The Double Diamond

The horses needed hay. They were out in the pasture pawing, but they weren’t getting much. The snow, thawing by day and freezing at night, was mostly ice on ice. Tom Bird’s pickup wouldn’t run, and he had neither the money to fix the pickup nor to buy hay. He could go to the creek and chip cottonwood bark as the Indians did, but surely that diet was too spare for thoroughbreds.

Bird was patching a stock tank and still thinking on the matter when his sister drove up. Her name was Sally and she was checking on him. Because it had taken him thirty years of buckarooing to accumulate any kind of capital and then had blown it "on those fool racehorses," she considered him addled in the big things in life. He in turn thought her useless in everyday tasks and was glad her husband had figured life out and bought into a car dealership that made it big. Bird didn’t see how she could get by without a purse.

Sally got out of the Buick and asked if the coffee was on. She was a tall, straight woman, with sharp nose and chin, and dark hair beginning to get silverpoints.

"Fresh out," Bird said. "How about towing my truck to town?"

She cast an eye at the rusting carcass. "To the dump?"

"I bought that pickup from Hondo Motors," he reminded her.

"Sixteen years ago," she reminded him.

They chained up and eased through the ruts of his driveway. On the freshly-graded county road, Sally drove like hell, throwing a blizzard of gravel onto the pickup’s grill and windshield. Bird tried to honk but the horn didn’t work. For a mile he waved at her, sometimes flinching when a single rock swelled huge in the flightpath leading to his head. He waited for her to glance just once in the rearview mirror but she didn’t, and with gritted teeth he rode out the barrage until they hit the pavement at the lumber mill. The windshield had a dozen fresh chips.

At Jensen’s Garage, Bird asked his sister to wait in the car. In the early years of Hondo Motors, Sally made people pay their bills. She’d learned toughness but nothing about cars. Bird flat feared the sisterly help. He explained, "When you point to the motor and say, ‘What’s that thingie,’ it costs me an extra fifty dollars."

"What am I supposed to say?"

"It’s not your choice of words. If you called it a thingamajig or thingabob or whatchamacallit or doodad, I don’t think it would be much better."

"Okay. Just remember. Frank Jensen is a greedy man."

Bird took the keys inside and told Jensen to fix it. He grabbed a cup of coffee for Sally.

"Thanks, Sis," he said as he handed the styrofoam cup through the window.

"I suppose you’re going to Alforcas." It was a bar that coerced rough men to be civil.

"For a while. Maybe fishing if Frank gets it fixed early enough."

Drinking, Sally understood. Many people were fond of that. But fishing in November snow flurries made sense only to her brother. He carried a duffel bag of rod, vest, and waders everywhere. When the two of them went to East Los Angeles for an uncle’s funeral, he fished an aqueduct while Latino kids stood on the access road and riffed on the loco fisherman. When people in these parts spoke of "the fishing cowboy," listeners understood.

"I’ll take you fishing now to the Big Timber," Sally said.

Bird grabbed his duffel from the front seat of the pickup. The Big Timber wasn’t his first choice, but it was nearby and maybe not too late to catch a brown trout coming up from the reservoir to spawn.

"And I’ll bring you back if I get a mess of fish to fry," Sally added.

She did not say idle things and Bird decided to creel a few if he could. Like most women, she thought it folly for a fisherman to return from the river smug and happy and empty-handed.

The snow that had been moving about the peaks slid down the timbered slopes and onto the sagebrush flats, where the county road meandered toward the cottonwoods of the Big Timber. The snow was so fine that it both rose and fell in the light gusts, more like gnats than bits of ice. Rigging up, Bird had to fight the notion he was inhaling bugs. Sally had the car heater on and a book out when he followed a trail through the undergrowth to the river.

The Big Timber begins at ten thousand feet and is, by elevation, halfway to the sea in forty miles, though it travels 900 more before its waters reach the Pacific. The high prairie which is halfway to sea is a short run, for a dam blocks the canyon where it used to exit the high country onto the farmlands of the Shoshone River plain. The water still flows, but the river is not the same; it is a desert river, with more mud and less rocks, and when it comes together with its sister, the Little Timber, it loses even its name because a Frenchman got sick and called the river he drank from Bad Water. In November the Big Timber ran low and the freestone glides were holes for small rainbow, but Bird, still thinking about late-spawning brown trout, walked a mile downstream and began fishing where the current made a long run against a cut bank just above the canyon of the reservoir.

He first tried the current seam near him, raising one small rainbow on an olive caddis. To fish the far seam he changed from the dry fly to a big brown and olive nymph. At the head of the drift, he had two bumps which he took to be darting fingerlings, and then the universe paused. He struck hard and fast. The rod bent, fast to an anchor. Then the fish rolled on the surface and he saw it was a rainbow, a silver female, four, maybe five pounds. The fish shot deep and downstream, tearing off all the fly line and twenty yards of backing before it jumped straight up on its tail. Bird had a deep parabola of line submerged in the water and he thought, I cannot land him, while he stripped in line and splashed downstream on moss-slippery stones in thigh-deep water, watching as the fish made two more spectacular shivering jumps against the same cursed slack, still stripping and thinking, I will lose him, as the fish went to more porpoising jumps before submerging to sull in the deepest, heaviest current, allowing Tom Bird to come up tight.