Holding Lies (6 page)

But tonight he didn't have the energy to cook, so he found some water crackers and sliced some cold elk roast and unwrapped the wheel
of aged cheddar he had asked the co-op to order special and poured a splash of cab. But he only managed two bites before stepping onto the porch for some big, slow breaths.

Annie would hate the house. There was little he could do to help that—she would be used to so much more—but he could distract her with the cooking. He'd already spent a trip's profit in wine and ingredients. Each meal was mapped out in the back of his fishing journal. They'd start rustic and simple, salmon with sweet potato au gratin and a chilled salad of spring greens and blue cheese and filberts and huckleberry vinaigrette. A shiraz seemed the right choice, or a zinfandel, he hadn't yet decided. When she raved about the complexity of flavors, the crisp freshness of it all, he'd tell her every ingredient had been grown right here in the Ipsyniho Valley. There would be elk tenderloin the next night, bear burgers the night after. Malbecs, pinots, a bottle of tawny port. He'd show her there was more to this place than clear water and big mountains.

He called his sport to confirm, then ordered the man's lunch, and finally packed his own cooler. He kept it pretty bare out there on the river, so as not to be distracted by the flavors: string cheese, almonds, an apple, a bag of jerky, and a beer for the ride home.

And coffee, of course, which was as important as his fly box. He measured a thermos-plus-a-cup's worth of water into a pan and put a lid on it. Then he measured six tablespoons of his own homemade roast into the French press and cleaned his travel mug. In the morning, he'd turn on the burner first thing and would be drinking steaming brew ten minutes later on the drive to the ramp. Nothing perked up a predawn morning like a cup of mud.

One benefit of Annie not coming would be that he wouldn't miss any mornings on the river. If she came, they'd stay up late and sleep in, and he'd miss all those dawns, the orange and pink pastels on the glassy tailouts, the secret promise of the day to come, the sipping rise of the unharried steelhead. Dawn offered its own rewards, and the year was too short as it was.

She'd call him tomorrow and cancel, and he'd be glad for it.

H
E'D MET ANNIE'S
mother, Rosemary, in '77, on Bakke Island, a slab of forested land on the middle reach of the river. He'd just dropped his client at the ramp above, finishing his half day of work, and was pushing down to the island and a run called Barrier just below, a place that shifted to the shade just after 2:00 p.m., the first run on the whole river to find reprieve from the afternoon shine. Rosemary had pulled her kayak into the cove on the island's bottom end, where she was sprawled out in the sand, nude.

She was more than a bit surprised to see a boat, as was he to see a pair of breasts. She held her shirt to her chest and crossed her sandy legs, and called, “Guess there's no place private on this river anymore.” He recognized the face—he'd seen her around town and on the river a time or two—but those were her first words to him.

“Guess not,” he called back. “Sorry.”

The problem, though she didn't know it, was that he needed to anchor here, on that beach where she was now waiting for him to leave. If he pushed on, he'd be drifting over Barrier and would be forced through the rapid below, rendering him unable to wade back up to give the water a proper fish. He pondered his options. Quickly determined he didn't have any.

“I hate to be a bother, but this is where I need to be.”

“Here?”

“I hate to be a bother.”

“Then push on.”

“Sorry, I don't have a choice.” He pointed to Barrier, explained the situation.

“Fishing is always a choice,” she said.

He turned his head to give her privacy, considered what she'd just said, realized they had fundamental disagreements. He muttered, “You can sun yourself anywhere.”

But this is where she wanted to be, and she wasn't moving. If she wouldn't bend, neither would he. He anchored, grabbed his rod, and leapt over the gunwale. “We can share the place then. I'll be down there for an hour or more. I'll holler when I'm on my way back up.”

She just stared at him, her hands still strategically placed. He spied the wet filaments of her armpit hair, the bulge of her underbreast. Maybe fishing was a choice.

“I'm not a painting,” she bit.

There was a strong run of fish that year, and he rose one in Barrier where they always rise if they're going to rise at all. The fish came once, missed the fly, came a second time, missed again, then wouldn't return. He fished his way through the run, then returned to that lie and tried for what must have been an hour, switching flies, switching casting positions, resting, trying again, but the fish wouldn't budge. This was the kind of fishing he loved, the run to yourself, an eager fish out there somewhere, and yet he found himself fishing poorly. His casts landed in piles, his flies kept ducking underwater. He wasn't immersed in the water's reality like he should have been. He kept glancing upstream, all the way up near the boat, at the golden shape on the beach.

When he returned, she was emptying a trap-load of crawdads into a bucket, clothed now in a tank top and a pair of cutoff jeans. She banged clean the trap.

“Hi,” he said meekly.

“You were down there a long time not to be coming back with a fish.” Her hair was back and drying and leaving a wet patch on her shirt like sweat.

“Never seen a woman trapping crawdads before.” He'd meant it as some variety of compliment. She took it as some variety of insult.

“Men don't have a monopoly on meat procurement.” She pointed at his empty hands. “Do they?”

“Didn't mean to suggest they do.”

And there began eight years of minor misunderstandings, some of which ballooned into major ones, which ballooned again into fullblown wedges, one of which would drive her to leave him. They were never right for each other. But in that moment, they were two late twenty-somethings on a hot summer day, the Ipsyniho a potent if one-sided aphrodisiac.

“I'm Hank.”

“I know who you are. I live near Marcy.”

During his few years in the valley, he'd developed—accidentally—a little reputation for himself among Ipsyniho's unattached ladies.

“Oh.” Marcy, a woman he'd holed up with last winter, was a baker in town who would in the years to come open Ipsyniho's first gourmet restaurant, Spindrift. Things between them had gotten, well, messy.

He pointed at her bucket, asked after her strategy. He'd tried catching crawdads during the summer lulls, to add to the Ipsyniho bouillabaisse that he'd been refining as his default first-date meal. Bouillabaisse, he'd found, possessed magical powers. When he served it, the evening more often than not resulted in a following morning. The meal's seductive force, he figured, lay in its contradictions. It suggested sophistication, that he possessed a certain cultural refinement, but at the same time it exhibited his “rugged” waterman skills; the salmon, the rock bass, the mussels, all could be procured in a day with a quick drive to the salt. Back then, romance had seemed as important an ingredient to a good life as the Ipsyniho itself.

She played like she had little interest in him, in his fly rod, in his interest in her crawdads. “Look,” she said, holding up a hand to block
the light, “I've got a party to be at this afternoon and I've still got four traps to pull between here and Susan Creek.”

“Is this Bridge and Rita's party up Echo Creek?”

It was, and so on this connection, she acquiesced to his advances and allowed him to follow her downriver, allowed him to help clear the traps, and later, allowed him to drive her to the party. But she refused when he offered her a ride home. And later, she refused two dinner offers. It wasn't until they saw each other again on the river that she finally accepted his invitation—though she said, “No bouillabaisse.” So, he took her for an evening boat ride and they grilled steelhead over a beach fire and there was a kiss but no next morning. There would be no next morning for months. But all her resistance only served to fuel his interest—he was sucker for hard-to-get. By winter, he'd fallen for her, and by spring, he thought she'd fallen for him.

Riffle Anne was born two years later, the surprise baby that sparked so many other surprises in Rosemary, in him. He took a month off work. He doted, he tended, he preened. After that month, he worked only seven trips a month, just enough to skimp by. He was going to do this right, to be the kind of father the world needed, even if it meant sacrificing what he assumed he never would.

He was a miserable guide that year, and frequently, his clients went fishless. There were fish in the river, and the flows weren't abnormally bad, but he was out of touch with the system, with its cycles and moods. He was half a step behind, his boat always low rod at the ramp. That bothered him. But not as much as Rosemary's disdain when he mentioned it to her.

She'd been a raft guide and waitress then and, in winter, a lifty at the mountain. She thought she understood the nuances of his career, what was required to keep clients happy. But no matter how carefully he explained, she still seemed to think the fish, like the rapids, were always in the same places. Really this tiff, which grew into a fight, was about Hank's need to stay connected with the ecology outside their home and its small domestic orbit. That connection was what made him feel substantial in the world, worth his molecules. Without it, no
matter the joys at home, he felt adrift, untethered, petty. He said as much. But for Rosemary, this fight was about having a partner at least as committed as she, a partner as attentive as her own father had been. Maybe, Hank wondered, he'd been raised to fail.

Still, Rosemary surprised him one day by deciding she couldn't live on the river forever and she couldn't live with him. “Riffle and I will be healthier elsewhere.” Her life had stagnated and needed a freshet: in her words, “I can't go on like this.” What she needed, she said, was to start architecture school in Eugene. When he begged why, she glanced toward four-year-old Riffle, who was in the yard talking to pinecones as if they were babies. “You'll be glad to have the space again, don't pretend otherwise. You'll be able to do whatever you want.”

“That's not what I want.”

“We both know you, Hank.”

So his time with Riffle suddenly became two days a week, which felt like nothing. She was taller and leaner and more sophisticated each time he arrived to pick her up. She was growing and becoming a person, a person he would just come to know again by the hour of her departure. He begged Rosemary to let Riffle spend the summer back on the river, to let him have a block of time with her. “You've made me into a joe with my own daughter.” But Rosemary had an internship in some far-off place, and was hesitant to leave little Riffle with a father who worked five or six days a week in the summer. He said he'd take time off, but she called him on it: “You can't afford to take time off during the sprint.” “What about the winter?” he asked. And she agreed that it would be good for Riffle to come spend a month during winter term. “I'll need that month to focus on exams anyway.”

She was six then, and he took the whole month off, though there wasn't much work to be had then anyway. An ice storm locked them inside for almost two weeks of the visit, and they filled their days reading stories on the couch and, later, crafting their own picture books. She would draw the images and he would write the words, and together they would staple the pages together and glue them within a
cardboard cover. Those were the most intimate days they ever shared. He wondered where those books were now.

A summer later, Riffle left with Rosemary for Michigan and some “opportunity” waiting there. Though they still saw each other for a few days here and a week there, the visits became increasingly painful. The moment she arrived, he'd already be shredded with the agony of her departure. And then she'd be gone, and an abyss of longing and regret would open beneath his feet, and he'd flounder there for weeks after. She was changing and he was missing everything.

The years passed, and her calls came less frequently. They were living in Chicago, and Riffle, on her summer trip to the river, begged him to “move home” with her. He considered it, he really did. He went so far as to call a client there to ask after work. “I once was offered a job in insurance,” he said to the man, summarizing the entirety of his professional qualifications. The client was kind—he had daughters of his own—and a few days later a call came with the offer of a position in sales. “It's a solid job, with a chance to move up.” But when the moment came, he couldn't. On the drive to catch her flight, he explained why he couldn't follow her east. “This is my home, Rif.” But she only heard what lay under the words: that he was choosing the river over her.

The next time they talked, Riffle was going by her middle name, Annie. Then, she wasn't home when he called and she didn't return his messages. Somehow, he'd lost her. Or so it felt.

The last time they saw each other, Annie was seventeen, starting college in Maine in the fall. She was scheduled to come for a month, but left after a week. They hadn't talked since, that is until she called him out of the murky blue just a month before Justin Morell went missing.

*

H
ANK GASPED AWAKE
before his alarm. It didn't help that his bladder had contracted to the size of a goddamn mandarin. He pissed off the porch and started the kettle and checked the river levels and the
fish counts and the weather predictions but none of this succeeded in washing away the drowning he'd been suffering just before he awoke. He still couldn't pull a full breath.

He ground the beans and poured the hot water over them and went to his bookshelf. The bottom row was filled entirely with composition journals, organized chronologically, and he knew precisely which to grab without checking the dates. He carried it into the light of the kitchen and opened to a page he'd seen a thousand times before, a page dated July 21, 1982. Riffle would've been three. He had recorded his regular river data, temperature, flow, clarity, and the details from a trip he ran that morning: client went zero for one. It was a short entry, at least by his current standard. But below it, he'd rambled on for pages.