by Peter Heller
Ken had been dispatched hurriedly, Jack was sure. Probably right where he had been apprehended after seeing whatever he had seen—running down the creek, down the only route he knew well. Because he was just a fishing guide like Jack, who could read a river but was maybe not so good at reading men. And Jack bet it had happened just the night before he had arrived, and they’d covered Ken fast in the spruce duff against the smell, and had meant to deal with him properly on Jack’s first night but something had come up. It was Alison! He remembered now how she had said that she truly liked to walk in the middle of the night and listen and look for night birds, and had done so on her first night there. She had probably almost walked right into them.
He thought of the Takagis. They had not been in the spa house or the massage cabin; they had been coming from upstream and they did not look at all happy.
He walked back up to his cabin slowly. Play ball. He’d go retrieve his .30-.30 from behind the tree where he’d hidden it and bring it up now to the main house and let them lock it in the safe or whatever. He put on baggy shorts and a T-shirt and found his flip-flops in a side pocket of his duffel bag and wriggled his feet into them. It was the first really hot afternoon and he might as well go casual. Look relaxed. Look the opposite of a guy who had just decided he had hardly anything to lose.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The rifle was leaning against the tree where he left it, so he slung it over his back and walked up through patches of shade to the main house. A late August afternoon in the mountains, hot in the sun and where the trees threw their shadows it was almost chilly. He loved this, this time of year. When he wasn’t guiding he wet-waded in just shorts and let the cold shaded bends raise goose bumps and then he’d round a corner into full sun and the sudden heat would smooth them out. He liked getting back to his truck and pulling on a sweater as the sun went over the ridge. Within a month the aspen would be turning and spreading gold down the shoulders of the ridges and up high there might be a flurry of first snow.
The way things ought to be. A turning of seasons and a natural acceptance of life pulling back and many things passing. There was a kind of relief in that, and a sharp beauty. Whose power had much to do with one’s ability to hold the losses it augured.
That’s what he thought as his flip-flops crunched the dry needles fallen in the track. That there was something unnatural going on here. He wasn’t sure what it was, but he could feel it, as strongly as he could feel the wind that blew upstream at sundown. People here were trying to subvert the natural order somehow and it was twisting the energies of the place into a vortex where the pressure dropped.
When he was at college he took a course on Moby-Dick from Marilynne Robinson, the great novelist and scholar. She must have been eighty, but still vigorous, and she had the light in her eye of someone who has been looking for the truest things every minute of her life. She liked him for some reason—Jack thought that maybe she had never taught a kid from rural Colorado who had read more on his own than most of the other students—and she invited him for tea at her house across the river. It was a small yellow-painted clapboard on the far side of a Vermont village whose main street was the county road that wound over the shoulder of a wooded mountain to the next town. They sat in metal spring rockers in the garden under a hummingbird feeder, and they ended up talking about the warming that was devastating the forests in Jack’s valley at home. And Jack rocked forward and squeezed his glass and said, “What is evil? What do you think it is?”
She didn’t think more than a second. She tossed her loose gray hair off the side of her face and said, “Impediment to Being.”
That simple. Jack had thought about it ever since.
He stepped up onto the porch and turned to survey the grounds. From here he could see five of the cabins set into the trees, dappled in afternoon sunlight, and a corner of the lodge below, and the parking area to his right. Beautiful layout. Glorious, really. He saw a golf cart bumping up the sandy road. It was Ana, the short housekeeper, shuttling a stack of folded towels and sheets from somewhere to somewhere. She glanced toward the office as she passed and recognized him and her face lit with a smile. She waved and he waved back. Tres, tres, nueve, tres, he thought and shrugged. Then he went through the screen door of the office cabin.
A woman he’d never seen before was behind the pine counter. She was maybe twenty-eight, athletic, with the stylish blond bob and reflexive bright smile of a real estate agent. How Jack thought of her, anyway. She wore a periwinkle linen shirt and a black Voormi wool vest, and when her smile had relaxed enough to allow speech she said, “Jack, hi. Kelly. Brr, it looks hot, but it’s actually chilly out of the sun.”
“What I was just thinking.”
“I see you brought me something. Good.”
“Yep, seems to have caused a lot of brain damage. Apologies.”
“Well.”
The smile turned on again. “A place like this doesn’t run without clear rules.”
Jack didn’t say anything. “Clear” is one way of putting it, he thought. “Here,” he said. He unslung the carbine, held the barrel to the floor, jacked the lever, and put a finger in the breach to double check that it wasn’t loaded and eased down the hammer with his thumb. Still aiming at the varnished planks, he pulled the trigger for a dry fire to take the pressure off the spring and laid it on the counter.
“Would you like a receipt?” she said.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Okay, just a sec. I’ll just put this in the closet.”
She took a key out of a drawer and walked into the next room, which served as a fly shop and swag store and, apparently, as an armory. Kelly, he thought. Someone like her, does she know? Whatever there is to know?
On the counter was a teak business card holder. Her card said “Kelly Koplinger, Guest Services and Marketing.” He knew people like her, or thought he did. She operated in a simple universe of gain and loss, cause and effect, pleasure and pain. Or wanted to. If you ran ten kilometers, you maintained your fitness level, and if you pushed yourself and made better time than the day before you could add a tick to the plus column. If you signed up ten guests, your fifteen percent commission would be so much, and would put your August earnings up twelve percent year over year. Like that. The birds you saw on your run or what went on behind the closed doors of the lodge never dented your consciousness because you had erected an impermeable membrane, in order to keep a clean focus on the things that mattered.
He knew when he thought like this he was being terribly judgmental and probably sophomoric. Because nobody was simple. Nobody on earth. The four chambers of the heart and all the crenellations in the human brain made certain of it. And it was pain that drove a desire for a simple calculus, and pain was infinitely manifold. He also knew that in the gaps between all those firing neurons was plenty of space for the divine and nobody, really, could protect against it.
Hell, maybe she was an expert bird watcher. Maybe she practiced the viola every evening. He had a hard time imagining Kelly sleeping so well at night knowing trafficking or murder was a part of the business plan of the place she worked.
He also saw just over the counter, on the high desk behind it, a black telephone in its cradle. Jack stepped out onto the porch to wait. He looked through the aspen to the little parking area and front gate and saw Cody walk to his truck and climb in. Jack shuddered and looked away.
* * *
•
On his own porch he tried to read. This was the porch he had seen just a few days ago and thought, I could sit here for the rest of my life and watch the river. How much could change in a few days. He sat in one of the rockers and put the book in his lap. It was The Orchard: Poems of Li Xue, one of his favorite collections of poetry. It was by a poet of eighth-century China who had gone into self-exile with her daughter and written some of the most exquisite poems of the T’ang Dynasty. She w
as an aficionado of loss and also of nature, which Jack could relate to right now. He closed his eyes and listened to the wind harassing the pines overhead and the throb of the creek below. He felt the sturdy little book in his hands and let his thumb ruffle the deckled pages until it found the last poem by feel. He spread the book and opened his eyes. The last poem was called “Winter Brook.”
When I climb above the brook flying from purple cliffs,
Through the wind in pines, the lonely bell,
And cross the creek, and climb
into the streaming mists, and past them,
and hear the geese descending in clouds—
When I find myself humming “Sail Returning from Distant Shore”
and feel the cold breath of the snows in the pass,
then I will stop before going over and turn
and I will raise this empty wooden cup to you, my dearest companion:
How many cups of springwater have we shared? How many cups of wine?
Tonight I will be so far away. We will not light the candles together.
Tomorrow only the sky and the mountains will be between us.
He read it, and then he repeated it aloud. As if he were talking to his best friend, Wynn, as if Wynn were sitting in the other rocker three feet away. The wooden cup is empty, and he is going over the pass. It was about more than saying one more goodbye, it was about death. Jack knew it. There was no turning around on that mountain trail. And it was about love, and a shared life of friendship, and what that means when facing the end.
He was not surprised that a tear hit the page, nor that he spread it on the paper with his thumb as he had before. Wynn went over without time to say goodbye, to raise any kind of cup, to tell his mother or his little sister, Jess, that he loved them, to thank his father for the times they boiled maple sap all night together in the sugar house. Wynn’s eyes looked at Jack with an empty terror as he bled out, then looked past him to the sky. Was it his fault? Jack’s? Yes. They had made an unspoken vow to take care of each other first, a vow they renewed with each foray into whitewater or into the mountains, and he had not done it. He had put his distrust of strangers before the life of his friend.
Jack’s uncle Lloyd was one of his favorite people. He was his father’s older brother, and they split their own parents’ ranch down the middle, so Lloyd lived a mile down the valley and the brothers ran their two herds together in the mountains, and helped each other irrigate and hay. Where Pop was reticent and rarely spoke unless circumstances required, Lloyd was the born storyteller whose embellishments were often the point of a tale, and who seemed to live two lives at once: the one on the ground, where cows were fed and fish were caught, and the one a few feet off the turf, where the swirling mists of Lloyd’s imagination would add color and cadence and carry it into a retelling that was never without laughter. It awed Jack. But what Jack loved even more was that when it came to hunting and fishing, or the accomplishments of others, the important details remained true. The trout never grew longer, the antlers never got wider. Pop said that Lloyd had once told him that a great storyteller had to know when never to lie. “Hunting and fishing’s so much fun,” he said, “only a pissant needs to lie about it.” Jack could see that in all his father’s dealings with Lloyd—sharing the lease, covering for each other in calving time, and with irrigation—Pop trusted his brother more than any other person on earth. Jack knew that Lloyd made life more fun, it was that simple, and without ever compromising the dead seriousness of it. That was a person to ride the river with.
One thing Lloyd repeated was “Leave no man behind.”
“Or cow,” he would add, if they were riding after the herd and searching for a stray. And he wasn’t joking. Uncle Lloyd had gone straight to the recruiter in Kremmling after high school and signed up and spent the better part of eight years as an Army Ranger. He had done a tour in Afghanistan and one somewhere he couldn’t talk about. Jack knew that what Lloyd meant was more than a warrior’s creed, it was a reminder that we are entrusted with certain souls, and that we are beholden in a broader sense, as people, to take care of others.
Jack had failed Wynn that way, and had not been able to help his mother. Had precipitated her death. Was he broken? Maybe. Den or Jensen clearly thought so. Didn’t matter. What mattered was that he was not going to do it again. This river would not take the life of his client, or the lives of children for that matter. Ken had mentioned kids, and Jack had seen one on the road, and now he needed to know.
* * *
•
He heard the crunch of pine needles and Alison came around the corner of the cabin and leaned over the porch and knocked three times on the post.
“Come up,” he said. “You’re not dressed for fishing.”
“Nope.” She stepped up, put her hands on the hips of her jeans, and surveyed the view—from the wooded wall of the canyon on the other side of the river that was catching the late sun, and down to the dark pool and the flurry of whitewater and the slice of left-turning bend. “Good,” she said. “A person could sit here a good long time.”
“What I thought when I first arrived.” He nodded to the other rocker. She sat and creaked back in the chair and gave it a few test tips. She said, “If I were in a summer dress this would be a country song for sure.”
“Kinda.”
“Out of sorts?” she said.
“A little.”
“Me, too. Why I wasn’t up for fishing.”
“Want a cup of tea?”
“Sure.”
He pushed up out of the chair and laid the book on the tree stump that served as side table. He opened the screen door and eased it closed behind him so it wouldn’t clap. From the porch she heard the blurred notes of the kettle filling, the scrape of a steel striker, the double knock of ceramic mugs on wood. If she closed her eyes she could hear the music in almost anything. And everyone moved to a different beat and a different key, and so many used words to try to cover the score, but Jack didn’t. She was beginning to get accustomed to Jack’s rhythms and she liked them, a lot. She picked up the book beside her and read the cover and opened it to a random page.
After Li Po and Li Shangyin
The moon doesn’t keep track of how many cups I drink.
She bobs along on the river of stars unconcerned with my sorrow.
I once had a beau whose voice touched me like falling blossoms.
We were just kids and we couldn’t wait to make a life together.
We got married and the moon sailed behind us.
What happened? If you came through the gate this evening
I would tell you how the nights have gone silent without your laughter.
I will never again hear the sound of your horse clapping up the road.
I want so much to tell you how I remember you tonight—
You are my first and only love.
It will have to wait until we meet again on the far side of Star River.
Until then, let’s not forget each other.
She shut the book and closed her eyes again. Why did the gentle lines hit her like a blow? The innocence in them, she thought. Distilled and pure. All she was ever trying to do with her music: find something true and distill it, and song had always been the best way. For her. Love was another way, wasn’t it? But it never held still long enough. No more than the rush of the river below or the trout that wriggled out of her hands. But for this poet it had, at least on that night of moon and stars and wine.
She could really use a drink. One of Ginnie’s mojitos would hit the spot right now. That would have to wait till dinner.
She heard the spring on the screen door yaw and she set the book back on the stump and took the cup of tea Jack handed to her. She could smell it almost like a campfire, Lapsang souchong. He sat and cricked the cane of the chair. She smiled
thanks but he didn’t see. He was letting his eyes rove over the opposite slope.
“I’ve been thinking,” he said.
“You have?” This time when she said it, it wasn’t coy.
“Why would they have a high security fence, arms at the top facing inward, and a big steel gate with code, and dogs downstream and shooters upstream if…?”
“If what?”
“If there’s the whole side of the canyon open to the north. And why would they have all that stuff anyway?”
“For celebrities, right? And billionaires. Billionaire’s Mile. Isn’t that what Shay said? To keep the paparazzi, et cetera, out?”
“Yeah, maybe.”
She took a short sip of the tea and set it next to the book. Still too hot. “Good,” she said. “With milk and honey, my favorite. Like liquid smoke.”
“Me, too.”
“But what?” she said.
“Something bad happened to Ken. Cameras everywhere, even over my bed. ‘Merc.’ What’s a merc? Ken said he saw one and they saw him. Mercenaries.” Jack blew on the tea. “I bet they’re wearing black.” He sipped, set the mug in his lap. “And the Takagis are the least addicted-seeming people I’ve ever seen. He looked guilty asking for a beer at lunch.”
* * *
•
They sipped their tea in silence. He had brought out a spoon and set it on the stump and she picked it up and fished out the tea bag and wound the string around it to squeeze the hot liquid out of it. The first swallows appeared in the canyon and flashed green as they hit a swath of sunlight.
“So did you come to any conclusions?” she said, finally.
“Yes.”
She tipped the chair forward and turned.