Everything (3 page)

Gorilla, Edgar said from the oarsman’s seat.

No way, said RL.

African lowland gorilla.

RL paused to cast, a big foam ant with a San Juan worm on a dropper. This was the laziest and most degenerate kind of fishing there was, sitting in a chair on a boat with a cold beer in his hand, casting big junk at the bank and letting the river carry them along. All he was lacking was a cigar and he had plans for one.

RL said, You ever see a grizzly bear up close?

Up in Glacier, sure.

From a mile away, RL said. With a ranger standing next to you with a high-powered rifle in his hand.

A little closer than that.

I was fishing the White River one time, RL said, right back in the middle of the Bob. I was standing in the river, wet wading, and I
just got that weird eyes-in-the-back-of-my-head feeling, you know, like I could feel something was watching me.

A grizzly bear.

Right on the bank, said RL. Big as a boxcar.

What did you do?

He was gone before I could even shit my pants, RL said. Just turned and ran. If I ever thought about trying to outrun one of those things, I don’t think so anymore.

Fast.

Like a racehorse fast. I’m serious—he was gone before I even started to get scared, but once I did, I stayed scared. I mean, I didn’t stop till I got back to my car. I don’t know why he ran like that, either. It wasn’t like he was scared of me.

Probably got a whiff of you.

It’s true, RL said. A couple of nights of sleeping on the ground and my man-smell gets rolling pretty good.

He was talking to Edgar but his eyes were on the fly as ever, floating just off the bank. He hadn’t seen a riser yet. That didn’t matter so much with a fat attractor like the foam ant. In his peripheral vision he watched for cover, a stump or log or overhanging bush, that might conceal a fat trout. He was healthy and vigorous and doing what he liked to do, but when he thought about that bear,
something inside him went weak and liquid still. A power radiated from the bear like light or heat. It didn’t even matter, the claws and teeth and speed and size. The real power was something else, invisible.

The ant disappeared and RL set the hook immediately, feeling the tug of a live thing on the other end, the flash of silver turning brown in the green water. A fifteen incher, maybe sixteen, had taken the worm. A rainbow. RL worked it quickly toward the boat, horsing it in. The water was warm, this time of year, and the fish couldn’t fight like they did in October. He brought it to the gunwale and wet his hand and lifted it briefly, just a moment to get the fly out. Then the fish was gone, back to its watery depths, its silvery light. Thank you, RL thought, a small automatic gesture like a baseball player crossing himself before an at-bat. He didn’t know who he was thanking except he knew that he himself had not made this river. There was such a thing as grace. RL felt it.

Try something yellow, Edgar said.

Why?

I don’t know, it was working the other day. Something big and hairy and yellow.

Madame X.

Sure.

RL tied the big ugly bug on obediently. RL himself knew the sequence of hatches on this river as well as anybody and could tie a
decent imitation, but there were also times when nothing much was going on and that was where Edgar had him beat. His hunches were golden.

The thing about a gorilla, Edgar said, a gorilla is
smart
.

So what? Smart doesn’t count for much when the freight train hits you.

They use tools.

Smart doesn’t matter, RL said. Instinct is what counts. I’m smart as hell when I’m sitting in the store or reading a book, but when I’m out here, I’m not as smart as a fucking fish most of the time. Fish’s brain is just a wide spot in its spinal column, but you put it in the environment, it knows everything it needs to know.

Put that grizzly bear in Africa, Edgar said.

It would still kick that monkey’s ass.

Just then the water swirled around the yellow fly, and then he set the hook and felt the weight of it and then the reel started spinning out that high beautiful note he loved.

That’s a nice fish, said Edgar.

RL didn’t say anything, just palmed the rim of the spool to slow him down a little. Even on 3X he wasn’t going to horse this one in. A big fish, maybe a very big fish. At first he thought it was a brown, but then—thirty feet away—it leaped from the water and spun in
the air, a big beautiful rainbow shining bright in the afternoon sun. RL kept the rod tip up, to keep pressure on him, as he leaped and leaped again. RL started singing his little happy song to himself under his breath, the little music that he heard when he had a big fish on the line, maybe a very big fish, and the reel was holding and then he was gaining a few inches at a time. Happy little song, an inch at a time, and then the wild run when the thing took flight, the fly line knifing through the water and then the slow, slow retrieve and then …

RL stared at the slack fly line. The thing was gone.

The music died down right away. RL reeled in until he saw the place where the knot had parted, the tiny pitiful corkscrew of tippet, right where the fly had been tied on. This was his fault.

Dumbass, RL said.

Edgar didn’t say a word, just pulled the anchor rope to set them moving again and took up the oars. Nothing for him to say except to agree with the dumbass comment, which wouldn’t do. RL would fire his ass. He would hire him back the next day but still. RL could feel the memory of the thing in the muscles of his forearm, the weight and spunk. The boat was in the current now, drifting down past fishy banks, shady shallows and undercut root balls. He cut the twisted tippet off and tied a new fly on cleanly, checking his work this time, tugging on the fly, looking to make sure the knot was tidy and sure on the eye of the hook. He dressed the fly with Gink and flung it into the water again although he didn’t want to. He didn’t want to catch a different fish. He wanted to catch the one he had just lost, the big one.

* * *

After a hundred yards of river had passed, Edgar said, The important thing is just getting out.

RL decided to laugh at this rather than kill him.

Fresh air, he said. It’s good for you.

RL lit his cigar then and they floated on, Edgar sometimes pulling on the oars to keep them lined up with the bank but mostly letting the current carry them downriver. A kingfisher followed them for a while, chattering loudly, and then RL spotted a beaver. He opened a cold beer. Any fish that came to him would be a sad little fish, he thought, and no match for the one that took his fly. But when he caught one and then another, he thought they were cheerful little fighters and the sight of them made him happy.

Then they came to an irrigation dam that stretched the full width of the river. Nobody knew for certain, but the rumor was that it fed the grass at Huey Lewis’s place, either that or the golf course at the Stock Farm, a walled-in development with a Western theme and million-dollar lots. The dam itself was rocks and boulders piled into a wall, and what water was left, after the golfers took theirs, spilled over the top. The drop was four or five feet. Edgar stood up at the oars, trying to get a look at the curl of water, trying to judge the depth of the pool below.

You think we can make it? he asked RL.

Beats me.

You see a better way around it?

* * *

Get out and walk, RL said. Unload the boat and drag it across.

That doesn’t sound like much fun.

Buckle up, then, RL said. I’ll run a strap around the dry bag and the cooler. You drown my cigar you’re going to pay for it.

I’ll take my chances, Edgar said, and sat down to the oars again. RL tied everything down and then resumed his throne in the front of the boat. A nice excitable quiet before the dam. The air was warm and thick with smoke, a campfire smell. A blue heron watched them from the shallows of an inside bend. The pool above the dam was slow and still and they drifted calmly toward the lip of the drop. Then they were in it.

The front of the boat with RL in it launched off horizontally into the air at first, a strange dizzy sensation as the water dropped away and the rubber raft sagged beneath his feet. Then the central part of the boat with Edgar and the rowing frame went over the lip and the whole boat tipped forward at once, launching RL almost out of his seat and dropping fast. He managed to hold on to his fly rod as the ass end of the boat came round and over. They were going to make it over. They were going to make it until the ass end of the boat spun into the shallow edge and into a sharp rock, the rubber wedged between the rowing frame and the rock, and then a tearing sound and that quarter of the boat deflated at once, pitching the whole apparatus, baby and all, headfirst into the water.

It was deeper than RL thought and he had to dog-paddle out, half sideways, clutching his fly rod still. First things first. A moment of panic when he couldn’t find bottom and he lost one of his sandals. Not here, he thought, not now, not me.

* * *

Then found himself wet and dripping on a gravel bank. He had no clear idea of how he had gotten there, but his waterlogged cigar was still pressed between his teeth and his fly rod was still in his grip. He was starting to laugh when he realized that he didn’t see Edgar anywhere. The raft was still hung up on the rocks with water pouring through it and the tethered cooler flopping in the current. Behind him on either bank he didn’t see a sign except Edgar’s hat floating downstream. He looked again at the raft and saw a hand.

Edgar’s hand was caught in the strap between the raft and cooler, back in deep water. When RL looked closer he could see Edgar’s head through the curtain of water coming over the dam. He surfaced and tried to catch his breath, but the water pushed him back under. He fumbled with his free hand, trying to get loose. It was backward. The cooler was stuck between rocks, and it was the press of water against the raft that was holding him tight.

Without further thinking RL kicked his one sandal off and swam toward the boat. With the current against him it was slow going. He didn’t have time. A white buzz like anger went off in his head. Fuck this river. Edgar had a young wife and a daughter and RL pictured them in his mind. He swam till he got there, somehow, shaking with the effort, his arms soft and sore. Then he was on the rocks and he didn’t know what to do. He tried to pull the raft in, to take the grip off, but the press of water against it was more than his strength. Edgar was coming up and going under, coming up and going under. Then RL remembered.

He remembered the knife in his kit bag, which was where? Somewhere with the boat—he remembered strapping it to the rowing
frame. RL ran his hand along the frame, under it and behind, blind, half underwater until his hand found the strap and drew it in and
there
was the bag and
there
the side pocket and
there
in the pocket was the knife, wicked sharp. He flicked it open one-handed and cut the strap and the whole assembly—raft, bag, Edgar and RL—drifted off the curl of the water. Sill hanging on to the raft frame, he saw that Edgar was free and half swimming on his own and so decided to bring the raft to shore if he could. RL drifted down until he felt gravel under his bare feet and then dragged the broken raft up onto the bank, the one quarter all deflated and flapping. He got it up into the weeds and looked upstream and saw Edgar safe on the bank, standing, holding his one arm with the other. A start of wind rustled through the cottonwoods, a sound of ease, and something triumphant started up in RL’s chest. He had beaten it. RL started to laugh, picking his way barefoot through the rocks.

I think I broke my arm, Edgar said.

RL quit laughing when he saw the pale light of his face, blood empty.

How’d you do that?

I don’t really know, Edgar said. It’s kind of a blur. I’m going to sit down for a minute.

Does it hurt much?

Yes, it does.

* * *

Can you move it?

But this was more than Edgar could answer. He sat on the gravel and waved RL away, sat a little too hard, dizzy. A hot dry wind blew through the canyon then. Leaves rattled in the forest fire smoke.

Women were starving to death
in the streets and their bodies left to freeze on the sidewalk. They were eating the rats, their pets, the animals from the zoo; they were eating each other. The human butchery.

Layla put her book aside and sipped her lemonade. Something was wrong with one of them, either her or Daniel. He came back from Russia all lit up, everything about Russia, about the food and the art, the women and the suffering. Over e-mail and long phone calls—he had only made plans as far as Seattle, would not commit to a trip to Montana—he told her what to read and which movies to watch. So far she had made it through
Anna Karenina, Notes from Underground
and
Solaris
. One of them was crazy, her or Daniel. This book she was reading now, he insisted, all about the siege of Leningrad and it was half military history and half pure suffering.
She could not understand his enthusiasm. Yes, it happened. No, it was not that long ago. But why? When she thought of him, it was lying in her bed in morning sunlight, legs in a furry angle, the glossy brown of his long hair. Not enough for Daniel, apparently. And he would not say definitely whether he was coming to see her, and it was only a day’s drive away ….

It was near sunset. College would be starting in three weeks. She would see him then and everything would be settled. At least she would know. That little spark of fear at the thought of knowing. That taste of pennies.

Her cell phone rang and it was RL. He needed her to pick them up by the side of 93. There had been an accident. No, everybody was OK, or pretty much OK. The turnout just by Poker Joe.

But when she saw them, Layla knew that things were not OK. She recognized Edgar from the shop but she had never seen him so ghostly. The two of them like Mutt and Jeff by the side of the road, Edgar all tall and narrow and sharp-nosed—a bony man but elegant, assembled from wire hangers—and RL next to him in his solid flesh. My dad, she thought. The solid father. She still hated the beard and wondered if she might talk him out of it before she went back to college. But even solid RL looked confused, too many second thoughts in the way he moved, now this and now that. A boat’s worth of crap by the sides of the road, cooler, dry bags, oars.