Free Everything by Kevin Canty Page A

afternoon, wading from the bank into the cold clean river. He was fine with the fishing part except that when he caught a fish it was a clusterfuck completely, and there was a moth hatch going on and a fish lying hungry and heedless in every bank. He took a fifteen-inch rainbow from under a willow tree and lost the fly and tippet trying to release it. The fly would work its way out of the rainbow’s lip in a few days but still it bothered him. Not the fly—a nickel’s worth of feathers and the five minutes of work that went into it—but the fish wearing it, the extra bit of junk on the streambed, for the few months before it rusted tonothing …. It wasn’t anything, really, anything of consequence, but it bothered him. A fish wearing a yellow stimulator.
    He caught another little brown and this time lost his sunglasses in the water, trying to unhook him. This was not going to work.
    He set the handle of the rod in his teeth and this time managed—with the forceps in his broken hand—to release the little brown and then felt around underwater for his glasses until his arm went numb from the cold. He couldn’t move his feet so as not to break the glasses. When he could move his fingers again, he put the rod back in his mouth and raised the cast above him and felt the bottom again. This time he found them. The glasses seemed to be fine, unscratched, But his fishing day was over.
    A burst of baby rage. It wasn’t fair. He had so nothing to himself, with the child and the job, so few hours to call his own and he had driven all this way … and then the anger was gone. He still had the afternoon and no one expecting him till suppertime.
    Edgar sat down at the edge of the gravel bank and watched the stream go by. He lit a cigarette from the illicit pack he had bought in Clinton. On the way home, he would toss whatever was left of the pack and buy some mints and hope that Amy didn’t smell it on him under the smell of sunblock, sweat and river water. The water in front of him tailed out of a riffle, a little way upstream, into a broad and deceptively deep pool at the base of a cliff. Something Japanese and pretty about the dark circling water under the rock wall. The moths, little white ones, were landing in the water out of the evergreen trees upstream and the tongue of the tailout was carrying them down the dead middle of the river, where dozens of fat trout lay in wait for them. Easy pickings for a two-armed man.
    * * *
    Did Amy really not know? She must smell the smoke on him. Was she just pretending not to? It didn’t seem like her at all, and yet … This whole business of marriage felt baffling to him, a game without rules, especially since the baby had come along. Edgar loved the baby, loved the afternoons when it was just the two of them, loved the smell of the baby’s head and her tiny, blunt hands. But things between them were different with the baby around.
    Insoluble, he thought. Then wished he had brought pad and paper with him. Then he was glad he had not. Edgar did not often get to enjoy the luxury of idleness. He didn’t approve of idleness, or like it, but it was good for him sometimes to stop all the usual doing and going and just look at what was in front of his eyes. The sky was a high clear blue that shimmered blue on the water. Edgar looked at the line where the shadow of the cliff met the sunlight on the water, the way the rock reflected black, deep brown and gray next to the sky blue. Downstream the river opened up into a wider valley, an old homestead, the cabin and barns long abandoned and tumbledown. In the near bend stood the overgrown remains of an orchard, the trees half dead and untended but the branches weighted down with apples still. Edgar wondered if the apples were any good. He was half in love with these old trees, their perseverance.
    In a minute he’d go over to the orchard and pick one of those apples. As soon as he was done with this cigarette.
    He lay back in the soft