The River Burns

by Trevor Ferguson

  The trucker twisted in the doorway to kiss his wife good night.

  “Oh shit,” André noted.

  “How ignorant can a man get?” Denny pondered aloud and watched as Jocelyn Mehra gave them a friendly wave, which answered his question.

  Xavier leapt off the back of Denny’s truck to drive in Samad’s. Denny rolled the side window down to call Samad over as he strolled across his lawn from his house.

  “Hey there, Denny,” Samad said. The man was self-consciously grinning, as though he was trying to get a joke he couldn’t unravel yet.

  “You got Alzheimer’s now?” André asked him.

  “Says who?” Samad asked him back. “Why?”

  “What was that about?” Denny inquired. He leaned forward and André leaned back so that they could both to talk to him through the open passenger-side window.

  “Huh? What was what about what?”

  “Samad, your wife, she knows about this? You told me she wasn’t going to be home.”

  “Don’t be stupid. Her plans changed. We’re going bowling, I told her.”

  “Bowling? Where exactly? Never mind that I don’t bowl, but where’re we supposed to go bowling, Samad, where nobody will see us? We can’t be noticed because we won’t actually be bowling.”

  The man shrugged, losing his grin, now worried about this inquisition. He glanced at the other two men, one inside the truck and the other back where his own vehicle stood parked, to see if they were understanding what he obviously did not. “In the city, I guess. What’s so wrong with that?”

  “In the city. Oh yeah? Joce must’ve asked you what bowling alley we’re going to tonight—in the city.”

  “I didn’t tell her that. What’s the problem?”

  “You don’t know? Next time, kiss her good-bye in the kitchen. Or let us know ahead of time that she’s still home.”

  “Fine! Bug off. Leave me alone. Anyway, what next time? There’s not going to be a next time. Smart guy, what did you tell Val?”

  “I’m doing extra maintenance on my rig.”

  “Oh.” Samad seemed downcast. “That’s good, Denny. That’s a good one.”

  “Yeah, well. I should’ve gone over it with you.”

  This screwup, Denny decided, was not substantial enough to call off their gambit, although he wouldn’t mind quitting on the spot and tossing their failure straight back in Samad’s face. He stared out the window with his hands squeezing the steering wheel, then looked at Samad’s worried sad-sack puss. The poor sod was clueless.

  “Never mind,” Denny said. “Let’s go bowling.”

  ■ ■ ■

  In his squad car, Ryan drove his date home across the old covered bridge. They were having a good time, culminating in a playful intimacy at the lovers’ leap on the opposite side of the river from the town site. Tara stopped him before they got too heated, so Ryan’s expectations for the evening were properly governed. He’d be permitted to kiss her good night and allowed to take his time, but the final motion of the evening would be to say good night at the door to Potpourri.

  Once on Main Street, though, the store close by, he suggested a nightcap, hoping to extend the evening.

  “You’re inviting yourself up? No,” Tara said.

  “Not what I meant. We could go to a bar.”

  She hesitated, but consented, and they drove past the gift shop to a nearby pub. The owner, usually an amiable guy, greeted them at the door with his hands on hips while shaking his head.

  “What?” Ryan asked him.

  “Ryan, seriously,” he put to him, “do I need that thing parked outside my door?”

  Both Ryan and Tara looked back, and saw the problem stirred up by a squad car parked outside a bar. Ryan was about to go back and move it when the owner chuckled and urged them inside. He was having them on. “Come on in. Enjoy yourselves. It’s not like people are hanging off the rafters.”

  They entered, and Tara took note that wherever Ryan went in this town people seemed to like him, and that seemed to have nothing to do with his profession.

  ■ ■ ■

  The two Ford pickups departed Samad’s. Denny’s led the way. He kept their speed down. He drove out of the keyhole residential development, out of the woods and onto the highway, then onto the narrow two-way into Wakefield proper. He stopped in the bumpy municipal parking lot on the edge of town and pulled into a spot on the gravel where he and André climbed out. He locked his truck using his key remote. They swung up onto the bed of Samad’s truck and they both sat down and Denny tapped the side of the truck with his palm—Samad’s cue to drive on. They headed back out the way they’d just come in and took the highway to skirt the edge of town, then they drove back in from the opposite side and in doing so approached the old covered bridge. By coming this way, they avoided driving through the centre of town. No one could say they’d been spotted there. Not one among them was a criminal or was ever an offender, but each understood what any crook instinctively believes, that no crime is worth committing unless it succeeds.

  Denny wanted everything to run according to plan. More than anything else, he wanted to get away with this, but to do that he must expect the unexpected. He reminded himself to depend on the unknown as much as on any other factor.

  Samad stopped near the bridge under a panoply of roadside trees.

  Denny jumped down from the bed and Xavier skulked out from the cab looking miserable. He shot a glance at Denny, who nodded, then started walking uphill. The three men watched him go, climbing the grade to the bridge.

  “Give him enough time,” Denny said.

  They knew to do that. Xavier walked across the bridge to control access on that side, and to signal them if someone was coming or to keep intruders away for their own sakes once the action commenced.

  They didn’t want to get anybody killed, especially not that.

  On the truck bed, André rolled the forty-five-gallon barrel of fuel from the front to the rear, then secured it again with straps. He unscrewed the small cap on the top of the drum and inserted a manual fuel pump that screwed into the same hole as the cap and was deep enough to reach the barrel’s base.

  “Prime it,” Denny instructed him.

  André did so, and tipped the contents of a small bottle into the top of the pump. He revolved the lever until a little fluid spilled onto the ground. They could smell the gasoline now in the warm night air just as a breeze came up.

  “You’re an idiot, Samad,” André said. He’d been holding the thought in and only now did he speak it, an outburst that proved he was nervous, too.

  “Why am I an idiot?” Samad protested.

  “Don’t ask,” Denny advised him. “You don’t want to know.”

  “I want to know, but. Why am I an idiot?”

  “We don’t have the whole night to answer that question.” Denny wanted to defuse any argument at this stage. He could kill André for bringing it up.

  “Your wife knows who you’re hanging out with tonight,” André said.

  “Oh,” Samad said, as though he finally understood. Then he said, “So?” which proved he didn’t.

  “So tell her we decided not to go bowling,” Denny decreed. He’d been thinking about this. “André told his wife he was going out for a drink, not bowling. And not with anybody in particular.”

  “Joce wouldn’t let me drive if I told her that.”

  André uttered a little laugh.

  “What?” Samad asked.

  “Tell her I’m doing maintenance so we called off the bowling, we just forgot to tell you. Then you guys talked me into having a drink and you don’t even know where we ended up. Some bar in the city. Tell her that because it’s the truth. André, tell Xavier our new story when you catch up to him.”

  “Okay,” André said.

  “Okay, Samad?” Denny asked. He changed
his tone. He recognized the problem here, that Samad was accustomed only to being honest, and was not at all practised in telling lies. He was less suited than any of them to criminal activity and had no experience at being either unscrupulous or deceptive. “See, none of us told our wives we were going bowling. None of us told our wives we were going anywhere with anybody in particular. Because the four of us are not supposed to be together tonight. Understand? There was no plan. Get it? No plan to get together. And tell Joce if she asks, or if the cops ask, that you were our designated driver tonight so you didn’t have a drink. You just drove us to a bar and back. Okay?”

  Samad was pouting, but he seemed to understand. “Yeah, sure,” he said. Then he asked, “What cops? Your brother, you mean? Why would Ryan talk to us? He doesn’t know anything.”

  Denny disregarded the question. “I’m going up to check on X,” he said.

  “Why would he talk to us?” Samad pressed on. “He won’t, right?”

  “Ryan might talk to anybody he can think of,” André said, picking up on Denny’s pacifying approach. “It won’t mean much. It’s his job.”

  Denny needed to be at a higher elevation to trace Xavier’s progress. The bridge was 148 feet long, which took a while for a lumbering man to cross. Xavier was more than halfway over. He was not going slowly for him but not rushing either. Thankfully, no one else came along, and there were no vehicles. Late enough that the commerce of the town eased, yet early enough that the bars and restaurants weren’t emptying out as yet. Denny pinched a mosquito just under his chin, then walked back under cover of the roadside woods to the truck.

  He was thinking that if he were to do this over, he might not select Samad. He needed the fuel drum that he perpetually dragged around on the bed of his pickup, as if he was the kind of man who ventured off into the untamed woods beyond the boundaries of civilization to hunt or fish, either routinely or on a whim. Denny doubted that Samad hunted much and probably never fished, but he didn’t doubt that Samad wanted people to believe that he did those things. Like everyone else, he was party to his personal insecurities. After he considered every angle, Denny knew that he couldn’t ask any other person to carry a barrel of fuel on the bed of his truck, or do that himself, as it would be tantamount to a proclamation of guilt. He needed to rely on Samad, and now, as things turned out, on Samad’s wife.

  Walking back down the side of the road, he saw that he mistimed the moonrise, as an upper silver tip of the moon poked above a hilltop. Thin enough, therefore dim enough, to be of no particular consequence. Still, why did he mess that up? That should’ve been the easy part, accurately calculating the time of the moonrise. Now his confidence also waned.

  He reached the others.

  “Wait a minute or two—two, let’s say. Xavier should be on the other side. Drive up to the edge of the bridge—”

  “We know that,” André said.

  “I’m repeating it,” Denny said, and he looked André in the eye and waited to see if he was about to give him any more lip. When André turned his gaze away and nodded, conceding, he said, “Watch for Xavier’s signal. Don’t you dare go across without it. You can’t see what he sees over there. At that point, he’s in charge, don’t think otherwise. Samad, two things have to happen before you start across. You get Xavier’s signal, and André says to go. Just one of those two is not good enough.”

  “I got it,” Samad said. He was looking nervous. Perhaps the notion of two signals gave him hope that the whole operation might yet be called off. Denny supposed that everyone was secretly hoping for that, except, possibly, André.

  They waited quietly then.

  Denny wished that he still smoked although now was not the time even if he did. André still smoked, but not while he was hovering over an open drum containing forty-five gallons of gasoline.

  Close to a minute went by when the headlights of a car appeared on their side of the bridge coming their way. Denny said, “Both of you get down, don’t be seen,” and he himself went around to crouch behind the truck. By looking under the chassis, Denny saw the vehicle, a small car, turn off, leaving them in the clear and in the dark once more. Denny returned to the driver’s side of the pickup.

  “Go,” he said quietly, sternly.

  Samad started the engine. André held on as the truck lurched forward.

  Denny watched them walk up the incline a moment, then returned to the anonymity of the trees and scanned the darkened bridge.

  ■ ■ ■

  In her flimsy white nightclothes, Mrs. McCracken opened her outside door a crack to admit Buckminster. Unfettered, he slouched in, not certain that he agreed with her assessment that he was in for the night. She pulled the screen tight to the jamb to insert the hook in its eye, and even as she did so moths regrouped on the screen and a June bug out of season landed. Then she shut and latched the inside door, too.

  “Done,” she said.

  Buckminster uttered an agreeable word and they both wandered through to the living room, where Mrs. McCracken returned to her cold cocoa.

  “Something I cannot explain,” she ruminated aloud, quietly at first, “about that girl. She intrigues me, Buck. I admit it. So few young women do. Really, I ought to harp. I’m inclined to harp, giving up a career like that, doing so little with a fine education. How odd, don’t you think?” As she awaited her cat’s reply, Mrs. McCracken was suddenly aware that she’d ceased talking under her breath and was now at full volume. She sipped more cocoa, then lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper between her and the feline. “But I sense that it’s not tomfoolery, Buck. Her lot in life is to be a serious person who is also given to some distraction. Not an easy combination to live with. A rarity in this town, male or female, don’t you think? But the rarest are the women. She is, undoubtedly, a serious person, with some distraction. Poor thing. I don’t know what’s to be done about her, having to bear life with such an onerous condition.”

  Buckminster circled his sofa pillow repeatedly, then quietly settled onto it. He yawned. Observed her intently.

  “It’s true. I really don’t know what’s to be done.”

  Finishing her cocoa, she set the glass down and listened to the tree frogs sing. Such a racket. She tried to hear right through their song, for in the heart of this night she was sensing a rhapsody so distant and refined that even the frogs ceased their chorus to attend. She listened.

  “I know,” she said. “It is that time.”

  She wasn’t in the mood to go up to bed just yet, despite feeling sleepy.

  Buckminster let his chin droop down. Momentarily, his eyes closed. As she sat there, hearing the ticking of her downstairs clock as the frogs went mute and detecting also a high, distant, inexplicable drone, Mrs. McCracken’s chin also dipped forward. A ways off, down along the riverbank, a tied-up dog that she presumed, illogically, to be a mangy mutt barked thrice, the last sound to register with any acuity before she dropped off asleep in the comfort of her chair. The cat, across from her, also slept.

  ■ ■ ■

  Denny ran, stumbled, then sprinted, breaking from the trees, shining a miniature flashlight, its beam dancing on the pickup’s rear window. On the verge of shouting he restrained himself, noise a last resort. A risk to take only if they didn’t see him. Samad caught the light slash across his mirror and braked suddenly, causing André to put a hand out to brace himself against the cab’s roof.

  “What the—?” André protested, too loudly for their circumstance. His words were cut off as he lost his balance and his chest struck the roofline.

  “Keep your voice down,” Denny hissed and continued his quick jog up to Samad’s window. André bent down to listen in.

  Denny took a moment to catch his breath.

  “There’s kids,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Under the bridge. Toking up. I saw the flare from a joint.”

  �
�They’re making out probably,” Samad said.

  “They better not be my kids,” André said.

  “That’s not the point!” Denny flashed. “It doesn’t matter whose kids they are. Or what they’re smoking. We might kill them, you idiots.”

  “What do we do?” André asked.

  Denny stepped onto the running board, clutching the inside of the doorframe and the outside mirror. “Drive across. Slowly. André, do nothing. Not now. Follow my lead when we’re over there.”

  He took the time to think this through, but he was feeling lucky. This might have gone badly if he’d been late to spot them, or not seen the flares of their smokes at all. He didn’t know if the others were feeling as he did now, but the seriousness of their work caused the blood in his veins, it felt like, to sink into his heels. Like a heavy tar. Then Samad stopped on the other side off the end of the bridge and Xavier didn’t know what was going on as he walked quickly up.

  Denny stepped down from the running board and whispered to Xavier, “Don’t say a word.”

  “What would I say?” Xavier whispered back.

  Denny stepped out onto the bridge. The three waiting men observed him in the breeze. A dim streetlamp down the road illuminated them, while shadows from the bridge’s superstructure crisscrossed Denny. He didn’t feel good about what he intended to do next, imitate his brother, but for several good reasons it was necessary. He toyed with calling the whole thing off because he was given an excuse now, this unbidden development, their risk factor increased. The gnarly, tight feeling in his gut and the blood pooling in his ankles reminded him that he was merely scared, and he argued with himself that to stop now would not be an act of wisdom necessarily, but one of fear. He could not halt what he was committed to do. He modulated his voice to be loud, clearly enunciated, authoritative.

  “Okay, guys, I know you’re under the bridge. I can guess what you’re up to . . . what you’re smoking. I can smell it up here. This is what we’ll do. I’m driving down the road on this side and I’ll wait five minutes. Then I’m coming back to check if you’re still here. If you are, I’m bringing you in on a charge of vagrancy, assuming you’ve ditched your dope by then. Not much of a charge, but enough for me to inform your parents what you been up to tonight.”