Betrayed by F. Scott Fitzgerald (24 page)

I baked for a while lying on the rock shelf, staring down. Time to angle, I thought. I am now going to angle. I drew the pole a foot upstream and saw the sinker drag up a little sand on the bottom, and then without seeing a thing, I felt the pole buckle in an arc which should have snapped it. The shadows were gone, which according to philosophy means “fish on!” The line ripped its razor rip around the pool once and then I did see a tail tap the surface and splash downstream. I stretched my neck over the edge watching the line move to forty-five degrees as the fish carried the hook down, until I felt myself slipping, both arms paddling air. Whoa! I grabbed the pole again and moved back by knee-power.

I jumped up then and walked the tense pole down the crevice, feeling all the while the strong, even pressure of the fish as he took line off the drag release. It was too big a fish to go very far in this stream. Like people in cities who eat themselves into their apartments, becoming too large to ever exit again, these fish had come upstream in their younger, leaner days, had eaten eighty billion mosquitoes, and now they lived leisurely lives of retired gentlefish grazing in the two or three pools large enough for them.

This particular monster dragged me down the rocky steps with a force that made me question his age. I clambered down, following the pole, like a man carrying a safe; the choices were not mine. When I reached the last rock and stepped again into the woods above the meadow, I felt the confusing slackness, and reeled in until the pressure took line again, this time upstream. Climbing up again was nasty acrobatics. I tried to keep the pole over the stream and the line away from the sharp rock wall. He toured me, as I knew he would, right back to the hole where he had bit the hook, but I still couldn’t see him. He continued upstream a ways as far as I can tell, because just as the line began to slant that way, I felt the electricity go off, and my line tailed up to me like a strand of hair.

It had sawed off on the rocks.

Examining it closely did not make me feel like an expert, nor did it make me feel any better. I looked back down at the water. The sun had moved and more of the ravine was in darkness, but I could see three shadows returned to their niches, like gems in a setting, fixed on the bottom.

“Wait here,” I said straight down to them.

To seal the promise I knelt and laid one of Nighthorse’s flies on the rock shelf; I would be back.

I walked up the rock sidewalk. At the first convenient spot, a place where the stream came out of another brief meadow, I collapsed on the bank and lowered my face to the water’s surface. I drew two long draughts of the cold water, then dunked my whole head and drank off the bottom. It was headache cold, and revived my competitive spirit. I would live.

Glancing again at the sun, that mad traveler, I noted that I had time to net three more before climbing the hill that separated Eldon’s endeavors from my own. I stood up, reconsidered, and knelt to drink again.

The water cycle, like all cycles, amazes me, and I was glad to my arteries that this water had evaporated from San Francisco Bay, sailed east, fallen as snow during the Viet Nam war, and now an eon of melting later, filtered through these woods right into my mouth. It helped.

I fished two more holes above the meadow, not fooling around, setting the hook hard and taking the fish five or ten seconds after the strike right out of the water and introducing them to air, bright ungillable air. They were the same size as the others I’d caught below, and I laid them in the creel. When I had the second one, I wet my hair again, and crossed the stream, and climbed the hill hoping to catch sight of Eldon’s red hat.

From the ridge I saw nothing. I climbed the next, sweating now in light that suddenly became slanted into afternoon. The third ridge revealed the Iron Fork. Upstream half a mile I found the unmistakable landmark of the three fallen trees that formed a substantial bridge. I couldn’t see Eldon, but when I tied my creel to a limb under the bridge so it would depend into the water, I saw his gill line. There were six fish on it; we’d tied. Knowing then that Eldon had to be watching me, I remounted the bridge, sat down and lit a cigarette.

“Come out of the woods whenever you find it convenient, you wonderful, wily, sneaky Indianlike veteran. My blood deep sixth sense tells me you’re lost in your own primitive metaphors.”

“You mean you want lunch, right?” Eldon called down from his platform hideaway in a tree. It took me a full minute to spot him.

“Trees,” I said.

“Right this way, bub.” He jumped down and led me to a shady grassy part of the bank above the bridge where a miniscule fire was about to go out. He stoked it and fried the two fish he’d been hiding, the two that put him ahead of me. When they began to fall apart on the flat tin he used as a pan, he handed me one on a pine slab, and I sliced two thick pieces of cheese.

“We’re going back over to the other fork after a while.”

“Why?”

“I found Sammy and Red’s brother, maybe their father, and I need a net man.”

“Just a minute.” He rose and went to the stream and returned with two dripping tin cans. He opened one and handed it to me. “Here, I brought you these.” I looked down at a cluster of apricots. He saw my face and said, “Aiding and abetting.”

“Thanks Eldon.” I sucked one out of the cold tin. The apricots were cool and sweet and met each of my several internal miseries directly.

“Is it working?” He waved his hands across the forest as he leaned back against his helmet.

“Yes. I believe it is. Lenore’s wedding shower seems two hundred and eight miles away.”

“It is.”

We lounged around on one elbow for awhile, smoking, talking about the time we tried to teach Ribbo about the woods. He had been unable to believe there was no electricity.

“Have you written about these forks for the
Guide?
”

“No no. You don’t write about the good streams, the rare ones; that’s suicide. A writer without a few secrets is out of gas. Besides, our readers prefer to fish from the back steps of their Winnebagos in little waters like Pelican Lake which I mention frequently. There are no hook-ups here, no snack bar, no propane distributor, and the fish are native. My readers prefer their fish hatched in the hatchery, properly, and flown in by Forest Service and dropped like little parachutists into the center of the lake. Any dolt with a year-old jar of fluorescent salmon eggs can snag them and fling them into the stainless-steel confines of his portable kitchen sink, which the fish in their confusion seem to prefer. I write for the modern out-doorsperson. People who climb this high to fish only read Twain, and Howells.” As he spoke Eldon scooped out a hole and buried the cans. I smothered the gray remnants of our fire.

“Let’s go fishing,” he said. “Where is this hole full of giant fish?”

“Over three hills.” I pointed. We gathered our gear and fish and started up the first incline.

The fly was where I had left it, but the ravine and pool were lost in shade now. Looking down we could see the ripple-less surface of the dark water. “God, quite the place for sailfish all right,” Eldon said. “There are fish down there that haven’t seen the light of day. Probably albinos.”

“Let’s bring one out, eh?” I said.

I lowered a worm, again, down, way down into the stream. Nothing. I jogged it a bit. Nothing. The sun was softer now, awash in the trees, ready to be eaten by Mount Gilbert.

“Bring him up and try this.” Eldon handed me a fly as I reeled in. While I changed gear, Eldon tied a yellow nylon cord to his net and lowered it in practice. I was suspicious of this long-distance, remote-control fishing, but the thought of netting Sammy’s brother or anything weighing eight pounds carried me onward. I lowered the fly to the surface. We couldn’t even see it. The net hovered five feet above the water. “It’s all by touch now.” We lit our cigarettes and we sat down, dangling our legs fishward.

It was the strangest fishing I’d ever done, and I sat on the strangest perch in time I’d ever known, and I looked off into the woods below us which were beginning to stir with the creaturings of late afternoon. The greens lapsed into blue as the trees descended to the horizon; faces were formed and changed expression in the millions and billions of boughs. I could make out Scott Fitzgerald’s profile, the famous one, the perfect one, from the backs of his books. It glimmered in the distance as he was turning his face toward us, I shifted to Eldon, who was studying the pond below.

“You say you saw fish in this chasm?” Eldon asked.

“Their shadows,” I said.

He looked at me in the dusky light and stood up. “Let’s take their shadows back to camp and fry a few for dinner.”

While he was speaking I felt the line seize. It hopped and went taut, running upstream. I didn’t say anything. Eldon was picking up his gear. He turned to face me. “Let’s go.”

Then he saw the pole, bent in a hoop, and I said: “Oh, oh.”

“Holy shit!” he yelled. He threw his stuff down on the rocks and whipped the net line free and lowered it again.

“Ease the drag. Give him line.”

“That’s how he sawed it off this morning.” I set the drag. “We’re going to hoist him into the net
now
.” We got to our feet. I held him to the pool hoping the six-pound test line would not snap. Eldon was trying to steer the net over the splashing, but it was like trying to grab a dime out of a grate with chewing gum on a string; there wasn’t a whole lot of purchase. For twenty minutes, we walked around as he swam the bottom of the pool. It was impossible to lift him while he was so strong. Eldon kept the net a foot off the water, ready.

“He’s waiting for the sun to go down, so we misjudge and step over to our deaths.”

“It’s worth it.”

The sun was behind Gilbert now, and we entered the extended high mountain twilight. Behind us, a crescent of the distant horizon was still golden in the sun, but crumbling like dry sand.

Eldon said, “Perhaps this fish has bears as allies who will venture out to bite us in the dark.”

“Perhaps, you should hold the net at ready,” I said.

“It has been ready for an hour. Let me know when you’re through sporting, and I’ll go to work.”

The circles the fish swam were less frantic now, but just as steady. It was getting dark.

Eldon asked me: “Do you know what ‘trout’ means?”

“Oh yes. From the Greek: ‘trouter’ or ‘truth.’” I pulled my rod into the bow again, no use. “Right?”

“To gnaw. It means ‘to gnaw.’”

Then the line was dead. I took up line. We couldn’t see but I suspected he was swimming the surface; the last cycle. “Put the net in the water.”

“Where is the water?” Eldon said as he looked into the black hole. The pole bent again and line ticked off the drag.

“You’re in; you’re in! He’s scared.”

“We can’t net him; I can’t see anything.”

“Faith, friend.” I took line. He was tired. “Put your line parallel to mine.” He held the net adjacent to my line.

“Okay, I felt him bump the net.”

“I’ll pull him out and you sweep him up … now!” Surprisingly, I lifted until the weight multiplied, became real in air, and I could feel the fish winging his tail in the air. The pole was insane with bending. Grabbing the line in my hands, I discarded the pole and began hoisting him up. Eldon was swinging the net back and forth randomly, chuckling at the measure of sensibility in such efforts. Finally he gave up and drew the net up quickly, holding it then in his hand. My line was like wire, I could feel it breaking every next second.

Eldon scooped the fish and nearly went over. I grabbed his arm with one hand, my other frozen on the fishline. The trout stood before us in the dark, arched into the sky like a god, his tail in the net.

“I don’t believe this.” Eldon said.

The fish moved, wriggled in unified strength. It was like holding the heart of a giant; its squirmings were seismic, pulsing above us. Eldon lost his grip and I went down onto rock. My hands lost the gills so I hugged it, trying to hold it with my cloth shirt. We rolled cheek to cheek like lovers, its tail slapping and punching my stomach convincingly.

“Hold him! I don’t believe this!” Eldon scrambled. I got to my knees and looked at the fish. “He’s a hundred years old!”

We knelt over him and I killed the fish. He had clearly been born in a previous century. Back at camp, he weighed out at eleven pounds.

Eldon mixed and warmed some powdered milk, and heated some cream of mushroom soup to make trout chowder, while I fried fillets of the fish. He laid the others in the ice. Sipping and scooping the soup into my mouth, breathing steam into the chilling air, sitting on my sleeping bag, tired to the corners of my lungs, dirty and warm as the fire shrank into trembling coals and my pupils widened in the dark, I was glad again to be associated with such a temporal, febrile object as my body.

We smoked Eldon’s last two Lucky Strikes.

I could see Scott Fitzgerald lounging just out of the circle of firelight, his cigarette held glibly in two fingers. He was forty-four. His knit tie fell outside his worn coat. He smiled without opening his mouth. I nodded. I want to be innocent again, Scott. I want to be eleven years old in a rowboat behind the best man on campus, listening to him propose to a girl more beautiful than any woman in the world, my imagination gone on reflections in the water, peopled by giants and princesses, not a single compromise in the atmosphere.