Platte River

by Rick Bass

  Around eight o’clock John and Jerry got up, and they chased each other into the kitchen, playing some advanced form of tag. The lighter, faster Jerry stayed just ahead of John, leaping over the coffee table, spinning, tossing a footstool into his path for John to trip over. Lory shrieked, spilled some milk from the carton she was holding, and Louella shouted at them to stop it, tried to look stern, but was made young again by all the motion, and secretly loved it — and A.C., having come meekly in from the living room, stood back and smiled. Louella glanced over at him and saw. him smiling, looking at the brothers, and she thought again of how eerie the fit was, of how he seemed to glide into all the right spots and stand in exactly the right places. It was as if he had been with them all along — or even stranger, it was as if he were some sort of weight or stone placed on a scale that better balanced them now.

  After breakfast — a dozen eggs each, some cantaloupes, a pound of sausage split among them, a gallon of milk, and a couple of plates of pancakes — the brothers went out to their car and tossed all their throwing equipment in it — tape measure, discs, throwing shoes — and they leaned the driver’s seat forward so that A.C. could get in the back, but still he wouldn’t fit.

  He rode standing on the bumper again.. They drove to the school, to the high, windy field where they threw. From there it seemed they could see the whole Hudson Valley and the knife-cut through the trees where the river rushed, the Sacandaga melting through the mountains, and on the other side the green walls of the Adirondacks.. A.C. looked around at the new town as they drove. He thought about Lory, about how soft and light she’d been in his arms, and of how he’d been frightened by her. Riding on the back of the tiny car reminded him of being in the river, swimming up through the rapids: all that rushing force, relentless, crashing down over and around him, speeding past. Things were going by so fast. He looked around and felt dizzy at the beauty of the town.

  ·

  There was a ring in the center of the field, a flat, smooth, unpainted circle of cement, and that was where the brothers and A.C. set their things and began to dress. The brothers sat down like bears in a zoo and took their street shoes off. As they laced up their heavy leather throwing shoes, stretching and grasping their toes, they looked out at the wire fence running along the south end of the field, which was the point they tried to reach with their throws.

  A.C. put his shoes on, too, the ones they had given him, and stood up .. He felt how solid the earth was beneath him. His legs were dense and strong, and he kicked the ground a. couple of times with the heavy shoes. A.C. imagined that he could feel the earth shudder when he kicked. He jumped up and down a couple of times, short little hops, just to feel the shudder again.

  “I hope you like this,” said Jerry, still stretching, twisting his body into further unrecognizable shapes and positions. He was loosening up, his movements fluid, and to A.C. it was exactly like watching the river.

  A. C. sat down next to them and tried to do some of the stretches, but it didn’t work for him yet. He watched them for half an hour, as the blue air over the mountains and valley waned, turning to a sweet haze, a slow sort of shimmer that told A.C. it was June. Jerry was the one he most liked to watch.

  Jerry would crouch in the ring, twisted — wound up — with his eyes dosed, his mouth open, and the disc hanging back, hanging low, his knees bent. When he began to spin, it was as if some magical force were being born, something that no other force on earth would be able to stop.

  He stayed in the small circle, hopping from one foot to the other, crouched low, but with the hint of rising, and then he was suddenly at the other end of the small ring, out of room — if he went over the little wooden curb and into the grass, it would be a foul — and with no time or space left in which to spin, he shouted, brought his arm all the way around on the spin, his elbow locking straight out as he released the disc, and only then did the rest of his body react, starting with his head; it snapped back and then forward from the recoil, as if he’d first made the throw and then had a massive heart attack.

  “Wow,” said A.C., watching him unwind and recover and return, surprisingly, to a normal upright human being.

  But John and Jerry were watching the disc. It was moving so fast. There was a heavy, cutting sound when it landed, far short of the fence, and it skidded a few feet after that and then stopped, as if it had never been moving.

  ·

  Jerry threw two more times — they owned only three discs — and then the three of them, walking like gunslingers, like giants from another age, went out to get the discs. The brothers talked about the throws: what Jerry had done right, and what he had done wrong. His foot position had been a little off on the first throw. He hadn’t kept his head back far enough going into the spin of the second throw. The third throw had been pretty good; on the bounce, it had carried to the chain-link fence.

  John threw next, and then Jerry again, and then it was John’s turn once again. A.C. thought he could do it himself. Certainly that whip-spin dance, skip, hurl, and shout was a thing that was in everyone. It had to be the same way he felt when he picked up a cow and spun through the tall grass, holding it on his shoulders. When it was his turn to throw the discus, he tried to remember that, and he stepped into the ring, huffing.

  A.C.’s first throw slammed into the center of the head-high fence and shook it. John and Jerry looked at each other, trying not to feel amazed. It was what they had thought from the beginning, after all; it was as if he had always been with them.

  But A.C.’s form was spastic. It was wrong, it was nothing. He threw with his arms and shoulders — not with his legs, and not with the twist of his wide back. If he could get the spin down, the dance, he would throw it 300 feet. He would be able to throw it the length of a football field. In the discus, even 230 feet was immortality.

  Again, the brothers found themselves feeling that there was a danger of losing him — of having him disappear if they did or said the wrong thing, if they were not true and honest.

  But the way he could throw a discus! It was as if their hearts had created him. He was all strength, no finesse. They were sure they could teach him the spin-dance. The amazing thing about a bad spin, as opposed to a good one, is how ugly it looks. A good spin excites the spectators, touches them all the way down and through, makes them wish they could do it — or even more, makes them feel as if they had done it, somehow. But a bad throw is like watching a devil monster changeling being born into the world; just one more awful thing in a world of too many, and even spectators who do not know much about the sport will turn their heads away, even before the throw is completed, when they see an awkward spin. A.C.’s was, John and Jerry had to admit, the ugliest of the ugly.

  His next throw went over the fence. The one after that — before they realized what was happening, or realized it too late, as it was in the air, climbing, moving faster than any of their throws had ever gone — rose, gliding, and hit the base of the school. There was a crack! and the disc exploded into graphite shards. One second it was there, flying and heroic, and then it was nothing, just an echo.

  “A hundred and ten bucks,” Jerry said, but John cared nothing for the inconvenience it would bring them, being down to two discs, and he danced and whooped, spun around and threw imaginary discs, waved his arms and continued to jump up and down. He danced with Jerry, and then he grabbed A.C.

  “If you can learn the steps ...” John was saying, almost singing. The three men held one another’s shoulders and danced and spun across the field like children playing snap-the-whip. John and Jerry had never seen a discus thrown that far in their lives, and A.C., though he had felt nothing special, was happy because his new friends were happy, and he hoped he could make them happy again.

  Riding home on the back bumper, the air cooling his summer-damp hair and clothes, he leaned against the car and hugged it like a small child, and watched the town going past in reverse now, headed back to the Irons’ house, and he hoped that maybe he could
make them happy forever.

  The brothers bragged about him when they got home, and everyone listened, and like John and Jerry they were half surprised, but they also felt that it confirmed something, and so that part of them was anything but surprised.

  John was dating a schoolteacher named Patty. A shyeyed Norwegian, she was as tall as he was, with freckles and a slow-spreading smile. A.C. grinned just watching her, and when she saw A.C., she would laugh for no real reason, just a happy laugh. Once when John and Jerry had gone to their rooms to nap, A.C. went outside with Lindsay and Patty to practice field hockey.

  A.C. had never played any formal sports and was thrilled to be racing across the lawn, dodging the trees and the women, passing the ball along clumsily but quickly. Patty’s laughs, Lindsay’s red hair. If only he could live forever with this. He ran and ran, barefoot, back and forth in the large front yard, and they laughed all afternoon.

  ·

  On the nights when A.C. did not stay with the family, he returned to the old stone house in Vermont. Some days he would swim all the way home, starting upstream at dusk and going on into the night — turning right where the little creek entered the Sacandaga, with fish bumping into his body and jumping around him as if a giant shark had passed through. But other nights he canoed home against the rapids, having loaded boulders into the bottom of the canoe to work his shoulders and arms harder. After he got home, he tied the canoe to the low branch of a willow, leaving it bobbing in the current.

  Some nights in the farmhouse, A.C. would tie a rope around his waist and chest, attach the other end of it to one of the rafters, and climb up into the rafters and leap down, swinging like a pirate. He’d hang there, dangling in the darkness. He’d hold his arms and legs out as he spun around and around, and it would feel as if he were sinking, descending, and as if it would never stop.

  He would tell no one where he had come from. And he would forget the woman in Colorado, the one he was supposed to have married. Everyone comes from somewhere. Everyone has made mistakes, has caused injuries, even havoc. The woman had killed herself after A.C. left her; she had hanged herself.

  This is what it’s like, he’d think. This is the difference between being alive and being dead. He’d hang from the rope and spin. This is the only difference, but it’s so big.

  Sometimes he would sleep all night dangling from the rafters: spinning, a bit frightened, hanging like a question mark, only to awaken each morning as the sun’s first light filtered through the dusty east windows. The sound of the creek running past just out front, the creek that led into the river.

  ·

  There were mornings when Lory was afraid to get up. She thought it was just common depression and that it would pass with time, but some days it seemed too much. She slept as much as she could, which seemed to make it worse and worse. She tried to keep it a secret from her family, but she suspected that her brothers knew, and her mother, too. It was like drowning, like going down in chains. And she felt guilty about the anguish it would cause others.

  But her brothers! They anchored her and nourished her, they were like water passing through her gills. If they came down the hall and found her just sitting in the hallway, her head down between her knees, they — John or Jerry, or sometimes both of them — would gently pick her up and carry her outside to the yard, into the sun, and would rub her back and neck. Jerry would pretend to be a masseur with a foreign accent, would crack Lory’s knuckles one by one, counting to ten some days in German, others in Spanish or French, mixing the languages to keep her guessing, to make her pay attention. Then he would start on her toes as John continued to knead her neck muscles and her small, strong shoulders.

  “Uno, dos, trey,” Jerry would hiss, wiggling her toes. He’d make up numbers. “Petrocci, zimbosi, bambolini, crunk!” he’d mutter, and then, “The little pig, he went to the market. He wanted beef — he wanted roast beef… ”

  He’d keep singing nonsense, keep teasing her until she smiled or laughed, until he had her attention, until he’d pulled her out of that well of sadness and numbness, and he’d shake his finger at her and say, “Pay attention!” She’d smile, back in her family’s arms again, and be amazed that Jerry was only eighteen, but knew so much.

  They would lie in the grass afterward and look up at the trees, at the way the light came down, and Lory would have the thought, whenever she was happy, that this was the way she really was, the way things could always be, and that that flat, vacant stretch of nothing-feeling was the aberration, not the norm; and she wanted it always to be like that, and still, even at thirty-four, believed that it could be.

  When they were sure she was better, one of the brothers would walk to the nearest tree and wrap his arms around it, would grunt and lean hard against it, and then would begin to shake it until leaves began to fall. Lory would laugh and look up as they landed on her face and in her hair, and she would not pull them out of her hair, for they were a gift, and still John or Jerry would keep shaking the tree, as if trying to cover her with the green summer leaves, the explosion of life.

  ·

  A.C. and the brothers trained every day. When A.C. stayed at the farmhouse, each morning shortly before daylight he would get in his canoe and float all the way to Glens Falls, not ever having to paddle — just ruddering. As if following veins or arteries, he took all the right turns with only a flex of his wrist, a slight change of the paddle’s orientation in the water, and he passed beneath dappled maples, flaking sycamores, listening to the cries of river birds and the sounds of summer as he slipped into the town.

  Besides hurling the discus outside near the school, the brothers lifted weights in the school’s basement and went for long runs on the track. Each had his own goal, and each wanted A.C. to throw the unspeakable 300 feet. It would be a throw so far that the discus would vanish from sight.

  No one believed it could be done. Only the brothers believed it. A.C. was not even sure he himself believed it. Sometimes he fell down when entering his spin, trying to emulate their grace, their precision-polished whip-and-spin and the clean release, like a birth, the discus flying wild and free into the world.

  In the evenings the whole family would sit around in the den watching M*A*S*H or the movie of the week — Conan the Barbarian once — their father, Heck, sipping his gin and tonic, fresh-squeezed lime in with the ice, sitting in the big easy chair watching his huge sons sprawled on the rug, with their huge friend lying next to them. Lindsay would sit in the corner, watching only parts of the movie, spending more time watching Lory — and Lory, next to her mother on the couch, would sway a bit to her own internal rhythm, smiling, looking at the TV screen but occasionally at the brothers, and at A.C.

  The nights that A.C. stayed over, Lory made sure that he had a pillow and fresh sheets. Making love to him was somehow unimaginable, and also the greatest thought of all; and he had this silly throw to make first, this long throw with the brothers.

  Lovemaking was unthinkable — the waist-to-waist kind, anyway. If she gambled on it and lost, she would chase him away from the brothers as well as herself.

  The idea was unthinkable. But each night she and A.C. would meet upstairs in the dark, or sit on the couch in the living room, dozing that way, with Lory in his arms, curled up in his lap, her head resting against his wide chest. That was not unimaginable.

  A.C. trained all through the summer. Early in the evenings, sometimes the brothers went out looking for statues with him. Their back yard was becoming filled with statues, all of them upright just outside Lory’s and Lindsay’s windows. A.C. laid them down in the grass at daylight and covered them with tarps, but raised them again near sundown: long-ago generals, riverboat captains, composers, poets.

  Louella kept her eye on him, suspecting, and believing in her heart, that he was the soul of her lost son come back in this huge body, come home finally. She did not want him to love Lory — it seemed that already he was too close — but she did not want him to go away, either. Louella watc
hed A.C. carefully, when he could not see she was watching him. What would it have been like to have three sons? What would that third son have been like? She felt both the sweetness and the anguish of it. She could not look away.

  ·

  He had not been so happy in a long time. He was still throwing clumsily, but the discus was going farther and farther: 250, 255 feet; and then 260.

  Each was a world-record throw, but the brothers did not tell A.C. this. They told no one else, either. It was the brothers’ plot to not show him off until he was consistently throwing the astonishing 300 feet. Perhaps A.C.’s first public throw of the discus would not only set a world’s record; perhaps he’d hurl it so great a distance that no one would believe he was from this earth. Sportswriters and fans would clamor after him, chase him, want to take him away and lock him up and do tests on him, examine him. He would need an escape route, the brothers imagined, a way back to the Sacandaga River, never to be seen or heard from again ...

  The plan got fuzzy at that point. The brothers were not sure how it would go after that, and they had not yet consulted with A.C., but they were thinking that somehow Lory would figure in it.

  Certainly they had told no one, not even their mother — especially not her.

  A.C. was euphoric as the summer moved on. When he was back at his farmhouse, he often went out to the pasture and lifted a cow and danced around with it as if it were stuffed or inflated. Or in Glens Falls he’d roll the brothers’ little Volkswagen gently over on its back, and then he would grab the bumper and begin running in circles with it, spinning it like a top in the deep grass. The muscles in his cheeks tensed and flexed as he spun, showing the most intricate striations. His veins would be visible just beneath his temples. A.C. would grin, and John and Jerry thought it great fun, too, and they’d get on either end and ride the upside-down car like a playground toy as A.C. continued to spin it.