Though when I reached farther into the snag branches and woods scruff, deeper into the water, what I felt was an animal. With my fingers I touched its hard rib-side, its legs, its short slick coat. I felt to its neck and head and touched its nose and teeth, and it was a deer, though not a big deer, not even a yearling. And I knew when I found where Troy’s dace had gone up in the neck flesh, that he had hooked a deer already snagged here, and that he had pulled himself out of his chair trying to work it free.
“What is it? I know it’s a big Brown. Don’t tell me, Les, don’t even tell me.”
“I’ve got it,” I said. “I’ll bring it in.”
“Sure, hell yes,” Troy said out of the fog.
It was not so hard to work the deer off the snag brush and float it up free. Though once I did, it was dangerous to get turned in the current on numb legs, and hard to keep from going down, and I had to hold on to the deer to keep balance enough to heave myself into the slower water. And as I did that, I thought: In the Clark Fork many people drown doing less dangerous things than I am doing.
“Throw it way far up,” Troy shouted when he could see me. He had righted himself on the sand and was sitting up like a little doll. “Get it way up safe.”
“It’s safe,” I said. I had the deer beside me, floating, but I knew Troy couldn’t see it.
“What did I catch?” Troy yelled.
“Something unusual,” I said, and with effort I hauled the little deer a foot up onto the sand, dropped it, and put my cold hands under my arms. I heard a car door close back where I had come from, up the riverbank.
“What is that?” Troy said and put his hand out to touch the deer’s side. He looked up at me. “I can’t see without my glasses.”
“It’s a deer,” I said.
Troy moved his hand around on the deer, then looked at me again in a painful way.
“What is it?” he said.
“A deer,” I said. “You caught a dead deer.”
Troy looked back at the little deer for a moment, and stared as if he did not know what to say about it. And sitting on the wet sand, in the foggy night, he all at once looked scary to me, as though it was him who had washed up there and was finished. “I don’t see it,” he said and sat there.
“It’s what you caught,” I said. “I thought you’d want to see it.”
“It’s crazy, Les,” he said. “Isn’t it?” And he smiled at me in a wild, blind-eyed way.
“It’s unusual,” I said.
“I never shot a deer before.”
“I don’t believe you shot this one,” I said.
He smiled at me again, but then suddenly he gasped back a sob, something I had never seen before. “Goddamn it,” he said. “Just goddamn it.”
“It’s an odd thing to catch,” I said, standing above him in the grimy fog.
“I can’t change a fucking tire,” he said and sobbed. “But I’ll catch a fucking deer with my fucking fishing rod.”
“Not everyone can say that,” I said.
“Why would they want to?” He looked up at me crazy again, and broke his spinning rod into two pieces with only his hands. And I knew he must’ve been drunk still, because I was still drunk a little, and that by itself made me want to cry. And we were there for a time just silent.
“Who killed a deer?” Nola said. She had come behind me in the cold and was looking. I had not known, when I heard the car door, if she wasn’t starting back up to town. But it was too cold for that, and I put my arm around her because she was shivering. “Did Mr. Wheels kill it?”
“It drowned,” Troy said.
“And why is that?” Nola said and pushed closer to me to be warm, though that was all.
“They get weak and they fall over,” I said. “It happens in the mountains. This one fell in the water and couldn’t get up.”
“So a gimp man can catch it on a fishing rod in a shitty town,” Troy said and gasped with bitterness. Real bitterness. The worst I have ever heard from any man, and I have heard bitterness voiced, though it was a union matter then.
“Maybe it isn’t so bad,” Nola said.
“Hah!” Troy said from the wet ground. “Hah, hah, hah.” And I wished that I had never shown him the deer, wished I had spared him that, though the river’s rushing came up then and snuffed his sound right out of hearing, and drew it away from us into the foggy night beyond all accounting.
Nola and I pushed the deer back into the river while Troy watched, and then we all three drove up into town and ate chicken-in-the-ruff at the Two Fronts, where the lights were bright and they cooked the chicken fresh for you. I bought a jug of wine and we drank that while we ate, though no one talked. Each of us had done something that night. Something different. That was plain enough. And there was nothing more to talk about.
When we were finished we walked outside, and I asked Nola where she’d like to go. It was only eight o’clock, and there was no place to go but to my little room. She said she wanted to go back to the Top Hat, that she had someone to meet there later, and there was something about the band that night that she liked. She said she wanted to dance.
I told her I was not much for dancing, and she said fine. And when Troy came out from paying, we said good-bye, and she shook my hand and said that she would see me again. Then she and Troy got in the Checker and drove away together down the foggy street, leaving me alone, where I didn’t mind being at all.
For a long time I just walked then. My clothes were wet, but it wasn’t so cold if you kept moving, though it stayed foggy. I walked to the river again and across on the bridge and a long way down into the south part of town on a wide avenue where there were houses with little porches and little yards, all the way, until it became commercial, and bright lights lit the drive-ins and car lots. I could’ve walked then, I thought, clear to my mother’s house twenty miles away. But I turned back, and walked the same way, only on the other side of the street. Though when I got near the bridge, I came past the Senior Citizen Recreation, where there were soft lights on inside a big room, and I could see through a window in the pinkish glow, old people dancing across the floor to a record player that played in the corner. It was a rumba or something like a rumba that was being played, and the old people were dancing the box step, smooth and graceful and courteous, moving across the linoleum like real dancers, their arms on each other’s shoulders like husbands and wives. And it pleased me to see that. And I thought that it was too bad my mother and father could not be here now, too bad they couldn’t come up and dance and go home happy, and have me to watch them. Or even for my mother and Harley Reeves to do that. It didn’t seem like too much to wish for. Just a normal life other people had.
I stood and watched them a while, then I walked back home across the river. Though for some reason I could not sleep that night, and simply lay in bed with the radio turned on to Denver, and smoked cigarettes until it was light. Of course I thought about Nola Foster, that I didn’t know where she lived, though for some reason I thought she might live in Frenchtown, near the pulp plant. Not far. Never-never land, they called that. And I thought about my father, who had once gone to Deer Lodge prison for stealing hay from a friend, and had never recovered from it, though that meant little to me now.
And I thought about the matter of trust. That I would always lie if it would save someone an unhappiness. That was easy. And that I would rather a person mistrust me than dislike me. Though I thought you could always trust me to act a certain way, to be a place, or to say a thing if it ever were to matter. You could predict within human reason what I’d do — that I would not, for example, commit a vicious crime — trust that I would risk my own life for you if I knew it meant enough. And as I lay in the gray light, smoking, while the refrigerator clicked and the switcher in the Burlington Northern yard shunted cars and made their couplings, I thought that though my life at that moment seemed to have taken a bad turn and paused, it still meant something to me as a life, and that before long it would start again in some promising way.