Bitch Creek

by Tapply, William

  “You trying to pull a Tom Sawyer on me, sonny?”

  “Nossir,” said Lyle. “Mr. Green and I are gonna have us a helluva good day, and he’s gonna lay a monster tip on me when we’re done. Too bad, Stoney. You could’ve had it, but this here’s my gig.”

  “Well,” said Calhoun, “tight lines, then. You two lads go on, have yourselves a day.”

  CHAPTER

  TWO

  CALHOUN HEARD KATE’S old Chevy Blazer coming a full minute before it pulled into the pea-stone parking area out front. He’d have to crawl under it sometime and give that tailpipe a few more wraps of duct tape.

  He glanced at the clock radio on his fly-tying bench. Nearly six-thirty. She’d met the New Jersey folks at five in the morning. Another typical thirteen-plus-hour day for the fly-fishing guide.

  Actually, he was a little surprised she hadn’t kept them out there for a second go at the turn of the tide, which had come around eight in the morning, and would, therefore, happen again about eight in the evening. Kate knew exactly where the cow stripers holed up at the bottom of the tide, and more often than not, the clients yelled “uncle” before she was ready to quit.

  He pushed himself up from his chair and went outside. Kate had backed her boat into its slot and was bent over the trailer hitch, cursing softly.

  “Let me take a whack at it,” said Calhoun.

  Kate straightened up, put her hands on her hips, and arched her back. “Damn thing keeps jamming on me.”

  Calhoun gave the crank a few more turns, thumped it with the heel of his hand, then lifted the trailer off the truck’s hitch. “You’ve got to hold your mouth right,” he said.

  “You’ve just got a way with machines,” she said. “Too bad you’re not so good with people. Hold it up here for me.”

  Calhoun lifted up the front of the trailer while Kate slipped a plank under its front wheel. Then he went to the side of the shop, turned on the outside spigot, uncoiled the hose, and brought it over to the boat. Kate opened the plugs and Calhoun hosed it down, first the inside and then the outside.

  She scrubbed at some blood stains with the big boat sponge. “We had us a day,” she said.

  “Bet you did.”

  “They were on sand eels all over the mudflats the entire last two hours of the outgoing and well into the incoming. My folks couldn’t throw much beyond the tip of their rod, but we dropped anchor there and they were sloshing and churning all around us for three solid hours.”

  “Schoolies?” said Calhoun.

  “Mostly. But we had some fun.”

  “Any keepers?” Keep-ahs.

  “I think Charlie had one on earlier, but she came unbuttoned before we got a real good look. You know that rip off the tip of the island?”

  “Where the black dog always comes out on the dock to bark at you?”

  “That one. This fish was lying there with her nose pointing at the rocks, and Charlie threw one of your bunker flies up into the wash. That old cow sucked it in, and Charlie hit her, and she hightailed it for Boston. He panicked, tried to snub her down, and—”

  “Ping!” said Calhoun.

  “Busted that ten-pound leader like it was a trout tippet. I think it must’ve got nicked on a mussel shell.” Kate grinned. “I thought the poor man was gonna have a heart attack.”

  Calhoun always marveled at Kate’s undiminished enthusiasm. She had owned Kate’s Bait and Tackle for eight years and had been guiding for nearly five. Every day was still an adventure for Kate, and every client was a new friend. For a while, the first-time sports had tended to look at the ground and shuffle their feet and mumble when they realized they’d hired a woman to guide them. But it didn’t take long for the word to get around: Kate Balaban had a nose for fish, a limitless repertoire of shaggy dog stories, and twice the stamina of any man. She could repair a dead outboard in the rain while her customized Boston Whaler bounced on heavy chop, she could cast a sink-tip line eighty feet into a ten-naut breeze, and she fixed an old-fashioned Maine shore lunch—an ice chest full of beer and fruit juice and soft drinks, fresh bluefish fillets (if they’d caught any, sirloin steaks if they hadn’t) grilled over an open fire, with smoked oysters for appetizers, a big tossed green salad, slabs of extra-sharp Maine cheddar, fresh-baked bread from Sally’s next door to the shop, and a wedge of Sally’s apple pie for dessert.

  Besides, Kate was a spectacular woman who didn’t mind the fact that men liked looking at her. She usually wore her black hair in a long braid that reached almost down to her waist, and she knew how to apply subtle touches of makeup to emphasize her high cheekbones, her big black flashing eyes, and her wide mouth. Kate usually wore walking shorts, T-shirts, and sneakers when she guided, and after a few weeks in the sun her Irish half disappeared and she looked like a full-blooded Penobscot Indian.

  She was an inch shy of six feet, most of it in her legs. In shorts, she never failed to stop Calhoun’s breath. She looked about twenty-five, except for her eyes. Her eyes betrayed more troubles than anyone could ever accumulate in twenty-five years. Kate Balaban was, in fact, three years older than Calhoun, who was thirty-eight.

  Her wedding band had failed to discourage more than one optimistic client, but Kate had a way of putting them in their place without offending them.

  He helped her unload her gear from the back of the Blazer, and while she hosed the salt water off the rods and reels, he lugged the rest of the stuff into the shop. When she came in a few minutes later, he had a cold Sam Adams on the counter for her and a Coke for himself.

  She picked up the beer, took a long swig, then bent to the logbook. “Humph,” she mumbled. She looked up. “Where’d Lyle go?”

  “He didn’t write it down?”

  “Nope. All it says here is: ‘Mr. Green’s secret trout pond.’ ”

  Calhoun summarized his encounter with Fred Green from Key Largo and how he had turned the client over to Lyle McMahan.

  “Well, hell, Stoney,” said Kate. “It was your turn.”

  “The man seemed pretty pleased with Lyle, and Lyle was happy to get the job. He and Mr. Green seemed to hit it off. Anyway, Lyle needs the money more’n me.”

  “That’s not the point. We’ve got a system here, and none of us are supposed to pick and choose our clients. I’ve told you that before.”

  “Sorry, ma’am.” He shrugged. “I didn’t like the man. What can I say?”

  “You can say it doesn’t matter whether you think you like him or not. You can say it’s Kate’s rule that you guide when it’s your turn like everybody else.” She shook her head. “Dammit all anyway, Stoney.”

  “I tied two dozen bunker flies and twice that many sand eels. Got to hear Van Cliburn play Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto, then the Chicago Symphony did some Bartok. Sold one of those nine-weight Sage rods and an Abel reel, and a couple of ladies come in around noontime and damned near cleaned us out of those discounted Orvis shirts. You think you had yourself a good day? I had a helluva day.”

  Kate cocked her head and frowned at him. He grinned back at her. She fought it for a minute, then shook her head and smiled. “Sometimes you really piss me off,” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You are incorrigible.”

  “Ayuh.”

  “I don’t know what I could’ve been thinking, hiring on a grouchy old shit like you.”

  “I never could figure it out myself,” said Calhoun.

  An hour before sunup on a June morning almost exactly five years earlier, Calhoun had been creeping along the muddy bank of a little tidal creek that emptied into Casco Bay just north of Portland. A blush of pink had begun to bleed into the pewter sky toward the east. The tide was about halfway out, and the water against the banks lay as flat and dark as a mug of camp coffee. A blanket of fog hung over the salt marsh, heavy with that rich mingled aroma of wet mud and decaying kelp and salt water and dead shellfish. Except for the squawks from a gang of gulls eating mussels along the high-water line and the muffled gong
of a distant bell buoy, it was quiet and solitary and altogether peaceful, the way he loved it.

  He was still nearly a hundred yards away when he spotted some nervous water along the edge of the eelgrass in the shallow water. He knew they were stripers, and he knew enough about stripers to guess that they could be big ones. He had a small chartreuse-and-white Deceiver tied to a long leader, and he went into a crouch as he neared the fish and began false-casting to the side so the shadow of his line wouldn’t spook them.

  His first cast fell a little short, but as he twitched it back, he saw a wake materialize behind his fly, and then came the swirl and he felt the fish close its mouth on his fly. He pulled hard with his line hand to set the hook, came tight, felt the live weight of a heavy fish, and swept up his rod. The fish bolted for the middle of the creek. Calhoun’s reel screeched. He held his rod high and let the fish take line.

  “Yeow! Whoopee!”

  The shout came from so close behind him that Calhoun nearly dropped his rod. He jerked his head around. Sitting on a boulder that had been exposed by the falling tide, not twenty feet away, was maybe the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. Big dark eyes, black braid sprouting out of the back of her pink cap, a wide exuberant smile, long tanned legs.

  He opened his mouth to speak to her—he didn’t know what he was going to say, but he figured, under the circumstances, she’d excuse him if it turned out to be something stupid—when his line went slack.

  “Aw, shit,” the woman said. “That was my fault. I’m damned sorry, mister.”

  Calhoun reeled in and examined his fly. The tip of the hook point was bent, and he remembered failing to check it when he’d nicked an underwater rock earlier.

  He went over to her and showed her the fly. “My fault,” he said. He bit it off and tied on another. He noticed that a spinning rod was propped against the boulder she was sitting on. “Catching any?”

  “I’ve been following you since I got here,” she said.

  He smiled. “Nobody follows me without me knowing it.”

  “Hey,” she said. “I’m an Indian. Been thinking of taking up fly fishing for some time. Sure looks like fun. Mind if I tag along?”

  He noticed that she was wearing a wedding band. “Let’s find us some more fish,” he said, “and you can try it.”

  “I’m not much good with a fly rod,” she said.

  “We’ll give it a shot.”

  So they walked the edge of the creek, following the ebbing tide toward the east where the sun had just risen behind a cloudbank, and she spotted the wakes first.

  He handed her his rod.

  “No,” she whispered. “You catch ’em.”

  “Take it,” he said.

  “I’ll screw it up.”

  “So then we find more fish. Go ahead.”

  She took the rod, bent low and crept into casting range, then began to work out some line. Her cast was sloppy and well to the side of the fish, but she twitched it back and Calhoun saw the wake turn. “Get ready,” he whispered. “He sees it. Keep it coming. Wait till you feel him.”

  Suddenly the water exploded. “Hit him!” Calhoun yelled.

  She hauled back on the rod, but it did not bend with the weight of the fish.

  “Dammit!” she said. She pulled in the fly. “I was so excited I forgot to hang onto the line.” She patted herself over her left breast. “My heart’s thumping like that little two-horse outboard of mine.” She cocked her head and grinned. “Okay, mister. That’s it. I’m hooked. You’ve got to teach me.”

  So they stood there on the bank of the little creek while the tide ebbed and the sun burned off the fog, and Calhoun stood behind her, guiding her wrist and counting rhythm for her, very aware of the soapy smell of her hair and her slim muscular body close to his, and within half an hour she was casting as if she’d been doing it all her life.

  Along the way she told him that her name was Kate Balaban—her maiden name, actually, which she went by—and how when her husband had gotten sick, she’d bought a little bait-and-tackle shop on the outskirts of Portland and was trying to run it all by herself. Walter—her husband—thought it was dumb and frivolous, and she guessed he was right, because so far she’d barely been breaking even, but she was determined to make a go of it.

  Calhoun told her more than he intended to—that he was building a house in the woods outside the little village of Dublin, about an hour due west of Portland, and that he’d been released from the hospital in Arlington, Virginia, just three months earlier. He was okay now, he said, except for the deafness in his left ear, which the doctors had said was permanent, and the black holes in his memory, which they thought might be temporary, and the fact that he could no longer drink alcohol, which had something to do with the change in the chemistry of his brain and wasn’t much of a handicap that he’d noticed.

  Kate Balaban nodded when he told her this, as if he’d explained how he’d just gotten over a touch of the flu. She asked no questions, for which he was grateful. He had no appetite for telling her the whole story.

  Finally she glanced at her watch. “Hell,” she said. “This is fun, but I’ve got to get back and open up.”

  She reeled in, handed him the rod, and they trudged back to the parking area.

  Calhoun leaned against the side of her Blazer while she stowed her spinning rod in back. She returned with a Stanley thermos and two mugs. She poured coffee, handed a mug to him, and leaned beside him. They sipped their coffee and gazed down on the creek, and after a minute, without looking at him, Kate said, “So, what’re you doing for work these days?”

  “Finishing the inside of my house. Moldings, cabinets, stuff like that. Then I’ve got the painting. Keeps me busy.”

  “Oh,” she murmured.

  “I don’t have an actual job,” he said.

  “Planning on getting one?”

  “Wasn’t giving it much thought,” he said. “Why?”

  She turned to him. “I can’t pay much right now. But I sure could use someone in the shop. I’ve been thinking of getting into fly fishing. Now that the stripers are back, it’s really popular. You could help me with that. And I want to do some guiding. Landlocked salmon, smallmouth bass, trout. Saltwater, too, of course. I got my guide’s license, but I’m stuck in the shop.” She smiled at him. “What do you say?”

  “You don’t know me,” said Calhoun.

  She shrugged. “Oh, I guess I know you well enough. I’m mostly right about people.”

  No, he thought. I mean, you really don’t know me.

  They sat around picking at the leftover bread and cheese and salad from Kate’s shore lunch for the folks from New Jersey while darkness seeped into the parking lot outside the shop. Calhoun sipped a Coke and Kate put away two bottles of Sam Adams beer, and finally she looked at her wristwatch and said, “Where the hell is Lyle?”

  Calhoun shrugged. “On his way, I expect.”

  “He’s a good kid,” said Kate. “But damn, sometimes he just doesn’t do things right. He knows he’s supposed to—”

  “He’ll check in,” said Calhoun quietly. “Probably found some trout rising when the sun got off the water. He’ll have some stories.”

  “I worry,” said Kate.

  He reached over and covered her hand with his. “Lyle’s a big boy.”

  “Tromping through the woods after dark, some old out-of-shape city guy with a bad ticker trying to keep up with him . . .”

  Calhoun squeezed her hand. “I’ll hang out, wait for him. You go on home, take care of Walter.”

  She turned her head and smiled at him. “You know, Stoney,” she said softly, “most days, I really don’t want to go home.”

  He nodded. “I know.”

  “You’ve got an hour’s drive,” she said. “You go on. I’ll give Lyle another hour, and if he hasn’t showed up by then, the hell with him.”

  “I’ll stay with you.”

  “No,” she said. “Please. I wouldn’t mind a little alone time.”r />
  He nodded and stood up. “We’ve got no trips tomorrow, right?”

  “Right,” she said. “I’ll open up. Can you come in around noon?”

  “I’ll be here, boss.”

  “Get going, then,” she said. “And drive careful, you hear?”

  CHAPTER

  THREE

  CALHOUN HAD LEFT the hospital in Arlington, Virginia, where he’d lived for eighteen months, on a warm Thursday toward the end of March five years earlier. He had a cashier’s check for twenty-five thousand dollars and a Visa card with his name on it in his pocket, along with the promise that money—enough so he’d never have to work—would be deposited monthly in the bank of his choice for the rest of his life.

  Somebody obviously owed him a great deal, although when he’d tried to find out who and what and why, they always neatly changed the subject. Calhoun hadn’t pushed it. He figured it might conjure up one of those memories that would be better left forgotten.

  So he bought a secondhand Ford pickup truck and headed north. Even though he was a southern boy, he was drawn to Maine. It was irresistible. He couldn’t have gone anyplace else. His brain fed him evocative, random images—the smell of seaweed and salt air and pine needles, the sound of night surf crashing against rocks, the taste of clam chowder swimming with bits of salt pork, boiled lobster dripping with melted butter, fresh-caught bluefish grilled over a beach fire, the feel of a smallmouth bass tugging against the bend of a fly rod, the sight of an October brook trout in full spawning regalia finning in a gravelly riffle, the silvery arc of a landlocked salmon leaping over a big gray lake.

  He knew, because they’d told him that much—that he’d grown up in Beaufort, South Carolina, which accounted for his name: Stonewall Jackson Calhoun. He hadn’t been able to figure out where the Maine memories came from. But they were there, and they were strong.

  In the hospital he’d read E. B. White, those perfect little essays about living close to the rocky Maine soil, and he knew he’d been there, and he knew he’d read these essays before.