Platte River

by Rick Bass

  Then the man stood, said goodbye, and waded back into the shallows, holding the rope taut in his hands to keep from being dragged in. When he was in up to his knees he dived, angled out toward the center, and once more began breast-stroking up the river, turning his head every now and again to look back at the brothers with cold, curious eyes, like those of a raven, or a fish.

  The brothers tried to follow, running along the rocky, brushy shore, calling for the big man to stop, but he continued slowly upriver, swimming hard against the crashing, funneled tongue of rapids, lifting up and over them and back down among them, lifting like a giant bat or manta ray. He swam up through a narrow canyon and left them behind.

  At home in bed that night, each brother looked up at the ceiling in his room and tried to sleep. Each could feel his heart thrashing around in his chest. The brothers knew that the big man was up to something, something massive.

  The wild beating in the brothers’ hearts would not stop. They got up and met, as if by plan, in the kitchen for a beer, a sandwich. They ate almost constantly, always trying to build more muscle. Sometimes they acted like twins, thought the same thing at the same time. It was a warm night, past midnight, and when they had finished their snack, they got the tape measure and checked to see if their arms had gotten larger. And because the measurements were unchanged, they each fixed another sandwich, ate them, measured again. No change.

  “It’s funny how it works,” said John. “How it takes such a long time.”

  “No shit, Sherlock,” said Jerry. He slapped his flat belly and yawned.

  Neither of them had mentioned the big man in the rapids. All day they’d held it like a secret, cautious of what might happen if they discussed it. Feeling that they might chase him away, that they might make it be as if he had never happened.

  They went outside and stood in the middle of the street under a streetlamp and looked around like watch-dogs, trying to understand why their hearts were racing.

  So young! So young!

  They drove an old blue Volkswagen beetle. When the excitement of the night and of their strength and youth was too much, they would pick up the automobile from either end like porters, or pallbearers, and try to carry it around the block, for exercise, without having to stop and set it down and rest. But that night, the brothers’ hearts were running too fast just to walk the car. They lay down beneath the trees in the cool grass in their back yard and listened to the wind that blew from the mountains on the other side of the river. Sometimes the brothers would go wake their sisters, Lory and Lindsay, and bring them outside into the night. The four of them would sit under the largest tree and tell stories or plan things.

  Their father was named Heck, and their mother, Louella. Heck was the principal of the local school. Lory was thirty-four, a teacher, and beautiful: she was tiny, black-haired, with a quick, high laugh not unlike the outburst of a loon. Despite her smallness, her breasts were overly large, to the point that they were the first thing people noticed about her, and continued noticing about her. She tried always to keep moving when around new people, tried with her loon’s laugh and her high-energy, almost manic actress’s gestures to shift the focus back to her, not her breasts, but it was hard, and tiring. She had long, sweeping eyelashes, but not much of a chin. The reason Lory still lived at home was that she loved her family and simply could not leave. Lindsay was sixteen, but already half a foot taller than Lory. She was red-headed, freckled, had wide shoulders, and played field, hockey; the brothers called her Lindsay the Red.

  Lory was not allowed to work at the school where her father was principal, so she taught in a little mountain town called Warrensburg, about thirty miles north. She hated the job. The children had no respect for her, no love; they drank and died in fiery crashes, or were abused by their parents, or got cancer — they had no luck. Lory’s last name, her family’s name, was Iron, and one night the boys at her school had scratched with knives onto every desktop the words “I fucked Miss Iron.” Sometimes the boys touched her from behind when she was walking in the crowded halls.

  The night the brothers’ hearts beat so wildly, they lay in the grass for a while and then went and got their sisters. Lory was barely able to come out of her sleep but followed the brothers anyway, holding Jerry’s hand as if sleepwalking. She sat down with her back against the largest tree and dozed in and out, still exhausted from the school year. Lindsay, though, was wide awake, and sat cross-legged, leaning forward, listening.

  “We went down to the river today,” John said, plucking at stems of grass, putting them in his mouth and chewing on them for their sweetness, like a cow grazing. Jerry was doing hurdler’s stretches, had one leg extended in front of him. There was no moon, only stars through the trees.

  “Summer,” mumbled Lory in her half sleep. Often she talked in her sleep and had nightmares.

  “Who was your first lover?” Jerry asked her, grinning, speaking in a low voice, trying to trick her.

  Lindsay covered her sister’s ears and whispered, “Lory, no! Wake up! Don’t say it!”

  The brothers were overprotective of Lory, even though she was the oldest and hadn’t had any boyfriends for a long time.

  “Michael,” Lory mumbled uncomfortably. “No, no, Arthur. No, wait, Richard, William? No — Mack, no, Jerome, Atticus, no, that Caster boy — no, wait…”

  Slowly Lory opened her eyes, smiling at Jerry. “Got you,” she said.

  Jerry shrugged, embarrassed. “I just want to protect you.”

  Lory looked at him with sleepy, narrowed eyes. “Right.”

  They were silent for a moment, then John said, “We saw this big man today. He was pulling a boat. He was really pulling it.” John wanted to say more, but didn’t dare. He reached down and plucked a blade of night grass. They sat there in the moon shadows, a family, wide awake while the rest of the town slept.

  ·

  They waited a week, almost as if they had tired or depleted the big man, and as if they were now letting him gather back his whole self. John and Jerry went to the rapids every day to check on the map in the sand, and when it had finally begun to blur, almost to the point of disappearing, they realized they had to go find him soon, or risk never seeing him again.

  Lindsay drove, though she did not yet have her license, and John sat in the front with her and told her the directions, navigating from memory. (To have transcribed the map onto paper, even onto a napkin, would also somehow have run the risk of depleting or diminishing the big man, if he was still out there.) Jerry sat in the back seat, wearing sunglasses like a movie star and sipping a high-protein milk shake. John’s strength in the discus was his simple brute power, while Jerry’s strength — he was five years younger and sixty pounds lighter — was his speed.

  “Right!” Jerry cried every time John gave Lindsay the correct instructions. In his mind, Jerry could see the map as clear as anything, and when John gave Lindsay a bad piece of advice — a left turn, say, instead of a right — Jerry would shout out “Wrong! — Braaapp! Sham-bama-LOOM!”

  There were so many turns to the road: up and over hills, across small green valleys, around a lake and down sun-dappled lanes, as if passing through tunnels — from shade to sun, shade to sun, with wooden bridges clattering beneath them, until Lindsay was sure they were lost. But Jerry, in the back seat, kept smiling, his face content behind the dark glasses, and John was confident, too. The closer they got to the big man, the more they could tell he was out there.

  The road had crossed over the border into Vermont, and turned to gravel. It followed a small creek for a stretch, and the brothers wondered if this creek flowed into the Sacandaga, if the big man had swum all the way upstream before turning into this side creek, to make his way home. It looked like the creek he had drawn on his map in the sand.

  Blackbirds flew up out of the marsh reeds along either side of them. They could feel him getting closer. There was very much the sense that they were hunting him, that they had to somehow capture him.

/>   Then they saw him in a pasture. A large two-story stone house stood at the end of the pasture, like a castle, with the creek passing by out front, the creek shaded by elm and maple trees, and giant elms that had somehow, in this one small area, avoided or been immune to the century’s blight. The pasture was deep with rich green summer hay, and they saw a few cows, Holsteins, grazing there.

  Again, the man wasn’t wearing anything, and he had one of the cows on his back. He was running through the tall grass with it, leaping sometimes, doing jetés and awkward but heartfelt pirouettes with the sagging cow draped across his wide shoulders. He had thick legs that jiggled as he ran, and he looked happy, as happy as they had ever seen anyone look. The rest of the cattle stood in front of the old house, grazing and watching without much interest.

  “Jiminy,” said Lindsay.

  “Let’s get him,” said John, the strongest. “Let’s wait until he goes to sleep and then tie him up and bring him home.”

  “We’ll teach him to throw the discus,” said Jerry.

  “If he doesn’t want to throw the discus, we’ll let him go,” said John. “We won’t force him to.”

  “Right,” said Jerry.

  But force wasn’t necessary. John and Jerry went into the field after him, warily, and he stopped spinning and shook hands with them. Lindsay stayed in the car, wanting to look away but unable to; she watched the man’s face, watched the cow on his back. The cow had a placid but somehow engaged look on its face, as if it were just beginning to awaken to the realization that it was aloft.

  The big man grinned and put the cow back on the ground. He told them that he had never thrown the discus, had never even seen it done, but would like to try, if that was what they wanted him to do. He left them and went into the stone house for a pair of jeans and tennis shoes and a white T-shirt. When he came back out, dressed, he looked even larger.

  He was too big to fit into the car — he was as tall as John but thirty pounds heavier, and built of rock-slab muscle — so he rode standing on the back bumper, grinning, with the wind blowing his long, already thinning hair back behind him. The big man’s face was young, his skin smooth and tanned.

  “My name’s A.C.!” he shouted to them as they puttered down the road. Lindsay leaned her head out the window and looked back at him, wanting to make sure he was all right. The little car’s engine shuddered and shook beneath him, trying to manage the strain. The back bumper scraped the road.

  “I’m Lindsay!” she shouted. “John’s driving! Jerry’s not!”

  Her hair swirled around her, a nest of red. She knew what Lory would say. Her sister thought that all the muscle on her brothers was froufrou, adornment, and unnecessary. Lindsay hoped that Lory would change her mind.

  “Lindsay, get back in the car!” John shouted, looking in the rear-view mirror. But she couldn’t hear him. She was leaning farther out the window, reaching for A.C.’s wrist, and then higher, gripping his thick arm.

  “She’s mad,” Jerry howled, disbelieving. “She’s lost her mind.”

  A.C. grinned and held on to the car’s roof, taking the bumps with his legs.

  ·

  When they drove up to their house, Lory had awakened from her nap and was sitting on the picnic table in her shorts and a T-shirt, drinking from a bottle of red wine. She burst into laughter when she saw them approach with A.C. riding the back bumper as if he had hijacked them.

  “Three peas in a pod,” she cried. She danced down from the table and out to the driveway to meet him, to shake his hand.

  It was as if there were three brothers.

  From the kitchen window, Louella watched, horrified. The huge young man in the front yard was not hers. He might think he was, and everyone else might too, but he wasn’t. She stopped drying dishes and was alarmed at the size of him, standing there among her children, shaking hands, moving around in their midst. She had had one miscarriage, twenty years ago. This man could have been that child, could even have been that comeback soul.

  Louella felt the blood draining from her face and thought she was dying. She fell to the kitchen floor in a faint, breaking the coffee cup she was drying.

  It was the end of June. Fields and pastures all over the Hudson Valley were green. She had been worrying about Lory’s sadness all through the fall and winter, on through the rains and melting snows of spring, and even now, into the ease of green summer.

  Louella sat up groggily and adjusted her glasses. When she went outside to meet A.C., she could no longer say for sure whether she knew him or not; there was a moment’s hesitancy.

  She looked hard into his eyes, dried her hands on her apron, and reached out and shook his big hand. She was swayed by her children’s happiness. There was a late-day breeze. A hummingbird dipped at the nectar feeder on the back porch. She let him come into their house.

  “We’re going to teach A.C. how to throw the discus,” said Jerry.

  “Thrilling,” said Lory.

  ·

  He had supper with the family, and they all played Monopoly that evening. Louella asked A.C. where he was from and what he did, but he would only smile and say that he was here to throw the discus. He wasn’t rude, he simply wouldn’t tell her where he was from. It was almost as if he did not know, or did not understand the question.

  They played Monopoly until it was time for bed. The brothers took him for a walk through the neighborhood and on into town. They stopped to pick up people’s cars occasionally, the three of them lifting together.

  There was a statue of Nathan Hale in the town square, and, drunk on the new moon, drunk with his new friends, A.C. waded through the shrubbery, crouched below the statue, and gave the cold metal a bear hug. He began twisting back and forth, pulling the statue from the ground, groaning, squeezing and lifting with his back and legs, his face turning redder and redder, rocking until he finally worked it loose. He stood up with it, sweating, grinning, holding it against his chest as if it were a dance partner, or a dressmaker’s dummy.

  They walked home after that, taking turns carrying the statue on their backs, and snuck it into Lory’s room and stood it in the corner by the door, so that it blocked her exit. It still smelled of fresh earth and crushed flowers. Lory was a sound sleeper, plunging into unconsciousness as an escape at every opportunity, and she never heard them.

  Then A.C. went downstairs to the basement and rested, lying on a cot, looking up at the ceiling with his hands behind his head. John and Jerry stayed in the kitchen, drinking beer.

  “Do you think it will happen?” Jerry asked.

  John was looking out the window at the garden. “I hope so,” he said. “I think it would be good for her.” He finished his beer. “Maybe we shouldn’t think about it, though. It might be wrong.”

  “Well,” said Jerry, sitting down as if to think about it himself, “maybe so.”

  John was still looking out the window. “But who cares?” he said. He looked at Jerry.

  “This guy’s okay,” said Jerry. “This one’s good.”

  “But do you think he can throw the discus?”

  “I don’t know,” Jerry said. “But I want you to go find some more statues for him. I liked that.”

  ·

  That first night at the Irons’ house, A.C. thought about John and Jerry, about how excited he had been to see them walking up to him. He considered how they looked at each other sometimes when they were talking. They always seemed to agree.

  Then he thought about John’s hair, black and short, and about his heavy beard. And Jerry, he seemed so young with his green eyes. His hair was blond and curly. A.C. liked the way Jerry leaned forward slightly and narrowed his eyes, grinning, when he talked. Jerry seemed excited about almost anything, everything, and excited to be with his older brother, following him down the same path.

  Later, A.C. got up from his cot — he’d been sleeping among punching bags and exercise bikes, with dumbbells and barbells scattered about like toys — and went quietly up the stairs, past
Lindsay’s room, through the kitchen, and into the living room.

  He sat down on the couch and looked out the big front window at the moon and clouds as if watching a play. He stayed there for a long time, occasionally dozing off for a few minutes. At around four in the morning he awoke to find Lory standing in front of him, blocking the moon. She was dark, with the moon behind her lighting only the edge of one side of her face. He could see her eyelashes on that one side. She was studying him almost the way Louella had.

  “Look,” he said, and pointed behind her.

  The clouds were moving past the moon in fast-running streams, like tidal currents, eddying, it seemed, all to the same place, all hurrying by as if late to some event.

  “What is that statue doing in my room?” Lory asked. She was whispering, and he thought her voice was beautiful. A.C. hoped he could be her friend too, as he’d become a friend of her brothers. He looked at the moon, a mottled disc.

  “Do you want to sit down?” he asked. He patted the side of the couch next to him.

  Slowly she did, and then, after a few seconds, she leaned into his shoulder and put her head against it. She put both her hands on his arm and held on.

  After a while, A.C. lifted her into his lap, holding her in both arms as if she were a small child, and slowly he rocked her. She curled against him as tightly as she could, and he rocked her like that, watching her watch him, until dawn.

  When it got light, she reached up and kissed him quickly, touching his face with her hands, and got out of his lap and hurried into the kitchen to fix coffee before anyone else was up. A few minutes later, Louella appeared in the living room, sleepy-eyed, shuffling, wearing a faded blue flannel robe and old slippers, holding the paper. She almost stepped on A.C.’s big feet. She stopped, surprised to see him up so early, and in her living room. He stood up and said, “Good morning,” and she smiled in spite of herself.