Bitch Creek by William Tapply Page A

been fighting a big fish when whatever happened to him had happened. Maybe some great brook trout had tangled in the reeds along shore and broken off.
    And then Lyle had died.
    It made no sense.
    Calhoun disjointed the two-piece rod, carried it back to where he’d left Lyle, laid it gently on the ground, and then knelt beside him. “I fetched your rod,” he told him.
    He took off Lyle’s vest, which bulged with fly boxes and all the other junk a fly-fishing guide had to carry. A big wool patch over the left breast of the vest was studded with a variety of flies, stuck there to dry after they’d been used. You could read the stories of dozens of fishing trips from the flies that were hooked in that wool patch. There were lifelike crayfish imitations for smallmouths and fancy Atlantic salmon flies that resembled nothing in nature, big flashy pickerel flies and tiny drab trout flies. Some of them were bedraggled from being chewed by fish. Some had been tried briefly, without success, then retired.
    Calhoun shook his head, remembering all the fishing trips he’d shared with Lyle, the stories that hid in that random assortment of flies stuck into that wool patch.
    He slipped the fins off Lyle’s feet, pulled the deflated float tube down off his legs, then peeled off his waders, which were half-full of pond water.
    He wrestled Lyle’s body up onto his shoulders in a fireman’s carry and headed back to the road.
    Lyle was tall and skinny—all bone and sinew. Calhoun was nearly six inches shorter, but he weighed more, and it was all wood-splitting, canoe-paddling muscle; the first couple hundred yards went easy. But then he began to climb the brushy old tote road, and about halfway up the long slope he ran out of adrenaline and began to stumble. “Gotta take a break, bud,” he mumbled to Lyle as he went down on his knees and rolled the body onto the ground.
    He sat beside Lyle, taking deep breaths and looking at his friend’s swollen face.
    He hadn’t done much thinking since he’d seen Lyle’s ass sticking up in the reeds. He hadn’t tried to imagine what could have happened, how Lyle could have drowned in a shallow little millpond, how his float tube could deflate so quickly that he couldn’t get to shore.
    Maybe he’d been playing a big trout, trying to follow it around the little pond, and his feet had sunk into the bottom and slowly sucked him down. Those peaty bottoms were like quicksand. You often encountered it in beaver ponds, and the harder you fought it, the quicker you sank. If you panicked, you went down fast, even wearing swim fins on your feet.
    But Calhoun had never seen Lyle panic. The boy had certainly played plenty of big fish, and he was cool in any crisis. One frigid December morning when they’d been hunting sea ducks out on Casco Bay before daybreak, a sudden squall had blown in off the ocean. In the darkness, and in the heavy driving snow, they couldn’t see each other from one end of the duck boat to the other. The tide was running hard and the seas were heavy in the wind, and it was so cold that the snow and the salt spray froze instantly on their hats and jackets. If Calhoun had been navigating, they’d have ended up in Africa, if they didn’t freeze to death or capsize first.
    Lyle had calmly brought them directly to the dock, singing the entire Revolver album over the roar of the wind and the throb of the outboard.
    Lyle had found himself stuck in peaty pond bottoms before. He’d been in tighter situations than that. It was hard to imagine that he’d ever panic.
    Anyway, Lyle hadn’t been stuck in the mud when Calhoun found him.
    What the hell had Fred Green been doing when Lyle got in trouble?
    Calhoun knew he wasn’t thinking clearly. He tried to slow down his brain, sort out the facts, make some kind of sense out of it.
    Lyle and Green had driven here in the Power Wagon. They’d parked near