Holding Lies (2 page)

Hank nodded at the boat. “Come on. I got a spot downstream, a real juicy seam. And a closer cast.”

They climbed into the boat, and Hank oared them out into the current, and as they left the pool, Stan muttered, “I could've made that wade.”

If Annie saw Hank right now, oaring a wealthy man down the river, pointing out fish that he, on his own, couldn't have caught, if she saw this, would she think it was a petty way to spend a life?

Since he'd last seen her, she'd gone to Brown, earned a graduate degree. She was three years into a big-shot career, an ethicist at a major
hospital. He sometimes looked up photos of her online, the hospital's official image of her (black suit, black glasses, only the slightest curve of a smile), the three images of her that had run in newspapers (hurried, addressing a crowd, standing beside an embattled surgeon). What hurt most was that if he'd seen her on a street corner, he might not have recognized her. So formal and official was she now, so yuppie. So unlike the little girl in the photo he carried in his wallet: dancing circles around a shore fire, propelled by the freedom of the river life.

She had called and asked to come. He didn't know why, but it had occurred to him that maybe Rosemary, her mother, was ill. “No, she's fine. It's nothing like that.” But Annie hadn't said what it was like.

For the past month, the impending visit had disrupted his routine, the daily pattern he'd carved for himself. It had been a pattern he considered perfectly functional and sustainable: wake an hour before fishing light; two cups of coffee and fill the thermos; hitch the boat if he had a client or throw the rods in the truck if not; fish until midafternoon; return home and nap; wake and make dinner, eat with Caroline, his oldest friend Walter, or an open book; tie a few flies; maybe watch half a movie; asleep by 8:00 p.m. Sometimes he ventured outside this pattern, went out for dinner, stayed over at Caroline's house, drove into town to see a movie, but usually he found himself stepping where he'd stepped yesterday. He liked it that way, liked the ceremony. He'd learned early that freedom must be shored somehow; otherwise it spills in all directions, its energies diffusing until they stagnate. But now, since Annie had bought the tickets, he found himself working on the house in the mornings he didn't have a client, fixing the dry rot in the bathroom or repainting the spare bedroom. He didn't give a shit about home improvement, and yet, there he was with a cordless drill.

“Here we are,” Hank said, anchoring the boat. They stepped into the shallows, and Hank pointed toward the water. “This spot is called Melted Glass. Cast there.” They were only thirty feet away, even Stan could make the presentation.

He imagined Annie in a big city apartment, one of those with sprawling wood floors and wall-sized windows. He imagined her taking her coffee in the morning, watching the rain slide down the glass and the antlike people scurrying far below. She would be used to a certain ease of life, a certain level of affluence. She wouldn't be used to freedom.

Stan's tenth or twelfth cast landed right, the waker immediately chugging toward the bank. The fish came fast, swatting at it with its tail and throwing a wall of water. Stan jerked the fly away and said, “Holy fuck.”

“Loosen your grip on that rod,” Hank called. “Don't set the hook.” She wouldn't be comfortable here. She'd leave early. She wouldn't be glad she'd come.

This time, the fish took solidly, and Stan did nothing, perfectly. The reel was screaming, the rod bucking, and the fish somersaulted over the lip of the rapid and out of the pool.

Stan was yelling, “Do it to me, baby! Yes, yes, YES!”

Hank lit a cigarette. It was moments like these that made him feel like a pimp.

*

T
HEY WERE ROUNDING
the last oxbow, having just run Whitehorse Rapid, drinking ale at Stan's insistence in honor of the two fish he'd caught, when Hank spotted the boat broadside on the midstream gravel bar. It was a low-sided ClackaCraft, orange guide stickers. Only two people had a boat like that around here; he hoped it was Danny Goodman's, owner of the fly shop in town and a longtime guide. Always a good guy to share the water with.

“I've never had a fish take like that before. I mean, Jesus!”

There wasn't a run to swing on either side of the bar, no reason to stop the boat there. Maybe Danny had found a new spot. Danny was always finding new spots.

As they drifted closer, he noticed an oar was missing and the anchor was up. He studied the banks, then the water around them. Someone had lost that boat. Someone had gotten thrown.

“That boat looks abandoned,” Stan said. Then with more urgency, “Hey, that boat
is
abandoned!”

He was still a double-haul away when he spotted the Fish Fear Me decal. It was Justin Morell's boat. And a minute later, as he dropped anchor alongside it, he saw the smear of blood across the oarsman's seat.

H
ANK MET SHERIFF
Carter and the fire department's search-and-rescue team at Millican Ramp, a mile down from Whitehorse Rapid. He'd called them from Stan's cell phone, just before Stan drove his rented Camry back to his motel in town. Only now did Hank realize Stan forgot to tip.

“I stopped at Morell's apartment on the way up,” Sheriff Carter said, catching his own reflection in a passenger window, adjusting his badge. “His boat wasn't there.”

“That's because it's on the bar.” Carter could be a bit distracted sometimes, especially when he expected reporters to show up.

“Called Danny at the shop,” Carter said, repositioning his belt and holster now. “They didn't give Morell a trip today.”

Hank helped drop the search-and-rescue sled in the river, buckled on the fire department's thick red PFD, and took a seat near the bow. The boat drifted back from the ramp, then tipped deep into the pool as the four-cylinder roared to life. Two seconds later, they skipped out on top, planing now at full throttle. It was a different river from a boat like this, a staircase of jumps, a place where current didn't matter and landmarks blurred; it was just another highway.

He'd been on the body boat before: the acrid smell of gasoline mixing with river water, the roaring splash of that engine chasing up behind them—it felt now as if he'd never quit searching.

The ClackaCraft was right where Hank had left it, anchor down.

“That's blood,” Carter shouted.

“Like I told you on the phone.”

*

A
LL THE GUIDES
converged at Millican Ramp, fourteen trucks towing boats, and highway traffic slowed to a crawl because of the rigs parked half on the shoulder, half in the lane. Everyone who could be reached was there. The new guys with their fish tattoos and stubby beards. The old guard including Walter Torse, who needed a wading staff just to navigate dry land these days. Caroline was there, pulling rods from her boat, locking them under her Tundra's canopy. Andy Trib was the first one to the ramp—he hadn't had a client that day.

This was what they did for each other. They might bicker and shit-talk, might even backstab a little, but if a guy went missing, everybody dropped everything and committed.

“Listen up,” Sheriff Carter bellowed. “You probably heard—we found Morell's boat on the bar, blood on the seat.”

Walter placed a hand on Hank's shoulder, nodded his head. He'd been a tall man when he first took Hank in, or at least that's how Hank remembered him, but now Walter was looking up. His eyes were sunken and gray as if he'd not been sleeping much, but with them he was asking a question basic enough not to require words:
You all right?

Hank spit:
We'll find this kid, this time we'll get it right
.

They'd converged like this three other times in the years Hank had been working the river. Once when Mickie McCune's heart gave out and he tipped headlong into Liberty Run. They'd pulled the body of the valley's first guide from a sweeper four miles downriver sometime after midnight. A sad day, but an end that Mickie would have approved
of, as happy probably as John Brown. There had been the client of Malloy's, the radiologist, who'd drowned in front of his daughter. A tragic day, for sure. Malloy had fled the valley after that, gone. And of course there had been Patrick O'Connell, which never should have happened. His body didn't turn up for a week, until a joe from Eugene spotted it wedged against a submerged boulder.

Danny was on a cell phone, his thick shoulders turned against the crowd, his eyes on the twins scraping pictures into the pavement with stones. Even from here, Hank could tell Danny was trying to arrange child care. He and his ex traded weeks, half the time in Eugene, half up here. When the twins saw Hank coming, they waved him over. Miriam and Ruben, six years old now, and coming up riverfolk, sandal tans and water blisters. Hank took a knee, and Miriam explained what he should see in the faint sketches. “This is a bear and this is a salmon and the bear is swiping at the salmon—”

Ruben finished the thought. “But he's missing and the salmon is ducking between his legs. See?”

Hank pointed to a circle a few inches over the bear. “What's this?” It was pride he felt when near these kids, so bubbling with enthusiasm and creativity, pride for Danny because he was doing it right, despite that messy divorce. And there was gratitude too, because Danny wanted Hank involved. The twins called him uncle, and once not that far back when Danny was in a bind, he'd called, and Hank had dropped everything and rushed over to finish up dinner and put the kids to sleep. He'd read them
The Emperor's New Clothes
until Ruben was sawing under the covers and Miriam was breathing slow and even, her head on Hank's shoulder. He'd stayed just like that, unmoving, until Danny returned home—two hours of perfection. “What's this?”

“Ruben drew that,” Miriam said. She was always the first to speak.

“It's a . . . ,” Ruben was deciding, “a moon.”

“Uncle Hank,” Miriam asked, “do you have any elk jerky?”

He grabbed what was left in the Bronco, and they were reaching for the ziplock before he could even get it open.

There was Caroline leaning against her truck. Their eyes met above the sea of sun-bleached baseball caps, and she lipped,
You okay?

Caroline knew him better than anyone. Even from this distance she could probably sense the tightness pinching in again. It was starting, like it always did, in his throat, and soon it would be in his chest too, pressing in, suffocating him. Tonight he wouldn't sleep a minute; there would be the panic of drowning every time a dream took hold. He—no, they—had been living with this too long. He might have four or five nights of clean sleep, a break every two hours to piss, of course, but dreamless, and then two or three nights of endless drowning. Booze helped some. Pills didn't.

He needed to get past it. He needed to put Patrick O'Connell to rest.

But his voice was still there, lonely and haunting, like it'd been in that first message on the answering machine: “Been dreaming about the Ipsyniho since I was a boy, and well, after my buddy passed on last summer, figured the only way to be sure you'll get your trip of a lifetime is to take it presently.”

O'Connell had come for a week of fishing from Flagstaff, Arizona, where he had worked fifty-hour weeks as an appliance repairman. Rented the cheapest motel in town and borrowed a car from a friend of a friend. He'd never hired a guide before; only flown once. Forty-seven years old, he was that summer; he should have turned fifty-one this year. That first morning on the water, he'd admitted, “I'm spending my savings this week. Putting it to good use, I figure.” It was then, or maybe even before that, that Hank found himself taking a little pity on the guy.

Most of Hank's clients where regulars. Guys for whom four hundred bucks equaled maybe a half-day's wage. These were “sportsmen”; they owned shotguns that cost more than Hank collected in a year, talked of investments and dividends like they were rivers or friends. He had no trouble taking a check from these folks, or keeping the relationship distant and businesslike. But O'Connell was different.

The first day he rose two fish, but didn't hook either one. At the ramp, he said, “I've been told that forty dollars is a fair tip.” He was
counting out five bills on the hood of the truck. Hank surprised himself by saying, “Save the tip until we've found you some fish.”

A south wind arrived that night, the evening air actually warming from dusk to dawn, and the next day, the high temperature soared over a hundred degrees and the fishing went to shit. Hank found a dozen fish holding deep in tailouts and high in rapids, but not one that would so much as flick a fin at a passing fly. Normally, Hank would have subtly trimmed back the client's expectations until eventually the day would be spent drifting the river and talking of fish as much as actually casting to them. But with O'Connell, Hank rolled up a bandana as a sweatband, cut the popper off the single-hander, and rigged up an indicator. He oared for hours in the hot sun, digging deep to slow the boat above holding fish and give O'Connell time for a few dozen presentations. This was steelheading at its dirtiest, and yet they still couldn't turn a nose. He had other trips the next two days; otherwise he probably would have taken O'Connell out for free. He did lay out a program for O'Connell to follow the next couple of days, all warm-weather spots, and said, “You'll get one, I'd wager anything.”

It stayed hot all week, and the night before their last trip, O'Connell admitted he'd yet to hook a fish. “I knew steelheading would be hard, but damn, this is something else.” Hank could hear the disappointment in the guy's voice, the disenchantment. Was
this
worth it?

As a guide, he'd long ago learned how to temper a client's hopes so as to keep the person as satisfied as possible. This meant offering the person some sort of narrative that explained it all, giving them—on a silver platter—the story they would tell their friends and colleagues. There was the “fish haven't been grabby” story, the “hardly any fish in the river” story, the “lots of other anglers pressuring the fish” story. All of them usually ended with, “We'll be lucky to get one.” Then when they got two, the client would be glowing with joy. That's when Hank would turn on the praise and write the story's end. “Took some real skill to raise that last one.” “Only one in ten anglers could have made that cast.” “Wasn't any luck in that.” Hank did this now without thought. It was a crucial part of the job, maybe more crucial in terms
of tips and repeat bookings than tying on beautiful flies or fishing the right water. And he didn't feel bad about it, not in the least.