by Ron Carlson
“We’re going back over to the other fork after a while.”
“Why?”
“I found Sammy and Red’s brother, maybe their father, and I need a net man.”
“Just a minute.” He rose and went to the stream and returned with two dripping tin cans. He opened one and handed it to me. “Here, I brought you these.” I looked down at a cluster of apricots. He saw my face and said, “Aiding and abetting.”
“Thanks Eldon.” I sucked one out of the cold tin. The apricots were cool and sweet and met each of my several internal miseries directly.
“Is it working?” He waved his hands across the forest as he leaned back against his helmet.
“Yes. I believe it is. Lenore’s wedding shower seems two hundred and eight miles away.”
“It is.”
We lounged around on one elbow for awhile, smoking, talking about the time we tried to teach Ribbo about the woods. He had been unable to believe there was no electricity.
“Have you written about these forks for the Guide?”
“No no. You don’t write about the good streams, the rare ones; that’s suicide. A writer without a few secrets is out of gas. Besides, our readers prefer to fish from the back steps of their Winnebagos in little waters like Pelican Lake which I mention frequently. There are no hook-ups here, no snack bar, no propane distributor, and the fish are native. My readers prefer their fish hatched in the hatchery, properly, and flown in by Forest Service and dropped like little parachutists into the center of the lake. Any dolt with a year-old jar of fluorescent salmon eggs can snag them and fling them into the stainless-steel confines of his portable kitchen sink, which the fish in their confusion seem to prefer. I write for the modern out-doorsperson. People who climb this high to fish only read Twain, and Howells.” As he spoke Eldon scooped out a hole and buried the cans. I smothered the gray remnants of our fire.
“Let’s go fishing,” he said. “Where is this hole full of giant fish?”
“Over three hills.” I pointed. We gathered our gear and fish and started up the first incline.
47
The fly was where I had left it, but the ravine and pool were lost in shade now. Looking down we could see the ripple-less surface of the dark water. “God, quite the place for sailfish all right,” Eldon said. “There are fish down there that haven’t seen the light of day. Probably albinos.”
“Let’s bring one out, eh?” I said.
I lowered a worm, again, down, way down into the stream. Nothing. I jogged it a bit. Nothing. The sun was softer now, awash in the trees, ready to be eaten by Mount Gilbert.
“Bring him up and try this.” Eldon handed me a fly as I reeled in. While I changed gear, Eldon tied a yellow nylon cord to his net and lowered it in practice. I was suspicious of this long-distance, remote-control fishing, but the thought of netting Sammy’s brother or anything weighing eight pounds carried me onward. I lowered the fly to the surface. We couldn’t even see it. The net hovered five feet above the water. “It’s all by touch now.” We lit our cigarettes and we sat down, dangling our legs fishward.
It was the strangest fishing I’d ever done, and I sat on the strangest perch in time I’d ever known, and I looked off into the woods below us which were beginning to stir with the creaturings of late afternoon. The greens lapsed into blue as the trees descended to the horizon; faces were formed and changed expression in the millions and billions of boughs. I could make out Scott Fitzgerald’s profile, the famous one, the perfect one, from the backs of his books. It glimmered in the distance as he was turning his face toward us, I shifted to Eldon, who was studying the pond below.
“You say you saw fish in this chasm?” Eldon asked.
“Their shadows,” I said.
He looked at me in the dusky light and stood up. “Let’s take their shadows back to camp and fry a few for dinner.”
While he was speaking I felt the line seize. It hopped and went taut, running upstream. I didn’t say anything. Eldon was picking up his gear. He turned to face me. “Let’s go.”
Then he saw the pole, bent in a hoop, and I said: “Oh, oh.”
“Holy shit!” he yelled. He threw his stuff down on the rocks and whipped the net line free and lowered it again.
“Ease the drag. Give him line.”
“That’s how he sawed it off this morning.” I set the drag. “We’re going to hoist him into the net now.” We got to our feet. I held him to the pool hoping the six-pound test line would not snap. Eldon was trying to steer the net over the splashing, but it was like trying to grab a dime out of a grate with chewing gum on a string; there wasn’t a whole lot of purchase. For twenty minutes, we walked around as he swam the bottom of the pool. It was impossible to lift him while he was so strong. Eldon kept the net a foot off the water, ready.
“He’s waiting for the sun to go down, so we misjudge and step over to our deaths.”
“It’s worth it.”
The sun was behind Gilbert now, and we entered the extended high mountain twilight. Behind us, a crescent of the distant horizon was still golden in the sun, but crumbling like dry sand.
Eldon said, “Perhaps this fish has bears as allies who will venture out to bite us in the dark.”
“Perhaps, you should hold the net at ready,” I said.
“It has been ready for an hour. Let me know when you’re through sporting, and I’ll go to work.”
The circles the fish swam were less frantic now, but just as steady. It was getting dark.
Eldon asked me: “Do you know what ‘trout’ means?”
“Oh yes. From the Greek: ‘trouter’ or ‘truth.’” I pulled my rod into the bow again, no use. “Right?”
“To gnaw. It means ‘to gnaw.’”
Then the line was dead. I took up line. We couldn’t see but I suspected he was swimming the surface; the last cycle. “Put the net in the water.”
“Where is the water?” Eldon said as he looked into the black hole. The pole bent again and line ticked off the drag.
“You’re in; you’re in! He’s scared.”
“We can’t net him; I can’t see anything.”
“Faith, friend.” I took line. He was tired. “Put your line parallel to mine.” He held the net adjacent to my line.
“Okay, I felt him bump the net.”
“I’ll pull him out and you sweep him up … now!” Surprisingly, I lifted until the weight multiplied, became real in air, and I could feel the fish winging his tail in the air. The pole was insane with bending. Grabbing the line in my hands, I discarded the pole and began hoisting him up. Eldon was swinging the net back and forth randomly, chuckling at the measure of sensibility in such efforts. Finally he gave up and drew the net up quickly, holding it then in his hand. My line was like wire, I could feel it breaking every next second.
Eldon scooped the fish and nearly went over. I grabbed his arm with one hand, my other frozen on the fishline. The trout stood before us in the dark, arched into the sky like a god, his tail in the net.
“I don’t believe this.” Eldon said.
The fish moved, wriggled in unified strength. It was like holding the heart of a giant; its squirmings were seismic, pulsing above us. Eldon lost his grip and I went down onto rock. My hands lost the gills so I hugged it, trying to hold it with my cloth shirt. We rolled cheek to cheek like lovers, its tail slapping and punching my stomach convincingly.
“Hold him! I don’t believe this!” Eldon scrambled. I got to my knees and looked at the fish. “He’s a hundred years old!”
We knelt over him and I killed the fish. He had clearly been born in a previous century. Back at camp, he weighed out at eleven pounds.
Eldon mixed and warmed some powdered milk, and heated some cream of mushroom soup to make trout chowder, while I fried fillets of the fish. He laid the others in the ice. Sipping and scooping the soup into my mouth, breathing steam into the chilling air, sitting on my sleeping bag, tired to the corners of my lungs, dirty and warm as the fire
shrank into trembling coals and my pupils widened in the dark, I was glad again to be associated with such a temporal, febrile object as my body.
We smoked Eldon’s last two Lucky Strikes.
I could see Scott Fitzgerald lounging just out of the circle of firelight, his cigarette held glibly in two fingers. He was forty-four. His knit tie fell outside his worn coat. He smiled without opening his mouth. I nodded. I want to be innocent again, Scott. I want to be eleven years old in a rowboat behind the best man on campus, listening to him propose to a girl more beautiful than any woman in the world, my imagination gone on reflections in the water, peopled by giants and princesses, not a single compromise in the atmosphere.
The fish chowder had cleared my head.
I once dreamed he came to my desk with a copy of The Last Tycoon finished, and then we were walking through the abandoned alleys of Salt Lake City. After I had the dream, which was occasioned by half a quart of Beefeater gin at a reception for a visiting poet, I spent ten days wandering the side streets after midnight, searching. On the tenth day I stepped on a man’s hand. He had been sleeping under some back stairs behind the Rialto, and woke to look at my saddle oxfords and then my eyes. I wrote in my journal that I had at last glimpsed the devil.
Now outside our circle, Scott Fitzgerald, a man eaten alive by his conception of romance and desire to be drawn inexorably up and toward the lights, the mainstream, seemed content to smile at me. It was the smile we offer children, and it is a promise that someday they’ll know more than they do today.
Eldon dropped his cigarette in the fire and turned to slip into his sleeping bag.
“Did you see the fish?” I asked both of my friends.
“I’m still not sure,” Eldon said.
Fitzgerald’s eyes squinted almost to laughter; it was a joyous, derisive look.
“What happened?” I looked straight at him.
“Your imagination bit you,” Eldon said. He knew me.
“Yeah, I guess so. Old movies. Summers when I was eleven I watched every late show there was. Did you ever see I Married an Angel?”
“Sure. That panorama of heaven, my first glimpse.”
“People took their time. Things mattered. Mr. Smith went to Washington.”
“No one should see that until they’re thirty.”
“And when my mind was ravaged by old movies, a silver screen of ninety heroes, I read the books. This Side of Paradise when I was seventeen. I learned how to smoke and moved my bed under the window. I was ripe.”
“Yeah,” Eldon said. “Well relax. Don’t worry. We’re the last victims. There aren’t any good movies left and no one reads books.”
“I’m not so sure.”
“I am. Kids don’t even read the labels on the drugs they swallow.”
“You’re a cynic.”
“Yes, and you’re my friend.”
48
And so fine friends, readers for instance, one life becomes another the way morning becomes electric (I know, I know), the way night becomes morning, gradually, suddenly, and the changes surprise us until we’re tired and lie down to change for the last time. What I mean is we left the mountains, a setting and viewpoint far above others I’d known, and raised dust on every switch-back and hairpin down, down, down, down. Ahead and below us, I knew the races could not quite measure up to a fish I’d seen and eaten. We’d had the climax over a river in the dark, and my innocence and proving it seemed less significant. Besides, I felt guilty again for not fishing more, for dragging four tons of self-pity to the Uinta Mountains.
Eldon leaned forward and shifted an imaginary stick shift in the Valiant in his crazy simulated test-pilot berserkness. He sang motor and brake sounds through each curve. We slid off the mountain sideways, or so it seemed, through the national forest gates and onto the flatlands where citizens for hundreds of miles around gathered their children into the family automobile and headed out for the raceway and the green flag that would drop near us at high noon. Footraces were started with a pistol, Eldon reminded me, because of the days when slaves ran away. In his helmet in the morning sun, motoring through Roosevelt in number 88, all six cylinders about to expire, Eldon looked the part: a cocky, deranged race-car driver.
“How you feel, Rocky.”
“Wired. Primed.”
“I’m Scared.”
“Relax kid, it’s my car that enters its last golden day on the laps of distinction.”
We listened to the distant static of the Roosevelt radio station. The announcer left the tail-end off every word he spoke in some incredibly consistent suffix phobia as he introduced a Leon Sanger tune: “Horse Trailer Love.” I was beginning to dislike this kind of massive country-western imprecision.
We lunched early on sausages and vermouth. Eldon sipped a little of the warm wine to further prime for the coming mangle. He pulled in the gas station next to the Day-Night Market and filled the car with water, oil, and gasoline, putting an extra quart of oil in the rubble of the backseat. Russell Case and his stock car were already gone, and we could see the new yellow green color of the June grass under the spot where the car had been. We gave the nine remaining trout to the woman who pumped gas and she nodded her toothless thanks. Eldon never stopped at the self-serve pumps preferring the human contact, and “Besides,” he’d say, “we’re a self-serving enough country.” I lowered all the windows and tied the doors shut with two neckties I located on the floor of the backseat. Eldon borrowed a crowbar from the woman, and said to the car, “This is going to be the hard part, Prince.” While he climbed onto the hood, the woman asked, “What are you going to do?”
Eldon held the crowbar aloft, fifteen minutes from racetime, and looked at me. “Aiding and abetting. It’s going to be worth it, I keep thinking.” He tapped a small hole in the upper corner of the window and then levering the whole thing with the bar pulled it out, a rubbery spiderwebbed piece of broken glass, and dropped it to the ground.
“I need air when I drive,” he explained to the woman. She held her breasts up with one arm and her chin up with the other hand. He then walked over the roof and broke out the rear window. “There! Now maybe a fellow can breathe.”
“You don’t fool me,” she said, “You’re in this stock-car race.”
“Right as right,” he answered, “Rocky’s the name.” He handed her the crowbar and we climbed through the windows into what remained of the Valiant. “Thank you kindly, ma’am. Just fry those fish in a little butter.”
49
One way to create a sense of fall holiday when out for a drive in October is to extract the windshield from your car and let the fresh air blow directly, as it comes off the hood, into your passenger’s mouth. Eldon and I motored along in this fashion toward the races. The air was redolent of cut hay, apples, and a little oil exhaust from our leakage. The last and largest and hardiest of the insect tribe bumped themselves against our squinting faces. Finally, at over fifty miles an hour, it became impossible to breathe facing straight ahead, and I had to turn my head or duck under the dash as if I were trying to light a cigarette. Eldon was laughing maniacally and swerving slightly from line to shoulder on the roadway.
“You’re not driving,” I yelled at his red helmet.
“What?”
“You are not driving in this race!” I repeated.
“My car. I drive.” He slowed but not much, to make a right, and I could hear all the valuable trash in the backseat slide over. I held my door handle.
“Untrue, big boy,” I said.” I am going to drive us directly to the police who will be there and then to Nicky and Lila who will be there, and we will dismount, and things will settle.”
“And you’ll get your innocence back.” He laughed. “No, I think I’ll drive around in old eighty-eight today while you have conversations with Nicky.”
Then we saw the grandstand, and I didn’t want to be there anymore. There was a sign on an old snow fence RACES, with an arrow pointing straight into the sky. Overhead, one cl
oud crossed its fingers and became a Jolly Roger. A half-dozen birds made wing for Phoenix. I did not want to go near Nicky or the Waynes who would battery and assault me, and I did not want to go near the police who would replace me in the facilities. But we continued. Cars were parked randomly, a wheel in every ditch, in the nearby fields. Adrenalin was arriving to do my thinking in October.
“This might not work.”
“It’s all we’ve got,” Eldon said. “And besides, we’re here; it’s so convenient.”
There was a larger sign on the parking lot fence: DEMO-DERBY DRAG RACE TODAY! SEASON FINALE. Eldon cruised through the parking lot past two hundred cars and campers, and eased up to the inner gate marked PIT AREA—TRACK. We drove through.
“Hey!” The guard yelled and ran up to us. Eldon continued to let the car drift a bit as he talked.
“Howdy, howdy,” Eldon said.
“You can’t go into the pits.” The guard held the door handle as he walked along with us.
“How have you been, Dave?” Eldon said.
“Malcolm.”
“Right, Malcolm, sorry.”
“You guys got a pass?”
“Hey, Mal, come on.” Eldon stopped the car short and quickly pulled off his helmet. “It’s me. Rocky.” Malcolm squinted at him as if he were a math problem. “Rocky,” Eldon assisted him, “Nicky’s brother for Christsake. Now get back and guard the gate before people start stealing cars.”
“Oh, hell Rocky, I’m sorry, I …”
“It’s all right. Where’s Lila? I’ve got a present for her.”
“They’re in the infield like always.” Before Malcolm finished saying this, Eldon drove away, nearly desocketing the guard’s arm.