Pete Fromm - A Job You Mostly Won’t Know How to Do

Table of Contents

With many thanks to Joe Millar, for years of friendship and for the poem that gave this story its title. Thanks as well to my agent, Gail Hochman, who found the right home for Taz and Marn and Elmo and Midge, and to my sister, Ellen, proofreader par excellence. And, finally, to Dan Smetanka, the kind of roll-up-your-sleeves-and-get-to-work editor long rumored to have gone extinct. This story would not be the same without them.

ALSO BY PETE FROMM

The Names of the Stars

If Not for This

As Cool as I Am

How All This Started

Night Swimming

Blood Knot

Dry Rain

King of the Mountain

Indian Creek Chronicles

The Tall Uncut

Emmanuel Romer

PETE FROMM is a five-time winner of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Book Award for his novels If Not for This, As Cool as I Am, and How All This Started; the story collection Dry Rain; and the memoir Indian Creek Chronicles. He is on the faculty of Pacific Universitys low-residency MFA program, and lives in Montana with his family. Find out more at petefromm.com.

Taz triedMarnie standing sideways before the bedroom mirror, shirt pulled up to her neck. He oohed and aahed, pushed out his own stomach, said, Oh my god, youre ginormous, but really it was just Marn, a silhouette he could trace blindfolded. He came up to run his hand down her stomach, and she shoved him away, said, Its there, jackass. Any fool can see it.

A month later he told her she looked like a rope with a knot tied in the middle. He got the look.

But, by the time they blow out of Missoula, seven months down this new trajectory, theres no denying anything. Ditching the interstate, they follow the Blackfoot upriver, the narrow twists of the first canyon, then into the flats of Potomac, the mist still hanging low in the pasture, fingering into the spruce and lodgepole, the Angus standing like shadows. They climb the hill, swoop back down over the Clearwater, then back into the turns of the next canyon, the ponderosa crowding the road on one side, the river on the other, and Taz catches her leaning over, studying the river, looking for fishing holes, or figuring runs for the kayaks. She was nuts for all of it, from the very first day, the college kid from Ohio. All he had to do was show her this stuff he knew like breathing, from when he could take his first steps. It drove Rudy wild, the ease of the courtship. Its so not fair. I could show her all that. I could take her fishing and wed actually catch fish.

She turns, catching him smiling, says, What? and he says, Nothing. Just the first time we came up here.

Back out on the higher flats toward Ovando, the Scapegoat peaks rear up to the north, gray and parched with the drought, their snowpack gone since April. Smoke palls the farthest peaks, the fire season taking hold in the wilderness. Taz takes the turnoff at the gravel piles, leaves the main fork of the river and the pavement behind, dust coiling up after them on the dirt, then into the trees, hammering over the last broken bits of anything that could be called road. A swimming lesson, Marn calls it, and Taz pulls the truck in tight to the chokecherries, the lone gigantic ponderosa that marks their secret spot, no one else, as far as they could ever tell, macheteing through the thick stuff to discover the drop and pool, never even a fishermans tracks, though once they did find a grizzlys in the mud, water splashed across the rocks, still wet. They opted out that day. But now, grizzly-free, they snag their rods and fly boxes from the bed of the truck and snake through the willow and scrub, keeping to rock, never leaving a trail for others to follow. As soon as they see water, Marn drops her fly rod and sheds her clothes like a skin that no longer fits. Its what theyve always done, from the very first time they stumbled into this place, back when Taz still couldnt get over it, how easily she stripped down, as if theyd known each other forever and, as usual, Taz gets caught gaping, has to rush to catch up.

The water, even in the scorching July heat, is at first breathtaking, and they gasp and giggle their way into it, then paddle deeper, pushing up to the drop and drifting back down, circling through the eddy, their breaths steadying, his arms around her belly, and they watch the clouds stream over, harmless as brushstrokes, no water coming from them in months. Theres no smoke to see here yet, just the tinge of it in the air, pleasant almost, like a campfire.

Her belly bulgesan elbow or knee sweeping beneath Tazs handand his eyes widen and Marnie laughs. Shes going to swim like an otter, this one, she says, her wet hair like a pelt itself, draped across his shoulder.

Or he?

Dont be an idiot, she says. Solid double X.

Really?

He feels her nod. Sacagawea, she says. Lewis can follow her along. Maybe even Clark. Hogging all the glory. Men, same old, same old.

Back at first, wowed by the way they just knew all these places she could barely imagine, shed called him and Rudy Lewis and Clark. Theyd only been twenty. Seven years ago, but already it feels a lifetime.

They dry raisin-style in the sun, then dress and pick their way upstream, the water so low in the drought that they crunch over whitened cobble theyd never before seen dry. When they reach the wall of the last little canyon, Marn flashes Taz a look, a question, and he glances down at her belly, raises an eyebrow. Sacagawea carried her baby all the way to the Pacific and back, Marnie says, and she goes first, stepping up onto the foot-wide ledge of cracked and crumbling stone. She clings to the stone, a root here and there, some wild bit of buffalo brush taking seed in the rock, cracking its way in. Below them, the river, channeled tight, races through the drop, split by boulders, and Taz follows inches behind, ready to grab, to dive in after her.

But they make it through, dropping from rock to bunchgrass, the little meadow the canyon keeps hidden, and they stroll through the brittle stems, scattering grasshoppers all the way up to the beaver ponds. Water trickles through the bulwark of sticks and mud, the first pond glassy beyond it. They catch their breath, set up their rods, and Marnie, looking around for any kind of a hatch, runs her finger across the flies in her box, pulls out a tiny one, a midge, and names it out loud.

Digging through his own fly box, Taz says, Maybe, but I think a hopper cant miss.

No, Marnie says. Midge. Thats what well call her. Her name.

Midge?

Yeah, just this tiny thing, but what sort of holds the whole deal together.

Really?

She smiles. Its perfect.

The food chain? You want her at the bottom of the food chain? He laughs. That is so not perfect.

She looks at him.

And youre going to explain that to her later? Yeah, jeez honey, we just wanted, you know, for you to be at the slaughter end, what the whole world preys on.

Her look narrows.

Come on, Marn. If you want to go all native, how about, I dont know, Cutthroat? Thatd be cool, make the other kids leave her alone. Or Otter maybe.

She squints down toward scary and Taz says, Or, you know, Midge is good.

She rolls her eyes and he says, Midge, like a punch line, and they cast out and hes thinking Maddy maybe, or Carly, or Sandy, or maybe Sarah, or Sybil, running with the Ss, but not Sybil, youd never know which one she was, and if its a boy, because, seriously, she cant really