When We Were Wolves (27 page)

The elderly desk clerk looks them over in their forage caps, Bermuda shorts, T-shirts (the Colonel’s Rolling Stones Voodoo Lounge Tour, the Private’s Bagelbird), and sandals.

“You fellas with the Passion Play?” asks the desk clerk.

“We’re Texas Rangers in town on a pornography bust,” says the Colonel. “You rent by the hour, too?” The desk clerk does not think this is funny, is frowning. The Private nods. “Yes, we are here for the Passion Play. There a discount for that?” One dollar.

The Colonel then pays the two-dollar surcharge for Charley Reynolds after the desk clerk says, looking down at the dog no car can contain, “I see you brought a dog.”

Her flies are small miracles. Tiny damsels, Daisy Millers, opulent caddis flies in all colors and sizes. Shiny Telico nymphs. Little Adams. Noble royal coachmen. Muddler minnows and grasshoppers. Bead-heads. Streamers. Hare’s ears. Stoneflies, salmon flies. Woolly buggers, black gnats, and renegades. She even invented
a fly she calls the Libbie Bacon, tied with the soft hair from Charley Reynolds’s belly.

“It’s a shame that you’ll now have to buy them, pay for them,” the Private tells the Colonel. But their fly boxes are still worlds of insects: peacock hurl, elk hair, chicken hackle and deer tail, rabbit fur and mallard feather woven to life around a gold hook.

“And you won’t?” asks the Colonel.

Sue gave the Private a full fly box as a Christmas gift the first year he moved to Hardin from Wyoming. Sometimes at night, when he’s alone—most every night—and cannot sleep, he opens the box under his reading light and gently touches the flies and his heart speeds up a bit. When he would lose a fly—on a large willow, a snag in the river, maybe a fish—Sue would replace it with one of the same kind but yet different, one thing but also something else. None of her flies are exactly alike. The Private pointed this out to the Colonel, who still calls them bugs.

The Private started keeping the fly journal the first day he fished the flies Sue tied for him, the morning of the day after Christmas. It was bitter cold and the guides on the rod kept freezing, so that he would have to dip the graphite shaft into the water to de-ice the rod before each cast. Yet he caught more trout than ever before in his life.

While the Colonel ties fresh leader and tippet material onto his line, the Private looks through his fly box. Their plan is to take in tonight’s Passion Play (free tickets) and do some fishing tomorrow after the ten-o’clock audition. From the motel room window, they can see Calvary, the sturdy cross as big as a pine tree, up the hill to the east of the amphitheater.

They were trying to have children—if not directly trying to prevent them is trying. Sue would often say, “I already have my hands full taking care of one boy. I don’t need any more.” This concerns the Colonel still. Even more so now. His mustache weighs at his lip when he thinks about it too hard.

Spearfish Creek runs strong and clear through the Passion Play neighborhood. Today you can stand on any bridge in town and peer down at fish feeding against the current. Many healthy rainbow and browns. The Colonel’s eyes widen as the men count the black silhouettes of trout feeding on the insects that wash their way. Heartbeats quicken. He calls this creek a river.

The detachment of three—a colonel, a private, and a basset hound scout—set out into the afternoon sun from the Shady Spot to scout the holes, the “honey buckets,” they will fish tomorrow. There are many of these honey buckets running through the back yards of the people who don’t mind living in the New Testament neighborhood.

As they patrol the river, the troopers wave to the grillers and the gardeners and the fertilizers and waterers, crossing now and then through the cool, calf-deep water in their sandals, though only some of the neighbors wave back—some sheepishly from behind their gazing balls and ceramic deer; some annoyed from behind their smoking Webers; some taken aback with beers in their hands as if, Honey, I think Colonel George Armstrong Custer in a Rolling Stones T-shirt and his basset hound just waded through our back yard.

Salome did not tell them about this: the hatchery! How could she have left this out? The creek runs under a stonework bridge, and they wade out from the shadow of the bridge and peer through the chain-link and barbed-wire No Trespassing fence of what the sign heralds as the
D.C. BOOTH FISH HATCHERY, EST.
1896. And for whole moments, minutes, they are old men outside the chain-link of the city swimming pool, Seaworld, Mainland, staring in.

Tall cottonwoods, oaks, and spruce trees, as well as the flowers that have been planted around each of the three stone-and-concrete rearing pools, reflect off the green-gray water. Two lovers and a family with a stroller and children walk along the boardwalk and gaze into the pools. You can, for a quarter, buy a handful of trout meal from the gumball machine bolted to the railing. Many signs: No Fishing.

A young woman in a khaki uniform sows trout meal from a tin bucket. The water boils with feeding fingerlings. Her auburn hair catches the late-afternoon light and is the color of Sunday. She is singing to the fry as she feeds them. Her hand dips into the bucket and she bows slightly and releases the meal. “I will make you fishers of men, fishers of men, fishers of men.” Charley Reynolds chases a butterfly at the edge of the shallow water running over their feet, never catching it, as the men watch, mouths slightly closed, hearts racing. “I will make you fishers of men, if you follow me.”

The lovers and the family stop to lean over the railing and look down into another pool, a larger pool. The father buys a handful of trout food and gives it to the young boy, who flings it all at once. The water explodes with trout, trout as big as—or bigger than— any the Colonel and the Private and Charley Reynolds have ever seen. “Good Lord, will you look at that! Did you see the size of those fins?” asks the Colonel. “Those tails!”

“Yes, she is beautiful,” says the Private in a dry-mouthed whisper.

The Black Hills Passion Play draws people from all over the country, from all over the world. The Colonel and the Private have never been here. Young Christians in purple tunics direct cars, sell tickets, sell programs. An official program costs as much as it costs Charley Reynolds to stay at the Shady Spot. Outside the ticket office/gift shop there is a rather graceless statue,
Christ Stilling the
Waters
, by Gutzon Borglum, the artist who blasted four presidents into a mountain just south of here. The Christ of the sculpture looks less like he’s stilling waters than waving to friends.

The evening is cool. The tickets Salome gave them are not excellent, not VIP tickets. The troopers are in the center, the fifty-yard line, but back fifty rows, back far enough to wonder how much real weight Salome pulls around here. But they can see downtown Jerusalem. They can see Calvary. They can see the tall cottonwoods that surround the trout hatchery a couple of blocks away. The troopers stand and remove their forage caps and place them over their hearts for “The Star-Spangled Banner.” There is a sliver of moon, not yet a quarter. There is an evening star in the west. The fanfare ends. A blond angel appears in the Great Temple and recites the prologue, “O ye children of God …”

“It’s going to be a long night—look at this program—twenty-two scenes,” says the Colonel.

“That which you will experience today, O people, treasure well within your hearts. Let it be the light to lead you—until your last day.” With that the angel disappears and the streets of Jerusalem fill with asses, sheep, armored centurions on white stallions, and laughing, running children.

When the play ends, the troopers are not besieged with passion, which is a little disappointing to both of them. An hour and a half of Sunday left. The actor has an audition in eleven and a half hours. Pontius Pilate is a muscular, tan, deep-voiced man. No long dirty-blond curls to his shoulders. No bushy handlebar mustache. It will not be easy.

“Private, you awake?” asks the Colonel at a quarter to midnight.

“Yes,” replies the Private. “Thinking about Sue?”

“No.”

“The audition tomorrow?”

“No.” Those fish. “Private, did you see those dorsal fins?”

They are out the door at midnight with an electric beep of the Colonels Timex Ironman, waders on, vests heavy with tackle, wicker creels, rods in hand, Charley Reynolds in the lead, scouting his way up the creek. They wade through the same back yards, which are now dark except for a few dim yard lights and the electric blue of hanging bug lights and TVs through a couple windows. Walking, wading slowly, they have enough light to see by. They do not cast, do not hit the honey buckets they mapped in their heads earlier. “Just where are we going?” asks the Private. The troopers are advancing.

They stop under the bridge. Charley Reynolds is up ahead, rustling through some willows along the bank. They take the lines from the reels and thread them through the guides on their graphite rods. The Colonel reaches into a vest pocket and pulls out a tin fly box. He opens it and the insects come to life in the dim glow of a streetlight. Gold bead-heads, hooks, and peacock hurl shine in the low light. The Colonel selects a size ten delta-wing caddis fly, threads his tippet through the eye, cinches down a simple Orvis knot, and slicks the insect up with silvery floatant to keep it on top of the water.

“Fishing dry, huh,” says the Private.

“I’m not yet sure what these Dakota fish like for breakfast.”

The Private ties on a humble Libbie Bacon in a size fourteen that will sink maybe a foot below the surface in still water, but no more.

Upstream, Charley Reynolds finds a low spot where he ducks under the fence and into the D. C. Booth Fish Hatchery.
The troopers watch the basset hounds silhouette as he sniffs around the ponds and lunges at the bugs ticking under the floodlights. “How the hell did he get in?” asks the Private. “Let’s advance along the fenceline,” says the Colonel.

They find the high spot in the rusty Cyclone fence. The Colonel goes to his knees and reaches his fragile rod and creel under the sharp steel mesh, “Just how low can you go?” he says and commences to crawl under on his soft neoprene belly, careful not to rip his vest or the three-millimeter-thick waders. He stands erect, brushing the dirt from his waders and vest. “Private, why don’t you check that flank over there?” says the Colonel, motioning with his rod toward the tree-lined fencerow at the south end of the hatchery. The rearing ponds are lit from the bottom and they glow in the night.

“Colonel,” says the Private, his rod leaning against the fence, both hands grasping the fence like a tree sloth, still outside the hatchery, still looking in. “Colonel, I can’t go in there.”

“Why in Heavens name not?” asks the Colonel, nervously adjusting the drag on his reel between glances at the pools after the occasional light smack of a fish on an unfortunate insect.

“Because it’s trespassing,” says the Private.

The Colonel looks at him, his mustache arched in disbelief.

“Because … I’m sorry. I know we’ve trespassed before plenty of times, but this is different,” says the Private. “And right now, I’m sorry, I haven’t always, but right now I have just a little more left to lose than you.”

“For one?” says the Colonel.

“A job, for starters.”

The Colonel reaches into his wicker creel and pulls out the crow-black government Colt. He tucks it back under the fence, handle first, and says, “Here, there’s one round in it. You know what to do if we’re ambushed.”

“You want me to shoot myself?” cries the Private.

“Chrissakes, no. Fire into the air, warn me.” The Colonel leaps atop the stone wall and his rod is at once in shadowy motion, the graphite whip whistling in the still summer night. False cast, follow through, false cast, follow through—the fly stays suspended throughout the series of false casts, back and forth, not landing but rehearsing to land. Sploosh! The moment the delicate caddis kisses the surface of the pool, a giant rainbow trout engulfs it, bowing the rod at a severe angle while the Colonel arches his back and sets his arms to play the fish.

The rainbow breaks water and steps a few beats across the surface, tail dancing in the night, its fat belly reflecting white from the floodlights. The Colonel plays out line, careful not to overstress his leader and tippet. The reel drag screams as the furious trout takes more line, across the short pool, around its smooth sides, down, back to the surface, down again.

The Private watches this from underneath a willow tree, sentinel duty. Minutes go by and he watches with his mouth slightly open, jaw set, palms sweating against the cork handle of his fly rod. He can hear the Colonels heavy adrenalined breathing and the high din of monofilament leader and tippet, taut as a mandolin string.

Two slaps at the water near the Colonels feet and the trooper sticks a thumb into her mouth, grasps the lower jaw, and raptures the fish out of the water and into the night air. She is heavy with eggs, heavy with flesh and fins and bone. Upwards of twelve pounds and easily the largest fish the Colonel, or the Private, has ever played, ever captured. Her gills heave as he stuffs her headfirst into his wicker creel, struggling to latch the lid. The Colonel reties another caddis where the tippet is gnawed and stretched. He tosses the old fly on the sidewalk—bent hook, frayed elk hair and hackle.

“Colonel, let’s get out of here, I think a car is coming,” whispers the Private as loud as he can from a copse of ironwood that runs along the outside of the hatchery’s southern length of fence. Fingers of one hand grasp his expensive fly rod, the other fingers curl around the smooth hardwood handle of the government Colt. But the Colonel is in the moment, back on the stone wall, casting in a frantic motion that causes the tippet and leader to jerk and the fly to land a moment after the heavy slap of the line on the water. Maybe the car will cruise on by. Maybe whoever is driving wall not see the Colonel playing a big fish under the floodlights of the hatchery. Maybe whoever it is will not hear the gun crack and echo in the peaceful night. “Goddammit, Colonel, a car is coming!” yells the Private, the scout.