Matthew Null - Allegheny Front

“Them are your people,” we said, waving at the last raft.

Kelly shrugged. We gave Reed Judy some hopeful looks, so he hunkered down next to our fallen idol. “You coming? We’re going to Bud Shreve’s, grill some food. Be fun.”

“No, I’ll set here awhile.” Kelly rummaged around his backpack and found a gray army-surplus blanket. Was he too good for us?

“Alright, bud. You hear about the blind kid up here got bit by the rattlesnake?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Least he didn’t see it coming.”

Kelly smiled and looked at the ground. “That’s a good one,” he said. Didn’t even flinch; there was hope for him yet. But then he whispered something that turned Reed pale and bloodless — and that Reed wouldn’t tell about till years later. “You’re the one lied about Meadow Creek,” Kelly said. “Lied about finding her. Why would you do that to me?”

We left him there as the drawknife of dusk peeled back the world.

In heirloom, fifteen-verse ballads, lovers of the drowned flung themselves in, so their bones could frolic and mingle. But Kelly never trucked in old ways. Instead he sat with us.

For the rest of the season, Kelly was the first on Pillow Rock and last to go. Word went round he’d slept there through the weekends, under a ragged tent of laurel. “But he looks to be shaving,” someone said. Sure enough, he never missed a single raft. He perched there like an osprey. When the maples flared, he began telling stories of the dead girl.

It was hard not to listen. He’d sidle up if you broke away to piss or get another beer. She wanted to be an environmental lawyer, he said. She was an athlete. Once she ran a mile in five minutes and thirty-two seconds, a fluke — her average was six-fifteen. She stayed with her father weekends and summer. She loved dogs. “Oh, who don’t?” Chet asked him.

On a coolish day in October, for the first and only time, he spoke to us as a group. Our numbers had trickled, as they do at season’s end. Kelly chewed his fingernails, his thumbnail. Sucking the taste from them. Then he spoke.

In Bethesda, the dead girl’s home was the size of — he struggled for comparison — of the county courthouse, the one with the statue of Nancy Hart, who seduced her jailer, shot him in his stupid mouth, and brought back a Confederate cavalry to burn the town. Why did our forefathers raise a statue to someone who destroyed them? Our people fought at Carnifex Ferry. Left the trees full of minié balls, as much lead as wood, so they grew hunched and buzzardy under their mineral burden. We sparred and set the boats on fire. They whirled like burning flags in the night and snuffed themselves hissing in the Gauley. Why not a statue to that?

“That’s history,” Kelly said. “Pull your head out your ass.”

“Nothing happens no more. Day in, day out.”

He said, “You got no idea.”

Well, maybe not. “Idea of what?”

To prove us wrong, Kelly plucked up and spoke — confident now. He explained the last day of his rafting career.

When they broke for lunch in the canyon, Kelly offered to lead any stouthearted rafter up Barranshe Run to see the five falls, a stairstep of cataracts up the mountainside.

Hours from drowning, Greg Stallings asked, “Is it far?”

“Little bit. Just follow me, Greg. Anybody else?”

The group sat at a table made of the raft turned turtle. One stood up: the dead girl. Kelly kicked his accent up a notch. “A young thing. Great. You’ll lead the pack, Amanda.”

“I can take it,” she said, with a measure of pluck.

Kelly looked the dead girl over: strong legs, sleek lines. “You can carry her up there on your back,” he said to her father, appraising her like a foreign coin. “She still your little girl, right?”

Greg smiled. The others waved them on, faces full of sandwiches and potato salad, bright and ridiculous in their water-sport clothes — chartreuse and pylon orange, same color as the Power-bait we sling to the government trout.

Ascent. The two of them did what Kelly did, clutching the same wet points of rock, the same dry patches of moss for footholds. The trail stitched itself in and out of the creek, where trout danced like Salome in the tannic water. Smell of rotting wood. Squelch and rasp of wet tennis shoes on rock. Kelly explained Barranshe Run was named for a sow black bear that never whelped a single cub. “No one ran their dogs on her, ever, even when she was reelfoot and gray. Don’t know why. We kill lots of bears here.”

Greg said, “That sounds like a story to me.”

“It’s just what they say.” Kelly knew the rafters were obsessed with fact. They paraded it at him again and again. “Would have been a mercy to kill her.”

“That’s so callous,” the dead girl said.

“Here, you need to stay hydrated. You forget that out here.”

She unscrewed the water bottle and took a drink. She wiped her mouth, cocked her head at him.

The trail narrowed. She kept flicking him little looks.

Hands scrabbled for holds. Calves burned with acid. “One more bend,” Kelly hollered. There, Great Swallow Falls, thirty foot tall. It sluiced over a mossy lip of stone and sent a misty perpetual rainbow into the air: a fisherman’s cast-net frozen mid-throw. The world smelled of cold, rich limestone. Swallows nipped stoneflies. The colored hoop shimmered.

The dead girl showed Kelly how to work the switches on her camera. “Wait, show me again,” he said, grinning. She slapped his arm. “Pay attention.”

Kelly snapped a picture of father and daughter, perfect for the Internet. “Think that’s nice, you ought to see the next one.” Each falls more riveting than the last: deeper drop, darker hues, emerald, topaz, Prussian. The swallows piping like bone flutes.

Panting now, Greg said he couldn’t go on. He sat on a log, nursing warm spots that promised to blister.

“But the last one’s the best,” Kelly said, pointing ahead. Now the trail ran vertical, just a thin trough of root and rubble through jagged stone. A deer couldn’t run it. The ground called for a more agile animal, say a bobcat, a lean leaping ghost with splayed pads and tight haunches.

The dead girl wanted to try it. Kelly promised to bring her right back.

Greg hesitated. “It looks dangerous to me.”

“We take people every day. Amanda be fine.”

“Take your camera,” her father called after.

Kelly led her around the bend. “You got to climb up this little rise to get there.”

Her face went slack. “Are you serious?”

“Grab hold of that laurel, Amanda. That plant there. There you go. Give you a boost.”

Kelly gave it — touching her! — and she pulled herself up. Over the rise, she saw the last waterfall. It was nothing more than a tiny gurgling delta. She began to laugh.

She turned around and found Kelly there. He had a dusky look, shards of coal dust imbedded in his face. Nine years in the Haymaker Mine, riding the mantrip into the belly of the mountain. At night, his skin leaked metal. He woke to blue slivers on the pillow. He kissed her open mouth. She felt his beard and its pleasant rasp on her skin. Swallows singing through the air, soft blue sickles. And the two worlds touch, in a way we always hoped they could. Kelly jumped the wall. He became one of them.

“I turned that raft over,” Kelly said. “I turned it over on purpose.”

“My God,” said Reed, “them people trusted you. My God, that’s fucking awful, that’s terrible .”

The air crackled with alarm. Kelly stared at the river, the sculpted earth and water.

“’Deed I did. Her dad was looking at us,” Kelly said. “He come up behind and saw.”

Reed went on mindlessly, “No, no, no.”