Rock Springs (11 page)

She widened her eyes at me. “You're now a criminal. I'm just sixteen, though I look older than that, I know it. Some day I'll regret it.” She reached for her paper sack and brought out a can of beer, a cold hot dog, and a red transistor radio. “I've accumulated this much so far.”

“When did you leave home?”

“Exactly one night before last,” she said. “I didn't think I could trust anybody up there—maybe I was wrong. Who knows?” When she opened the beer it spewed up her arm. She
took a drink and handed it to me, and I drank some. “Drinking distances you,” she said. “I
would
like to see the Space Needle, still.” She picked up the little radio, leaning on her elbow, and stared at it. “Batteries are my next assignment. For this thing.” She thumped it with her finger as if she wanted that to turn it on. “I'm not going to eat
this
either.” She picked up the hot dog and tossed it in the grass.

“You didn't want to come out here, did you?” I said.

“I didn't want to stay back in that room. Sunburst? Is that what that place is called? You accept help where you get it, I guess.”

“Uh-oh, now. Uh-oh,” Claude shouted. His rod was curved over, and his line was cutting around the water this way and that. “Here, now. Here he is,” Claude said, and looked over his shoulder and wound in on the reel. “This is the big whitefish,” he yelled.

Lucy sat up and watched. Claude had walked into the shallows in his shoes, holding his rod up as the fish toured around him. “Look how excited he gets,” she said and took a drink of her warm beer. “A monkey could catch a whitefish. They're trash fish. He's stupid.”

I saw the fish shine through the surface, then turn down in the cold water. It was a big fish, you could tell by how deep it took the line. I knew Claude wanted to get it in to show.

“He's going to break that one off,” Lucy said, “and I bet he doesn't have another hook.” And I thought he would break it off myself. I'd seen him break off big fish before.

Claude brought his rod butt down then, and struck it with the edge of his hand, struck it hard enough that the rod tip snapped. “They hate this,” he shouted, and he smacked his rod butt again. “A fish feels pain.”

The rod dipped, then rose. The line ran out toward the willow bank twenty yards away, then the fish turned on the surface, its white belly visible as Claude began backing it out,
and I saw that the fish was falling in the current, losing distance.

“That trick works,” Claude shouted at us. “Pain works. Come see this thing.”

I walked down to where he'd waded back onto the mud bank. The fish was already on its side, finning sideways in the shallows. “It's huge,” Claude said, hoisting the fish up with his rod. And it was a huge fish, long and deep-chested and silvery as it touched up out of the silt. “You can't catch this fish every day, can you?” He was sweating and jittery. He wanted Lucy to see the fish. He looked around, but she'd stayed sitting, smoking her cigarette.

“Great,” she said and waved a hand at him. “Catch two more and we can all throw one away.”

Claude smiled a mean smile. “Get it off,” he said, and dragged the big fish back onto the grass where it lay with its gills cupping air. It was not a pretty fish. It was two feet long, and scaly and silver-white. “Use this,” Claude said. He pulled his black spring-knife out of his pocket and clicked down the blade. “Just cut the hook out.”

And I got on my knees in the grass, held the fish across its cold body, and cut up right through the bottom of its gill, using the point of the blade. I opened the cut out, pushed under the hook and dug it loose. The fish made a strangled sound when I put my weight on it, but it didn't move.

“Hooked in the gills,” Claude said, watching the fish begin to bleed where I'd cut it. “It'll eat good.”

I stood up and gave Claude his knife. The fish still breathed, but it was too badly cut to live in the water again. It was too worn out and too big. It wouldn't have lived, I didn't think, even if I hadn't cut it.

Claude pinched the hook between his fingers and the knife blade, straightening the point. “I'm going to catch a bigger one,” he said. “They're out there in rows. I'll catch
every one of them.” Claude looked over his shoulder at Lucy, who was still watching us. He bit his bottom lip. “You're into something, aren't you?” He said this in a whisper.

“I hope so,” I said.

“She's a sweetheart.” He closed the knife on his pants leg. “Things can happen when you're by yourself, can't they?” He smiled.

“Tell secrets, now,” Lucy said and looked up at the sky and shook her head.

“It's not a secret,” Claude yelled. “We don't have any secrets. We're friends.”

“Great,” she said. “Then you and Sherman are all alike. You got nothing worth hiding.”

I
went back up and sat beside Lucy. Swallows were appearing now, hitting the creek surface and catching the insects that had hatched in the afternoon air.

Lucy was at her red radio, thumbing its little plastic dial back and forth. “I wish this worked,” she said. “We could get some entertainment in the wilderness. We could dance. Do you like dancing?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Do you have a girlfriend, too?”

“No,” I said, though I did have a girlfriend—in Sweetgrass—a half-Blackfeet girl I had not known very long.

Lucy lay in the grass and stared at where a jet was leaving a trail of white cloud, like a silvery speck inching westward. She had her green dress a little farther up her legs so the sun could be on them. “Do you understand radar, yet?”

“I've read about it.”

“Don't you see things that aren't there? Is that right?”

“They're still there,” I said, “but they're out of sight.”

“That's the thing I liked about fishing when my father used to go with me,” she said, gazing up. “You only saw half what was there. It was a mystery. I liked that.” She pursed up her lips and watched the jet going east. To Germany, I decided. “I don't mind feeling lonely out here.” She put her hands behind her head and looked at me through Sherman's dark glasses. “Tell me something shameful you've done. That's an act of faith. You already know something about me, right? Though that wasn't so bad. I've probably done worse.”

Claude yelled from down in the creek. His rod was bent and he had it raised high in both hands, the line shooting upstream. Then suddenly the rod snapped straight and the line fell back on the surface. “There's his long-line release,” Claude said, then laughed. He was in better spirits just from fishing. “If I didn't horse 'em, I'd catch 'em,” he said and did not look where we were.

“He's a fool,” Lucy said. “Indians are fools. I'd hate to have their kids.”

“He's not,” I said. “He's not a fool.”

“Okay. I guess I'm too hard on him.”

“He doesn't care.”

She looked at Claude, who was beginning to rebait his hook, standing to his knees in the creek. “Well,” she said, “you'll never see me after today, either. What have you done that's shameful?”

“Nothing,” I said. “I haven't done anything shameful.”

“Lying is it, then,” she said. “That's shameful. You lied because you're ashamed. There isn't any out to this. It's a game, and you lost it.”

“You're not ashamed of anything, are you?”

“Yes I am,” she said. “I'm ashamed of leaving home without saying anything to anybody. And of spending the night with Sherman at that motel. That's just two days of things. I'll give you a second chance. Are you ashamed of
being out here with me—whatever kind of person I am? That's easy, isn't it?”

“I haven't done anything to you I'm ashamed of,” I said, though I wanted to think of something I might be ashamed of—that I'd hurt someone or hated them or been glad a terrible thing had happened. It seemed wrong to know nothing about that. I looked at Claude, who was throwing his line onto the current, his bobber catching the sluice and riding it. In forty-five minutes we would lose daylight, and it would be colder. After that we'd take Lucy back to the motel for Claude's father, if he remembered. My own father would never even know I had been here, wouldn't know about this day. I felt on my own, which was not so unusual. “I was glad when my mother left,” I said.

“Why?” Lucy said.

“We didn't need her. She didn't need us, either.” Neither of those things was true, but I could say them, and it didn't bother me to hear them.

“Where is she now?” Lucy said.

“I don't know,” I said. “I don't care.”

Though just from her voice then I could tell this didn't matter to her. Shame didn't mean any more to her than some other way you could feel on a day—like feeling tired or cold or crying. It went away, finally. And I thought that I would like to feel that way about shame if I could.

Lucy took her sunglasses off. She reached over and put her hands on my arm and kissed my arm above the wrist. It was a strange thing for her to do. “What he said about your parents was a lie,” she said. “It was too harsh. If they're happy, you'll be the same way. I bet my parents are happy I'm gone. I don't even blame them.” I didn't say anything, because I didn't know what kind of people they could've been—some man who'd gone across the border to stay out of the war. “Why don't you kiss me?” Lucy said. “Just for a minute?”

I looked at Claude. I saw he had another fish on but wasn't yelling about it. He was just pulling it in.

“He can see us,” she said. “I don't care. Let him.” She pushed her face up into my face and kissed me. She kissed me hard and opened her mouth too wide and put her tongue in mine, then pushed me on the grass and onto her stockings and her shoes. “Just do this,” she said. “Kiss me back. Kiss me all you want to. I like that.”

And I kissed her, put both my arms around her and felt her skinny back and her sides and up to her breasts and her face and her hair, and held her on top of me, pushing against me until my heart beat hard, and I thought my breath would stop. “You boys,” she whispered to me, “I love you boys. I wish 1 was staying with you tonight. You're so wonderful.”

But I knew that wasn't what she meant. It was just a thing to say, and nothing was wrong with it at all. “You're wonderful,” I said. “I love you.”

“You're drunk,” I heard Claude call out. “You're both fuck drunk.”

I was on my back and my mouth was dry. Lucy pulled away from me and looked at him. “Don't act jealously,” she said, then reached for her can of beer and took a drink.

“I'm down here fishing,” Claude said. “Come look at this. It's a great fish.”

“Let's let him have something,” Lucy said and stood up, though I didn't want her to leave but to kiss me again, to stay. But she got up and started down barefoot to where Claude was kneeling in the grass. “Let's see your poor fish,” she said.

Claude had another whitefish in the grass. The one I'd killed was dry and lying beside it, and the second one was smaller, but it was bright and bending in the grass. Claude had his hand on it and his spring-knife ready to pry out the hook himself.

“It's smaller,” he said, “but it's prettier. It's livelier.”

Lucy looked down at the fish. She said, “That's a picture of helplessness, I guess, isn't it?”

“It's a whitefish,” Claude said as the fish tried to twist free under his hand. “They're the best. And it's helpless. Right. You bet it is,”

“What a surprise that must be,” Lucy said, watching the fish struggle. “For the fish. Everything just goes crazy at once. I wonder what it thinks.”

“They don't. Fish don't think,” Claude said.

“Don't they have little perfect spirits?” Lucy looked at me and smiled. She didn't care about any of this. I could tell.

“Not this one,” Claude said.

He moved his hand around to the top of the fish to make a better grip so he could use his knife, but the fish twisted again, and with its top fin it jabbed Claude's hand into the meat below his thumb.

“Look at that!” Lucy said.

And Claude let the fish go and wrung his hand and flung blood on the fish and on his face and on Lucy. He dropped his knife and squeezed his hand where the fish had cut him, his jaws set tight. “Son of a bitch thing, he said. He put his hand in his mouth and sucked it, then looked at it. The wound was small and narrow, and it had begun to seep blood on his wet skin. “Fucking thing,” Claude said. “Fucking fish is dangerous.” He put his hand back in his mouth and sucked the cut again. He looked at Lucy, who was watching him. And for an instant I thought Claude would do something terrible—say something to her or do something to the fish that would make her turn her head away, something he would later be sorry for. I had seen that in him. He was able to do bad things easily.

But what he did was take his hand out of his mouth and stick it in the grass and lean hard on it to stop the blood. It might've been an Indian way. “Who cares,” he said, and he
seemed calm. He pushed his hand harder in the grass. The blood had dried already on his face. The fish was still twisting in the grass, its stiff gills trapping air, its scales growing dry and dull. “This is your fish,” Claude said to Lucy. “Do something with it. I don't want it.” I knew his hand hurt him by the way he talked so quiedy.

Lucy looked at the fish, and I thought her body, which I was close to, became relaxed somehow, as if something that had been bothering her or that was hard for her suddenly wasn't.

“Okay,” Lucy said. “My fish. Let me have that knife.”

Claude picked the knife up and handed it to her, the blade forward in the dangerous way. “This is sharp,” he said, and as she reached for it, he jabbed it at her, though she only moved her hand out of the way and did not take a step back. “You think we're handsome?” Claude said. “Us two?”