by Walter Kirn
Mike grinned at Jerry’s jokes and funny lines, but I got the sense that he looked down on him as someone who didn’t take the outdoors seriously. When the talk turned to fishing, Mike was stern with Jerry, insisting that he release his trout and not tire them out by playing them too long.
“Your father’s the Führer of fly-fishing,” said Jerry. He gave a one-arm salute.
“Enough,” Mike said.
We stopped at the reservation store so Jerry could buy a carton of tax-free cigarettes. I hung back by the beer refrigerator, praying that Mike wouldn’t ask the clerk for Red Man. The clerk recognized me and waved. I nodded back.
“A carton of Raleighs,” said Jerry. “Make that two.” He turned to Mike beside him. “Anything?”
“No thanks. I’m fine.”
The day was starting well.
Once on the river, Mike left Jerry with me and headed downstream to fish his special hole. I watched Jerry struggle to tie his fly on, glad I’d already tied mine on at home. Jerry’s damp pink fingers jerked and shook.
“Not an easy night,” he said. “Lost a battle with a Wild Turkey.”
We fished side by side. The day was bright, poor fishing weather, and steam poured out of my waders into my face. Jerry lit one Raleigh after another and spat out his butts in the river. We chatted, told stories. Jerry asked what career I had in mind and warned me not to pursue the law.
“It’s brutal. For guys like Mike, who frighten people naturally, it might make sense,” he said. “But not for our type.”
I asked him what he thought that our type was.
“The guys who’d rather take the elevator. The guys who buy their buns already sliced.”
From his fishing vest Jerry produced a silver flask and tilted it smartly back. “The pause that refreshes,” he said, and wiped his mouth. “Don’t tell Hemingway, but fishing bores me. I bought all this gear because Esquire says it’s in this year.”
Jerry lounged on the bank while I kept casting. A hatch had started—hundreds of tiny green mayflies. I felt a strike and pulled back to set the hook. The trout wriggled off but a cast or two later another one hit. Jerry whistled. I played the fish. It was small but it liked to jump. “My first!” I shouted.
I was lifting the trout from the water when Mike walked up. He stood over Jerry and held out an open palm.
“What are all these?” he said.
Jerry rolled his eyes. I held up my fish but Mike didn’t look over.
“They floated down to me,” Mike said. “This river is not an ashtray, Jerry. Reel your line up, Justin. Fishing’s over.”
“But I got one,” I said.
“You’ll get another. Let’s go.”
Jerry sat in back on the ride home, blowing Raleigh smoke through his rolled-down window and nursing his flask. No one spoke. The car was stifling. As we were about to leave the reservation Mike touched the brake and pulled over on the shoulder. “Are you going to make me walk home?” Jerry said. Mike got out of the car and looked both ways, then quickstepped across the highway and bent down.
“Tell me he’s not going to eat that,” Jerry said.
Mike walked to the back of the car with a dead mallard, holding it by its neck. He opened the trunk. There was a thud and then the trunk lid slammed.
“Someone should tell your old man the news,” said Jerry. “It’s the nineteen eighties. The West’s been won.”
“We’ve tried,” I said. “He disagrees.” I didn’t know if this made me proud or sad.
A couple of Saturdays later I was browsing in the reservation store, waiting for Mike to fill the car with gas, when a kid with a push broom asked if he could help me. The kid had bad acne, like cinders under his skin, and a smile I had to look closely at to see.
“Thanks. I’m set,” I said.
“You need some fishing flies?”
“My dad ties his own.”
“That’s your dad there?”
I looked down.
“You’re the one,” said the kid. “My uncle met you. He watched you fish the other day.”
“Your uncle the clerk?”
“He said you can’t tie knots.”
The kid held a finger up, signaling me to wait, and disappeared through a canvas-curtained doorway marked “Employees Only.” He came back holding one hand out.
“Six bucks,” he said. “Everybody says they do the trick.”
The knot-tying gadgets were made of stainless steel. One was U-shaped. The other resembled a pen. I bought them both. It didn’t have to be me versus myself now.
Outside, Mike was pointing to something on our windshield: a grasshopper with its wings caught in the wiper blade. I noticed another one clinging to the aerial.
“Look at your shoes, they’re everywhere,” Mike said. “This is the day. Today’s the day. You ready?”
I sat on a log and practiced using the knot tools. The weather was hot and humid and overcast and sweat rolled off my nose onto my leader as I managed to tie my first unassisted clinch knot and then, a few minutes later, my first blood knot. Though the tools did most of the work, I felt proud anyway.
All around me hungry trout were feeding, some bursting right out of the water to snatch the grasshoppers struggling in the surface film. The larger, heavier fish left visible wakes as they missiled toward their targets, struck, then dove, resting for a moment near the bottom, where I could see their shadows on the gravel. The sight made me sick with excitement, a deep-down fishing greed I hadn’t known was in me.
I had a sport.
My first cast was perfect, depositing my hopper at the head of a deep green pool. I watched it float. It swerved past a jutting rock, accelerated, sliced through a wrinkle of foam, and vanished. A strike. I lifted the willowy rod and felt a pull followed by a sturdy, panicked jerking that meant I had something of size on.
My knots were holding.
When I lifted the big rainbow from the water, its belly was tense and stretched from gorging on hoppers. I shouted for Mike to come look but got no answer.
I knew what I was expected to do next according to the honor code of fly-fishing: let the trout go. I couldn’t, though. I wanted it. Not as a trophy or a souvenir, but as something wild to give me strength. I opened the mesh pouch inside my vest and slipped the trout inside and snapped the flap.
There. It was mine. And the next one would be, too.
They were all mine that day, all seven of them, which was two fish over the legal limit. The first three came to me in quick succession, as if to pay a debt that I was owed. Then my leader broke. I tried to fix it. My fingers, gloved in fish slime, didn’t grip, and I felt the old confusion creeping back. Then Mike walked by on the bank and said, “Still fussing?” and suddenly I felt sharp again, from spite.
I worked hard for the last few fish. I earned them. One was too small to keep. I kept it anyway. The fish pouch hung down bulkily behind me as I trudged through the swamp to the car. Mike wasn’t back yet. I stashed the trout on the floor in the backseat and covered them with my waders and vest. I planned to eat them in secret, I wasn’t sure how.
On the drive back I was quiet, full of thoughts. The moon was full but strangely dim and the dashboard lights glowed yellow on my hands.
“Admit it,” Mike said. “Today made everything worth it. I understand I’m hard on you sometimes, but that’s because I take the long view.”
“Huh.”
“Drama classes will be around forever. Clean wild trout streams won’t. It’s now or never. How many you catch today?”
“A few.” I could smell my fish in the backseat and it made me anxious to leave the reservation.
Mike recapped his day’s big moments as we drove. We passed a hitchhiker with a khaki knapsack, a billboard offering aid to unwed mothers. When the trading post’s neon arrowhead appeared, Mike shifted his hands on top of the wheel.
“I need something.”
“What?” I said. I knew what. “Don’t.”
“I’ve had a perfec
t day. I want my chew.”
We pulled up in front of the store and Mike got out. A tribal police car was parked beside the gas pumps. I could see the cop inside the building, talking to the clerk. Mike strolled inside. While he was making his purchase, the cop came out and looked at our car. I slid lower in my seat. I prepared myself to be punished for my fish lust.
The cop rapped on my window. I rolled it down.
“I see your permit?”
“They’re in my father’s wallet.”
“Out of the car, please.”
“I do something?”
“Get out.”
The cop walked around the car with his flashlight, playing its beam across the seats and even aiming it up into the wheel wells. I stood with my hands in my pockets. Mike walked up. One of his cheeks bulged with chew.
“I’d like you to pop your trunk lid, sir,” the cop said. “I’ve had some reports.”
“Of what? I don’t believe this. We shop your store, we support your businesses.”
“We’re grateful. I want to look inside your trunk.”
Mike opened the lid with his key and stalked away. The flashlight beam glinted off glassy eyes, bright feathers, a shard of white bone in a broken pheasant wing. There was a flattened weasel with matted fur, a gray squirrel without a tail. The mallard from the day we’d fished with Jerry lay bent-necked and stiff on top of the spare tire.
The cop looked at Mike and shook his head. Fleas hopped off the bodies and caught the light.
“Interfering with tribal wildlife. The law applies to remains.”
Mike mumbled something.
“Whatever that is in your mouth, sir, spit it out. I can’t understand you,” the cop said.
Mike spat. A little.
“Do you know where you are, sir?” the cop said. “All of it.”
That was it for trout fishing that summer. We surrendered our fishing permits on the spot, and in place of a bond, which Mike refused to post, the cop confiscated our sporting goods. I piled the rods, vests, and tackle in the parking lot while Mike, wearing rubber gloves the cop had given him, put the roadkill into plastic sacks. When I removed my waders from the car, the cop saw the fish I’d stashed in the backseat and asked me to count them for him.
“There’s seven,” I said. “I finally learned to tie knots, and I got greedy. I could barely catch a fish before.”
“I don’t understand you fly fishermen,” the cop said. “You take something simple and make it complicated. It’s like you can’t have fun unless you’re struggling.”
We didn’t discuss the incident afterward, but I could tell Mike was feeling bad about it when he offered to enroll me in the drama camp, which had added an extra session. I turned him down. After a summer on the Winnikick, the idea of learning to cry on cue and simulate knife and sword fights bored me stiff. I missed the strangeness of the reservation. I missed forgetting myself in the cold water. I missed that moment when you cast your fly, tied with a knot you can’t be sure will hold, and something hidden grabs it, and you’re caught.
3
North of town, on the shores of Heron Lake, where I sometimes went to be alone to worry about my family and my future and whether or not I would ever settle down inside and find a path that would lead me out of the middle of things, there was a famous rehabilitation clinic for drug addicts and alcoholics. Maple Glen treated celebrities and millionaires. Elvis Presley was rumored to have stayed there, as well as a Norwegian prince and the wife of a former president, but it was hard to know the truth. The clinic’s employees were sworn to secrecy and the windows of its long green shuttle vans were tinted with a dark reflective film that grew more opaque the harder you stared at it.
Still, I had a couple of close calls, and they were enough to fill me with resentment toward those whom the world seemed to favor for no good reason. One day I walked into the Shell station downtown just after one of the vans had left the pumps.
“Guess who just used a rest room?” the attendant said. “Elizabeth Taylor.”
“Right.”
“I shit you not.”
“What did she look like?”
“A woman with a cold. She bought some Fritos out of the machine.”
This brush with fame so close to home unnerved me. I felt strangely diminished, pushed aside. Elizabeth Taylor’s type, it seemed to me, belonged on television and in magazines, where ordinary people could look at them but they could not look back at us. The thought that she might have glimpsed me from the van and formed some opinion of my clothes or hair made me queasy with self-consciousness.
My next close call with a Maple Glen celebrity was less direct but even more discouraging. I was manning a booth at the Muscular Dystrophy Fun Fair held every fall in the high school parking lot. My job was to sell tickets for a guessing game involving a fish tank filled with jelly beans.
A girl, a senior debater I had a crush on, plopped down a dollar, guessed sixteen hundred and twenty, and asked me if I’d heard the news.
“Truman Capote was here. He got his fortune told.”
“Who’s Truman Capote?”
“He walked right past your booth. You really don’t know who he is?”
“Not really.”
“Pathetic.”
“A politician?”
“Pathetic. Get a clue.”
The pain of this conversation took days to heal. I changed the route I took to school each morning, avoiding the streets where I’d seen the shuttle vans. And if one of my friends even mentioned Maple Glen, I changed the subject. I didn’t want to hear it.
Then one night at dinner disaster struck.
“Audrey got a new nursing job,” Mike said.
“It’s only part-time. It’s nights,” she said. “It’s nothing.”
“Where?” I said.
“Maple Glen.”
“She’s stunned,” Mike said. “Guess who she saw in the lobby before her interview?”
“Stop it,” said Audrey. “I can’t go leaking names. I signed an agreement about it.”
“That writer,” I said.
Audrey gave me a hard look. “Eat your venison.”
I put down my fork and asked to be excused.
The long morning baths were the first sign she was changing. When Audrey would get home from work at breakfast time, she’d put on a robe and slippers, tie her hair back, and run the water in the claw-foot tub. The downstairs bathroom adjoined the kitchen, and the smells of the salts Audrey sprinkled in her bath—lavender, hyacinth, vanilla, cinnamon—penetrated the refrigerator and tainted the milk I poured over my cereal. When her tub was full, Audrey would shut the door and stay in there, soaking, until I left for school.
One morning I couldn’t find my Ritalin. I rapped on the bathroom door.
“I left my prescription in the medicine cabinet.”
“I’m meditating. Go away.”
“Just check.”
“It wouldn’t kill you to skip a day.”
“You’re meditating?”
When Audrey finally opened the door a crack and handed me my pills, I glimpsed something next to the tub: a flickering candle. To burn a candle so early in the day seemed wasteful to me, a troubling self-indulgence. When I smelled the candle again the next morning. I said something about it through the door.
“It’s sunny out.”
“So?”
“You lit a candle.”
“So? Let your mother do something for herself for once. She can’t just take of others all day long.”
This was the last time I tried to speak to Audrey during one of her baths. I listened instead. Sometimes, over the slip and slop of bathwater, I could hear her reading from a book written by one of the doctors at Maple Glen: One Year in Recovery: A Spirit Log. I’d sneaked a look at the book one day and I hadn’t liked what I’d seen. The pages were divided down the middle, with a little prayer on one side and a brief quotation on the other: “I will stop comparing my ins ides to others’ outsi
des.” “Don’t just do something, sit there.” “Easy does it.”
One morning school was called off because of snow and I was still home when Audrey left the bathroom. She’d been soaking by candlelight for ninety minutes.
“How was work?” I said.
“Quiet. Very quiet.” She set a kettle on the stove and opened the cupboard where she kept her tea. Instead of the Lipton she normally drank, she took down two colorful boxes of herbal tea I hadn’t seen before: Chamomile Cloud and Licorice Life Force.
“Any interesting patients?” I said.
Audrey hung a bag of Licorice Life Force on the rim of a mug from Maple Glen. A motto encircled the mug in silver lettering: “Growth is Change is Growth is Change is Growth.”
“Give me a hint,” I said.
“You know the policy.”
We’d been through this routine before. Audrey seemed to take great pride in shielding her patients’ identities, as if it allowed her to share their fame somehow. In fact, since going to work at Maple Glen she’d started to act like she was better than other people. Just yesterday, for example, while watching the evening news with Joel and me, she’d dismissed the entire United States Senate as a “bunch of senile white male narcissists.” Even Joel did a double take at her new haughtiness.
“It must get awfully depressing,” I said, softening my interrogation tactics, “seeing people who have everything throw it all away.”
“Addiction doesn’t play favorites,” Audrey said, pouring hot water over her herbal tea. “I’m learning something, Justin: the higher their status and level of achievements, the needier human beings tend to be.”
I sensed her relaxing, lowering her guard. If I could make her spill just one big name, I thought, we would be equals again. Just one big name.
“Truth be told,” Audrey said, “I pity these characters. Back where they come from—Los Angeles, New York—they’re surrounded by flatterers, by hangers-on. No one ever tells it to them straight. They smash up a sports car or run a traffic light and the cops let them off for an autograph. It’s sad. They have to come all the way out to Minnesota just to hear the truth about themselves.”