The Guide

by Peter Heller

  Kurt was generations in the valley and knew the country as well as anyone, and Jack was sure he had a self-extraction plan, and that’s probably what was now occupying the three men.

  Carefully they retraced their steps. It was a game trail more than anything and they lost it and refound it again and again in the dark. They held each other’s hands for balance. The sky broke open and the moon floated in streaming clouds, lighting the night enough that they could finally see the aisles between the trees.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  He went home. He helped Pop put up the last of the hay. In the afternoons, summer heat lay over the fields and the grasshoppers jumped ahead of the swather and by late afternoon the leaves of the cottonwoods gleamed the way they only do at the end of August and a fall cool settled into the valley. By nightfall the cold raised mist off the river. Sometimes in the evening he saddled Duke and they rode up onto the skirt of the Gore Range and looked north to the Never Summers and he could see the flush of gold spreading over the highest ridges as the aspen turned.

  The home phone rang off the hook with calls from journalists and news producers and studio execs from around the world. They were trying to pump up the story and make him a hero and finally Pop unplugged the phone from the wall. In late September he was subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury in the US District Court for the District of Colorado and he drove down to Denver and gave testimony for two days. In the courtroom he felt like he was moving through molasses and he testified in a flat monotone and the judge told him more than once to take his time. He didn’t see anyone else from the lodge.

  At home, he and Pop didn’t talk much. Sometimes at dinner they turned on the news and there was rarely a night without a Vampires of Taylor River story. Pop would say, “You sure?” and Jack would nod. “Kinda gotta see how it plays out.” But he would stop his fork in midair and watch fascinated as if the newscasters were describing badly a dream that had meant much to him and that he could only partly process or recall.

  The day the shit went down an enterprising young reporter for the local TV station in Crested Butte heard the frantic chatter on the police scanner and loaded the channel’s one camera into her vintage Land Cruiser and raced up the Taylor Canyon. She followed two ambulances through the big gate and got there in time to see two Jet Ranger helicopters in Kreutzer’s field and an FBI SWAT team ushering dazed guests out of the lodge and other agents and medics bringing the still drug-hazed kids from their bunker. In the footage they were again wearing the immodest hospital gowns, again walking as if windblown, and while Kayla Black was filming, two collapsed on the flagstones. Jack was told later that after Alison blew the door, and the firefight, and all the players with guns tore out of the compound, the team of golf cart drivers and employees at the main office had rushed up and herded the kids back to their bunker in the trees and told the guests to stay in their rooms until either a discreet extraction plan or a resumption of service was organized.

  The footage was chaotic. There weren’t enough ambulances, so the body of the operator next to the exploded truck was gurneyed to the back of a sheriff’s department SUV and the big doctor who was out cold but whose vitals were strong was carried out to the back seat. They used the ambulances for the kids, four of whom were deemed critical. Kayla was fearless. She shoved the camera in the faces of the clients, who were so disoriented they forgot for critical seconds to cover them, and the media recognized at least half. She shrugged into an EMT’s windbreaker that had been thrown over an ambulance mirror and dashed into the blown-open door of the house, holding the camera low and covered with her own jacket. And she had followed the commotion down the stairs and filmed chilling footage of the Vampire Pit and the Blood Chairs, as some outlets called them, with the clear tubes dangling and still half-filled with dark blood and urine-colored plasma and the recliners for the donors with the thick straps still hanging, looking like nothing so much as execution chairs.

  After a few minutes, Pop would turn and study his son, whose forkful of food might be still halfway to his mouth. Only someone who knew Pop well could have read the pain, and if a tear ever ran from Pop’s eye Jack didn’t see it. Because Jack was transfixed, frozen. Sometimes—often—on the broadcast there would be snapshots of Jack and Alison: a photo of Jack from a canoe club trip in college, of him holding a paddle, smiling shyly, with a canoe beached on the bank of some river; Alison in full concert passion, gripping a mic and singing, and then always one of her holding a fly rod, taken with her father when she was a kid. Then mug shots of Kurt Jensen, Miles Bottini, and Adam Taggart, who were now on the FBI’s Most Wanted list. And of the corrupt sheriff and deputy, who had driven back right into their own department’s road block and been arrested. Pop would look at his son and say gently, “Enough?” and Jack would nod and Pop would pick up the remote and turn it off.

  Once, as they ate in silence and looked west out the big window at a reef of dark rain squall blanketing the mountains and moving up the valley—the first rain of the fall and well needed—Pop said, “Jack? You did good. Remember that. You saved the lives of many people.” The boy, anyway, Jack thought. They had rushed the unconscious kid to the clinic, from which he had been helivaced to St. Anthony’s in Denver. He had survived.

  “You saved people,” his father said again. “You did.”

  Jack did not turn but put his hands flat on the table and looked down the valley at the veils of rain. They were curtains of night gray that curved against the wind and in them it was almost as if he could see the lives of his mother and of his best friend, their spirits, coming to him. It was not as if they lived, exactly, but maybe they were not lost forever to the great dark. That they endured in the weather and the seasons. The first gusts moved in the tops of the trees along the river and he cried. He let himself. It was the first time he had cried in the presence of his father since he was eleven and for the first time since then his father got up and came to him and held his shaking son.

  EPILOGUE

  She clambered along the boulders of the bank and stepped onto slab rock that sloped to the water and she waded to her knees and began to cast. The current was running low and clear. The Little Pigeon River ran out of the wooded ravines of the eastern Smokies, out of a wild country of cliffed gorges and dense rhododendron and mixed hardwoods of oak and ash and basswood, and thick forests of mute pines. This morning in early November the stream floated the leaves torn off in last night’s squall. They were every color of fire—yellows, burnt reds, crimson—and the frost still lay in the shadows, and shreds of white mist clung to the ridges.

  In a patch of sunlight a hatch of mayflies drifted off the water, and she casted up to the edge of a dark pool behind a slanting boulder and let the dry fly bobble down the seam. She wanted this. It was more than that, she needed it like food. Her rage-fueled song “Billionaire’s Mile” had made it to the top of the charts in October, but it had brought her no peace.

  Now she hummed. She had another song rising. It was half-formed, had not found its words yet, but it flowed out of an ache in her chest, out of images of cruelty and a pressure of hard loss, and of heartbreak, too. It was about letting go, which was in sympathy with the movements of the cast and the lengthening of the line. It needed to be sung and she would let it gather in her like a storm.

  She had not seen any rises, but truthfully she didn’t care if she caught fish. She just wanted to move against the fall current, smell the sweetness of turning leaves, and work the rhythm of the casts.

  She was focused and she was singing. At first she did not hear the bird. The pitched call. And then it rose and carried with the wind upstream. She stopped humming and tipped her head and listened. It was a whistle. A Carolina wren. One of her favorites. The call came in threes and she let her fly fall to the water and she held herself very still. She listened. All the loss and grief rose up inside her, out of the places from which her own song had come. The wren crie
d. Alison turned in the river and the sun was on her face and she closed her eyes. There is nothing better than this, she whispered to herself. You try. Try to believe it.

  When she opened her eyes she saw a fisherman at the bend. He was far away and backlit but she recognized the way he held the rod, the cadence of the casts. Jack? she thought. My beautiful friend. It’s Jack! The wren’s whistles were his. Three then three. He was fishing upstream. His line caught the sun with every cast. And the rhythm of it, and the way he moved with care and without haste, seemed as natural a part of the morning as a deer stepping to water.

  Acknowledgments

  Many people lent energy and insight to the making of this book. I am profoundly grateful to my first readers—Kim Yan, Lisa Jones, Helen Thorpe, Becky Arnold, and Jeff Streeter. And also to Jason Hicks, Bobby Reedy, Mike Reedy, Stephen Scaringe, Isaac Savitz, Willy Kistler, Karen Hammer, Jim Lefevre, and Landis Arnold for their invaluable expertise. Thanks to Adam Duerk, Lamar Simms, and Sascha Steinway for a better sense of the law. And to my doctor friends Melissa Brannon and Mitchell Gershten. Thanks to Donna Gershten for a certain voice. And to Maris Dyer for following through.

  This book would not have been written without the guidance and encouragement of my extraordinary agent, David Halpern, and my brilliant editor, Jenny Jackson. You were both with me from the first pages, and to you both I raise a glass.

  To everyone above: I am humbled by your generosity, wit, and wisdom. It is an honor and a privilege to know you all.

  a note about the author

  Peter Heller is the national best-selling author of The River, Celine, The Painter, and The Dog Stars. The Painter was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and won the prestigious Reading the West Book Award, and The Dog Stars has been published in twenty-two languages to date. Heller is also the author of four nonfiction books, including Kook: What Surfing Taught Me About Love, Life, and Catching the Perfect Wave, which was awarded the National Outdoor Book Award for Literature. He holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in poetry and fiction and lives in Denver, Colorado.

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