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Devil’s Postpile

John Ladd Zorn, Jr.

    “I’m sorry the wedding is on the same weekend, but the trip is set, and I’m not going to miss it for someone’s lame little prom,” Jay said.
    “They’re going to have caviar. We’ve never had caviar. How can a person prefer to play with worms than eat caviar? Besides,” Elizabeth said, “I don’t get why Hemingway’s considered such a great writer. It’s just a lot of macho nonsense.”
    He’d read Big Two-Hearted River in bed to her the night before in a last-ditch effort to gain her approval, but she’d begun snoring gently before Nick had baited his first hook. He kept reading, not trusting the depth of her breath at first, but he, too, was soon bored with the old Nobel winner, and this was a night after showing her A River Runs Through It; and if Brad Pitt could not win her over, what chance had Hem?
    “It’s man testing his mettle against the antagonistic forces in the world, and a man’s not a man if he doesn’t,” said Jay.
    “Are you hearing yourself?” She rubbed the back of her wrist into her eye as if this might dislodge the irritation he posed. “You read all your stupid books,” she pressed her lips together, “but you don’t have a clue about real life.”
    “Weddings aren’t real life.”
    She threw the carrot peeler into the sink and pushed past him and out of the kitchen.

*

    The glass lid over the salad clanked gently against the serving dish an hour later each time Jay braked in the stop-and-go traffic. Elizabeth had insisted he drive a hundred miles round-trip to go swimming in the bride-to-be’s pool before he left.
    After they’d arrived, Andy, the groom, had fixed him a couple of good muddy blarys, he called them.
    “People should be able to do what they want, as long as they’re not screwing anybody else over,” Andy proclaimed at one point. All morning Jay had wanted to leave, and then Andy made the muddy blarys and they agreed on philosophy and politics, and except that he was meeting the guys to go fishing, Jay didn’t even want to leave. He even thought he might have enjoyed the wedding. He took his muddy blary into the pool and floated with his little daughter, and they crossed Shark Cove and went to the octopus cave, and visited Fairy Island, and asked a mermaid for directions. Then, up on the pool deck, the alarm on his phone started chirping.
    Elizabeth began throwing wet towels and suits into the beach bag with angry little snaps of her wrist. When they reached the car, she said good-bye brightly to Dorothy and Andy, but once the door was shut, her silence conditioned the air.
    “Daddy,” Jay’s younger daughter whined, “why did we have to leave? I was having fun with the mermaids.”
    “Yeah, Dad—Get your wet hair off me, Annie!—That sucks,” said the older daughter.
    Annie giggled.
    “Stop it!”
    “Girls, settle down.” Jay looked to Elizabeth to back him up, but she said nothing.
    “Let’s play the guessing game. C,” he said.
    “Cinderella,” Annie screamed.
    “I’m going to marry Prince Charming,” Sammi yelled.
    “No, you’re not. I am,” said Annie.
    “See?” said Jay, looking at Elizabeth.
    “See what?”
    “See the expectations we’re giving girls, that Prince Charming is out there waiting to sweep them off their feet and take care of everything, and their only worries should be what to wear to all the balls?”
    “Yeah, that’s all I worry about,” she said.

*

    “You prefer the company of your boyfriends to me,” Elizabeth said as he bent to kiss her good-bye.
    A bolt of anger straightened his spine, and he shot a glance at Sota. Sota hadn’t seemed to have heard over the idling of his Jeep.
    “You never let up, do you?” he said. “You’re right. None of them are bitches.” He got into the car.

*

    Throughout the six hour drive, he and Sota said next to nothing. Jay’s book of Hemingway’s letters sat unopened on his lap while he tried to justify fishing. His mind was, as Hemingway used to say, bitched.
    He held out until dark before cracking a beer. He said to Sota, “In the woods, a man becomes purer, good or bad.”
    Sota pushed out his lips and nodded.
    Jay undid his seatbelt and climbed halfway over the seat to rummage around in the ice chest again. “You need one of these,” he said cracking open another can of beer. He held it up out to Sota, who took it and sipped it and put it between his legs.
    “The Sierra is a way to step outside of economics and inhabit oneself in a natural state,” Jay proclaimed. “Elizabeth is comfortable in the economic world. She defines herself according to the size of her SUV and the diamonds in her ring compared to those bought for her friends by their husbands. She measures her happiness in price tags.” He took a swig. “Fishing’s my way to take a break from that, but even at that, it’s less about taking a break, and more about my right to go. I don’t love fishing more than her, but I won’t be held hostage.”
    “Yup,” said Sota.
     Hot and cold battled in the air coming through the window as they rose out of the Mojave and into the mountains. It was two in the morning when they arrived at their campsite. Jay’s brothers, Mac and Marty, pulled up behind Jay and Sota five minutes later. They put up the tents and started a fire. Everything became sophomoric as they drank beer and cooked weenies over the fire.
    “It was unbelievable.” Mac was getting into character. “Marty went to dinner with some gramma and her daughter. The daughter was hot, but Marty’s with the gramma. Jerry goes ‘Where’s Marty?’ and I said, ‘I don’t know. He’s with gramma.’ She was right there, and she started crying! The next morning Marty was doing her on the toilet, and Jerry said, ‘Marty, I don’t care what you do, walk her out, throw her out, kill her for all I care, but get that slut out of here.’ So Marty told her he was gay to try to get rid of her. Told her he’d gotten all excited and had sucked dick three times.” Mac paused for effect. “She told him that turned her on.” Mac roared laughter before he finished the last sentence. “After we go in that tent tonight, Marty, you’re going to be up to four.”

*

    Jay slept well. It was not so cold. The ground was not too hard. He awoke after sun up. He poured whiskey into the coffee in his thermos and sipped it while he read Hemingway’s letters. Elizabeth has a point, he thought, really he’s just a crazy egomaniac. Maybe reading this is what has my soul and body all out of alignment. He closed the book and checked over his rods and tackle. His gear was an embarrassment. Two of the rods were broken and held together with electrical tape. He hadn’t had the time or money to get new equipment.
    Sota and Mac came out of the tents, then Marty.
    “Let’s get us some trout,” said Mac.
    They picked their way over the granite banks of the San Joaquin, flecks of quartz twinkling in the morning sun, until they came to a meadow of high grass where they stopped and spread out along the bend casting their lines. Jay’s salmon eggs were dried out and hard as gravel. He got one to stay on the hook and ran it downstream through the riffles and under the overhangs several times, but got no action. He wondered if salmon eggs tasted anything like caviar. NOT FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION it said on the jar. He put one on his tongue and crushed it between his teeth and then spent the next hour trying to spit the taste from his mouth.
    Sota walked up while he was spitting.
    “Any luck?” Jay asked.
    Sota shook his head.
    “Come check out the Devil’s Postpile,” said Jay. He led Sota up the trail through tall rough trunks of ponderosa and lodge pole. A few hikers came down the trail the other way, but Jay and Sota were alone when the trees parted to reveal a wall of smooth black monolithic columns of polished basalt towering several stories up the face of a cliff. Many of the columns had broken and fallen into a pile forty feet high at the cliff’s base.
    Obliquely, Jay watched Sota’s eyes dance and sharpen.
    “They say this was formed by lava oozing up and filling a bowl of granite and then cooling and cracking. Then glaciers came along and polished the top, and the earth around it eroded away, and this is what’s left,” said Jay.
    Sota shook his head as if in disbelief.
    “Looks like the ruins of some ancient temple down at the bottom where all the pillars have fallen,” Jay said, and Sota went from shaking his head to nodding. “I can’t decide if it’s eerily symmetrical or eerily unsymmetrical,” Jay continued. “It’s like parts of it were made with precision machinery, but when you think about it, everything in nature is like that. But then there’s that wavy part there where it’s all chaotic, and that’s true of nature, too.”
    Sota kept nodding.
    They hiked up and around the formation to the top where the black columns fit together like the hexagons on a turtle’s shell. “The Miwok people that lived here believed that the world was created when a great turtle puked it up. I always wondered if they got that story from this place.”
    Jay moved away from Sota to the cliff’s edge. From up there, where the hexagons fit together perfectly and the top was smooth, he looked out over the river and the meadow before it hit the gorge, and he missed her. Happiness depends on women, he thought.

*

    Mac had gone to town and come back with beer, bacon and eggs. Jay got the fire started and tended to the bacon and eggs. “I had a cel signal in town and Mom called,” Mac said to Jay. “She said Annie was crying and saying she was afraid something bad would happen to daddy.”
    Jay frowned. He already wished he had not come.

*

    After they had eaten, they hiked through the woods to Starkweather Lake. Jay waded in up to his belly and tried casting and reeling various lures, spinners and spoons, but got no action. The trout were striking at insects on the surface. Fly fisherman floating in tubes were catching a few, but Jay didn’t have the right gear for that. He stayed in the water three hours, the sun cooking his face and shoulders, the water freezing his testes. When he got out, the air temperature was in the seventies, but Jay shivered for an hour. Long after he had dried off and changed into dry clothes, his body was quaking, his fingers, calves, and toes were numb. When sensation came, it was in painful pricks.
    To try to get his blood circulating again, he hiked around to the far side of the lake. Partially on shore and partially floating, a quartet of fallen trees extended several yards out over the surface of the lake. Jay stepped onto one and wobbled out, the logs bobbing slightly beneath him. He found a spot where a thick branch overlapped the trunk of another tree, and he was able to stand with his feet far enough apart that balance was not a problem. He threw out a line of salmon eggs while the fish splashed the surface feeding on mosquitoes, and the mosquitoes fed on him. It seemed hopeless. The fish were not interested in his old salmon eggs and metallic lures.
    He reeled in and took a can of beer from his creel. He popped it open and before he could take a sip, a damselfly landed on the can. He pinched it by the wings and set the beer down. With his other hand he drew a small hook from his breast pocket and threaded it through the thorax of the damselfly. He couldn’t figure out how to cast it out far enough without lead split-shot weighting his line, but that would sink it, and he wanted it to float.
    The sun was nearly down. He walked back around to the main beach where he found Sota, Marty, and Mac with their lines in. A man with a flattop haircut was babbling at them. Mac said to the man, “I bet my brother’d be glad for soma that smoke.”
    “Yeah.” The man took a roach from his tackle box, lit it, and handed it toward Jay.
    Elizabeth would find out. She would ask questions probing for answers that she could use against him, and he would not lie. Here they were, though, up in the Sierra Nevada. Devil’s Postpile. Outside the law. Outside society. Free.
    He took it and hit it.
    The man talked about having been a colonel in the Marine Corp, and the six-time winner of the Channel Islands Bill Fishing Tournament. “I’ll show you pictures of my trophies,” he said. He claimed to be a martial arts expert, and a two-time Purple Heart winner. “I got ‘em in my glove box.”
    Then the Colonel started talking about his divorce, and the construction company in Dana Point he had owned, and how, “I decided to just give the cunt everything and come up into the mountains to live like a man.”
    Jay looked him in the eye for the first time.
     “I’m writing stories about fishing, and I’m going to sell them to magazines,” he said to Jay, meeting his stare.
    Jay nodded.
    “Everything is so beautiful,” said Marty.
    “He’s taken about nine Vicodin today,” Mac said. Marty reeled in a little rainbow and cradled it and marveled aloud in a whispering, awed voice, “It’s so beautiful.”
    “I told you you’d catch one if you listened to me,” said the colonel. “You boys listen to me and you’ll catch fish.”
    “How can I cast this fly out there without split-shot?” Jay asked.
    “You need to use a floater.”
    Duh. Of course. Using a bobber was the way Jay had learned to fish as a kid. He had one in his creel. How had he not thought of that? He tried to concentrate on rigging his bobber. His fingers felt like big clumsy sausages as he fed the line through the bobber and re-tied the hook, having to slap at mosquitoes every few seconds. By the time it was set, it was too dark to fish. Marty was right, though. It was beautiful.
    The colonel invited himself to their camp. Jay got the fire going, and they sat around it, drinking. Marty stumbled about, slurring, and cursing things no one else understood, when a nearby campsite attracted his attention. A few men and women were speaking to about twenty boys seated in neat rows of folding chairs, and Marty shuffled over and sat in an unoccupied chair.
    Jay looked at Mac. “I ain’t getting’ him,” said Mac.
    The colonel said, “I’ll go see,” and he walked over and stood by.
    Mac took a beer from the ice chest. “We’re almost out,” he said.
    Soon, the colonel returned. “It’s a Cub Scout meeting. They’re organized through their church. They’re Mormon,” he said. “They’re having a talk about being good Americans, and staying away from drugs and alcohol.”
    Mac laughed. “Smarty’s a pharmaceutical rep back in LA, hooked on painkillers and the biggest alkie in a family of alkies, so he’s in the right place.”
    Jay looked over at Marty’s dark form standing unsteadily with the fire burning on the other side of him. “He’s been a wreck ever since Milly left him.”
    “Never shoulda got married,” said Mac.
    “Humph,” said the colonel. “It’s a losing bet if a man’s honest and works hard. Love should be choice, not obligation. Commitment’s a word women have hijacked. Women who want a free ride for the rest of their lives use the word ‘commitment.’ I want a guarantee, say these women, that when we don’t love each other any more, you still have to attend to my financial needs. I want you to guarantee me, think these women, that if I am ever unhappy with you, I have the option of ruining your life. You need to make a commitment, because if you don’t, I need to spend my time and pussy finding some other fool who will agree to this deal—”
    A woman approached the campfire. “Can you come get your friend?” she asked.
    Jay, Mac, Sota, and the Colonel followed the woman to her campfire. Marty was standing in front of the boys. “You gotta love your moms and dads,” Marty said and gave himself a big hug. “Ya should hug ‘em and tell ‘em you love ‘em ever day. And especial they gotta forgive each other.” He held up his finger on the word forgive. The boys stared at him and whispered to each other, and the troop leader was edging closer to him.
    Jay went up and whispered in Marty’s ear. “Dude, let’s go back to camp.”
    “I’m tellin’ the boys sump nimportant here.”
    Jay put his hand around Marty’s arm. “They want you to go.”
    Marty pulled his arm away and almost fell. “Simpor tant.”
    Then big Mac, who had been an all-conference lineman in college, squared up on Marty and pushed him back to their own fire as easily as if Marty were a mannequin.
    “Whaddaya doin? I’s about to tell those boys sumtin at would change their lives.”
    “No, you weren’t, you dumb drunk. You were making a mockery of their whole show,” Mac told him. “They wanted you out of there.”
    “No, they didn’t. They wanted to know about how to be a good American.”
    “You’re not a good American. You’re a god damn drunk. We all are.” Mac’s volume had gone up with Marty’s.
    “I am a good American! I sup port the President, and I s’port the Rack war.”
    “Your being fooled, Marty,” said the colonel.
    “What kind of a ex-marine are you?”
    “The kind that knows what’s going on.”
    “Damn it all!” Marty yelled.
    The den mother reappeared. Apparently over-hearing Marty’s distress and wanting to do the good Christian thing, she thanked Marty. “We appreciate your good intentions,” she said.
    “Oh, Jesus,” said Mac, lighting a cigarette. “You want a smoke?” he said to her and coughed up a mouthful of mucous and spat.
    “No, thank you,” she said.
    Mac excused himself and stepped four feet away and audibly, splashingly, urinated on the ground while the woman became trapped in a conversation with the colonel in which he told of single-handedly saving a group of burka-less Afghan women from a murderous horde of Taliban during a Special Ops mission.
    “The fucking beer’s all gone,” said Mac.
    “I have to go now,” said the woman, and she hurried away.
    “I’m gonna kill myself,” Mac said. “Let’s go into town.”
    “That’s crazy, boys. Don’t go into town. I’ve got a box of wine.”
“Wine,” Mac said. “I’m gonna kill myself.”
    Marty staggered into the light of the fire, grotesque shadows on his face. “Smarty, gimme yer keys,” Mac said.
    “Whyfor?”
    “To get beer.”
    Marty said, “You can’t drive my car. ‘sillegal. I’ll drive us.”
    “You’re too drunk to walk, let alone drive.”
    “You’re not in sured to drive it.”
    “So you’ll drive it wasted, but you’re worried about someone uninsured driving it? Move it out of the way then, and we’ll take Sota’s.” Mac took a step and tripped over a rock in the dark.
    “See? Who’s wasted?” Marty said. He got in his car and moved it. Jay thought he was just going around the loop of the campground and would come right back. Sota and Mike got into the other car and started it up.
    “You boys are foolish. That’s a dangerous one-lane mountain road in the day when you’re sober. It’s thirty miles one-way...” The stereo went up, drowning the Colonel’s words.
    Jay filled his cup from the box of wine. He and the colonel sat a long time in silence. Marty still had not come back.
    “I’m about ready to go to sleep,” said Jay.
    “You boys better clean this campsite and put those pans in your trunk before you turn in tonight, or you’ll have bears,” said the colonel.
    Jay nodded in the dark. “The first time I ever saw a bear was up here. We were fishing Soda Springs and Mac caught a pretty good trout, and he said, ‘Come on, I’ll show you where I caught it.’ So we’re hiking along the river bank when this guy on the other side calls across to us in this loud whisper, ‘Hey! There’s a bear in the bushes right there!’ Mac and I stopped and sure enough, the bushes were moving back and forth like King Kong was coming through the trees, but the bear that stepped out wasn’t very big. I’m guessing he was two or three years old, and he looked at us and lifted his snout like, ‘What’s up?’ and then walked into the river and plopped his nuts down and let his tongue come hanging out and just sat there with this big old grin on his face.
    “I turn to Mac, but he’s gone, and there’s his trout lying on the ground, and I see he’s already about a hundred feet away and still running. I pick up the trout and look at this bear with his big smile, and I’m thinking ‘that bear couldn’t hurt anybody. He’s not even full grown. Why, if he came over here, I’d just kick him in the head.’
    The colonel said, “You know—”
    “I know. Let me finish,” said Jay. “Anyway, I decided to hike back to the road to get my camera out of my car, but when I got back the bear was gone.
    “But another time I came up here, and I just wanted to come by myself, but my wife insisted on coming with me. This is a woman who gets manicures and buys apple-scented toilet paper. Somewhere around Big Pine, she says, ‘I want something to drink,’ and I say, ‘Grab a water out of the back seat.’ She says, ‘I want something sweet.’ So I say, ‘I’ll stop at the next place,’ and she says, ‘We just passed a little store,’ and I go, ‘There’ll be another one coming up,’ and she says, ‘Just turn around, it’s right there,’ and I’m like, ‘What do we want to turn around for? It’s bad luck. We’ll be breaking the stream.’
    “‘Breaking the stream?!’ she screeches. ‘That doesn’t mean anything! Just turn around and let me get a drink.’
    “So I turn around and drive back to the store, and she goes in and comes back with a bottle of water. Now I don’t say anything about that, and we keep driving, and I’m looking at her, and we’re driving, and I’m wondering when is she going to drink her water that we had to stop and go back for, and I’m looking and watching, and ten miles later I go, ‘I thought you were thirsty.’ ‘I am,’ she says. ‘Why don’t you have a drink?’ I ask her and she says, ‘I’m saving it for later.’ Hoo boy.
    “I let it go, and we get up to Bishop, and we’re passing the K-mart there when she says ‘We haven’t packed any towels; we need stop at K-mart and buy towels.’ So we buy towels, and when we come back out to her Mustang, it won’t start. I can hear the solenoid clicking. There’s an auto parts store, so I go over there and buy a solenoid and an adjustable wrench and a screwdriver and start taking off the old solenoid, and of course, the wrench is too fat, so I gotta go back and buy a bunch of individual sizes and, of course, the nuts are all different, and for one of them I don’t have the right size wrench, so I go back and get it, and on and on like that before I finally get this solenoid changed, but the car still won’t start.
    “So I called a tow truck, and a guy came out and we jumped it, and the car started right up. So I paid him, and off we went on our merry way. We got about fifteen miles up out of Bishop, before the car goes dead out there. I get under the hood and tinker around, but nothing doing. She’s got a cel phone, but we can’t get any service out there. So we stand on the side of the road with our thumbs out.
    “Wasn’t too long before a guy in an old pick-up pulled over and took us into Bishop again, where we got another tow truck and rode all the way back to the Mustang and towed it all the way back to Bishop where they determined that the alternator is the problem, and it’ll be a hundred and fifty bucks, or so it was at the time, and about five or six hours to fix it. So we twiddle our thumbs and walk around Bishop. She wants to go to a restaurant; I’m thinking about a hundred and fifty dollars. Then it starts raining, so the restaurant wins. Eventually, the car’s fixed and we’re pulling into Mammoth now after midnight. I stopped at a gas station and bought some firewood, and then we took the long, winding road down into the canyon. We got that spot right over there. I was dog tired. I put up the tent, and all I wanted to do was go to sleep, but after the tent is up, she says, ‘What about this other tent?’
    ‘Wha’d you bring another tent for?’
    ‘It’s the clothes tent. So we have a place for our clothes.’
    ‘Whuh?’
    ‘It’s the clothes tent,’ she says. ‘So we don’t have to sleep with our clothes.’
    “I could have said, ‘What if we put them in the trunk?’ or ‘What’s wrong with sleeping with our clothes?’ but I went around hammering in the stakes, and threading the poles through the canvas and put up the clothes tent. When it was done, all I wanted to do was sleep. I went into the non-clothes tent, and while I was taking off my pants, I discover my wallet’s not in the pocket. I check my shirt pocket, search the car, look all around the campsite in the dark—can’t find it anywhere. So I trudge up to the ranger station where there’s a payphone and even a phone book, and I call the Shell station in Mammoth asking about a lost wallet. No dice. Go to sleep.
    “Next day I call my dad and ask him to wire to Mammoth a couple of hundred bucks so that we’ll have enough money to get home. So he says he’ll do that, and my wife and I go over to Sotcher and I catch a nice little one pounder. I fillet it and toss the guts back in the lake and wipe my hands on my shirt, and go back to camp and cook it for breakfast. When we’re done eating, she says, ‘I’m bored.’ So I take her over to see the Postpile, but first I change my shirt and throw it into the clothes tent, and put on a clean one, and we hike over there.
    ‘Is that it?’ she says, totally unimpressed.
    ‘Well, yeah. You don’t think it’s remarkable?’
    She frowns. ‘Why do they call it Devil’s Postpile?’
    ‘I don’t know. I guess because the goldpanners that first came through here a hundred and fifty years ago couldn’t explain it. It seemed so unnatural, it was unholy, you know, evidence of His Satanic Majesty or something.’
    ‘Oh.’
    ‘Come on up to the top,’ I said. ‘It’s this smooth black dome. After that we can hike to this big waterfall called Rainbow Falls.’
    About halfway up or less, she says, ‘Is it gonna be uphill the whole way?’ and I go, ‘Yeah, both ways. Coming back, too.’
    ‘You don’t have to be a jerk about it.’
    ‘Well, whadid ya wanna come up here for? You could be home at brunch sipping mimosas.’
    ‘How far is the waterfall?’ she asks.
    ‘It’s like six miles.’
    ‘Which way?’
    ‘Up that trail.’ I point.
    She takes off. She just starts marching away all determined. Screw it, I think to myself, and I go back to the camp and have a beer and read awhile, and start wondering if she’s gonna get lost and all that, and decide I better go after her. About halfway to the falls, here she is coming back the other way, and we walk right past each other without saying a word. I hung out at the falls a while and read and wrote in my journal and all, and then it started raining. So I hiked back to camp in the rain and when I got there, as I’m walking up, I see one of the tents, the clothes tent, is thrashed, just demolished, one wall standing and the rest of it tore up and flattened.
    ‘I’m thinking, she couldn’t be that pissed.
    ‘Elizabeth?’
    ‘Jay?’ She came out of the non-clothes tent. ‘I was so scared! A bear came.’
    You could see his paw prints all around, and on the one wall of the tent that was still standing were these four straight rips running down the side of it like Freddy Kruger had slashed it, and that was when I realized that if you tried to kick a bear in the head, even a juvenile could rip open your guts with one swipe.” Jay chuckled. “I figure the bear had gone after the shirt that I had wiped my hands on after cleaning the fish. You could see bear snot on the other tent where he’d sniffed and didn’t smell anything he wanted. Good thing we had the clothes tent or we’d have had no tent to sleep in.” Jay took a drink of his wine. “The reason I tell you every little thing, though is because I’ve always wondered if none of that would have happened if we hadn’t a gone back for that bottle of water.”
    Two pairs of headlights came crunching down the gravelly, dirt road. Mac got out of Marty’s car, and Sota got out of his.
    “Where’s Marty?”
    “Sota and me were about halfway up the mountain when we notice this car swerving around the road and nearly go off the cliff, and we finally figure out it’s Marty. For about ten miles we’re honking the horn and flashing the brights before we got dumb-ass to pull over. He’s asleep in the back now,” Mac said dumping beer in the ice chest. “I’m going to sleep.”
    “What about your beer?
    “Fuck it. I’m going to sleep.”
    The next morning, Jay rose before the others. It was cold and he got a fire going and sat next to it, staring. Blue jays chased each other around the trees, males pursuing females, undoubtedly. Jay finished the book of Hemingway’s letters, reading into the time of his mental illness and his final letter before the Sunday morning in Ketchum when, a note in the book said, “Hemingway rose before seven, unlocked the basement storeroom, chose a double-barreled Boss shotgun from the rack, carried it upstairs to the front foyer, slipped in two cartridges, lowered the butt to the floor, pressed his forehead against the barrels, and blew away the entire cranial vault.” Just like his father had done. Hemingway had said in his letters that his mother drove his father to kill himself. Women will do that to you, thought Jay.
    After Sota and his brothers woke up, they spent the rest of the morning aimlessly trying to find consensus, and ended up going into town. All the way out of the deep valley, Jay had looked down the cliffs aware that his daughter had been afraid something bad was going to happen to him, and he had wondered if it was some premonition as they drove past the deep fissure and the sign that says “Earthquake Fault”. Once they had gotten to town, he was able to call her and say hello and tell her he loved her and was thinking of her and was fine and would see her Monday morning. “Will you put Mommy on now, please, Sweetie.”
    “Everything’s fine,” Elizabeth said without saying hello.
    He could tell she still didn’t want to talk to him. “Okay. I love you,” he said.
    “Okay. Good-bye.”
     It was early afternoon when they got back to camp. Jay located his floater and drove up to Sotcher Lake. He went clear around the other side of the lake and waded through the muck up to his waist. The damselfly was dead and ineffective, and Jay spent an hour and half trying everything he could think of to catch a fish, switching from Powerbait to plastic worms to lures, trying different-sized hooks, using various lead weights, adjusting the length of his leader.
    When his beers were gone, he hiked back through the tall grass and dead wood and muck to the trail to the main beach where he found Mac and the guys fishing, and suddenly seeming sober. Jay spotted a dying midge making tiny ripples on the water’s edge and scooped it up. He hooked it down through the top of its thorax and tossed it out with the floater. Beads of water, gleaming like crystal, suddenly shot off his line as it tautened under the brilliant sun. He flicked his wrist back to set the hook and began reeling in smooth, steady circles, droplets from the line splashing his cheeks and lips. The line zigged back and forth, and he allowed the fish some slack for a few seconds, afraid it might break the line, before he began reeling again. A rainbow, glistening with color, danced along the surface trying to shake the hook from its jaw before plunging below again. “Bring that net over here,” he said.
    Everyone agreed the fish weighed at least five pounds. “She’s a six-pounder for sure,” said the colonel, who suddenly seemed to have materialized from out of the trees.
    The mosquito storm hit then, and they fled back to camp.
    Jay got the fire going. He slit the trout’s belly and scooped out the entrails before tossing them into the fire. He wrapped the rest in foil with some onion, butter, and garlic powder, and put it on the edge of the coals. After a while he warmed some tortillas. When the trout was ready, they passed it around, tearing pieces of tortilla to pinch off the trout meat. It was delicious. The men grunted ancient sounds of satisfaction.
    The stars dimmed as the moon rose. Jay went to bed early. Lying there, he thought maybe it was worth it.

*

    When he awoke, his entire being was mosquito-bite itch like it was some circle of hell. They drove up to Red’s Meadow and bathed at the hot springs, where the little waterfall rushes down the hill with the wildflowers all around it. They struck camp and loaded up before noon. All the way home through the barren desert mining country, Jay’s excitement to see his wife and daughters grew. He wished he could snap his fingers and be with them instantly.
    Five hours later, Sota dropped Jay off. Elizabeth’s car wasn’t in the driveway. Jay unloaded his gear and Sota drove away. Jay went up the walk up and put the key in the door. A small pile of mail had accumulated under the slot in the door and he squatted to collect it. The absence dawned first on his peripheral vision. The house was empty. The couch was gone, the table, the chairs, the television, the hutch. No sign of the girls. His books were piled on the floor, but the bookshelves were gone. Annie and Sammi were gone.
    Everything but the books.
    There was no note on the counter. The phone was gone. No sign of Annie or Sammi. No nothing. He went into the bedroom. The bed was gone, along with everything else. In the closet, piles of his clothes lay on the floor. He sat on them, and then lay down, and curled up. Looking out the door, he noticed one picture still on the wall of him and his brothers on a fishing trip in their early twenties, smiling with their arms over each other’s shoulders, beers in their hands.

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