Free Catch & Release by Blythe Woolston Page B

fish anywhere,” says Odd, and he just keeps driving past the channels of the Madison River. People come from halfway around the world to fish here, but us? We can fish anywhere, so we just blow right by.
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    I send my dad a message, “Madison now its all good.”
    I delete thirty-seven messages from my mom.
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    â€œSo Odd is a family name, huh? I heard you say Grandpa Odd last night. Is it short for something? Because, you know, it’s a bit odd,” I say.
    â€œHar-dee-fucking-har,” says Odd, “Is your name short for Polyester? Polyhedron, maybe?”
    â€œIt’s just Polly,” I’m a little ashamed of myself. Odd’s probably been putting up with crap about his name his whole life. It made me cry when the other kids called me Pollywog on the playground, but Odd has to be a lot worse.
    â€œOdd is a real common name in Norway,” says Odd.
    He doesn’t say another thing to me until we stop for gas, then all he does is ask for the toilet key so he can use it while I pay for the fill-up. The key is attached to a long chunk of broom handle with the words “PEE KEY” written on it. I hand it off to him like a baton in a relay race. When we get back onto the interstate, he rolls down his window and reaches down by his feet. He’s still got the pee key. He chucks it out the window.
    I just shut my eye and shut my mouth. There is no point in asking him why he needs to be such a jerk. He probably didn’t even use that pee key. He probably just wants the whole world to start peeing all over stuff like pack rats. I don’t say anything. And he doesn’t say anything, right back.
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    When he finally does talk, it comes out of nowhere.
    â€œGramma Dot, I lived with her when I was little. My mom tried to kill herself back then. She would have done it, too, but she didn’t want to make a mess so she was fiddling around getting everything ready. Gramma Dot just dropped by unexpected and tumbled to the situation. They put my mom in treatment, and after that, Gramma Dot, she took care of me. It was better for everybody.”
    I don’t know how to talk back to that. We don’t do crazy in my family. Not like that. Odd comes from crazy people. I look at him. There’s nothing to see. But now I know his head is full of snakes, all crowded in there and biting each other. It’s been going on so long they are immune to poison. Not to pain.
    â€œI’d take care of her, Polly. If they’d let me.”
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    Elkhorn the ghost town is less dead than I expected. There are trucks and four-wheelers parked around. Someone has hung out laundry. A thin track of smoke rises from the stovepipe on another cabin.
    â€œSee that?” says Odd, and he points to a grey, weathered building with a balcony staring out over the town. No Juliet is up there waiting for Romeo. No paranoid lawman with a gun has a rifle waiting for the bad guys. It’s a ghost town. Romeo and Juliet are both dead. Lawman? Dead. Bad guys? Also dead.
    â€œRight there, in that building, a guy shot another guy at a dance. They had a little disagreement about whether the band should play a polka or a waltz. That’s what my Gramma Dot told me. But come on, I want to show you the coolest thing.”
    Really? There is something cooler than laundry, four-wheelers, and Gramma Dot’s tales of getting shot for waltzing?
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    The coolest thing is the graveyard. We are using Odd’s definition of cool, which includes tombstones with little lambs kneeling on the top to make sure we know there are children buried in that dirt. One of the graves has a full-size tree growing right up through the middle of it. Some of them have fences around them. The dates on the ones I can read say 1889 mostly. Must have been an epidemic, or a school burned down, or some other screwed-up tragedy. Been there. Seen that, the latest version.
    Odd is going from grave to grave like an