“Where are the pale morning duns?”
“Must be out of them.”
“Don’t go anywhere without pale morning duns.”
“I make the light Cahill do the work for me.”
“Not on big fish,” said Holly, “only on dumb fish. I see you have Adamses in about nineteen sizes.”
“I believe in the Adams.”
“The Adams is pretty vague.”
“It’s not vague. It’s a strong generalization.”
“Where’s the vise and stuff?”
Frank dug out his fly-tying vise, an old Thompson A, and set it up on his desk. He pulled out the lower left-hand drawer, revealing a collection of feathers and pieces of moose and deer hide, small blue and white boxes of hooks, spools of different-colored threads and silk flosses. A nice smell of camphor arose and Holly took a deep breath.
“You and Uncle Mike are really going to sell the ranch?”
“If we can! All we need is a buyer! All he needs is American money! Who told you?”
“Uncle Mike.”
“I didn’t want to tell you.”
“Could it be sold before I get home again?”
“That would be too good to be true, but it could happen.”
“Then I’d like to go once more before I catch my plane.”
“Who’s picking you up in Missoula?”
“Mama.”
“Mama!”
“Yessir, this is a clean sweep. She wanted to come up and check out my boyfriend. Maybe she’ll give you a report. This boyfriend is special and I want you and Mama involved.”
“Well, send her my best.”
“I will. I’ll give her your best. I don’t know if I told you, I changed faculty advisers this term.”
“You didn’t tell me. You’re still a history major?”
“Still a history major.”
“Why did you change?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Dr. Carson — that was his name, huge redheaded guy — Dr. Carson had been reading all these statistics about increasing American ignorance ever since I got there. How many Americans had never heard of the Civil War, never heard of Roosevelt, couldn’t guess the dates of the First World War within fifty years, on and on. He collected these things as a joke and” — she put a size 16 hook in the vise and began winding cream-colored thread on it, almost too quickly to watch — “saved them for me as a kind of gesture of friendship. It got more and more obsessive with him until it became an icky form of intimacy. I tried to agree with him. But he just never seemed to feel I was quite negative enough about proclaiming the awfulness of everything.”
Holly rubbed beeswax onto the thread, then spun pale yellow fur onto it; she wound the thread on the hook until it looked like the eggy, delicate body of a bug. “I had to meet with him every week, but we couldn’t really talk about my work because the stupidity of the American people was becoming so ominous to him that he was paralyzed, and it was starting to paralyze me. Finally, about two weeks ago, I went into his office determined to take a course on the French Revolution even though I hadn’t had the prerequisite, and he said, ‘Do you know how many books the average American reads between graduation from high school and death?’ And I said no and that I really didn’t care because it was not in my plans to become an average American. But I could see he was in this vortex. He said, ‘Guess!’ I mean, he sort of croaked it out. I refused to guess. He stuck his arms straight out from his body and made little fists. His face was red. ‘Guess!’ When I backed out of his office for the last time, he was shouting, ‘Statistically less than one! Statistically less than one!’ So I got a new adviser.”
Holly set two minute white feathers on top of the hook and figure-eighted the thread around them until they stood up.
“Who is the new one?”
“A very quiet, very pleasant dwarf with a Ph.D. from Harvard.”
“Are you calling him a dwarf because he went to Harvard?”
“I’m calling him a dwarf because he’s four feet high.”
“Oh. Did you get the course?”
“Yep, Dad, yep I did.” Holly wound the hackle around the hook shank and the hackle points spun like a bright little cloud around the base of the wings. She wound the thread to the front of the hook and tied it off in a precise whip finish to make the head of the fly. She opened the bottle of lacquer and, when its good smell came out, looked over at Frank and smiled. She dipped the end of her bodkin in it and touched a clear drop of lacquer to the head of the fly. It gleamed for a second and soaked in. She took the fly out of the vise and put in another hook and started again on an identical fly.
“I was kind of surprised when you told me you were going to come back after graduation.”
“It’s home.”
“I know, but it’s not a place of much opportunity for people your age.”
“Think of the places that are.”
“That’s true.”
“I might even reopen Amazing Grease.”
“Please.”
“Well, I might.”
Frank watched while Holly finished another fly. She used to tie flies for the anglers’ shop, for spending money in high school. She had always fished with Frank. When she was in practice, she could outfish him. She couldn’t cast as far but she was a great water reader and better at stealing up on trout and making her casts count. She’d had a boyfriend down in New Mexico who fished; she even brought him up one time. Frank didn’t like him — Miles something or other. He seemed to think his being a fisherman covered everything. He was an avid, excited young man who took the position that he and Frank had known each other for years. It was part of the angling camaraderie. Frank despised him. Later, Miles gave up fishing to work at the Chicago Board of Trade, where he became a drug addict and dropped from sight. Holly put in another hook and wound the thread onto it.
“Where’ve you been fishing lately?” Frank asked.
“I haven’t been. I made a couple of trips to the Tobacco River, mostly to get away from school for a bit. It’s nice, small stream, a lot of small fish. Come up and I’ll take you.”
Frank was glad she was coming home, though he thought it a bad idea. Holly was a bit high-powered for her old society and her sharp tongue would make it no secret. She was a good-looking girl who did almost nothing on purpose to be attractive. It was hard for Frank to see her falling for one of the up-and-coming young men in town. He didn’t like any of them, found them stylishly callow and opinionated.
“What kind of fisherman was Grandpa?”
“Honestly?”
“Yes.”
“Not very good,” said Frank.
“That surprises me,” said Holly.
“He wasn’t very good, but nobody loved it more.”
“Because I remember him fishing constantly.”
“He did, when he had the time. But his approach was too direct. He tried to overpower trout, go straight at them. It was one of the many areas where fishing and life are not at all alike — or at least fishing and business. Your grandfather’s problem was that he didn’t trust anything or anyone but himself. He had to have a hold of things. A good trout fisherman has to understand a slack line. A slack line is everything. That was too much for Grandpa. If that line wasn’t tight, he believed it was out of control. I never knew him to catch a big fish. Big fish are caught on a slack line.”
“Well, what kind of a person was he?”
Frank thought for a moment. He’d never looked at it that way. “He was a pretty good fellow. The way he grew up, he got pretty trained to look straight ahead. I got the impression that people who grew up with him who hadn’t learned this hard, straight-ahead look were ground up, gone, blown away. He didn’t really understand or respect people who hadn’t come out of a Depression background.”
“You must have had trouble with this straight-ahead business?”
“I sure did. I can’t believe that’s a serious question.”
“Is that why you became a hi
ppie?”
“Here we go.”
“No, seriously.”
“I don’t know why I became a hippie. And maybe I wasn’t really one anyway. I never thought I was a hippie at the time. I liked the music. I’m still a child of rock and roll. Lots of us will never escape that. And when we’re old, we’ll probably let our hair grow out again, if there is any. Right now we’re in the swim of things. It’s not perfect but it is highly tangible, you know what I mean? We’re kind of running the store. Know what I mean?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Well, you’re in your youth. You’re washed around from possibility to possibility. God is telling you nothing matters but meeting the perfect partner, nothing. The world seems to be out ahead but nothing is real. It’s all ideas. You’re racing toward these balloons that the air currents move steady in another direction. But you get older and you catch up to some of those balloons. You get even with things and they’re not drifting away ahead of you. I know that I’ve settled into the limited possibilities of feeder cattle and rental property and grain sharecropping and the ridiculous limited characters of my friends and my own rather fascinating inadequacies. And all these things are so real! I can feel my limitations like the surface of marble a sculptor touches. And there’s only so much grass to be leased in the summer, and even subirrigated ground can only produce so many bushels of grain, and Budweiser and Coors are only going to accept so much malt barley, even if we do get it combined and delivered and past the tests for moisture content. The only things that undermine my happiness are things I can’t lay hands on.”
“Like what?” said Holly.
“Oh, I don’t know.”
“Just give me an example.”
“I can’t.”
“Is regret one of them?”
“Sure.”
“Do you ever get lonely?”
“Of course. That’s a bad one. It’s not like other things that strengthen you. Loneliness makes you weaker, makes you worse. I’m guessing that enough of it makes you cruel.”
“Two more pale morning duns and we can call it quits,” said Holly. She turned and looked at her father in thought. She smiled. He shrugged. She laughed, reached over and squeezed his nose. “Poor little friend,” she said.
25
The sun was just coming up. They could make out the light in the tops of cottonwoods. And dropping smoothly out of sight was the pale disc of the moon with its wonderful discolorations. It was like being in a big church in the middle of the week and the only light was in the high windows. They put their rods together and leaned them against the hood of the Buick. Frank opened the bag of doughnuts and set them out and Holly poured coffee from the steel thermos.
“It’s already warm,” she said. She screwed the lid back on the thermos and set it down decisively. The steam curled up from their cups. There was a dusting of powdered sugar from the doughnuts on the black paint of the hood.
“It was good we started early.”
Holly turned her head and listened. Then Frank heard it, a coyote insinuating a thin pure note that seemed to fade into the sky. He could almost feel himself carried with it into a pure blue place. “Are you going to take a net?” Holly asked. She still cocked her head in the direction of the coyote. She smiled to indicate that she had heard it. The little wolves had been here for thousands of years.
“I don’t think so. The lanyard always stretches in the brush and fires the damn thing into my kidneys. You know what, though? Maybe I better. Think if we hooked a big one somewhere we couldn’t beach it.”
“Gosh this coffee is good. Didn’t that ’yote sound pretty?”
“Beautiful.”
“Beautiful … That’s right, beautiful.”
Frank went ahead and found a cow trail through the wild roses with their modest pink blossoms. The cottonwoods left off quickly and they were on a broad level place. Here and there were stands of cattails, water just out of sight. And while they threaded their way on a game trail through the brush, they could hear waterfowl chatting among themselves about their passage. When they were almost to the stream, they walked under a huge dead cottonwood, a splendid outreaching candelabra shape festooned with ravens who nervously strode their perches and croaked at the humans beneath them. One bird pirouetted from his branch and, falling like a black leaf, settled on the trail ahead of them. They stopped and Frank tossed his last piece of doughnut. The raven hopped up to it, picked it up in his beak, flew back with it to his roost. “This isn’t his first day on the job,” said Frank.
Before they reached the edge of the stream the sun was upon them. There was no bank as such, just the end of the wild roses and an uplifted ridge of thorn trees where magpies squawked at the intrusion. But they could hear the stream, which emanated not far away from a series of blue spring holes at a water temperature that stayed constant, winter and summer. Frank loved to arrive at a stream he knew as well as this one. You could strike it at any point and know where you were, like opening a favorite book at a random page.
They stopped at the edge and gazed upon the deep silky current. A pair of kingbirds fought noisily across the stream, and on its banks were intermittent pale purple stands of wild iris. Holly said, “Ah.” For some reason she looked as small as a child in her chest waders; whenever she stopped, she stood her fly rod next to her as a soldier would, while Frank flicked at the irises with the tip of his. He stared at the steady flow of water.
“Nothing moving,” Frank said. “Needs to warm up.”
“Where is the otter pool from here?”
“Well, right above us is the long riffle —”
“With the foam buildup in the corner?”
“Yup, and then the long ledge with the plunge in the middle of it.”
“Okay, I know where I am now. Otter pool right above that.”
“Holly! We’re a little foggy on details.”
“I’m a history major. The foreground erodes for history majors. We like an alpine perspective.”
They worked their way along the bank, blind casting to the undercut far side, hopscotching upstream until they could hear the shallow music of the riffle. Frank tried to watch Holly without making her self-conscious. She was an accurate close-range caster, her line a clean tight loop, and she had the ability to slow the line down, almost to the point of its falling when she was presenting the fly. She soon hooked a fish.
“What have you got on?” Frank asked as she fought the fish, her rod in a bow. The fish jumped high above the pool as they talked.
“Elk hair caddis. Just something that floats.” She hunkered next to the bank and slipped her hand under the fish, a nice trout of about a pound. She let it go, stood up and smiled at Frank while she cast the line back and forth to dry her fly.
At the broad ledge they were each able to take a side of the stream and fish at the same time, casting up into the bubbled seam beneath the rocks. Holly pointed to the plunge at the center and said to Frank, “After you, my boy.” Frank cast straight into the center of the plunge. The fly barely had time to land before he hooked a rainbow that blew end over end out into the shallows and held for a long time against the curve of his rod, a band of silver-pink ignited by the morning light. Soon Frank had it in hand, a hard cold shape, gazing down at the water while he freed the hook. Frank let it go and rinsed his hand. He looked upstream and said, “The otter pool.”
“You forgot to thank me for that fish.”
“Thank you, Holly.”
The sun was still too low, and so they waited quietly before they started upstream. The tall sedges grew down so close to the bank that it was necessary for them to stay in the stream to get up to the otter pool. They waded in the center where the current had scrubbed the bottom down to firm sand. Frank was in over his hips and Holly was almost to the top of her waders. She held her rod up in the air and pressed the top of her waders to her chest with her free hand so that water couldn’t splash in. They made two great V’s in the current. “This i
s the moon,” said Holly, “and I’m on tiptoes.”
“Smell the cold air on the surface of the river.”
“Stop,” said Holly, peering closely at the water. They were on either side of the thread of current and mayflies were starting to appear, unfurling their tiny wings and struggling to float upright. Every few seconds one would come by, some still in their nymphal stage, the case just beginning to split and release the furled wing; others were sailing upright like pale yellow sloops.
“Ephemerella infrequens,” said Holly.
“Little sulphurs,” said Frank.
“Pale morning duns,” said Holly, “like I told you last night.”
Frank hung on to his old names for flies, had never learned the Latin of Holly’s generation of anglers. “Pale morning dun” was the compromise, reasonably objective compared to the sulphurs and yellow sallies and hellgrammites and blue-winged olives of Frank’s upbringing.
At the bend, the wild irises looked as if they would topple into the stream. The narrow band of mud at the base of the sedges revealed a well-used muskrat trail, and on this band stood a perfectly motionless blue heron, head back like the hammer of a gun. It flexed its legs slightly, croaked, sprang into wonderfully slow flight, a faint whistle of pinions, then disappeared over the top of the wall of grasses as though drawn down into its mass.
Around this bend was the otter pool, so called because, when Holly was twelve, she and Frank had watched a family of river otters, three of them, pursuing trout in its depths. Holly took the position that the otters were just like their family: one otter was Frank, one Holly, one Gracie. When the three seized the same trout and rent it, Holly cried, “Oh, poor trout!” and sent the otters into panicked flight upstream.
They stopped quietly at the lower end of the pool, which was wide and deep and surrounded by aspens and cottonwoods. At the top of the pool was a rocky run that looked like a watery stairway. It enlivened a silvery chute of bubbles that didn’t disperse until a third of the way down the pool. The movement of water folded into a precise seam of current only at the end of the pool. All along the seam, trout were rising and sipping down the mayflies under a tapestry of reflected cottonwood leaves.
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