All my dad wanted to do before he died was catch another steelhead trout. He told me stories of how, as a boy, he fished a remote section of the Snake River every summer, catching enormous steelhead that weighed over 40 pounds. But that was long ago, and he hadn’t caught a trout in years. He was broke and dying, dying of cancer from Agent Orange exposure in Vietnam, a sad man confined to a hospice with black mold growing on the walls and cockroaches crawling on the floors. He spent all day sitting on an 8-gallon plastic bucket by the hospice’s tiny pond, fishing with a homemade cane pole. Its only piscine resident was a goldfish someone had released; he must have caught it a hundred times.
I wanted to help him, but I was broke too, didn’t even have a working car. I tried to get him the VA compensation he was entitled to, but they just denied his claims over and over, even though I had all the required documentation. I begged my brother, who had a cabin along the Snake River, to come and take him fishing, just once, but he always refused, making ridiculous excuses. He didn’t seem to care; I don’t remember him ever visiting our dad. I thought that he was going to die in that hospice, without ever catching another trout.
One morning, my brother called me out of the blue. Sounding frantic, he said that we could use his cabin for a few days. I rushed over to the hospice and told my dad, told him that we were going to catch a steelhead. That was the first time I saw him smile in years.
We set off that very afternoon. I had to pawn my wedding ring to come up with the money to rent a car, but I knew it would be worth it. As we neared my brother’s cabin, my dad started smiling, telling me how he fished these waters as a boy.
We stopped at a bait shop a few miles from the cabin. The proprietor, a grizzly old man, stared at me as we entered. “What the hell are you doing here?” he growled at me.
“Just getting some bait,” I replied.
“I thought you knew enough not to show your face around these parts.”
I was confused for a few seconds, then I realized what was going on. “You must be mistaking me for Jamie, my brother,” I said, wondering what he did to upset the old man behind the counter.
“Get out,” he growled.
“OK, OK,” I said, as we left. I tried to calm my dad, told him that it was no big deal, that we could easily dig for worms.
We arrived at the isolated log cabin a little before sunset. It was set back a few hundred feet from the river, in a cluster of cottonwood trees. Bloody footprints led up to the front door. I didn’t think too much of them at the time, just thought that my brother had gone hunting and gotten blood on his boots.
The key was under the mat, as my brother said it would be. It was a fairly small cabin, about two-hundred square feet. Two bunk beds had been pushed against one wall. Opposite it was a sofa, above which an 8-point whitetail buck head had been mounted, and a small cast iron stove. Three fishing rods were leaning up against one wall, and two Remington bolt action rifles were resting on a gun rack.
My dad, tired from the long journey, collapsed on the couch. I went outside to look for the outhouse. As I was following a narrow dirt trail, stamped with bloody footprints, I glimpsed the day’s last light reflect off something coppery hidden amongst the shrubs on my right. I hurried over to it. It was a moonshine still. That might explain why my brother never wanted us to come over.
I continued following the trail. As I came around a bend, I saw three bodies. Two men, dressed in camouflage, and a woman. Their hands were bound behind their backs and they had been shot in the back of their heads, execution style. Maggots were crawling over their flesh and they smelled of rot. I wondered if my brother was an intended victim, or if he was the killer. Had he sent me to this cabin to try to frame me for the killings? I didn’t think he would do that, but I wasn’t certain. I just knew that we needed to get out of here.
I sprinted back to the cabin and found my dad snoring on the couch. I tried to tell myself that it would be OK. I’d come up with some excuse for why we needed to leave. We’d take the rods and find a campground somewhere else along the river. We’d catch that steelhead.
Suddenly, a shot rang out nearby. Just a hunter, I tried to reassure myself, just a hunter, but I didn’t believe it. Then there was another and the cabin’s glass window shattered. I froze, but my dad jolted up and dashed to the gun rack. I glanced through the window and in the fading light saw four shadowy figures dressed head to toe in black—three armed with rifles, one with a pistol—making their way towards the cabin. Now armed, my dad knelt down by the window and started returning fire.
“Get over here and help me, goddammit” he called.
I won’t lie, I was terrified, I had never served in the Army like my dad, but I managed to get a rifle and joined my dad at the window. For several minutes, we traded fire. I was useless, I had been hunting a few times but was a lousy shot. Thankfully, my dad could shoot, and downed the three riflemen. The man with the pistol fired one last shot and then started running away. It was a lucky shot, he didn’t even aim, but it somehow found its way through a crack in the logs and pierced my dad’s throat. With my final shot, the only shot of mine that found its target, I downed the last gunman.
I turned to my dad, who was lying on the floor, coughing up blood. I applied pressure to his neck, trying in vain to stop the flow of blood. “You’re going to make it,” I told him. “Don’t give up, we’re going to catch a steelhead. It’ll be the biggest one you’ve ever seen, fifty pounds, a state record. Just hang in there.”
But his breathing was growing weaker and weaker. He never did catch that one final trout.