The Next Valley Over

by Charles Gaines

  “I’m sorry, but I have to ask that you let me measure it first.”

  “Be my guest,” Epstein said proudly.

  Slipping to his knees, Talbot pulled a retractable tape from his vest, straightened the fish and measured it. “She’s not legal,” he said. “We’ll have to release her.”

  “What are you talking about?” Epstein demanded. “The limit is eight inches. That fish has to be over fifteen.”

  “Eighteen exactly,” said Talbot. He was quickly constructing a little platform out of twigs. “I think she’ll be okay if we can just get her back to the water without touching her anymore.” He looked up at me, ignoring Epstein. “We have a regulation here that we only kill fish between eight and sixteen inches. Or, of course, anything over twenty inches . . .”

  “What?” thundered Epstein.

  “Of course, most of us haven’t killed a fish of any size in years.” Talbot slid the trout gently onto the little stretcher he had made, and stood up carefully. “I think she’ll be all right, don’t you?” he asked me.

  “Well,” I said, “it’s bleeding from the gills.”

  “Let me get this straight,” said Epstein weirdly. We were both following Talbot as he catwalked toward the stream, holding the trout stretcher gingerly aloft. “That fish is two inches too short to be legal, and it’s also two inches too long to be legal? Is that right?”

  “Legal isn’t exactly the right word. It’s just the way we all agree to do things here on the Passacowadee.”

  I hadn’t liked the sound of Epstein’s voice, so I said, “Look here, Talbot, I really don’t think that fish is going to make it . . .”

  Epstein interrupted me by suddenly hopping in front of Talbot and snatching the trout off the stretcher. “The way I see it,” he said, looking from Talbot to me and back again, his eyes glittering, “we’ve got two classic trout angler problems here: Number one”—he held up the fish by its tail—“is this trout going to live or not? And, number two, he’s two inches too long for those of us here on the Passacowadee.”

  Talbot wanted the trout back. He reached out for it, but he was too late, because just then Epstein stuck the fish’s entire head into his mouth and bit down. Holding the tail with both hands, he gnawed away furiously, snorting and huffing like a grizzly, and spitting out trout blood and pieces of flesh, until finally he had chewed off the head—which he spat on the ground at the feet of the pale, hypnotized Talbot. Epstein grinned wolfishly. In his last civilized utterance of any kind to a trout angler, he had said in a deceptively kind voice, “You see how easy it is to solve these little problems if we just put our heads together?”

  Of course, it was not everyone who fishes for trout who drove Epstein to give up the primary passion of his life, but only that percentage (growing daily, he believed) who qualified in his mind as trout anglers. Epstein’s trout angler had rules to govern every pleasure, and that was what Epstein most despised about him. But he also hated the fellow’s stuffiness and academic bent, his pipe and tweed hats, how vulnerable he looked in waders, his sheepish enthusiasm for following other trout anglers, his womanish sentimentality, the prissy way he ate and drank, his physical cautiousness, and his obsession with minutiae: little flies, little rules, little tools hung all over his vest, the invention of little tactical problems to make trout fishing seem harder than it was.

  In the last year or so before he quit fishing, Epstein had begun to see trout anglers behind every bush and tree. In West Yellowstone and Ennis, in Maine and Idaho, in Labrador and Argentina, everywhere he went they were waiting for him, pursing their lips over some local rule, wading cautiously in shallow water with the help of a stick, making flaccid little casts, spooking fish they never saw, lighting their pipes, and talking sentimentally. Talbot was just a merciful last straw. When pushed, Epstein would acknowledge that Talbot was not the most egregious trout angler he had ever met, just the last; and he would even express some regret at having thrown Talbot bodily into the “Sundown Pool” of the Passacowadee.

  But however good or bad his motives, Epstein had sworn off all fishing that day in Vermont, and not fishing began to ruin his life. His marriage and his medical practice fell into shambles. He began to drink too much, and he developed an unnerving habit of picking fights with anyone wearing a uniform.

  I happen to enjoy the company of people who are actively engaged in wrecking their lives over something they like or don’t like, so long as they are not members of my immediate family; but one night Epstein’s wife took me aside at a party and asked me for help. She looked up at me with her great, dark, Byzantine eyes and pleaded with me to “do something.” We rarely saw the Epsteins socially, and I was moved. So I talked him into coming down to Cozumel with me. He had never done any saltwater fishing, and I was sure he would take to it. For the first few days, though, he had found Emilio’s pussyfooting about the weather, the cleanliness of his boat, etc., to be just another form of trout angling.

  Fishing, it appeared, was about to lose Epstein permanently; and then we walked down the dock and met José.

  José was sitting in a rusty lawn chair in the stern of a dumpy, homemade-looking, thirty-foot boat called the Gloria. He knew no English and Epstein and I only little Spanish, but we worked out the essential details in a matter of minutes. Epstein and I were given to understand this clearly: we had found a skinny, barefoot Indian with a pot belly who didn’t give a rat’s ass how much wind was blowing.

  The Gloria didn’t have sonar or teak decks or a shower. Neither did she have a few more necessary accouterments to sport fishing—such as outriggers, a mate, or bait. But she did have an ice chest full of Dos Equis, and Epstein and I found a nice blue-skirted lure which we rigged without a hook on one of José’s decrepit fifty-pound trolling outfits. As soon as we hit the straits, José turned up sea, cut the Gloria back to trolling speed, put on a Jimmy Buffett tape and—drinking beer with one hand and spinning the wheel with the other, laughing and singing to himself and hopping around like a potbellied parrot—commenced to go fishing.

  At first Epstein and I couldn’t stand up in the cockpit. But when we could, we let the lure out and sailfish started jumping all over it. Everywhere we looked behind the transom, there were sailfish, herds of them, lit up and running over each other to get to the lure. I gave Epstein the fifty-pound outfit and lurched toward the cabin for my fly rod.

  “They’re trying to eat the goddamned thing,” Epstein shouted after me. All either of us knew about fly-fishing for billfish was what we had read.

  I staggered back into the cockpit holding the fly rod and shouted, “Just don’t let them cut it off, it’s the only lure we’ve got.” Epstein was crouched at the transom, his knees locked under it, whipping the boat rod up and down and making the blue lure leap and plunge thirty yards back. Through the waves we could see sailfish diving and jumping all around it. I tried false-casting and couldn’t because of the wind, so I dropped the big red-and-white steamer into the prop wash and let the boat’s momentum carry it back about fifteen feet.

  “I’d better go tell José what to do,” said Epstein. “Here.” He shoved the boat rod over to me. “I’ll tell him to throw the boat out of gear when I shout.”

  “How are you going to tell him that?”

  “Small, small problem, amigo,” said Epstein. “About the size of a trout angler’s dick.”

  While he was gone, the boat quartered into a particularly big sea, yawed, and crashed into the following trough. Behind me I heard glass shatter and Epstein curse, then he was beside me again at the transom, grabbing back the boat rod.

  “José is all set. I’m going to bring this lure in, so get ready and don’t blow it.”

  I pulled the tip of the fly rod up into the wind to my right as far as I could without lifting the streamer off the water. Then I stripped some line off the reel and onto the deck, and hoped I could make one good cast. Epstein was reeling fast, and the blue lure skipped toward us, hounded by sailfish. When the lure w
as about fifty feet away and still coming, Epstein said, “You ready?”

  I nodded.

  “José!” Epstein yelled, and just as the boat went out of gear, he yanked the boat rod up and backwards over his head, lifting the lure off the waves and catapulting it toward us. Confused, the sails milled thirty feet off the transom. I lifted the fly rod’s tip another inch or two and pushed it hard forward. The streamer picked up, caught the wind, and rode it out perfectly to the sailfish, pulling loose line off the deck. When it slapped down I started stripping it back in foot-long jerks. The streamer hadn’t traveled a yard before a sailfish charged in a quick, silver furrow of water and ate it. I let go of the underside of the transom with my knees, reared back to hit the fish, and slipped. Epstein caught me and held me upright. “Hit the fucker again,” he said, and I did, three times, and then we watched the backing pour off the reel.

  “Why is there blood all over the deck?” I asked Epstein.

  “A window broke in the cabin and I cut my leg on it.”

  “Isn’t that an awful lot of blood?”

  He was still holding me upright against the transom while I played the fish, and I could feel blood running down the backs of my legs.

  “It’s okay, just don’t lose that baby. Can you believe this?” he whooped. The sail was tail-walking a hundred yards back, its lean, violet body snapping like a flag in the wind. “We have wasted our whole lives fishing in mudholes for guppies. I have just been made whole, goddammit . . .

  “I have to puke now,” he added after a moment. His voice was still so delighted I thought he was kidding. He wasn’t. Without letting me go, he turned his head and threw up violently onto his shoulder and the deck. When he was finished, he coughed a couple of times and spat. “Deep-sea fishing!” he shouted hoarsely into my ear. “To hell with women and work!”

  With Epstein holding me upright and with José handling the boat beautifully, I had the sail tired and circling just off the stern in eight minutes. When the fish moved under the boat, I yelled for José to go forward. Taking me to mean the fish was ready, I guess, he threw the boat into neutral and popped back into the cockpit like a jumping bean, gloved for billing the fish and thrilled to death with everything that was going on, even, it appeared, the unexplained blood and vomit all over his deck.

  “Go forward!” I yelled to him and pointed to the fly line running directly under the stern, which at that moment stopped and refused to budge. The fish had run the line around the prop.

  “Oh no,” Epstein said quietly, and let me go.

  “Aiyeee!” said José. He popped back into the cabin, reemerging in seconds in a mask and fins and, before Epstein or I could figure out what he was doing, jumped overboard into the heaving sea.

  Epstein and I looked at each other, then overboard. It was not a place anyone would have wanted to be. Between the fish and the fly line was a foot of sixteen-pound leader tippet. Though we didn’t say it, neither Epstein nor I believed that the tippet had not already parted, either on contact with the prop or at the fish’s first surge. But within seconds the line came unstuck and I felt it to be, miraculously, still connected to the fish.

  Epstein pulled José back into the boat and José got the engine going and the boat turned upwind, then he came into the cockpit and grabbed the sailfish by its bill. He pulled the fish half over the transom, and Epstein started clubbing its electric-blue head with a Coke bottle.

  “Stop it,” I said to him. “That’s my fish, and I want to release it.” Even before I had finished the sentence, I was sorry I had spoken it.

  Epstein paused with his hand raised, and looked at me. His face was set with a fierce new assurance, and his eyes had the same noncommittal savagery in them that you sometimes see in animals’ eyes.

  “The hell you say,” he said quietly. Then he clubbed the fish again with the bottle and José let it slide dead onto the deck.

  Both of them straightened up then, and grinned at me. Epstein had tied his T-shirt around his thigh, which had finally stopped bleeding. In real life he is a doctor, but he doesn’t look much like one. He is also an ex-college football player and wrestler, an enthusiastic fistfighter and skydiver—a big, hard, trouble-and pain-addicted man. Later, back in Cozumel, not trusting Mexican clinics, he would disinfect and sew up his wound himself. It took thirty-five stitches to close the cut, and then we went out and drank a world of Cuervo Gold and said very little to each other.

  One thing Epstein did say, late that night, was that he had found his religion. He said this very loudly at about three in the morning while staring unsteadily at a stuffed blue marlin hanging in the lobby of our hotel. And I suppose I believed him.

  I have not seen Epstein since that trip, but occasionally I hear about him and his fishing. My friend Captain Bob Marsten wrote me recently that he and Epstein took a Striker, a Morton’s salt box of cocaine, and two hookers down to Chile this past winter to look for swordfish, but spent all their time shooting sharks and getting laid in the tuna tower.

  I have learned for a fact that very little in life is simple, even fishing. But there for a moment or two in the cockpit of the Gloria, standing astride his sailfish, shirtless and hairy, new-looking and sweating and caked with dried blood and puke, Epstein was, I believe, a simply happy man. After he had grinned at me for a long time, he picked José up and hugged him. Then he sat the little Indian carefully back down on the deck.

  “Muchas gracias,” Epstein told him.

  José ran up to the wheel, cracked a cerveza, turned up the Buffett, and winked at us over the stained shambles of his boat. He put the throttle in the corner and the Gloria heaved forward. “More fish now, si?” he shouted.

  Epstein squinted approvingly at him. “I’d say . . . a hundred and sixty-four, maybe one-sixty-five.”

  “What’s that?” I asked him.

  “Trout anglers that little bastard’s worth.”

  FISHING FOR GRACE WITH THE BLACK DOG IN THE LAND OF PONCE DE LEÓN

  SO THERE I WAS, FETCHED UP IN KEY WEST AFTER FIFTEEN straight days of fishing, sunburned, a blister on my casting hand, and the black dog still on my trail. The black dog had been following me around for months. Maybe you’ve been there: where if you didn’t have bad luck you wouldn’t have any luck at all; where your life looks to you like the workbench in a small engine repair shop; where you’re angling hard for answers, not missing a cast, but your fly got snapped off in a willow tree an hour before and you don’t know it yet. A lot of people in Key West on any given day have been there too, some of them for so long it’s made them a little silly in the head. But this guy didn’t look like one of those.

  I was turning in to a coffee-and-bagel place on Simonton Street when I first noticed him walking down a side street a couple of blocks away, wearing shorts, a backpack, and a straw hat, and carrying a staff ornamented with buckskin. He looked jaunty and purposeful, and something made me want to see him up close, but he was headed away from the restaurant, so I went on in and broke my fast.

  When I came out a half hour later, the man fell into step beside me on the sidewalk as if he had been waiting for me, and we immediately began to talk as naturally as if we were resuming a conversation we had carried on for years. I saw that he wore a handsome necklace of claws with a leather packet in the center. He was of medium height and build, tidy and animated.

  Did he live here, I asked him. No. Where? Everywhere, he said. He had come here from Boulder. He came and went according to God’s will, and God told him where to go with signs. He had just that morning been given a sign to go on to Albany, New York, which meant that whatever it was he was here in Key West to do was nearly done. He spoke very well, with a strange but pleasant accent that was perhaps Middle Eastern. In the five-block walk in the hot sun down Simonton Street to the green gate of my hotel, he said a lot without seeming to hurry, and it was clear he was talking directly to me.

  He had been homeless for seventeen years, he told me, and that was as he wanted it, si
nce it was only through dispossession that we own and keep our power. What? I thought—I, who had recently somehow misplaced my own, such as it is, couldn’t find it anywhere, and had prayed for clues the very night before in my hotel room at the bottom of the continent—“You have to do what to keep your power?”

  “Give things up, number one, and recognize that everything is fine. We try to plan, we want things. Someone tells you to do something. None of it matters. We belong to God. He makes everything possible, controls everything. Relax. Everything is just fine.”

  He said something about following a cloud; something about Lucifer. At one point I was moved to tell him he was lucky, and he corrected me: he was blessed; luck had to do with other things. When we stopped in front of my hotel, I asked him his name in a voice cracked with . . . what? Longing? Intimation? He turned around and looked at me for the first time and Ohh, Son! the face—the soft curls of hair around it, the beard, the worn, resilient kindness in the eyes. The face was an icon; where had I not seen that face before? His old name, he said, was Samuel. His new name was Jesus.

  All I could manage to do was give the guy five dollars, all the money I had on me, and croak that I wanted to buy him lunch. Then I handed him a bottle of grapefruit juice I was carrying and told him I hoped it provided him with a cool drink on his way to Albany.

  He held up the bill. “There is a bank in heaven we all draw on. I had wanted to go to Burger King for breakfast and now here is my way to do that. And I have a drink for the road, too. Heaven is here,” he said. “We misunderstand heaven.”

  My face twitching, knowing without question I was experiencing something I couldn’t explain, I shook his hand and said, “God bless you.” Then I went into my little hotel room and cried like a baby and wondered if I was going crazy or having some kind of breakdown caused by too much fan in the sun. After a while I sat up on the side of the bed and said, “Okay. Okay, fine.” And in a few minutes more I was ready to get on with the hard labor that fishing had become for me over the past couple of weeks.