Питер Геллер - The River

They lowered her to the stones where she could use a driftwood stump as a backrest. She smiled again and said, “Optimism. All that green and the end of the burn.”

They split all the fish three ways and wished again they had salt and devoured it all. It didn’t feel like enough but it felt better. They didn’t see any berries here but knew they should find more farther down, so the stress of starvation seemed lifted for now. She ate, but she winced often and her skin was white and Wynn saw her press her stomach with her good arm as if she were quelling spasms.

Jack tossed a strip of fine bones into the coals. “He probably made it through,” he said. “The fire. If this is the northern edge and he is ahead of us by a day, he made it through.”

They both looked at him.

“Will he get harder or weaker?” Jack said.

Her eyes flickered. They were sleepy eyes, almost drugged. “What do you mean?”

“I mean will all the waiting and stalking make him sharper? Will it hone him or erode him? Will he start to waver?”

“He doesn’t second-guess himself, if that’s what you mean.”

Jack nodded.

She grimaced, and Wynn thought it was either her injuries or the thought of her husband. She said, “He told me that when he applied to prep school in Connecticut, the admissions director asked him to name his best quality. ‘I’m tenacious,’ Pierre said. ‘Okay,’ the man said. ‘What’s your worst?’ ‘I’m stubborn,’ he said.”

“So Pierre’s a psychopath and also cute.”

She shrugged her good shoulder.

“Why does he want you dead so bad?”

“Because he tried to kill me and screwed up?”

“Yeah, I mean before.”

“I’m starting to think it’s for the same reason he married me.” She half turned, as if ashamed, and Jack saw the tears running and looked away out of tact.

After a while he said gently, “Why?”

“Because my family has money?” She said it simply, without pride or shame but as a fact. “My husband loved me because I was a Rhode Island Brown.”

Jack blinked. It was clear that didn’t mean shit to him. “You die, he inherits.”

She nodded vaguely and wiped her wet face with her good arm. “We hadn’t been getting along for a while. And I had a paper in Science and one in Nature and he had a coauthor citation in Aquatic Geochemistry. ”

Jack studied her for a second, then took the pot to the creek and filled it for tea. At least they still had tea. Wynn knew the look and he knew what Jack was thinking: Poor Maia; damn. The lives that people twist themselves into. And also: Rich people are another species. Sort of lost in their own way. It’s a good thing they have country clubs and shit because it keeps them kinda corralled up in one place. Jack had surely decided that neither one in that marriage of scientists was very appetizing.

Jack set the pot over the coals and let it boil for a few minutes and then he fetched the makings from the box and the two travel cups and brought them to the fire. They were very lucky that the box and bag had been strapped in so well and that the straps had held. They drank the sweet tea slowly, and when she was finished Jack took the cup from her and made his own. Wynn watched her and saw her head loll once as if she would pass out. He thought again that if she didn’t get to a hospital soon she would die. Well, she was sitting against the stump and she was close enough to the heat—for now it was best to let her be. He sat away from the fire facing downstream where the woods were still green and standing and he worked the little chunk of wood in his hand with his knife. He heard a loon call, piercing and forlorn, and it poured into his spirit like cool water. It was a sad cry and he realized as he listened how barren the river had felt in the days without it. Why was a wail that seemed so lost and lonely so…what? Essential and lovely. It was like the blues, he guessed, or like Jack’s cowboy songs. Sad, but somehow you would starve without them.

Wynn looked downstream at the course of sky curving away between walls of living woods. Soon the channel of firmament would pulse with a star, then three, then a hundred, and it would keep filling and deepening until the stars sifted and flowed between the tops of the trees in their own river, whose coves and bends would mirror the one they were on. He had thought it before, and he loved thinking about the two rivers. The river of stars would find its way to its own bay and its own ocean of constellations and Wynn imagined, as he had before, that the water and the stars might sing to each other in a key inaudible, usually, to the human ear. But probably you could hear it. Sometimes. If you quieted the pulse of your own blood. A rhythmic keening at the edge of sound. Wynn thought that if wolves sang, and coyotes, and elk and birds, and wind, and we, too, it was probably in response to a music we didn’t know we could hear.

He thought about collecting embers from their fire and carrying them in the pot down to the river’s edge and spreading them into a bending river. It would be beautiful once night fell. If he then blew on them they would breathe and shimmer with sparks. He could see it: the low throbbing light winding through the dark. But it would not be quite like stars, and anyway the fire wasn’t big enough and they didn’t have enough embers. She needed the heat.

No one realized how late in the afternoon it had gotten. The sun dropped into the tall trees downstream and the air cooled fast. Damn. They must have been sapped by hunger and exhaustion, because they had let the afternoon slip away. Lost it to lollygagging on the shore. No, they hadn’t lost it: they had badly needed the fish and the rest. Wynn thought how they also needed to get downstream, to get her to a doctor if nothing else, and how it was unspoken but none of them wanted to paddle into the blasts of a 12-gauge shotgun. Because that’s what was surely waiting. Wynn put the scaled-down canoe in his pocket and went to the fire. She was stretched out—Jack had fetched the foam pad—and she seemed to be asleep and her bruised face was alarmingly pale.

Jack said, “Whoa. Big, you look like Frankenstein.”

“Thanks.”

“Hurt?”

“Not much.”

Jack pushed off from the bench he’d made from rocks and driftwood and went to the Pelican box and brought back a tube of Neosporin. “Here, wash your hands off and use some of this. Better if we let it breathe in open air than cover it. What they told me when I burned my thigh on the Kawasaki.”

“You did?”

“Fell over at like one mile an hour. A sizzling August afternoon. My inner thigh hit the motor and it made a sound I’d rather forget and smelled like pork chops.”

“Gross.”

“I jumped in the cow pond like a cartoon character. Bad idea. Not the cleanest water. By nightfall there were streaks running up my leg. Pop was at the Cattlemen’s Association meeting in the Springs. I called my neighbor’s mom, who was a nurse, and told her and she said, ‘Jack, you listen to me. That’s blood poisoning. It’s serious shit. Things can fall off.’ I looked down and saw how close it was to things and I drove myself straight to the ER.”

Jack’s hair was sticking out and he was immersed in the memory and wore a look of confounded horror. Wynn laughed. “You trying to scare me?”

“No, no. Sorry. You’ll be fine. But we’ll get it looked at as soon as we hit the village.”

Wynn sat beside his buddy. “She doesn’t look good.”

“I was thinking that. Something’s screwed up inside her. He hit her more than she told us about, or she blacked out.”

“Should we try to make a couple of miles before full dark?”

Jack shook his head. “We won’t get far. Plus we’re safe here. If he’da been anywhere near we’d have known about it by now.” Jack spat onto a chunk that had gone to ember and it hissed. “We were really lucky up above. He missed us at forty feet with a shotgun. That won’t happen again.”