Bitch Creek

by Tapply, William

  He took a final look at Lyle’s map. If this break in the stone wall did indeed mark the place where the single dotted line on the map led down a long slope to the brook, then all he had to do was follow the ancient ruts and he’d come to Fred Green’s secret trout hole.

  He started walking. Another, smaller stone wall perpendicular to the one along the dirt road paralleled the old tote road into the woods. The ancient ruts were still distinct, although what had once been a road where a tractor could pass was now thickly grown with alder saplings and briars and milkweed and goldenrod.

  Calhoun tried to imagine Lyle lugging two float tubes, two fly rods, two pairs of waders, and a lunch basket over this trail while Fred Green puffed along behind. Calhoun had made many similar treks himself. Usually the clients carried their share of the gear. Somehow he doubted that Mr. Green would have offered. Clients like Mr. Green believed that guides were paid to do all the work, and Lyle was too sweet-tempered to ask for help.

  After a few hundred yards, the ruts angled off to the left and began descending down a long gradual slope. Here and there Calhoun noticed old gnarled apple trees mingled with the oak and birch and juniper, and in a couple of places other stone walls marked the boundaries of old fields and orchards and pastures.

  Lyle could reconstruct elaborate stories from this old handiwork. He would know which stone-bounded areas had been for cattle to graze and which had been cornfields and hayfields and vegetable gardens, which stone walls had been designed to fence cows in, and which had simply served as a convenient way for the farmer to dispose of the rocks he’d dragged from his fields.

  The ground began to level off, and then through the pines and saplings Calhoun saw the glint of sun on water and heard the musical gurgle of a small waterfall. The ruts were more distinct here, and he followed them to a sturdy old stone dam, which had survived half a century or more of spring floods and was still doing its job.

  Off to the right, the stream twisted out of the woods and flattened into a long, skinny millpond. At the foot of the pond it poured over the top of the dam and then became a stream again. Above and below the pond, where the stream was a stream, it wasn’t much bigger than Bitch Creek. But the pond itself held quite a bit of water. Cattails and reeds grew along its rim. It looked shallow and muddy along the edges, but Calhoun assumed that a deep channel, the original stream-bed, cut through the middle. The water was clear but stained a coppery color, tannin from the decades of leaves and bark that had settled on the pond’s peaty bottom.

  Calhoun kneeled and dipped his hand into the water above the dam. It was sixty degrees, maybe—certainly a good temperature for brook trout. Undoubtedly trout had always lived in the stream itself. Big ones would likely lurk in the deeper water of the millpond. Maybe Fred Green had been on to something.

  He stood up, made a visor of his hand, and looked around. Now that he was here, he didn’t know what he expected to find. The tire tracks in the mud by the dirt road convinced him that Lyle and Fred Green had been here. But now Lyle’s Power Wagon was sitting behind the elementary school in South Riley.

  On the other side of the dam, the old ruts continued over a long stretch of flat marshy land before climbing up a hill and disappearing into the woods. According to Lyle’s map, a house perched on top of that hill—or, more likely, a cellar hole where a house had once stood. A lot of nineteenth-century farms had been abandoned by discouraged farmers whose sons had fled for factory work in the city. Many others had been leveled by the fire of ’47. The Maine woods told stories of tragedy and failure and plain old loss of will.

  Calhoun wondered if Lyle and Fred Green had caught anything. Gazing over the little millpond, he saw no evidence of trout—no rings of surface-feeders, no swirls or darting shadows in the shallows.

  But neon-colored damselflies and tan caddisflies skittered over the water, and Calhoun found himself slapping the blackflies that were eating the back of his neck and clouding around his head. The pond would breed plenty of insects and other trout food—big ugly nymphs, small baitfish, maybe crayfish and freshwater shrimp, leeches and scuds.

  As he gazed over the pond, something in the reeds along the opposite bank caught his eye—a rounded, olive-brown hump in the water. A mossy rock, maybe. But to Calhoun’s eye, it looked anomalous, not quite like something in nature. He stepped up onto the dam, raised himself on tiptoes, squinted at the shape, and from that angle something alongside the hump reflected in the sun.

  He forced himself to look away. He shut his eyes, hoping that when he opened them again the hump in the water would not be there, or if it was, that it wouldn’t look like a human body—that this was just his brain playing another dirty trick on his consciousness.

  But when he looked again, the hump was still there, and it still looked like a dead man.

  He crossed the dam, looked again, muttered, “Oh, shit,” and started running. The ground was mucky and studded with grassy hummocks and potholes, and he fell down twice before he got to the edge of the pond.

  He stopped there, ankle-deep in the water, dripping mud, breathing heavily, his feet sinking into the soft bottom. The hump he had seen was what he’d thought it was—a man’s rear end dressed in waders. The glint had been the reflection of sunlight off the varnished surface of a bamboo fly rod that angled out of the water beside that hump. Calhoun recognized the body and the rod at the same time. The rod was the sweet little seven-and-a-half-foot Tonkin cane Thomas & Thomas that Calhoun had refinished and given to Lyle for his twenty-sixth birthday the previous winter.

  The body, of course, was Lyle’s.

  Calhoun waded in. The spongy peat bottom sucked at his feet when he lifted them up.

  Lyle seemed to be kneeling in the water like a praying Muslim bowing to the east. His arms and shoulders and head were on the bottom under about three feet of water. His knees had sunk a ways into the mud. The air in the waders had gathered in the seat, lifting that part to the surface.

  Calhoun saw Lyle’s long ponytail waving gently in the coppery water, and he flashed on the phantom body he’d seen drifting in his spring creek with its hair undulating underwater.

  Lyle was wearing his fishing vest. His completely deflated float tube had slipped down around his knees. He had lost his cap, but he still had fins strapped onto his feet. His Thomas & Thomas rod lay beside him, the butt end in the water, the tip caught in the reeds. The line trailed out into the pond.

  Calhoun put his arms around Lyle’s chest, hauled him out of the mud, and dragged him through the marsh and bog along the edge of the pond. He kept falling down in the mud with Lyle’s dead weight on top of him.

  Finally he managed to haul Lyle up onto the dry land beside the dam. He collapsed on the ground beside the body, gasping for breath, and waited for the hammering in his chest to slow down and the fire in his brain to subside.

  After a few minutes, Calhoun got up on his hands and knees and looked at the dead boy. Lyle’s face was puffy and bloated. His pale blue eyes were staring up at the sky and his mouth gaped open as if he had been singing when he died.

  Lyle had liked to sing. He knew all the Beatles songs, and whenever they went out on a boat, he’d wail “Rocky Raccoon” or “A Day in the Life” over the roar of the outboard. “I’d love to turn you on,” he’d bellow, grinning as if he knew he was about to get laid.

  Calhoun remembered the time they’d met at four in the morning to catch a striper tide down toward the mouth of the Kennebec. About the time they’d launched the boat it had started raining, and then the wind turned so that the hard raindrops came at an angle, pelting their faces like birdshot. Lyle had smiled grandly, loving it. “Here comes the sun,” he’d bellowed, “and it’s all right.”

  A leech had attached itself to the side of Lyle’s neck. Calhoun plucked it off and flicked it away. Lyle’s skin felt like a trout’s body, cold and rubbery, about the temperature of the pond water. It was, in fact, about the color of a trout’s belly.

  Calhoun pushed
himself to his feet. “Be right back,” he told Lyle. He sloshed back to where he’d found Lyle, picked up the Thomas & Thomas rod, and reeled in the line. There was no fly on the end of the tippet. Calhoun wondered if Lyle had been fighting a big fish when whatever happened to him had happened. Maybe some great brook trout had tangled in the reeds along shore and broken off.

  And then Lyle had died.

  It made no sense.

  Calhoun disjointed the two-piece rod, carried it back to where he’d left Lyle, laid it gently on the ground, and then knelt beside him. “I fetched your rod,” he told him.

  He took off Lyle’s vest, which bulged with fly boxes and all the other junk a fly-fishing guide had to carry. A big wool patch over the left breast of the vest was studded with a variety of flies, stuck there to dry after they’d been used. You could read the stories of dozens of fishing trips from the flies that were hooked in that wool patch. There were lifelike crayfish imitations for smallmouths and fancy Atlantic salmon flies that resembled nothing in nature, big flashy pickerel flies and tiny drab trout flies. Some of them were bedraggled from being chewed by fish. Some had been tried briefly, without success, then retired.

  Calhoun shook his head, remembering all the fishing trips he’d shared with Lyle, the stories that hid in that random assortment of flies stuck into that wool patch.

  He slipped the fins off Lyle’s feet, pulled the deflated float tube down off his legs, then peeled off his waders, which were half-full of pond water.

  He wrestled Lyle’s body up onto his shoulders in a fireman’s carry and headed back to the road.

  Lyle was tall and skinny—all bone and sinew. Calhoun was nearly six inches shorter, but he weighed more, and it was all wood-splitting, canoe-paddling muscle; the first couple hundred yards went easy. But then he began to climb the brushy old tote road, and about halfway up the long slope he ran out of adrenaline and began to stumble. “Gotta take a break, bud,” he mumbled to Lyle as he went down on his knees and rolled the body onto the ground.

  He sat beside Lyle, taking deep breaths and looking at his friend’s swollen face.

  He hadn’t done much thinking since he’d seen Lyle’s ass sticking up in the reeds. He hadn’t tried to imagine what could have happened, how Lyle could have drowned in a shallow little millpond, how his float tube could deflate so quickly that he couldn’t get to shore.

  Maybe he’d been playing a big trout, trying to follow it around the little pond, and his feet had sunk into the bottom and slowly sucked him down. Those peaty bottoms were like quicksand. You often encountered it in beaver ponds, and the harder you fought it, the quicker you sank. If you panicked, you went down fast, even wearing swim fins on your feet.

  But Calhoun had never seen Lyle panic. The boy had certainly played plenty of big fish, and he was cool in any crisis. One frigid December morning when they’d been hunting sea ducks out on Casco Bay before daybreak, a sudden squall had blown in off the ocean. In the darkness, and in the heavy driving snow, they couldn’t see each other from one end of the duck boat to the other. The tide was running hard and the seas were heavy in the wind, and it was so cold that the snow and the salt spray froze instantly on their hats and jackets. If Calhoun had been navigating, they’d have ended up in Africa, if they didn’t freeze to death or capsize first.

  Lyle had calmly brought them directly to the dock, singing the entire Revolver album over the roar of the wind and the throb of the outboard.

  Lyle had found himself stuck in peaty pond bottoms before. He’d been in tighter situations than that. It was hard to imagine that he’d ever panic.

  Anyway, Lyle hadn’t been stuck in the mud when Calhoun found him.

  What the hell had Fred Green been doing when Lyle got in trouble?

  Calhoun knew he wasn’t thinking clearly. He tried to slow down his brain, sort out the facts, make some kind of sense out of it.

  Lyle and Green had driven here in the Power Wagon. They’d parked near where Calhoun’s pickup was now parked, unloaded their gear, and trekked into the pond together. Lyle had finned out onto the pond in his float tube. Maybe Green had, too. Or maybe the old man had started casting from the dam. Then Lyle’s tube suddenly deflated. Lyle had struggled toward shore, begun to sink. His waders started filling with water.

  He’d yelled for help.

  He hadn’t received it.

  Reconstruct it, Calhoun told himself. Okay. So Green had been unable—or unwilling to try—to help Lyle. When he realized what was happening, he panicked. He walked out of the woods, got into Lyle’s truck, and drove to the place where they’d left the rented Taurus—behind the elementary school, apparently, although it was a damned strange place for Lyle to leave a car.

  Then Green had swapped cars, leaving the keys in the Power Wagon’s ignition, and driven off in his Taurus. He did not go for help or report what had happened. He just . . . drove off.

  Well, as far as Calhoun had been able to determine, Fred Green was not the man’s name. That single fact raised questions about everything.

  It was too much to think about just then. He hoisted Lyle back up on his shoulders and resumed his trek out of the woods.

  He was about to take another break when he saw the glint of sunlight off the windshield of his truck. So he staggered the last thirty yards and collapsed in the weeds beside the road. He lay on his back gasping for breath with Lyle on his stomach beside him. Even after his heartbeat had slowed to normal, Calhoun continued lying there with his eyes closed, thinking about Lyle . . . the Beatles songs he bellowed in the rain . . . the stories he created from the gravestone legends in old family plots deep in the woods . . . the way he blushed whenever Calhoun asked him about living in a big old house with a flock of pretty young female roommates running around in their underwear . . . the July afternoon Lyle had appeared at his door lugging a cardboard box that turned out to have an eight-week-old Brittany puppy in it . . . the stormy March night they’d been tying flies and listening to Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony at Calhoun’s house, when Lyle had talked Calhoun into smoking marijuana—said you could really dig Beethoven when you were stoned—and an hour later, when they’d turned up the volume as high as it would go and Calhoun was using the tip section of a fly rod to conduct the grand choral finale, Kate had showed up wearing a little black skirt and fishnet stockings . . .

  “Hey, mister? You okay?”

  Calhoun’s eyes snapped open. A lanky, gray-haired woman was standing there with her hands on her hips, frowning down at him. She was wearing sneakers and baggy jeans and a flannel shirt with the tails flapping. A blue bandanna held her hair in place.

  “My friend,” said Calhoun. “He’s—”

  “Dear Lord,” she said, peering down at Lyle’s body. “He’s dead, ain’t he?”

  Calhoun nodded.

  “Don’t mind me sayin’ so,” the woman said, “you look half dead yourself.”

  “I just lugged him out.”

  She shook her head and blew out a long breath. “What happened?”

  “I guess he drowned.”

  “Ayuh, I’d say he did, by the looks of him.” She arched her eyebrows, inviting him to elaborate.

  “It’s a long story, ma’am,” he said.

  “Well, you best save it for the sheriff. You sit tight, I’ll go call. I live just down the road a piece.”

  “Trust me,” said Calhoun. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  CHAPTER

  TEN

  CALHOUN PROPPED HIMSELF UP ON HIS ELBOWS and watched the woman stride back to a ragtop Jeep Wrangler. From behind she looked like a man, raw-boned and narrow-hipped. She climbed in, glanced back at him, held up one finger, then drove off.

  He lay back and closed his eyes again. Fred Green’s face popped into his head. Calhoun held it there so he could study it. Nice even teeth—capped, probably, or maybe expensive dentures—face deeply tanned, pale eyes with deep squint wrinkles at the corners, wire-rimmed glasses hooked around big, protruding ears, whit
e hair to match his teeth. He scanned the rest of the man’s picture—green polo shirt buttoned to the throat, creased chino Dockers, shiny oxblood loafers, manicured nails, tanned and liver-spotted hands, no wedding ring on his finger, gold Rolex on his left wrist.

  From Key Largo, Green had said.

  He’d been fishing all over the world, he’d bragged, and Calhoun was inclined to believe that. Yet Green claimed he’d never caught a native brook trout. Looking back on it, that seemed like a stretch. Native brookies weren’t as plentiful as they’d been a hundred years ago, for sure, but they weren’t exactly an endangered species. Any serious world-traveling fly fisherman would surely try for the monster brookies that still ate big mayflies and small rodents off the surfaces of wilderness lakes in Labrador and brawling rivers in Quebec, never mind the little survivors that still reproduced in the headwaters of the legendary Catskill trout streams like the Beaverkill and the Willowemoc and the Neversink.

  If you were a big-time angler like Fred Green claimed to be, you probably wouldn’t choose a little rag-tag fly shop in Portland, Maine, to fix you up with a guide for the first native brook trout of your life.

  Well, the man had apparently lied about his name. Who knew what else he had lied about.

  Calhoun heard the Wrangler chugging back down the road, recognized its distinctive engine noises.

  A minute later the woman was crouching beside him. “Called the sheriff,” she said. “He said to sit tight, wait for him, don’t touch anything. Here. I brought you a beer.”

  Calhoun shielded his eyes with his hand. She was holding a can of Coors.

  “Appreciate it,” he said. “I can’t take alcohol.”

  She rolled her eyes, then nodded. “Stupid me,” she said. “I should’ve asked. I know plenty of folks got that problem.”

  I’m not an alcoholic, he wanted to say. It’s a physical thing. Because my brain chemistry got messed up. “One day at a time,” was what he actually said, because it was easier. “Thanks anyway, though.”