Bitch Creek (10 page)

“I've got a lot of time,” said Calhoun.

“If I owned that water,” said Lyle, “I wouldn't let anyone fish in it, either. Tell you the truth, I wouldn't fish in it myself. I'd just keep it, appreciate it, take care of it. I never kept any of those trout. I'd catch a couple, put 'em back, then quit. Native brookies. Pretty special. They've been here since the glaciers moved out, or at least their ancestors have. You aren't a fisherman, then.”

Calhoun had turned and smiled at him. “No, I'm a fisherman, all right. And I go fishing every day in that little creek. I don't bring my rod, though. I just sit on a rock and watch 'em. Try to figure out what they're eating, or why they aren't eating, or just generally ponder it. I appreciate a good mystery, and trout always give a man something to think about.”

Lyle had moved to the slash pile, dragged some branches over, and thrown them onto the fire. Then he'd picked up a hoe and shoved at the dirt around the edges.

And by the end of the afternoon, Calhoun had hired Lyle McMahan to help him build his house in the woods.

Calhoun and Lyle took down the old chimney stone by stone, and they patched up the granite foundation and made it plumb. Calhoun figured he must have built a house before, although he couldn't remember where or when, because he found that he knew how to erect beams and sills and joists and bearing walls. He and Lyle fit stones, laid pipe, and strung electrical wire, and by the middle of July they had the place framed in and Calhoun was sleeping on the floor in what would be his kitchen.

The two of them found a natural rhythm working together. Calhoun didn't need to tell Lyle what to do. The boy always had the right tool in his hand, and he'd lug over the right piece of lumber just at the moment when Calhoun needed it. Hours would pass when neither of them would speak. Calhoun had power lines strung in to run the tools, and he kept a radio tuned to the classical station out of Portland. Lyle seemed to like that music as much as Calhoun did.

When they talked, it was usually about fishing. And sometimes Calhoun called it quits early and the two of them piled some gear into Lyle's old Power Wagon and followed back roads to bass ponds and trout streams deep in the woods, or headed for the coast to try for striped bass in the estuaries and along the rock-strewn coastline.

That first summer, Lyle was between his sophomore and junior years at a small college in Vermont, which he'd chosen, he said, because it was near some nice trout streams and grouse covers. He'd grown up in Fryeburg, up to the north and west of Sebago Lake, and had spent most of his life in the woods. He was majoring in history. He wanted to teach high school. He said he'd learned a lot of history by wandering around the woods. He liked to read stories off toppled, hand-etched gravestones in overgrown family plots. He could reconstruct several generations of family history by the stone walls and tote roads and caved-in cellar holes and well stones he found while hunting deer or tracking down a new trout pond.

Lyle always made a point of talking with local old-timers, collecting their stories. He was writing them down, he told Calhoun that first summer when they worked together, and one day he might try to put them into a book. Lyle believed that this generation of old-timers—the men and women who'd scraped a living from the stingy Maine soil, who'd raised pigs and cows and chickens and had poached deer and ducks to feed their families, who'd survived the Second World War and the Great Fire of '47 and whose sons and grandsons had died in Korea and Vietnam—they represented the end of something. “It's got to be preserved, Stoney,” Lyle had said more than once. “If it isn't written down, it'll be gone forever.”

But as interested as Lyle was in history and stories, he never inquired about Calhoun's personal history, which saved him the trouble of telling the boy that he didn't know much about it anyway.

After Calhoun began working for Kate Balaban and she'd decided to start offering guide trips, it was natural enough that he'd suggest they hire Lyle McMahan.

He was good at it—enthusiastic, knowledgeable, and easy with people. Lyle was a natural teacher. He could identify every species of bird and wildflower and insect native to Maine, and he liked to share his knowledge of local history with his clients. He could spot the flaws in anybody's fly-casting technique, and he knew how to offer suggestions without giving offense. He was especially good with kids.

Lyle liked everybody, and he had no trouble winning over even the crustiest client who might be inclined to mistrust a gangly college kid wearing a ponytail and an earring.

Calhoun was proud of Lyle McMahan, proud that he'd “discovered” him, and proud to have him for a friend.

These were the thoughts that bounced through Calhoun's head as he drove to Keatsboro, heading for the X on Lyle's topographic map, the secret trout pond that Fred Green—or whatever his name really was—had wanted to fish.

Calhoun absolutely believed that he, Calhoun, Lyle's best friend, was solely responsible for whatever had happened to Lyle.

A
N APPLE ORCHARD AND A COUPLE
of dairy farms, widely separated by dense pine forest, were the only signs of human activity along the dirt road, which twisted through the rolling countryside to the single dotted line that led to the penciled X on Lyle's topographic map. Calhoun drove slowly, studying the old tumbledown stone wall that kept appearing and disappearing in the woods along the right-hand side of the road, and when he came to a wooden bridge spanning a brook he knew he'd gone too far.

So he turned around and headed back, and this time he spotted the break in the wall where an old tote road had once cut into the woods. He pulled to the side, got out, and looked around.

Tire tracks in the hardened mud led off the road to the opening in the wall. Someone had recently turned in here. Crushed weeds showed where the vehicle had parked behind some trees, hidden from the sight of anyone passing by.

Lyle always tried to hide his truck. Lyle believed—and Calhoun agreed with him—that there was no sense spending a lifetime collecting secret trout streams and bass ponds and grouse covers and then giving them away to some passing out-of-stater by leaving your vehicle in plain sight.

Only a big old truck with four-wheel drive—such as Lyle's Power Wagon—could have made it through the mud and over the rocky ruts to the hiding place behind the screen of pines. Calhoun doubted a rented Taurus could've negotiated the deep ruts that far off the dirt road without ripping away its undercarriage.

He took a final look at Lyle's map. If this break in the stone wall did indeed mark the place where the single dotted line on the map led down a long slope to the brook, then all he had to do was follow the ancient ruts and he'd come to Fred Green's secret trout hole.

He started walking. Another, smaller stone wall perpendicular to the one along the dirt road paralleled the old tote road into the woods. The ancient ruts were still distinct, although what had once been a road where a tractor could pass was now thickly grown with alder saplings and briars and milkweed and goldenrod.

Calhoun tried to imagine Lyle lugging two float tubes, two fly rods, two pairs of waders, and a lunch basket over this trail while Fred Green puffed along behind. Calhoun had made many similar treks himself. Usually the clients carried their share of the gear. Somehow he doubted that Mr. Green would have offered. Clients like Mr. Green believed that guides were paid to do all the work, and Lyle was too sweet-tempered to ask for help.

After a few hundred yards, the ruts angled off to the left and began descending down a long gradual slope. Here and there Calhoun noticed old gnarled apple trees mingled with the oak and birch and juniper, and in a couple of places other stone walls marked the boundaries of old fields and orchards and pastures.

Lyle could reconstruct elaborate stories from this old handiwork. He would know which stone-bounded areas had been for cattle to graze and which had been cornfields and hayfields and vegetable gardens, which stone walls had been designed to fence cows in, and which had simply served as a convenient way for the farmer to dispose of the rocks he'd dragged from his fields.

The ground began to level off, and then through the pines and saplings Calhoun saw the glint of sun on water and heard the musical gurgle of a small waterfall. The ruts were more distinct here, and he followed them to a sturdy old stone dam, which had survived half a century or more of spring floods and was still doing its job.

Off to the right, the stream twisted out of the woods and flattened into a long, skinny millpond. At the foot of the pond it poured over the top of the dam and then became a stream again. Above and below the pond, where the stream was a stream, it wasn't much bigger than Bitch Creek. But the pond itself held quite a bit of water. Cattails and reeds grew along its rim. It looked shallow and muddy along the edges, but Calhoun assumed that a deep channel, the original stream-bed, cut through the middle. The water was clear but stained a coppery color, tannin from the decades of leaves and bark that had settled on the pond's peaty bottom.

Calhoun kneeled and dipped his hand into the water above the dam. It was sixty degrees, maybe—certainly a good temperature for brook trout. Undoubtedly trout had always lived in the stream itself. Big ones would likely lurk in the deeper water of the millpond. Maybe Fred Green had been on to something.

He stood up, made a visor of his hand, and looked around. Now that he was here, he didn't know what he expected to find. The tire tracks in the mud by the dirt road convinced him that Lyle and Fred Green had been here. But now Lyle's Power Wagon was sitting behind the elementary school in South Riley.

On the other side of the dam, the old ruts continued over a long stretch of flat marshy land before climbing up a hill and disappearing into the woods. According to Lyle's map, a house perched on top of that hill—or, more likely, a cellar hole where a house had once stood. A lot of nineteenth-century farms had been abandoned by discouraged farmers whose sons had fled for factory work in the city. Many others had been leveled by the fire of '47. The Maine woods told stories of tragedy and failure and plain old loss of will.

Calhoun wondered if Lyle and Fred Green had caught anything. Gazing over the little millpond, he saw no evidence of trout—no rings of surface-feeders, no swirls or darting shadows in the shallows.

But neon-colored damselflies and tan caddisflies skittered over the water, and Calhoun found himself slapping the blackflies that were eating the back of his neck and clouding around his head. The pond would breed plenty of insects and other trout food—big ugly nymphs, small baitfish, maybe crayfish and freshwater shrimp, leeches and scuds.

As he gazed over the pond, something in the reeds along the opposite bank caught his eye—a rounded, olive-brown hump in the water. A mossy rock, maybe. But to Calhoun's eye, it looked anomalous, not quite like something in nature. He stepped up onto the dam, raised himself on tiptoes, squinted at the shape, and from that angle something alongside the hump reflected in the sun.

He forced himself to look away. He shut his eyes, hoping that when he opened them again the hump in the water would not be there, or if it was, that it wouldn't look like a human body—that this was just his brain playing another dirty trick on his consciousness.

But when he looked again, the hump was still there, and it still looked like a dead man.

He crossed the dam, looked again, muttered, “Oh, shit,” and started running. The ground was mucky and studded with grassy hummocks and potholes, and he fell down twice before he got to the edge of the pond.

He stopped there, ankle-deep in the water, dripping mud, breathing heavily, his feet sinking into the soft bottom. The hump he had seen was what he'd thought it was—a man's rear end dressed in waders. The glint had been the reflection of sunlight off the varnished surface of a bamboo fly rod that angled out of the water beside that hump. Calhoun recognized the body and the rod at the same time. The rod was the sweet little seven-and-a-half-foot Tonkin cane Thomas & Thomas that Calhoun had refinished and given to Lyle for his twenty-sixth birthday the previous winter.