OREGON: Your father killed himself. Apparently he wandered out onto the old country highway and put a bullet in his head, right there in the middle of the road. The gun was still warm when a farmer found him, but it was too late. You and Sarah have nearly left town when Sheriff Don pulls you over. You smirk because you’re legal now, but your palms are sweaty. You’ve never been pulled over. Sheriff Don asks you to follow him back to the station. You throw your hands up in protest and flash your license and that’s when he lays it on the line. “You’re father’s dead, son.”
BAKERSFIELD: Your mother asks if you’d like to take a trip up to Oregon to collect your father’s possessions, to experience the place he called home in his final years, but you decline.
OREGON: You’re still a minor, so they ship you a thousand miles away from Sarah, back to California, where you’re to live with your mother and a stepfather you’ve never met. They live in a million-dollar home. They are members of a country club. They tell you about the college savings fund they set up for you way back when. All these years they’ve been thinking of you, putting money away. They never once visited. Now they’ve torn you away from it all.
BAKERSFIELD: You’re not sure whether it’s the BMW or your estranged father’s death, but Sarah finally throws away notions of waiting until marriage. The way people talk to you, you know you’re expected to feel sad and hurt. In secret, you’re just stoked about driving and getting laid. You feel nothing for your father. You milk the sympathy, though. You learn that the grieving are granted certain privileges.
OREGON: You write letters to Sarah every day. You promise that you’ll return just as soon as you get yourself emancipated. Failing that, you’ll wait the two years until you turn eighteen and then you’ll move back to Oregon and marry her. She says she’d love nothing more than to marry you and have your children. You dream of your future life as a married couple, putting the pieces together in letter after letter. Your first child will be named Dean, after your father, if it’s a boy. Charlotte if it’s a girl. These letters from Sarah are the only thing that matter. They keep you going despite the isolation and the devastating weight of your father’s death, which squeezes your heart like a vise. You find it hard to breathe on the days when no new letter arrives. A few months later, the letters start to trickle off. First they drop in number, then they get shorter, then they come so infrequently that most days you don’t even bother checking the mail. You write to Sarah just as often, and twice as desperately. Then, after a hellish month of silence, the fateful letter arrives. The one you dreaded most. She hasn’t died. No, it’s worse than that. She’s started seeing someone else. She doesn’t say who, but she says you know him, that you’d approve, which of course you never would.
BAKERSFIELD: Life presents a myriad of choices. Driving drunk is one of them. That’s how your BMW ends up totaled. That’s how Sarah ends up leaving you.
OREGON: You take a swing at your stepfather for yelling at your mother. This is the final straw, they tell you. So the next day, you’re being shipped off to a school that’s more like a prison. And you thought the suburbs were bad.
BAKERSFIELD: They release you from jail after four days because you’re a privileged white kid who still has a bright future ahead. Your parents buy you a ten-year-old Lexus. “We hope you’ve learned your lesson,” they say.
OREGON: The only thing worse than military school is failing a suicide attempt at military school.
BAKERSFIELD: You’re out drinking by the river with some friends when one of them asks if you loved Sarah. You say you did, and what you’ve done finally hits you, and you break down in tears. You still love her. You will always love her. Your love for her is only surpassed by the hate you feel for yourself.
OREGON: Your hatred for this new place, this place worse than military school and the suburbs combined, is only usurped by the hate you feel for your father. The man loved you. He gave you everything. And then without warning, he took it all away.
BAKERSFIELD: Ten years later and the worst is over, but in secret, unbeknownst to everyone around you, you’re still climbing your way out of that deep, black hole you fell into when you were sixteen. You’re married now. You have a nice house and a good job and a baby. Funny thing is, you still love her.
OREGON: Ten years later and the worst isn’t over, but at least you’re back in Oregon. Your life is still in shambles, but you don’t love her anymore. She’s married to Dan Tannehill, the guy she said you’d approve of. She’s right, too. Dan was always a good guy. They have three kids together. You see them almost every week on account of it being a small town and them living just a few miles up the road from your father’s cabin, which you reclaimed from the bank with the money your mother gave you in the wake of her divorce. That was her way of saying sorry. You still smile when you remember how you laughed in her face. One of the few good memories among a lot of bad ones, the ones that keep you up at night, loading and unloading the chamber of the old suicide weapon, wondering if this is how your father felt. In the mornings, you fish alone. In the evenings, you drink whiskey and write letters to people you have known. You never mail a single letter. They make good kindling, though. Life is good in Oregon. It’s just too damn bad you ever had to leave.
And now we come to the place in the book where I pick up my fishing pole and we part ways, but if you ever get lonely, come find me by the river. I’ll be fishing for salmon or sturgeon or trout or walleye or catfish or bass or yellow perch or crappie or carp or peamouth or some new species only God has a name for. Or maybe I won’t be fishing at all. Maybe I’ll be staring into the deep, murky water, thinking about my love for you.
Salmon go away sometimes, but they always do come back. When we treat them right and with respect, they come back. Our love will come back too, you know. That’s how it has always been. Wherever the salmon go, we go too. They lead us to a love greater than ourselves. No matter how shallow the creek, no matter how high the dam, we must follow them. Now and forever, our love will go the way of the salmon. Now and forever, I love you.
Cameron Pierce is the author of eleven books, including the Wonderland Book Award-winning collection Lost in Cat Brain Land. His work has appeared in The Barcelona Review, Gray’s Sporting Journal, Hobart, The Big Click, and Vol. I Brooklyn, and has been reviewed and featured on Comedy Central and The Guardian. He was also the author of the column Fishing and Beer, where he interviewed acclaimed angler Bill Dance and John Lurie of Fishing with John.
Pierce is the head editor of Lazy Fascist Press and has edited three anthologies, including The Best Bizarro Fiction of the Decade.
He lives with his wife in Astoria, Oregon.
Special thanks to Kirsten Alene Pierce, J. David Osborne, and John Skipp. Without them, this book would not exist. For the support, good times, and insight, thanks to the bizarro family, the Portland writing community, and everyone who has ever shared a body of water or a good fishing story with me. Thank you to Matthew Revert for the beautiful cover, and to the editors who originally published some of these stories: Tobias Carroll, Molly Tanzer, Elizabeth Ellen, Pela Via and the Booked. Podcast crew, Jesse Bullington, Ryan Bradford, Jarrett Haley, and Michael J. Seidlinger. Thanks to Kate Bernheimer, Henry Hughes, Weston Ochse, Amelia Gray, Juliet Escoria, Ben Brooks, and Troy James Weaver for their generous words and feedback on this book. Additional thanks to Jeremy Robert Johnson, Carlton Mellick III, Rose O’Keefe, Jeff Burk, Mykle Hansen, Brian Allen Carr, Alan M. Clark, Michael Kazepis, Stephen Graham Jones, Patrick Wensink, Scott McClanahan, Sam Pink, Noah Cicero, Ross E. Lockhart, Cody Goodfellow, Brian Keene, Kris Saknussemm, Gabino Iglesias, David Bowles, the Pierces, the Gwins, Tristan and Hoeru, and the sturgeon under Burnside Bridge.
“Our Love Will Go the Way of the Salmon” and an excerpt from “The Incoming Tide” first published in Vol. I Brooklyn
“Drop the World” first published in
The Big Click
“Short of Lundy” first published in Hobart
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“Help Me” first published in Letters to Lovecraft
“The Bass Fisherman’s Wife” first published in Black Candies
“Three Fishermen” first published in BULL Fiction
“Easiest Kites There Are to Fly” first published in Everyday Genius
“California Oregon” first published in The Booked. Anthology
Table of Contents
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Our Love Will Go the Way of the Salmon Page 14
