THE Nick Adams STORIES (13 page)

Nobody knows how big this creek is, he thought, it picks up an awful volume of water in that bad swamp up above. Now he looked up the creek and down it and up the hill to the hemlock forest where the camp was. Then he walked to where he had left the pole with the line and the hook and baited the hook carefully and spat on it for good luck. Holding the
pole and the line with the baited hook in his right hand he walked very carefully and gently toward the bank of the narrow, heavy-flowing stream.

It was so narrow here that his willow pole would have spanned it and as he came close to the bank he heard the turbulent rush of the water. He stopped by the bank, out of sight of anything in the stream, and took two lead shot, split down one side, out of the tobacco pouch and bent them on the line about a foot above the hook, clinching them with his teeth.

He swung the hook on which the two worms curled out over the water and dropped it gently in so that it sank, swirling in the fast water, and he lowered the tip of the willow pole to let the current take the line and the baited hook under the bank. He felt the line straighten and a sudden heavy firmness. He swung up on the pole and it bent almost double in his hand. He felt the throbbing, jerking pull that did not yield as he pulled. Then it yielded, rising in the water with the line. There was a heavy wildness of movement in the narrow, deep current, and the trout was torn out of the water and, flopping in the air, sailed over Nick's shoulder and onto the bank behind him. Nick saw him shine in the sun and then he found him where he was tumbling in the ferns. He was strong and heavy in Nick's hands and he had a pleasant smell and Nick saw how dark his back was and how brilliant his spots were colored and how bright the edges of his fins were. They were white on the edge with a black line behind and then there was the lovely golden sunset color of his belly. Nick held him in his right hand and he could just reach around him.

He's pretty big for the skillet, he thought. But I've hurt him and I have to kill him.

He knocked the trout's head sharply against the handle of his hunting knife and laid him against the trunk of a birch tree.

“Damn,” he said. “He's a perfect size for Mrs. Packard and her trout dinners. But he's pretty big for Littless and me.”

I better go upstream and find a shallow and try to get a couple of small ones, he thought. Damn, didn't he feel like something when I horsed him out though? They can talk all they want about playing them but people that have never horsed them out don't know what they can make you feel. What if it only lasts that long? It's the time when there's no give at all and then they start to come and what they do to you on the way up and into the air.

This is a strange creek, he thought. It's funny when you have to hunt for small ones.

He found his pole where he had thrown it. The hook was bent and he straightened it. Then he picked up the heavy fish and started up the stream.

There's one shallow, pebbly part just after she comes out of the upper swamp, he thought. I can get a couple of small ones there. Littless might not like this big one. if she gets homesick I'll have to take her back. I wonder what those old boys are doing now? I don't think that goddam Evans kid knows about this place. That son of a bitch. I don't think anybody fished in here but Indians. You should have been an Indian, he thought. It would have saved you a lot of trouble.

He made his way up the creek, keeping back from the stream but once stepping onto a piece of bank where the stream flowed underground. A big trout broke out in a violence that made a slashing wake in the water. He was a trout so big that it hardly seemed he could turn in the stream.

“When did you come up?” Nick said when the fish had gone under the bank again further upstream. “Boy, what a trout.”

At the pebbly shallow stretch he caught two small trout. They were beautiful fish, too, firm and hard and he gutted
the three fish and tossed the guts into the stream, then washed the trout carefully in the cold water and then wrapped them in a small faded sugar sack from his pocket.

It's a good thing that girl likes fish, he thought. I wish we could have picked some berries. I know where I can always get some, though. He started back up the hill slope toward their camp. The sun was down behind the hill and the weather was good. He looked out across the swamp and up in the sky, above where the arm of the lake would be, he saw a fish hawk flying.

He came up to the lean-to very quietly and his sister did not hear him. She was lying on her side, reading. Seeing her, he spoke softly not to startle her.

“What did you do, you monkey?”

She turned and looked at him and smiled and shook her head.

“I cut it off,” she said.

“How?”

“With a scissors. How did you think?”

“How did you see to do it?”

“I just held it out and cut it. It's easy. Do I look like a boy?”

“Like a wild boy of Borneo.”

“I couldn't cut it like a Sunday-school boy. Does it look too wild?”

“No.”

“It's very exciting,” she said. “Now I'm your sister but I'm a boy, too. Do you think it will change me into a boy?”

“No.”

“I wish it would.”

“You're crazy, Littless.”

“Maybe I am. Do I look like an idiot boy?”

“A little.”

“You can make it neater. You can see to cut it with a comb.”

“I'll have to make it a little better but not much. Are you hungry, idiot brother?”

“Can't I just be an un-idiot brother?”

“I don't want to trade you for a brother.”

“You have to now, Nickie, don't you see? It was something we had to do. I should have asked you but I knew it was something we had to do so I did it for a surprise.”

“I like it,” Nick said. “The hell with everything. I like it very much.”

“Thank you, Nickie, so much. I was laying trying to rest like you said. But all I could do was imagine things to do for you. I was going to get you a chewing tobacco can full of knockout drops from some big saloon in some place like Sheboygan.”

“Who did you get them from?”

Nick was sitting down now and his sister sat on his lap and held her arms around his neck and rubbed her cropped head against his cheek.

“I got them from the Queen of the Whores,” she said. “And you know the name of the saloon?”

“No.”

“The Royal Ten Dollar Gold Piece Inn and Emporium.”

“What did you do there?”

“I was a whore's assistant.”

“What's a whore's assistant do?”

“Oh she carries the whore's train when she walks and opens her carriage door and shows her to the right room, it's like a lady in waiting I guess.”

“What's she say to the whore?”

“She'll say anything that comes into her mind as long as it's polite.”

“Like what, brother?”

“Like, ‘Well ma'am, it must be pretty tiring on a hot day
like today to be just a bird in a gilded cage,' Things like that.”

“What's the whore say?”

“She says, ‘Yes, indeedy. it sure is sweetness.' Because this whore I was whore's assistant to is of humble origin.”

“What kind of origin are you?”

“I'm the sister or the brother of a morbid writer and I'm delicately brought up. This makes me intensely desirable to the main whore and to all of her circle.”

“Did you get the knockout drops?”

“Of course. She said, ‘Hon, take these little old drops.' Thank you,' I said. ‘Give my regards to your morbid brother and ask him to stop by the Emporium anytime he is at She-boygan.'”

“Get off my lap,” Nick said.

“That's just the way they talk in the Emporium,” Littless said.

“I have to get supper. Aren't you hungry?”

“I'll get supper.”

“No,” Nick said. “You keep on talking.”

“Don't you think we're going to have fun, Nickie?”

“We're having fun now.”

“Do you want me to tell you about the other thing I did for you?”

“You mean before you decided to do something practical and cut off your hair?”

“This was practical enough. Wait till you hear it. Can I kiss you while you're making supper?”

“Wait a while and I'll tell you. What was it you were going to do?”

“Well, I guess I was ruined morally last night when I stole the whiskey. Do you think you can be ruined morally by just one thing like that?”

“No. Anyway the bottle was open.”

“Yes. But I took the empty pint bottle and the quart bottle with the whiskey in it out to the kitchen and I poured the pint bottle full and some spilled on my hand and I licked it off and I thought that probably ruined me morally.”

“How'd it taste?”

“Awfully strong and funny and a little sick-making.”

“That wouldn't ruin you morally.”

“Well, I'm glad because if I was ruined morally how could I exercise a good influence on you?”

“I don't know,” Nick said. “What was it you were going to do?”

He had his fire made and the skillet resting on it and he was laying strips of bacon in the skillet. His sister was watching and she had her hands folded across her knees and he watched her unclasp her hands and put one arm down and lean on it and put her legs out straight. She was practicing being a boy.

“I've got to learn to put my hands right.”

“Keep them away from your head.”

“I know, it would be easy if there was some boy my own age to copy.”

“Copy me.”

“That would be natural, wouldn't it? You won't laugh, though?”

“Maybe.”

“Gee, I hope I won't start to be a girl while we're on the trip.”

“Don't worry.”

“We have the same shoulders and the same kind of legs.”

“What was the other thing you were going to do?”

Nick was cooking the trout now. The bacon was curled brown on a fresh-cut chip of wood from the piece of fallen timber they were using for the fire and they both smelled the trout cooking in the bacon fat. Nick basted them and then
turned them and basted them again, it was getting dark and he had rigged a piece of canvas behind the little fire so that it would not be seen.

“What were you going to do?” he asked again. Littless leaned forward and spat toward the fire.

“How was that?”

“You missed the skillet anyway.”

“Oh, it's pretty bad. I got it out of the Bible. I was going to take three spikes, one for each of them, and drive them into the temples of those two and that boy while they slept.”

“What were you going to drive them in with?”

“A muffled hammer.”

“How do you muffle a hammer?”

“I'd muffle it all right.”

“That nail thing's pretty rough to try.”

“Well, that girl did it in the Bible and since I've seen armed men drunk and asleep and circulated among them at night and stolen their whiskey why shouldn't I go the whole way, especially if I learned it in the Bible?”

“They didn't have a muffled hammer in the Bible.”

“I guess I mixed it up with muffled oars.”

“Maybe. And we don't want to kill anybody. That's why you came along.”

“I know. But crime comes easy for you and me, Nickie. We're different from the others. Then I thought if I was ruined morally I might as well be useful.”

“You're crazy, Littless,” he said. “Listen, does tea keep you awake?”

“I don't know. I never had it at night. Only peppermint tea.”

“I'll make it very weak and put canned cream in it.”

“I don't need it, Nickie, if we're short.”

“it will just give the milk a little taste.”

They were eating now. Nick had cut them each two slices of rye bread and he soaked one slice for each in the bacon fat in the skillet. They ate that and the trout that were crisp outside and cooked well and very tender inside. Then they put the trout skeletons in the fire and ate the bacon made in a sandwich with the other piece of bread, and then Littless drank the weak tea with the condensed milk in it and Nick tapped two slivers of wood into the holes he had punched in the can.

“Did you have enough?”

“Plenty. The trout was wonderful and the bacon, too. Weren't we lucky they had rye bread?”

“Eat an apple,” he said. “Maybe we'll have something good tomorrow. Maybe I should have made a bigger supper, Littless.”

“No. I ad plenty.”

“You're sure you're not hungry?”

“No. I'm full. I've got some chocolate if you'd like some.”

“Where'd you get it?”

“From my savior.”

“Where?”

“My savior. Where I save everything.”

“Oh.”

“This is fresh. Some is the hard kind from the kitchen. We can start on that and save the other for sometime special. Look, my savior's got a drawstring like a tobacco pouch. We can use it for nuggets and things like that. Do you think we'll get out west, Nickie, on this trip?”