Platte River

by Rick Bass

  They stopped for cheeseburgers and shakes at a shady drive-in, in a small Vermont town whose name they’d never heard of. The drive-in was right by the banks of the river, where they would put the canoe in. The river was wide and shallow, cool and clear, and they sat beneath a great red oak and ate. Lindsay was delighted to be with them, but also she could not shake the oddest feeling. Again, the feeling that there was nothing special, that it had been happening all her life, these canoe trips with A.C. and Lory — and that it could just as easily have been John or Jerry sitting with them under the tree. If anything, Lindsay felt a little hollow somehow, and cheated, as if something were missing, because A.C. had shown up only this summer.

  Lindsay had never paddled before. She sat backwards and gripped the paddle wrong, like a baseball bat. And Lory did an amazing thing that her sister never understood: she fell out, twice. It was like falling out of a chair. She hadn’t even been drinking. Lindsay shrieked. They had water fights.

  Lindsay had baked a cake, and they ate it on a small island. When the sisters waded into the cold river to pee, A.C. laughed, turned his back, and made noise against the rocks on the shore.

  “Lindsay’s jealous,” Lory said when they came trudging out of the river. Lindsay swung at her but missed, and fell back into the water.

  The sun dried them quickly. Several times A.C. got out of the canoe and swam ahead, pulling them by a rope held in his teeth.

  Lory had brought a big jug of wine. They got out and walked up into a meadow and drank from it whenever they became tired of paddling, which was often. At one stop, on the riverbank, Lory ran her fingers through A.C.’s hair. In six years, she would be forty. A crow flew past, low over the river. Farther upstream, they could see trout passing beneath the canoe, could see the bottom of the river, which was deep. Stones lined the river bottom, as if an old road lay beneath them.

  On the way home, with A.C. at the wheel, they stopped for more cheeseburgers and had Cokes in the bottle with straws. They kept driving with the windows down. Their faces were not sunburned, but darker.

  When A.C., Lory, and Lindsay got home and went into the house, the brothers were immediately happy to see the big man again, as always, but then, like small clouds, something crossed their faces and then vanished again, something unknown, perhaps confused.

  ·

  The day before school started, Lory and A.C. paddled up to the farmhouse in Vermont. They were both sad, as if one of them were leaving and not ever coming back. Lory thought about another year of school. Tired before it even began, she sat on the stone wall with him, her head on his shoulder. He let her stay that way and did not try to cheer her up with stunts or tricks or feats of strength. The cattle in the field grazed right up to the edge of the stone wall, unafraid of Lory and A.C.

  He rubbed the back of Lory’s neck, held her dose against him. He could be kind and tender, he could be considerate and thoughtful, he could even love her, but she wanted something else. He was afraid of this, and knew he was as common as coal in that respect. He also knew he was afraid of leaving, and of being alone.

  ·

  A.C. was running out of money, so he took a paper route. He had no car, so he pulled the papers on a huge scraping rickshaw, fitting himself with a harness to pull it. It had no wheels and was really only a crude travois: two long poles with a sheet of plywood nailed to them, and little guard rails so that he could stack the papers high on it.

  He delivered papers in the early afternoon. All through the neighborhoods he trotted, grimacing, pulling a half ton of paper slowly up the small hills, and then, like a creature from the heavens, like some cruel-eyed bird, he swooped down the hills, street gravel and rock rattling under the sled. He shouted and tossed papers like mad, glancing back over his shoulder with every throw to be sure that he was staying ahead of the weight of the sled, which was accelerating, trying to run him down. It was funny, and the people who lived at the bottom of a hill learned to listen for him, loved to watch him, to see if one day he might get caught.

  But now it was lonely for A.C., with Jerry in his final year at school, playing football, and John coaching. Lindsay was back in school too, and Heck was still the principal. Only Louella stayed at home.

  Usually A.C. finished his paper route by late afternoon, and then he would put the sled in the garage and hose himself off in the back yard, his chest red from where the harness had rubbed, his running shorts drenched with sweat. He’d hold the hose over his head and cool down. Louella would watch from the kitchen window, feeling lonely, but she was also cautious, a mother first.

  Dripping, A.C. would turn the water off, coil the hose up, and sit at the picnic table silently, his back turned to the kitchen. Like a dog finished with his duties, he would wait until he could see Lory again, see all the siblings. Louella would watch him for a long time. She just couldn’t be sure.

  When Lory got home from school, riding on a fresh burst of energy at the idea of seeing him again, A.C. would jump up, shake sprays of water from his wet hair, and run to open the door for her. He kissed her delicately, and she would ask, teasing, “How was your day, dear?” Though it was all working out differently from how she had expected, she was fresher and happier than she had ever been.

  ·

  The children at Lory’s school were foul, craven, sunk without hope. She would resurrect one, get a glimmer of interest in one every now and then, but eventually it would all slide back; it had all been false — that faint progress, the improvement in attitude. Sometimes she hit her fist against the lockers after school. The desks with “I fucked Miss Iron” on them were still there, and the eyes of the male teachers were no better, saying the same thing. She was getting older, older, and each year she wondered if this was the year that the last of her youth would go away. It was a gauntlet, but she needed to stay close to Glens Falls. She had to keep going.

  It was like traveling upriver at night in the canoe with him, up through the rapids, only it was like being one of the darkened iron statues rather than her live, loving self. It was like night all the time, this job, and in her dreams of it, there was never any sound, no promise, no future. She was in the wrong place, taking the wrong steps, and she knew — she could feel it as strongly as anything — that it took her too far away from him, teaching at Warrensburg each day, a place of darkness.

  She was up until midnight every night, grading papers, preparing lesson plans, reading the barely legible scrawled essays of rage — “I wont to kil my sester, i wont to kil my bruthers” — and then she was up again at four or four-thirty, rousing herself from the sleepy dream of her life. But A.C. was also up by then, making coffee for her.

  When they kissed in the morning she’d be wearing a tattered, dingy robe and her owlish reading glasses. His hands would slide under her robe and find her warm beneath the fuzzy cloth. He wanted nothing else for either of them. There could be no improvement. He knew she wanted more, though, that she wanted to keep going.

  They would take a short walk right before she left for school. By the time they got back, John and Jerry would be up. Jerry’s clock radio played hard rock. John, with no worries, no responsibilities, sorted through the refrigerator for his carton of milk (biceps drawn on it with a Magic Marker) and got Jerry’s carton out (a heart with an arrow through it, and the word “Mom” inside the heart). The brothers stood around and drank, swallowing the milk in long, cold gulps.

  ·

  Watching A.C. and Lory grow closer was, to Louella, like the pull of winter, or like giving birth. Always, she thought about the one she had lost. Twenty years later, she had been sent a replacement. She wanted to believe that. She had not led a martyr’s life, but she had worked hard, and miracles did happen.

  It was true, she realized. She could make it be true by wanting it to be true.

  She looked out her kitchen window at him, sitting at the picnic table with his back to her, facing the garden, the late-season roses. Sun came through the window, and she could see hummi
ngbirds fly into the back yard, lured by the sweetness of the nectar she had put in the feeders.

  Louella watched A.C. look around at the humming-birds, staring at them for the longest time, like a simple animal. The birds were dancing flecks of color, flashes of shimmering emerald and cobalt. Louella saw a blur of orange in the garden, the cat racing across the yard, up onto the picnic table, then leaping into the air, legs outstretched. She saw the claws, and like a ballplayer the cat caught one of the hummingbirds in midair, came down with it, and tumbled and rolled.

  Louella watched as A.C. ran to the cat, squeezed its neck gently, and lifted the limp hummingbird from the cat’s mouth. The cat shivered, shook, and ran back into the garden. A.C. set the limp hummingbird down on the picnic table. The other hummingbirds were gone.

  Louella went into the back yard. The little bird lay still with its eyes shut, a speck of blood on its throat like a tiny ruby. The glitter of its green back like scales.

  “That damn cat,” Louella said, but as they watched, the hummingbird began to stir, ruffled its feathers, looked around, and flew away.

  ·

  Each morning after the others had left, A.C. would sit at the picnic table a bit longer. Then he would come inside and tell Louella that he was going to Vermont for a while. Always, politely, he asked her if she needed anything, or if she cared to go with him for the ride, and always she refused, saying she had things to do. Always, afterward, she wished she had said yes, wondered what it would be like, wondered what his stone farmhouse looked like. But there were boundaries to be maintained; she could not let go and say yes. So A.C. would lift the canoe over his head and walk through the neighborhood, out across the main road and down to the river, leaving her alone.

  What A.C. was working on in Vermont was a barn, for throwing the discus during the winter months. He wanted to perfect his throw, to make John and Jerry happy. He had no more money left, so he ripped down abandoned barns, saving even the nails from the old boards. He built his barn in the woods, on the side of the hill behind his farmhouse. It was more like a bowling alley than anything.

  He had planned it to be 300 feet long. He climbed high into the trees to nail on the tall roof that would keep the snow out. There was not enough wood to build sides for the barn; mostly it was like a tent, a long, open-walled shed. He had built up the sides with stones about three feet high to keep the drifts from blowing in. It would be cold, but it would be free of snow.

  He cut the trees down with an ax, to build the throwing lane, and then cut them into lengths to be dragged away. He was building a strip of empty space in the heart of the woods; it ran for a hundred yards and then stopped. He kept it a secret from the whole family, and was greatly pleased with its progress as the fall went on.

  The air inside the throwing room felt purified, denser somehow. It had the special scents of the woods. He burned all the stumps, leveled the ground with a shovel and hoe, and made a throwing ring out of river stones. The rafters overhead reminded him of the church he’d gone to once with the Irons: the high ceiling, the beams, keeping the hard rains and snows out, protecting them, but also distancing them from what it was they were after.

  He would work on the barn all morning, leave in time to get home and do his paper route, and still be back at the house before anyone else got there. Sometimes Louella would be out shopping or doing other errands. He would sit at the picnic table and wait for the sound of Lory’s car.

  ·

  Feathery snow fell on the Hudson highlands on the third of October, a Friday night. They were all walking to the movie theater in the mall, A.C. and Lory holding hands, Lindsay running ahead of them. It was too early for real snow.

  The brothers were as full of spirit as they had been all year. It was as if they were fourteen. They danced, did their discus spins in crowded places, ending their imaginary releases with wild shouts that drew some spectators and scared others away, then all three of them spun and whooped — John’s and Jerry’s spins still more polished than A.C.’s, but A.C.’s impressive also, if for no reason other than his great size. Soon there was a large audience, clapping and cheering as if they were Russian table dancers. (A.C. pictured it being late spring still, or early summer, before he had met them: back when he was still dancing with the cows on his back, a sport he had enjoyed, and which he secretly missed, though the brothers had asked him to stop doing it, saying it would throw his rhythm off. He missed the freedom of it, the lack of borders and rules, but did not want to hurt their feelings, did not want them to know he thought discus throwing was slightly inferior, so he’d done as they said, though still, he missed dancing and whirling with the cattle over his shoulders.)

  Lory shrieked and hid her eyes with her hands, embarrassed, and Lindsay blushed her crimson color, but was petrified, unable to move, and she watched them, amazed as always. Lory’s fingers were digging into Lindsay’s arm; Lindsay smiled bravely through her embarrassment, and was happy for Lory. Everyone around them in the mall kept clapping and stamping their feet, while outside, the first snow came down.

  ·

  A.C. gave the money from the paper route to Louella and Heck, and as he made more money, he tried to give that to them as well, but they wouldn’t hear of it. So he bought things and gave them to Lory. He bought whatever he saw, if he happened to be thinking about her: a kitten, bouquets of flowers, jewelry, an NFL football, a smoked turkey.

  She was flattered and excited the first few times he brought something home, but soon became alarmed at the volume of things, and eventually asked him to stop. Then she had to explain to him what she really wanted, what really made her happy, and he was embarrassed, felt a fool for not having realized it before, for having tried to substitute. It was like throwing the discus from his hip rather than with the spin, he realized.

  They went out in the canoe again that Saturday night, on Lake George. It was a still night at first, calm and chilly, and the full moon was so bright they could see the shore, even from far out on the water. They could see each other’s face, each other’s eyes; it was like some dream-lit daylight, hard and blue and silver, with the sound of waves lapping against the side of their small boat. They were cold, but they undressed anyway. They wanted to get close, as close as they could; they wanted to be all there was in the world, the only thing left.

  He covered her with the blanket they had brought, and kept her warm with that and with himself. After making love to her he fell asleep, dreaming, in the warmth of the blanket and the roll of the boat, that he was still in her, that they were still loving, and that they always would be.

  “You were smiling,” she said when he woke around midnight. She’d been watching him all night. She’d held him, too, sometimes pressing him so tightly against her breast that she was sure he’d wake up, but he had slept on. “What were you smiling about?”

  “You,” he said sleepily. “I was thinking about you.”

  It was the right answer. She was so happy.

  ·

  One weekend, Lory’s school had a Halloween dance. A girl had been raped after the dance last year, and several of the teachers’ cars had had their tires slashed and their radio antennas snapped. A small fire had been set inside the school and had scorched the walls. Lory was chaperoning this year. She went up there with John and Jerry and A.C., and stayed near them the whole time.

  The brothers dwarfed Lory like bodyguards; she was almost hidden whenever she was in their midst. The young thugs and bullies did not attempt to reach out from the crowd and squeeze her breasts, as they sometimes did on dares, and the male teachers, married and unmarried, treated her with respect. The four of them sat in the bleachers and watched the dance, listening to the loud music until midnight. There was no mischief, and they were relieved when it was time to go.

  They felt almost guilty, driving home to warmth and love. They rode in silence, thinking their own thoughts, back down to Glens Falls, whose lights they could see below, not twinkling as if with distance but shining
steadily, a constant glow, because they were so close.

  ·

  Geese, heading south late in the year, stragglers. A.C. worked on his barn during the mild sunny days of November. He could feel more snow coming, could feel it the way an animal can. The hair on his arms and legs was getting thicker, the way it had in Colorado in past falls. The barn reminded him of the one that had been out there — the hay barn. That was where she had done it.

  The throwing barn was almost finished. It was narrow, so his throws would have to be accurate. There could be no wildness, or he would wreck the place he had built. He would teach himself to throw straight.

  He finished the barn in mid-November, as the big flakes arrived, the second snow of the season. Now the snows that came would not go away, not until the end of winter. He brought the brothers up to see the barn, to show them how they could keep training together, how they could keep throwing all through the winter, even with snow banked all around them, and they were delighted.

  “This is the best year of my life,” Jerry said unexpectedly.

  A.C. bought a metal detector, and when throws did not travel perfectly straight — the barn was only thirty feet wide — the brothers and A.C. had to search in the snow, listening for the rapid signal that told them they were getting near. They used old metal discs now, which flew two or three feet farther in the cold air. The brothers ate more than ever, and trained harder.

  There was a stone wall at the end of the barn, the 300-foot mark, stacked all the way to the rafters and chinked with mud and sand and grass. A.C. had lodged a discus in it once, had skipped a few of them against its base. Hitting that mark was magical, unimaginable; it required witchcraft, an alteration of reality.

  It took the brothers and A.C. about sixty seconds to walk 300 feet. A minute away — and unobtainable, or almost.