The Sky Fisherman (4 page)

"Delicious. I wish we lived in the South so we could all sit out on the veranda and drink mint juleps."

"You can put it in iced tea," I said. "Or spoon it over lamb chops."

"That's a lovely idea," she said, holding the peppermint beneath her nose. "But I believe that mint sauce actually requires spearmint."

We settled into a small rental house across from the high school where my mother planned to enroll me in the fall. Although smaller than the place in Griggs, it had a combination bathtub and shower. She seemed excited about being on her own—except for me—and working again. She made curtains for the windows and bought some secondhand furniture in Central, about fifty miles away. So many people were moving to Gateway because of the boom, all the decent local furniture had been picked over, she said.

Jobs were easy to come by, and she got hired as a receptionist at Sunrise Biscuits. She had to go to work early, but the hours were regular and she wasn't on her feet. Anything was better than being a waitress was how she looked at jobs. "This pay's steady and you don't have to take anyone's lip."

As he had promised, my uncle put me to work, starting with simple things around the sporting goods store like packaging worms and fixing flats on kids' bicycles. The hours were long but the pay was low, as he liked to say, and I enjoyed working there, meeting the people coming through on vacation or planning their yearly fishing trips.

Except for Riley's occasional calls and the awkwardness they caused, things got back to normal. He had started calling as soon as we had a phone installed. A couple of times he had long conversations with my mother and talked about getting back together, but she shook her head firmly and told him that wasn't an option. Once he said, "Put the boy on," and she handed me the phone.

He talked about old times awhile, then asked, "Seems like her mind's set, huh, Culver?"

"It does seem that way, Riley."

"The best years of my life, gone to hell in a handbasket." He paused. "Well, anyway, I'd like to see you, buddy. Maybe do some fishing. Remember those salmon we caught on the coast? One was pretty near as big as you."

"Those were fish to remember all right," I said.

"By golly, we'll go again sometime then," he said, brightening. "Well, that's it for now. Don't take any wooden nickels."

I hung up, feeling a little low but wondering exactly why I didn't feel more torn up.

One morning, after we'd been in Gateway about two weeks, my mother was just ready for work when my uncle Jake showed up, pounding on the door. He pushed in past her and slapped the newspaper down on the kitchen table. I was finishing my shower but I could hear them talking with excited voices.

When I came out of the bathroom, my mother sat at the table reading the newspaper spread out before her. A strange look was on her face, one I can only describe as vindicated, but she seemed fierce, too.

"Would you believe it?" Jake said.

She stood and swept her hand across the table. "I knew it. I could see it coming." She paced around the kitchen, clearly agitated but somehow pleased, too, the way a person is when proven right. Stopping at the sink, she got a glass of water and took a long drink. "We got out of there just in time," she said.

"Do you want me to do something, Flora?" Jake asked.

"Just take me to work," she said, picking up her purse. "This is only my second week and I don't want to be late."

Jake started to gather up the newspaper, but she stopped him. "Let him read about it," she said, meaning me. "I got him out of there just in time." She thumped her small fist on the table. "Just in time."

When they had gone, I poured a glass of orange juice and sat, braced for the worst. I feared that Riley had blown off his head, or someone else's, but that wasn't the story.

He had burned Griggs to the ground, every building standing, including the trackwalker's outhouse. And he had planned it carefully, waiting until the trackwalker left on a binge and the stationmaster and his wife headed to the movies in Pratt. After dousing the buildings with railroad
kerosene, Riley had burned them. The arson investigator said Riley had left three cans around as evidence.

By the time the county's outlaw fire engine raced to the scene from Pratt, all the buildings were fully involved and the fire burned out of control toward the river. Only the water stopped it.

Remarkably, Riley had driven to Griggs Junction, drunk coffee, and eaten doughnuts while watching the spectacle below. "He was calm as a cucumber," the waitress was quoted as saying. "I never suspected him at all. He left a generous tip and said 'Good evening' as polite as pie." In the newspaper quote, Dwight called Riley "a very disturbed and sneaky bastard," but I guess that wasn't too bad, considering his house and all its belongings were gone. The paper went on to say the alleged arsonist had not been apprehended but the authorities were following leads.

In addition to the story, the paper carried "before" and "after" photos of Griggs. Nothing remained in the after photos except the buildings' charred foundations and the basketball hoop hanging from a blackened telegraph pole.

After studying the pictures awhile, I smiled because I realized that the first photo wasn't of Griggs, but of Barlow, the siding thirty miles east, and somehow it made me happy to think that probably no one had a picture of Griggs, except for how it looked after my stepfather burned it.

I fixed a bowl of corn flakes and sat at the table, reading and rereading the story just to see if I could fill in any of the gaps, but the story remained pretty much the same as when I had first read it. Neither my mother nor I was mentioned, and that made me feel relieved somehow, as if I had a special secret. Of course, I figured the authorities would contact us eventually to see if Riley had been in touch, but I didn't plan on telling them anything, even if I knew. Having a stepfather on the run made me feel exhilarated and I decided not to go to work.

When I went outside, the morning was bright and fresh. Two girls were hitting a tennis ball on the high school court, and their tennis outfits gleamed white in the sun. Even at this distance, I could see both were better looking than any girl in Grass Valley.

Beside the tennis court was a basket with five guys playing a pickup game. Two of them were Indians from the reservation nearby, and after we shot for sides, I was on their team. I realized the three big farm boys on the other team had missed on purpose, so they could play together, but I didn't mind. Still, I said to myself, Culver, you remember this is how things work in Gateway.

Knowing a man I had lived with for eight years was now a felon on the run gave me a streak of recklessness, and that day I shot red-hot hoops. Every shot seemed to fall. Each time I released the ball it flew like a wild bird to its nest, and when the farm kids tried to double-team me, I made quick passes to my open teammate for easy layups.

After a while the girls stopped playing tennis and watched us, the way girls do when they're interested but trying not to show it. The dark-haired one smiled a couple times like she knew something special, and after I made a long fadeaway jumper, I gave her a little wave. She half waved back, and not long after, they left.

"Don't even think about it," one of the Indian boys told me. "That's heartbreak city."

"Is that right," I said. "I'm new in town."

"What's your name, anyway? Maybe you're gonna make the team."

"Culver," I said. "I live right across the street." I nodded toward the house. My mother had left her bedroom window open, and in the breeze, the bright curtains seemed to wave a greeting, but I couldn't say if it was hello or farewell.

T
HE GATEWAY SPORTING GOODS
sign featured a leaping blue trout with a red neon rainbow along its side. The sign was illuminated twenty-four hours a day, and we stayed open most of those hours during fishing season. Gateway was the closest town to the Lost River Wilderness Area, and all the Chamber of Commerce brochures proclaimed "Gateway to Recreational Paradise."

Uncle Jake was the kind of stand-up guy a small town relies on. Before going into the sporting goods business, he had worked at the weekly newspaper, so he was acquainted with nearly everyone in town and on the nearby reservation. He had driven ambulance and fought fires as a volunteer when he wasn't guiding on the river. In short, he was everything my stepfather Riley was not.

As soon as the store opened at seven, we had to take the bicycles from the aisles and line them along the sidewalk just outside the plate glass windows that ran the length of the store. By clearing the aisles, we made a path to the worms, which were kept in a big refrigerator at the back of the store. It took fifteen minutes or so to clear the path, especially if one of us had to stop to write a couple of fishing licenses or boat permits for the Lost. During that time, the worm customers would browse and pick up hooks, weights, nets, and lures. Even the most dedicated bait fisherman sometimes became frustrated when the fish refused to bite on natural bait and would try trailing the worm behind an Indiana or Colorado spinner. I came to realize there was no particular hurry in getting the worms for the customers, because the longer they were
forced to browse in the store, the more likely they would buy other equipment. We actually lost money on the worms but made it up on all the tackle.

Three quarters of the worms came from Lucky's worm farm in the valley, where it was cooler and they had more rainfall. Lucky stopped by every two weeks with a small refrigerator truck loaded with worms. The truck had green shamrocks on the side but Lucky wasn't Irish. We'd buy six thousand on the spot because we kept another refrigerator in back that could hold twelve large boxes. They came five hundred to a box.

I guess we must have been his best customers, at least in that part of the state, because after each delivery he'd sit an hour or two in back, shooting the breeze and helping me package worms. We put them in Buss Bedding, adding a little moss to hold the moisture. The bedding was a dry grayish compound that resembled the dumpings from a vacuum cleaner bag. Moistened, it felt like bits of clay. In the refrigerator worms could last a month, but if someone left the worms unprotected in a sweltering car, they'd die in a couple hours. Backpackers who put them in their packs, then hiked five or six miles to some remote mountain lake, found the worms dead when they arrived. "You sold me lousy worms," they'd complain a couple weeks later. To prevent this sort of thing, each time I sold a package, I'd lift the lid and show them the worms, perfectly alive and wiggling.

Jake also bought worms from kids who caught them at night on the high school lawns after the big rotating sprinklers soaked the ground. The kids filled coffee cans or milk cartons, and we paid them a penny a worm, as long as they hadn't used electrodes. Shocked worms turned mushy and died after a couple days, so Jake never had me package kids' worms until they'd been in the refrigerator a few days and we could see how they were holding up. If a kid lied about them, we didn't buy any more from him. Only a couple tried to cheat.

As soon as we had wheeled the bikes onto the sidewalk, clearing a path to the bait refrigerators, and served the initial surge of customers, Homer Baxter delivered a tray of doughnuts, bear claws, and jelly rolls. Like most bakers, he got up around two
A.M.
so he could be to work at three, and as he was fond of pointing out, by the time we opened the store he was halfway to quitting time. Homer took great pride in his simplest goods such as cake doughnuts, but his passion was to create a perfect raspberry jelly roll. He rolled up long sponge cake strips into tight circles oozing jam and sprinkled the outside with confectioners
sugar; then he sliced the cake in sections two fingers thick. No matter what I was doing, when I saw Homer bearing a tray of jelly rolls, I stopped my task and headed to the back of the store. Once in a while, Homer would try a slice of his roll and grin. "I've almost got it right," he'd say.

My uncle nailed an old wicker creel to the wall by the coffeepot, and people tossed in dimes for coffee, quarters for bakery goods. Once a week he took out enough cash to buy another five-pound can of Folgers. The rest he gave to Homer.

Gigantic Gabriel Webster had sparkling blue eyes and a smile wide as a Cadillac grill. The station manager for KRCW, he chose the handle "Gab" for his radio work—everything from selling advertisements and promotions to covering high school events. Gab could talk, as Jake pointed out, and he constantly kept a string of patter going. A tireless promoter of local businesses and events, he firmly believed radio spots could push merchandise.

But for all his boosterism, Gab had a melancholy streak, the residue of years' selling door to door until he'd finally hustled his way into the heart of the station owner's daughter. By that time, he felt he'd missed his big opportunity, television. Handsome enough for the small screen, he had grown a little long in the tooth, and when he quit grinning, Gab appeared tired.

Even so, his voice was rich and confident, making him seem bigger than he actually was, just a shade over six one. "This is Gigantic Gab on the radio giant KRCW-Gateway," he'd announce as he did his radio promotions, and listeners could imagine him as big as they wanted. "When I talk, I fill up their entire front rooms and kitchens," he liked to say. "Radio offers the power of imagination."

Gab usually arrived a few minutes after Homer, and he put a pretty big dent in the pastry selections. When several locals had gathered to lounge in the back room, Gab would run four or five of his promo ideas by them. Big network stations did professional surveys, according to Gab; the smaller ones had to fly by the seat of their pants.

Buzzy Marek, usually the next to arrive, was the best crop duster in six counties, according to Jake. "Most dusters brag about treetop level," my uncle said. "Buzzy swoops so low he's got to burp to clear the barbed-wire fences! His propwash flips over the plant leaves, so he dusts both sides with one pass."

On first approaching Gateway, I'd seen Buzzy's yellow biplane, a Stearman World War II trainer he'd converted to crop dusting by replacing the forward seat with a hopper for chemicals.