Apparition & Late Fictions: A Novella and Stories Read Online Free

From wherever he was in the woods, Chinook could hear the line peeling against the drag, the fat smacking of the fish on the water, Danny shouting “Yes! Yes!” and ran to witness the commotion. It was fifteenminutes before the huge silver fish, fifteen pounds of hunger and outrage, was backed into the shallows where Danny held his line tight, the rod aloft, and, genuflecting, grabbed the steelhead by its tail. The tiny hook was deeply embedded in its jaw and with a pair of forceps Danny worked the hook free, held the gasping, wriggling fish to his face, admiring its teeth, its steely eyes, then knelt in the water and worked it back and forth in the current, letting the water wash through its gills, restoring the spent thing’s equilibrium. After thirty or forty seconds of this, he could feel the fish’s muscles flexing, Danny loosened his hold of the huge tail just enough for the fish to sense freedom. In a flash it was gone.
    It was his favorite thing—to hunt the stealthy, transparent, invisible fish, to know enough about its habits to isolate it in all that dark water, to present a fly or an egg of his own making, the right size and color, at the right angle at the right depth at the right speed to trigger the thing to animal desire, then to fight the thing in its own environs, counting on his knots, his timing, and the proper setting of his drag, then to catch the thing, to hold it, and then to let it go.
    “Love ’em and leave ’em,” is what his father used to say, and it was true. No dinner of salmon or steelhead, and they’d had plenty, ever made him feel as full as the utter mastery involved with returning the captive to its freedom, the genuine pleasure of letting it go.
    Among his clients it was well known now that Danny would put you on fish, teach you to catch fish, work hard to net them, and take your picture with them. And you could keep one male chinook or coho to take home to barbecue for the neighbors, with too much beer and blathermentia, but whatever plenty the season provided, whatever the limit the State of Michiganallowed, one salmon was the limit on Danny’s boat and none was better and no browns or steelhead were ever kept.
    “But they’re all just going to die,” one of his clients once protested when Danny released a thirty-pound hen.
    “We’re all just going to die,” Danny told him, “sooner or later, a hundred percent.”
    Danny washed the fish slime off his hands, poured another handful of his father’s ashes out, kissed the fist he held them in, and let them go into the dark water.
    He sat with his dog on the bank for a few minutes, waiting for no particular reason, watching the salmon working the reds. Everything around him seemed a metaphor for his father—the leaf-fall, the clear water, the fish in their futile quest. He tried to remember when he first became aware that his father approved of him, his life, and whether it was a gift outright or whether he had earned it.
    Early on they’d argued over church and Sundays. He’d quit after his mother died. He was ten when she had died of “complications” involving “medications” and “depression.” And though he would stand in the first pew on the left side of the church with his stepmother and siblings—for his father had married Margaret within the year—with a hymnal in his hand for a few years after that, he was never really “there” and didn’t really sing the songs or believe or understand the light that came through stained glass or how it had happened—how or why his mother had been removed from their lives. At thirteen he simply refused to go and gave his father and Margaret to believe that if forced he’d make a scene that would embarrass them more than his absence. He took to fishing Sundays at the dam below the park in town for bluegill and crappie and sucker and carp. He’d learned to like the quiet and the privacy andthe feel of fish on the other end of his line. And when he told his father