Kokanee

“Anytime you want to start circling, go right ahead,” her grandfather said.

“I think I’ll aim for that notch between the peaks,” Kiki answered. She was referring to two mountains in the Mission Range, miles beyond the east shore.

It was always like this. One of the two had just hooked a salmon a few minutes before, and after the fish had been landed, after the boat’s engine had re-engaged and the one steering had held to a straight line heading east in order for the tackle to be let out again without tangling, her grandfather would start agitating for the circle. They had just gone through a school of fish, after all, and he wanted to gradually work back into it by trolling in a circle tight enough to get them back to where they had had some luck, but wide enough to keep one line from riding over the top of the other in the turn and ending the fishing entirely. It made perfect sense to him.

“I think I smell a school a few hundred yards in front of us,” Kiki said.

“I don’t know...”

They were trolling the surface of Flathead Lake, two miles out from her grandfather’s place on the west shore, six miles from the other side. There was fifteen miles of water to the north and south of them. In the slow cold wind coming out of Canada on a day like today, it was always a difficulty to manage a circle in the surface chop, but the grandfather would push for it in any case.

Kiki, on the other hand, liked fishing to be a kind of slow-motion journey across the water, without circles, almost improvisational. She felt their luck would find them wherever they were on the water, as long as they were fishing at the right depth, which the two of them were able to find easily enough through trial and error each morning. She felt there was something sad about finding luck and then wanting to exploit it over and over again in the same spot. It was like wanting to live in the past. She wanted to pick a landmark on the east shore and head in that direction through any number of schools of salmon. She particularly liked that moment when, roughly midway across the water, she found the boat in the north-south river current running imperceptibly across 300 feet of depth toward the end of the lake at Polson. On days without chop, she’d know she was in the current when suddenly snags of weed would appear on the surface, or tree pollen, or large and small bits of driftwood. Secretly, she wanted to fish in a straight line so she could get to that middle place each time. Going ahead like this, with no guarantee of another strike—she thought this proved she had faith. And often enough, when they got to the river current, the fishing improved. Sometimes there would be a surprise catch: cutthroat or Dolly Varden. She liked that unpredictability. Fishing was a kind of jazz, she thought.

Things That Make Me Move or Not Move

I’ve been thinking for a long time about the things that move me from here to there. You see, when I get scared, I freeze. It’s happened when I’ve seen something sudden and frightening, like a fight breaking out two tables away at a restaurant. I’m sitting there drinking coffee with my friend Slick or Beasty, and suddenly there’s an angry man climbing over the salt and pepper shakers and tackling the man he’s been talking to to the floor. Those five seconds or so when he’s hitting and hitting, even as the other guy’s eyes begin to close and the blood begins to drain from his face—it’s then I don’t know what to do. Maybe this is normal, but I’ve known people whose first impulse is to jump to their feet and get in between the two fighters. I couldn’t possibly do that. I don’t have the instincts for it. And it’s not as if I don’t have good instincts otherwise, because I’ve been pretty lucky with near-accidents on the highway, swerves I’ve had to make without thinking, controlled skids around debris—things totally beyond the abilities of others.

“Tell me what makes your heart stop,” I said to Beasty once. It was July, hot even on the water. The swells were flat. We rocked a little on our boards, not even trying to surf, and with each little rock a bit of glare nailed itself into our eyes.

“Nature, I guess,” she said. “I could die on a day like today.”

“No, I mean what paralyzes you?” I said.

She thought about it for a moment. “The way Slick looks at me,” she said.

Beasty’s name is really Elizabeth. Her family has always called her Liz, but she’s preferred Beasty since we hatched that private nickname in third grade. She had grown fond of toads, and always kept two or three of them in an old aquarium in the cool light behind her garage. She called herself the Queen of the Animals then, and so the name made sense, but even long after she had let the toads go the name stuck between us. It survived her vegetarianism in fifth grade, it made extra sense during her Goth and punk periods, it was a lime green tag that to this day does not get painted over on certain underpasses around town. It makes a different kind of sense now, when she attacks the waves the way a white shark would attack them if a white shark was a land animal trying to keep from wiping out.

“The way Slick looks at me sometimes,” Beasty said, “I think we’re eleven again and we’ve just lifted some change from my mom’s purse. But then he looks at me like he has plans for me, and that’s when I want to rip him apart for even thinking any such thing. But I just go blank. Every word I know disappears and my whole body gets a charley-horse.”

If Beasty is a shark, Slick is seal on the waves. When he crouches under the roof of a curl, his black wet suit merges with his black board until it is hard to see where one ends and the other begins. If Beasty is all over a wave, ripping it apart under and over, Slick tucks himself into the most hidden recess of its curl. He becomes a shadow inside its shadow, a black blur inside a blow of spray.

“In another life, I’d like to be a bullet,” he said once. “Or a poison dart.”