Питер Геллер - The River

Jack said, “It’s not what you think.”

“No?”

“She’s hurt bad. We’re trying to get her out to a doctor. But—”

“I’m listening. With great interest, I surely am.” Brent spat.

“Her husband did this. Threw our shit in the river at the first portage and paddled out.”

Brent worked his jaw, cocked his ear sideways as if trying to hear the faint winds of logic.

“Then we flipped in that last big rapid, lost the rest of our food and warm clothes,” Jack said.

It was getting darker. The tide of night seemed to flow up the river and settle over the water and spill over the banks. Ever so slowly. Where there were trees the gathering darkness was rising up into the shaggy tops, which had gone still. The sunset wind had nearly died. It was just a stirring of air upstream that came with a cool touch that presaged another night of frost. For the first time in what seemed like years, Jack smelled less char than the cold scents of sediment-laden water.

He said, “It’s a long story. We thought we were fucked. Now we need to get her out to the village. You can move a lot faster with that motor. Maybe you can take her at first light.”

Brent studied Jack. And spat. Then he looked up at Wynn, who, even hunched, with his hands in his pockets, towered over them both. Even in the thickening dusk Wynn was all freckles and unruly curls and earnestness and seemed much more Norman Rockwell than James Dickey; he looked like a kid who had never had a mean thought in his life. Brent said, “You wanna put that rifle away somewhere?”

“If your man does.”

Brent whistled softly and JD tucked the aught-six back under the bow. Jack slung the .308 over his shoulder. Brent said, “I owe you one, back at the island. We were on a little bit of a bender.” His chuckle was mirthless. “Maybe we weren’t paying attention to what we should have. The day after you left, JD climbed a tree. And we saw that motherfucking fire. We didn’t get overcranked, but we kept an eye on it. So, thanks.”

Jack nodded. “Okay, well,” Brent said. “She’s bad?”

Jack nodded again. Brent said, “We’ll camp with you-all and take off at daybreak. Sound good? We’ve been fishing and we’ve got a bunch of extra food. Looks like you could use a good meal.”

Jack and Wynn helped the men unload. They had a big wall tent, which skinny JD set up by himself with the light of a headlamp. He never said a word and he never got too far away from his gun. He seemed to be the muscle. Brent brought up only one dry bag, presumably with his own stuff, and went to the fire, where he tossed on a few sticks of driftwood and settled himself on a bigger rock. He looked over at the sleeping woman without expression. Wynn had covered her with his sleeping bag so only her head stuck out, and except for the fading bruises and the dark circles under her eyes, and what even in the moving firelight was an unnatural paleness, she looked like any other sleeping woman. Brent dug into his bag and brought out a full plastic fifth of Ancient Age and unscrewed the cap, drank. Jack watched him. Brent knew he was being watched and didn’t seem to care. He had a second thought and roused himself and walked down in the dark to his boat and brought up a wire grill and what looked like a two-gallon plastic barrel with latches. With two sticks he shoved the blaze to one side of the fire ring and set up the grill on its legs over a heap of coals and unlatched the barrel and laid out four fat lake trout, evidently salted in brine. Yum. He nodded to himself at a job well done, sat back on the rock and busied himself with the serious business of drinking. When JD was done with the tent and unrolling the sleeping pads and carrying the kitchen box to the fire, he sat beside his buddy on the flat rock and took the fifth from Brent’s hands without a word and took a long swallow. Jack figured he must have drunk three ounces in one go. Well. One way of making yourself at home.

The men were no fools. Nothing like Jack had thought on the first encounter on the lake. They made a big meal with wordless efficiency. Brent even deigned to peel potatoes they fished from a plastic burlap sack. Salted lake trout and potatoes and steamed carrots, and a bouillon gravy JD stirred up in a frying pan with flour and some nameless oil. Jack and Wynn let Maia sleep and set up the little tent so she could move into it later. As soon as she woke they’d feed her. The boys ate with ravenous hunger. Nobody said much. If JD and Jack kept track of where the rifles were at all times and kept them close, nobody let on that they noticed.

The night was dark. The waning moon had come and gone, settling down like a curve of bone in a west where no smoke lingered. The stars and the flicker of northern lights on the eastern horizon had been doused in clouds. The campfire had nearly expired. Jack had let it die down. And he had let Wynn sleep. Wynn: laid out under the frost that never came, stretched out in the open under a night that smelled like rain, sleeping on the beach so he could let Maia have privacy in the tent. Wynn, who had said, “Cap, wake me in two hours. Let’s do two-hour shifts tonight. No one’s going to have any problem passing out.” Jack had promised and sat by the fire with JD and watched the man drink. The two with their rifles lying beside them on the stones.

JD had offered, proffered the now half-full bottle of bourbon by the neck, and Jack had taken the bottle the first two times. He knew with drinkers that the first impression was the thing, that once you started knocking back with a serious drinker they’d just assume you were with them all night, matching them slug for slug, even if you never took another sip. To a drinker, everyone else in the world was a partyer, too. So he got JD launched, which wasn’t hard because the two fishermen had probably been drinking all day. Jack wouldn’t have been surprised if one of the boxes in the canoe was solid fifths.

Brent had hit the hay early, muttering, “Big day tomorrow,” and keeping whatever thoughts to himself. JD drank with a steady sullenness. Between bouts, he swung his head and watched Jack from under his brow, and if he wanted to ask what the hell had happened with the girl, et cetera, he restrained himself, but he turned his head to the tent more than once and Jack had the strong impression that it wasn’t just because he had burning questions. There was a young woman lying in there, however injured. That’s the sense Jack got.

Jack watched him like a wolf. He was smelling the man as much as watching him. Smelling him getting more stewed, watching for signs of fatigue. He needed these guys, and he wasn’t going to screw it up. A light wind came up, moving downstream, and it chilled his back. Good. An owl hooted. Single hollow notes whose cadence Jack followed to keep himself awake. But they never formed a pattern, except that in their staggered randomness they seemed to probe a night of velvet depths and echoing solitude. He stirred up the fire and added wood to keep the heat coming, more to lull JD than to warm himself. He needed to stay awake.

And he did, barely.

There’s a certain stillness before dawn. A caesura. The fire was a heap of dusted embers. No wind. In the lacuna between outbreath and inbreath even the owl hushed. The sipping of the river seemed to drop an octave. Fuck. Jack’s head jerked up. He must have passed out. Even he couldn’t vanquish the exhaustion of the past couple of days. He must have slept sitting up, slumped over the rifle in his lap, and now he stirred and his head twitched up, and he shook it and straightened his back against the stiffness. Fuck. He sucked in a draft of cold air. Something had woken him. Wha—?