Joan Didion: Run River

“Where’s his car?” Everett asked suddenly, and as he said it the variables began crowding in, the elements he could never calculate, the other factors overlooked. Channing’s car still on the ranch; China Mary, not at her sister’s as she usually was on Saturday night but maybe in her own cottage beyond the house, hearing the shot, knowing; the possible appointments set up for Monday. Not that suicides didn’t set up appointments; not that Channing, in any case, had made much of a practice of keeping appointments the past few years. But still.

“Down the back road to the dock,” Lily said, calm, and the old resentment flared briefly, obscuring everything. (Parked just off the levee road, hidden in the trees and darkness along the old dock road; the black Mercedes still unpaid for. “I was down on the dock, baby,” she would have said in the same calm voice had none of it happened, had he simply come home from the party and found the house empty, simply waited upstairs as he had waited other evenings, listening for her high heels on the wooden verandah, listening for the screen door, for her humming. We will thrive on keep alive on/just nothing but kisses . “I was down watching the water. Didn’t Francie tell you I’d gone on home? Didn’t she tell you I had a headache?”)

He could get rid of the Mercedes, all right, but it would be like sandbagging a levee already breached. Something else would keep turning up. There was still, however, Lily’s way, the almost straight way, the way which would still give them something to talk about but the way which would be, in the end, the easy way: he could call the sheriff’s office now — he could call Ed McGrath at home, they had gotten him at home the night Martha drowned — and tell him that he had shot Ryder Channing in self-defense. Or protection of property. Or whatever they wanted to call it. He had come home, heard Lily screaming on the dock, had picked up his gun and run down to investigate. When he found Lily struggling with Channing he had tried to break it up; Channing had gone for him and he had shot him. Rancher Shoots Friend in Row over Wife, Did Not Mean to Kill .

It was plausible only if you accepted as given Lily’s alleged resistance. Get some hotshot District Attorney in there — who would it be? Everett no longer knew — he could make something of that, make it clear how many times Lily had heard the song before. Although they could probably prove nothing about Lily and Channing (Nancy Channing, he thought, would not have bothered to get whatever evidence there had then been; she had divorced him a long time ago and simply said mental cruelty but of course she might have had the evidence anyway — more variables, incalculable again), they could imply plenty, maybe prove something else, possibly even drag Martha’s name into it once they talked to Nancy Channing (he did not know how much if anything Nancy Channing had known about Martha), sink the knife in Lily, make it hard for a jury to believe she would have drawn a line, started screaming after that many times around.

But it was possible: Lily could probably make it work. They would drag it all out in the newspapers (give Francie Templeton two drinks, she’d probably testify herself) but Lily could make it work. She would say anything now, not particularly to save him but to save them all, him, Knight, Julie, herself. It would be a sweet trial, all right; a sweet trial for Julie. Well, he wanted to save them too. (Never had Julie seemed more precious to him than she had tonight: he would consider the world well lost to keep her intact, her small bones, her sunburn, her white dress, her hair so like Martha’s, her longing for a straight-stick Thunderbird. And his entire commitment to Lily had become an unbreakable promise to protect her from the mortal frailties which were, since they were hers, his own.) He wanted to save them and he would. It was only that he was not sure how. He could sort out no clear reason, no starting point. It was the kind of letters he got from Sarah and it was Martha buried there by the levee and it was the way Knight had talked in June; it was the way he had always felt about the kiln burning, only that no longer mattered. It was as if the kiln had burned already. Everything seemed to have passed from his reach way back somewhere; he had been loading the gun to shoot the nameless fury which pursued him ten, twenty, a good many years before. All that had happened now was that the wraith had taken a name, and the name was Ryder Channing.

A little late for choosing, she had said to Everett, quite as if it hadn’t always been. Was there ever in anyone’s life span a point free in time, devoid of memory, a point when choice was any more than sum of all the choices gone before? A little late for choosing: her father had known it, even as he denied it. But deny it he had. You say what you want and strike out for it , he told Lily on the morning of her sixteenth birthday: it was one of their rare attempts to grope through a conversation with each other, deafened as always by the roar of the blood between them. (Neither Walter Knight nor his only child ever forgot that blood: dumbly, they exchanged deliberate commonplaces, phrases perhaps dry and hard enough to carry the weight of something for which there was no phrase at all. Take care of yourself. Do you need any money. Write.) You say what you want and then go after it, and if you decide to be the prettiest and the smartest and the happiest, you can be .

“Just you remember that everybody gets what he asks for in this world,” Walter Knight repeated, making two stacks of the sixteen silver dollars he had dropped on her bed.

“Maybe that’s not such a prize,” she said. “Getting what you ask for.”

She was aware that the attainment of her own most inadmissable wish, to be asked to play Scarlett O’Hara in the movie version of Gone With the Wind , was not only outside the range of probability but not, over the long stretch, in her best interests. It would not, per se , build character. On the other hand her father was not talking about her character, which was one of the things that distinguished him from other people’s fathers. Another was that he was good-looking enough, despite what was called in her mother’s family “a weak mouth,” to play Rhett Butler.

“I didn’t say it was any prize.” Walter Knight took a fruit knife from his pocket and began cutting up the apple he had brought for Lily’s breakfast. “I didn’t say that at all. I said it’s nobody’s fault but your own. My own. Anybody’s own.”

He paused, dropping the core of the apple in a waste-basket. “Eat this apple and we’ll get some waffles. You’re too thin. I said you play the game, you make the rules. I said if a lot of people a long time back hadn’t said what they wanted and struck out for it you wouldn’t have been born in California. You’d have been born in Missouri maybe. Or Kentucky. Or Virginia.”

“Or abroad,” Lily suggested.

Walter Knight paused. To have been born abroad was not, even within the range of his own rhetoric, quite conceivable.

“Or abroad,” he conceded finally, seeing that the point was his own. “What I mean is you come from people who’ve wanted things and got them. Don’t forget it.”

“Maybe I don’t know what I want. Sometimes I worry about it.”

“I’ll do the worrying,” Walter Knight said. “You know that.”

With a faith that troubled Walter Knight even as he encouraged it, Lily believed at sixteen, as firmly as she believed that it was America’s mission to make manifest to the world the wishes of an Episcopal God, that her father would one day be Governor of California. It was only a matter of time before he could be rightfully installed in Sacramento in the white Victorian house he still called, in an excess of nonchalance (it had been since 1903 the Governor’s Mansion), “the old Gallatin place.” Any time Walter Knight spent in town could be explained in view of this end, and he spent, the year Lily was sixteen, a great deal of time in town: more time than he would ever spend again, for 1938 was to be, although they did not then know it, his last year in the Legislature.