Bitch Creek (3 page)

“You can say it doesn't matter whether you think you like him or not. You can say it's Kate's rule that you guide when it's your turn like everybody else.” She shook her head. “Dammit all anyway, Stoney.”

“I tied two dozen bunker flies and twice that many sand eels. Got to hear Van Cliburn play Beethoven's
Emperor Concerto,
then the Chicago Symphony did some Bartok. Sold one of those nine-weight Sage rods and an Abel reel, and a couple of ladies come in around noontime and damned near cleaned us out of those discounted Orvis shirts. You think you had yourself a good day? I had a helluva day.” 

Kate cocked her head and frowned at him. He grinned back at her. She fought it for a minute, then shook her head and smiled. “Sometimes you really piss me off,” she said.

“Yes, ma'am.”

“You are incorrigible.”

“Ayuh.”

“I don't know what I could've been thinking, hiring on a grouchy old shit like you.”

“I never could figure it out myself,” said Calhoun.

An hour before sunup on a June morning almost exactly five years earlier, Calhoun had been creeping along the muddy bank of a little tidal creek that emptied into Casco Bay just north of Portland. A blush of pink had begun to bleed into the pewter sky toward the east. The tide was about halfway out, and the water against the banks lay as flat and dark as a mug of camp coffee. A blanket of fog hung over the salt marsh, heavy with that rich mingled aroma of wet mud and decaying kelp and salt water and dead shellfish. Except for the squawks from a gang of gulls eating mussels along the high-water line and the muffled gong of a distant bell buoy, it was quiet and solitary and altogether peaceful, the way he loved it.

He was still nearly a hundred yards away when he spotted some nervous water along the edge of the eelgrass in the shallow water. He knew they were stripers, and he knew enough about stripers to guess that they could be big ones. He had a small chartreuse-and-white Deceiver tied to a long leader, and he went into a crouch as he neared the fish and began false-casting to the side so the shadow of his line wouldn't spook them.

His first cast fell a little short, but as he twitched it back, he saw a wake materialize behind his fly, and then came the swirl and he felt the fish close its mouth on his fly. He pulled hard with his line hand to set the hook, came tight, felt the live weight of a heavy fish, and swept up his rod. The fish bolted for the middle of the creek. Calhoun's reel screeched. He held his rod high and let the fish take line.

“Yeow! Whoopee!”

The shout came from so close behind him that Calhoun nearly dropped his rod. He jerked his head around. Sitting on a boulder that had been exposed by the falling tide, not twenty feet away, was maybe the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen. Big dark eyes, black braid sprouting out of the back of her pink cap, a wide exuberant smile, long tanned legs.

He opened his mouth to speak to her—he didn't know what he was going to say, but he figured, under the circumstances, she'd excuse him if it turned out to be something stupid—when his line went slack.

“Aw, shit,” the woman said. “That was my fault. I'm damned sorry, mister.”

Calhoun reeled in and examined his fly. The tip of the hook point was bent, and he remembered failing to check it when he'd nicked an underwater rock earlier.

He went over to her and showed her the fly. “
My
fault,” he said. He bit it off and tied on another. He noticed that a spinning rod was propped against the boulder she was sitting on. “Catching any?”

“I've been following you since I got here,” she said.

He smiled. “Nobody follows me without me knowing it.”

“Hey,” she said. “I'm an Indian. Been thinking of taking up fly fishing for some time. Sure looks like fun. Mind if I tag along?”

He noticed that she was wearing a wedding band. “Let's find us some more fish,” he said, “and you can try it.”

“I'm not much good with a fly rod,” she said.

“We'll give it a shot.”

So they walked the edge of the creek, following the ebbing tide toward the east where the sun had just risen behind a cloudbank, and she spotted the wakes first.

He handed her his rod.

“No,” she whispered. “You catch 'em.”

“Take it,” he said.

“I'll screw it up.”

“So then we find more fish. Go ahead.”

She took the rod, bent low and crept into casting range, then began to work out some line. Her cast was sloppy and well to the side of the fish, but she twitched it back and Calhoun saw the wake turn. “Get ready,” he whispered. “He sees it. Keep it coming. Wait till you feel him.”

Suddenly the water exploded. “Hit him!” Calhoun yelled.

She hauled back on the rod, but it did not bend with the weight of the fish.

“Dammit!” she said. She pulled in the fly. “I was so excited I forgot to hang onto the line.” She patted herself over her left breast. “My heart's thumping like that little two-horse outboard of mine.” She cocked her head and grinned. “Okay, mister. That's it. I'm hooked. You've got to teach me.”

So they stood there on the bank of the little creek while the tide ebbed and the sun burned off the fog, and Calhoun stood behind her, guiding her wrist and counting rhythm for her, very aware of the soapy smell of her hair and her slim muscular body close to his, and within half an hour she was casting as if she'd been doing it all her life.

Along the way she told him that her name was Kate Balaban—her maiden name, actually, which she went by—and how when her husband had gotten sick, she'd bought a little bait-and-tackle shop on the outskirts of Portland and was trying to run it all by herself. Walter—her husband—thought it was dumb and frivolous, and she guessed he was right, because so far she'd barely been breaking even, but she was determined to make a go of it.

Calhoun told her more than he intended to—that he was building a house in the woods outside the little village of Dublin, about an hour due west of Portland, and that he'd been released from the hospital in Arlington, Virginia, just three months earlier. He was okay now, he said, except for the deafness in his left ear, which the doctors had said was permanent, and the black holes in his memory, which they thought might be temporary, and the fact that he could no longer drink alcohol, which had something to do with the change in the chemistry of his brain and wasn't much of a handicap that he'd noticed.

Kate Balaban nodded when he told her this, as if he'd explained how he'd just gotten over a touch of the flu. She asked no questions, for which he was grateful. He had no appetite for telling her the whole story.

Finally she glanced at her watch. “Hell,” she said. “This is fun, but I've got to get back and open up.”

She reeled in, handed him the rod, and they trudged back to the parking area.

Calhoun leaned against the side of her Blazer while she stowed her spinning rod in back. She returned with a Stanley thermos and two mugs. She poured coffee, handed a mug to him, and leaned beside him. They sipped their coffee and gazed down on the creek, and after a minute, without looking at him, Kate said, “So, what're you doing for work these days?”

“Finishing the inside of my house. Moldings, cabinets, stuff like that. Then I've got the painting. Keeps me busy.”

“Oh,” she murmured.

“I don't have an actual job,” he said.

“Planning on getting one?”

“Wasn't giving it much thought,” he said. “Why?”

She turned to him. “I can't pay much right now. But I sure could use someone in the shop. I've been thinking of getting into fly fishing. Now that the stripers are back, it's really popular. You could help me with that. And I want to do some guiding. Landlocked salmon, smallmouth bass, trout. Saltwater, too, of course. I got my guide's license, but I'm stuck in the shop.” She smiled at him. “What do you say?”

“You don't know me,” said Calhoun.

She shrugged. “Oh, I guess I know you well enough. I'm mostly right about people.”

No, he thought. I mean, you
really
don't know me.

They sat around picking at the leftover bread and cheese and salad from Kate's shore lunch for the folks from New Jersey while darkness seeped into the parking lot outside the shop. Calhoun sipped a Coke and Kate put away two bottles of Sam Adams beer, and finally she looked at her wristwatch and said, “Where the hell is Lyle?”

Calhoun shrugged. “On his way, I expect.”

“He's a good kid,” said Kate. “But damn, sometimes he just doesn't do things right. He knows he's supposed to—”

“He'll check in,” said Calhoun quietly. “Probably found some trout rising when the sun got off the water. He'll have some stories.”

“I worry,” said Kate.

He reached over and covered her hand with his. “Lyle's a big boy.” 

“Tromping through the woods after dark, some old out-of-shape city guy with a bad ticker trying to keep up with him . . .”

Calhoun squeezed her hand. “I'll hang out, wait for him. You go on home, take care of Walter.”

She turned her head and smiled at him. “You know, Stoney,” she said softly, “most days, I really don't want to go home.”

He nodded. “I know.”

“You've got an hour's drive,” she said. “You go on. I'll give Lyle another hour, and if he hasn't showed up by then, the hell with him.” 

“I'll stay with you.”

“No,” she said. “Please. I wouldn't mind a little alone time.”

He nodded and stood up. “We've got no trips tomorrow, right?”

“Right,” she said. “I'll open up. Can you come in around noon?” 

“I'll be here, boss.”

“Get going, then,” she said. “And drive careful, you hear?”

C
ALHOUN HAD LEFT
the hospital in Arlington, Virginia, where he'd lived for eighteen months, on a warm Thursday toward the end of March five years earlier. He had a cashier's check for twenty-five thousand dollars and a Visa card with his name on it in his pocket, along with the promise that money—enough so he'd never have to work—would be deposited monthly in the bank of his choice for the rest of his life.

Somebody obviously owed him a great deal, although when he'd tried to find out who and what and why, they always neatly changed the subject. Calhoun hadn't pushed it. He figured it might conjure up one of those memories that would be better left forgotten.

So he bought a secondhand Ford pickup truck and headed north. Even though he was a southern boy, he was drawn to Maine. It was irresistible. He couldn't have gone anyplace else. His brain fed him evocative, random images—the smell of seaweed and salt air and pine needles, the sound of night surf crashing against rocks, the taste of clam chowder swimming with bits of salt pork, boiled lobster dripping with melted butter, fresh-caught bluefish grilled over a beach fire, the feel of a smallmouth bass tugging against the bend of a fly rod, the sight of an October brook trout in full spawning regalia finning in a gravelly riffle, the silvery arc of a landlocked salmon leaping over a big gray lake.

He knew, because they'd told him that much—that he'd grown up in Beaufort, South Carolina, which accounted for his name: Stonewall Jackson Calhoun. He hadn't been able to figure out where the Maine memories came from. But they were there, and they were strong.

In the hospital he'd read E. B. White, those perfect little essays about living close to the rocky Maine soil, and he knew he'd been there, and he knew he'd read these essays before.

And when he'd read Thoreau, it was so familiar that he only needed to skim a passage once to be able to recite it. “I went to the woods,” Thoreau had written, “because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life . . . I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life . . .”

Stonewall Jackson Calhoun, after being reborn in a Veterans Administration hospital in Arlington, Virginia, had been drawn to Maine, where a man could still go to the woods. He intended to suck some marrow out of his new life.

Maine. Powerful flashes of déjà vu, so vivid and evocative and disturbing that sometimes he had to sit down and blink the tears from his eyes. Dusty roads flanked by stone walls, sandy soil, blueberry burns, old cellar holes at the end of rutted cart paths now grown up in alder, meadows studded with juniper and clumps of poplar and gnarly old Baldwin apple trees, the roar of a flushing partridge, the flash of a whitetail's flag, sugar maples tapped with sap spigots, the aluminum roof of a barn covered with old tractor tires so it wouldn't blow off, Holsteins and Jerseys grazing in rock-strewn pastures, double-wide trailers sprouting twenty-foot television antennas, goldenrod growing through the rusted carcasses of dead automobiles, hens pecking gravel in the dooryards, blizzards and thunderstorms and September nor'easters, and always that honey-haired girl supine on an old brown army blanket, green eyes smiling, small naked breasts, reaching up to touch his face, murmuring something that sounded like
ayuh
. . .