A Field Guide To Murder & Fly Fishing Read online

  Jack frowns sullenly but does as he’s told, while his father demonstrates the technique of shaking the trout in a plastic bag with flour and lemon pepper. The fish come out of the bag like dusted mummies; Jack’s father embalms them with wedges of lemon and tabs of butter.

  Once the fire is going he fries them in a skillet while the boys skip flat stones over the lake. The smell of cooking trout piques their appetites, and they return to the fire and wait hungrily while the man serves the fish on paper plates. He shows them how the fillets come neatly off the spine if you slowly raise the tail. He tells them to eat the cheeks first, as a small ritual of thanksgiving to the warrior spirit of the trout.

  “Is that why we kiss them, too?” Tommy asks.

  His uncle nods. “Thanking the quarry is a way to close the circle. That’s what makes us human, Tommy—what keeps us in balance with all creation. It doesn’t matter what the rituals are, as long as you have them.”

  “Dad, do you really believe that crap?” Jack asks from across the fire. His mouth is twisted in a derisive thirteen-year-old’s smirk.

  “I’m still waiting to hear what you believe, son.” The man’s voice is patient, with an undertone of mild irritation—with a hint, perhaps, that the patience won’t always be there. Jack shakes his head and glances pointedly off into the spruce glades, as if alluding to his morning of target practice. The wind has begun to gust off the lake, sending up plumes of sparks from the fire, the blown smoke stinging their eyes. Tommy yawns, then gets up and crawls into the boys’ tent for a nap.

  He can’t sleep. He tells himself that he should feel a sense of accomplishment for learning how to fly-fish, but something has made him anxious. The tent zipper splits and Jack’s grim, freckled face peers in. He’s still wearing the blue bandana, and Tommy has a sudden image of his cousin as an Indian-hunter: General Custer come to scalp him in his sleep.

  “Let’s go shoot,” Jack says. “You’re not sleeping anyway.”

  Tommy sighs and gets up. He follows Jack out of the tent and over to the edge of the meadow, where a weathered log is already set up with a shooting-gallery row of beer cans.

  “Where’s your Dad?”

  “I don’t know, probably off hunting squirrels. He kills them with his bare hands by twisting their necks, then he hangs them on the pine trees like Christmas ornaments.”

  Tommy looks up sharply, stunned by the news.

  “Just kidding,” Jack murmurs, squinting down the barrel of the air gun. “He’s taking a stroll around the lake.”

  Tommy flushes, embarrassed by his own gullibility, but in truth, it’s mostly relief he feels. He watches while Jack shoots the cans off the log, one after the other. Jack is a good shot. When all the cans are lying on the spruce litter, he hands the rifle to Tommy and goes over to set them back up. Tommy’s shooting is less accurate, but when the shots do connect, it’s satisfying: Plink . Plink.

  A camp robber lands on the top of a spruce behind the shooting gallery, and Jack reaches over to jerk the gun out of Tommy’s hands.

  “Hey! What are you doing?”

  The older boy aims the gun at the jay, which sways back and forth on its perch atop the spruce.

  “You’re not going to shoot it, Jack, are you? Don’t shoot it.”

  The blond boy looks up at his cousin with a grave, wide-eyed expression, then presses his cheek to the polished oak gunstock to aim at the bird again. For a moment everything is peaceful: the breeze wrinkling the surface of lake; the mountain summits; the faint sound of the creek bubbling in the background; the wise-looking, gray bird regarding them from its swaying perch. Then the airgun’s mechanism lets out a gassy exhalation and the camp robber jerks, reels, and plummets in a drunken spiral into the shadows at the base of the tree.

  “Aw, man!” Tommy exclaims. “Why’d you have to do that?”

  Jack looks up with a forced grin. “It was a good shot, Tommy. You have to admit, it was a good shot.”

  Tommy shakes his head and looks away, not wanting to meet his cousin’s eyes. The two boys walk over to the tree, and Jack uses the gun barrel to poke around in the shadows. The jay jerks weirdly on the spruce litter, wings akimbo.

  A twig snaps some way off and the boys look up to see Jack’s father striding toward them from the other side of the meadow. Tommy feels his cheeks and temples burning with shame. Jack’s thin face has gone white.

  “There you are, boys,” the man calls cheerfully. “What’s going on?” As he approaches, Jack points with the gun at the mortally stricken bird. His father squats down to get a closer look. “What happened, son?”

  Jack opens his mouth to say something, but no words come out. He just shakes his head, looking away angrily. The man glances at Tommy, who shrugs helplessly, feeling a spasm of panic down in his crotch as if he’s the one in trouble.

  His father takes the air gun from Jack’s hands, and uses the stock to sweep the jay out from the tree base and onto the dry meadow grass. He raises the gun, barrel up, and prepares to bring it down on the twitching creature’s head. But then he hesitates, gazing at Jack with a look of strange intensity. It isn’t mere anger Tommy sees clouding his uncle’s face—or scorn, or disgust. It is a series of more frightening reactions: recognition, dread, and—worst of all—self-doubt.

  The man shakes his head as if to rid himself of an unpleasant daydream, and brings the butt down hard on the jay’s skull. There is a faint, dry pop, like the crack of a hard-boiled egg on a kneecap, and the bird is still.

  TOWER EIGHT

  I HAVEN’T BEEN BACK in years, but I have no doubt the Fitzwilliam Quarry still exists. To get there you have to hike a mile or so through a yellow-birch and hemlock forest and negotiate a field of massive splintered blocks, talus left over from the extraction of the New Hampshire granite that built the cities of the Eastern Seaboard. The quarry is impossible to miss, a yawning cavity cut in stepped gradations, like benches in a steep amphitheater down to a pool of pure black water. If it is a sunny day the surface of the pool glints like obsidian until something disturbs it, at which point faceted reflections leap like ghosts across the high granite walls.

  For much of the summer of 1982, Kimball Jones and I had the place to ourselves. We would arrive, take a cold plunge, climb to our favorite ledge—smooth and comfortable, with a birch sapling growing out of a mossy crack where the shelf met the cliff—and doze like zoo animals on the sun-warmed granite. Scrawled in peeling red paint on the opposite wall was this proverb:

  THERE IS NO GRAVITY

  THE EARTH SUCKS

  One day in July, as we sat on the ledge with our legs dangling, I asked Kimball what he thought the words meant. My voice was louder than I’d expected it to be, a high-pitched echo ringing out through the deserted amphitheater.

  “Who knows?” Kimball replied. He cupped his hands around his mouth to get a better echo. “Maybe whoever put it there never took physics.”

  “Or maybe he was just depressed,” I answered, following Kimball’s example and shouting the last word.

  “Or maybe he thought you could fly, if you could just—” Kimball rose to his feet and took a deep breath, the word fly volleying back and forth across the granite walls. “If you could just break free of—”

  He threw himself off the ledge, disappearing with a white flash into the pool below. He stayed under a long time, until the surface of the water was unbroken by a single ripple. For a moment I considered the idea that he’d never existed at all—that he was just a creature of my lonely imagination—but eventually he came up, laughing, and frog-stroked to the edge of the pool.

  Back on the ledge he shivered happily. Water dripped from the frays of his jean cut-offs onto his pale, hairless legs. He was a strange-looking boy, with a big, beaklike nose, a weak, almost nonexistent chin, and eyes that were abnormally wide-set and often appeared to be gazing in two different directions. His light blond hair was crew-cut, and from certain angles he looked like an enormous baby bird. Because of his bizar
re appearance, no one at school wanted anything to do with him. I myself had befriended him with great reluctance, mainly from a lack of other options, although by now his ugliness didn’t trouble me unless there were other people around to make fun of us.

  “Hey, check this out.” He knelt to extract something from his daypack and then sat beside me on the ledge, holding out a sheet of stiff paper the size of a cocktail napkin. The sheet was divided into dozens of tiny squares, each square stamped with the image of a cartoon character: Mickey Mouse, Wile E. Coyote, Daffy Duck, three or four others in a repeating pattern like wallpaper.

  “Cool,” I said. “What’s it supposed to be?”

  “It’s LSD. I got it from Temple.”

  I took the sheet and held it to my nose. It smelled like normal paper, maybe a hint of peppermint. “Temple sold you this?”

  “No, dude, he gave it to me. I saw him at the record store. He said I should share it with you.”

  “Cool,” I repeated uncertainly.

  Kimball took the sheet back and tore off one of the squares, a Tweetie Bird. He held it out to me on his outstretched palm, with a smoldering, chinless smile.

  “No thanks,” I said. “I read somewhere that taking LSD can make you certifiably insane.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” he replied. “Certifiably? Do you think they give out little certificates? Come on, Jeff.”

  “Not interested, dude.”

  “Snatch this pebble from my hand, Grasshopper,” he ordered. “Then you will understand.” He took my wrist and pressed the Tweetie Bird into my palm. He ripped off another square for himself, a Roadrunner, and stuck it on his outstretched tongue.

  With a powerful sense of foreboding, I swallowed the Tweetie Bird.

  The Fitzwilliam Quarry was not the place to hang out that summer. The place to hang out was Hobie’s, a river-fed swimming hole with a series of pools and waterfalls running through a stand of old hemlocks. There was a long, smooth rock exposed to the sun that served as a kind of beach, with well-trodden pathways leading upstream and downstream to jumping ledges of different heights and difficulties. Kimball and I had gone there once or twice, but it was not our scene. We told ourselves there was too much broken glass and too much noise—the dueling boom-boxes playing Lynyrd Skynyrd and Van Halen; the outbursts of shouting and laughter from the soccer players and their grinning sycophants—but the truth was, we didn’t feel welcome there. We, or at least I, got the sense that we were on probation; that at any moment, if we loosened up or did something construable as less-than-cool, the entire clique would close ranks around us like a pack of bloodthirsty hyenas.

  We liked it better at the quarry. It was a hike to get there, so we had it all to ourselves except on weekends, when the rednecks came. Fortunately, most of them had to work during the week.

  Kimball and I did not work. It wasn’t that our parents were rich. His mother was an occupational therapist who’d returned to her native state of New Hampshire after his father had been killed in a skydiving accident in Utah. My father was an underpaid college professor; my mother, a social worker. The reason we didn’t work was that we didn’t want to: we lacked motivation. We’d discovered this common truth about ourselves the previous November, when we’d both gone out for the ski team. We were good at the sport, having skied with our families from an early age, but the pre-season workouts were too grueling, and there was another problem as well. The ski team was a winter occupation for many of the same popular soccer players who frequented Hobie’s during the summer. Kimball was far too much of an oddball to be acceptable to that crowd, and I was one of those slow-maturing boys for whom the hormonal starting gun had yet to be fired.

  To make a long story short, Kimball and I quit the ski team before the first snowfall. We started hanging out on weekday afternoons, smoking pot and playing Ping-Pong in Kimball’s windowless basement suite. On weekends, newly licensed to drive, I borrowed my father’s beat-up old Volkswagen Beetle and we drove up to Mount Cratchett, our local ski area. By spring our friendship was ingrained. When summer came we staked out the quarry, and by that day in July when we dropped our first hits of acid, we’d come to feel as if we owned the place.

  The drug kicked in as a bee-like humming in the back of my throat. Then I was plummeting toward the water; then I was piercing the cold black depths in a protective capsule of silver bubbles. When my breath ran out I kicked my feet and ascended in a perfect spiral to the surface, where I gulped the air and imagined the blood delivering fizzy oxygen molecules to every cell in my body. I followed Kimball up to our ledge and jumped off again. This time I let myself sink deeper and stay under longer, fascinated by the bubbles that shimmered all around me like beads of buoyant mercury, rising steadily to the surface. I came up for air and saw Kimball scaling the granite wall, his movements quick and jerky, like a film character on fast forward.

  I made a halfhearted effort to follow, but I was drawn back to the silent underwater world, so I dove off the ledge I was standing on. Who knows how much time had gone by when I spotted him perched atop the Podium, the quarry’s highest viable jumping point. I’d never actually seen anyone go off it, but apparently people did. It was breathtakingly high, a jutting rectangle of granite framed by twin hemlocks. The Podium stuck out into the air like the aborted beginning of a bridge; even so, it was set far enough back from the water that a running start would be required to clear the lower ledges. Kimball stood with his toes on the lip, swaying slightly. From where I was treading water in the middle of the pool, he looked tiny and impossibly far away.

  “Are you sure?” I asked.

  He peered down from the heights, head cocked to one side like a curious bird. “What, dude?”

  “Now may not be the best time to do that,” I shouted. The echo of my voice returned to me sounding thin and scared.

  “Come check this place out,” he called down.

  I swam over to the edge of the pool and scaled the wall as quickly as I could. Near the top, the granite angled out in a slight overhang, and I found myself without a toehold. I repressed a detailed vision of my brain-case shattering like crockery as it hit the lower ledges. My unoccupied foot probed frantically, finding nothing but sheer granite. The ankle of my weight-bearing foot began to spasm, working up and down as if it were pedaling an antique sewing machine. I couldn’t bring myself to look either up or down, so I concentrated on a patch of orange lichen in front of my face, struggling to regain my composure. But the lichen began to squirm and bubble, and fearing that it was about to splatter out and burn my eyes I shrank away from the wall, nearly losing my grip. A chill went down my spine as I realized how close I’d come to simply letting go.

  “Danger, Will Robinson.” Kimball’s calm voice sounded close. I risked an upward glance and saw his pink, overbit face only inches from mine, a curious glint in the one eye trained down at me. He extended his hand. I reached up and took it, and in one effortless movement he hoisted me onto the flat top of the Podium. I staggered to my feet and backed away from the edge, blood roaring in my ears like whitewater.

  “Dude!” he exclaimed, tilting his head with an expression of kindly puzzlement. “What were you so afraid of?”

  I struggled for breath. “Did you see what was happening to that orange lichen? I almost had to let go.”

  He nodded solemnly. “Well, it’s probably good that you didn’t. But check this out. I’ve got a theory.” He drifted back into the trees, muttering to himself under his breath. I thought he was going to take a piss, but then there was a rush of air as he shot past me. His gangly body seemed to hang in midair for a moment, arms windmilling, before he plummeted out of sight.

  I cursed and got down on all fours to peer over the edge. The pool was a long way down, and the water was eerily still. The seconds stretched on. I scanned the lower shelves for blood; dungaree shorts; a pale, twisted corpse. There was a payphone in the town of Fitzwilliam. I pictured myself scrambling over the talus, sprinting along the trail thr
ough the shady forest. I imagined the announcement coming over the loudspeaker at school, and then I felt ashamed to be having such thoughts.

  Finally his head broke the surface. “I knew it!” he sputtered.

  “What?” I shouted, feeling both irritation and relief.

  “There is no gravity! Just like the graffiti says!”

  “Dude! Then how come you fell when you jumped?”

  “I didn’t fall!” He was treading water, his head a small pink cork in the middle of a circular ripple at the center of the blackwater pool. “Going down was my choice! There’s no gravity!”

  “Okay. Okay.” I nodded, swallowing. The acid was hitting with a new wave of intensity, tightening my throat muscles and causing everything in my field of vision to dance in sync with my pulse. The granite around the edges of the pool had melted and was floating on the surface like sea-scum. Kimball’s foreshortened legs scissored underwater, feet webbed like tiny duck feet. Vertigo was a physical suction pulling me over the edge. I lay flat on the granite with my arms spread wide as if to embrace it, gazing down at my distant friend.

  “Come on!” he shouted. “Don’t be afraid!”

  I shook my head. Speech was beyond my power at that point.

  “Think about it, Jeff,” he urged. “Let the concept seep into your mind. There is . . . no . . . gravity!”

  Seconds passed, maybe minutes. A parade of clear paisley amoebas floated down across my field of vision. When I blinked, the parade would start again from the top, sliding over my eyeballs like ice melting on a windshield. It was strangely soothing.

  I took a deep breath, picturing the blood cells carrying their happy little messengers. I blinked away the amoebas one last time and everything snapped into focus: the perfect circle of the sun reflected on the water; the exact geometric angles of the cliffs and ledges; the birch and hemlock saplings outlined sharply, as in an architect’s draft. I sketched a trajectory from the lip of the Podium in a steep arc straightening to a downward vector, ending at the exact point where my toes would cleave the meniscus of the pool. And of course, Kimball was right. There was no gravity.