Dave was so cautious, the trip back took longer. He overnighted at the Garfield again so as to arrive in daylight, getting up twice during the night to check on the car. In the morning, he was reluctant to eat at the café, where some of his former clientele might be sitting around picking their teeth and speculating about fall calves or six-weight steers. He was now so close that he worried about everything from misreading the gas gauge to getting a flat. He even imagined the trunk flying open for no reason. He headed toward the ranch on an empty stomach, knowing Morsel would take care of that. He flew past fields of cattle with hardly a glance.
No one seemed around to offer the hearty greeting and meal he was counting on. On the wire running from the house to the bunkhouse, a hawk flew off reluctantly as though it had had the place to itself. Dave got out and went into the house. Dirty dishes sat on the dining-room table, light from the television flickered without sound from the living room. When Dave walked in he saw the television was tuned to the shopping network, a close-up of a hand modeling a gold diamond-studded bracelet. Then he saw Morsel on the floor with the remote still in her hand.
Dave felt an icy calm. Ray had done this. Dave patted his pocket for the car keys and walked out of the house, stopping on the porch to survey everything in front of him. Then he went around to the shop. Where the airplane had usually been parked, in its two shallow ruts, Ray was lying with a pool of blood extending from his mouth like a speech balloon without words. He’d lost a shoe. The plane was gone.
Dave felt trapped between the two bodies, as if there was no safe way back to the car. When he got to it, a man was there waiting. He was about Dave’s age, lean and respectable looking in clean khakis and a Shale Services ball cap. “I must have overslept,” he said. “How long have you been here?” He touched his teeth with his thumbnail as he spoke.
“Oh, just a few minutes.”
“Keys.”
“Oh right, yes, I have them here.” Dave patted his pocket again.
“Get the trunk for me, please.” Dave offered him the keys. “No, you.”
“Not a problem.”
Dave bent to insert the key, but his hand was shaking so that at first he missed the lock. The lid rose to reveal the contents of the trunk. Dave never felt a thing.
An Old Man Who Liked to Fish
The Smiths were a very old couple, whose lifelong habits of exercise and outdoor living and careful diet had resulted in their seeming tiny — tiny, pale, and almost totemic — as they spread a picnic tablecloth on my front lawn and arranged their luncheon. Since I live with reckless inattention to what I eat, I watched with fascination as they set out apples, cheese, red wine, and the kind of artisanal bread that looks like something found in the road. The Smiths were the last friends of my parents still alive. And to the degree we spend our lives trying to understand our parents, I always looked forward to Edward and Emily’s visits as a pleasant forensic exercise.
Edward was a renowned fisherman, much admired by my father, and me, but given his present frailty, it was surprising that he thought he could still wade our rocky streams. He had a set rule of no wading staff before the first heart attack, and as he had yet to suffer one, he continued picking his way along, peering for rises, and if he ran into speedy water in a narrow place, he’d find a stick on the shore to help him through it. My father, by contrast, had always used a staff, an elegant blackthorn with a silver head that was supposed to have belonged to Calvin Coolidge.
Emily had been an avid golfer and considered fishing to be an inferior pursuit, with no score and thus no accountability. Therefore, she never followed Edward along the stream, instead taking up a place among the cottonwoods, where, with her binoculars, she quietly waited for something to happen in the canopy, hopeful of seeing a new bird for the list she kept in her head. She had done this for so many years that she felt empowered to report the rise and fall of entire species, extrapolating from her observations in the cottonwoods. This year she announced the decline of tanagers; last year, it was the rise of Audubon’s warblers. Lately, she would too often describe her sighting of Kirtland’s warbler, which occurred thirty years ago on Great Abaco. Not a good sign. At the last iteration, I must have looked blankly, because she said “wood warbler” in a sharp tone. Still, her birding represented mainly an accommodation of Edward, enabling her to stay close by while he fished, though he had never made a secret of his disdain for golf, golfers, and golf courses.
I fished with Edward for an hour or so, just to be sure that he could manage. He lovingly strung up his little straw-colored Paul Young rod, pulling line from the noisy old pewter-colored Hardy reel. Holding the rod at arm’s length, sighting down the length of it, he announced, “Not a set after forty years.” But I could see the leftward set from where I stood ten feet away. His casts, on the other hand, were straight as ever: tight, probing expressions of a tidy stream craft, such simplicity and precision. They took me all the way back to my boyhood, when from a high bank on the Pere Marquette, at my father’s urging, I had first observed Edward with utter rapture at seeing it all done so well. Now watching him hook an aerial cutthroat from a seam along cottonwood roots, I concluded he would be just fine on his own. He gave me a wink and cupped the fish in his hand, vital as a spark, before he let it go. I could see the fish dart around in the clear water, trying to find its direction before racing to mid-stream and disappearing. Edward held the barbless fly up to the light, blew it dry, and shot out a new cast. “I’m sorry your father isn’t here to enjoy this,” he said, keeping an eye on his fly as it bobbed down the current.
“So am I.”
“We had quite a river list. He was the last of the old gang, except for me and the wives.” Edward laughed. “The Big Fellow is starting to get the range.”
“My dad was a great fisherman, wasn’t he?”
“Oh, not really, but nobody loved it more.” My father and I hadn’t gotten along, so I was surprised to find myself feeling defensive about his prowess as a fisherman. But it was true: his style of aggression was ill suited to field sports. He had played football in college, and I could recall feeling that baseball, my sport, was a little too subtle for him. And slow.
Edward promised that when the sun got far enough to the west to put glare on the water, he’d head back up to the house, and meanwhile he hoped that I would be patient with Emily. She had begun to slip further, something that I had noticed but not much worried about, because she could still be talked out of the most peculiar of her fixations. I had seen the very old — my aunt Margaret, for example — slide into dementia good-naturedly, even enjoying some of its comic effects or treating the misapprehensions as amusing curiosities. But Emily demanded to be believed, and so perhaps her progression had not been so pleasant. Edward did say that they’d had to light the flower beds at home when she began to see things there that frightened her.
Edward said, “Well, I’m going to keep moving. I want to get to the logjam while there’s still good light.” He looked down at the bright water curling around his legs. “Amazing this all finds its way to the sea.”
Edward wasn’t seen again. That’s not quite accurate: his body turned up, what was left of it, in a city park in Billings, on the banks of the Yellowstone. It had gone down the West Fork of the Boulder; down the Boulder to the Yellowstone, past the town Captain Clark had named Big Timber for the cottonwoods on the banks; down the Yellowstone through sheep towns, cow towns, refinery towns; and finally to Two Moon Park in Billings, where it was found by a homeless man, Eldon Pomfret of Magnolia Springs, Alabama. In a sense, Edward had gotten off easy.