The River Why

by David James Duncan

  Suddenly she flexed, and O! the entire up and down of her rippled like a zephyr across a lake. Her line began wandering slowly upstream: something big had taken the bait! Like a ballerina she leaned and twisted, extending the rod out over the water as far as she could reach. Then, savagely, she struck! and sang out like a meadowlark as a bright summer steelhead of eight or nine pounds took a tail-walk across the top of the river. It tore upstream on a powerful run and would have her handful of line in seconds so I figured the game was up, but still her face was undismayed. She let the coils fly from her fingers as though she expected it. What came next took maybe ten seconds, but as those ten seconds contained the three most spectacular and profound fish-fighting maneuvers I have ever witnessed, I will take some time to describe them:

  First she pulled some sort of release string and the three guide-loops fell into the water. Her line was now attached only at the butt, so the long rod would be useless for battling the steelhead; yet her expression was still undismayed.…

  Next, she leapt to the very tip of the snag, turned the rod around backwards and threw it, like a javelin, upstream after the speeding fish! The hazel disappeared in the Siletz, then surfaced, speeding along butt-first like a whale boat on a Nantucket sleigh ride! Seeing in a flash that the attachment of line to butt made the hazel a truer-flying spear, a straighter-gliding sled, and a more resistant barge for the fish to tow, I felt for the first time in my life that I was in the presence of a fishing genius exceeding my own. It seemed no tactic could possibly surpass the two I’d just seen. But they were nothing.…

  When I looked back up in the alder my eyes met with a sight beyond hope: the small fraction of blue jeans, the t-shirt, and a pair of blue panties fluttered from a twig.…

  And the lithe and blinding figure of the naked girl was airborne, soaring out in an arc and flashing down through the leaves in a swan dive next to which the gliding flight of swans was a sorry, lumbering sight. She shot through the tree—sun and shadow streaking across her body—flying more than falling through the blue-green air, past glowing leaf and dark deadly limbs, vanishing with a fish-soft splash in the pool. Surfacing far upstream, she struck out after the speeding rod in an otter-swift crawl stroke. I scrambled through brush and boulders, gashing slits and gouging holes in my person, not about to take my eyes from the girl for a purpose so mundane as watching where I was going.

  The hazel stopped at the head of the pool. I ducked behind the long-forgotten picnic boulders. She waded up and grabbed her pole then started for the far shore, but the steelhead turned and ran downriver so she launched the pole again, but gently, like a toy boat, and breaststroked after. The fish jumped twice more, but sluggishly; then the line slackened and the steelhead wove, weary and confused. She waded o my god into thigh-deep water. She detached the line from the rod butt while the fish rested, tied it to the tip, then backed toward shore. When the line came taut the steelhead reacted with a last, slow-motion leap and a few short runs, but she’d calculated its strength perfectly and now used the length and suppleness of the rod to keep it from gaining line. She led it into the shallows, and by the time she’d beached and killed it my bloodstream was pulsating with so many outrageous romantic goads that I had to turn away to stave off the head-staggers. When I caught my breath I turned back—and she was swimming, rod and fish in tow, right toward me!

  I ducked behind a boulder and looked madly for a way into the trees. There was none. Any way I took would expose me, and the conglomeration of heat, scratches, and emotion must have had me looking like the Mad Rapist of the River. I heard her wading toward me through the shallows. I heard water dripping from her body onto the rocks. I heard her quick, soft breathing as she climbed onto a moss-topped boulder very near mine… then I heard nothing. She must have seen me! I could picture her face—gaping in horror, too terrified to begin the screaming sure to follow. I didn’t move a muscle: huddled in a ball, head in arms, arms round knees, I vowed to stay that way for a day, a week, as long as it took. I wouldn’t move for anything. Sooner or later she’d take me for dead or crazy and go away.

  But after an eternity of silence I heard a low humming. It was not the low humming of a horror-stricken nude. With a furtiveness that far surpassed any fish-stalking furtiveness I have ever accomplished, I peeked over my boulder.… She was sunbathing on a stone not a flyrod’s length away, in an utterly unsuspecting, utterly alone pose of poses.

  O ye frogs and fevers, ye coots and constellations, the fisher-girl was the loveliest of lovely sights! On the sunbaked boulder, on green moss she lay, the quicksilver trout, rose-hued and stippled, glimmering by her side, glistening by her side, a pale, paltry thing by her gleaming side. As she ran a slender finger through the moss, over the stone, along the wretched fish, only Heaven and myself knew the pain that I was in. And when at last I remembered to breathe, that breath came, that breath went, with a fall and rise of rose-tipped breasts. Birds flew, crickets sang, stone and river spoke together in the shallows, and her music low and lovely and the beauty of her body and the wind’s soft singing and the beauty of her body, O the beauty of her body beat upon me like a storm. Ah, what became of my mother’s boy as he watched beside the river? What became of her fisher-son gazing on the gleaming girl?

  The warble of the water owl poor Gus became.

  A salmon in a gill-net little Gus became.

  The ouzel’s cry on a frozen creek,

  the field mouse in the kestrel’s clasp,

  the otter whelp weeping in the nettle patch

  poor Gus became.

  The grass blade growing in the asphalt slab,

  the baying of a lone hound in bare winter,

  a gnat in a cobweb,

  a trout in a creel,

  a child in a night wood without a trail

  poor Gus’s heart became.…

  At last she stirred and I hid again. I heard her slide off the boulder. I watched her return to the alder and climb it with the grace and agility that marked everything she’d done. She dressed in her fishing perch. As she climbed down I broke at last out of hiding, striving hopelessly to feign innocence, ignorance, and a fresh arrival. To give her fair warning I crashed through the underbrush like a great landed nabob, whistling, mumbling, resolved on an attempt at bluff gruff fishermanly good humor. Just as I prepared my jolly hello I saw her face full on for the first time… Piteous Christ it was beautiful! I croaked, “Wet luke!”

  She froze, and said nothing. I tried to laugh: what emerged from my gullet was the death rattle of a wen-headed Hoosier. Attempting to explain my initial utterance, I gave vent to these sounds: “Oh! Me, I say Wet luke but A meant to snay ‘What muck,’ I mean ‘Lut,’ orm, um.…”

  That did it. Still silent, the lovely girl leaned over and picked up a big rock. Grinning my face off, I blurted, “AWrr! Yore rock hown!”

  O ye hodags and ye ditzels! I imagined what she must be going through.… Just got her clothes on—what few she had—when a blubbering Sasquatch comes heaving out of the underplants making incomprehensible mating gurgles in its hairy throat! I imagined my beard full of lint, my teeth yellow, my fly open and undershorts showing there the color of my teeth, and thick green boogers clogging both my nostrils. I stared at the ground: there was a wee little snail crawling peacefully along down there. O ye Newark New Jersey how I wished I was that snail! How softly I’d sneak under the nearest rock and die! She stood before me, terribly beautiful, terribly frightened, while I gawked on, helpless to hide, feeling my face was the size of a billboard. I had to do something. “Don’t get scored,” I burbled. “Me gog peech inspediment. M-m-my-I juss a marmless fissamren!”

  “Oh,” she said, clutching the rock tighter, lips quivering, eyes the size of ripe blue apples.

  It was too awful. I gurbled, “Ope! Got go now… Goodo, mmm, Good lerk! Bye.” I stumbled down to the river, picked up a forty-pound rock as stupid-looking as me, held it to my belly, strode forthrightly forward into the water, and kept on striding till
the Tamanawis swallowed me alive. Relieved to be sunk from sight by my forty pounds of stupid, I staggered through the deeps, where the slime and fish-shit and mudsuckers lurk, hoping to black out, inhale a fatal dose of river, get it over with then and there. But I came, curse my lung capacity, to the far shore’s shallows, dropped my forty pounds of stupid, waded up the bank without a glance behind me, and barged into the brush on a beeline, refusing to veer to either side for anything; I tore through devil’s club, briars, wildrose thickets, and choked, evil copses; I left a legacy of flesh and clothing on stickers and snags; then I came to a cedar—a great stinking monster of a tree—and since I wouldn’t move for it and it wouldn’t move for me I jumped up, caught the lowest branch, shinnied it to the trunk, and started climbing, intending to keep on climbing till I ran out of tree.

  As I labored up I encountered a red ant laboring down and was moved by my misery to interrogate it: I asked it why I was ever born, why my parents lacked the sense to expose me at infancy on some icy mountain, why I failed to drown, why some compassionate disease didn’t ravage and kill me, why some rabid squirrel didn’t come open my throat, and other questions of similar description. The ant, like the girl, took one look at me and began to brandish its tiny pincers. I climbed on alone.

  4

  Eddy

  Sweeny the thin-groined it is

  in the middle of the yew-tree.

  Life is very bare here,

  piteous Christ it is cheerless.

  Grey branches have hurt me,

  they have pierced my calves.

  I hang here in the yew-tree above,

  without chessmen, no womantryst.

  I can put no faith in humans

  in the place they are;

  watercress at evening is my lot.

  I will not come down.

  —from a medieval Irish myth

  As I ascended the cedar a plan formed in my mind in somewhat the way scum forms in an abandoned cup of water. This plan was an agenda—a program to carry out for the remainder of my scurvy incarnation. It went like this: #1 Climb till you reach the top of the tree. #2 Cling there till you become too weak and starved and thirsty to hang on. #3 Fall from top of tree, smash and splinter countless bones as you fall, burst your head and break your neck when you hit the ground. #4 Lurch, writhe, and bleed for a few moments. #5 That should do it.

  I liked this plan. It seemed like one of the few types of plan a person with my particular abilities and attributes could manage. I adopted it and commenced carrying it out. According to plan I reached the treetop. Not according to plan I looked back across the river: the girl was still there! Poof! went the plan.

  She had gathered her rod and fish and now sat with them, cross-legged, atop the same boulder that couched her during those eternal moments that reduced me to idiocy. She looked like a dryad bodhisattva there on the moss, every bit as beautiful but not so devastating as she’d been face to face. The river between us eased my panic; my tongue stopped writhing like a trout in a puddle; I could see she was no longer frightened. She called, “You all right up there?”

  Purified by water, mortified by devil’s club, I told the naked truth: “No.”

  “Are you hurt?”

  “Yes,” I said, for the pool carried her voice straight into my heart and convinced that heartless organ to start pummeling the rest of my innards mercilessly. At least the scratches and gashes didn’t hurt: I forgot I had a body the moment I saw hers.

  “Can you get down?”

  “No,” I said, thinking no a nice word, easy to conjure, easy to pronounce.

  “How come?”

  “Because,” I said, wary of any more syllabulous explanation.

  “Because why?”

  “Just because.”

  “Why just because?”

  “Just because just because.”

  “All right, Mummy-mouth. If that’s the best you can do I’ll see you later.” She started up.…

  “No don’t go!”

  “Why not?”

  “…………… ju… just… because,” I croaked, and we both started laughing. But the laughter died, a silence began, and no one broke it. A breeze came and played in her hair, and her hair came and played in my brain, and the breeze crossed the river and played in my cedar, then it died, too. The silence grew thick. I ought to say something. Mummy-mouth? I had to say something. But to her I could only say something beautiful, and my brain was full of her hair and my tongue was a trout again and for a trout to speak hair-thoughts beautifully was just not possible. Desperate, I took another tack: scanning my trusty rote memory, I pulled a passage from that controversial volume, The Compleat Angler, and with all the H2Oratory in me boomed, “No life, my honest scholar, no life so happy and so pleasant as the life of a well-governed angler!”

  “Prob’ly not,” she said. And she smiled.

  God what a smile! Craving nothing on earth but the sight of another, I poured forth another Waltonian passage: “Indeed, my good scholar, we may say of angling, as Dr. Boteler said of strawberries, ‘Doubtless God could have made a better berry, but doubtless God never did’; and so, if I might be judge, God never did make a more calm, quiet, innocent recreation than angling!”

  “I don’t s’pose He did,” she agreed, smiling some more.

  Dizzy with bliss, I recited, “And now, I think it will be time to repair to your angle-rod, which should be left in the water to fish for itself—and it is an even lay it catches!”

  “Why not?” she laughed—and she hopped down from the boulder, stepped into the shallows, and commenced turning stones till she spotted a big red crawdad; one fearless swoop and she had it in her hands—and I wished I was a crawdad till she gave it this brief sermon: “Life is short. It’s God’s fault. Sorry.” with which she tore off its tail, crushed its body into compost and soul into the Garden World, shelled the tail, baited her hook, cast into the head of the pool, propped the hazel, and climbed back onto the infamous boulder. I was moved to encourage her with this from The Angler:

  “Let me tell you, scholar, this kind of fishing with a dead rod is like putting money to use, for it works for its owner when she do nothing but sleep, or eat, or rejoice, as you know we have done this last hour!”

  “So that’s what we’ve done,” she said. “I thought I’d been catching a steelhead. And I thought you’d been up to even weirder things—like turning from a harelip into a harebrained bard, maybe.”

  “Trust me, scholar,” I recited. “I know not what to say to it. There are many country people who believe hares change sexes every year.”

  She smiled again, but this one faded into a frown. “Look, pal,” she said. “I don’t want to, uh, bring you down—so to speak. But are you afraid of something? I mean, like, did you run away from somewhere—an, uh, asylum, maybe? I won’t tell on you or anything, but maybe I could help. What are you doing out here? If you’re a fisherman, where’s your gear? What’s the story with you?”

  Suddenly clammy and weak, I abandoned the words of Izaak Walton and said, “I am a fisherman, but I only came here to swim. My gear’s at home—on the Tamanawis. And I did run away from something. And I am afraid of something, but it ain’t an asylum. But I am in trouble, and… and nobody but you could possibly help.”

  “So OK,” she said. “What did you run from, what are you scared of, how do I help?”

  Caution tried to stop me, but when my heart saw the opening the words leapt out: “It was you! It was you I ran from. It’s you that’s the… you I’m scared of—I mean, I was scared you were scared of me. I mean, I couldn’t stand to scare you again. And to help, just don’t go away. Just stick around a bit. I’ll stay up here. Heck, I like it up here. Just don’t go away… not yet.”

  She said nothing for a long time. When she spoke her voice was puzzled, but so soft and pretty. “I was scared at first. I’m not now. But what do you mean, I’m the trouble? I didn’t do anything to you.”

  “Yes you did.”

>   “What?”

  “I don’t know. Nothin’, maybe. But nothing will ever be the same.”

  She made no reply. I was afraid I’d gotten shlocky then, so to cover my tracks I shook the tree and filled the canyon with these lines: “‘Some waters being drank cause madness, some drunkenness, and some laughter to death.… One of no less credit than Aristotle tells of a merry river that dances… for with music it bubbles, popples and grows sandy, and so continues till the music ceases, then presently returns to its wonted calmness and clearness. Dolphins love music, and can swim as swift as an arrow can be shot out of a bow… but now let’s say grace and fall to breakfast. What say you, scholar?’”

  She said, “Say grace if you like, but don’t fall to breakfast.”

  “Why not?”

  “You’ll break your neck before I find where that lingo of yours comes from.”

  God what a smile! I said, “Comes from Zizik Waltlick—blaf! Zike Walston—brroff!”

  She laughed. “You’re doing it again! Did you mean ‘Izaak Walton’?”

  God, what a laugh! “Yast,” I said, melting like butter in a frypan.

  “What’s your name?”

  My name! She wanted to know my name!.…… ohoh. What was my name? Oh yeah! Gus. I blurted, “Gorse Vordlestine, er, Orffle-Orvisdit… dammit! What’s yours?”

  “Eddy,” she said. “Glad to meet ya, Gorstlevorkerdorkt.”

  “Eddy, like the swirlzles in riverd wattle?”