by John Larison
Bridge called himself a contractor, and he had on numerous occasions helped Hank with the house. Just as recently as last week, he had come over with a bed full of tools and supplies, and helped patch a leak in the roof. That was the thing about Bridge; if you needed help, he was there, no questions, no hesitations. That was the covenant by which he lived, community first, a covenant conceived maybe as he hitchhiked away his twenties from Alaska to Argentina and back. It was Bridge who had, decades prior, taught Hank to quarter, cool, and butcher elk. He laughed now at something Annie had said, his long beard bouncing.
Hank arrived just in time to hear Annie ask Bridge, “So are you a fishing guide too?”
Bridge put his arm around Hank. “Nah. What would you say I do, Hanky-Ray?”
“He’ll tell you he’s in construction.”
“I farm.” Bridge smiled.
“Oh, of course,” Annie said. “I’ve seen a lot of blueberry and hazelnut farms along River Road. Is one of those yours?”
Rita answered, “We live just down the road here.”
“Lucky you,” Annie said, turning to take in the view.
“You two actually have met before,” Hank said. “Rita caught you.”
“Caught me?” Annie canted her head to the side, a display of confusion—her mother’s mannerism. Hank had always loved that one, in both Rosemary and his little daughter. She mastered the mannerism early, just about the time she started speaking complete, if abbreviated, sentences. He remembered how back then Annie would furrow her eyebrows, an exaggeration of Rosemary’s expression, and raise her voice a full octave on the last syllable.
“I attended your birth.” Rita smiled. “But I almost didn’t make it. You were quick to get out here and see what all the fun was about.”
“You were small,” Hank said. “Five pounds, three ounces. When the contractions started, we took a walk on the river trail, and at first your mom was stopping and breathing through each contraction, but by the end she was bear-hugging trees and howling something fierce. We still thought you were a boy then. Were sure of it.” It struck him then just how vivid these recollections were, more vivid in a way than his recollections of last week. That was the funny thing about hindsight: As if the whole expanse of a person’s time lay in a straight line behind him so that at any given moment if he turned, all he saw was a tiny speck that made him think, Is that all? but if prompted just so, part of that distant trail would suddenly climb up and loom larger and closer than all the rest. There was Annie as an infant, here was Annie now, and somehow there was nothing in between.
Annie pointed at the distant river. “Tell me I was born in some back-eddy.”
“At the cabin we were renting off Rock Creek, actually.”
Annie asked Rita some question about sterilization, and as Rita began to answer, Bridge touched Hank’s arm and nodded toward the woods. “Got a minute?”
They strolled off a few steps and Bridge pointed his beer back toward town, which was there shimmering in the distance. “What do you think about this Andy Trib business? You know the kid better than me.”
Hank lit a cigarette, still remembering the pasty texture of Annie’s vernix on his fingertips. How Rosemary’s sweat-glazed skin reflected the candlelight. “What’s that?”
Bridge repeated the question.
“There’s no way he’s guilty. The kid’s as tender as a daffodil.”
Bridge nodded. “Exactly. A rosebud with testicles.”
“What does your man the sheriff have to say?” Sheriff Carter and Bridge went back to primary school, and if anybody had an inside line to Carter, it was Bridge.
But Bridge swatted at the question. “Cart has gone all tight-lipped on this shit. You know he’s running for some office or another? Suddenly rotten with ambition, that one. Some jerks get a sports car, some a younger lady-friend, others do a two-for and declare their candidacy.”
“Either way, you go tits-up in the end.”
“Thank god.” Bridge and Hank clanked beers.
A moment passed as they took in the view. Then Bridge laughed. “Heard about his diaries?”
“Carter’s?” Hank couldn’t imagine Carter reading, let alone writing.
“Trib’s. Supposedly, there’s like a hundred of them. The kid’s been scribbling faster than a prepube.”
“Are they fishing journals?” Hank asked. “Most of us write shit down. It’s a lot to keep balanced.”
“Maybe. Probably. Don’t know what else that brie-for-brains would be writing. I love the image, though. Trib sitting on his porcelain throne writing in his diary. It’s too much.” He was laughing. “Wonder if that’s what he learned in college.”
But if Trib was too tender, who then?
Danny’s truck rumbled through the gate, and the twins leapt out the passenger door—two redheads bailing before the truck even stopped. Danny hollered after them, but they were already sprinting toward Samson and Delilah and the other mutts.
Bridge gripped Hank’s arm, leaned in close. “So what’s up with Caroline throwing your party? You two getting serious?”
“Who’s Caroline?” Hank smiled.
Bridge slapped him on the back. “You filthy hound.”
Hank swigged from his beer. Mostly to keep himself from beaming.
“It’s natural, it’s right,” Bridge said, “if you want my three cents. ’Cept of course you’re getting uglier every day and she’s just coming into her prime. But besides that.”
Hank fingered the ring in his pocket, which he’d carried with him continually for weeks now. Tonight was the night.
Later that evening, the sun that much closer to the ridgeline, Hank found Annie and said, “There’s somebody I want you to meet.”
The twins were grabbing at Delilah’s tail and laughing uncontrollably and she was whipping around and around and licking at their faces, and Danny was chuckling at the scene with Trey Something-or-other, a recent transplant to the valley Hank had met a few times in the last couple years, but could never quite remember. There were more and more people like this every year, retirees and yuppie dropouts who moved up the Ipsyniho, but hardly looked twice at the river. He didn’t have much in common with these folks; they spoke of falling stock indexes and rising bond rates and seemed to think of him as some novelty character in the movie of their lives. The bearded fishing guide.
“Annie, this is Danny and …”
“Trey,” Trey said, extending his hand. To Hank he said, “We’ve met a few times, actually.”
“Have we?”
Annie turned to the twins and dogs. “Your kids, I haven’t seen them stop laughing in like ten minutes.”
“Good. Once they stop, it usually goes to hell.” Danny clanked Annie’s beer with his own. “Tough to believe you’re related to this ol’ bear.”
“Careful,” Hank said. “This ol’ bear still knows a thing or two.”
It wasn’t that he wanted Annie and Danny to connect—how impossible with Annie being recently married—though he’d be lying if he said he hadn’t fancied the idea, if only momentarily. “You two used to play together.” He pointed his beer at Trey. “Not you. These two.”
“I remember,” Danny said.
“Yep. I’ve got pictures of you both splashing naked in a mud bog at Carnival. And another series of crawdadding. You’re naked there too.”
“Lots of nudity,” Annie said. “Doesn’t anybody believe in diapers around here?”
It was time to impress her. “Danny here owns the fly shop in town and is somewhat of a celebrity. This guy’s mug is in all the catalogues and advertisements.”
“Really,” Annie said, maybe impressed, maybe not.
“I don’t know anybody,” Hank continued, “who is as good with a pair of oars or can throw a fly as far.”
Danny scoffed. “You’re forgetting yourself, old man.” Then to Annie, “This guy, he’s humble to a fault.”
“I’m just realistic.” Hank swigged his beer, about to t
ell of Annie’s philosophy training. But Annie jumped in, still watching the kids. “Were your twins born here in the valley? With Rita?”
Hank put his arm around Trey’s neck. “Come on, Trey. Let’s go snag us another round.”
*
THERE WERE THE elk roasts that Hank had made, the cougar backstraps and venison burgers that Bridge had brought, the pot of crawdad tails Caroline had boiled, the two full-length fillets Danny had contributed, a mess of homegrown veggies tossed in salads and churned in salsas, and a whole table of salads and pastas and halved melons. There was a second grill too, this one filled with chicken quarters and veggie burgers and other proteins of deficient genre. Hank stayed upwind.
Folks ate on paper plates and sat in lawn chairs and on tailgates and coolers, everybody within earshot of the grills, everybody with a drop-dead view of the valley. The sunset was crimson and violet, and its warm rays turned the dusty air to sepia. The conversations occurred in patches, three people here, six there, but every once in a while, larger groups would coalesce around a particularly riveting story or good-natured jab. There was a banjo and a fiddle and a pair of guitars, and later folks would be up dancing, and after that, Caroline would lead a group down to the creek for a midnight skinny-dip. They were awash in brandy and good humor.
And at some point, it occurred to Hank that he hadn’t seen Annie or Danny in some time, though he did find the twins snuggled up in Caroline’s bed, the quilt pulled tight to their chins. Miriam wore her horse PJs. Ruben his bulldozers. They both had Danny’s lava red hair and their mother’s delicate face, and Hank took a seat on the end of the bed just to watch them sleep for a time, watch but also to listen to the soft rhythm of their synchronized breathing. It occurred to him then that he might, someday, make a better grandfather than he had a father. If only life was charitable enough to offer such chances.
When he finally wandered back outside, a few trucks were rumbling across the moonlit meadow, headed back toward the valley, their taillights illuminating the dust in their wake. He watched as Bridge’s rig stopped at the gate and as Rita cinched tight the gate. Funny how folks treated these gates; though there hadn’t been roaming cattle here in a generation, still nobody dared leave one open.
He wandered up the meadow, a wide swath that seemed to lead into the star-freckled sky. Above him, the universe glowed maroon in the west and indigo to the east, and around him, the land quivered with crickets. He would die in this watershed someday, maybe in twenty years, maybe in twenty days, but in the moments before it happened, would he ever think, Yes, I was enough?
From somewhere below, a song wafted with the breeze. It was the Hunter and Garcia song, “Brokedown Palace,” Caroline’s favorite, and the words came in shifting echoes that seemed to be growing from the land itself.
Fare you well, fare you well. I love you more than words can tell.
When the time came, would he die alone in some dark room, or would he be looking into Annie’s eyes?
Listen to the river sing sweet songs, to rock my soul.
He had arrived at his own father’s deathbed seven long days before the man passed. Long enough for his perennial resentments to wither, then sprout anew.
His sisters had both been there and were doing a better job than he, so he kept mostly to the periphery, only occasionally holding the man’s hand during swells of pain or telling him stories as he slept, but mostly he remained with the paperwork and the telephone in the corner.
His father was dying, Hank had done his best to remember. He was just a man and he’d done the best he could and what else could a child ask? It was then that the resentments had faded to sympathy.
But in the last days, Hank had realized he still needed something from this stranger, though he couldn’t quite name what that something was. One afternoon when the sisters were eating in the cafeteria, he leaned over his father as he slept, trying to find the face of the man he’d known so long before. It had to be there somewhere. He put a hand over the sagging neck, trying to make the chin look as it had all those years before. He concentrated to remember the nose when it was narrower, less red. The eyebrows too, thinner and brown. But the father from his memories was nowhere in that face. Until the eyelids opened and there were those same storm-washed eyes, and Hank sat back in his chair, struck anew by a too-familiar pain.
“Betsy, come back,” his father had begged then. Again and again, he called that name.
But who the fuck was Betsy? Not an aunt or sister, and certainly not his mother. He left that afternoon and took a walk by the creek behind the hospital. There were chubs rising against the oily film of the surface, beer cans waiting in the eddies. When he returned a couple hours later, still without whatever it was he went searching for, the nurse touched his shoulder before he could reach the room and told him his father had passed.
*
BACK AT CAROLINE’S, he pushed through the front door and heard Annie’s laughter. She and Caroline were in the kitchen picking at leftovers, Danny and the twins already gone. Everything the two women did or said seemed to them impossibly funny, and Hank watched for a while trying to let the mood take him too, and when it didn’t, he swiped the brandy and pulled hard to see if that would help.
It did.
And soon they were all standing before Caroline’s bathroom mirror brushing their teeth and trying not to crack. But it was no use. The more they tried, the more they had to try, and then a little toothpaste shot from Annie’s pinched lips and she sank to the floor with the hilarity of it all. Caroline buckled right after her, because of her, and they rolled against Hank’s knee and he went down too. Toothpaste foam was everywhere and no one could stand, and the laughing turned to gasping and the gasping to crying.
Chapter Seventeen
THAT’S THE RUB of being a fishing guide, Hank thought come 4:15 the next morning: Even on a day off, you can’t sleep past dawn. Even on a day when your head pounds like a salmon thrown too soon in a cooler. He sipped the glass of water he’d left on Caroline’s bedside table, took some deep breaths, focused on a distant spot.
“I hate brandy,” Caroline muttered in the dark.
“Agh, don’t say it.”
He lay back, having no other choice given he was too dizzy to stand and too uncomfortable to sit. Caroline backed her naked body against him, and said, “Are you up?”
“I’m done sleeping, if that’s what you mean.”
She rolled and the silky warmth of her inner thigh was across him. “You know what I mean.”
Afterward, they lay together and watched the warming sky out Caroline’s bedside window. It would be casting-light in another fifteen minutes.
“Do you think Annie is having a good time?” he whispered.
For a long moment Caroline said nothing, and just when he thought she might have slipped back into sleep, she whispered, “She wants you in her life.” To Caroline, that meant everything.
“I don’t want to blow it.” He thought of Annie sleeping in the other room, her mouth wide open, her hand folded under her chin—just like when she was five. “I don’t know how to talk to her.”
“Complete sentences, Hank.”
“You know what I mean.”
“She’s here,” Caroline said, plucking a pill of lint from his belly button. “Stop worrying what she thinks.”
He imagined their next conversation, tried to picture himself letting go of all those expectations he’d kept kegged up, those expectations that turned his tongue to lead.
“Let your guard down. You’re so uptight around her. Really, Hank. You’re a different person when she’s nearby. Tell her a secret. Put yourself out there. Be real, be intuitive.” Caroline shrugged. “Be Hank Hazelton. She’s here to forgive you.”
*
WHEN HANK CAME in from cleaning the party shrapnel strewn around Caroline’s house—the beer bottles and paper plates and corncobs— Annie was stretching herself awake. “Morning.”
Guided by Caroline’s advice,
he’d thought of a couple points of conversation while outside, that poem he’d published years ago in Gray’s Sporting Journal, that philosophical French novel he’d found at a used bookshop about the stranger who shoots a guy on the beach because the day was hot and the sun was in his eyes, but the hangover had disrupted the usually well-traveled bridge between mental idea and verbal articulation, and now he just smiled at her. It was all he could muster.
“You guys really throw down,” Annie said, trying to stand up but then collapsing back into the couch. “Shit. Still buzzing.”
The shower started in Caroline’s bedroom, the water coursing through the house’s vascular system, a rumble and trickle in the walls, then beneath their feet.
Hank poured his daughter a glass of water, found a straw in a drawer, and delivered it to her on the couch. He’d planned on making coffee, but now he couldn’t overcome the compulsion to sit back into the soft couch. The Tylenol had helped with the pounding but done nothing to rejuvenate the depleted muscles. He felt like he’d been oaring twenty-four hours straight.
Annie set her feet across his lap and covered her eyes with her arm. “Why does it have to be so bright in the morning?”
Hank couldn’t get past those feet, laid so casually before him, touching him. He did the only thing he could think to do: began rubbing at the soles. Caroline often joked that she kept him around because he gave the valley’s best foot rubs. And now Annie was squirming. “Too hard?”
“No,” she sighed. “Just. Right.”
Maybe his hands could articulate what his words could not.
*
ANNIE INSISTED THEY needed a fried breakfast, something with potatoes and eggs and equal parts butter and salsa. “It was my magic cure in graduate school.” She found all the ingredients in Caroline’s reffrigerator and set to work, still in her pajamas, her hair tangled with sleep.
Caroline and Hank were cuddled on the couch, watching the fish tank. Each nursed a mason jar of water. From the recessed speakers, Dylan sang “Desolation Row.” Caroline pushed at his pocket. “Your keys, they’re cutting into me.”