by John Larison
But there was also something else. Last night, hours after she’d supposedly gone to bed, he stepped outside for a smoke. He couldn’t not hear her voice through her open bedroom window. She was on the phone in the darkness, and he just barely made out the word Shoshana. She’d been on the phone with Danny at 2:00 a.m., talking about his ex-wife.
“Did you know this guy who was murdered?” his client asked just as they entered a churning mess of white water.
“Say again?”
Clang. The boat hit a rock, and Hank fell from the oarsman’s seat, smashing his knee into the anchor release. He’d just kept his grip on the sticks, but it was enough, and he pulled hard now to straighten their course. His mouth was filling with a metallic fluid, and he spit a stream of blood onto the floor of the boat—he’d bitten his tongue. “Sorry.” That was the first time he’d thumped a rock in years. He’d been distracted like this all day. “You okay?”
The client rose and sat back in his chair, already tightening his life vest. “That was a doozy.”
Hank guided the boat into the pool and spit some more blood. His knee was stiffening, but it’d be fine. They’d been lucky. If an oar had gone, they would’ve taken the suck-hole broadside, and there wouldn’t have been any recovering from that.
The dude didn’t seem any the wiser. “Do you think this Trib fellow did it?”
Hank was certain the answer was no. But someone had. And it was probably someone he knew. It wasn’t that Hank necessarily thought Danny had done it. Danny was a father and had too much to lose, and plenty of people hated Morell more. But still.
“Trib’s innocent. I’d wager anything.” He pushed on downstream. “I got a spot down here. Real consistent.”
“I’ve heard of fistfights over low-holing,” the client said, “but murder? It just seems a little extreme.”
*
HE FOUND CARTER behind his desk at the sheriff’s station. The same wild steelhead was on the wall, the twenty-two-pounder Carter had caught and killed and had mounted in ’74, the same steelhead that had prompted a young Hank to pour sugar in a young Carter’s gas tank. The then deputy had never learned who sabotaged his rig. Or who did it a second time when the new engine arrived.
Carter had called the house two more times and, according to Bridge, sent a deputy knocking on doors looking for him. “The dweeb wouldn’t answer,” Bridge said, “when I asked why.”
“Where’s Cindy?” Hank asked, waiting in Carter’s doorway to be invited in. Cindy had been the receptionist at the sheriff’s station for as long as Hank had been a guide. They’d spent a winter holed up together in the mideighties, back when she was still fond of swimming nude in the upper river. Since then, she’d married, become head of the PTA, and later sent her three boys to the community college over in Bend.
“Budget cuts,” Carter said. “We’re down to two deputies now, no secretary, four rolls of toilet paper a month.” Carter pointed at the chair across his desk. “Can I get you something? Ice water or, well, hot water? That’s about the extent of it these days.”
Hank sat, tried not to look at the steelhead, asked Carter how his family was doing. They bullshitted awhile, not because either of them was interested but because custom required it.
Finally, Carter got down to the heart of it. “I’m glad you stopped by, Hank. I’ve been trying to reach you. There are some contradictions.”
“Like?”
“Like you say you were with your client,” Carter put a finger to the sheet of paper before him, “Steve Burke is his name, all that day, but he says you might have been gone for as much as an hour of the trip.”
“Yeah, if you add up all the minutes I spent pissing in the woods.”
“So you admit you weren’t with him for the entirety of the trip.” Carter leaned back in his chair, studying Hank now in his best impression of a cunning detective.
“No, I was with him the whole time. Except when I was behind a tree with my dick in my hands.”
“But he can’t confirm that.”
“No, I guess he can’t.” Hank found himself pulling at his beard. “What the fuck, Carter?”
Carter smiled that bullshit mocking smile of his, the one Hank had seen at Carter’s Texas Hold ’Em tournaments, which he hosted once a month. He saved that smile for the moment before he laid a winning hand. “Look at it from my point of view,” Carter said now. “You’re the first man on the scene. And you had an altercation with Morell not that far back. And the last time a guy went missing on the river, it was your client.” Again Carter checked that sheet of paper before him. “Says here that Patrick A. O’Connell died of blunt trauma to the head.”
“He fell from a cliff, Carter.” A cliff Hank shouldn’t have brought him to.
“That’s what your statement says. But you got to admit, it’s all a little suspicious. There’s precedent here.”
Hank laughed because he didn’t know what else to do. “You’re joking.” But clearly Carter wasn’t. Hank stood and looked to the steelhead on the wall and at the view out the windows and at the fire tower on a distant ridge.
“Sit down, Hank.”
Hank did. “We’ve known each other a long time, Cart, and so I say this as a friend.” He let that linger. “I think you’ve gotten a little trigger-happy on this one.”
Carter sucked through his teeth, leaned back in his chair, nodded his head. “Well, Hank, why don’t you come straight with me. If not Andy, if not you, then who do you think did it?”
“Nobody.”
“Come on.”
Hank pulled off his hat and leaned across the desk. “See that?” He fingered a long scar just behind his ear. “That’s where an oar clocked me. It caught a rock and wrenched free of my hand and hit me square. Knocked me for a loop. Pure luck I didn’t swamp in the suck-hole. The truth is if you’re on a river enough, bizarre shit happens.”
Carter watched him, and Hank couldn’t tell north or south what the man was thinking. Maybe he had a future as a politician after all. Carter spit a stream of tobacco into his coffee mug. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe it was just an oar. But somebody swung that oar, Hank. And I think you know who.”
He couldn’t help but glance behind him and check: He had this keen sense that Danny was there in the room with them. “This was an accident, Carter. Plain and simple.”
“Nah.” Carter was shaking his head. “You’re tapped deep into the river circle, and the way I figure it, you got a straight line on whoever did this. You’re protecting him, or her. And if you don’t come out and tell me, well then, I might just have to go looking into this precedent. I might just have to put you where Andy is.”
“Fuck you.”
Carter nodded at the steelhead on the wall. “That was a big fish, wasn’t it? You know where I got that one? At that pool below the jumping cliff.”
Feather Creek met the Ipsyniho just upstream. That pool was the staging area for the Feather Creek population, when it still existed in any numbers. A combination of bank erosion, overharvest, and chronic herbicide application on the farms in the floodplain.
“I used to fish the river all the time,” Carter said as if Hank didn’t already know. “My daddy fished it. My momma fished it. My daddy’s daddy fished it. That’s what we did during school, after work, on Sundays after church. We were a fishing family then. We were. Until you all went and got the laws rewritten.”
“We didn’t rewrite the laws.”
Carter scoffed. “You fly guides got your own industry, and that’s what the game commission pays attention to. The State’s just one big corporation. You and I both know it. And they’re a mismanaged one at that, one that makes mistakes.”
In a way, Carter wasn’t that far-off. The fly guides had argued that the upper river should be deemed fly-fishing only because the inefficiency of the technique, so went their logic, rendered it less likely to stress the lingering populations, but the Game Commission had glazed past those arguments and asked question after q
uestion about the number of trips run, the number of dollars brought into the economy, the lure of a “fly-fishing only” classification to out-of-state anglers. The approach had gone right for them that time, but less than a decade later, the bait guides made similar arguments about increasing the number of hatchery smolts released into the lower river, and the State had created the new hatchery complex—an action that undermined so many previous gains.
“You can still fish. Nobody took that away.”
“Can’t keep the big wild ones, can’t fish bait in the runs near town, what’s the point? Just a bummer, that’s all, my grandson won’t have these same opportunities. You know what he does for fun? He plays video games in his room.” Carter punched some numbers on the phone, held the receiver to his ear, and said to Hank, “Y’all have been above the law a long time.” Then into the phone, “Yeah, hello, Sheriff Carter here.” He pointed at the door. “Give it some thought.”
*
HANK SWUNG BY the fly shop on his way home. Danny’s truck was parked out front as always, boat in tow. He pushed through the front door, the bells announcing his entrance.
“How’d you make out?” Danny asked. “Saw your rig at the ramp.”
“Skunked.”
“Tough day? Saw that the temps were down finally last night. Thought it’d be good.”
“Everything looked right,” Hank said. “The dude couldn’t throw twenty feet.” A lie.
Danny poured him a cup of coffee, added two creams as usual, and kicked out a stool.
Hank said, “You fished this morning, no doubt.”
“Nope. Should have, the twins are with Shosh. But I was up late.”
Hank held the coffee to his lips. “Up late doing what?”
Danny shrugged off the question. “Did you hear? Trib’s out on bail.”
A wave of customers arrived, and while Danny worked, Hank occupied himself at a vise. In the time it took Danny to sell a new Burkheimer, he spun up three Muddlers, each with a wide face for chugging through the meniscus. A customer wandered his way, though he didn’t notice the guy until he heard, “You look familiar.”
It was a well-groomed twenty-something, flip-flops, khaki shorts, shirt that read “fish fear me”: a future blowhard. “So do you.”
The kid reached across the vise and snatched up one of the finished patterns, holding it to the light. “You’re that guide, right? The one with that twenty-pounder. You know, the picture on the blog.”
It was true. Danny had taken the image last summer. That fish had risen through eight feet of water to smash a fly just like the one he was tying now. He’d agreed to let Danny post the picture because he assumed the sunglasses and hat adequately obscured his likeness. He wasn’t interested in being recognized.
“I’m a guide too,” the kid said, tossing the fly back. “Got my own boat and everything.”
Hank looked up over his reading glasses. Those hands were baby-soft, the forearms veinless, the face evenly tanned. Obviously, a sticker from the marine board didn’t mean as much as it used to. “The ratio is just about one-to-one these days.”
“What?”
“Forget it. Good for you. Guiding …” What could he say about it? “It’s a splendid way to stay poor.”
The kid said, “I know it’s hard work. It’s not as romantic as it seems. Everybody says that you shouldn’t get into it just because you love fishing.”
“True enough.”
“But you got it made, Hank.” The kid surprised him. “Sorry, Mr. Hazelton.”
“I’m no mister.”
“You get to live a river life, Hank, and you get to live it on your own terms. And that’s something.”
Was it? There were costs this kid couldn’t fathom. “But it’s also about the fish.”
“I know. I’ve been working on Canton Creek this summer, placing wood and restabilizing banks. And this winter, I’ve already signed up to lead a redd count up in the headwaters. Danny is showing me the way.”
Danny was now pointing to a spot on a map of the river and explaining something to a customer. If this kid had earned Danny’s respect, that said something. “Get out of guiding while you still can. Trust me on that.”
He laughed. He thought Hank was joking. “I’m here for the long haul. I want to do something with my life that I can look back on and feel good about. We’re going to save these fish. We’re going to bring them back.”
Hank handed the kid one of the finished flies. “Don’t say you weren’t warned.”
When the shop was finally empty again, Danny flipped the “back in two shakes” sign. “Smoke?”
They stepped out the back door and into the alley, each taking a stool with them. Hank lit a cigarette and offered one to Danny. There was news about Cherry Creek, about the plan to log the Williams Creek fire. The California conservation groups weren’t in; they couldn’t spare the manpower. “They say they need to pick their battles,” Danny said. “This isn’t a battle they want, not now.”
That was about the long and short of it these days. Pick your battles, and pick the ones you were likely to win.
“Do you think it will always be like this?” Danny was staring absently down the narrow canyon of the alley. “Or will these shortsighted extractive types eventually kill themselves off? I don’t know if I have the energy to go a lifetime fighting these fucks.”
“Tell me about it.” Hank had come here for a specific reason, and yet he couldn’t quite bring himself to ask. “These extractive types won’t die alone, that’s the thing. They’ll take us all down with them.”
“I worry about Miriam and Ruben, about what kind of world will be left for them in forty years.”
“The whole galaxy will be digital then,” Hank said. “Don’t worry. They won’t even need watersheds.”
Danny was pondering the dumpster beside him. “It’s a fucked-up world to be leaving to kids.”
“Hey,” Hank heard himself say, “not that it matters, but you never mentioned where you were that afternoon.”
“What afternoon?”
“The one Morell went missing.” It was a stupid question to ask, a senseless question, a question that could bring about nothing good. He knew all this, and yet he asked it anyway. “Just curious.”
Danny frowned.
“I ask because everybody else has been real clear and straight up.”
“I haven’t been straight up?” Danny was coming off his stool.
Well, he hadn’t been. He’d been up late last night talking with Annie, and he’d kept her out all night the night before, and he hadn’t said a word about it. Neither of them had.
“What the fuck, Hank?”
An overwhelming bitterness rose up within him, like Danny himself had driven Riffle away that afternoon. “There’s precedent, that’s all.” He heard the echo of Carter’s voice and hated himself.
Danny’s eyes narrowed, then flickered. He looked at his feet, and muttered, “Wow.”
Danny wasn’t reacting like he’d expected. He’d expected Danny to defend himself; he’d expected a chance to put Danny in his place. But Danny seemed weakened by the provocation, almost shaken by it. “What’s this about?”
“You know what it’s about.”
A moment passed, and Danny’s shoulders settled into a hunch.
“Have you always thought …” Danny looked him square in the eyes, a tender look that matched the frailty of his voice. “Do you think I meant to … that it was intentional I cut her? That’s what you mean, Andy can’t bleed a person but I can.”
It was that voice that threw Hank offguard. A son’s voice, confused and betrayed. He heard himself in it—then he saw himself from Danny’s eyes. “No,” Hank said. “That’s not what I meant. I mean, it was, but I didn’t mean to imply—”
“Does everybody think that? I mean I knew her friends did, and those fucks at the paper, but you? Walt too? Does Caroline think it?”
“No. It’s not like that. Forget I said anyt
hing. Danny, I know you didn’t have anything to do with Morell. Forgive me. I’m not myself.”
Danny looked up and down the alley, like he thought someone might be watching.
“My client today, he was an excellent caster. I lied to you. I just fucked up the trip. Look,” Hank pointed to the red rise on his knee. “I thumped a rock and we almost lost the boat, that’s how not me I’ve been.” Hank reached for him. “Danny.”
“Y’all have talked about this, haven’t you? Behind my back.”
“No, we haven’t. Danny …” He searched for whatever words might make this right.
Danny pulled open the shop door.
“It’s not like that,” Hank called after him.
Danny turned and looked back at Hank, at his feet and then his eyes, like he was seeing him for the first—or last—time. And then he was gone, the metal door clanking shut behind him.
Chapter Twenty-Four
ANNIE’S CAR WASN’T at the house. Hank found a note taped to the front door. “Went for a hike.”
A padded envelope sat on the step. He tore it open and found the new ring he’d ordered.
Inside the house, there wasn’t the message from Caroline he’d expected on the answering machine. He’d called her three times now and not heard a thing, though he’d seen her rig parked on the river that morning.
There was one message, though, from Walter. He asked if Hank could come on up to the house “pronto.” He had some news, and he wanted “to get some things in order.” Ominous language from a guy who’d survived chemo only two years before.
Hank arrived at Walter’s to find the front door wide open. He called out, but there was no response. He knocked on the open door, called inside, but again heard nothing. It was like in those movies, when a friend arrives only to discover a corpse inside. Had Walter ended it and first called Hank so that his body wouldn’t rot?
