Page 40 of Rust and Bloom

So often it barely qualifies as a thought. It's just the hum underneath everything. It's structural at this point. Like the load-bearin' wall of whatever's left of my sanity.

I am here for Savannah. I am here for Savannah. I am here for Savannah.

"Fish on!" Colt yells.

For what feels like the four-hundredth time.

I didn't think people actually said that out loud in real life.

Fish on.

I thought it was some kind of broadcast shorthand, a catchphrase left over from cable TV and men who needed a camera pointed at them to feel like they existed.

Turns out I was wrong about that. Turns out Colt Ashby says it every single time, and every single time he says it like it's the first time he's ever been this happy, and every single time I have to remind myself that I am here for Savannah, and that Colt bein' alive is a condition of that.

At least for now.

He's reelin' in his catch, laughin' and talkin' the whole time, voice carryin' across the water like he's performin' for somebody. That's all he's done since we got in this river. Laughed and talked. Like he's havin' the goddamn time of his life, like this river is confessin' its secrets directly to him and he's righteous enough to collect 'em.

Meanwhile I'm standin' here with a tangled line that's been that way for goin' on twenty minutes now, and the cold has worked its way past the waders, past the boots that aren't mine, past every layer between me and the water, and it's just sittin' there in my bones like a debt I forgot I owed.

I haven't caught a single fuckin' fish.

Not one. Not even a bite. Not even the suggestion of a bite.

Turns out there's a way to do this shit. A technique. A whole goddamn science of it, apparently, that cannot be mastered in a single afternoon by a man who's spent the last three years learnin' how to survive concrete and not rivers.

I am standin' here like Exhibit A in a trial about Montana stereotypes—the kind of trial where the jury's already decided and the evidence is just ceremony.

Convicted before the first cast.

I knew that goin' in.

Colt knows it too. He even tried to teach me. Cast a few times, all generosity and patience, like he was doin' me some kind of sacred favor. Do this, do that. Not that way, this way. Bend from the elbow, not the wrist. Watch the line, watch the water, watch me.

I watch the water. I don't watch him.

I pay zero attention to Colt Ashby, and I pay it consistently, which is maybe the only thing I've done right since I waded into this river.

"You hate this, don't ya?" Colt calls from down the river.

"I mean…" It comes out under my breath, swallowed before it even forms into a real answer, and I don't bother finishin' it. No possible way he heard me over the current anyway. And I'm not exactly in a rush to confirm anything for Colt Ashby.

"It grows on ya," Colt continues. Like silence is agreement. Maybe it is. "We had this hand called Jerry when I was a kid. Took Cash fly fishin' every day off. I mean, every single day off, without fail. Didn't matter the season, or the weather, or how much work was pilin' up back at the ranch. Jerry and Cash, out on the water."

He pauses to cast, and I watch the line arc out over the surface without meanin' to.

"And the day I turned eight, he told me to come along. It was kind of a big deal, because I was the youngest and he never once took Wyatt. I think maybe Eleanor told him to take Wyatt, but if Cash was good at it, Wyatt wasn't, ya know what I mean?"

I don't, actually.

I don't have no brothers. No one to measure myself against, no one to be the better version of, no one to fail in the shadow of. That particular dynamic never once came up in my childhood.

"If Cash was there, Wyatt wasn't. Now, if Cash was shitty at somethin'? Or just didn't plain care about it? That's what Wyatt wanted to do."

I decide to participate because I'm just done with this fishin' bullshit. "I can't imagine Cash Ashby bein' shitty at anythin', to be honest."

Colt laughs, and it's the first sound out of him that doesn't feel calculated. "That's true. But it only applies to ranchin', really. Cash knows everything there is to know about how to be a cowboy, how to be a landowner's son, how to rodeo. How to stand in a room and make every other man feel smaller without sayin' a word." He pauses on that last part, and I think maybe he's talkin' about himself as much as Wyatt. "But he can't play the banjo."