Joan Didion: Run River

It had been the heat, and Sarah, and the way the summer had begun. Everett had wanted to find some way to talk to Julie, to tell her that he would take care of her, that she need not be frightened of anything. He had not even found a way to tell her that she drove too fast. He had once seen her doing eighty in the Lincoln on the river road. And Knight would be going East, alone. It was not that Everett minded. Although Princeton had not been his idea he thought it a good idea; he even thought that he might have liked, himself, a year somewhere other than Stanford. But he knew that Knight considered the trip back East less an interlude than a beginning. No matter what Knight said, he was not thinking of coming home to the ranch. What is it you want . Whatever he had wanted, none of the rest of them did. Before his grandfather had died, he had told Everett’s father that the riverfront and the other ranches, some seven thousand acres in all, were to be divided equally among his three grandchildren: Sarah, Everett, Martha. Although they had sold off some here and picked up some there, they still had the riverfront and they still had about seven thousand acres, all controlled by the corporation, the McClellan Company. (There was even a corporate seal, although Julie had broken the stamp years ago, trying to make an imprint on a leather suitcase.) Since Martha’s death, Everett and Sarah had each owned half of the McClellan Company, and Everett had managed all of it. Knight would hold even more land than that. All the old Knight orchards would come to him through Lily, and he would probably have everything up for sale before the ink was dry on the papers. (It had been Knight who had first pointed out to Sarah that the piece immediately upriver from the ranch was a tract called Rancho Del Rio No. 1 and the piece immediately downriver, developed a year later, a tract called Rancho Del Rio No. 3. “They’re just biding their time,” Knight had laughed, “waiting it out for Rancho Del Rio No. 2.”)

What is it you want . He had said it to Martha (what do you want, baby , he had said, what did you want) the night she drowned off the dock where his gun now lay. He had wanted to say it to Sarah, every time she came home (only she did not now call it home). He had wanted to say it to Knight and he had wanted to say it to Julie. He looked at Lily again. She had the blank, frightened look that she had some nights when he woke her from bad dreams. She had always been afraid of the dark. Sweet Jesus, what had she wanted?

“I want to go up to the house,” he said.

We could make the reasons . Everett’s mind began to function now for the first time since he had left the Templeton house (it must have been about midnight, because someone had shouted “no dancing on Sundays,” and then Francie Templeton had gone to get him a drink he did not need, Joe Templeton had asked him where Lily was, and he had walked out of the house, across the lawn and down the graveled drive to the car; he had seen Knight kissing Francie’s niece from Santa Barbara down on the stone bench by the swimming pool, had discerned Francie’s laugh among the voices and music from the house, and had seen then that Lily’s car was gone); began to weigh the potentialities now as he stood on the levee waiting for the headlights to pass so that he and Lily could cross the road to the house. (Oh God remember how it was to drive the river road late on hot summer nights with Lily asleep, her head dropped on his shoulder, to hear the mosquitoes above the sound of the motor and to know that ahead was the cool white room, the walnut bed with the mosquito netting, Lily’s room and his, his grandfather’s before him. Lost in the night fields, his body, Lily’s body, the house ahead: all one, some indivisible trinity. But maybe it had never been that way except late at night, never except when Lily was asleep. He knew this road so well that he could drive it with his eyes closed, could have plotted every curve in his sleep, knew exactly when to expect the jolt where the roadbed changed at the county line. Remember how it was. Asleep, Lily was any way he willed her.)

“Don’t be afraid now,” Lily said, her voice harsh. She put her hand on his arm as if to pull him along.

He realized then that the headlights were long past, that he still stood in the gravel with his head dropped forward. He had remembered, while they waited for the car to pass, what had happened between the time Joe Templeton asked him where Lily was and the time he walked out of the house. He had taken a swing at Joe, grazing his jaw and causing Francie, Everett’s drink in her hand, to step between them, almost sober for a change. What happened , she kept saying. Everett had not known what had happened but it had something to do with Joe. You’ve really got it made, haven’t you, Templeton , he had snarled. Swimming pools. New Thunderbirds. For a lousy dirt farmer you really got the world by the tail . As he walked out Francie was laughing: I don’t notice you driving any Model T, Everett McClellan. I don’t notice your kids swimming in the river. Between semesters at Princeton .

Straightening his shoulders, Everett pulled his arm from Lily’s touch.

“When’s Julie coming home,” he said.

“I don’t know.” She dropped her hand. “I don’t know about Knight or Julie. She was with one of the twins again.”

He looked toward the house. “The lights are on downstairs.”

“I left them.”

“I just don’t want to see Julie.”

“Listen,” she said. “We can make it all right.”

“Not Julie,” he said.

She put her fingers against his cheek and he caught them there with his hand. Her skin was soft and in the darkness she looked about twenty again, and vulnerable. Well, vulnerable she was. Pity her simplicity and suffer her to come to Thee . It could be easy enough. He could go back to the river now, lift Channing’s body off that rotten log, weight it, and roll it into the river. It would lie there three, maybe four months, anyway until the river picked up a little water, began running fast enough to move the body downstream. Then it might be found: might catch on a piling or wash into a slough, be dragged up. How much could they discover by probing that disfigured, disintegrating mass of flesh? He tried to recall detective novels, but could think only of the kind in which the room blacks out an instant and the victim, when the lights go on again, is discovered slumped across the chemin de fer table. At any rate, he need deal here with neither the C.I.D. nor the Sureté, but only the incalculable expertise of the county coroner’s office, an unknown quantity. This was less the stuff of detective novels than of newspaper murder accounts, which he had read throughout his life with a disinterest born of disbelief. They had never seemed probable. Father Kills Daughter’s Swain, Argument over Car Keys. Wife Kills Mate, Wounds Child, Did Not Mean to Fire. Carhop Slain, Assailant Unknown . He could dredge from all those years of reading only the impression that dentists were frequently key witnesses when it came to identification; he had a further notion, even more dim, that no matter how advanced the decomposition an autopsy would show whether or not the cause of death had been drowning. The lungs either did or did not contain water, he could not remember which. Even if the body did not turn up for months, in that case, there would be inquiries, questions asked of all Channing’s acquaintances and particularly of him, particularly of him and of Lily. Everyone knew, everyone must know, about Lily and Channing, about Martha and Channing. Fifteen years.

Anyway, it might be discovered tomorrow, next week. Nancy Channing would miss him, if nobody else did: she was suing for back alimony and had her father’s lawyers after him all the time. For all Everett knew a hearing was scheduled for Monday. Were Channing reported missing, they might think — would certainly think, in a summer when there had been three or four drownings a month — to drag the river; might drag up the weighted body, leaving no question of accident, no possibility that the generally disorganized details of Ryder Channing’s life had led him to drown himself. There were altogether too many variables.