River Rapture

by Vella Munn

  “In other words I’d survive if there was someone there to keep an eye on me, but I wouldn’t be much help?” she asked, not sure she was ready for an honest answer.

  “That’s about the size of it,” Chas answered, apparently unconcerned with whether he was being too blunt. “Look, Michon, you work in a dress shop, you wear expensive clothes. I’m willing to bet you don’t drive an old pickup like me. I’m out of my element in the city; you’d be out of yours on a river.”

  Michon closed her eyes, thinking, despite herself, about spending the rest of her life waiting on matrons at Chantilla. “Don’t you ever want a challenge, to test yourself?” she whispered, speaking more to herself than to Chas. “Or do you have everything you want?”

  “I thought I did. Once.”

  Michon opened her eyes, but there was a veil over Chas’s eyes. Only his words remained. Was he talking about having love and losing it? No! She wasn’t going to think about that. “I—I’m sorry,” she stammered. “I didn’t mean to ask a personal question.”

  “And I didn’t have to answer. Forget I said anything. Look, I hate to say this, but I really have a lot to do. I’m supposed to meet with the kids’ teacher this evening. That’s the other reason I’m in the city today.”

  “Oh.” Chas’s words were simple and straightforward, but they had the power to throw her into a nameless depression. He was leaving her already? “I—well, I enjoyed talking to you.”

  “So did I. Look, I know you have a boyfriend and all that, but I’d like to see you again some time. Just to talk, I mean.”

  “I’d like that,” Michon whispered. How long had it been since a man had simply wanted to talk to her?

  Michon gave Chas her telephone number and address, not bothering to ask herself why. They left the deli and Chas nodded at a blue pickup with faded paint, a battered bed, and huge heavy-duty tires Michon figured cost at least twice what she paid for her own tires. “It isn’t much to look at,” Chas explained, “but I give it hard use. I don’t expect it to look as if it came out of a showroom. The engine’s the best there is.”

  Michon walked over and glanced into the cab. Although it was dusty inside, the upholstery was expensive. There was a complex-looking CB radio attached to the dash. “Do you use that a lot?” she asked.

  “It can be a lifeline when I’m in the mountains,” Chas explained.

  Michon turned to him, her words coming as fast as her thoughts. “Don’t you ever get scared? I mean, what if you get hurt or something happens to the canoe? There aren’t any hospitals out on the river.”

  “You learn to rely on yourself when you’re in the wilderness. It’s a good feeling. Our ancestors did it. Look, it’s getting dark. What if I walk you to your car? I want you to know I’m not totally uncivilized.”

  Michon nodded, but she couldn’t dismiss Chas’s casual comment from her mind. Had she ever challenged herself, a real challenge? True, it took a certain amount of drive to support herself in the city, but help was always no more than a telephone call away. Trying to stretch one’s budget from pay day to pay day and fending off high-pressure car salesmen wasn’t exactly the same as keeping a canoe right side up while a river current played with it.

  “Do you like your car?” Chas asked as she was getting out her keys.

  “It’s okay. It gets me where I need to get.”

  “It looks like a toy.” Chas shook his head. “I just can’t imagine myself with one of those. I’d high-center it for sure the first time I took it on a dirt road.”

  “I don’t get out on dirt roads that much,” Michon pointed out, for some reason feeling as if she had to defend her choice of transportation.

  After Michon had gotten in and rolled down the window, Chas leaned against the door. “We don’t have a whole lot in common, you know.”

  “I don’t agree,” she protested. But what else could she say? She could hardly tell him that she couldn’t ever remember wanting to spend more time with any man than she wanted to at this moment. “We both like deli sandwiches,” she finished weakly.

  “You’re high fashion,” he said softly. “I’m Daniel Boone.”

  “No I’m not,” she protested. She ran shaking fingers through her tinted hair. “I look like this because it’s required in my job. There’s more to me than hair and painted fingernails.”

  Chas didn’t speak. Instead his eyes bore into hers, past their scant defense and deep inside, where something nameless and warm and hungry was stirring. She knew what he was saying and lifted her face in willing response.

  Their kiss spanned whatever differences existed.

  Chapter Three

  The phone was ringing as Michon unlocked the door to her apartment. She dropped her purse on the floor and hurried over to grab it.

  “Where have you been? I just about gave up on you,” Paul Shields was saying in the tone he used whenever he was dissatisfied.

  “I ate dinner before coming home,” Michon tried to explain, around the excited barking of the little mutt she’d rescued from a city street six months ago. Michon sank onto a stool next to the kitchen phone and lifted Worthless onto her lap, shrugging as his claws caught her leather belt. “I thought you had a client to entertain tonight.”

  “I do.” Paul lowered his voice. “Look, he wants to check out some of the night spots. And he doesn’t want just me to talk to. Do you think…well, a young woman in tow would sweeten the pot, if you know what I mean.”

  “I know what you mean, Paul.” It wasn’t the first time Michon had been asked to act as informal hostess for one of his clients. She didn’t particularly enjoy fending off advances from slightly tipsy men and told Paul so, but that didn’t stop him from continuing to ask her to “help me out just this one last time.” “I’m tired,” she gave as excuse. “It’s been a long day and Worthless needs a little attention.”

  “So do I, honey. Who means more to you—that mutt or me?”

  Tired and confused as she was, Michon was in no mood to debate that with Paul. “I have to change my clothes.”

  “We’ll be there in fifteen minutes. What about that new long dress of yours? The one with the slit. Knock his eyes out.”

  Paul hung up before she had time to respond. Michon returned the receiver to its cradle and held Worthless against her. “‘Knock his eyes out,’” she parroted sarcastically. “Show him a little flesh. Worthless, I don’t think I’m going to like this.” For a moment she rubbed noses with the delighted pup. “You’ve got it made, old boy. If I were smelly and ugly like you, no one would ever want to take me out. Come on. Keep me company while I try to find something to cover up my bones.”

  Worthless trotted after Michon and jumped up on the bed as she peered listlessly into her closet. She hadn’t been lying. Her feet ached from wearing high heels all day, and there was nothing she’d like better than to sprawl in a chair. If she spent the evening in her apartment with no one except Worthless to talk to, she might have too much time to think…about a kiss and a man who didn’t smell like expensive cologne. But she didn’t want to think about something he’d said. He once thought he had everything he wanted. How deeply had that affected him and the relationships he formed?

  Michon shimmied out of her new jumpsuit and carefully hung it up. In undergarments she went into the bathroom and washed her face and applied fresh moisturizer. Paul had said they’d be there in fifteen minutes. It didn’t give her much time to apply fresh makeup. Automatically she dumped out the contents of her cosmetic bag and reached for foundation.

  Then she stopped. Ten girls would be going on that river trip with Chas. Not one of them would bother to adorn herself with war paint. It had been so long since Michon had gone out without her public working face that she wasn’t sure she’d recognize herself. But tonight she was in a mood to try. It took her less than a minute to apply a little eyebrow pencil, a touch of mascara and a few quick strokes of green eye shadow. She stepped back, surveying herself in the mirror.

  �
�Not bad, Worthless. I forgot I had those freckles on my nose. I wonder if Paul knows.”

  Worthless wagged his approval of her freshly scrubbed cheeks and the slight shine on her nose. Michon used her fingers and palms to fluff her hair but didn’t bother to capture it with spray. She felt reckless and devil-may-care. So Paul wanted a female to escort around, did he? She just hoped he wasn’t counting too much on a talking mannequin. Tonight the real Michon was in a mood to present herself.

  “Haven’t you picked out anything for me to wear?” she asked Worthless as she padded barefoot back into the bedroom. “If I wear that thing with the slit I’ll have to put on panty hose, won’t I? Ridiculous invention, panty hose. They make me feel like I have something painted on my legs.”

  Michon laughed softly at her choice of words and grabbed at a long white skirt and a pale blue blouse with a high lace collar. Once dressed she had to admit she looked like a rather feminine takeoff of a frontier woman. She slipped into flat sandals and wiggled her toes in delight because they weren’t hampered by hose. “I think I like you better like this,” she told her image in the bedroom mirror. “I wonder if Chas Carson would approve?”

  Hearing Chas’s name spoken aloud instantly changed Michon’s mood. She sank onto the bed, unmindful of any wrinkles that might form in her skirt. She lay back, flattening her hair on the pillow, rubbing Worthless’s head absently. She was too young for a midlife crisis…so what was the matter with her? First she was getting sick to her stomach just thinking about spending another year making polite conversation with Chantilla’s wealthy customers. Then she’d started talking to squirrels. And now she was remembering how the world stood still when Chas Carson kissed her.

  He was right. They were different. Totally different. She honestly didn’t know there were men like him left in the twentieth century. A river guide? Did men really still do that kind of thing?

  They must. Obviously that was how Chas made his living. He was a man’s man in the old-fashioned tradition. He was experienced in search-and-rescue, lived the majority of his life out-of-doors, and by his own admission felt like a bull in a china shop in the city. Michon, for her part, had grown up on the city’s limits in a standard tract home paid for by working parents. She’d gone to college because that’s what all her friends were doing, had gone after the job considered “in” at the time, had found herself a modern apartment, drove a nearly new car, dressed in the latest fashions.

  She also had pulled her car over to the side of the road one evening, darted through commuter traffic, and hugged a frightened, half-starved mutt to her breast and brought him home to live with her.

  “What is it?” she asked Worthless softly. “Am I going through an identity crisis? I wish you could meet Chas. You’d like him.”

  And Chas would like Worthless. She didn’t have to see the two of them together to know that. Paul barely tolerated the enthusiastic, ugly, floppy-eared mutt who had won Michon’s heart. He frowned when Worthless curled up on her bed and booted him aside when the little dog scampered too close to his legs. So far Michon had been able to ignore Paul’s attitude toward Worthless, but in her present mood she found herself siding with her dog against the man who was going to show up in a few minutes to take her out on the town.

  “What do you think?” Michon asked as Worthless licked her neck. “Think I’d come back alive if I tackled the John Day River?”

  Worthless’s answer was lost in the sound of the doorbell. Michon sighed, scratched his head one last time, and got to her feet. As she reached for the doorknob she frowned. Copper sheen nail polish didn’t go with a frontier-style skirt and lacy blouse.

  Paul’s quick frown as he stepped in matched her own. “You aren’t ready,” he said.

  “Yes, I am,” Michon responded quickly. “This is as good as it’s going to get.”

  “Where’s that dress with the slit, the one I told you to wear?”

  “Beats the heck out of me,” Michon said over her shoulder as she stepped out the door, plainly indicating that Paul should join her. “Besides, I believe the word is ask, not tell.”

  “You’re in a fine mood,” Paul said as he locked the door behind them. “Look, this guy is important.”

  “I know,” Michon sighed. “Give me a little credit. I’m sorry,” she relented. “I told you I was tired.”

  “I don’t know why,” Paul said. “You’re the one who’s always saying you’ve got a cushy job. Nothing to do but keep your lipstick in place and smile nicely at the ladies with the fat pocketbooks.”

  “Those are your words, not mine,” Michon reminded him. “Don’t you ever get tired of staring at the same four walls and saying the same things every day? That’s what I’m tired of.”

  “Not as long as it pays the bills and paves the way to a promotion,” Paul pointed out as they walked to where his car was parked. “You just need more challenges in your job. Anything can get stale if it stays the same long enough.”

  “You hit the nail on the head about that one,” she agreed, accepting his hand on her arm as he helped her into the car. In the backseat sat a stocky, balding man cinched into a three-piece suit. For a moment Michon thought she wasn’t going to win her war with the giggles. Except for the color of their suits and the sizes, both Paul and the stranger could have come out of the same cookie cutter. She forced herself to smile pleasantly as Paul introduced her to Joseph McCullum. Paul said something about Mr. McCullum being involved in manufacturing in Chicago, but Michon barely listened.

  Now that she thought about it, she realized she knew very little about the details of Paul’s job. She knew it had to do with banks and investments and called for terms like cash flow and profit and loss, but, quite frankly, she found the whole thing a little too vague to hold her interest. She managed a few polite comments while Mr. McCullum, or Joseph, as he told her to call him, complained about the weather and streets in Chicago and told her how eager he was to open a branch office on the West Coast. “I’m convinced the women are better looking here,” he said. “It must come from the warmer climate. Paul said you’re someone who enjoys a good time. I’m certainly looking forward to the evening.”

  Michon shot Paul a quick look but he was concentrating on the road as he drove. A good-time girl, was she? Where Paul had gotten that idea she’d never know. He was probably just saying what he figured his client wanted to hear. The truth was, Michon’s idea of the perfect evening was to sit out on the patio of her apartment and eat a hamburger and corn on the cob. Not that they did too much of that. Paul got restless when the evening was too quiet. He liked action, lights, music.

  So, what are we doing going together, Michon asked Paul’s silent profile as Joseph continued his monologue about the benefits of West Coast girls. She didn’t suppose she should be so hard on Paul. After all, he was generous to a fault when it came to giving her material things, and he did make an effort to slow his pace to match hers. But their conversations were usually about such things as their respective jobs, what was being reported in the newspapers, the estate of the economy. Did Michon have any idea what Paul’s dreams were about? Did he wonder what moved her to tears? Someone to share an evening with, to keep from being alone wasn’t a good enough reason for blending their lives, was it?

  Paul pulled up in front of one of his favorite night spots and gave Joseph a glowing description of the variety of drinks the bartender could mix. Michon listened, thinking that her usual order of white wine sounded pretty dull alongside the concoctions they were describing. But then Michon wasn’t much of a drinker. Thank heavens that was one thing Paul finally understood. He didn’t say much when she nursed a slim glass until the liquid turned to room temperature.

  Usually when she’d been talked into coming along on one of Paul’s expeditions into the city’s nightlife with a client, Michon made an effort to enter the conversation. But tonight her mind simply wouldn’t settle on the words swirling around her. Instead she found herself staring at the plush, darkened
interior of the Blue Moon Lounge. Mahogany had been used to panel the walls and form the top of the bar. Rich blue drapes hung in full folds from the high windows. The only light came from candles placed on each table. The interior was carefully designed to take customers away from the everyday world and give them a feeling of relaxed luxury.

  But the effect was lost on Michon. She felt closed in, confined, with the drapes and paneled walls hiding the night sky. While they were driving over she’d noticed that the moon was half full. What was wrong with letting a little of the silent, timeless night in?

  Michon remembered sleeping out under the stars at summer camp when she was a girl. Her parents considered the camp a waste of money, but her grandfather had pulled out his checkbook and put his foot down. She’d been wrapped up in the fun of being away from her parents, surrounded by her girl friends, but even then she’d been touched by the rare feeling of night air unspoiled by city fumes. She’d lain awake in her sleeping bag, staring at the stars, awed by their brilliance and by the power of the universe evident in her uninterrupted view.

  Nights would be like that on the John Day River.

  Where would Chas and his students sleep at the end of each day’s journey? Would they use air mattresses or sleep on the ground? Her muscles ached, just thinking about trying to find a comfortable spot on rock-strewn ground, but somehow she knew it wouldn’t be like that for Chas. He was used to sleeping out-of-doors. He would slip into his worn but tested sleeping bag—probably still wearing his jeans—and fall asleep instantly, his muscles relaxing after a long day on the river.

  If he waked during the night the sounds that would come to him in the dark would be familiar…more familiar than the sounds outside the Blue Moon Lounge. Would he identify those sounds for her?