In Hemingway's Meadow by Joe Healy

Author:Joe Healy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Down East Books
Published: 2009-09-01T00:00:00+00:00

I didn’t get out with Pete again until the next season, after the spring runoff had spent itself and the water had cleared enough so you could glimpse pebbles on the bottom. I’d seen him a few times during the winter, mostly through the ice-glazed window of his apartment, bent so intently over his desk I didn’t feel inclined to stop and disturb his reveries. I did look up “querencia” in a Spanish dictionary. Learned it’s the place in a bullring where a bull feels safest.

When we finally did make it out on the river, Wally came too, despite the fact he had to take a sick day from the post office to do it. Clyde feigned a grumbling host of reservations, but I knew in the end he’d be waiting on his porch with his thermos of Irish coffee and his battered rod case.

I had volunteered to drive, to pick Pete up at dawn, hoping the few minutes alone with him driving across town would give me a jump on the questions we all had about his latest visions. The first answer wasn’t long in coming. “What river do you want to fish?” I asked as we idled at a stoplight, peering out at the first faint pink streaks in the sky.

He slowly turned from the window at the words, a thin smile creasing his face, jolted out of some private musing. Shaking a cigarette out of his crumpled pack, he stared at it for a long moment before lighting it, finally responding in syllables so soft and distant they hung like the shroud of blue smoke in the air.

“There is but one, my friend,” he murmured. “The rest are nada. The day of the Bighorn has come.”

An hour later Wally and I stood on its north bank with our rods strung. This time Clyde remained with us, waiting. He’d muttered under his breath, rolled his eyes, whenever Pete’s name came up over the winter, but we all knew the odds he’d strike off downriver and miss whatever was about to happen were roughly the same as his coming up with another garter belt from his ex-wife. If anything, he looked even more expectant than Wally, whose fireside tales of what he had missed the last time out had turned more than one of our winter tying sessions into concerts of bearish grunts and growls of disbelief.

Pete had directed us to a ranch that flanked the river—a roaring stretch of water where the Bighorn bent left and tumbled sharply down a gauntlet of fire-blackened pines. A ring of scorched hills formed a kind of moonscape amphitheater behind it. The short grass shone black as a sable pelt in the morning sun.

Already pigtailed, Pete climbed out and again toted his gear into a rock-cloistered changing room; it soon became clear that his winter pilgrimage had led him through a lot more shrines.

The spangled vest and hat were gone. His leaders were coiled between damp flannel pads. The orange line had been sacrificed to one of ivory.

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