The Guide

by Peter Heller

  also by peter heller

  fiction

  The River

  Celine

  The Painter

  The Dog Stars

  nonfiction

  Kook: What Surfing Taught Me About Love, Life, and Catching the Perfect Wave

  The Whale Warriors: The Battle at the Bottom of the World to Save the Planet’s Largest Mammals

  Hell or High Water: Surviving Tibet’s Tsangpo River

  Set Free in China: Sojourns on the Edge

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2021 by Peter Heller

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Heller, Peter, [date] author.

  Title: The guide : a novel / Peter Heller.

  Description: First Edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2021. |

  Identifiers: lccn 2020044749 (print) | lccn 2020044750 (ebook) | isbn 9780525657767 (hardcover) | isbn 9781984898968 (paperback) | isbn 9780525657774 (ebook)

  Classification: lcc ps3608.e454 g85 2021 (print) | lcc ps3608.e454 (ebook) | ddc 813/.6—dc23

  lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2020044749

  lc ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2020044750

  Ebook ISBN 9780525657774

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover photograph: Needle Mountains from Animas Canyon, Colorado. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C./Mary Evans Picture Library

  Cover design by Kelly Blair

  Map by Rodica Prato

  ep_prh_5.7.1_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Peter Heller

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Map

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  A Note About the Author

  To Pop,

  who made me laugh.

  And who always took the longest view.

  PROLOGUE

  They gave him a bunk in a cabin by the river. A wooded canyon, spruce and pine, with rimrock up high, and rock spurs that tumbled to the water.

  Jack dropped his pack on the porch. It was a cool afternoon with high running clouds that tugged their shadows over the canyon. He looked around. The cabin was on the edge of a steep bank in the shadow of the pines, and a staggered rush rose from the creek below and was carried by the sift of wind in the trees. A creek, really. They called it a river, but up this high it was his favorite kind of stream: an easy toss of a stone across and shallow enough in places to wade bank to bank.

  He studied the rhythm of it. It slid around a left bend and broke white through a jumble of boulders and coursed into a long black pool stuttered with smooth rocks. At the top of the pool he could see a pedestrian bridge, and a fishermen’s trail heading upstream on the other side. Trout water out of a dream.

  The shack was basic. On the narrow covered porch were a stack of split firewood and two cane rockers. He didn’t really care what was inside: he thought he could sit on this deck and watch that stream for the rest of his life.

  * * *

  •

  The lodge was booked solid from August twentieth, what the manager told him. They would close on October thirty-first or when the snow got too heavy, whichever came first. Jack would guide one fisher per day, or a couple, no more. Boutique fishing at its finest. Two hundred dollars a day plus tips, one day off every ten unless he wanted to skip it. Good money. Less than he could make running a drift boat on the Colorado, but it included food, lodging, and…

  “Two drinks or two beers a night. After that, Ginnie cuts you off. We encourage the guides to hang out at the bar before dinner and converse with guests, but there’s nothing sadder than a sodden fishing guide, am I right?”

  That was the manager, Kurt Jensen, stepping onto the porch and handing him a card with the key code to open the heavy art gate at the head of the drive—two giant rusted cams that rocked apart with a grinding of heavy chains and cogs that slid thick steel doors etched with leaping trout.

  “You’ll need it to get out, and in.”

  “Why do you need a code to open it from the inside?” Jack said.

  Kurt had pulled the screen and was shoving the cabin door with his shoulder. He was a big man, maybe six-one, wearing a cowboy hat and a wool vest. He was gray at the temples and had grainy blue eyes and Jack figured he was pushing fifty. “Door’s sticky,” Kurt said. “I can get you a palm sander tomorrow.”

  “Forget it, I’ve got a flat file in the truck, should work.”

  If Kurt heard him he didn’t say. He was already inside, taking in the sparse log room: two small windows with tied-back lace curtains, a counter in back with a sink and two gas burners, a tiny bathroom with a shower stall, and an on-demand propane water heater on the wall. Baseboard electric heat and woodstove in the corner for ambiance, Jack guessed. For light two sconces—bare bulbs behind metal cutouts of bears, and a reading lamp on a barnwood bed table. A Nest thermostat on the wall by the door over the one small bureau. Quaint. The bed was full-size, just larger than a twin, with two Pendleton blankets. Perfect.

  The cabin was pretty close quarters. Jack had a cloth face mask in his back pocket and he looped it over his ears and Kurt waved it away.

  “You won’t need that around here. It makes the guests uneasy. Fact is, everyone but you has been tested and Ginnie takes everyone’s temperature when they come into the bar every night. You don’t strike me as a hang-out-in-a-crowd type of guy, so I’m willing to take the risk.”

  “You were saying about the gate,” Jack said.

  “I was?”

  “Yeah, why you need a code to open it. I mean from the inside.”

  “So nothing just hits the button, like a coyote or some blowdown. The last one we had was always opening on its own and all kinda random public was coming in and they’d just start fishing. Walk right past all the houses and fish, until we ran ’em off. God.”

  “Sounds rough,” Jack said drily. If there was any sarcasm in Jack’s tone it didn’t register with the manager.

  Kurt finished his survey and blew out with a near whistle. “You won’t believe how crazy fishermen get around this river. The locals call our stretch Billionaire’s Mile. It’s the private water all mixed in with public. Us, the Taylor River Lodge downstream, a couple other outfits. I wish they’d just shut down the whole canyon, give the landowners some peace. You need matches for the woodstove, and an axe
to split kindling.”

  “Got ’em,” Jack said. He didn’t mention that his own ranch on the Colorado—his and Pop’s—was sandwiched between public water and they rarely had a problem.

  “Okay, good. I’ll help you with your stuff. Dinner’s at six thirty. If you come early you can meet Cody, the other guide. And your client tomorrow. Her name is Alison K.”

  “K?”

  “Famous. The famous guests use a lot of initials. Ha.”

  “Got it.” Jack followed his boss out through the door and they walked up the short path to the pullout and Jack’s truck. “What’s with the bike?” Jack said. There was a teal one-speed cruiser bicycle with a bell and basket. It stood on a kickstand in a patch of sunlight.

  “Oh that, yeah. One per guest. See how everything’s spread out?”

  Kurt waved his arm up the hill to the scattering of cabins in the pines; then he nodded down the sanded dirt road to where Jack could just see the exquisite rambling log ranch house of the lodge and the small trout pond beside it. Hand-stacked stone chimneys, shallow rooflines with wide eaves and covered porches most of the way around. Rocking chairs and hanging geraniums. Jack nodded.

  “You’ve got the main lodge, cabins, pool house, massage cabin, main desk with fishing shop—and no driving inside the compound. Except for me.” No grin. Kurt nodded at his shiny black F-250 pickup parked in the road. It had a metal rack over the back with a ladder tied down, and a sliding flat cover over the bed. “The way Mr. Den wants it. He figured the bikes would give kind of a Crested Butte townie feel, I guess. The guests love them. We sell ’em, you wouldn’t believe how many. Pink, green, and blue.”

  “Huh. They take them on the plane?”

  “Oh, we ship ’em for two hundred dollars. I mean, they could get one off Amazon for half the price, but they want the actual bike they used here. So that every time their ass hits the seat it reminds them of…” He waved again. “This.” Kurt lifted one side of his mouth into a half smile. “You’ll get used to it.”

  Jack had a topper on his truck covering the bed and Kurt reached for the latch on the back and Jack put a hand on his arm. “I got this,” he said. “Thanks.”

  Kurt stepped back. “Suit yourself. See you in a couple of hours. Did I say it’s a mile and a half of river? You, Cody, the guests, that’s it. Me, if I ever have time, which, sad to say, I don’t. Mr. Den doesn’t even want the cooks or waitstaff or maintenance fishing. Most pristine water on the planet, what he says. We don’t ever mention the dam or the reservoir up below the pass. Never mention it. In Mr. Den’s mind, in the guests’ minds, this is the wildest river on earth. Got it?” Now, finally, a spark of irony flashed in his eyes.

  “Yep.”

  “So our stretch starts at the first big meadow up top, down to the barbed wire at Ellery’s. I think you’ll have time to scout most of it before dinner. The rest you can fake it.”

  Jack gave him a thumbs-up.

  “When you’re fishing upstream, don’t go one step past the post at the start of the meadow. There’s a sign on it, ‘Don’t Get Shot!’ Not kidding. I think Kreutzer’s got a goddamn spotting scope and I know he has a rifle. One day he’s gonna kill somebody. No shit.”

  “Damn.”

  “I told you: crazy. Batshit crazy.”

  Kurt turned away, and Jack said, “Oh hey.” The manager half turned back. “It’s mid-season. What happened to the other guide. My predecessor?”

  Kurt’s eyes sparked and he pursed his lips. “Predecessor?” He gave Jack a once-over, as if really seeing him for the first time. Compact, broad-shouldered, strung together with maybe baling wire. Whiff of the ranch. Crow’s feet at the corners of Jack’s eyes earned probably in the saddle, just a guess. Tough. But he’d read on the short résumé “Dartmouth College.” Explained the vocabulary. He’d hired college boys before, nothing against them.

  “Ken? Ken the Hen. He up and quit. Said it was family trouble but I just don’t think he had the stamina.” Kurt’s smile was straight across. “I knew I needed you two weeks ago, it’s getting so damn busy. Now I’m gonna have to get one more.”

  “Stamina?” Jack said. Guiding was guiding as far as Jack was concerned. It was long days, sometimes a lot of rowing or wading and more or less untangling, more or less retying on lost flies, more or less encouragement depending on the client, but…

  “You know how much it costs to stay here?” Kurt wasn’t looking at him but at maybe a beetle on the ground. “Didn’t think so. Well, the folks who stay here are a different breed.” The manager rubbed his forehead with three fingers under the brim of his hat, settled the Resistol back on sweat-plastered hair, and nodded once. He walked around Jack’s truck and down the smooth track to his own rig. He had a slight hitch, probably from some old injury. The road was covered in pine needles and they crunched under his boots.

  * * *

  •

  August. Best time of year to fish. From now straight through September.

  He didn’t need to be on the ranch. Pop would be all right…when wasn’t he? Jack had helped his father put up most of the hay. They’d had no rain or major breakdowns and Pop had insisted he take off. After haying, there wasn’t much else to do except fix stuff…which Pop did can’t-see to can’t-see every day. Fences, machinery, pumps, trailers, trucks. He never stopped. Jack wondered if it had been different when his mother was alive. She had died in a horse accident when he was eleven. Could it have been fourteen years ago? Had Pop worked himself that hard for that long? Jack wondered if his parents had ever just sat and watched the running clouds or taken a nap. Jack honestly couldn’t recall. They must have. But he remembered clearly the sense of the love between them, almost like something on the air, a scent, or a stirring as a breeze stirs, and he remembered their laughter. He figured that to foster a love like that they must have taken the time to enjoy each other and the world.

  This year, there’d been plenty of snowpack and the cows were up loose in the mountains and the browse was rich. If the autumn snow held off, he could guide here through the season and help Pop gather the herd at the end of October. His father liked to wait until after the first blizzard anyway; he said that the cows were much easier to convince. Jack thought he just liked riding across slopes softened with snow and striped with the blue shadows of aspen, when the dry powder shook off his chaps like dust.

  He and Pop rode on the slopes of Sheep Mountain mostly, where you could break out into a sage meadow and look north to the Never Summers or south to the Gore Range shimmering in snowy brilliance. Usually it was just Pop and he and the dogs, but sometimes Uncle Lloyd rode with them, and sometimes Willy came up from Granby. His border collies were hellacious workers, even Chica, who was barely a pup. They had fun. Jack liked the hard smells of winter woods—ice riming the blowdown branches, the cold stones of the creeks—and the sounds: bit-ring jangle, knock of a hoof, occasional bellow of a panicked cow, the distant whistles of Willy and Pop working the dogs. He liked the steam of the horses’ breath when they rode up in the first light. It was one of his favorite things on earth and he stood now at the back of his truck and stopped thinking about it because he didn’t like the clench in his heart.

  He closed his eyes. He smelled the warm pine needles on the sandy track and heard the muffled rush of the river reverberating in its bed and murmured, “You’re all right. New gig, couple months, knee deep in a river. What could be better?” And he almost believed it.

  CHAPTER ONE

  That first afternoon he dumped his duffel and pack on the rag rug in the cabin and changed fast into nylon shorts. He put a packet of split shot and a small fly box in the breast pockets of his shirt, then pulled the five-weight Winston rod out of the truck and pieced it together. His wading boots were drying in the back seat and he tugged on wool socks and laced the boots, and slung over his head the lanyard that dangled nippers, tippet, forceps, Gink
. It was just warm enough and he liked best to go without waders. The water would be icy but he was on his own: he wouldn’t have to stand in the water for hours beside a casting client. He’d be moving fast.

  He did. He began at the big dark sliding pool below the cabin and worked upstream. He could see a hatch of mayflies coming off the slow water beside the shore. Blue-winged olives. He always loved how they rose from an eddy in deep shadow like animated snowflakes and flew up into sunlight and flared in a haze of soft sparks. He crouched on the bank and turned over a rock the size of a brick in the shallows and the silted underside was covered with the pupae of caddis, almost like a crusting of cloves. A stone fly also crawled over the cobble in the unexpected air. Due diligence. He’d fished the mountains of Colorado all his life, and he had a good idea what bugs would be where. He tied on a dry and a dropper, a tufty elk hair stimulator on top and a bead-head pheasant tail on the bottom. Clients loved fishing this rig and he did, too.

  He stepped into the icy water, caught his breath at the first clinch of cold. And then he waded in up to his knees and began to cast.

  * * *

  •

  The rhythm of it always soothed him. Laying the line out straight over dark water, the blip of the weighted dropper, the dry fly touching just after, the—

  The tuft of elk hair barely touched and the surface broke. The lightest tug and he set the hook and the rod bent and quivered and a colossal brown trout leapt clear of the water into a spray of sunlight. Jesus. It splashed down and ran straight upstream and he let the fish take the line to the reel and he heard the whir of the clicking drag and he ran after it. He splashed through shallows, slipped, stumbled, half his body in the water, didn’t care if he spooked everyone in the big pool. Somehow he tightened down the drag knob on the reel just a little as he went—it was sleek this brown, all muscle, and the flash of gold as it hit the air was better than any treasure, God. He ran and fought the fish. Ten minutes, twenty? Who knew. He lost track of time, and of himself. Forgot it was he, Jack, who fished, whose limbs and hands acted without thought. He forgot his name or that he owned one, and for the first time in many months he was as close as he could come to something like joy.