Trout Fishing in America (10 page)

At the seventeenth campground, a man had just died of a heart attack and the ambulance attendants were taking down his tent. They lowered the center pole and then pulled up the corner stakes. They folded the tent neatly and put it in the back of the ambulance, right beside the man's body.

They drove off down the road, leaving behind them in the air, a cloud of brilliant white dust. The dust looked like the light from a Coleman lantern.

Mr. Norris pitched his tent right there and set up all his equipment and soon had it all going at once. After he finished eating a dehydrated beef Stroganoff dinner, he turned off all his equipment with the master air switch and went to sleep, for it was now dark.

It was about midnight when they brought the body and placed it beside the tent, less than a foot away from where Mr. Norris was sleeping in his Arctic sleeping bag.

He was awakened when they brought the body. They weren't exactly the quietest body bringers in the world. Mr. Norris could see the bulge of the body against the side of the tent. The only thing that separated him from the dead body was a thin layer of 6 oz. water resistant and mildew resistant DRY FINISH green AMERIFLEX poplin.

Mr. Norris un-zipped his sleeping bag and went outside with a gigantic hound-like flashlight. He saw the body bringers walking down the path toward the creek.

“Hey, you guys!” Mr. Norris shouted. “Come back here. You forgot something.”

“What do you mean?” one of them said. They both looked very sheepish, caught in the teeth of the flashlight.

“You know what I mean,” Mr. Norris said. “Right now!”

The body bringers shrugged their shoulders, looked at each other and then reluctantly went back, dragging their feet like children all the way. They picked up the body. It was heavy and one of them had trouble getting hold of the feet.

That one said, kind of hopelessly to Mr. Norris, “You won't change your mind?”

“Goodnight and good-bye,” Mr. Norris said.

They went off down the path toward the creek, carrying the body between them. Mr. Norris turned his flashlight off and he could hear them, stumbling over the rocks along the bank of the creek. He could hear them swearing at each other. He heard one of them say, “Hold your end up.” Then he couldn't hear anything.

About ten minutes later he saw all sorts of lights go on at another campsite down along the creek. He heard a distant voice shouting, “The answer is no! You already woke up the kids. They have to have their rest. We're going on a four-mile hike tomorrow up to Fish Konk Lake. Try someplace else.”

 

Dear Trout Fishing in America:

I met your friend Fritz in Washington Square. He told me to tell you that his case went to a jury and that he was acquitted by the jury.

He said that it was important for me to say that his case went to a jury and that he was acquitted by the jury, so I've said it again.

He looked in good shape. He was sitting in the sun. There's an old San Francisco saying that goes: “It's better to rest in Washington Square than in the California Adult Authority.”

How are things in New York?

Yours,
“An Ardent Admirer”

 

Dear Ardent Admirer:

It's good to hear that Fritz isn't in jail. He was very worried about it. The last time I was in San Francisco, he told me he thought the odds were 10–1 in favor of him going away. I told him to get a good lawyer. It appears that he followed my advice and also was very lucky. That's always a good combination.

You asked about New York and New York is very hot.

I'm visiting some friends, a young burglar and his wife. He's unemployed and his wife is working as a cocktail waitress. He's been looking for work but I fear the worst.

It was so hot last night that I slept with a wet sheet wrapped around myself, trying to keep cool. I felt like a mental patient.

I woke up in the middle of the night and the room was filled with steam rising off the sheet, and there was jungle stuff,
abandoned equipment and tropical flowers, on the floor and on the furniture.

I took the sheet into the bathroom and plopped it into the tub and turned the cold water on it. Their dog came in and started barking at me.

The dog barked so loud that the bathroom was soon filled with dead people. One of them wanted to use my wet sheet for a shroud. I said no, and we got into a big argument over it and woke up the Puerto Ricans in the next apartment, and they began pounding on the walls.

The dead people all left in a huff. “We know when we're not wanted,” one of them said.

“You're damn tootin',” I said.

I've had enough.

I'm going to get out of New York. Tomorrow I'm leaving for Alaska. I'm going to find an ice-cold creek near the Arctic where that strange beautiful moss grows and spend a week with the grayling. My address will be, Trout Fishing in America, c/o General Delivery, Fairbanks, Alaska.

 

Your friend,

 

We left Little Redfish for Lake Josephus, traveling along the good names—from Stanley to Capehorn to Seafoam to the Rapid River, up Float Creek, past the Greyhound Mine and then to Lake Josephus, and a few days after that up the trail to Hell-diver Lake with the baby on my shoulders and a good limit of trout waiting in Hell-diver.

Knowing the trout would wait there like airplane tickets for us to come, we stopped at Mushroom Springs and had a drink of cold shadowy water and some photographs taken of the baby and me sitting together on a log.

I hope someday we'll have enough money to get those pictures developed. Sometimes I get curious about them, wondering if they will turn out all right. They are in suspension now like seeds in a package. I'll be older when they are developed and easier to please. Look there's the baby! Look there's Mushroom Springs! Look there's me!

I caught the limit of trout within an hour of reaching Hell-diver, and my woman, in all the excitement of good fishing, let the baby fall asleep directly in the sun and when the baby woke up, she puked and I carried her back down the trail.

My woman trailed silently behind, carrying the rods and the fish. The baby puked a couple more times, thimblefuls of gentle lavender vomit, but still it got on my clothes, and her face was hot and flushed.

We stopped at Mushroom Springs. I gave her a small drink of water, not too much, and rinsed the vomit taste out of her mouth. Then I wiped the puke off my clothes and for some strange reason suddenly if was a perfect time, there at Mushroom Springs, to wonder whatever happened to the Zoot suit.

Along with World War H and the Andrews Sisters, the Zoot suit had been very popular in the early 40s. I guess
they were all just passing fads.

A sick baby on the trail down from Hell-diver, July 1961, is probably a more important question. It cannot be left to go on forever, a sick baby to take her place in the galaxy, among the comets, bound to pass close to the earth every 173 years.

She stopped puking after Mushroom Springs, and I carried her back down along the path in and out of the shadows and across other nameless springs, and by the time we got down to Lake Josephus, she was all right.

She was soon running around with a big cutthroat trout in her hands, carrying it like a harp on her way to a concert—ten minutes late with no bus in sight and no taxi either.

Calle de Eternidad:
We walked up from Gelatao, birthplace of Benito Juarez. Instead of taking the road we followed a path up along the creek. Some boys from the school in Gelatao told us that up along the creek was the shortcut.

The creek was clear but a little milky, and as I remember the path was steep in places. We met people coming down the path because it was really the shortcut. They were all Indians carrying something.

Finally the path went away from the creek and we climbed a hill and arrived at the cemetery. It was a very old cemetery and kind of run down with weeds and death growing there like partners in a dance.

There was a cobblestone street leading up from the cemetery to the town of Ixtlan, pronounced East-LON, on top of another hill. There were no houses along the street until you reached the town.

In the hair of the world, the street was very steep as you went up into Ixtlan. There was a street sign that pointed back down toward the cemetery, following every cobblestone with loving care all the way.

We were still out of breath from the climb. The sign said Calle de Eternidad. Pointing.

I was not always a world traveler, visiting exotic places in Southern Mexico. Once I was just a kid working for an old woman in the Pacific Northwest. She was in her nineties and I worked for her on Saturdays and after school and during the summer.

Sometimes she would make me lunch, little egg sandwiches with the crusts cut off as if by a surgeon, and she'd give me slices of banana dunked in mayonnaise.

The old woman lived by herself in a house that was like a
twin sister to her. The house was four stories high and had at least thirty rooms and the old lady was five feet high and weighed about eighty-two pounds.

She had a big radio from the 1920s in the living room and it was the only thing in the house that looked remotely as if it had come from this century, and then there was still a doubt in my mind.

A lot of cars, airplanes and vacuum cleaners and refrigerators and things that come from the 1920s look as if they had come from the 1890s. It's the beauty of our speed that has done it to them, causing them to age prematurely into the clothes and thoughts of people from another century.

The old woman had an old dog, but he hardly counted any more. He was so old that he looked like a stuffed dog. Once I took him for a walk down to the store. It was just like taking a stuffed dog for a walk. I tied him up to a stuffed fire hydrant and he pissed on it, but it was only stuffed piss.

I went into the store and bought some stuffing for the old lady. Maybe a pound of coffee or a quart of mayonnaise.

I did things for her like chop the Canadian thistles. During the 1920s (or was it the 1890s) she was motoring in California, and her husband stopped the car at a filling station and told the attendant to fill it up.

“How about some wild flower seeds?” the attendant said.

“No,” her husband said. “Gasoline.”

“I know that, sir,” the attendant said. “But we're giving away wild flower seeds with the gasoline today.”

“All right,” her husband said. “Give us some wild flower seeds, then. But be sure and fill the car up with gasoline. Gasoline's what I really want.”

“They'll brighten up your garden, sir.”

“The gasoline?”

“No, sir, the flowers.”

They returned to the Northwest, planted the seeds and they were Canadian thistles. Every year I chopped them down and they always grew back. I poured chemicals on them and they always grew back.

Curses were music to their roots. A blow on the back of the neck was like a harpsichord to them. Those Canadian thistles were there for keeps. Thank you, California, for your beautiful wild flowers. I chopped them down every year.

I did other things for her like mow the lawn with a grim
old lawnmower. When I first went to work for her, she told me to be careful with that lawnmower. Some itinerant had stopped at her place a few weeks before, asked for some work so he could rent a hotel room and get something to eat, and she'd said, “You can mow the lawn.”

“Thanks, ma'am,” he'd said and went out and promptly cut three fingers off his right hand with that medieval machine.

I was always very careful with that lawnmower, knowing that somewhere on that place, the ghosts of three fingers were living it up in the grand spook manner. They needed no company from my fingers. My fingers looked just great, right there on my hands.

I cleaned out her rock garden and deported snakes whenever I found them on her place. She told me to kill them, but I couldn't see any percentage in wasting a gartersnake. But I had to get rid of the things because she always promised me she'd have a heart attack if she ever stepped on one of them.

So I'd catch them and deport them to a yard across the street, where nine old ladies probably had heart attacks and died from finding those snakes in their toothbrushes. Fortunately, I was never around when their bodies were taken away.

I'd clean the blackberry bushes out of the lilac bushes. Once in a while she'd give me some lilacs to take home, and they were always fine-looking lilacs, and I always felt good, walking down the street, holding the lilacs high and proud like glasses of that famous children's drink: the good flower wine.