2000 Charles River Review: Idaho Fish and Game

Hell's Anglers was the best place to get drunk in Last Prospect, Idaho. Rene, its owner, was a local fly fishing legend and Harley enthusiast who always wore a black leather biker vest over his sun-scorched and black-bristled torso. "Fuck California" was painted across the back of the vest in red, Gothic script over a skull wearing wraparound sunglasses. The vest also had two pieces of lamb's wool pinned to the front. The lamb's wool was covered with fishing flies. Rene was very fat, and his bald head and fleshy face made him look amorphous and spongy, as if he were still in the process of being born. He had painted the walls of his bar with cartoon skeletons and demons fly fishing in a lake of fire. One of the demons had Hitler on his line and another had Dracula, both of whom were caught by the top lip, leaping out of the lake with their hands to their sides, twisting like trout. Not many tourists came in the Hell's Angler.

Even without Rene's murals, it was not hard to imagine fire spitting out of the ground here. Two million years ago, the area of Last Prospect was a lava sea in the middle of a gigantic volcano. The land was covered in densely twisted gray-green scrub brush in all directions for several miles, broken only by tarp-covered bales of hay and herds of brown and black beef cattle that lined the barbed fences, blankly chewing whatever grass they could grab from the other side. Hard gray mountains surrounded the horizon, and their jagged tops looked like the edges of a giant bowl. Even in the summer the southern rim was capped with sparkling snow. Stands of scrawny lodge pole pines dotted the edges of the highway, stripped and chewed to barky ribbon by beetles. Last Prospect had a single gas station, three outfitters, one grocery store, and three other bars besides Hell's. Except for the mountains, everything looked as if it could disappear forever under the next snowstorm.

Lee had been sitting in the bar since after dinner, trying to remain as drunk as possible. He was supposed to go back east in three weeks to start law school. Getting drunk was childish, but it felt really good.

"So, did your lady friend like it up here? She is a very sexy girl." Rene sat down on his stool behind the bar and twisted one of the black hairs on his shoulder. Rene used sexy as an all-purpose adjective for describing everything from insect hatches to radiators.

"I don't think so." Lee picked at his beer bottle until he pulled up the edge of the label with his thumbnail.

"Why, I thought you were taking her in your boat. Showing her the mountains and the fishes, the sexy waters, and your furry piranha-friends."

Lee was working for Idaho Fish and Game, counting otters for the summer. Four days a week he'd paddle his canoe from Marmot down the Carson Scenic River Trail. This fork of the river was designated as a scenic trail two years ago in an effort to protect the fishery. But the designation brought a huge influx of tourists, and every household in Marmot decided to open up outfitter stores and canoe shops. Every weekend during the summer the river was jammed with floaters in paddle boats, canoes, and rafts, drifting downstream along with big white coolers full of beer strapped to truck inner tubes. Lee had even seen a guy float down on a giant inflatable pink flamingo. The otters had started biting people, and it was Lee's job to figure out why, as long as it had nothing to do with the increased tourism and floaters. Lee was going to hang it on genetically altered foods and increased gang membership among younger otters. He realized no one was ever going to read his report and as long as the otters didn't really hurt somebody, he figured they would be better off if Idaho Fish and Game decided to ignore them.

Lee looked at Rene, "I took her out, but we ran into Jack's fish-processing operation."

"Jack is OK. He said he fixed his generator now, so he's not killing so much fish. Besides, he gives me the big ones."

"That's because you let him play his Metallica tapes when he comes in here." Lee drained half his beer and fished a cigarette and a pack of matches out of his pocket. The matches were from a hotel bar he'd never heard of in Dallas. He'd gotten them from his girlfriend, Lisa.

Lisa had just left after spending a week in Idaho with Lee. She wasn't coming back. Lisa and Lee met their freshman year in college at a Halloween party where they were both dressed as Princess Leia. Lee admitted to himself he probably knew from the beginning she wouldn't quit her consulting job, drop everything, and live with him in a trailer in the Beartooth Mountains. When he mentioned a trailer he'd seen for sale, she'd laughed. At the Jackson airport, she said she couldn't wait to see him back in Dallas where he belonged, instead of living up here with mountainmen and psychopaths. The problem was, Lee realized he didn't want to go.

Rene rinsed out his Salvador Dalí coffee mug with some water and his fingertips and poured himself some beer from the tap. "She did not like Jack?"

Jack was Lee's roommate at the ranger station. He was also the only graduate student funded in Idaho this year. His father was the federal director of wildlife for Idaho, a man Lee met only once, over a dinner of Southern Comfort and an absurdly large rainbow trout. Jack was doing a fish count of the river, which was known as the best fly fishing spot in America. Jack would motor a flat boat down the river every night and hit the water with a high charge of electricity. When the stunned fish floated to the top, he'd count them. Jack was having voltage problems that resulted in a ten percent kill rate. Normally, the kill rate was supposed to be half a percent. Unfortunately, during their canoe ride, Lee and Lisa had floated into one of his stinking kills, a swirling eddy of humming insects and dead fish caught under one of the abandoned railroad trestles that crossed the river.

Lee scratched the side of his chin, "No. She didn't want to move out here either."

"Speak of my friend the devil," said Rene, just as Jack walked into the bar, wearing his favorite "Seeing Double and Feeling Single" T-shirt. He was also carrying a huge gray rifle.

Rene got up from his stool, "What is that, a machine gun?"

"AK-47. Some lumber guys gave it to my dad. You know you can clean the inside of these things with pebbles? In Vietnam, our troops would dump their own rifles and grab these from the Viet Cong." Jack set the rifle on the bar and pulled a cassette tape out of the pocket of his jeans. Rene took it from him and turned around to drop it into the tape player. Violent guitar music rumbled out of the speakers.

"What are you doing with it?" asked Rene.

"A bunch of buffalo got out of the park. Rangers said we could shoot them on sight."

Lee tried to blow a smoke ring. Buffalo carried a fatal cow brain disease and were killed as soon as possible if they left Yellowstone. The fact that the disease could be transmitted only if a pregnant cow ate the placenta of a newly born buffalo calf didn't stop ranchers from claiming free buffalo were menaces.

Rene set two Weinhard beers in front of Lee and Jack, "I'm your girl didn't like it here. This place is very romantic. Something about the land, the trees, the water, the isolation. Did you know four out of every five women employed at Yellowstone end up pregnant by April?"

"That's because they're bored, drunk, and the nearest drug store is 35 miles away over the Continental Divide." Jack gestured with his beer bottle.

Rene shook his head back and forth and sipped from his coffee mug. "No. It's something in the land. Look at the Grand Tetons. Those three jagged and cold mountains looked like breasts to the early French explorers. Do they look like breasts to you? How many three-breasted women do you know?"

"Besides Lee's mom?" Jack snorted with laughter and wagged his fingers back and forth, "This part of the song fucking rocks!" The three of them listened silently, with their heads down.

Rene cleared his throat with a bark. "OK. Another example for our friend the rocker. Coffee Pot Rapids is named after a woman in the thirties who tried to canoe down river and ended up wrecking her boat, losing everything but her coffee pot. You know what it was called before the thirties?"

"Tony?" mumbled Lee.

"Mortimer?" laughed Jack.

"The rapids didn't have a name. Even the Indians didn't name them. It took two centuries for a woman to show up and give that place an identity by falling into it."

Lee spun around to face Jack and poked him in the middle of his bony chest. "I can't believe you're going to take that machine gun and hunt buffalo. Aren't you supposed to be an environmentalist?" slurred Lee, tapping the sunken hollow over Jack's breast bone, "How hard is it to hunt with an automatic weapon? It's like your rodless fish-catching methods."

Rene laughed. Jack swatted Lee's hand away and frowned at both of them.

"If a buffalo gets out of the park, it's fair fucking game," Jack said, shaking off his scowl to smile down at the rifle. The benevolent gleam of a new father bloomed in Jack's eyes, and Lee had the ill realization he was more than a little afraid of Jack. "They know they're supposed to stay in the park."

Lee shook his head from side to side to regain his composure. "How the fuck would a buffalo know it had to stay in the park? Do you think the rangers go out and have an orientation meeting with them?" Lee fumbled in his pocket for another smoke and came up with an empty pack. He tossed it in the ashtray.

Jack crossed his arms and rubbed the scaly skin of his sunburned elbows with his fingertips. "They know. Everything and everybody has a place. Rene has this bar, you have your law school, I have my research. I feel bad that they used to be able to run all over creation, but they can't anymore. If everything just stayed where it was supposed to, there'd be no more problems in the world. No war. No disease. No racism. No pollution. Just everything where it's supposed to be. I choose to do my part to keep things in their place. If I get to shoot the hell out of something, that's just gravy."

"But what is life without change?" Rene asked to no one in particular.

Lee swallowed the last of his beer and set it down hard on the table. "You're an asshole, Jack. A real grade-A fucking dickhead. I'm taking a piss."

Jack glared at him, "Hey, fuck you, lawyer boy. Listen, I'm sorry Little Miss Ten Suitcases didn't want to stay, but that doesn't mean you have to get all snobby and shit."

Lee stumbled out the door into the parking lot. The door slammed behind him, dampening the music inside the bar. He found Jack's truck, stood on one of the railroad ties that marked parking spaces, unzipped his pants, and peed all over the driver's side door handle. When he was done, he zipped his pants back up and looked around.

The full moon made everything seem soft, but more real, as if he'd stepped out of the bar and into some movie of his life. He stood straighter and swaggered, the new cowboy in town looking for the showdown, hands held above his hip pockets over imaginary pistols.

Lee walked across the loose gravel onto the hard asphalt of the highway. He stood in the middle of the highway and placed both of his feet carefully on either side of the center line. At night, the road was rarely traveled, and he wasn't scared of getting hit. He stuck his arms out from his sides and tilted his head back. Lee howled at the moon, a long, growling, joyful, drunken howl. He squeezed his eyes shut to block out the moon and the stars, and in his imagination, he saw his howling self 25 feet tall, thundering down from the screen. His white T-shirt, baseball cap, and faded jeans looked luminescent, as if all the light on earth were emanating from him. The highway stretched like a blue-gray ribbon under his feet. In his dream, Lisa was sitting in the front row of the theater. He howled, consciously trying to feel his anticipated future drop away, but the harder he tried, the more ferociously it clung to him. The theater seats were filled with everyone he'd ever known, looking up at him in expectation of what he'd do next. He felt like singing, and his drawl started to ease out of him like a sliver of glass, "Should I stay or should I go now? Should I stay or should I go now? You got to let me know. Should I stay or should I go?"

Lee heard a clicking noise on the asphalt and the image disappeared. He opened his eyes.

Out of the darkness lumbered the dark shapes of more than a dozen buffalo. They were walking down the highway in pairs, their big heads dangling down from their shoulder blades. It was just cold enough to see the steamy puffs of their breath float and break above their heads. They were huge, and Lee was so shocked he couldn't run. His knees were locked, and his voice had left his throat. He stood with his arms still out, afraid to make any sudden motion.

The pairs of buffalo parted down the middle and passed him on either side. He could smell their musky hair and the mud on their feet. Their yellow eyes looked at him, but they didn't spook or slow their pace. The tips of his fingers brushed against their damp coats. Sand and dirt and hair caught under his nails. They moved like old men, stamping and shuffling their feet as they hurried down the highway. Then they went into the darkness, and Lee couldn't see them anymore.