Holding Lies

by John Larison

  When they’d first met, Hank asked Andy why he’d chosen to move all the way to the Ipsyniho. Andy said he’d been reading about the river since he was a boy and had always known this was where he’d “make his stand.” “Got to live someplace, and figure the Ipsyniho needs all the friends it can get.”

  It was precisely this determination that had bound Andy and Danny all those years before, when they were both brimming with that omnipotent optimism native only to twenty-year-olds. They had been fast friends from the beginning, and in the years since, they’d been through drought and high water. To Danny, Andy was a brother, a confidant, and an advisor and an uncle to his children. Their bond was deep and immovable, and it was this bond, more than any battle on behalf of the watershed, that had endeared Andy to Hank. Say what you might about Andy’s occasional elitism or his often banal sense of humor, the guy was Danny’s closest friend.

  But Andy had never gone out of his way to please those he didn’t respect. Carter, for instance. Only a couple years back, Andy had called the state game trooper to report two people fishing hardware in the fly water. The trooper responded fast, as they usually do to reports of poaching, but decided not to issue a ticket. Probably because the anglers in question were Sheriff Carter and his grandson and the location was just one pool up from the legal boundary. No fine may have been levied, but that didn’t stop Carter from showing up at Andy’s house to give him hell. In the time since, Andy had taken to calling Carter a “lazy-ass fuckup,” and Hank had once heard Carter refer to Andy as that “prissy know-it-all.”

  Surely, this arrest had more to do with spite than evidence.

  The thermometer on the deck read ninety-two degrees and it was only 10:15. Annie was sitting on the couch fanning herself with a magazine and reading a book titled The New Global Ethics: Contamination, Consumption, and Future Generations. When he proposed they go for a hike someplace cool, she flung the book down and said, “Yes, that’s exactly what I need. Anything but another bullshit rehashing of Kant.”

  They drove with the windows down upriver, parked at a wide spot, and followed the rocky trail that threaded Slide Creek Valley. Hank had packed them a lunch of cheese and crackers and fruit, and by the heat of the day, they were lounging at the base of Magic Falls, two thousand feet above the valley floor and the watershed’s coolest spot. The falls fell from a windblown cliff into a cylinder-shaped ravine, where the water-chilled air remained trapped. Caroline called this place “air-conditioning alley,” and in fact, Annie found it so cold she pulled on a fleece.

  Stunted firs grew from the craggy rocks, none taller than four feet, their compressed frames sculpted by their environment. Some, Hank knew, were over a hundred years old. Tiny cutthroat trout rose in the pool below, eagerly attacking any flake of dirt he tossed their way.

  “This is where the native Ipsynihians spent the hot days,” he said. “People have been weathering heat here since King Tut.”

  They’d been lost in conversation more or less since leaving the truck, mostly Annie’s excited answers to Hank’s questions. Like her mother, walking fueled her talking. For which Hank was glad. On the river, she’d been pensive and aloof, but here she was almost giddy. And he was too. He was eager to learn everything he’d missed, to memorize all the stops in her life in the years since they’d last seen each other.

  Since leaving the truck, he’d learned much about Thad, about Thad’s childhood in an old-money North Carolina family, about how they’d met at a party in graduate school, about how he liked to paddle a sea kayak around Nantucket. Thad was “brilliant,” she said, “capable of accomplishing anything he set his mind to.” He’d been a star at Johns Hopkins, a star since; jobs had fallen at his feet. He was a master of every hobby he ever tried, and with half the effort of those failing around him. “People resent him,” she said, out of breath, “because he makes everything look so easy.”

  He’d proposed under a full moon on a Caribbean beach, after insisting on a Thursday night that they fly there the next morning for a weekend in the sun. She called it either “impressively” or “oppressively romantic”; Hank wasn’t sure which.

  Something about Thad led her to transition to her dissertation, though only half the words she used to describe it made any sense to him. In fact, the only term from the title that he recognized was “imperative.” He asked a couple times for clarification, but her attempts to elucidate did little to improve his understanding. He got the sense that graduate school was mostly about learning a new language with which only the graduates themselves could communicate, in effect creating their own little island community. What he wondered, what he couldn’t be sure of, was whether what they were talking about was really any more complex, sophisticated, or illuminating than what everyone else talked about. But, nonetheless, he found listening to her easy navigation of the language its own kind of music. Here was his daughter, probably the smartest person he knew.

  They sat together on a mossy slab of granite, the falls roaring nearby, and ate Gorgonzola on crackers. Out in the distance, they could see square clear-cuts on most of the ridges and the rusty smoke of a new forest fire. Late summer in Oregon.

  What had the view been like from here a thousand years before? What would it be like a thousand years from now?

  “Do you and Thad think you’ll ever have kids?”

  “Hank.”

  “Just asking.”

  Annie shrugged, and that was that. She changed the subject. “I have to ask. Thad asked me and I didn’t know the answer and that got me curious and I called Mom but she said you were the one who picked my name.”

  It was thirty years ago, but he remembered as clearly as he did the fish she landed yesterday.

  “I mean,” Annie said, “‘Riffle is not really a name other people have. There must be a story.”

  “No story really,” Hank said. “Just the name I picked for you.”

  “I could understand Brooke or Finn or something like that.”

  He’d been standing in a riffle holding Rosemary’s raft when she told him she was pregnant. The air had been cooling with evening, the sun in their eyes, the breeze picking up. But that wasn’t why he chose the name. The name hadn’t come to him until the night after she was born. The fire had died down in the cabin and he got up to add a new quarter round and there she was, her face compressed and wrinkled and wedged against Rosemary’s breast. A smear of milky saliva ran along her cheek and he cleaned it with his pinky. This was his daughter. This was his family. In that moment, he felt more whole and satiated and essential than he had at any moment in the decades before or since. The name had come to him then, in the lee of this new life.

  “Riffles have mysteries. They might be five feet deep or five inches, it doesn’t matter: you’ll never clearly see the contour of the bottom.” She didn’t seem to understand this. “A riffle is the river’s point of balance.”

  “Sometimes I wonder,” she said, looking up at the cliffs that surrounded, “what might have happened if I hadn’t changed my name.”

  She was saying so much more than just those words. But did she mean, what might have happened if she’d stayed, or did she mean, what might have happened if he’d moved with her to Chicago?

  He put his hand on hers, and his heart pounded with the risk—this was the first intimate gesture they’d shared since that embrace when she arrived.

  She surprised him. She leaned and rested her head on his shoulder and said, “Tell me a story. Tell me a story from back then.” And for a small moment at the base of those falls, it seemed everything might work out.

  Chapter Thirteen

  ON THE RIDE up to Caroline’s, Annie asked, “Did you know the guy?” meaning Justin Morell. Hank had just finished explaining what Danny had told him at the fly shop, that one of the other guides had been arrested for murder. He hadn’t said much about Morell before this moment; he didn’t want her impressions of Ipsyniho to be tainted by violence and by death. Deep down, maybe, he had allowed
the notion that she might, someday, return to Ipsyniho, might buy a little home along the water and be near him again.

  “I did. He was a young guide. We weren’t close. But I knew him.” He fished around on the seat beside him and found the picture he’d taken from the corkboard at Morell’s house, the one of him and Walter. “He took this picture.”

  Annie pointed at the image. “Who’s the old guy? He looks familiar.”

  “Walter. A good friend. You spent plenty of time in his boat when you were little.”

  Annie set the photo on the dashboard. “How old was he?”

  “Walter?”

  “No, this dead guide.”

  “Twenty-something.”

  Annie put her arm out the window and let the wind lift it up and drive it down—just as she had when she was five years old. But now she shook her head like something wasn’t right, and retracted her arm. “Twenty-something.”

  “Just a kid, really.”

  They arrived at Caroline’s for dinner a little after seven, just as the evening’s coastal winds began sweeping through the firs and rustling the alders. Annie held open the gate, her sundress waving in the breeze, those dusty sandals below. Her hair was held back by a bandana, and she was wearing the sleek polarized glasses Hank had given her. Except for the lack of a substantive tan, she looked like she’d lived her whole life in the watershed.

  Though no local ever would have pulled a device from her purse and said, “Shit, no service.”

  Caroline and Annie hit it off from the get-go. They drank a glass of wine while Hank cut mushrooms and onions and squash and threaded them onto the kabobs and another while he massaged the elk tenderloin he’d put on marinade at 5.00 a.m. Like Annie, Caroline was a confident and articulate converser, just as capable in a conversation about politics as she was in one about stream ecology. And Caroline had, herself, spent half a decade living on the East Coast, in what she sometimes referred to as her “parallel life.” But most impressive to Hank, Caroline was capable of asking Annie challenging questions about philosophy. Twice Annie said, “Oh, that’s such the right question.” When Hank left to put the meat on the grill, neither of them seemed to notice.

  Out back, he smoked a cigarette and listened to the simple sizzling of food over heat.

  There’d been a message on the answering machine at home, a message he’d listened to twice. It was from Danny, who’d finally gotten a hold of a deputy friend. Turned out Carter believed Justin Morell had been hit in the back of the head. “He says there’s a divot in Morell’s skull, like someone clocked him with a baseball bat.” Danny was worried about Andy. “Maybe you best not go repeating what I told you, about Andy and Morell getting into it on the lower river. Maybe it’s time we all went hush-hush on this one.”

  That seemed futile at this point. Stories of conflict traveled like wind in the Ipsyniho Valley. But Hank would do Danny any favor.

  When Hank returned, Caroline gave him a kiss on the cheek and whispered, “She’s terrific, so bright and hilarious! Are you sure she’s yours?”

  Annie was across the room, checking the device in her purse. “Got her mother’s brains and my good looks.”

  Caroline refilled Hank’s wine glass and said, “You know, Annie, your mom and I were good friends back when she used to run raft trips. We couldn’t have been even your age. Twenty-five, maybe, something like that. Is she still living near water?”

  The three of them carried chairs out to a wrought-iron table in the grass, and Annie recounted how her mom had quickly climbed the ranks at a Chicago architecture firm, how she’d settled down with a city planner, bought a place with a view of the lake. Now they were both retired and spending half the year sailing the world. They’d spent last winter in the Mediterranean. “I’m continually amazed by how together she is. I mean, she went to school while being a single mother. I can’t even imagine that. Such an accomplishment.”

  But Hank had been there any time she needed him. It wasn’t like she had been ditched, not like so many single mothers.

  “Next time you see her,” Caroline said, “ask her if she remembers the night we drove to the beach and swam in the moonlight. You should know, Rosie was”—laughing now—“wild back then.”

  “Aren’t the beaches here freezing?”

  “Not freezing. Forty-something probably,” Caroline said.

  “Talk about an accomplishment,” Hank said. Then felt silly for saying anything at all. Both Caroline and Annie were looking at him. “She really was wild.”

  *

  THE TENDERLOIN WAS overmarinated and so didn’t grill at the speed Hank had anticipated. The outside remained tough from the excess salt and the inside was pink and stiff and he’d fucked it all up. He shouldn’t have put it on marinade when he did since the cut had already been exposed to salt the day Annie arrived in town, the day they went to the Lodge for dinner. Or he should have diluted the marinade. Or he should have wrapped it in mashed potatoes to extract the salt from the original soaking and then started again. Or … whatever. He’d fucked it up and there was nothing he could do about it now.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Caroline said charitably. “It’s delectable.”

  Annie nodded, gnawing at a bite. “It’s very good.”

  “Thanks,” Hank said. “It’s meat, but that’s all it has going for it.”

  Caroline had made the dessert, and it turned out exactly like she’d planned: a blackberry cobbler with hand-churned ice cream. She’d picked the berries that day while her client fished Heart of Darkness, a run on a lower drift that split a gauntlet of blackberry bushes. It was the first place the berries came ripe in the Ipsyniho Valley, and Hank was sure Caroline had selected that float for the berries, not the fishing. As a garnish, a pair of mint leaves topped each bowl, and their aroma lent the dessert a crisp chill. It was spectacular. Each bite sent you traversing strata of flavor: musky dawn, saccharine fog, dusty thundershower. Hank went back for a second helping. Then a third.

  “You guys do it right,” Annie said.

  “Anything worth doing.” Caroline’s mouth was full of cobbler.

  As the sun set, they walked Samson and Delilah up the old skid trail to the ridge top and looked east. The last rays were sending orange streaks through the smoky air, and the few clouds above them seemed to have been placed there with pink pastel.

  Caroline sent the dogs into the meadow to run loops and tire themselves, and they went straight to the thicket in the far corner, their noses to the ground. “Must be a raccoon over there,” Hank said.

  Caroline called once, and when the dogs didn’t return, she shrugged and said, “Old Mr. Raccoon has nothing to fear from those pacifists.”

  Pacifists they were, despite a combined weight of hundred and seventy pounds. Hank had once seen them chased up the shore by a mother duck, just sixteen ounces of waddling quack. He turned to tell Annie the story, but found her typing a message into that little device. “Now?” he said instead.

  She didn’t look up. “I know. Can’t believe there’s service here.”

  Caroline tossed him a glance: Let it slide. She put her arm around his waist and called again to the dogs, who were now obscured by the brush.

  “I remember when we couldn’t get a landline,” Hank said. He and Rosemary had tried in vain for a year to convince the phone company to put a line up to their house on Rock Creek. He’d had to organize most bookings by mail then. Despite the inconvenience, he was sure the world was better off then, when a place equaled a headspace. Now cell phones and these newer gadgets meant you could transpose one place, one set of concerns, over another—a place could vanish even though you were standing on it.

  Caroline sparked a joint and passed it to Annie. “Rosie and I smoked a few of these in our day.”

  Annie looked from the device to the weed. “Oh wow.” She typed a couple last words, and tucked the thing in her purse. “Really? Mom?” She pinched the paper and brought the joint to her lips. As she exhaled,
“Hank?”

  He waved the joint away, but Caroline said, “Come on, stud. Everybody’s doing it.”

  Caroline could handle her pot in a way Hank could not. She tried to tempt him every now and then, often while naked, but Caroline’s dope, like Danny’s, was too strong for an old bugger like him. This time, though, it was Annie handing him the joint. “Come on, it’ll be fun.” What it was, was a chance to bond with his daughter.

  He inhaled shallowly, just a little, but when he exhaled, hardly anything came out, and so he took one more. That one tasted pretty good, so another couldn’t hurt.

  “Look at this!” Annie said, effervescing now with the stoke of it all. She spun and said, “I mean, it’s fucking beautiful out here!”

  Caroline laughed. “In love with the ground under her feet.”

  “But the sky!” Annie said. “And look, there’s the first star! Holy shit,” looking back toward Caroline now, “you can touch the stratosphere from here!”