Fire and Forget (25 page)

I waded into the shallows at the head of the pool and cast my fly as near to the oak as I could without risking the line. Then, slowly, I retrieved it. I could not see my lure in the water but imagined how my movements would translate. When I jerked the line, the wooly bugger shot upward, top-lit at the surface, presented to any waiting predator—hopefully a trout, though I had inadvertently caught turtles in this creek. I paused, letting the fly fall through the water toward the bottom.

On my third try, the rod came alive in my hand. For the first time in a long time I felt a welcome burst of adrenaline, a better
drug than booze or pills. The hair on my neck stood on end and my breath quickened. As it fought against a shadow much larger than itself, the fish's every burst of life was transmitted to me through the fly line via the tippet, a thread of nylon, microns thick, the whole process a kind of naturalistic Morse code. For such a small creature it was surprisingly strong, bending the rod in half.

I took my time and let the fish run, careful not to give it too much line for fear it would entangle itself on the submerged tree. When the fish tired, I headed to the bank and reeled it in, lifting it from the water. It flopped wildly and fell off the hook onto the mud, where it continued to thrash, opening and closing its gills, gasping. I pounced on it, picked up a rock the size of my fist, and thumped its head until it went rigid.

It was a big one—not the biggest I'd ever caught—maybe fifteen inches long, a couple pounds of lean muscle. It was a rainbow, a species once foreign to this water, introduced in the 1940s when the government stocked the river to satisfy the increasing demand of sportsmen. The native brook trout, more sensitive to environment than their larger, hardier cousins, had lost out.

It had been years since I had eaten trout of any kind, but suddenly found I really wanted to. I couldn't bring my catch back on the bus—the park service's rules and all—but I had my lighter and pocketknife. I decided the thing to do was to clean the fish, build a small fire, and cook it on the spot.

First, to cut off its head. I walked up the bank and flattened a patch of ferns to form a work area. I experimented with holding the knife in my good hand, but the fish was too slimy and kept sliding out from under the other. So I switched hands, now holding the trout in place with my right, pinching the knife in what remained of my left. I plunged in the blade just anterior to the pectoral fin near the gill cover. Clear fluid tinged with blood ran into the ferns.

When I hit the spine, I couldn't generate enough force between my three fingers to keep the knife from slipping as I tried to sever bone and the sinewy spine. It probably would have been wiser just to gut the thing and leave the head on, but my father had taught me how to cut fillets, and I had done it that way countless times before. Force of habit dies hard.

I gripped the knife in the palm of my bad hand and nicked the tip of the blade into the spine, balancing the knife perpendicular to the ground. I rammed downward with the heel of my palm. The knife shot sideways and sliced through the index finger of my good hand. I cursed and tried to bend it; it would go only halfway, exposing white bone as flaps of skin separated to reveal layers of red and yellow tissue. Then the bleeding started. Great. Now I only had five good fingers.

I let out a primal yell, grabbed the fish, brought it to my mouth, and wrenched its head the rest of the way off with one powerful chomp. As I pulled its tail away, stomach, liver, swim bladder, and intestines were stripped from its carcass and fell, a chain of organs, onto my chin. I spit them and the attached head into the water. Black wisps of blood eddied and curled in the shallows of the dark pool. Another trout shot to the surface to strike at the remains.

My anger was gone as soon as it had arrived. I laughed, tasting bleeding gums pricked by scale and bone, and threw the carcass as far as I could into the woods.

“Rooster! You okay? Where are you?” Sleed's voice called to me from somewhere within the ferns on the north bank. I answered and listened to his noisy approach, picturing him whacking away at the fronds with his cane. He punched through the bank too near the oak, nearly plunging through a marshy false-ground before catching his step. Seeing me, he skirted the pool and came around to the shallows.

“What the hell?” I asked. “You following me?”

“Naw,” he panted, out of breath from bushwhacking. “There's a trail and a bench over there. I was taking a break and heard you.”

“I cut my hand trying to clean a fish.” I wiped blood, guts, and fish shit off my face.

“Damn, nigga, that's bleeding bad. Here, take this.” He stripped off his T-shirt, literally offering me the shirt off his back. What a great guy—I wish I could peel his face off and take it for my own.

“Keep it,” I said. “I'll use mine.”

I got him to tear a strip off my shirt and wrap it around my finger. I applied pressure and elevated my hand above my heart. I sat down. Sleed lit a cigarette.

“You know you not supposed to keep 'em, right?”

“I know,” I said. “But I wanted to eat it.”

“How were you gonna do that?”

I bared my bloody teeth and felt a few rainbow scales still clinging to my gums. They must have glistened like mother-of-pearl in the half-light. Fish and human blood commingled, tasting salty on my tongue. Sleed whistled and said, “Rooster, you one crazy son of a bitch.”

* * *

Following the graded path that paralleled Big Hunting Creek, Sleed and I returned to the parking area. There, Grossnickle dressed my wound with his first aid kit. Before returning to his nap on the bus, he said my finger would need stitches. Nothing new there—over the past seven months I had become a veritable expert in plastic surgery, obsessed with the latest advances in facial nerve damage, tear duct injuries, ear avulsions. Able to extemporize on the differences between split and full-thickness skin grafts, tissue expansions, random-pattern flaps, pedicled flaps, free-form flaps, my dream was to someday receive a face transplant, a procedure
yet to be performed in the States. A few stitches on my hand were small potatoes in light of the larger project of reconstruction.

It was almost noon, we were the first to make it back from fishing, and the clear blue of the morning had given way to an overcast sky, rusty-grey clouds moving quickly overhead. Looking straight up, I could almost trick myself into thinking it was the trees in the foreground that were moving, and not the sky behind.

A cold front had stalled in the valley to the east and finally spilled over the mountains. A fine mist formed in the forest, muted rainbows and halos sparking in the gaps between foliage, blurring distant objects. Two soldier fishers, identifiable only by silhouette, emerged like specters from the wood line before passing again out of sight. Sleed and I sat on a squared log coated with creosote, the border of the parking lot. We took turns pitching bits of gravel, aiming for an empty soda can ten feet away. To make the game interesting, we had a few bucks riding on it. Sleed hit the target first.

“Got a call from the PI when you was fishing,” he said. He picked up another pebble and shook it in his closed fist. “They're doing it in public.”

“What?”

“The Bitch is banging that nigga in public!”

“Oh, shit.”

“Yeah. Looks like he's got a thing for it. Restrooms, parked cars—my man said he got footage of them in the car outside my baby's daycare. He's sending me the video.” Sleed flung the stone at the can, nailing it again.

“Why would you want to watch that?”

“You know,” he said, ignoring me. “Krystal would never even suck me off. I mean, once in a blue moon—my birthday, right before we left for Iraq, shit like that. But I could tell she hated it. And then I'm gone for a year, and this nigga has her screwing in public. Unreal.”

What could I possibly say to console this man? Really more of a boy, only twenty-one, and he had already been denied in so many ways—cuckolded, mutilated. What could I possibly say to dignify the situation? Nothing. I hung my head and picked at the gravel, embarrassed for him.

We pitched rocks, traded stories and small bills, until a red sports coupe with tinted windows pulled into the parking area, empty except for our bus. A decal on the coupe's rear window read “Princess.” The doors opened and two girls got out. The driver looked no older than sixteen or seventeen, her passenger, a year or so younger. They were both dressed in flip-flops, brightly colored halter tops, and shorts cut so high, the bottom crease of their ass flesh was clearly visible. The girls gathered their book bags and locked the doors. Clearly, they were not here to fish.

Acknowledging our gaze, the younger one smiled and waved shyly. She had a kind face, and I waved back. Her friend refused eye contact; her face sharp, disdainful, ears pierced up and down with studs and dangling baubles. She looked like a stone-cold fox, like she didn't give a shit about anything. They both looked fine. I hadn't been with a woman in almost two years. Sleed never would again, not like that. When they reached the trailhead at the opposite end of the parking lot, the girls took the path to the left, hiking out of sight.

Sleed returned his focus to the can, tossing stone after stone. He lit a cigarette and smoked it down to the butt in a half-dozen drags. He stubbed it out. He cleared his throat, sighed deeply, took up his cane, and clambered to his feet.

“I'm gonna go take a walk to warm up,” he said. “It's cold as hell out here.”

“What about the game? It's my throw.”

“I forfeit. Take the money.” He stretched his long arms overhead and started off.

“Hold up, I'm coming with you.”

“Just wait here.”

“I'm coming.”

“Fine. Suit yourself.”

We had been together through some shit, and even though I had a bad feeling about what he was up to—or maybe because I had a bad feeling—I couldn't abandon him now.

At the trailhead, Sleed took the right-hand fork, easing my suspicions some. The birds that had called so noisily that morning were now quiet. Empty tree limbs swayed in a moderate wind. It was the type of weather you see before a big storm, a lot of rotation in the sky, the barometric pressure going haywire.

We had been walking for a few minutes when Sleed made an abrupt left off the trail. “It's a damn school day,” he said, apropos of nothing.

“What?”

“I said those girls should be in school.”

“What are you now, a truant officer?”

He smirked. He had this wild look in his eyes. “No. A messenger.”

“Have you lost it or what? Wait. Wait a minute. I said stop! This is—”

“Look, Sergeant.” He stopped. “Why don't you go back and wait.”

Still I could not desert him. I thought about picking up a tree branch and clubbing him from behind, but then again, he hadn't done anything yet.

We hiked awhile longer before cresting the top of a gentle rise. Fifty meters down the other side was the left-hand path, the one the two girls had taken. Sleed began to parallel it on the far side of the rise, observing what was ahead without silhouetting himself on the ridgeline.

“What are you gonna do when you find them?”

He would not answer or even acknowledge me following him. I reasoned hopefully that perhaps his intentions were not wholly malicious; maybe he only wanted to give them a good talking to, scare them a little, tell them playing hooky all alone in the woods wasn't smart. Maybe, I thought—my imagination ranging to the sexually fantastic—maybe he'll use that legendary charm to sweet talk them into laying me for the first time in years, conjuring up, with sheer charisma, a sympathy fuck
au naturel
, a therapeutic
ménage à trois
for the national good. Maybe this is not what it seems.

But soon I returned to reality: the shale outcropping beneath my feet, a mat of leaves, the root of a tree, exposed and gnarled. Sleed tottered along in front, herky-jerky, hunched over, pursuing his prey like a man in a trance, Jake Barnes and Captain Ahab rolled into one, his focus both monomaniacal and directionless. I followed on.

A quarter mile down the trail, we spotted them sitting on a bench just off the path, taking turns dragging on a one-hitter. Big Hunting Creek ran behind them, masking the sound of our approach. They had not seen us. Sleed ducked behind a tree. He motioned for me to do the same. It felt wrong, but I took cover. Part of me wanted to see what he would do.

They passed the pipe. It must have been the younger girl's first time, because she handled it awkwardly. Her older friend drew an exaggerated breath, demonstrating what she should do, and held the lighter. The younger girl took a big hit, kept it in her lungs for a few seconds, then coughed, doubling over, hacking up a rope of spit that hung from her mouth. The one with all the piercings laughed and patted her back until she recovered. Their mouths moved but I heard no words.

Sleed stepped out like a sleepwalker from behind the tree.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

He did not answer.

He made it to within thirty feet before they saw him and sprang to their feet. The older one fumbled with the pipe, a small bag of dope, and her book bag.