Holding Lies (12 page)

In the years after, Hank came to reduce these fights to a single essential disparity: Both he and Rosemary had only the highest of expectations for themselves, but how they defined “highest” differed entirely.

She had wanted to leave the valley a little after Riffle's second birthday, but he'd refused. “We need to raise her with all the advantages,” she would say. And he would completely agree. “We need to offer her the best education,” she would say. And he would point to the river and say “absolutely.” “We need for her to live in the cultural center, where her intuitive and rational mind can be developed.” And he would say, “That's why we're here.” For Rosemary, the valley was a last colonial outpost on the fringe of the civilization. For Hank, it was the rarest thing in this world, an authentic community built around the divine rituals of harvest, a refuge of civility and culture amidst a world intent on
hara-kiri-ing
itself on the sharp blade of “efficiency.”

Finally, when Riffle was five and about to start kindergarten, they found themselves in a fight so hot it would leave them burned. Riffle was asleep in her room and they were out back in the firs and ferns. Rosemary had stayed in Ipsyniho as long as she was willing, “longer than she should have.” She was leaving, and she was taking Riffle, and Hank could either come or he could become a weekend dad. A joe of a father. She said, “I'll fight you for custody and I'll win, you know it.” And with that, she had played her ace.

Riffle was still the bubbling little river girl then, a five-year-old who already knew how to ferry herself to the far bank with just a couple quartering backstrokes. She had raised two steelhead on her own, learned to herd crawdads into the shallows where they could be collected en masse, and taught herself to build windproof shelters from driftwood. She could debone a trout with her bare hands and spot the bulge of a prime chanterelle before it emerged from the duff. Her tan was deep, her feet calloused, and he hung on every word she spoke. She laughed as easily as she sang, and it killed him to imagine her sprightly self in a sweltering concrete shit hole, a place divorced from everything real and permanent and important. A place enraptured by its own whoop-de-do.

In the weeks, months, decades to come, he justified his decision to stay analytically: If he'd come with Riffle, her connection to the river would be severed. They'd become tourists, on the Ipsyniho for a few weekends a year, and Riffle would lose precisely what made her
her
. The river would become an escape from reality, rather than a conduit to reality itself. By staying, he was providing for her the best he could, he was keeping a home for her in the highest place. She would go to town, experience all that self-indulgent hoopla, and then retreat home where her real education could continue. Looking back on it now, he would've made the same decision again.

And that's what was killing him. Because it was that decision that cost him his daughter. Wasn't it?

When he was completely honest with himself, though, he had to admit that the decision to stay hadn't revolved entirely around Riffle. He had been as concerned for himself as he had for her. He couldn't stomach the thought of a life down there, a joe's nine to five, dreaming endlessly of the weekend—forty-eight piddly hours where his life would be his again. He imagined himself taking to drinking, to gambling, to—god forbid—watching sports on TV.

And so, he'd told Rosemary—in admittedly regrettable language—to go fuck herself. And a week later, Riffle left in Rosemary's green Chevy, waving despite tears out the back window at the father who'd chosen to be near the river instead of her.

T
HEY AWOKE EARLY,
just like she wanted, and towed the boat up to Hank's standard ramp. He'd picked up sandwiches, called in his regular shuttle, and brought three rods—the seventy-one thirty-three, the forty-one nineteen, and the seventy-nine six, the same three he always brought on a guided trip this time of year. They were the first people to the ramp, a clean thirty minutes before legal light.

“How will we retrieve the truck?” Annie asked.

“Somebody will drive it down for us.”

“Who does that?”

“Julianna and Petra. Ten bucks. It's their living. Good folks.”

From his closet of wading gear, he'd found a men's tall-small that fit her nicely and a pair of boots sized in men's sevens. She wore them now, as she staggered over the dark beach along the first run. He'd have to keep a careful eye on her to ensure she didn't go for an unintended swim.

Like so many of the underinitiated, she tried to walk over the river's cobbles as if they were flat and solid concrete: legs parallel, arms down, center of gravity somewhere just above the waist. Most every step, her footing slipped or shifted and she was falling out of balance.

“Try bowing your legs, sweetie.” It was understandable she'd forgotten how to wade. “And keep your arms out, so they're ready to balance you.”

Casting came more quickly. He started with the single-hander loaded with a weight-forward, medium-belly line, and knotted on his go-to dawn dry fly. She'd learned to cast all those years before and still retained a frayed mastery of the basics. Eleven and one, wait for the backcast to straighten before moving forward, don't cast more than you must, you won't catch fish with your fly in the air. She cast a stalling line across the current, and after the current straightened it, he reminded her to follow the swing with the rod tip.

It took a while, well into the dawn, but then the rhythm returned to her, and she sent a clean thirty-footer across the tailout. The fly landed and was in swing and Hank was just about to congratulate her when she lifted the fly into a new backcast. “I've forgotten how satisfying it is to feel the rod chuck the line.”

“Sure, but the point is fishing.” It was a stupid thing to say, and not even true, and he instantly wanted it back.

Her next cast landed in a pile.

But whatever. Annie was there with him again, tucked between the black ridges, the river reflecting the last stars as they faded into the crystalline dawn, and what more could he want? A father and a daughter in a moment disjointed from its history, in a moment between histories. She laid out a new cast and followed the skating dry fly, and it was as if she'd stayed with him all these years and still went by Riffle and allowed him to share all that had been shared with him. In that moment, her fly waking over the glassy surface, the legacy remained intact. He lit a cigarette and tucked his hands in his wader pocket and tried to memorize every detail. Perfection never lasted.

“When did you start smoking so much?”

“Cigarettes?” He'd first dabbled with them in adolescence because the girls he liked liked boys who smoked, and he'd continued to smoke the occasional stick into his forties. But the daily habit began later.

“I don't remember you ever smoking when I was a kid.”

He'd started in earnest only twelve or fourteen years back, during a week of self-destruction. There had been the three boxes of Camels from the 7-Eleven, the binge at the tavern, and the dirty fight with
that random trucker. And, of course, the crash on the way upriver and the broken leg. Funny, looking back on it, how the cigarettes had lasted longer than the limp. Rather than tell her this, he lied, though he wasn't quite sure why. “I started smoking cigs when I quit smoking grass, twenty-something years ago.”

“I didn't know. I never knew.”

“I kept it a secret.”

“What other secrets did you keep?”

He snuffed the smoke on the sole of his wading boot and dropped the butt in the film canister he carried in his wader pocket specifically for this purpose. “That's it.”

*

L
ATER THAT MORNING,
just about the time the red sunlight appeared on the ridge tops, she said suddenly, “I wish you still smoked pot. I mean instead of smoking cigarettes.” He had just finished explaining where she should cast, where the fish held, and where she'd want to stall the swing of the fly. She must have smelled his breath. “Thad smokes pot.”

“The pediatrician?”

“He doesn't smoke all the time, just an occasional weekend. You won't get cancer from smoking every pot every now and then. You should quit those things.”

“I think that ship has sailed.”

“You can still quit. There are all sorts of gadgets and gums to help. Cigarettes are evil.”

“But do I want to quit, is the question.” He'd decided a few years back that smoking enhanced his daily life sufficiently to justify the possibility of an earlier demise. A more contemplative and satisfying middle age seemed a worthy trade for a shorter, more abrupt old age. Maybe even a smart play, given how horrendously aggravating those years after seventy-five looked, especially when you were on your own.

And the pot these days didn't resemble the stuff he'd enjoyed thirty years before, when he could smoke a whole twisty to himself and have a nice, fishable buzz. The last time he'd tried a toke of the new stuff, off one of Danny's joints, he'd ended up lying on shore for an hour trying to determine which voice in his head was his own.

“I just want you around, that's all.” She made a new cast, but looked to him instead of following the swing.

“I've always been here, always will be.”

She glared off down the shore, and he thought she might curse him for so rarely calling. He cursed himself for that lapse all the time, which made him feel more shabby and awkward, which in turn made him even less inclined to dial her number because then he'd had to face her rightful judgment for not calling. It was a lame and pitiful loop he'd been in now for years, and he hated himself for it.

But she surprised him: “Thad lost his father last year. It was real sudden.”

A long-shelved memory appeared as vivid as the tailout before him: the lonely drive to his own father's deathbed, the rain splattering up from the log trucks, the manic beating of the windshield wipers. It had taken a week for the man to pass, the first week they spent together in twenty-something years. “Heart attack?”

“Stroke.”

“Good way to go. Fast.”

“Gosh, Hank. When did you become a masochist?”

*

H
E TOLD HER
all the standard stories, the little anecdotes that instilled the scenery with a sense of history and narrative, the stories that lent plot to this place. It was these stories that gave clients a feeling of possession, of mastery, and it was a sense of mastery over fish or place or both that drove them to dig deep into their tipping cash.

Over the years, the stories had morphed, becoming simpler and less concerned
with the absolute facts of their parent events. Sometimes, when Hank was feeling inspired, he would fill in the gaps with florid details, maybe add a character and delete another, maybe twist the event for hyperbolic effect. What did it matter if they were true or not? These dudes would forget the story the moment they stepped off the plane back in LA or Houston or Duluth. It would fade like the fish, like the river, like Hank himself, into the scenery of their own tale in which they, of course, were the hero.

But this time, he was driven by a compulsion to be entirely truthful.

As they drifted past the cement pillars and barren foundation of what had once been the Thompson Cottage, he told her about the newlyweds from Eugene who had bought the place, arrived for their honeymoon, and had a hundred-year-old fir smash through it the first night. “The tree crushed the front half of the house and they had no exit. But that was the least of their problems. It also cracked open the woodstove and the fire swept through the debris. They had no choice but to jump off the balcony into the river. They were nude, of course.” Only after he finished telling her about how they didn't make it to shore for a quarter mile and about how they'd sprinted through town like a rogue Adam and Eve did it occur to him that he couldn't quite recall if the fire in the house had started when the tree fell or sometime later. And maybe they hadn't jumped into the river nude. Maybe they hadn't jumped into the river at all. He'd told the exaggerated version so long, he couldn't determine where the exaggerations ended.

Nonetheless, Annie enjoyed the story, and recounted one of her own, about a German couple she'd helped while vacationing in Grand Cayman who had their clothing stolen as they skinny-dipped. “The whitest people I've ever seen.”

“You were in the Caymans?”

“Oh yeah, regularly,” Annie said. “It's Thad's favorite place.”

Of course, Hank thought. The guy is a tourist in his favorite place.

Which only spurred Hank to tell more stories. At Barrier, he explained the unique pool's geologic history, how it had once been a lava tube that had been buried by subsequent volcanic eruptions.

“As the river ate down through the valley floor, it uncovered the tube, busted through the top, and now runs right down what remains of the cylinder.” The geologic stories were much easier to keep straight.

As were the historical facts: at Boat, he pointed to where the tribal fishermen had kept their summer camps, to the place where they smoked the fish, to the runs from which they netted the chinook, the silvers, the eels, the smelt, the steelhead. “They had names for the runs on the river, names that had been passed down for generations. In the best runs, they even had names for the important boulders and ledges.”

“Why do you all call this place Boat, then? Why don't you use the original names? It'd be a nice show of respect.”

“We don't know the names. The legacy was broken after the Rogue River Wars, when the cavalry rounded up all the remaining natives in southern Oregon and marched them to a camp on the coast. The first European anglers didn't arrive for twenty years after.”

Just after lunch, they stopped at Mossy Rock, at the pool of apparently stagnant water behind it, water that was separated from the main flows by a granite ledge. This hot spring was a place he never stopped with clients, a place the guides never shared with a tourist. They anchored and stripped to the bathing suits Hank had suggested they bring and tiptoed their way into the scalding water. To cool the pool down, Hank grabbed the boat's bailer and heaved in a few gallons of icy river water.