by Jon Billman
They find the high spot in the rusty Cyclone fence. The Colonel goes to his knees and reaches his fragile rod and creel under the sharp steel mesh, “Just how low can you go?” he says and commences to crawl under on his soft neoprene belly, careful not to rip his vest or the three-millimeter-thick waders. He stands erect, brushing the dirt from his waders and vest. “Private, why don’t you check that flank over there?” says the Colonel, motioning with his rod toward the tree-lined fencerow at the south end of the hatchery. The rearing ponds are lit from the bottom and they glow in the night.
“Colonel,” says the Private, his rod leaning against the fence, both hands grasping the fence like a tree sloth, still outside the hatchery, still looking in. “Colonel, I can’t go in there.”
“Why in Heavens name not?” asks the Colonel, nervously adjusting the drag on his reel between glances at the pools after the occasional light smack of a fish on an unfortunate insect.
“Because it’s trespassing,” says the Private.
The Colonel looks at him, his mustache arched in disbelief.
“Because … I’m sorry. I know we’ve trespassed before plenty of times, but this is different,” says the Private. “And right now, I’m sorry, I haven’t always, but right now I have just a little more left to lose than you.”
“For one?” says the Colonel.
“A job, for starters.”
The Colonel reaches into his wicker creel and pulls out the crow-black government Colt. He tucks it back under the fence, handle first, and says, “Here, there’s one round in it. You know what to do if we’re ambushed.”
“You want me to shoot myself?” cries the Private.
“Chrissakes, no. Fire into the air, warn me.” The Colonel leaps atop the stone wall and his rod is at once in shadowy motion, the graphite whip whistling in the still summer night. False cast, follow through, false cast, follow through—the fly stays suspended throughout the series of false casts, back and forth, not landing but rehearsing to land. Sploosh! The moment the delicate caddis kisses the surface of the pool, a giant rainbow trout engulfs it, bowing the rod at a severe angle while the Colonel arches his back and sets his arms to play the fish.
The rainbow breaks water and steps a few beats across the surface, tail dancing in the night, its fat belly reflecting white from the floodlights. The Colonel plays out line, careful not to overstress his leader and tippet. The reel drag screams as the furious trout takes more line, across the short pool, around its smooth sides, down, back to the surface, down again.
The Private watches this from underneath a willow tree, sentinel duty. Minutes go by and he watches with his mouth slightly open, jaw set, palms sweating against the cork handle of his fly rod. He can hear the Colonels heavy adrenalined breathing and the high din of monofilament leader and tippet, taut as a mandolin string.
Two slaps at the water near the Colonels feet and the trooper sticks a thumb into her mouth, grasps the lower jaw, and raptures the fish out of the water and into the night air. She is heavy with eggs, heavy with flesh and fins and bone. Upwards of twelve pounds and easily the largest fish the Colonel, or the Private, has ever played, ever captured. Her gills heave as he stuffs her headfirst into his wicker creel, struggling to latch the lid. The Colonel reties another caddis where the tippet is gnawed and stretched. He tosses the old fly on the sidewalk—bent hook, frayed elk hair and hackle.
“Colonel, let’s get out of here, I think a car is coming,” whispers the Private as loud as he can from a copse of ironwood that runs along the outside of the hatchery’s southern length of fence. Fingers of one hand grasp his expensive fly rod, the other fingers curl around the smooth hardwood handle of the government Colt. But the Colonel is in the moment, back on the stone wall, casting in a frantic motion that causes the tippet and leader to jerk and the fly to land a moment after the heavy slap of the line on the water. Maybe the car will cruise on by. Maybe whoever is driving wall not see the Colonel playing a big fish under the floodlights of the hatchery. Maybe whoever it is will not hear the gun crack and echo in the peaceful night. “Goddammit, Colonel, a car is coming!” yells the Private, the scout.
Another large trout takes the fly just as the million-candlepower spotlight pans the hatchery like a movie premiere and backs up quickly to light the Colonel on the wall, balancing against the fish, eyes filling with the realization that his stand on the wall is about to come to an abrupt end. He looks at the dark water, then up to the blinding light, back to the water, yells “Ambush!” looks at his expensive rod and reel, up at the spotlight, back at his rod and reel, before dropping them in the water with the trout still attached to the business end. He leaps from the wall and runs for Charley Reynolds’s high spot in the fence.
Sploosh!
The government Colt lands in the rearing pond and sinks to the well-lit bottom, next to the expensive reel attached to the expensive fly rod attached to the expensive fish.
The deputy’s boot pins the Colonel to the ground between his shoulder blades like a speared suckerfish, the trooper’s tail end still in the hatchery, the other half of him a few feet away from the gently running creek he calls a river. His forage cap hides his face until the deputy whips it off and shines a heavy aluminum flashlight in his face. The deputy, a Sioux, looks at his partner, looks at the forage cap in his hand, and says, “Good Lord, we’ve captured the mighty Seventh Cavalry, red-faced and red-handed.”
Charley Reynolds, now on the opposite side of Spearfish Creek, fords the river and licks the Colonel on the face. Insects flit around the yellow glow of the deputy’s flashlight. “Have any more scouts in there, Colonel … Colonel Doggett?” asks the deputy as he reads the Colonel’s Montana driver’s license. “By the way, I’ll need to see a South Dakota fishing license. The fine for not having one is pretty steep. The fines for illegal fish are pretty steep. The fines for trespassing are pretty steep. Randall, you bring the calculator? Now, about your scouts, Colonel.”
The Private waddles out of the willows in his waders with his hands high, forage cap tilted down, rod in the air like a shepherd’s staff. “I’m not armed,” he says. “I surrender.”
“Careful with the Colonel,” says the Private as a deputy cinches the cuffs around his wrists. “He’s got a gun.”
“Why didn’t you shoot in the air to warn me?” asks the Colonel.
“Shoot what?” he asks, looking the Colonel in the eyes. “You’re the owner of the dripping gun.”
The troopers sit, hands cuffed behind them, in the caged back seat of the Lawrence County Sheriff Department Jeep Cherokee.
“She must have gone fourteen pounds,” says the Colonel. “A fourteen-pound rainbow on a number ten elkhair caddis. Put that in your fly book.”
“That is something that belongs in your history book. It’s your story,” says the Private. “Not mine.”
“This will probably mean we lose our South Dakota fishing privileges for quite some time,” says the Colonel. “Private, it’s a good thing we live in Montana.”
The engine idles and the radio squawks periodically and the deputies gather little bits of evidence from the scene of the trespassing, the slaughter. The troopers watch the deputies put the trout in a plastic garbage bag, twist it shut, and label it along with the creel. They watch the deputies fish the rod, reel, and pistol from the bottom of the pool, label each, and put them in plastic bags.
The prisoners wait in the Cherokee for what seems like hours. A car pulls alongside the sheriff’s vehicle and a woman’s silhouette gets out and walks over to the fence and speaks with the deputies. They show her the rainbow in plastic while she crouches, one leg in the dirt along the fence. After a moment the three of them walk toward the Cherokee. It is the Sunday-haired woman.
She looks at the prisoners. The corners of her eyes are sharp and pointed, like arrowheads, the centers glassy and reflective with tears. She is going to say something, and the wait for her to begin is agonizing. “They will take anything,” she says fina
lly. “They would bite on a pebble, on anything! Those fish will take a bare hook!” The prisoners see she wants to hit them, spit at them, shoot a flaming arrow through their hearts. Though she doesn’t.
“Fourteen pounds, Private,” whispers the Colonel, then whistles for emphasis after the woman turns for her car. “Fourteen pounds, I tell you. I was going to have that rainbow mounted.”
“Owen,” says Ben Fish the scout, Ben Fish the teacher, Ben Fish the trouter. “I’d as soon you call me Ben Fish here on out. I’ve gone civilian.”
SPEARFISH ON MONDAY
After nine A.M., Lawrence County Jail, Deadwood, South Dakota. The men breathe easily, adrenaline gone, in the tired relaxation of fully realizing that fate has them and there is nothing they can do to undo all they’ve done. They had their photos taken with Lawrence County license plates around their necks. They have ink on their fingertips. They have called Salome for bail money who said something to the effect of “Leave me the hell alone.”
“Wild Bill Hickok was shot here in Deadwood,” says Ben Fish flatly. “Shot in the back while playing cards.”
The Sioux deputy walks into the holding room, what they call the tank, says, “Your basset hound is in the pound and your wife called. She’s bailing you out. See you at the courthouse in two weeks,” and sets a stack of carboned forms in front of the men to sign, and hands the former substitute mail carrier a hastily scrawled note:
Owen Doggett,
Come home. Be quick. Bring Charley Reynolds and Ben Fish. I’m pregnant.
Sue
P.S. You can’t act as if nothing happened here. But I’m willing to work on it.
Owen Doggett reads the note once, twice, three times. His eyes show that he thinks it over deeply. He takes a long breath, exhales, and, without looking up from the note, says, “I suppose she needs me.”
Salt, pepper, and Tabasco fly, and the men eat the scrambled county eggs in their cell instead of auditioning for Pontius Pilate at the amphitheater. “These eggs need mustard,” says Owen Doggett. Ben Fish chews his eggs quietly.
“Owen, things are settled between you and me. I don’t want to have to worry about the three of you.”
FRIDAY IN OCTOBER
The prairie wind throws dirt and tumbleweeds against the classroom windows. Mr. Fish tells his eighth-graders that on the Black Hills Expedition of 1874 Custer lost a supply wagon full of whiskey and an expensive Gatling gun in a ravine along Boxelder Creek, now known as Custer Gap. He also tells them that Custer and four or five of his subordinates shot a bear. The bear was so full of lead and holes that it couldn’t be eaten, couldn’t be stuffed.
And he tells them this: “There was a troublemaker with the outfit, a private from Indiana. He stole food rations. He stole coffee, blankets, whiskey. He put locust thorns under saddles. He emptied canteens. One bright morning he cross-hobbled the wrong man’s horse. The wrong man shot him in the chest. The chaplain said prayers for his soul and a detail buried him in the shadows of sacred Inyan Kara Mountain. Custer knew the dead man was a bad egg and judged the murder justified.”
The class watches Mr. Fish and listens intently to these stories, the details once lost in the folds of history, brought to life again by the teacher, though some stories, for the sake of history, Mr. Fish just makes up.
MONDAY ON THE PLAINS
“I have an appointment on Monday,” Mr. Fish tells the secretary. “I’ll need a sub.” He does not tell her the blackflies are hatching on the Little Bighorn. Or that he will be there all day, with his new trouting buddy, Charley Reynolds, fishing, reading, sucking on sunflower seeds, the two of them eating bologna-and-mustard sandwiches. He does not tell her his old trouting buddy, Owen Doggett, has to work on Monday because the packing plant never closes, never shuts down, and days off are best spent tending to legalities in Dakota Territory. The fine for fishing without a license— the teacher’s only crime—can be paid by mail and doesn’t show up on your permanent record. He does not tell the secretary that Sue Doggett just tied some tiny new blackflies that buzz and dance around a room on their own when a white man isn’t looking. He does not tell her she gave him some.
er name was Ashley Elkind, but we called her Ash. She wasn’t a smoke-eater like the rest of us, but she lived in the crew quarters, two bunks down from me, and she slept in nothing. In the mornings she’d get up in nothing, stretch, and walk to the shower room that way. It was something we appreciated at first, the surprise of it, the surprise of her, all woman, every curve, every fold and jiggle. Pretending to sleep, through the slits under our eyelids, like toads, we watched her walk across the cold pine floor—sunburned neck, arms and legs, nipples hard as pine nuts. But, alas, we got used to it after a week or so, because it was animal and because it was no longer new. And because she was big. Not sloppy. Not classically voluptuous. Big. She could hold her own.
Soon enough her buckwheat pancakes were what we mostly got excited about mornings.
We were what is called a Type II wildland outfit. Groundlings. No parachuting into the torching bowels of the forest on fire. No helicopters or air tankers. No anything that would get us attention from our job title alone, like the Hot Shots from Logan or the tanker crews out of Greybull. We often worked at night and knew that if you stared too long at the fire, like a moon-blind horse, your vision could not adjust to the dark. But we stared anyway.
A Woodsy Owl calendar hung on the wall in the map room. We used a black map pen to cross the days off. We used a red map pen to mark the days we had fires. Red pins were used to chart fires nationwide; we got the situation reports every morning off the wire from Boise.
My girlfriend lived out east. She was going to graduate school in philosophy. She had been a cheerleader and still gave money to her sorority. Her name was Jennifer and she wrote a letter on blue stationery once a week that said, “It must be so lonely for you on those cold Wyoming nights.” The way she said it was more like a question.
Ash came from northern Arizona and she would interpret dreams. The second thing she ever said to me was “Fire is a good thing, favorable to the dreamer.” She carried a paperback of The Wordsworth Dictionary of Dreams. She had it with her everywhere she went, as if it were government issue.
She was a rangeland biologist. To the Forest Service, riparian land management means steak and wool; her job was cows and sheep. Deer, too. Antelope, some moose and elk, trout and cow-fish. But mostly cows and sheep. She was pretty, but too bulky to be beautiful. “If, of course, the dreamer doesn’t get burned” was the third thing she said. Red hair, less like a flame than a willow before the sap starts to rise in the spring.
We wanted fires. Smokey the Bear went straight against our grain. What we did was we fought fires, and it was as much a part of our inner selves as right and wrong. We might have pretended otherwise to appease Cappy, our boss, who had Tabasco in his veins but was up to his hard hat in politics, but we wanted fires. An evening dry-lightning storm was cause for celebration—“Tequila tonight, tomorrow we ride!” We liked the pay we got, but we loved fires more for everything infernal they were, everything volatile they could be. Our hearts worked like this: Flames or no flames, fire or no fire. Red or green. Hungry or satisfied. No sooty-gray in-between. Since fire was seasonal, the essence of temporary, that made it all the more precious.
They said about Hams Fork, Wyoming, our station, there’s a pretty girl behind every tree. The nearest tree—small scrub pine—was thirty miles to the north of town. We would match up on the first days of every season, a romantic version of picking teams in high school gym class. I finally had a little seniority in the pecking order, but the other guys didn’t want Ash for other reasons. There was a saying: “The summer’s too short to dance with a fat girl.” Maybe they didn’t know or couldn’t remember how long a slow, wet fire season could be. Ash was wide at the base like a spruce tree, sturdy and strong. I brought her Milky Ways and coffee with lots of cream and sugar. I couldn’t say to the other guys she wasn’t big,
because she was. The beautiful girls in Hams Fork were mostly Mormons who lived in Utah and did not work for the Forest Service. Anyway, we didn’t go into town very often, because there wasn’t much to go there for.
On our dates Ash showed me where horned toads lived in the roots of sagebrush and the little mountain scorpions no bigger than Lincoln’s head on a penny. “I never dream of fires,” she said one afternoon while we were walking in the blue dusk. “I tend to dream of fish. Fish are a good thing. What do you dream of?”
The dreams that stood out in my memory were of railroad tracks, spiders, sex, and tornadoes. “Sharks?” I said, not meaning it as a question.
The freckled skin around her mouth tightened and her eyes became cautious slits. She studied me. She knew it was a line, and not a very good one. I became convinced she could recognize a lie and know what kind it was the way I could smell smoke and identify the fuel. “To dream of catching fish is good,” she said, finally, as if to take me seriously. “If you fail to catch any in your dreams, it will be bad for you.”
“Does that include sharks?” I said. “What about sharks?”
She fumbled through her dream dictionary. “Sharks are not good,” she said, frowning. She smelled like horsemint. It was almost Flag Day before she let me hold her hand.
I had my useless degree in English lit, which took me six and a half years to get. I majored in English because I liked reading. Or at least I didn’t mind it. I wanted to fight forest fires during the season and do nothing in the wintertime. Maybe some skiing. Maybe read some books. It was that time of my life—my mid-twenties— when I hadn’t yet realized that fortune wasn’t going to fall from the sky, knock me down, and stick to me like slurry.