Seventh Enemy

by William G. Tapply

  “Damn right I’m sure.”

  “But it’s—”

  “Of course. They’re all supposed to be released. He’s a fucking poacher.”

  We hunkered there in the path for another minute or two. Then Wally said, “Let’s go.”

  We scrambled the rest of the way down the slope and found ourselves standing on the cobbled bank of the river where, in high water, we’d be up to our knees in surging currents. Big boulders along the edges were still wet from where, not too much earlier in the morning, they had been underwater.

  The fisherman had resumed casting. Wally called, “Hey! How’re they biting?”

  The angler turned, hesitated, then smiled. “Oh, hi. They’ve just started to rise.”

  “Catch any?” said Wally.

  He shrugged. “A couple.”

  Wally waded toward him. Diana and I followed along a few steps behind. Corky sat on the bank.

  The fisherman stopped casting. He cocked his head, squinting at Wally. “Hey,” he said. “I know you.”

  Wally smiled at him.

  “Walt Kinnick, right? Damn! I watch your show all the time. I heard you had a place near here. Jesus, what a treat!”

  He held out his hand to Wally, who took it.

  “You know,” said the guy, “I’m a real fan of yours. A couple years ago I drove all the way down from Brattleboro to hear you speak at the Boston Fly Casters club.”

  Wally nodded and said, “That’s a nice-looking fly rod.”

  The angler grinned. “Neighbor of mine in Vermont custom made it for me. I love it. Guess I ought to. Cost me fourteen hundred bucks.” He held it out to Wally. “Give it a try.”

  Wally handed his own rod back to Diana and took the man’s split-bamboo fly rod. He examined the workmanship, nodding his approval. He waved it in the air a few times. “Sweet,” he said. “I bet it casts like a dream.” Wally glanced at the man. “Come here often?”

  “Couple times a week. It’s only an hour or so from home, and it’s better than any of the rivers in my own state.”

  “It’s been terrific since they made it catch and release, huh?”

  The guy nodded.

  “I hear,” said Wally, “that sometimes guys’ll sneak in with bait, catch a bunch and kill them. It’s a shame that the wardens don’t patrol it better.” He waved the man’s rod in the air, admiring its flex. “The way I figure it,” he continued, “we’ve got to more or less patrol it for ourselves. Wally turned around to Diana and me and showed us the fly rod. “This is a beautiful piece of work, Brady,” he said. “Damn shame that this guy doesn’t deserve it.”

  The fisherman was frowning now. “Just a minute, there—” he said.

  Wally turned back to him. “I saw you kill that trout,” he said quietly.

  “What—?”

  “How long did it take the guy in Vermont to make this rod for you?”

  The guy frowned, “Almost two years from the time I ordered it. But I—”

  Wally gripped the rod with both hands. “It took five years to grow that trout you killed,” he said softly.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the guy muttered.

  Wally held the man’s rod up at eye level and began to bend it.

  “Hey—!”

  It cracked halfway up the butt section. Wally twisted the two broken parts until the splintered halves separated. He handed the mangled rod back to the wide-eyed fisherman. “That’s the price for killing that fish,” he said.

  The guy dumbly took his rod. He stared at it for a moment. Then he looked up at Wally. He was shaking his head slowly back and forth. “You broke my rod,” he finally said.

  Wally nodded.

  “You bastard. You broke my rod. Who the hell do you think you are?

  Wally shrugged. “Try obeying the rules, friend,” he said. He turned his back on the guy To Diana and me he said, “Let’s head upstream where the water’s not polluted.”

  The three of us began to wade away. The man with the broken rod yelled, “God damn it, Kinnick. That’s fourteen hundred bucks. I’ll sue you, you son of a bitch.”

  “This is my lawyer,” said Wally, gesturing to me. “Talk to him.”

  I turned to face the man. “Brady Coyne,” I said, clipping my head cordially. “My number’s in the Boston book.”

  The guy glared at me but said nothing.

  We headed upstream. “That was a little extreme, don’t you think?” I said.

  Wally shrugged. “Bastard deserved it.”

  “It’s obvious you’re not interested in a lawyer’s advice.”

  “Nope.”

  “You can’t just run around breaking people’s fly rods, for God’s sake.”

  “I know,” he said. “It’s a terrible habit of mine.”

  Diana smiled. “Walter’s a real diplomat. He makes enemies wherever he goes.”

  “Yeah, just what he needs,” I said. “More enemies.”

  “Judge a man by his enemies,” said Wally. “I’m going fishing.”

  He waded in and began casting. Downstream from where we stood, the fisherman with the broken fly rod was standing there knee-deep in the Deerfield River staring at us. As I watched, he trudged out of the water and disappeared up the path toward the parking lot.

  Diana and I continued to pick our way upstream through the calf-deep water over the slippery rocks. We hooked elbows with each other for our mutual balance. Corky followed along on the bank. “He’s a very impetuous man,” said Diana. “You must know that. It makes him lovable and impossible, all at the same time.”

  “It’s actually kind of admirable, in an Old Testament sort of way.”

  “Yeah, but he scares me sometimes.”

  “We grew up together, you know,” I said. “We used to fish and hunt when we were kids. We haunted a place on the other side of town we called the Swamp. Several hundred acres of forest and wetland. Full of game. Rabbits, squirrels, grouse, pheasants. We hunted every Saturday during the season and hardly ever managed to kill anything. A pretty little brook with native trout ran through it. Wally and I loved the Swamp. It was our playground. When the other kids were on the baseball diamond or the football field, Wally and I played in the Swamp. Anyway, we went there one April to fish and we began to find these surveyor’s stakes in the ground. You know the kind, with orange paint on top and lot numbers written on them. Wally went absolutely berserk. Screaming and cussing at the top of his lungs. Started to race through the woods ripping up those stakes and heaving them as far as he could. I tried to tell him that he couldn’t do things like that, but he paid no attention to me, and after a few minutes I got into the spirit of it myself. I think we ended up finding about fifty of those surveyor’s stakes. We yanked everyone of them out of the ground, and I’ve got to admit, it felt good.” I shrugged. “Of course, it didn’t do any good. Within a year the bulldozers were there, and a year after that they had that pretty little brook flowing through a concrete culvert and roads were cut through the woods and foundations were all poured and I guess there wasn’t a grouse or a rabbit left.”

  Diana looked at me and smiled. “And he’s been metaphorically ripping up surveyor’s stakes ever since. He’s managed to make a career of it.”

  “Like I said. It’s admirable. Of course,” I added, “as his lawyer, I’d advise against it. But he never consults me.”

  Diana and I picked out likely stretches of river to fish, and soon I was lost in the rhythms of fly casting. Little cream-colored caddis flies were dancing over the surface of the water, and here and there trout swirled and splashed at them. I had to change flies a few times before I found one that the fish liked. I missed a couple of strikes, and then I managed to hook one, a fat rainbow of about fourteen inches. He jumped clear of the water three or four times before I was able to bring him to my side. I slipped my hand down the leader and twisted the barbless hook from his mouth. He finned in the water beside my leg for a moment before he darted away.

&nbs
p; The river bubbled musically. Birds chirped in the trees. The May sunshine warmed my arms and face. I caught a few trout. Now and then I heard Wally grunt or Diana squeal, and when I glanced at them, their rods were bent. After three or four hours—my sense of time completely deserts me when I’m fishing—the insects disappeared from the water and the trout stopped rising. I waded to the bank, sat on a boulder, and lit a cigarette. Corky bounded over and sat beside me. I scratched his ears.

  A few minutes later Wally and Diana reeled in and came over to join me. They sat beside each other on a large flat rock, Diana tilted up her face and nuzzled Walt’s beard. “How you doin’, big guy?” she said softly.

  He smiled quickly: “I’m still pissed.”

  “Some day you’re going to break the wrong guy’s rod, you know.”

  He shrugged. “If the guy’s been killing fish illegally, it’ll be the right rod.”

  “You know what I mean,” she said.

  He hugged her against his side and looked at me. “Remember the Swamp, Brady?”

  I nodded. “I was telling Diana about those surveyor’s stakes.”

  “I’m still pissed about that.” he said.

  11

  BACK AT THE CABIN, Diana took Corky out for a walk and I went into my bedroom to change out of my fishing clothes. When I walked into the living room, Wally said, “Listen to this.”

  He was standing by his answering machine. He pressed the button. It whirred for a moment, then a recorded voice said, “Walter Kinnick, you have betrayed the Second Amendment For Ever and you deserve to die a just and ironic death.”

  The machine clanked and rewound itself.

  “Jesus, Wally,” I said. “Have you had any other calls like that?”

  He shrugged. “A few yesterday. They upset Diana. I figure they’re just venting their frustrations. Harmless.”

  “This guy didn’t sound harmless,” I said. “Play it again.”

  Wally did.

  “Recognize the voice?” I said.

  Wally shook his head.

  “‘Just and ironic,’” I said. “Interesting language for a death threat. I wouldn’t have expected anything quite so literate.”

  “Yeah,” said Wally. “The guy’s a poet.”

  “Somebody from SAFE, obviously,” I said. “Taking exception to your testimony.”

  “Well, fuck him.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Not to worry,” he said. “When someone actually plans to kill somebody, they don’t call them to announce it. Anonymous phone calls?” He dismissed them with a wave of his hand. “Just another variation on heavy breathing. Come on. I’m starved. Let’s eat.”

  Wally grilled giant steaks on his hibachi, I tossed the salad, and Diana was forbidden to do anything except kibitz, which she did, wittily. Then we sat on the front porch eating and sipping beer and watching the shadows creep into the meadow. Bats and swallows swooped and darted at moths and mosquitoes, and after the shadows had deepened from gray to purple a doe and her spindly-legged fawn tiptoed into the opening.

  Once from inside the cabin we heard the phone ringing. “Let the machine get it,” said Wally when Diana started to get up.

  She shrugged and sat down.

  I punched my palm. “Damn it,” I said. “You should’ve saved that tape.”

  “Why?”

  “That message you had. You should’ve saved it.”

  “What for?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  He smiled. “Me neither. Anyway, too late now. It’s been recorded over.”

  “What kind of message this time?” said Diana.

  “Just another nut, honey,” he said.

  “I think it’s scary.”

  He reached over and squeezed her hand.

  We sat out there in the darkness for a while longer. Finally Wally stretched, groaned, and stood up. “Gotta make a few calls,” he said. He bent over, lifted Diana’s hair, and kissed the back of her neck. “I’ll meet you in the sack,” he said to her. Then he went inside.

  Diana and I sat in the darkness for a few minutes. Then she said, “Do you play cribbage?”

  “I was the champion of Raven Lake Lodge up in Maine a few years ago. Wrested the title from a couple of very crafty Penobscot Indian guides. I’m probably too good for you.”

  “Let’s find out.”

  She went inside. I lit a cigarette. A few minutes later the porch light went on and Diana shouldered open the screen door. She was carrying a tray which bore a cribbage board, a deck of cards, and two mugs of coffee.

  We played cribbage and sipped coffee while the moths swirled around the porch light and the night birds called in the darkness. Once Diana paused in the middle of shuffling the deck and said, “Brady?”

  “Um?”

  “Those phone calls?”

  I nodded.

  “It’s scary.”

  “I know,” I said. “But Wally’s probably right. Some people get off on phone calls. They’re cowards.”

  “Mm,” she said doubtfully.

  A little later she suddenly began giggling.

  “What is it?” I said.

  “That man? Whose rod Walter broke? Did you see his face?”

  “I think Wally’s right.” I said. “He deserved it.”

  She beat me three games to two. She got all the good cards.

  As my penalty for losing, I went in to refill our mugs. Wally was seated at the kitchen table with the telephone wedged against his ear. He rolled his eyes at me.

  I brought coffee out to Diana. “Doesn’t he ever stop working?” I said.

  “He pretends to. When we come out here, he always swears he’s going to forget it. But every time I turn around, he’s on the phone.”

  We sipped our coffee in comfortable silence for a couple of minutes. Then she leaned toward me and touched my arm. “You were probably wondering about us,” she said. “Me and Walter, I mean.”

  I shrugged. “None of my business whatsoever.”

  “I want to tell you. Maybe you can give me some advice.”

  “Legal or personal?”

  “Either,” she said. “Both.”

  “As long as you don’t value it too highly,” I said. “Anybody can give advice.”

  “You’re a friend. That makes it worth something.”

  “Thank you.” I said.

  “It’s kind of a cliché,” said Diana quietly, “now that I think of it. My husband works for a public relations firm, and one of their clients is this bank president or something who wanted to get onto Walter’s show. Anyhow, there was some kind of reception at the Bostonian Hotel, and Howard had to go because his client was going. And Walter was there. Now, I had one of those marriages—well, Howard and I had been married for about six years, just drifting along. Nothing bad, but nothing much good, either. And when I met Walter—well, something happened. I just thought he was the sexiest, most down-to-earth guy I’d ever known. I mean, I talked to him for about three minutes and I just wanted him to wrap his arms around me and never let go.” She shrugged. “I loved him instantly. I never believed that happened. But it does. It did.”

  “And Wally?” I said.

  “He was charming. We talked. I couldn’t lake my eyes off him. I just wanted to grab him.” She smiled. “I made the mistake of letting him know how I felt. I mean, looking back on it, it was something out of a romance novel. I don’t even remember what I said, but it seemed outrageously bold at the time. Walter smiled at me, picked up my left hand, looked at my wedding ring in a meaningful way, dropped my hand, and without a word he turned around and walked away from me. That same night I told Howard I was leaving him. Which I did. Not for Walter. It had been coming for a long time. Meeting Walter, it just—it made me confront it. So I got my own place in Cambridge and filed for divorce. See, that response I had to Walter, it made me realize the truth about my marriage. Regardless of Walter, I just knew that the marriage had to end. It wasn’t really that I left How
ard West for Walter Kinnick. I just—I guess I left Howard for me. Anyway, I wrote Walter a long letter. I didn’t really expect to hear from him. I mean, I’d met him just that once, and I had no reason to believe that he’d even remember me. But eventually he wrote back to me. It was just a short polite note, really. He answers all his fan mail, and that’s all my letter was to him.” She smiled. “But I wrote back to him, and he answered that one, too. We did that for nearly a year. Finally we got together, and…” She shrugged.

  “I thought Wally told me you weren’t divorced,” I said.

  She nodded. “Right. I’m not. Howard’s still fighting it. He did not take it well.” She laughed ironically. “There’s an understatement for you. Howard went bananas is what happened. See, Brady, I’ve got nothing against Howard. I just don’t want to be married to him. But somehow his entire self-image is at stake here. It’s not that he loves me or needs me or can’t live without me. Not me. I honestly don’t think it’s me he really cares about. It’s the idea of me. He feels that if he loses me he’s a failure. He just can’t believe that somebody wouldn’t want to be married to him.” She paused, gazed up at the sky, took a deep breath, and whooshed it out. When she looked at me again, her eyes had brimmed with tears. “It’s so damn frustrating. I thought we could be friends. You know, I figured we’d tell each other it was a pretty good six years and get on with our lives. Just to show you how naive I was, I even thought Howard would be happy for me, that I’d found someone I really loved.”

  “It hardly ever works that way,” I said.

  “You do divorces, right?”

  “I do them. I also had one of my own,”

  “So you know what I mean. It’s been three years. He calls me. Talks and talks. He yells, he cajoles, he cries, he begs, he threatens, he—”

  “Threatens?” I said.

  She laughed quickly. “Wrong word. He never leaves death-threat messages on my answering machine, if that’s what you mean. Oh, he’d like me to believe that he’s going to kill himself or something, that he can’t live without me. Psychological threats like that. Just trying to make me feel guilty. I know him. He likes everything in its proper place. He hates surprises. This—I guess it surprised him. It’s out of place. He doesn’t know where it fits. It makes him a little crazy I never saw that part of him before. It makes me crazy sometimes. I mean, it’s unnerving, seeing something new in somebody after you’ve been married to him for six years.”