Wind is a four-letter word. It’s a noun and a swear word all in one. It is the bane of every man, woman and child on an Idaho river. Here I stand in waders with a cork-handle rod, watching my line sweep through the air to unintended places. As soon as the nymph touches the water, I pop it back and recast. I change tactics, hoping to outmaneuver the enemy. My efforts improve but not as well as my brother’s.
Ryal is twenty feet upriver, the picture of grace. Where he looks, his fly lights. Maybe he is in a vacuum. It wouldn’t be the first occurrence of this phenomenon. He is exempt from Murphy’s law. He didn’t come with that installed. As the years go by, I think the manufacturer gave me his dose.
“What are you using?” I holler upstream.
He doesn’t seem to hear me. Or rather he knows it’s not the answer I seek. I’m frustrated and want to blame something other than the whims of nature. The river rewards only patience and maybe a little skill. That’s what our uncle taught us since we were old enough to be trusted to hang onto a rod and not wander off looking for rocks – Ryal still goes looking for them. It’s an obsession of his. I can’t afford to have an obsession when, after more than sixty years, he’s still the better fisherman.
The water flows, I recast. The wind blows, I recast. The day goes on. The sun crosses the sky. The clouds roll in, big and threatening. I’ve watched them coming for the better part of the afternoon and have calculated the time before the rain reaches us. We are down to minutes. Ryal has packed it in and stands behind me now. His hand is on my shoulder and his other is behind his back. His eyes are grinning, the only part of his face I can see since he still wears a gator pulled up over his nose. I wait. I try not to roll my eyes because it won’t be a fish he is most proud to show me. He holds up a baseball size agate.
“Wow,” I say, mocking him. This isn’t the biggest rock he’s found. This is just another to add to the bucketfuls around his house. “Semi-precious stones will not make you rich,” I remind him. He doesn’t even scoff. He has heard it all. For years, I’ve bullied him. I’m older, it’s my job. That’s what I tell myself when I feel guilty about it.
“Let’s pack it out,” Ryal says, serious again. “Storm’s almost here.” He nods his head toward the dark clouds.
“One more cast,” I say. It’s the last full day of my trip. The last cast. I want to make it count. I fiddle with the line before I’m confident. I whip it back – one, two and then cast. It’s not the most proficient, but it gets within the two-foot diameter I have now expanded as my precision circle. In comparison, Ryal’s is a few inches.
“Nice,” my brother whispers as he stands to my right. I can sense him holding his breath. He wants me to catch a big one more than my own ardent desire.
The line catches. My heart leaps. Then sinks, it’s just a snag – wait, I test the reel, scared to hope. Yes! My fingers remember what to do faster than my head. They perform the necessary tasks at the correct rhythm. The line, taut. The rod, bending gracefully. I hold it low to play the line, gently, just in case it’s a trout.
Ryal is muttering our uncle’s old proverb. “Honor the fish, son. Honor the fish.” His words are soothing, mirroring what my soul feels.
The water swells. The fish breaks the surface. Brown. Massive. The beauty of the river. Eight pounds, easily. “Honor the fish,” I whisper, adding my voice to the flow. The trout dives. I pray he won’t spit out the hook. I reel. The tension reestablished. He is there. Big. Heavy. I’ve seen him now. I can visualize him swimming as I coax him closer, careful not to tear his mouth. Gentle, ever gentle, I think again.
Ryal’s at the ready, net in hand. The seconds tick with the reel’s rotation. I don’t breathe until the fish is netted and Ryal nods at me. He’s grinning. I’m grinning. I fumble with the rod as I wade over the rocky riverbed.
“We gotta get your picture,” he insists. Modern technology. All I need is to hold the trout, to know him for just a moment. That will be enough. I placate my brother because the picture is for him and no one else.
I reach into the water to coat my hands.
“Ten – maybe twelve pounds, easy,” Ryal says as I lift it up. He is pulling out his phone for the picture.
I feel the weight shift fully into my possession as I bring the trout from the river. He’s not quite ten pounds, but he’s the last brown trout, the last trout I’ll ever behold. And just as I have pulled him clear, it contorts. His slippery, powerful body is no match for my feeble fingers. With an insulting splash, the river reclaims him. I stare at the water. Gone. Nothing. Disappeared. I’ve been robbed of a fly fisherman’s purest pleasure – watching a beauty swim away.
“Butter fingers,” Ryal says. He’s trying to make light of it. I laugh because it helps. He laughs and pats me on the back. “It’ll be that way sometimes.”
Thunderclaps remind us of our own insignificance. The rains have started, and we stumble out of the river and up the bank. We’re getting old, don’t move as fast as we figure. Ryal would say speak for yourself and I suppose I should. I have a few years on him. And a few of those years were rougher than all his combined. But I don’t say that. I didn’t choose those.
Drenched, we stash our gear in his truck bed and climb inside to wait it out. The rain is too heavy to drive in. Not at our age. Not in this beat up truck.
“You ought to stay longer than a week,” Ryal says.
“I oughta,” I say. And I really should. I’m retired. It used to be justifiable – the one week. For years, the excuse was work and family. I only had so many days off the wife would let me spend on myself. The rest were saved for family vacations – If I never step foot inside Disney or a zoo or a cruise ship again, I’ll die a little bit happier. But now, the kids are grown, gone. The wife, divorced. The job, a pension check. I could. I could even move back.
The raindrops pound the windshield. The sound reminds me. Everything reminds me when I’m here. The loss of my innocence. I left when I was just a boy. Correction: dragged. I was dragged from this haven of harmonic rivers. My naïveté destroyed by shrapnel, and it hurts to be reminded. This is one of the reasons I cannot return, not permanently, not for longer than a week. It’s the reason it takes Ryal twisting my arm to get me out here to fish once a year. After a whole lifetime, a guy should be over it.
Ryal looks at me. His face softens even though he doesn’t understand, not really.
I stare out at the river. It’s barely visible from the sheets of rain. The storm is on top of us now. The lightening show is overhead. The claps, deafening. I can feel it in my chest and the booms remind me too. But especially the rain because it’s not dissimilar. The drenching rain. The miserable, drenching, deadly rain. There’s less mud here, that’s a difference, I remind myself. Less mud. Less violence. Correction: no violence. Just fly fishing and a rock obsessed brother.
“Isa divorced me,” I say. Ryal knows this. This is old news. It took her a while, but a good woman is hard to get rid of. I told her after the last kid packed up for college, that she should go too or me. She just shook her head, smiled at me and said no. Finally, after enough neglect, she found a better man and with my blessing she started her happy ending. I shouldn’t have ever got hitched. I knew I wasn’t any good. That was a cruel thing to do to a woman. I was nothing, but I didn’t want to believe that then. I wanted redemption. Isa believed in it. Ryal still believes in it. The doctors don’t.
“It’s time to come home, Sean,” my brother says. I think he has been waiting decades to say those words.
“She didn’t know about the diagnosis. Not everything,” I continue, ignoring him. “If she had, she wouldn’t have gone. But I couldn’t chain her with that knowledge. Now, it’s not little enough to keep secret anymore.”
Ryal doesn’t turn to look at me. He is waiting. Just like he waits for the brown trout to bite, he waits on me to drop the news. But that news isn’t the one that will hurt. I have something else to say.
The rain starts to subside. I can think again. I can think without remembering it so vividly now. I turn towards him, able to focus. “I’m not coming back, Ryal.” I never came back. I can’t shake it. Not even after an entire lifetime. And this – I look out at the river that’s now visible again, swollen from the rain and flowing faster – this is too much of a reminder of what I lost.
Ryal swats at a tear that escaped his eye. He knew. He knew I never came back from that place. He tried. Every time, every effort he made to get me back out here to fish was an effort to bring me back from those depths. But not Ryal, not even the rivers and trout of Idaho were formidable against my demons. A loving wife and children weren’t enough. Though I tried for years, I am still in that jungle.
“What did the doctors say this time?” he asks as we drive back to his place.
“They say the cancer’s back. End stage.”
Ryal lets this sink in. The heaviness of reality between us. “I’ve read about that stuff they sprayed over there,” he says, almost to himself.
I nod. Most likely is what the studies have shown. It’s inescapable. It nearly killed me then and it’s about to kill me now.
The morning wind whips as we walk across the airport lot, insisting on the last word. This is it. This is goodbye. I didn’t expect to be so emotional. I didn’t expect to not to want to leave.
“We have doctors in Idaho, too,” Ryal reminded me last night.
I had laughed at him. At the obvious. I suppose I could die just as well in a hospital here as in Chicago, but my plane is about to board and my treatment schedule starts the day after next.
“I’ll be seeing ya, Ryal,” I say. The words are inaccurate, but I don’t fix them. He pulls me in for a hug. “Thanks for all the years you dragged me back out here. I remember every trout, every beer.” I blubber into his shoulder. I cannot say goodbye. Not yet. If I’m lucky, I’ll get one last call.
[Image Credit : Photo by Brandon on Unsplash]
Abby Morales’ work has appeared in The Petigru Review and was a finalist for the Coker Fellowship. Her latest work, a novel about the return of American sailors from the Pacific theater after VJ Day in World War II, is nearing completion. She resides in Winnsboro, SC USA with her family and beloved dogs.
