They saw no trout at first but strung the rods anyway. They were getting testy, they could feel reserves of goodwill sapping away. They needed to eat and they figured now, at least, if they got skunked with fish and protein they could scavenge for berries and consume enough calories to paddle out. A huge relief. They grounded the boat and Maia woke up and they hauled her higher onshore and unclipped the dry bag behind her and pulled out the rods. Wynn asked her if she needed help getting out or peeing or anything and she shook her head and the boys walked upstream a little and jointed their rods and began to fish. This time Wynn followed the brook into the divided country. His face throbbed and seared but it had gone dull and he could forget about it for minutes at a time. He needed a break from the river, and he needed a break from Jack. Also, he had never seen anything so oddly beautiful. The land rose gently away from the river eastward, there must have been some broad uplift beneath the soil, and so he could see the creek for a long way like some sinuous creature glinting in its scales and slithering down through the seam between the green and the black, life and death. The green side was feathery and unkempt, chaotic with being. The grass and brush along the bank, the flowers, limbs of the trees, all reached past each other for the light of the creek. He could hear warblers and thrushes. The black side was burned to soil; it had not much to say and was startlingly eloquent in its silence. Wynn thought the boundary was as stark and sad as Hades.
The wind rushed louder through the pines and moved the branches. His face felt as if a heated fork had been laid over his cheek, but as soon as he stepped into the water he forgot about it. He began to cast and the breeze pushed his fly, which was just a tuft of elk hair, toward the burn. He adjusted his cast and threw to the edge of the current. It felt very good to be alone with only the creek for company, the wind, the forest and the ghost of a forest on either side. He’d left his Wellingtons on the bank and waded up the sandy bottom on bare feet and the ice-cold water numbed his legs and he liked it.
He moved without thought. Flicked the caddis off the current and false-cast twice to dry the fly and let the loop overhead straighten and pointed his right thumb, which lay along the top of the cork handle, pointed it toward the center of the current with a straightening arm and let the wind push the fly south almost two feet and it landed on the seam, the wavering line between the eddy pooling along the shore and the push of flowing water, landed just an inch to the inside on moving current, right where he wanted the fly to be; it touched the silvered surface and began to bounce and bauble down toward him through the riffle. Perfect. He began to hum. Unconsciously at first and then he caught himself, it was one of the tunes that Jack sang, “Little Joe the Wrangler.” He cast again, two feet farther upstream, where the eddy was darker and deeper, where a fish might be seeking more cover from kingfishers and eagles, and he thought what a sad tune it was, the little cowboy running his pony full-tilt in the storm, trying to turn the stampeding herd, and of course in streaks of lightning his buddies saw the horse stumble and fall. All the cowboy songs were like that. Pure, selfless souls who lived to ride the High Lonesome and sleep under the stars all meeting their pulpy ends under a thousand battering hooves. Or shot in the breast over some sweetheart who could never hope to match their goodness. Early death, that was the theme. The wages of innocence. Only the good die young. Why did Jack like those songs? Maybe because he knew he had enough badness in him to vouchsafe his future? An affirmation. He had certainly been acting differently lately. Like someone Wynn hardly knew. The ruthlessness. It scared him a little. But then, hadn’t he always sensed it was there? Wasn’t it part of what had drawn him to Jack in the first place?
His fly hit the water and was met with a small splash and tug. A hard tug, and Wynn’s spirit leapt and the rod tip doubled and quivered and he felt the trembling through his hand and arm and, it seemed, straight to his heart, where it surged a strong dose of joy into his bloodstream. What a strange sensation, almost novel. It had been a while. He only realized then how long. How dour he, they, had become. Whatever. He had a fish on now, and not a tiny brookie, and not big enough either to bring in on the reel. He stripped the line in by hand and when the trout jerked hard and made a run he let the line slip back out through his fingers and gradually tightened the grip again as he felt the fish tire at the end of his sprint and he began again to pull him in. It was not a long fight and not a huge fish, but it was a fourteen-inch brown—who knew how they had come to live way up here—big enough, the first like him they’d seen, and with a gratitude and quiet joy he did not know he still had he got the slapping fish up on the rocks and thanked him simply and thwacked him on a smooth stone and the golden trout went still. Phew. Lunch. A few more like that and they’d be set for the day.
He did not call out. On another day he would have whistled or yelped. Especially on new water, or on water they weren’t sure about. He almost did, but then he swallowed it. And it surprised him. He wanted to hold on to the quiet, the sense of being alone with the strange afternoon. Because it was strange. Being at this edge was like standing at the high-tide line of a tsunami. Looking out over the wreckage and death. The sense that you could turn around and walk away into the hills, and life.
It might not be that simple with a homicidal freak downstream, but for now the sun was shining and the day was warming and they would have fish for supper.
* * *
Jack caught trout, too. A handful of small brookies and a brown, not as big as Wynn’s but a good part of a meal. They made a fire on the beach and steamed the fish in the pot. Maia was awake. She climbed out of the canoe unsure of her balance and walked unsteadily toward them, and they both stood quickly and went to help her.
She almost buckled as soon as they had her but she stayed on her feet and smiled a sad apology. Sadness or apology, it was the same. She had gotten them into this. “If it wasn’t for me,” she murmured, “you two would be long gone.”
They lowered her to the stones where she could use a driftwood stump as a backrest. She smiled again and said, “Optimism. All that green and the end of the burn.”
They split all the fish three ways and wished again they had salt and devoured it all. It didn’t feel like enough but it felt better. They didn’t see any berries here but knew they should find more farther down, so the stress of starvation seemed lifted for now. She ate, but she winced often and her skin was white and Wynn saw her press her stomach with her good arm as if she were quelling spasms.
Jack tossed a strip of fine bones into the coals. “He probably made it through,” he said. “The fire. If this is the northern edge and he is ahead of us by a day, he made it through.”
They both looked at him.
“Will he get harder or weaker?” Jack said.
Her eyes flickered. They were sleepy eyes, almost drugged. “What do you mean?”
“I mean will all the waiting and stalking make him sharper? Will it hone him or erode him? Will he start to waver?”
“He doesn’t second-guess himself, if that’s what you mean.”
Jack nodded.
She grimaced, and Wynn thought it was either her injuries or the thought of her husband. She said, “He told me that when he applied to prep school in Connecticut, the admissions director asked him to name his best quality. ‘I’m tenacious,’ Pierre said. ‘Okay,’ the man said. ‘What’s your worst?’ ‘I’m stubborn,’ he said.”
“So Pierre’s a psychopath and also cute.”
She shrugged her good shoulder.
“Why does he want you dead so bad?”
“Because he tried to kill me and screwed up?”
“Yeah, I mean before.”
“I’m starting to think it’s for the same reason he married me.” She half turned, as if ashamed, and Jack saw the tears running and looked away out of tact.
After a while he said gently, “Why?”
“Because my family has money?” She said it simply, without pride or shame but as a fact. “My husband loved me because I was a Rhode Island Brown.”
Jack blinked. It was clear that didn’t mean shit to him. “You die, he inherits.”
She nodded vaguely and wiped her wet face with her good arm. “We hadn’t been getting along for a while. And I had a paper in Science and one in Nature and he had a coauthor citation in Aquatic Geochemistry.”