Rock Springs

Winterkill

I had not been back in town long. Maybe a month was all. The work had finally given out for me down at Silver Bow, and I had quit staying down there when the weather turned cold, and come back to my mother’s, on the Bitterroot, to lay up and set my benefits aside for when things got worse.

My mother had her boyfriend then, an old wildcatter named Harley Reeves. And Harley and I did not get along, though I don’t blame him for that. He had been laid off himself down near Gillette, Wyoming, where the boom was finished. And he was just doing what I was doing and had arrived there first. Everyone was laid off then. It was not a good time in that part of Montana, nor was it going to be. The two of them were just giving it a final try, both of them in their sixties, strangers together in the little house my father had left her.

So in a week I moved up to town, into a little misery flat across from the Burlington Northern yards, and began to wait. There was nothing to do. Watch TV. Stop in a bar. Walk down to the Clark Fork and fish where they had built a little park. Just find a way to spend the time. You think you’d like to have all the time be your own, but that is a fantasy. I was feeling my back to the wall then, and didn’t know what would happen to me in a week’s time, which is a feeling to stay with you and make being cheerful hard. And no one can like that.

I was at the Top Hat having a drink with Little Troy Burnham, talking about the deer season, when a woman who had been sitting at the front of the bar got up and came over to us. I had seen this woman other times in other bars in town. She would be there in the afternoons around three, and then sometimes late at night when I would be cruising back. She danced with some men from the air base, then sat drinking and talking late. I suppose she left with someone finally. She wasn’t a bad-looking woman at all — blond, with wide, dark eyes set out, wide hips and dark eyebrows. She could’ve been thirty-four years old, although she could’ve been forty-four or twenty-four, because she was drinking steady, and steady drink can do both to you, especially to women. But I had thought the first time I saw her: Here’s one on the way down. A miner’s wife drifted up from Butte, or a rancher’s daughter just suddenly run off, which can happen. Or worse. And I hadn’t been tempted. Trouble comes cheap and leaves expensive, is a way of thinking about that.

“Do you suppose you could give me a light?” the woman said to us. She was standing at our table. Nola was her name. Nola Foster. I’d heard that around. She wasn’t drunk. It was four o’clock in the afternoon, and no one was there but Troy Burnham and me.

“If you’ll tell me a love story, I’d do anything in the world for you,” Troy said. It was what he always said to women. He’d do anything in the world for something. Troy sits in a wheelchair due to a smoke jumper’s injury, and can’t do very much. We had been friends since high school and before. He was always short, and I was tall. But Troy had been an excellent wrestler and won awards in Montana, and I had done little of that — some boxing once was all. We had been living, recently, in the same apartments on Ryman Street, though Troy lived there permanently and drove a Checker cab to earn a living, and I was hoping to pass on to something better. “I would like a little love story,” Troy said, and called out for whatever Nola Foster was drinking.

“Nola, Troy. Troy, Nola,” I said and lit her cigarette.

“Have we met?” Nola said, taking a seat and glancing at me.

“At the East Gate. Some time ago,” I said.

“That’s a very nice bar,” she said in a cool way. “But I hear it’s changed hands.”

“I’m glad to make an acquaintance,” Troy said, grinning and adjusting his glasses. “Now let’s hear that love story.” He pulled up close to the table so that his head and his big shoulders were above the tabletop. Troy’s injury had caused him not to have any hips left. There is something there, but not hips. He needs bars and a special seat in his cab. He is both frail and strong at once, though in most ways he gets on like everybody else.

“I was in love,” Nola said quietly as the bartender set her drink down and she took a sip. “And now I’m not.”

“That’s a short love story,” I said.

“There’s more to it,” Troy said, grinning. “Am I right about that? Here’s cheers to you,” he said, and raised his glass.

Nola glanced at me again. “All right. Cheers,” she said and took another drink.

Two men had started playing a pool game at the far end of the room. They had turned on the table light, and I could hear the balls click and someone say, “Bust ’em up, Craft.” And then the smack.

“You don’t want to hear about that,” Nola said. “You’re drunk men, that’s all.”

“We do too,” Troy said. Troy always has enthusiasm. He could very easily complain, but I have never heard it come up. And I believe he has a good heart.

“What about you? What’s your name?” Nola said to me.

“Les,” I said.

“Les, then,” she said. “You don’t want to hear this, Les.”

“Yes he does,” Troy said, putting his elbows on the table and raising himself. Troy was a little drunk. Maybe we all were a little.

“Why not?” I said.

“See? Sure. Les wants more. He’s like me.”

Nola was actually a pretty woman, with a kind of dignity to her that wasn’t at once so noticeable, and Troy was thrilled by her.

“All right,” Nola said, taking another sip.

“Whattt I tell you?” Troy said.

“I had really thought he was dying,” Nola said.

“Who?” I said.

“My husband. Harry Lyons. I don’t use that name now. Someone’s told you this story before, haven’t they?”

“Not me. Goddamn!” Troy said. “I want to hear this story.”

I said I hadn’t heard it either, though I had heard there was a story.

She had a puff on her cigarette and gave us both a look that said she didn’t believe us. But she went on. Maybe she’d thought about another drink by then.

“He had this death look. Ca-shit-ic, they call it. He was pale, and his mouth turned down like he could see death. His heart had already gone out once in June, and I had the feeling I’d come in the kitchen some morning and he’d be slumped on his toast.”

“How old was this Harry?” Troy said.

“Fifty-three years old. Older than me by a lot.”

“That’s cardiac alley there,” Troy said and nodded at me. Troy has trouble with his own organs now and then. I think they all moved lower when he hit the ground.

“A man gets strange when he’s going to die,” Nola said in a quiet voice. “Like he’s watching it come. Though Harry was still going to work out at Champion’s every day. He was an estimator. Plus he watched me all the time. Watched to see if I was getting ready, I guess. Checking the insurance, balancing the checkbook, locating the safe-deposit key. All that. Though I would, too. Who wouldn’t?”

“Bet your ass,” Troy said and nodded again. Troy was taking this all in, I could see that.

“And I admit it, I was,” Nola said. “I loved Harry. But if he died, where was I going? Was I supposed to die, too? I had to make some plans for myself. I had to think Harry was expendable at some point. To my life, anyway.”

“Probably that’s why he was watching you,” I said. “He might not have felt expendable in his life.”

“I know.” Nola looked at me seriously and smoked her cigarette. “But I had a friend whose husband killed himself. Went into the garage and left the motor running. And his wife was not ready. Not in her mind. She thought he was out putting on brakeshoes. And there he was dead when she went out there. She ended up having to move to Washington, D.C. Lost her balance completely over it. Lost her house, too.”

“All bad things,” Troy agreed.

“And that just wasn’t going to be me, I thought. And if Harry had to get wind of it, well, so be it. Some days I’d wake up and look at him in bed and I’d think, Die, Harry, quit worrying about it.”

“I thought this was a love story,” I said. I looked down at where the two men were playing an eight-ball rack. One man was chalking a cue while the other man was leaning over to shoot.

“It’s coming,” Troy said. “Just be patient, Les.”

Nola drained her drink. “I’ll guarantee it is.”

“Then let’s hear it,” I said. “Get on to the love part.”

Nola looked at me strangely then, as if I really did know what she was going to tell, and thought maybe I might tell it first myself. She raised her chin at me. “Harry came home one evening from work, right?” she said. “Just death as usual. Only he said to me, ‘Nola, I’ve invited some friends over, sweetheart. Why don’t you go out and get a flank steak at Albertson’s.’ I asked when were they coming? He said, in an hour. And I thought, An hour! Because he never brought people home. We went to bars, you know. We didn’t entertain. But I said, ‘All right. I’ll go get a flank steak.’ And I got in the car and went out and bought a flank steak. I thought Harry ought to have what he wants. If he wants to have friends and steak he ought to be able to. Men, before they die, will want strange things.”

“That’s a fact, too,” Troy said seriously. “I was full dead all of four minutes when I hit. And I dreamed about nothing but lobster the whole time. And I’d never even seen a lobster, though I have now. Maybe that’s what they serve in heaven.” Troy grinned at both of us.

“Well, this wasn’t heaven,” Nola said and signaled for another drink. “So when I got back, there was Harry with three Crow Indians, in my house, sitting in the living room drinking mai tais. A man and two women. His friends, he said. From the mill. He wanted to have his friends over, he said. And Harry was raised a strict Mormon. Not that it matters.”

“I guess he had a change of heart,” I said.

“That’ll happen, too,” Troy said gravely. “LDS’s aren’t like they used to be. They used to be bad, but that’s all changed. Though I guess coloreds still can’t get inside the temple all the way.”

“These three were inside my house, though. I’ll just say that. And I’m not prejudiced about it. Leopards with spots, leopards without. All the same to me. But I was nice. I went right in the kitchen and put the flank steak in the oven, put some potatoes in water, got out some frozen peas. And went back in to have a drink. And we sat around and talked for half an hour. Talked about the mill. Talked about Marlon Brando. The man and one of the women were married. He worked with Harry. And the other woman was her sister, Winona. There’s a town in Mississippi with the same name. I looked it up. So after a while — all nice and friends — I went in to peel my potatoes. And this other woman, Bernie, came in with me to help, I guess. And I was standing there cooking over a little range, and this Bernie said to me, ‘I don’t know how you do it, Nola.’ ‘Do what, Bernie?’ I said. ‘Let Harry go with my sister like he does and you stay so happy about it. I couldn’t ever stand that with Claude.’ And I just turned around and looked at her. Winona is what? I thought. That name seemed so unusual for an Indian. And I just started yelling it. Winona, Winona,’ at the top of my lungs right at the stove. I just went crazy a minute, I guess. Screaming, holding a potato in my hand, hot. The man came running into the kitchen. Claude Smart Enemy. Claude was awfully nice. He kept me from harming myself. But when I started yelling, Harry, I guess, figured everything was all up. And he and his Winona woman went right out the door. And he didn’t get even to the car when his heart went. He had a myocardial infarction right out on the sidewalk at this Winona’s feet. I guess he thought everything was going to be just great. We’d all have dinner together. And I’d never know what was what. Except he didn’t count on Bernie saying something.”

“Maybe he was trying to make you appreciate him more,” I said. “Maybe he didn’t like being expendable and was sending you a message.”

Nola looked at me seriously again. “I thought of that,” she said. “I thought about that more than once. But that would’ve been hurtful. And Harry Lyons wasn’t a man to hurt you. He was more of a sneak. I just think he wanted us all to be friends.”

“That makes sense.” Troy nodded and looked at me.

“What happened to Winona,” I asked.

“What happened to Winona?” Nola took a drink and gave me a hard look. “Winona moved herself to Spokane. What happened to me is a better question.”

“Why? You’re here with us,” Troy said enthusiastically. “You’re doing great. Les and me ought to do as well as you’re doing. Les is out of work. And I’m out of luck. You’re doing the best of the three of us, I’d say.”

“I wouldn’t,” Nola said frankly, then turned and stared down at the men playing pool.

“Whafd he leave you?” I said. “Harry.”

“Two thousand,” Nola said coldly.

“That’s a small amount,” I said.

“And it’s a sad love story, too,” Troy said, shaking his head. “You loved him and it ended rotten. That’s like Shakespeare.”

“I loved him enough,” Nola said.

“How about sports. Do you like sports?” Troy said.

Nola looked at Troy oddly then. In his chair Troy doesn’t look exactly like a whole man, and sometimes simple things he’ll say will seem surprising. And what he’d said then surprised Nola. I’ve gotten used to it, myself, after all these years.

“Did you want to try skiing?” Nola said and glanced at me.

“Fishing,” Troy said, up on his elbows again. “Let’s all of us go fishing. Put an end to old gloomy.” Troy seemed like he wanted to pound the table. And I wondered when was the last time he had slept with a woman. Fifteen years ago, maybe. And now that was all over for him. But he was excited just to be here and get to talk to Nola Foster, and I wasn’t going to be in his way. “No one’ll be there now,” he said. “We’ll catch a fish and cheer ourselves up. Ask Les. He caught a fish.”

I had been going mornings in those days, when the Today show got over. Just to kill an hour. The river runs through the middle of town, and I could walk over in five minutes and fish downstream below the motels that are there, and could look up at the blue and white mountains up the Bitterroot, toward my mother’s house, and sometimes see the geese coming back up their flyway. It was a strange winter. January was like a spring day, and the Chinook blew down over us a warm wind from the eastern slopes. Some days were cool or cold, but many days were warm, and the only ice you’d see was in the lows where the sun didn’t reach. You could walk right out to the river and make a long cast to where the fish were deep down in the cold pools. And you could even think things might turn out better.

Nola turned and looked at me. The thought of fishing was seeming like a joke to her, I know. Though maybe she didn’t have money for a meal and thought we might buy her one. Or maybe she’d never even been fishing. Or maybe she knew that she was on her way to the bottom, where everything is the same, and here was this something different being offered, and it was worth a try.

“Did you catch a big fish, Les,” she asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“See?” Troy said. “Am I a liar? Or am I not?”

“You might be.” Nola looked at me oddly then, but I thought sweetly, too. “What kind of fish was it?”

“A brown trout. Caught deep, on a hare’s ear,” I said.

“I don’t know what that is,” Nola said and smiled. I could see that she wasn’t minding any of this because her face was flushed, and she looked pretty.

“Which,” I asked. “A brown trout? Or a hare’s ear?”

“That’s it,” she said.

“A hare’s ear is a kind of fly,” I said.

“I see,” Nola said.

“Let’s get out of the bar for once,” Troy said loudly, running his chair backwards and forwards. “We’ll go fish, then we’ll have chicken-in-the-ruff. Troy’s paying.”

“What’ll I lose?” Nola said and shook her head. She looked at both of us, smiling as though she could think of something that might be lost.

“You got it all to win,” Troy said. “Let’s go.”

“Whatever,” Nola said. “Sure.”

And we went out of the Top Hat, with Nola pushing Troy in his chair and me coming on behind.

On Front Street the evening was as warm as May, though the sun had gone behind the peaks already, and it was nearly dark. The sky was deep blue in the east behind the Sapphires, where the darkness was, but salmon pink above the sun. And we were in the middle of it. Half-drunk, trying to be imaginative in how we killed our time.

Troy’s Checker was parked in front, and Troy rolled over to it and spun around.

“Let me show you this great trick,” he said and grinned. “Get in and drive, Les. Stay there, sweetheart, and watch me.”

Nola had kept her drink in her hand, and she stood by the door of the Top Hat. Troy lifted himself off his chair onto the concrete. I got in beside Troy’s bars and his raised seat, and started the cab with my left hand.

“Ready,” Troy shouted. “Ease forward. Ease up.”

And I eased the car up.

“Oh my God,” I heard Nola say and saw her put her palm to her forehead and look away.

“Yaah. Ya-hah,” Troy yelled.

“Your poor foot,” Nola said.

“It doesn’t hurt me,” Troy yelled. “It’s just like a pressure.” I couldn’t see him from where I was.

“Now I know I’ve seen it all,” Nola said. She was smiling.

“Back up, Les. Just ease it back again,” Troy called out.

“Don’t do it again,” Nola said.

“One time’s enough, Troy,” I said. No one else was in the street. I thought how odd it would be for anyone to see that, without knowing something in advance. A man running over another man’s foot for fun. Just drunks, you’d think, and be right.

“Sure. Okay,” Troy said. I still couldn’t see him. But I put the cab back in park and waited. “Help me, sweetheart, now,” I heard Troy say to Nola. “It’s easy getting down, but old Troy can’t get up again by himself. You have to help him.”

And Nola looked at me in the cab, the glass still in her hand. It was a peculiar look she gave me, a look that seemed to ask something of me, but I did not know what it was and couldn’t answer. And then she put her glass on the pavement and went to put Troy back in his chair.

When we got to the river it was as good as dark, and the river was only a big space you could hear, with the south-of-town lights up behind it and the three bridges and Champion’s Paper downstream a mile. And it was cold with the sun gone, and I thought there would be fog in before morning.

Troy had insisted on driving with us in the back, as if we’d hired a cab to take us fishing. On the way down he sang a smoke jumper’s song, and Nola sat close to me and let her leg be beside mine. And by the time we stopped by the river, below the Lion’s Head motel, I had kissed her twice, and knew all that I could do.

“I think I’ll go fishing,” Troy said from his little raised-up seat in front. “I’m going night fishing. And I’m going to get my own chair out and my rod and all I need. I’ll have a time.”

“How do you ever change a tire?” Nola said. She was not moving. It was just a question she had. People say all kinds of things to cripples.

Troy whipped around suddenly, though, and looked back at us where we sat on the cab seat. I had put my arm around Nola, and we sat there looking at his big head and big shoulders, below which there was only half a body any good to anyone. “Trust Mr. Wheels,” Troy said. “Mr. Wheels can do anything a whole man can.” And he smiled at us a crazy man’s smile.

“I think I’ll just stay in the car,” Nola said. “I’ll wait for chicken-in-the-ruff. That’ll be my fishing.”

“It’s too cold for ladies now anyway,” Troy said gruffly. “Only men. Only men in wheelchairs is the new rule.”

I got out of the cab with Troy then and set up his chair and put him in it. I got his fishing gear out of the trunk and strung it up. Troy was not a man to fish flies, and I put a silver dace on his spin line and told him to hurl it far out and let it flow for a time into the deep current and then to work it, and work it all the way in. I said he would catch a fish with that strategy in five minutes, or ten.

“Les,” Troy said to me in the cold dark behind the cab.

“What?” I said.

“Do you ever just think of just doing a criminal thing sometime? Just do something terrible. Change everything.”

“Yes,” I said. “I think about that.”

Troy had his fishing rod across his chair now, and he was gripping it and looking down the sandy bank toward the dark and sparkling water.

“Why don’t you do it?” he said.

“I don’t know what I’d choose to do,” I said.

“Mayhem,” Troy said. “Commit mayhem.”

“And go to Deer Lodge forever,” I said. “Or maybe they’d hang me and let me dangle. That would be worse than this.”

“Okay, that’s right,” Troy said, still staring. “But I should do it, shouldn’t I? I should do the worst thing there is.”

“No, you shouldn’t,” I said.

And then he laughed. “Hah. Right. Never do that,” he said. And he wheeled himself down toward the river into the darkness, laughing all the way.

In the cold cab, after that, I held Nola Foster for a long time. Just held her with my arms around her, breathing and waiting. From the back window I could see the Lion’s Head motel, see the restaurant there that faces the river and that is lighted with candles, and where people were eating. I could see the welcome out front, though not who was welcomed. I could see cars on the bridge going home for the night. And it made me think of Harley Reeves in my father’s little house on the Bitterroot. I thought about him in bed with my mother. Warm. I thought about the faded old tattoo on Harley’s shoulder, victory, that said. And I could not connect it easily with what I knew about Harley Reeves, though I thought possibly that he had won a victory of kinds over me just by being where he was.

“A man who isn’t trusted is the worst thing,” Nola Foster said. “You know that, don’t you?” I suppose her mind was wandering. She was cold, I could tell by the way she held me. Troy was gone out in die dark now. We were alone, and her skirt had come up a good ways.

“Yes, that’s bad,” I said, though I couldn’t think at that moment of what trust could mean to me. It was not an issue in my life, and I hoped it never would be. “You’re right,” I said to make her happy.

“What was your name again?”

“Les,” I said. “Lester Snow. Call me Les.”

“Les Snow,” Nola said. “Do you like less snow?”

“Usually I do.” And I put my hand then where I wanted it most.

“How old are you, Les?” she said.

“Thirty-seven.”

“You’re an old man.”

“How old are you?” I said.

“It’s my business, isn’t it?”

“I guess it is,” I said.

“I’ll do this, you know,” Nola said, “and not even care about it. Just do a thing. It means nothing more than how I feel at this time. You know? Do you know what I mean, Les?”

“I know it,” I said.

“But you need to be trusted. Or you aren’t anything. Do you know that too?”

We were close to each other. I couldn’t see the lights of town or the motel or anything more. Nothing moved.

“I know that, I guess,” I said. It was whiskey talking.

“Warm me up then, Les,” Nola said. “Warm. Warm.”

“You’ll get warm,” I said.

“I’ll think about Florida.”

“I’ll make you warm,” I said.

What I thought I heard at first was a train. So many things can sound like a train when you live near trains. This was a woo sound, you would say. Like a train. And I lay and listened for a long time, thinking about a train and its light shining through the darkness along the side of some mountain pass north of there and about something else I don’t even remember now. And then Troy came around to my thinking, and I knew dien that the woo sound had been him.

Nola Foster said, “It’s Mr. Wheels. He’s caught a fish, maybe. Or else drowned.”

“Yes,” I said. I sat up and looked out the window but could see nothing. It had become foggy in just that little time, and tomorrow, I thought, would be warm again, though it was cold now. Nola and I had not even taken off our clothes to do what we’d done.

“Let me see,” I said.

I got out and walked into the fog to where I could only see fog and hear the river running. Troy had not made a wooing sound again, and I thought to myself, There is no trouble here. Nothing’s wrong.

Though when I walked a ways up the sandy bank, I saw Troy’s chair come visible in the fog. And he was not in it, and I couldn’t see him. And my heart went then. I heard it go click in my chest. And I thought: This is the worst. What’s happened here will be the worst. And I called out, “Troy. Where are you? Call out now.”

And Troy called out, “Here I am, here.”

I went for the sound, ahead of me, which was not out in the river but on the bank. And when I had gone farther, I saw him, out of his chair, of course, on his belly, holding on to his fishing rod with both hands, the line out into the river as though it meant to drag him to the water.

“Help me!” he yelled. “I’ve got a huge fish. Do something to help me.”

“I will,” I said. Though I didn’t see what I could do. I would not dare to take the rod, and it would only have been a mistake to take the line. Never give a straight pull to the fish, is an old rule. So that my only choice was to grab Troy and hold him until the fish was either in or lost, just as if Troy was a part of a rod I was fishing with.

I squatted in the cold sand behind him, put my heels down and took up his legs, which felt like matchsticks, and began to hold him there away from the water.

But Troy suddenly twisted toward me. “Turn me loose, Les. Don’t be here. Go out. It’s snagged. You’ve got to go out.”

That’s crazy,” I said. “It’s too deep there.”

“It’s not deep,” Troy yelled. “I’ve got it in close now.”

“You’re crazy,” I said.

“Oh, Christ, Les, go get it. I don’t want to lose it.”

I looked a moment at Troy’s face then, in the dark. His glasses were gone off of him. His face was wet. And he had the look of a desperate man, a man who has nothing to hope for but, in some strange way, everything in the world to lose.

“Stupid. This is stupid,” I said, because it seemed to me to be. But I got up, walked to the edge and stepped out into the cold water.

Then, it was at least a month before the runoff would begin in the mountains, and the water I stepped in was cold and painful as broken glass, though the wet parts of me numbed at once, and my feet felt like bricks bumping the bottom.

Troy had been wrong all the way about the depth. Because when I stepped out ten yards, keeping touch of his line with the back of my hand, I had already gone above my knees, and on the bottom I felt large rocks, and there was a loud rushing around me that suddenly made me afraid.

But when I had gone five more yards, and the water was on my thighs and hurting, I hit the snag Troy’s fish was hooked to, and I realized then I had no way at all to hold a fish or catch it with my numbed hands. And that all I could really hope for was to break the snag and let the fish slip down into the current and hope Troy could bring it in, or that I could go back and beach it.

“Can you see it, Les?” Troy yelled out of the dark. “Goddamn it.”

“It isn’t easy,” I said, and I had to hold the snag then to keep my balance. My legs were numb. And I thought: This might be the time and the place I die. What an odd place it is. And what an odd reason for it to happen.

“Hurry up,” Troy yelled.

And I wanted to hurry. Except when I ran the line as far as where the snag was, I felt something there that was not a fish and not the snag but something else entirely, some thing I thought I recognized, though I am not sure why. A man, I thought. This is a man.

Though when I reached farther into the snag branches and woods scruff, deeper into the water, what I felt was an animal. With my fingers I touched its hard rib-side, its legs, its short slick coat. I felt to its neck and head and touched its nose and teeth, and it was a deer, though not a big deer, not even a yearling. And I knew when I found where Troy’s dace had gone up in the neck flesh, that he had hooked a deer already snagged here, and that he had pulled himself out of his chair trying to work it free.

“What is it? I know it’s a big Brown. Don’t tell me, Les, don’t even tell me.”

“I’ve got it,” I said. “I’ll bring it in.”

“Sure, hell yes,” Troy said out of the fog.

It was not so hard to work the deer off the snag brush and float it up free. Though once I did, it was dangerous to get turned in the current on numb legs, and hard to keep from going down, and I had to hold on to the deer to keep balance enough to heave myself into the slower water. And as I did that, I thought: In the Clark Fork many people drown doing less dangerous things than I am doing.

“Throw it way far up,” Troy shouted when he could see me. He had righted himself on the sand and was sitting up like a little doll. “Get it way up safe.”

“It’s safe,” I said. I had the deer beside me, floating, but I knew Troy couldn’t see it.

“What did I catch?” Troy yelled.

“Something unusual,” I said, and with effort I hauled the little deer a foot up onto the sand, dropped it, and put my cold hands under my arms. I heard a car door close back where I had come from, up the riverbank.

“What is that?” Troy said and put his hand out to touch the deer’s side. He looked up at me. “I can’t see without my glasses.”

“It’s a deer,” I said.

Troy moved his hand around on the deer, then looked at me again in a painful way.

“What is it?” he said.

“A deer,” I said. “You caught a dead deer.”

Troy looked back at the little deer for a moment, and stared as if he did not know what to say about it. And sitting on the wet sand, in the foggy night, he all at once looked scary to me, as though it was him who had washed up there and was finished. “I don’t see it,” he said and sat there.

“It’s what you caught,” I said. “I thought you’d want to see it.”

“It’s crazy, Les,” he said. “Isn’t it?” And he smiled at me in a wild, blind-eyed way.

“It’s unusual,” I said.

“I never shot a deer before.”

“I don’t believe you shot this one,” I said.

He smiled at me again, but then suddenly he gasped back a sob, something I had never seen before. “Goddamn it,” he said. “Just goddamn it.”

“It’s an odd thing to catch,” I said, standing above him in the grimy fog.

“I can’t change a fucking tire,” he said and sobbed. “But I’ll catch a fucking deer with my fucking fishing rod.”

“Not everyone can say that,” I said.

“Why would they want to?” He looked up at me crazy again, and broke his spinning rod into two pieces with only his hands. And I knew he must’ve been drunk still, because I was still drunk a little, and that by itself made me want to cry. And we were there for a time just silent.

“Who killed a deer?” Nola said. She had come behind me in the cold and was looking. I had not known, when I heard the car door, if she wasn’t starting back up to town. But it was too cold for that, and I put my arm around her because she was shivering. “Did Mr. Wheels kill it?”

“It drowned,” Troy said.

“And why is that?” Nola said and pushed closer to me to be warm, though that was all.

“They get weak and they fall over,” I said. “It happens in the mountains. This one fell in the water and couldn’t get up.”

“So a gimp man can catch it on a fishing rod in a shitty town,” Troy said and gasped with bitterness. Real bitterness. The worst I have ever heard from any man, and I have heard bitterness voiced, though it was a union matter then.

“Maybe it isn’t so bad,” Nola said.

“Hah!” Troy said from the wet ground. “Hah, hah, hah.” And I wished that I had never shown him the deer, wished I had spared him that, though the river’s rushing came up then and snuffed his sound right out of hearing, and drew it away from us into the foggy night beyond all accounting.

Nola and I pushed the deer back into the river while Troy watched, and then we all three drove up into town and ate chicken-in-the-ruff at the Two Fronts, where the lights were bright and they cooked the chicken fresh for you. I bought a jug of wine and we drank that while we ate, though no one talked. Each of us had done something that night. Something different. That was plain enough. And there was nothing more to talk about.

When we were finished we walked outside, and I asked Nola where she’d like to go. It was only eight o’clock, and there was no place to go but to my little room. She said she wanted to go back to the Top Hat, that she had someone to meet there later, and there was something about the band that night that she liked. She said she wanted to dance.

I told her I was not much for dancing, and she said fine. And when Troy came out from paying, we said good-bye, and she shook my hand and said that she would see me again. Then she and Troy got in the Checker and drove away together down the foggy street, leaving me alone, where I didn’t mind being at all.

For a long time I just walked then. My clothes were wet, but it wasn’t so cold if you kept moving, though it stayed foggy. I walked to the river again and across on the bridge and a long way down into the south part of town on a wide avenue where there were houses with little porches and little yards, all the way, until it became commercial, and bright lights lit the drive-ins and car lots. I could’ve walked then, I thought, clear to my mother’s house twenty miles away. But I turned back, and walked the same way, only on the other side of the street. Though when I got near the bridge, I came past the Senior Citizen Recreation, where there were soft lights on inside a big room, and I could see through a window in the pinkish glow, old people dancing across the floor to a record player that played in the corner. It was a rumba or something like a rumba that was being played, and the old people were dancing the box step, smooth and graceful and courteous, moving across the linoleum like real dancers, their arms on each other’s shoulders like husbands and wives. And it pleased me to see that. And I thought that it was too bad my mother and father could not be here now, too bad they couldn’t come up and dance and go home happy, and have me to watch them. Or even for my mother and Harley Reeves to do that. It didn’t seem like too much to wish for. Just a normal life other people had.

I stood and watched them a while, then I walked back home across the river. Though for some reason I could not sleep that night, and simply lay in bed with the radio turned on to Denver, and smoked cigarettes until it was light. Of course I thought about Nola Foster, that I didn’t know where she lived, though for some reason I thought she might live in Frenchtown, near the pulp plant. Not far. Never-never land, they called that. And I thought about my father, who had once gone to Deer Lodge prison for stealing hay from a friend, and had never recovered from it, though that meant little to me now.

And I thought about the matter of trust. That I would always lie if it would save someone an unhappiness. That was easy. And that I would rather a person mistrust me than dislike me. Though I thought you could always trust me to act a certain way, to be a place, or to say a thing if it ever were to matter. You could predict within human reason what I’d do — that I would not, for example, commit a vicious crime — trust that I would risk my own life for you if I knew it meant enough. And as I lay in the gray light, smoking, while the refrigerator clicked and the switcher in the Burlington Northern yard shunted cars and made their couplings, I thought that though my life at that moment seemed to have taken a bad turn and paused, it still meant something to me as a life, and that before long it would start again in some promising way.

I know I must’ve dozed a little, because I woke suddenly and there was the light. Earl Nightingale was on the radio, and I heard a door close. It was that that woke me.

I knew it would be Troy, and I thought I would step out and meet him, fix coffee for us before he went to bed and slept all day, the way he always did. But when I stood up I heard Nola Foster’s voice. I could not mistake that. She was drunk, and laughing about something. “Mr. Wheels,” she said. Mr. Wheels this, Mr. Wheels that. Troy was laughing. And I heard them come in the little entry, heard Troy’s chair bump the sill. And I waited to see if they would knock on my door. And when they didn’t, and I heard Troy’s door shut and the chain go up, I thought that we had all had a good night finally. Nothing had happened that hadn’t turned out all right. None of us had been harmed. And I put on my pants, then my shirt and shoes, turned off my radio, went into the kitchen where I kept my fishing rod, and with it went out into the warm, foggy morning, using just this once the back door, the quiet way, so as not to see or be seen by anyone.