One of the first things she did after it was all over and they sent him up to Bland County and she had the house to herself was to open his tackle box. She thought she must be lonely, missing him, that touching the contents of the box might ignite a contact with him. Manslaughter. Five years, including time served, in the Bland County Correctional Facility, for the slaughter of a man. Five years would roll out long and slow if she waited for him. She would have to touch something. Something of his, of him. Something to keep the connection unbroken. Fishing had been his only peaceful pleasure, had been since boyhood. When fishing, he came as close as he ever would to serenity. The tackle box seemed a likely place to start. Hooks, leaders and small pliers, pellets of split-shot, a spool of line, red and white bobbers of different sizes and shapes, a bottle opener, a stringer and assorted lures. All neatly arranged in compartments on hinged drawers that rose out of the box as the lid opened. She stroked the contents smoothly, tentatively, cautious not to snag a finger on a hook. These were his things, but nothing electric had yet fired in her fingertips. She tapped lightly a purple, rubber worm, skewered with hooks, and remembered a story he had told of seeing someone eat one of these worms on a dare. Sure enough, he had seen it with his own eyes. Was that a fish story, and if true, had that someone taken the hooks out first? She remembered, too, how surprised she had been when she first realized that his fishing stories didn't really bore her quite as much as she thought they should. She could actually listen for a minute or two, with some interest, before she walked away or found a way to change the subject. Despite the careful course her hands followed through the tackle box, she pricked a finger on a shiny, plastic minnow, gaudy and insidious, thickly trimmed with pendants of hooks. She sucked a droplet of blood from her fingertip and dropped the lure back into the box, pronouncing this one simply too vicious, a glistening, garish traitor to the living fish its design aimed to seduce. "Dardevle," she said, quietly reading the odd spelling of the worn writing on another lure. Clean and precise, red and white bands on one side, silver on the other, shaped like the business end of a small spoon, with a single pendant of three hooks. She liked this one, its cool smoothness, and rubbed its surface between her thumb and forefinger, then spun it, soothed by the fluctuating silver and red and white. "Take the hooks off, and this would make a nice earring," she said, mostly to herself. Shoved into a corner in the bottom of the tackle box, a tiny plastic case. The flies she bought to go with the fly rod and reel she gave him for a late birthday present once she got her first paycheck after being hired at the hospital. It seemed a good idea at the time. He had never had a fly rod, and when she rented a copy of A River Runs Through It, he said he liked the fishing scenes. The characters were a bit preachy and teachy for his taste, he said, but they seemed like real folks and the fishing was good. He said he would cut off his left nut to catch a trout like the one Brad Pitt got at the end, right before he got killed. She always wondered at the oath of mutilating testicles as a show of sincerity. Cut off his left nut. And why the left one? What made that one, in particular, so special, so appropriate for sacrifice? In fact, she wondered if there actually was a left one. She had cupped them in her hands often enough to know that they sort of swam around in that wrinkled sack. Both testicles banged equally against her buttocks during sex. Why the left one? "Fish like that, be worth dying for," he had said. But he had never fished her gift. He tried casting with the long, willowy rod in the back yard but got the line tangled around his neck and shoulders. Too much fucking trouble, too much work, he had said, embarrassed to have to relearn something he thought he already knew. Besides, what he claimed he liked most about fishing was just sitting on the bank, relaxed, watching his bobber, knocking back a few beers. Too much work, fly fishing. He jammed the box of flies into the bottom of his tackle box and set the fly rig in the back of his closet and never touched them again. It had been a good idea, worth a try, but the tackle box had failed. No spark of contact had flared. He remained fully absent. She could try other things that were his things. She might come back to the tackle box later. Her breath blew steam lightly across a hot cup of herb tea she carried gingerly down the hallway to their bedroom. Before they arrested him, she had never slept a night without him since their marriage. She thought of that as she sat on the bed and carefully placed the cup of tea on the nightstand. She ran her hand over rumpled sheets and knew she wouldn't cry. She had cried loudly and extravagantly at first but had finished with it weeks ago, spent with crying for two men, one a husband to be locked away from her in a prison for five years, the other dead with his forehead split open on a lacquered bar top. She pressed her face down onto the mattress and breathed deeply through the bedding. Nothing. After a few sips of the hot tea, she stepped into his closet and gathered an armful of his abandoned clothing into a deep embrace, rammed her face into the folds, inhaled profoundly. Nothing. Her foot bumped something that rattled and fell to the floor. The fly rig, disassembled and untouched since the only time he ever tried it. Exhaling, she scooped up the pieces of rod, the thin reel still attached to the butt, and walked back to the bed. She laid the fly rig on the bed beside her and slurped more of her tea. As she sipped, she looked down at her fingertips gliding lightly along the rod and reel, tracing the circle of the reel, pinching the line guides, stroking the cool graphite, and she felt it. A tingle, a subtle charge running up her arm from her fingers, a touch of electricity flowing out of the one thing of his he had hardly touched at all. She finished her tea and sniffed the air of their bedroom. Two years together here and now nothing. Had the change come quickly or had this absence been lurking all along? She wondered. How could he have lived here with her for two years and left behind no scent? Stale odor of cigarettes, clothing, work boots, knick-knacks, fishing rods, the tackle box, but no palpable, animal track of his presence. It was her house now. The things he left behind, things she searched, touched, stroked, merely in storage. "I don't know how much more of this shit I can take," he said, after she asked how he was, touched his hand, and passed him two rolls of quarters and two cartons of cigarettes across the table. Kissing was not allowed. Every Sunday for six months now she had made the thirty-mile drive to Bland County for visiting day. She felt a guilty gratitude for his place of incarceration being conveniently located so close to home. A pleasant drive through these close, ancient mountains and valleys to see him. She would have enjoyed the drive whether to visit him or not. And somehow it fit, seemed appropriate, that he would do his time here, in the county of his birth, only a few miles from where he had grown up, so close to the streams he had fished as a boy. On her first Sunday visit he had told her that, as a child, whenever he passed the prison, he had shivered with a fear that one day he would be forced to live behind the tall cyclone fencing, under the spools of razor-wire, the searchlights, the guard towers. Now, here he sat. Come full circle. "Hell of a homecoming," he had said. She glanced quickly at the guards weaving slowly among the long tables in the visiting room. Everything was barred or bolted down. Nothing moved freely except the guards. She set her hands lightly on his hands that still clutched the rolled coins and cigarettes, this new prison currency he now traded in, needed. She struggled to understand it and often shuddered to imagine the possible methods of exchange. His hands remained fixed and clenched, unresponsive, as she traced the ridges of his knuckles, touching fresh bruises she found there. "What is it, honey? What's wrong?" "You fucking kidding me? What's wrong? What's wrong is I'm in this goddamn place, and everything else is out there." His face glared back at her dark and rigid, his eyes cold and flat, resentful. An undeniable quiver rippled down her spine into a knot in the small of her back when she realized that this was his face, a new face, different and permanent, not a temporary aberration or trick of the light. When had the change occurred? Had it been sudden or gradual? Had she simply failed to notice? She remembered that during her first visits she had thought it sweet, courageous, how he had tried so hard to be optimistic, upbeat. Tough it out. Tow the line and with luck and good time, he could be out on parole in two and a half, three years, he had said. Things could obviously be better, but they could survive this, he had said. She would still be there, waiting for him, he had said. Of course, she had said. His new face revealed itself, hard, desperate and reptilian. He seemed to stare through her, and she wondered if she showed a different face to him through his new eyes. "What is it honey? Has something happened?" "Prison's what happened, goddamn it." "Oh, honey, I know it's hard. It must be awful. But you can make it. Remember what you said? A couple more years and parole, most likely. I'll be here. You can make it. I know you can." "You don't know shit. Never will know shit. Can't know shit about the inside unless you're on the inside." She worried about his new face and now this new voice, full of prison, as she crossed the prison parking lot, dropped her purse in the car, and looked into the back seat to check her fishing gear. She hadn't told him that for the last three months she had combined her prison visits with fishing trips to nearby streams where the trout fishing was said to be good. Streams he had fished many times and told her about. She hadn't told him that she had rented instructional videos and learned to use his fly rod, had practiced casting in the yard behind their house. She hadn't told him that she had first started doing it as an attempt to be nearer to him somehow, to duplicate his life with her own, to complete his life, to use the unused parts, to keep it going while he was locked up. She had even tried to wear his clothes, his gear, sinking her legs into an old pair of waders he occasionally used, but they were simply too big. Her feet could find no footing, flapping loosely in the enormous boots. To tell him would have been cruel, she thought, too much for an imprisoned man who could smash open another man's head on a bar top because that man had tried to buy his wife a drink while he stood across the barroom putting quarters in a juke box. She kept it to herself, fishing for him in secret. She couldn't tell him that she had dusted off the little plastic case with the flies she had bought him, learned to tie leaders to the fly line and flies to the leader, learned how long to hesitate, drift, before bringing her cast forward, learned how to read the water and to select the proper fly for that water. She couldn't tell him that she had caught and released two small brook trout in the little creek just the other side of the mountain from the prison. She wouldn't tell him that the fishing she had begun as an attempt to sustain a connection with him, with his life, had become something wholly her own. She liked it. She wore her own new waders now. She wouldn't tell him that though he had never bothered to buy a fishing license, she now had two, one for freshwater in general, one specifically for the trout that swam the streams near the prison. The following Sunday his new face again appeared across from her at the bolted-down table. As she pushed his quarters and cigarettes to him and touched his beaten hands, she thought of the big brook trout she had spied last week lingering in a deep pool under a cutbank and wondered if the same fish would be there this week. She had read that a trout frequently inhabits the same stretch of stream its entire life. "How are you, honey? Any better this week?" "Just shut up and listen," he said, almost a whisper. His new face, still cold and fixed, had a new feature. She remembered a word from a high school vocabulary test. Furtive. A cold, rigid, furtive face. The word fit the face. "And don't look around or make any weird faces. Just sit still and listen, like I'm talking about any old thing." She kept still and quiet, focused on the odd new face. His eyes followed the movement of the nearest guard. "I'm getting the fuck out of here, me and a buddy." Her stomach churned and she could feel her rectum twitch in a tight spasm, but she remained still on the hard, wooden seat. "You got to get off work on Mondays. Can you do that?" She nodded too slowly, not speaking. Yes, she could get off. Thanks to a new contract negotiated by the nurses' union, she had staggered schedules, flex time, and a salary she could get by on while he was here. Yes, she could do it. "Good. Every Monday morning we work down in field number three." She recalled the white barn, marked with a huge black 3 in a circle, set in the middle of a rolling field of timothy. "It's the best spot. A quick run out of the field and disappear into the woods and over the hill. I know that ground like the back of my hand. Used to fish just the other side of that hill when I was a kid." "But honey," she said, and he cut her off, a razor-edged hiss to his whisper. "No buts. Just listen. All we have to do is wait for a break. For the guards to get distracted. Get out of shotgun range." "But they could . . ." "Shut up and listen. It's going to go down. Now, here's where you come in. All you got to do is wait for us with the car." "Where?" She eyed a guard walking slowly along the far side of the room. "Take the forest service road by the little grocery. Follow it a few miles along Dismal Creek till you get to a clearing on the right. There's a National Forest sign says White Pine Horse Camp. There's a little corral there, right by Dismal Creek. Big sign. Can't miss it." She didn't tell him that she knew the spot, that she'd been fishing there for the last two weeks. His planned getaway rendezvous was the same spot she had seen the big brook trout and after their visit today she would be fishing in that exact same place. She had wondered at first why a creek so lovely, so perfect in its meandering clarity, would be called Dismal. She had thought that perhaps it had been a ruse, a way to disguise the beauty, a name given by a man long ago to discourage outsiders, to keep the creek to himself, the way the Vikings had deliberately confused the names of Iceland and Greenland. "But honey, they could . . ." "Look. I'm telling you. There's no way I'm going to stick it out here. This is going to happen. You just do your part." She looked at her hands lying flat on his atop the carton of cigarettes. She breathed deep and exhaled with a rasp. "OK, honey." "Good. You be there at nine in the morning. Wait until three. If we ain't there by three, we ain't coming that day." "OK." "Then, just be there every Monday, remember, nine to three, until we get an opening to make our break. Sooner or later, they'll slip up and we'll be gone. Every Monday." "You'll have to wait a week," she said. "I won't be able to get rescheduled until next Monday." His new face went flat, blank. "Well," he said. "Waited this long. Suppose I can handle another week. And then we'll be together. Right, baby?" "Right," she said, and the image of the big brook trout finning the thick current of the deep pool floated before her. "That going to do you, missy?" An old man with a tiny flake of tobacco on his thin bottom lip leaned into the register behind the counter of the little grocery to ring up her purchase. "Yes, thank you," she said, fingering her wallet for the money for two apples, a candy bar, and three packs of leader. "Them apples is three for a dollar if you want to get yourself another," the old man said. "No thanks. Two's fine." As he slid her money into the register and made her change, his eyes flitted back and forth from his fingers in the cash drawer to the left side of her face. He handed over her change and snapped open a small paper bag. "That's OK. I don't need a bag." "Suit yourself. That's some earring," he said, his eyes again shifting to the left side of her face. "Oh, thank you. I was wondering what you were looking at." "Yeah. That looks like an old Dardevle spoon." She smiled and fingered the lure dangling from her left ear. The hole in her right ear lobe was empty. "It is. I took off the hooks and made it into an earring myself. My fishing jewelry." "I be damned. A Dardevle." "It's so hard to properly accessorize for fishing these days, you know," she said. "Say what?" he said, his eyes still on her homemade jewelry. "Nothing," she said. "What are the trout hitting this week?" "Same as always, I suppose. We got some of them little jars of trout balls back there. That's what most folks use." "What about flies? I'm using a fly rig." "Oh, well, I couldn't say for sure. Not too many folks round here use one of those. Too much work. Trees hang over the creek too close to make much of a cast. Ought to just get you some trout bait like everyone else." "Thanks. I think I'll stay with my flies for a while, though." "Suit yourself." She left the car parked by the corral at the edge of the clearing, pointed toward the service road. The clearing unfolded into a grassy apron behind the corral, and she crossed it, moving downstream, and ducked through a stand of wild rhododendron. After weeks of use, the dense, new-rubber smell of her waders remained strong, gliding up from her thighs to her nose, as she inched across the creek and began to work her way upstream on the far side from the clearing. Her legs were pliant and sure in their new rubber armor, sliding slowly, carefully, along the stony bottom, disturbing little, seeking a firm footing. She scanned the stream's surface closely, squatting nearly into the riffling water. "Trout balls. That'd be a hoot. Be hell for a trout trying to ride this current with a pair of balls dangling out behind him," she thought, thinking of the old man in the grocery and grinning. She gently rubbed her red and white earring and plucked a nymph from the little plastic case and tied it on. Her wrist arched deftly out and back as she rolled her line out upstream. She held the rod high and trimmed her line smoothly into a snaking mass, floating in the stream beside her, as she let the nymph ride downstream. The current pulled her line until she caught it up, holding the nymph in the swirl around the rock where she knew a fish would be waiting. She let the fly drift, sink, carefully controlled, and watched the line knifing the running water. She would work her way slowly upstream to the deeper pool where she knew the big brook trout would be waiting. She had all day. Since the escape plan had been set, Sunday visits at the prison had become forced, awkward, neither of them able to talk of much of anything because the one thing on both their minds was the one thing they could not discuss. She brought his quarters and cigarettes and studied the lines of his new face, the new scars on his hands, and thought of trout waters. She began to check her watch, anxious for the visit to end, anxious to be fishing. The first Monday she waited at the rendezvous, she did not fish. She kept the car at the ready, pointed out of the clearing, her foot on the accelerator, her ears twitching at any sound that might announce desperate men, crashing through underbrush and splashing across a stream, armed, angry guards in pursuit. Munching apples, she tried to pass the time reading a recent issue of Cosmopolitan she had scooped from the coffee table on her way out of the house, an article entitled "Bad Boys and Why We Love Them." The article offered no answers she could use, and she wondered if bad boys were really so lovable as the magazine made them out to be. She thought for a brief moment that bad boys who could split open another man's head in a jealous rage might be better locked away after all. She snapped the magazine shut and threw it in the back seat. She stayed rooted in the driver's seat all day, getting out only to pee behind a thicket, worried that urinating in the open might be taken as a sure sign of guilt by any passerby. She saw no one all day. The second Monday she sat on the grass in the clearing, alert but relaxed, listening to the gurgling of the creek, and read a copy of Fly Fisherman from cover to cover. She decided quickly that escape from a prison farm was no mean feat, and he would come when he came. She might as well enjoy her time here. After all, the escape plan afforded her two days of fishing a week, rather than one. Make the most of it. After a month and a half of Mondays following Sundays along Dismal Creek, waiting for the escape to come, she fell into the rhythm of the waiting, the rhythm of the rushing waters, the rhythm and motion of her cast, her line running out over the rippling surface of the stream, the rhythmic quiver of the tension in her arms as she waited out the completion of her seduction of a trout that would rise to her offering. Waiting there, she became a fly fisher. By three o'clock she had long since stopped thinking of the old man at the grocery and trout balls. She carried three good fish in her pouch and had been playing tag with the big trout in the deep pool for the better part of two hours, still unable to coax him out of his hole, still unable to offer up the right temptation at the right time. But there would be more chances. There would be more Mondays following more Sundays, and the fish would be there waiting. One day she would play him right. "You just stay right there. See you again next week," she said, out loud, speaking directly to a present companion. Only as she reeled in her line and stepped out of the stream toward the car did she realize she had not listened once, all day, for the sound of running men in the surrounding woods. On the next Monday she entered the creek at a point upstream from her usual spot, eased into the shadow of the rhododendron on the far side, and moved gracefully against the current into position to fish the deep pool under the cutbank. Today she was coming right for him. Her step fell slow and delicate, her own shadow dissolved into that of the rhododendron. He hadn't seen her yet. She saw him. Flashing on the surface, rolling from the shadows into erratic patches of sunlight leaking through the overhang. He whirled giddy in his deep pool--jubilant, brazen, glutting himself on a new hatch. "There you are. Today," she said, silent, completely to herself. The only sound her body contributed to, the surge of the water around her legs, firm and resilient, set in place in the streambed, forking the flow. She fed out line and leader and tied on a fly. A dry one. The right one. She knew. She could see him feeding. "Today," she said, almost an audible whisper. Thumb and forefinger lightly stroked her earring, then dropped to the reel and peeled off line. Her cast was agile, elegant, rolling out upstream, perfectly splitting the close overhang. She held high and trimmed in time with the flow of the current until she placed the fly on the rippling edge of the pool. Pull and release, take and give, rhythmic and regular, she kept the fly at the edge of his pool, inching it out onto the calmer surface against the sucking current, floating well, a dance of seductive simulation. She stood fast, focused, waited at the ready. The new hatch was heavy. He fed voraciously, but hers was only one seduction among many. She would have to wait, play him carefully, but he would come. Soon he would rise, come to her. The angle of light through the rhododendron shifted through the morning as she worked his pool, patient, deliberate, confident. She adjusted and recast when the current jerked her line off target. She flicked false casts over the surface to dry her fly and line when it began to slip under, reeled in and blew on her fly to fluff the hackles. Another change in the angle of light, and his pool came into high relief to its full depth. She had him in clear focus as he flashed and shot back to the creek bed. Her cast was perfect, silent, natural, and her fly rode effortlessly onto the surface of his pool. She was ready. Her finger locked her line against the rod grip. She had waited weeks for him. Now he was coming. She inhaled. He saw it. She didn't breathe. He rose. She waited. He flashed. She set it. Too soon. She flinched as she moved to set the hook and missed him. A distant sound, a sharp report, rolling down the mountain through the woods broke her balance. What was it? Gunfire? And now what? So distant yet audible. Voices? Dogs? The crackle and whoosh of the bodies of men running through thick brush. He was coming. She gazed vaguely through the woods in the direction of the approaching sounds. He was coming. She had waited weeks for him, and now he was coming. Now, of all times. She was set, ready, and now he was coming. Snapping brush grew louder. Shouting voices became nearly intelligible. The surging rush of water around her legs was thick and seductive. Now he was coming. She looked once, long and deep, at the pool, at the big brook trout still flashing joyfully, and lunged from the stream onto the bank. Dragging her unreeled line, she broke down her rod on the run, the tops of her waders flapping against taut thighs. Her pulse pounded as she stumbled against the corral and lurched forward to the car. As she ripped the car door open and flung the pieces of her fly rig into the back seat, she shot a glance toward the creek as he broke through the rhododendron with another man she had never seen before and pitched forward into the water. Farther back in the brush she could just make out the intermittent dark blue of the guards' uniforms and hear their shouts mixed with the barking of running dogs. She had waited weeks for him and now he was coming. "Move it, baby. Goddamn move it," he shouted, as he and his companion stumbled across the stream. She jammed herself into the driver's seat, bulky in her waders, and fired the ignition. A quick look in the rearview mirror revealed the two men emerging from the creek and bolting into the clearing toward the revving, waiting car. Everything had built to this moment. The planning, the waiting. She must act quickly, decisively. Everything depended on it. Just as the two men reached the car, panting, soaked and desperate, she snapped the door locks and slammed down on the accelerator, swerving out of the clearing and spraying gravel in the faces of two stranded convicts. Filtered through the roar of the engine and the clatter of gravel against the underbelly of the car, she could just hear his frantic voice, screaming. "Hey. What the hell are you doing? You crazy fucking bitch. Goddamn it. Stop. What are you doing?" At the moment she spun out of the clearing onto the service road, she could just see from the corner of her eye the dogs and guards burst from the rhododendron and draw down on two abandoned escapees in the clearing. Her foot in her waders kept firmly to the accelerator until she reached the main road. Sliding from the gravel surface onto smoother pavement, she cut her speed a bit as a line of prison vehicles, lights strobing, sirens screaming, turned past her at the old man's little grocery and rocketed down the service road. Her pulse began to settle as she eased through the curves in the road. It had been a close call. She had barely escaped. She had waited weeks, months for him. Her fly rig rattled in the back seat in rhythm with the vibrations of the moving car. Weeks, months of waiting. She could wait another week. A fish like that was worth waiting for. "Fish like that, be worth dying for," she said. __________ "Escapee" originally appeared in The Beloit Fiction Journal. |