The River

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Would a creek at the very edge boil? Would the fish on this side of the big river sense a fire and flee the way the others might have?

It was a blackwater creek like the others and scattered with white ash that must have drifted. In the eddies was a fine dust that filmed the water like pollen.

They saw no trout at first but strung the rods anyway. They were getting testy, they could feel reserves of goodwill sapping away. They needed to eat and they figured now, at least, if they got skunked with fish and protein they could scavenge for berries and consume enough calories to paddle out. A huge relief. They grounded the boat and Maia woke up and they hauled her higher onshore and unclipped the dry bag behind her and pulled out the rods. Wynn asked her if she needed help getting out or peeing or anything and she shook her head and the boys walked upstream a little and jointed their rods and began to fish. This time Wynn followed the brook into the divided country. His face throbbed and seared but it had gone dull and he could forget about it for minutes at a time. He needed a break from the river, and he needed a break from Jack. Also, he had never seen anything so oddly beautiful. The land rose gently away from the river eastward, there must have been some broad uplift beneath the soil, and so he could see the creek for a long way like some sinuous creature glinting in its scales and slithering down through the seam between the green and the black, life and death. The green side was feathery and unkempt, chaotic with being. The grass and brush along the bank, the flowers, limbs of the trees, all reached past each other for the light of the creek. He could hear warblers and thrushes. The black side was burned to soil; it had not much to say and was startlingly eloquent in its silence. Wynn thought the boundary was as stark and sad as Hades.

The wind rushed louder through the pines and moved the branches. His face felt as if a heated fork had been laid over his cheek, but as soon as he stepped into the water he forgot about it. He began to cast and the breeze pushed his fly, which was just a tuft of elk hair, toward the burn. He adjusted his cast and threw to the edge of the current. It felt very good to be alone with only the creek for company, the wind, the forest and the ghost of a forest on either side. He’d left his Wellingtons on the bank and waded up the sandy bottom on bare feet and the ice-cold water numbed his legs and he liked it.

He moved without thought. Flicked the caddis off the current and false-cast twice to dry the fly and let the loop overhead straighten and pointed his right thumb, which lay along the top of the cork handle, pointed it toward the center of the current with a straightening arm and let the wind push the fly south almost two feet and it landed on the seam, the wavering line between the eddy pooling along the shore and the push of flowing water, landed just an inch to the inside on moving current, right where he wanted the fly to be; it touched the silvered surface and began to bounce and bauble down toward him through the riffle. Perfect. He began to hum. Unconsciously at first and then he caught himself, it was one of the tunes that Jack sang, “Little Joe the Wrangler.” He cast again, two feet farther upstream, where the eddy was darker and deeper, where a fish might be seeking more cover from kingfishers and eagles, and he thought what a sad tune it was, the little cowboy running his pony full-tilt in the storm, trying to turn the stampeding herd, and of course in streaks of lightning his buddies saw the horse stumble and fall. All the cowboy songs were like that. Pure, selfless souls who lived to ride the High Lonesome and sleep under the stars all meeting their pulpy ends under a thousand battering hooves. Or shot in the breast over some sweetheart who could never hope to match their goodness. Early death, that was the theme. The wages of innocence. Only the good die young. Why did Jack like those songs? Maybe because he knew he had enough badness in him to vouchsafe his future? An affirmation. He had certainly been acting differently lately. Like someone Wynn hardly knew. The ruthlessness. It scared him a little. But then, hadn’t he always sensed it was there? Wasn’t it part of what had drawn him to Jack in the first place?

His fly hit the water and was met with a small splash and tug. A hard tug, and Wynn’s spirit leapt and the rod tip doubled and quivered and he felt the trembling through his hand and arm and, it seemed, straight to his heart, where it surged a strong dose of joy into his bloodstream. What a strange sensation, almost novel. It had been a while. He only realized then how long. How dour he, they, had become. Whatever. He had a fish on now, and not a tiny brookie, and not big enough either to bring in on the reel. He stripped the line in by hand and when the trout jerked hard and made a run he let the line slip back out through his fingers and gradually tightened the grip again as he felt the fish tire at the end of his sprint and he began again to pull him in. It was not a long fight and not a huge fish, but it was a fourteen-inch brown—who knew how they had come to live way up here—big enough, the first like him they’d seen, and with a gratitude and quiet joy he did not know he still had he got the slapping fish up on the rocks and thanked him simply and thwacked him on a smooth stone and the golden trout went still. Phew. Lunch. A few more like that and they’d be set for the day.

He did not call out. On another day he would have whistled or yelped. Especially on new water, or on water they weren’t sure about. He almost did, but then he swallowed it. And it surprised him. He wanted to hold on to the quiet, the sense of being alone with the strange afternoon. Because it was strange. Being at this edge was like standing at the high-tide line of a tsunami. Looking out over the wreckage and death. The sense that you could turn around and walk away into the hills, and life.

It might not be that simple with a homicidal freak downstream, but for now the sun was shining and the day was warming and they would have fish for supper.

Jack caught trout, too. A handful of small brookies and a brown, not as big as Wynn’s but a good part of a meal. They made a fire on the beach and steamed the fish in the pot. Maia was awake. She climbed out of the canoe unsure of her balance and walked unsteadily toward them, and they both stood quickly and went to help her.

She almost buckled as soon as they had her but she stayed on her feet and smiled a sad apology. Sadness or apology, it was the same. She had gotten them into this. “If it wasn’t for me,” she murmured, “you two would be long gone.”

They lowered her to the stones where she could use a driftwood stump as a backrest. She smiled again and said, “Optimism. All that green and the end of the burn.”

They split all the fish three ways and wished again they had salt and devoured it all. It didn’t feel like enough but it felt better. They didn’t see any berries here but knew they should find more farther down, so the stress of starvation seemed lifted for now. She ate, but she winced often and her skin was white and Wynn saw her press her stomach with her good arm as if she were quelling spasms.

Jack tossed a strip of fine bones into the coals. “He probably made it through,” he said. “The fire. If this is the northern edge and he is ahead of us by a day, he made it through.”

They both looked at him.

“Will he get harder or weaker?” Jack said.

Her eyes flickered. They were sleepy eyes, almost drugged. “What do you mean?”

“I mean will all the waiting and stalking make him sharper? Will it hone him or erode him? Will he start to waver?”

“He doesn’t second-guess himself, if that’s what you mean.”

Jack nodded.

She grimaced, and Wynn thought it was either her injuries or the thought of her husband. She said, “He told me that when he applied to prep school in Connecticut, the admissions director asked him to name his best quality. ‘I’m tenacious,’ Pierre said. ‘Okay,’ the man said. ‘What’s your worst?’ ‘I’m stubborn,’ he said.”

“So Pierre’s a psychopath and also cute.”

She shrugged her good shoulder.

“Why does he want you dead so bad?”

“Because he tried to kill me and screwed up?”

“Yeah, I mean before.”

“I’m starting to think it’s for the same reason he married me.” She half turned, as if ashamed, and Jack saw the tears running and looked away out of tact.

After a while he said gently, “Why?”

“Because my family has money?” She said it simply, without pride or shame but as a fact. “My husband loved me because I was a Rhode Island Brown.”

Jack blinked. It was clear that didn’t mean shit to him. “You die, he inherits.”

She nodded vaguely and wiped her wet face with her good arm. “We hadn’t been getting along for a while. And I had a paper in Science and one in Nature and he had a coauthor citation in Aquatic Geochemistry.”

Jack studied her for a second, then took the pot to the creek and filled it for tea. At least they still had tea. Wynn knew the look and he knew what Jack was thinking: Poor Maia; damn. The lives that people twist themselves into. And also: Rich people are another species. Sort of lost in their own way. It’s a good thing they have country clubs and shit because it keeps them kinda corralled up in one place. Jack had surely decided that neither one in that marriage of scientists was very appetizing.

Jack set the pot over the coals and let it boil for a few minutes and then he fetched the makings from the box and the two travel cups and brought them to the fire. They were very lucky that the box and bag had been strapped in so well and that the straps had held. They drank the sweet tea slowly, and when she was finished Jack took the cup from her and made his own. Wynn watched her and saw her head loll once as if she would pass out. He thought again that if she didn’t get to a hospital soon she would die. Well, she was sitting against the stump and she was close enough to the heat—for now it was best to let her be. He sat away from the fire facing downstream where the woods were still green and standing and he worked the little chunk of wood in his hand with his knife. He heard a loon call, piercing and forlorn, and it poured into his spirit like cool water. It was a sad cry and he realized as he listened how barren the river had felt in the days without it. Why was a wail that seemed so lost and lonely so…what? Essential and lovely. It was like the blues, he guessed, or like Jack’s cowboy songs. Sad, but somehow you would starve without them.

Wynn looked downstream at the course of sky curving away between walls of living woods. Soon the channel of firmament would pulse with a star, then three, then a hundred, and it would keep filling and deepening until the stars sifted and flowed between the tops of the trees in their own river, whose coves and bends would mirror the one they were on. He had thought it before, and he loved thinking about the two rivers. The river of stars would find its way to its own bay and its own ocean of constellations and Wynn imagined, as he had before, that the water and the stars might sing to each other in a key inaudible, usually, to the human ear. But probably you could hear it. Sometimes. If you quieted the pulse of your own blood. A rhythmic keening at the edge of sound. Wynn thought that if wolves sang, and coyotes, and elk and birds, and wind, and we, too, it was probably in response to a music we didn’t know we could hear.

He thought about collecting embers from their fire and carrying them in the pot down to the river’s edge and spreading them into a bending river. It would be beautiful once night fell. If he then blew on them they would breathe and shimmer with sparks. He could see it: the low throbbing light winding through the dark. But it would not be quite like stars, and anyway the fire wasn’t big enough and they didn’t have enough embers. She needed the heat.

No one realized how late in the afternoon it had gotten. The sun dropped into the tall trees downstream and the air cooled fast. Damn. They must have been sapped by hunger and exhaustion, because they had let the afternoon slip away. Lost it to lollygagging on the shore. No, they hadn’t lost it: they had badly needed the fish and the rest. Wynn thought how they also needed to get downstream, to get her to a doctor if nothing else, and how it was unspoken but none of them wanted to paddle into the blasts of a 12-gauge shotgun. Because that’s what was surely waiting. Wynn put the scaled-down canoe in his pocket and went to the fire. She was stretched out—Jack had fetched the foam pad—and she seemed to be asleep and her bruised face was alarmingly pale.

Jack said, “Whoa. Big, you look like Frankenstein.”

“Thanks.”

“Hurt?”

“Not much.”

Jack pushed off from the bench he’d made from rocks and driftwood and went to the Pelican box and brought back a tube of Neosporin. “Here, wash your hands off and use some of this. Better if we let it breathe in open air than cover it. What they told me when I burned my thigh on the Kawasaki.”

“You did?”

“Fell over at like one mile an hour. A sizzling August afternoon. My inner thigh hit the motor and it made a sound I’d rather forget and smelled like pork chops.”

“Gross.”

“I jumped in the cow pond like a cartoon character. Bad idea. Not the cleanest water. By nightfall there were streaks running up my leg. Pop was at the Cattlemen’s Association meeting in the Springs. I called my neighbor’s mom, who was a nurse, and told her and she said, ‘Jack, you listen to me. That’s blood poisoning. It’s serious shit. Things can fall off.’ I looked down and saw how close it was to things and I drove myself straight to the ER.”

Jack’s hair was sticking out and he was immersed in the memory and wore a look of confounded horror. Wynn laughed. “You trying to scare me?”

“No, no. Sorry. You’ll be fine. But we’ll get it looked at as soon as we hit the village.”

Wynn sat beside his buddy. “She doesn’t look good.”

“I was thinking that. Something’s screwed up inside her. He hit her more than she told us about, or she blacked out.”

“Should we try to make a couple of miles before full dark?”

Jack shook his head. “We won’t get far. Plus we’re safe here. If he’da been anywhere near we’d have known about it by now.” Jack spat onto a chunk that had gone to ember and it hissed. “We were really lucky up above. He missed us at forty feet with a shotgun. That won’t happen again.”

“You don’t really like her.”

Jack’s head came around and he looked at Wynn and his eyes were dancing with the old mischief. “How should I know? Do you?”

Wynn shrugged. He pulled the canoe from his pocket and tugged free the clip knife and sprang it open with his thumb. He dug at the wood with the point where he was hollowing out the bow.

“You like her,” Jack said. “She’s your kinda gal. Smart, tough, no BS, probably pretty. She’d boss you around just like your mom.”

“Hey!” Wynn grinned. It was good to have the old Jack back. “You don’t like her?” he said. “I mean Maia. I know you love my bossy mom.”

Jack snagged the tin of Skoal from his breast pocket, where it had miraculously stayed buttoned through the swim. It was still wet but chewable. He said, “I think she comes from a world I don’t understand. That shit about competing publications. Why would you live like that?”

There was no answer forthcoming, but there was the contingent crackle of the fire and the wind fluttering through it. They were on the green side of the creek and they could hear loud crickets again. Jack said, “And how on God’s earth could that lead to murder? Murdering your wife?”

“He must have been drunk.”

“She didn’t say that.”

“No.”

Jack said, “I’ve been thinking of that Windigo story you told me. The hungry ghost. And how the country has been drying up. And those people dying on the river last year. Like maybe the whole river is cursed. Like whatever stalked those folks in the village could turn a marital spat into murder.”

Wynn remembered in a flash Jack pointing the gun above the last portage—his best friend. Had it been a real threat? He wasn’t sure. He didn’t say anything.

In the saying nothing and in the hushed tones of the fire there was a hum of something persistent and barely registered, the twang of a bass guitar string long seconds after the last note was struck. It thrummed the dusk almost without sound, like the quality of air before a lightning storm. Jack heard it first and sat up. Wynn stopped touching the edges of his burned face and listened.

It wasn’t a lightning storm or music, it was a motor, distinct now, distant but growing closer, and it lacked the chuff and throb of an outboard, it was smoother, steadier, it thrummed through the twilight with the modest growl of an electric engine. It was the two drunks. Had to be. Jack and Wynn stood. They glanced at the woman asleep on the pad and trotted to the water. And stood there side by side like some backcountry couple who hear a strange car coming up the crick road for the first time in a year. Jack had a second thought and went back for the rifle. They waited in the dusk.

It was a gentle right bend and the long canoe appeared in the middle of it as if breached straight from the dark water, or as if the silvered water itself had formed and reformed until it gave substance to two shapes, the men, the two idiots, one thin, one fat, straining forward to interpret the flames they saw on the beach. The skinny one in the bow whistled, a piercing Bronx cheer that muted even the crickets for a startled second.

“Hey! Hey! Is it you-all?” That was the fat man.

Jack glanced at Wynn, who seemed stunned. Maybe by the dumbness of the greeting; maybe it was a trick question.

The fat man cursed. The canoe came ineluctably closer.

“Fuck a duck,” the fat man said, very clear. “It’s those kids. It’s you kids!”

“The short one’s got a gun,” the thin one said.

“So what, everybody’s got a gun up here. Hey! Hey! Fuckin’ A, we’re glad to see you-all!”

They came in like that, thrumming steadily over the dark mirror of the river, revealing the white square-tailed twenty-one-footer smirched with black, and one long gunwale, the starboard, edged and roughened with char where it had burned. “Fuckin’ A! We thought you-all were crisp by now. Damn!”

There was something wrong with the electric motor, because it was louder than it should have been, it sounded almost like a blender, and the fat man drove the canoe straight into the rocky bar. The boat hit the stones and the two men jerked forward and back in practiced synchrony and the hull grated up onto the shore and the fat man throttled the motor two more times for good measure and cut the engine. He was grinning. He was wearing a camo Texas A&M cap and in the dusk he was all teeth. “Whew!” he said. “That was one hellstorm, wasn’t it? We thought we were safe once it jumped, but a backdraft caught us. We shoulda waited a day. Man.” His eyes followed the creek. “Look at you-all. Just back into the green like any other Sunday. Hell, I woulda stopped here, too.” He clambered forward, knees walking on the bags of gear, and got out on dry rocks and came at them with his hand out. The thin man hadn’t budged—he was staring at the fire, at the person lying there, and Jack could almost hear the gears clicking in the man’s head from ten feet away.

“Brent. Remember me?” Fat Man shook one boy’s hand, then the other’s. “I remember you! We shoulda listened. Man! We caught fire at sea like that destroyer, whatchamacallit?” The boys had no idea. “Almost punched our ticket, I mean. That was waaay too close for comfort. Glad you-all—” He stopped short. He looked into Wynn’s face and grimaced. “Ow. You, too. That doesn’t look too good,” he said with real concern. “You boys came that close, too. I think we got some sterile bandages. JD—” He turned back to the boat and saw his buddy’s face and followed his gaze. “Wha—?”

Brent peered into the dusk, glanced back at the boys. Jack unslung the rifle, which was not lost on anyone.

“There was just two of you before,” Brent said softly.

Jack didn’t say anything. Nor Wynn. They didn’t know what to say. Neither had digested much of what they’d been through; what had happened since they’d met the men on their island was too immense.

The fat man worked his jaw, surveyed the little beach. “As far as I know there was only one other party up here—must’ve got dropped in at Moose Lake before us. A man and a woman in an Old Town. Green. A green eighteen-footer, I’d guess. We kept seeing them far off and wanted to stay out of their hair. We weren’t in no hurry.” The man spoke quietly but loud enough for his partner to hear. Jack watched as JD slowly slipped their Winchester bolt-action—probably an aught-six—out of its place under the bow deck: they had worked out the same configuration, pilot in the stern, shooter in the bow.

Brent was in no hurry now. He was a cool customer, for sure. He turned back again and looked each boy dead in the eye. It was as if he were searching for something inside them. Even in the half-light Jack could see, and remembered, the grainy mineral blue of the man’s eyes.

“Looks like her. From here. Can’t be sure. Same size, about. The long brown hair. Where’s the man?”

Silence. The crickets were at it again, and the low burble of the current and the eddy slurping the shore. Wynn cleared his throat and opened his mouth and Jack touched him with the barrel of the rifle. Wynn’s head swung around and he saw Jack’s face and shut his mouth and swallowed.

“That’s how it is, huh?” Brent said. “Some sort of Deliverance shit going on here and everyone’s clammed up?” He chewed the corner of his mouth, frowned. “We got through the goddamned fire, and I mean that was nip and tuck. Thought we had clear sailing. Fuck.” He turned his head sideways and spat. “You chewing?” he said to Jack. Jack nodded. “Give me a dip, will ya? I ran out in week two.” Jack took his left hand off the rifle and unbuttoned the shirt pocket and handed the man the tin. “Thanks.” Brent handed it back.

Jack said, “It’s not what you think.”

“No?”

“She’s hurt bad. We’re trying to get her out to a doctor. But—”

“I’m listening. With great interest, I surely am.” Brent spat.

“Her husband did this. Threw our shit in the river at the first portage and paddled out.”

Brent worked his jaw, cocked his ear sideways as if trying to hear the faint winds of logic.

“Then we flipped in that last big rapid, lost the rest of our food and warm clothes,” Jack said.

It was getting darker. The tide of night seemed to flow up the river and settle over the water and spill over the banks. Ever so slowly. Where there were trees the gathering darkness was rising up into the shaggy tops, which had gone still. The sunset wind had nearly died. It was just a stirring of air upstream that came with a cool touch that presaged another night of frost. For the first time in what seemed like years, Jack smelled less char than the cold scents of sediment-laden water.

He said, “It’s a long story. We thought we were fucked. Now we need to get her out to the village. You can move a lot faster with that motor. Maybe you can take her at first light.”

Brent studied Jack. And spat. Then he looked up at Wynn, who, even hunched, with his hands in his pockets, towered over them both. Even in the thickening dusk Wynn was all freckles and unruly curls and earnestness and seemed much more Norman Rockwell than James Dickey; he looked like a kid who had never had a mean thought in his life. Brent said, “You wanna put that rifle away somewhere?”

“If your man does.”

Brent whistled softly and JD tucked the aught-six back under the bow. Jack slung the .308 over his shoulder. Brent said, “I owe you one, back at the island. We were on a little bit of a bender.” His chuckle was mirthless. “Maybe we weren’t paying attention to what we should have. The day after you left, JD climbed a tree. And we saw that motherfucking fire. We didn’t get overcranked, but we kept an eye on it. So, thanks.”

Jack nodded. “Okay, well,” Brent said. “She’s bad?”

Jack nodded again. Brent said, “We’ll camp with you-all and take off at daybreak. Sound good? We’ve been fishing and we’ve got a bunch of extra food. Looks like you could use a good meal.”

Jack and Wynn helped the men unload. They had a big wall tent, which skinny JD set up by himself with the light of a headlamp. He never said a word and he never got too far away from his gun. He seemed to be the muscle. Brent brought up only one dry bag, presumably with his own stuff, and went to the fire, where he tossed on a few sticks of driftwood and settled himself on a bigger rock. He looked over at the sleeping woman without expression. Wynn had covered her with his sleeping bag so only her head stuck out, and except for the fading bruises and the dark circles under her eyes, and what even in the moving firelight was an unnatural paleness, she looked like any other sleeping woman. Brent dug into his bag and brought out a full plastic fifth of Ancient Age and unscrewed the cap, drank. Jack watched him. Brent knew he was being watched and didn’t seem to care. He had a second thought and roused himself and walked down in the dark to his boat and brought up a wire grill and what looked like a two-gallon plastic barrel with latches. With two sticks he shoved the blaze to one side of the fire ring and set up the grill on its legs over a heap of coals and unlatched the barrel and laid out four fat lake trout, evidently salted in brine. Yum. He nodded to himself at a job well done, sat back on the rock and busied himself with the serious business of drinking. When JD was done with the tent and unrolling the sleeping pads and carrying the kitchen box to the fire, he sat beside his buddy on the flat rock and took the fifth from Brent’s hands without a word and took a long swallow. Jack figured he must have drunk three ounces in one go. Well. One way of making yourself at home.

The men were no fools. Nothing like Jack had thought on the first encounter on the lake. They made a big meal with wordless efficiency. Brent even deigned to peel potatoes they fished from a plastic burlap sack. Salted lake trout and potatoes and steamed carrots, and a bouillon gravy JD stirred up in a frying pan with flour and some nameless oil. Jack and Wynn let Maia sleep and set up the little tent so she could move into it later. As soon as she woke they’d feed her. The boys ate with ravenous hunger. Nobody said much. If JD and Jack kept track of where the rifles were at all times and kept them close, nobody let on that they noticed.