Three things happened next that surprised him.
1. When he parked his truck inside the gate at the lodge and they walked down the sandy road to the cabins they did not hold hands or talk, but they walked slowly and their shoulders bumped in a genial rhythm and the aspen rustled. He felt easier in her company than he had in anyone else’s for a long time.
2. He slept like a log and dreamless until just before daybreak.
3. At very first light he coasted the cruiser bike down to the lodge. Just when he knew Shay would put out the first pot of coffee. And Cody was sitting on the edge of the porch, not in a chair but on the planks themselves, holding a steaming cup in two hands. He was lanky and loose-jointed even seated, and he had that air of a man squatting beside a campfire. Also he seemed to be listening to the daybreak breeze with his whole body. Jack had grown up with boys who could have been Cody’s cousins, or brothers, and he knew when a man was good to have in your outfit and probably dangerous otherwise.
“Morning,” Jack said.
Cody swiveled his head. Jack knew Cody had heard the crunch of the bike tires on pine needles, but he only looked up now. “Grab a cup” was all he said.
Jack did. Inside the lodge, no one was at the crackling hearth yet and the lights, the ones that were on, were dimmed. All but the standing lamp by the coffee setup. He liked the quiet. He went to the farthest of the three pots—he didn’t read the label, he was getting used to where they kept the dark roast—and he filled a mountain lion mug and walked back out to the porch, sat beside his colleague. The one whose truck had gone right through Kreutzer’s big security gate about sixteen hours before. Jack wanted to ask Cody how the fishing was yesterday afternoon, where he had taken the couple, etc., just to see how a kid like this would go about lying. But the wading boot in the spruce duff, the image of it, made him think twice. “Good day yesterday?” was all he said.
Cody shrugged. “Like every other pretty much.”
They were looking at the stocked fish pond ringed with aspen. No trout rose but a fat kingfisher sat on a dead limb almost over the water. It was a perfect perch and Jack wondered if the management didn’t cut it for a reason. Maybe it was entertaining to watch the bird hunt.
“You?” Cody said.
“Good. It’s good water.”
“About as fine as any mountain stream you’ll ever fish, I’d say. Except for Tomichi Creek, where you’re going today.”
“I am?”
“Yep. Jensen told me to tell you. Pack a lunch. Alison K marked it down for day three.” Cody stuck two fingers in the zip breast pocket of his Carhartt and fished out a key. It was on a marlin keychain, which seemed weird. But then Den probably had a fishing lodge in Barbados. The tail was a bottle opener. “There’s two gates, same lock.”
“What’s the opener for?”
“Mr. Den says it’s for cracking the Guinness when the client catches the biggest brown they’ve ever seen. I guess he never opened a bottle with the back of a knife.”
“Huh.”
From the same pocket Cody fingered out a folded slip of paper. “Here’s the directions. Simple but you’ll need to know the mileage from the turnoff. No cell service out there, either, so don’t bother mapping it. Also, there’s a new couple coming this afternoon. You’ll meet ’em at the bar before dinner.” Now Cody looked straight at Jack. The same flat gray eyes. Wolfish in their watchfulness. Dispassionate, and holding distances Jack bet no one had ever traveled. Cody said, “You haven’t been to happy hour much.”
“Just getting settled is all.”
Cody didn’t comment. He turned back to look at the pond. He sipped his coffee.
“Is Jensen gonna guide?” Jack said.
Cody winced. “Jensen?”
“Yeah. Is he gonna guide?”
“Jensen doesn’t guide.”
“Who’s gonna guide the new couple?”
Cody didn’t say anything. He watched the pond. After a while he said, “Maybe they don’t wanna fish. Some folks come just for the peace and quiet.”
Peace and quiet, Jack thought. Shots fired, and snarling mastiffs, and barn owls. But he kept his mouth shut.
Cody stood. “Refill?” he said.
“I’m good,” Jack said. “I’ll get one in a minute.”
He watched the pond. Gray green glass with tendrils of mist coming off the water. A spreading ring, now two, as of passing rain—the quiet feeding of a trout. The kingfisher held his perch. Jack heard the yaw of a screen door and he looked to his right, past the porch, and saw Shay come out of the back door of the kitchen carrying steel food trays, two stacked. She was wearing a maroon Arc’teryx softshell and a light knitted wool cross-country ski hat cocked jauntily on her forehead. She didn’t see him. She loaded the trays into the back of a golf cart parked there and pulled open the screen door again and disappeared inside. A moment later she came out with two more trays, loaded them on top of the others, then went back for two stainless insulated coffee urns like the ones inside, and a large carafe of orange juice. She packed those, too, climbed into the cart, and drove onto the track on the far side of the pond. The cart bumped silently on its electric motor up into the aspen. Jack knew that the cart path climbed the hill and passed behind the main office house and linked to the parking lot by the gate. On the far side of which were equipment and supply sheds. The carts were used by the housecleaning and maintenance staff, and apparently by servers like Shay.
Kingfishers are easily startled. Jack had fished with them all his life, and he liked how they would perch upstream and watch him work a creek—he liked to think it was one fisher observing another—but as soon as he waded up just a few feet to cast for new water they were off: a downward lilting arc with a swoop up to the next perch. And repeat. They were good company and he had fished with a single bird for miles. But Jack noticed that this bird did not even flinch as Shay drove the golf cart past his chosen tree: this was the bird’s territory and he must have watched her enact this ritual every morning and he was used to her.
The trays were the steel flats used by caterers and schools and made to slide into racks. The same used at the Orvis fishing camp in the Adirondacks he and Wynn had worked before their Canada trip three years ago. He figured Shay had loaded at least a score of breakfasts.
Were they for staff? He doubted it. As he had geared up in the mornings he had heard the sounds of cars entering the gate for the day’s work and later noticed the dozen vehicles parked next to his. Most of the workers except maybe Jensen, who seemed to live on the property somewhere, arrived having eaten already. Huh.
Jack heard the latch behind him and the clomp of packer boots and Cody sat beside him again at the edge of the porch. Didn’t say a word. Ten or fifteen minutes passed. Two young guides enjoying their first cup and just watching the dawn drain the last pockets of darkness out of the canyon. What could be better than this? Jack said it to himself, his mantra, and he tasted the coffee and then watched as Shay in her cart reemerged from the trees on the far side of the pond and swung in beside the kitchen door. She lifted her hand to Cody and then did a double take as she noticed Jack sitting right behind him. And she waved again, but tentatively. Jack waved back.
Had Shay seemed startled? Yes. He noted it. Noted it along with every other messed-up detail and sign. Sign of what? He had no idea. But they were starting to stack up.
Breakfast was faster than usual. Cody ate with his golden couple out on the deck, beside the open fire. Jack glanced out there a few times and thought they seemed dulled again—no quick smiles and easy laughter, no spirited hand gestures of a caffeine-fueled story. She wore a long-billed fishing cap for the first time, pulled down low. Noted. Will and Neave ate at their table closest to the hearth, as far away as they could be from him and Alison K. They barely nodded a greeting, and they had dark circles under their eyes as if bruised, and again he thought they looked hungover.
He and Alison ate with gusto and didn’t say much. Not out of any awkwardness, but because they didn’t have to. He had never felt such easy concord with a woman. Not that he had a ton of experience. After he’d broken it off with Cheryl he’d been with a couple of girls at Dartmouth, but they were flings, he guessed. One was kindled on an outing club wilderness ski trip up in the college grant just before Christmas, a week of cutting cross-country ski tracks through deep woods and camping beside iced-over brooks. So cold even the ledge drops were frozen, and they’d used an axe to break the glass beneath them. She was Margaret, a generous-spirited New Hampshire girl who had grown up with horses as he had, and he thought he might love her. It had lasted into March, until she’d had to leave school for good to take care of her dying mother. Jack had never understood why she’d broken it off; he had a truck, after all, he could’ve driven over a couple of days a week. The other was pure spring fever, a senior who had chatted him up during a bluegrass hoedown at his friend Andy’s cabin. Andy was a nut—a hellacious rock and ice climber, banjo player, and brilliant engineer who did zero anything by the book. Jack had met him at the first outing club meeting he and Wynn had attended freshman fall. There were maybe forty students seated around this giant cedar table, and Andy started whispering to Jack French Canadian jokes told in accent. Jack the introvert had been charmed and responded with some of Uncle Lloyd’s cowboy jokes. They both laughed so hard they’d gotten kicked out. Andy’s truck was outside and he had a six of PBR on the front seat and they’d driven down to the river and polished it off and told the rest of their jokes and stories with appropriate levels of volume and were fast friends after that. Andy graduated that spring and got a job just upriver at the US Army’s cryogenic research lab and often invited Jack and Wynn out to his place for dinners and music nights. Usually seven or eight showed up with instruments and it was either bluegrass or old-time country à la Merle Haggard. The group was outside on a late April night playing “Ramblin’ Fever,” and Jack was leaning against the cabin wall with a Dos Equis, and the singers were lofting into the chorus when he heard a contralto to his right and he practically bumped into the prettiest girl he had seen since he’d left Colorado. Pretty like I’m-going-to-Duke-Medical-School-and-I-can-run-seven-minute-miles-through-hills pretty. That had lasted just over a month until she’d graduated.
But this was different. Very. Suddenly he wasn’t making an effort, not any at all, and he didn’t feel in her company like he was some stranger to himself.
They ate breakfast fast; threw his pack, a small cooler, and their fishing gear into the back of his truck and drove out to the bottomland ranch and the slow, winding blackwater creek.
They fished for four hours straight. Like many creeks that meander through the broader valleys of the West, the private upper stretch of the Tomichi twisted on itself and twisted back in a series of looping bites as if resisting with every turn its surrender to a larger stream. It would take its own sweet time and nose into every oxbow and never offer a view past the next tight bend. Jack thought it was like reading some of the South American novelists who drove him crazy and whom he couldn’t stop enjoying. How their stories twisted and mazed and got lost in themselves. On Tomichi, the same intractable spirit wound the stream through thick walls of willows and alders. The thinnest margin of gravel bar here and there, but mostly the brush was overhanging. It was hard wading and there was no place at all to stretch out a cast. It was as if God had designed a creek to harbor the balkiest brown trout on earth. Jack had heard stories of some truly great fishers getting skunked out here.
At least there was no wind to speak of. The clouds blew by on their own cold currents and striped the bends with shadow, but down on the water the dark pools were nearly glass. And the morning warmed fast and the hatches drifted up and sparked in sunlight; and with a few tips from Jack, Alison got her roll cast going and flipped her nymphs across the creek without snagging the brush.
She hummed, and he relished the professional distance he kept between them as she fished. Sometimes she sang to herself. And it was strange—her voice was so rich, and broke so sweet, and seemed to flow past itself in layers like sliding water—and there was so much truth in it, and pain—he felt that it wreathed him. He didn’t need to touch her. He stayed back the guide’s four feet and he enjoyed just watching: she kept a rhythm in her casts, and in the stripping in of line, and in her steps forward, as if she were using the music in her head to keep time.
They ate lunch in the sun on the one sandbar broad enough to sit on. He bit into the chicken salad on toast and inhaled the slow-water tannin scent of the creek. The light gleamed off the narrow leaves of the willows the way it does only in late August. They shared a bottle of ginger kombucha and then shared another.
In the early afternoon they saw the silent rings of the trout dapping the surface and after that she casted a single light dry fly. She flipped it backhand up under the branches and let the tiny pale tuft touch the water as if blown on the breeze.
“Pure,” she said over her shoulder. “Feels pure.”
“All fishing’s pure,” Jack said.
“Right, if it’s so pure we don’t need to get grandiose and talk about it.”
“What I was going to say.”
She caught fish. Not many, but one brown that seemed to fill the net with such muscular defiance Jack released it with relief and a quiet salute.
As the sun lowered over the Sawtooths they turned to each other and without a word they packed it in. They found a break in the brush and pushed through. They climbed over a sagging barbed-wire fence, and followed the ruts of a four-wheel track through sage and wheatgrass back to the truck. Warmer here than in the canyon. They sat on the tailgate and pried off the wading boots and then stood on the dirt and pushed and tugged off the waders one leg at a time.
“What could be better than this?” Jack murmured.
“What?”
“What I always try to tell myself. What could be better than this?” He was sitting on the tailgate and she was standing on one leg wrestling to get the wet neoprene sock of her wader over her heel. She glanced up at him and blew a strand of hair off her face and her greenish eyes were lit in the long sun.
“I like that,” she said. “Why do you have to try to tell yourself?”
Jack shrugged and reached beside him and pried off the lid of the cooler with one hand and dug a can out of the ice. “Hawaiian Punch. I’m sure there’s beer in here.”
“I’ll take it,” she said, and reached a hand out unsteadily, still on one leg like a heron. “Thanks. That was pretty special.” She raised the can. “And this is the hardest part of fishing, for sure—getting off the waders.”
“Hold on.” Jack hopped down. “I forgot my job.” He knelt beside her and she bent the wadered knee and held her foot back like a horse waiting to have her hoof picked, and he tugged on the bootie and almost pulled her off balance, and then he set a hand on the back of her hip and tugged again. She was wearing black workout tights and there was nothing underneath them. He pulled the wader down and off and then she turned around. The hand that had been on her hip slipped over the rise and fall of her pelvis as she turned, and he was looking straight into a pitch of black nylon and the sheen of it off the swell of her pubis, and then he felt her hand on the top of his head. He felt dizzy.
“Um,” she said.
“Um.” He wanted her, and he didn’t. She was a superstar celebrity. Wynn had dated into a celebrity family once and it had not gone at all well. Jack knew that he’d end up being out of place and a burden for Alison, and he didn’t want to be a burden to anyone. Ever.
She cleared her throat. “I…I feel…” Her voice was husky. “You…” She stopped. She tapped the top of his head and when he looked up she was smiling. “You are…well…I could write a song about you. More than one.”
He smiled back at her now. Her smoky, musky scent was intoxicating. “And,” she said, “I’m paying you. Which feels weird. I don’t really wanna be that gal.”
Jack was surprised at the wave of relief. “Okay,” he said.
“Okay. So turn around if you want. I’m gonna try to get these tights off.”
They sat on the tailgate in the lowering sun. They drank Hawaiian Punch happily, in the hum of endorphins and relaxed tiredness that can come after a full day fishing. Jack couldn’t hear the reticent creek, though it was just beyond the screen of willows, but he heard the evening trill of a meadowlark. It was unabashed and self-delighting. One of his favorite songs. She said, “I don’t wanna go back.”
“You don’t?” he said. “To the lodge?”
“Not right now.”
Jack checked his watch. “Four-oh-five. We’ll barely make it to the bar before dinner if we leave now.” He meant the bar at the lodge.
“Fuck the bar. Will and Neave can barely speak anymore. Those others, the blondies, they looked kinda beat-up this morning, too. Jeez.”
“I noticed that.”
“What the hell? What’s going on? Will and Neave don’t fish, the Youngens fish, supposedly, but we never see them on the river.” She rolled down the sleeves of her quick-dry shirt and buttoned the wrists. “Any ideas?”
Jack said, “This morning, just before you showed up for coffee, I saw Shay loading maybe twenty breakfasts into the back of one of those golf carts. On trays.”
“Twenty?”
“Just guessing. More than ten.”
“Who would she be taking them to?”
“She was heading upstream. That’s one thing. The little cart path goes to the parking area inside the gate. So either to a vehicle or on upriver.”
“To Kreutzer’s.”
“It’s only half a mile more.”
Alison chewed her bottom lip. “It’s like it’s another lodge. Like maybe they have a bunch of guests there, too, but for some reason we’re not supposed to know about it.”
“Yeah, right. I keep thinking about the boot.”
“The boot?”
Jack’s mouth closed. He had forgotten that he hadn’t told her.
“What boot?”
“I don’t want to freak you out. A guide’s supposed to keep certain things to himself.”
“What thing have you kept to yourself? I’d say you’ve been free with all your things lately.”
He laughed, couldn’t help it. Last night in the truck seemed like a dream. Now she shook her hair out of her cap and it was a mess and she looked righteous and pleased with herself. “Point taken,” he said.
“So stop being coy. Is this how cowboys are?”
“When you caught your fish by Kreutzer’s and I went across the river to pee, I saw a boot.”
“So?”
“Just the edge of it. Sticking out of a bed of spruce needles. All hidden in those thick trees. The ground had been disturbed. It was a wading boot.”
She didn’t say anything.
“The ground around it had been roughed up, about the size of a tent. Or a grave. So that night I went back. I went to the same spot, I’m dead sure. There was no boot and the ground had been smoothed over. That’s when I heard the scream.”
“The owl.”
“The owl.” Jack blinked at her, into the sun. “The guide I’ve been hired to replace left in a hurry was what Kurt told me.”
“Kurt. Kurt Jensen.”
“Right.”
“Mr. Kurt has an interesting relationship with the truth,” she said.
“That’s what’s dawning on me.”
Her eyes darkened. They were pretty when they were lit, but when a shadow moved into them they were so beautiful they stopped his breath. “Are you saying…?”
“I’m not saying anything,” he said. “I just wonder if you shouldn’t check out. Maybe say you’ve been called back to Nashville or wherever for urgent business.”
“Asheville.”
“Asheville?”
“Mountains of North Carolina. I like to fish, remember?”
“So, Asheville. Maybe you shouldn’t finish out the week—”
“Ten days.”
“A lot can happen.”
“You chew, right?” she said.
He nodded.
“Let me have some.”
“You?”
“Singer can’t smoke. Shouldn’t.”
He fished the tin out of the back pocket of his Wranglers, handed it over.
Jack said, “Did Mr. Den say his first name? When you talked to him?”
“Sure. His name’s Nicholas. Nick.”
Out of a front pocket, Jack now slid his phone. “No cell service. Let’s go.”
“Where?”
“Back toward town. I have an idea.”
She didn’t say “You do?” She reached in the back of the truck where she had folded a fleece vest. “What’s in the bucket?” she said.
“Fencing tools. I leave it in there out of habit.”
She tipped it toward her. “Fencing tools, come-along, can of staples…”
“How do you know that stuff?”
“Country girl, remember?”
“Hunh.”
“Dynamite? Three sticks?”
“Don’t you have bedrock in North Carolina? Places on the ranch even the Hulk couldn’t dig a post.”
She turned her face back into the sun and her eyes lit and her laugh challenged the meadowlark.
They didn’t get decent cell reception until they were nearly three miles from town, so she said they might as well go in and have a beer. He said they’d be lucky to make the lodge dinner at all at this rate and she said, Fuck it, we might as well just eat in Crested Butte while we’re at it. He asked if that wouldn’t raise suspicion, and she said, Of what? That we’re boinking? And he laughed and she said as they drove that it must happen all the time, the guide-client thing, and they’d probably be suspicious if they weren’t. She was right, probably, but Jack still felt uneasy. He had the feeling, with no evidence to support it, that the lodge did not take kindly to guides and guests going AWOL. But she was paying the bill, what were they going to do? Fire her? His elbow was out the window and he shivered but it wasn’t from cold.
The town was less packed tonight and they parked right on Elk and walked a block down to the Dogwood. They couldn’t get their old table, but they got the four-top next to it in the window, and the waitress saw them from the bar and lifted her chin, turned herself sideways in the crowd, and raised her tray to get through. She recognized them and put down waters and unhooked the mask from one ear to reveal a big smile. “Blowdowns?” she said.
“Yep,” Alison said. “Good memory.”
“Eating?” the girl said. She was beaming again, as if she didn’t at all believe the llama-raising story.
“Definitely.”
“Okay, I’m Molly. Back in a sec with the beers.” She took two narrow happy hour menus out of her apron pocket, slid them onto the table, and dove back into the crowd.
“So much for social distancing,” Alison said.
“Right?”
“What was your idea?” she said.
“Hold on, I’ll come around.” Jack moved to the seat beside her and pulled out his phone.
There was a candle in a glass on the table and Alison took out an ancient Zippo. Jack loved the snick and scrape of the old lighters as they opened. Uncle Lloyd had one with which he fired up a cigar once in a while.
“Ambiance,” she said, and lit the candle.
“I thought you didn’t smoke,” Jack said.
“Nope, the lighter was Papa’s. It’s good luck.” She showed it to him. The nickel plating was worn to black at the edges and was stamped with a Harley on one side and a white-tailed deer on the other. “His two passions,” she said. “And me, of course.”
They googled Mr. Nicholas Den. There was a Scot whose Spanish land-grant ranch, the Royal Rancho, comprised most of Santa Barbara County in 1880, but that wasn’t him. Then there was a Trinity College, Oxford, and Yale PhD biochemist who now lived in London and had invented synthetic RNA, whatever that was. His company, DenGen—Nicholas clearly had a sense of fun—was bought by the German agri-pharma giant BauerSpahn for…
“Holy crap.” Alison squinted into the phone and pressed her icy beer bottle against the side of her face.
“Two-point-one billion dollars,” Jack said.
“And stock, worth half a billion more.”
She squinted again into the phone. “Ddddddddddddd—reading sounds…” she said. She read faster than he did. “Okay listen to this,” she said. “He was a major investor in PreVen—the dude can’t help himself, I’m surprised it wasn’t called PreVenDen—a Dutch company that was working on a promising vaccine for Covid Redux. It failed in its second clinical trial.”
“That’s Wiki. Let’s go back.”
Jack scrolled down the pages of search hits for Den. Awards, DenGen announcements, conference speaking engagements—Den had spoken all over the world about the medical and industrial potential of synthetic RNA, which included medical therapeutics and gene analysis. “Funny, there’s nothing recent about Den and the Kingfisher Lodge. Hold on.” Jack searched for the lodge and found the usual reams of promotional hits, articles in Travel + Leisure, in the American Express Platinum magazine Departures, testimonials from world-class fly fishermen and -women.
“Hey,” Jack said. “Apparently he’s got more than one. Fancy five-star fishing lodge. Here in Traveler it says, ‘just one of the premier lodges in the Seven collection.’ Seven, that’s the company. Damn.”
“Go back to Den,” Alison said. He did. He flipped back to page nine of hits and rolled down with his thumb, snagged on something, scrolled back. Jack recited: “Simba, beloved red lion of Hwange National Park, shot by biomedical pioneer Nicholas Den. Special permit awarded by the government of Zimbabwe. The Los Angeles Times.”
He clicked on the link and they put their heads together and read in silence beside the big window. Out on the street tourists streamed by, the sky over the brightly painted wooden houses deepened into a bowl of clearest blue. In the bar, the gregarious babble around them did not cease. A plate of cheese nachos slipped in front of them and they looked up and Molly was grinning. “On the house.” She swapped their empties with fresh cold ones. “These I’ve gotta charge for.” Jack looked up and touched his cap, Thanks. He felt lucky in Alison’s company. He thought they must project something good together, out here in the world. Back at the lodge it was different; back there, he was feeling more and more…what? Suspect maybe. Isolated. And he didn’t know why.
“Bastard,” Alison muttered. “No words. Look, he worked with the Hwange Conservation Project to reopen lion hunting in the park. Rationale given that revenue from the few pricey permits would bankroll conservation efforts. Un-frigging-believable. Look at the smarmy sonofabitch.” She reached with a finger and tapped the news photo. There was Den, a handsome rogue, dark-haired, lean, hint of a smile, squatting with his rifle under a savannah tree and holding up the head of the gorgeous lion with the glorious ruddy mane.
“Can I scroll back?” Jack said.
She nodded.
“Created quite a stink. Not much in the news after that,” Jack said. “Looks like he and his publicists decided he better lay low for a while.”
“Let’s go,” she said. She tipped back the new beer and drank half, clacked it down on the wood table.
“Right now?”
“Yes.” Alison dug two twenties out of her jeans and set them under the wet beer. “I wanna go to the bar at the lodge. I wanna meet this new couple you mentioned. What time is it?”
“Five fifteen.”
“Okay, you better drive like you mean it.”
He drove back fast with the warm evening rushing in the open windows and the country station turned all the way up. They dropped off the aspen ridge and thumped over the bridge and turned up the Taylor River and just before they entered the canyon, in an open bottomland of meadows and cottonwoods, they saw a figure running up the road. A slight figure in white—a white robe? A hospital gown? As they passed they saw it was a thin black-haired girl. Her face was scratched and she looked wild and panicked and she was in a hospital gown and she was barefoot. Alison craned her head out the window and looked back and yelled, “What the hell?” But they were already around the bend.
Jack pulled over into the purple asters and overgrown grass of the shoulder. “We gotta…”
“Check it out,” she yelled over him. He spun the wheel and lurched forward and cranked a three-point turn. He gunned it back onto the pavement and they came around the bend and Alison popped off the radio and cried, “Wha—?”
Pulled up on the opposite shoulder was a squad car, lights flashing, and a deputy in a tan uniform was out in the road wrestling the girl. He had her bodily in the air and he slammed her against his hood and the gown shifted and they could see her bare bottom and then he had one arm and then the other twisted back and he was cuffing her. Just then he looked up and saw them. He waved, nodded, like All under control now, thanks for stopping, and he put his hand on the top of her head and as gently as he could he settled her into the back seat. Then he got in the front, pulled closed the door that said gunnison county sheriff, and pulled back onto the county highway. And then he did something that surprised them both: he didn’t turn around and head back to town. Instead he accelerated up the canyon, the way they were going, and was around the bend and gone.
“What the heck was that?” Alison said.
“Beats me. Maybe the newest virus, I don’t even know what they call the latest one. Maybe it was someone breaking some sort of quarantine.”
“Yeah,” Alison said. “That’s probably what it was. They have quarantine centers in the damndest places.” But she forgot to turn on the music again as they drove back, and she was quiet and thoughtful the whole way.
Neither of them showered. They had to pass the little path down to Jack’s cabin on the walk to the lodge, so they just dumped the pack and their fishing gear onto his porch. He held open the screen for her and they both splashed off in his sink and she pulled her thick hair back into a band and they went on down the track. “Listo beasto,” she said. He carried the little lunch cooler, that was it.
At the bar it was as festive as Jack’s first night. The mood swings were jarring. They pushed through the heavy door from the porch into a room alive with conversation and the smells of rum and fresh baked biscuits. The Cuban son “Candela” poured from hidden speakers. Will and Neave were on stools at the corner looking just as rich but much more rested and energized. Next to them were the fleecy blond Youngens, laughing and talking loudly—the days of proximity seemed to have finally created some sense of cohort. Cody was there, too, beyond them, unsmiling but not unhappy, with a longneck in front of him. And all of their attention was turned to the new blood, a very attractive—Jack would have to say beautiful—young couple. They might have been thirty. She wore a simple, snow white button-down longsleeve that might have been a fishing shirt, and it so contrasted with the straight fall of her glossy black hair it was impossible not to stare. Her olive skin was tan, as if she’d recently spent days outside. He was compact and lean in a tailored khaki shirt and had an easy smile. Jack noticed right away that they both moved with a perfect comfort in their own skins and that their eyes were intelligent and curious. They carried a certain authority he sensed was rarely but deftly administered. At least they looked like fisherpeople. As he and Alison stepped to the bar, Ginnie called out, “The wayfaring strangers! Brilliant! Welcome. I think you two would fish twenty-four hours if there was some way to forgo sleep. Everybody, Jack and Alison. Jack and Alison, this is Yumi and Teiji—” The new couple turned on their stools and lowered their heads in a slight bow.
Well, now we’re getting somewhere, Jack thought. At last this looks like a fishing lodge.
Ginnie called, “Pull up a stool over here.” She gestured to the other side of the new guests and tagged them each with the forehead thermometer. “Jack, I’ve got your number”—she was already lifting an ice-cold Cutthroat ale from under the bar.“Alison, love, beer or”—she waved her hand over a line of mint-garnished tumblers—“can I sell you tonight’s mojito special?”
He almost managed to forget. The wider context. Sometimes the company is so congenial, the day’s fishing so glorious, the music and the drinks so spot-on…and the wonderful sense of having a new ally so restful and invigorating at once…it was easy to forget. Yumi and Teiji were charming. They were just to his left, and they broke away from the main conversation for a few minutes to ask Alison and Jack about the day’s fishing. Amid the telling, and in their few but carefully considered questions, the new couple betrayed a thoughtfulness and knowledge that went beyond politeness. They clearly took fishing seriously and were not here just for the peace and quiet.
Alison invited the two to join them for dinner. The four sat at the table by the window overlooking the river and the snowy rapid below. The sun was settling into the V of the canyon downstream and the river funneled and held the sprayed light. It warmed the pines and flushed the sandstone rimrock and gleamed in the lush greens of the alders and box elders at water’s edge. Again Jack thought, There is no more than this. But there was. Shay brought out a chilled Chardonnay to pair with tonight’s Cornish hen, and she held the bottle in a wrapped cloth for inspection by the guests, all of whom nodded amiably, and when she got to Jack her eyes slid away.
The conversation moved easily from fishing to when everybody arrived and where they were from. The new couple had flown from their mountain house outside of Sendai in the north of Japan’s main island—they had the house because they loved to ski in winter almost as much as they loved to fish—and did Jack, the Colorado native, know that the snow in northern Japan had been compared favorably to the champagne powder of Colorado and Utah?
“Of course,” Yumi interjected, perfectly timed so as not to interrupt her husband, “nothing in the world can compare to the majesty and the distances of the Rocky Mountains.”
The distances. Charming. She meant actual square miles, Jack thought, but there were distances here Jack suspected did not exist even in the Himalaya, and they had something to do with how the mountains lived in the imaginations of the people who grew up among them. Jack recalled aloud that Sendai was in the Tohoku region, wasn’t it? Made famous by Bashō’s Narrow Road to the Deep North, and Yumi raised an eyebrow and Teiji cocked his head to the side and studied Jack anew.
“Do you know it? The greatest work of the greatest haiku master?” Teiji asked.
“Yes. I have it with me. I keep an apple box of my favorite books in my truck.” Jack rarely betrayed his erudition, but he had never met anyone outside of college who knew anything about Bashō, much less anyone who knew the actual physical territory, and he felt himself getting excited.
“Really?” Yumi said. “So you are an admirer of the poetry of our Green Peach?”
Yes, Jack thought. More than an admirer. And he knew that Green Peach was one of the master’s early nicknames, taken in deep respect for Li Po, who lived nine hundred years before, and whose name translated from Chinese as “White Plum.” The only course he and Wynn had ever taken together was a class on Japanese poetry. It had been hands down Jack’s favorite class. But Jack just said, “Yes.”
Teiji, it was clear, was a very polite and considerate man. But he was intrigued now, and he evidently wanted to know if Jack was a name-dropper or a serious reader. And so he laid his fork upside down on the edge of his arugula salad plate and said, “Do you have a favorite haiku?”
Jack laid his own fork aside. “I love many. Honestly, it depends what mood I’m in.”
Teiji nodded, as if acknowledging a well-played point in tennis. “Which one would suit you now, for example?”
Jack cleared his throat. Alison watched the two closely, fascinated. Jack seemed more like a kid than she had ever seen him. His guard was down. “Gimme a minute,” Jack murmured. “Please.” He closed his eyes for just a second, as if trying to hear the vanishing song of a bird. When he opened them he said, “Tonight I’d have to say: The temple bell ceases— / but the sound continues to toll / out of the flowers.”
“Bravo!” Yumi cried, and made rapid claps with flattened palms. “I love this poem, too.”
Teiji was smiling as if he’d been rooting for Jack the whole time, which he probably had. Jack looked down at his bread plate shyly. He thought, You don’t know that it suits me now because the sounds that stop, but keep resonating, are not always lovely.
“Do you know Bashō?” Yumi said sweetly to Alison, making sure she was not excluded from the conversation.
Alison smiled, Jack thought, with some mischief. “Not too much,” she said. “I’ve heard of him. My neighbor has the one about the frog and the pond chiseled on his gatepost.”
Well, she was charming them, too. She was sticking with her salt-of-the-earth, mountains-of-Carolina persona, which, Jack thought, was exactly who she was.
By the vichyssoise, they were talking about the newest coronavirus. The latest one that was moving across Central Asia and had already arrived in Beijing and the US. It was not as deadly as the one that had ripped through South Asia two falls ago, but it was of grave concern because it seemed to be mutating faster than the others. Teiji averred that Japan, of course, was a leader in testing and real-time tracking, and had managed to isolate and contain most outbreaks in the past few years. Alison said that the US did not have nearly the sophistication or precision of identifying who was immune and who was vulnerable through each wave, perhaps because of the sprawl of the country, but also because of its culture of lionizing individualism, and she thought that people here were almost resigned to having novel and not-so-novel coronavirus seasons the way we have flu seasons.
“But of course the mortality rates are much much lower, now that we’ve all speeded up the production of therapies and vaccines. So it really is almost like the flu.”
“Of course,” Yumi said politely, and her husband politely nodded.
By the time they were served the fresh Maine blueberries in cream and maple syrup, and Cognac, which all declined, and decaf coffee, which all took, Jack understood that this considerate and modest couple were a team to be reckoned with, and he bet they were exceptionally good trout fishers.
Jack excused himself after the first cup of coffee, and thanked Yumi and Teiji for the company. He said he had some gear to organize before bed, traded a quick to be continued glance with Alison, and stood.
He went out the heavy door into the icy star-filled dark—clear again, this time probably frost—and on the porch he turned right instead of left.
He had never smoked but he wished he did now. So he’d have an excuse to stand outside the kitchen’s back door and take in the night. He knew that Shay smoked back there though she wasn’t supposed to. It was one of the first things Kurt had said to him after shaking hands—no smoking on the premises anywhere. Private time on the river was the one exception. He had nothing against his guides smoking a cigar or whatever as they fished on an evening off. What could be better, right?
When Kurt said it, Jack had looked up sharply at the enlistment of his mantra, though he understood that the manager was using it more as a rhetorical weapon than a prayer…He also knew that Shay liked to step out back and walk around the west side of the lodge and chuck grease or greasy water over the bank. Though he doubted she was allowed to do that, either. But he’d wait anyway. It was still early enough, he wasn’t going to lose any sleep. He zipped up his down sweater and leaned against the logs by the back door.
He looked up and saw the great canted W of Cassiopeia surfing the trees of the low ridge to the north, and above it the Little Dipper swinging from its handle around the North Star. Hard to get lost in a place where so many of the nights are clear. If you move at night. And that made him think about the river and the bridge and if anyone at all was really monitoring the cameras in the middle of the night. And Kreutzer’s—what was the security perimeter like around that lodge? If there really was anything beyond a heavy gate and tall fence—and perhaps a crazy old coot looking out one of his windows through a spotting scope. Though he doubted that story more and more. And as he let his eyes wander along the ridge eastward, upstream, and tried to capture the constellations that swam there in the net of his knowledge—admittedly not vast in the realm of astronomy; he knew a handful of the most prominent connect-the-dot figures—he thought of his father.
What would Pop be doing now, under these same stars? Probably reading at the kitchen table and not seeing anything beyond the plate window but the reflection of his own lamp, and his own face maybe above the book—a man not yet fifty wearing his granny reading glasses that Jack teased him about, a man not old but going gray, from grief probably, and dashed hopes.
He wondered how his father thought of that morning on the Encampment fourteen years before. How he would remember the four horses stringing along the steep rocky slope in thick trees above the roaring gorge. His father was first on Dandy, the old outfitting horse who never ruffled, leading the flighty half-Arab BJ on a loose rope with the packs; and then his mother on sweet big-boned Mindy, because he, Jack, at eleven decided this morning he wanted to ride sweep. Did Pop remember the sounds as Jack did? The dainty click of Dandy’s hooves as he crossed the sloping granite slab, the cluck as Pop encouraged him to cross, the gentle tug on the lead rope to the packhorse and then: the toss of bit rings and struck stone as BJ startled at something and balked back. And his mother. The gust of alarm: Mindy already halfway across, having to bunch back, too, behind the startled Arab. He would never forget the sharp scrape of Mindy’s scrabbling hooves as she lost her footing on tilted rock, his mother up in the stirrups and forward over her neck urging the horse to hold to the slope, trying to get her up in the steep duff above the slab, the thunder of the rapid in the narrow chasm too far below. How the horse scrabbled and slid backward and went over the edge, the two of them for a moment suspended, it seemed, in midair. He saw them hit the white torrent. For a moment, miraculously, they were swimming, she was grabbing for the saddle, then they went over what must have once been a ledge but was now the hump of a breaking wave that rolled down into the trench of a thundering backward-breaking hydraulic, they vanished, came up once, first the mare’s dark head, then his mother’s arm before they slammed into the wall and were tugged around the bend.
For years afterward he dreamt that the moment she fell and hit the air she took flight. She and the horse both did, and lifted and flew over the other side of the gorge. Her favorite bird had been the great horned owl. “What do you think he’s saying tonight?” she would ask Jack whenever they heard one. And for years afterward, whenever one of the huge owls flew over him at night, he believed it was she, gliding by to touch him, to remind him that she loved him.
No owl now. Jack swallowed and breathed. A cigarette would be good, really good, right now. Or one of those mojitos he wasn’t allowed to drink because he was a guide limited to two beers; or how about a mojito without any of the fancy limeade and mint parts, just straight rum, that would be good, too. He was thinking about that when he heard the latch of the door; yellow light fanned across the packed sand where they had parked the golf cart and he heard Shay’s hoarse laugh, as she said, “That sure as shit is not happening, Gionno, but thanks for holding the door!” and she backed out into the night carrying a twelve-quart stainless pot and pirouetted and gasped. She was almost face-to-face with Jack.
“Whoa, sorry,” he said.
“Man, you scared the crap out of me. Lucky this thing is half-full.”
“Let me take it.”
“I got it. Be right back. Meanwhile you think of a good excuse for being here.” She disappeared around the corner and he knew she was tossing whatever was in the pot down the slope. He bet she did it just to get outside, and just to do something—one thing—not allowed.
“That’s not allowed, is it?” Jack said when she came back. “Jensen would be mad.”
“Nope and yep,” she said, and put the pot down on a patch of grass. “This isn’t allowed, either.” She dug in the front pocket of her tight Wranglers and pulled out a hard pack of Marlboros. She held it out to Jack. Her sleeves were rolled up and he caught sight of the little anchor tattoo on the inside of her wrist. “You?” she said.
“Thanks.” Why not? he thought.
“You’re gonna work here, you better take up smoking and drinking.”
“Yeah?”
She fingered a lighter out of the same pocket and struck the flint, cupped her hand for Jack, then lit her own, inhaled deeply. “Tight damn ship,” she said. “Too tight. Have you noticed?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“More things not allowed than are.” She blew out to the side. “Let’s see, what’s allowed? Working your ass off, or…fishing, eating, being a billionaire. Kurt’s certainly not gonna tell Sir William Barron not to smoke on his porch.”
“Sir?”
“Knight of the British Empire. Bona fide.”
“No shit. He doesn’t have an accent.”
“ ’Cept when he gets tanked. You haven’t seen that yet.”
“Nope. What’d he get knighted for?”
“Designing a wind turbine that wouldn’t turn to matchsticks in a North Sea hurricane.”
“Whoa. What about her?”
“Dunno, Neave never says anything. It’s quite the clientele. You seem to be enjoying your fishing buddy.” She flicked the ash, surveyed the stars. When she looked at him again her eyes were moist. “I could use something stronger, you?”
“Better not. Gotta be on my game in the morning.”
“Huh. Everyone here’s on their game all the time. Trying to improve themselves. That’s what this place is all about.”
“It is?”
She didn’t say anything. She held the cigarette in the corner of her mouth and from the same magic pocket she pried out a small vial. She shook the white powder into the pocket between thumb and forefinger and snorted, blinked, wiped her nose, and shoved back the bottle. She was a pro. Now she blinked the wetness out of her eyes.
“Better.”
Jack didn’t say anything. Shay was pretty, probably a year or two older, and had the speech and bearing of someone who had attended the best schools and expected the best of the world. Like many of the kids he had gone to college with. The coke, or whatever it was, surprised him, as did the cigarette. But then in her class of people there were always rebels, those who made a mission of subverting expectations. A friend of his from the canoe club was a Northrop—a Northrop Grumman Northrop—and had graduated two years before and gone to northern Michigan and become a cop. He wanted to ask her about the anchor, but instead he said, “Sir Will doesn’t fish. Doesn’t seem to. What’s he doing here?”
Shay crushed her cigarette against the log wall and squatted. From behind a potted lavender by the door she took a Ziploc bag and dropped her butt in with a bunch of others and tucked the bag back in its hiding place. She winced a smile. “Kurt has a nose on him. Okay, cowboy, it’s been fun,” she said, and turned.
Jack put a hand on her arm and he felt it tense under her blouse. It was not soft, she was very strong. He wanted to ask her about that, too: she was not much older but he’d bet she had worked ranches, or maybe boats—the kind of sailing yachts that had manual winches where the crew had to be super fit. But now she froze and he knew the moment could tilt in either direction. “Um,” he said. “I was wondering what those twenty-odd breakfasts were for.”
Her face was two feet away. She had always seemed game and fun. She always brought a gust of ebullient energy to the table whenever she came around with wine or a new course. Jack understood why Jensen, who seemed to know everything, would cut her a little slack when it came to a cigarette now and then. But now her eyes were sad, and he saw fear there, too.
“Can’t say,” she said.
“Can’t because you’d lose your job?”
Her eyes searched his. There was not the defiance in them he expected; instead it seemed she was looking for a place to land her boat, or anchor.
“NDA,” she said. She saw his puzzlement. “Oh yeah, you’re a cowboy. Nondisclosure agreement.”
His hand was still around her biceps. “Well, I need to know.”
“Well, tough.”
“Well, how about I mention to Kurt that you’re doing blow behind the kitchen?”
Her expression hardened. “Go ahead.”
“And then while you were jacked up you started spilling info on the guests. Like full names and who gets plastered.”
Jack saw the fear flash across her eyes again. There and gone, like a coyote running in shade at the edge of the trees.
“You’re not a snitch. I’ve been watching you.”
“I need to know,” Jack said. “It’s gone past polite.”
She sucked in a deep breath and yanked her arm from his grasp. “I know you probably live on a horse. But out on the range or wherever, you ever hear of celebrity rehabs?” Yep, they’d gone past polite. Jack didn’t say anything. “Well, they always end up in BuzzFeed or TMZ, you know those shots of the poor things in big sunglasses and T-shirts, hair all wild, trying to hide their faces as they exit some treatment center?” Now he nodded. “Well, there’s no paparazzi here. And these aren’t just hapless celebrities.”
Jack was trying to digest it. He said, “Will and…Neave, they don’t fish, but…they stay here, get treatment. The others at Kreutzer’s…” He trailed off. He was trying to fit puzzle pieces together. “But some do fish, like Alison…”
“Think about it, cowboy,” she said. Jack grimaced. “If the CEO of a major corporation is spinning out of control, needs to get clean, but if the board or whatever finds out, it’s splitsville, walk the plank, dude—well, where does the dude go?”
Jack was no longer looking at her. He wasn’t seeing the night anymore, either, his imagination and memory were traveling…what added up?
Now it was she squeezing his arm. “If you mention one word, I lose my job that fast. Not kidding. And get sued. I mean it. I like you, I do, but you just put me out on the thinnest ice and I’m not sure I appreciate it.” She spun around, swept the stainless pot off the ground, and shoved back into the kitchen.
On his way back up the road, a shadow stepped out from the trail to the pool house. A big shadow. Kurt. Jack could just see his face in the porch lights from the lodge. He was not happy.
“Thought I told you we discourage guides and guests from going into town.”
Jack stepped back. Instinct. He never let himself get into a grapple.
“How’d you know we went into town?”
Kurt didn’t say anything. He turned his head and spat. “You’re getting out on thinner ice,” he said.
“Second time I’ve heard that tonight. Why? ’Cause I felt like drinking something different than Cutthroat ale?”
“You make trouble, don’t you?” the manager said quietly. “Wherever you go.” He turned and walked back up into the shadows toward the main house.
That stung. That might be true, Jack thought.
That night Jack lay awake on the bed fully dressed except boots, with the Pendleton blanket pulled over him and his hands folded under his head. No reason he could articulate, except that he couldn’t sleep and somehow undressing, getting into sheets, slipping off, even, into sleep, would make him more vulnerable than he wanted to be right now. It had been a long day—of fishing, of being closer to Alison, of new people who were smart and challenging—of revelation. Was it? Revelation in Shay’s explanation?
He didn’t know. It wasn’t just Kurt. Something was off, as it had been at this place from the first moment he was shown his quarters. Even his vulnerability: he sensed danger, but he wasn’t at all sure why, or from where. He might be suffering from PTSD after all—what Wynn’s mother had gently suggested on the phone when he had called to check in last winter.
He wished he could talk to Pop. As reticent as his father could be, he was as clear-eyed a person as he had ever known, and had sound judgment to go along with it. Uncle Lloyd, too. Lloyd was an extravagant storyteller, and as much as he moved within a cloud of his own laughter, he shared with his brother that remarkable ability to see things clearly and to act with prudence and courage. Jack wished he could be like them. Maybe it was what he wished for more than anything, except for being able to do two days in his life over again.
It must have been a few hours before dawn when he drifted to sleep. The alarm on his iPhone went off and he shunted the blasts of the hunting horns into his dream, where he was on some kind of warship that had been rocked by an explosion and the bulkheads were gushing seawater and the PA speakers were blaring the all-hands siren. He woke with gray light in the windows and his heart racing and some kind of grief from the dream and he realized as he remembered the last images that there were no other crew in the gangways, no shouts or running sailors. It tore him—the utter solitude of the disaster. And as he sat up against the headboard he thought, or felt, that dying among a band of brothers, or within one’s tribe, was better than trying to get to a lifeboat alone.
He turned off the alarm, left the phone on the bed table, rubbed his eyes. How different we were than wild animals, or even house cats. They’d had one cat at the ranch they let in the house, and she slept on his legs or feet every night of his life until midway through high school, when she died. When she died she did not find her way to his bed, where he would have lifted her to her usual spot, but she vanished, and he found her a day later curled up in the dust behind the furnace off the laundry room. People need people, more than any other being needs any other being, and Jack thought as he sifted the remnants of the nightmare that the need makes us particularly vulnerable.
Well, he needed coffee. Maybe company, too. He would have loved the reassurance of Alison beside him in the night, but she was not at all clingy and she knew how to give a new friendship room to breathe. Was it a friendship? He didn’t know what it was. No need to label it. In the taxonomies of relationships there were plenty of strange outliers and hybrids.
He reached for the phone without looking and heard the thunk as it fell to the floor. Damn. Lucky it had a silicone case. Stiffly, as if he’d taken a long hike the day before, he eased out of bed and crouched into a crawl to look for his phone. Dim in the cabin and he didn’t see it, but he felt under the bedstead, which was a wooden box with maybe an inch gap above the floorboards. He could just get his fingers underneath it to swipe along its length. He did and hit the side of his phone, good, and pulled it out. Except it wasn’t his phone.
It was green. A green case with a pale pink stripe down the middle and the black spot pattern of a rainbow trout. Jack understood immediately that the phone was Ken’s. Now he was wide awake. It was an iPhone and, still on hands and knees, he touched the screen and it lit. Of course it did. Probably only four days since…he wouldn’t let his mind go there. Jack swiped the phone. It was not password protected. It opened on the voice memo app. There were two new recordings. One was titled “URGENT To the Next Guy.” The latest one said simply, “FUCKED.”
Jack tapped the first. The voice was young, breathless as if the boy had just been running. It was energized with near panic. “You’re the next guy. Prolly a guide. Some shit going on here, I don’t even know. Had a evening off, scouting elk for bow season, nothing says we can’t hunt…I saw the kids—”
The voice cut. Jack was on all fours and for a second he couldn’t breathe. He remembered the girl running down the road, the deputy intercepting her and slamming her against the car hood. Her terror-stricken face, the scratches on it.
He breathed. He hit the next memo, “FUCKED.” “Okay I’m fucked I think. If you’re listening I am, I really am.” Now the kid sounded beyond panic. “One of the mercs saw me. Sure of it. I told Jensen there was family trouble and I need out, sorry. Looked at me like I was a worm, said I was broken. Cuz of the…getting caught selling. Fuck him. That was a year ago, I was just helping Sean. Jensen said Den only hires broken people. Said nobody believes ’em. Fuck ’em all. Going back up for one more look and then I’m gone.” Kid had more nerve than Jack had figured. He was clearly scared and pissed off at once. “Den is watching everything. Check the thermostat” was the last thing he said. Then the memo cut.
Broken people. Nobody believes ’em. Us.
The heat was in Jack’s face. On his knees on the rag rug he was actually shaking. It was a blind fury. Is that the way they—Den, Kurt, whoever—saw him?
He moved his fingers up toward the head of the bed and felt his own phone and retrieved it. He AirDropped the two voice memos to himself and slid Ken’s phone back under the bed. He stood slowly, glanced at the Nest thermostat on the east wall, and couldn’t think of what to do except walk over to it. It was round and black with a digital screen in the center that said off. He ran his fingers around the cover and with a sharp pull he popped it off. And saw, stuck to a small circuit board, the camera lens. No bigger than the one on his phone, and unmistakable.
It faced the bed, took in the whole small room, porch door to headboard. If he felt angry and violated before, when he found the camera that watched him fish under the bridge, now it was a white rage. He was about to yank out the bead of lens, but stopped. He took a deep breath and swiftly replaced the cover and tapped the thermostat to on, and ran his finger up the screen until the digital number said 70. Anyone watching through the camera would only see a man who had slept in his clothes, probably too cold with just the blankets; see him approach the thermostat and deliberate and turn it on. And they would think that this tough young honcho guide was really a wimp after all.