Trout Quintet

by Steve Raymond

  “Anyway, Ben Jericho, the guy who owned the ranch, suggested I should go to the store at Buffalo Jump. ‘Where the hell’s that?’ I asked. ‘You passed it on the way here,’ Ben said, ‘but you might not have noticed it. Nothin’ there but a general store with a gas pump and a couple of old houses. The store’s run by an old Indian named Dennis Bill. I’m pretty sure he’s got some hats.’

  “‘Dennis Bill? What kind of name is that?’

  “‘Lots of Indians take names like that. It’s easier for white folks to pronounce and remember ‘em. But they keep their tribal names, too. Dennis’s tribal name is about fourteen syllables long and I couldn’t even begin to pronounce it. Somebody once told me it means ‘Big Man Afraid of His Hair,’ but he might have been kidding.’

  “Anyway, I drove to Buffalo Jump, about six miles, and stopped in front of this run-down wooden building with a hand-painted sign saying ‘Store.’ Nobody was around and I didn’t see any fresh tracks in the dirt. The store had a window and I walked up and looked inside. First thing I saw was hundreds of dead bugs on the inside windowsill. I mean, there were enough dead bugs to illustrate a whole book on entomology. But that was about all I could see because it was nearly dark inside.

  “So I went in. At first I didn’t think anybody was there, but when my eyes got adjusted I saw this old Indian sitting behind the counter. He was so still I thought he might be dead. Didn’t say anything, either. I started looking around and saw lanterns, coils of rope, saddles, bridles, horse blankets, bottled water, canned foods, drawers full of hardware and, believe it or not, some fishing tackle. He had some flies so old they might have been tied by Dame Juliana. They were so covered with dust and cobwebs I couldn’t tell what they were. There was also some leader material that had probably been there since before the Depression.

  “But I didn’t see any hats, so I finally went to the counter. ‘Hey,’ I said. ‘Hey yourself,’ he said back. ‘You got any hats?’ I asked. ‘Over there,’ he said, and pointed. Sure enough, there was a shelf in the corner with a stack of what looked like ten-gallon hats. That wasn’t what I was looking for—the hat I’d left at home was a bucket hat like the one you bought at the thrift store—but I went over and looked anyway, because I needed a hat and I’d settle for one of those if I had to. I didn’t like any of them, especially when I saw the cheapest one was priced at sixty dollars.

  “So I went back to the counter and asked Dennis if he had any others. ‘Got those,’ he said, pointing to another shelf, and lo and behold, there was a pile of bucket hats. I picked out one, tried it on, and it fit like a glove. It was kind of a tan color, or maybe beige, and it had this neat-looking patch with a feather embroidered on it in front, maybe an eagle feather. I took it over to the counter and said I’d take it.

  “‘Special hat,’ he said. ‘Blessed by shaman. Bring you luck. Ten dollars.’ I thought that was a bit steep, but I really needed a hat and I liked that one, so I gave him ten bucks. ‘Ha’nt seen you before,’ he said. ‘Jus’ passin’ through?’ I nodded. ‘Up to Jericho’s place?’ And I nodded again. ‘You’ll have good luck,’ he said.

  “I drove back to Jericho’s and when I got there I took my first good look at the hat in the daylight. Inside I found a little tag that said ‘Made in China.’ ‘Special hat,’ ha! Then I found a price tag that said $6.95. Well, that really pissed me off. Old Ben Jericho heard me swear and asked what was wrong. ‘That old buzzard down at the store swindled me! He charged me ten bucks for this hat and the price tag inside says $6.95. Said it was a special hat blessed by a shaman, only inside there’s a tag that says ‘Made in China.’ I’m gonna go back down there and punch him in the nose!’

  “I guess Ben thought I meant it—and maybe I did—‘cause he said ‘Please don’t do that. We have to get along with Dennis Bill because he’s an important man. His store is the only one for forty miles, and the road runs right through the Dry Butte Reservation and it’s the only way in and out of here. If old Dennis gets mad, he’ll ask the tribe to shut it down, and then we’d be stuck. Also, if it’s any consolation, you’re not the first white-eye he’s swindled, and I’m sure you won’t be the last. If it means that much, I’ll pay you the difference just to keep the peace. Besides, if he told you the hat was blessed by a shaman, he probably knew what he was talking about.’

  “‘Why?’ I asked.

  “‘He’s the shaman.’

  “By then I’d simmered down, so I told Ben just to forget about it; at least now I had a hat. I spent three days fishing those private lakes at Jericho, and it was probably the best fishing I’d ever had. I caught browns and rainbows by the dozen, some of them even bigger than that fish you caught the other day. It was great. But when I got home, I put the new hat in my duffel bag and went back to wearing my old one.

  “That fall I went with a couple of other guys to fish the Henrys Fork, over in Idaho, which just might be the finest trout stream in North America. It was my first time there and while my friends were doing okay, I couldn’t seem to buy a fish for love nor money. We fished the whole morning, and I never had a touch. Then, right after lunch, we could see a storm coming. Pretty soon the sky turned as black as a Republican’s heart and lightning started flashing in all directions. Then it started to hail, I mean really hail, big hunks of ice and lots of them. I started running for the woods, looking for cover, when a big gust of wind lifted the hat right off my head and sent it sailing out over the river, where it disappeared. I had to pull my jacket over my head to keep from getting clobbered by the hail.

  “After a while the storm blew over and the sun came out again and I needed a hat. I remembered the one I’d got at Jericho Springs was somewhere in my duffel bag, so I hiked back to our car, found it, and put it on. Then I went back to the river and had one of the most glorious afternoons ever. I landed two rainbows I remember measuring at twenty-six and twenty-seven inches, plus a lot of others that weren’t a whole lot smaller. And I began to wonder if that old Indian at Buffalo Jump had been telling the truth about my hat.

  “I wore it all the time after that, and it never let me down. The first time I fished the Deschutes River in Oregon I caught four steelhead the first day and three more the second. Next year I went back to fish it again for trout during the spring salmonfly hatch—those are big orange stoneflies—and I caught so many trout I lost count. They were great fish, too, in that strong current below Warm Springs.

  “I had the hat on when I fished Peterhope Lake in British Columbia. Nothing seemed to be going on and nobody was catching fish, but I put on a scud pattern—scuds are like freshwater shrimp—and boated an eight-pounder and several smaller fish.

  “I wore that hat in sun and rain and every other kind of weather, and after a while it wasn’t tan or beige anymore; it faded to a sort of gray, with spots. I lost the patch with the feather on a steelhead trip to the Grande Ronde. I was casting a big fly into the wind and somehow fouled up the cast. The hook caught on the patch and ripped it right off the hat, and it wasn’t on the hook when I retrieved the fly. For a while I was worried it might have been the patch that was bringing me all that good luck instead of the hat, but within fifteen minutes I hooked a steelhead, and it was just the first of several I nailed that day.

  “Once I was camping at some lake and another fisherman invited me into his tent for a drink. We had a few and he started to admire my hat and I got to talking to him about it. ‘I had a hat like that once, but I lost it,’ he said. ‘Got it in a little voodoo shop down in New Orleans. The shop owner said it would bring me luck. I wore it for years, and he was right; I had phenomenal luck every time I went fishing. Then an airline lost my luggage, including the hat, and I never got it back. I’d give anything to have another one.’ He offered to buy mine, and of course I told him it wasn’t for sale.

  “Well, we had a couple more belts and he steered the conversation back around to my hat and offered to buy it again. I tell him no and he started getting belligerent about it. First thing yo
u know, he took a swing at me and we had a hell of a fight, right there in the tent, with him trying to grab my hat and me trying to hold onto it with one hand while I fended him off with the other. I finally pushed him away and he rolled against the side of the tent and broke one of the supports—it was one of those dome tents—and the whole thing fell down on top of us. So there we were, floundering around under the tent, cussing each other and looking for a way out. I finally escaped and got the hell out of there. I had one heck of a shiner and a cut lip, but I still had the hat.

  “One day when I was back fishing for steelhead on the Deschutes, I slipped and took a bad fall. I rode the current downstream and somewhere along the way I lost the hat. My waders were full of water and I was drenched to the skin, and man it was cold, but the only thing I could think of was what happened to the hat. I spent an hour combing the riverbank and finally, a couple of hundred yards downstream, I saw it. It had gotten caught on an alder branch sticking out over a deep pool and I couldn’t reach it. I tried to knock it loose with my rod, but it was just too far.

  “It was too deep to wade, so I tried to crawl out on the limb. Of course it broke and I fell into the river again and damn near drowned, but I got the hat. I’d have done anything for that hat.

  “You ever see that TV show, Fishing with Foster?” I shook my head. “Well, the host, a guy named Art Foster, asked me to be on it once. So I drove to the upper Houghton, where they were going to be filming. When I got there, the producer took one look at me and said ‘That hat has got to go!’ I was insulted. ‘What’s the matter with my hat?’ I asked him. ‘It looks like you got it out of a landfill,’ he said. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘if the hat goes, so do I.’ ‘That’s all right with me,’ he said. So I bailed out of the show, but I thought as long as I’d driven all that way and they had booked me into a motel, I might as well pay for the room myself and stay there and fish a couple of days, which I did. And the fishing was great.

  “All the people from the show were staying at the same motel, and they all looked pretty grim when they came back each day. So on the third morning, when I was just getting ready to go fishing, Art came to see me. He said the guy they had gotten to take my place hadn’t been able to catch anything and the producer was getting frantic. He’d even agreed to let me wear my hat if I came back. So I did. We fished another couple of days and, for me at least, the fishing was still great. I caught all kinds of trout, a couple over twenty inches, and they got it all on film. But you know what? They never showed it on TV. When they got back to the studio, the producer got upset over my hat again and refused to put the film on the air. So there went my fifteen minutes of fame. But I had a lot of fun and some great fishing, and Art gave me a copy of the film. I still watch it from time to time.”

  “The hat got a little beat up after a few years, but it still kept the sun and rain off and it sure caught me a lot of fish. I swear there’s something magic about that hat. It shrunk a little in the rain and I finally had to split the lining to make it fit, but I could still wear it. I stuck flies in the hatband to dry—like the one you used on that big trout the other day—and most of them just stayed there. After a while they became part of the hat’s personality. I used to keep part of a plug of chewing tobacco in the hatband, too, and it got wet and the stain spread around. The hat has specks of fish blood all over it, and stains from sweat, suntan oil and dry-fly dope. I had that hat a long time. Me and it have gone through a lot together. That’s why it means so much to me.” He turned and looked me in the eye. “That’s why I want it back.”

  Now I understood. I also understood that Briggs had needed to tell the story to someone, as if it was pent up inside just straining for release, and he’d told it to me apparently without realizing it made me only more resolved than ever to keep the hat. I’d already experienced its luck once and was anxious to try again. So instead of responding to his last comment, I asked him another question: “If that hat was so important, why did your wife take it to the Good Neighbors?”

  Harry sighed. “My wife has no clue,” he said. “She spends all her time on genealogy. You know what that is?”

  “Something to do with rocks?”

  “No, that’s geology. Genealogy is the study of your ancestors. Your family tree. That’s all she’s interested in. She’s traced her family all the way back to Abraham or somebody. Don’t ask me why; they were all nothing but goat herders, the whole lot of them. Anyway, she doesn’t know anything about fly fishing. She doesn’t know where I go, what I do, or what I wear when I’m fishing. Admittedly, there’s some advantage to that, but it also meant she had no idea what that hat means to me.

  “Well, week before last I was getting my gear together for a trip I’ve got planned with a couple of other guys, and I couldn’t find the hat. It wasn’t where I’d left it. I looked all over the house, cleaned out the garage and piled everything out of my car, but I couldn’t find it. Finally I asked my wife if she knew what had happened to it.

  “‘That dirty old smelly thing?’ she asked. ‘I came across it the other day and didn’t think you’d mind if I got rid of it. So I gave it to the Good Neighbors, along with some other old things.’

  “Well, if anything ever threatened our marriage, that was it, right there. But I somehow kept my temper and my patience and didn’t start swearing until I’d left the house and was on my way to the thrift store.

  “You know the rest.”

  Inside the trailer I could hear Adrian had awakened and was screaming again. “I have to go see what’s wrong with him,” I said, getting up.

  “Wait a minute. What about our deal?”

  “Sorry, but we don’t have a deal. I want to keep the hat.” I ducked inside hurriedly and shut the door, only to find that Adrian had made an enormous mess in his pants. Holding my breath, I peeked through a cracked window and watched Briggs, looking downcast, shuffle down the path to his station wagon. He turned, looked at the trailer, shook his head, and got in. For a moment he sat there, looking very unhappy. At last he started the engine and drove away.

  For the next two days I got stuck watching Adrian while Mom and Lyle went off and did whatever it was they did—probably get drunk. But on the third day I got up early, put on my new hat, picked up the Wonderod, slipped out and headed for the creek, anxious to see if the hat would continue bringing me good luck.

  It didn’t take long to find out. I drifted the same fly into the same pocket where I’d earlier hooked the giant trout, and once again had a terrific strike. This time the trout wasn’t as big, maybe only half the size of the one I’d caught before, but it was still better than any of the other trout I’d seen in Lofton Creek, and it put up a long, memorable battle. This time I managed to land it without having to make another football tackle.

  Looking at it, and remembering the appearance of the first huge trout, I began to wonder if they both might be steelhead. I knew about steelhead because I’d seen Gadabout Gaddis catch several on one of his shows. I also knew that Lofton Creek joined forces downstream with a river that flowed all the way to salt water, so it seemed possible these big trout were seagoing rainbows. I didn’t see how the small confines of Lofton Creek could grow such big trout otherwise. In any case, remembering Harry Briggs’ advice, I released the fish, just as I had the first one.

  I’d had nothing but a banana for breakfast and I was getting hungry, so I decided to head back to the single-wide and get something to eat. I remember feeling very pleased with the morning’s fishing—who wouldn’t?—and I was whistling as I hiked back to the trailer. As soon as I got within earshot I could hear Adrian screaming inside the trailer, which deflated my mood instantly. But then I heard something else that made my blood freeze: someone else was screaming, and it sounded like my mother.

  I threw the rod down in the grass, ran to the trailer, pulled the door open and came face-to-face with a scene I will never forget: Lyle was advancing slowly across the room, his face a mask of rage and streaming blood from furrows ob
viously carved by my mother’s fingernails. He held a large whiskey bottle in his hand. My mother was cowering in the opposite corner, sobbing, with blood running down her chin. The front of her dress was soaked with blood and vomit. Adrian was lying on the tattered sofa, screaming his head off, his arms and legs waving feebly, like a beetle on its back.

  I rushed toward Lyle, but he got to my mother first and swung the bottle in a giant arc. It struck her jaw with a loud crack and she collapsed in a heap. Then Lyle turned and met my rush with a bony forearm right across the bridge of my nose, and I went down too.

  I don’t know how long I was out, but probably only a few moments. The first thing I heard when I regained consciousness was Adrian, still screaming. I looked around and saw the trailer door was open and Lyle was gone. My face felt wet and I realized I had a bloody nose. I fished an old dirty handkerchief out of my pocket and used it to try to stanch the flow of blood.

  Then I remembered my mother. She was still lying motionless where she had fallen. I crawled over and spoke her name, but there was no response. I could see she was still breathing, however, and still bleeding from her nose. The stench of alcohol and vomit was overpowering. Still on my hands and knees, I crawled to the table where the phone was, called the police, and asked them to send an ambulance.

  We lived so far out on the edge of town that it was more than a half hour before an ambulance pulled up in front. I had spent the whole time kneeling beside my mother, trying to stop her bleeding. She still seemed unconscious, although she moaned from time to time. Adrian continued screaming.

  The ambulance attendants came running in and quickly examined my mother, then loaded her on a stretcher and took her to their vehicle. One returned to have a look at me. He stuffed some cotton balls in my nostrils to try to stop my nosebleed, then turned his attention to Adrian. Without asking me, he picked up Adrian and took him to the ambulance, and the ambulance sped away with Adrian and my mother.