Run River

1

Lily heard the shot at seventeen minutes to one. She knew the time precisely because, without looking out the window into the dark where the shot reverberated, she continued fastening the clasp on the diamond wrist watch Everett had given her two years before on their seventeenth anniversary, looked at it on her wrist for a long time, and then, sitting on the edge of the bed, began winding it.

When she could wind the watch no further she stood up, still barefoot from the shower, picked up from her dressing table a bottle of Joy, splashed a large amount of it onto her hand, and reached down the neckline of her dress to spread it, a kind of amulet, across her small bare breasts: on the untroubled pages of those magazines where Joy was periodically proclaimed The Costliest Perfume in the World, nobody sat in her bedroom and heard shots on her dock.

Her eyes fixed not on the windows but upon the framed snapshots of the children which hung above her dressing table (Knight at eight, standing very straight in a Cub Scout uniform; Julie at seven, the same summer), Lily held her hand inside her dress until all the Joy had evaporated and there was nothing left to do but open the drawer where the.38 had been since the day Everett killed the rattlesnake on the lawn: the drawer in the table by their bed where the.38 should be still and where it was not. She had known it would not be.

Nine hours before, at four o’clock that afternoon, Lily had decided that she would not go at all to the Templetons’ party. It was entirely too hot. She had been upstairs all afternoon, lying on the bed in her slip, the shutters closed and the electric fan on. Everett was out in the hops, showing the new irrigation system to a grower from down the river; Knight had driven into town; Julie, she supposed, was somewhere with one of the Templeton twins. She did not really know.

The afternoons always settled down this way. Late in June, after all the trouble, she had begun insisting that everyone lie down after lunch. Although on three afternoons everyone had gone upstairs, on the fourth she had heard Julie talking on the telephone downstairs (“You couldn’t mean it. He swore they broke up months ago”), and on the fifth she was, as usual, alone in the house. Everett and the children had been, nonetheless, extravagantly agreeable about the plan: if there was one word to describe what everyone had been about everything since June, that word was agreeable. It had been all summer as if a single difference among them might tear it apart again; as if one unpremeditated word could bring the house down around them for good.

She got up and opened a shutter. The heat still shimmered in the air, so concentrated as to seem incendiary. After dinner she would take another shower and throw the windows open and read one of Knight’s books. The floor of his room was stacked with books. It seemed to her that Knight had spent the entire summer packing, unpacking, arranging and rearranging the things he planned to take East to Princeton: he had already packed so many books to ship East that Everett had finally asked if he had reason to believe the Princeton library off-limits to freshmen. “Why leave them here,” Knight had shrugged, and for a few seconds Lily had hated him, had read malice into his bland voice as she watched Everett’s face take on that look of elaborate unconcern.

At any rate, she would try to read tonight, although she found concentration increasingly difficult; lately she had been able to read only books about Chicago gangsters or by oceanographers. The Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre and the Mindanao Deep seemed, in their equidistance from her, equally absorbing. She had asked Knight, last week when he was driving to Berkeley, to pick up some new books in one of the paperback bookstores along Telegraph Avenue. The books could no doubt be found, Knight had informed her, right downtown in Sacramento. She did not seem to realize that there were now paperback bookstores in Sacramento. She and his father would never seem to get it through their heads that things were changing in Sacramento, that Aerojet General and Douglas Aircraft and even the State College were bringing in a whole new class of people, people who had lived back East, people who read things. She and his father were going to be pretty surprised if and when they ever woke up to the fact that nobody in Sacramento any more had even heard of the McClellans. Or the Knights. Not that he thought they ever would wake up. They’d just go right along dedicating their grubby goddamn camellia trees in Capitol Park to the memory of their grubby goddamn pioneers.

Although she did not suppose that Knight would have brought any new books about either Columbus Iselin or Mad Dog Coll, even to simply sit in the dark and watch the lights on the levee road would be better than going to Francie Templeton’s, where everyone would be hot and someone would drink too much and say something with a familiar edge to it; going to river parties had become unpleasantly like watching reel after reel of badly focused home movies, the prints a little frayed by wear. Here’s the kitchen and there’s Joe Templeton, trying to pour Francie’s drink down the sink; look, Francie’s stamping her foot and it’s not even midnight yet; watch now, here comes little Jennie Mason, looking in the garden for Bud Mason; remember that, because next you’ll see Jennie Mason (who, in a sequence spliced out of this reel, unfortunately but naturally misinterpreted Bud Mason’s presence in the garden with Lily McClellan) being comforted by Everett McClellan; that’s Everett, there in the long-suffering suit. You did not even need audio. You could count on little Jennie somebody, could count on all the same faces, all the same games; at one of Francie’s parties last year, when Ryder Channing had announced belligerently that he owed money to five of the ten men in the room, it had occurred to Lily that she had been to bed with seven, and in four cases could not remember exactly when or where. They were all, now, one error in taste. Although she had not been to a river party since June, she could remember what had happened after that one with the same distorted clarity that hung about the whole of June: it had not been the first party she had deserted for a hotel room, but it had been the first party she had deserted for a room at the Senator, which she thought of, still, as her father’s hotel. Her father had liked the Senator bar, and several times when she was small he had taken her there for lemonade with grenadine. (The morning after that party, clutching Everett’s pillow to her stomach, she had dug her fingernails into her arm until the skin bruised, but by noon, driving to the lake by herself, she had begun again to see it all as Everett’s fault. It would not have happened had Everett been at the party instead of home brooding about his sister; none of it would ever have happened had Everett been there.)

You better cut it out, Ryder Channing had said in June, that day at the lake which had been part of the trouble, and although Ryder was the last one to have said it, Ryder was right. A party could begin it all again — two drinks, someone from out of town, Everett ignoring her, that was all it would take — and when Everett came upstairs at four-thirty she told him that she did not want to go to Francie Templeton’s.

“It’s too hot. You go if you want.”

She was brushing her hair, pulling it down over her face, trying to find the gray Julie had claimed to see among the dark. Lily could not imagine herself with gray hair: in the first place she was not yet thirty-seven and in the second place she had always imagined her style to be striking frailty. You could not, with graying hair, look strikingly frail; you could only look frail.

“Knight and Julie are going,” she added.

Everett sat down by the window. Both his face and his khaki shirt were splotched with dust and sweat. “I think you should go. They’re expecting you.”

“I have a headache,” she said mildly. “I can’t help that, can I. I mean that’s what anybody’d have to call an act of God, isn’t it. Even Francie Templeton. You’ll catch cold if you sit by the fan in a wet shirt.”

“You and your mother.”

“It’s congenital. I read it in the Reader’s Digest. Five New York doctors. How to Make Headaches Work for You. Anyway. You go.”

“All right,” he said without interest. “All right.”

Everett began whistling tunelessly through his teeth. Only that and the whine of the electric fan broke the silence. Lily was aware that he did not take his eyes from her bare arms as she brushed her hair.

“We could go away this winter,” he said abruptly.

“Go away,” she repeated. “Go away where?”

“We could take a trip. We could take one of those boats that keeps going for forty-one days or something. We could go to Alaska or Australia or Europe or someplace.”

“Not Alaska, baby. I mean it couldn’t be much fun to go to Alaska in the winter.”

“Somewhere,” he insisted.

“Australia. Imagine.”

“Listen,” Everett said. “I’d like it. We’ve never done that, gone away together. For a long trip. It’ll be good for you.”

It was unlike Everett to want to go away. Since the war he had left the ranches only for occasional weekends, growers’ meetings, funerals down the Valley; one might have thought him some agrarian Ivar Kreuger, guardian of an ephemeral empire in need of constant control, split-second manipulation. Although she had wanted him to go abroad with her and the children when they went the summer of 1957 (There’s no point if you don’t go, Everett, baby, there’s no use in sending me off alone, it’ll only be the same when I come back, please, Everett), he had refused.

“Could you get away?” she asked now.

“I think so.” He stood up and opened a shutter. “Anyway,” he added. “You and Julie could go.”

“She can’t leave school. She has to study for her College Boards and besides she thinks she’s in love. She thinks she’s going to get pinned to that Beta from Berkeley. I doubt that she could tear herself away long enough to see us off at the boat.”

“You don’t mean that boy she had up here.”

“That’s right. That very one.”

“I didn’t like him. You know I didn’t like him.” Everett paused. “He looked like a little wop in that jacket he wore up here.”

Lily said nothing. The boy was six foot two, an inch taller than Everett; was almost as blond as Everett had been at his age and as Knight was now; and had worn, one day in July when he drove up to see Julie, a madras jacket identical to one hanging in Knight’s closet. Everett had not liked him because he had made a drink for himself and offered one to Julie.

“Anyway,” Lily said finally. “That’s not the point, for me to go with Julie. I mean is it?”

“A trip would be good for you,” Everett repeated without looking at her.

“It would be just like before.”

“We’ll see,” he said. “A long vacation.”

She leaned back against the walnut headboard of the bed until the carved leaves cut into her back. A long vacation.

Sitting down beside her, Everett took the hairbrush from her hand and began to brush her hair. When she let her head drop against his arm he put the brush down and began massaging her shoulders.

“Julie said she saw gray,” Lily said.

“That’s not so bad, is it?”

“She thinks it would be distinguished. She thinks it’s very distinguished of you to be getting gray. Very distinguished and about time. I told her forty was not generally considered the other side of the mountain, and she just looked at me.”

Everett kneaded the muscles in her neck. “There’s nothing wrong with Julie.”

“I never said there was. That helps my headache.”

“Get in bed,” he said, still holding her shoulders.

She pulled back the sheet with one hand, slid the straps of her slip down with the other, and kicked off her straw sandals. Lying on the sheet, she watched Everett close the shutters again and take off his clothes. She had always liked the rangy way he looked without his clothes. He was the only man she had ever seen whose bones looked right to her.

“Oh, Christ,” she whispered as she reached for him. “Everett, baby, we’re so tired.”

Before he was finished she began to cry, a tearless weeping compounded in part of pleasure, in part of weariness, and long after it was over she still clung to him, her shoulders moving in faint convulsive sobs, her legs caught around him. (They could lie together now only in the afternoons or in the middle of the night, after both had been asleep; not since the first years of their marriage had they been able to turn out the lights and turn to each other. Some pride overcame them instead, some reticence or aversion. Each, over the years, had read a great deal.) Nerveless, Lily lay listening to the fan, to the mosquitoes, to Knight’s car outside the house; listening without moving to the persistent ring of the telephone and finally to the knocking on the bedroom door.

“Your ma’s sleeping, Knight,” China Mary called up from the kitchen; “she don’t want no telephone callers now. You tell him he can call back.”

“Call back, hell,” Everett murmured, half asleep. “Why’d they answer it at all. Why don’t they turn it down so they don’t hear it ring.”

“Why don’t you go to sleep,” Lily whispered, kissing his cheek. Everett’s aversion to answering the telephone had seemed, when they were first married, a great compliment: we won’t have it known, dear, that we own a tel-e-pho-own. It had taken her almost two years to see that it had nothing to do with her, that Everett was about the telephone exactly the way he was about the mail, as wary as if he were investigating night noises at the basement door.

“You lie still a minute,” she added, “and I’ll get you a drink.”

Although she would just as soon have sat on the bed whispering with Everett and drinking bourbon for another hour (the telephone rang twice again), they did, eventually, go downstairs for dinner. Julie was late, coming in some time after the artichokes with her face flushed and her eyes bright, a cotton shirt pulled over her swimming suit and a faded pink grosgrain ribbon tied around her wet blond hair (she had driven Mrs. Templeton’s T-Bird and talk about power on the pullout—not automatic, a straight-stick T-Bird if you can imagine), and somewhere between the artichokes and Julie’s arrival Lily took the telephone call, told Ryder Channing that she could be home, later on, which could have been easy enough but count on her. Everett did not ask who had called (he knew, he always knew) and as she saw the heat and tension tightening the vein on his forehead she knew that she had to say something. What she said, elaborately casual in that rush of confused guilt and love, was that she might go to the Templetons’ after all. Count on her. Never mind. Some of the tension left Everett’s face and it would be all right. She could take her own car, leave early (she did, Everett knew, have the headache), meet Ryder on the dock but only for a few minutes; figure out, later, some way to make it all right, make everyone happy. Dinner, at least, had been saved. Nonetheless, she began to wish immediately that she had never answered the telephone at all, began to wish that she and Everett could have stayed in bed while the sun gradually left the room and the crickets began and the night wind came up off the river (they had done that sometimes the first year they were married, stayed in bed in the falling dark, not talking, drinking a little now and then from the bottle of bourbon Everett always kept by the bed); began to regret that they could not have lain inviolable on that walnut bed from five o’clock until the following morning.

2

Everett sat on the dock fifteen minutes before Lily came. He heard her long before he saw her, because now at one o’clock the moon was entirely down. Although house lights flickered on the water downriver, the mile and a half of McClellan riverfront showed only the even flash of the Coast Guard channel markers; the light on the dock was gone, burned out he didn’t know when. Remind Liggett, he thought, abruptly alarmed about the dock light. (A dock light first, a torn fence next, maybe the pump goes off and loses its prime: before long the whole place would come crumbling down, would vanish before his eyes, revert to whatever it had been when his great-great-grandfather first came to the Valley.) Through the growth of oak and cottonwood Everett could see a single light on the third floor of the house; the lower stories were blocked out by the levee.

During those fifteen minutes Everett thought only of the dock light (Liggett should watch these things) and of the hops. Although he still held his father’s.38-caliber revolver in one hand, he did not think about that, any more than he thought about Ryder Channing’s flashlight, still burning, its thin light filtering through three inches of muddy water, caught there in the tangle of roots that showed where the current had undercut the bank. Next week they would be taking the hops down, stripping the vines from the strings. Each August, just before picking, Everett was suffused with a single fear, an apprehension specific in exactly the sense that nightmares are specific: the unshakable conviction that his kiln would explode as the hops dried. He could never sleep during the week the hops were drying. Sometimes he would go downstairs and sit all night in the kitchen, because he could see the kiln from the kitchen window. It was not, this or any year, that the loss of the crop could ruin him: he had fewer acres in hops this summer than any since his father’s death, fifteen years before. There was no longer any money in hops: everyone on the river was getting out of them. “It’s a combination of factors,” he had tried to explain, repeating by rote what the buyers told him, to his sister Sarah and her third husband when they came through in June on their way from Philadelphia to the Islands. (“Not Honolulu, Everett,” Sarah had corrected him. “Maui. Oahu’s been ruined for years.”) “Your shares aren’t paying what they used to pay because we aren’t making what we used to make. For one thing people aren’t drinking as much beer as they used to drink. For another the brewers are making what they call a lighter beer, using fewer hops.”

The loss of the hops would not matter to Sarah. Nothing about the ranch had ever mattered to Sarah. But Everett had seen little all week but that familiar image: his drying kiln burning, the flames breaking out against a night sky and still (impossibly, as in a nightmare) throwing no light into the dark. It would happen this year for certain, he thought now.

When he heard Lily he sat perfectly still, aware suddenly of the.38 in his hand, the blood on the sleeve of the Dacron suit Lily had bought for him at Brooks Brothers in San Francisco. He heard her high heels on the wooden steps down the river side of the levee (Jesus Christ, he thought with abstract tenderness, high-heeled shoes to get screwed on the beach), heard her pushing aside the oak branches, heard her call his name.

Everett, she called, long before she could have seen him on the dock. She called him, not Channing, answering the question he had never asked: would she hear the shot and come to him or would she come as usual to meet Channing; would she come to him, knowing, or would she come to Channing, come clean and unaware from the shower where she had been maybe twenty minutes before, come intending to take the boat downriver half a mile, meaning to lie there with Channing on the stretch of sand where Knight and Julie gave beach parties. (He had heard the shower when he went into the house to get the gun. Standing in their bedroom after he had taken the gun from the drawer, he had watched the steam through the open bathroom door, had listened to her humming a song to which she could never remember the words, we will thrive on keep alive on/just nothing but kisses.) Well, she had heard the shot and come to him: she had called Everett.

Still holding the gun, he got to his feet. Lily stood in the clearing by the dock, looking first at him and then at Channing’s body where it lay sprawled over a rotting log. In that moment before either of them spoke, it occurred to Everett that Lily was not as pretty as she had once been. No one had ever called her beautiful, but there had been about her a compelling fragility, the illusion not only of her bones but of her eyes. It was not that her eyes were any memorable color (hazel, her driver’s license must say), any extraordinary shape. It was simply that they seemed larger than anything else about her, making her very presence, like that of someone on a hunger strike, a kind of emotional claim. It exhausted him to look at her now: her eyes were too large.

“I guess he came here to meet you,” Everett said, swiping at a mosquito with his free hand. He did not look at Channing’s body.

She did not speak.

Unable to think, Everett wished that they could go back to the house and to bed; he wanted to make her a drink, bourbon with crushed ice the way she liked it, sit with her in the dark calm beneath the mosquito netting.

“There was no need,” she said finally, her voice barely audible. “No need.”

She began crying then. Everett stood watching until her sobs took on the helpless, automatic quality which meant that she was losing control, crossing an invisible border into some unmapped private terror. Sudden or expected death, the sight of a stranger planting daffodil bulbs, or the recollection of some commonplace, forgotten afternoon (say when they had taken the children to look at the seahorses in Golden Gate Park and the seahorses had been gone) could tap Lily’s reserve of hysteria. (“That’s how people should live,” she had said about the planter of daffodils; he had suggested that she set out some daffodils around the house.) He wondered without interest if Channing had ever seen Lily cry. He supposed he had. He supposed every son of a bitch on the river had.

He laid the gun on the dock and walked over to her. Her sweater had fallen from her shoulders, and he stooped to pick it up from the dirt. It was a pink cashmere sweater that belonged to Julie; one of the name tapes Lily had bought when they sent her down to school at Dominican was sewn in the neck. Julia Knight McClellan. Julie was as pretty now as Lily had once been. Although her fine, almost white blond hair had always reminded Everett of his sisters (“She may look like Sarah but she looks nothing like the way Martha looked,” Lily had said this summer, nearly screaming. “I don’t know how you can even say that”), Julie looked, on the whole, more and more like Lily: she moved the way Lily moved, had even the shy, hesitant smile which by now was only a mannerism for Lily. (Only about an hour ago, at the Templetons’ party, had he not looked across the room to see Julie brush a strand of hair from her face with Lily’s own rapid, tentative gesture? Lily, he had thought, his face suddenly cold with relief and shame, in that instant between seeing the gesture and realizing that it was not Lily at all, but Julie. Until that moment when he thought he knew he had refused to ask himself where Lily was. Only then did he realize that he had not moved from the room in half an hour, had stayed there deliberately so that he might believe Lily to be on the terrace, or downstairs in the room with the piano. We will thrive on keep alive on/just nothing but kisses. Julie had been wearing a white dress cut low in back, and he had stared at her sunburned back as if he had never seen it. What he had never before noticed was that her back was exactly like Lily’s. You could see the small bones. Both Lily and Julie stood very straight, holding their narrow shoulders back as if to hide the bones. He had been staring at Julie’s back as if in trance, wondering with intense irritation why she had not worn a dress which covered her bones, when he felt someone’s hand on his shoulder. In his irritation, he jerked away; it was Francie Templeton. “You need a drink, Everett,” she had laughed; he smiled and put his arm around her bare shoulders. “Sure, Francie,” he had said. “Sure I do.”) She was already gone then, he thought now, trying for the first time to make chronology of it.

The wind was rising off the river, breaking both the quiet and the still heat, disturbing the dry leaves and splashing water against the dock, rocking the little cruiser in its mooring, knocking Channing’s flashlight free from the tangled roots and into the drift of the water. Willows whiten, aspen quiver. It was the only line of verse Everett knew: he had learned it maybe thirty years before and he did not remember who had written it or what followed it, but often when the wind came up on the river he found himself repeating it in his mind. Once in Colorado he had seen aspen trembling, miles of them, and had wanted them for the ranch.

He brushed the leaves and dust from Julie’s sweater and wrapped it again around Lily’s shoulders. If a wind comes up when the kiln burns, he thought distantly, the house could go. He stroked Lily’s hair, imagining the flames flashing down through the windbreak of eucalyptus, catching the immense dusty growth of ivy on the north walls, smoldering, then flaring up irrevocably through the entire wooden frame of the house. He could not get it out of his mind that Lily would be trapped in the fire, and he shut his eyes in vain against the ugly image of her fragile bones outlined in the incandescent ruin.

“You knew,” she said finally, her dry sobs mixed with coughs now. “You knew there wasn’t any need.”

He recognized her plea and could not answer it. He wished that he could comfort her (there was no need, Lily, no need, you weren’t involved, Lily, count yourself out), because she had not, in fact, been involved. Now that it was done, now that Channing lay dead between the river and where they stood, it seemed to Everett that none of them, least of all Lily, could have been involved; that all of them, he, Lily, and Channing, had simply been spectators at something that happened a long time ago to several other people.

“You shot him,” Lily whispered.

Everett nodded, abruptly exhausted. Maybe she didn’t realize, he thought, inert with the new possibility that he would, after all, have to explain it to her. (He had thought they were at least done with that, had thought she realized that for once she had something worth crying about.) Maybe she just now figured it. Then he saw that she was looking beyond him at the dock where his gun now lay, and realized that she was doing no more than framing a question: what would he do now.

He had not thought of there being alternatives, solutions, next steps. Although he could not now focus upon how it had happened or what would happen next, he seemed to have known all along, as surely as he knew about the kiln fire, not only that it would happen but that everything he knew would be obliterated by it. Lily meant something else: you shot him, she meant. Now what.

It occurred to him that Lily had always been keyed to picking up pieces, peculiarly tuned for emergency. What eluded her was the day-to-day action. She would not buy a dress without his approval, but she had driven into the hospital without waking him the night last Christmas when they called to say that Julie had been in an accident after a dance. She had gotten a respirator down on the dock in ten minutes the night his sister Martha drowned. And once, years and years before, she had literally saved Knight’s life: he had been playing with Knight on the grass when Knight crawled away and tore his foot open on a broken Coca-Cola bottle. He had knelt there for whole minutes with Knight in his arms, helplessly watching the blood spurt clear red on the grass. Then as now, he could not think. (That time it had been Lily who had seen them from the house, had come running with a dishtowel and had known how to make the blood stop, and finally shoved Everett and the baby into the pickup and had driven twenty-five miles in to the emergency hospital in Sacramento, her foot down on the accelerator all the way in along that twisting river road. Knight nearly died and he might have died anyway, there in the waiting room of the hospital, if Lily had not slapped the attendant and screamed I don’t give a goddamn what the rules are you’re going to help my baby whether he’s a resident of the city of Sacramento or whether he’s not and you’d better get to it or my father’s going to have every one of you on trial for manslaughter. On the way home, with Knight in her lap, she had begun crying for the first time: she had forgotten, she said, that her father was dead.)

Lily’s hands were on his arm.

“Did Ryder have a gun?” she whispered.

“I can’t hear you,” Everett said harshly. Why did she whisper, knowing full well that there was only one person for miles around (Julie and Knight would still be at the Templetons’, and Liggett and the Mexicans in town; it was Saturday night) and that this one person, this single listener, the topic at hand, was dead.

Lily had stepped back and was staring at him.

“I mean you don’t have to whisper,” he said, brushing a mosquito from his face.

“I said did he have a gun.”

“What do you think? You think he had a gun? He wasn’t out here for the goddamn pheasant, was he?”

“He threatened you.”

Everett looked down the river. “No,” he said. “He did not have a gun and he did not exactly threaten me.”

“He might have, you see.” Lily spoke slowly and clearly, as if to the children when they were small. “He could have threatened you.”

Running for her life, Everett thought. He did not say anything.

“He’d been drinking and he might have come out here and tried to—” She broke off and looked away. “Tried to hurt me.”

“Sure thing,” Everett said. “That’s a nice one. You think the smartest Jew lawyer in California could find twelve friends and neighbors between here and Stockton who’d believe you hadn’t asked for it?”

“We could make the reasons.”

“Listen,” he said. “You listen to me now, this once, and mind what I say. It’s not as easy as that. There aren’t any reasons. I don’t want that.”

“It’s a little late for choosing.”

“You don’t see. I don’t want that.”

“What is it you want,” she said without inflection.

He looked down the river. What is it you want. He had wanted to go away with her, for one thing. The idea of going away had been weaving itself into the fabric of his daily life for months. He had not in the beginning (say in April) thought of it as a trip, a possibility, something which might easily be arranged by travel agents, steamship pursers, airline clerks; even by July, his desire had acquired neither the brilliantly attainable colorings of travel posters and Holiday magazine nor the subtler, more exotic pastels of Rand-McNally cartography. The want would strike him briefly, and at odd moments: while he talked price to the hop broker, or waited for someone to answer the telephone. Even before the idea took real shape, he had begun to count on it: when we’re gone, he would think without perceiving that he had thought it.

But a trip was not much to want. More than that, he had wanted this summer to do something with the children; he had not. In a few weeks Julie would be going back down to Dominican, and all he could remember of the summer was the heat. That was all he could make of it now: the heat, and Lily lying upstairs with the shutters closed against it, and Julie coming in jumpy from it, and how it had bothered Sarah when she came through in June, and how the coolest place was down in the dust among the hops. The house had seemed too small all summer. Three floors, seventeen large dark rooms, room enough for three generations of his family before him: the house had not seemed, this summer, big enough for the four of them. It had been the heat. (“I didn’t remember the heat this way,” Sarah had apologized breathlessly to her husband. “When you’ve lived where it’s green you forget how it is out here. You realize it hasn’t rained since April and it won’t until September? You realize that?” As disturbed still as he had been when Sarah first went away, Everett had said that if she wanted to see green, she had only to look out into the hops. Counting the new system they were spending maybe ten thousand dollars this summer keeping those hops green. “That’s exactly my point,” Sarah had said.)

It had been the heat, and Sarah, and the way the summer had begun. Everett had wanted to find some way to talk to Julie, to tell her that he would take care of her, that she need not be frightened of anything. He had not even found a way to tell her that she drove too fast. He had once seen her doing eighty in the Lincoln on the river road. And Knight would be going East, alone. It was not that Everett minded. Although Princeton had not been his idea he thought it a good idea; he even thought that he might have liked, himself, a year somewhere other than Stanford. But he knew that Knight considered the trip back East less an interlude than a beginning. No matter what Knight said, he was not thinking of coming home to the ranch. What is it you want. Whatever he had wanted, none of the rest of them did. Before his grandfather had died, he had told Everett’s father that the riverfront and the other ranches, some seven thousand acres in all, were to be divided equally among his three grandchildren: Sarah, Everett, Martha. Although they had sold off some here and picked up some there, they still had the riverfront and they still had about seven thousand acres, all controlled by the corporation, the McClellan Company. (There was even a corporate seal, although Julie had broken the stamp years ago, trying to make an imprint on a leather suitcase.) Since Martha’s death, Everett and Sarah had each owned half of the McClellan Company, and Everett had managed all of it. Knight would hold even more land than that. All the old Knight orchards would come to him through Lily, and he would probably have everything up for sale before the ink was dry on the papers. (It had been Knight who had first pointed out to Sarah that the piece immediately upriver from the ranch was a tract called Rancho Del Rio No. 1 and the piece immediately downriver, developed a year later, a tract called Rancho Del Rio No. 3. “They’re just biding their time,” Knight had laughed, “waiting it out for Rancho Del Rio No. 2.”)

What is it you want. He had said it to Martha (what do you want, baby, he had said, what did you want) the night she drowned off the dock where his gun now lay. He had wanted to say it to Sarah, every time she came home (only she did not now call it home). He had wanted to say it to Knight and he had wanted to say it to Julie. He looked at Lily again. She had the blank, frightened look that she had some nights when he woke her from bad dreams. She had always been afraid of the dark. Sweet Jesus, what had she wanted?

“I want to go up to the house,” he said.

3

We could make the reasons. Everett’s mind began to function now for the first time since he had left the Templeton house (it must have been about midnight, because someone had shouted “no dancing on Sundays,” and then Francie Templeton had gone to get him a drink he did not need, Joe Templeton had asked him where Lily was, and he had walked out of the house, across the lawn and down the graveled drive to the car; he had seen Knight kissing Francie’s niece from Santa Barbara down on the stone bench by the swimming pool, had discerned Francie’s laugh among the voices and music from the house, and had seen then that Lily’s car was gone); began to weigh the potentialities now as he stood on the levee waiting for the headlights to pass so that he and Lily could cross the road to the house. (Oh God remember how it was to drive the river road late on hot summer nights with Lily asleep, her head dropped on his shoulder, to hear the mosquitoes above the sound of the motor and to know that ahead was the cool white room, the walnut bed with the mosquito netting, Lily’s room and his, his grandfather’s before him. Lost in the night fields, his body, Lily’s body, the house ahead: all one, some indivisible trinity. But maybe it had never been that way except late at night, never except when Lily was asleep. He knew this road so well that he could drive it with his eyes closed, could have plotted every curve in his sleep, knew exactly when to expect the jolt where the roadbed changed at the county line. Remember how it was. Asleep, Lily was any way he willed her.)

“Don’t be afraid now,” Lily said, her voice harsh. She put her hand on his arm as if to pull him along.

He realized then that the headlights were long past, that he still stood in the gravel with his head dropped forward. He had remembered, while they waited for the car to pass, what had happened between the time Joe Templeton asked him where Lily was and the time he walked out of the house. He had taken a swing at Joe, grazing his jaw and causing Francie, Everett’s drink in her hand, to step between them, almost sober for a change. What happened, she kept saying. Everett had not known what had happened but it had something to do with Joe. You’ve really got it made, haven’t you, Templeton, he had snarled. Swimming pools. New Thunderbirds. For a lousy dirt farmer you really got the world by the tail. As he walked out Francie was laughing: I don’t notice you driving any Model T, Everett McClellan. I don’t notice your kids swimming in the river. Between semesters at Princeton.

Straightening his shoulders, Everett pulled his arm from Lily’s touch.

“When’s Julie coming home,” he said.

“I don’t know.” She dropped her hand. “I don’t know about Knight or Julie. She was with one of the twins again.”

He looked toward the house. “The lights are on downstairs.”

“I left them.”

“I just don’t want to see Julie.”

“Listen,” she said. “We can make it all right.”

“Not Julie,” he said.

She put her fingers against his cheek and he caught them there with his hand. Her skin was soft and in the darkness she looked about twenty again, and vulnerable. Well, vulnerable she was. Pity her simplicity and suffer her to come to Thee. It could be easy enough. He could go back to the river now, lift Channing’s body off that rotten log, weight it, and roll it into the river. It would lie there three, maybe four months, anyway until the river picked up a little water, began running fast enough to move the body downstream. Then it might be found: might catch on a piling or wash into a slough, be dragged up. How much could they discover by probing that disfigured, disintegrating mass of flesh? He tried to recall detective novels, but could think only of the kind in which the room blacks out an instant and the victim, when the lights go on again, is discovered slumped across the chemin de fer table. At any rate, he need deal here with neither the C.I.D. nor the Sureté, but only the incalculable expertise of the county coroner’s office, an unknown quantity. This was less the stuff of detective novels than of newspaper murder accounts, which he had read throughout his life with a disinterest born of disbelief. They had never seemed probable. Father Kills Daughter’s Swain, Argument over Car Keys. Wife Kills Mate, Wounds Child, Did Not Mean to Fire. Carhop Slain, Assailant Unknown. He could dredge from all those years of reading only the impression that dentists were frequently key witnesses when it came to identification; he had a further notion, even more dim, that no matter how advanced the decomposition an autopsy would show whether or not the cause of death had been drowning. The lungs either did or did not contain water, he could not remember which. Even if the body did not turn up for months, in that case, there would be inquiries, questions asked of all Channing’s acquaintances and particularly of him, particularly of him and of Lily. Everyone knew, everyone must know, about Lily and Channing, about Martha and Channing. Fifteen years.

Anyway, it might be discovered tomorrow, next week. Nancy Channing would miss him, if nobody else did: she was suing for back alimony and had her father’s lawyers after him all the time. For all Everett knew a hearing was scheduled for Monday. Were Channing reported missing, they might think — would certainly think, in a summer when there had been three or four drownings a month — to drag the river; might drag up the weighted body, leaving no question of accident, no possibility that the generally disorganized details of Ryder Channing’s life had led him to drown himself. There were altogether too many variables.

“Where’s his car?” Everett asked suddenly, and as he said it the variables began crowding in, the elements he could never calculate, the other factors overlooked. Channing’s car still on the ranch; China Mary, not at her sister’s as she usually was on Saturday night but maybe in her own cottage beyond the house, hearing the shot, knowing; the possible appointments set up for Monday. Not that suicides didn’t set up appointments; not that Channing, in any case, had made much of a practice of keeping appointments the past few years. But still.

“Down the back road to the dock,” Lily said, calm, and the old resentment flared briefly, obscuring everything. (Parked just off the levee road, hidden in the trees and darkness along the old dock road; the black Mercedes still unpaid for. “I was down on the dock, baby,” she would have said in the same calm voice had none of it happened, had he simply come home from the party and found the house empty, simply waited upstairs as he had waited other evenings, listening for her high heels on the wooden verandah, listening for the screen door, for her humming. We will thrive on keep alive on/just nothing but kisses. “I was down watching the water. Didn’t Francie tell you I’d gone on home? Didn’t she tell you I had a headache?”)

He could get rid of the Mercedes, all right, but it would be like sandbagging a levee already breached. Something else would keep turning up. There was still, however, Lily’s way, the almost straight way, the way which would still give them something to talk about but the way which would be, in the end, the easy way: he could call the sheriff’s office now — he could call Ed McGrath at home, they had gotten him at home the night Martha drowned — and tell him that he had shot Ryder Channing in self-defense. Or protection of property. Or whatever they wanted to call it. He had come home, heard Lily screaming on the dock, had picked up his gun and run down to investigate. When he found Lily struggling with Channing he had tried to break it up; Channing had gone for him and he had shot him. Rancher Shoots Friend in Row over Wife, Did Not Mean to Kill.

It was plausible only if you accepted as given Lily’s alleged resistance. Get some hotshot District Attorney in there — who would it be? Everett no longer knew — he could make something of that, make it clear how many times Lily had heard the song before. Although they could probably prove nothing about Lily and Channing (Nancy Channing, he thought, would not have bothered to get whatever evidence there had then been; she had divorced him a long time ago and simply said mental cruelty but of course she might have had the evidence anyway — more variables, incalculable again), they could imply plenty, maybe prove something else, possibly even drag Martha’s name into it once they talked to Nancy Channing (he did not know how much if anything Nancy Channing had known about Martha), sink the knife in Lily, make it hard for a jury to believe she would have drawn a line, started screaming after that many times around.

But it was possible: Lily could probably make it work. They would drag it all out in the newspapers (give Francie Templeton two drinks, she’d probably testify herself) but Lily could make it work. She would say anything now, not particularly to save him but to save them all, him, Knight, Julie, herself. It would be a sweet trial, all right; a sweet trial for Julie. Well, he wanted to save them too. (Never had Julie seemed more precious to him than she had tonight: he would consider the world well lost to keep her intact, her small bones, her sunburn, her white dress, her hair so like Martha’s, her longing for a straight-stick Thunderbird. And his entire commitment to Lily had become an unbreakable promise to protect her from the mortal frailties which were, since they were hers, his own.) He wanted to save them and he would. It was only that he was not sure how. He could sort out no clear reason, no starting point. It was the kind of letters he got from Sarah and it was Martha buried there by the levee and it was the way Knight had talked in June; it was the way he had always felt about the kiln burning, only that no longer mattered. It was as if the kiln had burned already. Everything seemed to have passed from his reach way back somewhere; he had been loading the gun to shoot the nameless fury which pursued him ten, twenty, a good many years before. All that had happened now was that the wraith had taken a name, and the name was Ryder Channing.