The Sky Fisherman

by Craig Lesley

  After Billyum left, Jake and I stayed at the back of the store and talked. No customers came in for over half an hour. I was so excited about going on the Lost with my uncle, I could barely keep quiet, but I did because I didn't want to seem like a dude. I knew my mother wouldn't approve, that she'd worry herself sick every minute if she knew, so I thought I'd have to think up some excuse.

  According to my uncle, the Lost claimed a lot of lives year round, but summers were the worst. Fishermen stepped in deep holes with the ankle straps of their waders tied too tightly to wriggle free; boaters failed to fasten the lower cinches of their life vests, so when they went into whitewater, the force ripped the vests over their heads like wet T-shirts; drunks waded into fast water and lost their footing, then banged their heads against the rocks.

  But Kalim's circumstances appeared to be different. The young man was only a few months past twenty-one when a troop of Boy Scouts had seen him standing on the railroad bridge at White River Junction. He had waved as the boats passed beneath the bridge, and they noticed he was wearing a crimson and black RedWing jacket. Some heard a shout, and when they looked back to the bridge it was empty. One boy reported he thought that he had seen someone else standing in the Russian olives along the riverbank, but he couldn't be certain. The scouts had stopped for lunch at Whiskey Dick's, two miles below the bridge, and while eating they were startled to see someone floating down the river face first. They had tried to get out to the body, but they were too slow. Later they had stopped downstream and searched the banks, but found no sign. Everyone agreed the body was wearing a RedWing jacket.

  "Once they go down in the Lost, they stay under about four weeks," Jake said. "Sometimes longer. Bloat depends on the water temperature, whether they drank beer and ate a pizza." His voice trailed. "Maybe they don't come up at all. There's sections that have old lava tubes. Some are blind—no outlets. It's always better if you get a floater before he goes down."

  "Yes," I said. I figured we were both thinking about my father.

  "Well, we better get some gear together. Those scouts planted a lot of Bureau of Land Management saplings hoping they'll get big enough to stop soil erosion. We'll take buckets and water them along the way. It gets mighty hot and it's good to have some shade."

  "And we can fish a little?" I asked.

  "You bet. We'll cook them up in the pan. I got to call Jed. He'll probably want time and a half."

  "You pay time and a half? What about me?"

  He grinned. "You're still learning. Hell, I ought to charge for showing you the ropes. Anyway, you're family and that makes it special."

  "You can't spend special."

  "You're keeping me broke in Pepsi and jelly rolls. Listen, be sure to pack a sweatshirt and windbreaker. It gets cold at night."

  "What about that guy on the bridge? Think he jumped?"

  "It's hard to say." Jake dumped the grounds from his coffee cup. "I imagine Billyum asked around, talked to his family, guys he works with, and girlfriend. Kalim was a damn good high school basketball player. Second team all-state. But he flunked out of college and started working in the woods."

  "Seems like a waste," I said.

  Jake wiped his cup with a paper towel. "Billyum probably checked the riverbank to see if he left anything behind. A good cop makes sense of that stuff..."

  "What kind of stuff?"

  Jake picked up a broken fly rod from the repair rack. We were waiting for the new tip section from Fenwick. He flicked it back and forth a couple of times, but the action was too stiff without the tip. "Say a fellow has some trouble with the wife or business—just decides to end it." Jake scowled at the rod. "He leaves a bottle and his fly rod on the riverbank. Now a lot of guys drink too much, go out in deep water, and lose their footing—but they're planning to fish. A rod on the bank is a dead giveaway, see?"

  "I get it," I said. "You're like a regular detective."

  Jake shook his head. "It's pretty simple. Take a real drowning. Some guy steps into a deep hole. His waders fill with water, but the air pocket at the bottom flips him upside down, just like that." He tapped the rod butt against the floor. "Let's say the dummy tied his ankle straps too tight and he can't kick free. Then his head hits a rock." Jake held out the broken rod. "Four weeks later you find that guy still gripping the rod butt like a vice. Can't pry open his fingers."

  "And the creel might still be on him, but the body's so bloated there's no way to get it off until the coroner cuts the straps. Old Doc Paisley, Gateway's retired coroner, used to brag he never bought a fly—just took the ones he found in drowned guys' creels."

  I shook my head. "Unbelievable."

  "Well, he was a windy old fart, so who knows. He never bought any here." Jake put the rod back in the holder. "Sometimes there's crawdads inside the creel, eating the guy's catch. In the valley, they have crawdad festivals and people line up to eat those scavengers. Not me."

  Thinking about it, I shivered a little. Not me either, I thought.

  "But if you find that creel on the bank, along with all the fancy flies and special tackle he's bought over the years, then you think it over. Maybe this guy's been to Idaho and fished the Silver, Oregon for the Deschutes, the Gallatin in Montana. Each place he's picked up some local flies, special lures. He isn't planning to take all that stuff down with him. That's a waste, so he leaves it on the bank—maybe for a relative, maybe for the next fisherman that happens along. Who knows exactly what someone's thinking before he takes the plunge."

  I nodded. I was giving the creel above the coffeepot a long, hard look, and Jake saw me.

  He picked it up, rattling that morning's coffee change. "Don't worry. This didn't come off a floater. It belonged to your granddad. I just keep it here to remind me ... of the good times we all used to have."

  A customer came in and Jake started for the front of the store, then stopped. "When you find them," he said, "it never matters how tall they are or how much money's in the bank account, or how much the kids love them. They all look pretty small floating facedown in two feet of water."

  I had thought it over while Jake was talking. "That guy wouldn't have been fishing from a railroad bridge. That's not how you fish the Lost."

  "No, he wasn't fishing," Jake said. "We know that for damn sure."

  6

  AFTER TWO DAYS on the river, I stopped imagining that every odd-shaped log was the drowned boy. I had conjured him so many times, straining my eyes to search the deadfall at the water's edge, that I believed I might be a little disappointed when we found him. Jake had grown quieter, that good humor and confidence he had always shown in the store wearing down to a dark moodiness. During the long stretches when conversation lulled, I just kept quiet and studied the river banks. Twice I had sounded false alarms, and each time my uncle had shipped the oars while his gaze followed my quivering finger. "Log," he muttered, then rowed to shore anyway, emphasizing my mistake. "I can't describe it, how a floater looks," he said, "but you'll know when your gut clenches. That's how you tell." Even so, I saw him pull close to shore a couple times, searching some debris along the eddies. He imagined he'd seen the boy, too.

  "Maybe he didn't drown after all," I said. "Maybe he was just stunned and crawled out along the bank somewhere."

  "Where would he be now, then?" my uncle asked. "Don't you think he'd show up?"

  "Maybe he's got amnesia. Maybe a snake bit him."

  "You're so damn raw." He chuckled, the glum mood broken. "You've been watching too much TV. Hardly anybody gets amnesia. And no one dies of snakebite. They just get puke sick."

  Twice we saw buzzards, and he pulled to shore for a closer look. Once it was a bloated cow poisoned in a patch of ragwort, and the second was a small deer that had gotten a back leg tangled in fence wire. The coyotes had been there first, and the buzzards were eating only the scattered remains.

  We had four large buckets in the boat and two short-handled shovels. Stopping every couple hours, we carried water to the BLM saplings.
The bureau had selected ponderosa pines, black alders, Russian olives, and fake had argued with the regional director because not all the species were indigenous to that area. Less than half survived the withering heat away from the riverbank, and these had to be watered regularly by passers-by. We used the shovels to dig little trenches around the saplings so the water we carried wouldn't run downhill.

  Before nightfall we came to a sagebrush and juniper flat containing one old abandoned prospector's cabin. Someone had spray-painted a sign on one weather-beaten wall: RATTLESNAKE TEST AREA, PLEASE ENTER AND BE PART OF OUR SURVEY.

  After dinner the wind blew, and clouds scuttled across a sky lighted by a gibbous moon. Coyotes howled from the flatland above the steep basalt canyons, and birds whistled in the willows a quarter mile upstream.

  "You hear that?" my uncle asked.

  "The coyotes?" They sounded so mournful, but I shivered when I thought of the deer they had torn apart.

  He shook his head. "The other sound. Like birds."

  "What are they? Chukars?"

  "The Indians say they're Steah-hah. Stick Indians. According to the legend, Steah-hah come when you're in some kind of trouble, spiritual trouble maybe. Or when you're lost in the darkness, they whistle like night birds. If you're a good person, they lead you to safety. And if you're bad..." He drew a finger across his throat and made a gurgling sound. "Well, it's better to be a good person." He laughed. "Of course, it's all a bunch of hokum, but the dudes like it. A story to take home from the trip."

  "You got any trouble?" I asked.

  "Nothing two drinks won't fix." He laughed. "How about you? I figure you made up a big story to tell your mom."

  I shrugged. "I just said I'd been working too hard and was going off camping for a couple days."

  "I hope you kept your fingers crossed," he said. "Well, I guess we know Steah-hah are calling for you. I can sleep tight."

  Jake took a handful of wooden matches and walked a few yards away from the fire, then tossed the matches out toward the darkness. "Here." He handed me some. "Give them a toss."

  "Are you serious?" I held on to the matches because I didn't want to seem foolish. "Is this a snipe hunt?"

  "I have the fellas do this." He walked to the other side of the fire and threw some other matches downstream. "Stick Indians like matches because they live in darkness. When Billyum takes his nieces and nephews up huckleberrying, he always gives them matches to throw. That way if the kids get lost, the Stick Indians will bring them home safely."

  "All right, then," I said and tossed a few into the underbrush.

  After we had settled down, he poured a couple cups of coffee and added a shot of Seagram's Seven to each. "You do get some desperate characters down here. A few years back, a trapper shot a game warden not far from here. The warden came into his camp to check his license and gear, see if he had any illegal camp meat."

  "Riley told me about it," I said. "He was interested in the trial. It took them a long time to catch that guy." I hadn't paid much attention to Riley because I was only twelve then.

  "That's right. Old Wilbur—that was his name—covered most of the West before they caught him. The state police and game wardens were combing everyplace, but he could survive in the wilderness. That's what he did best. A couple times before I took a trip downriver, the cops tried to show me wanted posters. But I refused to look. If I was way off in the wilds and a guy came into my camp, I'd just pour him a drink, hand him a hunk of steak left over from supper, and act natural as pie. I'd rather think he was just another fisherman or boater instead of some desperado that dropped a game warden, if you see what I mean."

  "Yes," I said. "I see what you're getting at."

  "I don't want to be a dead hero." He poured himself another half cup of coffee, then filled the cup with Seagram's. Nodding my way, he asked, "Just a splash?"

  "Sure," I said, "but I'm getting a little tired."

  "You're relaxing," he said, stirring the fire. "The dudes I bring down here finally relax after a day or two. It's calming to get away from the day-to-day routine. Some of those guys work their butts off fifty-one weeks a year so they can feed their families, buy the kids new shoes, get their teeth filled. They're the real heroes, just meeting the bills each month and praying the kids don't grow too fast or need braces. They get one week off a year and I show them a good time.

  "I set up a little booth at the sportsman's shows, take a few brochures and some pictures of the river and big fish. The other booths have guides from Canada and Alaska showing fancier brochures. Some of the hard working stiffs want to go north. Hell, who blames them? But they can't afford to, so they come with me."

  He held the coffee cup in his hands as if feeling its warmth. "Once they're down here awhile, maybe they get to talking. Usually the old dreams are sliding away. Everybody's losing ground. One of their kids goes bad on booze; Daddy's sweetheart gets knocked up by some no-'count. These men start talking a little, real quiet at first, because they're not used to spilling their guts at the plant or shop. Here on the river they can say what they feel. No danger of it getting back."

  "What about Riley?" I asked when he paused. "Do you think they're going to catch him?"

  Jake's eyes gleamed in the firelight. "Riley was long suffering. I'm not saying what he did was exactly square, but he made a break. I'm sure it wasn't easy for him—always living in your father's shadow like that. Your mother's a gem—don't get me wrong—but she's not a saint." He lifted his cup and drank.

  "Maybe you've got something there," I said after thinking about it a moment. I realized there had been times when Riley seemed to want to get closer. But I treated him indifferently, always figuring he wasn't really my father, but just a nice guy my mother had married. "You ever think of making a change yourself?"

  "This river and I go pretty far back," Jake said. "Your grandfather taught us boys how to fish. In the old days we all rode the train up after the old man finished putting out the paper. After dark, when our creels were bulging with fish, we'd wait on the tracks and ride the night freight back. During those waits, Dave and I hatched big plans to start up a guide business."

  He finished his whiskeyed coffee and set down the cup. "Right now, I'm just here to have a good time and treat the dudes square. And if you want to learn a few tricks, get to know this river, you might think of spelling me." He winked. "Partners in a way. The Top Hand and the Little Wrangler."

  We turned in shortly after that. The wind died and the coyotes quit howling. The night birds were quiet, too, and after a while, when the fire quit hissing, all I heard were Jake's snores and the lap of the small waves against the boat. I thought of what he had said about the Steah-hah and the working guys being heroes. Maybe Riley was a kind of hero, too, and I never gave him enough credit. He did go out of his way to help. One time after a Grass Valley bully bloodied my nose, Riley bought boxing gloves and took me into the basement. We boxed each night until my wrists ached, even though my mother called it barbaric. Riley in sisted it was survival, and after I thumped that kid, Riley handed me ten dollars and instructed me not to tell Mom.

  Thinking of the times Riley had been good to me, I slipped out of my sleeping bag and crawled from the tent, so as not to disturb Jake. I grabbed a handful of kitchen matches and carried them a few yards out into the sagebrush. I didn't really believe in such Steah-hah stuff, but what could it hurt? If a guy like Billyum did it, maybe there was something to it.

  I tossed the handful of matches out toward the tall sagebrush thicket, which gleamed silvery white in the moonlight. "Take care of Riley, you guys," I whispered. "Take good care."

  ***

  We were just finishing breakfast the next morning when my uncle put a plate of pancakes and sausages on a flat rock, along with a cup of coffee. "Come and get it!" he yelled, and except for the coffee, I thought he was talking to a couple of scolding magpies in a broken juniper.

  An old Indian emerged from the tall sagebrush patch near the cabin. He w
as carrying a fishing pole and a light sleeping bag. Two creels hung from his shoulders, each one so heavy with fish the tails hung out and he couldn't fasten the leather straps. Although he smiled at Jake, his eyes were hidden behind dark round sunglasses.

  "Thought it might be you," Jake said. "This was always one of your favorite stretches. Culver, this is Sylvester Silvertooth, one of the top men on the reservation. And a pretty decent fisherman."

  "Good to meet you," I said.

  Sylvester shook hands, then started eating. "Your uncle's a pretty decent cook, too," he said. "Make somebody a good wife, if he wasn't stump ugly." He concentrated on his food, remaining quiet until he had nearly cleaned his plate. "All I brought was pemmican and some Hershey bars. Damn chocolate melted."

  "You could eat your fish." Jake nodded at the catch.

  The old man shook his head. "Gonna sell these to the restaurant at the lodge. Tourists want them fresh caught by real Indians." He grinned. "That's me. One hundred percent full blood."

  "You drowning worms?" Jake asked.

  Sylvester drank some of his coffee. "The big ones are lying deep. I weight Salmon flies, bump them along the bottom." He finished his sausage, then pointed the fork at the last pancake. "Anybody want that?"

  "Go ahead," Jake said. "But I thought you were supposed to live off the land."

  "I do. Soon as I got up this morning, I knew some white guy was fixing my breakfast."

  Sylvester finished his pancake. As he held the coffee cup, his hand trembled a little. "I know you're down here looking for my nephew. Thanks for helping out."

  "Sure," Jake said. "We're sorry about the boy."

  The old man set down his cup. "He was a good kid, but after high school, he sort of slipped away ... Tried a little gypo logging, odd jobs at the mill. After a while, he should have straightened out."

  "You're looking for him, too," Jake said.

  Sylvester nodded. "I built a little sweat house right where Deer Creek comes in. It's hid pretty good but you can stop by anytime, Jake. The boy, too."