Nothing but Blue Skies

24

Frank adjusted the gooseneck lamp over the oak desk in his den and pulled up chairs for himself and Holly. Holly had been studying most of the day and had tied her hair back with a bandanna. “Let’s have a look,” she said. Frank opened the drawer and pulled out two aluminum fly boxes. Holly drew them toward herself and tipped open their lids. Inside, they each had twelve compartments with glassine covers that could be opened by tripping a small wire latch. About half the compartments were filled with flies. Holly frowned.

“Where are the pale morning duns?”

“Must be out of them.”

“Don’t go anywhere without pale morning duns.”

“I make the light Cahill do the work for me.”

“Not on big fish,” said Holly, “only on dumb fish. I see you have Adamses in about nineteen sizes.”

“I believe in the Adams.”

“The Adams is pretty vague.”

“It’s not vague. It’s a strong generalization.”

“Where’s the vise and stuff?”

Frank dug out his fly-tying vise, an old Thompson A, and set it up on his desk. He pulled out the lower left-hand drawer, revealing a collection of feathers and pieces of moose and deer hide, small blue and white boxes of hooks, spools of different-colored threads and silk flosses. A nice smell of camphor arose and Holly took a deep breath.

“You and Uncle Mike are really going to sell the ranch?”

“If we can! All we need is a buyer! All he needs is American money! Who told you?”

“Uncle Mike.”

“I didn’t want to tell you.”

“Could it be sold before I get home again?”

“That would be too good to be true, but it could happen.”

“Then I’d like to go once more before I catch my plane.”

“Who’s picking you up in Missoula?”

“Mama.”

“Mama!”

“Yessir, this is a clean sweep. She wanted to come up and check out my boyfriend. Maybe she’ll give you a report. This boyfriend is special and I want you and Mama involved.”

“Well, send her my best.”

“I will. I’ll give her your best. I don’t know if I told you, I changed faculty advisers this term.”

“You didn’t tell me. You’re still a history major?”

“Still a history major.”

“Why did you change?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Dr. Carson — that was his name, huge redheaded guy — Dr. Carson had been reading all these statistics about increasing American ignorance ever since I got there. How many Americans had never heard of the Civil War, never heard of Roosevelt, couldn’t guess the dates of the First World War within fifty years, on and on. He collected these things as a joke and” — she put a size 16 hook in the vise and began winding cream-colored thread on it, almost too quickly to watch — “saved them for me as a kind of gesture of friendship. It got more and more obsessive with him until it became an icky form of intimacy. I tried to agree with him. But he just never seemed to feel I was quite negative enough about proclaiming the awfulness of everything.”

Holly rubbed beeswax onto the thread, then spun pale yellow fur onto it; she wound the thread on the hook until it looked like the eggy, delicate body of a bug. “I had to meet with him every week, but we couldn’t really talk about my work because the stupidity of the American people was becoming so ominous to him that he was paralyzed, and it was starting to paralyze me. Finally, about two weeks ago, I went into his office determined to take a course on the French Revolution even though I hadn’t had the prerequisite, and he said, ‘Do you know how many books the average American reads between graduation from high school and death?’ And I said no and that I really didn’t care because it was not in my plans to become an average American. But I could see he was in this vortex. He said, ‘Guess!’ I mean, he sort of croaked it out. I refused to guess. He stuck his arms straight out from his body and made little fists. His face was red. ‘Guess!’ When I backed out of his office for the last time, he was shouting, ‘Statistically less than one! Statistically less than one!’ So I got a new adviser.”

Holly set two minute white feathers on top of the hook and figure-eighted the thread around them until they stood up.

“Who is the new one?”

“A very quiet, very pleasant dwarf with a Ph.D. from Harvard.”

“Are you calling him a dwarf because he went to Harvard?”

“I’m calling him a dwarf because he’s four feet high.”

“Oh. Did you get the course?”

“Yep, Dad, yep I did.” Holly wound the hackle around the hook shank and the hackle points spun like a bright little cloud around the base of the wings. She wound the thread to the front of the hook and tied it off in a precise whip finish to make the head of the fly. She opened the bottle of lacquer and, when its good smell came out, looked over at Frank and smiled. She dipped the end of her bodkin in it and touched a clear drop of lacquer to the head of the fly. It gleamed for a second and soaked in. She took the fly out of the vise and put in another hook and started again on an identical fly.

“I was kind of surprised when you told me you were going to come back after graduation.”

“It’s home.”

“I know, but it’s not a place of much opportunity for people your age.”

“Think of the places that are.”

“That’s true.”

“I might even reopen Amazing Grease.”

“Please.”

“Well, I might.”

Frank watched while Holly finished another fly. She used to tie flies for the anglers’ shop, for spending money in high school. She had always fished with Frank. When she was in practice, she could outfish him. She couldn’t cast as far but she was a great water reader and better at stealing up on trout and making her casts count. She’d had a boyfriend down in New Mexico who fished; she even brought him up one time. Frank didn’t like him — Miles something or other. He seemed to think his being a fisherman covered everything. He was an avid, excited young man who took the position that he and Frank had known each other for years. It was part of the angling camaraderie. Frank despised him. Later, Miles gave up fishing to work at the Chicago Board of Trade, where he became a drug addict and dropped from sight. Holly put in another hook and wound the thread onto it.

“Where’ve you been fishing lately?” Frank asked.

“I haven’t been. I made a couple of trips to the Tobacco River, mostly to get away from school for a bit. It’s nice, small stream, a lot of small fish. Come up and I’ll take you.”

Frank was glad she was coming home, though he thought it a bad idea. Holly was a bit high-powered for her old society and her sharp tongue would make it no secret. She was a good-looking girl who did almost nothing on purpose to be attractive. It was hard for Frank to see her falling for one of the up-and-coming young men in town. He didn’t like any of them, found them stylishly callow and opinionated.

“What kind of fisherman was Grandpa?”

“Honestly?”

“Yes.”

“Not very good,” said Frank.

“That surprises me,” said Holly.

“He wasn’t very good, but nobody loved it more.”

“Because I remember him fishing constantly.”

“He did, when he had the time. But his approach was too direct. He tried to overpower trout, go straight at them. It was one of the many areas where fishing and life are not at all alike — or at least fishing and business. Your grandfather’s problem was that he didn’t trust anything or anyone but himself. He had to have a hold of things. A good trout fisherman has to understand a slack line. A slack line is everything. That was too much for Grandpa. If that line wasn’t tight, he believed it was out of control. I never knew him to catch a big fish. Big fish are caught on a slack line.”

“Well, what kind of a person was he?”

Frank thought for a moment. He’d never looked at it that way. “He was a pretty good fellow. The way he grew up, he got pretty trained to look straight ahead. I got the impression that people who grew up with him who hadn’t learned this hard, straight-ahead look were ground up, gone, blown away. He didn’t really understand or respect people who hadn’t come out of a Depression background.”

“You must have had trouble with this straight-ahead business?”

“I sure did. I can’t believe that’s a serious question.”

“Is that why you became a hippie?”

“Here we go.”

“No, seriously.”

“I don’t know why I became a hippie. And maybe I wasn’t really one anyway. I never thought I was a hippie at the time. I liked the music. I’m still a child of rock and roll. Lots of us will never escape that. And when we’re old, we’ll probably let our hair grow out again, if there is any. Right now we’re in the swim of things. It’s not perfect but it is highly tangible, you know what I mean? We’re kind of running the store. Know what I mean?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Well, you’re in your youth. You’re washed around from possibility to possibility. God is telling you nothing matters but meeting the perfect partner, nothing. The world seems to be out ahead but nothing is real. It’s all ideas. You’re racing toward these balloons that the air currents move steady in another direction. But you get older and you catch up to some of those balloons. You get even with things and they’re not drifting away ahead of you. I know that I’ve settled into the limited possibilities of feeder cattle and rental property and grain sharecropping and the ridiculous limited characters of my friends and my own rather fascinating inadequacies. And all these things are so real! I can feel my limitations like the surface of marble a sculptor touches. And there’s only so much grass to be leased in the summer, and even subirrigated ground can only produce so many bushels of grain, and Budweiser and Coors are only going to accept so much malt barley, even if we do get it combined and delivered and past the tests for moisture content. The only things that undermine my happiness are things I can’t lay hands on.”

“Like what?” said Holly.

“Oh, I don’t know.”

“Just give me an example.”

“I can’t.”

“Is regret one of them?”

“Sure.”

“Do you ever get lonely?”

“Of course. That’s a bad one. It’s not like other things that strengthen you. Loneliness makes you weaker, makes you worse. I’m guessing that enough of it makes you cruel.”

“Two more pale morning duns and we can call it quits,” said Holly. She turned and looked at her father in thought. She smiled. He shrugged. She laughed, reached over and squeezed his nose. “Poor little friend,” she said.