Gus Peterman had the rest of his days ahead to look forward to. Both of them.
Once you’re diagnosed with terminal cancer, once you’ve gone through the whole denial, bargaining thing, you’re left with a case of “yeah-I-get-it” and choose how you’re going to live what’s left. Then there’s that final bout, when you’re in hospice and everything’s sort of a pastel cheery color and the nurses and aides sport bright scrubs to keep up spirits. That could go on for weeks or months unless a miracle happens. And don’t kid yourself, people in that situation still hope, if only a little, until it’s just a case of turning up the morphine.
Peterman made a choice. He lived in a state where he could exercise the Kevorkian cure. That would be two days hence. In two days the pain would end. In two days, he wouldn’t need help with adult diapers. In two days, he might find God. Or not. He had two days to joke that his was the only birth certificate with an expiration date, which would get uncomfortable chuckles from some, tears from others, and a lot of hands over aghast mouths. But it was his line and screw them if they couldn’t take a joke.
A fatal disease had some benefits.
So, what do you do with your final 48 hours?With only 48 hours, you don’t want to spend much time pondering the options and then conclude with the epiphany, “Oh, how time flies.” Money wasn’t an issue; he’d stopped looking at his portfolio when they gave him the prognosis. He couldn’t travel to exotic places. He couldn’t travel, period. He’d finished all the TV series he wanted. He’d almost finished a boring book. He’d liked that it was boring; it made the days seem longer. Hah hah. Not funny “hah hah,” just hah hah.
A counselor suggested a fine dinner. Peterman finished her idea. “Like they’d give to a condemned prisoner,” he told her. Steak would be on the list. Peterman loved steak and, because of that heart thing, had refrained from it for a long time. With a glass of a good red wine, one with a cork, not a screw top. Chocolate mousse to boot, one made with strong espresso and cognac. Maybe bits of dark chocolate mixed in. For texture. Why stop there? What about two or even three final feasts?
That’s the thing about chemo. Chances are your taste buds had lost their mojo. A pile of mush wouldn’t taste much different from butterscotch bread pudding, a USDA New York strip would be hard to distinguish from an overdone slab of tilapia. Cancer sucks.
Peterman looked at his watch. The doctor would show up in 47 hours and 53 minutes. Seven minutes down the drain, he thought. He was wasting time thinking about food when he wasn’t even hungry. He eyed a single malt, an aged Islay, and poured himself a dram. Smoky, rich, and as intense as the $250 price tag promised. He snapped his tongue against the roof of his mouth a few times to savor the vapor as it slid down his throat. Those were five minutes well spent. Now what?
He’d left hospice a few days earlier on his own two feet. It wasn’t a miracle; it was what the doctor ordered. She’d given Peterman enough pain meds to kill a horse, a Clydesdale. “OxyContin?” he’d asked when handed a vial of pills by the oncologist. “Is that okay?”
She took his hand and smiled. “Gus, they’re fine. Take them as needed.”
He looked at the pills, thirty of them, and smirked. “I guess I don’t need to worry about becoming an addict.”
Peterman was tempted to take more than one but didn’t want to get all drowsy. The pills only did so much, and he’d committed to the plan. A few days earlier, the pain squeezed a vertebra and plunged to his legs, bringing him to the floor. If it got like that, he’d take another. Maybe more than another.
Lying on the floor helped. But Peterman would have plenty of time for lying prone. Pain or not, meds in hand, he wanted to do something active, something alive. The hours in chemo followed by weeks of zero energy had worn the sedentary out of him. Peterman had been so focused on his decision, and the strange euphoria of having an end date—helped, no doubt, by more than a few tokes of medical marijuana—that he hadn’t thought about the legal requirement for a delay between signing away your life and the last little bit.
He’d gotten his affairs in order, paid his bills, signed this, initialed that, met with a bereavement counselor—“Say, aren’t you supposed to come in after the fact?”—and said his goodbyes via email. Peterman didn’t answer his phone. There wasn’t much left to be said, anyway. What was left was time to…
There was that question again—Time to do what?
Peterman heard the old clock still ticking on the wall. He’d wound it when he returned home, a habit whenever he’d been away, but didn’t bother to move the hands to the current time. What was the point? Time and tide wait for no man.
He’d waited often enough in happier days for tides to change. That was when the stripers got active. They waited on the slower margins of the flow, stacked up next to the moving buffet, rushing in to grab a meal then returning to the calmer edge only to repeat the instinctive process.
Man, he had his days, getting up before the sun to wade in and cast past the darkness, blind, but hearing the splashes of the bass chomping on the waves of fleeing prey. He smiled at the recollection of a forty-six-inch bass that took what felt like 30 minutes to land.
Peterman typed in “tide chart” on his Mac. The tide wouldn’t turn for four hours. He didn’t have many hours to spare. “What the hell?” he thought. “What else is there?” He headed off to the shed to collect his gear when a spasm of pain drove him to the ground. He knelt, holding his breath, counting until the pain subsided, then pulled himself up with the aid of a side table.
Maybe wading in the ocean wasn’t such a good idea. Neither was the long drive, especially with the second Oxy he was considering. But the fishing was a good idea, the best idea, and his only idea. Standing erect now, a hand on the table, he could hold off on the pill.
There was a river, really not more than a stream, close by. He’d fished it dozens of times, hundreds, maybe. It wasn’t a Montana trophy river, but it held fish, wild ones, and was designated catch-and-release only, which meant that aside from the poachers, who ignored the sign in English, Spanish, Vietnamese, and a handful of other cryptic languages, there should be something. The wading was easy, the river was always quiet, and, if he had to, he could always crumple on the bank in solitude.
His gear was still in the back of his car. He’d forgotten about that. He hadn’t fished in two years, ever since he started chemo and got a bug that turned into an infection, which for a while threatened him more than the cancer.
It was a gorgeous day, perfect, and the trees caressed each other over the road that led to a favorite spot on the river. There was something about the drive that made him sad. Peterman saw the hollowed-out maple that marked a small area that would hold one car. It was empty, a small victory that should have made him happy. He was happy. But it was the familiarity of the drive, the little pull-off, the blue sky, that made him realize that so much was the same and would stay that way. Except there’d be no Gus Peterman. No Gus Peterman to chat up other fishermen, provide advice, give over a few flies that work, or just offer a friendly wave. It was easy to think about death hooked up to an IV, when dying is the only thing on your mind. It’s what getting your affairs in order is about. Dying wasn’t something that came up very often driving on a dirt road to rising trout on a sunny day. Until it hit you that this was the last time.
Gus wiped his eyes from the dust that rose when he stopped his car and took a swig from a flask. It was sterling, etched with the outline of a mayfly, something he bought years ago and left to collect dust on a bookshelf. The Islay that filled it cost vastly more than the flask and was worth every penny.
The poachers had not been busy. Trout were rising consistently, making big splashes as they chased emerging caddis. They rose in a cloud driving the fish wild with desire. Peterman had chosen the right day. The fish were in a feeding frenzy. He only had to stop once on the path to wait for a pain to pass and it wasn’t even that bad.
There is something about a blanket hatch when there are so many naturals on the water, a lone fisherman’s fly gets lost. Peterman cast to dozens of rising fish, changing his fly to find one that would interest them. He got a few to look at it, one swiping it with his tail, but they all went back to the real thing.
Fishermen have days when nothing works. But those are one day out of many. You have to hand it to the trout. They don’t make things easy, which makes the one you do catch that much more satisfying. Peterman, however, was in a different frame of mind. His mind said now or never with emphasis on never. It could have been a coincidence. The pain was coming randomly, frequently, so the bolt that hit him then was nothing new, nothing special. But he’d never cried this way from the pain, nor had he ever cried from getting skunked.
He was vibrating even after the pain passed. He explored the pockets of his vest for the vial, but he must have left it in the car, and the car was a hike away. What Peterman found were the flask and flies. A sign, he mused. A swig revived him. He took out a fly that looked little different from the ones that had failed that day. This one was maybe just a little bushier. Trial and error had taught Peterman nothing if it hadn’t taught him that the little things in fishing mattered—a new tippet, a tweak left instead of right, a softer cast. Or a slightly bushier fly. His attention at that moment was on something other than what brought him to the river.
His focus was interrupted by a sharp spasm running down Peterman’s right leg. The leg crumpled from the shock, nearly sending Peterman into the river. He held on and straightened it as the spasm loosened. He breathed in, breathed out, counting slowly to ten. With his eyes closed, he felt the cool river flowing around his legs, imagining the pain washing away with it. The hatch had started up again and the fish were feeding even more aggressively, bigger ones too. He wondered what they’d been waiting for, why this hatch and not the earlier one. That was the mystery, the very tease of the game, mixed with an occasional dose of sheer luck.
Peterman waded deeper, standing in the lee of a boulder and holding it for balance in the current. He watched the foam line, the narrow part of the current that carried the flies, flow past another rock. A flash in front of that rock caught his eye. It flashed once more. It was big, almost too big for this small river. It was the side of a trout sidling into the current to take a bug before returning to the softer flow. It came out again, rising to sip a bug struggling at the surface.
Then it leaped out of the water to devour a fly that had almost managed to escape. Peterman couldn’t believe the size of its mouth. Mesmerized, he watched as the beast swam down to its lair near the river’s bottom.
He lobbed his fly five yards upstream. Let the fish get a look at it. The fish rose and turned back down. A refusal, the bastard. He cast again, closer. The fish rose, circled, and shook its head as if to say, “Who are you kidding?” It liked the fly, just not enough.
Peterman brought in the line and blew on the fly to dry it out, encouraging it to sit a little higher in the film. He cast closer to the rock. Don’t give it too much to think about. He jiggled the line, barely, tickling the fly, giving it an illusion of life, imperceptible to all but the eye of a hungry fish. It rose without enough time to inspect the fly. The trout flashed as it twisted to grab the fly, then dove for the security of the river’s bottom.
Peterman had other ideas.
He held the rod high, tip straight up. The power of the fish bent the rod nearly in two, the tip pointing down to the water, all the strain on the gossamer leader. Peterman needed both hands to hold his end up against the fish’s struggle to break free. He reeled in. The fish took off in objection.
They both were tiring, but Peterman had the upper hand. He reeled the fish close enough to see his hooked jaw opening and closing, blood trailing from the fly. His sideways twistings were slow, labored, exhausted. With one more turn of the reel, he came closer and faced Peterman. Was it anger or fear or just the cold eyes of a wild thing offering no expression or sentiment? Peterman held out his net, not sure if this trophy would fit into its twenty-inch opening. The fish seemed to give up, then swiped his tail against the net and tore away, breaking the line, the fly still hooked to his upper jaw.
Peterman looked toward the rock where he had lain but couldn’t see anything. He would stay there, not feeding again for a long while, if he survived. If, he thought, if. That fish should have another few years in him. This one was fat and strong. Maybe he had ten years in him. Ten good, wild years on this very river. The hook would come out eventually. It had to. It was just a sting. A little pain. The fish had probably forgotten about that already. Who was he, Gus Peterman, to cut its days?
More fish were rising again as a new hatch came on. Peterman took a new fly, clipped off the hook, and cast, teasing his quarry. He got hit several times. One fish, another big one, took the emasculated fly for a ride before contemptuously spitting it out.
He kept at it, moving up and down the river, sometimes casting, sometimes just watching. After some hours, he found himself back where he’d started, staring at the rock where the fish he feared he’d murdered had lived. But there, in the depth, he saw the flash. Then another, and still another. It was the big trout, dashing in and out of the strong current to gorge. He rose from the rock to take a bug off the surface, Peterman’s fly still in his jaw. It wasn’t murder after all, not even a case of assault. Peterman smiled. It had been a while.
Peterman forgot to take any Oxy until he got home. That was fine. He’d have some extra when he was back on the river in a couple of days.