Barney Gursky might have been forty or sixty. If you didn’t know, it would be difficult to tell, for he was the manner of man who after forty didn’t age but settled into himself. His black hair hadn’t been cut but sculpted. He was bronzed and tall, not a hint of flab on him, with hard blue eyes and a sullen calculating mouth. Had Moses not known him he would have taken Barney for a golf pro who had failed to qualify for the tour, or a local TV morning host still waiting for that network offer. Darlene hastily introduced Moses, explaining, “I opened the screen door and there he was.”
Either Barney didn’t remember Moses, or he wasn’t allowing that he did. “Do they call you Moe for short?”
“No. They don’t.”
“Well, glad to meet you anyway, buddy boy.”
Barney was the Gursky cockatrice. A week after Anita’s first wedding, he had acquired a Lamborghini, shifted into overdrive, and lit out for California and then Florida, rumoured to have invested in turn in a roller-derby team, film production, oil exploration, the international arms market, a wet T-shirt girls’ basketball league in which he held the rights to the Miami Jigglers, et cetera.
Wanted, at one time or another, on various charges including fraud and alimony payment arrears, by the authorities in Florida, California, New York, and British Columbia, he hadn’t even attended his sister’s funeral in 1963. Charna had been discovered drowned in a swimming hole at the Friends of the Earth commune in northeastern Vermont four o’clock one morning, wearing nothing but a pair of snakeskin boots.
The Logans were waiting in the living room which, to Moses’s astonishment, was festooned with red roses and actually had a bartender in attendance, something he had never seen before. The middle-aged Logans seemed an ill-matched pair. Mary Lou looked happily plump, wearing harlequin glasses with the sort of lenses that both magnified and blurred her eyes. But Larry was a scrawny bird, his bald head shiny, his dentures gleaming. Had he been a customs inspector he would have searched the bags of anybody that he considered saucy or younger or more privileged than he was. Their enormous son, who wore a Rolling Stones T-shirt over an immense belly and outsize faded jeans, sat apart. His button-nose cherry red, Rob held a box of Kleenex and two large Lowney’s Nut Milk chocolate bars on his lap. The Logans were casually dressed, but Barney Gursky was even more fashionably turned out than his dishy girlfriend—Ralph Lauren polo shirt and dungarees and Tony Lama boots. Summoning the bartender with a flick of his manicured fingers, he asked Moses, “What can I offer you to drink?”
“A soda water, please.”
“Shucks, I think we got us a teetotaller, Larry. Bring this admirable fella a soda and the former Miss Sunset Beach here,” Barney said, indicating Darlene, “will have a vodka on the rocks, but just one before dinner. She’s watching her calorie intake.” The Logans were from Chapel Hill, Barney said, furniture manufacturers, very big, and Barney’s investment group was backing them in a venture that was willing to bet some twenty million plus on a Canadian plant. “And, hey, the fishing’s going to be just great, because Jimbo here won’t be holding us to the legal limit of two measly salmon a day, will you, boy?”
“We can’t do anything illegal, sir.”
“Now isn’t that nice,” Mary Lou said, “really nice. Jim here must have been told that we’re very important VIPs, but he won’t bend the law none for us. I respect that. Where do you hail from, Moe?”
“He doesn’t like being called Moe for short,” Darlene said, wandering in narrowing circles, closer and closer to the bar.
“Forget it, baby.”
“Holy Toledo, I was just going to put my glass down.”
“Montreal.”
“We stayed at the Le Château Champlain there,” Mary Lou said.
No sooner did Moses begin to unwrap a Monte Cristo than Rob leaped up and pointed a fat trembling finger at him.
“If you intend lighting that thing,” Mary Lou said, “you’ll have to step outside pronto.”
Jim Boyd, tying a fly at the corner table, pricked his finger on a hook.
“And what,” Barney asked, “would be your chosen field of endeavour, Moe?”
“He likes to be called Moses. He must think we’re simply dreadful.”
“These days you could say I don’t do much of anything.”
“Well, something tells me the former runner-up to Miss Flowering Dogwood has taken a shine to you, Berger.”
“Oh boy,” Darlene said, “here we go round the blueberry bush again.”
“Mulberry.”
Dinner at Vince’s Gulch was usually something to be endured. Steak fried grey to the core served with potatoes boiled past the crumbling point, followed by “homemade” apple pie from Delaney’s General Store, usually still frozen solid in the middle. But tonight a chef had been brought in from the Tudor Room of the Queen Victoria Hotel in Chatham. There was sweet corn and boiled lobster. Barney reached over to relieve Darlene of her corn—“More cellulite would be a real turn-off, baby”—and then called for another Scotch. Larry leaned forward so that Mary Lou could knot the napkin behind his neck. “Mercy bowcoop, Mummy.” And Rob lunged for the bread basket, stacking four hunks at his place, then swooping on the butter dish, appropriating it. He gathered his plate in, leaving his plump arm curled on the table, sheltering what was his by right. Lowering his head as if to charge, he decimated his first corn cob and started in to strip the next one.
Jim explained that at Vince’s Gulch the guides went out in the morning and again in the evening. There was no fishing in the afternoon. Everybody, he said, gets one turn at all the different pools during their three-day stay. He threw little twisted pieces of paper with the guides’ names on them into a hat and asked everybody to draw one. Barney, who went first, drew young Armand. Larry got Len, or Motor-Mouth, as he was known on the river, and Rob drew Gilles.
“Well then,” Jim said, “I guess that leaves me and Mr. Berger.”
“He’ll have the edge going out with the head guide, won’t he, boy?”
“We don’t call Jim or anybody else around here ‘boy’. Furthermore, it is not a competition.”
Barney accepted a large cognac and swished it around in his snifter. “I know you don’t drink, Berger, but are you a gambling man?”
“What did you have in mind?”
“You, me, and Larry here each write out a cheque for a thou and tack it to the bar. Come Thursday top rod takes the pot.”
“I’m an old hand, Barney. It’s more difficult than you think.”
“He’s been fly-fishing for years,” Darlene said.
“Okay. We’ve got a bet.”
Thick unyielding clouds lay overhead as the Logans waddled down the dirt track to the river laden with bug sprays and cameras and expensive-looking movie equipment. Rob lugged a portable radio and his Kleenex and a big bag of candy. Barney carried a bottle of cognac. As Darlene raised a long slender leg to sidestep off the little floating dock into their long canoe—Armand reaching out to help, his eyes on her panting bosom—Barney immediately knocked her off balance with a proprietorial whack on her bottom. “Oh, man, do I ever go for those buns!”
Allowing everybody else a head start, Moses lighted a Monte Cristo and settled into his canoe with Jim.
“What can I say, Moses?”
“Don’t come this week is what you could have said.”
Over the hum of the outboards, The Rolling Stones began to ricochet off the river walls, scattering the crows. Fortunately Rob was heading a good mile downriver to the Bar Pool.
Once Jim had anchored at their first drop, out of sight of the others, Moses started out with a Silver Doctor, went to a Green Highlander and then a Muddler without getting anything to rise. Things were no better on the second drop. On the third drop they saw a big salmon roll and another leap, maybe thirty feet out. Moses laid every fly he could think of over their heads, but they weren’t taking. Then there came a hollering and a squealing from the Fence Pool. “It’s probably only a grilse they got,” Jim said.