He did not spill his mother. Clay zipped the sandwich bag closed, twist-tied the original bag inside the urn, and returned it to the mantel, careful to wipe away his fingerprints. Judd would notice those. He might even dust it for prints to prove Clay the culprit. And then the questions would start. Clay knew better than to invite an inquiry from Officer Judd Hawkins.
Clay pocketed the baggie that contained a bit of his mother and carried it outside to the creek behind the house. That’s where he set her free. Liar’s Creek merges with Camp Creek which tumbles into the Root River which feeds into the Mississippi in the town of La Crescent. The Mississippi River flows south to the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean where, in Clay’s imagination, at least, currents would carry his mother to the shores of Europe. One heaping tablespoon of her, anyway.
He understood, even at the age of thirteen, that the gesture was symbolic. His mother wouldn’t really visit Europe. Even if her ashes made it across the Atlantic they were not Pam Hawkins. Pam Hawkins, if she was anywhere, was not tied to anything physical. But the gesture of sending her ashes on their way made Clay feel the tiniest bit better. As if he could give his mother what his father had not. And she deserved that. Pam Hawkins had been Clay’s steadfast champion.
His earliest memories were of his mother defending him.He’s not like you, Judd. He doesn’t want to play baseball. He doesn’t like sitting in a boat all day. He doesn’t want to kill animals. I’m not judging you for what you like. And I am asking you to do the same toward your son. Your only child.
Clay appreciated his mother standing up for him, althoughhe wasn’t the sensitive artist she thought he was. Yes, he enjoyed reading more than most boys his age. And yes, he played the violin better than anyone his age, at least in southeast Minnesota. Taught by his mother, no less. And no, he did not want to sit in a boat all day or kill animals. But Clay was more like his father than he let on. He loved to fish but preferred stalking trout in small streams to sitting still in a boat. He loved athletics, but not the same sports Judd liked. And Clay felt a deep love of country and a need to protect it. But that, like everything else, manifested itself differently in Clay than it did in Judd. Differently and more quietly. Or maybe a better word isclandestinely.
With his mother gone, Clay turned to Judd’s brother, Uncle Teddy. For advice. For a little spending money. Just to hang out. Listen to music. Fly-fish the spring creeks of Fillmore County. Teddy would have bought beer for Clay and his friends if Clay had asked. But Clay never did. He had plans on leaving Riverwood, Minnesota, and didn’t want to participate in anything that might delay his departure.
Clay’s friends were jealous. Uncle Teddy was the coolest uncle anyone ever had. Teddy had played rhythm guitar in a punk band up in Minneapolis. That was before Clay was born, but Teddy still had the guitar, a beat-to-shit Les Paul worn clear through the guitar’s black lacquer, exposing the woodgrain of the body. Teddy had a book full of newspaper clippings, yellowed and frail, from the late seventies. Advertisements for the 7th Street Entry, the Cabooze, and the 400 Bar. All with lists of bands appearing that week. The Replacements. Hüsker Dü. The Hypstrz. And Dye the Sun Blue. That was Teddy’s band.He used to know Paul Westerberg and Tommy Stinson. Bob Mould and Prince.
In 1979, the Clash played in Minnesota for the first time. Teddy had weaseled a backstage pass from local security, and when Joe Strummer blew an amp speaker during sound check, Teddy took off for an hour and returned with the exact same amp. Joe Strummer was so grateful, he gave Teddy the small gold hoop from his right ear. Teddy removed the stud from his own ear, replaced it with Joe Strummer’s hoop, and hasn’t taken it out since. Coolest damn uncle ever.
Cool but far different from Clay’s mother. Pam had a degree from Winona State. Teddy never graduated high school. Pam taught band and orchestra to middle-school kids before her illness forced her to stop. But even then she still made money giving private lessons on everything from piano to oboe to cello. Teddy has never held a steady job in his life. He plows driveways and mows lawns. He does some basic handyman work. Plumbing. Electrical. Carpentry. He occasionally fills in as a bartender or short-order cook. He isn’t reliable or good at any of it, so the jobs don’t last long. But everyone likes Teddy. Likes him so much they tend to forget what a bad employee he is so they hire him again. And the cycle repeats itself.
Teddy is Judd’s fraternal twin. No one ever confused them for identical twins because they are opposites in most ways. Physically, temperamentally, and on which side of the law they’ve lived their lives. They were even born opposites: Judd left the womb headfirst. Teddy came out a few minutes later feetfirst. A breech birth is dangerous but the doctor thought it would beless dangerous since Judd had led the way. And it seems like ever since the day they were born, Judd has continued to lead the way, rescuing Teddy from one kind of jam or the other.
Young Clay loved his uncle Teddy, but it was Teddy’s lack of reliability that led Clay to become self-reliant. Without telling Judd, he applied to Dorset-Cornwall, a private boarding school just outside of town that attracts students from all over the world for its rigorous academics, elite athletics, and world-class music education. Clay was admitted and granted a full scholarship based on test scores and an in-person violin audition. After Judd got over the shock of Clay’s secretive application to, and acceptance from, Dorset-Cornwall, he agreed to let his son attend if and only if Clay commuted from home. Clay was Judd’s last living connection to Pam—he wasn’t about to let his son move out of the house at thirteen years of age.
During his first year at Dorset-Cornwall, Clay was introduced to soccer. He fell in love with the sport, and the sport fell in love with Clay. One year later, he made the team’s starting eleven and led Dorset-Cornwall in goals and assists. By the time he was sixteen, professional clubs and colleges sent scouts to Riverwood so they could watch Clay work his magic on the pitch.
That was the same year the headmaster called Clay into his office to inform Clay that he had to make a choice. Soccer or violin. There was too much overlap in time commitment. Dorset-Cornwall was not a public high school. It was not there to serve the general well-being of its students. The school existed for one reason: to develop its students so that they could achieve at the highest level. For Clay, that meant he had to choose: violin orsoccer. Clay chose soccer for the practical reason that there are about ten times more professional soccer teams in the world than there are orchestras. That meant a ten times better chance of leaving Riverwood and never coming back. Besides, Clay liked wearing shorts and a jersey more than he did black tie. And he liked the way girls responded to his scissor kicks more than the way they responded to his double stops.
Clay broke it to his dead mother while fly-fishing the Root River. That’s where he did his best thinking. Where his voice was so clear and present in his head he had to wonder if he was talking aloud to himself.
“I’m sorry, Mom,” he thought or said under the babble and bubble of the river.
She answered by swelling his heart and his eyes. He felt her presence and her affirmation. Shewantedhim to play soccer. Soccer would introduce him to the world.
“I’ll take you with me,” he whispered. “I promise.”
Offers to play after Dorset-Cornwall poured in. But to everyone’s surprise, especially Judd’s, Clay chose to play for West Point. To this day Clay isn’t quite sure why he made that choice. Maybe it was to appease Judd and alleviate his own guilt for leaving Minnesota. Maybe it was to best Judd at his own game. Tough guy. Law and order.
Five years after the day Clay sprinkled his mother’s ashes in the stream behind their house, he took a second tablespoon of ash from the urn. He funneled the ash into an empty fountain pen. A fountain pen gifted to him by the governor of Minnesota as a congratulations for his acceptance to West Point. Eightyears after graduating high school, after leaving the army to play professional soccer in Europe, Clay took that fountain pen to Germany, where he finally spread his mother’s ashes in the land she had so longed to visit.
Today Clay Hawkins stands in the Root River, thigh deep, reading the water for where trout are holding. Uncle Teddy taught Clay everything he knows about fly-fishing. How to cast without spooking the trout and how to mend line so the fly drifts naturally in the current. How to read water, like he’s doing now, so Clay knows where the fish should be even if they aren’t rising or flashing their buttery flanks below the surface. The trout lie in the seams between fast and slow water. In the deep pools. In the undercut of a grassy bank. In a fast-moving riffle on a hot day where the water churns with oxygen.
Uncle Teddy taught Clay the difference between mayflies and caddisflies. About their larval stages underwater and how they morph and rise through the water column to become adult flies on the surface, drying their wings in the sun before taking flight for the first time. And about stoneflies that crawl out of the water in their larval stages and then morph into an adult fly on a rock or tree. That is if the trout don’t pick them off first. Teddy taught Clay how to fish terrestrials in late summer and early fall. Mimicking grasshoppers, ants, and beetles that get blown off course and into the river, or fall from an overhanging branch.
These are technical skills. But the most valuable things Uncle Teddy taught Clay were how to find peace on the river. How to stay out of the house for hours at a time. And how to do so in places where Judd could not find him. That’s how Clay survivedhis mother’s illness and his father’s ill temper. Judd was never abusive. Nor was he warm. Or supportive. Judd could not overcome his own grief to comfort Clay in his.
It’s mid-June, and Clay is six weeks away from starting his new job as the director of soccer and boys U19 head coach at his alma mater, Dorset-Cornwall. The school courted him for years before he finally agreed to leave Europe and move back to where he grew up.
Clay squeezes the water out of his fly with his amadou patch and applies a fresh glob of floatant, then massages it into the feathers and fur. There’s something primeval about fly-fishing, thinks Clay. Something that takes us all the way back to when the first humans walked the Earth. Kill or be killed. Eat or be eaten. The concentration of reading the river is meditative. Healing. Maybe not for the fish, but certainly for him.
When Clay was a cadet at West Point, he made a point of fishing the Hudson Valley, the birthplace of American fly-fishing. When he had a day off, he’d wade Willowemoc Creek or Croton River. After graduating, he didn’t see active duty unless you count bouncing around between US Army bases in Europe, where he fished the chalk streams of England, the freestone rivers in the Bavarian Alps, and the same waters in Northern Spain that Hemingway had frequented. Learning those waters came in handy after Clay left the army to play professional soccer on the Continent. When traveling to away games, Clay carried a six-piece rod that fit into his luggage along with a fanny pack of flies, leaders, tippet, nippers, and forceps.
And now, at forty-two years old, Clay fishes the rivers and streams of his childhood. He hadn’t planned on fishing today buthe woke up with a want—no, a need—to be on the river. Had no idea why. But now that he’s standing in the current, he wonders if it’s providence. Because there is no better place to think about where Teddy might be.
CHAPTER 4
Judd keeps an eye on the backyard where Braedon shoots cans with a .22 pistol. Kid’s a hell of a shot. Clay never showed any interest in guns at that age. Maybe it skips a generation, thinks Judd, like musical talent or psoriasis. Judd checks his emails and texts to see if anyone’s contacted him about Teddy. Nothing.
What bothers Judd the most is that two nights ago, the Hawkins men met for dinner at the House of Bends, a bar-and-grill overlooking the Middle Branch of the Root River. Nothing felt out of the ordinary. They sat on the redwood deck watching mayflies hatch and hover over the water. Judd and Braedon discussed what they’d grill for Sunday dinner. Clay watched the Minnesota Loons game on one of the outdoor big-screen TVs. Clay has friends on the coaching staff, and Judd wonders if the real reason Clay returned home is because he wants themanager job. Coaching Major League Soccer in America isn’t at the level of coaching in the Premier League, Bundesliga, Serie A, or Ligue 1, but it’s a start. And Clay, at forty-two, is still considered fresh young talent when it comes to coaching at the professional level.
Teddy seemed especially interested in the Minnesota Twins game on the other big screen. He became more animated than he usually does, cursing the team that has disappointed fans in all but two years since 1961. Everything seemed normal during that dinner two nights ago. If Teddy was concerned about something, anything, Judd would have picked up on it. Judd isn’t the most sensitive of men, but when it comes to his twin brother, Judd is like a seismograph. He can detect the most faint disturbance far below the surface. An apt analogy, thinks Judd, because Teddy is like a fault line. He can be quiet and boring for years and then something slips and everything shakes to hell.
