“I could spin a tall tale myself, back in my heyday,” the West Texas Jesus boasted to me the next morning on our way through the mountains to my event in Missoula. We were following Clark Fork, one of the most beautiful trout streams in the West. My guy was eyeing it, spooling along in the valley a thousand feet below us through a series of deep green pools, white-water rapids, and trouty-looking runs of broken water.
“Back in your heyday?” I said. By now I wasn’t sure whether he was talking about playing steel guitar and singing backup (he claimed) for Marty Robbins in a roadhouse in El Paso City, or telling stories from a mountaintop in Galilee.
Then, trouble. I’d been expecting it for the past week or so. It had been building day by day, and frankly, I was surprised that it hadn’t come to a flash point sooner. Since Austin, Reg and the West Texas Jesus had been arguing, arguing about everything under the sun. Back in northern California, in a motel near Mount Shasta, they’d argued over whether the Catskills were true mountains or the remains of an eroded plateau. Reg said that the New York State history text he’d used with his kids at the one-room school in Chichester explained, in detail, that the Catskills were an eroded plateau. The West Texas Jesus said that for his money, a mountain was a mountain, period.
In Oregon, I’d spent the better part of an afternoon listening to them hash over the earth-shattering question of whether an eastern brook trout was a “true trout” or a char. Reg said a char. Jesus averred that a trout was a trout was a trout. On they jangled until I thought I’d go crazy.
This morning in western Montana, all of their wrangling came to a head over—baseball. That’s right. Not religion. Not politics. Baseball.
What got them started was the old debate over whether a pitched baseball actually curved or only appeared to. (Dad and Reg argued interminably over this.) Reg took the affirmative and, while I think the West Texas Jesus probably knew better, he claimed that it was all an optical illusion. “Get a bat,” Reg said. “We’ll settle this at the next ball diamond we come to.” Jesus said he could put any pitch in Reg’s repertoire “over the wall.”
Since there was no way to settle this latest hoo-ha immediately, my traveling companions fell into a sullen silence. Below us as we continued east through the Rockies—at least we could all agree that these 10,000-foot-high peaks were not the remains of a plateau—the Clark Fork ran cold, fast, and clear.
“Let’s wet a line,” the West Texas Jesus said as we dipped down toward the river. “Pull into that fishing access, Harold.”
“I’ve got a one o’clock in Missoula.”
“We’ll sink a six-pack in the river, fish up, and walk back down. Catch us some trout. Drink some ice-cold beer.”
“I said, I have an event in Missoula.”
“Fuck Missoula,” said the West Texas Jesus, getting out of the car. “I’m going fishing.”
“Wait!” I said. “I never did get to tell you about that unfinished business with my uncle.”
But he was already headed down over the bank toward the river, six-pack in one hand, a fly rod in the other. A fly rod very much resembling the split-bamboo, seven-and-a-half-foot Orvis my grandparents gave me when I graduated from college.
I thought he called something over his shoulder as he started fishing up the river. I caught the words “about it.” About what? I had no idea.
The last I saw of the West Texas Jesus, in the rearview mirror, he was tied into a good fish, his rod—or mine—bent and throbbing, his beer can lifted exuberantly, while the Loser Cruiser and I puttered on toward home and my reunion with Phillis.