Beyond Deserving

by Sandra Scofield

  “Are we going to their house?” Rhea asks, disappointed. Fish said at the parade, “Want to get out of here? Want to go somewhere cooler, away from all these people?” Rhea was eager to go down to the park to see what the booths were; that’s what Juliette was going to do. But she didn’t want to turn down a chance to be with her father, either. If they went somewhere in his truck, just the two of them, maybe she could get him to talk about boats. She wants to know where he will go when he has one. She wants to know what she needs to learn if she wants to go, too. She’ll be older then. She can learn to sail. She can imagine the sea breathing under her, out on deep water. She can imagine the three of them, her father and her mother and her, brown as berries and strong, landing on an island that is very beautiful and staying there a long time.

  “We’ll stop on the way back,” Fish says. “I want to pick up my fishing stuff, and my gun. I’ll bet my ma’s got my gun under the trailer. She can’t stand guns in the house. Fifty years with Pop, and two sons, too, and she still hates guns.”

  “There’s this girl in my class, Vicky Anne? Her brother shot their parents last year with a shotgun. He’s seventeen. I guess he really hated them. Vicky wasn’t home, so you don’t know if he would have shot her, too.” Fish gives Rhea such a look, it makes her wary. She doesn’t mean she thinks he’ll do something bad. She doesn’t mean to complain about his gun. He made her think of Vicky, that’s all.

  “No shit,” Fish says.

  “They put him in a hospital, Granny says. He was sixteen when he did it, and Granny says he’ll probably get out.”

  “What about the girl? Becky?”

  “Oh, Vicky. She lives with her aunt. She lives close to me now. I could play with her after school but Granny hardly ever lets me.”

  They come around a curve, and the river seems to split for a moment, around a chunk of land, and then it comes together again. Rhea thinks it would be more fun to drive the other way. It is confusing, going against the river. She can see that it runs fast, but she can’t get a feeling for its flow.

  “I never saw a river like this before,” she says. She wants to ask her father what he thought about the parade, but she thinks he didn’t like it, and she’s afraid he’ll say it was silly.

  “You ever see any rivers?”

  “Once, when we went to Piano to see a cousin of Granny’s. The cousin died, it was her funeral. My grandmother grew up with her. Coming and going, we had to cross a river. It was brown and wide and slow. Granny said there are snakes in rivers. You can’t go in them just anyplace.”

  “Not in the Rogue. There are rattlers, though, along the banks, when it’s hot. In rocky places. Sometimes a hiker gets bit, but it’s because he’s stupid. You have to pay attention to what you’re doing.”

  Rhea wants to talk about the river and not snakes. “It’s pretty, the river. It’s so blue.”

  “You wait. You haven’t seen blue yet,” Fish says. They are driving between high trees, like a ribbon blowing through a canyon. The trees stretch on and on now. After a while the thick firs and pines give way to skinny, bare trees. “Those are lodgepole pines,” Fish tells her. “The Indians used them for the frames of their teepees.” Rhea is fascinated by this, though she isn’t completely sure he isn’t teasing her. Everything about Oregon is new. She expected more hills and trees than at home; everybody knows West Texas is flat as anyplace on earth. But she didn’t realize, when she was looking forward to the trip, that there would be so many trees and hills that sometimes they would fill the eyes and block the sky.

  Strips of sun fall through the trees across the pavement, like slats on a window. Rhea closes her eyes. Still she sees bright stripes. She sleeps.

  “We’re getting close,” Fish says, to wake her. The drive is exciting now, as they climb higher. There is snow in patches, on banks above the lake. They pull into the parking lot at the rim, and Fish complains hoarsely. “Look at this. Goddamned Fourth of July here, too.” Rhea thinks it is exciting to be where there are so many people. All around, people in shorts or jeans or wraparound skirts are looking at brochures, checking their cameras, pointing at the lake and talking Everyone seems about to do something; they are all enjoying getting ready.

  She remembers it’s Fish’s birthday but it doesn’t seem the right time to bring it up. She wishes she had a present for him. She asked Katie about it, and Katie said they always had the barbecue for Michael and Fish, and that was all they wanted. It sounded like presents are something for kids, something you outgrow. She wishes she thought to buy a kit and make him a boat for his birthday. Uncle Michael would have helped her.

  A lot of people are milling around the cars, between the rim of the lake and the big lodge with the cafeteria and gift shops. Rhea follows Fish down to the stone wall at the edge of the lot and stands staring at the lake. She squeezes her fists as hard as she can to keep from crying. It is more beautiful than anything she has ever imagined, and at the same time it is the most terrible disappointment. There is no beach, no water in which to wade. It isn’t anything like a lake; it’s much more like Fish said, a hole in the ground. The lake fills the crater of an extinct volcano. Its sides are sheer and high. It is far away from where they are standing.

  “Can you get down by the water?” she asks. She remembers seeing a pretty lake on the way, where there were fishermen on boats. She thinks she would like that lake better.

  “If you fall down the side, it’s so steep, you plunge so deep you can’t come up again.”

  Rhea bursts into tears.

  “Shit.” Fish kicks the stone of the little wall. He sits down and puts his head in his hands. “Shit.”

  “I’m sorry,” Rhea says. Her nose is clogged and her face is all wet. She thinks people must be looking at her. They’re probably saying, what’s wrong with that little girl. She takes a step closer to Fish, but she doesn’t know what to do next, so she sits down, pulls up her tee shirt and wipes her face and nose. “You know what I used to think your name was?” she says. She holds her breath until Fish looks up at her.

  He grins at her. “Tell me,” he says, and he looks like he would really like to know. As suddenly as she was sad, Rhea is happy.

  “I thought your name was Fisher Fisher. Granny told me Fish was short for Fisher, and I knew your last name was Fisher, because so is mine.” She doesn’t think she has done a very good job of explaining the mistake. Out loud, there isn’t anything funny about it. She used to think there was magic in saying it over and over, Fisher Fisher, that it might make him appear. Maybe it did work, another way. Maybe it made Granny give in and let her come to Oregon.

  “You’re a kid with a lot of spunk,” Fish says. Rhea has seen that word in books, spunk, but she has never actually heard someone say it. “My name is Gulsvig Fisher, just like my pop. Gulsvig used to be his last name, but they changed it to his stepfather’s name, Fisher. So he kept both names, see? And then he gave me the old name, and gave Michael his name.” He shakes his head and laughs. “Pretty confusing, huh? Pop used to call me Gully, like him, but by the time I started school everybody called me Fish.”

  “Because you liked to!” Rhea guesses. “Like Grandpa. He told me he’d rather fish than eat. I’ve never been fishing. He said maybe we could go sometime, but I go home in a few days. And we didn’t go to the beach yet, either. But I liked what we did do! I love Mr. Melroy’s dogs. Do you like Bounder? Grandpa asked me which dog I liked best, and I said Bounder.”

  “Are you hungry?” Fish asks. She wishes he would say something to show he was listening, but what could he say. She didn’t mean to make him feel bad about the beach. Ursula said sometime when she comes they should rent a house at the beach and they can all go stay for a week. Everyone seems to assume she’ll come back next summer. Granny didn’t talk about that. She said, We’ll see how it goes. She should be here, to see Rhea at the rim of a giant lake. She should see it herself.

  “I am hungry,” she says. “I really am.”

  Fish
leads her to the cafeteria inside the huge stone building. He doesn’t watch to see if she keeps up with him. She likes that. While they stand in line he checks his wallet and counts his change. “We’re in good shape,” he says. “What looks good?”

  She studies his face. “Macaroni and cheese?”

  “Macaroni and cheese for the Texan,” he says to the boy behind the food line. He takes a bowl of chili. “I hate macaroni and cheese,” he says when they have sat down and Rhea is eating. She stops, mid-bite. “My ma made it every week, sometimes twice. And I had it about a thousand times in the navy.” He notices that she has stopped eating. “I’m not having it, you are,” he says, and she takes another bite. “You have to know what you like,” he tells her. “You have to not care what somebody else thinks you ought to like.”

  He finishes his chili and smokes a cigarette. Rhea feels content in the bustle of the cafeteria. If she calls her grandmother tonight, she’ll tell her, you wouldn’t believe all the people who came to see a lake. Coming up in the car, Fish told her the lake is as deep as from Michael’s house to the Safeway store. She tries to lay her mind on its side, to see how far that would be. She wants to walk it when she gets back. Suddenly she has an image of her crayon box from last year, the one with crayons in tiers, like a choir. All the blues: cobalt, robin’s egg, turquoise, azure. All those colors, in one lake.

  “Did you ever wonder what I looked like?” she asks. He doesn’t quite look at her. He draws deeply on his cigarette and blows it out slowly. He always smells like smoke. It worries her. When he smokes, he takes it deep inside and lets it out in a slow stream. She can see how much he likes it. She knows smoking kills you, though, and she wants to warn him. She wants to tell him about smoking and cancer, and about the food groups, about how not to get struck by lightning, and not to put butter on a burn. She has never assumed, when she learned something, that everyone else already knows it. She has always considered the possibility that she might be paying more attention. Granny says someday Rhea will know more than she does, that this is natural. She says children get smarter than their parents, but Rhea doesn’t think Granny would say that about Katie. Whenever Rhea asks about Fish or Katie, Granny takes a while to think before she answers. Even simple questions. It makes Rhea think that anything you ask about them has more than one answer, and Granny needs a little time to choose the one that suits her best.

  Fish stubs out the cigarette. It bothers Rhea that he hasn’t answered her. She says, “I brought a school picture for you. It’s in my suitcase at Michael’s. I’ll give it to you if you want.” She feels dumb, saying that. Why does he need a picture, when she is sitting right in front of him? If he would look at her, he could see her perfectly well. Her blond hair is all scraggly from not blow drying it or using a curler or anything. Granny warned her that a perm wouldn’t look good if you didn’t mess with it, but she said Rhea could find out for herself. She said they could cut it later and let it grow back straight. She said you have to make mistakes to learn. It almost made her not want to get the permanent at all.

  Fish sucks in his top lip, and a lot of moustache with it. She wants to laugh but she doesn’t think he knows he is funny, or that he means to be. He sometimes laughs when nobody else does, or he waits and laughs after everyone else is done. At night she hears him talking when she is falling asleep. He stays up late with Michael, and Carter when he gets home from work. They drink wine and talk and talk, after Ursula and Juliette and Rhea go to bed. Sometimes Katie is there and sometimes she isn’t. She has worked at the theatre three nights and two afternoons. She promises she will take Rhea down to see where she works, but she hasn’t, and now the time is almost all gone. Rhea hoped they would move into Fish’s house before she left. She would like to stay in a house with both her parents at the same time.

  “I knew what you looked like,” Fish says. “Katie and I came to see you when you were three. It was winter. The wind was blowing snow when we got to your house. A few days later we were in Mazatlán, hot as toast. Your grandmother wouldn’t let you go. It probably wasn’t a good idea, but I thought you’d look cute running around naked on the sand.”

  Rhea used to dream about Fish. She has a snapshot Katie gave her of Fish standing against his truck, one foot propped up, his hand up to shade his eyes. She thought from the picture that he would be taller than he is.

  “And the year after that your mother took a lot of pictures when she went to visit you.” He pushes their dirty dishes aside and opens his wallet. He lays out slips of folded paper. Some of them have lists, and some have lots of numbers. Some are yellow slips, receipts from things you buy. “Fuck,” Fish says. “It’s got these little dopples on it, I got it wet.” He is holding a photograph and smearing it with his finger. “But here’s one. Katie has the rest in a box somewhere.” He hands the photograph to her. “See that cloth tied around your head? A bandanna. That’s the way I used to wear bandannas on my head in Vietnam. It was like a joke your mom made for me, dressing you like that. That’s her scarf tied around your belly. I always figured you would be scrawny, but look at that belly and those legs. It’d take a truck to knock you down.”

  The girl in the picture doesn’t look like her. She knows you look different as a baby, but she can’t imagine she ever looked like that. She doesn’t think her grandmother would have agreed to her being dressed in a scarf.

  “It’s pretty old,” she says, and hands it back to Fish. He stuffs all the papers back in the wallet in wads, then slides the picture in last.

  “Let’s drive around the rim,” Fish says. “You might never see it again, or anything like it.” Rhea’s mouth is dry in an instant. She can’t believe he would say that. “You might never come to Oregon again,” he says, getting up. He isn’t even looking at her when he says it.

  As they come down off the mountain and drive along the river, she starts to cry. “I don’t want to go home,” she says. She wishes Granny and Aunt Christine would move to Oregon.

  Fish pats her leg. “It’s not late. We can do something else.” He thinks she means now. “Let’s see if Pop is still at home. Let’s see if we can catch you a fish.”

  58

  After they pick up what they need from Fish’s parents’ house, he drives a few minutes and then pulls off the highway onto a graveled shoulder above the river. Down a steep, rocky bank, the water breaks over rocks, and then surges toward the opposite bank in a deep arc. “Salmon rest in deep water before they struggle up the next shallow, faster water,” her father says. He shows her how he ties the preserved eggs into a little cluster surrounding the hook at the end of the line, and how the weight above the hook will pull the eggs down deep, yet let them drift with the current.

  They walk partway downstream, below the head of the deep water, and he casts the egg cluster upstream and slightly across the current. He turns the handle on the reel and gradually winds in line. “You’ve got to keep a little tension on the sinker,” he tells her. “You have to feel the weight as it drifts, bouncing along the bottom, so that if it suddenly stops, you can set the hook zip! just like that, when the fish snaps at the drifting eggs.” Bait, Rhea thinks. That’s what bait is.

  She does not know how much time goes by. It must be an hour we’ve been here, she thinks. In the steep canyon of the river, the sun is already setting. She has watched Fish carefully, but she is growing tired, and she is disappointed that he hasn’t had a strike. He tells her that sometimes he has fished for days without catching a salmon. “The uncertainty is supposed to be part of the fun,” he says. Even as he says it, he lifts the rod in a sudden arc, both hands high over his head. At the same instant a high-pitched whine comes from the reel as line is stripped from the spool and pulled rapidly up the current toward the shallow water. “We’ve got a good fish if we can land it!” he shouts to her.

  Rhea can’t see the fish, but she watches the movement of the line as it swings upstream, and she sees her father’s arms cocked against the buck and throb of the strai
ning rod. He tells her, “Hooking a salmon and landing one aren’t the same thing. I wish I’d thought to bring the landing net.”

  In a moment he says, “Wily bastard’s switching strategies on me.” The fish turns and races downstream so quickly that Fish can’t wind in the line fast enough to keep it taut. “Holy shit!” he yells. He looks mad and happy at the same time. “That sucker is going to get off the hook if I can’t catch up with its run,” he says. She sees the line tighten. The fish is stripping line from the reel faster than before. “It’s got the current on its side,” Fish says. “If it gets into the rocks at the bottom of the hole, it’ll break the line.” She steps closer to him, puts a hand on his hip as he arches. “I’ve got to stop its run,” he tells her. “It might break that way too, but I don’t know what else to do.” He fumbles with the drag until the whining sound drops and then stops altogether. His face is set and she can see the strain in his arms and shoulders. If she were taller, she would put her hand up across his shoulders to feel how strong he is. She peeks out from around his body, and suddenly sees the fish churning at the surface in a flash of spray. She had no idea a fish could be so large. In an instant it dives and disappears. Her father holds the fish against the current for a long time. She hopes it will come up again so she can see it, and says so. “Let it sulk,” Fish says. “It’ll tire itself out.”

  She feels like she cannot wait another moment for something to happen, and then Fish begins walking slowly downstream, almost as if he is stalking something, holding the tension in the line, winding it in as he moves. She can tell they’re getting closer to the fish, but the fish doesn’t move.