by John Larison
Without a thought, he reached in and pulled them free and tossed them to the floor—but the ring came out too and bounced, then rolled across wood floor. Caroline watched it until it came to rest against the far wall.
He hadn’t bought a diamond or even a ring with a setting, just a band of white gold with the wavy contours of a riffle. He’d designed it himself and paid three trips’ worth of profit to have it crafted, and now it was sitting there in obvious view.
“What’s that?” Caroline hadn’t taken her eyes from it.
“What?”
“That.”
A stick of butter sizzled in the frying pan. Dylan wailed. Samson barked out front. And Caroline pushed off the couch. She was at the ring before Hank could stand. “It’s—”
“It’s beautiful,” Caroline held it to the light. She wasn’t much for jewelry, owning only a couple necklaces and a few pairs of earrings, none of which she wore more than once a year. But this ring, it was exactly her style.
Besides the wavy riffles cut into the band, he’d also had an inscription engraved. She was holding it to the light when he plucked it from her hand.
“It’s custom,” Caroline said. “You had it made?”
His brain was still hog-tied by the hangover, and he said the first thing that came to him, in a whisper. “It’s for Annie.”
“For me?” Annie said, leaving the kitchen. “You got me a present?” It made sense: She was a jewelry person, she was wearing three rings now and a pair of small earrings. He took her hand and slipped the ring onto two fingers before finding it fit on her thumb. “I was saving it as a surprise.”
“Holy shit.” Annie held it to the light. “I love the design. What are those? Waves?”
“Riffles,” Caroline said. “It looks great on you. Hank, you’ve got an eye.”
And Annie smiled and kissed his cheek and lifted the ring again to the light and kissed him one more time. “I love it. And it fits too. How did you know?”
“Luck.”
When the meal was ready, they carried their heavy plates outside into the cool morning. From the height of the sun, Hank knew it was between 9:30 and 10 o’clock, midday for a fishing guide.
They sat in lawn chairs and ate slowly at first, the pace increasing as the churning seas of their bellies settled and became placid and trustworthy again.
“You know your cures,” Hank said.
“Trial and error,” Annie said, while extending her arm to get a look at the ring from afar.
Caroline said, “My remedy is the hot springs.”
Annie jumped at the idea. Sometimes she was the same little girl he remembered.
Caroline poked him in the shoulder. “You two should get a quick soak. Before the day gets too hot.”
He argued they all should go, but Caroline insisted on staying and spending some time with the dogs. “I’ve been neglectful.” But really, Hank knew, she was trying to give them some space, trying to give Hank a chance.
And so Hank and Annie drove up the Forest Service road to the top of the ridge, and followed a spur down the other side to the grove of ponderosa pine in a hanging basin. At the dead end, they parked and followed the rarely walked trail down to the oval hole in the earth, a black pool of steaming water. Echo Basin Spring it was called, by the few dozen locals who knew it existed.
Hank turned his back while Annie stripped to a bathing suit and tiptoed in. “This is perfect!” Her voice ricocheted from the cliffs. “It’s boiling!”
Annie told a story of a hot springs she and Thad visited in Costa Rica, how they’d been soaking, just the two of them, in this large stone pool when a lone man appeared from the woods. He was tall and tattooed and spoke perfect English. He waded into the pool, strangely close to Annie given all the room, and began explaining the ins and outs of critiquing coffee, which he claimed was his career. “International publications,” he bragged. It wasn’t long before he was talking exclusively to Annie. “Thad was so anxious all he could do was chuckle. That’s how you can tell Thad is nervous.” Thad kept chuckling as the man slipped his hand onto Annie’s knee and she smacked him in the nose. “Blood was just pouring out, and the guy was thrashing around, shouting something about never being able to taste coffee again, and Thad just kept chuckling. The whole scene was so Woody Allen.”
This was half of what a father wanted to hear: his daughter defending herself. The other half left him queasy. “Why didn’t Thad step up?”
“He’s not like that,” she said. “He’ll talk circles around just about anybody, but physically he’s as aggressive as a kitty.”
Hank thought of Danny, how he would’ve ground that coffee prick to Turkish grade dust. He asked her where they’d gone together last night, if she remembered him as a boy.
She evaded the questions. “His kids are so sweet.” And then she was asking about the pictographs on the cliffs surrounding the pool. Stick figures of people with bows, of elk, of fish. “Are they telling a story? Is that the point?”
“Sure.” Hank turned and studied them for the first time in years. That’s when he noticed the slab of unweathered rock, the chisel marks at its top and bottom, where someone had cracked free one of the images. Stolen it. Given how few people knew about this place, he had a pretty good idea who was to blame. Walter had a thing for Ipsynihian artifacts. He had a vast collection of obsidian arrowheads, crumbling reed baskets, and leather bags that left a powder on your fingers if you touched them, not to mention the darkest and most distressing item of all: a human skull.
“Why would someone take it?” Annie said.
To Walter, this collection was a show of admiration for the valley’s first people. No one spoke with more fervor about their accomplishments. He spent his winter months reading pioneer journals and studying anthropological records, and he could give a full account of the linguistic history of the Ipsynihians, all the way back to their ancestors in what would become British Columbia. “Just think,” Walter often said, “if somebody had cared back in 1880, if somebody had even tried to record their stories, imagine all we’d know about this place.”
“Did you and Mom ever come here?”
“Once,” Hank said. He remembered the day vividly, though he wished he didn’t. “I was trying to impress her.”
“Did it work?”
“I don’t think I ever impressed your mother.”
“Of course you did,” Annie said. “Tell me about that day.”
Hank tried to change the subject, but Annie insisted. So he told her how he’d come up the day before and stashed candles and wine and a bouquet of foxglove. How he’d written her a silly love poem and tied it with monofilament to the bouquet. The mono had actually been two sections bound together by what he considered the purest of bonds, the blood knot. “Ten-pound test, because it perfectly balances strength and suppleness.” He remembered every detail; pain had a way of extending a memory’s half-life.
“Sounds like a lot of effort.”
Hank smoothed the water with his hand, and thought about what Caroline had advised that morning. He took a chance. “I asked her to marry me. Right here. About where you’re sitting.” It was just days after they discovered she was pregnant.
“Seriously?” Annie asked. “But you guys never married.”
He had stashed the ring in the pool and come up with it after a dive. She was reading the poem he’d written, and when she turned around, he was holding the ring in his fingers. He said her full name, said he wanted to be with her for as long as the pictographs had watched this pool. “She said no.”
Annie was watching him, and he smiled at her to show that it meant nothing, that this rejection hadn’t been that big of a deal. “It wasn’t that we didn’t love each other. It was the time. We were raised when marriage was about subordination, about ownership. None of our friends were getting married. It was an act of rebellion. We were a generation of rebellion. Your mother especially. It made sense why she said no.”
But at t
he time, it hadn’t made any sense, and the rejection devastated him. To him, marriage was the logical and ethical precursor to children. When she said no, he took it as a sign of their bond’s frailty, of its temporality. A square knot in two-pound test. To him, it meant Rosemary was thinking of the little baby as hers, not theirs. That she was already leaving him.
Rosemary’s refusal had been as gentle as such a rejection could be. It was compassionate and thoroughly reasoned. And yet its mere fact caused Hank to begin severing his emotional ties and to start retreating within himself, extricating himself really from what they had been creating. The authenticity of their intimacy, the very sincerity that so fueled his love for her, began to wither: He was hedging his bet.
Already a prominent figure in his life, the river became his most intimate partner, maybe the only one. Only on the river could he fully detach from the protective mechanisms he now spent so much energy maintaining with Rosemary. Only on the river could he let his guard down and revel in the pleasures of unbridled connection.
“It hurt you though, didn’t it?” Annie was watching him.
“Sure,” he said. “But she was right, I guess. A divorce would have been ugly, and expensive.”
Annie laughed, though without a shred of humor. She turned away, as if she were looking carefully at the surrounding trees. “I think I’ve had too much hot water.”
They climbed from the pool and dried and dressed, and Annie asked, “Do you ever feel like you’re repeating somebody else’s life?”
Her eyes were wet and she was biting the inside of her cheek, a nervous habit of her mother’s. He thought about hugging her, but instead pulled on his shoes. “What is it?”
She found a rock and sat. “I shouldn’t have married Thad. I didn’t want to marry Thad. I loved him and didn’t want to hurt him. But I don’t want to be married to him.”
“Oh.” A surprise that left him unsure of what to say, or what to do with his hands. He tucked them in his pockets.
“He’s generous, and caring and kind, but I don’t want to be coupled right now. I don’t want to be tied down by somebody else’s expectations. I don’t want to be responsible for someone else’s happiness. It’s too much. It’s not healthy. It doesn’t make any sense, practically or philosophically. I should have said no.”
He understood. He understood as he’d come to understand Rosemary. The coupled life would interfere with all she imagined for herself. She’d be forced to make concessions, and in the end, she’d be less the person she had intended for herself—she’d live less of her own life. But he also understood as he’d come to understand himself. He knew just how thin and fragile these youthful visions of the life to come were. He knew how quickly the life-to-come became the life-back-then, how suddenly ambition became acquiescence. And he understood how lonely the free life truly was. “You might want a person later. Life becomes heavier.”
And strangely, he suddenly felt something for Thad, something new, something opposite of the resentment he’d been feeling since he learned of their marriage. He saw Thad as a boy eager to grasp the life he’d imagined for himself, even if that life wasn’t ready to be lived, even if he wasn’t ready to live it. The term son-in-law now fit even though Hank had never met the man and had only seen two pictures; Thad felt sonlike.
Annie smiled despite the tear sliding down her cheek. “I feel most lonely when I’m with him.”
She folded up against Hank’s chest like she had when she was young, and he remembered what his hands were for; they wrapped around her shoulders and rubbed at her goose bumps. “You came here to see if you can live without him?”
“No,” she said, “this trip isn’t about him. I came to learn you, Daddy.”
Daddy. It was the first time she’d called him that in decades, and it fractured him wide open. Daddy: he’d been one once and maybe he could be one again. He kissed her forehead, and blinked through his own tears, and said, “You feel lonely with him?”
“Do you think I’m a bad person?” she asked. “Do you think I’ve done a bad thing?”
He didn’t know shit about good and bad, but he knew she had done no wrong. “As long as you listen to yourself, Riffle, as long as you don’t compromise yourself.”
She didn’t say another word, and only because of that silence did he realize he had called her by the wrong name.
She took a step away and looked up the trail and wiped at her eye as if coming awake. Finally she said, “But what about other people? Sure, listen to yourself, but sometimes that means compromising some else’s future. Right? Have you never thought of it that way?”
He didn’t know what she was getting at, but he had the distinct feeling that he’d done wrong. “Sorry, it’s an old habit.” He’d meant using the name Riffle.
But she turned from him. She cleared her throat. She pointed the way they’d come. “I wonder what Caroline is up to.”
Chapter Eighteen
ANNIE WAS NEEDED at work. “Telecommuting,” she called it. A lawsuit had been filed and she needed to prepare for a series of conference calls. Hank made her a pot of coffee, a sandwich, and left to drive upriver and chat with Walter. As he left, she thanked him while holding the phone to her ear.
He’d decided long ago that he wouldn’t tell her everything, he just couldn’t. But he’d told her parts that he’d never told anyone else—even Caroline didn’t know that he’d once proposed to Rosemary—and in that telling, he’d found a surprising release, like a tree leaning in him had finally fallen to rest.
The ring wouldn’t be a problem. He would just order another one for Caroline, and when he admitted what had happened that morning, Caroline would laugh, and that would help relax any awkwardness. He didn’t have much cash left, he’d spent most of his reserve on updating the house for Annie’s arrival, so he would pay on credit. But no big deal, this expense was worth a little debt.
He started the truck and pulled left on River Road.
The missing pictograph had gotten under his skin. The skull was one thing; it was spooky for sure, but it was still just a material object, something long on its way to decomposition. The pictograph on the other hand was alive; it contained the fragment of a living story, and without that image, the tale told on those cliffs was incomplete. Caroline would see it just like Hank did, and so he hadn’t told her about it, worrying that she might hold it against Walter.
But there was more to talk about than just that pictograph. Cherry Creek Timber was again lobbying to cut, or “salvage” as they called it, the forest burned during last summer’s Williams Creek fire. The drainage was home to a small but lingering population of winter steelhead, and cutting the fragile hillsides would require some long-closed roads be reopened and regraveled. Even if every precaution was taken, the cutting operation would further destabilize the hillsides and dump sediment over the spawning grounds. The only benefit to the logging, as far as Hank could deduce, was to Cherry Creek’s bottom line, and the handful of men paid a dirt-low wage to do the actual work.
Business had long been doing all it could to fuck up the watershed. Long-term damage for short-term profit. And Hank was, unfortunately, used to the stomachache the steady barrage of logging and mining caused. But this plan was different. It was more sweeping, more potentially harmful, and something about its premise, something about that word salvage. Such bullshit. After learning of the proposal, he’d lost his cool and thrown a glass across the house. It shattered, and Annie had called from the other room, “Everything all right?”
Salvage. All lies and misdirections. On one level, the word assumed that trees left dead and standing in the forest were wasted. They needed to be rescued, otherwise they would be worthless. Which, of course, was simply crap. Dead and standing trees were an essential component of a healthy forest, home to all manner of bird and insect life. And once they fell, many would find their way into the creek bottom, providing refuge for all species of fish. But more generally, the dead trees acted as reservoirs
of nutrients for future generations of flora and fauna, nutrients that would be stolen if the trees were to be cut and trucked to a mill.
The word salvaged. It encapsulated all that was wrong with how people had come to think of the natural world. As if the trees, the minerals, the animals were there for our benefit, for our immediate gain. But weren’t we just another player in this system? Might we be here for their benefit too?
Walter had long argued that the old division between nature as resource and humans as resource extractors was hogwash. But so was the new division between nature as beauty and humans as corruptor. The answer, Walter figured, was in the destruction of silly divisions in general, starting with the most flawed and dangerous of them all, the lie of “natural” versus “artificial.” People were too quick to term human actions and human products as “artificial” and any action or product of an ecosystem, planet, or galaxy as “natural.” But “ain’t a human a natural critter too? Just as natural as an ape or deer or steelhead anyway. Anything that natural critter does is ‘natural,’ am I right? So stop thinking of us as outside of the ‘natural’ and start thinking of us as part of the ‘natural,’ and well that’d just about change everything, now wouldn’t it? Good luck finding a fool dim enough to ‘salvage’ his own toes.”
But how would Walter justify “salvaging” that pictograph?
*
WALTER WASN’T HOME, but his door wasn’t locked either, and so Hank let himself in, as Walter would surely do if waiting at Hank’s house. He poured himself a cup of orange juice—Walter always kept several jugs of the stuff in the refrigerator, believing vitamin C could cure or prevent any ailment if taken in sufficient quantities—and took a seat at the kitchen table. He started flipping through a fishing magazine there, but quickly grew bored of the grip-and-grins and the empty promises and was about to toss the rag aside when he saw an article called “Ipsyniho Chrome.” He didn’t even have to read the byline to see who’d written it. Someone—Walter surely—had taken a black Sharpie to a page-sized photo of Morell cradling a fish half in the water, half out. He had Satan horns and a tail, and a dialogue bubble read, “Notice the impressive girth of my wanker.”