Buffalo Jump Blues (3 page)

“Anything happens to this calf,” Harold said, “you'll answer to me.”

“Is that a threat?” He was looking at Ettinger. “This man has threatened physical violence upon my person and all I'm doing is trying to execute my job. I want it duly noted.”

“Not a threat.” Harold rearranged his grip on the struggling bison calf. “Like you said, Drake, some things are just a fact of nature.”

E
very July 7, as far back as he remembered, Sean Stranahan had gone fishing. The rivers changed, the spots on the flanks of the trout changed with the species, but the ritual at water's edge was the same. He'd pull the rod his father had milled from Tonkin bamboo from its sock, drink in the scent of tung oil, joint the nickel silver ferrules, and string a double-tapered silk fly line through the guides. The fly box, an old polished pewter Wheatley with spring clips, held three dozen flies, all that remained from his father's vise. His father had tied them with mechanic's hands—thick, blunt fingers with remote nerve endings—and the flies were crude by modern standards. They were traditional wet fly patterns, the oldest tied on vintage blind-eyed hooks, but they had been catching trout since before Sean was born. This year he chose a #12 Gold-Ribbed Hare's Ear and knotted it to a 3X monofilament tippet. The tippet was one size too heavy for the fly, but, having only a handful of his father's creations left, Sean didn't want to chance the leader being broken on a sizable fish.

The water eddying around his wader belt was his favorite stretch of the Madison River, only a short walk upstream from the log cabin owned by the Madison River Liars and Fly Tiers Club. Sean was an honorary member of the club; his dog, Choti, pacing the bank as she watched him cast, was a more or less permanent one during the summer months. Patrick Willoughby, the club's president, had affected mock disappointment when Sean declined his offer to fish with him after dinner.

“My dear boy, you cut me to the quick,” he'd said, and shaken his
head, his round-rimmed glasses and moon face lending him the look of a professorial owl. But he had not pressed the matter. He'd only asked if Sean would return in time to accompany the club members to the bar later.

Sean had said that was up to the trout.

It was still up to the trout an hour after he'd started casting. He'd clipped off the Hare's Ear, replaced it with a Leadwing Coachman, lost faith in the Coachman, and was swinging a somber pattern called a Dusty Miller when the line stopped, a trout into the air at the sting of the hook. The fish pulled away to midriver and wrapped the line around an exposed boulder. It hung there, the line throbbing while Sean lied to himself, telling himself there was still hope. As a last recourse, he threw slack into the line, hoping to fool the fish into thinking the pressure was from the opposite direction and coax it into swimming back around the rock. It didn't. Something had to give, and it was the knot that gave.

Sean reeled in the slack line, feeling a hollowness in his chest that had less to do with losing the fish than the fly.

“Sorry, Pop,” he said.

He thought about tying on another fly. He couldn't recall a time when he hadn't caught at least one trout on his father's birthday, and he knew that if he fished into the enveloping darkness, he still had a very good chance. But not catching was fishing, too, as his dad would have been the first to remind him. It was the angler's song in minor key.

Sean started back toward the cabin, Choti following, the rod balanced on his shoulder with the tip backward, like a boy in a Rockwell painting. Water had always been his window to the past, and as he walked along the fisherman's path his mind turned to an earlier trail, one that wound through a swamp along Michigan's Au Sable River. Twilight gloom had gathered in the arms of the cedars. His father took his hand as they crossed the deep part, a trout against the far bank rising like a metronome to mayflies that spread their wings on the surface, crucifix offerings to the trout. The line whistled. The
trout took, walloped its tail with a hollow smacking sound and then went deep as his father handed Sean the rod, that throbbing pull the only drug he'd ever need. When he curled his fingers under the gills to carry the trout back to camp, lightning bugs burned their lanterns under one willow, then the next, a string of winking lights to show the way.

Such recollections came less often now. They rusted away with the passing of the years, like the old hooks on the flies his father had tied.

“You have the look of a man who's been somewhere else,” Patrick Willoughby said, peeling his waders off on the stoop of the porch.

—

The Trout Tails Bar and Grill, “Tits and Tails” as the locals called it, was or rather had been one of those unzoned, wood-slat, metal-roofed Bud-and-burger bars that change ownership as often as the anglers who inhabit them change trout streams. Since Stranahan's move to Montana four years previously, it had been called the Bear Claw Bar and Grill, the Last Cast Saloon, and After the Hatch, each establishment succumbing to the fiscal limitations of a three-month season.

Its latest incarnation was a nod to the Sip 'n Dip Lounge, the Great Falls mermaid bar that had been christened by
GQ
magazine as the country's best watering hole. Sean had dropped into the Sip 'n Dip once while fishing the Missouri River and been surprised to discover that the real attraction wasn't the women flipping their tails behind glass, but Piano Pat Spoonheim, a great-grandmother who played a triple-decker keyboard and had been talking her way through old standards at the same bench for more than fifty years.

Trout Tails, built on a high bank of the Madison opposite its confluence with the West Fork, sported an electric sign wrested from pink-and-aqua neon tubes that operated on a timing mechanism, so that a mermaid's tail appeared to flip back and forth as you passed through the door. Inside was Margaritaville North—crab traps
suspended from a bamboo ceiling, a neon parrot advertising Budweiser beer, globe lights reflecting cheeks blushed by alcohol, a goldfish bowl for tips on the top of a battered baby grand. Sean arrived a few minutes behind the other club members and found Pat Willoughby already ensconced at a corner table, along with Kenneth Winston, a hairstylist from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, who supported his trout jones by teaching white hairdressers how to barber black men's hair.

“You need a trim,” Winston said as Sean sat down. “I know you're going for the lumbersexual look, but still, a lady likes a little grooming.”

“I need better luck is all. That's my first fishless night in a long time.”

“What you need, my dear fellow,” Willoughby said, “is a pint of Slow Elk Oatmeal Stout and a deluxe blue cheese bison burger, on me of course, though I'm still smarting from your snub.”

“Today's my father's birthday. I like to make a few casts for him. I'm sorry for not telling you earlier.”

“Perfectly understandable.”

Willoughby nodded to the waitress, and when the beers came, they toasted to Sean's father.

“Still no one to play the piano?” Sean said.

Winston raised a pair of sculpted eyebrows. “You're in a mermaid bar and you're worried about the piano player?”

“Actually, I heard they might be getting someone from New Orleans,” Willoughby said.

“Oh?”

Sean had had an affair of the soul, the body, too, though perhaps not the heart, with a piano bar singer from Mississippi shortly after he'd moved to Montana. The singer, who went by Velvet Lafayette and whose real name was Vareda Beaudreux, had read the etched letters on the ripple glass of his art studio at the Bridger Mountain Cultural Center—
Private Investigations
—taken the sign literally, and hired him to find her brother, and then her brother's killer, when the man wound up drowned with a Royal Wulff trout fly hooked in his
lower lip. No, it couldn't be her. Vareda had disappeared back into the Delta country from which she had come, but then she had mentioned singing in New Orleans once.

“You wouldn't have caught the name?” he asked Willoughby.

“No, it was just something the Queen of the Waters said in passing.”

“Ah, queen of my heart,” Winston said.

“I believe the body part to which you refer lies somewhere south of the heart,” Willoughby corrected.

When Sean had entered the bar, the seven-thousand-gallon tank was empty, the mermaids who took turns taking dips changing shifts. Besides the Queen of the Waters—a copper blonde with Botticelli curls who had been coaxed from South Florida, where she swam with reef fish as a surprise treat for the patrons of a glass-bottomed boat—the mermaids included the Parmachene Belle and the Chippewa Nymph. All had taken their names from fishing flies, and with the exception of the Queen, who was seeing Sean's best friend, Sam Meslik, Sean knew more about the histories of the fly patterns than of the women who assumed their names.

Hearing a splash, he turned his head to see the Parmachene Belle enter the tank, trailing a fizz of bubbles. Her hair was platinum with dyed red streaks and her long white tail was scarlet-banded, the color combination of the trout fly. A muscular swimmer, she backflipped, bubbles blowing out of her nose, her candy-cane tail flowing. Sean turned his attention back his burger and the table's conversation, which was about the bison falling off the cliffs, the Palisades being only a few miles downriver from the clubhouse and even closer to the bar. Robin Cowdry had broken the news, which thanks to Peachy Morris was up and down the valley in the span of a day. Sean's sympathy for the buffalo already being voiced by those at the table, he nodded along, and when his eyes returned to the glass, the Parmachene Belle had kicked to the front of the tank, where she stared incuriously at the patrons of the bar, who stared back as if they were
observing an orangutan in a zoo. When a man raised his camera, she beckoned him closer with the waving hands of a belly dancer.

Sean felt his phone buzzing in his pants pocket—a surprise as this part of the valley was usually a dead spot for reception—and walked outside to take the call. It was Katie Sparrow, the search dog handler who worked as a backcountry ranger in Yellowstone Park.

“Is dickhead one word or two?” she said by way of hello.

“Uh, one, I think.”

“'Cause I'm writing a text, and it starts, ‘Dear Dickhead, where were you last night when you said you'd help me bake dog biscuits?'”

Sean had been afraid that's where the conversation was heading. “I'm sorry, Katie. I didn't know it was a date.”

“What did you think it was?”

“Uh, more of a suggestion. I was just tired. It was a long day on the water and I didn't want to make the drive when I was half asleep.”

“Really? I'm not just your strumpet, some piece of low-hanging fruit like a kumquat. You just take a bite whenever you feel like it?”

“Do you even know what a kumquat is?”

“Don't change the subject.” Then: “Do you?”

“No,” Sean admitted. “I don't know what a strumpet is, either.”

“Where are you now?”

He told her. Silence.

“I got a tail, too.” There was a forlorn note in her voice.

This was the Katie Sparrow that Sean had come to know over the past few weeks, bold and chipper one moment, small and alone the next.

“You're still in love with Martha, aren't you? You want to be faithful even though she's taken up with Harold again.”

Sean didn't have an answer.

“I knew it. I guess I'm not one who can throw the first stone, though.”

Finally he said, “Tell me about the tail.”

“It's the one I wore to the Sheriff's Ball. The puma costume.”

“I remember.” He hesitated. “If I come over, will you show it to me?”

“If I can find it. I think it's in a drawer or something.”

By the time he closed the phone and returned to the bar, Willoughby had paid the bill and he and Ken Winston were standing up to go.

“We're fishing streamers at five a.m. sharp,” Willoughby said. “Pursuit of the mythical ten-pound brown.”

Winston's skeptical eyebrows meant that remained to be seen.

“You
are
bunking with us, Sean.” Willoughby gave him his peering-over-his-glasses look. “You
will
accompany us on this most hearty of endeavors.”

“I don't think so.”

“Elaborate,” Winston said.

“No,” Stranahan said.

Mischief danced in Winston's eyes. Very white teeth in a knowing smile.

“It was a wrong number,” Sean said.

“Uh-huh. Five-minute wrong number.”

“Oh, leave the poor boy alone, Ken,” Willoughby said. “Can't you see he's hit a rough patch? A little R and R is quite in order and it just leaves more fish for us.”

Sean finished his beer standing and followed them out the door. They said their good-byes and he stood a minute, lifting his eyes to the sky. A sickle moon, a few stars, too early for the diamond glitter of a Montana midnight.

“Are you looking for any one in particular?”

He turned to see a woman standing on the porch of the bar. She brought a cigarette to her lips, making a brief cherry circle.

“Tobacco is one of the four sacred medicines,” she said, waving the cigarette. She had long hair that created a shadow, making it hard to see her face. “So which one?”

“It's the star of Pegasus, Beta Pegasi. There.” He pointed to a bright star that dimmed, then grew bright again.

“I know most of the Native American constellations. I'm not sure they have that one.” She puffed at the cigarette.

“You shouldn't be doing that to your lungs, medicine or not.”

“But I don't inhale. I just smoke for the therapeutic aspect.”

He crossed the few yards that separated them and shook her hand. “I'm Sean,” he said.

“Ida.” She leaned back against the rail of the porch, hooking the heel of one boot over the toe of the other.

In the glow of the neon tubes, Sean could make out the sprinkle of freckles across her cheekbones and the bridge of her nose. Level eyes. Chestnut-colored hair. Her posture was utterly relaxed and unselfconscious, though an oversize jean jacket hid the contours of her body.