Diary of a Witness

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

  I watched him fight that fish in, thinking, There’s lots that could still go wrong. Moby could break the line, or wiggle off the hook. It happens. It happened to me. The question was, did I want it to happen to Will?

  No. That’s what I decided. No. I wanted Will to catch Moby. I got to come up here all the time. I also got the best Christmas present, and the good family. I even got the lingcod. Will never even caught a legal ling, and when he finally did, he had to give it to me and pretend he didn’t. Even though something in my stomach still didn’t like it, I decided I was willing to let Will have Moby.

  He pulled him up and out of the water. Holy cow, what a beauty. Speckled dark brown with a silvery belly. Biggest trout I ever saw with my own eyes. A trout is just the most beautiful fish in the world to me. Moby was the most beautiful trout.

  “Careful,” I said. “He can still come off the hook. Turn him away from the water so he won’t fall back into the pool if he comes free. Here, I’ll get the towel.”

  When I turned back with the towel, Moby had shaken the hook and fallen onto the ground. I threw Will the towel, and he dove down to grab him. But the fish gave one huge, thrashing flip of his body and landed in the water. Will was looking at his hands, like he couldn’t believe the fish wasn’t in them. Then we both just stood there and watched him swim away. It was heartbreaking.

  “I can’t believe I lost him. I had him. I just had him.”

  “I lost that same fish last summer. Either that or his identical twin. I still haven’t gotten over it.”

  “Gee, thanks. Here I was telling myself I’d feel better in a little while.”

  I baited his hook again, and my own, and we both cast back into the deep water under the falls. We both got hits right away. We were both reeling in at the same time. Two rainbows, ten or eleven inches long. They came all the way in, too.

  I took them both off the hooks carefully and put them in Uncle Max’s creel.

  “Well, that’s something, anyway,” Will said. “At least I caught something. What’re the chances that same fish would bite again?”

  “Not too good, I wouldn’t think. You hear about fish that’re so stupid they’ll get caught twice in one day. But I think they’re hardly ever trout.”

  I caught another one about ten minutes later. A brown, but not a huge brown. Big enough, I guess.

  Then I looked down and saw a good-sized brown hanging out in the shallow part of the pool, right near us. I pointed him out to Will. Quietly.

  “Where?” he whispered.

  “Right there.”

  “I don’t see it. Oh, yes I do!”

  They’re pretty well camouflaged. Until they move, you might not even see them.

  Will reeled in and then cast his worm right in front of that fish, and he followed the bait. I could feel Will holding his breath while the fish poked at that worm.

  “I can’t believe I’m watching this. I’ve never fished for fish I could see.”

  “Be patient,” I whispered.

  He was. Until the worm was gone. Then he set the hook and reeled him in. Will was so excited he just couldn’t contain himself. He had never in his whole life looked down through crystal clear water and watched himself catch a fish.

  Then we caught at the same time again, but mine was only about eight inches, so I kept him in the water while I pulled the hook out of his mouth, and I let him swim away.

  Will asked if there was a size limit.

  I said, “No, but the bag limit is five. So I can only catch one more.”

  “Hey, math genius, one more would make three.”

  “But I caught two this morning. It’s five per angler per day.”

  “Nobody’s going to know that! If we get stopped, they won’t see the two you caught this morning. We ate them, remember? No one will ever know.”

  I shrugged my shoulders. “I’ll know.”

  He just shook his head at me. “Then I’m going to catch seven. That way we’ll be heading back with ten for the two of us. Or are you going to turn me in if I do that?”

  I shrugged again. “No. It’s just one of those decisions we all have to make for ourselves, I guess.”

  It didn’t matter anyway, because Will didn’t catch seven. I caught my three and he caught four, and then they just stopped biting. When you’re not used to trout fishing, you don’t get that. You’re reeling them in like crazy, and you think you can do that all day. But they either bite or they don’t, and sometimes they just stop and other times they just start. And nobody really knows when or why. Believe me, if anybody knew the solution to that mystery, they’d bottle it and sell it to fishermen all over the world.

  We packed up to go, and Will opened the creel and looked in at our seven fish. Five rainbows and two browns. We didn’t know whose were whose anymore, and probably didn’t even care.

  “Wish I hadn’t lost that big one,” he said. “That would’ve been so cool, to show your uncle Max that. But these are good, I guess. They’re so beautiful. Trout are such a beautiful fish.” He ran a finger down one of the fish’s slippery sides.

  In my head I thought, Say it. Tell him we need to talk for real. Tell him you’re worried about him. That things are taking a bad turn. Tell him you brought him out here because something needs to change before we go back to school, otherwise just about anything could happen.

  “Yeah, trout are beautiful,” I said. And kicked myself all the way down.

  We fired up the barbecue and cooked the fish out on the back deck, on the grill, pressed into one of those fish baskets that keep the trout from falling apart when you turn them. It was nearly dark already. Will and I were sitting out on the deck, watching the moon rise over the mountains. This nearly full moon. And keeping an eye on the fish. The cabin is on a meadow, one of the High Sierra meadows, and this light mist of fog was lying down in the center of the meadow, but you could still see the stars come out above it. You could still see the early night sky.

  I was wearing my new jacket.

  Will said, “Trout is the best-tasting fish I ever ate, too. I know you probably thought I just said that for your uncle’s sake. But I really meant it. I never thought I’d eat fish for breakfast. But that was the best breakfast ever.”

  We sat and looked at the first stars a minute longer. Now and then the breeze shifted, and we had to wave smoke out of our eyes.

  Then Will said, “I’m sorry about that thing I said to you.”

  “Which thing?” But he looked a little hurt, so I said, “I didn’t mean to make it sound like you say lots of bad things. I just don’t know what you said.”

  “I’m sorry I said you should’ve let me die. That wasn’t true. Well, maybe I thought it was at the time. But now I’m glad you didn’t.”

  I didn’t answer, because I figured that was all that needed to be said about that. We just sat there and watched the stars come out, and waited for our dinner to be ready.

  Just before I got up to turn the fish, Will said, “I just realized something. This is what people are talking about when they say they’re happy. How are we supposed to go back, though? I wish we didn’t have to go back.”

  “I refuse to worry about that on the second day of our vacation.” After all, we still had time for things to change.

  He nodded, like he agreed. But he still looked worried.

  Much as Will loved to fish for trout, the hunting issue would not go away.

  It actually took us two days. One to teach me to shoot and for Uncle Max to satisfy himself that we understood gun safety, and another to actually go out in the woods and find a deer.

  The morning Uncle Max took us up into the forest was Christmas morning. And it was snowing. And early, and cold. But there was something about being outdoors on a morning like that, on a white Christmas in California, just being out in the middle of that perfect, untouched blanket of snow. It also made it almost impossible to get lost. We could always follow our own footsteps back to the truck.

  This’ll soun
d weird, but Will and I were tied together. Uncle Max tied a short piece of rope through my belt loop and then Will’s. He took our safety pretty seriously. And if we could never get more than about a foot apart, it would be nearly impossible to shoot each other.

  It took us over an hour and a half to find a deer. When Will spotted a young buck, we were comfortably tucked behind a boulder, where he wasn’t likely to spot us back. Uncle Max was about twenty paces back, just making sure we were okay.

  I looked at the buck, and I was just blown away by how beautiful he was. And how much I didn’t want to shoot him. Which is funny, because I was blown away by how beautiful trout were, too. But I caught them anyway. But trout were different. They breathed water. They were coldblooded. They didn’t have warm fur and warm hearts and draw breath through perfect black nostrils.

  We didn’t dare say a word, but I made a gesture to say, You. You take him. After all, Will is the one who loves to hunt. But he shook his head and handed it back to me, all without a word. After all, he was introducing me to hunting, and the least he could do was let me give it a try.

  I raised the rifle and peered at the buck through the scope. He was no less beautiful. I could feel my hands shake a little bit. Then I raised the muzzle of the rifle a hair higher and purposely fired a shot over his back. The shot slammed through the cold air and echoed around again. I dropped the rifle and watched the buck leap away. Well, leap anyway. He leaped into the air, and then a second shot hit my eardrums. The buck just seemed to freeze that way for a split second, a foot or two above the snow. Then he fell onto his knees and crumpled onto his chin, his eyes open.

  We ran through the snow to him, but it wasn’t easy, because we were still tied together. We found him bleeding into the snow from a perfect round red hole in his shoulder. Will was a good shot.

  “I missed,” I said.

  If Will knew I missed on purpose, he never said so. He might’ve known, though.

  Will ran a hand down the buck’s side, like he was worshipping something. The blood steamed when it hit the snow.

  I’m never going to be a hunter, I know that now. I don’t know why it should be so different. Like Will said, I eat meat. But if I had to look into its big, wet-looking dark eye and then shoot it first, I’d live the rest of my life on peanut butter, pasta, and fish. I just admired the deer too much.

  I felt Uncle Max’s hand on my shoulder. “Good shooting on someone’s part.”

  “It was Will,” I said. “I missed him.”

  “Excellent job, Will.”

  Will turned to Uncle Max and threw his arms around him, half dragging me along. I didn’t know if it was because he took us hunting, or because he told Will he did a good job on something. I’m not sure anybody ever tells Will that. I’m not sure anybody ever did.

  Uncle Max was surprised. He’s not a real touchy-feely kind of guy. Then again, neither is Will. At first Uncle Max just stood there with his arms at his sides. Giving me this look, like, What did I say?

  Will said, “Thank you for this vacation.”

  Uncle Max clapped him on the back and said, “You are very welcome.”

  Then he handed Will his hunting knife and untied the rope that held us together, and they wrestled the buck over onto his back. Will made a big cut down the middle of his belly. I heard a rush of warm air, and smelled blood, and watched a cloud of steam rise.

  At first I wanted to look away, but I didn’t. It was life. After all. So I watched him pull out the stomach and guts, and cut out the area under his tail, and leave all that in the snow for whatever animals would come along. I watched him reach up for the lungs and heart, pushing back his sleeves and getting bloody to the elbows.

  “I don’t like liver,” he said to Uncle Max, holding it in his hands.

  “I’ll eat the liver.”

  “I don’t have anything to put it in, though.”

  “Put it back in the body cavity when you’re done.”

  Then I watched Will go in under the hip bone, going after the bladder. Not that I knew what he was going for. But Uncle Max asked if he knew to be careful how he cut and how hard he pulled, and Will smiled and said, “Yeah, it’s not like I’ve never gotten a face full,” and Uncle Max smiled.

  I felt like they were speaking a language I couldn’t understand, and it made me feel left out and sad.

  Then they cut a long branch and tied the buck’s legs together, and slid the branch through and hoisted it up on their shoulders, and we all hiked back to the truck. Silent, not saying a word. Not needing to.

  I was clumping along behind, thinking, That’s really my uncle Max. Not yours. But it was a little like the giant brown trout. Will had so little. Not that it meant I should give him my uncle Max exactly. But it wouldn’t kill me to loan him out for a while.

  Good thing I came to that conclusion, because it took them two and a half hours to finish dressing that thing out and cutting it up. I heard Will skinned it, too, and hung the skin in the shed, so it wouldn’t draw animals in the night. I heard he was going to tan that skin and keep it. But I didn’t see any of it with my own eyes. I chose not to watch. I knew we’d be having venison for dinner, and I’d seen enough of the insides of that buck. I passed on seeing the skinned flesh.

  Besides, I did enough to help. I loaned him my uncle Max. I practiced tying flies for two and a half hours and stayed out of their way.

  That night Will and I pulled lounge chairs out on the back deck and lay on them in sleeping bags, looking up at the stars. It was a perfect, clear night. I’d told Will I bet he didn’t even know how many stars there really were, and he had no idea what I meant, so we lay out there and shivered in our sleeping bags and took it all in.

  Will was being quiet, but in a good sort of way. I knew he felt good. Settled. In a way I could never understand, he found himself in the hunting. I didn’t feel it, but I didn’t mind if he did. He didn’t get that many chances to find himself, or to feel good.

  “You’re right,” he said. “It’s maybe four times as many stars as I thought.”

  “It’s the city lights. They fade out the sky. Plus it’s a really clear night.”

  “It’s not completely clear. There’s that little soft band of cloud right along there.”

  “That’s the edge of the Milky Way.”

  “No way.”

  “Way.”

  “That band there?”

  “Yup. The edge of our galaxy.”

  He drifted back into that satisfied silence.

  I let that ride for a couple of minutes. Then I said, “Are we ever gonna talk about Sam?” Surprised the hell out of myself. I had no idea I was about to say that.

  He didn’t answer for a long time, and I didn’t look at him. I was thinking maybe it was a mistake to bring it up. After a time I heard a sniff, and I knew he was crying. At first I felt really bad, but then I thought, All that stuff is in there anyway. It might as well come out.

  “I’m sorry if it’s a sore subject,” I said. “I just keep thinking that if you could talk about what happened, then you wouldn’t have had to do something terrible to yourself to get help. I mean, do you still feel like it was your fault?”

  Another long silence. Oh well, I thought. At least I tried. Uncle Max would say, Then that has to be enough.

  “I do and I don’t,” he said, and it surprised me. “I know I didn’t mean for it to happen. I never meant any harm to the kid. But I should’ve sat up when you said to sit up. I mean, I had that ling on the stringer. And I had the stringer wrapped around my hand. He wasn’t going anywhere. All I had to do was sit up until the swell passed. And then go back to cutting him loose again. I think about that when I go to bed at night. And I wake up at night thinking about it. I have dreams, too. In my dreams at night I hear you saying, ‘Will, sit up, there’s a big swell coming.’ Sometimes I dream it out a different way, where I sit up. And the swell just kind of splashes us, and then I bring the fish in, and we catch a bunch more. And then we motor back
to shore, and Sam is fine, and everything’s fine. And I finally caught that big ling, and my father’s boat isn’t gone, and he doesn’t have to go to jail. And my mother doesn’t have to come live with me and bring that creep with her. And I don’t have to try to kill myself and you don’t get pitched down the stairs while I’m gone. And it’s just all okay. It could’ve been that way. I know now what I had to do to make it be that way. And it’s so easy. Just sit up. And now I want to, like … I want to rewind to that moment and do it right. How do you do that, Ernie? How do you rewind life?”

  “Um. You don’t.” Should I have backed up and corrected that part about getting pitched down the stairs? I don’t know. I just know I didn’t.

  “Right. You don’t. Why didn’t I sit up? Am I just stupid? Or am I a little bit crazy like everybody says?”

  “I don’t think either. I just think when you really love to fish like we do, your brain sort of locks up at that big moment. You know you caught something good, and it’s like an obsession. Your brain locks on it, and you just can’t think about anything else.”

  We were quiet for a long time. I felt small looking up at the stars. The world looked so big, and Will and I were just like nothing. In the whole big scheme.

  Then he said, “See, this is why you’re my best friend, Ernie. Because you get it. You actually get what I mean. Other people just look at me like I’m nuts.”

  I was struggling with how to take a compliment, but then it didn’t matter, because he just kept going.

  “Sometimes I think it’s not even that moment I blame myself for. It’s more like everything before it. I was so hateful to him. It’s like when he was born. As soon as he was born, I hated him. Because I already had nothing. I mean, whatever you’re supposed to give a kid so he can grow up, I had nothing. And then this little snot-nose comes along and I’m supposed to divide nothing in half and share it with him? And that was when he was born. Later it got even worse. When I found out he was cuter, and they were going to like him better than me. I know he was a really bad, snotty little kid. But sometimes I think, What if I hadn’t been so hateful to him? What if I’d acted like he was really my brother? Maybe he would’ve turned out all different.”