Holding Lies

by John Larison

  But then the bathroom door swung open and Walter stepped out and, upon seeing Hank’s terrified face lurking in his living room, shouted, “What the fuck, sneaking up on an old bugger like that!”

  “Sorry, I …”

  “You trying to kill me? Good god, Hankle.”

  Walter went to the refrigerator and found two beers and nodded outside. They sat on the lawn chairs Walter had placed under the alder grove, looking back at the house and boat port. Hank lit a cigarette, and Walter asked for one too.

  “What’s with the hitch?” Walter was pointing at Hank’s knee, which had been giving him a little grief since clanking the boat on that rock.

  “Not worth explaining. What’s with you smoking?”

  Walter took a drag. “Told myself, if I got word the world was about to end, my first stop would be the River Market for a pack of Luckies.”

  “Walt, what the fuck’s going on?”

  A new cancer, Walter explained, pancreatic this time, and he couldn’t afford treatment and he wasn’t sure he wanted the treatment if he could. “That prostate surgery left me limp as a bonked fish.”

  “Jesus, Walter.”

  “They tell me I only got a few weeks while I can still be up and around. It hurts something ruthless already. You don’t know pain until you got cancer in your gut.”

  “But you told me the doc gave you a clean bill, and that was only like two weeks back.”

  Walter shrugged. “Did I say that? Probably figuring I’d save you the headache. I’ve known since May. I tell you now only because last night, well, I can feel it coming.”

  “You should’ve told me.”

  “What would you do about it?”

  Whatever he could. Bring Walter water and food, sort his medication, drive him into Eugene for treatment, whatever. He’d done all this the last time around, he’d do it again. He owed Walter that much. He owed Walter a son’s gratitude.

  Walter spit. “Save your pity for somebody who needs it.”

  A long stillness settled over them. Hank was imagining, or failing to imagine, the valley without Walter in it. Walter was as intricate a piece of this place as the Douglas firs, the river, the fish. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Agh.” Walter swatted at the air. “I’m over it. We all gotta drift downstream at some point. It’s simple, and I’m done being sorry about it. I’m glad, in fact. Glad I made it this far.” He chuckled. “Fuck, I won. I’m seventy-nine and was a goddamn steelheader the whole way. I didn’t die in somebody else’s war, I didn’t rot my ass in no office cube, and I sure as shit didn’t sit by while evil little pricks fucked up my homewater. You should be so lucky.”

  Hank forced a smile. “True.”

  Walter tapped his beer against Hank’s. “Anyway, thanks for being such a loyal fuck, Hankle. I love you for it, in a way.”

  Hank stumbled for words, stumbled to articulate something he didn’t yet understand.

  “Shush for once, and let a dying man talk. There’s something I got to say.” Walter swigged from his bottle. “That funeral couple days back, it brought things into focus. Got me thinking about all the shit I’ve done wrong in this life. Letting Mindy go. Damn. I was selfish and mean and I’d take it all back if I could.” He pulled a sealed letter from his shirt pocket. “I don’t have her address, she wouldn’t want me to know it, but I’m hoping you can pass this along once I’m … once I’m tits-up.”

  “Course.”

  “There are other things too, things I’ll spare you. But I wanted to say, ’cause I’m feeling powerful wrong about this, well, I reckon you were right about that pictio-graph. I probably shouldn’t have taken it. I’m just another pile of cells in this watershed, and who am I to keep that thing? I told myself I was doing the valley a favor by taking it, told myself I was safeguarding it, keeping the legacy alive, you know, helping it jump this ravine we’re sitting on these days. But now I see, I wasn’t doing no such thing. I was hoarding it for myself. I’ve always been a selfish prick. Mindy was right about that. I probably could’ve listened better.”

  Walter finished his beer, and let out a careful belch, his hand against his abdomen like it was keeping him from rattling apart. “I want to return that pictio-graph. And I want to return the other things I took too. It needs to be done. Better out there than getting sold off at some estate auction. But the thing is, well, I’m not the man I was a year ago. Shit, I’m not the man I was a week ago. I’m an old buck, Hank, can’t barely hold my lie no more. There’s one thing I’m learning: Death is a bitch of a current.”

  “If you’re looking for help,” Hank said.

  Walter nodded. “Thanks for that.” He tightened, clenching his teeth and rising up in his chair an inch or two.

  “What is it? What can I do? Here.”

  When the pain finally passed, he said the waves were becoming more frequent. He was only sleeping now thanks to a cocktail of drugs he couldn’t afford. “Buying them all on credit. Never bought nothing on credit, ’cept that house. Now I’m deep in it.”

  “I got some money.” He didn’t really, but he knew he could put some together in a pinch.

  “Fuck that. But there’s something else.”

  “Anything.”

  “You got to let me borrow that twelve-gauge of yours. I’ve only got my rifles and their barrels are too long.”

  “Too long?” But of course. “Walt. No. There’s got to be something else, there’s got to be some chance.”

  “Keep your pleading tender-heart bullshit to yourself. It’s not you who’s gonna suffer through this. ‘Through’ ain’t even the right word. There’s no ‘through’ involved. It’s just suffering, plain and simple. Give me your scattergun.”

  “I can’t.”

  Walter swiped the beer from Hank’s hand and chucked it over the edge of the bluff. “Give me your goddamn scattergun or I swear …”

  Hank knew that when it came down to it, he’d give Walter the gun. It was the least he could do—the gift that would allow the man his final freedom.

  “I figure sometime around the solstice, I’ll drive up to Red Gate for one more session, and then end it, right there on the casting rock. Carter can pull this sack of bones from the river. I’m hoping to make it all the way to tidewater, but I’ll let Lady Ipsyniho decide that.”

  “Sorry I threw your beer,” he said a moment later. “Could you fish up that bottle? Don’t want to leave it littering down there.”

  *

  HANK DROVE THE Bronco, the first time he could remember Walter letting him do the driving. They started on a bluff above the Campwater, where Walter reburied a dozen obsidian arrow points. Walter rose from the dirt and wiped the sweat from his forehead and said, “The Ipsynihians gathered here to net and smoke salmon,” as if Hank didn’t already know. “They used to sleep up there, and work down here, and you see those ledges below the falls? That’s where they netted the fish.”

  Hank remembered the shards of black obsidian that used to cover the ground here, probably where people had chipped points while the fishing was slow. When the sun was high, the ground used to reflect shards of light, enough to blind a person. But in the years since, the obsidian had slowly vanished, probably buried under dirt that blew or washed down the bluff.

  Walter followed the old trail, which was now barely perceptible, a slight trough in the slope leading into the firs. There he found the rotten remnants of an old tree, its roots still clinging to the soil. He opened his bag and removed a crumbling reed basket. “This was my first find. I was maybe fifteen, and this tree was hollowed out, and inside there was this basket and a doll made of reeds about yay big. Gave that to Mindy as a wedding present.”

  Then Walter told Hank a story he didn’t know. “The cavalry ambushed them here.” He pointed to the high cliffs across the river and the open slope above. “They got the jump on them and shot dead the ones that didn’t surrender. They were running up the slope, trying to get into the next ravine. Easy pickings for a rifleman
on the bluff. Fourteen killed, only four men.”

  “Why?”

  Walter tapped his wading staff against a fallen log, as if he was about to explain the importance of decomposing wood to a forest. “The army thought they were part of the Rogue rebellion. Didn’t even realize they spoke a totally different language.”

  The afternoon turned to evening as they continued up the valley, visiting five other once-sacred places that were now forgotten and overgrown. Some of the places Hank had been, but a couple were new to him, meadows and cliffs along unnamed tributaries. Hank listened to Walter’s histories with a newfound intensity, trying now to memorize each detail so that he could share them, maybe with Annie, certainly with Danny, if Danny could forgive him.

  With the sun nearing the horizon, they crested a hidden skid road and emerged on the ridge that towered over Feather Creek’s headwaters. “Keep going,” Walter said.

  But they were at the turnaround. The wind streaming through the cab was cooler at this elevation, maybe two thousand feet above the river.

  “Across the grass.” Walter pointed. “You don’t expect me to walk all that’a way?”

  So Hank weaved the truck through the rocks and brush and then rolled along the grassy slope, descending to a pass he’d never before seen, not even from a distance.

  “This’ll do.”

  He parked beside two massive boulders, each as big as his truck. Boulders like these were rare in the valley, and Hank couldn’t quite figure how they had arrived at a point so high on the ridge. Walter explained. “This used to be a craggy mountaintop, probably like the Hash Points over that way. These boulders were part of the top that froze and cracked free, they got hung up here on their roll down.” Walter walked the path between them. “This was a special place for the Ipsynihian hunters. They’d send folks through the thickets below, and see how the slope funnels up here? The deer and elk would run straight up to this point, and come right between these rocks. Do it in the afternoon, and the wind is always right. Still works. My daddy put me right behind that boulder when I was eight and spooked a buck up from below. My first deer died right where you’re standing, wasn’t a ten-yard shot.”

  But it wasn’t the boulders that had brought them this high.

  They limped their way farther up the ridge, toward a rock outcropping there. Between Hank’s knee and Walter’s waves of pain, it took them almost an hour to walk what couldn’t have been a mile, and by the time they arrived, the sun was setting over the distant ocean. Long columns of light traversed the valley, orange in the dusty air.

  “The cave is this way,” Walter said, paying the view no attention.

  Sure enough, a cave as tall and long as Hank’s living room extended into the rocks. The ground here was a powder of dirt and fibers, and the air smelled of musk and urine. Stick figures lined the walls, and a dozen rocks on the cave floor were charred black from ancient fire. Walter had never said a word about this cave, not in thirty-something years. From the pristine appearance of the place, maybe Walter was the only person who knew it existed.

  He shrugged his day pack to the rocks, and began going at the cave floor with his wading staff. Hank tried to help, but Walter waved him back. “This is my doing.” The man was more delicate than he’d been just a week before, that much was clear. He was panting hard and cringing against the pain. He’d loosened in a way, these last few weeks, the skin under his jaw hanging lower now, the muscles in his forearms less pronounced—like he was decomposing from the inside out. But he wasn’t feeble, not hardly. When he encountered a pumpkin-sized rock in the cave floor, he used that wading staff to dig under and then lever it from the hole. A seventy-nine-year-old man displacing a rock that must have weighted fifty pounds. He wiped the sweat from his brow.

  Soon he was looking into a substantial pit in the cave floor, maybe two feet deep, and he kneeled over his backpack and extracted the shoe box. The skull was there, in the packing peanuts that had encased it for so many decades. The whole skull fit in Walter’s open hand; it must have been a child’s. Walter placed it in the bottom without ceremony, then stood, looking down into its empty eyes.

  “I found a lot of things here, Hank. More than I could ever put back.” He reached an arm to the cave wall for support. “I sold most of it. Rich fucks in new cars and khaki hats used to come around to buy bones and other things, but bones mostly. I don’t know what they did with them, sold them to museums or something, but they’d pay good money. I found three skulls here, sold two of them. Thought I’d keep the third as an investment.”

  His jaw quivered, and he squinted against tears. “That’s how I thought of it. As an investment.”

  “You were just a kid. You didn’t know any better.”

  “I knew well enough. I’ve known.”

  Walter pulled dirt over the hole, and sat, his hands balled into tight fists. “You don’t know everything I’m sorry for.”

  Hank sat too and put his arm around this man who’d shunned affection his whole life. “You’re a good man, Walt. I know you, and I know that.”

  Walter was shaking now, and Hank felt microscopic under these paintings of people and elk and fish. Walter had always been the resolute force in this wobbly world, the only person Hank knew who didn’t have a private doubt. He was more than Hank’s mentor, he was proof. And now the cave walls expanded outward and upward and Hank said what he could only hope was true: “You’ve made a difference.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  HANK ARRIVED AFTER dark at Caroline’s place, pushed open the gate, and drove too fast across the field. He didn’t know what to expect, another man’s truck maybe, but instead, there was nothing, not even a light on in the place. Samson and Delilah were tied to their posts, which was how Caroline left them when she was working or running errands in town.

  He left the truck running and walked to the door, the dogs jumping tight to their chains. “Shut it,” he hollered. They were barking like he was a common stranger, for fuck’s sake.

  The new ring was in his pocket, and he held it to the moonlight. Just a shiny reminder of something that didn’t need remembering. It balanced nicely on the doorknob, and he made it halfway back to the truck before turning back. He’d pawn the ring and use the money to help Walter.

  This was a fucked-up world for sure, but what he didn’t know was whether it had always been like this or whether something had happened, something that sent everything spiraling into discordance. He had always thought—no, he’d always hoped—that there were seasons in a person’s life like there were seasons on the river, a time of ease and plenty and a time of doubt and hardship. And since no calendar could help identify these seasons, a person could never really be sure where they were in the cycle. But now, now it seemed more likely there weren’t any seasons at all, just a wheel of pain, circular and pummeling, and try as you might, you’d never clear it, you’d never move on.

  He climbed back into the truck and turned off Cornell ’77. There was just the barking and growling of the dogs, and that huge and vacuous night sky.

  The pictograph was still wrapped in its tarp in the bed of his truck—it was the one item he and Walter hadn’t had time to replace—and he considered running it up to the hot springs now, just to be done with it. But it was dark and the thing was heavy, and he wasn’t in the mood any longer for setting things right.

  *

  CAROLINE’S TRUCK WAS parked beside Annie’s rental in his driveway, and through the window, he could see them laughing as they worked at the stove. And just like that, wholeness and direction seemed once again attainable; maybe spring was on its way.

  They had a glass of Grenache waiting for him when he pushed through the door. “Thought you’d gone lost on us,” said Caroline.

  Annie kissed his cheek. “Ever heard of a cell phone? Caroline told me not to worry, but jeez.”

  They were making spaghetti with the last packages of bear meat Caroline had in her freezer. “Did you know,” Annie exclaimed, “Ca
roline shot this bear herself?”

  Sure he did; he’d helped her butcher it. The bruin had three times busted into her trash cans, despite Samson and Delilah barking up a storm, and the fourth time she met him with the .270. That was a year back, and since, they’d been enjoying bear bratwursts, bear burgers, and bear burritos once or twice a week. “Pork of the woods,” Caroline was fond of calling it.

  “Pork of the woods,” Annie said now. “Got to try it once at least.”

  Caroline kissed him as she handed him a head of lettuce and a knife. “Get chopping, that garlic bread will be ready soon.”

  It wasn’t long, though, before Annie got a phone call, someone from work. She pulled on a fleece and took her glass of wine outside.

  Caroline was telling him about her day. She’d taken new clients out, two women from a fly-fishing club in Seattle. They’d really hit it off, invited Caroline to come speak at their next club meeting, do a little fishing in the Sound. Hank was doing his best to listen, but it was Walter that he was thinking of now: at home alone, and with all that pain. Caroline kicked him in the bum. “Are you even listening?”

  Hank pulled the knife across the leaves. “Walter. A new cancer. He probably won’t make it until fall.”

  She didn’t say a word; she stopped stirring the sauce and wrapped her arms around Hank’s waist and pressed her head against his back. For a long moment, she stayed there.

  “You okay?” she whispered.

  “You know,” he said, turning and letting her take him in her arms.

  “I’m so sorry.” She laid a kiss on each of his eyes, and pressed her forehead against his.

  *

  THEY WAITED FOR Annie to finish, the food going cold on the stove. Finally, Annie poked her head back inside and said, “Sorry, why don’t you go ahead without me. It’s an emergency. I don’t know how long I’ll be.”

  So they ate just the two of them, listening to the rises and falls of Annie’s voice through the screen door.

  “I think they call it a BlackBerry,” Caroline said. “Everyone has one now, I hear.”