One Small Fear, Greg Keeler

Henry can’t decide whether he is shivering because he is wet or because he is afraid. The small indenture in the cliffs where Henry is hiding beside the Clearwater River is too shallow to be called a cave, though it is deep enough to keep him out of the night wind. Why doesn’t Henry leave his little nook? After all, highway twelve is only a few dozen yards across the river from him.

The previous evening, everything seemed to be going well for Henry. A gallery in Lewiston had exhibited his paintings, and after the opening, a student from the local university named Tiffany had accompanied him back to his motel room and blown him. This sat very well with Henry because he had not been blown in many years owing to his wife, Audrey’s, five pregnancies, a sudden escalation in her zeal for religion and a proportionate decline in her sexual desire.

Henry felt no guilt from the brief encounter, perhaps because of Tiffany’s cavalier approach to the incident. After swallowing what she termed his vital essences, she struck a Dracula pose and hissed, “Drained, in the twinkling of an eye.” And this morning, instead of quickly and silently creeping to her car, she had swept around the bathroom performing her ablutions and singing Getting to Blow You with many of the same moves and inflections as Deborah Kerr in The King and I. He still heard her whistling when he peeked through the curtains as she fox-trotted to her blue Grand Am.

At breakfast in a local pancake house, several of the art department faculty had congregated at his table, and, while he downed a massive pile of strawberry blintzes, they debated the significance of his work as a tie between the New York and California schools of painting, occasionally looking to him for approval and confirmation.

Later that morning, after he drove to a turnout, donned his waders, rigged up his fly rod and made his way through the golden foliage of willow and cottonwood, he saw a large steelhead break the surface of the Clearwater. Something in that image along with the cool air, blue sky, warm sun and clear water made Henry speak out loud. “It’s all so true, so true,” and then, thinking of his oldest son’s favorite phrase, “So saweeheeeeeeet.”

As Henry tied on a gaudy yet elegant Thunder and Lightening which he had made following the instructions from Fly Fishing magazine, he really didn’t expect to catch anything. This was his first effort at steelheading, and he had heard many times that catching one on a fly was a long and arduous process; thus, when on his second cast toward the spot where the fish had risen, he tied into what must have been the very same fish, he relegated the experience in its entirety to a dream. The dilemmas of his family became a distant hum behind the scream of his reel’s drag as the fish tore into his backing. The departmental bickering of his colleagues back at B.Y.U. drifted away like the leaves around him when the fish breached then came wholloping back to the surface. Only one small fear pierced Henry — that the fish was, indeed, too good to be true and would escape, leaving him with a limp line and a pounding heart, a situation with which Henry was all too familiar.

So to avoid this minor catastrophe, Henry began to walk downstream to shorten the distance between himself and the fish without putting too much of a strain on his tippet. This effort so engaged Henry that he didn’t notice the substantial aluminum craft drifting up behind him, a craft loaded with three large men and two brown Labrador Retrievers. Only when the burly gentleman in the bow said, “Ride ‘im cowboy” did Henry become aware of the small carnival which had coalesced on the periphery of his dream.

Shortly thereafter, the shirtless and hirsute fellow at the oars said “Fuck me runnin’,” drained his Rainier and tossed the can into the current near Henry so that he might secure a better grip and position the craft for his friends to fish the very hole in which Henry was standing.

“Excuse me, but …” said Henry.

“Yer excused,” said the gentleman in the stern, and then he said “Ain’t he” to the dog sitting in front of him. The dog seemed to gather the significance of the situation and set up a high pitched howl, to which the gentleman at the oars responded, “Shut that bitch up,” and then, “You too,” to the other lab who had joined in. “Dogs need more beer,” said the man in the bow, and he poured his beer over the head of the dog beside him so that it calmed down to a whimper as did the dog toward the stern.

“This is the best hole we’ll fish today,” said the man at the oars, “so smoke ‘em if you’ve got ‘em.” Accordingly, the others lobbed contraptions of lead, surgical tubing and salmon eggs into the deepest part of the pool. Immediately, the man in the bow hooked a fish which shot downstream to one side of the run then the other, encircling Henry’s line then swimming upstream so that Henry’s line went limp. When he tightened it up, both he and the other man seemed momentarily hooked into one big fish; then both of their lines went slack.

“You fuck,” screamed Henry. “You fucking fuck.”

“You better put a lid on it, sport,” said the man at the oars.

“I’ll fucking show you a fucking lid,” said Henry charging toward the shore so that he slipped and filled his waders. The cold water only seemed to add another dimension to Henry’s intensity as he sloshed onto a gravel bar and picked up two lime-sized stones.

“Easy there, pretty boy, you’re gonna,” said the man in the bow but he didn’t finish because one of Henry’s stones grazed the side of his head and knocked off his cap that said Lucky Bug .

“Jesus,” said the man in the stern, and he winged a full can of Rainier at Henry but missed so that the can hit the rocks and bounced away spewing circles of foam. Henry started to assess his situation and regain his composure — but not enough to keep him from giving his remaining stone a halfhearted lob toward the boat. Henry didn’t really want the stone to hit anything, much less a dog, but it beaned the beer-drenched lab which consequently slid into the water.

Then everything went quiet until the man rowing said in a calm, deliberate voice, “I think we need to cut him.”

Now, from his little grotto, Henry can barely discern the sounds of glass breaking in the turnout where he parked his Suburu Forester. He has convinced himself that his pursuers will not search for him here where he swam under the cover of darkness after the beams of their flashlights began to probe the muddy depths where he hid in a long jam.

“Shhhhhh, Good boy,” says Henry as he pets the lumpy head of the lab which has just shaken itself dry next to him. “Nice boy.”