Above the Waterfall

by Ron Rash

  I hadn’t thought anyone to be around this late, but as I came up the freshly graveled road Billy Orr’s truck was parked in front of the cabin’s foundation. He sat in the cab, the driver’s window down. I pulled up beside him.

  “Just come by to see how far they got today,” Billy said. “It’s coming along good, don’t you think?”

  “I do.”

  “Matter of fact, I’m ready to order the porch materials. You’re still sure you want that wrap around, the one I showed you?”

  “I am.”

  “It’ll give you a pretty view in four directions,” Billy said, his gaze sweeping the mountains now, “but like I said, counting labor, it’ll be around twenty-five thousand.”

  “That’s fine,” I answered. “I need to go ahead and pay you, for everything. A hundred and twenty-five thousand total, right?”

  “That’s right, but pay half now and half when it’s finished. I want you to be certain you’re satisfied.”

  “All right. I’ll get half to you by Monday. It’ll be cash.”

  “I’m not averse to real money,” Billy said, smiling as he cranked the engine. “If something’s not the way you want it, let me know.”

  After Billy left, I checked out the foundation. Everything looked plumb, no cracks or bulges, the end and bed joints precisely measured. No drink bottles or food wrappers left behind either, another sign that Billy’s crew took pride in their work. I turned and looked at the view I’d have from the front porch. In winter, I’d see a couple of second homes on the ridge, but for now it was green trees and blue mountains and silence.

  It was a scene I’d once enjoyed viewing with a brush in my hand and a blank canvas. After a day dealing with the usual messes, it was nice to set an easel outdoors and look at the mountains, then try to re-create them, mixing colors to get the right shade of a leaf or boulder, or capture the way a tree limb reached crookedly toward the sky. The pleasure of that quietness, because even if people saw me in a yard or field they’d leave me be. Plus the pride anybody gets from doing something well, as the county art show ribbons attested, though sometimes, less proudly, an excuse to get away from Sarah. Which was ironic, because, like a lot of things, I’d not enjoyed painting much after she was gone, and so quit.

  I walked back to the car but didn’t get in. I leaned against the hood and looked at the mountains. A breeze stirred as the sun began to sink below them. Soon the leaves on the hardwoods would turn. Like the mountains are huddled under a big crazy quilt. That was what my grandmother used to say when it happened. Crazy quilt. It was an expression you rarely heard these days, same as “Proud to know you,” or “It’s a gracious plenty.” I thought about Gerald, who understood those words but, in a deeper way, couldn’t understand a NO TRESPASSING sign, because it belonged to a world he didn’t know.

  I had been bad to sleepwalk as a kid. There were times, for some reason always in the summer, I’d make my way out of the house and end up in the yard. Folks back then, or at least country folks, didn’t see the need for a porch bulb burning all night. I’d open my eyes and there’d be nothing but darkness, like the world had slipped its leash and run away, taking everything with it except me. Then I’d hear a whip-poor-will or a jar fly, or feel the dew dampening my feet, or I’d look up and find the stars tacked to the sky where they always were, only the moon roaming.

  I turned onto the main road and drove back toward town, all the while remembering what it had felt like when the world you knew had up and vanished, and you needed to find something to bring that world back, and you weren’t sure that you could.

  PART THREE

  Seventeen

  We were at Laurel Fork, not just Sarah and me but with three children, who soon left the water to get warm. Sarah joined them. They lay sprawled on the big boulder while I stood above the waterfall. Can you touch the bottom? Sarah asked me. I dove and when I surfaced Sarah and the children were gone. Only damp shadows remained.

  Then the phone was ringing. I looked over at the clock and saw it was 8:20.

  “Harold Tucker just called,” Ruby said. “He said you need to get out to the resort right now. You, not a deputy. I sent Jarvis but Mr. Tucker was adamant that you come too.”

  I got dressed and drove to the resort, already thinking that whatever had happened, Gerald was involved. Becky’s truck was parked next to C.J.’s SUV, another bad sign. She and Jarvis were down by the creek and I joined them. Becky kneeled beside the stream, filling a plastic bottle with water. A few yards farther, where the culvert was, a brown trout, easily five pounds, drifted against the mesh wire. More dead trout were around it.

  “What in the hell happened?” I asked.

  “A fish kill,” Jarvis answered. “They say it is worse upstream where there’s a big waterfall. DENR’s on the way. They’ve already contacted the water treatment plant and they’ve shut down the intake valves.”

  “It’s that bad?”

  “They’re just being safe, same as us,” Becky said. “There are no dead fish in the park, but Carlos is posting warning signs.”

  “It smells like diesel fuel,” I said.

  “It’s kerosene,” Jarvis said.

  He pointed at the reddish sheen on a pool’s edge. But it wasn’t just there. Red tinged a sandbar upstream, as if the creek was bleeding.

  “Why do you say that?” Becky asked, turning from the water she now tested.

  “They put red dye in kerosene,” I said, “to differentiate it from on-road diesel.”

  Becky didn’t look pleased to hear that. She already knew where this was leading.

  “What do your tests say?” I asked.

  “The ammonia levels aren’t elevated, right here at least.”

  “Which means?”

  “It’s probably not organic or animal waste and I don’t smell a herbicide,” Becky said. “Sewage or a pesticide either. But we won’t have the results for at least a week.”

  “But isn’t it obvious what killed them?” Jarvis said. “I mean, you can smell it, and the red.”

  “There could be something else mixed with it,” Becky said. “Or some chemical that was added in diesel fuel.”

  “I’m just saying,” Jarvis added.

  But Becky ignored him. She set the last sample bottle in the tackle box and snapped it shut.

  “Where’s Tucker?” I asked Jarvis.

  “Inside making phone calls.”

  “You talk to him?”

  “Just for a few moments. He was waiting for you to come. Mr. Tucker said this was done on purpose. He says he damn well knows who did it.”

  “I’m going upstream,” Becky said, getting up, “to try and find where it was introduced.”

  I watched her walk up the trail and disappear into the woods.

  She already knows, I thought, but she doesn’t want to hear it.

  “So Tucker thinks Gerald did this?”

  “He didn’t say Gerald’s name but you know that’s what he’s thinking.” Jarvis shook his head and frowned. “It’s not much of a stretch to think so.”

  “No,” I said, as Harold Tucker came out on the lodge’s porch and motioned me toward him. “It isn’t.”

  “I’ve got something to show you, Sheriff,” Tucker said.

  Eighteen

  As I move upstream, vomit scalds my throat like lye. Trout shoal on sandbars and banks. A few gills quiver feebly but most fish are death-paled, browns and rainbows now in name only. Festering sores on streamskin. Dace and war-paint shiners are sprinkled amid the larger fish. Two buzzards stalk the shallows, more overhead, blackly circling like clock hands. The stream rises and narrows. A dead trout vanes in the eddy. On the trail, between two stems of ironweed, a writing spider sways in the web’s palm. One eyelash-thin leg poised, as if pausing before finishing its message.

  T? R? G?

  Gerald couldn’t do this. I know him. This isn’t like it was with Richard.

  The stream disappears into rhododendron, then sidles back close
as the trail dips before rising again. I hear the waterfall and soon after I emerge behind it. A wreath of dead fish circle the pool. Here salamanders and crayfish awash too. The fuel smells stronger, and more red stains appear on the sand and water. It’s dye you are seeing, nothing more, I remind myself, but what I see feels like blood.

  I walk on up above the falls, where a granite bald pushes back trees to open the sky. Dead trout are here as well, all native. I didn’t likely think any of them speckled trout were still around but one day I was up here and I seen one, Gerald had said last fall, pointing into the water at one speckled trout and then another as we’d made our way upstream to a last pool before the creek split. I push through leathery rhododendron leaves to that same pool. A speckled trout fins in the center, another in the shallows. They look perfectly healthy so I retrace my steps, find a stain on the granite twenty yards from the waterfall. I rub the dampness with my fingers. Viscous. I raise it to my nose and it all comes back.

  We’d hidden behind the school buses that morning. Fuel had been spilled and I’d smelled it, felt it under my shoe soles. Then the policeman rushed us from behind the buses and across the black pavement. Some of us were screaming and then more screams when ambulances splashed red across our shirts and blouses. The policeman shouted, It’s only red light, children, only light, herding us onto the grass where too many hands grabbed as flashbulbs burst like the hallway’s first loud flash.

  The first loud flash . . .

  Promise me, children, not a single word, Ms. Abernathy had whispered, then led us down the hallway single file to the basement doorway. Then the cave feel of tight walls leading to a cool darkening. I am the very last, reaching for Ms. Abernathy’s hand as we make our way to the concrete floor. So much silence, the only sound pipedrip. Light slants down from the stair entrance. Ms. Abernathy ushers us toward the light leaking in from the basement door. Almost there when her shhhhh stills us. Footsteps come halfway down the stairs and pause. Both my hands clutch Ms. Abernathy’s. Another footstep and a shoe and pants cuff appear. The pipe drips loud and my first tears well. I try to squeeze the tears back inside me but the first one falls and I know he has heard it. . . . Ms. Abernathy stands in the basement door, blocking the exit as I run. Close your eyes, a policeman says as he grabs me. But I look back and when I do my tongue turns to salt.

  Nineteen

  “Video was taken up at the waterfall this morning,” Tucker told me, “where my workers found the first dead fish.”

  Randall Cobb, one of Tucker’s security team, tapped a few buttons. The screen changed to black and white and the back of a head passed in front of the camera’s lens.

  “That was 7:51 A.M. and this next one is 8:34,” Tucker said.

  Randall punched a few more buttons. I could see the face this time, blurry but unmistakable.

  “You’re acting surprised, Sheriff.”

  “It’s just that I can’t see him doing this.”

  “You just did see it,” Tucker snapped, “and I don’t get why you’re surprised. Gerald Blackwelder’s gotten away with everything but poisoning my stream. Why would he figure he couldn’t do that too?”

  “Are other cameras up there?”

  “There’s another one fifty yards downstream.”

  “Have you checked it?”

  “Why in hell do we need to?”

  “Just to be sure no one else was up there.”

  “Check that other camera between midnight and ten A.M. and let the sheriff know if anyone’s on it,” Tucker told Randall. “Do it quick.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Tucker didn’t wear his golf clothes today. He had on a blue cotton suit, dress shoes, a white shirt but no tie. Perhaps it lay on his office desk or even the floor, unknotted then jerked off his collar when he heard what had happened. His frustration became more evident as we stepped outside and saw that a TV news van had pulled into the lot.

  “DENR’s already supposed to be here,” Tucker fumed. “I can’t clean up this mess till they say so. I’ve got phone calls to make, Sheriff. My hope is you or your deputy’s gone to arrest Gerald Blackwelder before I finish them.”

  “Let’s see what the second camera shows,” I said, “but if you or C.J. talk to any newspeople, I’d appreciate you not mentioning Gerald by name until he’s been charged.”

  “I’ll be the one talking to them,” Tucker said. “I fired C.J. Monday, after Gerald came and threatened me.”

  “You fired him?” I said. “But his SUV’s here.”

  “I gave him two weeks’ notice. But after this,” Tucker said, gesturing at the creek, “I told him to clean out his office and leave, which he’s doing now.”

  “But he couldn’t have stopped this,” I said, “or what happened Monday either.”

  “You’re wrong about that,” Tucker snapped. “Here’s the difference between you and me, Sheriff. Unlike you, I don’t wait for things to get out of hand before I act.”

  “But to fire him—”

  “Look,” Tucker interrupted. “C.J. asked me not to talk about him losing his job. I don’t even know if he’s told his family, though they’ll surely know now.”

  “C.J.’s been too good an employee for you to do this.”

  Tucker glared at me.

  “You had your role in this fiasco too, Sheriff. If you’d locked up Gerald on Monday, this fish kill wouldn’t have happened.”

  Tucker turned and went into the lodge. As I left the porch, a news crew met me. I told the reporter, “No comment,” and walked down the esplanade to where Jarvis waited.

  “They’ve got Gerald on a security camera, right up there where the fish started dying.”

  “I guess we ought not be too surprised, but somehow I still am,” Jarvis said. “You want me to go get him?”

  “I’ll do it, but not yet.”

  Tucker’s security guard came and said no one was on the other camera, which pretty much sealed it. I looked at the big brown trout and thought of the one C.J. and I had tried to catch the summer of our junior year. You’re smart, Les, but you try to hide it. But C.J. never hid his smarts. The taunts picked back up some as we entered our last two years of high school. Teacher’s pet, brownnoser. Neither was true. Some of the teachers didn’t like C.J. either, because at times he wasn’t above questioning what they said in class. But after that day at his great-uncle’s farm, I’d sit with him if I saw him alone in the cafeteria or at an assembly. He’d tried to get me to take college prep courses with him, even said we could study together. When C.J. had come back five years ago, he’d made it a point to tell me that the stay would be temporary, but in the last couple of years he hadn’t said much about leaving, and I’d wondered if what my grandfather had told me was true, that if you’re born in the mountains, you can’t feel at home anywhere else. But now . . .

  Becky came out of the woods, the tackle box in her right hand.

  “That old man means a lot to her, doesn’t he, Sheriff?” Jarvis said.

  “Yes, he does,” I answered, “and I’m afraid she’s made herself believe he’s someone that he’s not. Why don’t you check in with Ruby while I talk to her.”

  “Okay,” Jarvis said.

  You warned her about Gerald and now he’s proven you right. The fault is with her, not you. But that thought did me no good, especially because last night, in one of those 3 A.M. moments when we’re most honest with ourselves, I’d wondered if in some way I’d known on Monday that Gerald would go to the resort and confront Tucker. No, I told myself, I hadn’t known that. I’d made Gerald promise that he wouldn’t go. This is all Gerald’s fault. But it was like putting a metal washer in a vending machine and it falling straight into the change box. That same hollow ring.

  “I found where it was introduced,” Becky said as she joined me. “It’s right above the waterfall.”

  “Did that confirm what it is?”

  “Kerosene,” Becky said, not meeting my eyes. “Some was spilled on the sand, but something else co
uld have been dumped in.”

  “But you’ve got no cause to think something else was?”

  “I can’t say that for certain,” Becky said. “Nobody can without the sample results.”

  “But kerosene,” I said, pitching the word back to her like a baseball, “that’s definite.”

  I waited but knew I’d have to be the one who said it. I stepped closer, placed my arm gently around her.

  “You know this doesn’t look good for Gerald. I mean, we both know he’s got a temper.”

  “Gerald didn’t do this,” Becky said firmly as she would if I’d misidentified a wildflower.

  “A camera at the waterfall shows him up there this morning. I saw the film and it’s Gerald.”

  Becky’s expression didn’t change.

  “They’re showing some film they took on Monday.”

  “He’s wearing a different shirt, Becky,” I said softly.

  “Gerald didn’t do this.”

  “I know how much you care about Gerald,” I said, “and I know some of it, probably a lot of it, has to do with your grandparents, what they did for you. But what you owe them, or feel you owe Gerald, has limits.”

  “Trout were killed above the waterfall, Les, speckled trout,” Becky said, more emotion in her voice now. “I went up there with Gerald to look at them last fall. If you’d been with us that morning . . . if you had, you’d know he couldn’t do this. Those speckled trout, Gerald didn’t want to catch them to eat. He wanted them just to be there, and to stay there,” Becky said, her voice breaking. “The way Gerald looked at those speckled trout. Les, he loved them.”