by Peter Heller
“Not at all,” Alison K said. “Would you like to join us?” She was lit from the morning and feeling expansive. “We can pull up another chair, plenty of room.”
“Ate earlier, thank you. Jack, a quick word.”
Jack followed his boss inside the lodge, where they stood by the now empty bar. “Did you hear the news?” Kurt said.
“News? There’s no signal in my cabin, no wireless, no cell. When I drove in yesterday my radio went to snow as soon as I hit the canyon.”
Kurt nodded. “They confirmed a case of the virus in town this morning.”
“Crested Butte?”
Kurt nodded. “We’re encouraging our staff not to drive in. Can’t prevent you, but it’s unwise. The patient ‘Y’ is in quarantine at the hospital in Gunnison. Another case or three and the government will lock down the town. The way they did up in Rawlins.”
“Huh.”
“All the guests are booked for the entire ten days, so that’s a good thing. By then if there’s no new cases it should quiet down.”
Jack was suddenly thinking of his father and of home. “Any word on any other towns?”
“Nope, CB was all I heard. Okay, just thought I’d tell ya. No reason to share it with the guests. Not a thing we can do about it and they come for peace and quiet.”
“Right,” Jack said slowly.
“Thanks.” Kurt squeezed his shoulder with a hand like a vise grip and tightened his mouth into something like a grin. “She do good this morning?”
“Yes.”
“Good. She had that air.” Kurt released his hand, turned away, turned back. “Oh, one more thing.”
Jack waited.
“Ana, the gal that cleans, was tidying your cabin and saw the thirty-thirty in the corner. It frightened her.”
The aggravation that had coiled when the man had touched him now rose like a snake into Jack’s chest.
“I didn’t ask anyone to clean up after me.”
Kurt stretched his mouth into a thin line. Meant to be a smile maybe, but his eyes were hard. “Cowboy through and through. Well, if that’s what you want. She means well. You can leave your bedclothes and towels on the porch on Sundays. ’Less you want to wash ’em in the creek. Ha!”
Jack didn’t say anything.
“But anyway, we don’t allow firearms on the premises. Like I said, the guests come for peace and quiet and they can get mighty touchy. Just a policy of Mr. Den’s. So when you’re done tonight you can bring whatever you have up to the gun room in the office. Good with you?”
No, not really. “I’ll bring it along,” Jack said. The .30-.30 was Jack’s saddle gun, the classic lever-action carbine made famous in every western. Iron sights, no scope, short and light. It was easy to carry, easy to swing, and sighted in dead-on at a hundred yards. He didn’t tell Kurt that he had a Glock 26 in his fishing waist pack. He wasn’t a gun nut, he was just a fisher and a hunter who spent a lot of time in the mountains.
“Good, thanks. Hope you all do good this afternoon.”
And now the manager headed for the heavy front doors but it was Jack who stopped him. “Mr. Jensen?”
“Yeah?” Kurt was irritated. Well, so was Jack.
“I never saw Cody on the river this morning. Didn’t they fish?”
“He drove ’em out to Tomichi Creek,” Kurt said. “We have rights there, too.” He shoved out the door.
Jack stood in the dim bar and wondered also why Mr. Silver Buttons and his wife didn’t seem to have been assigned a guide.
* * *
•
Jack put the manager out of his mind, or tried. But it wasn’t until they were through lunch and back on the creek that his anger swirled away in the thigh-deep current. The thing about fishing: it washed everything away but water and stone and wind. And bird cry. And blowdown. And a spiderweb’s gleamings in the exposed roots of a cut bank. And in a tailwater pool: the spreading rings of rising trout, dapping silently like slow rain. His heart rose to these things like a hungry fish and he could forget himself. It was why, after his mother died, he disappeared into the creeks. The only place aside from books he could find a minute of solace.
Usually he was alone, but he had guided on and off since he was sixteen and he liked it, as long as he wasn’t with a total ass. And if he was with someone like Alison K it was fun and he could lose himself in her own absorption.
She knew how to be absorbed. That was something else Jack had noticed about people who had attained mastery in a chosen discipline—that ability to be immersed. Focus was one thing, and necessary, but it was active. The energy went from the actor to the activity: Okay, I’m casting now, I’ll focus on casting. I’m painting, I’ll focus on the canvas and the touch of my brush. I’m dancing, I will leap in cascading symmetries. What he’d noticed in all true masters was that the focus turned soon, or immediately, into full absorption by the act itself. The actor surrendered, and it was as if, like a change in tide, the energy was now flowing in the opposite direction—from the river, or the basketball court, or the painting. Flowing into the one who was doing. It swept her up and carried her. It fueled her, and in the most intense moments allowed her to relax.
Alison K was not a master fly fisher but he could see right away that she knew how to lose herself, which was a rare talent. Rarer than it ought to be. When she got on a fish she yelled like she was five. He had caught himself doing it, too.
They decided to drop down the trail right below the lodge and fish upstream from there. They started in full sun and soon they were shucking sweaters down to their base layers. Jack wore a light synthetic hoodie in camo, hood back, and she was in a tight olive Capilene undershirt, long-sleeved to protect her from the sun. He wore only the pack and a small waist bag. She had on an abbreviated vest with six pockets that barely snapped in front, and as the creek was rarely more than crotch deep, she’d folded the bib of her waders down over the belt, as had he. The day was growing hot.
Jack tried to follow the motions of her cast and tried not to notice the length of her neck, the breadth of her shoulders. How gracefully her hands moved, or the thin fabric of her shirt where the vest hid nothing. He made himself concentrate on where she might want guidance. She was lovely and forthright, so what? He thought she was a famous singer but he would never ask.
In the first hour they fished briskly around the bend and to the new water of the long shaded pool below his cabin. They were standing in the shallows and he said, “Hold on. I have an idea.”
“You do?” There was so much wry play in the question. Another thing he’d noticed about her: she often let a few words do a lot of work. He was standing just a couple of feet off her left shoulder and he reached for the rod, which she handed to him. On the breeze, barely a breath, he could smell her shampoo and the tang of her sweat.
“There’s a hatch of pale morning duns coming off the water. There, just off the bank. The little pale guys.”
She didn’t say a word, but smiled.
“This pool is easy casting. I just saw a rise, too. Wanna try a straight dry fly? Like an eighteen? They’re pretty tiny but you’ll see it fine against the dark water.”
She was looking at him with unabashed admiration and she nodded, barely. Something about the look: the slow blink, maybe. His heart hammered. He blew out a long cooling breath and said, “Okay,” and cradled the rod in his crooked elbow and concentrated on digging the fly box out of his waist pack. “Here it is,” he said, and dared to look up.
She was still watching him. Her eyes seemed smoky. “It’s okay,” she said. “You’re a boy and I’m a girl.” His mouth must have dropped open because she grinned suddenly and her smile was wide. “But we’re fishing. That’s what we’re doing. I’m having the best time and I’m not a cougar and you’re not a sleazebag. So let’s keep having a blast.”
“Right
,” he croaked.
* * *
•
On her third long cast she made a beautiful throw all the way across the river and six inches upstream from a silently spreading ring; and the hit was so fast and hard, the gulp on the surface so loud they heard it above the current and they both shouted. And the line went taut and the rod tip tugged down hard and quivered and the fight was on. He’d seen the green gold flash of the back only; it was probably a brown and big and it struck in almost the same spot as his beauty from the night before. You couldn’t make it up.
The fish ran fast upstream and took her line to the backing on the reel and he shouted, “You gotta run! Can you run after it? Go! Go!”
Her answer was to snug the drag on the reel and wade fast to the bank and go. She was agile. She hopped nimbly from rock to rock, in and out of sunlight. She reeled in line when she could, and she splashed into the water to wade when the fish pulled her in. It had to be a monster. He never saw it. Some fish turned downstream and ballooned open their gills and let the current take them. Not this one. It ran straight into the current. She followed the trout under the bridge and into the next bend, letting it take line as it dashed up the slower runs and zigzagged in the riffles. He ran after her. At first he called encouragement, a patter of instruction, and then he fell silent. This was all hers and she was meeting it with everything she had.
They rounded a tight bend into deeper shade. The river widened a little into a rocky riffle at the top of which, in sunlight, was the famous post with its sign and the meadow. All on the river’s left bank, to their right as they looked upstream, same side as the lodge. The grass was long and almost the color of the trout’s back. What Jack thought. The bank was not high here and the brush and trees had been cleared away so that he could see the log ranch house across the field. Line of sight. Kreutzer. If he really did have a spotting scope, or a good scope on a rifle, he could probably see the silver of her earrings. What a crazy fucker, he didn’t really shoot at people, did he?
Just then the fish caught her second wind, if she’d ever lost the first. Jack had begun to think of her as female, because to fight this hard she must have been full of roe and protecting her eggs. The riffle was not long and the trout lunged up it and swam into the quiet pool at the top, right at the edge of the meadow. Then, with what must have been the last shreds of her strength, she fought the pull and went deep and stopped. Unbelievable. Few humans had this much heart. Jack could not have measured his admiration. He loved the fish right then as much as anything in his world.
Alison K slowed and trotted past the wooden marker that said keep out! private! don’t get shot! She went past it along the bank until she was level with the plunging line and he could see her breathing hard and she finally looked back. And he did not have time to tell her to please not go past the post. “Hey!” he yelled. She waved. “Hey!” He ran. He stumbled on a root, caught himself, and ran to her side; he did not slip the long net from his belt as he went.
“Hey we—we can’t—” He was going to tell her that they were trespassing, that they better break off and turn back. But. He followed the taut yellow line from the bent rod straight down into the dark pool. The strength, the desperate effort it was still taking the fish to hold that depth. Fuck that. That fish, any fish, deserved better than if they parted the tippet and she swam away with a hook in her jaw and three feet of trailing line that would eventually tangle on some root and kill her. Nope, they would bring her up and release her.
“Good” was all he said. “That was really good. She is a special fish. Damn.”
“Damn.”
“Wanna bring her up?”
“Yes.”
She did. And as she brought up the fish Jack was aware of his back in a new way, that it faced the house two hundred yards off, that the light pack he wore would not stop a thing, and though he did not believe that anyone on this river would really shoot at anyone else, he realized that he was bracing for the crack of a warning shot, the jump of a stone on the far bank.
* * *
•
She was probably three pounds. Alison K didn’t care about a picture, all she wanted was to slip the tiny hook from the trout’s lip and cradle her in her loosely cupped hands. Hold her against the slow current as the great fish’s gills worked and her tail wavered slowly as she breathed and recovered. Alison squatted in the shallow water at the edge of the pool and held her for as long as it took. After maybe ten minutes, Jack said, “You’re good? I’m gonna go see a farmer about a horse.”
He really had to pee. He looked around. At the top of the pool was a ford of shallow stones and he waded across into a dense grove of spruce. He crunched onto the bed of needles and cones and unclipped the waist pack and the webbing belt and pushed down the waders. He couldn’t do it fast enough. It had been a while since lunch, where he’d drunk too much iced tea, and the chase was high adrenaline and he was nearly in pain. He exhaled and was about to close his eyes and release when he noticed the strap sticking from the ground.
It was a dun green Velcro fastener. Barely emerged from disturbed duff.
It was all disturbed. A patch like the outline of a small tent. The spruce needles were darker where they had been roughed and tossed and he could see that the Velcro was the strap of a wading boot. He let go and pissed—that wave of relief—but he wasn’t following the arc of the stream: in the dim light he was trying to make out the edge of the boot and then the shot cracked and a chip of bark flew from a tree five feet away.
He dropped to his knees. Mid-piss and the flow clamped. He pulled up his waders, ran his palm over the ground behind him, and found his webbing belt and clipped it, picked up the waist pack, and crouched and ran. What the hell?
Jack came out of the trees at a full sprint. She was standing, holding her rod in the sunlight, startled, blinking. His net was on the rocks. He splashed across the stone ford and yelled, “Downstream! Run downstream!” She was confused. She looked across the meadow, then at the river. “Go!” he yelled. “Run!” Half nod and she was moving.
CHAPTER FOUR
“I should fire you right now. If it wasn’t goddamn impossible to get a decent guide mid-season, I would.”
That was Kurt, who was waiting for Jack on the porch of his cabin. Kurt did not want to dress down his guide by the lodge or in the sandy track by Jack’s truck where guests might see. He had dealt with one crazy client already. Alison K had been beyond pissed. She wanted to drive up to Kreutzer’s right now, with Kurt, and give the sonofabitch a double-barreled reprimand. Wanted to break his damn rifle against the wall of his fancy log mansion. Kurt stood in front of her and tried to calm her, held his big hands out in air as if he were pressing down on the back of a bucking pony.
“Well, I know, I know, but we can’t go over there. Gate’s locked, first off, and he will never open it. Won’t answer his phone, either. I know—I been through this before. Yes, the old coot should be locked up. No, the sheriff won’t touch it, long as it’s a warning shot. Law’s unclear is why—he kinda has a right to warn folks off his property. Yes, even with a gunshot. I know. How old? Christ the bastard must be eighty if a day. Or eighty-five. Eighty-five going on fourteen if you ask me. Crazier than a loon, apparently. Yes, but he’s been like that his whole life. I know.”
“Warning shot?” Alison steamed. “Eighty-five, for chrissakes. How bad does he shake? He could’ve killed Jack. Or me. Jack said he hit a tree a few feet away, warning shot my ass.”
She was apeshit. Jack had to hand it to Kurt: he held out those big palms and let her buck out. Never once cast blame or aspersion in her direction. Never once said, “You know, the boundary is clearly marked and it does say, ‘Don’t get shot!’ ” He never once shook his head and led with a “Just sayin’.” Nope, he agreed with her one hundred percent and let her vent out her anger.
It was Jack he had words for. On the cabi
n porch with the stone smell of the river coming up from below.
Kurt said, “You saw the sign. Fact, I don’t give a shit if you saw it, or if your eyesight is twenty–a thousand and you can’t read those big block letters—I told you. I expressly warned you: Do-not-under-any-circumstances-go-past-the-post. I told you this was no bullshit, we had a guest shot at last year. Cody, too, and he swears he was this side of the post. But unh unh. Rules don’t apply to you, maybe, and you went ahead and endangered your client, yourself, and frankly this whole operation. If word gets out—which it will—that another guest was shot at we could lose I don’t even wanna guess how much potential business. Goddamn. First goddamn day.”
He was not playacting. He stood beside Jack at the edge of the porch, arms crossed, looking down at the bending river silvering in the long sun coming up the canyon and he spat. A jet of chew. His jaw set tight again, chin out. As if he couldn’t even bear to look at this worthless employee.
Jack opened his mouth. “I—”
Kurt held up a hand. Don’t wanna hear it. Shut the fuck up. Then he reconsidered, spat. “Were you gonna apologize, sans excuses numbers one, two, and three?”
“No.”
Now the manger turned with a creak of his boots on the planks. He had a lethal gleam in his eye. “No?”
“No. She followed the fish ten feet past the line. She fought it all the way up the riffle and it dove deep in that pool. Anybody watching could see it clear as day—that all she wanted to do was bring it up and turn around.”
Kurt slipped a finger into his snap-shirt breast pocket and fished out a can of Copenhagen. He refreshed his dip and slid it back. Didn’t say a word. Spat off the porch. Turned back to study the river. “Why are you here?” he said finally.
“Need work.”
“Yeah?”
Kurt didn’t complete the thought. He didn’t have to say, “You’re a stone-cold liar.” They both let the question or challenge drift off the porch like a moth on the breeze. Yeah? But he wasn’t done. Kurt said, “Guy with an education like yours, who takes up guiding, he’s usually running.”