The Unforeseen

by Molly Gloss

  He washed out the cut in a puddle of salt water. He didn’t have anything to wrap around it. He picked up the clam shovel in one hand and held onto her cut hand with the other. They started back along the beach. He could feel her pulse in the tips of his fingers. What did you dream? he wanted to say.

  It had begun to be dark. There was no line dividing the sky from the sea, just a griseous smear and below it the cream-colored lines of surf. Ahead of them Jay watched something rolling in the shallow water. It came up on the beach and then rode out again. The tide was rising. Every little while the surf brought the thing in again. It was pale, a driftlog, it rolled heavily in the shallow combers. Then it wasn’t a log. Jay let down the shovel and Mare’s hand and waded out to it. The water was cold, dark. He took the body by its wrist and dragged it up on the sand. It had been chewed on, or shattered. The legs were gone, and the eyes, the nose. He couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. He dragged it way up on the beach, on the dry sand, above the high-tide line. Mare stood where she was and watched him.

  He got the clam shovel and went back to the body and began to dig a hole beside it. The dry sand was silky; some of it slipped down and tried to fill the grave as he dug. In the darkness, maybe he was shoveling out the same hole over and over. The shovel handle was sticky from Mare’s blood on his palms. When he looked behind him, he saw Mare sitting on the sand, huddled with her thin knees pulled up, waiting. She held her hurt hand with the other one, cradled.

  When he had buried the legless body, he walked back to her, and she stood up and he took her hand again and they went on along the beach in the darkness. He was cold. His wet shoes and his jeans grated with sand. The cut on Mare’s hand felt sticky, hot, where he clasped his palm against it. She said, in a whisper, “I dreamed this, once.” He couldn’t see her face. He looked out but he couldn’t see the water, only hear it, a ceaseless numbing murmur on the dark air. He remembered the look that had come in her face when she had first seen his boat building. There are mines in the strait. He wondered if that was when she had dreamed this moment, a pale body rolling up on the sand.

  “I know,” he said, though what came out was shapeless, ill-made, a sound like Ah woe. Mare didn’t look at him. But in a while she leaned in to him in the darkness and whispered against his cheek. “It’s okay,” she said, holding on to his hand. “I won’t tell.”

  He had seen a lot of dead or dying children, had often written about them. Even on this remote coast, far from any battlefield, he could easily imagine the myriad ways a child might die. Harder to imagine what manner of death, any death, could bring an end to war. But he had sent off the pages for his October journal already and Mare was in them, and Lago Negro, and her father standing shifting his feet, not looking up as the jets screamed over him. She had dreamed her own death, and he had written that down, and when she was dead he would write that down too. He didn’t know why, suddenly, his mouth was full of the remembered salt taste of tears, and blood, and the sea.

  Downstream

  WHERE THE RIVER RAN ACROSS the waist of the city it was edged in by piers and dikes and seawalls, and places where boulders had been trucked in to hold embankments along the back sides of warehouses and old millworks. It wouldn’t have been entirely true, though, to say there was no riverbank. There were still a few vacant lots, places where a building had been torn down or it had never been appropriate to build one—under the piers of bridges, for instance—where the ground was allowed to slant out gradually to the muddy water, and weeds grew doggedly in the crazed soil among broken bricks, rusted iron, cast-off tires.

  It was at one of those places, where there was still that kind of meager riverbank inclining down from Macadam Avenue between the tiers of warehouses, that Anne saw the man and the horse standing out in the water. The late sun was behind them so there was no detail, just their burnished red silhouettes. The man was washing down the horse, lifting water in his cupped hands and sluicing it over the animal’s back and shoulders and flanks.

  “Look,” Anne said.

  Mel was driving. The rush-hour traffic on the old Ross Island Bridge was clotted and slow; the sun shone flat in his eyes below the edge of the sun visor. He drove with both hands gripping the steering wheel. “What?” he said, without turning his head.

  “There’s a man down there with a horse. In the river.”

  “You’re kidding,” Mel said. He was still watching the narrow road. He might not have been able to see over the concrete parapet anyway from his side of the car.

  Anne held both hands above her bangs and peered against the sun. The man leaned into the shoulder of the horse and bent to run a palm down along the animal’s foreleg. As the car slid finally into the shadow of the Tualatin Hills, the figures, no longer backlit, deepened suddenly so she could see that the horse was not red but chestnut brown. She could see too that the man’s shirt was faded almost colorless, the long sleeves folded carelessly above the elbows. His canvas jeans were worn almost white at the thighs. Bent over washing mud from the leg of the horse, he tipped his head back and seemed for a moment to look right at Anne. Then he straightened, still looking up toward the car, toward Anne, and lifted one hand in greeting. She had lifted her own hand to return the gesture when she realized he was reaching to comb his wet fingers through his hair. She swiveled her head to watch him—stooping again, continuing to wash his horse in the gray water there at the riverbank—until the corner of a building closed them off.

  “Where?” Mel said, turning his own head belatedly.

  “Back there. You can’t see them now.”

  He blew out a little sound of incredulousness. “What would a guy be doing with a horse down there?”

  “They were washing. In the river.”

  He made another small sound—annoyance. “You know what I mean. There’s nothing but warehouses and crap down there.” He glanced at Anne, waiting for another answer. They had been together almost ten years, and a lot of things had gradually built up between them. Anne turned her head and looked out the side window; she felt she had answered his question.

  While they dined with friends—or not exactly friends, they were some sort of acquaintances of Mel’s—she thought of mentioning the man she had seen along the riverbank but then decided not to, for reasons she couldn’t quite make out, something vaguely to do with Mel and with horses, how she had used to love horses and how, since she’d been with Mel, she had forgotten how much she had once loved them. It was Mel who said, “We saw the damn stupidest thing driving over here. Some guy was trying to swim a horse across the river, down there under the Ross Island Bridge.”

  “You’re kidding,” the other man said. His name was David. Mel had done some work for his company or David had done work for Mel’s company, something like that.

  “He wasn’t swimming,” Anne said. Her cheeks burned as if Mel had said something private about their sex life—as if what she had seen along the bank of the river was profoundly personal.

  He may not have heard her. Without looking up from the cigarette he was lighting, he said, “Christ, I wouldn’t take a swim in that river if you paid me. You ever see those old guys down there fishing? All those Koreans or whatever, and the old bums hauling in bottom fish. Begging for cancer. And a guy rides a horse out into that shit.”

  “He wasn’t riding,” Anne said, and then, “You’re the one begging for cancer.”

  Mel put his weight back in the chair and looked at her. He had started smoking again on his last trip to Thailand, which they hadn’t talked about at all. “So you tell it,” he said. “You got a better look than I did.”

  “You didn’t see him,” Anne said savagely.

  After a long moment of silence, David’s wife Kay laughed and said, “It’s all industrial along there. What a place to keep a horse.”

  Mel, who had been looking at Anne, turned his head deliberately toward Kay. “Well, nobody’d be keeping a horse around there, Kay, not in that neighborhood. The guy must have trailer
ed it in.” He spoke to her softly, as if they were alone in the room.

  “There wasn’t any trailer,” Anne said. She remembered that she had seen the prints of horses’ hooves among clumps of weed and wracks of shattered wood on the slick clay slope going down to the water.

  “Maybe from Mountain Park,” Kay said, glancing once at Anne and then back to Mel. She had a long, narrow chin and she seemed to point it at each of them. “There’s a stable up there, isn’t there? An arena and riding trails and all of that. Maybe he rode down from there. How far would that be? Three or four miles?”

  “More than that,” Mel said, shaking his head.

  Kay’s husband made a big gesture with both hands, trying to get between the two of them, get back in the game. “He’d have to come down along Taylors Ferry Road or all the way out from West Linn along Macadam. I don’t see how anybody could ride a horse through there and not get run over. He must have trucked it in.”

  Anne looked out the window to the dark street while the others went on debating. Later, while they sat at the dining room table talking about the stock market and eating osso buco from square white plates, Anne began to remember that the man under the bridge had had a beard: a bony face sunburnt above a crescent of reddish beard. It was a plain face, completely guileless in that way you seldom saw on men anymore, and the top half of his forehead stark white where his hat had cast a shadow. He must have set the hat down somewhere, set it on a stone or a log while he sleeved the sweat from his face before walking the horse downhill to the river.

  When Mel drove them back over the bridge that night, the sky was ruddy above the glare of the neons, and much of the city itself was clear yellow below the shine of the streetlights, but there was a pocket of darkness along the riverbank where the man had stood with his horse. Before she had met Mel, Anne had been with a man who taught history at the community college. A few times driving down with him from the Tualatin Hills, looking out at the city straddling the river, he had unsuccessfully tried to get her to imagine the landscape and the riverbank as it must have been when the Lewis and Clark party camped there, or when the trapper William Johnson hewed the logs for his little cabin, the one that was believed to have stood just about under the piers of the Ross Island Bridge on what would later, very much later, be Macadam Avenue. Tonight, without any effort at all, she could imagine trees in ranks down close to the water, and clean stones along the river edge, and little worn paths in the grass where animals came down to drink or to bathe in the shallows under the eaves of firs.

  Mel had had three or four martinis and he drove with exaggerated caution, all his attention apparently focused on the bridge lanes and the late, light traffic, but he said without looking toward her, “Gone?”

  She’d been thinking about William Johnson and how, when he had built his cabin there in the 1840s, there were no other white men or women known to be living for several miles in either direction along the banks of the river, and how later an Indian woman had come by and the two of them had married and lived there together until a town began to grow up around them and then they’d moved somewhere else, somewhere less crowded. At least that was the nostalgic legend she remembered Tom Kline—was that his name?—telling her.

  “What?”

  “The guy with the horse. Look and see if he’s gone.” Once, Anne would have seen this as a sign of how well Mel knew her, knew the things that interested her. Now it was a dig, or a way to reopen their half-voiced argument.

  She turned in the seat, twisting all the way around to look back through the rear window. In the darkness above the silvered edge of the river she was not surprised to see a small stuttering light. It was the campfire he had kindled after he and the horse had finished their work, after the two of them had gone tiredly together up through the ferns and salal brush, under the cool shadow of the trees.

  “It’s dark. They’re gone.”

  In the slow, precise voice Mel used when he was showing her how little he was affected by a couple of drinks, he said, “I think there’s a horse show at the Expo Center. The guy must be a stupid shit, though, to let a show horse get out in that stinking water.”

  She didn’t bother to argue. It wasn’t a show horse, she might have said but didn’t. By now she had remembered the way the horse looked, patiently standing, trailing harness—its thick neck and homely sloping flanks. The horse and the man had been pulling out stumps to widen a clearing, hauling peeled logs up the slope to a cabin site. She looked at Mel, the whole cast of his face slightly greenish in the light thrown from the dashboard, and she made a brief, unsuccessful attempt to imagine him with a beard.

  She had, in the recent past, had more luck imagining him dead. It was a benign sort of fantasy, absent the dead body, the coffin, blood, illness. In the daydream, she was surrounded by solemn-faced friends who supported her, and when Anne wept she was solemn too and her nose didn’t run. Afterward, with the insurance money, she put up a log house in the wooded foothills behind Newberg or Yamhill on a lively little year-round creek that never flooded, and she grew a giant garden and began painting landscapes in watercolors and chalk, drove into Portland to sell her produce and paintings at the Saturday Market. She was prone to daydreams furnished with elaborate details, and this particular one felt easier to her, felt purer, than the dream that began with divorce.

  In the morning she awoke thinking of the fact that people used to grow everything they ate. She had a two-year-old seed catalog, and she leafed through the pages while she drank her coffee, then hunted up a pad of paper and began to lay out a garden plan. She would have to have forty acres, she decided—room to pasture horses, grow raspberries, bell peppers, potatoes. She planned an orchard, its neat rows of apple and prune trees hedged by old roses. When she heard Mel come in from washing the car she folded the papers—the list of seeds and rootstock, and the diagram—and put them inside the seed catalog and put the seed catalog carelessly back in the drawer where they kept the directions for all their appliances, because if she tried to hide it, he might suspect there was something to hide and might open to the sugar-pod peas and find the list and think Anne had a screw loose, because of course he wouldn’t know about the log house in the Yamhill Valley, and would probably think the plan and the list were for the corner behind the garage where she had turned under the sod and set out three tomato plants.

  She went out to the yard and laid a hose among the tomatoes and stood watching the water run out to darken the clods. The leaves of the plants were hairy and yellowish, the limbs spindly. There were five or six grass-green tomatoes, hard and round and small as marbles, on each of the bushes. She squatted and spent a few minutes pulling out the grass that had come up around the plants. The grass broke off in her hand, leaving the stripped white stems standing up in the dirt. It would be hot later in the day, but above the edge of the garage the sun was not much more than a smudge behind a yellowy haze. In the summer whenever they went out of the city—up into the mountains or over to the coast where the sky was clean and blue—when they came back to town she would always notice the jaundiced sky for a day or two until it became, if not the correct color, the ordinary one, and she stopped seeing it. There seemed no particular reason why she was aware of it today—unable not to see it.

  She left Mel on the phone talking to someone in Hong Kong, and drove to the garden nursery on Stark Street. She bought sacks of sterilized manure and compost, and a tall clay pot, its wall pockets planted with strawberry starts. The clerk helped her load the pot into the trunk of her car and brace it with the sacks of manure. She didn’t have far to drive, she told him, but when she left the parking lot she turned west on impulse, away from the house. Above the edge of the railing on the Ross Island Bridge, when she slowed the car she wasn’t surprised to see a small clearing in the trees, and smoke rising up from a brush pile. Along the west bank of the river on both sides of the bridge, shaley steps and blue pools of water stepped down from the hillside. She turned north onto Barbur Boulevar
d to circle back toward home, and in the rearview mirror caught sight of the man coaxing his laboring horse up a grassy path through the woods. They were hauling a load of mud and stones on a canvas drag.

  She didn’t ask Mel to help her with the strawberry pot. She lugged it out of the trunk herself and set it on the patio. The sacks of manure and compost she carried over one by one and piled up at the corner of the garage. It was steer manure—the nursery didn’t carry horse manure, the clerk had told her. She split open one of the sacks with the edge of her rose clippers and dumped the dry fertilizer out at the feet of the tomato plants, worked it into the dirt, and turned the hose on to water it in.

  She had been sleeping in the guest bedroom for the last few weeks, but after midnight she took a blanket out to the back deck and curled up on the chaise. There was too much highway noise to hear crickets or birds, but she could smell the mown grass. The night air, unconditioned, felt alive to her, felt real. Occasionally she heard a dog barking. Neither she nor Mel had ever wanted children, but they used to talk about getting a dog. She didn’t know when they had stopped talking about it, or which of them had decided it was too much trouble.

  In the morning, she took the car downtown without saying anything to Mel. When she crossed the bridge, she was not surprised to see several horses browsing the knee-high grass along the bank of the river. In the clearing, the man was on his knees, setting rocks into mud slurry for the foundation of a fireplace. The ground had been plowed in crooked furrows between the stumps, and corn was beginning to sprout there.

  The central library was a Carnegie building from the 1910s and lately renovated in classic style, though there were no longer card catalogs, just banks of computers where the oak cupboards with their long, skinny drawers had used to stand. She found a new book about the early history of the city, one that must have come out after she had stopped trying to impress Tom Kline by reading about such things—after she and Mel had gotten together—and books about subsistence farming, home veterinary remedies, “anachronistic” crafts.