Holding Lies (21 page)

The last time Hank fished with Lee was right here at the lip, a year back. Lee used a fifteen-foot rod and a hookless fly and would often raise a fish where others had failed. He knew how to position himself to make short, perfect presentations. On that day though, the fish had been especially dour. Neither Hank nor Lee had raised a fish by midmorning, when they ran into Danny here on the bridge. Hank had said, “Impossible day, with this warm water.” Lee pointed to the fish on the lip below. “That's a big buck.” Danny had snuffed his joint and said, “Well, I'll go waste a few casts.” Of course Danny made one cast, twitched his fly just right, and that big buck somersaulted over the fly. Lee had turned to Hank and repositioned his hat. “That kid knows his fish.”

Hank lit a second cigarette now, though not because he needed it, and looked across the empty bridge.

What Lee understood was the ecology of place, how patterns superseded their players. And what worried Hank, what had his stomach twisting, was that the ecology of harm might be no different.

But the rumors about Danny and his ex had been bullshit. Anybody who
really
knew Danny, who fished with him, had known the truth. Besides, one look at those happy twins and any fool could see Danny wasn't a violent man. Having a temper was one thing, being violent was another. Ask anybody who knew Danny, they'd all say the same thing: He couldn't have meant to cut her.

The official report six years ago, Carter's report, stated that it had been an accident, that Danny had tripped with the knife in his hand. Hank never asked why he'd had a knife in the first place, why he needed one when he and his pregnant wife, Shoshana, were arguing along the side of the road. There were plenty of good reasons—they'd been trailering boats at the time and occasionally a tie-down would stick or an anchor line would wrap around an axle—which folks who knew boats would understand. Whatever the reason for that knife, she'd spent the night in the hospital. The divorce came through before the birth, though people said it'd been a long time coming.

Danny wasn't afraid of pissing people off. If the wild fish were in need, he stepped up and did what was right. So he wasn't exactly loved by the bait guides downriver, the ones who argued adamantly to maintain the hatchery program and the catch-and-kill policy on natives. And the folks at the chamber of commerce didn't much like him either, on account of his rallying to stop the upriver golf course that had been proposed a couple years back. Danny was quick to be the point man on any controversial issue. It was the very feature of his personality that had made him so popular among fly anglers—though it had done little to make him the most beloved guy in Ipsyniho. And so, after the newspaper article, a lot of people had rushed to call him a danger, a criminal, a threat. Which was ridiculous.

And that's where Hank had left it for the past six years. Hank, Caroline, Walter, Danny's devoted customers and fans, anybody who
knew Danny had left it there too. “Nothing more than flung dung,” Walter had quipped the one time they talked of it.

But here Hank was staring at the water, thinking again of that knife. Thinking of it now not as Danny's friend but as Annie's father.

J
USTIN MORELL'S MOTHER
would be taking his body back to the family plot near their home in Grand Rapids, Michigan, but before leaving, she wanted to host a “celebration of life” in her son's honor. The girlfriend helped organize the event at his house, and word quickly spread up the valley. Despite any hard feelings that might have existed when the kid was alive, all of the riverfolk put on long pants and shoes and tucked in their shirts and came armed with flowers or fruit or smoked fish and generous stories starring Morell, stories that his mother could carry home and cherish like the boyhood pictures she'd brought and placed around the house in lieu of the Marley and Floyd posters. She would tell these stories to her neighbors and the family friends who'd known Justin as a boy, and she'd feel warmed each time by the knowledge that her son and his magical gifts had been loved and appreciated by the larger community, despite the tragic and violent and still-mysterious circumstances of his death. That death would become a story of its own, one she'd imagine and reimagine until it felt as real as if she'd been there herself—but ultimately, it would be reduced to a random black moment in a life lived in light and love. It had to be this way, Hank thought; otherwise, how could she go on?

“Your son,” Hank began, not knowing where he'd end up, “learned this river faster than anyone I've ever met.” There it was, something
truthful and warm he could give her. He took her hand in his. “He had a gift for understanding water.”

Her grown daughter was there with her and she stared unflinchingly at Hank. Like she was thinking,
Is this the one who did it?
Clearly, she didn't need these stories, or didn't yet know she needed them. Hank did his best to offer a pursed, sympathetic smile.

Carter had called that morning, though Hank had let the answering machine pick up. He'd said, “Give me a call at your earliest convenience. There seems to be some contradictory info we'd like to pull straight. Hank, call me.” The call made him feel guilty. Like this sister's glare.

The mother nodded now. “He spoke of you guides so highly. He was writing an essay, you know, we found it on his computer, and it was all about fishing and the mentoring between the older and younger guides. The essay was called ‘Uncles.'” She smiled. “There's a line, ‘uncles and keepers of the tradition.' Beautiful, huh?”

Hank now remembered the warmth of Morell's neck against the side of his forearm, the gasping sound he'd made when Hank slammed him against that truck. Some uncle. “He'll be missed,” Hank said, turning and moving away now.

It occurred to Hank now that the last time he'd done this was at Patrick O'Connell's funeral. He'd flown to Arizona on a Friday and returned on Sunday and didn't feel a lick better for going. He'd been one of fourteen attendees.

Annie laced her fingers around his arm. “That was kind of you,” she said. She'd been at the house making breakfast when he returned from the bridge that morning. He didn't ask about her failure to come home the night before, and she didn't offer an explanation.

The party was spilling into the backyard, where someone was barbecuing and someone else was opening beers. Here, thank god, no one was crying.

Annie, Caroline, and Danny stood in a crescent looking back at the house from across the lawn, sipping their beers and watching Morell's mother through the kitchen window. There was a table set up on the
small porch. On it sat a guest book, photocopies of a Grand Rapids newspaper article featuring Morell as “State's Youngest Fly-fishing Guide,” copies of the articles Morell had written, and a large framed picture of the kid, a senior portrait probably, his naive eyes smiling over them.

Someone laughed nearby, a raft guide. He was telling a story about a client that afternoon. Hank felt like telling a story of his own, some random event, something funny, but there was nothing but Morell and darkness anywhere inside him.

“What a waste,” Danny said. Whether he meant the death or this event itself wasn't clear. What was clear was that he'd been looking at Annie when he said it.

She responded a moment later with, “I prefer the Jewish arguments about death, personally. In the Hasidic tradition, there's no separation between the finite and the infinite. It's all one realm. So when you die, your body reenters the world, through the soil, through the grass, through the deer. It's all God.”

“Yeah,” Caroline said. “I like that. It's all God. We live forever that way.”

Walter brushed this talk aside. “New Age nonsense, all of it. You die, you're dead, that's it. There's nothing more to it. No God. No living forever. You're tits-up, you're lights-out, you're done.”

“Come on, Walt,” Hank said. This was his daughter Walter was affronting.

“You know it's true.” Walter brought his beer to his lips, but paused before sipping to say, “Anything else is delusion.”

Annie was speaking before Hank could muster a reply. “It's all delusion. Nobody's arguing that. The point is we're free to pick the delusion we find most helpful.”

Walter scoffed and left them and disappeared back inside.

“What's gotten up his ass?” Danny asked.

Later, there was a toast and Morell's sister told a story about her little brother as a three-year-old fishing in mud puddles in the family driveway. “He sat there for hours, sure some giant fish lurked in those
four inches of water.” People were laughing and crying as if this image somehow encapsulated the Justin they knew. There were other stories like this told by the mother, who downed a whole glass of white wine before standing. She touched the framed picture of her son and said, “If only your father could have seen the man you became.”

And that's when Hank found himself overcome. He'd so far managed to keep this whole event at arm's length, but in that moment, with the mother touching that high school portrait, he swallowed hard at the tears welling within him. He looked for Caroline, and she wrapped her arms around him and dried her cheeks on his shirt. Even Walter was leaning against the fence, his head down, his hand covering his eyes, his shoulders shaking with sobs.

Hank hadn't been the uncle this boy needed, hadn't even tried. He put an arm around Annie and decided the next patch of water he found on the river, a hidden place that held fish, he'd name it after Morell.

“
I WANT TO
see where I was born,” Annie said as they drove upstream. “Can you take me to where I was born?”

And so Hank turned up Rock Creek and followed the winding road through the oaks and their neon leaves, then through the golden savanna with rusty patches of poison oak, along the one-lane pinch beneath the sheer cliff, and to the saddle and the dozen homes there. A whitetail deer bounded across the meadow and sailed over a fence, its erect tail visible over the horizon even after the creature itself had disappeared. On the other side, a blacktail deer and her spotted fawn turned broadside and never stopped chewing as the truck rolled by.

Only two of the houses were occupied now, pickups parked beside forsaken stoves and overturned refrigerators and sun-faded mattresses. A shirtless boy threw a rock at them as they passed. His shorter sidekick pointed a toy rifle and yelled, “You're dead!”

“You lived here?” Annie said. “I lived here?”

“It didn't look like this then,” Hank said. “These weren't our neighbors.” He explained that the houses had been built in the late sixties by a group of hippies from Eugene. They'd pooled their money and come to grow soybeans and live the highest life, one focused on equal quantities of art, farming, and community. They'd never thought to check how soybeans did in the Ipsyniho's rocky loam.

“Your mom and I moved up here after the hippies left. This was where a bunch of our friends lived, raft guides mostly. That one was ours.” Hank pointed to the slanted box beside a cluster of feral apple trees, the one with broken windows and weathered gray planks for siding. The grass out front was waist high and flashing in the breeze, and the open doorway glared back at them, black as deep space. Hank stopped and shut down the truck. “Your mom kept a garden over there and our latrine was down where those blackberries are growing now.”

“Latrine?”

“There was no plumbing in the houses. We passed the communal well on the way in. That metal sea horse thing.”

“Was there electricity?”

“A diesel generator. We dreamed of solar.”

Annie waded through the grass, her arms outstretched and sweeping through the tops. She spun once, like she'd done so often as a two-year-old. And Hank was taken with a sparkling recollection of her, leaning over a purple iris, struggling to touch her nose to the fragrant petals—then falling forward into the flower and coming up laughing. “You don't remember this place?”

She shook her head no.

They walked to the house and peeked through the window frames. It was too dark to see much at first, until their eyes adjusted. Hank was the first to step inside, testing the floor to ensure it would hold their weight.

“You're going inside?” Annie seemed surprised.

He gestured for her to follow. “It's solid.”

Annie felt the width of the doorway as she entered. She seemed so enormous there, a silhouette against the blinding day. He remembered her sitting there as a toddler, against the shut door. Nighttime or evening maybe. She'd been drawing, and Rosemary looked and asked what it was. A girl, Riffle had said. A happy girl. Why is she happy? Because her daddy is home.

Annie now fingered a hole in the wall at her waist. “I remember this. I put this here with a hammer. Why did Mom let me play with
a hammer?” She walked a few paces, pointing at the room's corner. “There was a stove somewhere here, right? You used to boil water on it. Once I spilled it and burned myself. I remember that.”

Now only the chimney's ceiling hole remained. He'd stacked each day's wood along that wall, where it could dry before being put to use. Heating this place had been a lesson in futility. During windstorms, gusts flowed across the room, little breaths against your cheek, lifting loose papers from the kitchen table. During heavy rains, an occasional splatter would find its way to your brow. He might as well have been heating the open sky. How young he'd been then. How sure of himself. Sure of his family—and of his place within it.

“This place is making me dizzy.” Annie kept a hand on the wall for balance. Years of autumn leaves lay piled in the corners, and mouse turds littered the floor. But it was the tilt that was most disconcerting. Like the whole house might at any moment slide off the ridge and into the Ipsyniho.