The River

by Peter Heller

  She was down at the bottom of the field where the pasture dropped off into the willows on the banks of the Fraser. The heavily dewed grass wet his pant legs to the knees. As he got closer he could hear the big-boned quarterhorse tearing at the bunched grass, hear her huff, and then he could smell her. She was the color of a saddle wet with rain.

  He walked to her and she lifted her head and turned. He said, “Hey, girl. Hey.” He put a hand on her neck and she pushed into the side of his cheek with her nose and her hot breath puffed into the collar of his shirt. Her right foreleg was wrapped with bandage. When she stepped to him she lurched as if hobbled. He leaned his forehead into her at the base of her neck and she stayed still. He let his hand travel lightly over her rippled ribs, which the vet said had been broken. She did not flinch. She was his mother’s favorite horse. She let the boy lean into her.

  Jack stood with her. He didn’t make a sound. He leaned into her and inhaled. Here was the last place his mother had been. Before the crashing water. Been at peace. Humming along with his father, who sang. He thought that. You were here. Now you’re not. He would have given his own life gladly to hear her sing to him one more time. He put his face hard into the mare’s side and let himself go. He wrapped his arms around the mare’s neck as best he could. He didn’t move.

  After a while Mindy turned suddenly and lurched into him and he saw his father coming over the sunlit pasture.

  He was wearing a sport coat and he didn’t say anything. He didn’t say, “I’ve been looking for you.” He came up to the boy and the mare and he put one hand on his son’s head and one on the flank of the horse and just stood. Stood for a while. Jack wished they could stay like that. Finally his father said, “It’s time.”

  They walked back to the barn. His father kept his hand on him, his shoulder, his head. Many people spoke. Someone played a song on a guitar. They spoke again. People wept. Some laughed through tears. He couldn’t make out the words. He stood in the deep shadow of a makeshift platform. Then he felt his father touch him and he heard him say, “Jack? Jack, can you say a word? Just something. Anything?” He felt himself nod. He stepped up onto the platform. All he could see was sunlight. He said…nothing. He froze. That was it. The air was full of sun. Nobody spoke. What could he say when this was all his fault? His mouth moved and no sound came out and he began to spin. And then he heard a rush like wind and the thump of his father’s boots on the planks and his father’s big hand on his shoulder and heard, “Jack. It’s okay, son, that’s okay,” and he felt his father lift him. He lifted him skyward and covered him. He covered him and squeezed him tight and held him, all the time whispering, “Let’s get something to eat. It’s okay, it’s okay…”

  Jack didn’t snap out of it until he heard a rush like surf. He woke up and he was paddling hard and his tears were falling into the skim of water in the bottom of the canoe, the water that was pink with Wynn’s blood. No wind, the air very still; they must not have needed the motor. The evening had chilled and the sun was in the tops of the trees on the left shore. And then he was fully awake as from a dream and he started with panic because he knew the rush was the falls and he knew they needed to get to the left bank. He sucked in a deep long breath, fuck, and he found her with his eyes and what of her face he could see was white, too white, but he saw the slight lift of her breathing and blew out in relief. He did not look at Wynn’s head lying there on his arm in the bow, he looked past it and felt the pull of the swift current downstream toward the flat horizon line and roar, the lip of the falls, and gauged the distance to the open stretch of cobbled beach he could see, which must be the take-out and the portage, and the thought flashed: We might not make it. He dropped the paddle against the seat and reached back and toggled the switch and pushed the starter and the engine chafed and hummed to life, thank God. He shoved the throttle arm hard away and pushed the boat into a steep left arc and swung the bow up into the current at a ferry angle toward the left bank. And then he stood in the stern and scanned. With his free hand he shucked the .308 from where he’d stuck it into the strap of a food-box, barrel down. He tugged it free and gunned the engine full throttle and was surprised again at the power of the electric motor, good, and he sat and held the tiller with his knee and shouldered up the rifle and scanned.

  He kept both eyes open and looked through the scope. He let the crosshairs travel over the bank and back and then farther into the tall grass and fireweed and then back into the big pines that stood at the edge of the woods. Nothing. If everything had gone down the way he thought it had, then Pierre would be long gone, probably in the last miles approaching Wapahk, where he would begin weaving lies as fast as he could talk.

  Good. But. Still. He scanned, and he could see with relief that he had ferried far enough to make the beach, and he throttled back and slowed and stood and he scanned the beach and the trees with his naked eye and then took up the rifle again and covered every rock and tree and shadow with the scope. Nothing. Good. He did not relax. He was not going to fuck up now.

  He slung the rifle and gunned the heavy canoe onto the stones of the shore, heedless of gouges, and he hopped out fast where the stern was still in the water and he splashed the shallows almost at a run until he had gotten around to the front and he grabbed the bow and heaved back hard so the canoe was high on dry rocks and then he ran. He unslung the .308 from his shoulder and ran up the beach and dove into the fireweed and circled back down. He moved with the lightness and speed of a hunt when the bull elk had lifted his nose in alarm and bolted from the meadow. He was not going to get shot now. Not now. He slowed and came down through big scattered pines, eyes following the startled flight of a flycatcher, a shift in the shadow of a limb, the lift of a moth. Nothing. And then he saw it. The glint of stainless steel in tall grass. In the long light that cut through the pines. Stainless steel, and two careful steps and he saw the shining length of the barrel, the wooden forestock of the 12-gauge, and then the man’s arm. Outflung. In a green plaid shirt. The arm, the torso twisted back as if arched, the dark curls of the head and a black fleece hat a foot away in the grass. And the wool shirt caked in dried blood and one neat bullet hole in the center of the breast.

  * * *

  Pierre, you fucker. Good riddance.

  He didn’t feel a thing.

  He crouched fast, and now he moved as low as he could to the ground, tree to tree, stopping often to listen. He knew Brent and JD would be long gone, but he’d also known that Pierre would have shot the Texans and he’d been wrong. He wasn’t going to get plugged by Brent now. He moved tree to tree as the shadows of the pines lengthened over the beach and broomed over the stones. He covered the shore and then plunged down the easy trail around the falls and— Nothing.

  He ran back to the top and cast around in the brush for Pierre’s canoe—he thought if he could find the sat phone he could call in a chopper—but there was no canoe. Damn. Where had he stashed it? Wherever it was, he’d done a good job. Jack looked for sign, for drag marks, and saw nothing. Fuck it. He didn’t have time to screw around any longer. Anyway, Pierre had probably tossed the phone in the river so the authorities wouldn’t find it when he got to the village and ask why he hadn’t called in an emergency earlier.

  Jack went to the boat and lifted her and carried her as gently as he could around the roar of crashing whitewater to the launch beach below and laid her carefully on a thick bed of lichen and moss and ran back up and made himself carry Wynn. Wynn was much too heavy. He was unwieldy with the stiffness, but Jack got under him and heaved himself standing, and he kept him on his shoulder all the way down the trail, and though his knees buckled twice he did not let him drop. His ear and chin were against the cold skin of Wynn’s right side above his belt, and he made himself talk the whole way: “Okay, buddy, we’ve got this, we’ve got this, we’re going home now. I’m taking you home.” Over and over. And then he ran back to the top beach and did not look again at Pie
rre sprawled in the shadows, and he slid the canoe up onto the wheely thing and took almost none of the provisions or gear, they just had to get through the night, and he bumped and heaved the lightened boat down the trail of the portage, and he laid her back into the boat on a bed of empty dry bags and murmured, “Please please please,” and he laid Wynn as best he could over the front seat, and then he shoved off and did not look back at the falls. He knew it was only forty-three swift-water miles to the village. Three days on a normal trip, but he knew they could navigate it safely at night and that they’d be there sometime tomorrow.

  EPILOGUE

  Jack drove.

  The steep twisting road up Dusty Ridge. He drove with his lights off, because it was not yet full night and he wanted to see all the woods and the sandy track going through them. He hit holes filled with the afternoon’s rain that splashed up onto the hood of the truck, and when the wind blew, it gusted water and leaves out of the trees and spattered his windshield.

  Though it was a cold October night he drove with the windows down and he could hear Sawyer Brook rushing in its banks. He knew every turn and every big maple. He had driven the road who knew how many times. He had driven it mostly with Wynn, and driven it alone when Wynn was studying for some exam and he had already finished and was hankering for family to come home to. It was not his home, but it was close—they had made him feel so. He loved almost more than anything the singsong call of Wynn’s mother, Hansie, as he came through the door: “Jack? Jaaack? Is it you? Come in, come in! Wynn called, said you’d be here. How wonderful, come in!” That song. And the smells would hit him, of a family in the midst of their lives, the morning’s bread on the board, the woodstove, stone scent of the slate at the entrance crumbed with mud, the Lab, Leo, knocking the leg of a table with his tail, the pine and oak exhalations of the old house. The smells wafted in intertwining tendrils and filled a space in him he was used to having empty. It was almost painful.

  Tonight he drove the twisting dirt road with dread. He had not come to the funeral. It had been in late September, three weeks after the trip had ended. It was maybe Wynn’s favorite time of year to be on the ridge. The woods yellow and flushed to almost the color of honey, and you could smell the apples ripening on the trees down the hill. And they had held the service in one of his favorite spots, the old hayfield that ran to Sawyer Brook where his mother, mostly, had taught him to fish. They had graciously asked Jack to come, and to say something. He was already at home on the ranch, and he had said, “I’m sorry, I can’t.”

  “You can’t?” Hansie said. That hadn’t occurred to her.

  “I just can’t.”

  There was a pause—it sounded like wind through the line—and Hansie had said, “I don’t blame you. Who would? Nobody does.”

  “Well.”

  “You blame yourself, it’s crazy. I mean it, Jack. God. Just come. Please come. You know he’d want nothing more than that.”

  Electronic wind.

  He could hear her huff. She said, “He told me once that he didn’t even know where you came from.”

  “He did?”

  “He said you were the best friend he’d ever had, it was like God or someone dropped you out of the sky onto that trail, and he never hoped to have another one so good. Like a brother but better, because you didn’t have to grow up fighting. God.”

  Well. He could hear Wynn saying that. Not wanting to leave God out of it and maybe hurt His feelings in case He really was up there ex machina-ing all over the place. He thanked her and told her he had to go help his father now. That was all he could manage. He wondered for the first time in his life if he was a coward.

  But two weeks later he climbed into his truck and drove east. They had not registered for the fall quarter and he had no idea what he was going to do or even if he was going to return to school in the winter. He asked his dad if it was okay if he was back in May and he drove east. He drove across the high desert and the Great Plains, he drove all night. He tried to make himself not think of anything. It was already late in the day when he got to Putney.

  The forests at the edge of the fields were luminous with yellows and pinks. The waning light could not mute them. He had already lived one autumn and he was having to live it again. He had no cell signal for some reason and he pulled into the grocery store of the Putney Co-op and asked to use the phone.

  “Hello?” Hansie asked, uncertain. She sounded ragged.

  “It’s Jack.”

  “Oh.” Indrawn breath.

  “I’m in town. At the co-op. I was wondering if I could come up.”

  A freighted silence, carrying who knew what.

  Finally: “You’re here? In Putney?”

  “Yes.”

  “Now?”

  “Yes.”

  A rustling.

  “George is away. He’s designing a school in Craftsbury.”

  “I’m sorry.” He didn’t know why he said that. “I can come back another time.”

  “No. No, no, no. Come up. For God’s sake. You can stay in Wynn’s room.”

  No, I can’t, he thought. I have my sleeping bag.

  He bought two bottles of good red wine, he didn’t even know what kind, the price card said thirty-two dollars, and he got back in the truck and drove up the hill west out of town. He passed the sturdy painted clapboard houses and the elementary school and turned up West Hill and the houses became sparser. The road climbed steeply. At a green sign that said Brelsford Road he took the left and drove up to the house that sat above the field.

  He held the two wine bottles by the neck in his left hand. When she opened the door he didn’t know what to do with his right hand. He held it out, expecting a handshake or nothing, and she came against it and put her arms around his shoulders and squeezed, squeezed hard, and let her head rest against him. Her hair smelled like woodsmoke and he could see the few rough strands of white. It occurred to him then that he was the last person to see her son alive, that if she was hugging him, she was also hugging Wynn. Goosebumps ran down his arms and he brought his free hand to her back and he held her. He could feel her ribs and she felt frail. It was the first time he’d thought that. He expected his shirt to be wet when she pulled away but it wasn’t.

  “It’s good to see you,” she said, not looking at him, and took the bottles. She looked disheveled. Her hair, often in a long braid, was loose. He walked in. He could smell a roast. Jess was at the table, drawing on a sketch pad, her tongue in the corner of her mouth. She looked up and seemed startled. She opened her mouth and her eyes lit and then he could see the confusion. That this time was not like the others.

  “Hi,” he said. “Hi, Jess.”

  “Hi.” She closed the sketchbook. He didn’t ask her what she was drawing.

  “Where’s Leo?” he said.

  “Dad took him.”

  “Oh. Oh, good.”

  She moved her lips around and blinked fast and he could see the fingers of her good hand bending the corners of the sketch paper. “He likes road trips,” she said.

  “Oh, good. Yeah, I remember.” He said, “I was thinking of running up the mountain early in the morning. Do you wanna come?”

  She shook her head. “No, that’s all right.” She wouldn’t look at him.

  Hansie took a deep breath. “Take your jacket off and sit,” she said. “We’re ready.”

  He did. She opened one of the wine bottles. She used an old-style simple corkscrew and he noticed that she paused, almost as if to summon her concentration, before she screwed it into the cork swiftly and true and rocked the cork out with two motions. She forked the roast from the oven pan onto a platter and set it on the table.

  “It’s from Littledale, down the hill. We bought half a steer this year.”

  He nodded. “Smells good,” he said. “His cows were always way better than ours.” />
  They ate. He faced the big window, out of which, in daylight, he knew he could look down the folded hills and orchards to the Connecticut River Valley and across to Mount Monadnock. They ate in silence. Hansie put down her fork and took a long sip of wine. She left only enough to color the top of the stem of the glass. She turned to Jack.

  “It was a beautiful service. He would’ve—” She stopped herself.

  He didn’t know what to say.

  “What have you been doing?” she said. The edges of her eyelids were raw.

  He didn’t know how to answer. He might have said, Combing over every hour of the month of August, then parsing them into minutes. “Helping Pop gather,” he said.

  “The cows? Like a roundup?”

  “Yes, off the mountain. The Never Summers.”

  “You’re on horseback, right? I remember. Like a cowboy song, Wynn said.” He saw her freckled hand reach blindly for the stem of her empty glass. He picked up the bottle and poured the glass full.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said. She blinked. He’d never called her that, not since their first meeting, when, laughing, she had given him endless shit. She started to say something but didn’t. Jack thought she was having trouble getting a full breath, and he looked away. He looked down at the table. Wynn had made the table for his parents’ wedding anniversary—clear cherry. The tree must heve been very old, the grain was dark and tight. The grain of the wood was like the contours of a topographic map and he would have given a lot to walk into a country with that much wildness and rhythm and relief. Across the table she was trying to be silent, and he looked up only when she wiped her eyes with her napkin.

  “You came a long way,” she said.