The World Made Straight (13 page)

Diagnosis: Same.

Treatment: Hot sassafras tea three times daily. Oatmeal and
baking soda bath morning and before bed.

Fee: None.

Transcribed letter to take to her father.

Nancy Cathey, age
26.

Return visit from Dec.
30.

Much improved. Continue to drink ginger tea twice daily at
onset of menses.

Fee: None.

Marcie Alexander, age
51.

Complaint: Puniness.

Diagnosis: Torpid liver.

Treatment: Mayapple-root tea twice daily.

Fee: None.

Received word today Julius wounded at Corinth in October.

The fishing rod rattled in the truck bed as Travis drove north toward Antioch. Daylight savings time had ended at midnight and Travis felt disoriented when he checked for rain clouds. Twelve o'clock, his watch said, but for six months the sun had not been overhead at noon. The sky seemed to have slid forward, dragging the sun with it.

Lori came out the door in jeans and tennis shoes, a purple sweatshirt with
ASHEVILLE-BUNCOMBE TECH
printed on the front. The same denim backpack she'd brought to the hospital dangled from her right hand. Probably some sandwiches inside, though he'd told Lori to eat before he picked her up.

“This one's for you,” she said, and pulled from the backpack not a sandwich but a sweatshirt. “It's just like mine. Got them Friday when Momma took me to fill out financial aid forms.”

“Thanks,” he said, and laid the sweatshirt on the seat between them.

“Don't you want to put it on?”

“No,” Travis said, trying not to sound irritated. “I'd just get fish slime on it.”

Lori took a book from the backpack. “Got some reading for English tomorrow. Thought I'd get a little of it done while we're driving there.”

We
ain't driving, he thought, I am. Lori read as he drove west a few miles, then turned onto the gravel road that led to Spillcorn Creek. Shank and the other guys Travis knew spoke of the future in vague generalities—joining the military or farming, a mill job in Asheville or Winston-Salem. You'd have thought a girl from Antioch, which was the back of beyond even in Madison County, would have done much the same, especially one who sat on the back row and said near nothing until forced to. Most folks would figure a girl like that wouldn't have the confidence to plan much of a future, but Travis knew better now. Lori believed she could do most anything she put her mind to, and didn't mind letting you know it. She reminded Travis of places on the French Broad where banks tightened and the water flowed quiet and the surface looked smooth, but once you stepped in the current ran so strong you couldn't stand up against it.

Travis wanted to share some of that confidence, and because of his reading he'd begun to. He was learning in a new way, every reading assignment and every discussion linked to a single chain. Except
chain
wasn't the right word to describe it, because chains held things close and what Travis felt was the
opposite, a widening like ripples in a pond. Synthesis. That was what Leonard called this kind of connecting, and he claimed a lot of folks at college, including some who taught, couldn't do what came naturally to Travis.

Starting to think you're too good to get dirt under your nails. That's the kind of thing his daddy would say if he heard such talk, finding fault because there was no pleasing him. Wednesday morning Travis had seen the old man's truck parked in front of Pinson's Feed and Seed. He'd finished putting groceries in the customer's backseat but hadn't rolled the buggy back inside, instead taking a few steps closer to the street. Travis now two months on his own when his daddy claimed he'd be back in a week. Travis had waited, his hand half raised to wave. But when the truck passed the parking lot the old man hadn't even glanced his way.

Travis gripped the steering wheel tighter, the memory of how foolish he'd felt making his face burn. Next time he'd have a big rock in his hand. He'd throw it right through the damn windshield and see if the old man would notice him then. He remembered the slap, how it seemed the poison of the yellow jacket stings coursed from all other parts of his body into his left cheek. Somehow still there, like a brand. But he didn't have to worry about not pleasing his father anymore. He could do what
he
wanted, work on a farm or in a grocery store or even behind a desk if he had a mind to. He could read a book and take that book apart the same way you might a car engine to see how it runs.

Yet when Travis glanced down at the purple sweatshirt, he couldn't shake the notion that maybe not much had changed
after all, that he was still trying to please someone other than himself and nothing he did was quite enough. When he'd told Lori about the GED, he thought it would finally stop her nagging about his returning to school, which was what she'd done pretty much nonstop since August. Getting the GED was something he wanted to do, but soon as he told Lori she started pecking at him about his going to Tech with her come fall. Leonard too kept bringing it up, not just A-B Tech but schools like Western Carolina and Chapel Hill. Wants you to have what he had and screwed up, Dena had claimed.

They parked beside the bridge. Spillcorn was low, surfacing enough sand and rocks so they wouldn't get much more than their feet wet. First frost had withered the trillium and jewel-weed. On the stream's banks sumac had blistered to a deep velvety red. But it was warm for late October, in the high sixties, the leaves of the trees thinned out enough that the sun laid a scattered brightness on the water. A sagging barbed-wire fence bordered the creek, and they eased through the strands, careful not to let the rusty thorns snatch shirt or jeans. A dead walnut tree rose on the other side, leafless, dry branches beneath. Travis saw a hole in the trunk, reached inside, and brought out a single butternut-colored feather.

He held it up for Lori to see.

“A yellowhammer feather,” he explained. “A man in Marshall makes trout flies out of them.”

He unzipped his vest's side pocket and placed the feather inside. Having good luck already, Travis told himself as they stepped onto the creek bank. He tied on a Panther Martin, its
treble hook wrapped in crimson thread, then bit off the excess line. He tested the knot and checked the drag.

“When I told Momma we were going fishing she said to bring some back to eat.” Lori smiled. “I think she wants proof we weren't just looking for an excuse to get off by ourselves to do some sparking.”

“I'll do my best,” Travis said.

They moved upstream, Lori hopscotching between sand and rock while Travis took a straighter path. The water seeping into his shoes was cold enough to have him do some hopscotching of his own, but he didn't want Lori thinking he couldn't stand a little cold water. Nearing the first pool Travis moved slower, hunched over to be less visible. He paused in the tailwaters. In the pool's eddies red and yellow leaves laid a thin quilt on the stream's surface. The more sodden leaves blackened the bottom, made hang-ups harder to see.

He aimed for the white foam at the pool's head, but the cast was too long and snagged rhododendron. As Travis moved forward to free the lure, water rippled on the pool's far side as a trout shot under the bank.

“I'm rusty,” he said.

He unhooked the spinner and they walked up the creek. His next casts were better, but it was only where the stream bowed and made a deep undercut that a strike made the rod flex and shudder. A flash of red and silver darted downstream, then threw itself against the air, the spinner dangling from its mouth. It was a big fish for a creek, fifteen, maybe sixteen inches. The trout turned back upstream and the reel's drag
made a zipping sound as the fish veered under the bank. A brown would have stayed there, trying to tangle the line up in a snag, but rainbows liked their fight in open water. The trout came out and jumped once more before giving up.

Travis knelt on the shore, pinning the fish so it couldn't flop back into the water. The trout beat its black-spotted caudal fin against the sand, its body struggling under Travis's palm like one long slippery muscle. He gripped a fist-sized rock and struck the fish's head. It shuddered and went limp. His hands trembled as he laid the trout in the shallows and rinsed the sand off. For a few moments he just stared at it, the gold-ringed eyes and small head, the long red slash on the flank. He'd only caught a couple of trout this big, and it didn't yet seem fully real.

Lori came up behind him. Travis hooked his index finger through a gill and lifted the fish so she could see it.

“This one ought to keep me on the good side of your mom.”

“I think so,” Lori said. “That one could probably feed near the whole family.”

Travis dipped the trout in water one last time and placed it in the deep pouch of his fishing vest. He pulled the vest back on, felt the trout's damp weight between his shoulder blades. His hands were sticky with scales that glistened like slivers of silver. He washed his hands in the creek, keeping them in the cold water as long as he could stand.

Lori smiled at him.

“You worried I won't hold your hand if it smells like trout?” she asked, which was exactly what he'd been thinking. He blushed and that just caused Lori to smile wider, like she'd got him good.

Travis had three more trout in the vest when they came to where the creek split. One smaller branch went into a meadow while the main stream disappeared into a stand of poplars. Travis took the meadow fork, the rivulet no more than two feet wide, in most places the water thin and clear. He and Lori walked thirty yards before Travis made his first cast into a pool no bigger than a truck tire.

“There can't be a fish in there,” Lori said, but the spinner barely touched the surface when a six-inch trout shot out from under the bank and struck. Travis raised his rod and lifted the fish, set it down in the broom sedge. He dipped his right hand into the water before cradling the fish in his palm so Lori could see the gray-black back, the red and olive spots on the flanks and deep-orange dorsal fins.

“It's prettier than the others,” Lori said. She pushed her hair back and leaned closer. “What kind is it?”

“A speckled trout.”

“I've never seen one before. Are they rare?”

“Didn't used to be.”

Travis gently freed the hook and eased the trout in the water. It surged from his hand and disappeared under the bank.

“What happened?”

“Browns and rainbows got stocked in streams. Speckleds don't compete well. Plus they need purer water than other trout.”

“How'd you learn all this?”

“Read about it.”

“Probably in the school library when you should have been doing classwork,” Lori said, though not in a chiding way.

“The stuff we did in class was boring. Or at least the teachers made it boring.”

“But Leonard doesn't?”

“No, he makes it interesting, even the science and math.”

A gray squirrel chattered in a big hickory across the meadow. Enough leaves had fallen to expose its nest wedged in the tree's highest fork. Another squirrel answered deeper in the woods. Squirrel season was just days off, and Travis figured these two wouldn't last very long.

“Does he have any idea when you'll take the GED?” Lori asked.

“Maybe soon as April. He said it depends on how quick I get through the math.”

“That means we can start A-B Tech in the summer.”

Lori spoke matter-of-factly, as if it were already decided, and Travis knew how Shank and his other buddies would react if they were there. They'd wink at one another, talk later about how Travis didn't have to make up his mind anymore because he had someone to do it for him.

Lori moved closer, leaned her head into his shoulder.

“I bought some new perfume.” She raised her hand and let it rest on his cheek. “Smell,” she said, pressing the back of her wrist to his nose.

Travis breathed in the perfume's sweetness, and it gave him the same easy downshift into mellowness as a second beer. His aggravation seemed to settle on the rivulet's surface and drift away.

The sun fell full upon them, a soft warming that made the whole meadow drowsy, the jorees silent, a big yellow and
black writing spider motionless in its web. No hint of a breeze, as if even the wind had lain down for a nap. The cloudless sky like a painting too, its color a light but also denser blue. Cerulean, he thought, remembering the word he'd read last week, one he'd asked Leonard to pronounce for him.

“The sky's cerulean,” Travis said.

“What does that mean?”

“Cerulean,” Travis said again, enjoying the way the word's sounds moved from the closed front teeth, then up and down in his mouth and ending in the throat as though the word had to be bitten off, chewed, and swallowed. “It means a clear blue.”

It also means you don't know everything, which maybe you ought to remember when you try to decide everything I need to do, Travis could have said, but he didn't say those words because Lori had brought her lips to his and at that moment nothing else much mattered. So this is what all those songs are about, he thought, remembering nights he lay in the dark listening to radio stations, songs coming from faraway places like Chicago and New Orleans and Memphis, and pretty much every song saying the same thing—that love was near the only thing worth singing about. He wished he'd brought his transistor radio, because it would be like all those singers were singing just for him and Lori.

They sat down in the broom sedge, and the cooler ground reminded Travis that despite the warm sun it was October. Soon enough there'd be cold days after snow when the low sky turned a blue so dark that come dusk it would seep like ink, stain the white ground deep blue as well. Not long before such
nights would be here. He thought about how good it would be to hold Lori once it turned cold, let the press of their bodies warm them as they kissed, maybe did more than kiss.