The Sky Fisherman (15 page)

As he drove off, my mother glared at the pickup. "He needs to work on his manners."

Inside, she insisted that I tell her all about it, and I tried to think of everything, even though I was tired. We drank tea and I described the church and the graveside ceremony, the people's dress, the salmon, venison, and roots. Throughout, her eyes shone with excitement, and she stopped me now and again to clarify a detail. "What an experience for you. Learning about different cultures always helps you get along," she said. "The world's changing."

When I told her about Juniper, she listened with complete attention, and as I finished the homecoming story, my mother smiled and nodded. "She must be a remarkable woman." Putting down her teacup, she added, "I'm certain your father told me something about her. Parts of that story sound familiar."

"Did he really?" I asked.

"I'm positive," she said. "There might be something else. Jake used
to be sweet on an Indian girl. Your father said so. I wonder if she's the one."

"I don't think so, Mom."

She spilled a little of her tea on the robe. "Look at me slop. I don't know why I'm so messy." After dabbing the tea with a napkin, she said, "We'll just have to wait and see about Juniper. But renting gallery space makes her pretty unusual. I wonder how she got started."

"Billyum used to be interested in her," I said. "Jake went on about it."

She laughed, but her face seemed troubled and she rose, carrying the cup and saucer to the kitchen. "You're too young to know about these things, Culver."

In my bedroom, I lay awake going over the events of the day and thinking of Juniper. After meeting her, I felt worse about taking Kalim's money and wondered if Billyum suspected me. Turning on a flashlight, I quietly checked the suitcase. The money was there all right, but somehow the whole search for Kalim seemed unreal, like a movie.

***

When I awakened in the night, I was surprised to see the table lamp still on in the front room. As I looked in, my mother was holding the phone to her ear but she wasn't saying anything. This went on for what seemed like a long time, until I finally entered and asked, "Mom, is everything all right?"

Startled, she rose a little from the love seat and put the phone receiver down hard. "My God, Culver, you scared me half to death." Her face showed how upset she was. "Don't go sneaking up on me like that again or you'll be a complete orphan."

"I wasn't sneaking," I said. "Who were you talking to so late? Did Riley call or something? I never heard the phone ring."

She looked agitated but pretended to laugh. "Honey, I was just calling the operator to see what time it was. I believe the kitchen clock's slowing, and I was afraid I'd be late to work. Would you check it, please?"

I stepped back into the kitchen. "It's not slow, Mom."

When I returned to the front room, she was going into her bedroom. "Well, it seemed that way to me. I had intended to call earlier, but it slipped my mind. Now I need some sleep. You, too. We both work in the morning." She closed her door almost completely.

She hadn't turned off the table lamp, so I did, checking near the phone for a number or message about Riley, but there wasn't one. However, a
damp Kleenex lay on the floor beside the love seat. "Damn him," I muttered.

I didn't believe her story about the clock and went to bed angry at Riley because I figured he had called up to pester her, but she didn't want to upset me by saying anything. I turned this over for a long time, when suddenly the angry feeling changed to surprise as another idea struck. She might have been trying to call my uncle Jake, checking to see if he ever went home and letting the phone ring and ring inside the empty house.

O
VER THE NEXT TWO WEEKS
, while Jake stayed busy with Juniper, my mother started dating a man named Franklin Worthington II who drove a brand new Chevrolet Bel Air and smelled of English Leather. Franklin worked at Sunrise Biscuits with my mother, but not in the same office, as she was quick to point out. That was against company policy.

The first time Franklin came to dinner, she made shrimp salad and cheese muffins, her standard fare. The second time, she served Rancho pork chops broiled in the oven—ketchup, slice of lemon, and onion on the top. Adding a little brown sugar to the ketchup sweetened the dish. Working on my second pork chop and studying Franklin across the table, I wondered if this was going to become steady. If my mother made Hawaiian ham, Riley's favorite, that meant serious.

Franklin seemed okay, not mean or anything, but too prissy. His clothes were color matched, his cologne too strong, and his hands accountant smooth. He vigorously sucked breath mints, and when he'd crunch them, I'd see my mother's face tighten. Franklin's car was terrific, though—two-tone beige and navy blue with a hula girl air freshener jiggling from the rearview mirror.

Two Saturdays in a row, Franklin took us for a spin and we tried a little fishing on the Lost, the accessible part you could drive along, where broad paths were beaten to the river and the banks were littered with fishing debris and beer cans. He wasn't much of a fisherman although he had new equipment, a discounted spinning rod and reel set that came shrink-wrapped in plastic.

A lure plunker, Franklin splashed out from shore, scaring the feeding fish as he bumped rocks or stirred up the mud with a wading stick he had purchased in Scotland. He claimed to have caught salmon there, but never offered to show pictures.

Jake's rule of thumb was ten percent of the fishermen catch ninety percent of the fish. Nice rainbows populated this overfished stretch of the Lost, but few people caught them. Using Jake's tips like casting a fly into the foam line where the fish wait for food, I caught some fairly nice ones. Showing up Franklin was fun. I let him try my fly rod a few times but he couldn't get the hang of it.

For these "outings," as she called them, my mother packed a picnic lunch in a wicker basket she and my father had received as a wedding gift. She prepared deviled ham sandwiches, fruit cup in icebox dishes, neatly sliced carrot and celery sticks. She spread pimento and cream cheese on the celery, but I couldn't eat mine that way. Beer for Franklin, sodas for me, a thermos of tea for herself.

She spread the picnic on an old blue Pendleton blanket and we'd eat after Franklin and I had fished a couple hours. We didn't talk much, although I remember Franklin going on about a trip he planned to see the castles on the Rhone River.

Lunch finished, I'd head back to the river while she and Franklin sat on the blanket. They'd study the sky and remark on cloud shapes—one of my mother's picnic pastimes. As I fished, I glanced back every so often, but nothing was going on. Even so, I kept them in sight.

I pretended to think that if Franklin didn't know more about fishing than he did, he was equally inept at other activities and thus of little interest to my mother. Still, I knew she wanted to come up in the world, have things a bit easier. She remained beautiful. "A bit of bloom lingered on the rose," she might comment when she felt good about herself. As soon as we had moved to Gateway, she had taken off her wedding band, and now her tan lean fingers didn't show a trace of white line.

Whether or not she told Franklin about Riley I considered her business. I realized that if she did marry again, Mother would most likely select someone professional. She as much as said so herself. Once, when I told her the story of how Riley thought she had been swimming nude with Dwight Riggins, she threw back her head and laughed. "Why don't you give me some credit? Dwight lived in Griggs and smelled like cigars and creosote." She shook her head. "Can you imagine his poor wife? No, Culver, the whole point was to get away from Griggs and get around some professional people."

She meant white-collar. I could imagine Franklin at the office, taking
off his suit coat to show how hard he was working, rolling up his shirtsleeves two turns to display the fine brown hairs on his forearms.

"A person could do worse than Franklin," she had remarked the evening after he dropped us off from the first picnic. "I'm certain any house he lived in would have screen doors." She raised her chin for emphasis. "When they came and told me your father had drowned, we were stuck in a little place that swirled with flies each time you opened the door. Jake and the policemen stood right there holding it open, and I couldn't keep the flies out."

On the river, she had felt comfortable enough with Franklin to fall asleep. I knew how much she liked the soothing sound of rushing water. When I splashed ashore late afternoon with a couple decent trout, she was asleep on the blanket, one tan arm across her eyes, hair fanned out against the blue wool.

I don't know how long she had been asleep, but long enough to appear deeply relaxed. Her lips were parted, revealing her fine white teeth. I had the idea Franklin had been admiring her for a long time.

Raising his head toward me, he said, "Your mother's a remarkably pretty woman."

I gazed at her a few seconds and replied, "Pretty enough for Hollywood."

***

While Mom stayed busy with Franklin, and Jake with Juniper, I worked my tail off at the store, writing licenses, packaging worms, sacking ice, assembling and repairing bicycles. A Gateway kid never brought in a bike unless it had two flat tires and several busted spokes. Schwinn made over seventy spokes in those days, so it was never easy finding the right match. Replacing inner tubes was faster than repairing them with glue and patches, and while it was a waste, I tossed the old ones, unless the kids insisted on a repair. If they had bought a repair kit from us, often the tubes had been fixed at home half a dozen times already. With all the commotion, I seldom took time to eat lunch or go to the bathroom. Even so, I couldn't keep up.

By the time Jake drove in from the reservation, he was often an hour late for the guide trips, and both of us would scurry around the store in a half panic. Checking over the disarray, he'd shake his head and comment, "Going to hell in a handbasket."

"There's only one of me," I'd mutter.

One time we ran out of coffee and the back-room boys carried on like
the end of the world. That had happened only once before, when Jake was away at elk camp for ten days. To ease the strain a little, Jake hired Jed to help out again, but he hardly ever left the stool behind the cash register. Every blue moon, he'd package a dozen worms or make coffee, and even that was weak. Jed claimed that growing up in the Depression had taught him to tolerate coffee like his relatives—thin and bitter.

Of course, the less Jake was around, the more people insisted on talking with him. Sports reporters called up to ask where the fish were biting and what lures or flies worked best. I'd tell them exactly the same information Jake would, but they brushed me off. Once a man phoned to talk about the dam and how it might affect the fishing when it was completed.

"Terrific fishing in the lake behind the dam," I said. "Boating, too, and water skiing. Mention Jake's as recreational headquarters."

"Can I quote Jake on this?" he asked.

"From the horse's mouth. This is his nephew."

But they never ran the article.

Eventually Jake became so frazzled that he asked me to call and cancel half a dozen guide trips. "Tell them I'm under the weather. Make up some bullshit. Ask them to reschedule." His eyes were bloodshot and the lines in his face seemed deeper. "Too much burning the candle at both ends, some in the middle."

"You want me to lie straight out?"

"No, lie crooked." He grinned. "That's why you're getting paid big bucks."

Most of the dudes sounded mad when I called to tell them Jake was canceling their trip. After their initial anger cooled, I'd say, "He's suffering from gallstones." Then I'd lower my voice. "We're praying and keeping fingers crossed it's no more than that. Exploratory surgery in two weeks. Meanwhile, he's just fighting the pain."

The voice would soften at the other end. "Gee, I'm sorry to hear that."

"It's rough, all right. Still, he doesn't want to be rowing you fellas through some class-five rapids and suffer an attack." And here I'd pause a moment as Jake had suggested, to allow them time to imagine the situation. "He feels terrible about letting you fellas down. But he wants to reschedule in October when the big steelhead come in. If that squares with your party." Another pause. "No extra charge to you fellas. He insists. And your deposit locks in the trip." They always took the bait and we'd fix the schedule. "Understand, I got to write this in pencil for now. Just in case..."

No one asked for his deposit back, and we got a sprinkling of get-well
cards, some chocolates, several bottles of liquor, one bouquet of flowers. I took the flowers home to Mom, considering them a bonus for covering Jake's ass.

***

One afternoon Jake and Juniper showed up at the store with five of her paintings carefully wrapped so they hadn't been damaged in the pickup bed. "We need to take down some of the trophies," Jake told me. "We're hanging these."

I got out the stepladder and tried to share Jake's enthusiasm, but I wasn't sure our customers gave a hoot about art.

After climbing the ladder, Jake handed me the trophies, making a show of blowing dust off each one. "Here I go and pay my nephew union scale, and look how filthy he keeps this place." The last to come down was a mangy moosehead. For each holiday, Jake decorated the critter, now sporting Fourth of July stuff—Uncle Sam's tricolored hat, sunglasses, three skyrockets clenched between its teeth.

Juniper laughed at the getup. "I never knew you were so patriotic, Jake." Turning to me, she said, "Why did I let him talk me into this?"

"Don't worry," he said. "A little culture won't hurt these dudes. Isn't that right, Shotgun?" Without waiting for me to answer, he said, "Anyway, I own enough of this outfit to say what goes."

She handed him the first painting, wild horses on the reservation prairie. Two stallions were Appaloosas. I was amazed at how lifelike the animals appeared—almost like a photograph. Standing back, she measured the distance. "The right side needs to be lower." She crossed her arms as Jake made the adjustment. "That's fine, but I still don't know about hanging them in your store."