He gathered up his rod, his fishing vest and waders, and drove over past Connolly Park where some children were already kicking a soccer ball back and forth between them. He stopped a few blocks beyond, where a street ended in a view of the stockyards, got out and knocked on the door. It opened and Phil Page came out carrying his tackle. Page was tall and thin with a long black beard that came down to his chest. Almost all that revealed expression were his eyes, which were detached and suspicious. Frank and Phil had played on the same baseball team in high school. Phil was a first baseman, and Frank always thought he had the right sort of detachment for that position, a driftiness in responding to the facts, a kind of lag timing peculiar to first basemen.
“Hi, Frank.”
“Phil. We’ll go in my car.”
Phil put his tackle in the back seat of Frank’s car and got in.
Phil Page was a brakeman on the railroad. Their friendship, which went back a quarter of a century, had been revitalized by troubles with their marriages. It was just like being back on the baseball team together. Phil usually fished with him on the weekends, but only if they made what he called a reasonable start.
“How’s the railroad life?”
“Rolling.”
“Making any money?”
“A little.”
“Where are we going?”
“Let’s go way the shit up the Sixteen,” said Phil. “I’m in a brook trout state of mind.”
They stopped at a twenty-four-hour convenience store to get some lunch supplies. The woman at the cash register was watching television so intently that Frank was able to slit the plastic wrap on a porn magazine and get a glimpse of the photographs, one after the other; it was like a seafood catalogue. Hard to maintain fascination in the face of that. The vagina was a splendid thing, but viewed as a monument it was entirely terrifying. The tiny, out-of-focus heads in the shadows behind those colossal, multicolor Mount Rushmore — sized cunts made Frank sorry he had looked. He wondered if these young women were discovered at soda fountains the way they used to discover Hollywood movie stars.
Phil came around the corner. “Man cannot live by bread alone,” he said, then held up a jar. “He must have peanut butter.” Phil displayed the two described items. “What else?”
“Two six-packs.”
The country opened up quickly as they came down out of the Bridger Range going east toward the route of the old electric railroad. Blue skies, white flatiron clouds, sagebrush and grass, rhythmic hills betraying sea-floor origins, a sinewy black road that lifted on occasion to afford a glimpse of sparkling watercourses in the willows, cows of different colors but the same expression, doe-eyed calves, hawks contouring an air cushion on the surface of the land, the golden skeletons of tumbleweed blown into the fence corners, pictures of politicians on the telephone poles grinning insincerely into the vast space, and gophers running, heads down for speed or heads up to alertly observe themselves being run over.
A truck went by with a pair of scowling ranchers in front.
“I wonder if their mothers tie weights in the corners of their mouths,” Phil said. “You know, kinda like the Watusis do to their ears and lips. I bet that’s the case, the mama rancher hangs weights in the corner of baby’s mouth. Then the little boy baby gets a little cowboy hat and little boots with little spurs and weights for his mouth. Next they give the little shit a little lariat and stick a pair of steer horns on a hay bale. Most generally, the little shit is called Boyd, and in ten or twenty years’ time Boyd’s getting drunk and beating cows with his stock whip, abusing his old lady and stubbing out cigarettes in front of the TV.”
“During this entire time,” said Frank, “your railroader is mostly in church or tending his kitchen garden or cuddling a litter of rabbits to help them through a blue norther. He’s a man of few words but they are always the same words: ‘The Railroad Built Montana.’ ”
“Turn left,” said Phil. “Asshole.”
The road took them off into a prairie with brilliant pale stands of bear grass and, below, a spring surrounded by aspens. A quarter mile beyond the spring a long slough solidified into a shining expanse of canary grass, deep green and dense. The Sixteen River meandered between parallel bands of willows, a true sagebrush trout stream heading west to rattlesnake canyons and the wide Missouri.
They stood beside the car, rigging up their rods and tying on flies. “Attractor patterns today,” said Phil. “And death to all streamside entomologists.”
“D’accord, sport. I’m putting on a royal Wulff tied with me own pinkies.”
“I long to feel that creek push in on my waders.”
“I long to hear the Pflueger opera as I drag the first hog to the gravel.”
“I doubt there’s any hogs up here. Not enough water.”
Frank suddenly thought about Boyd Jarrell. Boyd hated people who fished, although he spent plenty of time watching television or sitting in bars. Sometimes after he’d been in a bar for two days and spent every cent he’d made that week, Boyd would tell people, “I’ve lived next to these cricks all my life, but I’ve never had time to fish.”
“Walk down about half a mile and I’ll fish behind you,” Phil said. “We can hopscotch.” He was pulling on his beard and looking through the willows into a small pool. “I can see about nineteen of the fuckers from here,” he said in an enraptured voice. “Time to rip some lips.”
Frank started along the stream bank at a brisk walk. A covey of partridges took to the air in an ivory rush, brown terrestrial birds against the blue of outer space. After a bit he looked back and watched the heron-like figure of Phil Page forming a bow of line in midair over the stream, a slight breeze lifting his black beard from his chest. A meadowlark stood atop a Canadian thistle and poured out its song, barely pausing as Frank passed by. The prairie grass rolled away to the north. About halfway to the horizon, a sandstone seam made a long wavering line in the silvery grass. The sun dilated toward noon and Frank felt breathless to be in this very spot.
The line straightened and fell, and the bright speck of fly soared on the current. It lifted into the air again, then returned to teeter along the quick water on its hackles until it disappeared down a small suction hole, and the trout was tight, vaulting high over the water again and again. The rod made a live arc in Frank’s hand, and in a minute the fish splashed in the shallows at his feet. He grasped the fly and the trout wriggled free. Frank let out a deep sigh and looked down the meander of wild water; it spiraled away forever.
He could see Phil fishing behind him, hovering on the stream bank and probing with his fly line like an insect. Every so often his rod tightened in a bow and Phil scrambled down the bank to grab a trout. Frank caught three in a row from a flowing pool. Miles and hours went by and it was time for lunch. Frank stretched out on the stream bank, his fly rod crossed on his chest, the sun warm on his face, and waited for Phil to catch up. Ants were crawling on his forehead. He was drifting off, thinking how easy friendship could be.
“Good grief,” Frank said and sat up. “I’m suddenly starving.”
“I’m afraid we’re talking PB and J here, sport.”
“That’ll do just fine.”
“Doesn’t really go with beer, but who really gives two shits what goes with beer when you got beer?”
“Not me,” said Frank, pulling the top and smelling the spray of hops on his face. “Oh, boy.”
“The little creek’s hotter than a two-dollar pistol today.”
“I lost count.”