Holding Lies (24 page)

“I worry about Miriam and Ruben, about what kind of world will be left for them in forty years.”

“The whole galaxy will be digital then,” Hank said. “Don't worry. They won't even need watersheds.”

Danny was pondering the dumpster beside him. “It's a fucked-up world to be leaving to kids.”

“Hey,” Hank heard himself say, “not that it matters, but you never mentioned where you were that afternoon.”

“What afternoon?”

“The one Morell went missing.” It was a stupid question to ask, a senseless question, a question that could bring about nothing good. He knew all this, and yet he asked it anyway. “Just curious.”

Danny frowned.

“I ask because everybody else has been real clear and straight up.”

“I haven't been straight up?” Danny was coming off his stool.

Well, he hadn't been. He'd been up late last night talking with Annie, and he'd kept her out all night the night before, and he hadn't said a word about it. Neither of them had.

“What the fuck, Hank?”

An overwhelming bitterness rose up within him, like Danny himself had driven Riffle away that afternoon. “There's precedent, that's all.” He heard the echo of Carter's voice and hated himself.

Danny's eyes narrowed, then flickered. He looked at his feet, and muttered, “Wow.”

Danny wasn't reacting like he'd expected. He'd expected Danny to defend himself; he'd expected a chance to put Danny in his place. But Danny seemed weakened by the provocation, almost shaken by it. “What's this about?”

“You know what it's about.”

A moment passed, and Danny's shoulders settled into a hunch.

“Have you always thought …” Danny looked him square in the eyes, a tender look that matched the frailty of his voice. “Do you think I meant to … that it was intentional I cut her? That's what you mean, Andy can't bleed a person but I can.”

It was that voice that threw Hank
offguard
. A son's voice, confused and betrayed. He heard himself in it—then he saw himself from Danny's eyes. “No,” Hank said. “That's not what I meant. I mean, it was, but I didn't mean to imply—”

“Does everybody think that? I mean I knew her friends did, and those fucks at the paper, but you? Walt too? Does Caroline think it?”

“No. It's not like that. Forget I said anything. Danny, I know you didn't have anything to do with Morell. Forgive me. I'm not myself.”

Danny looked up and down the alley, like he thought someone might be watching.

“My client today, he was an excellent caster. I lied to you. I just fucked up the trip. Look,” Hank pointed to the red rise on his knee. “I thumped a rock and we almost lost the boat, that's how not me I've been.” Hank reached for him. “Danny.”

“Y'all have talked about this, haven't you? Behind my back.”

“No, we haven't. Danny …” He searched for whatever words might make this right.

Danny pulled open the shop door.

“It's not like that,” Hank called after him.

Danny turned and looked back at Hank, at his feet and then his eyes, like he was seeing him for the first—or last—time. And then he was gone, the metal door clanking shut behind him.

A
NNIE'S CAR WASN'T
at the house. Hank found a note taped to the front door. “Went for a hike.”

A padded envelope sat on the step. He tore it open and found the new ring he'd ordered.

Inside the house, there wasn't the message from Caroline he'd expected on the answering machine. He'd called her three times now and not heard a thing, though he'd seen her rig parked on the river that morning.

There was one message, though, from Walter. He asked if Hank could come on up to the house “pronto.” He had some news, and he wanted “to get some things in order.” Ominous language from a guy who'd survived chemo only two years before.

Hank arrived at Walter's to find the front door wide open. He called out, but there was no response. He knocked on the open door, called inside, but again heard nothing. It was like in those movies, when a friend arrives only to discover a corpse inside. Had Walter ended it and first called Hank so that his body wouldn't rot?

But then the bathroom door swung open and Walter stepped out and, upon seeing Hank's terrified face lurking in his living room, shouted, “What the fuck, sneaking up on an old bugger like that!”

“Sorry, I …”

“You trying to kill me? Good god, Hankle.”

Walter went to the refrigerator and found two beers and nodded outside. They sat on the lawn chairs Walter had placed under the alder grove, looking back at the house and boat port. Hank lit a cigarette, and Walter asked for one too.

“What's with the hitch?” Walter was pointing at Hank's knee, which had been giving him a little grief since clanking the boat on that rock.

“Not worth explaining. What's with you smoking?”

Walter took a drag. “Told myself, if I got word the world was about to end, my first stop would be the River Market for a pack of Luckies.”

“Walt, what the fuck's going on?”

A new cancer, Walter explained, pancreatic this time, and he couldn't afford treatment and he wasn't sure he wanted the treatment if he could. “That prostate surgery left me limp as a bonked fish.”

“Jesus, Walter.”

“They tell me I only got a few weeks while I can still be up and around. It hurts something ruthless already. You don't know pain until you got cancer in your gut.”

“But you told me the doc gave you a clean bill, and that was only like two weeks back.”

Walter shrugged. “Did I say that? Probably figuring I'd save you the headache. I've known since May. I tell you now only because last night, well, I can feel it coming.”

“You should've told me.”

“What would you do about it?”

Whatever he could. Bring Walter water and food, sort his medication, drive him into Eugene for treatment, whatever. He'd done all this the last time around, he'd do it again. He owed Walter that much. He owed Walter a son's gratitude.

Walter spit. “Save your pity for somebody who needs it.”

A long stillness settled over them. Hank was imagining, or failing to imagine, the valley without Walter in it. Walter was as intricate a piece of this place as the Douglas firs, the river, the fish. “I'm so sorry.”

“Agh.” Walter swatted at the air. “I'm over it. We all gotta drift downstream at some point. It's simple, and I'm done being sorry about it. I'm glad, in fact. Glad I made it this far.” He chuckled. “Fuck, I won. I'm seventy-nine and was a goddamn steelheader the whole way. I didn't die in somebody else's war, I didn't rot my ass in no office cube, and I sure as shit didn't sit by while evil little pricks fucked up my homewater. You should be so lucky.”

Hank forced a smile. “True.”

Walter tapped his beer against Hank's. “Anyway, thanks for being such a loyal fuck, Hankle. I love you for it, in a way.”

Hank stumbled for words, stumbled to articulate something he didn't yet understand.

“Shush for once, and let a dying man talk. There's something I got to say.” Walter swigged from his bottle. “That funeral couple days back, it brought things into focus. Got me thinking about all the shit I've done wrong in this life. Letting Mindy go. Damn. I was selfish and mean and I'd take it all back if I could.” He pulled a sealed letter from his shirt pocket. “I don't have her address, she wouldn't want me to know it, but I'm hoping you can pass this along once I'm … once I'm tits-up.”

“Course.”

“There are other things too, things I'll spare you. But I wanted to say, 'cause I'm feeling powerful wrong about this, well, I reckon you were right about that pictio-graph. I probably shouldn't have taken it. I'm just another pile of cells in this watershed, and who am I to keep that thing? I told myself I was doing the valley a favor by taking it, told myself I was safeguarding it, keeping the legacy alive, you know, helping it jump this ravine we're sitting on these days. But now I see, I wasn't doing no such thing. I was hoarding it for myself. I've always been a selfish prick. Mindy was right about that. I probably could've listened better.”

Walter finished his beer, and let out a careful belch, his hand against his abdomen like it was keeping him from rattling apart. “I want to return that pictio-graph. And I want to return the other things I took too. It needs to be done. Better out there than getting sold off at some
estate auction. But the thing is, well, I'm not the man I was a year ago. Shit, I'm not the man I was a week ago. I'm an old buck, Hank, can't barely hold my lie no more. There's one thing I'm learning: Death is a bitch of a current.”

“If you're looking for help,” Hank said.

Walter nodded. “Thanks for that.” He tightened, clenching his teeth and rising up in his chair an inch or two.

“What is it? What can I do? Here.”

When the pain finally passed, he said the waves were becoming more frequent. He was only sleeping now thanks to a cocktail of drugs he couldn't afford. “Buying them all on credit. Never bought nothing on credit, 'cept that house. Now I'm deep in it.”

“I got some money.” He didn't really, but he knew he could put some together in a pinch.

“Fuck that. But there's something else.”

“Anything.”

“You got to let me borrow that twelve-gauge of yours. I've only got my rifles and their barrels are too long.”

“Too long?” But of course. “Walt. No. There's got to be something else, there's got to be some chance.”

“Keep your pleading tender-heart bullshit to yourself. It's not you who's gonna suffer through this. ‘Through' ain't even the right word. There's no ‘through' involved. It's just suffering, plain and simple. Give me your scattergun.”

“I can't.”

Walter swiped the beer from Hank's hand and chucked it over the edge of the bluff. “Give me your goddamn scattergun or I swear …”

Hank knew that when it came down to it, he'd give Walter the gun. It was the least he could do—the gift that would allow the man his final freedom.

“I figure sometime around the solstice, I'll drive up to Red Gate for one more session, and then end it, right there on the casting rock. Carter can pull this sack of bones from the river. I'm hoping to make it all the way to tidewater, but I'll let Lady Ipsyniho decide that.”

“Sorry I threw your beer,” he said a moment later. “Could you fish up that bottle? Don't want to leave it littering down there.”

*

H
ANK DROVE THE
Bronco, the first time he could remember Walter letting him do the driving. They started on a bluff above the Campwater, where Walter reburied a dozen obsidian arrow points. Walter rose from the dirt and wiped the sweat from his forehead and said, “The Ipsynihians gathered here to net and smoke salmon,” as if Hank didn't already know. “They used to sleep up there, and work down here, and you see those ledges below the falls? That's where they netted the fish.”

Hank remembered the shards of black obsidian that used to cover the ground here, probably where people had chipped points while the fishing was slow. When the sun was high, the ground used to reflect shards of light, enough to blind a person. But in the years since, the obsidian had slowly vanished, probably buried under dirt that blew or washed down the bluff.

Walter followed the old trail, which was now barely perceptible, a slight trough in the slope leading into the firs. There he found the rotten remnants of an old tree, its roots still clinging to the soil. He opened his bag and removed a crumbling reed basket. “This was my first find. I was maybe fifteen, and this tree was hollowed out, and inside there was this basket and a doll made of reeds about yay big. Gave that to Mindy as a wedding present.”

Then Walter told Hank a story he didn't know. “The cavalry ambushed them here.” He pointed to the high cliffs across the river and the open slope above. “They got the jump on them and shot dead the ones that didn't surrender. They were running up the slope, trying to get into the next ravine. Easy pickings for a rifleman on the bluff. Fourteen killed, only four men.”

“Why?”

Walter tapped his wading staff against a fallen log, as if he was about to explain the importance of decomposing wood to a forest.
“The army thought they were part of the Rogue rebellion. Didn't even realize they spoke a totally different language.”

The afternoon turned to evening as they continued up the valley, visiting five other once-sacred places that were now forgotten and overgrown. Some of the places Hank had been, but a couple were new to him, meadows and cliffs along unnamed tributaries. Hank listened to Walter's histories with a newfound intensity, trying now to memorize each detail so that he could share them, maybe with Annie, certainly with Danny, if Danny could forgive him.

With the sun nearing the horizon, they crested a hidden skid road and emerged on the ridge that towered over Feather Creek's headwaters. “Keep going,” Walter said.

But they were at the turnaround. The wind streaming through the cab was cooler at this elevation, maybe two thousand feet above the river.

“Across the grass.” Walter pointed. “You don't expect me to walk all that'a way?”

So Hank weaved the truck through the rocks and brush and then rolled along the grassy slope, descending to a pass he'd never before seen, not even from a distance.

“This'll do.”

He parked beside two massive boulders, each as big as his truck. Boulders like these were rare in the valley, and Hank couldn't quite figure how they had arrived at a point so high on the ridge. Walter explained. “This used to be a craggy mountaintop, probably like the Hash Points over that way. These boulders were part of the top that froze and cracked free, they got hung up here on their roll down.” Walter walked the path between them. “This was a special place for the Ipsynihian hunters. They'd send folks through the thickets below, and see how the slope funnels up here? The deer and elk would run straight up to this point, and come right between these rocks. Do it in the afternoon, and the wind is always right. Still works. My daddy put me right behind that boulder when I was eight and spooked a buck up from below. My first deer died right where you're standing, wasn't a ten-yard shot.”