as well. “Bounced my fly off the boulder to the right, couple feet above the cutaway. Got one of those big ones.”
“Wonderful. On a yellow stonefly?”
“Yeah. I took a few from your bench. I was out.” Sandy made no reference to the flawed flies, but she looked tentatively at the side of Keefe’s face, searching for a readable sign.
“Good. That’s what they’re for,” he said.
Sandy stood and stretched, arching her back. “I’m hungry. You have anything to eat back there?”
Keefe pushed himself up from the hearthstone, took his rod, and handed Sandy hers. “I think we may be able to stir up something.”
Keefe walked a half step behind Sandy as they stepped out of the clearing onto the fire road. Sandy turned immediately downstream, and as she turned, she saw from the corner of her eye that Keefe seemed to hold back, for no more than a second, and that he expelled a shallow sigh before he turned down the fire road in step with her. Any other time she’d have noticed nothing in this moment, but now, after finding the botched stoneflies on his bench, she was on the alert. Had he found his haven in the clearing, but then not known how to return to the bungalow from there? In this place he had lived for over twenty years, this place he knew so intimately, had he been lost? For now, she would say nothing, only continue to watch for the signs that might form a pattern. Sandy took Keefe’s hand, something she rarely did, and held it close as they walked the fire road back to the bungalow. Keefe’s hand firmly returned the press of her grasp.
4
OPPORTUNITIES FOR SANDY TO GET TOGETHER WITH HER friend Margie Callander were occasional, at best, for all the usual reasons of work and family obligations. Margie worked as a nurse in the intensive care unit of the hospital up in Sherwood and did her best to manage two young sons from her first marriage, encroaching on their teenage years, and her husband of the last four years, J. D. Callander, the good-natured but overworked game and fish warden for the Ripshin Valley. That she and Sandy would both have a day off at the same time was rare, indeed. Margie agreed readily to Sandy’s proposal of meeting for breakfast at the Damascus Diner, followed by a little fishing up in the headwaters afterward.
“Oh, hell yes,” Margie had said when Sandy called. “I need a day away like you can’t believe. J.D.’s been spitting piss and vinegar for days now, and these boys will be out of school for the summer in a couple of weeks, at which point they’ll really start to drive me nuts.”
Damascus was a tiny patch of human congregation collected at a bend of Route 16 along the lower Ripshin, the road most locals referred to as the old river road. Midway between Sherwood to the north and Willard Lake to the south, it survived as a point of convergence for people driving north to jobs in Sherwood, if they were lucky enough to have them, and for fishermen towing their bass boats south to Willard Lake. Other than a few modest houses and mobile homes stretched along the bend, the meager social and economic life of Damascus emanated from two places, the Citgo station and the Damascus Diner. The Citgo station was an amalgam of gas station, convenience store, and bait shop and managed to make a go of it selling fuel, beer and cigarettes, lottery tickets, and incidentals to the locals who inhabited the homes and farms in the fields and ravines spread through the hills around Damascus. It sold more fuel, more incidentals, and tubs of night crawlers to fishermen passing through. For anything not available at the Citgo, which was quite a lot, folks drove the twelve miles up the old river road to the Walmart in Sherwood.
The Damascus Diner, the other half of community life in Damascus, sat across the road from the Citgo. A refurbished squat cinder-block building that had once been a welding shop, the diner sat in the middle of a fan of asphalt that provided space for parking. An oversized glass window where the garage door of the welding shop had once been fronted the diner; the rear of the diner reached within a few feet of the bank of the river. A large plywood placard hung over the front door. On a background of dark green paint, in meticulously hand-painted white block letters, “Damascus Diner” was written above a rudimentary outline of a fish around an equally rudimentary cross. The diner was operated by the women from the commune tucked in the ravine off Wilson Hollow Road. Furnishings inside the diner were of a simplicity in keeping with the sign. Scarred, thickly painted wooden booths sat around tables covered with red and white checkered vinyl tablecloths. On the walls, generic watercolor prints of rustic scenes interspersed with varnished wooden plaques engraved with Bible verses. The food was oily and heavy, ample and inexpensive, making the diner a popular spot with both local residents and those just passing through. The women who cooked the food and waited on the tables all moved through the grease-heavy air of the diner in their informal uniforms of straight, modestly restrained hair nearly as long as their ankle-length denim skirts.
Margie thanked the waitress when she topped off her coffee. Sandy held her hand over her cup and shook her head gently. She rarely drank coffee and when she did, only a little of it.
“To tell you the truth,” Margie said, “I have to wonder how a guy like that ever got through med school and residency. Such a priss. One of those, oh, what to call them? Sort of, the overgroomed type, if that makes sense. Every hair in place. Thin little beard, all so carefully trimmed. Always a tie on under his lab coat.”
Sandy grinned, nodded, and dabbed at the pool of egg yolk on her plate with a half-eaten piece of toast as Margie continued.
“I don’t know, there’s just something off with someone who spends that much time and effort fussing with himself. One time he’s in with a patient, and the woman’s having a reaction to the antibiotics he’s got her on. And while he’s examining her, well, she hurls all over him. Oh god, he goes running out of the room, tearing his lab coat off, screaming for a towel, and gagging like he was going to barf too. All I could do to keep from laughing. If I hadn’t been busy trying to take care of that woman, I’d have been rolling on the floor, howling. I swear, he shrieked like a little girl. Seriously, how does a weenie like that get through medical school?”
“I’ve come across a couple like that,” Sandy said.
Margie slid a forkful of home fries into her mouth and pointed her fork at Sandy’s plate. “You gonna eat that bacon?”
“It’s for Stink,” Sandy said, and glanced out the diner window to see Stink in the truck cab, his nose sticking through the three inches of open window. “But if you want it, go ahead.”
“No, no. Wouldn’t want to take food out of your child’s mouth. Besides, I’m getting fat and stuffed enough as it is. Not used to these big, greasy diner breakfasts.”
“Something to last you through a day of fishing.”
“More like last me into next week.”
Sandy smiled and wrapped Stink’s bacon in her paper napkin.
“Really, honey,” Margie said, “I’m so glad you called. Your timing was perfect. Not to mention it’s been weeks since I’ve heard from you.”
“Well, busy with work. The usual.” Sandy shrugged, even winced with a bit of guilt in her face, knowing full well she shouldn’t run the risk of falling out of touch with the only real friend, other than Edith, she had.
“We all have work and other shit to attend to. We do, if we’re lucky these days. That’s not what I worry about. I worry about you reverting to a wild state, spending so much of your life out there in the wilderness, just you and James and your smelly dog. I half expect to hear that you’ve been found wearing animal skins, living off raw meat you’ve killed with your bare hands, keeping house in a cave.”
“Oh,
