Holding Lies

by John Larison

  But she surprised him: “Thad lost his father last year. It was real sudden.”

  A long-shelved memory appeared as vivid as the tailout before him: the lonely drive to his own father’s deathbed, the rain splattering up from the log trucks, the manic beating of the windshield wipers. It had taken a week for the man to pass, the first week they spent together in twenty-something years. “Heart attack?”

  “Stroke.”

  “Good way to go. Fast.”

  “Gosh, Hank. When did you become a masochist?”

  *

  HE TOLD HER all the standard stories, the little anecdotes that instilled the scenery with a sense of history and narrative, the stories that lent plot to this place. It was these stories that gave clients a feeling of possession, of mastery, and it was a sense of mastery over fish or place or both that drove them to dig deep into their tipping cash.

  Over the years, the stories had morphed, becoming simpler and less concerned with the absolute facts of their parent events. Sometimes, when Hank was feeling inspired, he would fill in the gaps with florid details, maybe add a character and delete another, maybe twist the event for hyperbolic effect. What did it matter if they were true or not? These dudes would forget the story the moment they stepped off the plane back in LA or Houston or Duluth. It would fade like the fish, like the river, like Hank himself, into the scenery of their own tale in which they, of course, were the hero.

  But this time, he was driven by a compulsion to be entirely truthful.

  As they drifted past the cement pillars and barren foundation of what had once been the Thompson Cottage, he told her about the newlyweds from Eugene who had bought the place, arrived for their honeymoon, and had a hundred-year-old fir smash through it the first night. “The tree crushed the front half of the house and they had no exit. But that was the least of their problems. It also cracked open the woodstove and the fire swept through the debris. They had no choice but to jump off the balcony into the river. They were nude, of course.” Only after he finished telling her about how they didn’t make it to shore for a quarter mile and about how they’d sprinted through town like a rogue Adam and Eve did it occur to him that he couldn’t quite recall if the fire in the house had started when the tree fell or sometime later. And maybe they hadn’t jumped into the river nude. Maybe they hadn’t jumped into the river at all. He’d told the exaggerated version so long, he couldn’t determine where the exaggerations ended.

  Nonetheless, Annie enjoyed the story, and recounted one of her own, about a German couple she’d helped while vacationing in Grand Cayman who had their clothing stolen as they skinny-dipped. “The whitest people I’ve ever seen.”

  “You were in the Caymans?”

  “Oh yeah, regularly,” Annie said. “It’s Thad’s favorite place.”

  Of course, Hank thought. The guy is a tourist in his favorite place.

  Which only spurred Hank to tell more stories. At Barrier, he explained the unique pool’s geologic history, how it had once been a lava tube that had been buried by subsequent volcanic eruptions.

  “As the river ate down through the valley floor, it uncovered the tube, busted through the top, and now runs right down what remains of the cylinder.” The geologic stories were much easier to keep straight.

  As were the historical facts: at Boat, he pointed to where the tribal fishermen had kept their summer camps, to the place where they smoked the fish, to the runs from which they netted the chinook, the silvers, the eels, the smelt, the steelhead. “They had names for the runs on the river, names that had been passed down for generations. In the best runs, they even had names for the important boulders and ledges.”

  “Why do you all call this place Boat, then? Why don’t you use the original names? It’d be a nice show of respect.”

  “We don’t know the names. The legacy was broken after the Rogue River Wars, when the cavalry rounded up all the remaining natives in southern Oregon and marched them to a camp on the coast. The first European anglers didn’t arrive for twenty years after.”

  Just after lunch, they stopped at Mossy Rock, at the pool of apparently stagnant water behind it, water that was separated from the main flows by a granite ledge. This hot spring was a place he never stopped with clients, a place the guides never shared with a tourist. They anchored and stripped to the bathing suits Hank had suggested they bring and tiptoed their way into the scalding water. To cool the pool down, Hank grabbed the boat’s bailer and heaved in a few gallons of icy river water.

  “Do you remember coming here with your mom and me? We used to come all the time.”

  “Maybe I remember, but only viscerally. No details, only this feeling against my skin. Holy shit,” she sighed, her eyes shut, her head resting back on the rocks. “It’s so womblike.”

  “Funny you say that.” Hank pointed at the shady patch of sand beside the pool. “That’s where you were conceived.”

  Annie glanced at the patch. “Looks uncomfortable.”

  Hank smiled. “That’s not my recollection.”

  *

  THEY HADN’T RAISED a fish all day, though Annie didn’t seem too concerned. She wasn’t that interested in the fishing, and repeatedly deferred a run to Hank, saying she liked watching him more than bumbling around at it herself.

  But Hank made sure to have the boat at the top of Faux-Colman by 3:30. They waded onto the midstream ledge and into casting position and waited for that band of shade to fall over the bucket in the tailout. He knew fish would be holding there, and the sudden loss of the glaring sunlight would wake them from their midday stupor, and a correctly cast dry fly might entice a fish to come busting through the surface.

  “That elk jerky,” she nodded back at the boat. “You hunt too?”

  “Not really. I mean, I carry a rifle in the boat during elk season and I usually get one, but I’m not of the hunting temperament. I just like meat, and cows kill salmon.”

  She thought about this. “What about chicken?”

  “Rats with feathers. A ruffed grouse, now that’s a bird worth eating.”

  A lock of hair had ended up in her mouth and she blew it to the side, just like Rosemary used to. She was so much her mother’s daughter. “What else do you like to do?” she asked.

  “Besides fish?” The shade was just now crawling up through the rapid. The steelhead would be ready to see a fly soon.

  “Yeah, besides fish.”

  He shrugged. “I like boating. Swimming. Reading. Cooking. You know. But steelhead are enough.”

  “What is it about them?” She was looking downstream, into the sunlight, the baseball cap he’d lent her pulled low, and the river reflected in her sunglasses. “This is, like, what you do.”

  From the tone, he could tell she had meant, all you do. He tried not to be insulted. “What is it about steelhead?” It was a frequent question from the spouses of clients, who often accompanied their mates on the trip, forced to watch their partner flail obsessively at the river. Nonetheless, it was still an impossible question for Hank to answer.

  Should he tell her of their awe-inspiring life cycle? How they were born in a small patch of gravel in the headwaters and lived in the vicinity for two years before descending the river to the ocean, where they would traverse the Pacific shelf all the way to the Aleutians and Russia’s eastern shore gorging on baitfish and crustaceans before turning and swimming all the way back to their natal river and—impossibly—to the same gravel from which they were born, where they would spend one to ten months without actively feeding before spawning themselves. Their offspring, which would emerge a few weeks later, would do it all again.

  Or should he speak of the mysteries, the questions yet to be answered, both biological and behavioral, like what allowed some rivers to have enormous fish and other rivers to have only smaller ones, and why were some populations more inclined to take dry flies than others, and how was it they were able to find the precise location of their birth after so long?

  Or of the
cunning and attractive features of their personalities? For instance, their curiosity; they frequently jumped vertically out of the water and looked straight at a person on shore who’d just spoken loudly. They sometimes tracked a swinging fly, nipping at it with their mouths or tickling it with their fins. And of course, they often ignored a real insect to strike a pinecone or leaf.

  They were the underdogs of the fish world too. Once inhabiting every coastal trickle from the San Mateo north to the Skeena and around to the Kamchatka Peninsula, they had been vanishing at a steady pace for generations. In the fifties and sixties, the southern California populations vanished, in the seventies and eighties, the northern California populations, in the nineties and oughts, the Oregon and Washington populations, and in the coming twenty years, the Canadian populations, which were on a straight trajectory toward oblivion. Now, only a few American rivers still had wild runs, the Ipsyniho being the most notable, and even here the fish were a couple bad years away from extinction. Their populations were robust when their rivers were pure, delicate when their rivers were damaged.

  But for him it really came down to the steelhead’s rivers: wild, rugged, raw places, places forgotten and untouched, places with mysteries. Steelhead offered an opportunity to explore these places with purpose, and in intimate proximity.

  He could go on for hours; in fact, he had and probably would again.

  The appreciation of all things steelhead was one thing he never had to explain to Caroline, and one thing she never had to explain to him—the reason, maybe, she’d kept him around longer than his expected shelf life.

  “They’re individuals,” he finally answered. “Each one is different, and each one is worth getting to know. And,” he added a second later, “each one is worth fighting to save.”

  “But it’s a fish, Hank.” She was looking off downstream, and he wondered if he’d heard her straight.

  He blurted, “They’re the coal mine’s canary,” and then worried his tone had revealed too much.

  She turned to him. “We need fights, don’t we?”

  “You and me?” He was about to charge on, to say, I never wanted to fight with you, but she continued before he could.

  “All of us. We need something to fight for. We need a cause.”

  “We need love too.”

  “Maybe,” she said. “We’d like to think so anyway, but really, we just fear loneliness.”

  The shade had fallen over the water and he didn’t like where this was headed. He handed her the rod and said, “Here. Drop that fly on that seam. The one near the patch of yellow grass.”

  She cast the two-hander like he’d showed her, but her top hand overpowered the bottom, and the fly landed quite some distance from where he’d hoped. Nevertheless, the current brought it around, and a half-second later, it was gone in a bolt of silver brighter than the sun.

  She did nothing—a reflex remembered from her youth?—and the fish leapt again, coming down broadside and leaving a divot the size of a car door in the surface. Annie’s rod was bucking and the reel was screeching out line and the fish was leaping beside them, then turning and blurring downstream as fast as any fish Hank could remember.

  He pulled the boat’s anchor and helped Annie in, who was by now laughing obscenities, and they were off following the fish through the rapid and into the next pool, where Hank anchored again and Annie was able to regain all that backing and most of the fly line. Soon the fish was beside them, and Hank waded out and reached a hand for the leader and followed it down to the fish, gripping the fly in one hand and slipping the other under the pectoral fins. It was a female of ten or eleven pounds, gunmetal and cobalt.

  “Can I touch it?” Annie asked.

  He helped her find delicate purchase on the tail joint, and unpinned the fly and said, “She’s yours to release.”

  Annie didn’t waste any time. The fish kicked and was gone.

  On shore, Hank was shaking from the excitement of it all, as if he hadn’t been party to thousands of landings in his life, but this was his daughter and everything was different. She’d handled the fight, the landing, the release, all of it with innate competence. The early lessons must have remained in her somewhere.

  Annie pinned the fly on the hook-keep.

  “So?” Hank asked.

  “It was fun,” she said. “I’d forgotten how fun.” She seemed about to say more.

  “What is it?”

  “Nothing.”

  When he probed, she finally came out with it: “It seems kind of wasteful, that’s all.

  To hurt the fish like that and then just let it go. To catch it for no reason.”

  “For no reason?”

  “Yeah, I mean, if we were keeping it and eating it, that would be one thing, but to just let it go … it seems cruel.” When she saw his face, she amended, “But it was fun. Don’t get me wrong. I really enjoyed it.”

  For the next hour as they drifted toward the takeout, as she spoke about Thad and their courting, about the trips they’d taken to Europe and South America, about the life she had been living since he’d let her go so long before, as she spoke about all these things, one word she had said echoed back again and again like a rifle’s report ricocheting between the ridges: wasteful.

  *

  ANNIE SAW THE body boat before Hank did, near a patch of heavy brush in the Wright Creek Run. As they neared, Hank saw three firefighters reaching long poles into the limbs. He oared down, hoping to get Annie below their boat and out of sight before they succeeded in retrieving whatever it was they were after.

  As he passed, one of the firemen recognized him and shouted across the water. “Had to turn up eventually.”

  Chapter Twelve

  IT WAS A good thing they fished when they did. The next day, the air temperatures climbed into the low hundreds, and the water temperatures followed suit, climbing into the midsixties, and the fishing shut down. Hank knew the steelhead would be crowding into a few holes, those fed by icy submerged springs or cool tributaries, and that they would likely refuse every presentation and every fly an angler offered. It hadn’t been this hot since that week with Patrick O’Connell.

  Annie slept in the next morning, and Hank left her a note with ideas for breakfast and drove down to the fly shop to find out what he could about Morell.

  Danny had done great things for the store. The former owner had been a royal schmuck, dishing out trips only to guides willing to work for less than the going rate, underpaying the fly tyers, refusing to lift a finger to help on any conservation projects. In fact, the guy had sided with the State and lobbied for the new hatchery complex. The only reason he stayed afloat was because Danny worked there. Even at eighteen, Danny could talk Ipsyniho steelhead all day, every day. The customers loved him. He’d had this way back then of making a customer feel like the most interesting person in the galaxy, which usually prompted them to buy more than they intended. When Danny quit, the shop lasted only six months or so. No surprise. Danny bought the inventory for a steal, about the same time the twins were born.

  Now the shop was booming, even in these less-than-easy times. For one thing, Danny knew precisely which rods, lines, and flies to carry. There were no bullshit products on the walls, gimmick rods or soulless lines that had all the right advertising and all the wrong heart. If you found it here, you knew it would work. For another, Danny had started a blog and contracted a pair of geeked fish junkies to write for it, how-to bits and fishing reports and videos of people landing big fish. Joes from all over the West tuned in daily, and when they needed something, they clicked on the shop catalog for discount rates. Because of the onslaught of orders, Danny had recently hired a full-time box packer.

  Danny was there with the twins, who were watching cartoons in the back office while he helped customers. Hank went past the counter and into the office and took a seat between Miriam and Ruben, and lost himself in their world of high voices and flashing pinks and blues. Ruben whispered, “Do you have any jerky?”
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  “Not today, sorry bud.”

  But Ruben rested his head on Hank’s shoulder anyway, and the minutes quickly became a half hour. When Danny came in, he said, “Sorry about that. It’s been like a Saturday around here.”

  Back in the shop front, Danny poured them each a cup of coffee. “I take it you’ve heard?”

  Monofilament was spread across the counter, and Hank went to work tying up the leaders Danny had started but not finished. “Heard what?”

  Danny pulled shut the office door so the twins wouldn’t hear and said, “Andy. Carter arrested him last night.”

  “Arrested?”

  “It’s gotten real ugly,” Danny said, leaning on the counter now, close enough to whisper. “Carter isn’t talking, won’t return my calls, and Andy is locked up and can’t be bailed out until Monday.”

  “What did they find?”

  Danny shrugged. “Fuck if I know.”

  Hank looked out the shop windows, across river road, like he was expecting to see something there that would answer his question, and all the others. “Has Andy been charged with any—?”

  “He was arrested for murder.”

  “Fuck off,” Hank said too loudly. Both the twins turned his way, spotting him through the glass pane separating the office from the shop floor. Ruben smiled.

  “At least that’s the word.” Danny shrugged. “But like I said, Carter’s not returning my calls.”

  *

  HANK CHECKED THE sheriff’s office, Carter’s home, and even the hospital, but didn’t find the man. Finally, the morning heat already too much for his Bronco’s air-conditioning, he turned upstream toward Annie.

  Andy Trib might have been a transplant, but the guy was solidly Ipsyniho now. Just last spring, he’d laid spike strips across an access road being used by log trucks to reach a headwater clear-cut; two trucks, driving in tandem, rumbled over the strips that morning. Andy then laid another strip lower on the road, which ruptured all four tires of the service truck sent to repair the first blowouts. But vandalism wasn’t the only trick up Andy’s sleeve; he also had a way with words and had, three times now, incited protests at the Board of Forestry’s annual meetings. Maybe most impressively, though, he’d once organized a midnight incursion onto a cattle ranch that had for years allowed its livestock unfettered access to Feather Creek. The cattle had devoured the shoreside vegetation and trampled the soft clay banks, causing catastrophic erosion that had smothered the spawning redds downstream. Hank, Walter, even Trout Unlimited had failed to convince the rancher to amend the situation. So Trib quietly solicited donations from guides and clients and caring citizens and, by the cover of darkness, led a team of thirty-something volunteers down the waterway. In one night, they constructed a twenty-foot buffer all the way down the creek, restricting cattle access to a cobbled beach on the inside of a bend. But in the savviest move of all, Trib convinced a reporter to show up the next morning to document the improvements; the small-town headline read: “Local Rancher Repairs Damaged Stream.” After that, the cowman left the fence standing.