by Rick Bass
Willis looks smug. “Ah, it’s just the three of us,” he says, waving his hand toward the front door, toward the night. “The rest are all fairies. We’re all we’ve got,” he says, and Nick and Jack look down and smile, both pleased and embarrassed by the statement.
Coffee is made, and everyone goes back and sits by the big window, watching the stars and the lake, watching the moon shine, broken on the tossing waves.
“A sub went down there yesterday,” Claudia says to Harley, “the day before you got here. They just pulled the bodies out today.”
“A sub?” says Harley.
“Submarine,” says Shellie, nodding. “These two guys from Traverse City, engineers, built one in their garage and took it out on the lake, took it down to, what” — she looks over at Nick, who’s staring at a cigarette he’s just lit but isn’t smoking — “a hundred feet? And the engine broke down there, and they couldn’t get out, and then water started leaking in and filled the sub. They couldn’t get out.”
Lois shudders, and Claudia gets up, lights a cigarette, and walks over to the stereo, changes CDs.
“There’s a picture of it in the paper,” says Shellie. “It was a big thing, not just some little old thing. It was a real submarine.”
Nick leans forward and crushes his cigarette in an ashtray. He lights another one, takes a puff, his first of the evening. He seems to be coming to life, to be stirring. “So you just live up in the woods, is that right?” he asks Harley. “Up in Canada, with nothing to do but hike and fish?”
“That’s right,” Harley says. He turns to the women to explain. “They gave me a bunch of money when I hurt my knees and couldn’t play anymore. I’m poor now, but I get by.” The women look part stricken, part fearful, but also, in that dreamlike way, perhaps … fascinated? wishful?
Nick crushes his cigarette after the second puff and lights a new one. Willis is looking out at the lake.
“I’d like to do that,” Nick says dreamily. “Move into the woods, just read and write poetry all day.” He studies his cigarette, starts to smoke it, then puts this one out, too. Shellie casts him a warning glance of some kind, a frown that in no way matches her lovely china-doll face (she’s studying griffins at the nearby university; she’s one of only three or four people in the country studying the stone monsters), and it’s a look that neither Harley nor anyone else can understand.
“I’ve never been west of Louisville, Kentucky,” Willis says, apropos of nothing. Harley watches as Claudia lowers her eyes.
“I’ve never been west of Cincinnati,” says Jack, still beaming as if half tight, though there’s been no drinking; he’s just cheery. “I’d like to go someday, though.”
“You guys’ll have to come visit,” says Harley. Nick lights yet another cigarette, and Willis fiddles with the volume on the stereo, lowers it a bit. Implicit in the still air are money worries, babysitters, master’s theses to be finished, jobs, Little League soccer.
“At night the salmon move,” Nick says, quoting a poem. Jack smiles, as does Willis, looking at Nick with an undisguised love. Harley helps Lois and Claudia clean the dishes while Shellie picks up the newspaper to look at the pictures of the salvaged submarine again.
·
The men pull their waders on over their jeans, right there in the living room, and everyone says their goodbyes, does their hugging.
“Bring home a big one,” Claudia says to the Wolverine. No one’s supposed to eat any of the fish from the Great Lakes, they’ve got lead and zinc and shit in them, but the men do it anyway. The women aren’t frightened either, figuring it’s no worse than what they’re being sold in the stores.
Jamie twists Harley’s hand, trying to hold him, to keep him from leaving.
The men go out to Jack’s station wagon — walking like monsters in their big waders — climb in awkwardly, and drive away. Harley notices that Nick has fallen into a funk, a trance almost, since he put the waders on, and for a minute Harley did not think that Nick was going to let go of Shellie’s hand. They held each other and kissed lightly, repeatedly, as if Nick might not be coming back. It occurred to Harley that that thought had always to be in the back of Shellie’s mind, that one day Nick might try to do it again. He thought about the petite, lively Shellie studying griffins in the library all day — gargoyles and demons — and felt childish, almost undeveloped. How simple his life in the woods was. He had it so easy! All he had to do was chase after Shaw and catch her each time she ran off; that was all.
But out here in the real world, there are crazy people — people playing for high stakes, men driven to launch strange inadequate submarines into lakes and pilot them straight to the bottom, drowning in graves of water ... for no reason, and for every reason …
Jack drives with the high beams on, to watch for deer. The back of the station wagon is overflowing with gear: ice chests, landing nets, poles, tackle boxes, flashlights. Nick sits up front next to Jack, and Willis sits behind Nick and massages his shoulders, works the kinks in Nick’s neck, the way he might rub a woman’s shoulders. Harley thinks about Claudia, left behind with Jamie, and of how Claudia must have to put on some sort of sham, a semblance of happiness for their child’s sake, whenever the long Michigan winter sadness comes on.
It’s a long drive to the river. Clouds scud quickly past the full moon. There’s a strong south wind, though it’s still cold outside, almost cold enough to snow. It’s like no country Harley’s ever been in before — a cold south wind? he finds himself thinking — and Jack puts in an old hippie tape, one he’s recorded himself, with Tom Rush, Tim Buckley, and Tim Hardin. Nick lights a cigarette, begins to smoke it, and looks out the window, but lowers his head again.
“Whatever happened to those guys?” Jack asks, glancing in the rear-view mirror, trying to fill the station wagon with his light, his airiness — his strength, thinks Harley. “Didn’t they die? Didn’t something get them?”
Willis nods. “Drugs. No, alcohol.” He pauses, trying to remember. “No, a heart attack. It was one or the other. Buckley OD’d and Hardin had a heart attack, or maybe it was the other way around.”
“What about Rush?” Jack asks. “That still leaves Rush.”
Willis shrugs, rubbing Nick’s neck again: leaning forward and kneading the thin muscles the way he would a dog’s. Harley has the feeling that Nick keeps starting to say something — that he’s on the verge, every time he takes a puff of his cigarette — but so far he hasn’t uttered a word. The car smells like men, Harley thinks, and after living so long with only Shaw, in their cabin, with no one else around, it feels good.
For a second, as if opening his eyes under water for the briefest of instants before shutting them again, Harley thinks he sees, feels, even understands why Shaw runs, or rather, what she feels when she runs, though he cannot put a name on it. He pauses, tries to hold the feeling, the blurry sight of what it’s like, but then he loses it, loses it like a dream, that quickly.
“I drove fifteen hours to hear him play one set — one set — at a folk festival in Provincetown, my freshman year,” Jack says. “It was worth it. But I haven’t heard about him in a long time.”
Nick’s cigarette glows in the front seat, and he starts to say something once more, then takes another puff and leans forward, tapping the ashes into the ashtray.
“He’s alive,” Harley says, though he has no idea who Tom Rush is. “I went out on a lake with him in a canoe this summer, up in New Hampshire. Me and my girlfriend, and he and his girlfriend. It was real nice. We had a real good time.” Harley feels as if he’s under water again, his eyes open, swimming hard, looking for Shaw.
“Did he play?” Jack asks, fascinated. “Did he play his guitar?”
“He played and sang,” Harley says. “Loons were crying all around us, diving and bobbing all around the boat, and it was real quiet, right at dusk. The acoustics were perfect. He sat out on the bow — we barely all fit — and he played and sang for over an hour.”
Jack’s watching Harley in
the rear-view mirror. “Was he still good?” he asks.
“Oh, he was wonderful,” Harley says. “It was as lovely an evening as you can imagine. His girlfriend is a friend of my girlfriend’s. We went swimming after we came back in to shore, and then Tom fixed pork loins with some kind of wild raspberry sauce poured over them. He lives in this big castle kind of place with lots of flowers out in the garden, but does his own cooking.” Harley’s lying like mad, trying to bring Shaw back in to him, and trying to keep Nick from leaping off any bridges, too.
“In the morning we had strawberry waffles. Joni Mitchell called and was coming by later that afternoon, but we had to go, we had to be somewhere. He gave us a bunch of his albums and a jug of maple syrup and wild honey that he’d made.”
Harley says, “He’s still alive, he’s in good shape.”
They ride the rest of the way to the Platte in silence, listening to the tape. It’s like they’re all five friends now, the four men and Tom Rush, admitted into their circle. Old Tom, old pork-loin-cooking Tom, one of the guys — Tom Rush, who survived: and they listen to the guitar, listen to the tape, and drive through the night, through the dark trees.
Jack reaches over and squeezes Nick’s thigh. “Tonight’s the night, bucko,” he says. “Tonight your luck’s going to change. Tonight you’re going to catch your first steelhead.”
Nick groans, and Willis laughs. “He’s been fishing hard all year,” he explains, “but he hasn’t caught one yet.” Nick groans again, and Harley likes, even loves, the fact that there are no secrets among the three friends. They don’t treat Nick like a leper or anything just because he hasn’t caught a single steelhead, hasn’t even hooked one, while they, Jack and Willis, the Wolverine, have been catching them pretty regularly all season long. Sometimes two or three in a single night, and always big ones, monsters: adults, spawners, sneaking up the river to lay eggs and spray sperm, then die. Big bulls and sows, blunt-nosed, glimmering, marching up the river at night.
Nick groans again and finally says what it is he’s been trying to say all along, taking one last puff of his cigarette before crumpling it in the ashtray.
“I should kill myself,” he says, looking out the window at nothing. He laughs a mean, lost laugh. Harley’s heard the phrase uttered hundreds of times — he’s even said it himself a few times — but he’s never heard it said the way Nick says it.
They stop at the first bridge, and like boys they get out and sneak along the railing until they’re over the center of the river with their flashlights. They peer over the edge, shine their lights down into the fast-moving, shallow water to see if the steelhead are running, if they’re moving upriver yet. It’s not quite midnight.
“I see one,” the Wolverine says, pointing. “There!” They all see it then, a dark shadow like a shark — a big shadow nearly two feet long — steadying itself, moving slowly against the current.
They all study the fish for a long time, the flashlight’s beam faltering as the battery weakens; then, with a quick flip of its tail, the fish’s shadow shoots upstream, and the shallow river is empty again. The men turn and run to the other side of the bridge, the upstream side, but the fish is gone and there are no others, not at this point, anyway.
“They haven’t really started yet,” Jack says. “I’ll bet they’re still down at the mouth of the river. We can still get into them down there.” They hurry like commandos back to the car, get in, and drive again.
When they arrive at a hot spot, a honey hole — just upstream of where the river enters the lake — there are smelt fishermen, cretins and barbarians, wading at the river’s mouth with nets and lanterns, inadvertently blocking the salmon from entering the river. The smelt netters try to catch the more numerous, dumber fish: a sport for old men and mental patients, Jack tells Harley.
Willis wades into the water and talks to the smelt netters for a while, and then their lanterns go off. The netters — there are three of them — come out of the river, get in their car, and drive away.
“What did you tell them?” Jack asks.
“The truth,” Willis says. “That we had a manic-depressive with us, that he wanted to try and catch a steelhead, that it might be the last year of his life, and that they were blocking the steelhead’s return to the river with their stupid lanterns and yo-yo nets.”
Nick smiles, a bit sadly, and nods.
“And they left?” Jack asks, amazed.
The Wolverine shrugs. “Well, I told them some other things, too.”
Harley laughs, and feels like a savage.
There’s a long walk through the woods to the sharp bend in the river where the men like to fish. They’re headed for a steep bluff on the outside of the bend, and on the inside there’s a shoal and ankle-deep shallows. Between the bluff and the shoal is a deep channel that runs down the middle of the river. It may be thirty feet deep, says Willis, but it may be bottomless, too. That’s where the salmon are, moving up and down it, to and from the lake, and the way to catch them is to cast fluorescent yellow and orange marshmallow-looking flies (resembling salmon eggs) into that channel and let them free-drift, hopefully into a salmon’s jaws.
“Don’t get too near the channel,” Willis warns Harley, handing him a fly rod. “It’s shallow, no more than waist-deep all the way out into the current, but then once you step off the shelf and into the channel, you’ll go straight down, especially in those waders you’ve got on. Straight to the bottom. We had to pull old Nick out of here twice last year.”
The men are standing in the trees on the far side of the river, beside an abandoned hunting cabin, where the river straightens and is only chest-deep in the middle. They will cross there to get over to the shallows on the other side, in order to cast back into the deep channel.
“Follow our footsteps exactly,” Jack says, easing into the river. The stars are bright all around them. It’s so lonely that it’s exciting. Harley feels as if something big could happen at any second.
“Don’t get out of our footsteps,” Willis says as he and Nick enter the river. “We know where to go.”
Harley can’t swim, but with the waders on, it wouldn’t matter if he could. He’s at the river’s mercy, and it’s flowing from left to right as he steps into the water behind them. He feels like a sea creature returning to the ocean, some evolutionary throwback trying to reverse history. The water’s cold even through the rubber waders, ice cold, and the current’s strong — stronger than he is, Harley can tell in an instant.
The men hold their fly rods over the top of their heads and cross the mystery spot that only they know about, with the water rising quickly above their knees, above their waists, and then almost up to their chests. They take several steps like that, too many, so that surely they are marching toward their doom. The sound of the river is loud in Harley’s ears, the river just a foot or so below his chin and trying to sweep him away. But then, like a blessing, they’re climbing out again. Once they’re on the other side it all seems silly, like there was never any danger, and they’re ready to fish. They’re rigging up their lines, tying on the blaze-yellow artificial flies.
Walking through the woods, on his way down to the river, following Nick and the others — ducking branches and trying to avoid the briars — had been like chasing Shaw through the woods at home, Harley thought — exactly. And he had the feeling, as the men walked in silence ahead of him, that each of them knew, somehow intuitively, what Harley was going through, the tremble and terror of Shaw’s packing, one box at a time, leaving. And Harley was sure too that each of the men ahead of him knew, as if they could read his mind, how he chased Shaw through the woods once a month, through the snowdrifts, leaping fallen logs, floundering, and then tackling her and carrying her back.
He had the feeling that not only was his secret being read, but that those men had gone through the very same thing — had chased their wives before, lost them, caught them, let them go, chased them, found them — and that the reason no one was saying anything
as they walked, with the stars scattered bright around them, was that they were all the same. There was no need to speak.
·
It’s a slow night. They stand in the waist-deep water in the dark, at the edge of the trough. It’s gurgling and splashing, lifting cool air to their faces and pressing against their legs, as if trying to draw them in. They cast their flies back and forth into the trough’s heart, into the crease, saying nothing, just the four of them, waiting and staring at the empty cabin on the other side of the river, the bluff side. Their flies hang for a second on the back-cast above their heads, the tiny yellow flies mixed in with the stars before being launched forward, floating down to the river and then drifting, riding the center’s mad rush, waiting to be taken by the cruising steelhead. The men on the other end of the thin line stare into near darkness at the fast black water, waiting for that shoulder-jolt sock, the yank like an electrocution that tells them that lure and fish and man have connected. There are hundreds of salmon, perhaps, cruising up river, up the trough in the darkness, but no way to tell, there’s only hope, and the longer the four men go without a bite, the more it feels like the salmon aren’t coming, like it’s a bad night, or maybe there aren’t any salmon left anymore, perhaps they’re all gone, or uncatchable.
It’s an hour before one bites. “Fish!” cries Jack, lifting his rod into a bow, a flexing, slender half circle. Harley’s surprised to see that they’re so technical about it, crying “Fish!” rather than the more spontaneous, boyish “Got one!” Everyone else reels in and backs up into the shallows to keep from tangling lines as the big steelhead leaps, its belly silver in the moonlight. Harley leans forward, imagines he can see the fish’s bulging eyes, the gasp of its mouth, the fight of a lifetime, with everything at stake, too much at stake. Willis, Harley, and Nick stand back by the sandbar, poles in hand, and watch as Jack, not grinning for once, passes through wooded shafts of moonlight, the strips of light working across his arms, his face, the river. Jack’s following the big fish downriver, stumbling sometimes; the fish is running for the lake, using the strong current to help it. Jack splashes through the shallows, trying to keep up and give the fish some semblance of a fight, trying to tire it out so he can reel it in without snapping the thin piano-wire line, the line that the poets in Jack’s and Willis’s and Nick’s art school refer to, in olden poems, as “gossamer.”