PM was a middle-aged Anglo lady with tanned skin and leathery wrinkles that outdid even Georgia O’Keeffe’s. Soon, I gathered that Professor Madachy had also received a frozen trout. But hers just had a note that said thanks for supporting an unusual thesis: seems everyone other than PM was down on Hemingway as a topic altogether, and not just here at the university.
According to PM, the Hemingway bashing was nearly universal throughout all of Academia, e.g.: the feminists said he was a machismo misogynist for having four wives he cheated on with each successor, and mistresses on the side; the gay professors called him a sexually insecure homophobe with a penis-gun fetish; the sociologists said he used the “N” word for black persons, and looked down on folks of Indian roots, like Palo and me. In psychology classes they said he suffered from depression exacerbated by alcohol and a long history of familial suicide; even in Palo’s journalism courses they played podcasts from a noted “literary” writer, harping on how boring Hemingway was, and how he’d destroyed American literature. While in literature departments, Hemingway was apparently total anathema. And why not?—after all, the guy got to be a Nobel laureate, while packing nothing by way of credentials but a midwestern public high school diploma.
I could certainly see how Palo had a problem finding a thesis advisor who had accepted her general concept. Now I just had the problem of finding Paloma herself.
Maybe a wolf always returns to its known haunts, but my sister had only one haunt that I ever knew of. And that was the late, great Ernest Hemingway. He seemed the one and only key to my next move.
My little sister was perhaps Hemingway’s first official girl “camp follower.” Palo had been obsessed with Hemingway even as a child. By the age of ten, she’d read everything he ever wrote—his fiction, nonfiction, journalism, letters—and she hankered to go everywhere he’d ever been, so she could experience him in the three dimensions of Life with a capital L, as the legendary, larger-than-life writer had experienced it himself. I confess, whatever one thought of his work, Hemingway was one of the best-looking bastards who ever graced a page of literature.
Because our parents were separated, Palo knew how to torture them into her service in different ways, and she marked them out accordingly: Mom got to suffer through the “Two-Hearted River” phase, where, for month after month, Palo would eat nothing but sandwiches of raw onion slabs, washed down with canned apricots in syrup, and she’d make coffee by boiling the grounds right in the pot, because that’s how Nick Adams, Hemingway’s alter ego, ate when he went fishing alone in the wild, just after the Great War.
Then too, Palo tagged along with our dad at every conference he’d allow—from Venice to Paris to Wyoming—even to Lago Maggiore—consuming along the way everything that our Great White Hunter had eaten, from roast baby pig in Madrid to wild marlin in the Florida Keys.
There was only one place she couldn’t get to, due to “Cold War Hangover” as she put it: the restriction printed into our passports against travel to Cuba. But now—based on her cryptic notes on that fish-scented flash drive she’d sent me—I was pretty sure that was right where Palo would be headed. And though restrictions had started to lift, of late, she’d still need my help and connections to get there. I knew of some private strings I might pull, and I was just checking flights through Miami and Mexico, when the message popped up on my screen from a private, unlisted server. A missive that changed everything.
Your sister dead in drowning; remains found in Magic Reservoir; contact Sheriff of Blaine County, Idaho. See contact info below.
It was signed simply: The Company.
When it came to “family,” The Company usually got there first: cowboys to the rescue and all.
But apparently, not this time.
I was absolutely miserable. Okay, I’d flunked a major intelligence test, and in doing so, I had maybe killed my own sister. Because one thing was as transparent as a martini glass right now: Palo’s death on that river could be no “accident.”
And yet, during all my rickety flights through the Rockies, from Albuquerque to Salt Lake to Ketchum, and with as many times as I’d read and re-read Palo’s notes on that digital card plugged into my cell phone—again and again and again—they still didn’t add up to her death.
Where was the underbelly of the iceberg? What was I missing?
Even now, out here on the Big Wood River, as the Blaine county sheriff and I moved against the icy current to reach the spot where my sister had last been seen before she vanished beneath the waters, it was all pretty tough for me to visualize. What was she doing on this river all by herself before dawn? Especially since, by now, her paranoia seemed to have had a strong basis in reality.
I had to get to the bottom of it. And fast, before this wild river claimed me, too. Why had I even asked to see this place?
I was wending my way around the downed cottonwoods along the shore, struggling to keep my balance on the slippery, rocky floor wearing these unwieldy rubber suspender waders that the department had loaned me; they encased my lower body and came all the way up to my chest.
Over the rush of waters, the sheriff—I’ll call him “Ted”—was asking me: “You or your Sis ever come hereabouts, before, to visit our ‘fly-caster’s paradise’?”
“Idaho, yes; Ketchum, no,” I told him.
Despite our disdain toward the exotic technicalities and trappings of fly-fishing that Palo and I had historically shared, at the moment I thought it prudent to try a bit of fish-bonding, myself:
“As kids, though,” I added, “our dad used to take us to a place on Redfish Lake, to watch the Rainbows hatch out.”
“So you’re from fishing stock! I thought so!” Ted beamed appreciatively, as he navigated his bulk along the shoals with surprising ease. “It’s our biggest Idaho industry, you know: fishing and hunting. We got 26,000 miles of rivers in our state, almost more than anybody on the planet, I guess…”
As I followed Ted downstream to the place where Palo had last been sighted, he launched into a verbal tangent, casting details back to me over his shoulder about rods and reels, bait and tackle, hooks, lines, and sinkers… until I tuned out.
I realized glumly, with my legs stuck in these unwieldy waders and my butt bashed by fast water, that this scenario was destined to go on for quite awhile with no possible chance of escape.
Palo would be laughing her ass off at my predicament—that is, I thought in abject misery, if she weren’t dead as a minnow, and washed ten miles downstream by now. And worst of all, I was still no closer to finding out exactly what happened to her. Palo was right, she had been in danger, and I kicked myself for not seeing, much sooner, how real it was.
Ted had worked his diatribe all the way up to the esoteric dangers posed by “ghost gear”—those yards of line and hooks strewed around by irresponsible Out-of-State fishermen, which had endangered the local sturgeon population nearly out of all existence—when all at once I thought that I’d caught an important non sequitur:
“… until we found your sister’s waders, where they were floating…”
“My sister’s what?” I said, as calmly as possible.
“Well, not real waders like you got on now, but her foot gear, you know—them lightweight-type wading booties, more like rubber shoes, that the ladies all wear…”
Now my heart was thumping. This bit of news gave me my first glimmer of hope: what was wrong with this picture? A gaping hole had just appeared smack in the middle of the jigsaw, and I thought I knew exactly what was missing.
Sure, Paloma knew how to catch a fish—as her recent frozen-trout “messenger” had demonstrated. But when it came to the art of fishing, she was a Nick Adams girclass="underline" simplicity before all. Her “technical equipment” of choice was a safety pin for a hook, a grasshopper for bait, a pair of dungarees for attire, and a boardwalk to sit on. She’d always left the rest—the “ties and flies and waders and wrist-posturing”—to the “Weekend Sportsmen,” as she liked to call them.