Riverwatcher

by Ronald Weber

  “Keep in sight,” Verlyn had said, giving the main reason for fishing the stretch of water below the Kabin Kamp. “In sight of who?” Calvin asked. Verlyn didn’t answer, the reason being that Calvin already knew the answer. Some fishermen who stayed at the Kabin Kamp, older types especially with bum knees or bad backs, talked about fishing more than they actually fished. When they did venture in the water, it was usually the stretch from the lodge to the canoe landing, the fish therein the most fished-over fish in the Borchard. When he wasn’t floating the South Branch with Verlyn, Graham Underwood could be one of the fishermen on the stretch of water, keeping an eye on his daughter and the guide. “No taking off in the truck,” Verlyn said, giving Calvin his instructions. “No fishing the South Branch. No showing her beaver ponds in the pine barrens. Stay visible.” Calvin shrugged and said, “You know me, boss.” “That’s the point,” Verlyn said.

  More and more, Verlyn sounded like a regular old fogy. There were times still, off with Calvin for private fishing, when he was himself, meaning as he was when he and Calvin, young guys, camped all summer on the South Branch, called themselves blood brothers, generally thumbed their noses at what passed for commonplace life. Then Verlyn inherited Kelso’s Kabin Kamp when his dad died, and began the process of becoming a regular old fogy.

  When Calvin had laid out for Fitzgerald the reason for Verlyn’s decline, Fitzgerald had nodded and quoted Thoreau, which was like him to do: “I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in.” “That’s good,” Calvin told him, “except Verlyn didn’t inherit a farm.” “You’re too literal,” Fitzgerald said. “Naw,” Calvin explained, “you got to keep things straight, is all.”

  What was straight now, he noticed, was Gwendolyn’s line, a fish on. She was leaning forward, the rod bent in a tight arc, looking like she might get pulled into the water. Calvin moved close beside her, just to her left side, told her not to force the fish. “Just keep a tight line.”

  Gwendolyn’s mouth was open, her eyes wide under a long-billed blue hat, the pony-tailed hair dangling below a shimmering chestnut brown in the sun. The things you notice, Calvin thought.

  “You’re doing good,” he said to her. “Soon as you can, run in the line. Hold the fish on the reel. Take your time.”

  The fish probably wasn’t big, but it was good enough for a first one on a fly. All her life she would remember it, forever hook it in her dreams. He didn’t want her to lose it. You had to see your first fish, remove the hook from the jaw, release the miracle of it back to the river. He pulled his landing net from the clip at the back of his vest, held it ready.

  Suddenly, the fish came out of the water, in a spray of foam danced for an instant on its tail—a rainbow, strong, fourteen inches maybe. Just as instantly Calvin knew what came next: limp line, straightened rod, deflated heart. “Naw,” he said when Gwendolyn turned to him with stricken eyes, “nothing you could have done.” He tried for a tone he didn’t feel. “Think of it like a long release. Best kind there is. You didn’t have to put a finger on the fish. We come back tomorrow, we’ll hook that guy again.”

  Gwendolyn kept looking at him, but the appearance of her eyes had changed. Anger flared back at him. “That’s baloney, Calvin.”

  Calvin nodded. “You’re right.”

  “So why’d you say it?”

  Calvin waited a moment before he asked, “Anybody ever call you Gwen?”

  “Not at home. At school.”

  Calvin nodded again. “Tell you what, Gwen. Let’s wade on past the canoe landing. There’s a logjam I know, down there around a bend, where a big brown holes up. You can’t get a cast in where he’s at, but that Woolly Bugger might tempt him to come out.”

  “You’re not just saying that?”

  “He does come out, smacks your fly, you’ll think you’ve gone to heaven.”

  *  *  *

  FITZGERALD HAD SPOTTED a few tricos in the air but none on the water, and no fish were feeding. He sat on a downed log on the edge of the stream, tying on an Adams Wulff as an attractor with a Pheasant Tail nymph on a dropper, hearing the whine of a siren coming from downstream. The sound was a long way off, but it cut into his attention.

  His mind had been emptied of everything except the feel of sun on his skin, the flat sheen of the water above a stretch of riffles, and the deadly silent accuracy of jays and swallows inhaling tricos in the languid air. He always told himself, going off for a morning of fishing rather than remaining saddled to his desk, that he would spend the downtime when the fish weren’t hitting to think about his novel. He could work out plot details, form sentences in his head, even write a few things down in the spiral notebook he dutifully kept in a shirt pocket. He kept telling himself that, yet never did a thing.

  In Walden Thoreau tells of night fishing on the pond from a boat, drifting in a gentle breeze and thinking large thoughts, then suddenly getting a strike and feeling jolted from “vast and cosmogonal themes” to a linkup once again with nature. That was the way it ought to be, Fitzgerald agreed, but wasn’t with him. Nature steadily held the upper hand when he went fishing, fish active or not. Maybe that was why, later in life, Thoreau gave up fishing: so he could concentrate solely—Fitzgerald had looked up the definition of cosmogonal—on theories of the universe. If so, it was unfortunate. He preferred a Thoreau united with the pond and its “mysterious nocturnal fishes.”

  The siren was probably coming from a vehicle crossing the river at Walther Bridge. The next bridge downstream was too far for the sound to carry. Fitzgerald moved from the downed log into the current, water tightening around his legs. He planned to wade upstream a ways, holding to the middle of the stream, floating the attractor and the nymph along wood piles, giving the tricos time to turn on. He’d go as far as a gray-shingled cabin set back in the pines, two hundred river yards or so, and if there was still no feeding activity, give up for the day, head back to the A-frame, saddle himself at his desk.

  Maybe he would.

  The siren coming from Walther Bridge had carried Mercy into his thoughts. They had left the A-frame together that morning, but Mercy had been heading off to work. Most people did. Someone who was working drove the vehicle crossing the bridge with its siren on. That was how people lived, by working. Yet here he was, wading a fine stretch of the Borchard on a fine morning, birds and insects and unseen trout his only company, not doing anything that could be called work. “What should be man’s morning work in this world?” Thoreau asked in Walden, the assumption being there ought to be some.

  Fitzgerald had worked before, for a newspaper, and might again. Technically, he was on indefinite leave of absence from the Detroit Free Press. Winning a modest state lottery had given him enough money to temporarily support the kind of life he was leading, which meant renting the big A-frame at Walther Bridge and reading Thoreau and writing a novel and fishing the Borchard through all the seasons. And having Mercy Virdon as a live-in partner—Mercy who had a job and a schedule to keep and, given the way the rest of the world was set up, a normal life. On certain mornings Mercy’s example caused Fitzgerald to work up a decent sense of guilt.

  Not that Mercy indicated in any way that he should. She kept telling him he was lucky, damn lucky, and should take full advantage. She would if she had won the lottery. She would spend her days fishing the river and tromping the woods studying the wildlife and, the weather lousy, staying inside listening to CDs and reading books and tying flies that were works of art. She wouldn’t have any problem with that kind of life.

  He knew Mercy meant what she said, but knew, too, she would never win a lottery because, a basic problem, she never bought a ticket. When he asked her about that, she tossed a hand in the air and said, “Because lightening never strikes t
wice,” meaning because he had already won a lottery. “But it does,” he said, “all the time.” “So why don’t you keep buying tickets?” “Because I’m not greedy,” he told her, “except for you.”

  Deep down, Mercy didn’t want to win a lottery. Winning would upset her life, complicate it at least, and she was content with it the way it was. She had the only job she ever wanted in the only town she ever wanted to live in. She didn’t have a husband, but she had a son, Kit, and now she had Fitzgerald. There was that much of her life that hadn’t been perfect, that much that was lacking, until he showed up on the Borchard and rented the house at Walther Bridge and fell in love with her. Thinking about it that way, you could say, ticket or no, Mercy had won a lottery.

  Fitzgerald reacted a heartbeat too slow, setting the hook into nothing, when a fish hit the Adams just after it settled on the water. He was casting mechanically, thinking of Mercy, expecting nothing on the dry fly and little if anything on the nymph. He drew in the line, dried the Adams with false casts, dropped it again onto the same stretch of water. He needed to center his attention—the fish was probably small but a start for the day—and that meant forgetting Mercy, emptying his mind.

  When he came to the gray-shingled cabin, he would turn around, switch to a pair of Matuka streamers, wade downstream to where he had parked the Cherokee. Then he would head back for the A-frame, pick up a bottle of Valpolicella, drive into Ossning for cheese at Glen’s and fresh bread at the Six-Grain Bakery, show up at the DNR office at lunch time, and tell Mercy it was too nice a day not to have a picnic.

  They would drive to the town park on the East Branch of the Borchard, and there Fitzgerald would tell her what had just occurred to him: She had won a lottery, so to speak, when he showed up in her life. He could picture the way her eyes would flash when he said that, and he would tell her she was probably as Irish as he was.

  Then he would ask her, again, to marry him.

  *  *  *

  KIT WAS STANDING outside the fly shop, having a smoke, when an EMS ambulance raced by on the bridge road, siren blasting the air. Two sheriff’s patrol cars had crossed the bridge just before, blue lights revolving but no sirens, which was all that was needed considering the fact that there wasn’t another vehicle on the road. It was Kit’s view that some guys got into emergency work just so they could turn on sirens as they raced through the woods.

  There was probably an accident on the South Downriver Road, a madman hauling logs driving up the rear end of a tourist out seeing the sights, which amounted to nothing more than flat vistas of jack pine. They would have to scrape the tourist off the asphalt, which was a job Kit wouldn’t care to do, though maybe guys who liked sirens didn’t mind.

  From the fly shop he passed through a stand of white birch to the water’s edge, sat on one of the lodge’s peeled-log benches, flipped the stub of his cigarette into the river. A tiny trout rose to it, turned away. He lit a fresh cigarette and leaned back against the bench, worried.

  It wasn’t the way he should be feeling since, that morning, he had been doing the next best thing to fishing, which was running the fly shop while Verlyn was in town, none of the guides even around, tying flies and telling lies the way guides do when they aren’t guiding. Today they weren’t all guiding since the lodge was only half full, so they must be out fishing on their own, which was another thing guides did when they weren’t guiding. And why, long term, it was the life Kit had in mind for himself.

  In the meantime, he was satisfied working in the fly shop. Before, Verlyn had only let him help out the maids in the lodge and mow grass, mightily pissed off, as was Mercy, when he dropped out of Central Michigan. Verlyn hadn’t even started college, yet now he thought going to school the greatest thing in the world. Mercy was another matter, having two college degrees, which was something Kit could barely imagine. But it was Verlyn who owned the fly shop and assigned the guides, not Mercy, so it was Verlyn he had to deal with day to day.

  He had done the “peon” work around the lodge and pretty much kept his mouth shut, and eventually Verlyn had let him stock shelves in the fly shop and now and then run the cash register. He was moving up—but he wasn’t giving in, not entirely. Verlyn called cigarettes “cancer sticks,” which was why Kit smoked, going outdoors on his break time and lighting up in full view of Verlyn watching through the window of the shop. When he was a young guy, Verlyn probably smoked his head off, as everybody did back then, but now people who smoked drove him as wild as canoeists who littered the river or fishermen who kept the trout they caught.

  Calvin was worse. You couldn’t even smoke outside when you were around him, Calvin saying how he had read in some article that secondary smoke was worse outside than in, which was clearly bull. But you couldn’t talk Calvin out of anything, which was why, if you ignored smoking and the fact Calvin didn’t touch alcohol and a few other batty things about him, Kit liked him so much. Calvin—a modified Calvin but still the top guide on the Borchard—was his model.

  Right now, Calvin was on the stretch of water below the Kabin Kamp, fishing with Gwendolyn Underwood, and she was the reason Kit was worried. Gwendolyn was pretty enough, so you wouldn’t mind spending the day with her, guide fee or not, but Kit considered her too young for anything more. His taste ran to older women, at least over twenty-one. He wasn’t twenty-one himself, but he was certain he looked like he was. When he stopped in at the Keg O’Nails, the manager, Deke Musso, never asked his age. Gwendolyn Underwood, on the other hand, wouldn’t get past the door. She still had the look of a kid.

  You could tell Calvin was lapping it up, the way Gwendolyn paid attention to everything he said, even the bull, and looked at him with wide eyes. Calvin was an expert when it came to the Borchard and fishing, but he was as old as Gwendolyn’s father. He didn’t look like her father, though, which might be the point as far as Gwendolyn was concerned. Calvin had a gray beard and gray hair in a pony-tail that hung out below the big Western Stetson he always wore on the river and usually a leather vest over his blue-denim shirts and duck boots on his feet whether it was wet or not. Calvin probably looked exotic to Gwendolyn, whereas to Kit he just looked like Calvin.

  So Calvin would be lapping it up out there on the river with Gwendolyn, but Kit was pretty sure he wouldn’t try anything on her. Calvin already had a string of women in Ossning and God knew how many tucked away in New Zealand when he was down there guiding in winter. And Kit had heard Verlyn make a point of telling Calvin to keep his hands off as far as Gwendolyn was concerned, her father being a hotshot businessman who kept coming to the Kabin Kamp year after year. Verlyn didn’t want Calvin doing anything to rock the boat. Calvin had acted the smart ass, but you could tell he understood. Calvin had his head on pretty straight when it came to mixing business with pleasure.

  About Verlyn, on the other hand, Kit wasn’t so sure. He talked a good line to Calvin, and he certainly knew Gwendolyn was business since he personally guided her father on the South Branch. What had Kit worrying was what happened to Verlyn’s eyes every time Gwendolyn came in the fly shop, going from their usual look, hard cash-register eyes, to glazed-over high school eyes, meaning eyes filled to the brim with impossible longing.

  Kit didn’t get it. Unlike Calvin, Verlyn had only one woman, but the woman was Jan, and Jan was still pretty sharp looking. So why did Verlyn get that look in the eyes around a kid like Gwendolyn Underwood? This morning, after Calvin and Gwendolyn had gone out on the lawn to work on her casting, Verlyn had abruptly put Kit in charge of the fly shop, went out to the Land Rover, shot off to town. He never went into Ossning during the fishing season when the fly shop was busy, but he had done just that nearly every morning since Gwendolyn and her father arrived at the Kabin Kamp.

  Kit flipped another stub of cigarette into the river, watched it ride the current a few seconds before a trout—probably the same one, trout being none too intelligent—rose to take a look. He would have to make Verlyn a priority, watching out for him so he didn’t
do something stupid, make a fool of himself where Gwendolyn was concerned, and thereby harm the Kabin Kamp’s reputation with someone like Graham Underwood. Business hotshots like that had hotshot friends, and word could get around.

  Verlyn kept yakking to anyone would listen that a fishing lodge was a fragile thing as far as business went, and the slightest thing could send it down the tubes. He had the quality of the fishing on the Borchard in mind when he said that, but it could apply as well to messing around with a customer’s daughter.

  Kit got up slowly from the peeled-log bench, began making his way back through the stand of white birch to the fly shop. He had the feeling he was dragging a weight of concern behind him, which didn’t seem entirely fair since he wasn’t even an apprentice yet in the guide business. But that was the point: Someone had to keep an eye on Verlyn so he didn’t foul up a future that, if Kit played his cards right, might come his way.

  3

  A SHERIFF’S PATROL car blocked the road into Rainbow Run. When Mercy pulled up beside it, Zack Cox got out of the car and came over to her open window.

  “About time.”

  “For what?”

  The deputy pushed back his broad-brimmed hat, drew a hand across his forehead. “We got us a long day here.”

  “C’mon, Zack. Quit stalling.”

  “Willard’s been tryin’ to get you.”

  “I know. But I’m here now. What’s up?”

  “Campground’s sealed off. Nobody in or out ’til we get things figured out.”

  “But about what?”

  “Willard said to send you in. Second loop, all the way back. Said you’d know where.”

  Mercy stared at him.

  “Yup,” Zack said. “Afraid so.”

  *  *  *

  AN EMS AMBULANCE was there, stopped in the middle of the loop road. In front of it she could see another patrol car and Willard Stroud’s unmarked car, both parked just behind the blue Ford pickup. Mercy pulled her Suburban to the side, quickly got out, began half-running up the packed-dirt path to the campsite obscured by pines. Willard Stroud met her partway. When she saw his face, she knew there was nothing to ask.