Flies—Wet, Dry and In-Between

It was my highlight of the year, telling the class of freshman boys they all wanted to murder their dads and screw their moms. Freud's idea—not mine. We were reading about Antigone, Oedipus’s daughter, buried alive for attempting to bury her traitor brother. I wanted them to see that her fated end resided in her family line—and that there were many such invisible connections perhaps guiding their own lives even now.

I sought out the most uncomfortable face. Tim Boggs. He first buried his face between both hands, rubbed his eyes, twisted in the chair, shook his head. Tim never met the world’s gaze, his look always askance. Here, again, someone who’d rather not see. Well, I’d see about that.

“A problem, Tim?”

“That's a load of crap," he said. He avoided me, his classmates, choosing the black of the board. I waited and slowly, uncomfortably, he swiveled to face me.

I winked at him and said, "Yeah, Tim. Figures you'd say that. I've seen your mother."

Ah, the eruption of laughter, some of them even falling into the aisles. Usually the act brought a smile from even the kid in Tim’s position. But not this year. This year, he trembled, his eyes searching for something else to rest upon, back, forth, like a darting trout crossed by a shadow from above.

The thing was—I'd never seen Tim's mother.

That next day, Robin sat at the end of the kitchen island, its green granite flecked with dark brown, hazel like her eyes. She wore her brown hair pulled back, no attempt made to hide the bones that protrude in her cheeks, shoulders. It gave her the look of someone unapproachable, someone wrapped too tight.

She took deep breaths. "Okay Nick, so the mother was what?"

"I don't know," I told her. "Disfigured. Burns or something."

"Fuck!" She stood up, swung at the air, tried to kick the stool, missed. "And so now what will we do? Move? Who's going to hire you here?"

I knew, but I didn't want to say it. My mother. I'd have to return to my mother's lodge. A linebacker, my mother. Looming. Foreboding. What was it Sylvia Plath called her father? A bag full of God. Well, my mother was a bag full of God-knows-what.

Robin leaned on the island. "Look, I'm not moving—not going to lose my job." She was the school psychologist. "So what precisely were you thinking?

"I don't know. They laughed. That's it."

"They're a bunch of teenage boys. Just make farting sounds if you need a laugh."

That was the challenge in class, to catch them with these off-the-wall comments, show a willingness to go where most teachers wouldn't.

"It was funny," I said. "You have to admit that."

She raised her hand into the air. I expected the middle finger, instead got the ring one, the ring. Oh Jeez.

"The ring," I said. A few paychecks away. "I didn't think—"

"Nick, I used to like your recklessness, as if the things that mattered to the rest of the world had yet to make an impression upon you." She put on her coat. "But now, I don't know, it's not working for me anymore."

I said nothing.

"You really believe the fleeting pleasure of this laugh was worth it?" she said. "Well, was it? Was it?"

I knew not to answer. Robin was an anchor, in a good way. She kept me from drifting too far out. Was she right about all this? Why wasn't it funny anymore? What about the world had changed?

I told her I got it, understood now. But proof, Robin said. She wanted proof.

"Like what?" I asked. "A polygraph test?"

"Figure it out. You know where to reach me. Where you used to work."

Robin lived in a world void of excuses, focused only on what was clear. Incontrovertible proof. Or she would be gone. Just like that.

* * *

Client after client, all women. Her son, aren't you? I'm fishing with Elinor Longarden's son. Wooha! A flyfishing guru, my mother, had her own line of products, the Longarden Triangle, her very own parachute pattern, the Fuzzy Elinor, and even her own fly floatant lotion, the Rub-A-Daub. The Yoda of Dry Flyfishing. Dry flies. Only dry.

I sat under the pavilion, watched the water. Nothing yet. How daring and mature, I thought, such a return, here, to prove to Robin how wrong she was about me. But three weeks later Robin still wouldn't talk to me, believed this return to my mother was actually a regression. A great example of irony for the class—if I’d still had one.

I heard the footsteps of the morning's client, turned to her, squinted, saw mostly sun.

She stopped, waited, hands on hips. "Well," she said.

I shrugged, spread my outstretched hands, a "what's up with you?" gesture.

"You have no idea who I am."

I squinted at a tiny stick of a woman, still masked by the sunlight. Thought of a cartoon: "I hate being a stick figure; every time I rub my hands, I catch on fire."

"I'm Denise." The pause, waiting for a shock of recognition. "Boggs ... Tim's mom?"

"Oh, jeez ... You've come to fish. Or kick my ass?"

She moved, finally, under the pavilion. Her face, around her left eye, caved in, a crater, a black patch over the eye. "You sat behind me on the school bus," she said. She plopped down across from me on the bench, cracked, ready to collapse. "Said Denise the Dog. Denise the Dog. All the way to school."

"Really? That sucks." I looked back at the water, a few bugs had begun to appear, tiny olives, here, there, not enough to bring the fish to the surface yet. More proof of my idiocy, my saying stupid things that seemed funny at the time--the consequences lingering, like the smell of trout in my clothes. But still. How I hated grudges, people who held on to things way too long. They should let go, for god's sake! Was her face like that in school? Wouldn't I remember such a thing?

"So ... your injury," I looked up into the black patch. "That wasn't in school, was it?"

"No, you weren't making fun of me for this. This came later. A few years after high school."

And then I remembered. Something my mom mailed me in college. A note. Wasn't she a classmate? A baby. A Doberman. A mom between them. Disfigurement. A bite out of her head. An eye hanging. "The dog," I said. "That was you. That dog attack."

"Yes. I saved my son only to have him told later by his English teacher that he'd never want to fuck me." She didn't smile, looked at the water, at the sound of the splashes.

They were all wild trout, none of them over a foot, but hundreds of them like boiling popcorn--fish rising here, there, everywhere, the problem being so many flies that the trout often ignored the client's fly, floating among the naturals; but I knew the technique to catch the wariest of these trout. Course, never told my mother. Swore the clients to a vow of silence. No one had squealed, yet.

"You've got quite a problem, Nick. You lost your job, and your fiancée so I'm told. Yet all you see is this hole in my face. You can't even be mad at me, can you?"

I shrugged. "Why are you here exactly?"

"Well," she said, standing up. "I paid for a day of guided fishing. You’re going to guide me."

"Forget it, okay. I was just making a joke. I didn't know anything about you." I stood up. Names popped into my head, taunts to whisper as if we were still in school. Then I thought of Robin. Something was horribly wrong inside me. “Just go. Please.”

"Look," she said. "I thought maybe you could show me you weren't such an asshole. And maybe, I don't know, I could do something about your job. My son. Well. He's getting blamed for it all. And I guess the kids liked you."

The proof Robin needed was here. The guide tied knots, undid snags, removed miscast flies from trees, changed flies, pointed out prospective trout lies, suggested casts, netted the fish, wiped a dripping nose, if need be, if the client asked. Magic, I was, out here.

I nodded. "It's a deal," I said.

* * *

Denise Boggs, knee-deep in this always-cold mountain stream, placed the fly wherever she wanted, her eye never leaving its drift.

"Another one, Nick. That's what, two dozen now?" she said. She high-fived me.

We stood at the bottom of a small waterfall. The stream turned, spilled against a large rock, the straits of Gibraltar. The foam gathered in that far bend of the curve. Follow the foam and you find the food; find the food and you find the trout. With all the currents between them and the fish, the key was to cast in a way so that the line had no drag.

"Drag-free drift," I said to Denise. "Throw an S-curve cast. Shake the lines and it'll put curves of slack in the line."

"Thank you, sir," Denise said, and then did exactly as instructed. The current took the S's, left the fly alone, and there, in center of the bend, Denise got her rise.

Sometime in the morning, the fish stopped hitting the dry fly, and so I switched her set-up. "Really," she said. "Your mother know about this?"

"My mother," I said, purposely trying not to stutter over the 'm' and sound like Norman Bates. No, my mother, the guru of dry fly fishing, the writer of a billion articles on the horrors of subsurface fishing, the artlessness of it, knew nothing about the fact that I tied wet flies onto the dry fly, and that I fished under the water. "Knows, Of course, she does."

Denise looked up at all the placards on all those trees: DRY FLYFISHING ONLY.

"An exception," I said. "For her son. But that doesn't mean we have to tell her, right? She'd rather not hear about it."

"Whatever you say, Guide." Denise held out her hand, pulled me up from my crouch. Could anyone get past the missing eye? A great test of love, such a gap. Could I? Did I have such a heart, such strength?

And so it went, the morning spent taking care of her, putting her into dozens and dozens of trout, and finally Denise winked at me. "So I guess you’ll pass. Tim will be relieved. I'll talk to Headmaster Whitling."

She made her last cast, and up rose a trout, a beautiful brookie, shimmering green. She reeled it in, held it under its belly, let it slide back into the current.

Denise wiped her hands on her shirt. "By the by, it isn't true. What you said."

"What I said?"

"The Freud crap. It isn't true. That's all." We were on the bank now, stomping the mud and water away. "No boy would want his mother. It's unnatural."

"Well, well." Another voice. I looked to the woods. Here she came, my mother, pounding down the path like some sort of Sasquatch, her red hair ablaze, the goddess of flyfishing and insanity. Born in a crossfire hurricane, jumping jack flash. I felt the earth rumble with each step she took towards me. Denise looked up, at this form bearing down upon her, stopping only inches from her, putting her into the cool darkness of shade. An eclipse, she was.

"Saw your name on today's ledger and I thought, why that's the bastard who got my son fired."

"I don't think women can be bastards, Mom."

"They can! And don't hit me with your English teacher gobbley goop." Denise caught in the burning headlights of Elinor Longarden had yet to recover her senses. "Now, Denise. What the hell happened to you that you can't take a harmless joke? A grown woman."

Denise looked at me. I understand, her look said. You grew up with a crazy woman.

"You did this stupendous thing–saved your son. You should be proud." And then she reached for the patch, as if to grab it and rip it off Denise's face. Denise stepped back, held her rod out like a sword. "Come now," my mother said. "You need to let the world see what you did for your son."

I envisioned my mother finally grasping the patch and holding it in the sky, far beyond Denise's grasp. Like a tiny dog, Denise would jump after it, the emptiness of the eye, a black hole, my mother would glare into, unafraid.

"Your badge of honor," my mother told her. "A sin, to cover it up."

Denise looked ready to run her through. She backed away, aimed the rod toward my mother’s heart, wherever that might be, even though the rod would only bend, then snap. You couldn't kill Elinor Longarden with a fishing pole.

"She's a hell of a fly-fishing woman," I said to my mother. "The trout didn't have a chance."

"Doesn't surprise me. I knew as soon as I read that article that you must be something else. But this? This school thing? Doesn't add up."

"Oh," Denise said, putting the rod down. "What's it matter? Your son apologized. He'll get his job back."

"He apologized?" my mother looked to me. "You? What do you have to be sorry for? You didn't rip out her eye, did you? Attack her son?"

"No, Mother."

She glared down at Denise as if she were going to pick her up by her collar, hold her kicking in air. "My God. How I hate what's become of women!" She kicked at a fallen stick. "Pathetic. The whole lot of you!"

A crunch of sticks and leaves. I looked up. Robin strode down the path. What? I felt dazed. On the stream, with my intense focus on one act, one goal, the world floated away, but then when it returned ... I shook my head, wiped my eyes, and Robin still appeared to me, hands on hips now and still. Had she come for me, finally? Her eyes passed me by and focused on Denise. "Mrs. Boggs. Tim told me you were here. I couldn't imagine why." And then she looked at me. "What gives?"

"You've got some nerve," my mother said. "Nick would be a fool to take you back. Runs away at the first sign of trouble."

"Is that right, Nick?" Robin said, then to my mother, "Don't you know this was the proof of his love for me, Elinor? Coming back here. Purgatory. Didn’t Nick tell you that?"

Denise raised up, face red, dirt-streaked. She held the rod straight up, as it were now a lance she rested upon. Robin turned back to Denise. "They weren't tormenting you, were they?" Robin asked.

Denise looked at me. "No. He's not bad. Once you get him on the stream."

"Really?" Robin asked. "I never had him on the stream. Did you?"

"Jesus, Robin," I said. "What are you thinking? She's going to Whitling. Going to get my job back. So you should be happy, now. Right?"

Robin walked by my side. "You really are sorry about all of this? Or do you feel the way she feels?" Her head bobbed toward my mother.

"I know my Nick," my mother said. "He isn't about to bend to your demands. He's much bigger than that."

My mother envisioned me as something big, solid, unyielding. In Robin's eyes, this same person verged on childish and scatterbrained.

Robin walked forward and latched onto me. And as she did, Denise watched her, and Robin's unbitten, uncratered face. Denise shook her head. "By the way," Denise said to my mother. "Your son's wet-fly rig is something else. Especially when the trout turn off to the dries."

My mother grabbed at her chest. "My God, Nick."

"A bit much, mother," I said. "Don't tell me this is the 'big one'?"

Robin reached for me, grasped my elbow. "You went against your mother? Really?"

So that was it. Robin wanted the snapping of that connection, the type of run a monster of a trout makes, so the line breaks with a crack and the angler falls backward from the force of it.

Denise smirked. Perhaps I understood it. How are you ending up with Robin, the smirk asked. What if she had a patch, a crater for an eye? What then? I see your heart, Nick, and there's not much to it. You've bought into myths, and so here you are, married to your new mother.

"The sanctity of my stream, Nick," my mother said. "You, of all people—"

“Yes,” I said. “My fly’s wet.”

Robin pulled me towards her. I didn't move with her, so she stumbled backwards, tripped on a branch lying across the path. Crack. She fell into my mother's legs, knocking my mother over, straight down, like a bag of sand, plop, next to Robin, plop.

I ended up beside Denise. "So, we're it." I said. "The only ones left standing."

My own foot slid along the mud on the bank, split me, and I twisted against this fall and hit the cold water on my belly and struggled against, what, surely not drowning. The stream wanted to pull me away, down, under, and I wanted it too, but it lacked such will or the power or something.

When I opened my eyes, I hoped to find myself alone, finally and utterly.

Instead, I found Denise. Her one eye scanned me, up, down, then penetrated the vest, the guide shirt. I thought—finally—of Tim, her son, a lifetime caught in that gaze, searching his heart for things it didn’t have.