* * *

  Bill backed out of the shed. His spine creaked gratefully as he straightened up. He’d brought Mervin McDougald here to examine fish guts. That didn’t mean they interested him.

  Kelly Ann stepped outside into the fresh air a moment after he did. she took a deep breath. “It did get a little smelly in there when he undid the tie on that one,” she said.

  “Yeah, just a big,” Bill said. The odor wafted out in her wake. He and Kelly and moved farther away. Rex the golden retriever tried to go inside again. Whatever McDougald was doing smelled great to him. Greg shooed him away.

  Kelly Ann lit a Virginia Slim. She glanced at Bill. “You don’t mind?”

  “I’m not rude enough to tell you what to do on your own property,” he said. “I hope to God I’m not, anyway.”

  “That means you do mind but you’re too polite to say so,” Kelly Ann said accurately. She didn’t step on the cigarette, but she did move downwind of him.

  Inside the shed, Merv kept making little excited noises. Every so often, Eric Bishop echoed him. The game warden seemed to know a good deal about how the insides of fish worked. Well, that was part of his job, even if not all of it. The dominant refrain seemed to be Will you look at that?

  After a while, Greg Donovan stepped out of the shed. Shaking his head, he said, “I’m glad I saved the offal, but I’ll be damned if I can get excited about it.”

  “I’m with you,” Bill told him. “I’m glad you saved everything, too, and I can’t get excited about it, either.”

  Greg turned to his wife. “Let me bum one of those off you, huh?”

  As she gave him the pack, she teased, “You want the governor to see you smoking a women’s cigarette?”

  “Like I care,” he said, lighting up. “They’ll rot my lungs same as my Marlboros, and this way I don’t have to go in the house and find those.” He held the pack of Virginia Slims out to Bill. “Go for one yourself?”

  “No, thanks,” Bill answered. “I already have plenty of bad habits. I drink beer. I drink scotch. I do politics.” Greg chuckled and gave the cigarettes back to Kelly Ann.

  Merv and Eric showed no signs of coming forth any time soon. They would have been happy pawing through the speartooth’s entrails for the next week. Bill took a surreptitious look at his watch.

  “What time is it getting to be?” Kelly Ann asked.

  “Close to eleven,” Bill said. “I crawled out of bed early to pick up Merv in Ashland before we came here. I’m getting hungry. Where’s a good place to go grab some lunch that isn’t too far?”

  “If you want, I can fry up some more of the speartooth. Lord knows there’s enough of it to feed an army.” Kelly Ann paused, thinking. Then she said, “Heck, I’ll bring it outside for everybody. I’m sorry, Governor, but our house is little-people-sized.”

  “Most of them are,” Bill said easily. “A lot more people your size than mine.” Even in Jefferson, sasquatches were a small minority. Accommodations laws here said hotels and restaurants and other public buildings had to make allowances for them, but you couldn’t hope to pass legislation like that for housing. The governor waved. “It’ll be fine. It’s a nice day—a lot nicer than yesterday—and this is a nice place.

  “You’re a nice man, is what you are,” Kelly Ann said. She went inside. Pretty soon, savory smells floated out of the kitchen.”

  Not quite out of the blue, Greg Donovan said, “You know something, Governor? I think I’m the luckiest fella alive.”

  “Well, I understand that. I feel the same way with my Louise,” Bill replied. “Find the right one, she’s worth her weight in gold and them some. You guys have kids?”

  “Boy and a girl, senior and a sophomore at the high school.” Greg dug out his wallet. He wore it in his left front pocket, not on his hip the way most little men did. “Wanna see pictures?”

  “I’ll put up with yours if you put up with mine,” Bill said. The deal was made. Bill pulled out his own wallet. Each agreed that the other’s spouse and offspring were superior specimens of their kind. Ritual satisfied, both men stowed their billfolds.

  Kelly Ann slid the kitchen window open and hollered “Lunch!” through the screen.

  Merv and Eric failed to come out of the shed. “Hey, you guys!” Greg said loudly. “Better get it while it’s hot! C’mon out and clean up. When’ll you get the chance to eat speartooth again?”

  That did the trick. The ichthyologist’s arms and shirt were somewhat the worse for wear. They cleaned their hands at the garden hose. Most of their talk flew straight over Bill’s head. He knew no more about the intricacies of scale and ray counts than they did about the gears and wheels and pulleys behind passing legislation.

  Kelly Ann passed out plates of fried fish and fried potatoes. When she got to Bill, she said, “I know you’ll want more. Don’t be shy. I’ve got plenty—it wasn’t a little fish.”

  “Shy? Me? I’m the governor, remember? If I were shy, they would’ve run me out of town a long time ago.” Bill ate a forkful of fish. He chewed thoughtfully. Yes, it was closer to trout than to salmon—definitely in that range. Whatever it tasted like … He nodded approval. “That’s mighty good!”

  None of the little men argued with him. Greg fed Rex some scraps. The retriever wolfed them down, then tried to climb his master in hopes of getting more. “Forget it,” Greg told him. “If you had your way, you’d be a basketball with legs.” Rex did an excellent impression of a dog that didn’t speak people—excellent, but not good enough for seconds.

  Bill, on the other hand, took not only seconds but thirds. “You don’t get any extra salary or allowance because you’re a sasquatch, do you?” Kelly Ann asked.

  “I wish!” Bill said sincerely. “But I don’t. The taxpayers, Lord love ’em, would come after me with pitchforks and tar and feathers if I asked for one.”

  “I don’t see why. You’re as big as three of us. You eat like three of us. Seems only fair you should be able to afford to,” she said.

  “You are a nice lady,” Bill said. “But it depends on what you mean by ‘fair.’ Most people think it means everybody should be treated exactly the same no matter what.”

  “That’s dumb. People aren’t all identical, like the stupid Farkel Family on Laugh-In. We’d be boring if we were,” Kelly Ann said.

  He was inclined to agree with her. Even in easygoing Jefferson, the vast majority of the voters weren’t. Anything that smacked of special privilege for anybody was a political kiss of death. You might not like that particular fact of life, but you flouted it at your peril.

  * * *

  Eric and Merv hopped into the game warden’s car for a run to get more ice and possibly some formaldehyde. They came back with the frozen water but without the embalming fluid.

  “Wouldn’t work.” Merv sounded said. “I’d have to cut up the specimens and put them in bottles. We don’t have the bottles and we don’t have the time. I’ve got got to keep everything cold till I can get it down to Ashland and into the freezers in the lab there.” He glanced over to Bill. “Governor, I can use your trunk to move things, right?”

  “Well, there’s plenty of room,” Bill said, which wasn’t exactly assent. It was true enough; the Mighty Mo’s trunk would hold anything this side of a 747. All the same, Bill added, “Make sure you close all the bags up good and right. Otherwise, I’ll be remembering this trip every time I open the trunk for the next five years.”

  Greg laughed. “Isn’t that why God made air freshener?”

  “I don’t think God or Procter and Gamble ever made air freshener strong enough to beat old fish,” Bill said. Greg spread his hands, yielding the point.

  Eric Bishop pulled a Fotomat receipt out of his wallet. “May I use your phone for a minute?” he asked Kelly Ann. “I want to see when the pictures will be ready. I told ’em to hurry as much as they could, so maybe we won’t have to wait till four.”

  “Sure. Go ahead. There’s one on the wall by the fridge,” she said.

  Bishop walked inside. When he came out, he was grinning from ear to ear. “They’ve got ’em!” he said. “The kid in the booth put in a special rush on ’em, bless her heart. I’ve got to find something nice to do for her.”

  Money works, Bill thought. But that was the game warden’s business, not his. Eric piled into the Fish and Game Department Plymouth and peeled out of there at the best speed its small, unexciting engine would give him. Plainly, he would have liked to burn rubber on his way to the Fotomat. Just as plainly, the car wouldn’t let him.

  “If I’m working that Fotomat now, I’d tell him, ‘Sorry, none of the pics came out,’ just to see the look on his face,” Greg said.

  “That’s evil!” Kelly Ann sounded more admiring than not. Bill would have said the same thing, but perhaps not in the same tone of voice.

  Half an hour later, Eric Bishop came back. By his expression as he got out of the car, he hadn’t got any bad news at the booth with the yellow roof. He held up two envelopes full of prints. “I put these on the state’s nickel, Governor,” he said. “I figured they’re official business.”

  “That’s fine.” Bill nodded. “Your boss grumps, tell him to talk to me.”

  “Okay. And I gave the Fotomat girl ten bucks out of my own pocket for hurrying the orders. I had to talk her into taking it. Can you believe that?”

  “Can we see the pictures? They’re as close as I’ll come to the speartooth in vivo.” Merv McDougald had literally salivated over fried speartooth at lunch. He seemed much droolier now on account of the photographs.

  “Here we go.” Eric Bishop pulled prints out of the first envelope. Everybody crowded around him for a look. Bill bent forward to get as close a view as he could.

  “Oooh,” Merv whispered. Bill doubted whether the sexiest, nakedest Playmate of the Month could have coaxed that noise from him. He’d seen naked women before. A naked speartooth? Nope.

  There it lay, on the muddy bank of the Rogue. It was greenish brown above and silvery below. Greg Donovan stood beside it to give a sense of scale: it was about as long as he was tall. That’s a hell of a lot of fish, Bill thought. The speartooth’s golden eye stared back at the camera with what the governor imagined to be reproach.

  Other photos were tighter shots of the speartooth’s head, of its fins, and of its tail. One, taken from a little too close for the Instamatic’s lens, tried to show its toothy mouth.

  “Okay, on to the next roll,” Eric said. He put the first batch of photos back into their envelope and took the second batch out of the other one. On the first picture here, Greg was digging into the speartooth’s belly with what looked like … “Is that a bayonet?” Bill asked.

  “Sure is,” Greg answered. “Came off the M-1 I carried in Korea almost thirty years ago. Still as good a utility knife as I’ve ever found.” Something dark passed across his face. “I’d sure rather use it on a fish than—” He broke off, shook his head, and didn’t finish.

  “Hey, babe,” Kelly Ann said quietly. He put his arm around her.

  There were the speartooth guts, spilled out onto the riverbank. Bill had to glance away from the photo for a second. The entrails looked too much as if they’d come out of a human belly, not a fish’s. He hadn’t been ready for that; his stomach’s slow lurch caught him by surprise.

  Merv McDougald, on the other hand, focused on the picture like a burning glass. He made learned comments on the shape of the liver and the relative lengths of the small and large intestines that did nothing to help Bill’s poise or equilibrium.

  The last pictures were of Greg cutting up the salmon so he could lift the pieces—and the guts, for which science would bless him—into the back of his pickup. That made Bill find another question: “How many times have you hosed down your truck bed?”

  “Three or four so far,” Donovan answered. “That may do it—or it may not.” Bill nodded. He wouldn’t be able to clean out the Mighty Mo’s trunk the same way if something went wrong on the way south.

  Eric kept one set of photos for himself. Bill and Merv divided up the other set, except for a couple that went to Greg. “I’ll have ’em make you a full set from the negatives,” the game warden promised.

  “Good. I want ’em,” Greg said. “When I get old and stupid—”

  “Stupider,” Kelly Ann put in.

  “Stupider.” Greg accept the correction without a blink, which seemed to disappoint her. “When I get old and stupider, I’ll be able to pull ’em out and remember it wasn’t just another bullshit fish story.”

  “Well, now I’m gonna call the Daily Courier. You can pull that story out, too,” Eric said.

  “And I’ll be getting hold of the Daily Tidings in Ashland,” Merv added.

  “And I—or my publicist—will be talking to every reporter and his brother-in-law,” Bill said. “That’s why we’ll want you at the press conference Monday.”

  “We’ll do it,” Greg said. Kelly Ann nodded.

  “That’s right,” Eric agreed.

  “With these photos, you couldn’t keep me away,” Merv added. Bill smiled. He’d got them all moving his way.

  * * *

  But you had to give to get. That was a basic lesson of politics. Even so, a certain number of lardbrain politicos never got it. Bill had it down solid. He kept right on smiling when Merv and Eric filled the bottom of the Mighty Mo’s trunk with bags of ice. Then Merv and Greg took bags of fish parts and set them on top of the ice. Bill sniffed. No, it wasn’t bad. With luck, it wouldn’t get bad. Still more ice went on top of the Hefty bags. Bill slammed down the trunk lid—thud!

  “That’s a hell of a big trunk, Governor,” Greg Donovan said. “And you’re a hell of a good sport about this, too.”

  “I’m excited about it,” Bill said. “My ancestors were probably telling stories about speartooths before the Indians ever got here. Nice to know those stories weren’t total bullshit.”

  “There you go.” Greg nodded.

  “Yup. Here I go.” Bill raised his voice: “C’mon, Merv. I’m taking you back to Ashland and me back to Yreka. The sooner we get to Jefferson State Ashland, the less time your specimens have to spoil.”

  “I’m coming.” McDougald came with such alacrity that Bill smiled his inward smile again. He’d been in this game a while. He knew which buttons to push, all right.

  He found his way back to the I-5 with only a couple of little fumbles. Grants Pass wasn’t like Ashland or Yreka, where he knew his way around without needing to stop and think. Once you were going the right way on the Interstate, though, you could turn off most of your brain till you got close to where you wanted to swing back onto surface streets.

  One trucker had turned off too much of his brain. His rig lay sideways on the soft shoulder of a curve he’d missed. Several tons of grapes spilled onto the shoulder and the field around it. The driver hadn’t hurt himself. He stood by the overturned cab and stared glumly at the mess he’d caused.

  “He’s kissing his job good-bye,” Merv said.

  “Uh-huh.” Bill nodded. “And if he had a beer or two at a truck stop in Grants Pass, he’s in worse trouble than that.”

  The accident cost the Mighty Mo about five minutes on the trip back to Jefferson State. By the way Merv McDougald fidgeted in the right from seat, he either needed a rest stop or he was picturing the Hefty bags full of rotten, stinking speartooth.

  But everything seemed fine when the governor parked near the biology building. He sniffed anxiously at the Eldorado’s trunk as Merv hauled bag after bag to the freezers. Bill dropped the ice bags into a dumpster. Then he did some more sniffing. Everything still seemed okay. He hoped that, unlike Fotomat prints, the stink wouldn’t take twenty-four hours to develop.

  “Thanks for everything, Governor.” Merv held out his hand one more time.

  Bill shook it. “Thanks for coming along. The speartooth isn’t a myth—and we’ve got the pictures to prove it.”

  “And the specimens,” the ichthyologist agreed. “I’ll see you Monday morning in Yreka.”

  That saved Bill the trouble of nagging him about it one more time. He slid into the Mighty Mo instead and headed back to the Interstate.

  * * *

  Thursday morning, Bill knocked on Barbara Rasmussen’s open door. He didn’t go any farther till his publicist said, “Come on in.” He knew he intimidated little people if he just suddenly loomed above them. It was too much like Godzilla coming over the hill and descending on the village.

  “Got something to show you,” he said.

  “What’s up?” Barbara was a tall, well-made blonde, certainly publicist-pretty, very possibly starlet-pretty. She was pretty enough to carbonate Bill’s hormones. Like a lot of members of small minorities, he got most of his ideas about beauty from the larger society in which he lived. He hadn’t done anything about them with Barbara; he liked being married to Louise. But that didn’t make them go away.

  “Check these out,” he said, and set some of the best speartooth photos in front of her. Not all of his ancestors had been so scrupulous as he was; if family stories had it straight, one of his great-great-grandmothers was a little woman.

  “Good God!” she said, staring up at him. Her eyes were big and improbably blue. “They said you went up to Grants Pass yesterday for something that had to do with a speartooth, but I thought it had to be a joke or a hoax. It wasn’t, was it?”

  “Sure wasn’t. I ate some for lunch, matter of fact. Can’t very well do that with a hoax.” Bill smacked his lips. “Oncorhynchus rastrosus, in the—pretty tasty—flesh.”

  “Oh-kay.” Barbara made two very distinct syllables of it. She peered down at the photos again. “The speartooth looks … pretty much like a speartooth’s supposed to look, I guess. Wow! It’s really big.”

 

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