“So did I.”
They ate and watched the stream as though something very important could happen there at any moment. Some jelly leaked into the palm of Frank’s hand and he licked it out. A band of antelope drifted over the top of the sandstone seam and began to graze toward the west. The clouds climbed like a low ladder toward the west and a darker blue.
“You been going out?”
“Some,” said Frank. “No one special.” He thought about it: was that true?
“Anyone I know?”
“You know Lucy Dyer?”
“Wasn’t Jerry Caldwell fucking her?”
“I really don’t know.”
“I’m pretty sure she was fucking Jerry. This’d be a year or so ago. But what’s the difference? The only thing that’ll stop them from fucking the mailman is AIDS. My old lady’s probably fucking somebody right now. Who gives a shit.” He pulled his beard straight down while he thought. “It’s inflation. The consumer is king.”
Frank thought of saying something but he didn’t. He just tried to watch the country. Phil soon went on to something else: out-of-staters. Seems every time Phil tried to go downtown, he had to plow through out-of-staters to get anywhere he was going. Things, no matter how you looked at them and as more time went by, were a bitch. Phil had set his face.
“How can you tell they’re out-of-staters?” Frank asked.
“Shit, you just look at them. For one thing, the motherfuckers take little tiny steps.”
“Oh.”
“And they’re dressed for an Everest assault. I don’t have to tell you that there’s a world of difference between Deadrock and Mount Everest. The cocksuckers will come into the Dexter, read the menu and leave, go down the street to O’Nolan’s, read the menu, leave, then drive out to Wendy’s, tie up everyone in the drive-up line, customizing their goddamn burger order, hold this, hold that. I hate to see it, man. I wish they’d go back to where they came from.”
“I can remember when you were an easygoing first baseman.”
“Yeah, well, I wised up. I’ve got plenty of anger in me now and it gets my ass out of bed in the morning. That’s the only way you get anything done. This country was built by pissed-off people.”
“Maybe that’s what I need,” Frank mused. “I don’t know, I just get sad. When you get comfortable you tend to brood on your losses. Hunger produces optimism. You’re on the move and that big Dagwood sandwich is just around the bend.”
“Well, I hope I catch up with it. Them boys at Rail Link busted my union and cut me to the bone.”
Frank felt the quiet that ensued, two men on a riverbank, didn’t used to be here and someday would be gone. Just now their lives seemed so important. Frank had made a killing in real estate; Phil would never be out of debt. Both of them loners, by choice or not. Brief stories of local life. Frank felt it made sense to think of it this way.
Through the afternoon, Phil fished on ahead. A breeze came up, and casting the pale fly line was not quite the pleasure it had been earlier in the day. The small clouds that rode the westerly cast racing shadows on the ground. Trout kept coming to the fly. The riverbank curved like the rim of a bowl. It was taller than Frank was on its outside edge and its face was speckled with the borings of swallows who came and went incessantly. There were small groups of ducks occasionally floating toward him, and when they struck an invisible boundary, they took flight and wheeled to the east. A small island divided the river and balanced the two halves of water in an even flow across a pure white bar of gravel.
Frank noticed the great length of Phil’s shadow on the ground as he walked toward him. Moths arose in clouds from the prairie and nighthawks began to soar in the violet light. The day of fishing was over. They broke down their tackle, got in the car and started along the empty road toward home.
“That was all right,” said Frank.
“I guess it was.”
“I really stop thinking about everything else when I fish. I think about how to catch a fish, period.”
On state and local news, Mr. Medicine Horse, a prominent chief in the sun dance ceremony, was running for sheriff of Hardin, promising to join his opponent, Mr. Rogers, in avoiding undue mudslinging.
“Good luck, Mr. Medicine Horse,” said Phil to the road ahead.
“If he didn’t learn mudslinging at Crow Agency, he better study it now before it’s too late.”
“So, what’s happening with your ranch?” Phil asked as they bent around toward the south.
“It’s ruining my life. I fired Boyd Jarrell.”
“It’s about time.”
“Well, he had his merits. Hard worker, good cowboy. This was the usual deal, he was hunting for a quit and he found one.”
Phil looked out the window rigidly. “I thought he needed to be elsewhere a long time ago.”
Frank drove and thought for a moment. “I’m surprised you feel one way or another about him.”
“I have to be honest, Frank. He spent all his free time running you down. I told him I didn’t appreciate it. He said it was a free country. I thought he was no good.”
It was absolutely silent in the car except for the hiss of wind around the doors. Frank felt something in his stomach. “I didn’t know that was the case, Phil.” Frank realized he had been naïve in thinking his problems with Boyd had been between them.
“That was the case.”
Frank kept driving. He was no longer thinking about Boyd; he was thinking about Gracie. The last time the ranch had meant anything to him was when Gracie kept Archie, her little paint gelding, out there. One spring he just disappeared. Frank was later told on pretty good authority that a rancher up the road had shot him to make a bear bait. After that, Gracie didn’t want to go out there anymore. Frank couldn’t help his silence. He wanted to say something to make Phil feel better, but he couldn’t speak.
“I shouldn’t have said anything, Frank,” said Phil.
“Actually, I started thinking back … about Gracie.”
“That’s good. I didn’t think you were that worried about what anybody said.”
Frank waved the whole thing away. The silence resumed and it was oppressive. “Yup, old Gracie.” Phil writhed around in his seat, trying to watch out the window. He fooled with the radio, then turned it off again and took a great sigh. He dropped his fist to his knee.
“Okay, me and Kathy, we’re married like twenty years. It’s not perfect but it’s okay. The day we get the news Denny Washington’s gonna bust the union, I take off a half day and head for the house. I walk in. I hear it in the back room. I have to see with my own eyes: Kathy’s fuckin’ our family doctor. You know him, an asshole backpacker in your clinic, Dr. Jensen. And I can see he’s trained her in a couple deals I’d never found out about. I go out and sit in the hall. I sit there and think: A, do I shoot them? B, do I divorce her? C, do I shoot myself? I’m going round and round. The doctor walks by. Kathy walks by. And that’s it. Life goes on. End of story.” Phil went back to gazing out the window and they rode the car together as if it were a time machine.
“I appreciate that, Phil.”
“I guess that if we didn’t have trout fishing, there’d be nothing you could really call pure in our lives at all.”
Frank stared at the road ahead, filling with joy at this inane but life-restoring thought. “I do like to feel one pull,” he said.
“Yes!” Phil shouted and pounded the dashboard.
“Yes!” shouted Frank, and they both pounded happily on the dashboard. “Trout!” The volume knob fell off the radio. Phil dove down to look for it, muttering “Fuckin’ douche bag” as he searched.
A few miles down the road, Frank drove past a hitchhiker sitting atop a backpack with a thumb out.