Ron Rash: Chemistry and Other Stories

He parked by the bridge and walked upriver toward where Caney Creek entered. Afternoon sunlight slanted over Brushy Mountain and tinged the water the deep gold of cured tobacco. A big fish leaped in the shallows, but Lanny’s spinning rod was broken down and even if it hadn’t been he would not have bothered to make a cast. There was nothing in the river he could sell, only stocked rainbows and browns, knottyheads, and catfish. The men who fished the river were mostly old men who stayed in one place for hours, motionless as the stumps and rocks they sat on. Lanny liked to keep moving, and he fished where even the younger fishermen wouldn’t go.

In forty minutes he was half a mile up Caney Creek, the spinning rod still broken down. The gorge narrowed to a thirty-foot wall of water and rock, below it the deepest pool on the creek. This was the place where everyone else turned back. Lanny waded through waist-high water to reach the left side of the waterfall. Then he began climbing, using juts and fissures in the rock for leverage and resting places. When he got to the top he put the rod together and tied a gold Panther Martin on the line.

The only fish this far up were what fishing magazines called brook trout, though Lanny had never heard Old Man Jenkins or anyone else call them anything other than speckled trout. Jenkins swore they tasted better than any brown or rainbow and paid Lanny fifty cents apiece no matter how small they were. Old Man Jenkins ate them head and all, like sardines.

Mountain laurel slapped Lanny’s face and arms, and he scraped his hands and elbows climbing straight up rocks there was no other way around. The only path was water now. He thought of his daddy back at the farmhouse and smiled to himself. The old man had told him never to fish a place like this alone, because a broken leg or a rattlesnake bite could get you stone dead before anyone found you. That was near about the only kind of talk he got anymore from the old man, Lanny thought to himself as he tested his knot, always being lectured about something — how fast he drove, who he hung out with — like he was eight years old instead of sixteen, like the old man himself hadn’t raised all sorts of hell when he was young.

The only places with enough water to hold fish were the pools, some no bigger than a wash bucket. Lanny flicked the spinner into these pools and in every third or fourth one a small, orange-finned trout came flopping out onto the bank, the spinner’s treble hook snagged in its mouth. Lanny would slap the speckled’s head against a rock and feel the fish shudder in his hand and die. If he missed a strike, he cast again into the same pool. Unlike browns and rainbows, the speckleds would hit twice, occasionally even three times. Old Man Jenkins had told Lanny when he was a boy most every stream in the county was thick with speckleds, but they’d been too easy caught and soon enough fished out, which was why now you had to go to the back of beyond to find them.

Lanny already had eight fish in his creel when he passed the No Trespassing sign nailed in an oak tree. The sign was scabbed with rust like the ten-year-old car tag on his granddaddy’s barn, and he paid no more attention to the sign than when he’d first seen it a month ago. He knew he was on Toomey land, and he knew the stories. How Linwood Toomey once used his thumb to gouge a man’s eye out in a bar fight and another time opened a man’s face from ear to mouth with a broken beer bottle. Stories about events Lanny’s daddy had witnessed before, as his daddy put it, he’d got straight with the Lord. But Lanny had heard other things. About how Linwood Toomey and his son were too lazy and hard drinking to hold steady jobs. Too lazy and drunk to walk the quarter-mile from their farmhouse to look for trespassers, Lanny figured.

He waded on upstream, going farther than he’d ever been. He caught more speckleds, and soon ten dollars’ worth bulged in his creel. Enough money for gas, maybe even a couple of bootleg beers, he told himself, and though it wasn’t near the money he’d been making at the Pay-Lo bagging groceries, at least he could do this alone and not have to deal with some old bitch of a store manager with nothing better to do than watch his every move, then fire him just because he was late a few times.

He came to where the creek forked and that was where he saw a sudden high greening a few yards above him on the left. He left the water and climbed the bank to make sure it was what he thought it was. The plants were staked like tomatoes and set in rows the same way as tobacco or corn. He knew they were worth money, a lot of money, because Lanny knew how much his friend Shank paid for an ounce of pot and this wasn’t just ounces but maybe pounds.

He heard something behind him and turned, ready to drop the rod and reel and make a run for it. On the other side of the creek, a gray squirrel scrambled up a blackjack oak. Lanny told himself that there was no reason to get all jumpy, that nobody would have seen him coming up the creek.

He let his eyes scan what lay beyond the plants. He didn’t see anything moving, not even a cow or chicken. Nothing but some open ground and then a stand of trees. He rubbed a pot leaf between his finger and thumb, and it felt like money to him, more money than he’d make at the Pay-Lo. He looked around one more time before he took the knife from its sheath and cut down five plants. The stalks had a twiny toughness like rope.

That was the easy part. Dragging the stalks a mile down the creek was a lot harder, especially while trying to keep the leaves and buds from being stripped off. When he got to the river he hid the plants in the underbrush and walked the trail to make sure no one was fishing. Then he carried the plants to the road edge, stashed them in the ditch, and got the truck. He emptied the creel into the ditch, the trout stiff and glaze-eyed. He wouldn’t be delivering Old Man Jenkins any speckleds this evening.

Lanny drove back home with the plants hidden under willow branches and potato sacks. He planned to stay only long enough to get a shower and put on some clean clothes, but as he walked through the front room his father looked up from the TV.

“We ain’t ate yet.”

“I’ll get something in town,” Lanny said.

“No, your momma’s fixing supper right now, and she’s set the table for three.”

“I ain’t got time. Shank is expecting me.”

“You can make time, boy. Or I might take a notion to go somewhere in that truck myself this evening.”

It was seven-thirty before Lanny drove into the Hardee’s parking lot and parked beside Shank’s battered Camaro. He got out of the truck and walked over to Shank’s window.

“You ain’t going to believe what I got in back of the truck.”

Shank grinned.

“It ain’t that old prune-faced bitch that fired you, is it?”

“No, this is worth something.”

Shank got out of the Camaro and walked around to the truck bed with Lanny. Lanny looked to see if anyone was watching, then lifted a sack so Shank could see one of the stalks.

“I got five of ’em.”

“Shit fire, boy. Where’d that come from?”

“Found it when I was fishing.”

Shank pulled the sack back farther.

“I need to start doing my fishing with you. It’s clear I been going to the wrong places.”

A car drove up to the drive-through and Shank pulled the sack back over the plants.

“What you planning to do with it?”

“Make some money, if I can figure out who’ll buy it.”

“Leonard will, I bet.”

“He don’t know me, though. I ain’t one of his potheads.”

“Well, I am,” Shank said. “Let me lock my car and we’ll go pay him a visit.”

“How about we go over to Dink’s first and get some beer.”