Читать книгу Temperance Creek - Pamela Royes - Страница 21

Confluence

“When you fish for love, bait with your heart, not with your brain.”

—MARK TWAIN

My heart, like the circling hawk, rode the prevailing air currents in and out of sheltered draws and across open, grassy slopes. From Cow Creek, Annie and I followed the green, coursing Imnaha once again to the distant Snake. It was the middle of March and the eve of my twenty-first birthday. I’d quit college (disappointing no one but my parents, as far as I could tell), and moved into the Minam Schoolhouse. I was unemployed and unattached.

We reached the confluence of the Snake River late morning and picked up the trail to Eureka Bar. Ahead, on a wide grassy flat, we were surprised to see two horses, a bay and a buckskin. The bay was picketed by a foot to a long rope, the buckskin tied to a wizened hackberry tree and dozing in the sun, no one in sight. A bell around the bay’s neck clanged when she swung her head in our direction, announcing our presence. The sight of them gave me a breathless, sudden moment of joy. Horses.

Beyond the horses we followed the smell of frying fish and campfire woodsmoke. Above us, a canyon wren sang, and in the tuck of the next draw, pitched in a small grove of hackberry trees, we spotted a lean-to canvas tent painted with bold and colorful Native American designs. Before a dying campfire, a young man was relishing the last bites of an early morning catch from a well-greased skillet. From his squat position he straightened, beaming with pleasure as we approached.

“Annie,” he said.

“Hey there, Skip.” His was a strong-featured face, open and intelligent. He’d been eating with his fingers, and now he paused to pour a little water from a canteen into a basin, wet his hands, and then wipe them on his blue jeans. Totally at ease. Small-framed and muscular, he wore moccasins laced to the calves, button-up Levis (only one or two of the buttons secured), and a moss-green, tie-dyed long underwear shirt pushed up at the elbows. His wavy, shoulder-length hair was held back by a dark blue bandana and tied around the forehead. His bushy beard glinted red. Annie introduced us, and his hand, when I took it, was dry and rough and worn like a cedar plank. The kind of wood that endured wind and water and didn’t burr up. Stained and authentic, he was just the sort of man my father would disapprove of. The kind who wore his shirts untucked and tilted his chair back on two legs.

“I’d offer you breakfast, but I finished just as you were walking up. The fishing’s been outrageous. Been living on steelhead the last two weeks.”

“Darn. Bad timing,” I said, thinking of our meager rations. Annie and I dropped our packs to the ground.

“What are your plans?” Annie asked. “Where do you go from here?”

Skip poured a little water into the skillet and set it on the coals. “I’m looking to pick up some work. Ranching, packing, shoeing horses, that kind of thing, but definitely stay in the mountains, keep moving.” He threw us a Peter Fonda Easy Rider grin, crescent green eyes crinkling deeply at the corners. I tried not to stare, but I was mesmerized. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. I couldn’t think of what to say that didn’t sound naive or ridiculous.

“How did you get here?” I blurted.

He opened his hands, looking past me to the opaque Snake River rolling in the background, then back to us. “On a horse.”

We laughed, and when he didn’t offer more, Annie and I talked of other things.

Taking the skillet by the handle, he stepped away from the fire and flung the water in a high arc into the tall grass. He stooped and with a little sand scoured the bottom. Rinsing with fresh water from the canteen, he set it momentarily back on the coals to dry and sat down beside us. My gaze fell on a fishing pole leaning against a nearby tree. I envisioned pulling in a Very. Big. Fish. And eating it.

By now, Skip was telling a hilarious account of our friend Glen-boy riding the Snake River rapids with Styrofoam pontoons strapped on his feet. “It was miraculous, he was walking on water. He looked just like Jesus . . .”

We laughed, and when a silence fell again, I leaned forward. “Do you think I could borrow your fishing pole, Skip? I mean, I understand if you say no.”

“You fish?” he asked.

“Yes,” I replied, though I had never fished a river.

“Okay. But you’ll have to walk back to the mouth of the Imnaha to catch a steelhead. You’ll never get one to bite in the Snake, water’s too murky. What will you use for bait?”

I knew he was testing me, but the only logical answer was, “Worms?”

“Won’t need anything but the spinner, already on the pole.”

The river mouth was about a mile back. I looked at Annie, who’d removed her boots and sat propped against her backpack. She laughed, saying not to worry about her, to just catch one. I jumped up, grabbed the pole, and was walking away when I remembered the horses dozing in the thin spring sun, and I turned. “Would it be all right to borrow one of your horses?”

Then, he really looked at me. Maybe for the first time.

“Do you ride?” he asked.

“Yes,” I answered with confidence, betting it wouldn’t be easy to give his horse to this stranger who already stood clutching his fishing pole.

“You’ll have to ride bareback with a halter.”

I nodded.

“Okay, take Candy, the buckskin.”

“Really? Far out.”

“I’ll walk with you as far as the horses. I’ll need to tie Bonnie Bay up when you leave.”

My guess was he’d decided there’d be no way I could handle a horse bareback and hold onto a fishing pole, therefore making it possible to retract his offer. I watched his moccasin-clad feet moving on the trail ahead of me. Toes pointed slightly outward, his walk a rolling, confident extension of the terrain. His natural athleticism and exuberance was reminiscent of a hometown hockey player. What we would call a scrapper.

Once we got to the horses, I jumped from the uphill side and was able to swing onto Candy with pole in hand. I shouted thanks over my shoulder, found the trail, and rode out of sight. “Bet he didn’t expect that,” I said under my breath as I pulled the mare up and leaned forward to stroke her sleek, golden neck and breathe in her smell, all the stolen moments of pleasure associated with horses flooding back.

On the banks of the Imnaha I tied Candy to a small bush. I crouched on the boulder-strewn bank, hoping to glimpse a steel-head, and wondered at the ancient memory that drew them to run the gauntlet of dams and hooks, to return to spawn so far from their adulthoods in the Pacific Ocean. I imagined my flashing spinner in the water. Turning, I saw Skip. He’d followed me on the bay, now tied next to the buckskin. Over the rush of the river I called out, a little self-consciously, “I used to fish when I was kid. On a lake. With corn and marshmallows, a worm if I could find one.” He moved to stand near me, making it easier to converse. “I’d get up in the dark and row out, alone. I wouldn’t stop until my arms got tired. Early in the morning, the lake was so still.”

“Where?”

“Ottertail, Minnesota. We rented a cabin. Dad fished for walleye pike, but I liked the little fish, the crappie and perch, less intimidating. Not so many teeth,” I said, showing him mine. He nodded.

Briefly I pictured my dad’s shockingly white legs sticking out of his cotton swim trunks. How relaxed my parents were at the lake. They slept in. No one wore shoes; we trailed sand into the cabin and nobody scolded. It was the first indication I had that my parents were people, but people mysterious and unknown.

I unhooked the spinner and, with him watching, made my first awkward cast into the swirling Imnaha. It came up short, landing three feet in front of the pole. I glanced at him, grimaced, and held the pole out, wishing he’d take it. But he declined, seeming content to look on. So I cast out again, this time winding reel and line through a set of riffles and a deep, devotion-blue hole. While I learned to “take play” out of the line with my left hand, I guided the pole with the right, trying to keep the spinner to the edge of the moving water as told, and not in the middle. When I felt the lure tapping the rocks on the bottom, I waited tensely for the line to tighten and the tip of my pole to dip.

“Pick it up a bit,” he said, pantomiming the motion with an imaginary pole. “You want to keep your spinner moving, but stay off the bottom, so they can see it.” He found a boulder and perched on top of it.

“How long have you been here, Skip? In the canyons?” I asked, jerking the pole up as instructed and reeling. After a couple more casts, and getting no strikes, I lifted it out of the water, leaned it against a rock, and sat down next to him.

“Three, four years.”

“Before that?”

“I was in the Willamette Valley, hanging with friends, unemployed, trying to be a hippie. It was great for a while, living in a van and fishing all those pretty rivers. God, the fishing was good. But I couldn’t seem to find any rhythm, and I knew it was time to move on. It was January, no, February. I started thinking about these canyons, knew I could get into Hells Canyon early in the spring, but couldn’t get into the high mountains till late June.” He was staring at the river, stroking his mustache between thumb and forefinger and lost in memory. Then he looked at me and smiled. “I remember literally clicking my heels when I finally left.”

“That is exactly the way I felt about quitting school,” I said.

He gave me a conspirator’s nod, mischievous and bright, and then continued. “That first summer, I backpacked. Wore out two pairs of moccasins. The next summer I traded work with a rancher for the buckskin. I knew a horse would allow me to stay out for longer periods of time, say four months, before I’d have to re-supply. That summer I explored Hells Canyon and the Eagle Caps. Last summer, Candy, Bonnie, and I rode clear to the Salmon River country.” Shaking his head in amazement, he added with a broad grin, “That was an adventure.”

I imagined him alone, walking, and leading the buckskin. Saw rugged mountains, long summer days. Saw his moccasins worn through. He is brave, I thought with a sudden clarity, watching his eyes. The simplicity. Coming here. Trusting the tall, silent hills and possessing a freedom I had only imagined. To stay out here, what kind of sacrifices would that demand?

He got up, grabbed his pole, and motioned for me to follow. Above the next hole he lobbed a perfect cast and reeled it in. Then another. Apart from the small sideways glances we stole—we pretended the focus was fishing—the current, the line, the bait, the hook. I thought how fishing a river was all current, about keeping things moving and nothing like lake fishing. How this guy was not like anyone I’d ever met, and how my heart was flopping around like it had been pierced. I wanted to tell him how much I admired his wild, free life, but at the end of an hour, I didn’t know whether to let him kiss me, or whether to run for my life.

We didn’t catch a fish that afternoon. I don’t even remember getting a bite, but as we rode back toward camp, I felt eager, excited, and slightly panicked with the awful knowledge that we were about to go our separate ways. It was spring, we were alive, and life was in, and around, and beating through us. I was a girl, watching a boy, and he was watching me.

Around the campfire that evening we went out of our way to bump into each other and then apologize. Another three-quarter moon rose. When Annie retired, he looked at me. Shyly I followed him to his tent, knelt, and went in.

Under the canvas wings, cleaving open to the night sky and a thousand winking stars, we made love. He was ardent and attentive, and I was aroused and beguiled and soft, he said, grinning impudently. Which I took to mean I was still packing my baby fat. “Romantic,” I replied.

During the night when I mentioned that he was my birthday present, I was startled to learn that his birthday was the very next day, and on that morning, as the sun was pinking the ridges, the first thing he said was, “Why don’t you come with me?” I hesitated, wondering if I’d been anticipating this offer. I’d been seeing him as a loner, and here he was offering something else. What a fine thing that could be. To go with Skip. To say yes. Thinking how I fell for the rogues, the loners, the hoods, and the scrappers.

I should’ve been finding a job, working, getting serious about my future . . . and yet, I stood in the sun, having been offered the thing I truly wanted most: to know someone, someplace, on my terms. Discover something that could stand on its own. Up to this point, the few pieces I’d put together seemed utterly random and far short of making a whole. I didn’t want to make this decision now, I needed time to think about it . . . but somehow I knew if I held back, hedged, let Skip’s offer slip through my fingers, I would regret it.

There is the river. The canyon. The bait—a fly, a bug, a spinner, a hook with a worm breaks the surface of the water, and sinks, tumbling and turning. Beneath a jutting rock lies a fish, fins wimpling. Hungry, it pulses toward the bait, leaps, and leaps again, flashing underbelly yellow in the blue light. The world in that pool. All that I might be, all that I couldn’t be. And time, the only thing that mattered.

I couldn’t have been more naive about men, or about love.

“Yes,” I said. “I want to go with you. How long will we be gone?”

“Well, until we get back.”

We made the necessary arrangements to meet and then joined Annie for breakfast.

Walking out, I offered her a fumbling apology for my impetuous behavior and was relieved to hear her say she understood. She said what happened between Skip and me was like standing in front of a wildfire. Dazed, I thought about what I’d committed myself to . . . I had a little money, but not much . . . had just arrived in a place I loved . . . now I was leaving to ride the canyons indefinitely via horseback . . .

“I can’t believe I agreed. I don’t really know anything about him.”

“Well, I can’t tell you much,” Annie said. “Other than he was in Vietnam and they call him the wild man of the Snake River.”

Vietnam? Which explained everything and nothing.

“Oh, Annie,” I said. “What am I going to tell my parents?”