B000FC0U8A EBOK (23 page)

Mulligan plunges through a last thicket. On the bank, beside the Rapid River pouring along, sleek and glazed and black, he feels an old feeling, the irresistible tug of moving water and his blood trundling with it and a kind of joy splits his lips. He stands on the bank, his breath tossing clouds, and by penlight reads the letter again, fingers its edges, slides it back inside the folded newspaper. The clouds have piled up in the west, and soon the last stars are
gone. The blotted moon offers a film of light. He ties a Hairwing to his tippet, wades into the river and fishes.

Before long he sees the penlights of other fishers, upstream, over his right shoulder, but it is not so hard to pretend he is alone. With numb fingers he keeps his line tailored so that his fly does not skate or slide but simply drifts and he runs his fly where few fishermen can.

Daybreak comes silently and simply with no more than a thin hem of pink and he is a little disappointed in it, because there is none of the glory of an August sunrise and soon the light around him is gray and day is begun. The tea-colored river purls around his waders, thick and clingy, the way river water gets when it is cold. Upstream the other fishers work their stretches of river, roll-casting to the opposite bank, a bearded man with a cigarette on his lip and another farther up.

But there is plenty of water, Mulligan thinks, and plenty of fish. He works carefully downstream, takes his time, casts to each pool, runs his fly around every boulder, searches under branches and in eddies across the river. He knows where every golden and weeded stone is placed and how the river threads over it.

But he doesn’t. There are places he doesn’t know, new places, innumerable tiny changes: a clot of submerged timber, a place where the river has undercut the bank and caved it. Clumps of leaves in several spots where he thought the water ran faster. He has not been here in weeks and it hurts him to know the river has poured on without him.

Around eleven the clouds thin slightly, and the sun tracking in its blue and windy space angles in weakly and lights the hills and muddy clear-cut to the east. The wind heaves; the birches rattle. Mulligan steps numb-legged out of the river and kicks each foot to warm it. He opens his knapsack and pours himself some of Weatherbee’s coffee. He chews a gingersnap awhile, but it is dry and the coffee is much better. He unfolds his newspaper and sits against the lichened trunk of a birch to read, but instead sits and
feels the coffee warm his stomach and watches yellow leaves shuttle downriver and makes wagers with himself about which leaves will pass him first and which will be trapped in eddy or snag. It brings him pleasure when the river funnels a leaf well and quickly, delivering it downstream without complication. Everything runs into the river, he thinks. Not just the leaves, but beetle corpses and heron bones and expired worms. Everything that starts on the hills eventually slides into the river. And the river spills it into the sea. Only the fish do it backward and he loves them for it.

He shivers a bit. The air is thin, cold, hard to breathe. It smells like beaten tin, like snow. It is early for snow and it makes him uneasy. He sits against the tree and crosses his wrists in his lap. A swallowtail, born too late, alights frantically on a thistle and pauses, flexing its wings. Mulligan blows gently and it flies, wandering dangerously low over the river, and is gone.

There are the tiny splashes and sucks of the river and he drifts into a shallow kind of sleep. The river threads over the stones and the wind breathes through the moss-mantled branches and the clouds skate over the hills in heaps. In his sleep he does not dream but on the underside of his eyelids he sees his wife, fisting bread dough and planting it in a buttered bowl. His wife bends, and he sees her wide back, her rotten ankles, her floured wrists. She covers the dough with a towel so it can plump.

When Mulligan looks up two people are standing over him.

Hey, they say. How is it, Mully?

Nothing yet. I can see them. Mostly undercuts. They aren’t eating a whole lot. Maybe it’s too cold.

The others nod. One is the bearded man with the cigarette. He looks into the river, squints, scratches his cheek. The other is a woman, thick and with a hard look to her. She is the niece of Mulligan’s wife. A woman who fishes, hunts and gambles.

No maybes about it, she says. Her voice is loud and it makes Mulligan wince, a voice like that echoing along the river. She
squats beside him, pries open one of his Ziplocs and tears herself a sinewy strip of jerky. My damn feet are froze.

The bearded man nods. Frost this morning, he adds. Snow tonight.

The niece chews jerky, runs her big-pupiled eyes over his things.

Did you see the swallowtail? Mulligan asks.

Swallowtail?

The butterfly. I saw a swallowtail.

The bearded man gives the niece a look.

How’s my aunt? the niece barks. There is jerky in her teeth.

Mulligan wants to be rid of them. Well, he says. Fine.

The niece grabs the bag of gingersnaps. And you, Mully? How’s retirement?

Fine. Fine and good.

I thought I’d see you here every day. You fishing somewhere else? Or my aunt putting you to work?

I don’t know.

You’re a softie, Mully, she says. Always have been.

You can have the cookies. If you want.

Her eyes fix him. The bearded one lights a cigarette. You don’t want them? she asks. Her hand roots in the bag.

Mulligan shakes his head, looks down at his vest, runs a zipper on a pouch up and down. He wishes hard that they would leave him. The niece takes up the newspaper, folds a page back and says, Just need to see about the races. Mulligan is cold. They didn’t believe him about the butterfly but he saw it.

Take that too, he says.

I just need to look for one second.

Take it. I’m not gonna read it. Mulligan wishes they would leave. It was nice sitting against the birch trunk and he does not like the smell of cigarettes or the loudness of the niece’s voice.

We’ll probably try below Middle Dam, the bearded man says. Mulligan nods, will not meet their eyes. The niece stands, rubs her
palms along the thighs of her waders, then folds the newspaper into a rough square and wedges it under her arm.

Through half-chewed gingersnaps she spits, We’ll holler if we get something.

Okay.

Something worth hollering about.

All right.

The bearded fisherman exhales smoke and gives a wave as they leave, ducking along the trail downstream, their boots shaking the moss knitted over the undercut roots of trees. Riddance, Mulligan faintly mumbles. He sits against the tree and sips his coffee, which has gone cold. He feels a bit unsteady. He thinks he can maybe feel the entire planet making its slow turn, and the roots of trees scrabbling around bedrock, and the clouds curling over the hills. Finally he takes his rod and wades back in.

It is afternoon, three or four, and he has been casting awhile, alone except for a pair of ravens who sweep and shout over the trees, when he gets his first fish. It is a sluggish strike, on a beaded nymph Mulligan had run through the same gravel pool ten times or more. The fish fights for its life, makes one jump and then Mulligan nets it, wets his hand and holds it. A red-flecked salmon, male, with a mean blunted head, black-eyed. The lower jaw beginning to develop its breeding hook. Its body jackknifes in his hand.

Mulligan holds it in the river, strokes its flanks and releases it. The fish sinks, turns over, then bursts away. Mulligan checks his knot and feels the energy run out of him, that tightness that always comes when he has a fish. It is not until he begins to cast again that he remembers, with a jolt, the letter tucked into the newspaper that he no longer has.

He splashes onto the rocks and the river pours off his waders and with trembling hands he snatches his knapsack and begins to stumble-run along the tangled riverbank. The blood is all out of his face. His feet are numb and they betray him, lifting too slowly over roots, thudding into fallen and rotten logs. It is like running
with weights lashed to his ankles. He scrambles into the ravine and falls; his fists disappear in black mud. He struggles to his feet but wells of peat clutch his boots. Brambles grab for his waders. Seed thistles explode across his shins. He runs up the trail and the deep wood grasps at him, turns on him, fattens his terror, the tiny and once-lovely kingdoms now black and terrible, thin needles slipped through his ribs.

The path unspools much too slowly. His fly rod snags on brambles, the fly line is suddenly, immediately, miserably tangled, how do such things happen, how do such horrific tangles suddenly emerge from thin straight lines? He stops and blood howls in his ears. He pulls at his reel, but the line only cinches down more tightly and it seems the line is wrapped around an entire snarl of blackberry; plump thorns like the teeth of sharks hold it fast.

His shoulders slump. He squints ahead into the inscrutable thicket. Then he sits in the cold mud of the narrow fishermen’s trail and works at the line, easing it free of barbs one by one. The heaving of his rib cage slows. The line begins to come free, loop by loop. All around him orange and yellow leaves spiral to earth.

When the line is untangled he spools it back onto his reel. He looks up through the branches at the clouded sky a long time. There is the sounding of the river, behind him, clucking and murmuring, voicing old notes. The front of his throat is white and stretched; his whiskers are silver.

Finally he wheels and plods back to the river. The first snowflakes sink from the sky and aim for the bronze coils of the Rapid River.

It is well after dark and snow sifts through the thickets and Mulligan stands half frozen in the river and fishes in the feathered darkness. His hands and feet are numb; his back stings from ceaseless casting. Delicate flakes expire on the sliding water. He fishes on.

It is near midnight and the boughs sag from the weight of snow, and flakes fall still when a fish takes his fly and charges downstream, hauling from the reel in singing bursts and making it very clear who is in charge. Soon it runs the line to the backing. The blood in Mulligan’s chest waxes, heats. His reel screams. The fish leaps once, twice, five times, a dim bullet twisting a yard above the river, beautiful, terrible, and then it is around a shallow bend and Mulligan can only hear it thrashing, panicking, yanking out the backing by the yard, its splashing mingled with the splashing of the river and the wind in the trees and the luminous descent of snow. The tide of blood in Mulligan’s chest mounts and mounts until it seems he must burst.

The fish runs all the backing from the reel. Mulligan fumbles for the line with his bloodless fingers; the fish races on. The backing comes free, it was not tied on—who would think a fish could run out sixty yards of backing?—and the line slips through the guides on Mulligan’s rod and he lunges for it and catches it between his palms, the line free of the rod altogether and the fish swimming far downriver pulls at the line between Mulligan’s hands and he can feel the fish yard down against its tether, rise up and leap and smack the water, and the line slips through his hands and the fish breaks free and Mulligan is left, hands outstretched, a penitent, an imploring gesture.

The fly line floats slack upon the water. He shivers. His fly rod and emptied reel rest nose down in the gravel. The mute indifference of the woods is all around him. There is only the ceaseless suck of flowing water where the river glides endlessly through the forest and the snow, makes its faintest sliding whispers.

Mkondo

[
mkondo,
noun. Current, flow, rush, passage, run, e.g., of water in a river or poured on the ground; of air through a door or window, i.e., a draft; of the wake of a ship, a track, the run of an animal.]

In October of 1983,
an American named Ward Beach was sent to Tanzania by the Ohio Museum of Natural History to obtain the fossil of a prehistoric bird. Teams of European paleontologists had found something like the Chinese caudipteryx—a small, feathered reptile—in the limestone hills west of Tanga and the museum was eager to get one for itself. Ward was not a paleontologist (halfway to his doctorate he had given up) but he was a competent fossil hunter and an ambitious man. He did not like the work itself—backbreaking hours with a chisel and sifting pan, blind alleys, dead ends, disappointments—but he liked the idea behind the work. To discover fossils, he told himself, was to reclaim answers to important questions.

He was driving the nameless ridge he’d driven to the dig site
every day for two months when he came upon a woman running in the road. She wore sandals and a khanga tied loosely above her knees and her hair bounced against her back in a thick braid. The road narrowed and kinked as it climbed under a blazing sun, with a flat density of growth on both sides. He made to pass her but she darted in front of his truck. He braked, skidded, went up on two wheels and nearly slid over the edge. She did not look back.

Ward leaned over the wheel. Had that really happened? Had that woman dashed out in front of his truck? Up ahead she was sprinting now, her sandals raising dust. He followed. She ran as if chasing something, like a predator, running expertly and without wasted motion. He had never seen anything like her; she did not glance back, not once. He eased the truck closer until her heels were just missing the bumper. Above the engine noise he could hear her breath storming in and out. They went like this for ten minutes: Ward over the wheel, hardly breathing, possessed with something—anger, curiosity, maybe, already, desire; and the woman charging uphill, braid bouncing, her legs churning like pistons beneath her. She did not slow. When they reached the road’s summit, a puddled hilltop steaming in the sun, she spun and leapt onto the hood of the truck. He braked; the truck slid heavily in the mud. She turned onto her back, hooked her hands around the sides of the windshield and gasped for air.