Platte River

by Rick Bass

  She would shake violently then, it was so cold, and burst from the water and run for shore with numb legs, numb arms, sometimes tripping and falling, unable to run properly, with nothing working right at all. But she was clean, cleaner than she had ever been. She’d rub herself dry with a rough towel and crawl into her sleeping bag shivering and pull the bag’s drawstring tight around her. Sam slept at her feet. Leena fell asleep with her face and hands still tingling from the river, her feet still numb, but the warmth inside her beginning to glow once more, like something that could never again be chilled. She was poor and her luck was bad, but she was clean.

  Sam had been with Leena through three men, three men in six years. Things had fallen apart, lost their glue, like toys submerged in water, parts drifting away, shy parts, plastic parts that were never meant to last. They always wanted her to be a certain way, never wanted her to be able to change her mind or change anything. Leena fell asleep tingling, sinking, warm and safe, Sam’s breath steady in her ear, with all the stars above her moving, rotating, sliding from view and back down behind the tall mountains as the earth spun. She would never have another man, not ever. They were like fish, they were wet, and they were all the same. There was no connection, no beauty. They just bit at the hook and were pulled in, and then they did nothing but lay there, gasping, their eyes turning slowly blue. Leena tumbled through her dreams, unimperiled by her lack of luck. She had never been so happy. She had never lived in so clean a place. Sometimes she thought she could sleep forever. It was good to be in a wild place where men didn’t try to rule you.

  Despite the deep good sleeps, Leena was up each morning at seven, frying bacon as the sun, a late riser, was only beginning to show over the tops of the tall mountains. Leena had a Frisbee, and she would go to the meadow with Sam and play, first thing every morning, right after breakfast.

  Sam was daring, acrobatic, even heroic, chasing the Frisbee wherever it went, even diving into the river after it. He would race at full speed, tumbling over the little bluff and down into the water, never looking down to notice where the land ended and the river began. Surfacing immediately, he’d watch the Frisbee as it hovered in the air, just beyond his struggles, always a little too far away.

  Leena would cry out whenever he did make a great catch, or even a great effort. She would clap her hands and pretend that she was a football coach, as her father had been, back in California. “Sammy my boy, that’s what I like to see. That’s the way to do it, Sammy boy!” she’d shout, laughing and clapping, delighted at Sam’s excitement, his reaction to the praise.

  Her laughter carried all the way up and down the narrow valley, trapped in the thin air, living forever in the thin air. Anyone could hear her. There were no secrets there. Everyone knew who Sammy was by the end of the first week.

  A hawk’s summer cry, drifting down over the ragged jumble of mountains, spread into the foothills and the valley’s green, flat river bottom, which was no wider in some places than a freeway. Blue water cut through its middle. At noon, back in the woods, the loggers shut off their saws, sat down and opened their lunchboxes. Five or six miles away, on a still day, you could hear their laughter down in the valley, sometimes even hear their voices from up in the mountains, as if angels were speaking.

  The valley was a park, green and forever, in the summer.

  ·

  Leena thought how she wanted a horse with which to explore the mountains. She wanted a parrot, too, to talk to her, to ride around on her shoulder. Her life was a river across which she would build a bridge.

  There would be one side, and then the other. Ray, owner of the mercantile, had told her that he had an old hay barn farther down the valley, and that he might sell it to her when winter came, if she still had not found a place to stay. There were holes in the roof, it was caving in, and the barn was full of years-ago, dry, no-good hay, but it would be better than the tent, and Leena began to apply her savings toward that, picturing it. She imagined the snow coming down as she sat at a table next to a lantern, writing letters, perhaps a letter to her parents, with the parrot on her shoulder and the horse in its stall, eating hay. Sam would be asleep at her feet. She would get a cat, too, to catch the mice.

  No more men. She saved her wages, twelve dollars a day, for the winter. It was understood that whatever she had saved, no matter how much or how little, would be the actual purchase price of the barn. Leena knew that Ray was counting how much he paid her, counting how much she spent. She knew that he was watching. That was how men were: watchers, rule makers. But it was all right. After she bought the barn, it would be hers. This valley would be different. This valley still had wild promise.

  The barn she was saving for was also along the river, farther upstream where the valley narrowed and the snows fell deeper. Whenever she moved in, Leena knew she would have to walk down to the frozen river with an ax and chop ice to get to the water for the horse to drink, and to get water for cooking. She would have to tie a rope around her waist to keep from getting lost in the heavy snows, and with that same rope around her, she would slip down through the hole into the cold water to bathe quickly. And she would fish through a hole in the ice, farther out, over the center of the river: she would build a fire to stay warm, a fire whose light would attract the dull, cold fish, and through the small hole she would catch them all, as many as she wanted, all night, and she would dry them, smoke them, hang them from the rafters to cure in the cold dry air, and her cabin would smell good, like fresh fish and smoke.

  Leena thought about this as spring settled in around them, and she saved her money, knowing these things — for once knowing how something was going to be, and for once in control.

  She kept bathing in the river at night, her skin dark when there was no moon. When she rolled over on her back and let the cold water carry her downstream, bits of moss and trout minnows brushed against her legs. Breasts, shoulders, everything became shiny, luminous, when the moon was out. Drifting into a fast current, she would look up at the stars, the moon, and remember only then that she might have gone too far. Breaking out of her trance, she would swim hard upstream, moving like a fish back to where she had started from, and clean.

  ·

  What Mahatma Joe thought about in the spring-going-to-summer, sitting alone in his tiny office with its woodstove, listening to the sounds of dripping water and the great cakes of ice sliding off his roof, melting and losing their winter grip, was how he was nearing the end, and how he was soon going to be accountable not for the things he had done, but for the things he had not done.

  Not enough. He had done a lot, but not enough. He had failed to change things, really. He had sent some canned goods, jams and jellies mostly, to Africa from his own modest garden each year. He buried people in the valley when they died, and said words over them. He had put down the Naked Days rebellion almost twenty years ago. But he’d wasted time, too, wasted perhaps a whole life, on other things: on long slow walks through the woods, especially in the fall when the light was gold and strange. He’d wasted time on sinful daydreams. Sometimes, moving through that particular fall light, Mahatma Joe pretended that he had already died and was in an afterlife. The light was so still, so different, and the woods so silent, that some days he believed it, that heaven was here and now, and not in need of alteration or correction.

  Sinful!

  Winters were spent in the office studying, making notes for imaginary sermons or for services to his wife and servant, Lily. Over the years, she’d heard it all, knew the answers better than he did, and corrected him in lilting, broken Eskimo-English when he faltered, or when he lost his thoughts to his age, forgetting even what it was that he was supposed to be studying. Lily had been his housekeeper in Alaska, and gradually over the years he had just stopped paying her. He had performed the wedding ceremony himself, though he wasn’t sure if his license for such things had been current at the time.

  “I haven’t done anything,” he’d tell Lily when he came back to the house
late each afternoon. Thousands of pages of sermons, stuffed all around his office. The house would be warm, warmer than it had been in his drafty office, and supper would be cooking, vegetables and meat warming on the woodstove. Mahatma Joe shot moose and deer when they invaded his garden; bears and elk, too, anything that came slinking around looking for the Lord’s produce. He hung the animals in the garage for Lily to skin and butcher. There was always meat.

  When Joe came in sad and complaining, Lily would think of what she could say to cheer him up. “God loves you” was her favorite. That was usually the best one, the one he could not argue with when he came in sulky and self-abusing. Mahatma Joe had been a hero among some of the Inuit up in Alaska. He’d converted them to Christianity left and right, packing the church every Sunday, curing people in both their minds and their bodies, chasing fever from their blisters and wounds, and fever from their twisted, ecstatic, free souls, unsaved souls that didn’t know the Word from the caw of a raven or the howl of wolves. Joe would shout at the heavens, shaking his fists and looking at his flock with wild eyes that frightened them, and made them want to change. It was as if he had come upon them in the woods and saved them, had fired a shot and killed or wounded some dark beast back in the woods just behind them. The Inuit had treated him like a king, and Lily believed that she’d been lucky enough to go with him when he left: proud to be such a strong man’s wife, though sometimes she missed the pay she’d had when she was just a housekeeper.

  That six-week slow stretch, when Joe had become disgruntled, and thought he was being called elsewhere — should they have stayed? Lily wondered. Would it have been evil for him to stay in Alaska and just be a regular man, instead of a saint? She understood the drama and attraction of saving souls — changing and controlling the course of a life, or lives — but Lily wondered often what it would have been like if, after running out of souls, Joe had just stayed there and been a regular preacher, just living a regular life instead of moving on and looking for fresh souls, like new meat, like a hunter.

  That had been a long time ago. Things had gotten so different once Joe and Lily were across the border, in the Grass Valley. Despite its wildness, its lack of electricity or phones or a single radio station, the people were frightened of nothing, they were wild like animals, and happy — and Lily felt lost. She was shocked at the way they laughed at her husband — laughed at him openly — though she did as Mahatma Joe had instructed her, and prayed for them anyway.

  “I have to do something,” he told her more and more, as the days, and then the seasons, went sliding past, surely moving faster than they had ever moved for anyone else. Joe had been a middle-aged man when he and Lily came to the valley, strong and with a whole new place before him. But now it was no different than how it had ever been. In all of his sixty-eight years he had done nothing.

  Joe never received thank-you notes from any of the agencies to whom he sent the jars of tomatoes, the preserved squash, the strawberry jam. He used not to mind it, but as he grew older, it only added to the panic.

  Except for Lily, he did not exist. It could already be the afterlife, and it was not that much different from the first life, because nothing was happening: nothing major, nothing dangerous, not that he was aware of.

  Lily cooked for him. They read magazines together, talked about the garden, reminisced about Alaska, and then compared their lives with those found in the Bible, how what they had done or thought about during the day reminded them of something someone had done in a parable. Then they would go to bed.

  They would undress and get under the covers together, still wearing their socks. Another day would slide past as night drew up over them, while outside, in a hard cold that dropped birds from midair, the stars glittered and flashed through the trees, and all through the valley coyotes howled and screamed.

  Mahatma Joe would listen to the coyotes and think that he was a sinner for doing nothing, and would be startled to realize that he was breathing hard, almost panting.

  “Ssshh,” Lily would tell him, pulling him closer, patting his back, his shoulders, and his head, lowering it to her breasts. “Sssh, it be all right, ssshh,” she said, believing it was the coyotes that were alarming him, coyotes racing across the frozen snow, laughing and yapping, howling, running. “Sssh, it be all right,” she would keep saying, and finally, falling into sleep, he would believe her, and would be grateful for it, as if she had come upon him in the forest with a gun and had killed a dangerous thing stalking behind him, and saved his life.

  And then, after Joe was asleep, down in her breasts and warm like a child, Lily would put a pillow beneath his head. She would get out of bed, go into the kitchen, dress warmly, and put on the ice skates they had hanging on the wall, which they kept for when children sometimes came by, wanting to skate on the little pond below their garden. Lily kept the ice swept and scraped in winter for just that purpose. It was always ready, and on the rare occasions when children did come to the door asking if they could skate, Mahatma Joe was delighted. He would hurry down to the frozen pond with them, sit on a snowbank with his Bible, and read to them as they skated around and around the tiny hard pond, the sound of steel cutting through frozen water, steel scraping and flashing. The children, ignoring the Scripture, would have their fun as Mahatma Joe read on, tears coming into his old eyes, so much pleasure it brought him to be reading to an audience, to be touching young lives, the most important ones, and the tears would fall from his cheeks, freezing, like small bits of glass.

  Lily would now take the skates out below that field of stars, the crunch of frozen snow, with the coyotes singing and howling, their cries echoing all around the narrow valley as if going in circles, start to finish and back to start again. She’d walk down to the pond and put the skates on, and with her hands behind her back and her chin tucked down, she would skate the way she and Joe had seen men and women do at a park in Seattle, so many years ago. It was a small pond, but she would skate as fast as she could anyway, using only her legs slicing them back and forth like strong scissors, with the cold air racing past her face, and two moons to give her light: the real one cold as stone in the sky above her, and then the one frozen in the ice, reflected, the one that was just ahead of her and then beneath her, passing under her skates as she raced across it, an illusion, behind her, gone.

  Lily would skate for hours, her long black hair flowing from beneath her cap. Her eyes watered with pleasure at the speed, and at the feel of it, and at the chance to be doing something that meant absolutely nothing at all, something other than gardening or cooking or cleaning — and she would skate until her legs were trembling,. until she could no longer even stand.

  She would lie down on the ice and rest, spread-eagled in the center of the pond. She would watch the moon, panting, her face bright as bone, and would imagine that it was watching her.

  There were things to think about as she rested. It would be close to daylight now, colder than ever. The coyotes would be silent, resting too. There would be no sound at all. Lily would think about the other life, the one she had left.

  Lily would remember Alaska, remember her friends, remember certain colors, certain days, like scraps of cloth. She would close her eyes, still spread-eagled on the ice, and think about her life with Mahatma Joe, and try to feel all of the water beneath her, an entire pond of water beneath the ice.

  Sometimes she thought that she could feel it, that she could sense there was something beneath all that ice. But she would grow quickly cold, lying still like that, and would have to get up and go back to the house, where she would hang the skates back up, build the fire again, slip out of her clothes and into bed with Mahatma Joe, who slept so soundly and who looked, each night (especially in winter), as if he were never going to wake up again. His brow would be furrowed, and Lily would smooth it with her thumb, and say again, “Sssh, ssshhh, it be all right.”

  ·

  The chinooks came, and people behaved fairly well. Mahatma Joe walked down the roads looking
for violators, but he rarely saw anyone, clothed or unclothed; the town had changed, especially in the last five years. There was talk of properly paving the road, which was studded with gravel and blue flecks of galena. The town. was aging; growing softer, less wild.

  The soil began to warm. The snow blanket shrank, spotted itself away, new ovals of earth and dry grass appearing larger each day, opening so suddenly that it surprised people, even though they saw it happen every year.

  But it was never the same. Each year was a surprise. Each year winter fooled them, and they forgot all over again that earth and grass lay beneath the snow, that the world was not made of snow and ice, that the real world would reappear quickly when the grace of the chinooks arrived.

  Mahatma Joe prowled the river bottom, explored the fecundity of the valley along the river near where Leena had her tent. He jabbed his walking cane into the rich mire. The cane made a sucking sound as he pulled it out. Joe wanted the soil badly. He took handfuls of it home in his coat pockets and sprinkled it over his own poor garden. It occurred to him, and not for the first time, that these were his last days, but somehow he felt more free than he had in the past, felt cleaner, stronger.

  It was like walking through the mountains for days and days — for years, even, without seeing anything — and then coming over a pass and looking out and seeing a small town below, glittering in the distance.

  He knew, suddenly, that he was almost there, that he did not have far to go. He no longer had to conserve himself. His steps quickened.