Road to Bountiful (15 page)

“Yeah. Me ’n Pete here want meat. A big old piece of red meat. Can you fix us up?”

She eyes me again, top to toes, with what seems to be X-ray vision. I wish the little blue sailboat on my T-shirt would take on water and sink. I wish my legs were hairier and my voice deeper. I wish I had a scar on the side of my nose and breath bad enough to drop a horse a quarter mile away.

“We might be able to do that. Depends.”

Depends?
Depends on what? How could you walk in to a restaurant and ask for a meal and the waitress says, “Depends”? It was time for quick thinking. It was time to get culturally acclimatized in about one thumpy heartbeat. I look at Uncle Loyal. He is taking in the whole scene, smiling sweetly. He nods at the stiff, ugly, mean faces and then goes into his plains-polite mode again. “We understand the food here is wonderful. I hope you have low-cal dressing.”

This is not the time, Uncle Loyal! This is not the place!
I wanted to die
.
No, check that. I thought I would die. I had to change the subject. I had to change the feeling, the atmosphere, and I had to do it quickly. Manly. I needed manly fast.

“Well, see here, Miss. Me ’n Pete here, we like our meat rare. Once over the flame, and that’s just about perfect. We like it so that it’s just this side of mooing.”

“Actually, I prefer chicken, if it’s on the menu,” Uncle Loyal chirps.

The waitress/gatekeeper/head thug either didn’t hear him or ignored him. In any case, I’m relieved.

“We can do that for you boys. Glad you put it that way. We don’t take to no one who says ‘well done’ here. The ‘depends’ part was all about the kind of meat we got and how you want it served.”

She chews her gum, at least what I hoped was gum, although it’s brown, and I notice a faint streak of something coating her teeth. She tosses a glance over a shoulder toward what I took to be the kitchen. “’Cause we only got red meat here. Lemme find you a table.”

I begin to think that we might live after all. At least Uncle Loyal is smart enough to not press his hope for a chicken dinner with fresh greens.

We take a few slow steps behind her. I say in a loud enough voice for most of the crowd to hear, “Did I tell ya I got pulled over in Salt Lake, Pete? Yeah, the boys in blue did it to me.”

Uncle Loyal finally gets into character and says, “That right, Butch? You need to be careful. They know you in Salt Lake. Am I right?” He is grinning like a five-year-old in front of the Christmas tree. He is living out a fantasy, I assume.

“Yeah. That’s right. Me and blue. We don’t get along so good.”

We slide our way toward a small, plain wood table with two rickety chairs off in the corner of the restaurant. Uncle Loyal goes out of character again when he sees a couple of men with a dazzling array of tattoos portraying things that I had never imagined, staring at us. “Oh, excuse me. Good evening to you, gentlemen,” he calls out cheerfully.

“
Stay in character!
” I hiss at him after we pass the tattoo kings, and Uncle Loyal nods absentmindedly and continues to look around the restaurant and smile and wave at people.

There isn’t a menu, as such. The waitress comes by after a while and says, “Okay, you want steak, is that with a potato all trimmed out?” I do my best at growling again, “Yep, that’ll be fine here for me and Pete,” and she disappears again into the blue haze and dimly lighted part of the restaurant.

I say a little prayer that Uncle Loyal won’t ask for salad, and if he did, it wouldn’t be with the vinaigrette dressing, and if he did, he wouldn’t ask for it on the side. No doubt, it would be heard in heaven and tagged “strange prayer of the day” by the ministering angels who keep track of such things. I had never prayed about salad dressing before.

“This is a most unusual place. The patronage. It surprises me. Do you think any of these people will be fishing tomorrow? They look the jolly sportsman type, eh?”

“I don’t think so, Uncle Loyal,” I say in a voice barely above a whisper, my eyes darting around, looking for anyone who might be wanting to eavesdrop, pull a knife, or just hit someone for the general principle of it.

“Very good, then. More open space for us. More fish for us to pursue.”

To my surprise, the waitress shows up in a matter of minutes, but I guess when the meat is just a hint darker than a Santa Claus suit, it doesn’t take long to cook it. She flops down a couple of big plates with the abundance of very red meat and huge potatoes and a sprig of parsley and says, “Go after it now, boys. Drinks?”

“Lemonade would be wonderful,” Uncle Loyal says.

“I’ll take water. No ice. Straight. No rocks,” I say. “Straight water. Just water. For me. It’s my ulcer. From the police messing with me so much.”

“Hard drinkers, are we boys?”

“No ma’am. We just have to drive up the canyon tonight. Want to have our heads clear and our eyes sharp.”

“Can’t blame you for that.”

“Nope. Not that.”

“I’ll get the water and lemonade,” she says, turning toward the murky part of the restaurant/bar/biker hangout. “Lemonade. Haven’t had that ordered in a year or two. Hope we got some. You, fella, you’re kind of cute.”

“Thank you,” I say.

“Not you. I mean the little old fella.”

“How kind of you,” Uncle Loyal says, obviously pleased. “And you are an attractive young lady.”

“Nice of you to say,” she says as she saunters off. “A lotta people think so.”

She comes back with the water and lemonade, and I decide to not tell her that my glass is greasy. The steak, I’d say, never really did get acquainted with the flames. Still, it tastes good. Marty was right about that. We fairly gulp down our meal, pay the bill, and I leave a big tip, because this is the kind of place where they might send out a couple of guys after you if you stiffed the waitress. We were leaving alive, after all, and for some reason, I feel that it was because the waitress thought Uncle Loyal was cute. She even winks at him as we’re leaving, and to my surprise, Uncle Loyal winks back, in the way you would expect an eighty-two-year-old man to wink—deep, chaste, and exaggerated. It was with the lightness in my step of a doomed man who receives a reprieve that I walk back to the red car and head back to the cabin.

“A most satisfying meal,” Uncle Loyal says. “Although I am unsure if I would return there. The people. They were quite colorful, although warmhearted and gracious.”

“Another story we can tell. Aunt Barbara will never believe this one. I’ll save it until we get to Utah. I want to see her face when I tell her I took you to a biker bar for dinner one night and the waitress thought you were cute. She did have some nice tattoos. Personally, I thought the cobra swallowing the puppy was charming.”

“Call it this: our first fishing tale.”

“Yes, our first. Only we were the bait, I think. We’ll have a few more stories tomorrow.”

“What time shall we start? Early I suppose.”

“Yep. They usually bite best first thing in the morning. I guess fish are like us. They need breakfast too. Most important meal of the day for them and us.”

I drive up the canyon toward the cabin, cozy under the trees, a happy yellow lamplight beaming into the dark night to greet us.

Fishing tomorrow. It’s quiet and I am getting drowsy, and for some reason, I start to think the way I do just before I fall asleep, namely, big, random thoughts that hardly make sense.

Fish. We are fish
, I think. From one water to the next, one pool to another. From creek to river to ocean, we move on, we move ahead. All of us. Uncle Loyal. Me. The people at the bar. We are fish, they are fish. We are all like fish, sometimes swimming with the current, sometimes against it, trying to figure out what’s bait and what is true.

Uncle Loyal yawns, but his eyes are wide open.
He sees a lot,
I thought. He sees so much more than most people do. He called the people at the biker bar “gracious,” which is a word I would not have connected with the patrons in about two thousand years of thinking. But maybe they were, in their own way. Different fish in a different current, that’s all.

And driving up the canyon, on a road I’d never been on before that day, getting ready to take my ancient great-uncle on his first mountain fishing trip ever, I decide to try to find the grace in people, no matter where they were or what they looked like.

Uncle Loyal sees it. Maybe I can learn how to see it too. I’m sure it’s there. I just need to look harder for it.

When You Fish, You Cast in Your Line and Never Know What You Might Pull Out

Dark. Still dark, an hour or maybe more before the sun tripped over the mountains to the east. Levi rumbled in his bed, tossed and turned and, I think, might have fallen asleep again. This is an old habit from the plains. I wake up and just listen to the sounds. I wake up early. As I have aged, it becomes easier to wake up before dawn. Four or five in the morning, most days. I blink a few times and think of where I am, and then I am awake. Sometimes, I fall back asleep, but more often, I stay awake and allow myself the pleasure of slow thinking. Today, I am unsure for a few moments of where I am. The stiff bed, the air of pine, dew, and old wood walls. The cabin. Yes, the cabin we have rented in the mountains.
Today, we will fish.

Levi bolts upright in the bed across the room. My eyes adjust to the darkness, and I see him quickly and quietly groping for his clothes and the fishing gear. We stopped at a small store on our way home from the restaurant last night and purchased more provisions for the day: crackers, juice, water, ready-made sandwiches, jerky—lots of jerky again—and fruit. Levi said, “You don’t know that you’re hungry when you fish because all you want to do is keep fishing, keep moving to the next hole. And then you do get hungry, and there’s not enough food in the world to fill you up.”

He sits on the edge of his bed for a few moments. I glance at the alarm clock. It is a few minutes after five.

“Uncle Loyal,” he whispers. “You awake?”

“Yes, Levi. I’m awake. Is it time? Do we get up and get ready and go fishing now?”

“Think so. It will be daylight in an hour. I’d like to be on the creek just about the time the sun comes up.”

I admit to being a little groggy, but I find my fishing clothes, laid out on a chair by Levi last night, and struggle into them. I put on a plaid flannel shirt, the pair of durable, practical cotton pants, my walking shoes, and finally, the fishing hat.

Levi nods in approval. “You look like a fisherman. That’s half of it.”

“I am certainly dressed for the part.”

“Let’s go, then. The fish await us. They tremble to know that we are on our way.”

He pulls out the keys to the red car, we lock the cabin door behind us, and soon we are on our way back toward the rushing dark waters of the creek we had seen the day before. The headlights pierce the remains of the night, and we round curves in the road, moving upward, steadily climbing in elevation. Spooked, dusky deer hop across the road, one, then another, then a third and a fourth. A faint rose-and-pink light burnishes the sky eastward. Levi stares at each side road, looking at the Forest Service numbers. After thirty minutes in the car, he slows to a stop and squints at a sign.

“This is it. We turn here. This is the road Jason told us about. Fish heaven, a couple of miles away.”

The road is narrow and dusty. Light reaches the tops of the trees on either side of us. A creek appears, then disappears. At a wide spot in the road, Levi pulls over.

“We need to hike . . .” and he stops and looks puzzled for a second. “We need to hike this way for no more than a quarter mile, and we’ll hit the creek.”

We get out of the car. Levi grabs most of our gear after handing me the two fishing poles. He looks around again, like an explorer unsure of his way. He closes his eyes and listens.

“I hear water. We’ll follow this little game path until we get to the creek. We’re almost there. I can smell water. I can smell pine. I can smell fish. It all adds up to the smell of victory and triumph. Beware, wily trout. You are no match for us. Levi and Loyal are at your doorstep.”

I meekly follow Levi up the small trail. Soon, I also can hear the water, roiling, chattery, tumbling. Then I see it: a black ribbon, froth butting against rocks, the home of the trout, water on its merry way to a rendezvous with the sea. This moment is all so perfect. The sun splashes down in a swath through the tall trees and sends its spotlight to the clearing where we are standing. A fog or vapor rises from the stream as the sunlight touches it. Levi senses the perfectness of this moment.

“Just right,” he mumbles. “Just right. Let’s get you geared up.”

He tosses the rubbery slick waders to me and instructs me on how to put them on. He grabs the poles and expertly ties a dry fly onto the end of my leader. He feints a cast and wiggles the pole. Then he pronounces with Biblical gravity, “We are ready. It is good.”

“Which pole is mine?”

“Rod, Uncle Loyal. When you are in the mountains, they are rods, not poles. Rods for fly fishing. It is important to know the difference.”

“I stand corrected.”

“This one is yours.”

He hands me my pole, and I try to flex it as he did. I am surprised at the play in it. It is elastic in its motion; it has a nice whip and feel to it.

“What will you wear?” I ask.

“What I have on.”

“Do you want the waders? I can do without them.”

“No. They’re for you. With the waders on, you can get to the deeper water, the holes. That’s where the fish will be in the morning. The deep holes. Where it’s dark, where they have been still all night. Now they are moving with the sunlight. They’ll look up and see a splotch on the water, and they’ll mistake it for food. Not too bright, these fish. They can’t tell the difference between a bit of steel shank and feathers and a big, meaty bug. But it’s okay. If they were smarter, we would have to find a less interesting way to catch them.”

“Can we share the waders?”

“No. They’re yours. Now and forever. For when we fish in Utah. We
will
fish in Utah.”