HORSESHOE BEND by Brian Hart
The fishermen had a 1947 International pickup raised on blocks. On the rear axle they had spooled a hundred feet or so of quarter-inch cable. They stood at the river’s edge with their fishing poles and alternately pitched and held and reeled in their big tow-chain and half-crappie rigs, and when they hooked into a fish they’d stagger up the rocks to the cable and clip their leader to the d-ring fastened there and at the signal the owner of the International would lay on the accelerator and without ceremony drag the sturgeon from the depths. The fishermen cheered these moments vigorously.
Kate walked across the field to the edge of the bluff and surveyed the river below and spotted the fishermen on the northern shore. It was late in the day and the fish were piled high. She and her husband used to swim there, and she would dive down into the green then black swirling water and go limp and let the powerful currents push her around. Ty would sometimes catch her by the ankle and scare her. She was unnerved that so many large fish had been so near. She sat down to watch.
Ty said he’d seen sturgeon when he worked on the new spillway at Bonneville in ’34, chewed up in the power station turbines or floating on the water after they’d set a charge. He said that when new workmen arrived they’d tease them and tell them the big fish were sea monsters, dinosaurs. To Kate, they looked it; they didn’t look like something to be toyed with, or edible. She’d never heard of anyone eating them.
A man on the riverbank had a fish on, and he clipped his leader to the cable. The truck revved its engine and the roar echoed through the canyon and the echoing calls of the men went with it. The fish fought and tore the fabric of the river. The men gathered around the cable as the axle-long fish came in. They waded out into the shallow water; then someone gave the signal and the truck was shut down. The fish stopped fighting and the scene quieted and became still. Then the fish rolled and a man staggered backward and fell into the water. The laughter of his friends echoed like spilled marbles and Kate smiled.
One of the men had a club and he came forward and bashed the fish several times with it; then they dragged it out and stacked it with the rest. The sun was fading and this appeared to be the last catch of the day.
The International was jacked up and the blocks were removed and thrown into the back. The jack was lowered and put in the back as well. The cable was unhitched and coiled like a rope and handed off to be put away in a different truck. A man with a box camera and a rickety wooden tripod set up on the rocks and took several photographs of the group with the catch in the background.
As the sun set, they started their pickups and drove off. Kate watched the convoy climb the Dixie Grade, a thin cloud of dust trailing behind them. They’d left the fish behind. The ones caught in the morning or early afternoon were probably already beginning to spoil. Yellow jackets would swarm, blow flies. A photograph would do, something to prove that they were there. The drive to Elk City would take the fishermen four hours. If Kate got Ty’s pickup running it would take her six because she had to drive an hour back upriver to catch the Corn Creek Bridge. The dust smoked at the top of the grade like a signal fire. The fishermen were gone.
The evening light went blue and she left her vantage point feeling slightly disgusted by what she’d seen. If they were small fish, she wouldn’t care at all. As a girl she’d caught more rainbows than that in a day. She’d been proud, walking home with her stringer coiled around her, long as a jump rope. It’s different when big things are killed. The meanness and helplessness touched her.
The canyon walls seemed to grow taller as night fell. A star, then several came out, and a soft, night wind began to blow. She took a deep breath and went inside to fix Ty his dinner. Jerked beef, milk, and carrots chopped into a fine paste. She poured the thick mixture into a small cup and took the cup into the bedroom where Ty had been for several months. The room was dim and smelled of a grandmotherly convalescence. She set the cup down and lit the gas lantern by the bed.
Her husband had never been a handsome man. He was skinny and his oil-black hair had receded to the center of his narrow skull. There was a large dent in his forehead where the bull had stomped on him. In life he’d made a habit of hiding his prominent overbite with an unnatural thrust of his lower jaw, but now he was at ease, mouth-breathing and bucktoothed.
She fed him, then rolled him and cleaned him and changed his diaper, then dressed him again and tucked him in. She looked at him, the stranger in their bed. “Good night, my idiot. My goddamn rodeo star.” She touched his face, then went to the kitchen and fried some eggs for herself. Outside the coyotes started yipping, desperate and joyful. She put her plate in the sink and went onto the porch to listen. She sat down but her legs felt jumpy and the hair on her arms was raised from the chill air. She stood and walked out into the field toward the oncoming light of the moon. She crossed into the tall grass and felt out the bluff edge with her feet and found it and sat down and hung her legs over. She knew she should be concerned with rattlers but she wasn’t. There were worse things than being snakebit.
The crescent moon showed itself and the pale light crept up the canyon. The hush of the rapids upriver seemed to grow louder once she could see the white of the foam. She turned and faced the house. She’d left the lantern going in the bedroom. It’d been leaking fuel and there was a dark oil stain on the table. She thought of going back but decided against it. The outline of the dead fish was visible in the forelight of the moon.
She stood and found the trail and made her way down to the skiff. She pushed off and climbed in and rowed into the current. Looking back she could no longer see the house or the barn. Someday, she thought, it would collapse board by rusted nail and disappear because that’s what happened. And oxbows became islands; the river would severe the land in a thousand years, a hundred thousand. The narrowest point, the hip, Ty had called it, was still more than a half-mile across and that was a lot of dirt and rock for a river to eat, but it would happen.
She ran aground and the skiff conked hollowly on the rocks. She stepped onto the shore and hurried up the bank with the bowline in her hand and clove-hitched it to her hitching snag with a long lead. The skiff drifted, then the bow snapped to and the small boat worked nervously in the slight current from side to side like a dog. She walked on the smooth, shining stones toward the fish. They were knurled and sharklike and the color of the dead. There were a dozen, sixteen at the most. They didn’t seem to belong in this river of ten-inch bass and fourteen-inch trout, steelhead and salmon. She touched the slimy back of one and felt its sharp ridge of scutes then leaned down and surveyed its small eyes and anvil head, barbells, sucker’s mouth. They didn’t belong on the shore either.
The slope of the riverbank and the natural slickness of the fish against the wet river rocks made lighter work of it than Kate had expected, and in the time it took the moon to move from its partial hiding place beyond the canyon walls to the open sky above the gut of the river she’d moved all but the last and largest back to the water and sliced their stomachs open with her pocket knife and sent them on their way. It was a courtesy to sink them; the fish would go back to their hole and if any survived in it they would feed on the returning dead. Kate imagined this; she stood on the shore and looked at the black water, and the hush of the distant rapids pulsed through her and she could see it clearly: the bottom feeders at rock bottom.
The last fish was too large to move. Possibly if she had started with this one she could’ve managed. But now, after all the others, she was bone-tired and sweaty and soaked to her beltline in gore. She flicked open her knife and plunged it into the fish’s anus and cut upward with a sawing motion through the thick-skinned underbelly. At the gills she stopped and wiped the knife on her jeans, then folded it and put it away. With both hands she reached inside and hauled the guts onto the rocks and with them came a large sack of roe. She pinched up one of the eggs and looked at it and considered tasting it but didn’t. She dragged the guts across the rocks to grease the tracks like the old time loggers would oil the corduroy roads to run their logs. Then she pitched the guts into the water and went back up the shore and sat down with her back to a boulder and used her legs to spin the fish ninety degrees so its head was facing downhill. She got back to her feet and bent at the waist and sunk her hand into its grotesque mouth and pulled and pulled harder and eventually got it sliding along.
She went with it into the water and floated it out. They drifted alongside her skiff and she climbed onto its back and rode it until the current took it. Then she let it go and swam back to where her feet could touch. She splashed through the shallows and untied the boat, then pushed off and got in. She hit a few strokes on the oars then drifted. She began to shiver in the slight breeze. The moonlight lit the eddy lines and showed her the path. She shipped the oars and hugged herself for warmth. Soon the current had her. She remembered the lantern. She’d meant to fix the lantern. She should go back. It was too late. The current had her. The shore reeled past, black rocks and pale sand. It was for the best. There’s love in this, she thought. This is between me and Ty and no one else. To leave someone like that. She turned and expected to see fire but it was only the moon, the canyon and sky. Resigned to what she’d done, she faced what was ahead. Waves slapped at the hull. There was big water down river, bigger than her little boat could handle. She’d have to portage a dozen times just to make it to the confluence. But from there, there were towns. If she could make it there, she was out.
Brian Hart is the author of Then Came the Night (Bloomsbury USA, 2009). His fiction has appeared in The Greensboro Review and Portland Review.