Give a man a fish and he has food for a day; teach him how
to fish and you can get rid of him for the entire weekend.
ZENNA SCHAFFER
I';m glad you took us up on our invitation, Michael.” Stephanie's dad, Pastor Bud, adjusted the brim of his faded Montana Outfitters cap, the one with fake seagull poop on top that Mom never let him wear at home. “Especially on the spur of the moment.”
Our invitation? Stephanie thought it a casual use of the word our. Dad could have at least warned her, given her the chance to find an excuse not to come. She watched an osprey in the distance working the far shore and paying no attention to the men.
“Yeah, Will's going to be sorry he didn't come,” replied Michael. “What about Mrs. Unruh, though? Does she ever—”
“My mom doesn't like fishing,” Stephanie explained. “She never has. The scales, the smell, the hooks. She thinks it's all yuck.”
“And you don't?”
Stephanie shrugged but never took her eyes off the distant bird. “Doesn't bother me. Dad and I have always been fishing buddies.”
She held on to the side of the boat and let the wind whip her hair back like a flag. In the bright morning sunlight, the freckles on her face would stand out—but so what if they did? She let her father tell the rest of the story as they bounced over a light chop in their trusty old aluminum boat. Dad had stenciled Amazing Grace on the side, which explained how it had held together over the years.
“Steph's right,” Pastor Bud told Michael as he leaned against the steering wheel. “I never could convince her mother to come out with me. I think the boats too small for her.”
“Small?” A waved rocked them from side to side, and Michael clung to his seat. “Well, I can see her point.”
Stephanie's father grinned and gunned the outboard motor once they passed the line of buoys marking the entrance to Kokanee Cove and the end of the no-wake zone. The motor stuttered for a moment, wheezing and smoking. It had seen just as many summers as the Amazing Grace, which was several. The motor caught, pushing them straight through a wave and slamming them down on the next one. The wind whipped a shower of spray over the boat.
“Hoo!” Michael whooped. “That's as chilly as the other day.”
Stephanie didn't step through the door he opened for her, but she hid a smile at the memory of Michael demonstrating the finer points of paddling a canoe without a paddle. Too bad her father hadn't been there. He might have harvested a sermon illustration from the incident.
They plowed across the southern end of the lake, where the floor rested over a thousand feet below the boat's thin aluminum skin, heading for the western shore. Her father aimed for the abandoned limestone mine, his favorite place to drop his lines. The deep shadows of the Selkirk peaks sheltered the waters there, holding off the choppier waves.
“Stephanie tells me you're a mechanic at your folks’ resort,” Pastor Bud said to Michael, charging off on a new topic of conversation. Michael would be able to show his better side now, wouldn't he?
Michael explained that he took engines apart and put them back together again and that he'd been a mechanic in the service for a few years, where he'd worked on Humvees and personnel carriers in Iraq and Afghanistan. But it wasn't anything special, he said. A motor was a motor no matter where he found it. Here in Kokanee Cove, he'd already tackled the pile of broken outboard motors in the boathouse.
He crouched next to the pastor and looked at the blue green blend of mountains and horizon, speaking just loud enough to be heard over the drone of the motor. Stephanie wondered again why her father had asked him to come along.
He seemed different when he talked about things that he liked, things that mattered to him, like fixing things and delivering people safely, without incident. Her father kept asking questions, and she couldn't help listening. Out here Michael didn't sound like someone who thought he was anything special, like so many other guys she'd met.
“We prayed for you.” Her dad looked at their guest out of the corner of his eye to check his reaction. He got a puzzled stare. “Of course, we didn't know who it was at the time, just the soldiers in the Middle East who needed our prayers.”
“Oh.” Michael nodded. “You mean, in general. I appreciate that. Really, I do. And I appreciate you taking me out like this. I don't think I've ever been out fishing in a boat before.”
“Really?” Stephanie asked before she could stop herself. “Never? What did you do in California for fun?”
“Oh, you know.” He shrugged. “California stuff. I was big into skateboards when I was a kid. Broke my arm in three places. Then motorized skateboards, then motorcycles, then cars. Drove my parents crazy.”
“So you were never a surfer?” her dad asked. He throttled down, and they drifted into a calmer patch of water, close to a steep, wooded shore with a narrow, gravel beach.
The question made Michael laugh—a light, pleasant chuckle. “No surfers where I lived. That's the other California, L.A. I grew up in northern California. Suburbs. About fifty miles east of San Francisco.”
Stephanie had never thought of it like that, as if there were two Californias. She'd never thought much about California, period, except to realize that a lot more people were coming here from there, and there wasn't much she could do about it.
There was also a lot to Michael that surprised her, like how he handled a fishing pole.
“Uh…” He fiddled a bit with the reel, caught himself in the finger with a hook, then looked to see what Stephanie and her father were doing. “Are we supposed to put worms or something on these things?”
Pastor Bud laughed and helped extricate the barb from Michael's thumb. He didn't flinch, just popped the thumb in his mouth, but it had to hurt.
“You could use worms if you wanted to,” said her dad, “but that wouldn't help us catch what we're catching today.”
“Which is…”
“Rainbow trout, my friend.” Pastor Bud expertly cast off the side of the boat with a flick of his wrist then turned to help their guest. “They're all over Lake Pend Oreille, and we catch ‘em first because they eat the kokanee hatch-lings, which are protected and, if you noticed, we named our town after the kokanee, so—
“Yeah, what's the deal with that name?” Michael asked in a curious tone. Here came the history lesson. Her dad smiled.
“Kokanee is from the Salish Indian word kikinee, for the little landlocked salmon they liked so well. Our town's founders liked the fishing here too. And I'll tell you, if you haven't had fresh trout cooked up in my wife's frypan before, boy, are you in for a treat.”
Stephanie gritted her teeth and wondered if her dad would invite Michael to dinner as well.
“That's the one reason she puts up with our fishing,” she said. She switched off the drag to free up her line and flicked her silver spoon lure several yards out to the side—every bit as expertly as her dad. That got Michael's attention, and she had to keep herself from grinning.
Were girls supposed to enjoy fishing the way she always had with her father? She wasn't sure, but right now she was getting a kick out of watching this tough GI wrestle with a rod and reel.
“You've really never been fishing before?” she asked. She wouldn't have believed him if she hadn't seen his rumbling.
“We caught crawdads in the creek behind my house.” He smiled. “Does that count?”
“Hmm. Your dad's not a fisherman, either, I guess.”
As soon as the words slipped from her mouth, she wished she could rewind the moment.
Michael winced. “Will, uh…he was always gone while I was growing up. Sales trips, conventions, you know. I ended up doing my own thing.”
That was the second time he'd said Will—not Dad or even my father. Stephanie exchanged looks with her own father, who gave her a subtle shake of the head—his signal to back off. She would have anyway, but she had a hard time imagining growing up like that. And what kind of man called his father by his first name?
“Well, it's good that you guys can work together now,” Stephanie finally said.
Michael didn't answer.
“I don't know about you two,” said Pastor Bud, “but I'm planning to catch Old Joe today.”
Michael lifted his eyebrows in a question. “You're going to have to explain who Old Joe is.”
Stephanie did, grateful for the change in topic. Old Joe had been swimming these waters since she was seven, never mind that fish didn't live that long. The legend of Old Joe was enough to keep them coming out time after time, looking for the big one that would bend their poles and nibble their lures—only to swim off with everything from hook to sinker.
Michael nodded, and it occurred to Stephanie that he might be a good listener.
“That Old Joe has been good for a sermon illustration or two,” her father said, studying his line as they trolled just offshore. By this time, Michael had his own line in the water, lure and sinker properly attached.
“You think?” Stephanie laughed. “You've got to watch out for my dad. He sees a sermon illustration just about everywhere, but especially out here on the; lake.”
“Out here?” Michael said, looking around.
“Out here. Like the time I fell off the boat when I was four, and I wasn't wearing a life jacket.”
“That was a good one,” her dad said. “The illustration, I mean. Not what happened.”
Stephanie smiled. “And the time I came home with an owl chick when I was ten.”
“Another sermon illustration?” asked Michael.
She nodded and pointed to a spot just under her left eye. “Especially when I got my face too close, and it nipped me right in the face.”
“Ouch.”
“Wasn't his fault. He was just hungry. See this little scar?”
He leaned closer, which made her flush and turn away. What was she thinking?
“Oh, and the time—” her dad started, oblivious. He didn't finish, though, as his pole dipped. “Hold on, hold on!”
They sprang into action, Stephanie grabbing the net as her dad slowly reeled in his prize. She throttled down the outboard motor even more, and it sputtered and died.
In all the excitement, no one noticed Michael's pole until it was too late.
“Holy cow!” Michael yelled as it jerked out of the place he had wedged it. He reached for it and missed, and they watched helplessly as it went over the side of the boat and—plunk—into the lake.
Before anyone else could react, Michael tossed his wallet into the bottom of the boat and launched himself over the side in a perfect dive.
“You're kidding me!” Pastor Bud shouted.
Stephanie couldn't believe it, either. But if Michael didn't know anything about hshing, he knew how to move through water on his own power. With a couple powerful strokes, he overtook the pole just below the surface. Stephanie wondered if the net would be big enough to land both her dad's fish and the crazy Californian.
What do I do now? she wondered.
Michael tread water, holding his pole. Pastor Bud started laughing as he pulled in his fish, and Michael whooped and pulled on his lines, as well as he could from that angle.
“Here, here.” The pastor gestured to his catch. He brought it close to the side, and Stephanie scooped it up, as they'd done so many times before. They tossed their gear aside—along with the smallish rainbow trout Pastor Bud had caught—and turned their attention to landing Michael. The trick would be getting him back in the boat without swamping everyone in the process. He'd been in the frigid water for several minutes and had to be tiring. The waterlogged fisherman came in fairly well, though—Michael tossed his pole into the boat and then flopped over the gunwale with a grunt and a heave.
“The fish!” he gasped, out of breath and teeth chattering from the cold. But his line had gone slack, and from his knees, he reeled in the last of it.
“Oh, man! “ Michael dangled the lure, sans fish. Old Joe had slipped out of his grasp.
“Yup, that's what he does,” Pastor Bud reassured him. “Old Joe just grabs the lure and spits it out. What he's been doing for years. He's a crafty one.”
Stephanie wasn't worried about Old Joe. She grabbed a towel from the front of the boat and tossed it to Michael. “You better dry off before you freeze to death.”
“Thanks.” He took the towel with a smile, then looked at the pastor. “So how's that for technique? Does that give you another sermon illustration?”
Pastor Bud shook his head. “I couldn't believe it when you went over the side like that.”
“Well, I didn't want to get in trouble for losing your pole. Especially not on my first fishing trip.”
Stephanie started giggling, then chuckling. It spread to the others, and soon they were all laughing. Her dad held up his prize, still wiggling. That set off a new wave of laughter, until they were all helpless and out of breath.
“If I ever lose my pole, Mike,” Pastor Bud finally gasped, “I'll know who to call.”
“Sure. Anytime.”
Michael dried his hair with the towel, glancing quickly at Stephanie. He looked less like a cocky ex-soldier now and more like a waterlogged little boy, who was only here on vacation.
She looked away, finding lures in the tackle box that needed straightening.