In the Loyal Mountains (12 page)

I only understood what it was like to swim through deeper and deeper water, trying as hard as I could to keep from losing my breath, and trying, still, to make it to the deep end.

W
E DRIVE
through the city, through the rain, January: a man I've never met before, Jack, and my best friend, Kirby, still my best friend after twenty years. Jack and Kirby live in the city and are practically best friends themselves now. A dentist and a real estate appraiser. I drove three days and nights to go fishing with them—not just wade fishing, not sissy-pants shore fishing, but in a boat. Jack has a boat with a motor and everything.

I watch Jack as he drives. He looks serious, intent. He's poor, even though he's a dentist, because he's got a wife and three kids, and because this is not a good time in Houston, for dentists or anyone else. Jack's boat is old, and the chances are good that something will go wrong with it today—if we even get out on the water. Kirby is not so poor. Both he and his wife work, and they have only one child, a little girl, who is also named Kirby.

We drive slowly through the thunder and lightning in downtown Houston. Tall buildings leap into the sky all around us with each lightning flash. We pass the building where Kirby works; we pass the building where his wife works. They look like high-rise jails to me, the shutdown of a life. I feel like an outlaw sitting in the back of the jeep, riding with two married men, the fathers, up front. I feel almost as if one of them
is
my father, and the other one of my fathers friends. In fact, I am a little older than both of them. It doesn't help that I have never fished from a boat before.

It has been so long since I've been around anyone, man or woman, other than my girlfriend. We've separated. We have done this before, and I think we'll get back together again, because we've been together far too long
not
to get back together.

This time, after Margie left, it was a little different. I felt alone right away, and also, I wanted to do something new, and I did not want to be in that house alone.

It wasn't the usual list of griefs this time—not, Why don't we get married? not, Why are you always traveling so much? not, Who was that woman who called? Those are the little things, the things that can be erased. Or if not erased, at least put aside.

This time, Margie said, she was tired. Just tired. A little frightened, but mostly tired. She went home, back to Virginia.

I did not want to be in that house alone. I just wanted something new. And after a while, that gets hard to find.

We listen to the crackle of the local AM station, the early morning fishing report. The roads are slick, and there are other cars out, so many other cars, but none of them are pulling boats.

Kirby and Jack lean forward and watch the road and sip their coffee. The rain is coming straight down, beating against the windshield. We all try to hear what the Fish Man is saying on his talk show. He is telling us the fishing has been poor to spotty the past few days. Kirby grins, but Jack scowls and says, “Got-damn.”

I don't really care one way or the other.

In Texas young men and women are taught to believe the world can be tamed. It's a bull that can be wrestled, and with strength and courage and energy you can lift that bull over your head, spin it around, and throw it to the ground. In certain parts of the world, and even in certain individuals, such a thought would be ludicrous. But in Texas I have seen the myth become truth, lightning strikes, men and women burning across the prairie of their lives, living fast, living strong. I have
seen
it, in my father, my mother, and others, and I feel like an imposter, not having any children to follow after me, even though I am trying to live one of those strong lives myself—fast and free, scorning weakness.

A bolt of lightning smashes down on our left, tingles the hair on our arms. Jack shouts in his fear, and Kirby laughs, leans back in his seat, and rolls the window down a little. A few flicks of rain blow in on his face, and on mine in the back seat. It feels good, and I crack my window a little too.

I mean, Margie takes care of me. Sometimes I get really wild, just run out of the house and up onto the mountain behind our cabin, just
running.
I'll be gone all afternoon, lying up there on some damn rock or something, like a dog in the high mountain sun. When I finally come back, late in the day, she'll be very quiet, and we'll sit together and all will be real calm. What I'm saying is, she takes care of me. And I take care of her, I do. But it's not enough, I think.

Not only are Jack and Kirby best friends now, but their wives are too.

“I dreamed you were in my garbage can last night,” Kirby tells Jack matter-of-factly. “I dreamed you were a raccoon, banging around in the garbage, sorting through my trash.”

“Uh-huh,” says Jack, seemingly amused at the thought of being taken for a raccoon.

There's a metal box in the back of the jeep, a strange-looking box with small holes punched in the sides of it, and I keep imagining I hear grunts and clicks coming from it.

“What've you got in the box?” I ask Jack.

“A coyote,” he answers, without even looking back. Eyes on the road.

“No shit,” I say, happy that he trusts me enough, already, to bullshit with me. “Where'd you get it?”

Jack doesn't answer, and I can tell that Kirby thinks we, Jack and I, are playing some sort of joke on him, one that he refuses to pick up on, and so the subject is dropped. But I can still hear something in that box behind me, something alive, moving around from time to time, occasionally making what sounds like spitting noises.

 

Near Galveston the night ends, and the flags on buildings are snapping straight out to the northwest, toward Montana, from where I've come. There's a warm southeast wind, which is the best for fishing, and though we are still in the squall, Jack appears crazed by this good omen, rolling his window down, despite the rain, to smell it. He believes there is the tiniest chance that it will be raining on land but not out in the bay, that it will be wet and storming in one place, but dry and breezy at that place's edge. As we start driving past the refineries, past the tidal inlets, Kirby and I begin to believe in his wild hope; we have only a few miles to go, but it's true, the rain has slowed to a drizzle.

“We did it,” Jack says, delighted. “We fucking outran it.”

 

There's no one else out on the bay, though soon others will begin showing up, diluting the space with their presence. For now it is just us, and we get out and watch as Jack backs the trailer down the boat ramp into the water. Colonies of barnacles cling to nearby pilings, and there's a little bait shop at the end of the dock, which is not open yet because the weather has been so bad, even though it's early light, dawn, fishing time.

Towering above our launch spot is a huge billboard with the photograph of a dark-haired woman on it, perhaps the most beautiful woman we've ever seen; it's one of those “Wanted: Missing Person” advertisements. She's smiling on the billboard, and way above us like that, up in the windy, cloud-parting sky, she looks like a goddess, granting us permission to go fishing, to go out and play.

“
HELP FIND RENEE JACKSON
,” the billboard says, and I study the woman closely as I try to remember if I have ever seen her before, and then I think how the name sounds familiar. Perhaps she is someone I went to school with. But that is too long ago, it is old pork, stored in salt, gaps in memory, and there is only the future. I would like to help if I could—I would like to lift that bull too—but it's all I can do to hope that Renee is all right, to give her my earnest, best hope. It is not a good feeling.

We're lowering the boat into the water with a winch, the
click-click-click
of the wire cable spooling out. Kirby's operating it. He's been on a hundred fishing trips with Jack. I get the sack lunches that Tricia, Kirby's wife, packed for all of us, and carry them down the dock and hand them to Jack, who is already in the boat arranging things, checking the fuel tanks and such.

“Tricia make these?” Jack calls up to Kirby, who's about to pull the jeep and trailer away, to go park.

“Yep,” says Kirby.

“She's so sweet,” says Jack.

“Would Wendy make a lunch like that for you?” Kirby asks.

“Hell,” says Jack, looking through the lunch as if it's a discovery, “she didn't even get up to say goodbye.”

Kirby is beaming, as if he's gotten away with something.

Kirby and I climb into the boat. The first thing I notice is that there aren't any life vests, and I can't swim, but I'm not worried. I'm not going beyond the bay. I look above me at Renee Jackson, the most beautiful woman I've ever seen, and it seems, this early in the morning, having driven through the night and the rain to get here, a blessing to launch ourselves beneath her gaze. The wind whips at my windbreaker, and I feel my eyes beginning to blur and go to water.

“Hey, are you crying, man?” Jack asks, and I wonder if Kirby has told him about Margie and me separating. “It's okay if you are, man,” he says. The engine has finally caught and is sputtering clouds of blue smoke out over the bay, giving off the summer-sweet smell of outboard fuel. Jack the dentist is another man now, down low in the boat, working the throttle, turning the wheel with one hand. He's suddenly an outlaw too, the happiest one, and I think that's how it always goes, how the longer you go without something, the happier you are when you finally get it. I think about how happy Renee Jackson's parents would be if she were to show up at their front door today.

“I mean, it's all right,” Jack says again, squinting at me in the weak light. Every raggedy cloud is fleeing, burning flame red above us as the sky begins to light up, though down here on the water it's still dusky and gloomy, still foggy gray. “Kirby cried for half an hour after we lost a redfish last year,” Jack says. “I don't mean lost it on a hook—I mean lost it, dead. She was a forty-five-pound female with eggs, and it took so long to land her that she wasn't any good by the time we got her in. We tried to let her go again right away, but she just lay there in the surf, gasping, and then rolled over on her side. We worked with her for two hours before she died. For a while we thought she was going to make it,” Jack says. “She was as big as a dog. Two hours. What else could we do but cry?”

I have to turn away from the picture of Renee Jackson or I
will
cry.

“Hand me one of those Rolling Rocks,” I tell Kirby.

“Running like a fine watch!” Jack shouts, revving the engine.

An alarming
thump
shakes the back of the boat, where the motor is housed, followed by an even more alarming miscellany of piston noise and exhaust. Slowly we creep into the bay, following the lane of driven cedar piles into deeper water.

We run around in large circles before entering open water, to iron out the engine's kinks before we get too far from shore. Sure enough, the engine cuts out, just as the sun is completely up, brilliant and golden in our eyes, and the strong salt wind is in our faces.

We sit like fools for a while, too far from shore to wade or swim back—the water is four to six feet deep throughout the bay, but the current is strong. Kirby and I, out of old habit, begin to despair and open bottles of beer. Jack, though, is still riding the crest of being captain, and the change in him is still evident, even from the set of his jaw. He lifts the cover of the engine and spies the problem immediately: the wire leading from one of the spark plugs is bare and wet from the storm, and has shorted out. Jack has some electrical tape in his toolbox, and he wraps the offending wire quickly.

I don't mean to make Jack look like such a genius. The reason he was able to go straight to the problem is that he and Kirby had taken Jack's seventy-nine-year-old father out in the boat the week before, and the old man, a perfectionist, had ranted and raved for the first hour of the trip about the terrible condition Jack had let the boat fall into. Evidently the boat had belonged to Jack's father fifteen or twenty years ago, and the old man's loopy hearing had picked up on the spark-plug wire's shorting right away.

“He was really howling,” Kirby says of Jack's father. “Man, is he a hardass.”

Chastened by the memory, Captain Jack slouches a little lower in the seat. Something is troubling him now; his face looks like it did when he was driving through the rain.

“Dollar-bill green!” he shouts, looking down at the water we're skimming across. I'm sitting up in the high-perched bow like a mascot, sniffing the sea. “When the water's this color and the wind's out of the southeast,” Jack says, “you'll catch fish.”

Kirby moves up to the bow with me, still drinking his beer, and tries to fill me in as quickly as possible on all the things I should know, all the things he and Jack have learned from fishing together for the last five or six years.

“There's dolphins out here, but you never catch them,” Kirby says. “They only follow you. Sometimes they come right up to the boat and stick their head out of the water and look you in the eye. A lot of times you can tell where the speckled trout are by the way the seagulls are acting. In warm weather, the summer usually, you can look for slicks. A slick is an oily, flat spot on the water where the fish have gotten into a feeding frenzy on the shrimp and have eaten so much they've regurgitated it, and all the oils and digestive juices make this big slick on the ocean. It smells like watermelon. You smell watermelon out at sea and you'd better be ready.”

“We may run aground,” Jack shouts from the back. “Be careful.” I picture us sliding to an immediate stop, beached by a barely submerged sandbar. I picture myself not stopping but being catapulted out of the boat, a human cannonball, and I sit a little lower in the bow and grip the sides.