by Peter Heller
Wynn’s loss reverberated and was swept up into the more pervasive loss of his mother just as the sound of the stream rose up and was scattered by the wind in these pines. How do you do it? He asked himself the question all the time. He blamed himself for both deaths. Sometimes he wondered if he should join them.
* * *
•
He stood at the edge of the deck and listened to the sounds of water and smelled the breath of the creek, which in its chill carried a portent of fall. He was uneasy. Not just the dream but something about this place. He stepped to the upstream corner of the porch. He crouched and reached to the damp ground and found the rounded cold river rock, and then felt over a foot to the right and dug in the matted needles; he fetched up his keys. People always hid their keys high on a door or window frame, or low under a rock. Nobody just dug them into the duff. He walked barefoot up to his truck and opened the topper and slid out his .30-.30 carbine rifle. When he got back to the cabin he scraped the clinging dirt off his feet on the oak threshold and leaned the rifle in the corner by his bed. That was better.
He lay awake for a while longer thinking about Wynn and his new situation and before he fell asleep he saw through the upstream window a ruddy half-moon rising out of the spindly pines of a high ridge. A dim moon, but waxing, and casting enough light to throw a shadow.
* * *
•
How do you do it?…
How you do it is have breakfast at seven. Kurt had said that the guests always felt like they were getting their money’s worth if they had to wake up at daybreak. Maybe it was like a real ranch. He’d said, “You and I know the good fishing might not start till nine. But you’d be surprised. Shay has the coffeepot in the lodge ready at six, in the dark, and the fire going, and I shit you not, a lot of the guests will be right there. On the feedback forms many say it was their favorite part of the day. Drinking coffee and watching the day break. Like they had to come way up here to learn how to do it.”
Well, it was Jack’s, too—favorite time. He didn’t want to make conversation that early, though, so he’d make his first cup of coffee here at the cabin. He had the fixings in his truck.
* * *
•
He walked down to the lodge with his pack and waders and one rod at 6:50. Alison K had told him at the bar the night before that she had her own outfit, waders, boots, vest, and would use her own Scott five weight. Fine with Jack. He had extra gear and so did the lodge, but clients were very particular.
He set his pack on the porch and another of his own rods in its tube strapped to the side of it. Remember to get the snacks, he told himself. The jerky and cookies, cans of pop and water bottles Kurt had said Shay would have ready for them. They’d fish all morning and come back to the lodge for lunch and then fish again, either right away or in the evening, depending on Ms. K’s preference.
Alison K was standing at the blazing hearth with a mug of coffee when he entered. She was alone. He could see through the French windows the younger fleecy couple out on the deck overlooking the river; there was a hearth out there, too, and the flames were blowing around in the downstream wind. They stood by the fire but a table was set. Huh. Pretty cold still, nearly a frost. Jack had slept more nights out under the stars than he could count, and made more breakfasts over an open fire in every kind of weather, but he didn’t think he’d choose to eat out there when there was a warm room inside. He didn’t see the super-rich couple. He wasn’t sure why he was calling them that in his head.
Alison K was wearing workout tights, a dun-colored mohair sweater, and a baseball cap that said homer tackle and supply above the brim. Inconspicuous silver earrings. She turned and smiled and he nodded and went on to the side table in the dining room where coffeepots were labeled French Roast Dark, Yergachef Light, and Costa Rican Decaf. He poured a cup of the dark and hesitated and came back. He didn’t want to intrude.
“Ma’am,” he said. “Morning.”
“Good morning, Jack. It’s Jack, right?”
He nodded.
“Is it short for anything? Jackson or John or Jonathan?”
He shook his head. “Nope,” he said. “My parents were too wary.”
“Wary?”
“Of diminutives, I guess.”
Her eyes flickered and she gave him an up-and-down, reassessing maybe.
“I mean, they would’ve had a heart attack if teachers at school started calling me Johnny.”
Now she laughed. It surprised her and her hand shook and she almost spilled her coffee. “Right,” she said. “Mine weren’t so savvy. I got called Ally.”
“Life can be hard.”
She studied Jack again. His humor was drier than dry, the way she liked it most. “If you call me Ally we won’t get along.”
“Got it.”
Someone came out of the kitchen, the young woman from last night, and chimed the bell hanging on the wall. Shay—that was her name. Alison K said, “Care to join me for breakfast, Jack-not-Johnny?”
“I thought you might be eating with your friend.”
“He’s not my friend. I mean he is. His name is Vincent and he’s head of my…” She hesitated. “Security. He insists on casing every place I stay for more than a night. God.” She smiled as if the thought of Vincent gave her real pleasure. “He means well. The manager, Mr. Jensen, was not at all happy about it.”
Jack nodded. “Is it allowed? Me eating breakfast with you? It’s my first day, I don’t know all the rules.”
“Doesn’t strike me that either of us ever really gave a damn about rules anyway. C’mon.”
* * *
•
Ham-and-egg scramble, home fries, Belgian waffles with real maple syrup and whipped cream. Homemade sourdough, Cabot cheddar. The plates came out at a brisk pace. They ate in avid silence for a while, making small animal sounds, and then she said,
“Not local, are you?”
His mouth was full. He pointed out the windows, across the river, and gave his finger a double pump, as if to say, Some distance north, over those mountains. As he did he saw that Cody had joined the couple at their outdoor table. Good, he was eating with his clients, too.
“Colorado?” she said.
He washed down some waffle with a slug of coffee. “Yep, near Kremmling.”
“What happens in Kremmling?”
“Sunrise, elk migration. Stuff like that.”
“Mountains?”
“Never Summers and the Gore Range.”
“God, the names. You could almost walk into the words themselves.” Now Jack put down his cup. He’d never heard anyone say that and it was true. For a moment he lost the blithe tempo of their conversation that had shielded him from his own shyness. For just a second he was at his own kitchen table back home, looking through the big window from which he could see both ranges. He felt his eyes moisten. She was tactful and half turned away and motioned to Shay for more coffee.
“Cattle at home, too. Right?” she said after their cups had been refilled.
“Yes.”
“Thought so. Family ranch?”
He nodded. Was he that obvious? Well, he’d sussed Cody from the get-go. “Pop and me.”
“Do you mind if I ask what happened to Mom? Am I being too nosy?”
“It’s all right. She died in a horse accident when I was eleven.”
“Oh. Ow. I’m so sorry.”
“Thank you.”
“I lost my father when I was fourteen. I grew up in the mountains, too. North Carolina.”
What he liked, thinking about it later, was the ease with which she shifted gears. She was playful and game, but her repartee was always respectful, and when there was something true or beautiful to reckon with she slowed way down and considered.
They didn’t talk once about politics or sports or
the sickness. The novel virus from three years before that kept mutating, the superbug that finally broke out of India. But Jack knew that there was a reason the very rich preferred to spend their vacations now deep in the mountains, in regions where the viruses were still rare.
* * *
•
They geared up in the slanting sun on the front porch. He had guided many fishers who thought it was a race to get on the water. As if getting into waders, boots, stringing line, tying on tippet and flies were all something to get over with at a hundred miles an hour. As if getting on the water ten minutes sooner meant catching more fish. But somehow it never did.
He liked to take his time and it was evident that she did, too. He had always found that the rhythm of fishing—the patient, music-like rhythm one needed—began with slipping the rod sections out of their flannel wrapping, with holding each to the light, with stretching the leader properly between sliding fingers that burned with the friction of the line. Each step given its due. Often he caught himself humming. It was the same relaxed pace that allowed one to step into the current and carefully consider the patterns of rock and pool, current, shadow, wind that went into the unconscious calculus of every cast. Start too fast and you’d stumble and hack your way into the morning. He’d done it too many times as a kid, and so the slower pacing was not inherited but learned.
It was clear that she was not at all green and had learned it, too. And she was humming. In a husky, sweet voice that he recognized but couldn’t place. Sometimes she sang a snatch of song, barely above a whisper, and he was sure he’d heard it on the radio.
“How do you feel about a dry and dropper?” he said from one of the Adirondack chairs where he was lacing up his wading boots.
“What I’m most used to,” she said.
“Okay, great. We’ll tie on when we get down there.” She nodded and took off her cap and shook out her hair, which was thick and ruddy brown in the new sunlight, nearly the copper color of spruce bark. She regathered it behind her and slipped it more snugly through the hair band and worked it again through the baseball cap. “Ready,” she said. But he had already made himself look away.
* * *
•
Jack was twenty-five. He’d been in love once, but then again he sometimes wondered if that were true. He’d known Cheryl since second grade, since her father had come to Grand County to be the police chief of Granby. Over the years in a small school, they’d been adversaries, buddies, embarrassed spin-the-bottle kissers. She was a fine equestrian and she had helped him and his dad search for missing cows on the mountain more than once. And then, junior year she had come over one afternoon to help him train his new filly, Cassie. It was early September and hot, and she had Cassie on the lunge line in the sun and dust for over an hour. The four-year-old was remarkably patient and clearly wanting to please, responding as well as she could to the gentle commands to change gait—neck rounded, ear closest to the girl twitching to her low voice, chest dark with sweat. And Jack knew it was her energy—Cheryl’s—that the young horse could feel. It was the way this girl with the lanky frame and dark bob encouraged everyone, her generosity and seriousness.
He leaned against the rail of the corral and marveled and admitted to himself that he wasn’t worth crap as a horse trainer. Afterward they decided to ride down to the river and cool off. They brought lead ropes from the barn and he whistled in Duke and Mindy and they slipped on the halters and then swung up and rode them without saddles or bridles along the east edge of the big hay meadow to the river. They rode into the shade of a huge cottonwood and swung down. The swimming hole was a slow blackwater pool above a natural ledge-rock weir and Jack always felt cooler just hearing the current sift through the drop.
They tied the horses and stripped to their underwear and jumped in. And yelled with the shock. And clambered back out onto the bank almost as fast, and into the spontaneous silence of another shock: blinking in the dappled light, soaked, goosebumped, in wet skivvies that now hid nothing, they saw in each other a young man and a young woman, full-fledged and glorious. And they laughed—discomfort, surprise, and joy all together—and somehow ended in each other’s arms.
Over the next two years they were rarely apart. In late fall she rode up into the Never Summers with Jack and his father and the dogs to gather part of the herd. She hunted with Jack in November and they camped above Harrier Basin in the snow and built a blazing fire outside their tarp lean-to and stayed up much too late playing dominoes and trying to devise ways to toast and ruin every marshmallow in the bag Jack had packed as a treat. When she, not Jack, shot the cow elk for the one tag they’d drawn, they quartered it together, hide on, and tied two quarters each with baling twine and slung them over their saddles, hide to leather, and walked the horses out to the truck. They rode back up the next morning to break down the camp and decided to skip school and stay an extra two nights. Jack thought it was a spontaneous decision but found out later she’d already told her father they’d be gone.
In this way—the way she trained her horses—she loved Jack into some semblance of comfort in opening a heart that had closed since the death of his mother. This was precocious for a sixteen-year-old, the work of a young woman, really, not a girl, and she enacted it with patience.
Jack had already kept mostly to himself outside of school. Since his mother died he had shied from team sports, which he thought were exhibitionist and encouraged the worst kind of cocky behavior. His mother was gone because he had gotten too big for his britches. Too many nights he dreamt it: a summer morning on the Encampment, riding on a narrow high trail above the roaring gorge—Pop going first, leading his skittish packhorse, then Mom on sweet Mindy, and then he on Duke bringing up the rear. Because he had insisted; because he thought he was big enough now at eleven.
He knew it was his own cockiness that had caused her to die. And so he had withdrawn from group activities into helping Pop with the ranch, and reading. He read and read with the hunger of someone seeking more than diversion. And had gotten used to taking long rides on Duke by himself, and losing himself with a fly rod on the river and in the mountain creeks.
So it was not a huge adjustment to make room for another. Cheryl rode as easily as she walked. She did not fish but was happy collecting stones and studying tracks. She liked a good story and so did not mind reading. At sixteen, the two were nearly inseparable, and all of junior and senior years they lived almost as if they were married. They were not allowed to spend the night together at either house, but their three collective parents were wise enough to know that water flows downhill, and so they allowed themselves to believe that their afternoons together and the increasingly frequent camping trips were merely the extension of a childhood friendship.
Did Jack miss her? Sometimes. But at some point he had to admit that he loved the memories more than their time together. She got less and less interested in anything but studying hard and spending time with him, and she was so serious. In April of their senior year she got into CSU pre-vet, and he into Dartmouth, and she begged him to consider staying in Colorado. She wanted to get married and raise a family and she knew they could do it at some point in their studies. They could handle it. But he had begun to feel a constriction in his spirit when he was around her, and in his second year of college away in New Hampshire he had to admit that a future with Cheryl felt more like a tunnel than an adventure and he wrote her the letter.
* * *
•
“Hey, guru,” he heard Alison say. “We going fishing or what?”
Jack shook himself. He was not on the ranch back home but here, in a chair, in the sun. Stay present, dude, Jesus. “Oh, yeah, sorry.”
She was holding her rod and smiling with whimsy, almost as if she knew. When she smiled the crow’s feet deepened at the corners of her eyes. She was fully dressed in waders with a tight webbing belt to keep water out of the legs in case of a fall
. She wore her own vest. “Ready,” he said. “Let’s hit it.”
He slung the pack, shoved the long-handled net into the back of his own belt, and they stepped into the shade of the trail that led down the bank to the river.
CHAPTER THREE
At lunch Kurt, the manager, pulled him aside.
He and Alison K had fished for three hours straight. They had walked down the good trail to Ellery’s wire fence—no killer dogs in sight—and had worked upstream just to the bottom of the big pool below his cabin. She was a competent fisher with a smooth cast and didn’t mind wading in stiff current. She had a sense of humor about her screw-ups and was eager for any instruction and critique. He’d shown her how to lift the rod fast and skip the fish over the surface to net it, and how to lay out successive mends in a stiff current. He’d demonstrated the long cast and she’d mimicked him. She yelped at every hit, and she must have hooked on to a dozen fish and brought in most of them. He’d stopped counting. The plan was to continue up under the bridge to the meadow in the afternoon.
The day had warmed and a table had been set for them in the sun on the outdoor deck. No hearth fire needed. Shay had offered them local farm-to-table roast beef and heirloom tomato sandwiches on homemade rye. And sweet sun tea. No objections. He didn’t see either the Youngens—the fleecy couple—or Silver Buttons and his wife. Jack had pulled out his chair and was about to sit down when the big man creaked the boards of the steps.
“Don’t mean to interrupt,” Kurt said, touching his spotless fawn cowboy hat.