by John Larison
He turned his head to give her privacy, considered what she’d just said, realized they had fundamental disagreements. He muttered, “You can sun yourself anywhere.”
But this is where she wanted to be, and she wasn’t moving. If she wouldn’t bend, neither would he. He anchored, grabbed his rod, and leapt over the gunwale. “We can share the place then. I’ll be down there for an hour or more. I’ll holler when I’m on my way back up.”
She just stared at him, her hands still strategically placed. He spied the wet filaments of her armpit hair, the bulge of her underbreast. Maybe fishing was a choice.
“I’m not a painting,” she bit.
There was a strong run of fish that year, and he rose one in Barrier where they always rise if they’re going to rise at all. The fish came once, missed the fly, came a second time, missed again, then wouldn’t return. He fished his way through the run, then returned to that lie and tried for what must have been an hour, switching flies, switching casting positions, resting, trying again, but the fish wouldn’t budge. This was the kind of fishing he loved, the run to yourself, an eager fish out there somewhere, and yet he found himself fishing poorly. His casts landed in piles, his flies kept ducking underwater. He wasn’t immersed in the water’s reality like he should have been. He kept glancing upstream, all the way up near the boat, at the golden shape on the beach.
When he returned, she was emptying a trap-load of crawdads into a bucket, clothed now in a tank top and a pair of cutoff jeans. She banged clean the trap.
“Hi,” he said meekly.
“You were down there a long time not to be coming back with a fish.” Her hair was back and drying and leaving a wet patch on her shirt like sweat.
“Never seen a woman trapping crawdads before.” He’d meant it as some variety of compliment. She took it as some variety of insult.
“Men don’t have a monopoly on meat procurement.” She pointed at his empty hands. “Do they?”
“Didn’t mean to suggest they do.”
And there began eight years of minor misunderstandings, some of which ballooned into major ones, which ballooned again into fullblown wedges, one of which would drive her to leave him. They were never right for each other. But in that moment, they were two late twenty-somethings on a hot summer day, the Ipsyniho a potent if one-sided aphrodisiac.
“I’m Hank.”
“I know who you are. I live near Marcy.”
During his few years in the valley, he’d developed—accidentally—a little reputation for himself among Ipsyniho’s unattached ladies.
“Oh.” Marcy, a woman he’d holed up with last winter, was a baker in town who would in the years to come open Ipsyniho’s first gourmet restaurant, Spindrift. Things between them had gotten, well, messy.
He pointed at her bucket, asked after her strategy. He’d tried catching crawdads during the summer lulls, to add to the Ipsyniho bouillabaisse that he’d been refining as his default first-date meal. Bouillabaisse, he’d found, possessed magical powers. When he served it, the evening more often than not resulted in a following morning. The meal’s seductive force, he figured, lay in its contradictions. It suggested sophistication, that he possessed a certain cultural refinement, but at the same time it exhibited his “rugged” waterman skills; the salmon, the rock bass, the mussels, all could be procured in a day with a quick drive to the salt. Back then, romance had seemed as important an ingredient to a good life as the Ipsyniho itself.
She played like she had little interest in him, in his fly rod, in his interest in her crawdads. “Look,” she said, holding up a hand to block the light, “I’ve got a party to be at this afternoon and I’ve still got four traps to pull between here and Susan Creek.”
“Is this Bridge and Rita’s party up Echo Creek?”
It was, and so on this connection, she acquiesced to his advances and allowed him to follow her downriver, allowed him to help clear the traps, and later, allowed him to drive her to the party. But she refused when he offered her a ride home. And later, she refused two dinner offers. It wasn’t until they saw each other again on the river that she finally accepted his invitation—though she said, “No bouillabaisse.” So, he took her for an evening boat ride and they grilled steelhead over a beach fire and there was a kiss but no next morning. There would be no next morning for months. But all her resistance only served to fuel his interest—he was sucker for hard-to-get. By winter, he’d fallen for her, and by spring, he thought she’d fallen for him.
Riffle Anne was born two years later, the surprise baby that sparked so many other surprises in Rosemary, in him. He took a month off work. He doted, he tended, he preened. After that month, he worked only seven trips a month, just enough to skimp by. He was going to do this right, to be the kind of father the world needed, even if it meant sacrificing what he assumed he never would.
He was a miserable guide that year, and frequently, his clients went fishless. There were fish in the river, and the flows weren’t abnormally bad, but he was out of touch with the system, with its cycles and moods. He was half a step behind, his boat always low rod at the ramp. That bothered him. But not as much as Rosemary’s disdain when he mentioned it to her.
She’d been a raft guide and waitress then and, in winter, a lifty at the mountain. She thought she understood the nuances of his career, what was required to keep clients happy. But no matter how carefully he explained, she still seemed to think the fish, like the rapids, were always in the same places. Really this tiff, which grew into a fight, was about Hank’s need to stay connected with the ecology outside their home and its small domestic orbit. That connection was what made him feel substantial in the world, worth his molecules. Without it, no matter the joys at home, he felt adrift, untethered, petty. He said as much. But for Rosemary, this fight was about having a partner at least as committed as she, a partner as attentive as her own father had been. Maybe, Hank wondered, he’d been raised to fail.
Still, Rosemary surprised him one day by deciding she couldn’t live on the river forever and she couldn’t live with him. “Riffle and I will be healthier elsewhere.” Her life had stagnated and needed a freshet: in her words, “I can’t go on like this.” What she needed, she said, was to start architecture school in Eugene. When he begged why, she glanced toward four-year-old Riffle, who was in the yard talking to pinecones as if they were babies. “You’ll be glad to have the space again, don’t pretend otherwise. You’ll be able to do whatever you want.”
“That’s not what I want.”
“We both know you, Hank.”
So his time with Riffle suddenly became two days a week, which felt like nothing. She was taller and leaner and more sophisticated each time he arrived to pick her up. She was growing and becoming a person, a person he would just come to know again by the hour of her departure. He begged Rosemary to let Riffle spend the summer back on the river, to let him have a block of time with her. “You’ve made me into a joe with my own daughter.” But Rosemary had an internship in some far-off place, and was hesitant to leave little Riffle with a father who worked five or six days a week in the summer. He said he’d take time off, but she called him on it: “You can’t afford to take time off during the sprint.” “What about the winter?” he asked. And she agreed that it would be good for Riffle to come spend a month during winter term. “I’ll need that month to focus on exams anyway.”
She was six then, and he took the whole month off, though there wasn’t much work to be had then anyway. An ice storm locked them inside for almost two weeks of the visit, and they filled their days reading stories on the couch and, later, crafting their own picture books. She would draw the images and he would write the words, and together they would staple the pages together and glue them within a cardboard cover. Those were the most intimate days they ever shared. He wondered where those books were now.
A summer later, Riffle left with Rosemary for Michigan and some “opportunity” waiting there. Though they still saw each other for a fe
w days here and a week there, the visits became increasingly painful. The moment she arrived, he’d already be shredded with the agony of her departure. And then she’d be gone, and an abyss of longing and regret would open beneath his feet, and he’d flounder there for weeks after. She was changing and he was missing everything.
The years passed, and her calls came less frequently. They were living in Chicago, and Riffle, on her summer trip to the river, begged him to “move home” with her. He considered it, he really did. He went so far as to call a client there to ask after work. “I once was offered a job in insurance,” he said to the man, summarizing the entirety of his professional qualifications. The client was kind—he had daughters of his own—and a few days later a call came with the offer of a position in sales. “It’s a solid job, with a chance to move up.” But when the moment came, he couldn’t. On the drive to catch her flight, he explained why he couldn’t follow her east. “This is my home, Rif.” But she only heard what lay under the words: that he was choosing the river over her.
The next time they talked, Riffle was going by her middle name, Annie. Then, she wasn’t home when he called and she didn’t return his messages. Somehow, he’d lost her. Or so it felt.
The last time they saw each other, Annie was seventeen, starting college in Maine in the fall. She was scheduled to come for a month, but left after a week. They hadn’t talked since, that is until she called him out of the murky blue just a month before Justin Morell went missing.
*
HANK GASPED AWAKE before his alarm. It didn’t help that his bladder had contracted to the size of a goddamn mandarin. He pissed off the porch and started the kettle and checked the river levels and the fish counts and the weather predictions but none of this succeeded in washing away the drowning he’d been suffering just before he awoke. He still couldn’t pull a full breath.
He ground the beans and poured the hot water over them and went to his bookshelf. The bottom row was filled entirely with composition journals, organized chronologically, and he knew precisely which to grab without checking the dates. He carried it into the light of the kitchen and opened to a page he’d seen a thousand times before, a page dated July 21, 1982. Riffle would’ve been three. He had recorded his regular river data, temperature, flow, clarity, and the details from a trip he ran that morning: client went zero for one. It was a short entry, at least by his current standard. But below it, he’d rambled on for pages.
She doesn’t like to eat much. Occasionally, we’ll show her a piece of chicken or a cheese ball and she’ll rush across the room to strike, but usually, she’ll turn immediately back to whatever it is that she’s doing, usually drawing. But no matter how steadfastly she refuses something, I can still get her to eat it. I move in close without distracting her and place the bite within inches of her mouth. If she sees it coming, she won’t take. But if I can deliver it without her seeing it, she’ll strike it, every time. She senses it there somehow, and her mouth does the thinking.
Two pages later, dated the next day:
I came in the bathroom and found her standing before the toilet, gripping the rim, her undies at her ankles. She was peeing all over herself. “What are you doing?” I said. She looked up at me and smiled. “I’m using my pee-nee.”
He tucked the journal back in its place and was on his way to the coffee. Time to meet the client. His eye glanced across the lone journal on the top shelf, out of order and out of place, and even without opening it, he remembered its words verbatim.
August 7 1997:
Fished with Annie this morning on what I thought would be our first drift of many this summer. She didn’t want to fish, so I took the rod and landed one, a fourteen-pound buck. Mint fish. Probably be the best I’ll get this year. She really missed out. Day ended early, when she said, “You mean nothing to me.” Teenager thing, I’m sure.
I’m not very good at this parenting thing. Trying but I’m starting to fear that I’m missing some essential ingredient. Checked out four books on the subject from the library. Next time she comes, I’ll get it right.
Tomorrow, after returning from an early trip to the airport, I’ll fish hard. At least there’s something I’m good at.
Chapter Six
IN THE DAYS that followed, little was learned about Morell’s disappearance. Search and Rescue at first expanded their body search, bringing in a helicopter from Roseburg. The Huey’s chop, chop, chop could be heard echoing up and down the valley as if it were delivering marines to some battle upriver. Looking up at the passing roar, Hank could see three pink faces, helmeted and intent, peering down on his pool. But after a few days, the Search and Rescue coordinator announced the formal search for Justin Morell had ended. “We have little hope of recovering him at this point.”
That same day, Hank learned through the grapevine that Sheriff Carter suspected foul play. He’d been interviewing people in and around town, but had been focusing on those folks who’d spoken to Morell in the days before his disappearance. Hank expected Carter’s truck to arrive at his house any moment.
But today Hank was with Danny enjoying a morning off. Danny had this way about him, something that made Hank feel lighter, more agile even. Danny seemed to see the world from a place of fundamental optimism. And if anybody had reason to think poorly of this world, it was Danny. Nonetheless, he had once said that if a guy let go the oars and did nothing else, his boat would eventually deliver itself to the takeout. “Oaring only adjusts the view.” That seemed to encapsulate it all for Danny: This life would be filled with good and bad in more or less equal parts, and either way you would arrive at the end—so why not use your energies to maintain the best vista?
Danny backed his boat through an eddy and to the shore and dropped anchor. The same move would have taken Hank four or five pulls on the oars, but it took Danny just one. He was easily the strongest man Hank had ever known, a logger by breeding, an oarsman by profession. “Your turn, old man.”
They were at the head of Big Bend, a long and wide pool for this river, a place where a caster could really open up. A ledge on the far side held most of the fish these days, though twenty, thirty, forty years back they would stack up behind all the pool’s boulders. Hank and Danny knew right where the fish would be, yet they still chose to fish the run the old way, from the top down, a cast to every lie. Big Bend had four generations of custom to guide its angling, and who were they to fish it otherwise?
“I’ll follow you through,” Hank said. “One more fish isn’t going to make or break my life.”
Danny bit through his leader. “Enough deferring. How’ll I learn your secrets if I don’t watch you fish?”
“I don’t have any secrets left.”
Danny chuckled. “Fuck you.”
They both knotted on new flies, and Danny lit a joint and Hank fished out a cigarette.
It was true that in the last few years he’d become much less stable on his feet. Someday soon he’d have to carry a wading staff like Walter’s, at least while negotiating fast water. “Mostly,” Hank called, wading into position, “I’m afraid I’ll fall in and you’ll tell everybody at the shop about it.”
“I will too,” Danny said, “you know it.”
Hank had known Danny since Danny was too small for waders. He could still remember the little red-haired kid chasing all the girls at those summer parties some thirty years back, pulling at his wanker and hopping around like an overcaffeinated jackrabbit: boy in its essential form. Danny’s older brother, Joel, who had passed away as a teenager, was at those parties too, typically roaming the periphery with a small band of pranksters. Now Danny was definitively grown-up, a couple years older than Annie, his face seasoned by decades outside. Hank had known from the first time he took Danny in the boat that the kid would end up a guide. No doubt. Children divided themselves into two categories when in a drift boat—those who couldn’t peel their nervous eyes from the shore and those who were all but climbing over the gunwales to swim in the water. Danny h
ad taken the latter to a new level of enthusiasm. Three times, Hank had lifted that sopping boy out of a rapid. Danny’s own father had little interest in anything but the bottle. Something else Danny and Hank had in common.
As a teenager, Danny became a fixture on the river. He would hitch rides between runs and often linger at boat ramps hoping to score an empty seat. Hank remembered one trip in particular, a dawn he had only one client and Danny was waiting with his bike at the ramp. The client said he didn’t mind if this kid took the empty seat—probably because he figured no pimply-faced youth could outfish an experienced angler like himself. But at the end of the day, Danny had risen six or eight fish to the sport’s one. Angling ability was one thing, class was another, and Danny had both, even then. At the ramp as the client congratulated this kid on his fish, Danny shrugged and said, “I had to get lucky eventually.”
It had been Hank who’d lent Danny the money for his first boat, who’d called the marine board and helped him get legal as a registered guide. It had been Hank who’d taught Danny to oar, to pick a line through a Class V, to rig the ropes and recover a stuck boat. Hank who’d shown Danny the remaining spawning strongholds, the rearing areas, the staging pools. Danny didn’t need Hank to teach him how to fish the runs, but he did need Hank to teach him the history of those runs, their customs, their particular etiquettes. All the things Walter had taught Hank those years before. That was how it was done on Ipsyniho, at least then.
Over the years, their relationship had evolved until the tutelage went both ways. They had for years traded secret lies, hidden seams and ledges that held fish but weren’t fished. But now they traded strategies for spinning deer hair and splicing lines and chucking heavy winter flies. Hank was an old dog these days, but Danny was just coming into form. He was known throughout steelhead country as an innovator, and had become an esteemed gear designer for the biggest name manufacturers—Danny was the cutting edge of the sport. Most recently, he’d refined and shortened Skagit lines, and designed a special series of rods meant to tip-cast these short heads in tight casting conditions— something other guides had for years considered impossible. If Hank had a question about tackle or boats, he came to Danny. If Danny had a question about the fish or river history, he came to Hank.