Which of you fathers, if your son asks for bread,
will give him a stone?

SEVEN DAYS after Devin graduated with honors from Montana State University his father stood over him and broke his nose.  That was seventeen years ago; Devin hadn’t been back to Montana since. 

Then his father called from Bozeman.

“Why don’t you come up and stay awhile?” he said.

“No desire,” said Devin.

It was eight-thirty where Devin was, nine-thirty in Montana.  From the chrome chair beside his bed Devin stared at the city again, out over the bank of lights and the blending they went through as the night took shape.  He said what he said, then he was quiet. 

Devin had left in the off-white Impala on three semi-bald tires and one whitewall, two retreads in the trunk for spares.  His mom’s side of the family gave him the car for a dollar and it took him three days and all six tires to make it as far south as he could, south and west to the city where he’d forgotten his father and commenced laddering the backbones of corporations.  
 
“I’d like to pay for you to come up,” his father said. 

“I’m a banker,” Devin replied. 

Devin balanced ledgers and paid accounts, justified things from a desk on the eighth floor of the Bank of America building in Santa Monica.  Two and a half years ago his wife had left with a friend of his named Beck.  She’d taken Devin’s daughter with her, cross country to shut his mouth.  He had nothing to say.  He never gave what she desired.  He drank more, and since they'd gone he hadn't slept much.  My father knows nothing of me, he thought.

“I’d like to pay for the plane ticket,” his father said.  Then the line went quiet again. 

He’d been calling every Sunday for some months now so Devin was used to the pauses, how he took his time saying things, then waited for Devin to respond.  And Devin had warmed some to him.  But saying he’d pay for the ticket, Devin told himself it’s not how this thing would be done.

His father met him at Gallatin Field near Belgrade, the Montana version of an airport: two gates, one baggage claim.  When Devin deplaned, his father stood in a small ring of people at the west door up on the second floor, in among the glass and stone architecture.  It was after dark.  He moved toward Devin.  

“Nice to see you,” he said, and grabbed at Devin’s hand with both of his, shaking it firmly.  “Glad you’re safe.”
 
“Yeah,” said Devin. 

They descended a cement stairwell, squares of granite embedded in the banisters.  A silence set in as they made their way down.  He’ll try to find something to say, thought Devin. 

“I think they let the bags in over here,” his father said, and led Devin to a small metal garage door, the roll top kind, attached to a steel bin that slanted to the floor.  A couple of men in light blue workshirts hoisted bags.

Devin lifted his two out.  His father took the heavier one. 

“Thanks,” said Devin. 

“Truck’s out here,” his father said, and he walked into the mostly empty parking lot, off toward his beat-up Ford.  The pickup was parked far out on the edge of the square, just outside a cone of amber light cast by a high steel lightpost.  

“Not too clean,” he said as he tipped the passenger seat forward to put the bags in.  Behind the seat the space was full of blankets and old coats, overlaid by a .243 and a .22.  The cab smelled of deer blood. 

Devin remembered the guns.  He noted the .243 had a new scope on it and thought the stock on the .22 was even darker than it had been, smoothed out by the placement of shoulder and cheekbone.  Devin’s father put the bag down, carefully lifted out the .243 and handed it to Devin.  “Hold this, please,” he said. 

“Yeah,” said Devin, taking it in his right hand.  The cold feel of the wood and the sheen of the gun barrel were foreign to him now, but still strangely familiar.  The gun was heavy.  He set his bag down and held the stock and the wood beneath the barrel, and he liked how it brought a good feeling of things that had been gone from his mind for years: early mornings, day trips with his father.

His father removed the .22 and positioned Devin’s gear flatly in among the mess, then placed the rifles over the bags, pushing the guns down so they wouldn’t slide or bump each other.  The way he handled the guns reminded Devin of his father’s third or fourth call, a few months back.  Devin could hear how delicate things were for his father then, how near he was to something he both desired and feared. 

“I’ve been thinking a whole lot,” his father had said, “about the man I was to your mother. About the kind of father I’ve been to you.”

“Uh huh,” Devin had said. 

“I was hard on her,” his father continued, “I didn’t give her much.  I drank a lot.  Didn’t have much guts.  Maybe harder on you.  I guess I deserve the place I’m in now.”

“I guess you do,” Devin had said.
|
“I’d like to make it up to you,” his father replied. 

Devin had gone quiet, his bitterness still charged with his father’s image.  Add to it the void he felt over his wife, over the dying they’d gone through and the fortress she’d made of herself and the child.

“I was wrong to you,” Devin’s father had said.

“Yeah,” said Devin, then he let the silence be.

But past two a.m. he was wide awake in his bed.  He lay on his back with his arms straight, staring at a span of wall about three feet in length between the upper steel molding of the window and the black crease of the ceiling.  Finally, he slept, and he dreamed.

When he awoke it was still dark. He felt very cold, especially around his wrists, ankles, and neck.  He remembered three things: a set of false teeth on a night stand; the color red; and an image of his child, Bethen, two years old, laying near his dead father.  Her cheek was pressed to his father’s cheek and her nose was near his mouth.  She inhaled a white vapor, seeming to draw it from his father’s mouth in a long, slow breath.  His father’s hand was on her back.  Devin couldn’t place himself in the room.  But he saw her searching him with her eyes.  Her cheek still touched his father’s face.  Her small, tender arms were around his father’s neck.  But she stared quietly at Devin.  Watching her, Devin felt she knew his desperate motivations, his frailties.  The dream troubled him immensely and he told himself then that he would return to Montana.    

They entered Bozeman from the west.  Devin’s father lived a few blocks south of I-90 in a set of old two-story buildings that lined the edge of an industrial zone.  The apartment was on the ground floor, a narrow box with a bathroom just left of the door, then a hallway that opened to a kitchen and living room/bedroom area.  “This okay?” he asked and he set Devin’s bag down where the edge-eaten linoleum ended against the dull green carpet of the living space. 

“Okay,” Devin said. 

At the kitchen table, a metal rectangle barely big enough for two, they sat over the potatoes and fried deer meat his father had kept warm for him.

“I bet it’s been awhile,” Devin’s father said. 

“Yeah, ” said Devin.

“Nice fat doe,” his father said, “standing right next to a four-by-five over near Big Timber at the foot of the Crazies.” 

His father had taken him there when he was a boy.  Devin pictured a big white-tail, the brown-gold rack of horns, four points on one side, five on the other. 

“Bright, sunny day,” the older man recollected.  He looked into Devin’s face and placed his hand on Devin’s forearm.  Devin wanted to draw back when he did this, but he was struck by his own weariness and by a remembrance of all the late night walking he’d been doing, down hallways and stairwells, or out wandering Pico, or Wilshire, finding the unlit places on 3rd Street with his head turned down over his coat, shuffling beneath the crisscrossed maze of fat electric whir, the numbing he’d go through to get some sleep.

“It’s good to have you here,” Devin’s father said.

Devin noticed his father’s face, the lines and the skin beneath his eyes, the lack of tension in his jaw, the full head of hair, silver and smooth, turned up and back by the way he pushed his hands through it.  The bones of his cheeks were hard beneath the loose skin.  He was a tall man, awkwardly folded into the short-armed kitchen chair, broad-shouldered as he faced Devin, more a man of mountain and stream than the linear structure of the small apartment space.  Devin remembered a weekend his father was hunting bighorns on a tag drawn in the Bridgers.  A white-out had swept in from the northern Rockies, down the gap from Glacier through a north-south corridor that lent force and snap to the cold.  In little more than a pair of garage-sale wool pants and a hunting jacket, he had spent the night shouldering the slant of a granite outcropping, shielded some from the wind.  When he came in late the next afternoon, Devin and his mom had watched him unload his vehicle.  He described the night as uneventful.  Devin had had to heat the oilpan on his mom’s car that morning.  She’d had it plugged in too.  “What was it like out there?” Devin asked him. 

“Windy,” his father answered.

“Where did you sleep?” Devin asked.

“On that rocky bend near Leland’s pass,” his father had said.

Devin’s father moved about the kitchen, attending to him.  Devin noticed his eyes.  They have an open quality, thought Devin, no longer the brooding or the sharp anger that consumed and concealed.  Just a sense of sorrow now and the tiredness of how he carries himself.  It’s hard to find the violence in him anymore or the fear in me.

“I’m talking to Devin,” Mom had told Devin’s father.

“Get in the car,” he’d said to her.

“In a minute,” she answered.

“Now,” he said, yelling at her.

Devin had turned to him and said, “Shut up.”  Small words, but profane between him and his father, something Devin had never said.  Devin didn’t want to really, but once he got started he kept going and it was hard to hold back.

“You’re a fool,” Devin said to him.

“Quiet, boy,” said his father. 

“No,” said, Devin.  “Someone disagrees with you and then you think you’re God.  Not anymore.  Not with me.”  They stood over the hood from each other on the far edge of the dirt parking lot above Worthington Arena.  Some strands of cloud skirted the sky’s most distant edge.  The mountains seemed small out there.  It was just after graduation from Montana State, and Devin knew his father had hated the whole ceremony.  His face bore the length of it, the tedium.  He never cared, thought Devin, about burdening me and Mom with things like that.  His agenda above all, as if it were her fault or mine how inept he was at celebrating someone.  There were a few families near, getting in their cars.  Devin despised him.

“You’ve said enough,” Devin told him.  “You’re done.” 

People stared at them now, Devin’s father tall and broad-backed in his browbeaten Stetson, and Devin almost skeletal, still in his gown.  Devin had notched himself up to get physical if it came to it.  But what could he do really, twenty-two years old and so threadlike next to him. 

“Get in the truck,” his father said, staring at Devin’s forehead, eyeing the boy. 

Devin gave the people a helpless look and shrugged at his father like he was crazy.  But he got in the truck.  His father glowered while he drove and Devin stuck his hands under his legs and stared out the window.  Touching neither of them, his mother sat between them with her neck tight, her face like a flint pointed at the road.  They’d done this before.

They were silent the whole way home, and mostly silent as they settled in, but seven days later Devin’s father made sure the backtalk would stop.  They lived off east of Bozeman then, in a thin-walled trap of a ranch house near the break toward Livingston.  This time they stood face-to-face in the kitchen after Devin’s father had criticized his mother again.

“Shut up,” Devin said, an echo of the parking lot exchange at MSU.  “You’ve got nothing to say to her.”

After coming in from driving hay Devin’s father had cussed her for failing to get milk.

“Back at it again?” Devin’s father asked him, still glaring at Devin’s mom.  “Keep it up.”

Devin thought later he should have heeded this.

Instead he said, “I suppose it’s none of my business how you sneak around on her either.”  At this, his father’s face angered so suddenly the roots of his hair stood like white whiskers at the red edge of his hairline.

“For your own good, you better shut your mouth,” he said.

“Like hell,” Devin said.  His voice sounded high and weak.  His mother was in the corner of the room in a vinyl-backed chair.  She had her arms crossed.  Her eyes were teary.  “Back in Colstrip, you think no one knew?” Devin said, “We all knew.  You shamed her whenever you got the chance.  Came home drunk and sexed-out like a male whore.  Smelled of it every time you stumbled down the hall.  Everyone knew.”  They’d moved out here when he found work with one of the big ranches, and maybe he’d stopped what he’d been doing in Colstrip.  But Devin didn’t care.  He’d have his say.     

Devin’s father grabbed him and hauled him to the couch, shoving him down in the corner of it.

“Probably doing more of the same to her here aren’t you,” Devin continued.  From her place in the corner his mother’s voice made a small, pinched sound, a sound like the sound a cat makes when you squeeze its ribcage.  
Devin’s father was on top of him then, his hands at his mouth and jaw, grabbing his face to shut him up.  But he couldn’t stop the boy.

“Why else would you treat her like a dog?” Devin said.  “You’re the dog, not her.  Everyone knows it.”

“Stop, Devin,” his mother said. 

Devin’s father put the boy’s neck in the crook of his arm while he dug the heel of his free hand into the boy’s lips and teeth and threatened him.  But things kept spilling from Devin, pent up things urged on by the precision of how he released them, the kind of things better left unsaid.  His words were sharp, bred from seven days of silence, sent now in a clean blade of articulation.  “You’re a reservation dog,” Devin said, stealing one of his father’s own phrases, a phrase taken from the half-dead, mange-infested hounds that roamed the streets in Lame Deer, over by Colstrip, humping everything that moved.

With Devin’s last string of words his father sat him up and began slapping his face, increasing the pace of it until Devin’s mouth was fat and bloody and his neck had gone purple.  And he kept on slapping, the rage unadulterated now, probably unable to pull it back even if he had tried.  In the middle of it he misplaced one of the slaps so that they both heard the crunch of Devin’s nose as it realigned itself, the sound like a bootstep on fresh snow.  It was the kind of broken nose that bled freely and it’s likely they both thought he might stop then.  But he kept on and didn’t end until Devin lay spent on his side, crushed beneath his father’s weight, holding his face in his hands. 
When Devin’s father got up and went outside, his mother came and knelt by Devin, her body shuddering over the curve of his ribs.

All this time Devin had convinced himself he needed to say what he’d said to his father.  But he didn’t know anymore, seeing him as he was now. 

When it was all finished Devin’s father had shut him up all right.  But Devin just bided the hours to morning and when he walked out the front door he never looked back. 

It took Devin’s father seventeen years and a few months of calling before an apology came.  When it came Devin was alone in Santa Monica, sitting on the edge of his bed with the phone pressed between his shoulder and his jaw.  He had his face in his hands, staring down through his fingers to the floor, to his feet and the way the veins moved when he lifted his toes.  Tiny upraised rivers.  Rivulets bending over ligaments, bending around bones.  Devin’s father had called late, and it was taking him some time to get to what he wanted to say.  Devin had the light off.  From the window, the city put a faint line on the floor, an oblique angle from behind Devin’s heel to the far corner of the room. 

“I’d like to ask you to forgive me,” his father said. 

His voice had a fine quality, thought Devin, wonderful in its way, but Devin couldn’t give back to him.  For most of his life Devin coupled cynicism with despair, and that’s all he felt during the call, not a sense of care for his father. In fact, his father’s words had angered him.

“I’ve got a long day tomorrow,” Devin had said.

“Yeah,” Devin’s father replied.  “Probably be good to get some sleep.”

“Yeah,” said Devin.

“Okay,” said Devin’s father.

“Goodnight,” Devin said. 

“Goodnight.”

Devin listened, but he didn’t hear his father hang up.  Devin slipped his hand over the receiver.

“I’ve been learning a lot these days,” his father went on, starting them up again.

Devin stood and stared out the window thinking how odd it was to be listening to this.  It was what Devin had been unable to do with his wife, he knew it, what she had hoped he’d do just once instead of fueling his words with criticism, instead of shutting her out. 

“I’ve been wondering about how to be different than I’ve been,” said Devin’s father, then he waited for Devin’s response.

“It’s been on about five years now since I started in on those meetings,” Devin’s father continued. 

Quiet on the line. 

“Haven’t missed yet, and don’t plan to.  Keeps me sane.” 

More quietness.  Devin’s father breathing, Devin breathing.  

“Keeps me from craving like I did,” he went on, “holds me back from wanting to get ugly.” 

“I’m not sure I’d like to hear about it,”  Devin told him.

When Devin was young his father’s father had died with a bottle of Jack Daniels under his pillow.  Ended it in Colstrip, isolated from everyone who knew him, angry at them all.  A passing tenant found him after he’d been dead three days.  He was nothing to anyone.       
     
“I’m busy,” Devin said.  “I need to put in sixty hours this week, maybe seventy.  I gotta go.”

“Okay,” said Devin’s father.  “Take care, Son.”

They hung up the phones.

 The exchanges had built to this.  Him talking of the man he was trying to become and Devin pretty much closing him down, talking over him or ending the conversation, at times just flat condescending him.  A feeling of loneliness and dark intent always accompanied this but Devin wasn’t going to stop, even if he knew his father’s voice had changed.  The tone had lessened in power, and softened.  He’d brought it back to what it was when Devin was a boy, in the times they’d had together.  Devin convinced himself not to think about it.

Devin’s father relaxed in the kitchen chair, wearing an old western shirt frayed at the cuffs and patterned with fine crisscrossed lines.  

“Thank you for coming up, Devin,” he said.

Just peace now, thought Devin, there among the creases around his eyes, looking out as he does, looking in.  Seeing him that way, Devin thought it odd he wasn’t at the wedding.  Devin hadn’t invited him, didn’t even tell him until a couple of years had gone.  But seeing him, Devin knew Cherise would’ve liked him and would’ve wanted him there. 

A feeling of loss came when Devin remembered himself with her.  Back when they met she wore trim business suits.  Her eyes were quick and bright.  Three years later she stood in a sweatshirt and jeans near the window in the kitchen, her hand white, gripping the edge of the counter.  Her face bore lines he’d grown accustomed to, permanent grooves that bent in and down.  She wore a look of oppression, of the deadness that comes from a long-fought resistance.  Devin missed the smell of her skin, he missed embracing her.  They’d lost each other.
“You know you’ll be home whenever it’s convenient for you,” she had said.  “Don’t lie to me anymore.  Don’t tell me about six or seven.  Just say it’ll be nine or ten, or one or two, so you’ll have some integrity.”

“I’ll be on time tomorrow,” Devin had said, but he was lying.  With the distance between them he could hardly stand being home.  He had her in a bad light.

“I’m sick with you,” she said, pursing her mouth.  She walked passed him, down toward the nursery.  Then she paused in the hall, turned, and said, “You don’t even know your own daughter.”

“What are you saying,” he said, not looking at her.  He sat in the easy chair in the family room, only half-facing her, looking down and away, more interested in turning channels on the television than listening.

“You’re afraid of her,” Cherise continued.  “You hardly come near her.  You never say her name. You’re always putting something between you and her—work, or the computer… or that television.”  She motioned over Devin’s head to where the small voice of the TV accompanied the colored glow of images.  Devin turned to her, saw the tears in her eyes, heard her going on.  “You don’t know your own daughter,” she repeated, and she sent a second and a third dictum with the same blank tone.  “You don’t know yourself.  How can you expect to know me?”

She leaned against the wall in the hallway, more plaintive than angry, the angular slant of her body set within her oversized clothing.  Her face was flat.  She waited for him but Devin had nothing to say so she released herself and moved back toward the nursery.  Devin went back to watching television. 

Thinking back, he wouldn’t have blamed her if she had already given herself to Beck.  She had been more right than she knew.  Bethen was fresh to the world but holding her was so painful his hands ached, and every time he tried, things would get knotted up and he’d fear what was to come, fear she’d be fatherless with him right there in her presence, and fear he’d be all he’d been to her mother, all his father had been to him.  So he stayed away.  In the year since she was born he held her only when her mother pushed her on him.  It didn’t surprise him that Cherise took the child and walked away.

Devin’s father placed another cut of deer steak on Devin’s plate.

"Dan caught a bunch up near Beartrap canyon," he said.  Devin remembered faintly Dan was his father’s fishing partner who tied flies for a local sporting goods store, Bob Ward’s, the Sportsman, or something.

"How many?" Devin mumbled. 

"One-hundred," his father said, "in six hours,” saying it like it was nothing. 

"I stopped at Bob Ward’s,” he continued, “had Dan show me what rig he used.  Do you want to head up there tomorrow and see if we can catch some rainbows?"

He motioned to the window, his fingers slender, knotted at the knuckles.  

"Fine," Devin said.

Devin’s father touched Devin’s arm often as he spoke, and each time Devin felt far older than him.  Far closer to death.  He's well over sixty, thought Devin, with me a kind of shadow of him when he was forty.  I’m dragged and husked-out though, older and still more thin than I should be, and uglier, not as beautiful as I might have been.
"It'll take two hours," said Devin’s father.  "We'll have to get up at four to get there about right." 

"Fine," said Devin, knowing he’d likely be awake then anyway.    
           
In the early morning, Devin’s father put his hand on Devin’s shoulder.  Devin had the feeling his father had been there beside him for a very long time, patient as trees with the sun in their arms, watching him, probably praying.  His father had taken the couch, given Devin the bed.  With the touch of his hand there on his shoulder Devin felt he could sleep forever.  The apartment was dark and still.  His father waited for him.

"Are you awake?" his father asked.

"Yes," said Devin.
      
They met at the kitchen table, where his father had some toast prepared.  He sat reading from his Bible.  Devin asked him to read something aloud.  Looking to the chapter he was on, his father said, "A friend loves at all times."  He turned to Devin then, gaze of light-blue and grey, affectionate and sad in the same glance. 
   
When they emerged from the building the morning was full of grey-white clouds, low on the earth, shrouding the mountains.  They drove west from Bozeman toward Four Corners, then south along the Madison toward Quake Lake and the park.  The smell of deer blood lined the cab.  The truck moved with a loud, firm drone.  Beneath the horizon, the sun opened the blue and grey of the mountains, and the pewter of the Madison.  The river moved, with the road a thin dark line alongside the water.  At this hour the world was new and the clouds lay full on the land.  The sun was hidden beneath it all. 

They were mostly silent.  Devin’s father had made and packed the lunches.  The same Mother made for them three decades ago: roast beef sandwiches on plain brown bread with butter and mustard, deer jerky, some chips, a couple of Cokes.  They sat in a cooler between father and son, next to the plastic jugs of water.  In the back between the spare tire and the sidewall, two fly rods and a spinning rod lay in the truck bed, their tips clicking to the bumps in the road.

"I've got some gloves for you, it's probably gonna be pretty cold," his father said.

From the truck's cocoon it was hard to imagine the cold outside, but when it came to weather his father was rarely wrong.  Devin’s head was back on the seat.  His coat rose and fell to the rhythm of his breathing.  As a boy he’d be fast asleep by now.  On the side window where he stared at the darkness, the dash lights opened his reflection.  Here he saw the red rims of his eyes, the grey of his eyelids and the black hollow beneath, then the bones of his forehead squarely angled and appearing fragile, a skein of bluish veinwork near the temples.  Wisps of hair receded high up on his head, the skull all thin as the shell of a robin’s egg.  His father was right there next to him, but he thought again how alone he felt. 

They crossed the Madison on a simple highway-bridge and Beartrap Canyon opened to the south, saw-toothed, backboned, steep from water to sky.  Into the canyon the river moved silver grey, with mist over the surface in the half-light.  Devin stared until the road turned and the view was lost.  

Dawn was a desire, a hunger in the land and sky.  It had not been like this for Devin for some years, so clear, edging as it did toward day.  Mostly in the dark of his own apartment he’d hear the noise increasing.  He’d lay in his bed peering out, unable to sleep, or sitting at the chrome chair he’d stare from the bedroom window.  Out across the city, the metalworks would begin to glow and it seemed forever before he would move.  Because of how weary he’d become, his feet were a burden, as was the bulk of his body above them.  Often, he discovered his fingertips were numb.  When he had stayed at work so much he didn’t miss Cherise.  Now he found this sad. 
The lights were off when he went from room to room.  No one would know he was moving again.  He drank alcohol and he cried, pitying himself for how it had happened to him just as it did to his mother and father.  The loss of who he and Cherise were had overshadowed what they might have made together.

Devin’s father pointed out the window, east toward Bozeman. 

“Look at that,” he whispered.

Above the clouds the Bridgers were clear, cut in blacks and greys, taking up much of the sky, and behind them the scarlet horizon.  While he drove his father would steal long looks.  The sky's blood gathered and went out.  The morning turned Devin’s face gold.

“Nothing like it, is there?” his father said. 

They topped a broad rise.  The truck moved from shadow to sun.  The land opened wide.  To the south mountains and fields were free of clouds, open now under a sweep of sky.  The road banked down and left, and the mountains parted.  The river appeared again, emerald, flared by sunshine, blazing around an arm of land.

At the start of the marriage Devin was able like the rest to gladface his way, thinking to himself it would be alright, overlaying his fear with the brightness of her spirit next to his, the boldness of it.
“Come to bed with me,” she’d say, and she’d smooth the line of his jaw with her fingertips.  “I like to talk.  It’s good to go to sleep together.” 

“I know,” Devin would say.  But the words he uttered were curt and the clip of them annoyed her, sending her down to bed while he slumped in the easy seat with his chin in his hand.  He’d watch television until the night became a dark strength and he’d have to get up and walk.  He’d pace the living room, then walk the hall toward the study, then down toward the nursery, repeating the pattern, making himself busy.  When he made ready to join her he’d have to go to the kitchen and drink a glass of milk to settle his stomach.  For a few months she would still open her arms to him.  No matter how late he came to bed she’d say, “Good.  Thank you, Devin,” pulling him in, not going cold or turning her back, or moving a little away as it became.
    
Devin and his father drove further south, yet always the land rose, from fields to swales, from foothills to mountains.  They were closer to the edge of Yellowstone, on one of the more obscure routes where few towns stood. Traditional Blackfeet country, initially absent of Whites due to the rough set of the land and more so the nature that turned man against man, the contemplative warlike way of those pushed to repel others, a desperation inbreathed with ferocity.  The river gathered and twined here, hugging cutbanks and land bends, parted by islets and sandbars.  The water narrowed in the canyons, then broadened again among the mountains, flanked always by aspen and cottonwood, wildflowers, willow and wild rose.

At the bottleneck of a tight canyon, they plateaud, slowing to park off the shoulder in the brush.  The wind bent the timothy grass here.  They’d be using wet flies, an egg pattern and a pheasant tail dropper, and tiny split shot like little broken teeth.  They walked an old sleuceway, then scaled down an embankment to reach the river. 

A roar sounded from the Quake Lake gateway, a large concrete hole grated by thick iron bars.  White and dark blue the Madison rushed headlong, shot from the opening like bold clusters of stars.  The river pooled from the whitewater in a wide swirl, narrowed, then widened and smoothed itself downriver. 
      
With the gusts through the canyon Devin’s nose and ears started to burn.  The cold grew crisp, unbearable for a moment, then it passed.

“Remind me,” Devin said to his father as they began.

His father stood at his back, placed his hands on Devin’s forearms, and started to speak him through the movement. 

“Keep your frame,” he said.  “Firm upper body, firm in the shoulders.  Quick now in the forearms.  Fluid, fluid with the wrists.  Firm in the hand.”  His fingers, strong like the roots of trees, held Devin to the motion.  “Good, Devin,” he said.  “Nicely done.  You haven’t forgot a thing.”  Down inside his coat Devin resisted, but he was struck forcefully by how deeply he desired just to be held by him.  No matter, though, Devin thought, whatever I need, I know I won't turn and ask him for it.  I won't admit how badly it has all gone.  In Devin’s apartment, in the dark there is the hum of the city and all inside him a desolation he did not imagine for himself. 

When he first came in on PCH out of Oxnard and down the coast, then up the rise to Ocean Boulevard and straight up Wilshire, Devin knew.  This was it: all the metal and glass, the absolute clarity, nothing muddled or chaotic, nothing flat, slow, or wide, just narrow and angular, all of it, everything a straight line pointing to the sky.  He secured an apartment in a high-rise in Santa Monica, an old superstructure from the seventies, a bulk of metal named The Oceanside, lusterless so he could afford it, tall enough to command a view.  He made sure his window faced the city, not the ocean, because of the raw feel of the wires and the light, the grounding it gave him to envision girders reaching down through the asphalt and concrete, steely narrow fingers down into the earth, gripping, digging in with their nails.  From there he moved away from the ocean, up the 110 to a studio near the city center, then he and Cherise moved together to Agoura Hills and a modest 2500 square foot home.  But when the marriage was done, he came back to The Oceanside.  Three doors down from the old place, thinking he might find a remnant here of what he’d been, the fire and the ascension, the way he looked out on the city with a child’s eyes.  He’d be alone at the window, vodka in his hand.  From there the grid of the city began, a stepwise casement of large and small structures, thin and tall, or shorter and more stout, the sides of them glinting gold in the morning light, the whole of it as sharp and promising as the day he had arrived.  The sun gave a white-yellow hue that settled to brown in a haze at the city line.     

Devin’s father walked downstream.  He found a place that was quiet and slow.  The fly he threw went out far and broke the surface, then travelled down along the river bottom, bumping with the current.  He knew the river's smoothness, behind boulders, below small bends or sandbars, places of slow-moving pools where the fish reside.

Devin’s arms moved, reaching the line back and forward again over the jade whirls and darker bends of the river.  His father was far down stream now.  They fished separately this way in the early morning.  Devin didn’t catch a thing.  His body was cold, so were his hands and face and feet.  But he wasn’t bothered anymore.  His chest no longer felt small, or pressed.  He was breathing some, and he went on thousands of times with the same movement, slowly at each hole.  He waited, drawing the line back, drawing it forth.  The tension took its time going from him. 

Past midday Devin and his father met up at the truck.  They got in, and his father stoked the heat.
 
“Hard luck,” his father said.

Devin stared out the window, methodically eating the sandwich his father had given him.  They’d fished for seven hours but they’d both been shut out.  When his father was finished he placed his hand on Devin’s arm.  If he knew me, Devin thought, what would he think of me?

"What do you say we head on up to the lake and see if it’s any better up there?"  said Devin’s father.

"Fine," Devin said.

They followed the black line, curving again as they ascended.  When they topped another rise, the road wound through a place where the mountains had caved in.  To the side of the roadway and up in a broad steep slide, huge boulders crowded each other.  The dislocated arms of dead-white trees jutted among the debris.  Devin’s father slowed the truck.

"Felt the earthquake all the way over in Circle," he said, “about fifty years ago.   |

"The mountain fell and covered thirty people; they were camping around here.  Workers had a real hard time finding them, buried so deep.  Heard about it on the radio.  The mountain choked off the Madison and formed the lake."  He motioned with his eyes.

Hundreds of trees needled the water, pale, bare and jagged-limbed, naked where they stood.  In the silence between them, Devin imagined himself rowing in a small jonboat while the oars clanked in their metal holdings.  He was gliding in the bone-colored forest, in among the trees locked like frightened old people near shore.  The mountains themselves could be my skyscrapers, he thought, the black lake the city street, and I am walking among the millions with my flat inward stare wondering again what is there for me?

"Devin?" his father said. 

"Fine," Devin answered dumbly, and looked over.  Devin’s father was touching his hand, staring at him like he’d been lost. 

"Nothing," his father said.  "It's all right, Son."  He went back to driving, watching the country in the way he did, taking it all in. 
  
The lake was more than a mile long, turned up by wind, white-capped, dark grey-blue.  They drove the expanse, silent while the winds gnashed.  Swells, strangely reminiscent of oceans, pulled and turned on the surface. 

"Too windy," Devin’s father said, slowing. 

They turned and drove back down, below where they were.  They we're looking for another stretch to fish, but not far on, the tributaries joined with the river, muddying it, mixing it up.  They turned again and went back where they had started.  Again they reached the river floor.  Devin pulled up on a grey fist-shaped rock and watched his father for a time.

“Tired out?” his father asked.

“I’m alright,” Devin said.

The wind was quick and crisp but not as vicious as up on the lake.  The sun shined bright, while at the same time snow fell in fast diagonal sheets, slanted, embodying the wind.  The water was the color of steel and Devin’s father's arms were moving out and in again.  He lengthened the line upstream and it went forth unfolding until the split shot, the egg pattern, and the fly quietly met the water and went down beneath the surface. 
A neon green indicator marked the path below which the weight and fly took the current's draw, a signal point from which a hungry fish might turn and pull the indicator down.  Fluid in the river's lie, the indicator drifted downstream until it was even with Devin’s father and he set out more line to keep from breaking the motion.  The bump and pull of the river tipped the pole but the draw was empty this time, so he lifted the line up and out.  Back and forth over the water he wove invisible tapestries, loading the line while it lengthened, increasing its reach to twenty or thirty yards.  Above his head his arm was outstretched, and over the surface the line was seamless, flowing, settling upriver in its quiet way.  Here, the movement began again, the downriver sweep of the current and the line. 

There was a strike.  He whipped the rod backward.  The line went taut, the pole bent nearly in a circle.
 
"Hey, hey!  Will you look at that!" he laughed and yelled.

The rod was high, the arc swollen, moonlike.  Deftly, he worked the line with his left hand, keeping the tension on, feeling the play of the fish.  The fish spasmed, came wildly alive, then soothed itself downstream for a time, then jerked to life again.  The fight was a paradox like this, aggressive then smooth, until the fish darted in the green-blue of the water near shore.  He unclipped his net and captured it.  When he drew it out and freed the hook, he held a rainbow in his hands. 

"Nice work," Devin said.  Then there was a pause, and Devin said, “Why did you treat her so bad?”
           
He looked up into his father’s eyes.

“Your mom?” his father replied, eyes down, toward the rocks, the river.

“Yeah,” Devin said.  “Why’d you have to run her off when all she wanted was to be with you?” 

“I was a bad man, Devin,” he said, and he turned and set the fish in the water and watched it move away.  The words were so unassuming they took Devin off guard. 

“Why don’t you go to her?” Devin said.  “Why live out here all alone?”

His father set his fly rod down and sat on his heels a few feet from Devin.  “I have gone to her, Devin.  Drove to her place in Nevada twice.  She thinks we’re not ready to be together again.  She’s probably right.” 

Devin felt the cold in his hands.  He pressed them against each other.  There was a quietness between him and his father. 

“I wasn’t much of a husband to Cherise,” Devin said finally, and he looked south along the river, off to where the color of the water became less distinct and the mountains crowded the river from vision. 

“Where is she now?” his father asked.
 
“She’s gone, Dad.  Lives in Boston.  She took Bethen with her.”

His father took a smooth stone in his hand.  He began rubbing the dirt from it with his fingers.  “I’m sorry it’s gone that way, Devin,” he said. 

“Me too,” Devin said.
  
When his father began again the sun was white and high.  The mountains went up into the blue; the sky was their companion.  Bright clouds flung snow that gathered in the tops of the crags and fell sustained, sweeping to the river, to the shore.  Devin’s father was silver and brown, beaten of weather and stone, hair like mercury, skin like copper.  He caught five straight.

"They're on," he said, "better go give it a try." 

Devin did as he suggested, walking upstream to a small bend in the river where he readied his line.  He cast forth the line and began again the rhythm.  He drew the line back to reach the mountains.  He set it forth to touch the river.

In the late afternoon they turned toward home.  Driving, Devin’s father had the wheel in one hand, the other he rested on Devin’s shoulder.  At day's end the mountains had gone blue again.  He waits for me, Devin thought.  From the horizon the sun gave way and it was long after dark when they arrived.  The apartment was quiet.  There was a light on in the kitchen.  When Devin turned to his father to say goodnight the two were face-to-face.  Devin leaned toward him.  His father gathered him in his arms.