Our Love Will Go the Way of the Salmon Read online

  “Hey,” he said.

  “You need somethin’, hon?”

  “I think I’ll have a beer after all.”

  “What’d you like?”

  “What would you recommend?”

  She filled a taster glass with a copper-colored beer and slid it in front of him. He threw back the taster like a shot. Citrus and bitterness crackled on his tongue.

  “You keep it up like that, we might end up sleeping together,” the bartender said. She laughed while she said it, but she was already pouring him a pint of the same beer.

  “What is it?” he said.

  “Bitter Bitch,” she said. “Like me.”

  He’d already traveled two-thousand miles to escape love. Somehow, it had followed him.

  V. Shark Fishing in Hell

  Frank Decker was three-fourths shit-faced when he launched his boat out of the East End Mooring Basin. Sea lions barked at the moon. The cargo ships anchored in the river were brightly lit but quiet, rocking back and forth on the waves, like slumbering giants. Frank swigged from a flask and gunned the boat out of the marina, out into the roiling current.

  The lights of Astoria passed on his left in a blur. He crossed under the Astoria-Megler Bridge. A sandbar in the middle of the river had wrecked many ships, especially at night, so he kept to the shipping channel. The boat skidded over the chop and went airborne every couple seconds before crashing down again. The incoming tide would push baitfish into the Columbia River estuary. At certain times of the year, blue sharks schooled at the river mouth and followed prey upriver. Every year or so, a sturgeon or salmon fisherman reported hooking into something big that would saw through their braided leaders in seconds. These were usually blue sharks. Great whites, threshers, and salmon sharks also patrolled the Oregon coast, occasionally pursuing seals and schools of fish inland and close to shore. Predators did unpredictable things, which is why Frank identified so much with them. Nobody targeted them, but from time to time, when Frank was feeling especially lost or extremely drunk, he went out on the river at night to fish for sharks.

  He eased up on the throttle as he approached Buoy 10. He anchored up and threaded a red label herring onto a large octopus hook. He lowered the bait into the water, pulling out on the line until the line counter notched fifty feet. He set the rod in the holder and sat back with the flask. He’d hardly begun to admire the chaos of the stars when the rod buckled over. He swiped it out of the rod holder and set the hook. The fish on the other end thrashed its head from side to side and took off, surging upriver. Frank released the anchor rope and buoy.

  The way the fish pulled the boat like a sled, Frank felt convinced he’d hooked into an oversize sturgeon, probably an eight to ten footer. But when he finally fought the fish in and brought it alongside the boat, he discovered something else entirely. Not a shark, not a sturgeon, but something equally prehistoric. He found himself face to face with a dagger-mouthed fish with human hands. The fish had the bluest eyes Frank had ever seen, and as he gazed into those eyes, he was filled with a sense of love and belonging that not even Llewellyn made him feel. The fish spoke to Frank. The fish spoke words in a language no human could ever understand, but Frank knew they must be words of love, and so he removed the hook from the fish’s lip and, as the fish sat there breathing hoarsely, clutching the side of the boat with its human hands, Frank lowered himself into the dark water. By the time he reached the bottom, he was little more than a skeleton, and yet somehow he remained. Tragic as it was, the fish with human hands reassured him that he’d avoided something far worse, something coming soon. Fish hand in skeleton hand, they swam out of the river to the open sea, far from the bad thing about to happen.

  VI. Klaskanine

  “Staying in town a while, or just passing through?” Llewellyn asked.

  “I’m at a campground on the Klaskanine.”

  “Not much to do out that way.”

  “I got lost.”

  “You gonna be lost out there long?”

  “I don’t know what I’m gonna do.”

  “So long as you’re alone?”

  Anisedias shrugged. “I don’t mind a little company.”

  Llewellyn pursed her lips. She went over to the serving window. “Hey Larry,” she called into the kitchen. “You mind if I skip out?”

  “Sure. Just one thing,” Larry said, coming out from the kitchen with an oyster shooter in each hand.

  “What’s that?” Llewellyn already knew what he’d say next.

  “Get me a date with your sister.”

  “Get me out of this place and you can marry my sister.”

  “I’m getting you out right now.” He downed one of the oyster shooters.

  “I mean for good.”

  “Why you wanna leave so bad, huh? This ain’t such a terrible place to live.”

  “He’s right,” Anisedias said. “It’s not so bad.”

  “You,” Llewellyn said, pointing at Anisedias, “you got here today, so your opinion on this place doesn’t count. And you—” She pointed at Larry, whose head was tilted back to let the second oyster shooter slide down his throat. “You stay quiet about this. If Frank finds out, I’ll know you were talking.”

  Larry looked at her with this look like I didn’t see a thing. There was some cocktail sauce in his mustache. “Larry,” she said, “you’ve got cocktail sauce in your mustache. You know what that means, don’t you?”

  “It means you can trust me, right?”

  “It means you ain’t ever getting a date with my sister.”

  She pulled two bottles of Bitter Bitch out of the cooler and gestured with one of the bottles toward the door. “Come on, Anise baby. Let’s see your ride.”

  VII. Berserker

  “Oh, a Rebel,” she had said, unable to mute her disappointment. Women always did that. When they found out he rode a bike, they assumed that meant a Harley. But Harleys were all branding and no muscle. Weak shit.

  Swaying women in favor of his Honda Rebel took nothing more than a nighttime ride. Even with a chick hugging his waist, he could cut breakneck corners going sixty-five. Pure torque and acceleration, he’d named his bike S.S. Berserker, and he truly believed she had the power to sail on open seas, to ride on water, if the desire ever arose in her machine heart. She was the love of his life, but there had been others, and more would follow.

  No.

  In truth, the bike was a piece of shit. He’d stolen it from his sister’s ex-boyfriend, the one whose ass he’d kicked on Easter. The dude was a shithead and he drove a shitty bike, but it was Anisedias’s shitty bike now.

  Although the storm had relented a little, they were both soaked by the time they arrived at the riverside campground. The ride had been dark. At one point, they came around a bend in the highway to find an elk, standing in the road. The elk’s antlers fell under the illumination of the bike’s headlight, but they were moving too fast to stop. Anisedias swerved right and hoped the elk moved in the other direction. Somehow they stayed upright, passing within inches of the elk, which remained still, as if it were made of stone. But he knew that if they’d hit it, they would have spilled blood. The elk’s, and also some of theirs. Llewellyn wasn’t at all shaken by the near-miss. Instead, she laughed.

  Now they were in his tent, undressing out of their wet clothes. She wrapped her arms around his neck and pressed her lips against his. He didn’t kiss her back. He wasn’t ready for that, not after what he left behind.

  He turned his head into his shoulder, breaking her lips from his. She leaned back and looked at him in the dark. “Is something wrong?” she asked.

  He flipped her around so she faced away from him. She made a confused sound as he pushed her onto all fours. Then a surprised sound as he slid up behind her and pushed his way inside. From that point forward she remained silent, right up until he collapsed on top of her. Then she said: “Now it’s my turn.”

  She wriggled out from under him and turned over on her back. She grabbed a fistful of his
long dark hair. “You gonna do what I say?” she said.

  He nodded, wincing at the pain.

  “I didn’t hear you,” she said.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Then scootch down there and let me fuck your babyface.”

  She spread her legs wide and he moved himself between them. She pushed his face into her crotch without ever letting go of his hair. His cum leaked out of her, coating his tongue as he licked. He found it hard to breathe with his face mashed into her like that. He tried to sit up to take a breath, but she twisted his hair so hard he cried out in pain. “Lick it, bitch,” she said. He buried his face again, slick with both their juices. For a while he lost himself in the smothering darkness. When he came to, he found that she was crying. Her head remained in her hands. Then he realized it was him who was crying, and she was no longer forcing his face into her crotch. She was soothing him. She was singing: “Hush little baby don’t you cry…”

  VIII. Catostomus

  And the small town on the big river slept.

  On the hill that overlooked the river, the houses were dark, except for one Victorian brightly lit by golden pale Christmas lights that had not been taken down or turned off since the day they were stapled to the awning.

  Anchored out on the Columbia, a young sailor shared a final cigarette with his captain. They passed the cigarette back and forth, watching the Christmas lights on the house on the hill, while miles away on the opposite shore, the forests of Washington stood dark.

  IX. Cutthroat

  She woke up cold, the tent empty. She drew her knees into her stomach and grabbed her bare feet, which were freezing, but warmth did not come. Finally the cold won out. She dressed in yesterday’s clothes while remaining under blankets. She unzipped the tent. She expected rain, and yet it was a clear and blinding day. The sun provided no warmth. Not even the frost on the grass had thawed. She had trouble focusing her eyes in all the brightness. The sharp pangs of an oncoming headache licked at the back of her skull. She hadn’t been awake long enough to know if she was tired or hungover.

  An eagle soared high above, carried by an updraft.

  The campground was empty with the exception of a gray-haired man working under the hood of an RV raised on cinderblocks. The man paused from his work to drink from a thermos. He saw her and waved. She smiled at him, or tried to anyway. Her face didn’t always form the expressions she wanted and she’d given up on worrying about it long ago. She waved to the man just in case. She could be sure of her hands.

  For some reason, the man reminded her of her great-great uncle, a man named Harvey Van Norman. Or at least a photo she once saw of him. He’d been Mulholland’s right-hand man, taking over for him when the St. Francis Dam Disaster ruined Mulholland’s career. Llewellyn’s father once remarked that Harvey had been the only success the family ever produced. She’d always resented her father for saying that, considering she’d still harbored aspirations of being something at the time. The resentment had rubbed off on her thoughts about Harvey Van Norman, even though she’d never met him and it wasn’t his fault for being instrumental in the development of Los Angeles. She often wondered what she might have become if she’d lived in an age where anything was possible, like the twenties. She might have been a famous dancer, or the Amelia Earhart of the sea.

  Anisedias emerged from the forest carrying a fishing pole and a stringer of small trout. He kissed Llewellyn on the forehead and started a fire. She warmed herself beside it while he cleaned the fish and wrapped each fish in tinfoil. He set the trout on the coals and they sat there in silence until the fish were ready to eat. Then, as they ate, a deafening sound encroached, followed by a wave of something white and blue, something so immense that it ate them up and made them part of it, transforming the world into a murky, tumultuous place. They were quickly separated by the force of the thing that had consumed them. That was okay too because love was never going to carry Llewellyn far away from this town, but this thing, this incoming tide, would take her wherever she wanted to go, on and on forever, even as she sank further under.

  I was born a collector. From the ages of seven until about twelve, the heart of my angling fixation boiled down to one question: Can it be mounted? I wanted to hang a trophy on the wall beside my father’s ten pound bass and his pair of deep red Kern River rainbows. I collected action figures, football cards (at age ten, a list of mine was published in Beckett Football Monthly), Goosebumps books, and nearly anything else with the remotest collectability, so naturally I was also inclined to collect the fish kingdom as well. Sometimes my old collecting habit paid off. I convinced my father to drop thirty dollars on a hand-painted, hand-carved nine inch Castaic Lure Co. trout. That model, which ceased to be produced by hand in 1996, now goes for as much as three-hundred dollars. Mine remains in mint condition. My card collection, primarily consisting of rookie cards from the sixties through the early nineties, might be valued at several thousand dollars. And yet there was nothing I wanted to collect more than a trophy fish of my own to mount on the wall. In 1996, the same year as the value of my Castaic Lure Co. trout skyrocketed, my father made a promise he would soon regret.

  We were fishing Buena Vista Lakes outside Bakersfield, California. Even though Lake Webb, the larger of the two lakes, was primarily known as a boating and jet ski lake, we tended to fish there instead because fishing pressure was lighter and the fish tended to be bigger and more plentiful. We spent innumerable days catching crappie and bluegill, brown trout and rainbow trout, largemouth bass and striped bass, blue catfish and channel catfish, with hardly anyone else fishing on Lake Webb. If we hiked around to the reed-lined far shore, we were pretty much guaranteed to have the shoreline to ourselves. We were doing just that one May evening in 1996. We walked along the bank, throwing six-inch white curly tail grubs between the reeds for largemouth bass. As daylight ran down, I pitched my grub out into the water and began retrieving it with subtle twitches. During the retrieval, a big fish boiled on top of it. The fish didn’t take, but that hardly mattered. I had its number now. I cast back out and almost as soon as the grub hit the water, the fish exploded on it. My rod buckled. The fight was on. I’d finally nailed it, a monster bass worth hanging beside my father’s bass. There was no way he could resist mounting it. The fish peeled line, making several impressive runs. We didn’t have a net, so my father stripped down to his underwear and waded out to his thighs. After several minutes, the fish tired out and resigned. My father stood in the water, ready to snatch up the bass of a lifetime. But when the fish finally surfaced, it flashed gold. It was a ten pound carp, not a ten pound bass. A beautiful fish, a hell of a fighter, and my first carp, but to a bass lover like my father, that’s the equivalent of catching a ten pound bag of dog shit.

  “It’s just a big ol’ carp,” my father said.

  “Can we mount it?” I said, hopeful.

  “No, son. You can’t mount a carp.”

  I pleaded. Look at the size of it. Look at the golden scales. Do fish get any prettier?

  He’d always had a hard time telling me no, so he made me a deal.

  “We’ll come out this weekend,” he said. “If you catch a bigger one, we’ll take it to the taxidermist.”

  That sounded like a sweet deal to me, so we let my ten pound carp swim free. My father was a little pissed that he’d taken off his pants and waded out into the lake over a carp, but at least he’d avoided taking one home for the wall.

  A couple days later, we returned with my stepbrother and my dad’s friend Harry, a diabetic with the flowing white hair of Gandalf. This time around, we fished with whole kernel sweet corn. We were getting serious about carp.

  My stepbrother caught the first fish of the day. A five pound goldfish. After that, we caught a couple four to six pound carp, but nothing came close to dethroning the fish from the previous trip. Eventually, my dad grew bored of carp fishing and he and Harry wandered along the back shoreline to throw for bass, leaving my stepbrother and me alone in the pu
rsuit of carp. We drank Pepsi and sat there sweating under the hot Central Valley sun. At some point, my pole popped out of the rod holder and smacked against the rocky shore, half in the water and half out. I ran over and started reeling. Something on the other end pulled back, something heavier than I’d ever felt. A minor population of sturgeon existed in Buena Vista Lakes, but I had never caught one, and I didn’t think they ate corn. All I knew was I had something big on.

  I shouted for my father. He and Harry took their time returning, and by the time they arrived, whatever was on the other end of my line had stopped moving. My father took the rod from me and gave it a short, sharp jerk. “You’re snagged up,” he said.

  “It’s a big one,” I said.

  “Naw, it’s just a snag.” He attempted to free the rig from whatever rock or weed he believed it was caught on, and that’s when the fish made its first big run, burning off fifty yards in mere seconds.

  He couldn’t believe it, and for a moment, neither could I. The fish was already halfway to the island in the middle of the lake. My father handed the rod back to me and rushed to clear the other lines to give me room to fight the goliath. A crowd gathered as the battle stretched beyond five minutes, then ten. A younger kid asked if he could net the fish if I landed it. We’d once again failed to bring a net, so we agreed. He ran off to borrow a net from some other fishermen, returning a short time later.

  “Remember you said we’d get it mounted,” I told my father, confident that I was going to land this fish, and that it was bigger than my last.

  “We’ll see,” he said.

  Finally, twenty minutes after the fight began, we got a first look at what was on the other end.