Coming in Jim gave Sally a slap on the hip and a simple "hi, hon," before he stripped off his dirty clothes and went straight down the hall to have a shower. She cinched up her nightgown and bundled his clothes off to the laundry, not minding the dirt. She held the coveralls by the shoulders, hanging like a blue, oil stained skin, before dropping it in to soak. She saw his hard work in those clothes, heard the saws and knew that for 20 years he'd sweat into a pair of coveralls like that as a faller in some of the roughest logging country in the West. They'd raised two kids, paid off their house and land and had never had to ask anybody for a handout.
His dinner was on the table when he came out. Sally turned off the television and came to sit with him while he ate. He'd been gone for a week at a logging show on the far side of the peninsula so she had to catch him up on the gossip. There wasn't much news except for the fact the Brown's kid had been picked up for drunk driving, and let go without a charge and Bob Short, the supermarket manager, was maneuvering to get his wife a seat on the school board.
"Oh, she'd probably do an ok job," said Jim.
"Except for everybody hates her guts," said Sally.
"And all he's doing is trying to get a profile so he can run for mayor and promote that damned development. . ."
"And everybody knows it," she said finishing his sentence for him.
Then she told him how Laverne had been, according to what she heard, in the bar most the week and staying late, if you know what I mean.
He stopped with a fork full of steak almost in his mouth, then went ahead and chewed on it for a minute.
"Uh, oh," he said. "How long before Brian figures that one out?"
Sally just shook her head.
"Don't she know you can't get away with nuthin in a town this small?"
"Maybe she don't care anymore," she answered, raising her eyebrows.
She picked up his plate and rinsed it in the sink before putting it in the dishwasher.
"Oh," she said. "Nick phoned from New York a couple of days ago."
"Oh, really? What's up?"
"I don't know, but I think he might want to come out and go fishing with you. He said to call him whenever you got in and it didn't matter how late."
Jim made a face and looked at the kitchen wall clock.
"Midnight in New York isn't it?"
"Beats me," said Sally. "I don't know if it's three hours or five hours difference. But he said for me to make sure I told you to call whenever you could and the time didn't matter."
She put the phone on the table. Nick's number was written on a piece of paper tucked under the receiver.
"He must have caught himself one helluva big fish somewhere. I can't think what else could be so urgent," said Jim as he dialed.
He heard the phone ring three times and was about to hang up when the phone was picked up, dropped, sworn at.
"James?" said a groggy voice. "About bloody time."
Jim laughed. "Hey buddy," he said.
"When's the bight on?" said Nick.
"They bight all day here, you know that."
"I'm not talking about roe fishing. I'm talking about fly fishing."
"They bight all night too. Say did I tell you a couple of kids were swimming in the Corner Pool this summer and found your rod? Yeah, it's the only $800 graphite on the river being used to 
dunk worms."
Sally was smiling as she wiped the counter. She remembered how the three of them had sat around the table on that winter steelheading night, laughing and drinking hot rums while Nick dried out. They'd fished 'til after dark and Nick had fallen in three times stumbling after a 12 pounder, losing his rod and the fish in the process.
She put the salt and pepper back in the cupboard, put the bread away then stopped what she was doing and turned towards Jim. His voice had gone quiet and she knew something was wrong.
"Oh," he said. "Gee, I'm real sorry Nick. Yeah. Of course. Ok. I promise. See you then."
He hung up and looked over at Sally and she thought maybe somebody had died or something.
"Nick's coming out for a couple of days," he said.
"What's wrong?" she asked.
Jim shrugged. "Lee-Anne has gone off with some young lawyer. I've never known Nick to sound so rough."
"What happened?" she asked. "I thought they were happy?"
"I don't know. I really don't know."
Sally stood behind him and put her arm over his shoulder and across his chest. The house was so empty and quiet with the kids grown up and gone to college. She held him close.
Late the next day, too soon to seem real when you considered Nick had been in New York, there he was standing by the luggage rack in the small airport, waiting for his bags to arrive.
As Jim crossed the terminal towards Nick, it struck him how pale his friend looked. His face had a blankness to it beneath a four-day white stubble starting to take hold. Nick, a tall angular man who stood out like Gary Cooper in a crowd, turned and smiled as he saw Jim, and there was a glimmer of his old self in there still.
"Hey, you came down. You didn't have to do that," he said kindly.
"You were gonna maybe take a cab 30 miles?"
"I was going to rent a car, but this is much better. Thanks."
The bags arrived and the rod tubes were there, which was always such a great relief. Jim hefted the suitcase but Nick stopped him, unzipped it, pulled out his fishing vest, put it on, dug around some more and came up with a bottle of expensive rum, a bag of cigars in little rod cases, and a beautiful new fly box.
"Best tied May flies you'll ever see," he said. "From Montana. And Cuba," slapping the rum bottle and cigars in Jim's hand. "Now, let's go fishing."
They threw everything in the truck and drove up to Jim's house on the river. By the time the drift boat was loaded and Nick was settled in the guest cabin it was dark, so they went in and had dinner with Sally. Then the three of them drove the ten miles up river to town, where they had some beers and watched a standup comic who pulled a safe down over his head. And then blew it up.
Jim saw Nick turn as Laverne went by. "That one could cure you," he said leaning over. "She'd make you forget your own name."
When Sally left the table, Nick saw Laverne, smiling over at them from across the bar.
"Looks to me like you're the one she wants to cure," he said to Jim.
Jim laughed. "Don't think I haven't thought about it. But in this town you can't get away with nuthin."
They drifted late in the morning, slightly hung over, the way friends will, especially when they know the river. It had snowed that night and the banks were soft and white, but it was warming in the day and water dripped from dark branches into the stream.
Nick hit a fish five minutes after they started down. A slender 15 inch rainbow, discolored along the belly.
"Small," said Jim. "But they are nice fish."
"Beautiful."
The next fish went 18 inches and was clean and bright; one that had dropped down from the lake to feed on eggs from the last of the spawning salmon.
After that they took a dozen more rainbows, one of 21 inches, and then finally a brown trout, a solid trout of about 3 lbs. with a perfect white belly and pale golden back.
"Oh man," said Jim.
The next fish was spectacular; a five-and-a-half pound brown that ran down through the pool with the boat following through fast water then back eddying into a quiet pool where Nick played it out. They took a picture of it in the snow then let it go in the submerged yellow grass where the river had come up to flood the shore.
Just before lunch Nick hit his first steelhead, an 18 lb fish in a dark run beneath overhanging cedars. The fish went into deep water, where each twist and turn was signalled by faint flashes of silver; glimmers of light from the edge of the universe. It fought doggedly, never jumped and swirled on the surface only once, as Jim reached forward to unhook it. Just then the leader popped and the steelhead hung in the current for a long time as if it were hypnotized. It drifted away slowly, the water turning amber around its glowing body until the image of the fish dissolved in the current.
Jim, knee deep in the river, mouth open, turned and looked up at Nick who'd been standing in the anchored drift boat. Nick was smiling.
"What a beautiful fish," he said. "What a great river."
Jim felt so good. He liked to fish with a guy who loved the fish so much he even loved to lose them.
"Wanna stop here for lunch or drift down to the splits?" asked Jim.
"What I feel like doing is going to church right now," said Nick. "I want to talk to God."
"I think you just did," said Jim.
They beached the boat and went up through a cedar grove and made a small fire to cook their sandwiches. They had hot coffee. It started to snow and grew darker with the clouds.
They talked about a lot of important things. Politics and love and life in small towns, families and the way time seemed to be running through their hands like water as they both hit 50.
Jim liked fishing with Nick because most of his local friends talked only about football and women, or argued about releasing fish.
They'd met five years ago, when Nick and a partner in his law firm had come out for a week's fishing. He'd expected guiding two lawyers from New York to be difficult, as it is when you get clients who are completely out of touch with nature and who can't cast. But both men had been intense, sporting fishermen who had no need to kill any fish. One day Nick surprised Jim by putting down his rod.
"I want to watch the river for awhile," he'd said. "I'm missing too much."
They fished together twice a year. Brown trout in May. Steelhead in February. It was December now. They hadn't been together or talked in seven months and a lot had changed.
That summer, after a lifetime of logging without questioning it, Jim had become involved in environmental issues. When the company sent his crew to cut to the river bank along a steelhead stream, a stream he had fished since he was a boy, he refused. He went to the media. Got a tv news crew in to the clearcut. Stood on a bank beside the murky, brown river and said in an interview that the siltation was caused by bad logging practices, and it was killing fish. It stirred up a lot of trouble and forced people in the small logging town to take sides.
"A lot of friends don't talk to me anymore," said Jim, turning a log in the fire with his boot. "I knew just 'bout everybody there in the bar last night, but did you see anybody come over to the table?"
"So you're a leper," said Nick. "That's what happens when you try to change the world. How's Sally taking it?"
"It's harder on her, I guess," said Jim who hadn't thought about it before. "It hurts her to see friends deserting us."
"And you?"
"Naww, not me," said Jim. "I'm tougher than any of those people ever dreamed and I'm not going to let anybody destroy this river the way they have all the others."
Earlier that winter Jim had come home from the woods to find Sally running up the driveway to meet him. He thought the house had burned down or something. She was breathless when she reached the truck.
"Look," she said. "Look at this."
She thrust into his hands a letter from a law firm, Erkhard, Whitney and Scoonge, announcing that Malloch and Mulloch Logging had acquired rights to a 10 square mile chunk of privately held valley bottom along the river, including the land surrounding their five acres.
"They plan to cut all the timber along the river between our house and town," said Jim. "This company has destroyed entire valleys in the south. I have to wake people up to the fact that if we don't do something, we're all going to be looking at clearcut hills around here. The river is going to be ruined and the town is going to look like hell."
Nick listened quietly to the frustrations Jim had met in trying to win local support. About his own problems, he only said: "There was another guy. For a whole year. That's what I feel bad about. That year of being a fool. She's gone with a younger man. He's not even a good lawyer. But he makes a lot doing mergers. She said I wasn't fulfilling her spirit. That I’d lost touch with her."
They listened to the fire for awhile. Then Nick went on.
"I've been killing myself for the last month. Working. Drinking. Being mean. I'm gonna have to let it all go. I'm just not going to live with that kind of anger any more. This is so much better, you know," he said holding up one hand to show that he meant the river, the fish, and the way the snow fell around them in the forest. He was feeling relaxed for the first time in a month.
"I have some time off," Nick went on. Then after a long pause, added: "Truth is, I don't ever want to go back. And there's nothing there for me anyway now. I could help you oppose that land use proposal if you want."
"The public hearing isn't for a month yet, but they've already started to put in road flags. They're just rushing it through," said Jim.
"First we'll get an injunction to stop the roads," said Nick. "Then we'll prepare for the hearing. This will be fun. Corporate law destroys the soul. Facing Erkhard, Whitney and Scoonge at town hall sounds like a refreshing change."
Jim felt like putting his arm around Nick's shoulder as they went back through the dripping woods to the boat. He hesitated, and then he did, for a moment, just as they came up to the river. They looked at the dark pool, knowing there were steelhead there somewhere, on the other side of the universe.
"I'll be ok," said Nick.
As they drifted down to the take-out, under the bare oaks and the green cedars, Jim realized how much he'd missed having a friend to share the river with this winter.
Driving home they lit two cigars and had a shot of rum from Nick's silver flask. When they pulled into the yard Sally was standing in the kitchen doorway, arms crossed, dressing gown tight against the chill. Nicola was bouncing in the headlights, yapping as always. When the lab jumped up, Jim caught her by the shoulders and rolled her over. Covered with mud and wet snow, she ran to Nick, who growled and pawed at her like a black bear.
At the kitchen door, one step below Sally, Jim stopped and took both her hands. He couldn't see her face very clearly with the light behind her, but he knew how she looked. She was smiling and he felt like a lucky man.
