Tim rolled his eyes and said, “What crap. Jesus Christ.”
Jack had never heard Tim talk with such sarcasm before, and he was a little shocked. He tried to cover for his host. Jack said, “Tim’s been all over the West on all the famous rivers, right, Tim? The Bighorn, the Big Hole, the Wind, the Madison, the North Fork, and of course here on the North Platte. He always tells me about his trips. So when he invited me on this one, man, I jumped at the chance.”
Duke said, “So you’ve gotten around, eh, Tim?”
“I’m not the only one, Randall.”
Jack shook his head. Tim seemed so out of character, so bitter. He thought, Something is going on here. He wondered if rich men treated guides this way. If so, he didn’t think he liked it.
Jack heard a heavy splash and he turned around in his seat again. He’d seen the anchor hanging from an arm off the back of the boat and now it was gone. The anchor was ten scarred pounds of pyramid-shaped lead. It was triggered to drop by a foot release under Duke’s rowing bench. Jack could feel the boat slow and then stop when the anchor bit into the riverbed and the boat swung around into the current.
Duke spoke to Jack as if he hadn’t heard Tim’s earlier statement.
“We’ll get you started with nymphs and an indicator. When we get rigged up, throw it out there and keep an eye on the indicator, Jack. If you see it tick or bounce, you raise the rod tip fast. Sometimes these fish barely lip the nymph. So if you see that indicator do anything at all, set the hook.”
Jack nodded. “Okay.”
“It’s easy to get mesmerized by the indicator in the water, so don’t worry about that. We only have one place on the river where it gets a little hairy, and that’s the place downriver called the Chutes. You’ve probably heard of it.”
“I have. Didn’t somebody die there last year?”
“About one a year, actually,” Duke said, stripping lengths of tippet from a spool to build the nymph rig and tying knots with the deft movements of a surgeon. “There are big rocks on both sides and some rapids down the middle. But as long as you hit the middle squared up, there’s no problem. I’ve done it a hundred times and never flipped a boat. That’s the only place you’ll need to reel in for a few minutes and you may get a little splash of water on you since you’re in front. Otherwise, don’t worry about a thing. Tim, do you want me to tie on a couple of nymphs for you?”
“I’ll do it myself.”
“Suit yourself, Tim.”
“I will, Randall.”
Jack really didn’t know Tim well enough to claim they were friends. So he had been surprised when Tim called him at his construction company the week before and offered to host him on a guided fishing trip on the North Platte River. Jack had said yes before checking his calendar or with his wife, Janey, even with the odd provision Tim had requested.
Later, Jack had told Janey about the invitation and the terms of the provision. She was making dinner at the stove — spaghetti and meat sauce — and she shook her head and made a puzzled face.
She said, “He wants you to make the booking? I didn’t think you knew him all that well.”
“I don’t. But yes, he asked me to use my credit card for the deposit, but said he’d pay me back for everything afterward, including the flies we use and the tip. He wanted to make sure we were scheduled to go on the river with the owner of the guide service — somebody named Duke — and no one else. He said it was important to go with the owner because we’d catch the most fish that way. Who was I to argue? Tim wants the best, I guess.”
“But why you?”
Jack shrugged. “I guess he remembers I was the only one who never gave him any shit in high school when we were growing up. Everybody else did because he was such a weird dude. And he was. You’ve seen that picture of him in the yearbook. But hell, I guess I always sort of felt sorry for him. For some reason, I liked him and I kind of sympathized with the little creep. His parents were real no-hopers, and for a while the whole family lived in their car. That car was just filled with junk — sleeping bags and crap. They’d drop him off for school on the street we lived on so nobody would know, but I saw him get out once. He was real embarrassed, but I didn’t tell anyone I saw him. I guess he appreciated that. He told me once he never wanted to live in a car again. A high school kid telling me that, I don’t know. I was sort of touched. Man, I sound lame.”
She laughed and said, “You do, honey, but that will be our little secret. Then he invented that thing — what was it?”
“You’re asking me? Hell, I’m not sure. Somebody explained it to me once but it didn’t take. Something about a circuit for a wireless router or something. Whatever it was, it made him millions.”
She pursed her lips and said, “And he moved back home to Wyoming. I always thought that was strange.”
“Yeah, me too. He coulda lived anywhere.”
“Jack,” she asked, while making a sly face at him, “if you made tens of millions, would you move?”
Jack snorted and rolled his eyes. “We won’t have to worry about finding out. I’ll never have to make that decision, so you better keep your job.”
“Bummer,” she said, and changed the subject. “And he got married to that bombshell. What is her name?”
He could see her in his mind’s eye: tall, black hair, green eyes, great figure. A bit much, but that was the point, he thought. But her name? “I can’t remember,” he said.
She said, “I saw them together once. Beauty and the Geek, that’s for sure.”
“Maybe he wanted to prove something to all the jocks and high school big shots who used to pants him and hang him upside down from a tree, like, Look at me, losers!”
“But he asked you to go fishing with him.”
“Yeah, and I want to go.”
“Maybe he thinks you’re his best friend. That’s kind of sweet and pathetic at the same time.”
“Oh, bullshit,” Jack said, looking away. “I just want to catch big trout with a five-hundred-dollar-a-day guide. That’s the big time, baby. Every man wants to fish with flies and catch a big trout. Here’s my chance.”
Jack caught two large trout before noon with the nymphs and missed at least five more. The fish he boated and Duke netted were a rainbow and a brown. The trout were big, thick, and sleek and reminded him of wet quadriceps muscles that happened to have a head, fins, and a tail. Both were over twenty-two inches. When the fish took the nymphs, it was as if an electric current shot up through the line to his rod, as if they’d like to pull him out of the boat and into the water. He’d whooped and Duke dropped the anchor with a splash and reached for his big net. Jack couldn’t remember when he had had so much fun.
Tim caught ten, but netted them himself without a word, and Duke simply shrugged and said, “Let me know if you need any help.”
“I don’t. I do things for myself.”
The rhythm of the current lulled Jack. He stared at the indicator until the image of it burned into his mind, and its bobbing mesmerized him. At one point he looked up and thought the boat and indicator were stationary in the river, but the banks were rolling by, and not the other way around. There were bald eagles in some of the trees — Duke pointed them out in a way that suggested he did the same thing every day — and they floated by mule deer drinking in the water and a family of river otters slip-sliding over one another on some rocks.