John Casey - Compass Rose

She volunteered for the longest route, on foot, an unpleasant thrash through bullbriars and low-limbed rhododendron along the Usquepaug and the Queens River. Some exercise, and in all likelihood no people. She tucked a pair of rain pants into her fanny pack for pushing through thorns or poison ivy. For lunch she packed an apple and a carrot. All she deserved.

There was a path into the river, but upstream and downstream, both banks were overgrown. She stuck her hand in the water — too warm for trout? She saw a bird, a dull speck flitting in the tree shade. When it crossed the stream and caught the light it turned electric blue. It wheeled away from her and vanished into the woods. The blue persisted in her. Her eyes were so astonished that her other senses went numb. She wasn’t sure if she’d made a noise. An indigo bunting. Not indigo at all — blue, bluer than a jay or a bluebird, absolute blue.

She was alone, blissfully alone, for the first time in months.

She put on her long pants, rebuckled her web belt, and began to pick her way through the bushes, gracelessly at first. After a mile or so she was sweating. Good. Sweat it off. She cut over to the stream and filled the first of her three test tubes. On the far bank there was a stand of cardinal flowers. The blossoms were half hidden by mourning cloaks, some hovering, some attached to the flowers while slowly flapping their wings, velvet black with violet and ivory edging. On the moving surface of the water the reflected red, black, and violet wavered in and out of focus. At first glance it seemed that the colors were being swept away. Then they seemed to be swimming against the current. She looked away to stop feeling giddy. She’d been fooled before — seeing and unseeing. She looked at the butterflies, the real ones, knew what they were up to with the cardinal flowers — their coiled proboscises, grotesquely long fusions of nose and mouth parts, were uncoiling deep into the flowers’ cups. She wondered what they felt. Was it just taste, or was there touch? Was that slow flapping just to keep their balance, or was it a sign of pleasure?

A year without sex. More than a year. She hadn’t gone that long since she was a schoolgirl. She breezed through her memory of a few fumbling schoolboys, then surprised herself thinking of dresses. Dresses she’d put on to be taken off. Unbuttoned slowly. Unzipped and stepped out of. A few frenzied times hoisted waist-high. Once in Sally’s garden. The only red dress at the party. She went into the garden first. He didn’t see her until she stepped into a bit of light between the boxwoods. Then back into the dark. A tall man. She clung to him as he sank to his knees, her face in his chest, her right knee jangling the keys in his trousers pocket. He slid his trousers down, her skirt up, the crotch of her underpants sideways. It was close enough to what she’d had in mind. He worked in downtown Providence — she got off by thinking of walking into his office …

Then she heard the sound of the party, the blur of voices from the front rooms, the clinking of plates from the kitchen. She heard them suddenly, as if snapping out of a daze on a train.

The knees of his trousers were so obviously grass-stained that he went straight to his car and left. She’d laughed. How far she was now from that hard little self. She could miss it or call it names, it didn’t matter. She could call it up for a quick fantasy visit. (Was it odd that she didn’t have fantasies — sexual fantasies — about Dick?)

It had been more than a year since she’d gone to one of Jack and Sally’s parties. Sally occasionally mentioned that one man or another asked where her sister was. Sally sometimes added, “Did you ever think of him?” Sally meant courtship: mixed doubles, charity balls, theater parties, a first kiss. Elsie had made shorter work of it.

Now here she was back in the woods. She looked under a fallen tree limb and found a black beetle. She tossed it into the stream. It drifted ten feet, then a trout sucked it in.

She ate her carrot and apple, drank half her canteen, and moved upstream.

When she stopped to fill her third test tube, she saw something move. The tip of a fishing rod. It stuck out from behind a pine tree on the far bank. She corked the test tube, put it in her pouch, and circled into the brush. She crept back toward the stream until she saw a man. Not a fly fisherman. An ultralight spinning outfit. He was using live bait, letting it drift. She couldn’t tell if it was a bug or a worm. No license pinned to his hat or shirt. He reeled in. He’d lost his bait. He picked a bug from a can and put it on the hook, tossed it upstream, shut the bail.

Not anyone she knew. Middle-aged, nicely faded blue shirt, rolled-up sleeves. Panama hat, beat-up but too classy for this neck of the woods. Sort of like Jack wearing broken-down patent-leather dancing pumps around the house on a Sunday morning.

He got a bite. The rod bowed; he held it high as the fish ran for the bank, almost in front of her. She ducked down. She heard the fish thrash, the drag whine. She pushed a clump of leaves aside so she could peer out. He was playing the fish calmly, not horsing it in. All she had to do was stand up and he’d be flummoxed. She watched. She felt a voyeurish intimacy — his gaze was so intent, his right forearm showing little bands of muscle. The fish ran back upstream. He lifted the rod tip and reeled in. He let it run out some more line. The fish swam in an arc, then another, each one closer to him. He stepped into the stream, lifted the rod high, and grabbed the trout. She thought at first that was a dumb move, good way to scare it into a last wriggle that would free it. But he’d got a finger into the gills. He stepped back on shore, set his rod down, and bent the trout’s head back sharply. He held the dead fish at arm’s length, his finger still hooked through the gills. She guessed twelve inches, maybe a hair more. He considered it for some time. He wiped his right hand on the seat of his pants and pushed his hat back. She liked his face. She’d always been a sucker for the face of a passably attractive man doing things deftly.

She lay on her side of the stream and watched him gut the fish with a pen knife. He slit open the stomach and squeezed out a dark pulp. He sifted it with his fingertips, plucked out a more or less intact bug. A black beetle? He lobbed it into the stream and watched. A little swirl and it was gone.

He made a small fire on a flat rock. Another violation. He pulled apart the sections of his rod, tucked them into a cloth case. At least he wasn’t greedy. He washed the cavity, laid the fish by the fire. He cut a long twig and trimmed it. (Cutting or uprooting live plants …) He skewered the fish from anus to mouth and held it over the fire. The tail curled, the skin crisped, the eye turned white. She caught a whiff of wood fire and cooked trout. Still squatting and holding the stick, he moved nearer to the water, groped a bit, and pulled out a half-full bottle of white wine. (No alcoholic beverages inside the park … This meal could cost him more than a dinner at Sawtooth Point.) She watched him wiggle the cork loose with one hand and take a swig. He put the open bottle back in the stream, twisting it into the bed. He turned the fish, poked it with his finger. His intentness focused hers, pulled her gaze into a close-up. He sucked his fingers and broke off a piece of tail, then began to nibble at the body.

She was going to let him go. She pictured him licking his fingers, looking up, as she waded across the stream. Brief alarm. And then? Taking in her badge, her holster, her mild hello. Would he help her up out of the stream? Certainly if she held out her hand.

This cameo reappearance of the old Elsie ended. He would eye her badge, her holster, but then … The son of a bitch might even laugh at her waddling across the stream on her pale, plump legs.