The Sky Fisherman (47 page)

"What do you think?" I asked Billyum that night when he dropped me off at our place.

Reaching across the pickup cab, he squeezed my shoulder. "Sylvester
thinks he's dead and started the death chant. That gives me hope." He squeezed again. "I figure Jake and me should grow old together, cussing and spitting all the way to the grave."

After five days of fruitless search, I was convinced that Jake, like my father, had gone under to stay and that the boat had been ground to flotsam. But they found Jake a week later, after the water had receded. He and the boat lay smashed under a black stump, gripped by its tangle of roots. From the water the boat was scarcely visible, and only Billyum's persistence with the dogs led to the discovery. The temperature had dropped below freezing once again, so Jake's body was preserved. The broken boat and wiry roots sealed him away from the scavenger coyotes, and the sharp-beaked magpies couldn't reach his eyes.

For most of an afternoon, Billyum and Squeaky tried cutting him free with the chain saw but the effort failed, and Squeaky went upriver for help while Billyum built a warming fire and stayed with the body. He spread tobacco around to keep away the Wet Shoes.

The following morning they brought in a logging helicopter to lift the stump and then finished cutting free the boat and body. Billyum had the helicopter take out the smashed boat, but he brought Jake upriver himself. When he passed the vehicles standing watch along the riverbanks, they turned off their headlights one by one.

Billyum, Squeaky, and I carried Jake up from the river. The Gateway Fire Department ambulance crew wanted to put Jake in back, but we weren't ready to let him go. "I think he'd want to ride home in his truck, boys," Billyum said, and we loaded the body bag into the back of his rig. The keys were still in the ignition.

I expected Billyum to drive, but he climbed into the passenger seat, so I started her up and followed the ambulance's pulsing red light. We'd driven only a few miles when I started to sob. Billyum reached across the seat and squeezed my thigh. Then I settled down.

"I know how you feel," he said. "A fool's born every minute, but a good man died this time."

We arranged the service for the high school gymnasium, since no other facility in town could hold the crowd. The overflow sat in their pickups around the football field, and the janitor hooked up the outdoor loudspeakers so everyone could hear. Oars lashed into a cross, Jake's guide boat stood behind the makeshift pulpit. Flowers filled the boat and a couple dozen fishing creels. On the funeral program they used the Bible
passage where Christ tells the disciples he will make them fishers of men. I figured old Harold would like that.

Everyone came—the guides and outfitters, the Elks, Indians from on and off the reservation, dudes with their wives and children, old high school chums, salesmen, Ace and the Redwings, game wardens, Fish and Game Commission officials. A few people thought they saw the governor, but it was actually the secretary of state. I recognized dozens of people with long-term outstanding bills at the store and realized this would probably be their excuse never to pay. Juniper was there, of course, Doreen, my mother. A few other decked-out women claimed to have been Jake's girl at one time or another.

I glimpsed Riley at the graveside service, but he slipped away before I could say anything. He wore a sports coat and tie, indicating better times, and I hoped his story about the rich widow was true. Franklin spotted him, too, but didn't let on. After the service we found divorce papers stuffed behind our screen door, so Riley had visited the house.

When they had finished the food and drinks at the hard-drinking wake, the back-room boys draped a big
GONE FISHING
banner across the front of the store. Sharing attention with the red-nosed deer and sleigh, the banner looked peculiar, but I liked the sentiment. Billyum turned Jake's coffee cup upside down next to Seaweed's.

Throughout that night and the next, Gab stayed on the air so listeners could call in and reminisce about Jake. I listened until three in the morning, enjoying the yarns even though I doubted half of them were true. Gab's voice coming out of the illuminated radio brought comfort to my darkened room. He played interviews with Jake from the year he started up the guide service and when he'd served as captain of the volunteer fire department. Hearing Jake's voice seemed magical, and I drifted off to sleep, nothing lost, since Gab was recording the entire program.

***

The following spring we built the memorial for Jake, my father, and the other river guides on Whiskey Dick Flat. After Billyum brought down the smashed boat, my mother used it as a kind of giant flower planter. Balsam root, lupine, phlox, and Indian paintbrush bloomed until late summer.

Most of the trees Jake planted continue to grow. Fishing guides, their dudes, even the rafters, have all lent a hand watering them. People
seemed compelled to leave mementos at the memorial or imbedded in the boat. Hand-tied flies, beat-up lures, feathers, river agates, adorn the gunnels. Juniper attached a bronze steelhead mask to the largest alder and no one has touched it, although it's a valuable work of art.

You probably know how her career took off after her paintings of the Havasupai were displayed all across the Southwest. And now her work is featured in major national museums. Still, she returns to Mission a couple times a year to offer workshops.

On the whole, things turned out well for my mother, so Gateway did offer a new start, although in a different way than either of us would have guessed. She and Franklin married—no children. She quit her job and does volunteer work at the library and Gateway's new hospital. Summers they travel. If anything, the excitement has made her more beautiful.

A couple of the mill boys moved away with their parents who were looking for jobs, and Thatcher was killed in a car wreck, so our basketball team barely scraped a winning season my last year of high school. I attended college in another state, where they had a good journalism program, and I suppose that was Billyum's doing, although he probably wouldn't take credit for giving me the nudge. Maybe I was tempted to hang around Gateway and follow Jake's footsteps, but Billyum laid a big hand on my shoulder once and said, "Cut your own trail. If you stay around Gateway, you'll always be Jake's nephew."

The store and the house both went to Mom, and she sold them after trying to ensure that the fellas who bought the store would try to run it pretty much the way Jake had. And they did for a while, but their style differed from his, so things changed as they always do. The new owners started carrying merchandise for new brands of dudes—water-skiers, rock climbers, cyclists. They even carry some golf equipment. Maybe Jake would have changed, too, but I doubt it. When I go to see Mom and Franklin at Christmas, a deer and sleigh still adorn the store roof. The deer came from a taxidermy shop in Central, and I know Jake's objection to that. I miss the mangy critter touched up with marine paint and held together by catgut. That was Jake's way.

W
HAT I DON'T THINK MUCH ABOUT
anymore are those events that remain unclear but still cast long shadows on my days and haunt my nights. My father's drowning. My mother's infidelity. The mystery surrounding Meeks and Chilcoat. After Jake's funeral, I kept thinking of the ambiguity of Billyum's words. While he was vouching for Jake, he also might have been covering for himself. The two of them might have left the river to settle the debt themselves.

And I don't think much more about the Wet Shoes, words I haven't heard since the long night of the flood. I don't believe Jake saw my father's face in the window or that my father's hand reached out of the chill water to pull Jake in. My uncle was in the wrong place, and a snag hit the boat. The face he saw in the window—that's anybody's guess. The mind can play tricks. A reflection of light, as Billyum said.

I kept Juniper's painting of Kalim on the basketball court. She had planned on taking it with her to Albuquerque, but I offered to buy it. She seemed pleased but wouldn't take payment, just gave it to me with that generous way Indians have when you admire their craft.

Over the years I marvel at the way Juniper got Kalim's expression exactly right. The quick surprise you imagine at first is really in the posture, the turn of the head. After studying the work longer, you see the penetrating eyes that realize the calamities the rest of us fail to notice in our day-to-day routines. Maybe that vision is truer for Indian people because they've experienced so much loss, still experience it. But after that time in Gateway, I understand loss, too, at least partway.

While the other players huddle heads down to concentrate on the coach's instructions, Kalim's staring at whatever's coming toward him. And now I realize what he sees—restless horses on a snowblind road, a slick black stump with tangled roots grasping like a claw, the snag of betrayal lying just beneath the smooth bright surface of a faithless lover's eyes.

Glimpsing my own reflection in motel mirrors, I sometimes recognize Kalim's expression, and I know that day I must remain especially vigilant. Now or soon, something rushes toward me. Keep alert, Kalim warns me. Stay on guard.

But when I dwell on those nightmare snags bumping along the dark current, I hear Jake say, "Don't go thinking negatory thoughts, nephew." And I realize I'm focusing only on the loss of that year. The time was magical, too.

When I'm on the road and chance into an old-fashioned sporting goods store, perhaps I smell coffee perking in the back room, catch the intoxicating ferrule cement as the owner rewraps a customer's favorite fly rod. While I ratchet the fly display case round and round, searching for some local, hand-tied special that's guaranteed to fool the lunkers, I listen to the customers bragging and telling improbable tales. None match the yarns of the back-room boys, but each storyteller has his own particular charm. If I feel especially comfortable, I'll reveal that Jake was my uncle, and they'll set aside their work long enough to swap a few stories. Everyone has a Jake tale and most remember him from the guide conventions.

At his funeral, the minister asked how do you say good-bye to a legend, and I suppose the answer is you don't. I can't, anyway, and I expect to be around to tell the story much later, when some of the wide-eyed youngsters from those Labor Day Polaroid shots grow up and ask about that grinning man who crowds the photo and shares his trophy fish.

After a little coaxing, I can usually get the locals to reveal a decent stretch of water off the beaten path where I can walk in and enjoy the quiet. I'll study the river a long time, imagining the people who fish it and realizing this river means as much to them as the Lost does to my family.

As I tie one of the local specials onto my leader, I can picture Jake standing at my shoulder, offering instructions. Downstream, my father and the old man fish the bright water.

I fish through the twilight. Venus appears on the horizon.

I locate the Sky Fisherman.

According to Billyum, old Indian legends claim the stars are campfires at the centers of villages. Around these campfires, the storytellers gather. Their words spark fires, warming the people until the sun rises. One by one, the fires dim and the storytellers slumber until the next night.

After Jake's death, I discovered a new light beside the Sky Fisherman, a blue-white star that shimmers like spring water. I expect he has built a campfire and is swapping yarns with my father and grandfather. Old feuds are forgotten. The smells of fish, biscuits, and whiskey mingle with the old man's pipe smoke. Harold approaches the campfire, toting a Bible in one hand, fly rod in the other. His bow tie remains impeccable and he has a string of glorious fish. Before he can shuck off his hip boots, the teasing begins.

I ache for their companionship. Still, despite the longing, I smile as I remember those friends, both white and Indian, who lined the riverbank and the high basalt cliffs, standing vigil for five days while waiting for Jake's gleaming light to reappear on the Lost.

From his campfire, Jake must have looked down each night, studying those sentries, smelling the good human scents of coffee, baked goods, and wet wool drift skyward. And when they spoke, he caught his name. Already, the storytellers were practicing.

Jake throws another log on the fire. He waits for the back-room boys, Billyum, Juniper, my mother. Even Franklin has a place. The last is mine.

Now I am finished casting. No twilight remains. Quick clouds of breath rise toward the night sky. I disturb the river with my hand. Reflected stars dance.

Thrusting my head back, I gaze at the countless stars. I stare and stare and stare until my balance falls away. Tasting water, I begin swimming toward the firelights.

KATHERYN STAVRAKIS

Craig Lesley
is a lifelong resident of the Pacific Northwest. He was born in The Dalles and now lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife and two daughters. His academic credits include an M.A. in English from the University of Kansas and an M.F.A. from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He has spent much of his life exploring the outdoors, including an eight-year stint with the Deschutes River Guide Service in Oregon.