Willows and Parker Box Set

by Laurence Gough

  In repose his face was thin, sallow, and deeply lined. His sandy brown hair was limp and receding. There was a pouch of loose skin under his chin. His pores were enlarging. And in the mornings, standing bleary and defenceless in front of the bathroom mirror, he secretly admitted to himself that with each passing day he looked a little bit more like the picture on his driver’s licence.

  Mannie tried to minimize his physical shortcomings by spending a lot of money on clothes. So, usually, he looked like a very well dressed pear-shaped forty-year-old prematurely balding man.

  But not tonight.

  Tonight Mannie was wearing a generic brand shirt made of flimsy Taiwanese polyester; a tie that looked like a slice of neon pizza and was almost as wide as his chest; a shapeless bile-green suit with an inkstain under the pocket; and a pair of scuffed brown penny loafers so small they could have been bronzed. The shoes were a full two sizes too small and Mannie’s feet were killing him. But he liked to think he had discipline. As he walked down the gentle slope of Davie Street, he forced himself to ignore the sharp little forkfuls of pain that accompanied each and every step he took.

  Off to the left, the sun was about to fall into the Pacific Ocean. Above him, a trio of mosquito hawks dipped and wheeled erratically in the shadows of the surrounding highrises, their high-pitched cries of gluttony and pleasure bouncing and echoing off the concrete walls.

  Mannie glanced at his watch. It was twenty minutes past nine. He was dead on schedule.

  Limping noticeably, he walked past the restaurant. Three storeys high, it was built of massive blocks of rough-cut sandstone, and squatted magnificently in the middle of half a city block of prime real estate. At the front of the building, an immaculate expanse of lawn was neatly bisected by a driveway of interlocking pink brick that ran in an exact semi-circle through a miniature forest of carefully pruned shrubs and dwarf evergreens.

  At the rear of the building, there was an alley and a gleaming black Econoline van. The van was parked up against a big Smithrite dumpster. The dumpster was full to the brim with expensive leftovers, but Mannie noticed that none of the dozens of flies buzzing around were wearing tuxedos. He leaned against the Smithrite, taking some of the weight off his feet. The shoes were murdering him, the level of pain just barely this side of tolerable. He told himself that next time he’d go the other way, buy a pair that were a couple of sizes too large and stuff them with old newspapers or maybe six pairs of socks. He shot the cuff of the bile-green suit. Twenty-five past nine. Now that the sun was down, the light was fading fast. Mannie took a quick, furtive look around, satisfying himself that the darkening alley was empty.

  Sliding the knife out of its oiled leather sheath, he moved in on the van. His pace was unhurried and his back was erect. He looked as if he had every right to be there. Except for the knife, he looked perfectly harmless, even a little bit lost.

  The knife was eight inches long. It had a weighted aluminium and composition slab handle and a deep, sharply curved blade. It had been designed to cut the lead strips that were used in the construction of stained-glass windows. The blade was high-quality carbon steel, forged in West Germany. Mannie had spent most of an afternoon applying the edge to an oilstone, and he had sharpened the blade so fastidiously that he was able to chop effortlessly through small bones with it.

  Now he reversed the knife in his hand and used the handle to punch a ragged hole in the window on the driver’s side of the van. When the hole was large enough to get his hand through, he reached inside, twisting his wrist at an awkward angle to get at the lock.

  A door at the rear of the restaurant swung open. A rapidly widening beam of smoky yellow light splashed across the van. Mannie crouched, froze. He heard the clatter of pots and smelled but failed to identify béarnaise sauce. A bulky silhouette filled the doorway, an arm pointed accusingly at Mannie. Then a cigarette arced like a tracer through the air towards him, lost velocity and altitude, struck a shower of sparks on the asphalt.

  The door slammed shut.

  Mannie let out a little sigh. His heart started beating again. He unlocked the door and sheathed the knife and climbed into the van. Brushing away fragments of glass, he lay down on his back in the leg well with his head resting on the red shag carpet that covered the transmission hump. Taking a small magnetized flashlight from his pocket, he attached it to the steering column so the narrow beam shone up into the confusion of brightly coloured wires and cables that were hidden behind the dashboard.

  Mannie was no electrician, but years of experience had given him plenty of confidence in his plodding methodology. Using a wire stripper, he peeled away half an inch or more of the protective plastic coating that covered the ignition wires, and then began to experiment with several short lengths of loose wire soldered at both ends to small alligator clips.

  Twice he caused short circuits that resulted in brief fireworks displays, unpleasant smells and showers of sparks. Then the big V-8 engine turned over, and caught. The evening’s first rush of adrenalin coursed through Mannie’s veins. He pressed down hard on the gas pedal with the heel of his left hand. The engine howled and the van shuddered beneath him. He made sure the alligator clips were secure, and hauled himself up off the floor and into the driver’s seat.

  Looking anxiously around, he saw that the alley was still deserted. Nobody was paying any attention. It was just him and the flies. He rolled down the side windows and then kicked off his shoes, picked them up and twisted in his seat to throw them into the back of the van.

  Surprise!

  The floor, walls, and even the ceiling were carpeted in the same gaudy red plush that covered the transmission hump. The stuff was everywhere, even glued to the sides of the little bar fridge standing in a corner at the back.

  Above the fridge there was a chrome rack holding two wine glasses. Diagonally opposite, suspended from the ceiling by a steel bracket, there was a small colour television. Most of the remaining space was taken by a low bed with a mirrored headboard and heart-shaped cushions, a bedspread of a silvery metallic material. A bordello on wheels. Mannie blinked, and turned away. He fiddled with the tape deck. A flood of syrupy music blared from hidden speakers. He turned down the volume, released the emergency brake, and put the van in gear.

  At Jervis he stopped for a red light. He was only one short block from the intersection of Davie and Bute. Through the windscreen he could see the bank of open phone booths that were the main reason for the corner’s popularity with the younger set.

  He took a cigar packaged in an aluminium tube from the inner breast pocket of his suit. The cigar had cost three dollars, but Felix Newton was paying for it. Not that this was unreasonable, since Mannie had never been a smoker, and the only reason he had bought the cigar was because he liked the idea of a meaningless prop. Small deceptions had always been his idea of a good time. Probably that was one of the reasons he was so happy in his line of work.

  He got the cigar out of the tube, bit off an end, stabbed at the lighter with his index finger. The traffic light changed. He pressed his stockinged foot down on the gas pedal, and the van powered smoothly through the intersection.

  As he approached the corner, Mannie slowed to a crawl and then pulled in to the curb and stopped. There were half a dozen hookers loitering around the phone booths. Most of them were in their early teens. Mannie spotted the boy he was after. They made eye contact, and Mannie saw the boy stiffen. Mannie took the cigar out of his mouth and smiled broadly, ear-to-ear stuff, really stretching his face to the limit. The boy grinned puckishly back, raised a knowing eyebrow. He had a very nice complexion. His eyes were dark green, inviting. When he returned Mannie’s smile, he displayed two rows of perfect teeth.

  Mannie gave a little nod of his head and the boy started confidently towards the van, hands wedged deep in the pockets of his tight white linen trousers. Mannie let him get almost close enough to touch, then punched it. The boy took his hands out of his pockets. A look crossed his face as if he’d just bitten
into something with mould on it. Mannie watched him dwindle and then vanish into the tinted depths of his rearview mirror. He drove two blocks down Davie and took a left, parked in front of a brightly lit grocery store and got out of the van.

  It was fully dark now. Although he could still hear the mosquito hawks hunting in the air high above him, he could no longer see them.

  Chapter 4

  Willows pushed upstream for several more hours without encountering any fishable water. By late afternoon he was starting to tire, and to wonder if he was wasting his time. Then, without warning, he suddenly came upon a broad and sharply defined clearing, bright sunlight that made him squint and shield his eyes. He was standing at the tail of a pool perhaps sixty feet long and thirty feet wide at its widest point. To his right there was a meadow in the shape of an elongated oval, tall yellow summer grass and a profusion of wild daisies.

  Willows slipped out of his pack and took a can of Black Label from one of the outer pockets. He stepped into the pool and put the beer in the cold water, twisting the can into the fine golden sand on the bottom so the current would not carry it away. Back on the bank, he sat down on a rock, kicked out of his waders and pulled off socks that were wet with perspiration. Wriggling his toes, he looked around.

  On the far side of the pool there was a steep cliff, the top crowded with overhanging cedars. Here and there the afternoon sun streamed down through the widespread branches like celestial spotlights, sparkling on the water and giving it body and the appearance of depth. The face of the cliff dripped with run-off from above, and was blanketed with bright green moss, fat and glittery with moisture, and with a few precariously situated sword ferns.

  Willows wrung out his socks and lay them down on the gravel bank to dry in the sun. He rolled up his twill trousers, took the few short steps to the water’s edge, and tested the temperature with his toes. He waded slowly into the pool. With each cautious step he took, the water pulsed away from him in a little rolling wave that soon vanished in upon itself like a magician’s trick. The flat, apparently motionless surface of the water seemed to act like a magnifying glass. Willows watched grains of sand eddy up around his feet, fall slowly back.

  At the head of the pool, sixty feet away, there was the cliff, and opposite the cliff a boulder as large as a house but shaped exactly like the top half of an egg. In the narrow, constricted gap between the cliff and the rock, a short steep rapids churned and frothed noisily. Near the foot of the rapids a large cedar tree had lost its footing and toppled into the water, and its branches had been stripped clean of bark and foliage by the force of the churning current. Below the rapids, in the throat of the pool, the water was so deep that it was black.

  If Willows couldn’t quite taste his dinner, he could certainly smell it cooking.

  He cupped his hands together and scooped water out of the creek, drank thirstily. When his thirst was quenched, he turned and waded slowly back out of the pool. Picking up his gear, he made his way through the bending grass and the tall white and yellow daisies, up to the high end of the meadow. In half an hour he had pitched his tent, dug a fire pit and gathered enough wood to last him through the evening. The chores completed, he retrieved the can of Black Label from the pool and unpacked his Waltonesque lunch of cheese, dark bread, and fresh fruit.

  When the last of the crumbs were gone, he lay down in the grass with his head resting on his pack and the cold beer balanced on his chest. All around him the flowers swayed gently, cutting cookie shapes out of a flawless blue sky. He sipped at the last of the beer, and closed his eyes. The ground beneath him was spongy and soft, and he soon drifted into a deep sleep.

  He slept for several hours, the alarm that finally awakened him a big pileated woodpecker banging away on a stump at the fringe of the meadow. He sat up and stretched, spreading his arms wide. The bird caught the movement and scuttled crab-like around to the far side of the stump. It continued to hammer away as he started a fire, using twigs for kindling and feeding the growing flames with chunks of vine maple salvaged from a nearby deadfall.

  When the fire had steadied and was no longer throwing sparks, Willows took his coffee pot down to the tail end of the pool and filled it to the brim with cold, clear water.

  It was early dusk, and at the head of the pool a trio of trout were feeding. One was working just below the rapids and the other two were some distance downstream. He watched the fish for a few minutes, and then carried the coffee pot back to the fire and stood it on his makeshift grill. The pot had an old-fashioned shape and was finished in a dark blue enamel speckled with a creamy white. Willows had owned the pot since his early teens. It was a much-treasured possession, one of those rare things that never seemed to wear out or outlast its usefulness, and that somehow became more valued as the years passed by.

  Sitting on his heels, he eased the Hardy fly rod out of its leather case and fitted the two lengths of graphite together, carefully lining up the guides and then pushing the ferrules firmly home. His reel was also a Hardy, fitted with a very old double-tapered silk line and thirty yards of nylon cuttyhunk backing.

  Willows seated the reel and screwed the locking ring tight. Then he fed the end of the fly line up through the guides and attached nine feet of three-pound-test nylon leader.

  The leader was brand new, and hung in limp coils. Willows straightened it by pulling it several times through a piece of innertube pinched over upon itself.

  When he was satisfied with his tackle, he put on his socks and waders and went back down to the tail end of the pool, where the bottom shelved quickly up and the swiftly flowing water had a glossy, taut look about it, as if compressing itself in its rush to escape the confines of the pool.

  Standing knee-deep in the water, Willows saw four drowned wasps drift by in the space of only a few minutes. Now he knew what the fish were feeding on, or at least had been given a glimpse of the menu. He opened a hinged aluminium fly box, and selected a Western Bee on a number 8 hook. The fly was bulky and colourful, with a body of alternating bands of orange and black chenille, and blunt backswept wings of natural tan bucktail. He fastened the fly to the leader with a double turl knot. Finally, he fluffed the hackles so the fly would ride high on the water, denting but not penetrating the surface film; causing sparkles of light to radiate down to his quarry and stimulate a reflex response. Or so the theory went.

  Crouching, keeping his profile low, Willows worked his way upstream.

  The surrounding mountains had cut short the day, and the shadows of this early summer evening were already blurring the edges of things, making depth perception difficult. The footing in the shifting, deceptive light was tricky and uncertain. Willows moved cautiously into the pool until he was thigh deep, the pressure of the moving water firm and constant.

  Behind him the bank sloped steeply upward, topped with a fringe of grass and a wild tangle of scrub brush. In this constricted space, Willows had no option but to try to reach the feeding trout with a roll cast. Stripping line from the reel, he pointed the tip of the rod at the water, and waggled it gently from side to side. Line slithered through the guides and was carried slowly downstream by the current. He gathered more line in loose coils in his left hand. Then, in a single fluid motion, he brought the rod sharply up until it was just past the vertical, twisted his wrist, and swept the rod forward and down. The line behind him lifted off the water in a rolling loop, the weight of it pulling the prepared coils from his left hand and through the guides.

  Forty feet of line straightened in the air, hung motionless and then descended.

  The Bee dropped lightly on the water within a reasonable distance of Willows’ intentions. The cast was complete.

  He retrieved a bit of slack.

  The trout moved up through the blackness like a lightning bolt, striking viciously at the deceptive bundle of thread and feather and sharp steel.

  Willows struck back, setting the barbless hook. The rod bowed and the line tightened, throwing a spray of mist that sparkled
in the air like a fistful of powdered diamonds. The fish jumped. Willows dropped the rod’s tip, trying to keep the line slack. The fish jumped again, twisting and turning like a length of animated neon. Then it sounded, dropping to the bottom of the pool to sulk and recover its strength. Willows hit the butt of the rod with the heel of his hand. The fish rose quickly, and shot towards him. He saw the black and orange of the fly in the corner of its mouth, and then it flared and raced back upstream, making a run for the downed cedar and tangle of pale yellow branches at the head of the pool. Willows struggled to gather in the slack, but too late; the leader was snarled and he had lost contact with the fish.

  Turning, he made his way carefully out of the water and back up on the beach. His line drifted downstream, bellied in the current. He could feel the living weight of the trout on the end of the line, now. But there was something else there too, something stiff and unyielding.

  Intending to break off, Willows gradually increased the pressure on the line.

  A human hand, the wide-spread fingers pale and bloated, rose slowly out of the water and then fell back with a splash.

  Willows stood motionless, unwilling to believe his eyes. Surely what he had seen was nothing more ominous than a freak arrangement of branches? He raised the rod and the hand appeared again, puffy and splayed and very white. Then the leader snapped.

  Willows slowly reeled in his line. The hand was on the far side of the pool, at the base of the cliff. To reach it he would have to make his way upstream past the rapids, find a place to cross and then circle back down.

  He leaned his rod against the bank and started up the beach, gravel crunching under his boots. At the head of the pool he had to enter the woods to get around the huge, egg-shaped rock. It was tough-going through the thick brush, fallen trees, and waist-high salal.

  He made his way back to the stream as quickly as he could, and by lucky accident came across a natural bridge; a pair of uprooted fir trees that straddled the creek. The trees were exactly parallel and no more than six inches apart. The gap between the trunks was filled with a long and intricate web of sand, pebbles, and small stones, each fragment and grain wedging its neighbours in place. Under different circumstances Willows would have paused to examine this strange jigsaw puzzle, a puzzle that seemed logically impossible to construct except all at once. But his mind, as he crossed the stream, was filled with recurring images of the dead hand rising from the water and falling back with a soundless splash.