Shots Fired: Stories From Joe Pickett Country

Every Day Is a Good Day on the River

The guide, Randall “Call Me Duke” Conner, pushed them off from the sandy launch below the bridge into the river and within seconds the muscular dark flow of the current gripped the flat-bottomed McKenzie boat and spun it like a cigarette butt in a flushed toilet. The morning was cool but sunny and there was enough of a breeze to rattle the dry fall leaves in the cottonwoods that reached out over the water like skeletal hands. There were three men in the boat. Jack, who’d never been in a drift boat before, cried out: “Is this safe, Duke?”

“Ha!” Duke snorted. “Of course. Just let me get at the oars and get us turned around. Everything will be just fine. It’s a good day on the river. Every day is a good day on the river.”

Duke stepped around Jack, who had the front fishing seat in the bow. The boat bucked with his weight. Jack reached out and grasped the casting leg brace in front of his seat and held on and slightly closed his eyes until Duke got settled in the middle of the boat and it stopped rocking. The guide grasped the oars and with two quick and powerful strokes — forward on the left oar, backward on the right — stopped the boat from spinning and righted it within the flow.

Duke said, “See, we’re perfectly fine now. You can relax. It’s Jack, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it’s Jack.”

Duke nodded, then spoke in a pleasant, soft voice. What he said was well rehearsed. “This is a McKenzie-style drift boat, Jack, the finest of its kind. It was designed for western rivers like this. Flat-bottomed, flared sides, a narrow pointed stern, and extreme rocker in the bow and stern to allow the boat to spin around on its center like a pivot. It’s not sluggish like a raft or a damned tank like a jon boat. We point the bow toward one of the banks downriver and keep the stern upriver and we use the power of the river to move us along. That’s why it’s called a drift boat! I use the oars to keep us in the right place for fishing. Hell, I can shoot this boat from side to side across the river like a skeeter bug to get you fishermen in the best possible position for catching fish, Jack. That’s why we float at a forty-five-degree angle to the current, so both of you will have clear fishing lanes and you won’t have to cast over each other. It’s stable as hell, so don’t be afraid to stand up in that brace and cast. Just make sure you keep balanced, Jack. And try not to hook me in the ear on your back cast!”

Duke had a deep laugh that Jack would describe as infectious if he were in the right mood.

Jack found out his fishing seat would turn on its pedestal. He released the leg brace and cautiously spun the seat around so he could watch Duke work the oars. The guide was a magician, an expert, and he could move the boat with a flick of either oar. Duke was tall, with powerful shoulders from rowing, no doubt. He had a big sweeping mustache and a dark tan. He wore a fishing shirt, shorts, and river sandals. His eyes were hidden by dark sunglasses fitted with a strap so he could hang them from his neck. Forceps were clipped to a breast pocket as were clippers strung from a retractable zinger. He had a big wolfish smile full of perfect white teeth. Jack thought, He’s a man’s man. One of those men, like skiing instructors or firemen, who just seem to have everything they ever wanted in life.

Jack watched as Duke turned around and looked over his shoulder at the other fisherman, Jack’s host, in the seat in the bow of the boat.

Duke looked over his shoulder. “And you’re Tim, right?”

“Yes,” Tim said wearily.

Jack turned in his chair. Tim looked small and slight and scrunched up in comparison with Duke. Jack thought Tim looked like a wet mouse, even though he was dry. Maybe it was the way Tim sat, all pulled into himself, hunched over in his seat, his chin down against his chest. He wore an oversized rain jacket, waders, and a ridiculous hat with hidden earflaps tucked up under the band. Jack shot a look toward the northern horizon to see if there were thunderheads rolling. Nope.

Duke said, “So it’s Jack and Tim. You guys seem like a couple of hale fellows well met. Did you say you’ve fished this river before?”

Jack said he was new to drift boat fishing, but he was willing to learn the ropes. Jack confessed, “I’ve never fished with a guide before. This is all a new experience. But when Tim asked me to come along, I jumped all over the opportunity. So just tell me what to do, I don’t mind.”

“That’s a good way to be, Jack. We’ll have a good time. What about you, Tim?”

Tim didn’t answer. He stared at the water on the side of the boat as if the foam and bubbles were the most fascinating thing he’d ever seen. The only sounds were the metal-on-metal squeak of the oars in the oarlocks and the rapid lap-lap-lap of the water on the side of the fiberglass hull.

Again, Duke said, “Tim, what about you?”

Finally, Tim looked up. There was something mean in his eyes and his lips were pulled against his teeth so hard they looked translucent.

“Duke, why do you say our names every time you ask a question, Duke? Is that so you’ll remember our names, Duke? Is that one of your guide tricks, Duke?”

Then he added, in an icy tone Jack had never heard Tim use before: “Your name is Randall, but you go by Duke. I think I’ll call you Randall, Randall.”

Duke flashed an uncomfortable smile and looked up at Jack instead of over his shoulder at Tim. As if trying to get Jack to acknowledge Tim was out of line. The silence between them grew uncomfortable until Duke finally shrugged it off and filled it.

“Someone wake up on the wrong side of the bunk this morning? Well, never mind that, Tim. Everything will change, Tim. Every day is a good day on the river. We just haven’t caught any fish yet because we haven’t been fishing. So let’s just get you fellows rigged up. I’ll pull over here into this little back eddy and drop the anchor and get you rigged up. Everything will be fine once you hook up with one of these monsters.”

Tim rolled his eyes and said, “What crap. Jesus Christ.”

Jack had never heard Tim talk with such sarcasm before, and he was a little shocked. He tried to cover for his host. Jack said, “Tim’s been all over the West on all the famous rivers, right, Tim? The Bighorn, the Big Hole, the Wind, the Madison, the North Fork, and of course here on the North Platte. He always tells me about his trips. So when he invited me on this one, man, I jumped at the chance.”

Duke said, “So you’ve gotten around, eh, Tim?”

“I’m not the only one, Randall.”

Jack shook his head. Tim seemed so out of character, so bitter. He thought, Something is going on here. He wondered if rich men treated guides this way. If so, he didn’t think he liked it.

Jack heard a heavy splash and he turned around in his seat again. He’d seen the anchor hanging from an arm off the back of the boat and now it was gone. The anchor was ten scarred pounds of pyramid-shaped lead. It was triggered to drop by a foot release under Duke’s rowing bench. Jack could feel the boat slow and then stop when the anchor bit into the riverbed and the boat swung around into the current.

Duke spoke to Jack as if he hadn’t heard Tim’s earlier statement.

“We’ll get you started with nymphs and an indicator. When we get rigged up, throw it out there and keep an eye on the indicator, Jack. If you see it tick or bounce, you raise the rod tip fast. Sometimes these fish barely lip the nymph. So if you see that indicator do anything at all, set the hook.”

Jack nodded. “Okay.”

“It’s easy to get mesmerized by the indicator in the water, so don’t worry about that. We only have one place on the river where it gets a little hairy, and that’s the place downriver called the Chutes. You’ve probably heard of it.”

“I have. Didn’t somebody die there last year?”

“About one a year, actually,” Duke said, stripping lengths of tippet from a spool to build the nymph rig and tying knots with the deft movements of a surgeon. “There are big rocks on both sides and some rapids down the middle. But as long as you hit the middle squared up, there’s no problem. I’ve done it a hundred times and never flipped a boat. That’s the only place you’ll need to reel in for a few minutes and you may get a little splash of water on you since you’re in front. Otherwise, don’t worry about a thing. Tim, do you want me to tie on a couple of nymphs for you?”

“I’ll do it myself.”

“Suit yourself, Tim.”

“I will, Randall.”

Jack really didn’t know Tim well enough to claim they were friends. So he had been surprised when Tim called him at his construction company the week before and offered to host him on a guided fishing trip on the North Platte River. Jack had said yes before checking his calendar or with his wife, Janey, even with the odd provision Tim had requested.

Later, Jack had told Janey about the invitation and the terms of the provision. She was making dinner at the stove — spaghetti and meat sauce — and she shook her head and made a puzzled face.

She said, “He wants you to make the booking? I didn’t think you knew him all that well.”

“I don’t. But yes, he asked me to use my credit card for the deposit, but said he’d pay me back for everything afterward, including the flies we use and the tip. He wanted to make sure we were scheduled to go on the river with the owner of the guide service — somebody named Duke — and no one else. He said it was important to go with the owner because we’d catch the most fish that way. Who was I to argue? Tim wants the best, I guess.”

“But why you?”

Jack shrugged. “I guess he remembers I was the only one who never gave him any shit in high school when we were growing up. Everybody else did because he was such a weird dude. And he was. You’ve seen that picture of him in the yearbook. But hell, I guess I always sort of felt sorry for him. For some reason, I liked him and I kind of sympathized with the little creep. His parents were real no-hopers, and for a while the whole family lived in their car. That car was just filled with junk — sleeping bags and crap. They’d drop him off for school on the street we lived on so nobody would know, but I saw him get out once. He was real embarrassed, but I didn’t tell anyone I saw him. I guess he appreciated that. He told me once he never wanted to live in a car again. A high school kid telling me that, I don’t know. I was sort of touched. Man, I sound lame.”

She laughed and said, “You do, honey, but that will be our little secret. Then he invented that thing — what was it?”

“You’re asking me? Hell, I’m not sure. Somebody explained it to me once but it didn’t take. Something about a circuit for a wireless router or something. Whatever it was, it made him millions.”

She pursed her lips and said, “And he moved back home to Wyoming. I always thought that was strange.”

“Yeah, me too. He coulda lived anywhere.”

“Jack,” she asked, while making a sly face at him, “if you made tens of millions, would you move?”

Jack snorted and rolled his eyes. “We won’t have to worry about finding out. I’ll never have to make that decision, so you better keep your job.”

“Bummer,” she said, and changed the subject. “And he got married to that bombshell. What is her name?”

He could see her in his mind’s eye: tall, black hair, green eyes, great figure. A bit much, but that was the point, he thought. But her name? “I can’t remember,” he said.

She said, “I saw them together once. Beauty and the Geek, that’s for sure.”

“Maybe he wanted to prove something to all the jocks and high school big shots who used to pants him and hang him upside down from a tree, like, Look at me, losers!”

“But he asked you to go fishing with him.”

“Yeah, and I want to go.”

“Maybe he thinks you’re his best friend. That’s kind of sweet and pathetic at the same time.”

“Oh, bullshit,” Jack said, looking away. “I just want to catch big trout with a five-hundred-dollar-a-day guide. That’s the big time, baby. Every man wants to fish with flies and catch a big trout. Here’s my chance.”

Jack caught two large trout before noon with the nymphs and missed at least five more. The fish he boated and Duke netted were a rainbow and a brown. The trout were big, thick, and sleek and reminded him of wet quadriceps muscles that happened to have a head, fins, and a tail. Both were over twenty-two inches. When the fish took the nymphs, it was as if an electric current shot up through the line to his rod, as if they’d like to pull him out of the boat and into the water. He’d whooped and Duke dropped the anchor with a splash and reached for his big net. Jack couldn’t remember when he had had so much fun.

Tim caught ten, but netted them himself without a word, and Duke simply shrugged and said, “Let me know if you need any help.”

“I don’t. I do things for myself.”

The rhythm of the current lulled Jack. He stared at the indicator until the image of it burned into his mind, and its bobbing mesmerized him. At one point he looked up and thought the boat and indicator were stationary in the river, but the banks were rolling by, and not the other way around. There were bald eagles in some of the trees — Duke pointed them out in a way that suggested he did the same thing every day — and they floated by mule deer drinking in the water and a family of river otters slip-sliding over one another on some rocks.

Duke kept up a steady patter.

“River right there’s a nice hole.”

“Nice cast there, Jack.”

“Don’t forget to mend your line. There, that’s the ticket.”

“If you hook up again, use your reel. That’s what it’s there for. Don’t grab the line. Don’t horse it in.”

“What a beautiful day. Every day is a good day on the river, ain’t it?”

All of the land they were floating through was private, with just a few public spots marked by blue diamond-shaped signs mounted on T-posts. There were few houses or buildings along the shores and it seemed to Jack they were the only people on the river or, perhaps, on the planet. There were no take-out spots anywhere, and the truck and trailer would be miles ahead by now, he guessed.

He thought: Once you’re on the river, you’re on the river for the rest of the day. You can’t stop and go home. You can’t get out. There’s nowhere to go.

Although he was concentrating on the gentle bobbing of the strike indicator, Jack saw — or thought he saw — an odd movement in his peripheral vision from the back of the boat. When he turned his head and looked directly, he saw Tim pulling his arm back and jamming his hand into the pocket of his coat. There had been something black in his hand and his arm had been outstretched, but whatever it was was now hidden, and Tim wouldn’t look up and meet his eyes. Instead, Tim made a beautiful cast toward the opposite bank.

Jack shook his head and rotated back around in his chair. What had been in Tim’s hand? And why did he think it might have been a gun pointed at the back of Duke’s head?

Then Jack thought: Stop being ridiculous.

Duke backed the boat to the bank and dropped the anchor on the dirt with a heavy thud and said, “How about some lunch, guys?”

Jack had already reeled in because he could hear the increasing roar downriver. The sound was heavy and angry. He asked, “Is that the Chutes up ahead, Duke?”

“That’s it, all right. But we’ll grab some lunch here first.”

Jack was hungry and it felt good to step on hard ground and stretch his legs and back. Duke had said the camp was leased from a rancher exclusively for Duke and his fishing guides and it had a picnic table, a fire pit, and an outhouse. Tim headed for the outhouse first, and Jack followed. Duke stayed back at the camp and started a fire in the pit and dug items out of his cooler.

When Tim finally stepped from the outhouse, Jack smiled at him. “I really want to thank you again for inviting me along. This is really special.”

“Sure, Jack,” Tim said. But he seemed distracted.

Jack hesitated, wondering how to put it. Then he said, “Is everything okay, Tim? I know we don’t know each other all that well, but, well… Are you feeling okay?”

Tim looked up sharply. “Why do you ask?”

“Is there something between you and Duke, or am I just imagining things?”

Tim looked hard at Jack, as if searching his face for something or wondering what he should reply.

Jack said, “A while back, I looked in the back of the boat and I thought I saw something.”

“Really?”

“Yes. But I might have been imagining things.”

In response, Tim reached up and patted Jack’s shoulder as he walked past him. He said, “I shouldn’t have gotten you involved. I’m sorry.”

“Involved in what?”

But Tim was gone, walking alone toward the river far to the right of the camp.

Jack and Duke sat at the picnic table and ate hamburgers. Jack ate two and half a tube of Pringles. He washed it all down with two cans of Coors Light. He said to Duke, “I can’t believe I’m so hungry.”

“Being outside does that to you.”

“The burgers were great, thank you.”

“You’re paying for them,” Duke laughed, then shouted toward Tim, who was still standing alone on the bank, watching the river flow by. “Tim, are you sure you don’t want lunch? You’ve got to be starving, man.”

Tim didn’t reply. Duke leaned across the table and lowered his voice. “To each his own, I guess. Is he always this surly?”

“No.”

“I never got his last name. What is it?”

“Hey, I really don’t like gossiping about my host, if you don’t mind.”

“Sorry,” Duke said, “I should mind my own business. You’re right. Oh well, I’ve had worse in the boat. Luckily, I’m a people person. You have to be a people person to be a guide.”

“I guess you get some characters, eh?”

Duke laughed and shook his head from side to side. “You have no idea, Jack. You have no idea.”

Duke packed up the lunch items and secured the cooler to the floor of the boat with bungee cords. Jack waited on the bank, looking downriver toward the roar. He said to Duke, “You say there’s nothing to worry about, right?”

“Right,” Duke said, chinning toward the Chutes. “I’ve done it a million times and haven’t lost a fisherman yet. And right past the rapids is one of the deepest holes in the whole river. You’ll need to be ready to cast out as soon as we clear the rapids. We’ll for sure pick up some fish in there.”

“Jack, I’ll take the front this time.”

Jack turned. He hadn’t noticed that Tim had joined them. Tim’s face was ashen, and he looked gaunt.

Jack asked, “Are you sure? Duke says it gets a little splashy in front.”

“Yes. Please, Jack, step aside.”

Tim shouldered past Jack and stepped into the front of the boat and took the seat. He swiveled it around so it was backward and he faced Duke, who was already on the oars. Duke ignored Tim and spoke to Jack.

“I’ll swing the boat around so you can get in the back easy.”

Tim had his hand in his parka pocket and when he withdrew it he held a snub-nosed revolver. He pointed it at Duke’s face, not more than two feet away from him.

Tim said, “Start rowing.”

Duke’s face reddened. “Hey! What the fuck are you doing?”

Tim said, “I said start rowing. Pull up the anchor. We’re leaving Jack here. He doesn’t need to see this.”

Duke spread his arms, palms out. “Jesus, this is a joke, right? It’s a joke?”

Jack stood on the bank with his mouth gaped. Tim spoke to him without taking his eyes, or the muzzle of his gun, off Duke.

He said, “I’m sorry, Jack. I’m sorry I used you and brought you along. But I was afraid Randall would recognize my name if I made the booking. I’m sure Amanda told him my name.”

Jack noticed that the blood had drained from Duke’s face. Amanda, that was Tim’s wife’s name. Amanda.

Tim said, “Right, Randall? Right? She told you my name. She called you and told you when I was going on a business trip? Or a fishing trip? So you two could get together and humiliate me in my own hometown? Right in front of dozens of people who know me? I know all about it, Randall. Did you laugh at me when you were in my bed? Did you laugh because I was so stupid?”

“Look,” Duke pleaded, “it was Mandy’s idea. Really. We never laughed at you.”

“Mandy, is it? She never asked me to call her Mandy. It’s a stupid name. Like Randall. Or Duke.” A few wisps of Tim’s hair had dislodged from his scalp and hung down over his eye.

Duke said, “You don’t have to do this. This is crazy. Look, I’ll never see her again. I fucking swear it, man.”

Tim’s smile was terrifying. He said, “No, you’ll never see her again. You’re right about that. No one will ever see her again.”

He let it sink in.

Duke moaned, “Oh, God. No.”

“Yes,” Tim said. “This morning. In that bed you know so well. She thought I was bending over to kiss her good-bye. And in a way, I was.”

Jack didn’t realize he was unconsciously stepping away from the boat until the picnic table hit him in the back of the thighs. The roaring in his ears drowned out the sound of the Chutes. Tim shouted to be heard over it.

“I’m sorry, Jack. I’m sorry to leave you here. But there’s a ranch house a couple of miles away. You’ll be fine.”

Jack said, “Tim, don’t do this. Please, Tim.”

“Too late, I’m afraid. They laughed at me, Jack. That’s the worst thing anyone can do to me. Remember how they used to laugh at me in school?”

“That was a long time ago, Tim. You’re a big man now. You’re a good man.”

Tim said to Duke, “No one laughs at me.”

Jack watched Tim say something else to Duke, and the boat slipped out into the current and was gone. Because of the heavy brush downriver, he lost sight of it quickly, but began to run parallel to the river, hoping he could catch them ahead on a bend. Hoping he could persuade Tim to pull the boat over before it picked up too much speed entering the Chutes and he’d lose them. And before Tim did something he’d regret.

Jack stopped when he heard the sharp crack of a shot. Then he lowered his shoulder and forced himself through the brush. Thorns tore his flesh and his clothing, and his face was bleeding when he broke through and stood knee-deep in the cold water.

The boat was a long way downriver. Beyond it Jack could see the huge boulders in the river and the foam of whitewater. Duke was bent over the oars, his head forward, his arms hanging limply at his sides. Tim had swiveled his chair around, his back to Duke’s body, to face the Chutes. Tim stood up in the fishing platform and braced himself. He tossed the gun into the water and reached up and clamped his hat on tight and then raised his chin to the oncoming rapids.

Jack shouted but couldn’t even hear himself. The boat began a lazy turn sidewise.