Holding Lies (8 page)

What bothered him now was that he couldn't muster more than some trivial compassion. He could say, “What a waste,” but then again, wasn't he glad the kid was gone?

Case in point, the first time Hank encountered Morell guiding the river. Hank's clients were fishing Sawtooth, one at the top and the other in the tailout. Morell came around the corner and made a showy display of moving his boat—and his clients who were fishing Montana-style, one in the bow and one in the back—to the far bank. They shared a nod as Morell passed, and that's when Hank noticed the earphones in the kid's ears. He was listening to music while blessed with the splattering aria of the Ipsyniho? As if this wasn't insult enough, in the center of the run, Morell pulled back offshore and instructed his clients to cast to the center boulder, precisely where Hank's client would be fishing in another couple minutes. They didn't move a fish, but that was hardly the point. Morell had low-holed him, and while listening to a fucking iPod.

Hank could have held a grudge about the whole thing, but Morell was young and relatively new to the watershed and Hank himself had made faux pas at that age. Besides, forgiveness was the highest end. So they say.

But this wasn't an isolated incident. After a while, Hank started referring to low-holing as “Morelling.” The kid's lasting nickname came not long after: Poddy. Walter had dubbed him after watching him shout at a client over music only he could hear.

But now the kid was dead and Hank was looking for an empathetic reading: Morell was just a product of this up-and-coming generation, a whole tribe of youth that had come to expect entertainment at every turn, and of course he would listen to music on the river, because you can't text while oaring. It wasn't his fault. He was the product, not the producer.

But there was one memory that Hank couldn't soften, no matter how rigorously he tried to reinterpret it. There it was as fresh as it had been in the moment: Walter at Millican Ramp, two clients waiting on land, Walter working as fast as he could given the limp and the pain of the cancer to move the tackle and gear from the bed of his Chevy to the boat. Like all the old guides, who never made enough money to secure even a simple form of retirement, Walter was still working, despite his doctor telling him not to and his friends chipping in to buy him some recovery time. Under his baseball cap, he was bald from the chemo. Under his waders, he was emaciated from the vomiting. He'd had to mortgage his house to afford the treatment. And yet, there he was at 4:19 in the morning, loading his boat and standing straight. Morell, though, couldn't wait. He was next in line on the ramp, his client asking about fish size, fish strength, fish numbers. Hank had his own clients, a pair of quiet teachers from Portland, and he told them to wader up while he went and helped a friend. He was walking toward Walter and the ramp when Morell leapt from his truck, grabbed the remaining gear from Walter's cab, and heaved it into the old man's boat. Walter looked up, a bit struck by the suddenness of the whole thing, and Morell said, “Next time, maybe, you could do this in the parking lot.” Then to Walter's clients, who'd surely heard the exchange, “Come on, guys, time to climb aboard.” It was Walter's silence immediately after, his refusal or inability to defend himself, that prompted Hank to grab Morell by the collar as he came back up the ramp. There were clients watching, so he didn't knock the little fuck's teeth out or throw him headlong into the
river, but he did jam an elbow to his neck and press him against the side of the truck. Morell gasped for air. In that moment, Hank had so much to say, so much he didn't know where or how to start. All that came out was, “Mind your manners.”

In Hank's day, such disrespect for the river's elders would have been met with a broken casting arm, an injury feared second only to total paralysis. A broken casting arm would effectively end your season, and your clients would find a new gillie. Depending on the details of your sin and the sobriety level of the vigilantes, there might also have been some truck sabotage, a ruptured boat, maybe minor arson to home or dwelling. And the assault would have continued until the offending prick had packed his shit and found a new watershed. In the ethical code of the Ipsyniho, respect for the river and its fish came first, then respect for the river's old guard, then respect for the etiquette the old guard had established. Justin Morell seemed hell-bent on insulting all three.

Yet Hank found himself surprised now, not that the kid had gone missing, but that he felt so obligated to forgive him, just because he was dead. And what was this “kid” nonsense? Morell had been a grown man.

Morell had wasted a chance. That was it. He'd misused his time. He'd neglected this most spectacular gift the world had offered him.

There came a time for people like that to face what they deserved.

*

H
E DROVE TO
town for supplies: paint and spackle and whatever über-potent carpet cleaner he could find. He still had plenty to do before Annie arrived.

But once in town, he drove first to Morell's place, one of those sixties-era ranch homes that proliferate in the West, the ones seemingly built to emphasize their garages. He parked out front and waited to shut down the truck, humming along to
Cornell '77
. “Row, Jimmy, row.” He was here to muster up some compassion, to find a reason to forgive this kid. “How to get there, I don't know.”

The girlfriend answered, a beanpole of a girl, black hair, lip ring, swollen eyes—probably a couple years younger than Annie though she looked ten years more haggard. She was wearing hardly anything, tiny shorts or a bikini bottom (was there a difference these days?) and a muslin-thin tank top. If interested, he could've learned much about the geography of her dark nipples, which were barely concealed by the fabric.

“I'm stopping by to pay my respects,” Hank said. He caught himself pulling at his beard, and forced his hands deep into his pockets. “I want to help however I can. This must be, this is … well, I can't imagine how hard.”

She turned and walked inside, leaving the door ajar.

He followed her in. “Shut this?”

She didn't answer, and he decided to leave it open, an escape route. She was drinking and offered him a glass. He accepted, and watched as her bony arm tipped the vodka bottle like it was tonic. He guessed she didn't do much eating.

“His mom is coming out on Tuesday,” she said. “It will be hers to deal with then. I'm so done being the one. I didn't sign up for this, you-know-what-I-mean? It's not that I'm a bad person or anything, but it's not like I was in this for the long haul. It isn't fair to stick me with this. We weren't tight like that, you-know-what-I-mean? I'm not a bad person.”

“It's too much for anyone.” There was a Bob Marley poster on the wall, another for Pink Floyd, the one with the nude women sitting beside a pool, their backs painted with each of the album covers. Bottles of hard liquor lined the windowsill, some sporting half-burned candles, wax dripping like frozen tears down the glass. The place smelled of cat, of incense, of unsmoked weed.

With a series of eye-watering gulps, she drank her beverage down far enough that she could add some ice cubes. “You're one of his coworkers? ”

Hank considered this. Supervisor was more like it. “Yep, exactly.”

Down the hallway, through an open door, he saw a fly-tying vise, a stack of fly boxes.

“Do you think he's dead?” she asked, while crunching on a piece of ice.

“Oh. Um.” He reached for the wall behind him, to lean against it, but stumbled slightly into the open room. He could have sworn there was a wall there. “A lot of possibilities. A lot of room for hope still.”

“I'm sure of it,” she said. “To be honest. I told myself if he wasn't found by last night … This is just so crazy. It's not fair. Like you said, it's too much for one person.” She looked toward the window as if she were considering issues of great philosophical weight. “It's too much for one person.”

Hank pointed his beverage down the hallway. “Do mind if I have a look at his flies?”

The room with the fly-tying bench also housed all his rods, which were leaning with no apparent order in one corner. There was a laptop on a second desk—likely the site where he'd written those articles. On the small bookshelf nearby rested a single row of books, mostly whereto-fish books. The other two rows were filled with sideways stacks of magazines. All the fly-fishing titles, plus some snowboarding glossies he'd never seen before.

On one wall hung the famous Sage poster of the guy double-hauling across the tropical blue from the roof of that crashed plane. On another, two posters, one of a big British Columbia river on a snowy morning and the other Jeff Callahan's renowned image of the Ipsyniho at dawn. Images so common as to hold little or no interest for Hank. However, immediately above the laptop hung a slab of corkboard. There Hank found maybe twenty-five photos tacked. He was expecting to see Morell in each of them, holding a big fish, gripping and grinning like some weekend joe. But to his surprise, only a couple of the photos were of Morell. The rest were of the river, of certain runs, of unidentifiable anglers casting at last light, of an otter sitting on a rock. And then, to Hank's utter wonderment, there was a picture of Hank himself and Walter. They were standing on the shore near Kitchen, wadered up and laughing. Hank couldn't remember the day,
but he was wearing last year's waders. Morell must have happened by and snapped this photo. But why? And why post it so prominently?

“There's going to be a service,” the girlfriend bellowed. Her drink sloshed over the rim. “You should come. They say it will be healing.” She elbowed the pile of rods in the corner. “You can have any of this shit you want.”

He unpinned the photo. “Mind?”

She shrugged. “What the fuck am I gonna do with it?”

Walter and Hank met Danny and Andy at the Cougar Creek confluence pool, the river's primary staging pool, just past noon. Another truck was parked on the one-lane Forest Service road. A fading and tattered bumper sticker read, “Fuck spotted owls.”

Walter said to Danny, “Rifle.”

Danny folded down the seat in his old Cummins and produced a slender, rolled-up blanket. He cracked open the bolt-action and tossed the blanket back in the cab. Walter grabbed his .30-06 from the gun rack in his window.

Andy shook Hank's hand. “How you been?” Andy Trib, a compact little guy with bloodshot eyes, prematurely graying hair, and a baseball cap always pulled low. For what the guy lacked in social skills, he more than compensated for with a two-hander. Hank had met him first in the midnineties, when Danny started bringing him around. He was one of the first Great Lakes transplants. In the years since, a river of unemployed twenty-somethings had come streaming from the failing industrial center, salivating to be steelhead guides, their hunger fueled by the images of big rivers and big fish that now plastered the national fishing magazines. Most burned out or drifted on within a year or two. But a few, like Andy Trib, proved themselves and became respected—if steadily goaded—members of the circle.

“Hear you had a run-in with Morell,” Hank said.

Andy spit. “You could say that. Won't talk shit on account of all that's happened, but did you hear that fucker cut my anchor line?”

Walter called, “You two finish your tea party. Danny and I'll take care of these Bubbas.”

Andy and Hank leaned against the tailgate and watched Danny and Walter disappear over the shoulder, rifles in their hands. Walter, of course, had his wading staff in the other.

While they waited, Andy tucked a pinch of Kodiak into his lip and Hank sparked a smoke, and the nicotine got Andy chatty. He went on and on about how Morell had been swiping clients, low-holing, and, Andy suspected though couldn't prove, puncturing his truck tires. “Feel bad saying it, but the valley's a better place with Poddy gone. Just wish of course he'd left under different circumstances.”

“Funny how death changes the way you think about a guy.” Hank was thinking of that photograph he'd taken from Morell's corkboard, the one still in his shirt pocket.

“Didn't change the way I think of him. Once a douche, always a douche.” Andy blew some snot from his nose. “What do you think, somebody kill him?”

“Just a matter of respect, really,” Hank muttered. When a person died, they could no longer defend themselves; the living had a responsibility to give them the benefit of the doubt. And some of the living, the indebted ones, had a moral imperative to fight the dead's battles. That's how debts could be repaid. Of this much, Hank was sure. Or pretty sure, anyway. But why did he feel indebted to Morell? Was that what this feeling was? “He was doing the best he could.”

Andy shook his head. “Maybe. But I think somebody killed him.”

“No,” Hank said. “Nobody killed him. He was just a kid, for fuck's sake.” But to be honest, the more times someone asked him if he thought Morell might have been murdered, the more he began to think the answer could be yes. Had to be yes.

“Didn't realize you were taking this so personal.”

“I'm not.”

Andy shrugged. “O-kay, boss.”

Hank was just about to apologize for getting snappy when two men, one nearly obese, the other as thin as a binge tweaker, stepped up on the road. Neither wore a shirt. They threw their fishing rods in the bed of their truck, and the thin one hollered, “Fuck all y'all. Fucking, fairy-faggot fuckers. Yeah, you heard me. You want some of this, bitch-fuck?” He was beating his fists now against his chest, hard enough to leave bruises, which to Hank seemed somehow emblematic of all this guy's problems.

The scrawny one had halved the distance between them and was still coming. “I seen you prancing around in your fly costume, stroking off your big ol' sticks. Well I'll take that big ol' stick and bust it over my knee and ear-fuck your skull with it, yeah, you heard me. My daddy's daddy been fishing this river since your kin was still learning to wipe their prissy eastern asses, and I'm done with y'all coming in here and actin' like we're a bunch of off-reservation Injuns. We own this place, who the fuck are you?”