Platte River

by Rick Bass

  Sometimes the throws went too far off into the woods, and the discs were lost for good. Other times, they went too high and crashed through the rafters, like violent cannonballs, cruel iron seeking to destroy.

  “Forget it,” John would say gruffly whenever A.C. threw outside the barn. They’d hear the snapping, tearing sound of branches being broken and then the whack! of the discus striking a tree trunk. John would already be reaching for another disc, though, handing it to him. “Come on, come on, shake it off. Past history. Over and done with. Shake it off.”

  Past history. No harm done. These were sweet words to A.C. His eyes grew moist. He wanted to believe that. He wanted to make good this time.

  ·

  As the winter deepened, they set their goals harder and farther. John and Jerry wanted to throw 221 feet, and A.C. wanted to be able to throw 300 feet on any given throw, at will.

  And he wanted Lory. He wanted to build fences, to take care, protect. Sometimes while everyone was at school, Louella would decide that she just couldn’t keep away any longer. She would challenge herself to be brave, to accept him without really knowing whether he was hers or not. She would ride in the canoe with him up to the barn, to watch him throw. She had come over to his side, and believed in him, and she did that. Louella wanted to know about his past, but A.C. simply wouldn’t tell her.

  A.C. built a fire for Louella in the barn, and she sat on a stump and sipped coffee while he threw. His spin was getting better. It was an imitation of her sons’, she could tell, but it was starting to get some fluidity to it, some life, some creativity. Louella enjoyed watching him train. His clumsiness did not worry her, because she could tell he was working at it and overcoming it. She was even able to smile when the discus soared up through the rafters, letting a sprinkle of snow pour into the barn from above — yet another hole punched through the roof, one more hole of many, the snow sifting down like fine powder.

  They were alarming, those wild throws, but she found herself trusting him. Secretly she liked the wild throws: she was fascinated by the strength and force behind them, the utter lack of control. It was like standing at the edge of a volcano, looking down. She moved a little closer to the fire. She was fifty-eight, and was seeing things she’d never seen before, feeling things she’d never felt. Life was still a mystery. He had made her daughter happy again.

  “Keep your head back,” Louella would caution whenever she saw that his form was too terribly off. “Keep your feet spread. Your feet were too close together.” She knew enough about form to tell how it differed from her other sons’.

  ·

  The whole family came for Thanksgiving: cousins and moved-away aunts, little babies, uncles and nieces. Everything flowed. A.C. was a good fit; it was as if he’d always been there. Passing the turkey, telling jokes, teasing Lindsay about a boyfriend; laughter and warmth inside the big house.

  The roads iced over. There was the sound of studded snow tires outside, and of clanking chains. Football all day on television, and more pie, more cider. Then Thanksgiving passed and they were on into December, the Christmas season, with old black-and-white movies on television late at night and Lory on her holiday break from school. Everyone was home, and he was firmly in their center, her center.

  He was in a spin of love and asked her to marry him. “Yes,” she said, laughing, remembering last year’s sadness and the crazy lost hope of it, never dreaming or knowing that he had been out there, moving toward her.

  In her dreams, in the months preceding the wedding, she saw images of summer, of June coming around again. She and her mother stood in a large field, with cattle grazing near the trees. In the field were great boulders and fieldstones left over from another age, a time of glaciers and ice, of great floods.

  And in the dream, she and her mother leaned into the boulders, rolling them, moving them out of the field, making the field pure and green. They built a stone wall out of the boulders, all around the field, and some of them were too large to move. Lory gritted her teeth and pushed harder, straining, trying to move them all. Then she would wake up and be by his side, by his warmth, and realize that she had been pushing against him, trying to get him out of bed. That could not be done, and she’d laugh, put her arms around as much of him as she could, and bury her face in him. Then she would get up after a while, unable to return to sleep.

  She’d dress, put on her snow boots, go to the garage, and pick up one of the discuses, holding it with both hands, feeling the worn smoothness, the coldness, and the magic of it — magic, Lory believed, because he had touched it. Certain that no one was watching, that no one could ever find out, she would go into the front yard, bundled up in woolens and a parka, and under the blue cast of the streetlight she’d crouch and then whirl, spinning around and around, and throw the discus as far as she could, in whatever direction it happened to go. She’d shout, almost roar, and watch it sink into the soft new snow, jumping up and down afterward when she threw well and was pleased with her throw.

  Then she would wade out to where she had seen the discus disappear, kneel down, and dig for it with her hands. She’d carry it back to the garage, slip it into the box with the others, and finally she’d be able to sleep, growing warm again in bed with him.

  In the spring, before the wedding, after the snows melted and the river began to warm — the river in which A.C. had first seen and swum up to his brothers — he began to swim again, but with Lory this year.

  A.C. would fasten a rope to the harness around his chest and tie the other end of it to the bumper of her car before leaping into the river from a high rock and being washed down through the rapids.

  Then he would swim upriver until his shoulders ached, until even he was too tired to lift his head, and was nearly drowning. Lory would leap into the car then, start it, and ease up the hill, pulling him like a limp wet rag through the rapids he’d been fighting, farther up the river until he was in the stone-bottomed shallows. She’d park the car, set the emergency brake, jump out, and run back down to get him.

  Like a fireman, she’d pull him the rest of the way out of the river, splashing knee-deep in the water, helping him up, putting his arm around her tiny shoulders. Somehow they’d stagger up into the rocks and trees along the shore. He’d lie on his back and gasp, looking up at the sky and the tops of trees, and smelling the scent of pines. They would lie in the sun, drenched, exhausted, until their clothes were almost dry, and then they would back the car down and do it again.

  He liked being saved. He needed her. And she needed him. Closer and closer she’d pull him, reeling in the wet rope, dragging him up on shore, bending over and kissing his wet lips until his eyes fluttered, bringing him back to life every time.

  PLATTE RIVER

  The man must not drink of the running streams, the living waters, who is not prepared to have all nature reborn in him — to suckle monsters.

  — THOREAU, August 1851 journal

  Shaw used to be a model and is still beautiful, fierce and timid both, like a coyote or a wild dog — more beautiful, in that way, than when she modeled. Harley is strange looking, as plain as butter, huge, and believes in his heart, with his ragged dress, his half beard, his falling-out hair, and his badger’s temper, that he makes Shaw feel older, less beautiful, less whole. Less than what she used to be. Harley tells Shaw this, to hear her deny it, and she does deny it, and keeps denying it until the time she packs to move out, saying that she feels older, no longer beautiful, no longer whole — but that it’s not Harley’s doing.

  Harley’s forty-one. Shaw is thirty-eight. Old enough to have lived full lives, and yet they have not even started.

  She takes her time leaving this time. Usually she bolts in the night, hitchhiking, since they have only one old truck between them, which runs infrequently. But this time Shaw has told Harley of her fears, her feelings, calmly, matter-of-factly, rather than just fleeing. She’s already met with the bank officer in the small town nearest where they live. It’s an hour’s
drive down out of Canada, along a one-lane cliff road. Shaw and Harley have a mailbox in northern Montana, but they live up over the line, ten miles into Canada, on an old logging road. Their house is an abandoned hunting lodge, large and airy, with the stuffed heads of deer and elk, moose and bear, staring down at them from the walls — ancient heads from animals shot fifty and sixty years ago. It’s such a fairy-tale existence, Harley thinks, with the big, stone-circled fireplaces, the cavernous bedroom — everything oversized, as if a giant had once lived in the lodge — that he often thinks they’ve died and are living some sort of afterlife, separate from the real world.

  Then Harley realizes that’s the problem, that he loves the empty, echoing, ringing feeling, but that Shaw is terrified of it.

  She used the silk scarves that she paints as collateral. She stretches the silk between sawhorses in the back yard, and then, wearing a big straw hat to protect her face from the thin mountain sun, she paints abstract patterns across the silks before hemming the edges and sewing them into things — scarves mostly, but also skirts, blouses, ties. The car she’s taken the loan on is an old Subaru. Shaw parks it in the back yard and paints that, too — autumn red and lichen green, swirling.

  “I need a car that’ll get around in the snow,” she tells Harley. It’s April, the month it always is when she leaves, right after the long winter. Like an animal coming to its senses, Harley thinks; like an animal waking up.

  It’s late April and she’s talking about snow. That means she’ll be gone longer than two or three weeks, he thinks. Till November at least. Maybe longer.

  ·

  Shaw cries sometimes after they make love. Harley asks her why.

  “I just think about how sad it’s going to make you when I leave,” she says.

  They still make love often — in the woods, with tiger stripes of sunlight falling across their bodies and the snow-melt river hurtling past. Shaw gazes into Harley’s eyes during love — into the back of his eyes, into his cells, Harley thinks — but then she bursts into tears the second it is over, and it’s the end of beauty, and nothing but semen, cooling.

  It’s a restlessness. Nothing specific, but it’s strong.

  She remembers how he was when he hurt his knees and had to leave the league — how they wouldn’t let him play football anymore, how much he needed her then, how they moved up to these woods. Shaw can leave the lover part of the relationship — that’s her choice, she feels. But leaving the friendship part, just cutting loose and drifting away from that, too ... She feels guilty, almost to the point of feeling anchored — drowning, going down at sea with chains wrapped around her body, around her neck. Fish swimming through her hair.

  It’s why she takes so long to leave. She’s never left a friend before. His steadiness, trustworthiness ... If he were handsome, she thinks, she would hate him rather than love him, for trying to hold her there with that. But she can’t explain this to him. He thinks she’s saying it to make him feel better, preparing him for when she does it: leaves.

  This planned leaving — it’s new, it’s curtains, it’s the end of the line, he thinks. The way Shaw’s applying for that loan, the way she packs carefully, each day, one more box — buttons, fabric, paints, brushes, winter clothes. It’s nothing like the usual, once a month, mad leavings whereupon Shaw and Harley would get in a shrieking fight. Names would be called, and called back, and Shaw, despondent, would burn her bridges, race out into the night, and, if it was snowing, flounder across the field, running high-kneed through the drifts, across the meadow, and down the lonely, icy road. Harley would rush upstairs and, in his bull rage, his anguish at having lost her, at having not been good enough — at having been baited into a fight rather than being gentle and letting the name-calling drift past him — would begin butting his head against the wall of the log cabin, bellowing with pain.

  This, in the winter.

  When he had finished beating his head against the wall, when he was able finally to feel the pain subside, the drumming blood-pulse between his ears and through his head slow down, then the giant three-story cabin would be immense in its emptiness. Harley would remember how short life was, but how long it was, too. With his bad knees he’d hobble down the stairs, around and around their boxy spiral and out the front door, running now as if for his life, believing that each time she leaves will surely be the last, that she will not calm down, will not return or allow herself to be caught but will keep running, down the road and then off into the woods, up over Roderick Buttes and then higher, over Lost Horse Mountain and into the next valley, and then to the one beyond that, running to Alaska, perhaps.

  They race through the woods: always, it seems, at night, as if there were some dark biochemical stirring when the light fades and the woods around them grow gloomy and dark. Shaw bolts from the center of the empty road she’s walking down when she hears him coming, bolts into the woods, into the trees. And like a hound after a fox, like a wolf chasing a deer, Harley runs after her. They both zig and zag, leaping logs, running through the forest. When Harley catches up with her (feeling, strangely, a terror even greater than hers when he corners her — exhausted, both of them panting, Shaw with her back up against a stand of trees, half bent over, the way a moose will do when bayed by a pack of wolves), he doesn’t try to calm her with words, with promises or apologies, or ask for forgiveness. Instead, he picks her up (he doesn’t feel her fists as she struggles and tosses her head back and forth, finally going limp, crying, her hair tangled and hiding her face) and carries her out of the woods and back up the deserted gravel road to their cabin, to what used to be their cabin — theirs, not simply hers or his — and to what Harley hopes will be theirs once again.

  He lays her — if it’s fall, or winter, or even cold spring — in front of the fireplace, which is always flickering and hissing with low coals. Harley covers her with a blanket. She turns her head away from him and stares into the fire, hating him, hating everything, knowing only that she feels trapped and must run, hating him for trying to control her.

  Bears in the autumn night, or winter’s forty-below blizzards, it makes no difference. When Shaw wants to run, she runs.

  After the sleepless night, things are better, though rocky for a couple of days, rocky and raw. Shaw paints new scarves — down in the basement if it’s cold out, or in the back yard if it’s late spring or summer or fall — fierce-colored abstract slashes on shimmering silk, tear drops and razor stripes of unheralded colors, colors exceeding even the golds and blues and fireweed reds of the country’s late summer. She paints bending over the silks, straight-lipped, furious, about to cry — paints like a madwoman, unsure if she wants to stay or leave, wanting to leave for her next journey but afraid to, and furious, no longer at big dumb Harley for trying to hold her but at herself, for being frightened. And Harley feels as if he’s used the last faint glimmers of her love for him as a lure with which to bring her back, with which to hold her one last time. Always, he feels it’s the last time.

  Later in the day, if the afternoon sun is warmer, Shaw hangs her newly painted scarves on the side of the barn, tacks them to the boards as if they’re animal hides. They flutter brightly in the wind, four or five of them at a time, so bright and shimmering that to anyone passing (though no one does) it would, must, seem as if everything’s right, as if there’s only peace, as if there’s no restlessness in the world.

  ·

  This time, Shaw packs the boxes slowly. And she thoroughly cleans the house — scrubbing it, even the farthest corners, to preface her departure — moving methodically, logically, gathering her courage steadily so that it will last. This time it terrifies Harley. He knows that empty-cabin feeling is rising to meet him again, and that he won’t be able to do anything about it.

  If she doesn’t run, how can he catch her?

  Harley feels his power being drained from him. He feels Shaw growing stronger. The scarves flap and dry in the wind, as if they, too, are trying to take flight. They, and their flutt
ering message of freedom, are infinitely more brilliant than an aging, predictable Harley.

  ·

  While Shaw goes down to Montana and Idaho to scout out work and a new place to live, Harley flies to northern Michigan to visit an old friend and teammate of his, Willis, who was never drafted, who never played for money, but perhaps should have. He had been a small, churlish running back nicknamed “the Wolverine,” whom Harley spent three years blocking for, protecting, when they went to college in Ohio.

  Willis — the Wolverine — teaches English. He’s not erudite, but he learned the same plays — Hamlet, The Tempest, The Cherry Orchard — over and over again, so he can present them to the burning young students, the best students in art from around the country, in a way that is acceptable to them. They like the Wolverine’s dark looks, his distant, permanent scowl, which often leads people to mistake him for a brooding artist, but which is really simply the scowl of a wolverine. They like his short, wide, muscular, artist’s body: to them he looks like a paragraph.

  It’s sort of a scam that the Wolverine has been able to hire his old blocking buddy to come out to the art school and talk about football: fifteen hundred dollars for the weekend. Things are so crazy at home that Harley would do it for free, just to get out of the house, but he’s glad for the money. He thinks how if he were married, he would give the government half for taxes and the other half. for alimony, after the divorce, leaving him nothing — nothing — for his work.

  It’s wicked and greedy, he knows, to think this way, but it’s what he’s thinking, and he can’t help it. It gives him a small, stupid solace — for once — that Shaw wouldn’t marry him, back when he asked.

  ·

  Willis picks Harley up at the Traverse City airport late in the afternoon. Harley’s been traveling for a day and a night to get out of the woods: driving out of Canada, slipping across into the States, and on down to Spokane. He had to take a staggering number of cross-connections and route-around flights, each one moving him, albeit obliquely, closer to his destination, to the Wolverine’s own small lair, also on the Canadian line. Harley made the last leg of the journey in a hydroplane, his big knees pummeling the seat of the passenger in front of him as they crossed the choppy air in that ancient plane.