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Excerpted
from Bitch Creek:
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 Calhoun's 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 streambed, 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
chilly -- 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 onto 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 Dodge Power Wagon was sitting behind the elementary
school in South Riley.
On the other side of the dam, the 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 cellarhole 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 many 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 lightweight nylon 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.
The body, of course, was Lyle's.
Calhoun waded in. The spongy peat bottom sucked at his feet when he lifted
them up.
Lyle seemed to be kneeling in the water like a praying Moslem bowing to
the east. His arms and shoulders and head were on the bottom under about
three feet of water. His knees has sunk a ways into the mud. The air in
the waders had gathered in the seat, lifting that part to the surface.
Calhoun saw Lyle's long ponytail waving gently in the coppery water, and
he flashed on the phantom body he'd seen drifting in his spring creek
with its hair undulating underwater. More spooky deja vu.
Lyle was wearing his fishing vest. His completely deflated float tube
had slipped down around his knees. He had lost his cap, but he still had
fins strapped onto his feet. His Thomas & Thomas rod lay beside him,
the butt-end in the water, the tip caught in the reeds. The line trailed
out into the pond.
Calhoun put his arms around Lyle's chest, hauled him out of the mud, and
dragged him through the marsh and bog along the edge of the pond. He kept
falling down in the mud with Lyle's dead weight on top of him.
Finally he managed to haul Lyle up onto the dry land beside the dam. He
collapsed on the ground beside the body, gasping for breath, and waited
for the hammering in his chest to slow down and the fire in his brain
to subside.
After a few minutes, Calhoun got up on his hands and knees and looked
at the dead boy. Lyle's face was puffy and bloated. His pale blue eyes
were staring up at the sky and his mouth gaped open as if he had been
singing when he died.
Lyle had liked to sing. He knew
all the Beatles songs, and whenever they went out on a boat, he'd wail
"Rocky Raccoon" or "A Day in the Life" over the roar
of the outboard. "I'd love to turn you on," he'd bellow, grinning
as if he knew he was about to get laid.
Calhoun remembered the time they'd met at 4:00 AM to catch a striper tide
down toward the mouth of the Kennebec. About the time they'd launched
the boat it had started raining, and then the wind turned so that the
hard raindrops came at an angle, pelting their faces like birdshot. Lyle
had smiled grandly, loving it. "Here comes the sun," he'd bellowed,
"and it's all right."
A leech had attached itself to the side of Lyle's neck. Calhoun plucked
it off and flicked it away. Lyle's skin felt like a trout's body, cold
and rubbery, about the temperature of the pond water. It was, in fact,
about the color of a trout's belly.
Calhoun pushed himself to his
feet. "Be right back," he told Lyle. He sloshed back to where
he'd found Lyle, picked up the Thomas & Thomas rod, and reeled in
the line. There was no fly on the end of the tippet. Calhoun wondered
if Lyle had been fighting a big fish when whatever happened to him had
happened. Maybe some great
brook trout had tangled in the reeds along shore and broken off. And then
Lyle had died.
It made no sense.
Calhoun disjointed the two-piece rod, carried it back to where he's left
Lyle, laid it gently on the ground, and then knelt beside him. "I
fetched your rod," he told him.
He took off Lyle's vest, which
bulged with flyboxes and all the other junk a fly-fishing guide had to
carry. A big wool patch over the left breast of the vest was studded with
a variety of flies, stuck there to dry after they'd been used. You could
read the stories of dozens of fishing trips from the flies that were hooked
in that wool patch. There were lifelike crayfish imitations for smallmouths
and fancy Atlantic salmon flies that resembled nothing in nature, big
flashy pickerel flies and tiny drab trout flies. Some of them were bedraggled
from being chewed by fish. Some had been tried briefly, without success,
then retired.
Calhoun shook his head, remembering all the fishing trips he'd shared
with Lyle, the stories that hid in that random assortment of flies stuck
into that wool patch.
He slipped the fins off Lyle's
feet, pulled the deflated float tube down off his legs, then peeled off
his waders, which were half-full of pond water.He wrestled Lyle's body
up onto his shoulders in a fireman's carry and headed back to the road.
Lyle was tall and skinny -- all bone and sinew. Calhoun was nearly six
inches shorter, but he weighed more, and it was all wood-splitting canoe-paddling
muscle, and the first couple hundred yards went easy. But then he began
to climb the brushy old tote road, and about half-way up the long slope
he ran out of adrenaline and began to stumble. "Gotta take a break,
bud," he mumbled to Lyle as he went down on his knees and rolled
the body onto the ground.
He sat beside Lyle, taking deep breaths and looking at his friend's swollen
face.
He hadn't done much thinking
since he'd seen Lyle's ass sticking up in the reeds. He hadn't tried to
imagine what could have happened, how Lyle could have drowned in a shallow
little millpond, how his float tube could deflate so quickly that he couldn't
get to shore.
Maybe he'd been playing a big trout, trying to follow it around the little
pond, and his feet had sunk into the bottom and slowly sucked him down.
Those peaty bottoms were like quicksand. You often encountered it in beaver
ponds, and the harder you fought it, the quicker you sank. If you panicked,
you went down fast, even wearing swim fins on your feet.
But Calhoun had never seen Lyle panic. The boy had certainly played plenty
of big fish, and he was cool in any crisis. One frigid December morning
when they'd been hunting sea ducks out on Casco Bay before daybreak, a
sudden squall had blown in off the ocean. In the darkness, and in the
heavy driving snow, they couldn't see each other from one end of the duck
boat to the other. The tide was running hard and the seas were heavy in
the wind, and it was so cold that the snow and the salt spray froze instantly
on their hats and jackets. If Calhoun had been navigating, they'd have
ended up in Africa, if they didn't freeze to death or capsize first.
Lyle had calmly brought them directly to the dock, singing the entire
"Revolver" album over the roar of the wind and the throb of
the outboard.
Lyle had found himself stuck in peaty pond bottoms before. He'd been in
tighter situations than that. It was hard to imagine that he'd ever panic.
Anyway, Lyle hadn't been stuck in the mud when Calhoun found him.
What the hell had Fred Green been doing when Lyle got in trouble?
Calhoun knew he wasn't thinking clearly. He tried to slow down his brain,
sort out the facts, make some kind of sense out of it.
Lyle and Green had driven here in the Power Wagon. They'd parked where
Calhoun's pickup was now parked, unloaded their gear, and trekked into
the pond together. Lyle had finned out onto the pond in his float tube.
Maybe Green had, too. Or maybe the old man had started casting from the
dam. Then Lyle's tube suddenly deflated. Lyle had struggled toward shore,
begun to sink. His waders started filling with water.
He'd yelled for help.
He hadn't received it.
Reconstruct it, Calhoun told himself. Okay. So Green had been unable --
or unwilling to try -- to help Lyle. When he realized what was happening,
he panicked. He walked out of the woods, got into Lyle's truck, and drove
to the place where they'd left the rented Taurus -- behind the elementary
school, apparently, although it was a damned strange place for Lyle to
leave a car.
Then Green had swapped cars, leaving the keys in the Power Wagon's ignition,
and driven off in his Taurus. He did not go for help or report what had
happened. He just . . . drove off.
Well, as far as Calhoun had been able to determine, Fred Green was not
the man's name. That single fact raised questions about everything.
It was too much to think about just then. He hoisted Lyle back up on his
shoulders and resumed his trek out of the woods.
He was about to take another break when he saw the glint of sunlight off
the windshield of his truck. So he staggered the last thirty yards and
collapsed in the weeds beside the road. He lay on his back gasping for
breath with Lyle on his stomach beside him. Even after his heartbeat had
slowed to normal, Calhoun continued lying there with his eyes closed,
thinking about Lyle . . . the Beatles songs he bellowed in the rain .
. . the
stories he created from the gravestone legends in old family plots deep
in the woods . . . the way he blushed whenever Calhoun asked him about
living in a big old house with a flock of pretty young female roommates
running around in their underwear . . . the July afternoon Lyle had appeared
at his door lugging a cardboard box that turned out to have a eight-week-old
Brittany puppy in it . . . the stormy March night they'd been tying flies
and listening to Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony at Calhoun's house, when
Lyle had talked Calhoun into smoking marijuana, said you could really
dig Beethoven when you were stoned, and an hour later, when they'd turned
up the volume as high as it would go and Calhoun was using the tip section
of a fly rod to conduct the grand choral finale, Kate had showed up wearing
a little black skirt and fishnet stockings . . .
"Hey, Mister? You okay?"
Calhoun's eyes snapped open. A lanky, gray-haired woman was standing there
with her hands on her hips, frowning down at him. She was wearing sneakers
and baggy jeans and a flannel shirt with the tails flapping. A blue bandanna
held her snarly hair in place.
"My friend," said Calhoun. "He's --"
"Dear Lord," she said softly, peering down at Lyle's body. "He's
dead, ain't he?"
Calhoun nodded.
"Don't mind me sayin' so," the woman said, "you look half
dead yourself."
"I just lugged him out."
She shook her head and blew out a long breath. "What happened?"
"I guess he drowned."
"Ayuh, I'd say he did, by the looks of him." She arched her
eyebrows, inviting him to elaborate.
"It's a long story, ma'am," he said.
"Well, you best save it for the sheriff. You sit tight, I'll go call.
I live just down the road a piece."
"Trust me," said Calhoun. "I'm not going anywhere."
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