation. “So that’s why you’ve come? To tell me you’re married?”
“No. I mean, that’s part of it. But it’s been so long, hasn’t it? Too long. That’s why I’m here. I want to learn you.”
He thought of what he’d been doing in May, of the lonely days he’d spent tying flies while Caroline was on that meditation retreat in California. “You could have brought Thad. I’d like to meet him.”
“I’ll bring Thad next time. I wanted some quality time with my pop.”
He swallowed whatever this feeling was, and leaned forward and kissed her cheek. “Congratulations. My little girl, a married woman. How is it? He must make you laugh.”
“I’m sorry, Hank. I should have called you. I should have invited you, even if it was on a whim. Even if we hadn’t talked in like forever.”
He brushed this aside. “Don’t think twice. I’m just glad you found someone who makes you happy.”
As their meals came, as he forced himself to eat, as they laughed about this and that, he saw and turned over each of his failings as a parent, as a man. If Caroline had been there, he would have grabbed her and begged her to start a family with him, to start fresh and do it right from the beginning. He would do it now, could do it now, because now he realized: there was nothing else.
When the bill came, the server placed it by Hank and he reached for his wallet.
“No, absolutely not.” Annie snapped it away. “This is my treat.”
“Bullshit,” Hank said, surprising even himself with the sudden and too-loud profanity. People turned and looked. “My treat. A late wedding present.”
“It was my idea and I won’t allow it.”
Hank opened his wallet, intent to pay the server, before Annie could extract her credit card from her purse. But he found only thirty-eight dollars, less than half of what was needed. And by then, thank god the server had taken Annie’s card.
Annie smiled and said softly, “Let me do this for you.”
Chapter Ten
IT WASN’T LIKE this great error of his life had occurred in the capsule of a single moment, some apex scene where the bright sun disappears over the dark horizon and that’s it. His great error was in fact a million little errors that had assembled slowly and imperceptibly, accumulating like a glacier’s ice pack and measured like one too: not in days or even years, but in decades. What was life but a disorienting progression of fragmented ambiguities that resisted any attempts at ordering—until viewed through the fictionalizing lens of hindsight? Then, and only then, could sense be made of it. And by then, what was the point? Nothing could be amended.
Life wasn’t like a river, no matter how many stupid pop songs said it was. A river could be known, its channel could be learned, so that even on the foggiest predawn morning, a person could pick the right line, one move at a time. No metaphor could capture or illuminate life’s chaotic unknowns, its swift determinism, its painful irrevocability. No, life was a precarious balancing act between enjoying the time you had left and surviving the mistakes you couldn’t quite identify. Of this much, Hank was sure.
*
HE AND ROSEMARY had been struggling for years. They’d dovetailed well enough when they were both single, unattached riverfolk. Put them in a boat, give them a sunny afternoon, and they kept each other amused and giggling all the way past midnight. That was the thing: Being happy riverfolk was about keeping the stakes low. Once the stakes got high, the island of merriment that was the river vanished. Then the river either became a mechanism for procurement or was relegated to scenic backdrop status.
Rosemary had been all too ready to relegate the river, and their former selves, to backdrop status, the panorama behind their new, ultimate-stakes lives. It was time, in her words, “to grow up.” For Rosemary, the river life had been little more than a fun stop on the otherwise calculated trajectory of her existence. A short-lived rebellion from a life that had been scripted long before, by whom Hank wasn’t sure.
That was the difference between them. She was of money and so needed to procure more; he was of nothing and so was content with less. Her pangs of insufficiency would be resolved, she thought, by a prestigious career; his would be resolved by a better understanding of his role in this place.
Riffle came as the turning point, the moment that definitively ended the rebellion.
But for Hank, there wasn’t a road that led away from the river. The river was the river, which was to say, it was everything. If she wanted to call this a rebellion, she clearly didn’t understand rivers.
The sun was orbited by the planets, the planets encased by their oceans, and the oceans fed by their rivers. There was a straight line, as far as Hank was concerned, between the river under his feet and the universe over his head. Everything flowed into the river, and the river flowed all the way to the Center. You could turn outward toward the arbitrary hubbub of concrete and career, or you could turn inward toward the infinite connection of water and gravity. When he explained this, Rosemary called him an escapist, which was exactly what he would have called her had he thought of it. He also would have said that only in a private moment of connection with a river and its creatures could the outer world so fully diffuse into the rumble of the nearby currents that the nearby
currents could fuse with the ecological systems encompassing all; only in this moment would the complete cosmic reality condense and expand at once and render a single infinity of timeless divine. For Hank, for Caroline, for Walter, for Danny, no single moment provided this reward in such sprawling proportions as when a steelhead rose to a dry fly. It was that simple, and it was that complex. Maybe his life was “petty,” as she had said, but if so, then he had fundamental disagreements with her unit of measure.
In the years after, Hank came to reduce these fights to a single essential disparity: Both he and Rosemary had only the highest of expectations for themselves, but how they defined “highest” differed entirely.
She had wanted to leave the valley a little after Riffle’s second birthday, but he’d refused. “We need to raise her with all the advantages,” she would say. And he would completely agree. “We need to offer her the best education,” she would say. And he would point to the river and say “absolutely.” “We need for her to live in the cultural center, where her intuitive and rational mind can be developed.” And he would say, “That’s why we’re here.” For Rosemary, the valley was a last colonial outpost on the fringe of the civilization. For Hank, it was the rarest thing in this world, an authentic community built around the divine rituals of harvest, a refuge of civility and culture amidst a world intent on hara-kiri-ing itself on the sharp blade of “efficiency.”
Finally, when Riffle was five and about to start kindergarten, they found themselves in a fight so hot it would leave them burned. Riffle was asleep in her room and they were out back in the firs and ferns. Rosemary had stayed in Ipsyniho as long as she was willing, “longer than she should have.” She was leaving, and she was taking Riffle, and Hank could either come or he could become a weekend dad. A joe of a father. She said, “I’ll fight you for custody and I’ll win, you know it.” And with that, she had played her ace.
Riffle was still the bubbling little river girl then, a five-year-old who already knew how to ferry herself to the far bank with just a couple quartering backstrokes. She had raised two steelhead on her own, learned to herd crawdads into the shallows where they could be collected en masse, and taught herself to build windproof shelters from driftwood. She could debone a trout with her bare hands and spot the bulge of a prime chanterelle before it emerged from the duff. Her tan was deep, her feet calloused, and he hung on every word she spoke. She laughed as easily as she sang, and it killed him to imagine her sprightly self in a sweltering concrete shit hole, a place divorced from everything real and permanent and important. A place enraptured by its own whoop-de-do.
In the weeks, months, decades to come, he justified his decision to stay analytically: If he’d come with Riffle, her connection to the river would be severed. They’d become tourists, on the Ipsyniho for a few weekends a year, and Riffle would lose precisely what made her her. The river would become an escape from reality, rather than a conduit to reality itself. By staying, he was providing for her the best he could, he was keeping a home for her in the highest place. She would go to town, experience all that self-indulgent hoopla, and then retreat home where her real education could continue. Looking back on it now, he would’ve made the same decision again.
And that’s what was killing him. Because it was that decision that cost him his daughter. Wasn’t it?
When he was completely honest with himself, though, he had to admit that the decision to stay hadn’t revolved entirely around Riffle. He had been as concerned for himself as he had for her. He couldn’t stomach the thought of a life down there, a joe’s nine to five, dreaming endlessly of the weekend—forty-eight piddly hours where his life would be his again. He imagined himself taking to drinking, to gambling, to—god forbid—watching sports on TV.
And so, he’d told Rosemary—in admittedly regrettable language—to go fuck herself. And a week later, Riffle left in Rosemary’s green Chevy, waving despite tears out the back window at the father who’d chosen to be near the river instead of her.
Chapter Eleven
THEY AWOKE EARLY, just like she wanted, and towed the boat up to Hank’s standard ramp. He’d picked up sandwiches, called in his regular shuttle, and brought three rods—the seventy-one thirty-three, the forty-one nineteen, and the seventy-nine six, the same three he always brought on a guided trip this time of year. They were the first people to the ramp, a clean thirty minutes before legal light.
“How will we retrieve the truck?” Annie asked.
“Somebody will drive it down for us.”
“Who does that?”
“Julianna and Petra. Ten bucks. It’s their living. Good folks.”
From his closet of wading gear, he’d found a men’s tall-small that fit her nicely and a pair of boots sized in men’s sevens. She wore them now, as she staggered over the dark beach along the first run. He’d have to keep a careful eye on her to ensure she didn’t go for an unintended swim.
Like so many of the underinitiated, she tried to walk over the river’s cobbles as if they were flat and solid concrete: legs parallel, arms down, center of gravity somewhere just above the waist. Most every step, her footing slipped or shifted and she was falling out of balance.
“Try bowing your legs, sweetie.” It was understandable she’d forgotten how to wade. “And keep your arms out, so they’re ready to balance you.”
Casting came more quickly. He started with the single-hander loaded with a weight-forward, medium-belly line, and knotted on his go-to dawn dry fly. She’d learned to cast all those years before and still retained a frayed mastery of the basics. Eleven and one, wait for the backcast to straighten before moving forward, don’t cast more than you must, you won’t catch fish with your fly in the air. She cast a stalling line across the current, and after the current straightened it, he reminded her to follow the swing with the rod tip.
It took a while, well into the dawn, but then the rhythm returned to her, and she sent a clean thirty-footer across the tailout. The fly landed and was in swing and Hank was just about to congratulate her when she lifted the fly into a new backcast. “I’ve forgotten how satisfying it is to feel the rod chuck the line.”
“Sure, but the point is fishing.” It was a stupid thing to say, and not even true, and he instantly wanted it back.
Her next cast landed in a pile.
But whatever. Annie was there with him again, tucked between the black ridges, the river reflecting the last stars as they faded into the crystalline dawn, and what more could he want? A father and a daughter in a moment disjointed from its history, in a moment between histories. She laid out a new cast and followed the skating dry fly, and it was as if she’d stayed with him all these years and still went by Riffle and allowed him to share all that had been shared with him. In that moment, her fly waking over the glassy surface, the legacy remained intact. He lit a cigarette and tucked his hands in his wader pocket and tried to memorize every detail. Perfection never lasted.
“When did you start smoking so much?”
“Cigarettes?” He’d first dabbled with them in adolescence because the girls he liked liked boys who smoked, and he’d continued to smoke the occasional stick into his forties. But the daily habit began later.
“I don’t remember you ever smoking when I was a kid.”
He’d started in earnest only twelve or fourteen years back, during a week of self-destruction. There had been the three boxes of Camels from the 7-Eleven, the binge at the tavern, and the dirty fight with that random trucker. And, of course, the crash on the way upriver and the broken leg. Funny, looking back on it, how the cigarettes had lasted longer than the limp. Rather than tell her this, he lied, though he wasn’t quite sure why. “I started smoking cigs when I quit smoking grass, twenty-something years ago.”
“I didn’t know. I never knew.”
“I kept it a secret.”
“What other secrets did you keep?”
He snuffed the smoke on the sole of his wading boot and dropped the butt in the film canis
ter he carried in his wader pocket specifically for this purpose. “That’s it.”
*
LATER THAT MORNING, just about the time the red sunlight appeared on the ridge tops, she said suddenly, “I wish you still smoked pot. I mean instead of smoking cigarettes.” He had just finished explaining where she should cast, where the fish held, and where she’d want to stall the swing of the fly. She must have smelled his breath. “Thad smokes pot.”
“The pediatrician?”
“He doesn’t smoke all the time, just an occasional weekend. You won’t get cancer from smoking every pot every now and then. You should quit those things.”
“I think that ship has sailed.”
“You can still quit. There are all sorts of gadgets and gums to help. Cigarettes are evil.”
“But do I want to quit, is the question.” He’d decided a few years back that smoking enhanced his daily life sufficiently to justify the possibility of an earlier demise. A more contemplative and satisfying middle age seemed a worthy trade for a shorter, more abrupt old age. Maybe even a smart play, given how horrendously aggravating those years after seventy-five looked, especially when you were on your own.
And the pot these days didn’t resemble the stuff he’d enjoyed thirty years before, when he could smoke a whole twisty to himself and have a nice, fishable buzz. The last time he’d tried a toke of the new stuff, off one of Danny’s joints, he’d ended up lying on shore for an hour trying to determine which voice in his head was his own.
“I just want you around, that’s all.” She made a new cast, but looked to him instead of following the swing.
“I’ve always been here, always will be.”
She glared off down the shore, and he thought she might curse him for so rarely calling. He cursed himself for that lapse all the time, which made him feel more shabby and awkward, which in turn made him even less inclined to dial her number because then he’d had to face her rightful judgment for not calling. It was a lame and pitiful loop he’d been in now for years, and he hated himself for it.
