The River Why

by David James Duncan

  “I wish,” she said, laughing again. “But it’s Eddy like my dad, Edwin. What do they call you for short, Orgdwartstilldiftergraft?”

  “Crall me Gust,” I moaned.

  “Sure thing, Gust,” she said.

  “There’s smumthing I ought telled you, Eddy.”

  “What’s that, Gust?”

  “You gite a bite.”

  And she did, so to speak. She pounced on the hazelnut, slammed home the hook, and away down the river shot a second steelhead, towing her pole behind. She dove in and struck out after it while I half fell, half climbed down the cedar, hoping to help out, tearing myself into finer tatters in the devil’s club, reaching the riverbank breathless and bloody—but only the pole was veering about the pool. Eddy was gone!

  I spotted a blue and gold blur dashing through the woods on the opposite shore. She was running away! “Wait!” I shouted. “I’ll grow brack up tree! Just wanded to helpt! Crum back! Come brack!”

  But the louder I shouted the faster she ran. I didn’t want to scare her, but if she got away before I found out something more about her—where she lived, her license number, anything, I’d never see her again! I plunged into the river and swam as fast as I could (which was incredibly slow). I struggled out of the canyon, fighting brush, exhaustion, heart attacks. I was a mess when I reached the road but I staggered to my pickup and started after the telltale dust cloud rising from the road downriver.

  I kept it floored all the way. If my truck wasn’t such a turkey I’d have killed myself on the curves. As it was, I overtook the car after a mere half-mile chase. I honked and waved: the car pulled over. I drove alongside—and peered into the furious face of a fat old woman. “You’re not Eddy!” I screamed, and leaving her gaping I tore back the other way. I drove a maniacal, fish-tailing ten miles, passing at least twenty turnoffs, any of which Eddy may have taken. My nerves began short-circuiting, my gas gauge slipped toward E, I was shredded and wasted and my heart was jumping rope with my intestines. Admitting defeat, I turned and drove slowly back to the Broken Alder Pool.

  I limped down into the canyon and began searching the river for the hazel pole and its steelhead, hoping against hope that it would bear some clue by which I might one day find her. I started at the head of the pool and worked downstream, but found only the dead steelhead lying on the boulder, and the mangled remains of the crawdad. The pole was nowhere; the river wore a poker face; I might have believed the afternoon a dream if the sweat weren’t stinging the hell out of my cuts and scratches.

  I climbed into the alder and huddled in a stupor as the sun sank and the air grew chill. The evening star came out and I thought of dreefees and my twin, but how could they cheer me now? Death was no longer the thing I feared. But to live without ever seeing the beautiful fisher-girl again… God, what a miserable prospect!

  I stayed in the tree as the day turned to dusk, salt in my cuts, cramps in my gut, metamorphic numbness in my mind.… Then something stirred on the surface of the Siletz, down at the tail of the pool: a derelict V-wake, wobbling slowly toward me. I plunged into the river in a kind of goose-dive that was an insult even to those ungainly birds and struck out in a spent dog paddle toward the wake which, thanks to my splashing, now moved in the opposite direction. Seeing it outdistancing me, I scrambled ashore and straggled after, adding bruises, cuts, and gashes to the unreckonable total. Sure enough, it was the hazel.

  It stopped at the brink of the rapids, but the steelhead at the end of the line was so utterly spent that the pull of the pole was more than it could resist. The hazel washed downriver, dragging the luckless, thrashing fish after—a strange and pathetic sight. I followed and finally waylaid it in a shallow gravel run, pulled the steelhead to me, and bent to release it. But there was blood streaming from its gills, and it couldn’t right itself. Then, for the second time in my life, I wept for a fish, thinking it and me the most regrettable pair of fools that ever swam a river. I took a rock and released it into the waters of a better world. Its body, the deadly hazel, and I trudged back to the alder, picked up the first victim, struggled out of the black canyon, and drove slowly, sadly home.

  5

  Jesus Keeps Fishing

  After she left me and I quit my job and wept for a year and

  all my poems were born dead, I decided I would only fish and drink.…

  In the river was a trout and I was on the bank, my heart in my

  chest, clouds above, she was in NY forever and I, fishing and drinking.

  —Jim Harrison again

  After a night of fitful sleep and fits of sighing, dawn found me covered with iodine and band-aids, my bottom atop a rock beside the Tamanawis, the Tamanawis atop its own rocky bottom. Iodine, band-aids, rocks, and bottoms—that’s what Life was made of. For the thousandth time I sighed, then grumbled “Good morning” to the river. It gurgled an incomprehensible reply. Then I remembered that its gurgles came from the tip of the in its . So that was its reply.

  “You’re right,” I said. “It isn’t a good morning.”

  “Because I’ll never see her again.”

  “You know, River, you’re stupider than I thought.”

  “Because I thought any water knew what every water knew, because there’s only one water and it’s been around forever, but if all being around forever teaches you is how to say why why why why why I guess immortality ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.”

  “I don’t know, dammit! And I don’t know why she ran away, or why I had to see her at all when I’ll never see her again, or why she smiled but ran, or laughed but ran, or talked to me but ran, or asked my name but ran, but God she was beautiful, and she fished like, like, like Thomas and Ma and H2O and Piscator put together, and I think I might go crazy if I never see her again!”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m in love with her.”

  “Why did she scratch you all up like that?”

  “The brush and stickers… Hey! Who said that?”

  I turned around. It was Steve. And Rama and Arjuna. And their braids. And Arjuna’s machete. And Rama’s white India-cotton monkey doll.

  “You look terrible,” said Steve. “She’s beautiful, huh?”

  “Yeah,” I mumbled, embarrassed.

  He shook his head. “What it is.”

  “Yeah. Sure. I guess. What’s the monkey’s name, Rama?”

  “Hanuman,” said Steve.

  “Whitey,” said Rama.

  “Hanuman Whitey or Whitey Hanuman?” I asked.

  “Just Whitey,” said Rama. “Mama and Papa call him Hanuman. But he’s my Whitey.”

  “Hanuman,” teased Steve.

  “Whitey!” shouted Rama.

  said the Tamanawis.

  “Because he’s white,” I said.

  “Yeah,” said Rama.

  “What it is,” said Steve. “We’re going up the mountain. Want to come?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  We started out, me and Steve with walking sticks, Arjuna with his machete, Rama with Whitey, Whitey with three long strands of yarn sticking out the top of his head like antennae.

  “Hey Rama,” I said. “Why’s Whitey got those funny hairs? Makes him look like a bug.”

  “Mama made them,” he said. “I show you.…” He twisted the three hairs into a braid and stuck a rubber band like his and Arjuna’s and Steve’s rubber bands on the end to hold it together. Then he kissed the monkey’s grunjy face and said, “Oh Whitey, you looks bootiful!” Then he unbraided the hairs, and a while later braided them again, said the same thing, unbraided them, braided them again, and so on, clear up the mountain. Meanwhile Arjuna macheteed stickers, Steve showed me edible plants, and I nodded and mumbled over each plant, seeing nothing but the fisher-girl.

  We reached the top and sat around looking at the view. I showed Steve the in the Tamanawis. Rama and Whitey and Arjuna fought some monsters that looked more like rotten logs to Steve and me, hacking their limbs and fangs off with the machete. Then we walke
d back down and ate the other five pounds of oranges. I told Steve I’d rather show him my rods and flies when I was feeling a little better. He said, “How it is.” Then it was time for them to go. That’s when I noticed something wasn’t quite right.

  “Hey Rama, where’s Whitey?”

  Rama held his two smudgy, empty hands in front of his face and stared at them incredulously. “Whitey!” he cried. “You’re gone!”

  “You left’m up there,” growled Arjuna, pointing at the mountain with his machete, “when we was killin’ monthters.”

  “Whitey!” cried Rama, looking up at the mountain. “Whitey! Whitey!” It was like Anvil Abe’s friend in the fog, the pitiful way he called.

  “I’ll go get him,” said Steve. “Mind watching the boys, Gus?”

  “Glad for the company,” I said, and meant it.

  Steve left. Arjuna and Rama and I stayed by the river. It was an hour-and-a-half wait. Arjuna started worrying after a while about getting home for lunch. I started worrying after a while about Steve, in between my constant worries over Eddy. And every few minutes Rama would sigh and say, “O, Whitey, O Whitey, I hope he finds you!” The three of us were a whiny mess.

  Finally Steve returned. Empty-handed. Rama moaned, “Whitey!”

  Steve grinned and turned around… Whitey was riding piggyback, woven right into Steve’s braid. “Whitey! you’re back!” cried Rama. Steve untied the monkey and handed it to its master. Rama hugged it for a while, then commenced braiding its three crummy hairs. I don’t know, for me it was a moving scene—the three of them there with their cotton clothes and braids, Steve smiling about how everything was how it was, Arjuna scratching his stomach with the hilt of his machete saying “I’m hungry,” Rama fastening the rubber band on the end of the monkey’s lousy little hairs and crying, “O Whitey, you looks bootiful!”

  I was sorry when they left. I went back to my rock by the river and watched the eddies, wishing I had a Steve to fetch my lost one for me.

  After a while I saw a guy way downstream, flyfishing. That reminded me of the fourteen-foot hazel—all I had left of Eddy. I fetched it from the pickup and returned my bottom to its rock, then sat there like a lump of mud, fondling the fish-murdering thing and moaning Why? Why? Why?, the Tamanawis commiserating with me for a change.

  But who was that joker down on the river? Holy Izaak, what a parody of a Piscator! He had on a huge, flop-brimmed Amish-style hat pin-cushioned full of dozens of the gaudiest Taiwanese flies imaginable; his torso was buried in a cram-packed fishing vest, pouches, landing net, creel, camera, and binoculars; his face was raccoonish in some kind of welder’s goggles doubtless guaranteed to lay bare every fish in the river; his waders were three or four sizes too big in the chest and one shoulder strap was broken so that his fly-line fell into them and refused to come out—and no wonder: it was a terribly ill-used line. Most flyfishermen spend their fishing time drifting imitations at the current’s sweet pace through the likeliest looking water in the stream. This angler obviously held no truck with so simple a process: his method was to lurch through the deepest water flagellating the river fore and aft before slashing his mutilated fly into ankle-deep shallows where it sank and died—an advertisement to minnows, a curiosity to crawdads, and an item ignored by the angler himself, who was busy pulling fly-line from his waders and gear.

  When he reached the riffle below me he waved. I nodded and watched. He began making fabulous mock casts with outrageous vigor, possibly to impress me. “Crack! Whoosh! Crrack! Whoooosh! Crrrrackk!” went his line. After thirty or forty Crack-Whooshes I was more than impressed: I was hiding behind a log. When he’d let out too much line to keep airborne he tried to force a cast—the line piled into the back of his head, he roared “Sacajawea Argeiphontes! I am wounded!”… and I recognized the voice and vocabulary of my friend Titus.

  Ensnarled and sweating, he waded ashore, pulled off the goggles, tossed down the hat, pointed to the #10 Mosquito freshly hung in the lobe of his right ear, and said, “The Sufi, Attar, has written: ‘One tiny fly which entered the ear of Nimrod troubled the brain of that idiot for centuries.’” He fished a fingernail clipper from his vest, then added, “Please, Gus: spare me Nimrod’s fate!”

  I clipped the barb from the Mosquito, invited Titus to say Tintinnabulatious, and yanked the fly from his ear on the fifth syllable. “How’s it feel?” I asked.

  “Eerie,” said he.

  While we untangled him from his gear I invited him to stay and fish (or learn to fish) all weekend. He accepted, and I proposed we begin with a good meal—but he said, “I’ll find it hard to digest in peace until you answer a few questions.”

  I said, “I’m hungry. Ask away.”

  He pointed to my gashes and iodine: “Was it odious harpies or house cats that attacked you yesterday? How did you escape? Why’d they do it?”

  I blushed, and it burned every scratch. “I’m not hungry anymore,” I mumbled.

  “That’s no answer.”

  “It’s a long, dull story.”

  Titus lit a smoke and eyed the hazelnut pole. “What is that?”

  I shrugged. “Part of the long, dull story.”

  His eyes narrowed and his tone turned serious. “Trust me, Gus. You look like a dam about to burst. What happened?”

  I said nothing. He said, “Unless I’m much mistaken, I’ve seen that look before. Is there a woman in this?”

  I turned crimson, but I’d always trusted an intuitive ear: I said, “If I’m gonna tell what happened I’m gonna need help—the bottled variety.”

  He nodded. “There’s bourbon in the Carp.”

  Ezra Brooks bourbon proved a fine tongue-loosener, and Titus a sympathetic listener: I started at the beginning—the evening after the Anvil Abe episode—and as the whiskey got to flowing, so did I. I talked for hours without a break, pouring out all I’d thought and felt and seen, and throughout the sagas of fever, fog and cold, light-knights and Garden World, and Wolf Clan, Titus smoked pipe after pipe, nodding and grunting now and again, keeping my cup full, being more cautious with his own. He didn’t interrupt or cross-examine, didn’t counsel or question, but the nods and grunts were oddly eloquent, and at the light-knight chapter, at the , and again at the tale of Thomas Bigeater his eyes flickered and the pipe went out for neglect. When I reached the Siletz the going got tough, but I chugged my pride with a whiskey chaser and told the unexpurgated edition of my fool performance. Titus laughed a little, but mostly just kept nodding and grunting. Sometimes grunts are just the thing you need to hear. When I’d ended with Rama and Whitey he shook his head and said, “Gus, you’ve lived a lifetime in a week!”

  I smiled bitterly. “Yep. Nuthin’ left to do but drink till I die.”

  He pursed his lips so hard they vanished, took another slug of bourbon, and said, “I admit there’s no cure for a soul in your situation. But there are three consolations.”

  “Let’s see,” I said. “Suicide… amnesia… and Lone Ranger comics.”

  He said nothing, so finally I had to say, “OK. What are they?”

  “One is hope. You may one day find her.”

  “Shit. Fat chance!”

  He shrugged. “I admit the odds are not obese, but there are odds. Why would she ask your name if she didn’t like you?”

  “For the fun of hearing me bite my tongue off!”

  He shook his head. “No, you made a horrendous first impression, but an excellent second one, I’m sure of it. When you fled to the tree you earned her respect—maybe more.”

  “How?”

  “Chivalry,” he said.

  “Chivalry-shivery-shittery,” I burbled, adding, “Oops. I’m crocked.”

  Titus loaded a pipe and handed it to me; when the tobacco had cleared my head a little he said, “Listen, Gus: if she’s as beautiful as you say she…”

  “She’s twice as beautiful as I say she is!”

  “All right,” he said. “If she’s twice as beautiful as you say she is, she
’s accustomed to reactions to her far worse than yours: the world is full of proctological-headed orcs who leer at and torment beauty. She thought she had you pegged when she picked up the rock. But then you took your inspired plunge and tree climb.”

  “So what?”

  “So she realized you meant her nothing but good but were too stunned by her to speak. That had to flatter her. And I doubt your treetop recitations hurt your cause either.” He pointed at the hazel. “Quotations to match her pole: arcane but likable period pieces.”

  “But why did she run!”

  He shrugged. “Shyness. A little fear. I don’t know. Mohammed the Prophet said that men must accept women as they are, ‘with all their curves.’ She knows your name; she knows your river; she might guess you have her pole and fish; she might come to get them.”

  “We might grow wings,” I muttered.

  “We might,” he said hopefully.

  I took another drink. “What about these other consolations?”

  “You’ve put down a healthy dose of the second already.” He gave his glass a tap. “The third takes more aptitude.”

  “What sort?”

  “A sharp mind. Some erotic mania of the soul. Maniacal stamina. Ever hear of Boethius?”

  “Nope.”

  “Meister Eckhart?”

  “Nope.”

  “They wrote books about the consolation of philosophy—good books.”

  “Goody gumdrops,” I said. “Hells bells, Titus! I know as much about philosophy as you know about fly casting.”

  “Then you’re no philosopher,” he said calmly, “and are therefore unfit to judge its consolatory powers.”

  “You got a point,” I admitted.

  “I know this must sound like a dehydrated scheme to a creek addict like yourself, Gus, but if I were you I’d get ploughed tonight, and in the morning I’d start philosophizing.”

  “I just told you, Titus, I don’t know how.”

  He smiled. “And I don’t know how to fish.”

  “So?”