Falling Scales

Alice liked D.C best when the sludgy Potomac was still a mirror, a few rowers scratching the surface like skimmers or heteroptera gerridae, legs spread wide enough to balance on surface tension alone. Before consultants and lobbyists and other parasitic wasps trickled into the streets during morning rush hour. Marble cool and limestone still. Columns and statues and steps dissolving softly, dripping back into the tidal floodplain. Chalk to chalk, the water always wins.

Packing her rod and spare lines and a net and a cracked cooler full of ice, she was the one making weak coffee this morning. Not Debbie at the Moultrie Courthouse who always called her hon and saved stale muffins because they both made $17 an hour or Brenda in the legal aid office who could tell when it was going to rain because she had been under so much pressure for so long her knees had become perfect barometers. Mercurial guidance was not needed, the sky a ripe fuzzy blue. 

By 5:00 a.m. her mug was in the sink and permit double-checked and folded in a pocket. She smiled at the soft reverberation from reverse to drive in the lever behind her steering wheel, traffic lights flashing yellow, still-full trash cans on the curb. A hawk balancing on the nape of a gargoyle’s hunched neck at the National Cathedral watched for wobbly rats, poison-drunk and easy to catch in the last few hours before they bled themselves to death from fiberglass shards folded into their bait.  

By now she was well bored of fishing parts of the upper Potomac: Point of Rocks, with its shallow fast current and eager smallmouth bass, nestled in a part of Western Maryland, once with more horses than people but now dotted with new-growth trees reclaiming old farmland a bit more every year in a game of cat and mouse against cookie-cutter townhouse developments for city transplants with fake names like Gambrill Glenn. The lower Potomac, when she had been too depressed to travel far, brackish and slow. The few stripers caught there worked better than any SSRI’s when pan-fried with brown butter and capers, some parsley and lemon.

As she drove through Georgetown toward Key Bridge, a truck backfired in the distance, offloading frozen fish from Thailand by way of Baltimore. Made her foot twitch on the brake, nerves still shot from a case earlier in the week. Client lunging over the desk mid-hearing toward the judge. Nail file shiv. Fish and human blood smell the same. Rust.

She needed to get out of the city, to fall into the current and watch isonychia, quill gordon, and march brown mayflies hatching. To feel how the afternoon makes fields of buttercups glow like distant stars and how when thunder is about to roll the cold air whips leaves upside down, flashing shades of celadon. How clouds mirror the wings of small moths and you taste a storm before lightning and fish will only ever see rain from below, water hitting water, a song in braille, chorus rattling their bones. And if today didn’t work to clear her head, well, she could always put river stones in her pocket and slip away, skin greying and greening like a rainbow trout returning home. 

It was a close race against the sunrise into Virginia. Past a stream called Difficult Run and the North Fork of Moormans River. By Dulles and mansions with fifteen rooms and gated drives and the long empty stretches of Loudon County where the train stops running and the road narrows and windowless data centers sprout in block after block of thrumming metal and pulsing wires. Surrounded by endless fences catching naive birds in their barbed wire. Sparrow wings caught in metal burrs. Red-tailed hawks after the broken sparrows. Turkey vultures after self-gutted hawks. Heads on spikes. But warning whom?

The parking lot at the Luray Caverns was empty when she slipped into Shenandoah. Windows in the motels hugging the park still curtained. She remembered thinking they were charming at first, how comforting wood paneling and the sweet ammonia smell of decaying insulation could be when walls and locks feel safe.

It was barely past eight when she reached the trailhead on Skyline Drive, the main road cresting this slice of the Blue Ridge Mountains, air thick with sassafras and the sharp perfume of nettle. The hood of the car burned her hand when she touched it. Her own fault for getting her bearings from faded instructions written on a small piece of paper folded to the point of softness. She almost missed the half-hearted red blazes on the trees marking the path at first, walking around the gravel perimeter of the road pull-off with a slight headache. You ok hon? No free coffee here. 

She juggled the now-leaking cooler on her hip, fingers slippery with sunscreen as the early morning fog burned off. The trail was overgrown. Brambles and mock strawberries creeped over fallen trees. Two squirrels chased each other, chittering. An eagle circled. Shadow dimpling the path, more rock than dirt. Almost fell twice. But even in the shadows of deep forest, the river couldn’t hide. Sweetness in the air and dirt softening and darkening until it gives the game away. 

She set down the cooler and rod, left arm numb. Her nylon jacket rustled as she unzipped and carefully folded it, hotter than expected. The water’s edge was uneven. She paced up and down the bank and then, making sure her net was secured across her chest and rod was perched against a green sapling, stepped down with a sigh. Her boots filled with fast-moving water, sliding on the pebbles under the surface.  Everything seemed to be multiplying in the heat—birds, rabbits, weeds, gnats, drops of sweat, prickling rash.

The only trick beyond luck to get a bite in the hole was to know where to look, behind drowned logs or large rocks, on the edges of currents, in shadows. Shy fish getting lazy, gorging before the leaves burned off in the November cold. 

She learned that from Charles. Perhaps the only thing that ever really stuck. Never able to focus when he tried to teach how to cast, leaning instead into the cigarette breath tracing the back of her neck. His line melted into the brook while hers looked like a toddler throwing a stick. Her first try she caught the lure on a maple sapling over her shoulder.

“Easy does it, girl.”

“I’m not a horse, you know.”

“You wish.”

“Neigh.”  

It took an hour before she felt tension on the rod.

“I think I got one!”

“Let me help you.” He waded over, water cresting the thighs of his waders. 

“Ok, so this is the rare species of granitas pebbleus.”

It took two more hours for her to finally catch a small brook trout. 

“Set!”

She flicked her hand up, lodging the line’s hook into a thin cheek, using the panicked thrash of the trout against itself. The rod bowed and Charles grabbed his net. The fish was still a baby, eager and fat. The fly too deep to remove.

“Charles?”

He put a wet hand on her shoulder.

“I’m sorry.”

Her first domestic violence civil protection order case involved a mother of three in southeast D.C., worried about safety after threats from the father. Barely twenty. Won the order and was about to call. Court sergeant radio trilled. Mass homicide, domestic.

Charles was drunk off morning beers and forgot his pliers in the truck the last time they went to Shenandoah. Took too long with a bright adolescent bluegill. Tried to revive him with an urgency she had never seen before, slapping the fish in the water. He stood silently afterward, facing upstream. 

They stopped fishing together after that but a box was still left on her desk after he died, abandoned in his locker, trail instructions folded under an old parking pass and a spare tie for trial. He always wore paisley to disarm the jury. No one worries about the guy in purple.

She prospected toward the shivering horizon, casting across and up the river. A sharp-shinned hawk joined the eagle flying overhead. At least they thought she might catch something. Tenacious mosquitos fought through her layer of DEET. Stoneflies bobbing on the surface, fueled by the warmth, laying eggs before dying from exhaustion. No clouds in the bleached sky made it easier to watch the expressions of the water’s surface. Bubbles in a small corner, changes in rivulets from precocious tree roots, moments when the river talks to itself.

He gave her back the apartment key with a shy hug. Maybe it was because a case went wrong and he was to blame, though it could have been the pretty new intern or his ex who always called when she was sad. Could have been the wrinkles beginning to strangle her neck or a fault line buried deep inside her collarbone.

But even now, when she closed her eyes, he still flashed. Netting gorgeous sunfish, black crappie, and channel catfish. Cooking them over a crackling fire at dusk. Curling up together in the thick humid summer night as an owl hooted sonnets. Fireflies watching as they slept. Voyeurs on a tent’s screen. A jumble of legs and arms becoming a low steady hum. 

To forget him she went on a trip in remote Montana with a shaggy-haired guide named Rhett. Dimples instead of frown lines. A gentle voice. Saving up for a seaplane license. Was happy to take her out for a few extra hours beyond their agreed upon rate but the water was chocolate milk after a week of record rain. No bites. He took off his net and unhooked his waders. She slid off her shirt and he grabbed her hips. Interrupted by a thirty-person forest service crew sent to clear a nearby ridge who started to watch, she yelled nothing wrong with skinny-dipping. All four of her cheeks blushed redder than the sunburn she’d wake up with the next morning.

It didn’t work, of course, despite a few subsequent visits to Rhett’s camper van and the bathroom at the old movie theater whose handicap stall sink they almost broke off the wall. She had always been good at trying. Not quite as good at following through.

By now it was noon and still nothing. A ham sandwich was nestled back in the cooler. Wrapped in tinfoil. The thought of a slimy bite made her stomach turn.

The next time she saw Charles she didn’t notice him at first, a tall figure downstream in the Little Occoquan Run near Great Falls. But it only took a few minutes for her to realize it was him, with another woman, hands guiding her arm. For the first time since she was thirteen she felt like a souvenir of skill. Mounted on the wall with a plaque, look what I did.

She walked upstream toward a fallen pine. The trout must be sleeping, though she didn’t know how. Was it against barriers, gently pushed against an edge to rest on, nestled still? Was it in motion, pillowed by the current, dreaming of June in January and January in June?

To get out of sadness, one of the hard ones she could not self-medicate with sugar and butter and cheap wine, she went with the Chesapeake Women’s Anglers on a backcountry fishing trip to Laramie. Their fishing guide got arrested at the local dive while they were on the plane. The horse-packer, Finn, a shy kid barely nineteen, was forced to tap in.

She only knew what happened because she got a few beers to help with jetlag, leaving the rest of the women to their own devices. The jukebox couldn’t play music but had enough flashing lights to make even sober barflies see double. She could count the age of the wood bar from the water rings sanding off the varnish. A small crunch underfoot came from beer bottles and peanut shells and shaken-off road dust from hunters who had been alone so long they started to twitch like their hounds. 

She pulled Finn aside next to the 24-hour bait vending machine outside. Nightcrawlers. The metal box hummed with refrigeration. Baitfish. Cups and bags instead of candy bars and chips. Crickets. A picture of a fish looming over an airbrushed yellow backdrop was big enough to beckon drivers heading to the nearby stocked municipal lake. Call Vending Solutions and Reel in the Profits. Worm machines gave her the creeps.

He clumsily lit a cigarette.

“What’s the worst that can happen? No one is going to die.” 

He tried to muster a smile.

The next evening when they reached the campsite, Finn set up the tents and the women started to rig up. The unofficial leader of the group, a tall dyke named Bex who used to manage the floor of a cleaning supply factory and had a permanent scowl that looked like she could still smell the solvents to show for it, asked what they should tie on. Finn looked at Alice. She nodded.

“I always go with a yellow-bellied warbler.”

“I’ve never heard of that,” Bex’s voice hardened by years of experience with bullshitters.

Finn solemnly walked over to the rock where he had perched his tacklebox and stared in deep contemplation. Held up an orange butt carpet caddis dry fly, fingering the imitation egg sack before scoffing and throwing it back with its siblings, hiding a small cut on his thumb from the hook’s lip. Rolled two copper john flies in his palm, checking that the brass bead nymph head would stay on in the thrumming, swollen stream. Finally pulled out a yellow bugger, as fluorescent as a cat toy or arcade prize.

“This one. It hits every time.”

Bex laughed but caught a whopper on the first cast. Held the glistening fish like a newborn.

Alice swallowed the urge to call Charles and tell him he had been right, that confidence is all that matters in everything but death, but instead zipped her phone inside the waterproof pocket of her waders and gave Bex a whistle.

 That night she dreamed she was a trout, watching from below the way light drips and waves push around immovable objects, feeling more than seeing the fingerprints of a riverbed. A step upstream becoming a mushroom cloud echoing in a semi-sphere, a prism of pressure and heft. A fly on the surface etching a message into the water. Come, find me, I’m here, waiting. 

She flipped her line up and down in the fading afternoon and tried not to think about who she had tried to save, as fragile as a gill out of water, shivering and silently screaming to breathe. She could use that yellow-bellied warbler today.

A cramp crawled up the inside of her calf behind her knee. The tea-stained sky hummed with gnats. Shadows from oaks on shore creeped longer and longer. She could barely feel the ground and her foot snagged on a root under the surface. Was barely able to grab a young sapling trunk in time. Water pooled in her waders. Tired and cold, she let her body float in the current.

Brenda told her about Charles’ funeral over a piece of stale coffeecake. She threw up in the bathroom while a teen mom with an ankle bracelet took a shit in the stall next door. 

Jumped off Chain Bridge. Didn’t leave a note. She wondered if he second-guessed himself at all in the shimmering moments between choice and impact. 

The longer she stayed in the water, the better the numbness felt. She dipped her head back. How easy it would be to slip in just a little bit further.  Clothes swollen with silt and midges and snow fleas. Heart rate slowing. Hair wrapping around her neck. Watch yourself bitch. A common refrain in the courthouse parking lot. If those men could see her now they would piss themselves. 

Being depressed is a luxury when you know you’re going to wake up the next morning, one of her clients told her after losing a custody case, holding a dinged paw patrol water bottle with a neck bruise still blooming purple and green. 

Most of these rulings depend on what the judge is looking for, what they think they know, Alice tried to explain. The mom gave a half-hearted smile, revealing a gap from a gold tooth sold for baby formula. 

A horsefly slit her wrist, jagged pinch jolting her back into her body. She took a deep breath. Got a foothold. Scrambled up the bank. 

Evening bugs gossiped midair, small black bodies glinting. A few flew into her mouth and she spit them out as she dried the line and wrung out her hair. She kicked brown mud off her boots. Looked back at the water. Calm and clear. Her skin goosebumped. Time to head up. It was always easier leaving. The hard part was knowing when.

She loaded gear in the back of the car and sat down, exhausted. The hotboxed seat-belt fabric burned her skin and warmth settled in. Tomorrow she would see Debbie and Brenda and drink watery coffee and talk about the weather but today she was nowhere. Alone in a dinged car in an overlooked pull-off. This was the last thing Charles gave her, the only thing he couldn’t take back. 

The peace of the right place at the wrong time. The beauty of close but not enough. The comfort of would have. If only. Catch and release. 

Thump. Something slammed on the roof, loud as thunder.

She opened the door and stepped up on the sunbaked frame, the smell of iron and iodine slamming her before her eyes could focus.

A monster trout. Dropped by a clumsy eagle still circling overhead. Bigger than any she had ever caught. Slime and egg viscera sprayed across the roof. Eyes popped out. Face degloved and grinning on the trunk. Scales from the impact scattered in orbit around the car, glinting in the sunset. Taking off her shirt and wrapping what was left, she cradled the mangled body against her breast and laughed until the tears carved a stillborn river under her feet.