Rie was sitting at the table in the front room of the union headquarters with a cup of coffee in her hand. She was barefoot and wore a pair of white shorts and a rumpled denim shirt, and her face was pale with hangover. I went through the screen door without knocking.
“Get in the car, woman. I’m going to do something for that Yankee mind of yours today,” I said.
“What?” She looked at me with her hair in her eyes.
“Dinner on the ground and devil in the bush, by God. Come on.”
“Hack, what are you talking about?” Her words were slow and carefully controlled, and I knew she really had one.
“I’m going to introduce you to my boyhood. Goddamn it, girl, get up and stop fooling around.”
“I don’t think I can do anything today.”
“Yes, you can. Never stay inside with a hangover. Charge out into the sunlight and do things you never did before.”
“How much did I drink?”
“You just did it with bad things in your mind.”
“I’m sorry about last night. I must have seemed like a real dumb chick.”
>“You could never be that.”
She smiled and pushed the hair out of her eyes.
“I’m sorry, anyway,” she said.
“Right now there’s a green river about seventy miles from here, and under a big gray limestone rock there’s an eight-pound bass with one of my flies hanging in his lip, and unless you get your ass up I’m going down the road by myself.”
“You’re a real piece of pie, Hack.”
“No, I ain’t. I’m shit and nails and all kinds of bad news. You ought to know that by this time. If you need any references you can contact my brother. I left him yesterday with his ulcer bulging out of his throat.”
She put her fingers to her forehead and laughed, and that wonderful merry flash of light came back into her eyes.
“I’ll be out in a minute. There’s some chicory coffee and corn bread on the stove,” she said.
“For a Yankee girl you may be all right after all,” I said, and watched the smooth curve of her hips against her shorts as she walked into the back of the house.
We drove north through the hills and flat farmland of string bean and corn fields and cow pasture to a wide, green, slow-moving river lined with willow, redbud, and juniper trees, where I had fly-fished as a boy with my father. The river was low from the drought, and the surface was covered with seeds from the juniper trees, but there were still eddies and deep holes behind the boulders in the current, and I knew that I could take all the crappie, bream, and bass that I could put on a stringer. The mud banks were covered with the sharp, wet tracks of deer and raccoons, and mockingbirds and blue jays flew angrily through the hot shade of the trees. The sunlight reflected off the water, and farther down, where the river turned by a grove of cypress trees, the sandbars gleamed hard and white in the middle of the current. Dragonflies flicked over the reeds and lily pads near the bank, and the bream were feeding in the shade of the willows, denting the water in quiet circles, like raindrops, when they rose to take an insect.
I took my three-piece Fenwick fly rod in its felt cover and the small box of number-eighteen dry flies from the trunk, and we walked through the trees and dead leaves and twigs to the river. Comanche and Apache warriors used to camp here on the banks to cut and shave arrow shafts from the juniper wood, and for a moment my eyes became twenty years younger as I looked for the place where they had probably built their wickiups and hung their venison in the trees over smoking fires. I knew that if I looked long enough I could find their old camp: the fire line a foot or so below the soil, the flint chippings from a work mound, the bone awls and shards of pottery. Since I was a boy I always felt that the land breathed with the presence of those dead men who had struggled on it long before we were born, and sometimes as a boy, particularly in the late evening, I almost felt that they were still living out their lives around me, firing their arrows from under the necks of war ponies at pioneer cabins that had long since decayed into loam. Once when I was plowing a field that we had always used for pasture, I felt something hard and brittle snap against the share and grind into pieces over the moldboard. I felt it right through the vibration of the tractor, and before I had shut off the engine and turned around in the metal seat I already knew that I had scraped across a warrior’s grave. The shattered skull and bits of white vertebra were scattered in the furrow, and all of his rose quartz arrowpoints gleamed among his ribs like drops of blood.
We sat under a cypress tree close to the water, and Rie opened the beer and made sandwiches of sausage and cheese while I tied a new tapered leader with one-pound test tippet. I waded out into the warm water and false-cast under the overhang of the trees, pulling out the line from the reel easily with my left hand, and shot the small brown hackle fly into a riffle on the far side of a boulder. The Fenwick was a beautiful rod. It was as light as air in my palm, and it was tapered and balanced so perfectly in its design that I could set the hook hard with one flick of the fingers. The fly drifted through the riffle twice without a strike, but on the third cast a largemouth bass rose from the bottom of the pool, like a green air bubble floating slowly upward, and broke the surface in an explosion of light. He took the fly in the corner of his lip, shaking his head violently, his dorsal fin and tail boiling the water, then he dove deep again toward the heavy current. I kept the rod high over my head with my right arm outstretched and let the line run tightly between my fingers. He sat on it once, deep, pointed downstream, and the tip of the rod bent downward until I knew that he was about to break the leader and I had to give him more line. I waded with him in the current, working him at an angle toward the bank, then he rose once more, the hook now protruding close to his eye, and hit the water sideways. He tried to turn his head back into the current, but he was weakening fast, and I started pulling in the line slowly with my left hand. He waved his tail in the shallows, clouding the water with sand, and each time I lifted the rod to bring his mouth to the surface he sat on it again and bent the tip in a quivering arch. I let him spend his last strength against the spring of the rod, then I worked my hand down the leader and caught him carefully under the stomach. He was heavy and cold in my hand, and I slipped the hook out of his mouth, watching the eye, and placed him back in the water. He remained still for a moment, his gills pulsing, then he moved slowly off through the shallows and dropped into the green darkness of the current.
I leaned the rod against the cypress trunk and drank a bottle of Jax with a sausage and cheese sandwich. The Spanish moss overhead looked like wisps of cobweb against the sun, and I could smell the dank, cool odor of the rotted stumps and worm-eaten logs back in the woods. Rie had waded on the edge of the river while I fished, and her bare, suntanned legs were coated with sand. She sat with her arms behind her, looking at the sandbars and stretch of willows on the far side of the river, and I had to force myself from dropping my eyes to her breasts.
“How did you find such a wonderful place?” she said.
“My father used to take me here when I was a boy. In the spring we’d fish the riffle from that rosebud tree down to where the river turns in the shade. Then we’d dig for an old Indian camp. I found my first bannerstone in the bottom of that wash.”
I sat down beside her on the tablecloth and drank from the beer. A shaft of sunlight struck inside the amber bottle.
“It must be fine to have a father like that,” she said.
“Yeah, he was a good man.”
“Was he a lawyer?”
“He taught southern history at the University of Texas, then he was in Congress two terms during Roosevelt’s administration. He took me deer hunting once on John Nance Garner’s ranch in Uvalde, but I was too small then to believe that the Vice President of the United States could chew on cigars and spit tobacco juice. My father had to convince me that Mr. Jack really did work in an important capacity for the government.”
“Gee, what a great story,” she said.
“I shook hands with Roosevelt once at Warm Springs, too. I wanted to look at the metal braces on his legs, but his eyes were so intense and interested, even in a boy’s conversation, that you couldn’t glance away from them. I was full of all kinds of pride and sunshine when I realized that my father was a personal friend of this man. I watched them drink whiskey on the verandah together, and for the first time I knew my father had another life that
