American Masculine (16 page)

They were mostly silent. Devin’s father had made and packed the lunches. The same Mother made for them three decades ago: roast beef sandwiches on plain brown bread with butter and mustard, deer jerky, some chips, a couple of Cokes. They sat in a cooler between father and son, next to the plastic jugs of water. In the back between the spare tire and the sidewall, two fly rods and a spinning rod lay in the truck bed, their tips clicking to the bumps in the road.

“I’ve got some gloves for you, it’s probably gonna be pretty cold,” his father said.

From the truck’s cocoon it was hard to imagine the cold outside, but when it came to weather his father was rarely wrong. Devin’s head was back on the seat. His coat rose and fell to the rhythm of his breathing. As a boy he’d be fast asleep by now. On the side window where he stared at the darkness, the dash lights opened his reflection. Here he saw the red rims of his eyes, the gray of his eyelids and the black hollow beneath, then the bones of his forehead squarely angled and appearing fragile, a skein of bluish veinwork near the temples. Wisps of hair receded high up on his head, the skull appearing thin as the shell of a robin’s egg. His father was right there next to him, but he thought again how alone he felt.

They crossed the Madison on a simple highway-bridge and Beartrap Canyon opened to the south, saw-toothed, backboned, steep from water to sky. Into the canyon the river moved silver gray, with mist over the surface in the half-light. Devin stared until the road turned and the view was lost.

Dawn was a desire, a hunger in the land and sky. It had not been like this for Devin for some years, so clear, edging as it did toward day. Mostly in the dark of his own apartment he’d hear the noise increasing. He’d lie in his bed peering out, unable to sleep, or sitting at the chrome chair he’d stare from the bedroom window. Out across the city, the metalworks would begin to glow and it seemed forever before he could move. Because of how weary he’d become, his feet were a burden, as was the bulk of his body above them. Often, he discovered his fingertips were numb. When he had stayed at work so much he didn’t miss Cherise. Now he found this sad.

The lights were off when he went from room to room. No one would know he was moving again. He drank alcohol and he cried and pitied himself for how it had happened to him just as it did to his mother and father. The loss of who he and Cherise were had overshadowed what they might have made together.

Devin’s father pointed out the window, east toward Bozeman. “Look at that,” he whispered.

Above the clouds the Bridgers stood clear, cut in blacks and grays, taking up much of the sky. Behind them was the scarlet horizon. While he drove his father would steal long looks. The sky’s blood gathered and went out. The morning turned Devin’s face gold.

“Nothing like it, is there?” his father said.

They topped a broad rise. The truck moved from shadow to sun. The land opened wide. To the south, mountains and fields were free of clouds, open now under a sweep of sky. The road banked down and left, and the mountains parted. The river appeared again, emerald, flared by sunshine as it blazed around an arm of land.

At the start of the marriage Devin was able like the rest to glad-face his way, thinking to himself it would be all right. He had overlaid his fear with the brightness of her spirit next to his, the boldness of it.

“Come to bed with me,” she’d say, and she’d smooth the line of his jaw with her fingertips. “I like to talk. It’s good to go to sleep together.”

“I know,” Devin would say. But the words he uttered were curt and the clip of them annoyed her and sent her down to bed while he slumped in the easy seat with his chin in his hand. He’d watch television until the night became a dark strength and he’d have to get up and walk. He’d pace the living room, then walk the hall toward the study, then down toward the nursery, repeating the pattern, making himself busy. When he made ready to join her he’d have to go to the kitchen and drink a glass of milk to settle his stomach. For a few months she would still open her arms to him. No matter how late he came to bed she’d say, “Good. Thank you, Devin,” and she’d pull him in.

Devin and his father drove farther south, yet always the land rose, from fields to swales, from foothills to mountains. They were closer to the edge of Yellowstone, on one of the more obscure routes where few towns stood. Traditional Blackfeet country, initially absent of whites due to the rough set of the land and more so the nature that turned man against man, the contemplative warlike way of those pushed to repel others, a desperation inbreathed with ferocity. The river gathered and twined here, where it hugged cutbanks and land bends, parted by islets and sandbars. The water narrowed in the canyons, then broadened again among the mountains, flanked always by aspen and cottonwood, wildflowers, willow, and wild rose.

At the bottleneck of a tight canyon, they plateaued, slowing to park off the shoulder in the brush. The wind bent the timothy grass here. They’d be using wet flies, an egg pattern and a pheasant tail dropper, and tiny split shot like little broken teeth. They walked an old sluiceway, then scaled down an embankment to reach the river.

A roar sounded from the Quake Lake gateway, a large concrete hole grated by thick iron bars. White and dark blue the Madison rushed headlong, shot from the opening like bold clusters of stars. The river pooled from the white water in a wide swirl, narrowed, then widened and smoothed itself downriver.

With the gusts through the canyon Devin’s nose and ears started to burn. The cold grew crisp, unbearable for a moment, then it passed.

“Remind me,” Devin said to his father as they began.

His father stood at his back, placed his hands on Devin’s forearms, and started to speak him through the movement.

“Keep your frame,” he said. “Firm upper body, firm in the shoulders. Quick now in the forearms. Fluid, fluid with the wrists. Firm in the hand.” His fingers, strong like the roots of trees, held Devin to the motion. “Good, Devin,” he said. “Nicely done. You haven’t forgot a thing.” Down inside his coat Devin resisted, but he was struck forcefully by how deeply he desired just to be held by him. No matter, Devin thought, whatever I need, I won’t turn and ask him for it. In Devin’s apartment, in the dark there is the hum of the city and all inside him a desolation he did not imagine for himself.

When he first came in on the Pacific Coast Highway out of Oxnard and down the coast, then up the rise to Ocean Boulevard and straight up Wilshire, Devin knew. This was it: all the metal and glass, the absolute clarity, not muddled or chaotic, not flat, slow, or wide, just narrow and angular, all of it, everything a straight line that pointed to the sky. He secured an apartment in a high-rise in Santa Monica, an old superstructure from the seventies, a bulk of metal named the Oceanside, lusterless so he could afford it, tall enough to command a view. He made sure his window faced the city, not the ocean, because of the raw feel of the wires and the light, the grounding it gave him to envision girders reaching down through the asphalt and concrete, steely narrow fingers down into the earth, gripping, digging in with their nails. From there he moved away from the ocean, up the 110 to a studio near the city center, then he and Cherise moved together to Agoura Hills and a modest twenty-five-hundred-square-foot home. But when the marriage was done, he came back to the Oceanside. Three doors down from the old place, he thought he might find a remnant here of what he’d been, the fire and the ascension, the way he looked out on the city with a child’s eyes. He’d be alone at the window, vodka in his hand. From there the grid of the city began, a stepwise casement of large and small structures, thin and tall, or shorter and stouter, the sides of them glinting gold in the morning light, the whole of it as sharp and promising as the day he had arrived. The sun gave a white-yellow hue that settled to brown in a haze at the city line.

Devin’s father walked downstream. He found a place that was quiet and slow. The fly he threw went out far and broke the surface, then traveled down along the river bottom, bumping with the current. He knew the river’s smoothness, behind boulders, below small bends or sandbars, places of slow-moving pools where the fish reside.

Devin’s arms moved, reaching the line back and forward again over the jade whirls and darker bends of the river. His father was far downstream now. They fished separately this way in the early morning. Devin didn’t catch a thing. His body was cold, so were his hands and face and feet. But he wasn’t bothered anymore. His chest no longer felt small, or pressed. He was breathing some, and he went on hundreds of times with the same movement, slowly at each hole. He waited, drawing the line back, drawing it forth. The tension took its time going from him.

Past midday Devin and his father met up at the truck. They got in, and his father stoked the heat.

“Hard luck,” his father said.

Devin stared out the window, methodically eating the sandwich his father had given him. They’d fished for seven hours, but they’d both been shut out. When his father was finished he placed his hand on Devin’s arm. If he knew me, Devin thought, what would he think of me?

“What do you say we head on up to the lake and see if it’s any better up there?” said Devin’s father.

“Fine,” Devin said.

They followed the black line, curving again as they ascended. When they topped another rise, the road wound through a place where the mountains had caved in. To the side of the roadway and up in a broad steep slide, huge boulders crowded each other. The dislocated arms of dead-white trees jutted among the debris. Devin’s father slowed the truck.

“Felt the earthquake all the way over in Circle,” he said. “About fifty years ago. The mountain fell and covered thirty people; they were camping around here. Workers had a real hard time finding them, buried so deep. Heard about it on the radio. The mountain choked off the Madison and formed the lake.” He motioned with his eyes.

Hundreds of trees needled the water, pale, bare, and jagged-limbed, naked where they stood. In the silence between them, Devin imagined himself rowing in a small johnboat while the oars clanked in their metal holdings. He was gliding in the bone-colored forest, in among the trees locked like frightened old people near shore. The mountains themselves could be my skyscrapers, he thought, the black lake the city street, and I am walking among the millions with my flat inward stare, wondering again what is there for me.

“Devin?” his father said.

“Fine,” Devin answered dumbly, and looked over. Devin’s father was touching his hand, staring at him like he’d been lost.

“Nothing,” his father said. “It’s all right, son.” He went back to driving, watching the country in the way he did, taking it all in.

The lake was more than a mile long, turned up by wind, white-capped, dark gray-blue. They drove the expanse, silent while the winds gnashed. Swells, strangely reminiscent of oceans, pulled and turned on the surface.

“Too windy,” Devin’s father said, slowing.

They turned and drove back down, below where they were. They were looking for another stretch to fish, but not far on, the tributaries joined with the river, muddying it, mixing it up. They turned again and went back where they had started. Again they reached the river floor. Devin pulled up on a gray fist-shaped rock and watched his father for a time.

“Tired out?” his father asked.

“I’m all right,” Devin said.

The wind was quick and crisp but not as vicious as up on the lake. The sun shone bright, while at the same time snow fell in fast diagonal sheets, slanted, embodying the wind. The water was the color of steel and Devin’s father’s arms were moving out and in again. He lengthened the line upstream and it went forth, unfolding until the split shot, the egg pattern, and the fly quietly met the water and went down beneath the surface.

A neon green indicator marked the path below which the weight and fly took the current’s draw, a signal point from which a hungry fish might turn and pull the indicator down. Fluid in the river’s lie, the indicator drifted downstream until it was even with Devin and his father set out more line to keep from breaking the motion. The bump and pull of the river tipped the pole but the draw was empty this time, so Devin’s father lifted the line up and out. Back and forth over the water he wove invisible tapestries, loading the line while it lengthened, increasing its reach to twenty or thirty yards. Above his head his arm was outstretched, and over the surface the line was seamless, flowing, settling upriver in its quiet way. Here, the movement began again, the downriver sweep of the current and the line.

There was a strike. Devin’s father whipped the rod backward. The line went taut, the pole bent nearly in a circle. “Hey, hey! Will you look at that!” he laughed and yelled.

The rod was high, the arc swollen, moonlike. Deftly, he worked the line with his left hand, keeping the tension on, feeling the play of the fish. The fish spasmed, came wildly alive, then soothed itself downstream for a time, then jerked to life again. The fight was a paradox like this, aggressive then smooth, until the fish darted in the green-blue of the water near shore. He un-clipped his net and captured it. When he drew it out and freed the hook, he held a rainbow in his hands.

“Nice work,” Devin said. Then there was a pause, and Devin said, “Why did you treat her so bad?”

He looked up into his father’s eyes.

“Your mom?” his father replied, eyes down, toward the rocks, the river.

“Yeah,” Devin said. “Why’d you have to run her off when all she wanted was to be with you?”

“I was a bad man, Devin,” he said, and he turned and set the fish in the water and watched it move away. The words were so unassuming they took Devin off guard.

“Why don’t you go to her?” Devin said. “Why live out here all alone?”

His father set his fly rod down and sat on his heels a few feet from Devin. “I have gone to her, Devin. Drove to her place in Nevada twice. She thinks we’re not ready to be together again. She’s probably right.”

Devin felt the cold in his hands. He pressed them against each other. There was a quietness between him and his father.