Platte River

by Rick Bass

  The summer had not softened him; he was still all hard, still all marvelous. Children from the neighborhood would run up and touch him. They felt stronger, afterward.

  Lately, on the nights he stayed over at the Irons’ house, once everyone else was asleep, A.C. would carry Lory all through the house after she had fallen asleep in his lap. He imagined that he was protecting her. He carried her down all the hallways — past her parents’ room, her brothers’, past Lindsay’s, into the kitchen and out to the garage: it was all safe and quiet. Next he took her into the back yard, among the statues, and then into the street, walking through the neighborhood with her as she slept.

  There was a street called Sweet Road that had no houses, only vacant lots, and trees, and night smells. He would lay her down in the dew-wet grass along Sweet Road and touch her robe, an old fuzzy white thing, and the side of her face. The wind would stir her hair, wind coming up out of the valley, wind coming from across the river. He owed the brothers his happiness.

  Some nights, far-off heat lightning flickered over the mountains, behind the steep ridges. She slept through it all in the cool grass. He wondered what she was dreaming.

  ·

  Late in the afternoons, after practice, the brothers walked the mile and a half to the grocery store in town, and along the way they showed A.C. the proper discus steps. Lory and Lindsay followed sometimes, to watch. The brothers demonstrated to A.C., in half crouches and hops, the proper setup for a throw, the proper release, and he tried to learn: the snap forward with the throw, and then the little trail-away spin at the end, unwinding, everything finished.

  Jerry brought chalk and drew dance steps on the sidewalk for the placement of A.C.’s feet so he could move down the sidewalk properly, practicing his throws. Like children playing hopscotch, ducking and twisting, shuffling forward and then pretending to finish the spin with great shouts at the imaginary release of each throw, they moved through the quiet neighborhood, jumping and shouting, throwing their arms at the sky. Dogs barked at them as they went past, and children ran away at first, though soon they learned to follow, once the brothers and the big man had passed, and they would imitate, in the awkward fashion of children, the brothers’ and A.C.’s throws.

  Lory could see the depression, the not quite old part of herself, back behind her — back in June, back in the spring, and behind in winter; back into the cold fall and the previous dry-leaved summer — but she was slipping forward now, away from all that. A.C. took her to his farmhouse and showed her how to hang from the ceiling. He’d rigged the harness so that she could hang suspended and spin.

  He had to get over the fear of injuring someone again. Had to hit the fear head-on and shatter it. He had run a long way to get here. He was ready to hit it head-on. It was worth it, once again. And he wanted her to be brave, too.

  “It feels better naked,” he said the first time he showed it to her, and so she took her clothes off. Lory closed her eyes and put her arms and legs out and spun in slow circles around and around, and A.C. turned the light off, sat down against the wall, and watched her silhouette against the window, watched her until she fell asleep, and then he took her out of the harness and got in bed with her, where she awoke.

  “We won’t tell anyone,” he said. She was in his arms, warm, alive. It made him dizzy to consider what being alive meant.

  “No,” she said. “No one will ever find out.”

  She fell asleep with her lips on his chest. A.C. lay there looking at the harness hanging above them, and wondered why he wanted to keep it a secret, why it had to be a secret.

  He knew that this was the best way to protect her, and that he loved her.

  He stayed awake all through the night, conscious of how he dwarfed her, afraid that if he fell asleep he might turn over and crush her. He rose before daylight, woke her, and they got in the canoe and drifted back to New York State, and were home before dawn. A.C. crept into the basement that first night, and every night thereafter.

  Lory had not liked hanging from the ceiling. She didn’t know why, only that it had frightened her. She kept the harness with her, kept it hidden in her drawer. She just wanted to love him, was all.

  ·

  Many evenings the family had grilled corn for dinner, dripping with butter. They sat outside at the picnic table and ate with their hands. Night scents would drift toward them. As darkness fell, they would move into the house and watch the lazy movies, the baseball games of summer, and then they would go to sleep. But Lory and A.C. stayed up later and later as the summer went on, and made love after everyone had gone to bed, and then they would go out on their walk, A.C. still carrying Lory, though now she remained awake.

  When she was not too tired — when she did not need to go to bed — they would paddle the canoe upriver to his farmhouse, with Lory sitting behind A.C. and tracing her fingers on his wide back as he paddled. The waves would splash against the bow, wetting them both. They moved up the current slowly, past hilly, night-green pastures with the moon high above or just beyond their reach. Summer haying smells rose from the fields, and they passed wild tiger lilies growing along the shore as they crossed into Vermont. Lory felt weightless and free until it was time to go back.

  They lay on the old mattress in the farmhouse, with holes in the roof above them, and through the roof, the stars. No brothers, thought Lory fiercely, clutching A.C. and rolling beneath him, over him, beneath him again; she knew it was like swimming through rapids, or maybe drowning in them. Her brothers protected her and understood her, but A.C. seemed to know what was in the center of her, a place she had believed for a long while to be soft and weak.

  It was exciting to believe that perhaps it was strong in there. To begin to believe she did not need protecting. It made his protection of her all the more exciting, all the more delicious — unnecessary, and therefore extravagant, luxurious.

  This new hardness and strength in her center.

  They sat on the stone wall in front of the farmhouse afterward, some nights, before it was time to leave, and they watched the cattle graze under the moon, listening to the slow, strong, grinding sound of their teeth being worn away as their bodies took nourishment. Lory and A.C. held hands and sat shoulder to shoulder, cold and still naked, and when it was time to go, they carried their clothes in a bundle down to the stream, the dew wetting their ankles, their knees, so that they were like the cattle as they moved through the grass — and they’d paddle home naked, Lory sitting right behind A.C. for warmth against the night.

  ·

  The brothers continued to train in the daytime, and as the summer ended, there was a haze over the valley below them. They were throwing far over the fence, better than they’d ever thrown in their lives. They were tanned from the long hours of practicing shirtless. The sisters came by with a picnic lunch while the men threw. They laid out an old yellow Amish quilt that had belonged to their mother’s mother, with the hexagon patterns on it looking not unlike the throwing ring in which A.C. and the brothers whirled before each heave of the discus. The sisters would lie on the quilt on their stomachs, the sun warm on the backs of their legs. They ate Swiss cheese, strawberries, and apples, drank wine and watched the men throw forever, it seemed, until the sisters grew sleepy in the sun and rolled over and looked up at the big white cumulus clouds that did not seem to be going anywhere. They closed their eyes, felt the sun on their eyelids, and fell hard asleep, their mouths open, their bodies still listening to the faint tremors in the earth each time the discus landed.

  A.C. had stopped sleeping altogether. There was simply too much to do.

  He and Lory would go for canoe rides out on Lake George, only they would not take paddles with them. Instead, A.C. had gotten the harness back from Lory, and he slipped that over himself and towed her out into the lake as if going to sea, bare to the waist, and Lory in her one-piece suit. They were both brown from the picnics, and with nothing but the great blue water before them, they appeared to glow red, as if smudged with
earth. The sunlight seemed to focus on them alone, the only two moving, living figures before the expanse of all that water, out on top of all that water. Their bodies gathered that solitary light so that they were upright, ruddy planes of flesh, of muscle, dull red in that late summer light, and with nothing but blue water beyond.

  A.C. waded out, pulling the canoe with Lory riding inside, sitting upright like a shy stranger, a girl met on the first day of school in September. And then thigh-deep, and then deeper, up to his chest, his neck — he would take her out into the night.

  Once they were on the lake, he would unbuckle the harness and swim circles around her and then submerge, staying under for a very long time, Lory thought. She lost track of the time. There was no way for her to bring him up; she could only wait for him. She watched the concentric ripples he’d left in the lake’s surface until the water faded to smoothness again. She could feel him down there, somewhere below her, but the water was flat again, motionless. She would try to will him back to the surface, as if raising him with a rope from the bottom of a well, but he’d stay hidden below her.

  For A.C., it was dark and yet so deeply safe at the bottom of the lake. But then he would kick for the surface, up to the wavering glimmer of where she was, the glimmer becoming an explosion as he surfaced. He found her trying to pretend she wasn’t worried, not even turning her head to look at him.

  A.C. would get back into the harness and, like a fish or a whale, he would begin her on her journey again, taking her around and around the lake, leaving a small V behind the canoe. Lory trailed her hand in the water and looked back at the blotted treeline against the night and the restaurant-speckled shore; or she would look out ahead of her at the other shore, equally distant, where there were no lights at all.

  With A.C. so close, tied to the end of a rope, pulling her and the boat through the water as if she were a toy, she wanted to stand up and call out, cupping her hands, “I love you.” But she stayed seated and let her hand trail in the coolness of the lake. She was not a good swimmer, but she wanted to get in the water with him. She wanted to strip and dive in and swim out to him. He seemed so at ease that Lory would find herself — watching his wet, water-sliding back in the moonlight, the dark water — believing that he had become a sleek sea animal and was no longer a true human, mortal, capable of mortal things.

  Occasionally Lory and A.C. went out to the lake in the late afternoon, and she would take a book. Between pages, as he continued to swim, she looked at the treeline, the shore, all so far away. Sometimes a boat drew near to see if she needed help, but always she waved it away, gave the people in the other boat a cheery, thumbs-up signal. When dusk came, if A.C. had been swimming all afternoon, he would head back to the harbor, side-stroking and looking at her with a slow, lazy smile. But she did not want laziness or slow smiles; she wanted to reach out and hold him.

  In the dark harbor he would climb into the boat, slippery and naked, as she removed her own clothes, pulling off the old sea-green sweater she wore over her swimsuit in the chill night air, then removing the yellow swimsuit itself, and then her earrings, placing all of these things in the bow, out of the way, so that there was nothing, only them. She met him, offering herself as if meat to a wet, slippery animal. They would lie in the bottom of the cool green canoe, hold each kiss, and feel the lake pressing from beneath as they pressed back against it, riding the surface of the water. With the water so very nearly lapping at her skin but not quite — separated only by the canoe’s thin shell — Lory felt like some sort of sea creature. One or both of her arms would sometimes hang over the edge of the canoe as they made love, would trail or splash in the water, and often she didn’t see why they didn’t just get it over with, dive into the lake and never come back to the surface.

  Later, they would get up and sit on the wicker bench seat in the stern, side by side, and lean against each other, holding hands.

  They would sit in the harbor, those cool nights, wet, steaming slightly from their own heat. Other boats rode slowly into the harbor, idling through the darkness back to shore, their lengths and shapes identifiable by the green and yellow running lights that lined their sides for safety, as they passed through the night, going home. At times it seemed as if one of the pleasure boats were coming right at them, and sometimes one of the boats with bright running lights would pass by — so close that they could see the faces of the people inside.

  But they were unobserved. They watched the boats pass and let the night breezes dry their hair, dry the lake water from their bodies so that they felt human once more, and of the earth. They would make love again, invisible to all the other passing boats, all of them full of people who could not see what it was like to be in love.

  A.C. and Lory would have coffee at a restaurant on the short drive back — five or six miles from home — on a deck beneath an umbrella like tourists, looking out at Highway 9A. Lory drank her coffee slowly, stirring milk and sugar into it, cup after cup, watching the black liquid turn into swirling, muddy shades of brown. A.C.’s weight was up to three hundred pounds now, more muscle than ever, but she would reach over, smiling, look into his eyes, and grip the iron breadth of his thigh and squeeze it, then pat it and say, “How are you doing, fat boy?”

  She felt lake water still inside her, even though they had gone in for a quick cleaning-off swim — A.C. staying right next to her, holding her up in the water with one hand. She felt deliciously wild. They drank coffee for an hour, until their hair was completely dry. Then they drove home, to Louella’s dismay and the brothers’ looks of happiness, but looks that were somehow a little hurt, a little lost; home to Heck’s mild wonderment and interest, looking up from his gin and tonic; home to Lindsay’s impatience, for A.C. and Lory would have been gone a long time.

  “We’re just friends, Mom,” Lory would say whenever Louella tried to corner her in the kitchen. “I’m happy, too. See? Look!” She danced, leaped, and kicked her heels together three times, spun around when she landed, then went up on her toes — an odd interpretation of the discus spin that A.C. was trying to learn.

  “Well,” said Louella, not knowing what to say or do. “Good. I hope so.”

  One morning when A.C. stayed in Glens Falls, he lifted himself from sleep and moved around the basement, examining the old weights, the rowing machines, the rust-locked exercise bikes, and the motionless death-hang of the patched and battered punching bags. A.C. ran his hand over the weights and looked at the flecks of rust that came off on his hands, and thought how the brothers were outlasting the iron and the steel. He stared at the rust in the palm of his hand and smelled the forever-still air that had always been in the basement, air in which John and Jerry had grown up, spindly kids wrestling and boxing, always fighting things, but being part of a family: eating meals together, going to church, teasing their sisters, growing larger, finding directions and interests, taking aim at things. That same air was still down there, as if in a bottle, and it confused A.C. and made him more sure that he was somehow a part of it, a part he did not know about.

  He pictured pushing through the confusion, throwing the discus farther and farther, until one day he did the skip-and-glide perfectly. He would be able to spin around once more after that, twice more, and still look up after the throw in time to see the disc flying. It would make the brothers happy, but perhaps then they would not feel that he was a brother anymore.

  He trained harder than ever with them, as if it were the greatest of secrets they were giving him. They put their arms around him, walking back from training. Sometimes they teased him, trying to put his great throws in perspective.

  “The circumference of the earth at the equator is more than 24,000 miles,” Jerry said nonchalantly, looking at his watch as if to see what time it was, as if he had forgotten an appointment. Lory had put him up to it. She’d given him the numbers to crib on his wrist. “Why, that’s over 126,720,000 feet,” he’d exclaim.

  John looked over at A.C. and said, “How far’d you throw
today, A.C.?”

  A.C. would toss his head back and laugh a great, happy laugh, the laugh of someone being saved, being thrown a rope and pulled in. He would rather be their brother than anything. He wouldn’t do them any harm.

  ·

  Lory and A.C. took Lindsay canoeing on the Batten-kill River, over in Vermont. It was almost fall. School was starting soon. Lory stayed close to A.C., held on to his arm, sometimes with both hands. She worried that the fatigue and subsequent depression would be coming on like a returning army, but she smiled thinly, moved through the cool days and laughed, grinning wider whenever their eyes met. Sometimes A.C. would blush and look away, which made Lory grin harder. She would tickle him, tease him; she knew he was frightened of leaving her. She knew he never would.

  They drove through the countryside, past fields lined with crumbling stone walls and Queen Anne’s lace, with the old canoe on top of the VW. They let Lindsay drive, like a chauffeur. A.C. and Lory had somehow squeezed into the back seat. Now and then Lindsay looked back at them when they kissed, and a crimson blush came into her face, but mostly it was just shy glances at the mirror, trying to see, as if through a telescope, the pleasure that lay ahead of her.

  The road turned to white gravel and dust with a clatter and clinking of pebbles, but Lory and A.C. did not notice. They looked like one huge person wedged into the back seat. Sun flashed through the windshield. It felt good to Lindsay to be driving with the window down, going faster than she ever had. Meadows passed, more Queen Anne’s lace, maples, farms, cattle. A.C. reached forward and squeezed the back of Lindsay’s neck, startling her, and then began rubbing it. She relaxed, smiled, and leaned her head back. Her red hair on his wrist.

  Lindsay drove down the narrow road raising dust, and brilliant goldfinches swept back and forth across the road in front of them, flying out of the cattails, alarmed at the car’s speed. Lindsay hit one; it struck the hood and flew straight up above them, sailing back toward the cattails, dead, wings folded, but still a bright yellow color. Lindsay cried “Oh!” and covered her mouth, because neither A.C. nor Lory had seen it. She was ashamed somehow and wanted to keep it a secret.