A Field Guide To Murder & Fly Fishing Read online

  “Deal.” He handed me a cube, quickly popping another into his mouth. He made a show of putting the remaining ones back in his coat pocket, but his fist stayed closed when he took it out and I think he must have taken the extras, too. In the end, it probably didn’t matter.

  We liked to ride the lift as singles, propping our skis and boots up to stretch comfortably across the chairs. In the chair ahead of me Kimball lounged in his dirt-stained down parka, a sky-blue Gerry coat held together with duct tape. He wore a headband with the Rossignol rooster logo, and his light blond hair had grown out so that a good four inches of it curled up and forward above the headband like the crest of a woodpecker. He was as bizarre-looking as ever, but he didn’t seem out of place on the slopes. The fact was that we were both lifelong skiers, as comfortable as could be in the lift-served environment.

  The sugar cubes had begun to kick in. Kimball kept peering back at me over his shoulder, nostrils bubbling with snot, cheeks red in the frosty air, chin with its white-blond goatee all but lost in the folds of his neck as he snorted and cackled with glee. He’d been laughing like that ever since we’d boarded the lift: giggles building to crescendos of crow-like cawing, punctuated by episodes of descending hoots and hiccups. Whenever his eyes met mine I would crack up, too, and just when I would start to get a grip on myself, he would crane around and make another face—eyes rolling divergently under that ridiculous blond woodpecker crest—and the red-white-and-blue rooster on his headband would detach itself from the wool and do a little jig in the air in front of his forehead. The lift cable rollers squeaked noisily in the background, like a pack of excitedly fleeing rats.

  My stomach cramped up. The laughter had begun to feel ominous, as if it were coming not from me but from some alien force in possession of my body. I started to worry that I would get trapped in laughing mode, like that urban legend about how if you play with your eyelids they’ll get stuck permanently inside-out. I strained to keep my mouth clamped shut, having convinced myself that if I opened it, my tongue would freeze solid and crack off in the snow.

  The lift deposited us on the hoar-frosted mountaintop. The scenery cut to slanting planes of bright white, the DayGlo blur of other skiers, the frigid wind licking our faces as we plummeted down a broad slope called Arrow. We were good skiers, but the drug made us even better. No hesitation, no false moves: all the vectors were at our disposal; our skis were flexing extensions of our feet. We soared downhill with delicate precision, gloriously, like hawks on the wind.

  At the bottom of the slope we glided into the lift line, a harrowing arena brimming with potential danger: strangers’ eyes lingering just a moment too long, or worse than strangers—the familiar faces of teachers and schoolmates, faces that must be ignored at all costs. Hazards were everywhere, even in something as apparently harmless as the lift-shack window, if one were inadvertently to catch a glimpse of one’s own reflection.

  There was too much of a line now for us to ride as singles, so we boarded the chair together, shaken and introverted, desperate to get back to the thoughtless freedom of ski-borne travel. I began to ponder the physics of skiing: the actual movements of hips and knees and ankles that translated into long arcing turns on the snow. I should have known that was a mistake. If you think too hard about anything, even something you’re very good at, it’s easy to convince yourself that you don’t really know how to do it.

  Approaching the off-ramp Kimball raised the safety bar. I stared straight ahead, trying unsuccessfully to visualize the body stance of a competent skier.

  “Hey, dude?” I said in alarm. “I think I forgot how to ski.”

  He gave me a sidelong glance. “Bullcrap. You’ve been skiing like a banshee all morning. You’re hell on skis, dude.”

  “Okay. Okay.” I nodded, desperately trying to believe him.

  The chair shuddered as the cable fed through the rollers on the last tower. When my skis touched the snow, I rose stiffly. At the end of the ramp I fell over backwards. Kimball skated back and gazed down at me, leaning on his poles, with an amused look on his face. He seemed to have the drug more or less under control.

  “What the fuck, dude? Do you seriously believe that you forgot how to ski?”

  I sighed despairingly, and let my head rest on the frozen ground. The sun hung low in the January sky, contracting and expanding to the rhythm of my pulse, but seeming to give off no heat. It was hard to believe that this weak and trembling orb was the same sun that had once warmed the granite ledges of the Fitzwilliam Quarry.

  Kimball clicked out of his bindings and knelt beside me in the snow. In the background, the flywheel groaned like a grief-stricken monster.

  “Skiing is a memorized skill of your body,” he said. He kept trying to hold my gaze, but his eyes wouldn’t cooperate. As he focused one, the other would drift; he would tilt his head to rein that one in, and the other would wander off. “You learned how to do it when you were three years old, Jeff, and you still know how to do it. Okay?”

  He offered me my poles, grips forward. I accepted them, used them to push myself upright, and glided down the knoll to the billboard that held the trail map. He skied by and gave me the thumbs-up sign, but his head flash-morphed into that of an enormous bird of prey—a hawk or a vulture—and I yelped and fell over backwards again.

  I lay on the snow, heart pounding against my rib cage. It was time to face the truth, I thought. I was not some kind of god; in fact, I barely deserved to call myself human. The LSD had wasted my body down to something weak and despicable, bringing genetic tendencies to the fore that had been masked by thousands of years of evolution. I was an underdeveloped Neanderthal with arms too long for my body, and a neck too skinny for my massive, tottering head. And what of Kimball? A bird, was he? The soccer players and their sycophants were correct to ridicule us. We were freaks, both of us: debased, ravaged, mutated beyond recognition, and beyond repair.

  He skated back to where I lay. He looked more rattled now; his head twitched a little as he tilted it from side to side trying to maintain a steady downward gaze.

  “Okay, Jeff. Forget what I just said, and think about this.” He placed the tip of a ski pole squarely in the middle of my chest. “We are not bound by the normal rules of physics, do you understand? Suck up your heels and strike a mind-body fusion within your energy field. And remember:” He lowered his voice and pressed the pole-tip firmly into my sternum. “There is. No. Gravity.”

  “That may be true for you, dude,” I said, unable to summon the will even to sit up. “But I believe in gravity.”

  “No, Jeff, dammit! That’s not what I’m saying. Don’t believe in it! You don’t have to! It’s a personal choice! Just get the fuck up and let your energy field carry you down the mountain, dude!”

  Slowly, reluctantly, I got to my feet and started sliding downhill, past the billboard and the trail signs and all the clustered skiers watching us out of the corners of their eyes. Something Kimball had said about sucking up my heels had lodged in my mind, and I found myself striking a new equilibrium, hurtling downhill in a state of controlled acceleration, held securely in a double vortex with its axis at the very spot in the center of my sternum where he’d pressed the tip of his ski pole. The physical world was rushing by at a very high rate of speed, but within my energy field, all was calm and still. I could tell from the rhythmic whoosh-whoosh-whoosh off to my right that Kimball was also in a groove. Temperatures must have been in the teens, but the sun on my face felt warm again as the two of us raced cackling and hollering down the steep mogul field under the Wildcat lift, cresting and dipping through the Volkswagen-sized bumps. Someone cheered from a chair above.

  Then the moment came. In my peripheral vision, I saw Kimball veering upward. He might have taken the opportunity to catch air, or perhaps he lost control and was launched accidentally skyward by an inconveniently placed mogul. By the time I skidded to a halt, he was well along in his flight. I watched him arc across the sky—arms windmilling, body backl
it by the sun—and the sight filled me with exhilaration. It must have been even better from his perspective, twenty or thirty feet above the snow, wind whistling around his ears, his shadow tracking across the dimpled slope like the shadow of a soaring bird, or an alter ego, or the final glimpse of a departing soul.

  And I’m sure he saw the lift tower. He may even have had the chance, as I did, to dwell for a moment on the meaning of the number painted on the tower cylinder he was about to hit, the design of it, how if you let your eyes follow the curves it formed a continuous loop, number eight in fresh white paint on a field of dully glinting black. Just a painted number, true, but also a symbol of something as real as it was impossible to comprehend.

  In my mind I can still see him clearly, red-faced with laughter on the chair ahead of me, or at the quarry, cockeyed and grinning, always ready to show me how easy it is to keep going and going and going.

  “Holy shit,” I said. “Holy shit,” and I felt my weight settle on the rounded hump of the nearest mogul. For an instant the feathers from his Gerry coat swirled all around me, like snowflakes from a clear blue sky.

  My memory of what happened next isn’t exactly clear, but I do recall that they stopped the lift, and that a deep, cruel silence came over the mountain. A crowd began to gather at the base of the tower, and I withdrew to a safe distance. People began to shoot covert glances my way, and eventually an old patrolman in a red jacket, with a white cross on his back and a crackling radio strapped to his chest, traversed the slope to ask what I was doing, standing there all by myself. I didn’t know what to say.

  THE AFTERNOON CLIENT

  POINT OF PRIDE: I always clean the boat between clients. Before anything else. Before gassing up or using the john or going to get a Coke and a sandwich and my daily dose of heartbreak from the college girls who work in the marina. So as soon as my morning client drives off in his Jeep—ninety percent of my clients drive Jeep Wranglers rented from the same island agency—I lower a bucket on a halyard for seawater. I splash it over the deck and sluice the blood out through the scupper holes. I rinse the rods with the freshwater hose from the dock, inspect the leaders for tooth frays, and stow the tackle box in the stainless steel cabinet beneath the windscreen.

  A man drives up in a shiny black Land Rover. He rolls down the window and a few notes of Hotel California spill out before he turns off the stereo and calls out across the dock: “You Zimmerman?”

  I nod. “What can I do for you?”

  He parks the Rover and gets out. He’s wearing expensive shoes and a yellow polo shirt. His black hair is slicked back with product and he has a lantern-jawed face some might consider handsome. “I’m Jay Clawson, your afternoon client.”

  “You’re more than an hour early,” I observe. “I have to get lunch and put gas in the boat.”

  He looks at his watch, a stainless steel TAG Heuer on a sleek, hairy wrist. “I called the marina. They told me you were in, and I was hoping we could go early. I’m supposed to tee off at four.”

  I stare at him. His voice is smooth but edgy, like someone used to giving orders over the phone. Mechanical trouble with the boat, I could say. Unlikely to catch fish anyway, sunny weather like this.

  “Totally appreciate it,” he says, opening the hatch of the Rover and taking out a red gym bag. He steps onto the dock and stands beside the boat.

  “All right,” I say gloomily, reaching up to take the gym bag. He comes aboard. I start the engine, untie the bowline, and motor around the dock to the gas tank.

  “What are we after today?” he calls out over the noise of the engine. He’s donned a pair of aviator glasses and stands next to me, too close, behind the windscreen.

  “This time of year we’re looking at bluefish, mostly. Maybe a rogue striper or two if we get lucky.”

  He raises his eyebrows behind the glasses. Perhaps he was thinking bonito, or marlin, or, who knows, a great white shark? I can tell it’s going to be a long afternoon. My stomach is empty, and I feel a bit lightheaded.

  The blues are running. I can smell them in the air, and long wavering slicks of fish oil reflect the sun on the water beyond the red and green buoys marking the entrance to the harbor. This morning we anchored over a slick and caught two dozen of the big carnivores, razor teeth snapping as I held them down on the blood-spattered deck with my bare feet and whacked them with a truncheon to extinguish their primitive little lights. Not that he deserves it, but this guy is probably in for a superb afternoon of fishing.

  It takes about twenty minutes to get to the spot I have in mind, a submerged bar that boils up a small, productive rip. I cut the engine and lower the anchor slowly to avoid frightening away any stripers. I hand the client a blunt rod with a chartreuse bomber attached. It’s the same lure my morning client used to excellent effect, a four-inch plastic teardrop scored by the teeth of countless marauding blues. I prefer fly fishing myself, and stripers to blues, but a man’s got to make a living.

  Clawson holds up the rod and squints doubtfully at the bomber. “It’s pretty scratched up. Can’t you give me a new one?”

  “Those tooth marks are from this morning,” I explain. “It means the fish find this particular lure desirable.”

  He hands back the rod. “I’d prefer a new one. Call me superstitious.”

  I hold my tongue, unclipping a rod with an unused lure and passing it to him. “If the fish are here, we’re sitting right on top of them. You shouldn’t have to cast far.”

  “From the platform?”

  “From anywhere you like.”

  The client climbs up to the platform. He doesn’t have sea legs; his rebalancings are jerky and awkward. He looks to be in decent physical shape, but it’s artificial, a city-bred fitness gained from the weight room and the treadmill. I feel sorry for him, because it’s pretty clear that he’ll never truly appreciate the ocean the way one should, in all its fierce, changeable beauty—its awesome, biding power. On the other hand, I can tell he’s fished before. He knows the basics of casting a spinning rod, though he puts more muscle into it than he needs to.

  “Reel it faster,” I suggest.

  “Pardon?” Clawson stops casting and stares down from his perch on the platform. It’s as if I’ve said something surprising.

  “Just letting you know, you need to reel in a little faster for bluefish. They won’t notice the lure as much if it’s not splashing around on the surface.”

  He casts again, and doesn’t adjust his retrieval speed. Suit yourself, I think, glancing at my watch.

  After a few more casts Clawson comes down from the platform and hands me the rod. “I need to piss.”

  “Aim it off the stern,” I suggest. “And hold onto the rail—it’s getting rougher out here, and I wouldn’t want you to fall in.”

  He starts aft, ignoring my advice to hold the rail. The tide is at full ebb and the rip is a compact, standing torrent of whitecaps tugging on the anchor. A gusty southwest wind has picked up, and the water around the rip is choppy, unsettled.

  The client stumbles and catches himself on the rail. I can’t suppress a derisive snort. He hears it or senses it above the wind and the roar of the rip, and shoots me a look over his shoulder. I smile innocently and give him an encouraging nod. He stands at the stern without touching the rail. With his feet spread wide for balance, he makes an adjustment and starts pissing across the wind.

  “How long you been doing this?” he asks on his way back to the platform.

  “Pretty long while,” I reply.

  “What’d you do before?”

  “This and that. Wasting time, mostly.” He holds out his hand for the rod and I give it to him.

  “I would have guessed you were new to it,” he says.

  A surge of anger clamps my throat. “What makes you say so?”

  “You don’t seem entirely comfortable. With people, I mean.”

  I feel my ears redden and for a moment I can’t think of anything to say. I watch him climb the ladder to the platfor
m. It’s an unsteady place to stand, especially without a life preserver. These are dangerous waters. A sudden tilt of the boat in the choppy swells; an abrupt shift in the wind; or, if I were to rev the engine suddenly, causing the bow to jerk on the anchor chain. These currents are trickier than they look. If you’re not a strong swimmer, a rip like this one can suck you under before you know it.

  There isn’t much conversation after that, which suits me. The client keeps casting, but he’s still reeling it in too slowly to attract any attention from the blues. After a while, out of boredom, I cast the rod with the chewed-up bomber. Seconds after I start skipping the plug along the choppy surface, a big tail splash erupts behind it. I pull up to set the hook; the rod bends and the reel drag whines as the fish runs for deeper water. The client stops casting and watches glumly from the platform. From the way it’s fighting—intermittent and forceful, like a Rottweiler tugging on a stick—I can tell it’s not a bluefish, but a big striper instead. This is unexpected. Stripers don’t often follow lures on the surface, especially with so many blues in the water.

  Striped bass are my favorite fish. They correspond to bluefish approximately as an eagle does to a buzzard. Their intelligence and selectivity make them difficult to catch at the best of times, but especially in midsummer. They’re prized by restaurant chefs up and down the East Coast for their firm, buttery flesh, which is perfect for grilling, but I prefer to release them. An old girlfriend once accused me of loving stripers more than people. She was joking, but the funny thing is that as the years have gone by, I’ve come to realize she wasn’t too far off the mark. Sometimes when I have no clients I drive to a certain sheltered beach I know of, and I wade out to a sandbar and cast a nine-weight fly rod. Each time I bring in one of these dignified predators, I feel a visceral link to the wild essence of the sea. Their life force flows like an electrical current into my hands, and it fills me with an enduring sense of peace. It gives me solace to imagine them cruising beneath the troubled surface, patrolling their realm in groups of three or four, fast, green shadows flying over the eel grass.