Bitch Creek by William Tapply

He shut his eyes, hoping that when he opened them again the hump in the water would not be there, or if it was, that it wouldn’t look like a human body—that this was just his brain playing another dirty trick on his consciousness.
    But when he looked again, the hump was still there, and it still looked like a dead man.
    He crossed the dam, looked again, muttered, “Oh, shit,” and started running. The ground was mucky and studded with grassy hummocks and potholes, and he fell down twice before he got to the edge of the pond.
    He stopped there, ankle-deep in the water, dripping mud, breathing heavily, his feet sinking into the soft bottom. The hump he had seen was what he’d thought it was—a man’s rear end dressed in waders. The glint had been the reflection of sunlight off the varnished surface of a bamboo fly rod that angled out of the water beside that hump. Calhoun recognized the body and the rod at the same time. The rod was the sweet little seven-and-a-half-foot Tonkin cane Thomas & Thomas that Calhoun had refinished and given to Lyle for his twenty-sixth birthday the previous winter.
    The body, of course, was Lyle’s.
    Calhoun waded in. The spongy peat bottom sucked at his feet when he lifted them up.
    Lyle seemed to be kneeling in the water like a praying Muslim bowing to the east. His arms and shoulders and head were on the bottom under about three feet of water. His knees had sunk a ways into the mud. The air in the waders had gathered in the seat, lifting that part to the surface.
    Calhoun saw Lyle’s long ponytail waving gently in the coppery water, and he flashed on the phantom body he’d seen drifting in his spring creek with its hair undulating underwater.
    Lyle was wearing his fishing vest. His completely deflated float tube had slipped down around his knees. He had lost his cap, but he still had fins strapped onto his feet. His Thomas & Thomas rod lay beside him, the butt end in the water, the tip caught in the reeds. The line trailed out into the pond.
    Calhoun put his arms around Lyle’s chest, hauled him out of the mud, and dragged him through the marsh and bog along the edge of the pond. He kept falling down in the mud with Lyle’s dead weight on top of him.
    Finally he managed to haul Lyle up onto the dry land beside the dam. He collapsed on the ground beside the body, gasping for breath, and waited for the hammering in his chest to slow down and the fire in his brain to subside.
    After a few minutes, Calhoun got up on his hands and knees and looked at the dead boy. Lyle’s face was puffy and bloated. His pale blue eyes were staring up at the sky and his mouth gaped open as if he had been singing when he died.
    Lyle had liked to sing. He knew all the Beatles songs, and whenever they went out on a boat, he’d wail “Rocky Raccoon” or “A Day in the Life” over the roar of the outboard. “I’d love to turn you on,” he’d bellow, grinning as if he knew he was about to get laid.
    Calhoun remembered the time they’d met at four in the morning to catch a striper tide down toward the mouth of the Kennebec. About the time they’d launched the boat it had started raining, and then the wind turned so that the hard raindrops came at an angle, pelting their faces like birdshot. Lyle had smiled grandly, loving it. “Here comes the sun,” he’d bellowed, “and it’s all right.”
    A leech had attached itself to the side of Lyle’s neck. Calhoun plucked it off and flicked it away. Lyle’s skin felt like a trout’s body, cold and rubbery, about the temperature of the pond water. It was, in fact, about the color of a trout’s belly.
    Calhoun pushed himself to his feet. “Be right back,” he told Lyle. He sloshed back to where he’d found Lyle, picked up the Thomas & Thomas rod, and reeled in the line. There was no fly on the end of the tippet. Calhoun wondered if Lyle had