Buffalo Jump Blues Read Online Free Page A

rock. It didn’t. Something had to give, and it was the knot that gave.
    Sean reeled in the slack line, feeling a hollowness in his chest that had less to do with losing the fish than the fly.
    â€œSorry, Pop,” he said.
    He thought about tying on another fly. He couldn’t recall a time when he hadn’t caught at least one trout on his father’s birthday, and he knew that if he fished into the enveloping darkness, he still had a very good chance. But not catching was fishing, too, as his dad would have been the first to remind him. It was the angler’s song in minor key.
    Sean started back toward the cabin, Choti following, the rod balanced on his shoulder with the tip backward, like a boy in a Rockwell painting. Water had always been his window to the past, and as he walked along the fisherman’s path his mind turned to an earlier trail, one that wound through a swamp along Michigan’s Au Sable River. Twilight gloom had gathered in the arms of the cedars. His father took his hand as they crossed the deep part, a trout against the far bank rising like a metronome to mayflies that spread their wings on the surface, crucifix offerings to the trout. The line whistled. Thetrout took, walloped its tail with a hollow smacking sound and then went deep as his father handed Sean the rod, that throbbing pull the only drug he’d ever need. When he curled his fingers under the gills to carry the trout back to camp, lightning bugs burned their lanterns under one willow, then the next, a string of winking lights to show the way.
    Such recollections came less often now. They rusted away with the passing of the years, like the old hooks on the flies his father had tied.
    â€œYou have the look of a man who’s been somewhere else,” Patrick Willoughby said, peeling his waders off on the stoop of the porch.
    â€”
    The Trout Tails Bar and Grill, “Tits and Tails” as the locals called it, was or rather had been one of those unzoned, wood-slat, metal-roofed Bud-and-burger bars that change ownership as often as the anglers who inhabit them change trout streams. Since Stranahan’s move to Montana four years previously, it had been called the Bear Claw Bar and Grill, the Last Cast Saloon, and After the Hatch, each establishment succumbing to the fiscal limitations of a three-month season.
    Its latest incarnation was a nod to the Sip ’n Dip Lounge, the Great Falls mermaid bar that had been christened by
GQ
magazine as the country’s best watering hole. Sean had dropped into the Sip ’n Dip once while fishing the Missouri River and been surprised to discover that the real attraction wasn’t the women flipping their tails behind glass, but Piano Pat Spoonheim, a great-grandmother who played a triple-decker keyboard and had been talking her way through old standards at the same bench for more than fifty years.
    Trout Tails, built on a high bank of the Madison opposite its confluence with the West Fork, sported an electric sign wrested from pink-and-aqua neon tubes that operated on a timing mechanism, so that a mermaid’s tail appeared to flip back and forth as you passed through the door. Inside was Margaritaville North—crab trapssuspended from a bamboo ceiling, a neon parrot advertising Budweiser beer, globe lights reflecting cheeks blushed by alcohol, a goldfish bowl for tips on the top of a battered baby grand. Sean arrived a few minutes behind the other club members and found Pat Willoughby already ensconced at a corner table, along with Kenneth Winston, a hairstylist from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, who supported his trout jones by teaching white hairdressers how to barber black men’s hair.
    â€œYou need a trim,” Winston said as Sean sat down. “I know you’re going for the lumbersexual look, but still, a lady likes a little grooming.”
    â€œI need better luck is all. That’s my first fishless night in a long time.”
    â€œWhat you