Gary Paulsen: The River

Just that. The Time. When he was speaking quietly to Deborah about it — he’d tried to tell her of it, all of it, including the moments when he tried to end himself — when he spoke to her about it, he always started it with just those words:

The Time.

A year had passed, and in the world around him not much had changed. His mother still saw the man, though not as much, and Brian thought it might be passing, what they had between them. The divorce was still final — and would probably remain so. He’d gone to visit his father after the Time and found that he’d fallen in love with another woman and was going to marry her.

Things ground on, a day at a time.

But Brian had changed, completely.

And one of the things that had happened was that now he loved to cook. There was something about the food, preparing the food, looking at the food — there was so much of it compared to what he’d had in the woods. He enjoyed taking the food out, working with it and cooking it and serving it and eating it. Chewing each bite, knowing the food, watching other people eat. Sometimes he would just sit and watch his mother eat what he had cooked, and once it bothered her so much that she looked up at him, a piece of sauteed beef on a fork halfway to her mouth.

“What is it?”

“I’m just watching you eat,” he’d said to her. “It’s something — eating. Just to see somebody eat. It’s really something.”

“Are you… all right?” she’d asked. Of course, he wasn’t — or maybe he was and had never been all right before in his life. But he’d smiled and nodded.

“Sure, fine…”

But it was more that he couldn’t tell her what was wrong, or even if anything was wrong — he couldn’t really talk to anybody about it because nobody understood what he meant.

His father and mother had insisted that he go to a counselor when he first came back, and more to humor them than anything else he went, but it didn’t help. The counselor thought he was somehow mentally injured, somehow harmed, and the truth was almost the exact opposite. He tried to tell the counselor that he was more than he had been, not less — not just older, not just fifteen when before he had been fourteen, but more. Much more. But the counselor didn’t understand, couldn’t understand, because he hadn’t been with Brian in the woods during the time. The Time.

“I discovered fire,” Brian told the counselor.

“Well, sure, but you’re back now—”

Brian had stopped him. “No. You don’t understand. I truly discovered fire — the way some man or woman did it thousands and thousands of years ago. I discovered fire where it had been hidden in the rock for all of time and it was there for me. It doesn’t matter that we have matches or lighters or that fire is easy to make here in the other part of the world. I truly and honestly discovered fire. It was a great thing, a very great thing….”

The counselor had sat behind his desk and smiled and nodded and tried to know what Brian was speaking about, but it wasn’t there — he couldn’t.

And that became the way of it for Brian. In all his dealings with the new world around him since he was reborn in the woods — as he thought of it — he had to be evasive, hold back. If he told the truth, nobody believed him; and if he was silent — which he found himself becoming more and more — they thought he was sick.

He couldn’t win.

He took two pork chops out of the freezer and thawed them in the microwave. Then he found the cookbook and flipped to the page for breaded pork chops.

When he first returned home, he found himself wanting to eat a great deal. He would buy a hamburger, eat it, drink a malt, then think immediately of buying another one, but that only lasted a brief time. His stomach had shrunk and the food made him feel heavy, wrong somehow, and he’d stopped overeating.

But he still took great pleasure in food, and he now prepared the pork chops slowly, enjoying himself as he worked.

He cut the fat off them, breaded them, preheated the oven, and put them in a glass pan. While they were baking he looked at the clock again — his mother was due in less than half an hour and she was never late — and put two potatoes on a plate to bake in the microwave. He would start them when she came home — they baked in a few minutes — and they could eat before the men came back.

“ It was a wonderful meal,” his mother said, leaning back from the table and smiling, “as usual.”

Brian nodded. “Something I whipped up.”

They cleared the table. They had become strangely closer since his return. So much of the divorce, and the other man, had bothered him, but coming close to death in the woods had led him to understand some things about himself and other people. He realized that he was not always right, was, indeed, often not right, and at the same time he found that others were not always wrong.

He learned to accept things — his mother, the situation, his life, all of it — and with the acceptance, he found that he admired her.

She was trying to make a go of it alone, working in a real estate office selling lots, and it was rough.

“We have to talk,” he said, putting the dishes in the dishwasher. To have dishes, he thought, just to have dishes and pots and pans and a stove to cook the food — it still marveled him. “Some men are coming over to talk to you.”

“What men?”

He explained Derek and the other two, what they wanted.

“You mean what they said they wanted. They might be anybody. We should call the police.”

He shrugged. “If you want. I was a little worried at first, but they didn’t do anything and they seemed all right, so I told them to come back.”

She thought it over and finally nodded. “Let’s see if they come — we’ll play it the way it looks best.”

As if on cue the doorbell rang, and she went to the door with Brian following.

Derek stood alone on the front step. He backed away so they could see him well through the peephole in the door.

She opened the door.

“Hello. I’m Derek Holtzer—”

“My son told me about you. Weren’t there two others?”

“We thought one man might be less pushy. They stayed in the motel.”

“Please come in. We’ll have some coffee.”

Derek followed her in and they sat down at the dining room table and Derek explained to Brian’s mother what he wanted — all that he had told Brian.

“We would control the operation closely,” he said, “and take every precaution possible. Of course, we wouldn’t do anything without your permission, and Brian’s father’s as well,” Derek concluded.

His mother sipped coffee and put the cup down carefully. Her voice was even, as if talking about the weather. “I think it’s insane.”

Brian half agreed with her. In all the time since his return, he had had dozens of kids and not a few adults say how much they would have liked to do it — be marooned in the woods with nothing but a hatchet. But they always said it when they weren’t over a block and a half from a grocery store, usually in a room with lights and cushions on a couch and running water. None of them had ever said it while they were sitting in the dark with mosquitoes plugging their nostrils or night sounds so loud around them they couldn’t think.

To want to go back was insane.

And yet.

And yet…

Yet there was this small feeling, a tingle at the back of his neck as his hairs went up.

“I know it sounds strange, but Brian has had a unique experience,” Derek said. He set his cup down carefully on the saucer. “It could save lives if he would help us.”