Holding Lies (3 page)

But O'Connell wasn't a sport. He was just a regular guy who really wanted to catch a steelhead. He confessed on that first day that he didn't like the idea of guides—“no offense”—because to him fishing was all about learning a river, discovering where the fish held and what they took. A guide dished all that up in easy servings. “Wouldn't normally do this. But figure I'll need all the help I can get fishing the Ipsyniho.”

And so for O'Connell, Hank broke his routine a second time. Instead of fishing first light to midafternoon, they fished first light to midmorning, midafternoon to dusk, and that way maximized their low-light casting. He hated working late, especially when he had a trip to run in the morning, but he couldn't have this guy going home fishless.

And yet the river would offer them no slack. It wasn't raining or cloudy or even cooler the last day. Instead, the high temperature rose to 108 degrees. Come 6:00 p.m., Hank told O'Connell to reel in. This was ridiculous. “I know a spot,” he said. “It's bit dangerous, but the fish will be there, and it won't have seen another angler all day.” He'd never taken a client to Froth, never even fished it with Danny or Walter or Caroline. But the time had come to play his ace.

Froth was the hidden step between upper and lower Nefarious, one of the river's most feared rapids. It couldn't be accessed on foot because of the barrier cliffs upstream and down. And guides didn't fish it because no one wanted to run their boat through Nefarious. The whole river pinched down to ten feet across, then dropped six or eight feet, widened over a boulder field, only to pinch together again and drop eight or ten feet more. What made this spot so dangerous was exactly what made it so fishy. The steelhead would tire in the first rapid and hold for hours or days in the boulders before attempting the second. During hot weather, the fish were in no hurry to leave because of the little ice-cold creek that converged just below Nefarious's upper drop. When the flows and water temps aligned, as they had that day, Froth produced a fish about ninety percent of the time, a fact Hank would have withheld from most clients, but divulged to O'Connell.

They ran the rapid first, after Hank tied down the gear and cinched on his own life vest: two big backstrokes to position them, then a series of tight forward strokes to balance them over the wonky hydro-logics at the base of the drop. Steelhead scattered as they went over the boulders. O'Connell cracked his nose on the gunwale during the second drop and, despite the blood staining his T-shirt, swore he was fine. “Let's get those fish!” he said in a high nasal whine.

They started by resting the run for thirty minutes, then swung a Lady Caroline through. Nothing. Then a two-ought Green Butt. Nothing. Then a fourteen Partridge and Orange below some T-14. Nothing. Rested it over an hour until last light. Tried three more approaches. Nothing. Hank handed O'Connell the single-hander, onto which he'd looped a glow-in-the-dark balloon as an indicator.
If Caroline or Walter saw me now
… “Stand on that ledge and dead-drift it through. Do or die time.”

There was something else about O'Connell, something Hank could hear in his voice. Deference, that's what it was. He'd said when booking the trip, “If you'll take me,” as if others had refused, “If you'll take me,” as if he might not be
worth
taking.

He shouldn't have put him on that ledge. It was wet and mossy and dangerous as all hell at high noon, let alone at midnight. And O'Connell wasn't exactly agile. Hank should have known better. He had known better.

What exactly happened, Hank never knew. One minute O'Connell was there, high-sticking the flies through, the rapids loud as hell, and Hank turned to light a cigarette. The lighter blinded him for a moment, and as his vision returned, he slowly became sure that the ledge was empty, that his client was gone. “Are you there?”

*

B
Y DARK, THE
search for Justin Morell had turned up nothing. The fire department kept at it until 11:00 p.m., then called it for the night. “We'll be back at dawn,” Sheriff Carter said.

The guides, young and old, regrouped at the ramp, drank a beer, said this didn't mean shit. A guy could get lost hiking up from the water, or take a swim and huddle on shore until morning, or a dozen other scenarios. Plenty of people had disappeared on the Ipsyniho only to be found hiking up the road the next morning.

Walter leaned on his wading staff and said, “It's all a matter of grace, of whether you're in good with the river or not.”

Eyes flashed to Walter, and there was a long silence. A beer opened. “What's that supposed to mean?”

It was one of the younger guides, maybe the youngest, a guy Hank had met before but whose name was as memorable as his personality. Most of the youngsters came and went with the summer, here one season and gone the next. This punk was on the river come spring, Hank would invite him for a fish and buy him a beer. Until then, he was just another joe. A joe who was calling Walter out. “Watch yourself.”

“It means,” Walter said, “if you're clean with Lady Ipsyniho, you got nothing to worry about. Am I right?” Walter was asking Hank.

Hank snuffed his cigarette. “Sure as shit.”

Caroline was there too. She popped the cap off her beer with Hank's lighter, then slipped it back in his pocket. They shared a glance, and for once he could tell what she was thinking.
That boy is not coming back
.

“By that measure,” Danny said, sitting on the tailgate, the twelve-ounce bottle shrunk to eight by his big hands, “we're all angels.”

If Hank hadn't broken his routine and taken O'Connell to Froth, the man would still be alive right now, and in the half lunacy of this long search, Hank felt sure that if he hadn't been hating so hard on Morell just that afternoon, the kid would still be up and pissing people off now. He knew Morell's disappearance wasn't his fault, but it sure felt like he'd caused it. He tried for a full breath. Took two small ones instead. “Angels fix things. We don't fix shit.”

The last time he'd seen Morell, he'd had him by the neck against the side of the Bronco. Morell had deserved it, but still, that was no way to treat a person. And now, from the darkness, he thought he heard
that gagging sound Morell had made. Hank turned toward the sound, but there was nothing there.

“It's late,” Caroline said. Somebody had to.

Jimmy, an older guide, said, “Ain't doing the kid no good here. I'm gonna get forty winks. Fresh eyes for dawn.”

And then the guides started peeling away two at a time. Walter, Caroline, the others over fifty. Their trucks leapt to life and they shouted their good-byes from afar. Old fishermen weren't built for late nights.

In his mind's eye, Hank could see O'Connell's corpse clear as if he'd just touched it, see it ragged and submerged, its back pressed to a boulder, a limb jammed tight against its neck, its arms outstretched and flailing in the current, its mouth gasping for air. He'd called out to O'Connell that dusk, “Are you there?” He sure felt here now.

“Fuck this,” Danny said. “I'm going back out. Who's with me?” He was already pulling the battery from his truck to rig up a spotlight.

All at once, the young guides finished their beers. Nobody was going home with Morell still out there.

Hank heard his own voice, distant and strange in the darkness. “I'll row.”

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, as Hank arrived at the diner just after dawn, he saw the town paper: “Local Guide Missing.” There was a picture of the fire department racing upriver on their sled when it was still new and didn't have the gouges—a file photo. The paper was in the yellow circulation box outside the door, on the table near the waiting area, in everyone's hands.

He had stayed on the water all night, taking turns at the oars and on the spotlight, and he had worn out his voice calling the boy's name. To see this paper now stunned him in his sleeplessness: How had the news made it all the way to town already? He hadn't even been home yet.

Caroline was eating huevos rancheros at the counter, a second order steaming beside her, and she looked up from the paper when he neared. He hadn't said her name or even cleared his throat. She must've sensed him nearby. That was her way in this world.

“Ordered for you,” she said. “Figured you'd be hungry. They say you ‘acted quickly in calling 911.'”

“Not quick enough.”

They didn't kiss—they rarely kissed in public, or touched each other for that matter—but he took the seat beside her, and thanked her for the eggs, though he pushed them aside and ordered a coffee and a large milk instead.

“Can't be hard on yourself, Hank. This isn't your fault.”

“I know.” He lit a cigarette. “I was wishing he'd leave. Move to Alaska, be a body counter up there.” He pulled hard on the Camel, wishing now he hadn't said “body counter.” He looked around. Only truckers within earshot, nobody looking.

He reached for the ashtray; it wasn't there.

“I hope he doesn't have any family,” Caroline said. “Damn that phone call.”

Tommy, the server, poured Hank's coffee. “Got to ask you to snuff that, Hank. New state law. Smoke-free workplace and all that.”

Hank dropped the cigarette in his coffee.

Tommy flipped over the clean cup at the next setting and filled it. “Sorry Hank. Ain't my rule, you know that.”

Caroline's fork dashed at the eggs. She was wearing a black tank top, her back and shoulders lean and striated from years at the oars. Her skin wore a permanent tan, mahogany in summer, fading to oak in winter, a Z perennially stenciled on her sandaled feet. She'd been a raft guide for decades before the big-money nineties convinced her to switch to guiding fly anglers. But well before that, she'd been an institution on the fly water, “that woman” who appeared from the forest, stepped in above you, and rose a fish where you'd found none. Which shouldn't have been all that surprising, seeing as she was the only child of Malcolm Abbot, the valley's most legendary guide.

Hank's forearm brushed the side of Caroline's—he wanted nothing more than to touch her, to be touched by her. That's what he needed right now, the warm wash of her body against his, the pulse of her breathing in his ear, a moment of contracting reality so intimate not even the Ipsyniho could budge its way in. Only there could he take a full breath.

She reached for her coffee. “Not here, sweet.”

It'd been like this between them for a while now. Hank assumed Caroline was just being cautious. She'd carved a career for herself—a traditionally male career—not in small measure by avoiding becoming fodder for the rumor cannon. Guiding, or really scoring clients,
was all about reputation, and hers was carefully calibrated. Strength, competence, self-reliance, all things that a romantic relationship might undermine. Just look at how she behaved when they moved through town together: she opened her own doors and carried her own groceries. Hank knew the truth: that under that coarse veneer she was as fragile as anyone, and as lonely too.

“I take it you're not working today?” he asked.

“Half-day trip, rearranged it for the evening.” She finished her coffee, tossed him a glance. The glance.

“Tommy,” Hank called, as Caroline walked out the door and climbed into her truck. “Can you wrap up these eggs?”

*

H
ANK FOLLOWED
C
AROLINE
up Steamboat Creek, crossing the small tributary of Echo, then another called Sunshine, where they turned up a thread of a county road, roaring up the ridge to a hanging valley. This was hers, all of it.

He'd met Caroline years before, when he first arrived in the valley. She'd been a college girl then, spending the year down in California and returning to run splash-and-giggle trips during the summer months. He remembered seeing her, before he even knew she was Malcolm Abbot's daughter, cinching down her raft at a ramp or joking with friends at Upstream Runs, the guide's preferred bar at the time. She was a mystery to him then, that girl with the bellowing laugh and the strong arms, the one who never wasted an oar stroke in even the wildest rapids. Her hair was brown then, and she kept it back in two cute braids. You could recognize her by those braids a couple pools away, enough time to lose your confidence and bumble the hello. There were plenty of women on the river then as now, but none who seemed so at ease on the sticks. Hank had been taken by her instantly. He'd never had trouble starting conversations with women—he'd been raised the little brother to two older sisters. But this woman was different. She seemed at peace with herself then, and it was hard not to be intimidated by a person like that,
man or woman. His infatuation became near obsessive one August day some thirty years back when she called from her raft, “Keep the fly broadside through that bucket.” She was running a group of clients and he was fishing on a day off. He hadn't realized she knew anything about fishing. “With this light, the fish can't see your junk.” Only later did he figure what she meant: the sun was slightly upstream, and the fish couldn't see the thin profile of the fly with so much light in their eyes. Keeping the fly broadside would, and did, make the difference. He'd asked Walter that night and discovered the mystery girl's name. “Ah, Carrie? She caught her first fish when you were still shitting in your drawers.”

Then one June, the same year Annie was born, Caroline didn't return to the Ipsyniho. He heard through the grapevine that she'd married some rich guy and gotten pregnant. For once, the rumors were true.

“When men go looking for a wife,” she had quipped once about that marriage, “they're really looking for real estate.”

They passed along the fence with a No Trespassing sign nailed to every fifth post, then turned into her driveway. She held open the gate for him, and as he pulled through, her two Rottweilers leapt at the open window, roaring and biting. He blew each a kiss and pulled around the back of the house, where Caroline liked him to park. By the time the dogs came racing around the corner, he was on one knee, a hug for each of them. They licked his eyes and mouth and beard savagely.