Beth watched the tip of the rod quiver, the motion sharp against the gentle sway of pine trees and white shells of aspen jutting from the boulders and cliffs surrounding them. She looked at her shaking hands and took a steadying breath, stepped ankle deep into the river. Her casts were neat, but they were falling short of the uprooted trees near the opposite bank by at least ten feet and the more she forced herself to aim for them, the more the exposed roots started to bend, blur into tentacles tangling in Micah’s hair, holding him under until their father could pull him out.
She shook her head, turned the tentacles into roots again. This was the first time they’d been tentacles. Usually they were chains or barbed wire. Once, after a week of working at a craft store, they’d been colorful ropes of yarn, the strands lifting and weaving themselves into a doily-like restraint. Tentacles were a surprise even if the scene wasn’t, probably the result of a Christmas with nothing but Star Trek DVDs to keep her company, one of the few things she managed to throw into her truck when she finally left Texas and the man who lived there. What she had to do was not think about it, catch herself before she sunk so deep into memory that she couldn’t climb back out without help, chemical or otherwise. She reeled in her line and looked back at David, watched the warmth of his breath pool in the chill early morning air, air that caught the just breaking pink of the sun, sharpened it.
David’s lips pulled to the side and his eyes crinkled at the corners when he caught her watching him, she blushed and looked away, still wasn’t comfortable around him though he seemed relaxed around her. She tried to keep her eyes on her own cast, but caught herself watching him when she reeled in her line. He looked so much like their father, the same reddish hair and barrel chest, the same gray eyes and cleft chin, she wanted to see if he fished like him too, if his whole body hooked into the rhythm of it, the momentum traveling in a continued easy movement from his feet through the sharper bend in his wrist. It did, though she’d been a child when she watched her father, their father, and she hadn’t paid as much attention as she should have, could still hear him telling her that she wouldn’t learn anything if she didn’t stop fiddling with pebbles or the hackle or rock spiders. She wondered if David had ever heard that voice, if he had sat on the bank for more than a year watching before he was allowed to handle a rod. She doubted it, whatever mistakes their father had made with his first family he seemed to have gotten it right the second time. David studied architecture and played on a local soccer team, donated his spring breaks to building homes for the less fortunate. Depending on where he’d gone those past few years, she might have lived in one of them. But despite their different lives, despite the cold working its way across her neck and numbing her fingertips, despite knowing that he would ask questions she couldn’t answer and that at some point she would have to repeat to herself that they were just tree roots, she was glad he’d called, was glad they were spending the day together.
She wrapped her pink fleece scarf tighter, blew on her hands. After a few minutes of hoping he would suggest a break she gave up and filled her chest with air, eased her feet deeper into the river. Her pulse kicked up but she took a few breaths, flexed her wrists, let out a little more line and threw the fly further upstream, let it float along the half-sunk tree. She remembered that, remembered her father pointing out the good spots, the still places in rivers. The current caught her fly, she reeled in, tried to judge the distance to the trees again, blew on her fingers.
“Hands cold?”
She jerked a little at his voice. They hadn’t said more than a hello since she’d climbed into his truck early that morning and headed out. They hadn’t spent too much time talking at all since he’d called just before Christmas to introduce himself, let her know he was interested in her life, that their father had died. Maybe that was why she’d turned her truck toward Colorado when she left Texas, she wasn’t sure. But she was enjoying the quiet there, enjoying David, a man who could sit in quiet. A brother. She never thought she’d be able to say that again. She smiled at him and held up a reddened hand, “Got any gloves?”
A grin worked across his face, “Might scare the fish.” She rolled her eyes and turned back to her cast, listened to the light echo of his chuckle. Every man she’d been fishing with said something different scared the fish away. The one in Texas said stirring the river bottom, her father told her it was talking, told Micah it was deodorant. Apparently he’d told David gloves were to blame.
She let out a little line and took a few more steps, stopped when the water was knee deep. Now that she knew David was watching her she tried to make her arc perfect, make him proud of her. The reward from her father for a good cast had been Reese’s Pieces or maybe a bologna sandwich. David had probably been given granola bars and bananas. But maybe they didn’t have to eat. Maybe they could just sit and enjoy the quiet, that early morning quiet in the mountains even breathing seemed to violate. Something, anything other than stand in the river while tree roots morphed into tentacles.
She’d sworn after Texas that she wouldn’t go anymore, that whatever fish were in those rivers, it wasn’t worth it. But the first night they met, when David had peeked over her shoulder and seen her bait pole propped against the wall in her new apartment, he’d picked her up in a bear hug and told her that she was a disgrace to fish and humans alike and that he would teach her how to catch fish that were worth catching. It was the first time anyone had hugged her like that, like not hugging her would have been the awkward thing. She’d put her arms around his shoulders.
Later, over coffee, words tried to squeeze out of her throat, all of the words that would have told him she’d been fly-fishing, tell him about the men who had taken her, Texas, their father, tell him all the stories she was afraid would make him hop into his truck and drive toward a Habitat for the Homeless project, a place where he could do some good. But all of those words caught against one another in her throat. So she listened to him plan their trip and promised herself that she could handle it this time, that even if the river was nothing but tree roots and sucking mud she could tough it out.
What seemed like a decent sized trout nabbed her fly and ran behind the sunken tree before she could pull the line tight. She heard David call out but she was already heading toward the log, trying to get an angle around the tree so she wouldn’t have to go too deep into the current. She eased her way along the bottom of the river, tested the water’s power, she had to get closer but the rapids were strong and the roots were starting to blur again. She swallowed and tried for a larger step with her right foot. The current lifted her leg high and water rushed over her boot before she got her foot back down and into the river bed. The way it had filled her sneakers as she backed away from her father while he pumped her brother’s chest, said “Micah,” with each press on his rib cage, the tone strangely common, like he was calling him into the kitchen for dinner.
Beth gagged and the cold air hit her teeth, made them throb. She closed her eyes, tried to feel the fish out, block the sight of the beckoning tree roots. The toes of her left foot cramped but she kept them curled and choked back the bitter spit as it worked its way over her tongue. The pain in her thighs pushed a small humming moan out of her mouth. The moan she made when she tried to relax against pain, ride it. The moan she’d perfected while Texas pressed her face into bed springs while he fucked her from behind when she was strung out and didn’t care. A moan she’d learned from a father that left her with a broken collar bone and two fractured ribs before he finally just left after he lost the son he’d always wanted.
Her eyes teared and she shook her head, blinked them clear. She wanted to yell for David, or drop the rod and let go, let the current take her somewhere else, maybe she’d wash up on a beach in California, learn to surf, leave men with fly rods and fish and never come back.
She exhaled, gripped the rod tighter, took two steps backwards, squatted deeper, pulled toward the shore. The fish was fighting less, his runs were shorter, and with every backwards step, every inch of line collected, the tentacles started looking more like roots, brown and innocuous.
The fish gave a few half-hearted flips out of the water but it was tired and small, a pretty little rainbow but nothing spectacular, nothing worth the work or the panic she’d gone through, not worth letting David see her like that. She turned to look for him when she had her thumb in its gill, jerked when she found him standing a few feet behind her. He’d never said anything, just stood there, and she knew by his expression that he’d noticed her weird display. He knew about Micah, she didn’t know if he knew about the collar bone and the cracked ribs but she wondered if maybe he’d faced a few sprains and fractures too, if maybe he was standing so close because of that.
She held the fish up and tried to grin. He glanced at the fish then looked back at her, looked hard, asked if she was okay. She nodded, was hoping that if he did know that part of their father he wouldn’t ask her about it, she wasn’t sure she could talk about that yet. He reached out and put a hand on her shoulder, “You sure?” He squeezed a little bit, almost like another hug only gentle this time, and the words bubbled up again. But whatever it was, shame or fear or something she couldn’t even name, it made her look down at the river instead. He kept his hand there for a while then nodded.
“Quite the little beauty,” he said and walked back to the pack.
Beth took a few deep breaths. It was a clean catch through the lip, she could probably get it with her fingers, wouldn’t need the pliers she assumed David was going for. She had the fly between her fingernails when she heard beer cans thudding against each other, looked up. David was standing above the contents of his pack, hands on his hips. He looked up, caught her watching him, smiled.
“Can’t find the string line,” he said, put his palms on top of his head and stared up at the sky. A gesture she recognized, the pose their father made when he had to think about something, needed to work out the details. He’d been a civil engineer, had needed to understand the chain of cause and effect.
She looked back at the trout and started walking toward David, maybe he hadn’t really looked at it, maybe he’d just assumed from her spectacle that it was a fish worth keeping, big enough for a meal, a fish half-again the size of the one that was starting to bleed down her thumb. She hefted it into her hands to see if it was heavier than it looked, tried to picture the body split into fillets.
Rocks scattered, she looked up and saw him running back up the trail. He called over his shoulder that the line probably got caught on some brush when he went to pee, that it wasn’t far, that she should just hold onto the fish, he’d be back in a flash.
She didn’t think he’d really gone at first, stared at the trailhead waiting for him to reappear. When she didn’t hear anything she looked back at the fish. If they were keeping it she needed to get it dead, rip its gills and let it bleed out, she remembered that, remembered that she needed a large flat rock to smash his head against.
She found one but sat on it instead and laid the fish in her lap, ran her hand over its head. She brushed the orange fur of the fly out of the fish’s eye then worked the barb out of its lip. It mimicked an insect, she remembered that, and whatever insect it was supposed to be it had done well, a disastrous breakfast for the trout. She looked at the rainbow’s gills, gills that weren’t moving against the flesh of her bloody thumb. The spotted black shimmer of its body scales were spotted with it, red that stood bright even against the pink stripe down its body. Maybe if they had let him live he would have learned not to bite the orange ones, that biting into one meant he would be yanked into the sky, taken to a place where he couldn’t breathe the air, where floppy green things stood and watched as he gasped and crawled over the alien dirt. Then one of them would pull the gasping body onto its lap and a tentacle would melt shirt and pants, reveal pale stomach and nascent penis and rubber boot feet, leave a trail of river slime across Micah’s blue lips.
She heard David’s boots crushing through the brush. She took her thumb out of the fish’s gill, wrapped her hands around it and took two steps, placed it in the water, let it go. It suspended near her left boot long enough before the current pulled it downstream to force a lunge and a sharp ‘what are you doing?’ when David got to her side and realized what she’d done.
He stood with his red hands tucked under his armpits, the string line dangling from under his crossed arms. He’d been so excited for her fish, for them to share something, she knew that. He stared at her then shook his head and started sloshing back upstream. She let out the breath she didn’t know she’d been holding. The fish was dead, dead for at least a few minutes before she’d put him in the water. She knew David had seen its white belly as the current pulled it away from his hand.
David grabbed his rod from the bank and walked back toward her. Something about his walk made her back up until the flat rock caught her legs and she sat. He stopped beside her and looked down. “What do you think I’m going to do?” When she didn’t answer he shook his head, marched past her. “Bad idea” he said. She didn’t know if he meant releasing the fish or the trip or calling her to begin with, trying to make some sort of family from the wreckage their father had willed them. She heard him throwing things back into his pack, beer cans and sardine tins and extra clothes.
On the opposite bank the land flattened a little and there were early blue star columbines peaking out, their white faces softening the rocky soil. She wondered if there was a way over to that clearing, wanted to stretch her body out over the purple-blue leaves, drink beer, eat the sardines and oysters they’d brought in case they blanked. She wanted to talk to him about his girlfriend and his job, about his mother, she wanted him to describe the house he grew up in, tell her what sports he’d played in high school, what he thought of college, what life had been like with the man she’d known ten years before he was born. She didn’t want to tell him why she’d just put a dead fish in the river. She didn’t have any idea how to explain that.
The noise behind her stopped and she turned, afraid that he would be vanishing into the cut in the boulder as he took off up the trail, but he was standing with his hands on his hips, his head bowed. She tried to smile an apology.
“Don’t” he said when he turned to her and saw her cheeks lifting. “I’m sorry I lost my temper. I do that sometimes.” They locked eyes for a moment, long enough for both of them to grow uncomfortable and nod. Her eyes lowered and she turned back to the river, watched the water rush through the upturned roots. Alien hands kneading Micah’s pale flesh, prodding his body while she and her father stood, hands at their sides, useless. She shook her head, it was their father, plural. She had a brother again. She lifted her eyes to the columbines, rubbed her hands together and blew on them.
“Cheeseburgers,” she said. David turned to her but she couldn’t look at him and do this so she kept her eyes on the flowers, tried to see every yellow center of every bloom. “Micah liked cheeseburgers so much and our father loved him so much that he let Micah eat them for breakfast.”