by John Larison
“Poetic,” Hank said, gulping some wine. “Blackberries invade and take over so thick nothing else can grow.”
“Oh, you.”
Caroline had moved her chair around to his side of the table, and they ate with their arms touching. He could smell the oaring sweat on her skin and the faint remnants of sunscreen. She refilled his wine glass, then her own. Something about her proximity now reminded him of her empty house, the dogs barking at him, the loneliness of that vast night sky. And then the bitterness was all he could feel. Walter was going to die.
She kissed his neck and slipped her hand into his lap. “How’s this for a little distraction?”
She didn’t return his calls. She went cold on him sometimes for no reason. And he lived knowing that she might leave at any moment. He lifted her hand from his lap and said, “I don’t need distraction.”
She frowned, and went back to her meal. “Okay.”
What he needed was permanence and warmth and the knowledge that she at least would always be there. He was too old to go on like this. Too tired.
He took her hand and kicked free his chair and got down on his knees, and Caroline said, “Right here? Hank, how naughty—” But she fell silent when she saw the ring.
“Caroline, I want to share the rest of this life with you. I love you, and I want springtime forever.”
All she said was, “Isn’t that Annie’s ring?”
He explained how life was so confusing but that love like theirs could order things and that he didn’t want to lose her and that he’d been waiting to propose all summer and that he loved her and would do right by her and she’d never regret this. “You won’t, I promise.”
She got down on her knees with him. “Hank, I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“We just can’t.”
“Why the fuck not? That’s not an answer.”
“I’ve been married before, Hank. I’m not interested in being married again. I like what we have. It’s perfect. Why mess with it?”
“‘Been married before,’ that’s just an excuse. You married a prick. Please. Take this ring. Say yes. Make us family.”
“Hank.” Caroline held his hand in hers. “We both know you.”
“What does that mean?”
“Have you ever been single? How many total months have you been alone since you moved to Ipsyniho?”
“Plenty. What’s your point?”
“My point, Hank,” Caroline said, rising to her feet now, “is that I know your pattern. We both know it. You latch on to whichever woman is giving you the most affection in that moment.”
“Is that right.” He rose to his feet. “You got a pattern too. Ditch whichever man you’re with for no reason, just because things have become intimate and serious, because if you leave, then there’s no chance he can leave you. You’re afraid of love.”
“I’m not sure you know what love is, Hank.”
“This ring,” he held it up for her to see again. “This ring says that I’ll never leave you. That I’ll be with you through heat and freeze. That I love you.”
“That’s what you want it to say.”
“What’s the problem with marriage?” he roared.
“I don’t have a problem with marriage,” she said, while gathering her things. She stopped at the doorway. “Trust, Hank, that’s what I’m unsure about.”
*
BY THE TIME Annie came back inside, Hank had the kitchen cleaned, minus one plate. He was scrubbing the specks of brown between the sink and the splash tile. Not even baking soda and vinegar was working.
Annie apologized for missing dinner.
He threw the sponge in the sink. “Oh, you’re done?”
Annie took a tentative bite of the meat. “It’s 2.00 a.m. back there. Even attorneys need sleep. Thanks for saving this. I’m so hungry I could eat … a bear.” She laughed, and Hank took deep measured breaths. It was pinching in again, the drowning, and he knew there’d be no sleep tonight.
None of this was Annie’s fault. He was pissed about Caroline and about Walter and about it all, and the last thing he wanted was to trouble Annie. Especially since they only had two days left.
She poured a glass of wine, and said, “So I have some bad news. I’ve got all day tomorrow, but I have to leave by eight thirty to catch a red-eye home. I’ve already switched my reservation.”
He pulled hard on the last of the wine, and set the empty glass on the counter.
“I’m sorry I have to leave early,” she said. “I could stay a month and still feel like I was leaving too soon. Like I was just getting my feet wet.”
Hank whispered all he could muster: “What do you want to do tomorrow?”
She shrugged while chewing an oversized bite of bread. “What do you want to do?”
He headed for the door. “I need a cigarette.” Like a fish needs water.
The flash of the lighter, the clarity of the first draw. The drowning ebbed, if only for a moment.
And so this was it, how he would spend his life. Alone and clinging to women who were perfectly content without him. The smoke filling his lungs, this world’s truest companionship.
Annie slid open the door and joined him on the porch. “Can I?”
He handed her the pack and the lighter. “Don’t start this. You don’t need it.”
“I want you to take me fishing,” she said. “Not like I’m your client. I don’t want a tour of the river. But like I’m you.” She inhaled and broke into a hacking cough. “I’ll never understand the attraction,” she said, handing him back the cigarette.
“You don’t want to fish.”
“I do. But I don’t want to learn how you fish. I want to learn why you fish.” She laced her arm around his, leaned her head against his shoulder. “Will you take me?”
“Four too early?”
She shrugged. “I haven’t been sleeping much anyway. To be honest.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
THE RIVER RUSHED in at 2:33 a.m., smashing through the sliding door and knocking him to the floor, his nose and mouth filling, his hearing reduced to an aqua roar. He hit the ceiling but found no air. He clawed at the wood until his fingernails pulled back. So this was it: the way it would go. Deep space and comets, blackness and a sonic rumble.
He came to on the floor, still reeling from the pain of choking. He’d torn free a fingernail and the blood was smeared in trails on the floor. He had to stand and touch the chill of the sliding door to believe it had all been a dream.
He dressed for the day because he’d never sleep again and went to the computer to check the levels, the water temperatures, the run counts. He pulled the spinach tortillas from the fridge, the salami from the pantry, the secret sauce from the cabinet, and rolled up his signature boat wraps. He’d bring these and some homemade lox, some red onions, some flatbread. Of course some pistachios for between meals. He probably wouldn’t be able to eat any of it; the flood’s nausea had yet to recede. He looked now to discover his bloody finger had leaked through its bandage.
It was while he stuffed the flatbread’s cardboard box into the recycle bin that he remembered something from the day before, an object that at the time hadn’t even registered. It was a file sitting on Carter’s desk, an old brown cardboard file, the kind of cardboard that had been replaced by clerical manila decades ago. Even from across the desk, Hank had gleaned the title printed in large letters along the rim: Homicide, E. Jackson. In those moments he’d been too distracted by the mounted steelhead, by Carter’s bullying tone, by Walter’s news. But now, in the half thought of sleeplessness, that file was there bigger and brighter than anything.
He chased this distraction back to the computer, and—using the Ipsyniho library’s database—pulled up newspaper accounts of the murder dating back to the days immediately following. It seemed the sheriff at the time, Bridge’s father, had suspected a random killing, a Manson-style execution job; Jackson had been alone in an obscure pull-off on a remote stretc
h of rural highway, and why would someone want to kill a harmless fishing guide? There was a total lack of evidence, and the investigation went nowhere. As far as he could tell, no suspect had ever been named, no warrants issued.
Despite an hour spent peering through his glasses at the headache-bright screen, he didn’t learn anything that would explain why Carter had that ancient file on his desk. The nausea returned and with it the shortness of breath.
So he rose and followed this desire for answers to Annie’s bedroom door. He leaned an ear to the wood and heard nothing, not her voice, not her breathing, nothing. A moment passed and he remembered waiting by the tapestry that sufficed as a door as Riffle cried in those early days of falling asleep alone. He would read her two stories, sing her two songs, then say, “Mommy and I will be back just as soon as we finish cleaning the house.” “Don’t go, Daddy!” she’d yell. He’d wait just outside, bearing the heartbreaking wails and the desperate calls for his return. He’d hum to her through the tapestry, wanting all the while to tear it aside and lift her into his arms. She had cried for an hour the first night, a little less the next night, until she was finally, after days or weeks, falling asleep on her own, without a tear shed.
He regretted that, leaving her in a dark room alone. Sure all the parenting books of the era said it was the right thing, and Rosemary claimed it was necessary. But it went against his every instinct. He’d come to think of parenting as a fundamentally intuitive enterprise; if something seemed wrong, then it probably was. If millions of years of evolutionary pressure had instilled anything within humans, it was the proper way to raise our offspring. Letting our theories trump our innate impulses was simple hubris.
Danny was doing things differently. He lay in bed with the twins, one on each shoulder, humming songs until they were both out. “Sure, it takes awhile sometimes,” Danny had said once, “but with them bouncing back and forth between homes, every moment counts.” Danny was doing it better, and Hank found some comfort in that.
He turned the handle to Annie’s room now and crept open the door. There she was, curled and asleep, her mouth open and a book beside her. She didn’t stir as he crossed the room, as he leaned down beside her. Her breaths were slow and sour, an intake and a long pause, then a long sliding exhale. He was close enough to feel them on his cheek, close enough for Annie to blur into Riffle.
*
IT WAS AN exceptionally dry season, that summer fourteen years before. Wildfires burned in most of the watersheds in the Cascades, the Ipsyniho included. Thick smoke hovered over them and around them, red at dawn and corrosive gray at noon. It followed them indoors. It tickled their throats as they slept. It left them restless and spooked and up at all hours. And they weren’t alone. A herd of cow elk wandered into city limits and ran up and down Main Street for an afternoon before finally lunging down the bank and across the river. A bear walked down the highway with no regard for the line of pickups and log trucks inching along behind him. Even the steelhead, Hank remembered, were uneasy. One afternoon, he counted sixty-two jumps in the span of a single hour. The fish were leaping straight into the air, a missile leaving its silo, rising three or four feet above the water before stalling and turning and crashing back to the surface: They wanted to see what was turning the sky colors.
Seventeen-year-old Annie didn’t seem to notice the smoke, just like she didn’t seem to notice any of Hank’s efforts to ensure she enjoyed her month with him. He’d organized hikes and parties, and he’d spent two hundred dollars on front-row seats at the theater in Eugene simply because Rosemary told him Annie had a budding interest in the stage. But despite these best efforts, she remained reclusive, and he began to wonder if Rosemary had forced her to come, if Rosemary had lied to him on the phone when she said, “Annie couldn’t sleep last night, she was so eager to get on the plane and see you.” Probably, she couldn’t sleep because she so dreaded the trip. Probably she felt pushed away by him, by her own father, and he knew exactly what that was like. But whenever he reached for her, she recoiled. She pretended not to notice his efforts, pretended to be bored by them. He understood that too.
The morning of her departure she wanted to be dropped off at the terminal, but he insisted on parking and walking her to her gate. She was a teenager for god’s sake, anything could happen. But she insisted on carrying her own bags and on walking too fast, her hood up and her earphones in. He followed her gray shape through the darkness of the terminal tunnel and then through the noise of the congested gates. There were too many people in this world, and here she was trying to lose herself among them.
He was the one who forced the conversation, as she stood in line to board. “Did you even want to come?”
She didn’t really answer, not at first, and he felt his face reddening and then felt foolish for being so angry with his teenage daughter, his flesh and blood, who had already suffered such a confusing childhood. He surveyed the other faces in line: an old lady scowling at him like she suspected him of some impropriety.
“What do you care?” Annie almost shouted, her earphones still in.
He tried to remove them so they could have a private conversation, but she pulled away from his hand. Glaring at him: “You don’t care about anything that isn’t wet.”
Anyone who wasn’t already looking turned to study him. A middle-aged, bearded man pleading with a striking young woman.
The line began moving.
“I care about you,” he said, “more than—” Anything, was what he meant to say. But somehow, in that moment, the word felt hollow. He could feel a looming permanence under this goodbye, and he had to do better. “You’re the most important—”
“You can’t even say it.” Tears broke down her cheeks, pulling dark mascara with them. “Look at you. You can’t even say it.”
The line moved forward.
“Annie, my sun rises and sets on you. It has since the moment you were born.”
She pushed the pause button on her Discman and handed her ticket to the agent.
“Sorry, sir,” the agent said to him. “I can’t let you by without a …” He didn’t hear the rest, because Annie was asking him a question.
“Then why did you do it? Why did you do that to Mom and me?”
The old lady was waiting by the concourse door, as if Annie might need her protection. The agent, too, was watching him as she tore someone else’s ticket.
Annie was on the far side of the divider, just out of reach. “Your mom took you. Annie, you know that.”
Annie pushed play on her Discman, the tears coming hard now. “That’s what I thought.” She turned from him and to the old lady and together they vanished down the concourse and into a future that Hank wouldn’t see.
*
WHEN HE RETURNED from the porch and his fourth piss in as many hours, he found Annie awake too, drinking a glass of water in the kitchen. She was fully dressed, and it wasn’t yet 4:00 a.m. When she saw him coming, she said, “Oh, you’re up.”
“I’m old, I’m always up.”
He made them coffee, and while packing the snacks he’d prepared earlier in the cooler, they sipped the mud and talked of random things: weather, floods, Caroline’s family. Annie was the one asking questions, eager maybe to learn all she could before she left. Or to fill the airspace with safe chatter.
He’d decided to take her to a new section of river, a section rarely floated. In fact, to his knowledge, only he and Walter had ever run it in hard boats. It was a canyon on the upper river, high above the highest boat ramp; they’d have to drop the boat from the road down a steep incline. There the river would curve away from the highway and go around Wolf Mountain before coming back and ducking under Fifth Bridge. They would bounce through some big rapids for sure, though nothing he couldn’t handle, and hopefully be rewarded with a few unpressured fish. This was the only section of river where he was sure they wouldn’t encounter other guides and anglers, the only section of river they hadn’t drifted together at some point
in their history.
Because of the heavy rapids, he tossed into the boat the floatation bags, which would keep water from filling the craft and, in the unlikely but conceivable event of a flip, keep the boat afloat. He also grabbed the river helmets and the bowline buoy, and the medical and survival kits he kept packed and ready in a dry bag.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“A great section. Nobody fishes it. We’ll be exploring new water. Your BlackBerry probably won’t work up there.”
She looked at the thing sitting on the counter. “Maybe we could do a different section?”
“You’ve seen all the others.”
*
COME THE EARLIEST fuzz of dawn, they were standing at the wide point in the road, staring at the drift boat anchored in the eddy below. Hank had backed the rig up to the lip and lowered the boat over with the crank, doing all the work himself rather than put Annie in the awkward position of jimmying a craft down that rocky slope.
He hid the keys under the bumper for the shuttle driver, and touched Annie on the shoulder. She was studying the river now, which was half the width here, a frothing blur of white.
Above them, the dark mountains towered against the gray sky, lines of snow still tucked in their shaded recesses. A couple stars remained, and a sliver of the old moon. Not even the ravens were up yet.
“Wow,” she shouted over the water’s roar. “This is nuts.”
He handed her the helmet. “Don’t worry. It’s the same river here as it is below.” He helped her tighten the helmet’s chinstrap.
She was looking at him squarely. “Are you sure about this?”
“I’ve been around too long to be sure of anything.”
“That doesn’t make sense. That doesn’t make me any more comfortable.”
“I oar better than I think.” He wasn’t concerned. He’d run this section twice before. Though not enough times to have the rapids memorized—they’d have to scout a couple—enough to feel comfortable. Besides, in a way, not knowing a section made running it safer; an oarsman always paid fuller attention when he was unsure.