Thirteen

Into view, under the surface, it came, a ghostly wingless fuselage. No wink glanced from it, regrettably. His foil and pins and the tongue from the fangless leather puddle lifeless at his feet returned to him through the water sedately no matter how he might vary the retrieve. But, in the air again, examined by him, at least it had held up. It held up through a dozen casts and he was proud of it, though it wasn’t attracting anything.

If twelve is straight out, he tried from nine to three. He cast as if taking bows, and after each retrieve changed stance and aim before again flinging the tangle-prone ripcord as softly as he dared. He gave special attention to the extreme angles, because a distressed protein source darting sidelong across some sulking lunker’s vision window can trigger unpremeditated attempted murder.

Best would be to have a boat or a float tube, but this lateral troll of his funky silverfoil contrivance was second best and he was proud and persevered, bent at the waist, tip low, hand-wrist retrieving—darting—the thing through the green brown just out from the reeds. The coils were hard to control and pay the lengths of into the rod and store in left-hand loops, as he stripped, and thwart the tendency of, as jouncing loops, to twine and mingle themselves into knots.

He had no boat, no float. He had his own devices, to which he had left himself. He was living in just the rules and laws and consequences of fishing, an immense relief.

A lure he whittled with various Swiss Army attachments from a dead piece of soft hardwood did better. Two inches long, hog fat yet streamlined, tail-finned and snouted to dip, it dipped when retrieved. He gave it eyes and a lateral line with the pen he packed in all packs with a notebook in case of epiphany, and he gave it a pair of hooks shaped from his dwindling supply of safety pins, fixed through a pair of tiny holes he augured. He gave it a nose ring—key-chain’s flimsy clip-ring secured through a third hole augured through the blunt snout, by which he married this new and superior lure to his line. For weight, and with difficulty, he cocooned an oblate pebble, first in foil then in a wrapping of line, right on the thing’s nose.

It dipped nicely, swam at a nice depth. It was better than its predecessor, which had, truth to tell, caused nearly all rise circles in the vicinity to shut off. This one, when he threw it, settling well into the glassy black felt better as his careful hands called it back. Then suddenly he would be able to see it, flying at almost no airspeed at all through the dusk of the shallows before him as he gave it that last pause and hang, at retrieve’s end, that can cue an attack if something’s following.

He was getting excited because the first excitement had worn off and he was starting to get pessimistic, which is often when the hit comes, but it didn’t.

He tried different water, tramping across to the far side, tramping through forest and marsh, carrying his coils, to where he had to tightrope-venture, teetering on a log, to be able to overhand swing it out.

He gave it an extra beat of sinking time.

He initiated the retrieve.

“That’s coming back fine,” he encouraged himself.

But it wasn’t.

He tried again, then bowed to the inevitable.

He stood, rod under arm, looped coils in hand, both hands combining to make a third hand—fingers—elbows—to hold his carved lure at the same time as everything else so he could examine it. No seaweed. Water-darkened, but that was fine. And the knot was if anything better wet.

Oh my God, key-chain! Where were the keys to the truck? Slap pocket . . . feel shapes . . . okay, keys. Good. Okay. Whew.

He thought of an adjustment. Hollow a further streamline in the back, where the dorsal fin ’d be. Triple the effect and vary the action to a more exacting shimmy. He sat down, cross-legged, midway between the beaver dam and the shallows where the boulders lived.

The sun fell through the leafed branches on him like prison stripes as he worked.

He worked hard, absorbed. He was cautious, right thumb playing a steadying role. He whittled, sickle-moon chips falling. His beard itched but there wasn’t a chance of its getting scratched. You’re a guide, so guide. Carve. Consider, moving it out of a bar of shadow to see it better. You are not the best guide who ever lived; in fact you are far from it. All the more reason to do your best.

Take off more?

Yes, a hangnail’s worth.

Just.

Better to take off too little than too much.

Either guide—do your best—or you will start coming out here alone until it becomes too wonderful. You will turn into a mountain man or else you will boomerang back out of your guilt and into that dreaded world you know and are so paralyzed by the thought of that you scarcely dare name it. The world of wear. The world of sacrifice and loss, sapping in its toils, debilitating in the communal submergence of its challenges, unsubjugateable in the insurmountability of its pace: the real world, or so they tell us.

Wading in three feet of it, off a forest point north of the boulder shallows, he flung every inch of line he could conjure. He got his lure out to some quite dark water, water well distant from the muck his boots were sinking in . . .

And there came another of those random wilderness moments of complete quiet, a stillness immortally brief, peacefully uncanny, the bright mountain light, at a slant, cool and dry in the atmosphere lake, forest and peaks hang in.

There was a wreath of perspiration on his temples.

He gathered in, hefted his rod, and with a shoulder heave scythed.

He let it sink even more, then strip, pause, strip-pause . . .

His lure’s resistance to the element it was in, felt by him—pause, wriggle and bob—seemed right.

He could move his hiking boots only with effort and only slowly in the muck, stepping to a different position.

Now he scarcely let it sink at all in the olive water. He stripped it back without waiting.

His free hand dangling, he lifted a forearm sleeve to daub at the sweat on his brow.

Rod camber springs line to life with a shoulder throw . . .

He waded out, fighting the mud. He waded a ways south, edging as far as he could out into the cold lake to avoid the gloop—up to his armpits in the water now—boots uncertain on the slurping bottom.

Rise circles were appearing. They were appearing in other places, not here. He cast an indistinct shadow on the water. He had retreated and was in only up to the waist, so his shadow was his torso.

A shadow appeared.

Two on the water.

“Try something different,” Boldt suggested.

When Rick had started fishing Boldt had paid no attention. Wandering the shoreline meadows, drifting into the woods, sitting on a rock to gaze into a distance pointedly not in the direction of Rick, Boldt had paid anti-attention. Rick had decided that if that was the way he wanted it, so be it. Then, one time when he turned, there was the tiny white oval—at a distance—of Boldt’s face.

It had been a hundred yards away down the shoreline.

Rick had turned back to his angling for a time, then, remembering Boldt, had turned again, and this time Boldt was standing thirty feet away. Fingers jammed straight into the pockets of his trail pants, thumbs hooked out over.

That had been minutes ago, and now Boldt’s shadow, beside Rick’s, said: “Try something different.”

“Should I stand on my head?”

“Different weight, different shape.”

“I’ll tell you what I’ll try. I’ll try resting. I’ve been fishing for damn near an hour.”

Rick splashed back to shore. He strode over the pebbles. He sat on a log.

Boldt’s form and face were haloed shadow. The sun stood directly behind Boldt. He stood over Rick. “A different weight,” he said tranquilly.

Rick’s spirits seesawed, declining. He felt like giving up.

“You try.”

“No you. You’re better.”

“Hah.” To his hanging hands. “You don’t believe that.”

“At fishing,” Boldt quietly qualified.

“Hah. You want to see me try because if I fail then you won’t have failed because you didn’t try. But if I catch one or get a hit you’ll step in and take over.”

“Right,” Boldt said impatiently. “Let’s keep at it, that’s the main thing.”

About to say more, Boldt sensed he might be pressing his luck. He went dark.

Rick sighed. He got up. He got his rod. They tried—that is Rick did—the black beaver water that lay to the north through the woods they hadn’t been able to see around.

“Let it sink more,” Boldt called.

“I am!”

“Can’t you get it out any further?”

Maybe.

He tried.

But he couldn’t.

He was fishing angrily from an old embankment of beaver sticks and mud piled tight and gone to seed. The obsidian pond lay like a cauldron of cold ink. Boldt was standing in some trees off to the right.

“Feel anything?”

“Nothing.”

Boldt let his guide fish some more.

“Why not try something different? You need to make a change.”

Rick quit. He walked back—all the way to where they’d been—not looking to see if Boldt was following, which he was, a bearish, thoughtful figure picking and choosing its way over the stones with downcast eyes and fingers in front pockets.

Rick sat on some stones. He said to hell with everything by dropping his rod rather than setting it down or leaning it. It made a noise on the pebbles. The white coils lay unneat. He unbuttoned his second and third buttons, yanking his shirt away from his chest as roughly as a medic in an emergency. He exhaled.

Boldt pinched, where there would have been creases if one ironed trail pants, and lifting the closewoven space-age fabric squatted to lower himself onto the stones with a dainty bump.

Boldt kicked his heels out.

Boldt seemed pleased, as if the agenda of a directors meeting long precontested had finally been laid out in just the way Boldt desired so that while the battle was yet to be fought, now at least it would be fought on his terms.

“What else have we got?” Boldt asked. “For example matches, shoelaces, snaps, straps, razor blades—”

“You can’t catch a trout with matches.”

Boldt held a hand up.

“Of course not.”

“You want me to go through the pack again?”

Boldt held a hand up.

“Whatever you think.”

“Well dammit you’re the one saying try something different.”

Boldt cocked his face up, birdlike, checking a remote quadrant of sky.

Rick struggled up—it’s hard to get up unaided from sitting on pebbles—and re-inventoried his pack. All right, he was thinking, all right, can you catch a fish with a compass? Can you catch a fish with a pedometer? Thermometer? Water-purification tablet?

Boldt was emptying out his pockets.

“Nothing,” Rick reported, “I’m serious.”

Boldt had his room key in a palm and was assessing it with an expression smooth of brow and breezeless eye. Boldt also possessed a partly consumed box of cough drops (including crumply wax paper). This too passed a time in his fingers under the shine of the shrine of his cognizance.

Boldt held a pen. Boldt unfolded a city map, a handkerchief, then his wallet, which, the more he browsed it, came to interest him greatly.

Boldt was not one of those richies who never carry money, Rick could see from the lettuce garden bulging from the leather crack. Boldt poked among his cards. With a finger snap (magician causing the card you were thinking of to materialize), Boldt showed Rick his family.

In the glossy two-by-three Ektachrome: Matron with ice-white hair, her smile a rocker. There were several married and smiling young incorporated moms and dads, clearly in good anonymous health, each with a generational hand on the shoulder of a little one (or holding a littler one still). And all were gaily saying “Cheese” in upscale sports clothes ordered the day before. The enormity of the Boldt front lawn with its oaks and manicured shrubs and riots of florescence had been rendered photogenically unmistakable in a sharpness of focus well thought out beforehand and lenswork that spared no detail of the Boldts and Boldt-in-laws in the foreground.

The tableau centered on the dark Abe lower face of the patriarch, who was snarling a self-congratulatory smile. It was impressive, whatever else one might think. It was plainly a stalwart clan, a clan by which, it occurred to Rick, he would not wish to be attacked.

“Nice family.”

“Thanks.”

“What does everyone do?”

Boldt told him. Boldt pointed out the investment banker. Boldt pointed out the fencing ace, the surgeon, the school-bus driver, the video-game whiz, the executive v. p.

“Which one’s your daughter?”

“That daughter’s not in this picture.”

“Oh?”

“I can’t control her.”

“That implies you control everyone else. Everyone in the picture.”

Boldt held the portrait closer to take a closer look.

“Just in the big things,” he said. “Not in every damn fool little thing.”

“Well, it’s none of my business.”

“True,” Boldt agreed, still examining the photo, “none of your business . . . but go on.”

Rick was flustered because it was so painfully obvious. “You can’t control people,” he said. “I mean maybe you can, but you shouldn’t.”

Boldt blinked. He looked from the photo to Rick and back to the photo, then back to Rick.

“Why not?”

“It’s not right.” Rick wanted to say more and would have, given time, but the indisputability, the obviousness, of the rule that you should not control people was so complete that he had never examined it. So he didn’t know why it is that you should not control people.

“I don’t make them do anything they shouldn’t do, and sometimes I prevent them from doing something they shouldn’t do. Sometimes I make them do something they should do but don’t want to do,” Boldt enumerated, “but I never make them do anything that isn’t good for them.”

“Well that’s great except how can you know what’s good for them better than they can know that themselves?”

“Experience, knowledge, objectivity, will.”

“Suppose you’re wrong.”

Boldt looked at Rick. “Sometimes I am. Who isn’t? But I’m wrong a lot less than they are.”

“I think people should be allowed to make their own mistakes.”

“The strong ones will,” Boldt nodded. He spoke in seriousness and without zeal but with great firmness and calm, addressing his family in the photo he held. “The strong ones always do.”

“Defy you in other words.”

“You could say that.”

“And you respect that? You admire someone who defies you?”

Holding the photo, Boldt turned his head again, seeming to re-realize that Rick existed.

“Like your daughter for instance. The one not in the picture? She defies you. Right?”

Boldt started to smile but it was frosty and it quickly turned to distaste followed by dismissal.

“People do what they have to do,” Boldt said.

He shifted the way he sat. He was scanning the windless expanse for rises. There were some.

“In other words, if she has to defy you,” Rick summed up, “she has to. You just said so. You said people have to do what they have to do.”

“Yeah.”

“And you have to try to control her; that’s what you have to do—”

“Yeah yeah yeah.”

“—because you, heh, can’t control yourself—”

Boldt was silent.

“Or,” Rick headily wore on, “maybe you can control yourself but the only way you’re able to do it is by controlling everybody else. You know? In other words if you were prevented from controlling all the people you control you wouldn’t be able to control yourself any more.”

“For god’s sake.”

“But if she persists in defying you that means she’s like one of the strong ones, and you admire that. You respect that. You just said so.”

Boldt did not like it. He did not gainsay it. But it was not so simple. It was never simple. “It’s not that simple,” he said angrily, “but of course. Of course that’s right. You can respect someone without agreeing with them.”

“Well I just think people shouldn’t be controlled. That’s all. They should be free. People should be free.”

“Freedom isn’t not being controlled. Freedom is being controlled by the right things.”

“Who are you to decide?”

“The one who can,” Boldt said, but, on reflection, seemed dissatisfied with such facileness. “Look,” he added, “who is anybody to decide—who are you?”

“But that’s just it, I don’t decide.”

“Exactly.” Boldt smiled.

“I decide for myself. I don’t decide for others.”

Boldt was walking his snapshot of his family through his fingers. Then he was holding the photo up for Rick to look at. But when Rick looked, it wasn’t the photo! The magician had switched. It was one of Boldt’s credit cards, slipped by Boldt from his wallet. He was showing it—between a pair of ample fingers—to Rick with diabolical eyes.

“Yeah?” Rick asked.

Boldt thrust the card faceout nearly into Rick’s face: “Think!”

“About a credit card?”

“Does your Swiss Army knife,” Boldt demanded in dark glee, “have scissors?”

You had to cut slowly, using restrained pressure at the ever-advancing fulcrum where the blades’ edges meet, because there weren’t stacks of backup cards if you messed up.

Their heads were nearly together over Boldt’s tongue-in-corner-of-mouth toil.

Boldt finished.

He held it up.

Rick looked at it, the tail-cut angled sideways, rudder-like. He thought on it. He neither scratched his shale-colored hair nor, fitting V of thumb and finger to chin, did much of anything but stare at the artwork, with his sandy eyes’ dreaminess, which was all he had.

“It’s good,” he said.

It was. A card with many tens of thousands of dollars’ purchasing power had been destroyed that a fake baitfish might be born.

“Of course it is,” Boldt blinked.

The “hooks” turned out to be a cinch.

They test-cast.

When pulled slowly, it could be felt to sway. When pulled fast, the tail fluttered. Adjusting the tail, conscious of Boldt’s owl eye on him as he worked, Rick was able to make it flutter even better . . .

“Was that a fish?”

“No.”

“You’re sure?”

“Underwater branch.”

“It looked like a fish.”

“It did,” Rick granted.

“But it wasn’t.”

“No.”

“You’re absolutely sure.”

“No.”

“Jesus. Try again.”

Rick tried again. But it was no go.

“Ok ok ok,” Boldt concluded. “Let’s try different spots.”

“How many?”

“Five.”

“Why?”

“You pick a number.”

“Oh.”

“You pick a number in this life. There’s no Why.”

“Oh.”

“Your line’s tangled.”

“It ties itself in knots.”

“It sure does. Here, wait.”

“From swinging. You never realize how smooth flyline is.”

“Here wait,” Boldt said patiently, “wait a second, calm down.”

“Thanks.”

“My god, this looks like a double carrick bend. There, that’s got it.”

“You sail?”

“Maybe,” Boldt said. “What if I hold it? I can feed it to you as you cast.” He took the extra coils of line and, holding them, stood ready to pay out as Rick cast. The idea was to then store line when Rick retrieved, as if he were Rick’s reel. “Try it like this?”

“Sure.”

It worked.

They moved to a different, difficult spot, where they saw trout.

It was south of the beaver dam. Big boulders stood well out from shore, with no walkways built to them. Rick had been in up to his armpits more than once now, and he suggested they try wading. It was deep, getting there.

Chilly.

They climbed up, dripping, onto the biggest one, from which, standing, they could see fish, rather than just the circles they made. Out from the boulder they stood on, toward the middle of Stantliner, the bottom shallowed up to make a sandy pebbly half-acre. And the way the declining sun was shining now, right down into those distant shallows all the way to the light-reflecting bottom, the trout swimming back and forth were very visible, pink, bright, haloed, with the rest of the lake shadow all around them. It was a strange and magical small promised land of trout in the distance. Now and then one planed up to swipe something just under the surface.

Boldt and Rick stood gazing at the vision . . .

They watched without a word.

The high country was still.

The peaks, flying it seemed, moved yet never moved, regents of rock sharpened heavenward. The cooling forests stood in the shadows of the peaks, sap-silent and austere ramrod communities of green. The drab face of the lake, excepting of course the glowing shallows the anglers were staring at, seemed in its mystery not impenetrable but hugely and ominously welcoming, finally, of the guide and his client, as if the lake were a giant reverse mirror, drawing in instead of reflecting, now that the human pair had paid sufficient dues of failure and humility. So it seemed. But it wasn’t so. The lake—untroubled, glacial, pure—the sky bowl above it and the trees guarding it and the cutthroat submarining in it and the granite under its muck—no more welcomed the humans or drew them in or noticed them than the falcon returns to its handler’s glove from friendliness.

Boldt crewed for Rick, acting as his reel, uncoiling and recoiling line with quick neatness as Rick cast to the far water shining like a magical little trout heaven. And lo, on the first retrieve here one came. It approached the plastic silhouette, swimming at it, but veered off. On the next cast no fish approached. They were still swimming around but no fish approached. Rick cast again, dropping it near one. With a tail wag the fish darted away immediately slowing, drifting off to cruise elsewhere.

Being able to see all the way into some water for the first time, and seeing swimming fish, and having one approach their offering, and getting adept at the system of Boldt’s handling the line as Rick cast, they tried here longer than was wise. The distant pink trout finally, when the credit-card lure fell among them, dispersed in anger.

“Let’s wait. They’ll come back.”

“They will,” Rick said. “But if I cast this to ’em again they’ll disappear.”

“Think they’d go for a dry?”

“Well sure, I mean maybe. What would we use?”

“Cut something up.”

“Let’s look in the pack. I wasn’t thinking of a dry when I looked before. This is insane. You know it?”

Toothbrush. And there was a way to sculpt it, carving, hacking the plastic head once the neck had been snapped and the remainder filed down, without losing the bristles’ coherence. There was a way to get a hook to stay.

Rick made a pair of wings by tying in a strip from a spare shirt. And when they got back to the boulders with it, there were trout out again swimming around in that strange patch of glowing lake, swimming back and forth like sentries . . . and one sees something, darting at it with a swirl . . .

Rick’s toothbrush number-eight dry met the water. The fish nearest it turned. It swam straight at it and, seeing it close, whirled in the water, finning angrily. It whirled again, extremely agitated. Nothing, nothing that looked like that thing was supposed to be in this water. Rick tried retrieving it a bit over the surface tension, Boldt dutifully handling the extra line, and they threw a few more casts with the misfit, to a few different spots, before giving up entirely.

“The Native Americans,” Rick said, “took fish with spears. They used nets. They constructed weirs, which are a holding pen you build.”

“Don’t.”

“They caught fish with their bare hands. They gill-netted fish.”

“No,” Boldt said.

“They fished with rods. Not everyone knows that. They whittled hooks, lashed bone splinters to wood hooks, no really. And they had this crazy lure they made. It looked like a shuttlecock? In badminton? They’d push it to the bottom with a pole and it floated so when they let go this thing comes twirling up off the bottom, and a big fish would follow and they’d spear it. I’m not kidding.”

Boldt said, “I know you’re not. That’s why I’m saying No.”

“They used baitfish. They had fishing line, thin strips of bark. They had traps and all kinds of nets and they used trotlines. They even had like these clever little underwater nooses. Some of it was very sophisticated, but I also think they were much more in touch than we are with the outdoors, I mean to do what they did. We should try to catch a fish using just—”

“No.”

“Why?”

“No is why.”

“We could weave a net.”

“No.”

“Sneak around in just our bare—”

“It’s not a plan,” Boldt said.

They were ashore.

Boldt, like Rick, had taken his socks off. He had taken his pants off. He was toweling his lower half dry. He was using the fleecy towel Rick made sure every one of his packs included. Powerful looking in bare legs, Minotaur-looking, Boldt quit toweling himself. He stood, holding the towel like a slack whip—eloquent testimony to the finality of his refusal to go native. The towel dangling easily from the strong, open hand. The skeptical Boldt gaze untroubled and placid.

There was to be no debate.

“It’s not a plan,” Boldt repeated. He was holding the towel. “It’s an idea. It’s an abstraction. It’s a distraction. We would do it all wrong. We’re not natives.”

“Oh.”

They sat down.

The two sat down together.

They sat on a rock.