The Sky Fisherman

A MARC JAFFE BOOK

Houghton Mifflin Company
BOSTON NEW YORK
1995

Copyright © 1995 by Craig Lesley

All rights reserved

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lesley, Craig.
The sky fisherman / Craig Lesley,
p. cm
"A Marc Jaffe book."
ISBN
0-395-67724-6
I. Title
PS
3562.
E
815
S
58 1995
813'.54—dc20 94-47493
CIP

Book design by Anne Chalmers
Text type: Trump Medieval (Adobe),
Trio-Light (Castle Systems)

Printed in the United States of America

MP
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For
KATHERYN ANN STAVRAKIS
and our daughters,
ELENA
and
KIRA

T
HE NEON TROUT
blinks off and on, advertising my uncle Jake's guide service and store. Near the railroad tracks, wheat elevators and a flour mill mark the biscuit company where my mother worked. Early sunlight flashes off a silver passenger train crossing the trestle. From the high bluffs, Gateway looks about the same.

After the steep descent into town, I see change. The Oasis offers espresso for the river rafters. Homer's bakery has moved into a modern grocery store, and I want a jelly roll, but they stopped making them when Homer retired. The shabby house where my mother and I hoped to start a new life has been razed for a fast-food chain. The Phoenix stands dark.

At least my mother's new place contains the old icons: Ivory soap, Lipton tea, yellow curtains, a separate hand towel for each guest. Later I will visit my uncle's store. Even now, I know baseball gloves' rich leather smell, the ice machine's whir and clink, the worm beds' earthy odors, fishing tackle's bright allure. An old moosehead trophy has replaced Juniper Teewah's haunting painting of Kalim at the All-Indian basketball tournament.

Seated at the weekly
Gazette,
I pore over yellowed newspapers to see if memory matches facts, or whether my imagination has transformed those past events into myths. Pleased, the young editor offers her help and a cup of herbal tea. "Which year was it?" she asks.

I can't believe she doesn't know.
If not for Billyum Bruised-Head and Jake, the entire town might have been lost.

Reading old accounts, I nod as detail after detail rings true. I recog
nize familiar faces among volunteers who braced shoulders against the disasters. One photo astonishes me. A tiny biplane emerges from billowing thunderheads of smoke. How could it survive that inferno? The photographer is longdead, but he left one hell of a shot. I hear the Stearman's radial engine whine, the warning shouts of ruddy-faced men. I smell char.

Buzzy has given up flying, I learn. Impossible. For me, he remains forever bursting from the smoke, caught in time.

Billyum could be right. "You white guys have a screwball notion," he says. "For you, time's a damn straight line. For us, it's more like a wheel turning 'round. Everything you call the past is still happening right now. No use running."

M
Y STEPFATHER
, Riley Walker, worked for the Union Pacific Railroad, and it was a steady job, but uncertain, because trucking had hurt the railroad by then and they were cutting back. Riley had only a little seniority, and he was always getting "bumped," a railroad term that meant moving to another job when you were forced out by someone with more seniority who wanted yours. In turn, my stepfather bumped someone with less seniority than he had. As a result, my childhood was spent moving from one railroad town to another, each one smaller and more remote than the one before. This constant moving gave me a sense of restlessness, of always being near the edge of something, but of freedom, too, and loss. I learned that I didn't have to feel attached to anyone, except my mother, stepfather, and my uncle Jake, and even that changed eventually.

My mother faced these frequent moves with patience and relentless good cheer for the most part. Her first item of business was to measure the new windows. Then she sewed bright, colorful curtains and seemed even cheerier once they were hung. "That civilizes the place a bit," she'd say, and Riley would nod and agree. "Just like home."

I'd glance up from the railroad housing linoleum—it was my task to scrub the floors with disinfectant, trying to remove any trace of germs left by the former tenants—and I'd try to say something encouraging. But the packing and loading were always difficult, and we worked like coolies, if you want to know the truth.

The moving pattern was recognizable. After we'd been in a place
about a year, one night Riley would delay coming home while he stopped off for a couple hours at a tavern near the railroad depot commiserating with the buddies he'd be leaving, and working his nerve enough to tell my mother. Supper finished, she'd stand anxiously by the door, sipping a cup of hot tea and watching the twilight settle. Riley always carried a small gift when he arrived late—candy or scented candles, perhaps, and she'd thank him and reheat dinner while I went into the front room to watch TV and sulk.

They'd talk with lowered voices at the kitchen table, and I'd hear the clink of Riley's fork and knife, my mother fixing more tea. Her voice always caught a few times, and one phrase I'd hear was "Riley, when's all this going to stop?" Then he'd attempt to say soothing, comforting words, such as he was building up seniority all the time, or he'd heard the schools were good in Harney or Grass Valley, small towns near the railroad sidings where we lived. When the towns became too small to offer comfort, he'd say it was good for a boy to have room to roam, and rural people still had good values.

After they went to bed, I usually didn't hear anything except a few sighs, until the night my stepfather announced we were moving clear across the state to Griggs. Then my mother cried.

In the morning hours I went to the bathroom sink for a cold glass of water and found her lying naked on the tile floor. A wet washcloth covered her face, and her skin seemed flush, as if she had a fever. My turning on the light had startled her, and she bolted upright for a moment, whipping the washcloth from her eyes and calling out, "Griggs! Griggs!" Then she settled back like a child in a restless sleep.

We'd usually have about two weeks before the actual move, enough time to make arrangements for the mail, utilities, and phone. I'd mope around school a little, wringing sympathy from my teachers and a few classmates. Most of the kids had lived on family farms, generation after generation, and I was just a newcomer to them anyway. The teacher might suggest a going-away gift, and the class would bring dollars to buy a book or a basketball. They'd dutifully sign their names and I'd promise to remember them and write, but of course I never did.

My mother always conferred with my teachers and took careful notes about my subjects, so I wouldn't fall behind in the shuffle. She dressed well for those conferences, and when I saw her standing alongside my teachers, I was surprised how pretty she was and how her ash blond hair shone in the sunlight. "Pretty enough for Hollywood," Riley always
teased, but my mother claimed it wasn't true, on account of her nose, which was a little sharp.

Riley tried to ease the strain of displacement by buying some things my mother treasured. A love seat with matching needlepoint chair and a drum table with a leather top come to mind. These nice pieces of furniture were always purchased on time, and I remember how odd they looked in the small plain houses where we lived.

My uncle Jake usually helped with the moves. He was my father's brother and had been fishing with my father when he drowned in a boating accident on the Lost River. After that, Jake tried to keep an eye on us, but he was a bachelor by nature, and I always thought he was relieved when my mother remarried. I knew my mother blamed Jake and his recklessness for my father's death—but she never said much. The Griggs move was our seventh, and my mother didn't call Jake to tell him about it because she knew he was so involved with his sporting goods store and guide business that he couldn't spare the time.

My mother always tried to appear happy while packing, and occasionally she whistled. Before each move, she made a triple batch of her three-bean salad, because you could eat it hot or cold, and her oriental sesame chicken for the same reason. Sometimes the power wasn't turned on at the new place, and it took a while to settle.

For the Griggs move Riley hired two casual laborers from the hall in town, and that pair hardly moved at all. One had high-water pants that barely grazed the top of his runover boots, and the second owned a stomach as big as a flour sack, so he had to sit down frequently to wait out his "woozy" spells. Each man heaped several helpings of chicken and salad on his plate, and the first said the chicken reminded him of being in the Philippines during his tramp schooner days. The other kept pushing the food around his plate with a piece of white bread. "Mighty good fixings," he said. When they were out of earshot and gouging the drum table while loading the truck, my mother glared at Riley and muttered, "I guess we've still got a ways to slip."

***

Moving to Griggs was a slide. We lived in railroad housing at the siding itself. The reality was I'd have to take the school bus thirty-five miles to Pratt for my junior year. My mother would have to do without the comforts of a nearby town. "I'll just catch up on my reading," she said when she realized the situation.

As always, we started out hopeful, but as we traveled across miles and miles of desolate country, a pall fell over our little band. Riley gripped the U-Haul truck steering wheel as if trying to seize control of his life. I sat staring out the window at sagebrush and sparse juniper trees, a few jackrabbits, and an occasional loping coyote. "Good hunting around here, I'll bet," Riley said when we saw a covey of chukars eating gravel at the roadside.

Griggs was one of those remote railroad sidings with three buildings and a lot of dust. All painted leprous yellow, the buildings varied in size with the largest for the stationmaster and the smallest for the trackwalker. Ours was the middle house and sported a strip of cheatgrass-infested lawn. In the early June heat, the buildings appeared to undulate, and my mother said, "Riley, we're going to need some fans."

Beyond the railroad tracks was a sluggish, dirty brown river with a fringe of willows. Close to the river, the air seemed rank and stagnant, offering little relief from the heat. The one outstanding item I noticed at Griggs was a decent basketball hoop and backboard fastened to one of the telegraph posts just beyond the trackwalker's shack. The hoop had a new nylon net. I had been the sixth man for the Grass Valley team the past year and figured I could have started my junior year, especially with two senior guards going off to college. But Pratt was smaller, and I knew I could play B-league ball with no trouble at all, maybe even move to forward, so I planned to keep my shooting touch sharp over the summer.

That basket was the only thing I felt good about. Still, we started fixing our house with a vengeance—hanging curtain rods and curtains, lining the shelves with contact paper, covering the pitted Formica table with a bright blue tablecloth.

My mother's face had dropped when she saw the bathroom, though, which had only a shower unit. She was accustomed to long baths, soaking away her worries and doubts. When she pointed out this lack of a tub to Riley, he just spread his hands wide. "It's only temporary, Flora," he said. "I'm building seniority all the time."

Dwight Riggins, the Griggs station agent, was a burly man with black hair the color of creosote. He kept four or five cigars tucked into the bib pocket of his striped coveralls. The day we arrived in Griggs he was away, but he showed up later that evening just in time to help us unload some heavy items like the refrigerator from the front of the truck bed. My mother had put lamp shades in the refrigerator to keep them from getting crushed, and Dwight thought that was a pretty nifty trick. "After you move a few times, you learn some little shortcuts," she told him.

"I'm sure you do at that," he said. He seemed friendly enough, and I was glad for his help, because by that time we were all getting pretty tired. Still, I didn't care for the way he kept sneaking sidelong glances at my mother, and I thought maybe his laugh came just a little too easy. It turned out that he was batching a couple weeks because he had dropped off his wife and daughter at a fancy art camp.

"They're taking painting classes at the coast," he explained. "Both of them together. It's a mother-daughter deal."

"It must be cool at the coast," my mother said, and I could hear the touch of envy in her voice. "I'll bet it's quite lovely."

"It better be, for what I'm paying for that program," he said. "My wife doesn't have a lick of talent, but Dwy-anne, my daughter, there's another story. Of course, the teacher tells them both they're gifted. That's how he affords living on the coast in summer."

After Dwight left to have dinner in town with some friends, my mother strolled through the house, checking the layout. Even though the boxes hadn't been unpacked, the beds were made and the furniture set out, so you had a sense of the place. She ran her fingers over the dusty doorsill and looked out over the dry countryside. "We're going to need some fans, Riley, if this is going to be tolerable."

"I'll put them on my list, Flora," he said.

"There's more to Dwight than meets the eye," Riley told me later. At first I thought he was talking about Dwight's sidelong glances at my mother, but then Riley said, "He's a nudist. Word has it the whole family is—even the daughter. And she's just a couple years older than you are."