by John Larison
Walter knew the jailor’s father, and when Walter asked, the guy pointed his magazine toward the cells and said, “Have at it.”
“I keep waiting to wake up,” Andy said, slouched against his cage. There were no windows and no natural light. The place smelled of urine and mold, and Andy looked as if he hadn’t slept since his arrest. “I’d much prefer the one where I go to class naked.” Before settling in Ipsyniho, Andy had done a stint at college. He brought it up often.
“Fuck this.” Danny torqued on the cage bars and dust shook free from the ceiling.
“Listen,” Walter said. “We know you didn’t do it. Carter has got his ambitious head up the ass of some cartoon elephant.”
“What?”
“Don’t matter. Point is, we won’t sit by with you rotting in here.”
Hank checked to be make sure the hunter was lost among his carcasses, then pulled a paperback copy of The Habit of Rivers from his back pocket. “A little something to keep your mind on the water.” Hank and Andy had always had books in common.
Andy tucked the book down his pants, checking the guard as he did.
“You can keep that copy.”
“Tell us,” Danny said. “What do you need?”
“I didn’t fucking do it,” Andy said. “I didn’t. Sure we had our shit, but I’m no killer. You know me, I feel bad as hell when I bonk a fish. You gotta help me. You got to make Carter know.” Andy said this last part to Walter.
“I’m working on it,” Walter said.
“I can’t stomach the thought of everybody thinking I’m guilty. This is slander. I’m going to sue the piss out of him.”
Sue was a dirty word in Ipsyniho. Sports sued. Locals worked things out like people. “You ain’t gonna sue nobody,” Walter said. “Now listen, somebody musta seen you that day.”
“I was alone. I parked at the ramp and walked down to this spot I found, just a few casts. I was alone. That was it. Then I came back up. Didn’t see anybody. Didn’t see anything.”
“This spot I found” was code for “a secret place that I’ve never shown you.” So, Andy Trib had a few tricks up his sleeve after all. Who knew.
“You didn’t see Morell?” Hank asked.
Andy glanced at Danny before answering, and Hank got the impression there was more going on here than he knew. Andy shrugged. “I didn’t see anything.”
“But you told Carter you were at home alone.”
“It was simpler. I didn’t think anybody saw me up there. And he came gunning for me, asking all these questions, and I got spooked. So I told him I was at home. It seemed easier.”
“Do you have a lawyer?” Hank asked.
Andy nodded. “My father, he hired a guy from Portland. I’ll see him tomorrow.” Andy came from money, everybody knew that.
“That’s a start,” Walter said. “But a lawyer can’t recognize his own dick unless he sees it on paper. We’ll work the source, we’ll work Carter.”
As they left, Andy called out, “Hey, do me a favor.”
“Anything.”
“Bring me something worth eating. That guy”—Andy nodded toward the jailor—“is bringing me leftovers from his house and, I swear, the meat’s rotten.”
Chapter Sixteen
HANK AND ANNIE spent the day in a raft on the fast and mean upper river, where Class IVs were stacked one atop the next; Caroline was at the oars. Annie seemed to love the ride. For a time, she sat on the bow, her feet dangling over, her hands gripping the oh-shit cord. When the raft punched into a standing wave, Annie would shriek, then laugh. She looked fifteen up there.
“Your mom had a reputation,” Caroline said while feathering the sticks, “for not putting up with any bullshit from her clients.”
“I’m not surprised,” Annie said. “She’s got a similar reputation now.”
“Once when we were running a joint trip, I watched her broadside the boat through a rapid. This one guy took a wave in the face and fell inboard.” Caroline laughed at the memory. “Later, when I asked your mom about it, she said the guy had been telling sexist jokes all morning.”
They were passing Wolf Creek. Hank pointed at it. “We spent weeks last winter up there transplanting beavers.”
Annie laughed. “Excuse me?”
“From other drainages, private ones, where the owners were going to shoot them for flooding out their fields. Beavers are listed as vermin in the Beaver State, go figure, right? But you put a few beaver families in a basin and water temps go down, rearing habitat goes up, and silt stays off the redds.”
He had to stop this, stop trying too hard in all the wrong ways. Like a teenage boy, he was, compulsively showing off for the pretty girl.
This time Caroline bailed him out. “Your dad here has a reputation of his own. Bet you didn’t know he’s somewhat of a guru.”
Annie smiled. Whether out of humor or surprise, Hank didn’t know.
“He all but invented dry-fly-fishing for steelhead.”
Hank corrected her, explaining that dry flies had been fished over Atlantic salmon for generations and that Lee Wulff and Roderick Haig Brown, two famous authors and anglers, both fished dry flies to steelhead before Hank was born. “I’m just a fisherman.”
“But you can’t deny you’ve advanced the technique. You’ve changed the way people think of it entirely. See,” Caroline said to Annie, “people used to fish dry flies that mimicked natural insects, thinking steelhead were striking because of some latent reflex to attack buglike things. But your dad didn’t buy it. He thought steelhead were striking because of curiosity.”
“That’s not my theory,” Hank said. “Enos Bradner was arguing the curiosity theory sixty years ago. Lee Spencer argues it now. I got it from him.”
“But you’re the one who caused the radical shift in the flies people were fishing,” Caroline said. “Because of your dad, people now fish big flies in unnatural ways, not like bugs. Just look at the people on the river; they’re all fishing Hank’s way.”
Annie said, “Huh.”
“And you can’t deny,” Caroline continued, “that you developed the lines for turning over those flies. That’s all you.”
“It’s silly,” Hank said. “Fly design. Presentation. Who cares?” “I think it’s pretty neat,” Annie said.
“It’s why we’re together.” Caroline laughed. “I always wanted to date a rock star.”
They lunched in the shade beneath Eagle’s Nest, and after, they sprawled out for a little siesta. Annie took a book up the bank and sat in the moss, and Caroline rested her head on Hank’s shoulder. After a minute, he realized she was watching Annie.
Her own daughter was grown and out there somewhere. In the years they’d been together, he’d twice seen Caroline come unhinged, both times in the winter when she wasn’t working much. The first time, he’d found her locked in the bathroom, shaking and speechless. The second time was just last December, when she’d become distraught after seeing a film about an orphan who escaped Auschwitz. When Caroline lost it, there was no bringing her back. She didn’t even want solutions, he’d come to understand; she simply wanted him to take her in his arms and share the burden. Now, he passed his fingers through her hair and told her he loved her.
“What a blessing,” she said.
He wanted to say, Yours will come too, or something else optimistic, but he knew better. Caroline would never meet her daughter. And even if she did, neither of them would know.
Caroline stood and pointed to the top of the cliff. “Come on, Annie. Forget that book and follow me.”
Annie laughed. “You’re kidding.”
“Don’t be a siss. It’s a thrill.” Caroline grabbed her hand and all but pulled her up.
Hank called out, “It’s a big jump, Caroline.”
“She can handle it.”
Hank pulled himself from the ground and hurried to catch up.
Eagle’s Nest was a massive slab of granite that teetered over the river. From the lip to the water
was easily fifty feet, and downstream was a torrent of white water. According to Walter, the native Ipsynihians had once used the place for a coming-of-age ceremony that concluded with a headfirst dive. “It’ll be fun,” Caroline called.
Hank caught up with them near the top. Annie was laboring for breath and shaking her head. Beads of sweat were tracing down her back. “Really, I’m not sure.”
“But you’ve climbed this far,” Caroline said. She was smiling that smile of hers, the one that was meant to dare its receiver into being as carefree as she was.
“She’s not interested,” Hank said. “Carrie, stop it.”
Caroline laughed. “Ah, Hanky-Jo. Always worried about your women.” She stood higher on the hill than either of them, her hands on her hips as she caught her breath. Her muscular arms were ripe from the day’s rowing. “Come have a look, Annie.”
This is what Caroline did. She challenged people into contests of resolve—contests they probably wouldn’t win. Caroline had leapt from Eagle’s Nest a thousand times; to her it was known risk. To Annie, it was probably five times higher than anything she’d jumped before. And with that rapid downstream, this was for real. This wasn’t just some lake jump.
Hank touched Annie’s shoulder. “You don’t have to do this.”
“At least look,” Caroline said.
Annie climbed another step. “I’ll look, but I’m not much of a jumper.”
As Riffle, she’d been a fanatical jumper. Hank had always stopped the boat by small cliffs and large boulders, places in still water where a person could jump in safety. And Riffle had charged off these places again and again, only quitting when Hank insisted they move on. As she grew, he actually became a little concerned, concerned that he might have created a person without a healthy dose of fear.
So he was pleased when Annie peeked over the lip at Eagle’s Nest and shook her head. “Jesus. People jump from here?”
Caroline said, “You’ll feel great after.”
Annie backed away from the edge. “I’m not a big free-fall person, actually.”
“You’ll feel so alive.” Caroline backed her heels to the edge. “Let’s do it together.”
“Leave her be,” Hank said. “Caroline, enough already.”
Caroline took off her baseball hat and her sunglasses and tossed them to Hank. “We’re not your responsibility, Hank.”
Annie walked one more time to the edge, her toes a little closer to the lip this time. “Really? You think I can do it?”
Caroline smiled. “I think you should do it. I think if you don’t, you’ll regret it rest the day. You’ll regret it on the flight home. I’ll wait for you below.” And with that, Caroline backflipped out of sight. A moment later, the splash echoed off the far shore.
“Holy fuck,” Annie said, looking down. “She went in headfirst.”
She always did. In diving and elsewhere.
Hank nodded toward the trail. “After you.” But Annie was still looking down. “Annie?”
“I’ll do it if you do it.”
“Jump?”
She nodded. She was scared, but she was smiling. “I want to do it.”
Caroline’s echo from below: “You’ll love it!”
Annie tossed Hank her hat and sunglasses. “I’d rather we do it together.”
And so, he pulled off his shirt and set the sunglasses and hats in the shade and joined her on the edge. The water was a mile below. “You’re sure about this?”
“One, two”—she jumped and he followed a half second behind.
*
AFTER THEY SHUTTLED the truck and cinched tight the raft, Hank and Annie followed Caroline up to her house. Caroline had organized a barbecue that night in Annie’s honor, and the guests would be arriving in another hour or two.
Annie said, “I really like Caroline. She’s just so alive, you know? So fucking real. She just does what she wants, no bullshit, no conditions. I can see how she and Mom were friends. Mom is like that too, just in a different way.” Then she said, “I’m glad you two have each other.”
“Have” might have been a strong word. Caroline “had” him, surely, but he would never “have” her. “To have” implied a certain degree of permanence, and permanence wasn’t something that interested Caroline.
He remembered something she had said one rainy winter day. They were lying on the futon in the loft, watching the water braid down the window, and she told him of a Chinese proverb she’d read and found especially illuminating. Caroline often read Asian philosophies. Did yoga too. “It’s about this old twisting tree. It grew itself to have as many limbs and knots as it could, to be as ugly as possible. Why, right? Because only the ugly and useless are allowed to live the life they desire. The beautiful and straight are cut down to be somebody else’s lumber.”
“I’m lucky she keeps me around,” Hank said.
“She’s crazy about you,” Annie smiled. “That much is obvious.”
A minute or two passed as they climbed the gravel road up from Steamboat Creek. Annie was looking absently out the window. “It must be lonely around here if you don’t have someone.”
Before thinking better of it, Hank responded, “No. It’s never lonely.” Why say that, he wasn’t sure. He also wasn’t sure why he was still talking. “With a river like this one, there’s always some sense of purpose.”
“Purpose?”
“There’s always something to do, a way to stay busy.”
“Isn’t ‘staying busy’ what people do when they’re lonely?”
“No,” Hank said. “People are only lonely when they have no purpose.”
Annie thought about this for a moment. A pensive moment in which Hank imagined her deconstructing his logic, testing his assumptions, measuring his deductions. He was no match for her intellect.
Then Annie surprised him. “I get lonely sometimes.” She was staring at the passing trees.
He wanted her to say more, he wanted to know all about her loneliness, wanted to confess his own loneliness, but he didn’t know how to talk to this woman that was his daughter. That’s what he had realized these last few days: When near her, he didn’t know how to be himself, let alone how to father. “These trees are cedars. One of the last original stands in the valley.”
*
THE GUESTS ARRIVED on Ipsyniho time, driving through the open gate a half hour, an hour, two hours after the time Caroline had told them on the phone. They parked out front of the house, and for several minutes after each truck came to a stop, dust hovered in the calm air, an ethereal mist backlit by the setting sun. Soon adults roared with stories and children chased the blissful dogs. Someone produced a football, someone else a bocce ball set. Yonder Mountain String Band was playing from a truck stereo. And there was IPA being pumped from a keg.
This wasn’t the first time Hank had attended a party at Caroline’s house, but it was the first time Caroline had hosted a party that should have been, according to the unwritten and unspoken rules that governed these things, hosted by Hank himself. He was considering a public proposal, right here in front of everyone, when a Frisbee came careening by and his hand snagged it out of midair.
“Over here, Hank!” He sent the disc long, and surveyed the crowd.
Caroline was crouched before a little girl of seven or eight, helping her fix a pigtail that had come undone. As he neared, the little girl said, “Thanks, Ms. Caroline,” and bolted after the other kids, now out in the middle of the meadow. Caroline watched her go, before returning to her business with the food.
He busied himself with the meat, waiting for her to finish a conversation with Mildred Harrington, the ninety-eight-year-old widow who lived in a crumbling farmhouse just a mile down the road. After taking the elk roasts from their marinade—he’d get it right this time—and placing them on a rack to drip dry, he leaned too close to Caroline’s ear and whispered, “Thank you for this.”
She said without looking, “Your place is a shit hole, no offense.”
&
nbsp; Annie was laughing out back with Rita and Bridge, two of Hank’s oldest friends. Rita was the valley’s midwife, had been for as long as Hank had been a guide. She wore a pair of faded Carhartts, flip-flops, her gray hair in two easy braids. When they’d first met, Hank had been madly infatuated with her; this was before she and Bridge had made children of their own, before Hank had met Rosemary. Back then, she’d been exactly his type: sturdy but luscious, fierce but festive, a mountain momma through and through. He’d made his infatuation known to her in a less-than-sober moment one moonless night, and they’d found themselves kissing wetly and horizontally. There had been a falling out with Bridge, but in time, the transgression was forgiven, and life carried on as before. The river had a way of putting things in perspective.
In the years since, Rita had become, in a way, the valley’s closest approximation to a spiritual leader. There wasn’t a lot of organized religion between the headwaters and the ocean, but there was an almost universal respect for the power and sanctity of natural birth. In a place a full hour from the nearest hospital, in a place where the year was marked by the birth and death of seasons and species, a midwife was an essential guide between this realm and the former, this realm and the next. Her role was to shepherd the unborn into the dry light and, as the responsibility so frequently fell to her, the dying into the darkness. Few in Ipsyniho asked for a doctor when they were pregnant or a priest when they were dying; these were natural events, not medical or religious ones.
Besides, Ipsynihians had a fundamental distrust of doctors, of the silent control they tended to command over their patients. When at a medical crossroad, you never could be sure if a doctor was telling the whole story or just the simplest one.
Rita had assumed her most crucial role from her mentor, Eleanor Karr, when she passed away some three decades back. Now, there was a monument to Eleanor in downtown Ipsyniho; there were no monuments to presidents or congressmen.