by Peter Heller
Jack didn’t rise. Was he running? He had no idea. He knew that when he was at home on the ranch helping his father it wasn’t great to have a ton of unstructured time. It was harder these days to crack a book or take out his fishing gear. Running or not running, it was his concern, nobody else’s. He was here, on contract, for the rest of the season. He was not a felon. That’s about all that should matter to the lodge.
Kurt grimaced at the river, stretched his neck, rubbed his chin. “I been canoeing once or twice,” he said.
Jack took a half step back as if pushed. If Kurt heard it he didn’t bother to look. “Shit can happen on a river. The strangest shit. Dangerous, too. Outta nowhere. Am I right?”
If Jack had words they were stuck like pieces of ice swallowed sideways.
“I think that’s why I like fishing, guiding. Pleasant mostly, but—” Kurt spat. “Shit can get crosswise so fast. Keeps you on your toes. And you don’t wanna be distracted, dwelling on what all you might have done, or some fat screw-up where somebody died. I mean…” His head swiveled and he winced at Jack, who was staring. Kurt chuckled. “Don’t look shocked. Ever Google your name? Once you screen out the real estate agent in Indiana you get a lot about a kid who was on a river expedition up by Hudson Bay that didn’t turn out so well for his best friend. Three years ago, right? I’m sorry, I truly am.”
Kurt tugged his hat brim down tight on his forehead, turned on his boot heel, and walked right past Jack and off the porch. He smelled of woodsmoke and burnt plastic and kerosene. “Oh,” he said as he passed. “Park your truck with the others by the gate. And don’t forget to bring up that thirty-thirty and whatever other guns. Bad enough that Kreutzer’s shooting at folks.”
* * *
•
Jack skipped dinner. He wasn’t in the mood. He’d been shot at by his neighbor and dressed down by his boss all in one afternoon, and ordered to give up his Winchester lever-action .30-.30 carbine. Which he was loath to do, on principle. It gave him, if anything, moral support. Last night, after he had fetched it from the truck and leaned it in the corner, he had slept better. Also, he’d seen something that afternoon that had disturbed him: the green strap emerging from the duff of spruce needles like the nose of some small animal seeking air. And beside it, the edge of what had to be a wading boot. What was that? Where they dumped worn-out gear? But it wasn’t just the shoe, it was the roughed-up ground around it, and the shape of it.
He would meet Alison K in the morning and they would fish again, maybe work on her nymphing, but tonight he wanted to stick to himself. He especially did not want to meet Kurt for fear of what he, Jack, might say or do. The man had impugned his integrity as a guide—the client’s safety is always the first priority—and had basically called him a screw-up. For this day and for his past. Did he need the job this badly? No. Did he want to stay? Probably not. Did he want to get in his truck and drive out tonight? Not really. He really needed to get away from the family ranch for a while. The routine there was so ingrained, he and his father so habituated to each other, that being there was almost like standing still. Or drifting on a very slow current, and it left him altogether too much time to think and to feel. This, the fishing part, the guiding and teaching with a good client, he loved. If he could stay out of Kurt’s hair, keep from tangling, he might be okay. It was good money and he could fish until November and have a small stake to take him to the next thing, whatever that might be.
He had food in the truck—packets of noodle soup and freeze-dried stroganoff that he always kept with him, and a case of Dinty Moore beef stew, in cans. Because one never knew. He also had his backpacking gear, but he wouldn’t need the stove tonight as the cabin had the two burners. He’d make a modest meal—poor compared to what would be served a few hundred yards downhill—and he’d eat it on the porch and enjoy it more. Kurt hadn’t said anything about being required to eat in the lodge.
Before he heated dinner, would he walk up to the office house by the gate and hand in his rifle? No. He wanted it tonight. He’d make Kurt ask him again or fire him. He’d say it slipped his mind.
He took a hot shower and heated up a can of stew. He was just buttoning his shirt when he heard footsteps on the porch and a hesitant knock on the door. He opened it. A short woman wearing a blue windbreaker with the lodge’s leaping trout logo held out three folded towels. She had long black hair in a braid on her shoulder and her eyes flicked up to his and down to the towels.
“Ana?” She nodded.
“Hello. Mr. Jack?” she said.
“Yes.”
“I thought you might want extra towels before I go home.”
“Oh.” He reached out to take them. “Thank you.”
“I’m sorry about the gun.”
“That’s all right.”
“They are very strict here.”
“I’m getting that.”
“If I don’t report what I am supposed to report I lose my job.”
“Sure.”
She wouldn’t look at him. Jack said, “¿De dónde es?”
Her head came up.
“¿De qué estado?”
“Durango.”
“Lo conozco.”
Her eyes widened. “¿Sí?”
Jack smiled. “I once bought a horse from there. From Santa Clara. There is a breeder there, famous for his cutting horses. Fui para recogerla.”
She returned the smile, hesitant. Sad.
“Beautiful, big country. You must miss it,” he said.
She nodded. “I do. Claro. I better get home,” she said. “My little one starts first grade in a week and she—”
“She wants her mother all the time,” Jack said.
“Sí, eso es. Okay, buenas noches.”
“Á usted.” He held up the towels. “Gracias.”
At the edge of the porch she turned. Something like fear crossed her face, followed by something like decision. It reminded Jack of the shadow of two hawks fighting in mid-air. She hesitated and then she said, “Tres, tres, nueve, tres.”
“What?” Jack said, confused.
“Recuerde…Dígamelo. Please.”
“Three, three, nine, three.”
She nodded and went up the path. He took the towels in and lifted the pot of stew off the burner. What the heck was that? The last part? He had no idea. He took the stew out to one of the rockers and ate straight from the stainless backpacking pot, and had the sifting of the river and the reedy peeps of flycatchers for company. He saw an osprey glide downstream into the low sun that flooded the bend with warm light. And he let the stresses of the day wash through him. He was glad to meet Ana; she somehow took the sting out of Kurt’s anger. He didn’t want to think about any of it, just feel those last sprays of sun on the side of his face and eat his dinner. But he did think. He thought about Alison K, for one.
She was really famous, he was certain. A singer—he knew as soon as he heard her hum. Her voice was beautiful, even barely above a whisper. Soulful. Iconic, one of the great ones. He had heard the voice and seen her face in photos, he was certain, but couldn’t place her because he was pretty much musically illiterate. He listened to the radio in his truck but that was about it. He had spent so much time in the saddle and on the creek, and reading, that he had missed the waves of musical fashion that had rocked his peers. If he had a cell signal now—which he didn’t—he could search her, but he probably wouldn’t anyway, out of a natural tact. To prevent the kind of intrusion he had just felt from his boss.
She was a celebrity here for some peace, for escape probably from relentless recognition, for fishing. But she did not act how Jack thought celebrities acted. She was not shuttered behind big sunglasses, she was not elusive or snotty, she seemed truly down-to-earth. More than that, he thought she had a certain bravery he rarely encountered and couldn’t define; it was something to do wi
th a willingness to look beyond the surface of things, into their heart, and he wondered if that was an essential part of being an artist. It was more than just curiosity, it seemed to him she was restless for truth somehow. How he had understood that in one day of fishing he wasn’t sure, but it intrigued him. He remembered, or relived, the scent of her, leaning in against his shoulder as he showed her how to tie on a fly with an Orvis knot rather than the classic clinch knot. A blossom smell of shampoo and something almost woody, or smoky, coming off her neck, her arms. The way she had stood after lunch, straight, with her hands near her sides, and looked right into him and said yes to everything. Her lack of fear—of criticism, or of whatever they were going to try next. Her sudden surprised laugh. How she broke the tension with her candor: “It’s okay. You’re a boy and I’m a girl.”
He would not fall in love, that was something he no way would do on the first day of a new job. He was trying to work his way into some stability, some solace maybe, not out of it. And he would not lose his heart in a mountain canyon a thousand miles from wherever this person lived. A person who probably had a million suitors, including famous musicians and actors. Millionaire producers. Who was he? A boy who had barely graduated from college because he was so stricken with the aggregated losses of his mother and his best friend. Whose past life was slipping out under his feet and who had no notion of how to approach the future. Except to try to keep this job for the next two and a half months, a prospect that seemed less certain this evening than it had been in the morning. God.
Still he could not stop seeing her fishing, the grace of her movements as she stepped across two stones, the curve and swing of her hips. Her smile, blinking into the sun; the smooth line of her jaw where it met her throat; her long neck. Husky laugh. And the way a melody carried on her voice, even when she hummed; he had never heard anything like it. Jesus. Was she flirting with him? Yes. Was she toying with him? He didn’t know. She did not seem cruel in any way, or self-aggrandizing, or in need of any affirmation from anyone. She had a self-sufficiency that rivaled his father’s, without the terseness. She seemed to act honestly on how she saw things and how she felt. Seemed. He was not really in any shape to judge anyone’s character, was he?
Whew.
The sun dropped below the last ridge of pines downcanyon, and drew after it a train of shadow and immediate chill. Jack pushed up and out of the chair and stepped into the cabin and clapped the screen door behind him. He pulled on the thick wool fisherman’s sweater that had been his grandfather’s. He rinsed the pot and threw the greasy wash off the porch, then heated water for tea. He went back to the truck and found a plastic honey bear and stirred some in and returned to his creaking seat. He sipped the tea as darkness thickened.
Small bats appeared over the river, just fluttering shadows that seemed to condense out of the cool grainy air. They were soft like the air, and they flitted with a silence that belied their speed. If he listened hard he could hear now and then the slightest peep. He tried to follow one after another in aerobatic flight and lost them to the dusk and to their elaborate weavings. He envied them in a way: the simplicity of the night’s errand—to catch bugs; to return to an overhang somewhere, in cliff or outbuilding. To mate, to nest. What Cheryl had wanted, with him, and right now it didn’t seem at all soul killing or dull. If he could guide, just fish, and come back to this every evening, he’d be fine. More than fine. If he could keep from getting crosswise with Kurt—more crosswise—and if some new crazy virus didn’t burn through the town and up the canyon.
It’d be nice to have one summer of peace.
He took the empty tea mug inside and rinsed it in the sink. He set his alarm for 5:30, though he knew he wouldn’t need it, and fell asleep hard.
* * *
•
He woke suddenly to the sound of footsteps. He thought they were steps. A slow but rhythmic crunching of pine needles. Was it? There would be deer moving up and down the canyon, elk, too. Coyotes. Bear. Mountain lion for sure. Were the steps four-legged or two-? By the time he knew he was not dreaming but fully awake and his head was clear he was not sure what he’d heard. He thought in a flash it might be Alison K paying a visit. Her cabin was only a hundred and fifty yards down the bank and she seemed to know where he slept. His heart hammered and he listened hard. He wasn’t sure if he wished that it was her and he sat up. But it wasn’t. The creshing stopped as soon as he gave it his full attention.
Still, he swung his feet to the floor and reached for the gun. Must have been late. Through the upstream window, between the lace curtains, a nearly half-moon the color of bone struggled off the ridge. The light it cast was sallow, as if fevered, as if pushing through haze, and he thought maybe there was a fire off to the east somewhere, though he smelled no smoke.
He levered the action of the gun halfway and slid a finger into the breach and felt the brass of the round chambered there. Good. He lay the rifle across the quilt and dressed quickly. He felt for his cap on a nail by the door and had the thought as he did that Ken the Hen, the previous guide, must have hammered it there for just that purpose; the lodge would have used a fancy hand-wrought hook. This had been Ken’s cabin. And then the image of the wading boot barely seen in the spruce grove sent goose bumps up his arms.
Murder? No way. But then he hadn’t thought it possible that a neighbor would shoot at him, either.
If someone was casing his cabin he wanted to know. He picked up the rifle and he pushed out through the screen, yawing the spring, and closed it gently behind him. Very carefully, he stepped over the boards and off the upstream side of the porch. The moon threw a feeble light over the canyon but he moved into the shadows of the dense trees and he found a large ponderosa among the lodgepole and leaned against it. As he would if he were waiting for an approaching elk. The smell off the bark he loved, like strong vanilla. He listened. A still night with the breeze stirring downstream, following the river. He could hear the muffled rush of it, of the rapid above the bridge where she had run with her valiant fish. Whatever had been moving was stopped and waiting or gone. He flared his nostrils. He knew deer smell and bear and the musk of bull elk in rut, which would be beginning now. A person’s deodorant could give them away. Nothing.
What the hell. He didn’t have a whole lot to lose, he was on the verge of getting fired anyway. He really needed to know.
He slung the rifle and walked quietly across the slope to the trail that descended to the river. If someone stopped him, which they wouldn’t, he would say he was going night fishing, one of his favorite pastimes. If they asked him why he didn’t have a rod, he’d say he’d leaned it against a tree back a ways while he scouted. Fuck ’em.
He went down the steep path, and turned upstream when he hit the river and the fishermen’s trail, and crossed the bridge. On the other side he followed it easily by moonlight to where it ended abruptly in a pile of boulders fifty yards below Kreutzer’s line. He could see, across the river and upstream, the opening of the meadow and the dreaded post.
He climbed over the rocks. He threaded in and out of willow brush, at the edge of the wall of trees. He could see the moon clearly floating in the ragged V of the canyon. It was dirty, almost spectral, its light wan, but he felt exposed and wished it had been two hours earlier when the night was only stars and much darker.
When he got to the grove of black timber he was glad for the richer darkness. He pushed into the spruce and prickled his cheeks on the sharp needles. When he reached the small opening in the middle where he thought he had peed, he peered out and could see the lights of Kreutzer’s lodge. The night was very still. The long pool where Alison had netted her fish quieted the creek and he could hear crickets in the grass on the opposite bank.
He knelt and ran his hands over the duff of needles where he thought the boot might be but felt nothing. He had a headlamp in his fishing waist pack but he was loath to use it. He crawled forward and
made another semicircle with his palms. He closed his eyes to focus better and then he heard it. A thrum, very faint, he thought it sounded like a motor, and then a heavy door, not slammed but solidly closed, and then a shriek.
Was it a barn owl? They sound some nights like a woman being murdered. This one rose to a terrible pitch like the owl’s but was silvery and sharp and thin. And then it clipped short.
Silence.
Even the crickets had ceased. No motor now, no door, nothing.
It took him a second to sit up, to move his limbs again. To hear anything but the thudding of his heart. Nothing again, same as before. He dug the headlamp out of his waist pack and took off his cap and shielded the lamp on the river side and thumbed the switch over to the red beam. Red light did not affect night vision and it would be harder to see from Kreutzer’s.
He scanned the ground and scanned it again. And felt his heart begin to race. This was where he had stood for sure. But the ground that had been rough with disturbed needles was now smooth and dry as if combed. Haphazard spruce cones lay where he had seen the boot. Maybe he was wrong, maybe he was ten feet off. He risked it. He brought the red light up along the trunk he remembered and there was the pale scar of the shot that had missed him, a patch of missing bark and splintered cambium. Here. Here had been a boot, for sure. No longer.
He was not going around the bend. He had seen it. It was not a fiction-reader’s imagination. Strap, Velcro, edge of wading boot. He fitted the elastic headband of the light to his head and knelt on all fours and began digging with his hands.
CHAPTER FIVE
Daybreak. Gray light moved among the trunks of the pines.
Before he had turned back downstream he had dug away the duff in a ten-foot circle. All he found was a nipper for cutting line—a modified toenail clipper with a rainbow trout enameled on the back. It could have belonged to any fisherman.