Two

A boulder had rolled down the hill.

It was cubish. It was enormous. It was grainy gray with tints of beige.

It was filled with silence.

They watched the water, looking out along the side of the monolith. Some anglers stood in up to their waists, not fishing, one languidly falsecasting while the others—heads bowed—fiddled with their angelhair trinkets and toys.

To get here from the parking area they had hiked for fifteen minutes along a sidesloping trail of pebbles like beach sand in the making. There had been scrub trees and a wildflower now and then, but mostly the steep hillside was sparse by way of vegetation and color where they traversed it, except for the rock grays, tans and browns. But the river was always there to the left and below, and Boldt had stridden steadily, bursting with mute energy, and stood now with his hat off and not a sweat drop on him, watching the anglers who weren’t fishing.

There were tiny blastfurnaces at the centers of Boldt’s eyes.

That the anglers were in the water but not fishing it bothered Boldt greatly.

Boldt’s anger, when it flashed, fascinated Rick.

“We could try here,” he suggested.

“You tell me. You’re the guide.”

Rick was slow to reply.

Boldt turned and was walking upstream along the boulder’s inland face.

They were trodding the mud-like dirt at the boulder’s bottom on the side away from the stream, which, because of the rock, they could not see. As they went, the shadow of the great rock moved over their hats.

“We could try here,” Rick said, “or keep going and get up to the place I’m thinking of taking us to.”

“You’re the boss.”

The boulder had rolled down the hill a very long time ago. It had rolled right to the river’s edge. They were walking—single-file due to space—upstream, and, truth was, Rick didn’t know if the boulder had rolled down or if the water had excavated it over the aeons. He liked to think of it as having rolled down.

Boom.

In fishing the only tension you ever want is on your line.

“Well, but you know, if you want to try here.”

“You’re the boss,” Boldt said. They stepped out around the giant rock and came out of its shadow into sunlight. “We’re going,” Boldt decided. “We’ll keep going.”

As they went upstream they watched the river as much as they could, having also to watch where they were stepping on the extremely pebbly footing.

There was a pool the size of a polo field, lordly brown water with one rod climbing out of a far corner. There were stretches hidden by hardwood. There was an impossible-looking chute—racecourse of waves. There was a glide—seven big waterrocks, each its own world of swirl and change, where, if they were going to try anywhere around here instead of going all the way up, Rick would have had them fish. But Rick preferred going right on upstream as far as originally planned. Then, carried by the water, so to speak, as the day went its way, he liked to fish leisurely back down.

Boldt grunted or something—Rick was not sure. The path was angling them up, diagonally up.

“Watch out for the ball bearings,” Rick advised wittily, he hoped, meaning the pebbles.

Boldt walked faster, the quicker to get to where they would fish. When his phone rang he yanked it out and argued into it as Rick gazed with increasing interest at the changes in the west. They hiked on. Boldt threw a question over a shoulder. Rick said twenty minutes.

Rick wanted to slow down. It was his way to slow a day down. It was his way because he was inclined to hurry. He knew too well the ambitious and impatient compulsion to get there and get started, a virus that in its extreme form can replace fun with triumph, always a disaster. It was because of this eagerness that Rick had learned to pace the flow. One should, if one could, be exuberant, but not at a day’s beginning. It was best to wait for the exuberance, incarnate as Trout, to find you and come to you once the day’s fishing had been decorously gotten into with suitably slow puttering and idle talk and procrastinative fussing about.

Rise slowly . . . let the day unfold.

He heard a noise and looked up.

Boldt had lost his footing on a sidesteep of pebbly grains the smoothness of BBs. An obscenity was unmistakable as Boldt slid.

“Those are the ball bearings I was talking about,” Rick called. Boldt saved himself, staying on his feet with a lunge and glaring, saying nothing, not looking at Rick or acknowledging him but clearly not about to let such a near-fall happen again.

They came to a spot where without a word of discussion they stopped and sat on a pair of convenient rocks. This stretch had four of the six characteristics Rick considered great-trout-water criteria.

“There are fish down there,” Boldt said.

“Yep.”

There was no disputing it. None were to be seen at the moment, but they had to be there. There could not be no fish in such water.

Boldt sat with his thumbs in his belt. Both men were looking down the incline at the beautiful run.

“Is that one?”

“Where?”

“This side of that whitish boulder.”

“There?”

“No. Three feet directly—”

“Oh yeah, well, hm, maybe, but I don’t think so.”

“I thought I saw it move.”

“Maybe. My eyes,” Rick said, “are average. I see what you mean though. It could be a fish.”

“I’ll show you a fish. One rock downstream,” Boldt said, without turning his head. “In the current-break.”

“The widow’s peak.”

“Huh?”

“You know, like a widow’s peak of current flowing just like how a beautiful woman hooks both fingers to pull her hair out to the side from the center part of her smooth creamy—”

“Jesus all right. Do you see it?”

Rick did, and indeed it was a fish.

“Yes,” he said.

“It’s hard to see, but it’s there.”

“We could try here if you want.”

“You said you wanted to go to your upstream place.”

“Well—”

Boldt’s phone made its noise. He took it out, turned it off, and put it back, never taking his scanning eyes from the peat-brown water. Rick sat where he was sitting. He was scanning the water too. Suddenly the sun came out all the way. Burning through a haze that hadn’t been noticeable until now, it was hot on the hands. It was very bright and surprisingly hot.

“Oh my god,” Boldt said.

They were everywhere. There were a dozen or more. More. There were so many, in their lies—blunt shadows in the glow—that there was no point in trying to spot individual fish or in pointing anything out. They were just, in this sudden furnacing light, there.

“Wow,” Rick admitted.

“Now—”

“Well—”

“It’s your show,” Boldt said frantically.

“Well—”

“I would only say, I would only say, if we aren’t going to fish here then we should get our butts the hell up to where we’re going.”

“Well,” Rick said, looking at the panorama of transparent honey golds and glinting ambers around the big rocks where the living trout were shadows, two dozen holding, and a tail moved, side-shimmying slightly—all the dark bodies in suspension alive. “This is not as far up as I had planned.”

But.

He felt and peripherally saw the light glancing off Boldt’s white face as it stared at him.

“In other words,” Boldt said, “if we start here, your inclination would be to stay. Not go up to your other place. Start here and work down.”

“Well,” Rick admitted . . .

He hated to start fishing anywhere but the farthest up he was planning to go. It was a superstition pure and simple. And Boldt had caught him in it.

“It’s your show,” Boldt said. “You know what you’re doing.”

“Okay,” Rick said. “All right. Now. Here are some things we need to consider.”

Lifting its head, dropping its tail and trimming its fins, one turned from shadow to bright trout—as beautiful a rise as Rick had ever seen. With subtle sashay and a slipping drift backward, downstream, looking up, it spurted forward to take something at the surface with a heart-rending glimpse of white open mouth. Turning its shoulder in a swirl it was gone.

Rick had half the gear out of his pack and Boldt was hopping on one foot then the other pulling on a pair of boots. Rick had the cases open and the rods out and assembled and the reels seated and was threading the guides. Boldt was helping. With teeth, eyes, spreading hands, Rick was readying tippet material to tie on for such shining water.

Boldt gave a sardonic laugh, his eyes wickedly alight, his “heh-heh-heh” full of dark ironic pleasure as he looped the nearly invisible filament ends through the small circles he had made with his plump fingers. As he rotated each end through twice, smiling his alligator smile with one side of the mouth and saying “heh-heh-heh” softly to himself, he was, consciously or no, giving lip service to the rule of slowing down. If you rush your preparations you will rush your fishing, and the time you saved by rushing will be squandered. So did Rick Tamerlin earnestly believe. And so apparently did Boldt now that they were getting down to it. Instead of moistening his readied knot and pulling it tight, Boldt was showing it to Rick with both pairs of finger-thumb.

“Now,” Boldt was inquiring, as both of them outwardly ignored the splash, “when you make your loop do you lap your ends in front of the standing part of the line or behind, or does it matter?”

“It doesn’t really matter.”

They were staring at the knot puzzle that—with lips-lick and drawstring pull—Boldt was about to resolve. Neither cared about it, with the rises increasing and accumulating in frequency below. Boldt started to turn away from Rick and their conversation because it was time to get to work. Boldt had given the Don’t-Hurry rule its due. Thirty seconds’ worth. Plenty. But Rick couldn’t hurry his slowing down like that. With Rick, not hurrying was a question of survival, the survival of his inner gyroscope. Rick’s inner gyroscope wasn’t all that well seated. He insisted, pushed—nearly in Boldt’s face—his own favorite shortcut version of the knot: “Look at this though. This can be useful in situations where time is of the essence. Watch,” Rick said. “If you’re willing to waste some leader . . . see?”

He was watching his fingers—each specialized in its duty—re-do part of the knot. This little amendation wasn’t necessary. The knot was fine. “See you can put everything through at once. Much quicker. You gotta trim a lot off though.”

Boldt paid attention. Boldt wanted to be fishing. But it was either ignore Rick or pay complete attention, because for Boldt ambiguity was impossible. So he stared at Rick’s 60-second knot demonstration.

Then in disbelief they watched the three anglers who had come quietly up the lower trail, with ready rods, wade into the current and begin unlimbering their lines.

They were dressed gaily—yellow hats, shirts of kelly green. Their voices carried, voices cheerful and sportively inquisitive like their changing lines scrolling on the air in sunflash, looping out long, probing like—from Rick’s flabbergasted perspective—screen geometrics: boulders, arms, hats, rise splashes, river currents, fluent lines—living graphs all of what was going on on and in the water below, in which neither Boldt nor Rick was.

“Blast,” Boldt said softly.

A muscle under his cheek worked. The anger in his eyes was doused smoldering force rather than flashes, an umbrous and unsteady struggle. It was anger at a world in which unwanted things happen.

Clasping his right wrist Rick rested the back of his left hand against his coccyx. He touched his rueful smile to the air his upper chest warmed. He smiled that rueful smile for some seconds, at his boots, shaking his inner head.

Her rod leaping like a rail signal the middle hat cried “Tally-ho!” Her line was straight to the spray.

“Blast it,” Boldt said.

“Oh look, they’re getting the picture. They’re getting a picture of her fish before the careful release.”

“Do you carry a gun?”

“No.”

“I thought,” Boldt said, “if you had a gun.”

“We could shoot her?”

“Just blow it out of her hands.”

“Smile,” Rick advised the young woman, who was stooping to hold her catch and smile in her friend’s camera’s world of field.

“Blast.”

“Well okay,” Rick said as the photo session came to an end and everyone—everyone but Rick and Boldt—was casting again. “Here’s what we can do. Or not do. We can either—”

“We’re not waiting here. We’ll go to your place and get fishing. How much farther?”

Rick looked at his watch.

“Twenty minutes.”

“From here?”

“Yeah.”

“Why did you look at your watch?”

“Huh?”

“Why did you have to look at your watch to know how long it takes to get from here to there?”

It was a good question, and Rick didn’t have an answer.

Boldt waited, pointedly unsympathetic and not helping as Rick got the pack packed. Rick broke his rod down, sliding the sections into their pine-green sleeve and sliding that into its metal cylinder while Boldt, frowning, did not do any of the same things with his rod, which he carried assembled as they hiked upstream again along the shifty footing.

“Notwithstanding,” Rick said, “the action is likely to get better. The later in the day, the better the action.”

“You’re the expert.” Boldt’s voice was on the other side of confident, coming from beyond his swinging back muscles. “You’re the pro.”

“The implication being that if I don’t do the job I’m fired?”

“What’s wrong with that?”

Boldt’s phone. He must have turned it back on. Didn’t break stride. Said “What.” Lowered and hardened his voice, clapping its armor on, striding, phone to ear, rod and case clasped like the American Eagle’s bundle of arrows. Watch my rod Rick thought.

“I’ll be back when?”

It was Rick he was asking.

“Oh, well, let’s see. It’s an hour to hike back out, then the drive, assuming—I mean first I’d have to—”

“Nine,” Boldt snapped into the device. “I’ll be back by nine at the outside. Right. Right. So what’s he saying? Everything what? No way—one year, one, a year’s a year, we were clear on that from the start. No warranties beyond . . . right. Hanh? You thought what? Well we didn’t. Send the letter . . . no I’m not saying we’ll do it, I’m saying send it, send the blasted letter. Right. What else? Huh? No. We’re not taking those people. We may take some, but that’s after, not before . . . they what? Past their board? The extension? You serious? Well you tell me, you tell me what we say. What do we say? Pretend it’s a quiz. That’s right. You better believe it. Right, right . . . bye.”

“Hungry?” Rick called, for Boldt had opened up a lead of many strides.

“Hanh?”

“Lunch? Are you—er, hungry?” Rick croaked, feeling as if an Andalusian bull had wheeled on him.

“I’m starving,” Boldt leveled, none of him moving except, always, flicking, checking, deciding: the eyes.

“I thought we could get lunch out of the way. I mean rather than go without food ’til evening or else get up there and get fishing and then have to—”

“We’ll eat.”

They ate.