Holding Lies (7 page)

She doesn't like to eat much. Occasionally, we'll show her a piece of chicken or a cheese ball and she'll rush across the room to strike, but usually, she'll turn immediately back to whatever it is that she's doing, usually drawing. But no matter how steadfastly she refuses something, I can still get her to eat it. I move in close without distracting her and place the bite within inches of her mouth. If she sees it coming, she won't take. But if I can deliver it without her seeing it, she'll strike it, every time. She senses it there somehow, and her mouth does the thinking.

Two pages later, dated the next day:

I came in the bathroom and found her standing before the toilet, gripping the rim, her undies at her ankles. She was peeing all over herself. “What are you doing?” I said. She looked up at me and smiled. “I'm using my pee-nee.”

He tucked the journal back in its place and was on his way to the coffee. Time to meet the client. His eye glanced across the lone journal on the top shelf, out of order and out of place, and even without opening it, he remembered its words verbatim.

August 7 1997:

Fished with Annie this morning on what I thought would be our first drift of many this summer. She didn't want to fish, so I took the rod and landed one, a fourteen-pound buck. Mint fish. Probably be the best I'll get this year. She really missed out. Day ended early, when she said, “You mean nothing to me.” Teenager thing, I'm sure.

I'm not very good at this parenting thing. Trying but I'm starting to fear that I'm missing some essential ingredient. Checked out four books on the subject from the library. Next time she comes, I'll get it right.

Tomorrow, after returning from an early trip to the airport, I'll fish hard. At least there's something I'm good at.

I
N THE DAYS
that followed, little was learned about Morell's disappearance. Search and Rescue at first expanded their body search, bringing in a helicopter from Roseburg. The Huey's chop, chop, chop could be heard echoing up and down the valley as if it were delivering marines to some battle upriver. Looking up at the passing roar, Hank could see three pink faces, helmeted and intent, peering down on his pool. But after a few days, the Search and Rescue coordinator announced the formal search for Justin Morell had ended. “We have little hope of recovering him at this point.”

That same day, Hank learned through the grapevine that Sheriff Carter suspected foul play. He'd been interviewing people in and around town, but had been focusing on those folks who'd spoken to Morell in the days before his disappearance. Hank expected Carter's truck to arrive at his house any moment.

But today Hank was with Danny enjoying a morning off. Danny had this way about him, something that made Hank feel lighter, more agile even. Danny seemed to see the world from a place of fundamental optimism. And if anybody had reason to think poorly of this world, it was Danny. Nonetheless, he had once said that if a guy let go the oars and did nothing else, his boat would eventually deliver itself to the takeout. “Oaring only adjusts the view.” That seemed to
encapsulate it all for Danny: This life would be filled with good and bad in more or less equal parts, and either way you would arrive at the end—so why not use your energies to maintain the best vista?

Danny backed his boat through an eddy and to the shore and dropped anchor. The same move would have taken Hank four or five pulls on the oars, but it took Danny just one. He was easily the strongest man Hank had ever known, a logger by breeding, an oarsman by profession. “Your turn, old man.”

They were at the head of Big Bend, a long and wide pool for this river, a place where a caster could really open up. A ledge on the far side held most of the fish these days, though twenty, thirty, forty years back they would stack up behind all the pool's boulders. Hank and Danny knew right where the fish would be, yet they still chose to fish the run the old way, from the top down, a cast to every lie. Big Bend had four generations of custom to guide its angling, and who were they to fish it otherwise?

“I'll follow you through,” Hank said. “One more fish isn't going to make or break my life.”

Danny bit through his leader. “Enough deferring. How'll I learn your secrets if I don't watch you fish?”

“I don't have any secrets left.”

Danny chuckled. “Fuck you.”

They both knotted on new flies, and Danny lit a joint and Hank fished out a cigarette.

It was true that in the last few years he'd become much less stable on his feet. Someday soon he'd have to carry a wading staff like Walter's, at least while negotiating fast water. “Mostly,” Hank called, wading into position, “I'm afraid I'll fall in and you'll tell everybody at the shop about it.”

“I will too,” Danny said, “you know it.”

Hank had known Danny since Danny was too small for waders. He could still remember the little red-haired kid chasing all the girls at those summer parties some thirty years back, pulling at his wanker and hopping around like an overcaffeinated jackrabbit: boy in its
essential form. Danny's older brother, Joel, who had passed away as a teenager, was at those parties too, typically roaming the periphery with a small band of pranksters. Now Danny was definitively grown-up, a couple years older than Annie, his face seasoned by decades outside. Hank had known from the first time he took Danny in the boat that the kid would end up a guide. No doubt. Children divided themselves into two categories when in a drift boat—those who couldn't peel their nervous eyes from the shore and those who were all but climbing over the gunwales to swim in the water. Danny had taken the latter to a new level of enthusiasm. Three times, Hank had lifted that sopping boy out of a rapid. Danny's own father had little interest in anything but the bottle. Something else Danny and Hank had in common.

As a teenager, Danny became a fixture on the river. He would hitch rides between runs and often linger at boat ramps hoping to score an empty seat. Hank remembered one trip in particular, a dawn he had only one client and Danny was waiting with his bike at the ramp. The client said he didn't mind if this kid took the empty seat—probably because he figured no pimply-faced youth could outfish an experienced angler like himself. But at the end of the day, Danny had risen six or eight fish to the sport's one. Angling ability was one thing, class was another, and Danny had both, even then. At the ramp as the client congratulated this kid on his fish, Danny shrugged and said, “I had to get lucky eventually.”

It had been Hank who'd lent Danny the money for his first boat, who'd called the marine board and helped him get legal as a registered guide. It had been Hank who'd taught Danny to oar, to pick a line through a Class V, to rig the ropes and recover a stuck boat. Hank who'd shown Danny the remaining spawning strongholds, the rearing areas, the staging pools. Danny didn't need Hank to teach him how to fish the runs, but he did need Hank to teach him the history of those runs, their customs, their particular etiquettes. All the things Walter had taught Hank those years before. That was how it was done on Ipsyniho, at least then.

Over the years, their relationship had evolved until the tutelage went both ways. They had for years traded secret lies, hidden seams and ledges that held fish but weren't fished. But now they traded strategies for spinning deer hair and splicing lines and chucking heavy winter flies. Hank was an old dog these days, but Danny was just coming into form. He was known throughout steelhead country as an innovator, and had become an esteemed gear designer for the biggest name manufacturers—Danny
was
the cutting edge of the sport. Most recently, he'd refined and shortened Skagit lines, and designed a special series of rods meant to tip-cast these short heads in tight casting conditions— something other guides had for years considered impossible. If Hank had a question about tackle or boats, he came to Danny. If Danny had a question about the fish or river history, he came to Hank.

In a world of secrets, they were one another's trusted confidants. It was an intimacy as deep and permanent as any Hank had known. He felt it with Walter, and he felt it with Danny. That was the magic of mentorship, Hank realized now. Each person received more than he gave.

Of course, they both kept some secrets for themselves, a long-established custom among the guides. Hank had the boulder field between Upper and Lower Nefarious, plus a couple other minor spots, and he knew Danny had at least two or three places just as good that he kept close to his chest. If Danny was talking about a fish he'd caught and didn't reveal the location, it was understood that Hank wouldn't ask where.

Danny didn't know about Red Gate, for instance, which was one of Walter's many dozen secret places. When Walter had first been diagnosed with cancer, he'd begun divulging his places to Hank, on the unstated condition that Hank not fish them with anyone else. He'd learned of Red Gate, of Ridge Back, of Tendrils, three places that could produce fish on impossible days. When Walter got word the cancer was in remission, the divulging stopped. But now, when they spoke, Walter would say he “rose two in Tendrils, a couple others in another spot I'll show you soon.” When Hank passed away, he'd leave his shelf of fishing logs, and all their pool maps, to Danny.

They respected each other's secrets because they understood just how essential these secrets were. To love a river, as to love a romantic partner, a person needed to have the sense that the water had shared something intimate. Those confidences, and the promise of further discovery and insight, were the fuel that kept any romance alive. Walter, Hank, Caroline, Danny—they all understood this. It was those “chargers” who didn't, a generation of misfits who'd never learned to love.

But Danny had a dark side too; Hank couldn't deny it. There were rumors and then there were the truths Hank had seen himself. Like when Danny was eighteen and had called asking for bail. Hank had arrived to find Danny's fists swollen and his toe broken. According to the cops on scene, it'd taken five men to pull Danny from the choke-setter who'd picked the fight.

Hank didn't know for sure what had happened between Danny and his ex. He didn't want to know.

“Have you been exploring the lower river much?” Danny asked. He was standing on shore behind Hank, off to the side so as not to interfere with Hank's cast.

The lower river had been gouged by two serious floods several years back, its course drastically altered, the old runs buried and new ones uncovered. “In December and May and June. Trying to catch the waves of fresh fish. I got the impression they were blowing through that water. Why?”

“Just wondering,” Danny said.

Hank stepped down; his next cast would land on the ledge. He dug deep in the cast and made sure the dry fly landed at the same moment as the line—the fly was skating the moment it alit. “I take it you've been spending time down there.”

“I have,” Danny said. Which said everything he wasn't. “Morell was too.”

A step down, a new cast. Morell.

“He got into it pretty heavy with Andy there last week.” Andy Trib, Danny's good friend, though it was no secret they'd had their own troubles a few years back; the rumors had been vicious—concerning
Danny's wife at the time, now his ex. “Andy told me he was sure Morell was the one that cut his anchor rope. I told you about that, right?”

A step down, a new cast. He had. Andy had been guiding some clients through a run—Hank didn't realize it had been on the lower river— when Andy saw his own boat come drifting by. He had to swim for it.

“Morell didn't tell me his side, knowing Andy and me are tight, so I don't have the clearest picture. But from what I can muster up, Andy cut him off at the ramp one morning, then low-holed him that afternoon. That was the thing about Morell, he kept a grudge.”

A step down, a new cast. Guides guarded their grudges like they did their secrets. “I heard that Morell had undercut Andy's prices, got his client list, and called a bunch of them.” Hank had heard that through Caroline a couple weeks back.

“That's what Andy has been saying,” Danny muttered.

“You don't believe him?”

“No, I do. It's just, well, I'm not telling you this because I'm interested in the particulars.”

A step down, a new cast.

Danny aimed his rod to a point across the river. “Strip out another five feet and throw it on the same angle.”

“Really? All the way to the bank?”

“I swam that ledge last week. There's a shelf just off that tuft of grass. There was a hog on it.”

“You're kidding.” Hank pulled out the line and came around: The fly smacked the surface just off the grass, broad wakes behind it. Nothing, not today. “Not interested in particulars?”

Danny spit. “I've just got a bad feeling about this whole thing. Can't shake it, that his going missing was no accident.”

“The guy wasn't quick to make friends.” Hank took two big steps down, sent another cast to the spot Danny had mentioned. This time after the fly landed, he fed it slack, tugged it, gave it slack. Nothing.

“Times are tight, least for the younger guys. That isn't making the situation any more friendly. Bookings through the shop are way down.”

“People know the fish aren't here like they used to be.”

“Morell, though, he was staying real busy. Maybe it was those articles he was writing. Or maybe he was swiping clients. Whichever, he was too new to be top dog, if you get my drift.”

Hank reeled in, offered the water to Danny, but Danny declined with a nod to the boat. They walked back up the shore. Danny said, “I bet he turns up sooner or later, a knife in his back.”

***

A
FTER FISHING WITH
Danny, Hank couldn't stop thinking about Morell. Disdaining Morell, really, and then feeling shabby for thinking ill of the dead. There was something else there too, something maybe like guilt. Like he'd watched the punk inch to the edge of a cliff and, despite knowing better, hadn't warned him to step back.