Holding Lies

by John Larison

  Hank took a seat on the tailgate too.

  “He was snagging those fish though,” Walter continued a few moments later. “It happened because he was up there. He shouldn’t have been up there. He should’ve been doing his job. That’s why it happened. Gotta be in good with the river. I was just the messenger. Can’t feel shitty about that, right? If it hadn’t been me, woulda been somebody else. The river made up its mind.”

  The breeze slowed to a stop, and the day felt that much hotter. Walter passed his sleeve over his brow. “What? Stop looking at me like that.”

  A moment passed and Walter pointed at the boat. “I gave you the reels for those rods, the lines too. Hank? Are you going to tell anybody?”

  Was he? Could he? Could he not? “Do you want me to?”

  That’s when Hank noticed the fear. He wasn’t afraid of Walter, he was afraid of his reasons. Afraid that Walter’s logic might be lying dormant in him too.

  Walter shrugged. “It was a long time ago. Nobody cares anymore. Jackson didn’t have no sober kin.”

  Walter took the shotgun, racked the action. “Christ, Hank, don’t you ever clean this? This here powder looks like it’s from the Carter era.”

  Hank was thinking of Morell, of that wading staff leaning against the truck. Metal, stiff, and heavy enough to crack a skull. This man he’d known forever, this stranger. Capable of anything.

  Walter pointed at Hank’s truck. “You should get on. Hook up the boat and put those rods in your rig and fuck off. Last thing I need is somebody around here looking at me like that. You and Mindy. I’m in good with Lady Ipsyniho. That’s all I need.”

  Hank didn’t know what to say, how to leave Walter—or how to remain near him. He knew this man better than he’d known his own father, and yet, there he was, old and dying and guilty as all hell and more wicked than anyone he’d ever known.

  “I’m a part of this valley, Hank, I’m part of her. It’s her juice in my blood, and my bones is her gravel, and I’ve only ever done what’s best for her. Sure, I’ve fucked up. But I’ve never worked against her. That’s got to count for something.”

  “It counts,” Hank said, though he didn’t know if it did. “Counts as much as anything.”

  “Stop thinking I did it,” Walter said. “I can see it in your eyes. The river killed that kid.”

  Hank backed away, sure now.

  “The river killed him. You know it.”

  Hank turned and walked to his Bronco, forgetting everything except the wickedness. Even the firs looked menacing, their limbs crooked and reaching and knowing. They’d known all along.

  Walter called, “Don’t forget this title. Sign it like I said. Get it in the mail today. And for fuck’s sake, rig up that boat and get it out of here.”

  Hank was already at the Bronco.

  Walter pointed the wading staff at him. “Hank? There’s fifteen G’s worth of tackle there.”

  But he needed out of here.

  Walter stood, and Hank thought he was going to holler at him. But instead, he tried to crack a joke. “Hope you ain’t expecting this scattergun back.”

  The Bronco rumbled to life, and he dropped it in gear.

  “Hank?”

  His foot was still on the brake, and there was Walter calling after him—calling after his only future.

  This old man looked nothing like the man who’d shown Hank the way. He looked poisoned and prehistoric, and Hank wanted none of that for himself. Yet he knew all the same, this was his precedent.

  He turned the engine off and kicked open the door and walked back. Walter was handing him the truck title, and Hank folded it without a glance and tucked it in his shirt pocket.

  Hank put his hand on Walter’s shoulder, as close to an embrace as Walter would allow. “You’ve been damn good by me.”

  Walter whispered, “Is that enough?”

  Hank shrugged. “Come by my place. Let’s pack a bag and you stay a few days.”

  “No.” Walter shook his head. “You ain’t a nursemaid, you ain’t what I need. I’m nobody’s burden.”

  Hank tried to take his hand and lead him to the Bronco, but Walter pushed away. “Go on.”

  When Hank didn’t move, Walter grew angry. “I said get. Leave me be. I ain’t no charity case. To hell with your pity. Take my things and get on. That’s the way it’s done.”

  “I’m not leaving.”

  Walter heaved up the empty shotgun and, tears swelling his eyes now, leveled it on Hank. “I’ll do it, Hank. I will.”

  Hank considered pushing past the shotgun. Or staying put until Walter relented. But in the end, he backed away for the same reason he’d brought Walter the gun in the first place. “I’ll come up first thing, Walt. Tomorrow we’ll fish, okay? First thing.”

  Walter held fast.

  And he was still holding fast when Hank reached the end of the driveway and turned downstream, nearly blind with the knowledge of what he had lost.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  HANK HEARD DANNY’S truck pull up the driveway just after dark. He finished putting Annie’s bed sheets in the washing machine and met him at the door, wiping the sweat from his beard with a towel. It must have been in the nineties still, and these patches weren’t worth a shit. “Good to see you.”

  Danny looked like he always looked, substantial and determined and capable. His sunglasses hung around his neck and there was a band of sweat darkening his baseball cap. He’d been on the river today. “I got some bad news, Hank.”

  “First,” Hank interrupted. “You got to know that nobody, not Caroline or Walter or me or anybody else on the inside, has been talking behind your back. That was just me at the shop, me being stupid.”

  “Walt,” Danny said, his face canted, but his eyes square on Hank’s. “Hank, he’s dead.”

  Hank reached for the doorjamb. He’d known it, and yet it still hit him like he hadn’t.

  “Some joe found him just an hour ago in the Campwater. Carter located his truck upriver. A note on the seat. He floated some miles, I guess.”

  He’d left Walter leaning and broken. That wasn’t the way it was supposed to go. He should have been there.

  And yet, how else could it have gone?

  The crickets were buzzing like a bad headache. “What did the note say?”

  “Classic Walt,” Danny said, as close to a laugh as one could get given the circumstances. “Something like, ‘I’m killing myself ’cause I got my reasons and don’t go blaming nobody. Walter P. Torse.’”

  Hank pointed at the porch chairs, and they both sat and stared out into the dark woods. “There had to be something else. That can’t be all the note said.”

  “Goddamn shame.” Danny pulled free his hat and set it in his lap. “He’d been looking pretty sorry, but I didn’t reckon on this. Not now.”

  They just sat there, together, figuring the world now that Walter wasn’t part of it. And then Danny surprised him. “Hank, I know why he did it. I know why he killed himself.”

  He turned to see the moonlight in Danny’s eyes. “Do you.”

  Danny wiped the sweat from his forehead and said, “He’s the one, Hank. He’s the one that did it.”

  Danny explained what Andy had told him the day Morell went missing, that Andy had been driving upriver to fish that day when he’d seen Walter’s rig hidden on an overgrown spur road, a place he’d never seen anyone parked before. He parked just up the road, and dropped down to the river, assuming that Walter must have some secret walk-in location. What he saw was Walter coming back through the woods, without a rod. “He was torn, Andy said. Real messed up. Andy called to him, offered to help, but Walter hurried off through the woods, all crazylike. Andy thought he’d had a stroke or something. It was only later that he put it together. Walter was coming up from Whitehorse just about the time Morell would’ve been going through.”

  There were a dozen possible explanations. Walter did have a lie down there, one that nobody fished, a spot that produced on hot day
s. Maybe he’d ditched his rod when he saw Andy. And maybe he’d hurried off because he didn’t want to be recognized.

  But even as Hank worked this out, he knew better.

  “I don’t know what to do,” Danny said. “I mean, you saw Morell’s mom and sister. You saw what they’re going through.”

  Hank turned to the man beside him, this man he’d known from diapers. This man he’d helped make. “You’re thinking you got to tell Carter what you know?”

  Danny turned to him. “I don’t know what to do. Fuck Carter. But Morell had family. They deserve to know everything, don’t they? But then what about Walt? I mean, what he did—if he did it—was wrong, but he did so much else that wasn’t. And if people think he’s the one, well, they’ll be quick to forget everything else.” Danny leaned over his knees, and stared straight into the porch below him. “What’s right here?”

  It was true, everything he said. If people learned what Walter had done, his legacy in the valley would evaporate. If people knew about Morell, what was worthy of example would be lost. Morell’s family would gain for sure, but the valley would lose.

  “The family deserves to know,” Danny said. “But would they want to know? I mean, by now, they must have figured it was an accident in the rapid, right? And wouldn’t you rather think, if you were that mom, it was an accident that took your son, not some pissed-off old man? I mean, no parent wants to know that someone hates their kid. Tell me I’m right here.”

  Hank thought of Annie settling in back at home. He wondered if Thad was at this moment hating her, or if he was still living in the dark.

  “Hank?”

  He thought of Annie walking on eggshells all those years, afraid to call and say the wrong thing.

  “I’m mean, I guess I’m looking for some guidance here.”

  And he thought of Walter, living his lonely life in that house, devoting every authentic part of himself to the river, and why? Because he could know right by the river. And because he could keep the river at a distance.

  “We don’t hold this one,” Hank said. “We tell that mother what we know. And if she tells Carter, well, that’s the way it’ll go.”

  Danny turned to him. “I didn’t think you’d say that.”

  Hank felt the stitches above his ear, the fluids oozing from the wound. “If you disagree, speak up.”

  “I don’t disagree.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  FALL ARRIVED LATE that year, toward the end of October, the first freshets clouding the river and filling it with drifting leaves. Shimmers of yellow and red and orange fluttered through the tea-stained pools, spun endlessly in the eddies, and carpeted the cobbled shores. Cool coastal gusts rushed upriver, ripping still more leaves from the trees and carrying them upstream in an inverted reflection of the river below.

  Everything was waiting for the fish. The bears sat on the beaches, their berry bellies shrinking with each passing day. Bald eagles circled their roosting trees, long whistles echoing upstream. Ospreys streaked through the airborne leaves then the water-soaked ones, trying to snatch those few young trout cruising the eddies. Anglers too waited, in their hotel rooms, in their tents, in the fly shop. No one dared ask the question everyone was pondering: Might this be the year the fish fail to return?

  Hank found Caroline at her gate. Samson and Delilah stayed behind, barking and chasing each other in circles. “Beasts,” Hank said, as Caroline pulled shut the door.

  “We all got our bark,” she said.

  Since Walter’s memorial service, they’d only seen each other a few times, evenings when Hank had driven up to spend the night. They’d both been working steadily, though their clients hadn’t been catching many fish. Which meant they had been working harder, staying out longer, covering more miles. Both of them felt a responsibility to do all they could to get a sport into at least one fish. A dude who touched a steelhead was a citizen willing to fight Cherry Creek Timber.

  But soon the year would slow and they’d have time again, time for themselves and each other. That was part of this life Hank appreciated most, the fluctuation between the seasons, the rush and then the calm, their own version of the week and the Sabbath. The original version, maybe.

  Caroline asked if he’d heard from Annie, and he told her he had, though he hadn’t exactly “heard” from her. They’d been exchanging e-mails, one or two a week, which seemed an easier way for her to stay in touch. He disliked the distance of it, how he couldn’t hear her inflections to tell if she was joking or not, but he was grateful to have these updates, to be part of her life. She and Thad were living in separate apartments now, though neither had filed for a divorce. “Thad is so forgiving,” she had written one day, and “maybe I’m willing to try.”

  “I’m going to build a sauna this winter,” Caroline said. “Off the bedroom. I got a line on some fallen cedar. Good stuff. Bridge said he’ll mill it for me.” She was wearing her weathered work pants and her wading jacket and her fishing cap, her hair in a ponytail out the back. Despite the rain, she was wearing sunglasses, the low-light version. You could always spot riverfolk, Hank thought, because they never leave home without their polarized; they might miss a chance to see past a reflection.

  “I’d be glad to help,” he said. “You know I like wearing a tool belt.”

  “You and that tool belt are why I’m building the thing.”

  They parked at the ridge and Hank handed Caroline the dry bag and lugged on the backpack, and they started down the trail to Pine Basin Springs. From all the leaves on the trail and grass hanging across, it looked like no one had walked here in some time. Maybe since Hank and Annie.

  They cleared the needles and cones from the base of the cliff, right below the patch of young rock, and Hank carefully placed the pictograph so that it faced the pool. Its image was of one person holding the hand of another, a parent and a child maybe or just two adults, it was hard to tell, and there behind and before them were the salmon.

  They backed away a few steps and surveyed the whole sequence, unbroken again, the story intact if not complete. They didn’t know whether to read it from left to right, or right to left, or whether its originators meant it as a single story at all. But, nonetheless, there it was, before them, offering.

  Hank left a kiss on Caroline’s temple, and she pulled him close.

  After a time—the rain pattering the pool and the trees sifting the winds—she whispered, “How’s this done?”

  Hank opened the dry bag and removed the urn. “We write it as we go.”

  They both held the container and tipped it toward the pool, and watched as Walter ghosted over the water and joined the currents that flowed toward the lip. A small trickle left the pool there, a creek that descended two thousand feet through a forgotten ravine before joining the Ipsyniho, which descended another three thousand feet through canyon and farmland and estuary to the join the Pacific. “Everything runs downhill,” Hank whispered.

  “Except salmon.”

  For a time, they were quiet, and then in the lee of the cliff’s story, Caroline began humming “Brokedown Palace” and Hank joined in and their voices merged with the pattering rain and the breathless wind, and that seemed words enough.

  Acknowledgements

  NOVELS ARE CRUEL projects. Early mornings, late nights, the precious hours between—their epiphanies slip away if they’re asked to wait.

  And so, first, thank you to the singular person who made Holding Lies possible: Ellie Rose. I hope the finished story is worthy of all you sacrificed on its behalf.

  And to my enchanting daughters: may you remember everything you came into this world knowing.

  A novel also demands readers and critics who care enough to take the story’s hand and lead it where it means to go. So thank you, Lilly Golden, who, like the finest doctor, inquired, diagnosed, and healed. And thank you, Nick Lyons, who first offered encouragement and later advocated on the manuscript’s behalf.

  And thank you to Wayne Harrison, T
ed Leeson, Alison Ruch, Rachel Teadora, and Joshua Weber, who each highlighted fissures where I saw none.

  And thank you also to those who supported the writing of the story: Tom Christensen, Tracy Daugherty, Jay-Roy Jones, Nate Koenigknecht, Jim and Elaine Larison, Ted and Sarah Larison, Steve Perakis, Scott Powell, Sarah Rushing, Rob Russell, Marjorie Sandor, and Keith Scribner.

  Also thank you to the English Department at Oregon State University for its continued support.

  And to those inspired souls and organizations dedicated to winning the good fight, including Lee Spencer at the Refuge Pool, Bill Bakke and the river stewards of the Native Fish Society, Dylan Tomine and Rich Simms at the Wild Steelhead Coalition, Guido Rahr and Jay Nicholas at the Wild Salmon Center, and the thousands of volunteers across the West working to save wild salmon. May others learn what you know: that salmon are more than this coal mine’s canary.

  I am indebted to each of you.