Denny Prewitt lost more fish than any man on the river, and he’d tell you why before you asked. It wasn’t the tippet or the drift or how he set the hook, like he was swatting a horsefly off his own ear. It was material. He was gathering material. A trout that broke him off was a trout that had gifted him something about longing, and longing, Denny said, was the whole enterprise of poetry.
Nobody had read a word of it.
He carried two notebooks everywhere, black ones with elastic bands, made in Japan, and he stacked books on the tailgate like a boy building a fort out of encyclopedias. Neruda. Some Merwin. A biography of Rimbaud with the spine cracked open to a photograph, always the same photograph, like he’d practiced cracking it there. At the bar he’d set the books down first, then his beer, so the order of operations was clear to anyone paying attention. Micah paid attention. Curt did not.
“Let us see something,” Micah said, maybe once a month, always in the same tired key, like a man asking his brother-in-law to finally pay him back.
“I don’t show unpublished work,” Denny said. “It isn’t personal. Bukowski didn’t show anybody either.”
“Bukowski showed everybody. He read out loud in bars for tips.“
“Different era.” Denny drank like the subject was closed, and it always was, because nobody had the appetite to keep pushing a boulder that clearly enjoyed where it sat.
“Look up the stuff I published. It’s out there.”
It was, technically, out there, like a coin at the bottom of a well. A poem in a journal called Sagebrush Quarterly that folded the year after it ran him, a chapbook he’d self-financed with money that was supposed to go toward a new Abel reel. Nobody looked. That was the arrangement, unspoken but sturdy as a wading staff: he’d point, they’d nod.
He was, by any angler’s accounting, terrible. He tangled leader in dead calm. He set the hook on refusals no self-respecting trout angler would have committed to. Once he set the hook on a submerged log and fought it for thirty seconds before announcing it was the biggest brown he’d ever felt, while Curt sat on the bank and let him have it. When they landed a good bow that afternoon on the Madison, two of them working the net like men handling a stretcher, Denny stood back taking notes, actual notes, pen moving while the fish thrashed itself calm against the rocks.
“You’re gonna write about the fish we caught,” Curt said, “instead of catching it.”
“Somebody’s got to witness it.”
“We’re all standing right here witnessing it.”
“Not the way I witness it.” He said this without a flicker of doubt, like a man announcing his blood type. There was something almost holy in how little it embarrassed him.
They came into the Grizzly that evening smelling like mud and marijuana, three men and one who’d contributed mostly moral support and a sunburned squint. Denny set his books on the bar how other men set down keys. A woman two stools over was reading the spine of the Rimbaud upside down, which took some doing, and doing it upside down was, Curt thought later, the first real sign of trouble.
She was dark-haired, cut close on one side and long on the other like she’d made a decision and then changed her mind halfway through, with a denim jacket covered in pins that looked like a map of countries that didn’t exist yet. Her name was Del–“Yes, after McCoury.”
“You actually read this,” she said to Denny, “or is it a decoration.”
“I read everything twice. Once for the story, once for the bones.”
“That’s a good line.”
“It’s not mine. I stole it from a guy who’s dead now, so he can’t ask for it back.”
She laughed, and something in the register of her laugh made Curt look at Micah and Micah look at his beer, the universal signal among friends that a man is about to make a decision none of them can veto. Del ordered a whiskey neat like she was closing a business deal. She asked what he wrote about, and Denny said the river, mostly, and the failures of men who wade into it thinking they’ll come out changed. She said that sounded like every country song ever written and Denny said maybe country songs know something poets forgot, and she laughed again, louder.
By eleven they were the only people at the bar still speaking in complete sentences. By midnight Denny had his jacket half on and one notebook tucked under his arm like a running back protecting a football, and Curt watched them go out the door together into a parking lot lit up orange by a bug light the size of a hubcap, and thought, not unkindly, that his friend looked like a heron trying to walk gracefully on land, all legs and conviction and no clear plan for where they were taking him.
Nobody heard from Denny for two days. This wasn’t unusual. What was unusual was Del walking into the Grizzly on the third afternoon, alone, wearing the same jacket with a different shirt underneath, and setting one black notebook down on the bar in front of Curt and Micah like a cat delivering something it had caught and wasn’t especially proud of.
“He left this,” she said. “Tell him I don’t have his number. Tell him it was fun, though. Genuinely.”
“You didn’t want to give it back yourself?”
“I’ve got a shift.” and then she was gone, and the two men were left looking at the notebook. A locked box somebody’s uncle left them in a will.
They didn’t touch it for an hour. Micah bought a round he didn’t need to buy, just to have something to do with his hands that wasn’t reaching for the elastic band. Curt turned his stool toward the window and watched a magpie work over something in the gravel lot that appeared to be a fish head.
“We should give it back unopened,” Micah said. “Man’s got a right to his own notebook.”
“Man’s had four years to show us one line of it.”
“Doesn’t make it ours.”
“No,” Curt agreed, and reached over and slid it toward himself anyway, the elastic band giving with a small sound like a held breath finally let out. Micah didn’t stop him. That was its own kind of answer.
Most of the pages were nothing, fly patterns, a few phone numbers and a sketch of a drift boat hull that looked more like a shoe. Hatch charts. A recipe for something involving capers that neither of them could picture Denny cooking. Then, near the middle, in handwriting smaller and more careful than either man expected, appearing to belong to somebody else entirely, somebody who’d been hiding inside Denny this whole time waiting for a quiet room:
My father’s ashes sink in the Madison. The first and last time we shared a river. Dead men raised me. Hugo taught me anger Harrison taught me to eat to read water, to forgive almost everything. My father taught me nothing about knots. Forty years alive somewhere in the house. Now the river carries him places he never took me. A brown trout rose through what was left of him. I didn’t cast.
Curt read it twice. Once for the story. Once, he supposed, for the bones. Micah read it over his shoulder without asking, his lips moving slightly on each line. The bar sound going on around them, ice against glass, a ballgame nobody was watching with the volume too loud.
Curt closed the notebook and slid the elastic band back into place, careful, like closing a door on a room he wasn’t sure he’d been invited into.
Thank you.
Very nice