by John Larison
Hank left the magazine and began checking the obvious places first, the cabinets and the shelves, then found himself on hands and knees looking under and behind the furniture. Soon he was checking the bedroom, the gear room, the bathrooms. He looked especially closely at the bedroom closet that contained the other artifacts. He knew the skull was in the shoe box on the bottom, though he couldn’t bring himself to open it.
He poured himself a second glass of juice and considered leaving, but then decided to walk around back and check the boat port.
The driftboat was gone. Walter was probably running a trip. He moved some spare oars out of the way and found a green tarp. When he tried to lift it, he discovered the tarp contained something small, heavy, flat. A minute later, he was looking at the stick figures and salmon. Fucking Walter. Some things were inexcusable.
Walter arrived an hour later, his boat rattling against its trailer as the truck climbed the gravel driveway. “One for two,” he called as he gently let himself down from the cab. “Farmed the first one gloriously, you should have seen it. A real blowhard, couldn’t cast thirty feet if God himself had given him three weeks of lessons.”
“Where’d you get the rises?”
“Guess.”
“Faux-Colman.”
“Close. Tinsel Town.” Walter pointed his wading staff at the orange juice. “Pour me one, kid.”
They sat on the tailgate eating filberts Walter had roasted in his solar oven, and discussing how they’d handle the new Cherry Creek offensive. “What pisses me off,” Walter said, “is if we win, they just try again. If they win, it’s over, we’re done.”
Hank bit a filbert in half. “We got to win every fucking time. They just got to win once.”
Walter tossed a nut in the air and caught it in his mouth. Sometimes he was agile for an old bastard.
“With the Morell death and all,” Hank said, “we probably shouldn’t use spikes or strips or boom-booms on this one. Better to stay small, go through legitimate routes.”
“Agreed. Wouldn’t want any office cop up in Salem thinking they’ve got a problem down here in Ipsyniho. God forbid they replace Carter with somebody worth a shit.”
They agreed they’d work this the regular route, the phone tree, the e-mail alerts, the blog postings, see if they couldn’t drum up enough anglers to flood the state office with complaints. “And I’ll get on the horn with the old faithful,” Hank said.
“Make sure you get Cynthia at the Sierra Club, and remind her she still owes us one. A long shot, but if you appeal puppy dog–style, you might get her. The yuppie guilt runs strong in that one.”
The nuts were gone, and Walter clapped his hands like a coach announcing the huddle was over. “Let’s get a session in. Still got time to get upriver.”
Hank checked the sky. “There’s something else, Walt.”
“Stop your pussyfootin’.”
Hank cleared his throat. “I was up at Pine Basin Springs, and saw one of the pictographs was missing.”
Walter smiled. “Knew you’d give me shit about that.” He spat on the ground between them. “This valley ain’t some museum, you realize. There ain’t some curator that comes around and keeps things safe in their climate-controlled boxes.”
“No offense, Walt, you know I have nothing but the utmost respect and all, but really. You can’t just take these things. They’re part of the valley.”
“And they’re still part of the valley. Don’t go getting your waders in a bunch. That pictio-graph was already loose. One more freeze and the sheet would have fallen free. Likely would have busted. I did it a favor, that’s all.”
“But still.”
“Still what?” Walter pointed his wading staff at the sky. “If we’re going make it to Red Gate, we best get on.”
Hank didn’t move. He had dinner plans with Annie, and there was no way he was giving in that easy. “You’re a selfish old prick, you know that? Let me take it back up to the spring.”
Walter climbed into his truck. “Fuck you and your high horse.” As the Chevy rumbled to a start, he called, “Rather fish alone anyhow.”
*
BUT WHEN HANK arrived back home, he found a note on the table that read, “Danny stopped by and offered to take me out for dinner. Couldn’t remember what your plans were for tonight. Hope I didn’t leave you in the lurch. See you before too long.”
So he extracted some prepackaged burritos from the freezer and set the toaster oven to three-seventy-five and started making the calls. First the Sierra Club, then Trout Unlimited, then the Native Fish Society, then the ten leads on the angler phone tree. By the time the burritos were done, he was already drafting up the action alert.
The phone rang a little after eight, and it was in his hand before the end of the first ring. Steve Burke, his client the day Morell went missing. “Sorry to call so late, but I knew you’d want to hear.” Carter had just called him and asked for a full description of the events of that day. “He asked three times if you had left me alone at any point during the trip. Three times, Hank. Like he thinks you might be the one who killed that guide. But haven’t they already arrested someone?”
It was probably Carter just tying up some loose ends. Hank told Steve as much, thanked him for the call, and put on a movie.
*
COME MIDNIGHT, ANNIE still wasn’t home. His movie had ended and he couldn’t keep himself awake any longer. He crawled into bed, but left the door open so he could hear her return.
Chapter Nineteen
HANK FIRED UP the Bronco at dawn, loaded the rods, and headed upstream.
It was Annie who woke him, though only from a thin veil of sleep. She’d come creeping by his door a half hour before fishing light, like a teenager returned from some illicit rendezvous. He’d risen in hopes of catching her, but her door shut just as he reached the hallway. In the kitchen a few moments later, he’d found himself tossing a coffee cup into the sink and letting a drawer slam shut.
He parked on the Wright Creek Bridge, the blue green water swirling below, and lit a cigarette. It was Danny he was thinking about now. Danny with his arm around Annie. He pulled hard on the smoke— too hard—and gagged on it.
Below, off Lee’s Lip, he could see a fish holding. Fish were always holding at Lee’s Lip.
He’d named the spot after Lee Spencer, this generation’s greatest mind. An archeologist by training, Lee now lived most of the year in a trailer at the refuge pool upstream, a pool as long as a semitruck but never as deep. At times, three hundred fish would hold there, awaiting higher water and better spawning conditions. In the days before Lee, the fish were often shot by drunk assholes, and at least twice, they’d been dynamited. Since Lee, they were hardly harassed even by bears.
Lee’s days were spent recording what he saw. He kept a journal beside him and made notes whenever he saw a fish stir. If a fish rose to the surface, he recorded the time, the air temperature, the water temperature, and the item for which the fish rose. If the pod of steel-head became nervous, Lee examined the sky for eagles, the shores for coyotes, the water for otters. Anything and everything those fish did, he recorded. And from more than a decade of such notes, Lee had amassed an exhaustive understanding of steelhead behavior. For instance, he understood the fish possessed an acute sense of smell. If a deer crossed the riffle upstream, they would smell it in the water and begin jumping to get a better look. If a person touched the water upstream, they would begin a nervous daisy chain around the pool, their collective shape forming the mathematical notation for infinity.
But more than recording simple observations, Lee had been recording the ecology of a place, how the land affected its creatures. His was true nature writing. Lee wasn’t a tourist in a place, he wasn’t inspired by some fleeting moment of natural majesty, he was a character in the story of an ecosystem. His notes didn’t turn the place into a portrait to be admired; they documented the thin tendrils of connection between him and the fish, the fish and the water, the water
and the sky.
The last time Hank fished with Lee was right here at the lip, a year back. Lee used a fifteen-foot rod and a hookless fly and would often raise a fish where others had failed. He knew how to position himself to make short, perfect presentations. On that day though, the fish had been especially dour. Neither Hank nor Lee had raised a fish by midmorning, when they ran into Danny here on the bridge. Hank had said, “Impossible day, with this warm water.” Lee pointed to the fish on the lip below. “That’s a big buck.” Danny had snuffed his joint and said, “Well, I’ll go waste a few casts.” Of course Danny made one cast, twitched his fly just right, and that big buck somersaulted over the fly. Lee had turned to Hank and repositioned his hat. “That kid knows his fish.”
Hank lit a second cigarette now, though not because he needed it, and looked across the empty bridge.
What Lee understood was the ecology of place, how patterns superseded their players. And what worried Hank, what had his stomach twisting, was that the ecology of harm might be no different.
But the rumors about Danny and his ex had been bullshit. Anybody who really knew Danny, who fished with him, had known the truth. Besides, one look at those happy twins and any fool could see Danny wasn’t a violent man. Having a temper was one thing, being violent was another. Ask anybody who knew Danny, they’d all say the same thing: He couldn’t have meant to cut her.
The official report six years ago, Carter’s report, stated that it had been an accident, that Danny had tripped with the knife in his hand. Hank never asked why he’d had a knife in the first place, why he needed one when he and his pregnant wife, Shoshana, were arguing along the side of the road. There were plenty of good reasons—they’d been trailering boats at the time and occasionally a tie-down would stick or an anchor line would wrap around an axle—which folks who knew boats would understand. Whatever the reason for that knife, she’d spent the night in the hospital. The divorce came through before the birth, though people said it’d been a long time coming.
Danny wasn’t afraid of pissing people off. If the wild fish were in need, he stepped up and did what was right. So he wasn’t exactly loved by the bait guides downriver, the ones who argued adamantly to maintain the hatchery program and the catch-and-kill policy on natives. And the folks at the chamber of commerce didn’t much like him either, on account of his rallying to stop the upriver golf course that had been proposed a couple years back. Danny was quick to be the point man on any controversial issue. It was the very feature of his personality that had made him so popular among fly anglers—though it had done little to make him the most beloved guy in Ipsyniho. And so, after the newspaper article, a lot of people had rushed to call him a danger, a criminal, a threat. Which was ridiculous.
And that’s where Hank had left it for the past six years. Hank, Caroline, Walter, Danny’s devoted customers and fans, anybody who knew Danny had left it there too. “Nothing more than flung dung,” Walter had quipped the one time they talked of it.
But here Hank was staring at the water, thinking again of that knife. Thinking of it now not as Danny’s friend but as Annie’s father.
Chapter Twenty
JUSTIN MORELL’S MOTHER would be taking his body back to the family plot near their home in Grand Rapids, Michigan, but before leaving, she wanted to host a “celebration of life” in her son’s honor. The girlfriend helped organize the event at his house, and word quickly spread up the valley. Despite any hard feelings that might have existed when the kid was alive, all of the riverfolk put on long pants and shoes and tucked in their shirts and came armed with flowers or fruit or smoked fish and generous stories starring Morell, stories that his mother could carry home and cherish like the boyhood pictures she’d brought and placed around the house in lieu of the Marley and Floyd posters. She would tell these stories to her neighbors and the family friends who’d known Justin as a boy, and she’d feel warmed each time by the knowledge that her son and his magical gifts had been loved and appreciated by the larger community, despite the tragic and violent and still-mysterious circumstances of his death. That death would become a story of its own, one she’d imagine and reimagine until it felt as real as if she’d been there herself—but ultimately, it would be reduced to a random black moment in a life lived in light and love. It had to be this way, Hank thought; otherwise, how could she go on?
“Your son,” Hank began, not knowing where he’d end up, “learned this river faster than anyone I’ve ever met.” There it was, something truthful and warm he could give her. He took her hand in his. “He had a gift for understanding water.”
Her grown daughter was there with her and she stared unflinchingly at Hank. Like she was thinking, Is this the one who did it? Clearly, she didn’t need these stories, or didn’t yet know she needed them. Hank did his best to offer a pursed, sympathetic smile.
Carter had called that morning, though Hank had let the answering machine pick up. He’d said, “Give me a call at your earliest convenience. There seems to be some contradictory info we’d like to pull straight. Hank, call me.” The call made him feel guilty. Like this sister’s glare.
The mother nodded now. “He spoke of you guides so highly. He was writing an essay, you know, we found it on his computer, and it was all about fishing and the mentoring between the older and younger guides. The essay was called ‘Uncles.’” She smiled. “There’s a line, ‘uncles and keepers of the tradition.’ Beautiful, huh?”
Hank now remembered the warmth of Morell’s neck against the side of his forearm, the gasping sound he’d made when Hank slammed him against that truck. Some uncle. “He’ll be missed,” Hank said, turning and moving away now.
It occurred to Hank now that the last time he’d done this was at Patrick O’Connell’s funeral. He’d flown to Arizona on a Friday and returned on Sunday and didn’t feel a lick better for going. He’d been one of fourteen attendees.
Annie laced her fingers around his arm. “That was kind of you,” she said. She’d been at the house making breakfast when he returned from the bridge that morning. He didn’t ask about her failure to come home the night before, and she didn’t offer an explanation.
The party was spilling into the backyard, where someone was barbecuing and someone else was opening beers. Here, thank god, no one was crying.
Annie, Caroline, and Danny stood in a crescent looking back at the house from across the lawn, sipping their beers and watching Morell’s mother through the kitchen window. There was a table set up on the small porch. On it sat a guest book, photocopies of a Grand Rapids newspaper article featuring Morell as “State’s Youngest Fly-fishing Guide,” copies of the articles Morell had written, and a large framed picture of the kid, a senior portrait probably, his naive eyes smiling over them.
Someone laughed nearby, a raft guide. He was telling a story about a client that afternoon. Hank felt like telling a story of his own, some random event, something funny, but there was nothing but Morell and darkness anywhere inside him.
“What a waste,” Danny said. Whether he meant the death or this event itself wasn’t clear. What was clear was that he’d been looking at Annie when he said it.
She responded a moment later with, “I prefer the Jewish arguments about death, personally. In the Hasidic tradition, there’s no separation between the finite and the infinite. It’s all one realm. So when you die, your body reenters the world, through the soil, through the grass, through the deer. It’s all God.”
“Yeah,” Caroline said. “I like that. It’s all God. We live forever that way.”
Walter brushed this talk aside. “New Age nonsense, all of it. You die, you’re dead, that’s it. There’s nothing more to it. No God. No living forever. You’re tits-up, you’re lights-out, you’re done.”
“Come on, Walt,” Hank said. This was his daughter Walter was affronting.
“You know it’s true.” Walter brought his beer to his lips, but paused before sipping to say, “Anything else is delusion.”
Annie
was speaking before Hank could muster a reply. “It’s all delusion. Nobody’s arguing that. The point is we’re free to pick the delusion we find most helpful.”
Walter scoffed and left them and disappeared back inside.
“What’s gotten up his ass?” Danny asked.
Later, there was a toast and Morell’s sister told a story about her little brother as a three-year-old fishing in mud puddles in the family driveway. “He sat there for hours, sure some giant fish lurked in those four inches of water.” People were laughing and crying as if this image somehow encapsulated the Justin they knew. There were other stories like this told by the mother, who downed a whole glass of white wine before standing. She touched the framed picture of her son and said, “If only your father could have seen the man you became.”
And that’s when Hank found himself overcome. He’d so far managed to keep this whole event at arm’s length, but in that moment, with the mother touching that high school portrait, he swallowed hard at the tears welling within him. He looked for Caroline, and she wrapped her arms around him and dried her cheeks on his shirt. Even Walter was leaning against the fence, his head down, his hand covering his eyes, his shoulders shaking with sobs.
Hank hadn’t been the uncle this boy needed, hadn’t even tried. He put an arm around Annie and decided the next patch of water he found on the river, a hidden place that held fish, he’d name it after Morell.
Chapter Twenty-One
“I WANT TO see where I was born,” Annie said as they drove upstream. “Can you take me to where I was born?”
And so Hank turned up Rock Creek and followed the winding road through the oaks and their neon leaves, then through the golden savanna with rusty patches of poison oak, along the one-lane pinch beneath the sheer cliff, and to the saddle and the dozen homes there. A whitetail deer bounded across the meadow and sailed over a fence, its erect tail visible over the horizon even after the creature itself had disappeared. On the other side, a blacktail deer and her spotted fawn turned broadside and never stopped chewing as the truck rolled by.
