The two sets of headlights that came down my gravel road belonged to a cruiser of the Baxter County Sheriff and a gray sedan with no markings, and they parked side by side at the edge of my firelight like old friends. The sheriff, Tim Reaves, got out first, a big man in a campaign hat, followed by two deputies. From the gray sedan stepped a slim woman in a windbreaker marked with three yellow letters, DEA. She walked straight to the fire and nodded to me. “Mr. Haskins,” she said, “Special Agent Lena Park. Thank you for the phone call. You have saved me about six months.”
She told the fire and the thirty people around it, quietly, what she had known for a year. The pawn shop in Harrison owned by the brothers of Kendra was a front for the sale of oxycodone, brought up the river from Memphis, and it had hooked every bored young man in three counties, including my son. The sale agreement for Haskins Fly and Tackle was a way of washing the money, one point two million dollars from the pawn shop through a respectable sale. The note in the handwriting of Kendra, which I had photographed and sent to the lawyer, tied it all together in a single line.
Jace had gone the color of cold ash. His brother, standing at the edge of the firelight, was already looking at the dark. And the wife of my son stood with her hands over her mouth, shaking, as the agent said her name. “Mrs. Haskins,” said Agent Park, “you are not under arrest this evening. But you wrote that note, and I would like to speak to you about it, with a lawyer, tomorrow.” Kendra nodded, and slowly lowered herself into the empty lawn chair next to the cooler, like a woman folding up.
A phone call made from a tailgate gave one widower the evening to bring his son back to the river in Mountain Home.
I gave my terms from the tailgate, with a half eaten trout on the paper plate beside me. “Wyatt, you will go with Agent Park tonight and tell her what you know. Then you will go to the treatment center in Mountain Home, and you will stay until they say. Kendra, you will tell the truth, and then you will come back to the shop and learn what a fishing rod weighs in your hand. Jace, I have nothing to say to you. The shops are mine, the safe has a new code, and every rod stays on the wall. Now somebody eat this fish before it gets cold. Bonnie would not stand for waste.”
Wyatt came over and sat on the tailgate beside me, so close that our shoulders touched. For a long moment he did not say anything. Then he put his face in his hands. “Dad,” he said, “I started with one pill for my back, and then one more for my nerves, and then I was taking them from Jace, and I owed him for them. When he said sign the sale, I signed. I told myself you were old. I never once thought about Mom, and what she would say.” He wept openly. “I am so ashamed that I cannot lift my head.”
While the agent was speaking to the sheriff, Jace crept to the edge of the firelight, grabbed the sale agreement from the hood of the truck where I had left it, and bolted for the river trail with it in his fist. He did not make it past the first pine. Pastor Dale Whitfield and ten men from the church retreat, who had been sitting quietly in their lawn chairs through the whole thing with their paper plates on their knees, rose together and closed ranks across the trail. Ten Baptist men in fishing vests do not look dangerous, until they are in a line. Jace stopped, and the sheriff took his arm.
They led Jace and his brother away in the cruiser, and the fire popped and settled. Agent Park shook my hand, and she left with Wyatt in her gray sedan, with his permission and mine. He looked back at me through the rear window, a grown man with the face of a child. Kendra stayed behind in the lawn chair. After a while, I walked over and gave her a plate of trout, and I sat down next to her. She ate in silence. When she finished, she said, in a very small voice, “I am sorry I sent you to the truck.” I said, “I know.”
The money consequences were severe for the guilty. The pawn shop was closed by the DEA and the brothers were charged with distribution and money laundering. The sale was void. Wyatt cooperated, entered treatment, and received probation. Kendra gave a full statement and was not charged. My three shops, my guide service and the line of fly rods stayed with me, and not a single bamboo rod left the wall. The one point two million dollars never changed hands. What changed was that Harlan and I rewrote the company papers, so that every sale needs two signatures, forever.
In the name of Bonnie, who passed in 2022, I started the Bonnie Haskins Fund. It pays for rods, reels, waders and guide trips for kids and veterans in recovery in Baxter, Marion and Boone counties. In the first year we took ninety four people to the White River. One was a boy of fifteen from Flippin, quiet and sullen, whose brother had lost himself to pills. On the third cast, a rainbow trout took his fly, and he stood in the cold water laughing like a child, holding the line up to the sun.
Wyatt came home after ninety days, thinner and clearer, and met me at the dock of the shop on a Sunday in October. We went out on the White River in the old johnboat before the sun was up, with the mist on the water and the dam rumbling upstream. I handed him a bamboo rod, one of the two thousand dollar ones, and he held it as if it might bite. He cast, and cast again. On the fourth cast the line went tight. He turned to me, and for the first time in a year, my son was smiling.
