In the Valley

by Ron Rash

  “Tell Clary he needs to educate his new hires.”

  The couple had heard him but stared at their lines, not wishing to get involved. Afraid. But Stacy wasn’t. What she experienced first when eight years old came again—the sense of entering an expanse where nothing could touch her. Yet this was a different kind of flight, no longer away from but toward.

  Stacy nodded at the stringer staked to the bank.

  “How many fish have you got?”

  “Don’t remember,” Hardaway said, his left boot inches from the stringer. “But you might call Clary before you check.”

  Stacy stepped forward, leaned over to tug the nylon cord. The fish emerged. Hardaway was so close she could smell his muskiness. Stacy counted fourteen and stepped away, began writing the second ticket. Hardaway reeled in and lifted the stringer.

  “I’ll let you tear up that one,” he said, muttering “bitch” as he went up the bank to the trail.

  At five Stacy went back to the station, found Clary peering at real estate brochures. Only six weeks from retirement, he spent less time on the trails than in his office sipping coffee and searching for beach property. The three keys to being a good ranger were experience, good manners, and common sense, Clary had told her several times in their four months together, each time with less of an easygoing smile. Something’s wrong with that girl, Stacy overheard Clary tell a maintenance worker. But she’d known others thought that, why else the years of counselors, therapists, doctors.

  Stacy showed him the copies of her citations, told what Hardaway had done.

  “He’s a real piece of work, ain’t he,” Clary said, smiling.

  “He’s a lawbreaker.”

  “I’d not argue that, and it’s put him in jail half a dozen times, including near killing a man in a bar fight. As a matter of fact, I didn’t even know he was out.”

  “What do you want me to do, besides taking these citations to the magistrate?”

  “Nothing except throw them in a trash can,” Clary answered. “Having to deal with Hardaway isn’t worth it for you or me.”

  “So let him think I’m afraid of him?”

  “I’m saying it’s best not to provoke him,” Clary answered, “the same way you’d not take a stick and poke a rattlesnake. He’ll soon do something serious enough to put him back in jail, hopefully for a long time. Whatever that screw-up is, I’d rather it not happen in my park.”

  “I did my job, and he called me a bitch,” Stacy said, “but he knew better than to say it to my face.”

  “Knew better?” Clary said, grimacing when Stacy nodded.

  “And when he comes back?” she asked.

  “Look,” Clary said. “I’ll make this easy for both of us. I’m ordering you not to check Hardaway’s license or catch. You keep your ticket pad in your pocket, and remember you’re on probation.”

  * * *

  —

  The following Wednesday morning the white hatchery truck made its weekly stocking, so Stacy wasn’t surprised the lot was crowded with vehicles. By late afternoon many of the stocked fish had been caught, the fishermen gone to await next week’s dump. Stacy was about to check the catch-and-release section when she saw Hardaway’s blue truck pull into the lot. She watched him walk down the trail, can of corn and rod in his hands. She waited a minute, then followed, stopped at the bridge edge where she could see below but not be seen. Another man, younger, was already fishing the pool. Hardaway sidled up beside him and said something. The other fisherman pulled up his stringer and walked downstream.

  Stacy stepped onto the bridge.

  “What did you say to that guy?”

  “What guy?” Hardaway said.

  “Him,” Stacy said, nodding downstream.

  Hardaway smiled.

  “I just told him the fishing’s a lot better below this pool.”

  Stacy stepped off the bridge and walked a few yards into the forest. She pressed a palm against a white oak to steady herself, looked at the brown leaves covering the ground, then the tree trunks, and last the gaps in the greening canopy. I am a part of only what I see here before me, she told herself and let go the oak. With her fingers Stacy preened her black hair until she grew calm. She closed her eyes and smelled the woods, went deep inside herself and felt her bones lighten.

  Stacy opened her eyes and searched the understory until she found a rock of sufficient size. Then she returned to the bridge. At first, Hardaway ignored Stacy as she watched him from above. She waited until he looked up, then settled her forearm on the bridge railing, the rock filling her hand.

  “You ain’t going to do that,” Hardaway said.

  The rock was heavy, but she held it in her palm a few more moments, then tilted her hand. The rock slipped free and hit the pool’s center with a loud splash. She walked off the bridge and up the stream trail, thinking Hardaway might follow but he didn’t.

  After half a mile she came to where the creek split and followed the narrower branch. The small path ascended. Alongside, the water leapt off rocks to pause in kettled pools. Only brook trout lived here. Unlike the browns and rainbows downstream, Stacy knew these fish were native to these mountains, holdovers from the last ice age. With their orange fins, tiny moons of green, red, and gold brightening their flanks, they were beautiful creatures, but fragile.

  Few people came up this far, the path too steep and the air too thin. They’d turn back, out of breath, legs wobbly. But she could make the ascent easily, her body trained to do so. At the beginning of tenth grade, the high school’s counselor told her parents that sports might be a way for Stacy to develop better social skills. She chose cross-country, but liked it for reasons opposite of what the adults had hoped. For Stacy, the whole idea was to flee from everyone else. She had been good at that. She ran an extra three miles before school, did workouts alone on Saturday and Sunday. By October she was the fastest on the team. But what mattered were the moments she forgot she had arms and legs, felt instead the gliding sensation of flight, something none of the medications had ever given her. The other girls resented her, especially Stacy’s refusal to run with the pack even in practice. By her senior year she was the best cross-country runner in the conference, but one dawn morning she tripped and her Achilles tendon snapped.

  The path leveled, a granite outcrop on the right. Here was her favorite perch. She could see the valley, the stream, even the peaks on the farther mountains. A limb rustled behind her, a glimpse of glossy black feathers. Probably a crow. But at this elevation ravens also could be here.

  The name had been bestowed on her last summer at the ranger academy. In nineteenth-century Colorado, the instructor had told them, a woman hoeing in her garden had watched a raven fly toward her, dip low as it passed overhead, and settle a few feet away. The bird performed the same action twice more. Perplexed, the woman looked around the surrounding land. She saw it then, a mountain lion hunched low in the prairie grass. She dropped her hoe and fled, barely reaching the safety of her cabin.

  So what have we learned from this story? the instructor had asked. One trainee spoke of the woman’s ability, learned from living close to nature, to interpret the bird’s actions as a warning. Another spoke of the bird’s intelligence, its creation of a way to communicate danger to humans. The instructor waited and Stacy raised her hand for the only time all term. The bird was leading the cougar to prey they could share, she told the instructor. The class was silent but the professor nodded, said Stacy was the first student who’d ever answered correctly.

  Later that day, Stacy was in the lunchroom when one trainee nudged another and said, Look out, here comes the raven. In the months afterward, Stacy let her dark hair lengthen to cover the sides and back of her neck. She’d had each shoulder tattooed with a feather, though she soon realized such adornment was as unnecessary as the meds that had only helped shackle her.

 
Flight, but not the sparrow’s flight of her childhood, that vacation morning when her step-uncle took Stacy’s small hand and led her into the backyard, then behind the garage. Afterward, the smell of his cigarette lingered on her shorts and shirt, but her parents didn’t notice. The next day he took her there again, except this time a sparrow, even at eight she knew the type of bird it was, landed on a nearby tree and began to call to her. Then the bird flew, taking Stacy with it into the sky.

  It was Sunday afternoon when Stacy saw Hardaway again, not on the stream but in a BI-LO checkout line. Skoal and Schlitz malt liquor were placed in the plastic bags Hardaway lifted, but an elderly woman took bills from a pocketbook and paid. As the woman accepted her change, he saw Stacy. The old woman said something, and Hardaway, red-faced now, shifted one bag so she could tuck coupons and a receipt inside. As they walked out the glass door to the lot, Stacy wheeled into the checkout lane just vacated, quickly emptied her buggy. When the card reader dinged its acceptance, she told the teenager bagging her groceries she’d be back to get them. Stacy wasn’t sure what she was going to do or say, but the truck was already gone when she got outside.

  * * *

  —

  Stacy thought Hardaway might not return to the park, but one morning the blue truck was in the lot. She went to the bridge and saw Hardaway fishing the pool alone. Farther downstream was a middle-aged couple. Stacy checked their license and limits first before returning to the bridge. She watched Hardaway fish.

  “Go ahead and write up your fucking tickets,” Hardaway muttered.

  “I’m not doing that, because I know it wouldn’t be you paying the fine, same as it wasn’t you paying for those groceries.”

  Hardaway’s face reddened as it had at the store, but not from embarrassment.

  “You’re going to wish you hadn’t said that,” he said, raising his eyes to meet hers.

  “There’s a story I could tell you,” Stacy said.

  Stacy left the bridge, Hardaway not far behind her. Soon the trail forked. Stacy followed the stream while Hardaway went on to the lot. She walked a ways before she saw the Jeep’s owner wading the upper portion of the catch-and-release section, close to where the creek split. A light hatch dimpled the water and he fished a dry. The angler cast well, the fly falling soft on the surface, no line drag. He was catching fish steadily, mainly rainbows but an occasional brown. Each one netted, carefully released. When the angler got to where the creek split, he stepped out of the water.

  “That left trib has brook trout in it,” she said.

  “Not stocked?” he asked.

  “Native.”

  “And it’s okay to fish for them?” he asked.

  “Yes, and it’s not catch-and-release.”

  The man nodded and went up the tributary to a waterfall. The pool was narrow, rhododendron on both sides, but he made a good cast. The fly was snatched as soon as it touched the surface, the bright colors flashing as the fish was tugged farther downstream into the net.

  “You eat that one,” Stacy said, as the angler freed the hook. “It’s a real fish.”

  But the man let it go. Stacy turned away in disgust.

  * * *

  —

  She did not return to the parking lot until checkout time. The truck’s left front tire had been slashed. She’d expected it would be a tire or windshield. The surveillance camera had also been shattered, pieces of plastic and metal in the grass. Stacy wasn’t really surprised, had figured the odds of his doing that fifty-fifty. She took the tire iron from the lockbox and put on the spare.

  Clary had left for the day when she returned to the office. Stacy knew that Hardaway would come tomorrow to see her reaction. She went to the storage shed, found an X-ACTO knife and a roll of duct tape, and drove to the cabin. Slashing the tire should be enough to satisfy Hardaway, at least for tonight, but Stacy took the sleeping bag from the closet, set it down in the backyard and got inside. The stars were out, so Stacy lay face up and watched them. After a while she felt the stars coming nearer. They whispered to her. Her sleep was deep and dreamless.

  * * *

  —

  The next morning Stacy waited on the outcrop for Hardaway to come. Soon she saw the blue truck on the park road. She left the ridge, avoiding the trail as she walked to the parking lot. A fly fisherman leaned against his Jeep as he tied on a leader. After he went down the trail, Stacy took the tape and knife and crawled under Hardaway’s truck. Two hours passed before she saw Hardaway sling a stringer of trout in his pickup and drive off.

  It was late afternoon when Clary found her checking licenses in the catch-and-release section.

  “Hardaway had a wreck. He’s in the hospital, pretty banged up but he’ll live. Sheriff Patterson thinks he was taking a curve too fast. That’s what he thinks, anyway.” Clary took a handkerchief from his pocket, patted his brow almost daintily and then put it away. “I saw the duct tape and X-ACTO knife on your truck’s dash. Saw what looked and smelled like spilled brake fluid in the lot too. Interesting what the front brakes do when there’s a slow leak in the hose. Not that I’m bringing that up to the sheriff though. I don’t want the hassle, but when I do your probation evaluation, I’m stating that you repeatedly disobeyed instructions and you shouldn’t be kept on. Which might be a blessing if Hardaway figures out what really happened.”

  He wanted her to react, Stacy knew. They always had—words, tears, something. Clary walked back to the lot and Stacy went upstream, not to check licenses but to be alone on the outcrop. Once there, she gazed at the trees and water below. What humans she saw were so small. The afternoon sun cast her shadow across the outcrop. Stacy raised her arms and saw wings.

  Last Bridge Burned

  When the woman had tapped on the locked glass door a few minutes after midnight, she had startled Carlyle. He’d set his broom aside but did not go to the door. Instead, he went around the counter, took the .38 from the shelf under the register. He turned down the radio and looked out the window. The woman was barefoot and had a scrape on her left brow, left forearm scraped also and still bleeding. Though it was October, she wore only frayed jeans and an oversized black T-shirt. Her hair appeared unwashed for days. As she tapped again, he saw a ring adorned with a skull.

  One day you’ll learn trouble finds a fellow easy enough without inviting it in. Carlyle was sixteen when his exasperated father told him that. By the time he’d finally heeded the advice, Carlyle had lost three jobs and two wives. He searched the shadows near the exit ramp for accomplices. Just last week a store one exit down had been robbed. The woman tapped again and Carlyle stepped around the counter, the .38 tucked in the back of his jeans. He stood in front of the door and pointed at the CLOSED sign. When she didn’t move, he mouthed the word and turned away.

  The outside lights and gas pumps were turned off, the register emptied. He kept the gun tucked in his jeans, picked up the broom and, not looking up, began sweeping his way around the shelves. All that was left was to shut off the radio and inside lights. Then, the woman having given up and gone away, Carlyle could do what he did almost every night before going home, sit a few minutes in the dark on the store’s back porch. He’d smoke a cigarette and watch headlights pass below on the interstate. After hours of dealing with people, the soft yellow glow soothed him, as did the sound of the vehicles themselves, a sound like approaching rain.

  Now, two years later, the song on the radio brought back that night, and that the woman at the door had not gone away.

  On a late-night east of Nashville

  My last bridge burned, my money gone

  The kindness of a stranger

  Showed me a way to go on.

  By the time he’d finished sweeping, the woman was no longer peering through the glass. Chin down and arms clutched to her chest, she seemed abandoned, much like the dogs dropped off by city folks who’d tired of carin
g for them. Abandoned cats always found a way to survive, but the dogs stayed close to the exit ramp, waiting.

  “What do you want?” he’d asked, after unlocking the door.

  “I don’t know,” the woman finally answered.

  Her long hair was stringy and disheveled, her eyes red-veined and glassy. Drunk or drugged, Carlyle knew. She reeked of cigarette smoke and dollar-store perfume. Younger than he’d thought too, thirty at most, but a hard-lived thirty. She was shivering.

  “You don’t know?” he asked.

  “I was with some people headed to Nashville and they made me get out of the car.”

  “Why’d they do that?”

  “I don’t remember,” she said, looking toward the exit ramp. “What state am I in?”

  A damn sorry one, Carlyle thought, then told her North Carolina.

  “I was hoping Tennessee.”

  “That’s forty more miles,” Carlyle answered. “Those people you were with, you expect they’ll come back for you?”

  “No, I’d say that bridge is burned.”

  Carlyle’s arm was tiring from holding the door open.

  “I guess you can come in for a minute.”

  “I can’t buy anything. I don’t have any money.”

  “I’m not asking you to,” he answered, “but I ain’t holding this door open but a few seconds longer.”

  The only light came from a single bulb overhead, but it was enough to find the hydrogen peroxide in the front aisle. Carlyle twisted off the plastic top and handed her the bottle.

  “For those scrapes,” he told her, and pointed to the bathroom. “There’s paper towels and soap in there.”

  She went to the bathroom. Soon he heard the water running, the squeak of the soap container. In a few minutes the toilet flushed and more water ran in the sink. She came out and handed Carlyle the bottle. Before he could stop her, she eased herself onto the floor, resting her head and back against the wall as she closed her eyes. Her breathing steadied. He spoke to her, said it was time to leave, then shook her shoulder. “Hey, wake up,” Carlyle told the woman, but her eyes remained closed. What was he supposed to do now, Carlyle wondered, drag her outside, lock her in for the night, take her home and put her in his house’s one bed?