A Field Guide To Murder & Fly Fishing Read online

  “Tim Weed’s A Field Guide to Murder & Fly Fishing is a fiction collection of the first order. I found myself parceling out the stories to make them last. These are stories that will live a long time both on the page and in your heart.”

  —Joseph Monninger, author of The World as We Know It

  “In his first short story collection, novelist Tim Weed shows his stunningly impressive range—transporting readers from the heights of the Andes and the depths of the Amazon to the backstreets of Rome and Granada. Many of Weed’s stories have a hint of the mysterious, even the supernatural, but they are all grounded in sharply-rendered material worlds so fresh one feels one might step directly into the literary photographs he has created and stroll around for a while. A top-notch debut, not to be missed.”

  —Jacob Appel, author of Einstein’s Beach House

  “Each story is a jewel, cracking open what matters most: love, family, and our big beautiful planet.”

  —Ann Hood, author of The Book That Matters Most

  “From the mountain lakes of the Colorado Rockies to the cobbled streets of Spain, this fascinating collection of short stories by Vermont-based writer Tim Weed (Will Poole’s Island) never disappoints. The stories are more about choices than they are about fly fishing or murder, but time and again Weed’s vivid characters in these thirteen tales of dark adventure are forced to confront a vision of themselves—or others—that’s not quite as positive as they’d hoped . . . A Field Guide to Murder & Fly Fishing is a collection you’ll be happy to get lost in.”

  —Julie Reiff, Ploughshares

  ALSO BY TIM WEED

  Will Poole’s Island

  A Field Guide To Murder & Fly Fishing

  STORIES

  Tim Weed

  Copyright © 2017 Tim Weed

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Printed in the United States

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Green Writers Press is a Vermont-based publisher whose mission is to spread a message of hope and renewal through the words and images we publish. Throughout we will adhere to our commitment to preserving and protecting the natural resources of the earth. To that end, a percentage of our proceeds will be donated to tenvironmental activist groups. Green Writers Press gratefully acknowledges support from individual donors, friends, and readers to help support the environment and our publishing initiative.

  Giving Voice to Writers & Artists Who Will Make the World a Better Place

  Green Writers Press |Brattleboro, Vermont

  www.greenwriterspress.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available upon request.

  ISBN: 978-0-9974528-7-7

  VISIT THE AUTHOR’S WEBSITE:

  WWW.TIMWEED.NET

  PRINTED ON PAPER WITH PULP THAT COMES FROM FSC-CERTIFIED FORESTS, MANAGED FORESTS THAT GUARANTEE RESPONSIBLE ENVIRONMENTAL, SOCIAL, AND ECONOMIC PRACTICES BY LIGHTNING SOURCE ALL WOOD PRODUCT COMPONENTS USED IN BLACK & WHITE, STANDARD COLOR, OR SELECT COLOR PAPERBACK BOOKS, UTILIZING EITHER CREAM OR WHITE BOOKBLOCK PAPER, THAT ARE MANUFACTURED IN THE LA VERGNE, TENNESSEE PRODUCTION CENTER ARE SUSTAINABLE FORESTRY INITIATIVE® (SFI®) CERTIFIED SOURCING

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  The Camp at Cutthroat Lake

  Tower Eight

  The Afternoon Client

  Mouth of the Tropics

  A Winter Break in Rome

  The Dragon of Conchagua

  Steal Your Face

  The Money Pill

  Six Feet under the Prairie

  Scrimshaw

  Diamondback Mountain

  The Foreigner

  Keepers

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  “The Camp at Cutthroat Lake.” Pooled Ink. Northern Colorado Writers, LLC. 2014. Honorable Mention, NCW Contest. Originally appeared in Borealis.

  “The Afternoon Client.” Writer’sDigest.com. April, 2014. Winner of the Ninth Annual Writer’s Digest Popular Fiction Awards, Crime Category. Originally appeared in Sixfold.

  “Tower Eight.” Grand Prize Winner, The Mountain. Outrider Press, 2014. Originally appeared in Gulf Coast.

  “The Dragon of Conchagua.” Saranac Review. Fall 2015. Shortlisted for the Tucson Festival of Books Literary Awards.

  “Six Feet under the Prairie.” Manifest West, Volume II. Western Press Books, 2014. Originally appeared in Colorado Review.

  “Mouth of the Tropics.” Green Writer’s Press Journal. Green Writers Press. April 1, 2015. Originally appeared as “Specimen,” in Victory Park: The Journal of the New Hampshire Institute of Art.

  “A Winter Break in Rome.” The Flexible Persona. November 2014.

  “The Money Pill.” Everywhere Stories: Short Fiction from a Small Planet. Press 53, 2014. Originally appeared in Lightship Anthology 2 (Alma Books). Short List, Lightship Publishing International Literature Prize.

  “Keepers.” Boston Fiction Annual Review. 2006.

  “The Foreigner.” Polterguests: A Main Street Rag Anthology. MSR Publishing, 2016. Originally published in Margin: Exploring Modern Magical Realism (anthology), and Compass Rose Review.

  for Susan and Chuck

  “Whosoever is delighted in solitude, is either a wild beast or a god.”

  —SIR FRANCIS BACON

  THE CAMP AT CUTTHROAT LAKE

  TWO BOYS AND A MAN in his late forties sit in an aluminum rowboat in the middle of a lake at the bottom of a broad mountain basin. The lake mirrors the sky of a calm summer afternoon, but tendrils of cold air coming down from the surrounding crags will soon dispel the fragile illusion of warmth. All around the rowboat the lake is pocked with rises, the fleeting perfection of circular ripples left by trout taking a dun mayfly hatch. The boys are freckle-faced and crew-cut. Each holds a spinning rod, and from the tip of each rod a length of transparent monofilament line leads out to the half-red, half-white sphere of a bobber floating on the still meniscus of the lake. Approximately eighteen inches below each bobber hangs an artificial salmon egg, a tiny maraschino cherry suspended in water so clear that if salmon eggs had eyes, each could see the glint of the hook impaling the other.

  The man takes a match from a box in the pocket of his red flannel shirt and strikes it on the oarlock. He cups his hands around the flame and holds it over the cob of the pipe clamped between his strong white teeth. The boy sitting in the stern of the rowboat—the man’s nephew—watches the flame dance high as the man puffs. With a whip of his wrist the man extinguishes the flame and places the smoking matchstick back in the box, and the box back in his pocket. His skin is tanned leather. Two days of gray stubble accent his handsome jaw. The only sound is the occasional whistle of a camp robber—a gray jay—from the spruce glades surrounding the lake. It is the summer of 1978.

  “Okay,” the boy sitting in the prow of the rowboat says. “I’ll take a fly now.” He is son to the man, cousin to the younger boy who watches from the stern. His hair is reddish-blond and cut uniformly at half an inch, so that the pale contour of his skull shows through.

  “What kind, Jack?”

  “You know what kind. Those little gray ones coming up off the water.”

  The man leans forward in the boat, offering the open fly-wallet like a dessert menu. Jack squints at the flies and then points.

  “Good choice, Jack.” Jack’s father pinches the fly between his thumb and forefinger to remove it from the wallet while the boy reels in his line. He lifts the rod tip over his father’s head so that the bobber swings ba
ck and forth like a pendulum. The man watches it swing for a moment, reaches for it, and tucks it under his arm while he bites the monofilament to remove the hook with the salmon egg, and quickly ties on the fly. Jack casts the bobber out, and Jack’s father turns to his watching nephew.

  “Want a fly, too, Tommy?”

  “Sure, I guess.” Tommy reels in his bobber and the man shows him the wallet, but before Tommy can pick out a fly Jack’s bobber is dragged under the surface and he jerks it high, ripping the hook from the unseen trout’s mouth. The bobber hits the side of the aluminum boat, a loud drumbeat echoing over the lake.

  “Easy, Jack,” the man says through his teeth that clench the pipe stem. “Not so hard next time.”

  Tommy picks out a fly and his uncle ties it on. A moment after his bobber hits the water it dives: two distinct tugs as if by a kind of prearranged signal. Tommy raises the rod’s tip and the trout goes into a frenzy of runs and twists, a determined fight to flee, unhook, survive. Heart pounding, Tommy reels in, the taut line slicing to and fro through the water, the rod bending and jumping with powerful life. When the fish is beside the boat Jack’s father leans over, nets it, and holds it up for Tommy to see—a luminous creature writhing in the hammock of black mesh.

  “Wet your hands,” the man says. “You should be the one to unhook it.”

  “Can we keep it?”

  “I always release the first catch, but this one’s yours, Tommy. It’s up to you.”

  Tommy lays his rod down in the rowboat and leans over to wet his hands in the frigid water. He takes the net and holds it with one hand while he reaches for the fish with the other. The creature is cold and substantial and slippery, and there is something miraculous about it: the tense, streamlined musculature; the trembling, golden-brown skin with black and orange speckles under an opalescent sheen.

  He looks up at his uncle. The man smiles and nods.

  With both hands Tommy lowers the fish and cradles it in the cold water. For a moment, nothing happens. Then the trout pulsates, as if animated by a sudden charge of electricity, and darts away. There is a green-gold flash like fleeting shadow-lightning, and then it is gone.

  Tommy looks up, bewildered. Somehow it feels as if more time has elapsed than the few seconds it has actually taken to release the trout. His uncle grins at him. The air on the lake is dry and fresh, with the Christmastree scent of spruce.

  Jack gets another bite but he jerks the line too hard and dislodges the hook again. Tommy smells his own hands; the trout-scent is clean and pleasant mingling with the spruce.

  As the sun sinks below the spur of the pyramid-shaped peak to the west, Jack’s father assembles his fly rod and begins to cast. The yellow line rolls and unrolls over the lake in a long, neat loop, unfurling straight before settling lightly on the surface. The boys watch, awestruck. On the third cast a violent splash engulfs the fly just as it settles on the water. The boys watch as the man fights the big trout in and leans over the edge of the rowboat to net it. It’s another beauty, slightly larger than Tommy’s, with a stroke of bright scarlet on the throat.

  “Cutthroat,” he says. He mutters something under his breath, brings the creature up to his lips like a sacrament, and lowers it to the water to free it.

  A few minutes later, after the man has put away the fly rod, he takes up the oars and whistles the Battle Hymn of the Republic as he rows them toward the shore, where an old Jeep Willys and two army-surplus tents sit in a meadow next to a small creek that rushes down from the high country to feed the lake. Jack catches Tommy’s eye and sarcastically pantomimes his father’s act of kissing the fish. Tommy shrugs and looks away.

  “What’s the matter?” Tommy whispers, shivering under his gray-wool blanket. They’re sitting in foldout chairs by the tents, looking out over the iron-colored lake. The whole basin is in shadow except for the peaks of a jagged cockscomb ridge to the east; these are bathed in alpenglow. Jack’s father is out of sight in the spruce glades; in the distance the boys can hear the snap of dry branches. Jack’s lips are turned down at the corners in an angry frown.

  “He could’ve told us they would only take flies. Instead of letting us strike out with salmon eggs all morning.”

  “I think he wants us to learn for ourselves,” Tommy says, pulling the blanket tighter over his shoulders.

  “You don’t understand, Tommy. Everything has to be done exactly his way. He gets these ideas in his head. I can’t even watch television when he’s around. He’s always trying to teach me something.”

  “If someone knows a thing, why shouldn’t they teach it? Don’t you want to learn?”

  There is a rustling in the shadows and Jack’s father emerges with a bundle of broken twigs. He strides over and dumps the wood by the fire pit. He’s wearing frayed khaki pants with red suspenders over a white V-neck undershirt. A streak of sweat runs down the center of the undershirt and his upper arms glow palely in the half-light.

  “Know how to build a fire, Tommy?”

  “Sure, I guess.”

  “Show him how to do it right, Jack. I’ll go for one more load.” He turns back in the direction he came and is soon swallowed in darkness.

  “See what I mean?” Jack whispers. He gets up, wool blanket draped over his shoulders like a cape, and squats before the fire pit. He shows Tommy how to build a fire efficiently and without paper: a handful of dry spruce needles at the center, small twigs in a compact teepee, a layer of thicker branches around them leaving an opening for the match.

  “Good,” Jack’s father says, dropping another bundle of sticks on the pile. He kneels to light the pine needles.

  The wood is dry and the flames roar up, illuminating the three in the fading dusk. Their faces are pale and drawn in the firelight, the way human faces gathered around fires have looked for a hundred thousand years. The man heats up some chili and they use metal forks to eat it directly out of the fire-blackened pan. Afterwards he produces a chocolate bar and breaks it in three pieces. They savor the chocolate in the darkness, staring at the blood-red embers in the heart of the fire.

  The sun rises over the cockscomb arête; it will be another clear and windless day. As they eat breakfast in the rich dawn light the camp robbers watch them, big solemn jays with clean, gray feathers and wise-looking whitish heads, perched on spruce branches at the edge of the meadow. Occasionally one of the birds emboldens itself to come forward for a scrap of egg or a crumb of last night’s bread.

  Tommy asks his uncle to teach him how to fly-fish, and after breakfast the man obliges, setting him up in the meadow beyond the tents to cast a line with no fly tied to the tippet. Jack watches for a while, then walks over to the Jeep to get his air-powered BB gun.

  Later, out on the lake, Tommy’s uncle ships the oars and lets the boat drift. “Careful not to slap the water with your line,” he urges. Tommy casts, concentrating on the rhythmic motion he learned in the meadow—back-stroke, pause, forward-stroke, pause—letting the line straighten out fully before reversing direction.

  “Very good, Tommy,” his uncle says, grinning. “But don’t forget to let the fly touch the water sometimes. If you want to catch any trout, that is.”

  Tommy lets the line settle and watches the fly drift on the glassy surface. It looks insignificant, a tiny fleck of lint on the shimmering expanse of lake. In the background is the periodic, muffled gasp of Jack’s airgun.

  Suddenly the water under the fly erupts and there is a live weight pulling on the line. The fly rod is suppler and more sensitive than the spinning rod; the connection to the animal feels less mediated, more direct. Heart pounding, he brings the fish up beside the boat. The man scoops it and hands Tommy the net with the thrashing trout.

  “I want to keep it.”

  “Then hit it on the head with the net handle. Right between the eyes.”

  Tommy glances at his uncle, who is regarding him with an interested, carefully neutral expression. He reaches down into the net to untangle the struggling creature. When h
e grasps it in his hand the trout goes still, as if bracing itself. Gingerly, he brings it up to his lips as he’s seen his uncle do. Then he holds it down on the aluminum seat with one hand and uses the other to strike it with the net handle.

  “Harder, Tommy.”

  Tommy hits it again, but the fish is still alive. He hits it a third time, feeling sick because one of the eyes is bulging out and the blood is dripping from its gills into the muddy rivulet in the rowboat’s hull. He wishes he had let this one go, too.

  “Once more, Tommy. Hard.”

  He bludgeons it as hard as he can, and this time he feels a vibration down the length of the fish’s body, an electric shiver like that of the released trout but more pronounced. More final.

  The man leans forward, holding open a canvas creel, watching the boy closely. There is something in his eyes: empathy perhaps, a glimmer of buried pain. Tommy feels a wave of guilty relief as he deposits the trout in the wide, rubberized mouth of the creel, and the lifeless creature slides away into the green darkness.

  On shore at midday, Tommy’s uncle shows him how to clean a trout: make an incision at the vent and slice up through the belly to the pectoral fins; cut a tab under the lower jaw; insert two fingers and pull back forcefully to extract the neat package of gills, pectorals, and rose-gray bowels; submerge the fish in the lake and run a thumbnail down the spine inside the empty cavity to clean out the vein of purple blood. It seems miraculous that a wild animal can harbor such a ready-made solution, like a Ziploc bag or a Jiffy Pop.

  There are several more fish now, a hearty lunch for three. Jack comes to watch the gutting. He squints unhappily in the bright noonday sun, rifle slung professionally over his shoulder, blue bandana tied in a folded strip around the blond crew cut.

  “Why don’t you build a fire, Jack,” the man suggests, “while I show Tommy the proper way to dress these?”