by Pam Houston
“We’re going twelve miles an hour at least,” Jack yelled. “Which one is this?”
“Niagara,” I yelled. “Right center.” The noise of the river swallowed my words and I only threw out two bucketfuls before we were over the lip of Niagara and I had to hold on. I could hear Ladle around the bend and I was throwing water so fast I lost my balance and that’s when I heard Jack say, “Bail faster!” and that’s when I threw the bail bucket into the river and watched, unbelieving, as it went under, and I saw Jack see it too but we were at Ladle and I had to sit down and hold on. I watched Harvey’s big boat getting bounced around like a cork, and I think I closed my eyes when the first wave crashed over my face because the next thing I knew we were out of the heaviest water and Harvey was standing and smiling at us with his fist in the air.
I could see No Slouch around the bend and I don’t remember it or Miranda Jane because I was kneeling in the front of the boat scooping armfuls of water the whole time.
We all pulled up on the first beach we found and drank a beer and hugged each other uncertainly, like tenants in an apartment building where the fires have been put out.
“You’re on your own,” Harvey said. “We’re camping here. Take a look at Wolf Creek, and be sure and get to shore before Selway Falls.” He picked up a handful of black sand and let it run through his fingers. He turned to me. “He’s a good boatman, and you’re very brave.”
I smiled.
“Take care of each other,” he said. “Stay topside.”
We set off alone and it clouded up and started to rain and I couldn’t make the topography match the river map.
“I can’t tell where we are,” I told Jack. “But Wolf Creek can’t be far.”
“We’ll see it coming,” he said, “or hear it.”
But it wasn’t five minutes after he spoke that we rounded a bend and were in it, waves crashing on all sides and Jack trying to find a way between the rocks and the holes. I was looking too, and I think I saw the run, fifty feet to our right, right before I heard Jack say, “Hang on, baby,” and we hit the hole sideways and everything went white and cold. I was in the waves and underwater and I couldn’t see Jack or the boat, I couldn’t move my arms or legs apart from how the river tossed them. Jack had said swim down to the current, but I couldn’t tell which way was down and I couldn’t have moved there in that washing machine, my lungs full and taking on water. Then the wave spit me up, once, under the boat, and then again, clear of it, and I got a breath and pulled down away from the air and felt the current grab me, and I waited to get smashed against a rock, but the rock didn’t come and I was at the surface riding the crests of some eight-foot rollers and seeing Jack’s helmet bobbing in the water in front of me.
“Swim, baby!” he yelled, and it was like it hadn’t occurred to me, like I was frozen there in the water. And I tried to swim but I couldn’t get a breath and my limbs wouldn’t move and I thought about the three minutes and hypothermia and I must have been swimming then because the shore started to get closer. I grabbed the corner of a big ledge and wouldn’t let go, not even when Jack yelled at me to get out of the water, and even when he showed me an easy place to get out if I just floated a few yards downstream it took all I had and more to let go of the rock and get back in the river.
I got out on a tiny triangular rock ledge, surrounded on all sides by walls of granite. Jack stood sixty feet above me on another ledge.
“Sit tight,” he said. “I’m going to go see if I can get the boat.”
Then he was gone and I sat in that small space and started to shake. It was raining harder, sleeting even, and I started to think about freezing to death in that space that wasn’t even big enough for me to move around in and get warm. I started to think about the river rising and filling that space and what would happen when Jack got back and made me float downstream to an easier place, or what would happen if he didn’t come back, if he died trying to get the boat back, if he chased it fifteen miles to Selway Falls. When I saw the boat float by, right side up and empty, I decided to climb out of the space.
I’d lost one loafer in the river, so I wedged myself between the granite walls and used my fingers, mostly, to climb. I’ve always been a little afraid of heights, so I didn’t look down. I thought it would be stupid to live through the boating accident and smash my skull free-climbing on granite, but as I inched up the wall I got warmer and kept going. When I got to the top there were trees growing across, and another vertical bank I hadn’t seen from below. I bashed through the branches with my helmet and grabbed them one at a time till they broke or pulled out and then I grabbed the next one higher. I dug into the thin layer of soil that covered the rock with my knees and my elbows, and I’d slip down an inch for every two I gained. When I came close to panic I thought of Rambo, as if he were a real person, as if what I was doing was possible, and proven before, by him.
And then I was on the ledge and I could see the river, and I could see Jack on the other side, and I must have been in shock, a little, because I couldn’t at that time imagine how he could have gotten to the other side of the river, I couldn’t imagine what would make him go back in the water, but he had, and there he was on the other side.
“I lost the boat,” he yelled. “Walk downstream till you see it.”
I was happy for instructions and I set off down the scouting trail, shoe on one foot, happy for the pain in the other, happy to be walking, happy because the sun was trying to come out again and I was there to see it. It was a few miles before I even realized that the boat would be going over the falls, that Jack would have had to swim one more time across the river to get to the trail, that I should go back and see if he’d made it, but I kept walking downstream and looking for the boat. After five miles my bare foot started to bleed, so I put my left loafer on my right foot and walked on. After eight miles I saw Jack running up the trail behind me, and he caught up and kissed me and ran on by.
I walked and I walked, and I thought about being twenty-one and hiking in mountains not too far from these with a boy who almost drowned and then proposed to me. His boots had filled with the water of a river even farther to the north, and I was wearing sneakers and have a good kick, so I made it across just fine. I thought about how he sat on the far bank after he’d pulled himself out and shivered and stared at the water. And how I ran up and down the shore looking for the shallowest crossing, and then, thinking I’d found it, met him halfway. I remembered when our hands touched across the water and how I’d pulled him to safety and built him a fire and dried his clothes. Later that night he asked me to marry him and it made me happy and I said yes even though I knew it would never happen because I was too young and free and full of my freedom. I switched my loafer to the other foot and wondered if this danger would make Jack propose to me. Maybe he was the kind of man who needed to see death first, maybe we would build a fire to dry ourselves and then he would ask me and I would say yes because by the time you get to be thirty, freedom has circled back on itself to mean something totally different from what it did at twenty-one.
I knew I had to be close to the falls and I felt bad about what the wrecked boat would look like, but all of a sudden it was there in front of me, stuck on a gravel bar in the middle of the river with a rapid on either side, and I saw Jack coming back up the trail toward me.
“I’ve got it all figured out,” he said. “I need to walk up-stream about a mile and jump in there. That’ll give me enough time to swim most of the way across to the other side of the river, and if I’ve read the current right, it’ll take me right into that gravel bar.”
“And if you read the current wrong?” I said.
He grinned. “Then it’s over Selway Falls. I almost lost it already the second time I crossed the river. It was just like Harvey said. I almost gave up. I’ve been running twelve miles and I know my legs’ll cramp. It’s a long shot but I’ve got to take it.”
“Are you sure you want to do this?” I said. “Maybe you shouldn’
t do this.”
“I thought the boat was gone,” he said, “and I didn’t care because you were safe and I was safe and we were on the same side of the river. But there it is asking me to come for it, and the water’s gonna rise tonight and take it over the falls. You stay right here where you can see what happens to me. If I make it I’ll pick you up on that beach just below. We’ve got a half a mile to the takeout and the falls.” He kissed me again and ran back upriver.
The raft was in full sunshine, everything tied down, oars in place. Even the map I couldn’t read was there, where I stuck it, under a strap.
I could see Jack making his way through the trees toward the edge of the river, and I realized then that more than any other reason for being on that trip, I was there because I thought I could take care of him, and maybe there’s something women want to protect after all. And maybe Jack’s old girlfriends were trying to protect him by making him stay home, and maybe I thought I could if I was there, but as he dropped out of sight and into the water I knew there’d always be places he’d go that I couldn’t, and that I’d have to let him go, just like the widow said. Then I saw his tiny head in the water and I held my breath and watched his position, which was perfect, as he approached the raft: But he got off center right at the end, and a wave knocked him past the raft and farther down the gravel bar.
He got to his feet and went down again. He grabbed for a boulder on the bottom and got washed even farther away. He was using all his energy to stay in one place and he was fifty yards downriver from the raft. I started to pray then, to whomever I pray to when I get in real trouble, and it may have been a coincidence but he started moving forward. It took him fifteen minutes and strength I’ll never know to get to the boat, but he was in it, and rowing, and heading for the beach.
Later, when we were safe and on the two-lane heading home, Jack told me we were never in any real danger, and I let him get away with it because I knew that’s what he had to tell himself to get past almost losing me.
“The river gave us both a lesson in respect,” he said, and it occurred to me then that he thought he had a chance to tame that wild river, but I knew I was at its mercy from the very beginning, and I thought all along that that was the point.
Jack started telling stories to keep himself awake: the day his kayak held him under for almost four minutes, the time he crashed his hang glider twice in one day. He said he thought fifteen years of highwater was probably enough, and that he’d take desert rivers from now on.
The road stretched out in front of us, dry and even and smooth. We found a long dirt road, turned, and pulled down to where it ended at a chimney that stood tall amid the rubble of an old stone house. We didn’t build a fire and Jack didn’t propose; we rolled out our sleeping bags and lay down next to the truck. I could see the light behind the mountains in the place where the moon would soon rise, and I thought about all the years I’d spent saying love and freedom were mutually exclusive and living my life as though they were exactly the same thing.
The wind carried the smell of the mountains, high and sweet. It was so still I could imagine a peace without boredom.
HIGHWATER
Casey told me she was pregnant in the same offhand way that so much of life’s most important information is revealed. We were eating black bean and cheese burritos at the Fat Chihuahua on the west side of town near the lake. I started to pour her a second beer from the pitcher in front of me, and she shook her head.
“Only one for me,” she said, and then she patted her stomach as if I was supposed to know what she meant, as if it was some kind of inside joke between us.
“What?” I said, and then she bobbed her head from one side to the other the way she does when she doesn’t want to answer, and I knew that had been her way of telling me.
“No way,” I said.
She nodded, and then she grinned, and then she ordered a glass of milk so I’d know for sure.
We drove out to the lake just for somewhere to go, to the place where the beaches used to be before the water started coming up. Now there was only a two-foot strip of land between the lake and the interstate, and it was piled high with sandbags. No one knew why the water was rising, or when it would stop. When the wind blew up across the salt flats, waves as tall as four feet crashed on the highway.
“How long have you known?” I said.
“Two weeks. We conceived on my thirtieth birthday. Can you beat that?” she said. “Biology in action.”
It was just like Casey not to tell me right away, to sit on it herself for a while, to get the feel of it before she tried it out on me. I’ve always said she’s the definition of a hedonist, and as much as she can be under those circumstances, she’s my best friend. Not that a hedonist is the worst thing you can be. Her boyfriend, Chuck, told her it meant she gave good blow jobs, and she got mad, but after I showed her the real definition she knew it was true and I’ve even heard her describe herself that way, once or twice since then, to people she didn’t know.
I wanted to be honest so I told her I wasn’t sure hedonists were supposed to have babies, and she said she thought that it was just about the best a baby could do.
The mountain remnant they call Antelope Island rose out of the lake in front of us like a mirage, and doubled itself perfectly in the still water. Beyond it were the billion-dollar pieces of machinery that would start pumping excess water out of the lake and into the salt flats within the year.
“Does Chuck know?” I asked.
She shook her head.
“What do you think he’ll say?”
Chuck lives with Casey in the house behind mine. He isn’t just a hedonist, he’s a musician. He plays the piano and sings in a real throaty voice in a bar downtown. Casey fell in love with his fingers first. The morning after the first night she went to bed with him she drew me a picture of his hands.
“Millie,” she said, “you can’t imagine what it’s like with someone whose fingers are so long and muscular.”
I tried to imagine it, then I stopped.
“Does Richard have long fingers?”
Richard is the man I date. He is compact: a perfect miniature of a perfect man with ice-blue eyes so deep they’re hard to measure. His fingers are short, but I’m not that tall. Our sex is fine.
Casey has known Chuck exactly as long as I’ve known Richard. We met both men on the same weekend, and got together late the next morning for the Sunday report. Besides drawing me a picture of Chuck’s fingers, Casey told me these things: Chuck used to be a junkie but now he’s clean, he had a one-bedroom basement apartment and one hundred and twenty-seven compact disks, and he used moleskin condoms which don’t work as well but feel much better. This is what I told her about Richard: He put marinated asparagus into the salad, he used the expression “laissez-faire capitalist” three times, once in a description of himself, he played a tape called “The Best of One Hundred and One Strings,” and as far as I could tell, he’d never had oral sex.
“You’re kidding, right?” Casey said.
Once they met, it took Chuck and Casey three weeks to move in together. Chuck showed up on a Saturday morning with his compact disks, three sets of wind chimes, seven musical instruments, and a box full of calendars called “Women on the Move.” All twelve months were topped with half-naked pictures of Salt Lake City paramedics, and Chuck’s ex-wife was on the cover. If Casey was intimidated by it, it didn’t show.
Six months went by before Casey got pregnant, and during that time I only brought up living together once to Richard, and he said then that it was economically and emotionally unfeasible. What he really meant was that he didn’t want to end up supporting me and that he was still hung up on his ex-girlfriend, Karen. Every Wednesday night he drove halfway across the state to see her. He said that if I let it bother me, I was too young to understand a real friendship between a woman and a man, but he always took a fifth of Scotch with him that came back empty, and he always wore a necklace that he never wore for me
.
Every Thursday morning Richard would show up back at my house looking like a whipped dog, and when I finally got the nerve to ask him about it he said that actually Karen spent most of the time they were together yelling at him for wasting her last four childbearing years. I asked him what that had to do with friendship, and what he expected to gain for himself, and he said he needed to understand the depth of her anger, he needed to get some answers before he could really go on. I told him that for those kinds of questions one answer was as good as another, but he shook his head, and I decided he might think he wanted answers, but really what he wanted was to be forgiven, or maybe something worse.
Karen called his house every day at least once to yell at him some more, and he’d sit on his bed in the dark and never say a word into the phone. I asked him if she yelled about things he’d done while they were together, or just about the way he was, and he shrugged and said, “Both.” She didn’t like the way he drove, the way he made love, the way he signed his name. If he didn’t answer the phone, she’d let it ring a hundred times.
I called her house once to see if she’d have anything to say to me and her answering machine said: “This is Karen, and obviously I’m not home.” I hung up fast and never had the courage to try again.
Casey and I are exactly the same age and we are both ten years younger than Richard and Chuck. You’d think because they’re from the same generation they’d have something in common, but it’s like they got on two different buses at birth and just happened to wind up in the same place. Richard was brought up in a wealthy Texas ranching family that was extremely conservative. He spent ten years in Santa Fe, where he learned to get along with liberals, to play the stock market, and to use marinated asparagus to impress a date. Chuck grew up on the beach in Hawaii. He’s kind and unreliable and stoned all the time. The only thing the two men have in common is how much smarter and more world-wise they feel than Casey and me. When we were all together we made jokes about father figures and Freud and Oedipal fantasies, but it wasn’t really all that funny because Casey’s father had died of a heroin overdose, and mine never said he loved me in twenty-nine years.
