Carson Valley

by Bill Barich

  “Yes, I am. Tell me some more stuff, Arthur. Make it up if you have to. Entertain me.”

  “Well, here’s one that cracks me up.” He was in fact feeling very merry and honored to be blessed with such a challenging companion. “A Scout’s supposed to be helpful, right? So we had a whole menu of helpful things to do.”

  “Like what?”

  “‘Pick up broken glass from the street,’” Atwater said, in an evangelical voice. “‘Move furniture for an old person. Make a scrapbook for a hospital.’”

  “Please,” Anna said, laughing along with him. “No more now.”

  “‘Clean trash off a vacant lot. Do errands for a sick person. Get a child’s kite down from a tree.’ I actually used to walk around Napa searching for kites to rescue!”

  “I mean it, Arthur. Just quit it. I have to pee. Stop somewhere, will you?”

  He nosed the canoe into a cove. Anna grabbed her shirt, stepped out, and walked rapidly toward a handy clump of bushes. Atwater shook his arms to freshen the flagging muscles and observed the flowing green river and the many oaks, laurels, and madronas, the whispering grasses and the sky above streaked with a lone cirrus cloud. He unwrapped a stick of spearmint gum, broke it in two, and commenced to chew it, his head tilted back to watch the cloud move, and he felt the wind stir and listened to the shiny leaves of a nearby poplar rustle and chime. Anna came out of the bushes after a while and sat in the bow again, clearly distressed and trying to hide it from him, not saying anything or venturing a look his way.

  “It’s nothing,” she told him before he could ask. “I’m having some cramps.”

  “Do you want an aspirin? I’ve got some.”

  “No, really, Arthur. It’s nothing. I’ll be fine.”

  “You should put on your hat.”

  “Hats don’t cure cramps.” She was short with him, even irritated. “Can we go? I’ll feel better in a minute.”

  He didn’t argue. He just pushed them off again with his paddle. They drifted down a willow-choked channel that opened onto some tumbling water peaked with miniature whitecaps. The canoe bounced and teetered as some small but energetic waves smashed against its hull. The river whacked the aluminum and sprayed them with rainbow droplets of froth. Ahead, in a rocky gorge, the current turned even stronger, and they giggled like kids on a Ferris wheel when it tossed them to the brink of tipping over. Atwater had to employ all his merit badge skills to keep them afloat, oaring madly with quartering strokes to lessen the rise and fall of their bow and stern. He plowed into the trough of one wave straight on, and water roared up in a plume and drenched them. Anna shrieked in delight. When she turned to face him, he shrugged and quartered some more until they were out of the chop.

  They passed under an old green trestle bridge. There was a campground near it pitched with mushrooming tents. They floated by a party of boys and girls, who were messing around in the water. The kids waved and showed off for them by executing fancy dives from a sandbar. One energetic boy swung toward them on a rope tied to an oak limb and cannonballed into the river, barely missing the canoe. They went around another bend and through a stretch that was almost becalmed. Anna took up the paddling, while Atwater knotted a swivel to his fishing line and attached a lure to it, a Rapala meant to imitate a wounded minnow, and cast it out behind them. He hooked the river bottom first and next a fat, ugly squawfish whose skull he rapped thuddingly against the stern thwart, leaving it to bob belly-up in the stream until an osprey swooped down to pluck it.

  “Those are trash fish,” he explained to Anna, heading off her objection. “They feed on steelhead fry.”

  “There must be a reason for it, no?”

  “Only in the biology books.”

  Noon came and went. Atwater was beginning to reel under the heat of the sun, his brain nearly fried despite his protective baseball cap. He had no idea how far they had gone, although he guessed that they must be about halfway to town. He saw a shadowy side channel lined with some towering redwoods and veered into it. There were only a few trees, but the huge canopy of branches blocked enough light to lower the temperature. The redwoods were like a forest apart, an enchanted place, and that brought him some relief, but soon the canoe was in open water again and passing a vineyard where a farmer tended a pile of burning brush and then a cattle ranch where some Aberdeen Angus ambled about in a dry and stubbly pasture.

  “When is lunchtime?” Atwater asked.

  “Any time the captain’s hungry.”

  “He’s been hungry since breakfast.”

  She pointed to a clearing among some cottonwoods on the far shore. Filtered sunlight fell through the leaves to dapple the sand and gravel. Atwater beached the canoe and held out a hand to Anna, then lifted the picnic basket and set it down where she directed him to, on a flat bit of ground. She spread out a checkered tablecloth and arranged some plastic forks and knives on it and some cloth napkins rolled up in wooden rings. Every precise detail, Atwater reflected in awe. Such a fortunate beneficiary am I. Anna had the promised roast chicken neatly carved into quarters—he could smell the rosemary and garlic—along with a bowl of potato salad, sliced tomatoes from her garden, and a baguette from the patisserie.

  He sat cross-legged in the dappled light and surveyed the banquet before him. “I’m a lucky fellow, Anna,” he said.

  “What would you like to drink? I’ve got two beers, two Cokes, and a bottle of Evian.”

  “I’ll have a Coke, please.”

  He unscrewed the cap and swallowed mightily, quenching a thirst he had not been aware of until that very instant. He polished off a chicken breast and helped himself to seconds on the salads, his appetite as usual in full fury.

  “We never had picnics like this in the Boy Scouts,” he told her, with appreciation. “Our big meal was ‘caveman steak.’ The meat cooked right on the hot coals. No grill, no aluminum foil, no nothing. That was the toughest cow I ever ate, plus it was covered with soot.”

  “I’m spoiling you, I’m afraid.”

  Atwater stared at her hard. Anna is not herself, he thought. She’s too quiet. She’s not laughing at the jokes. He didn’t like what he saw at all. Her face was pale, and she seemed distracted and shaky. “You’re not eating anything,” he said, chiding her. “You didn’t touch your chicken.”

  “Am I being scolded?”

  “I’m concerned about you.”

  “Don’t be,” Anna told him. “I’m just a little off today.”

  “You’re all sweaty, too.”

  “It’s the heat. Relax, Arthur. Why don’t you put your head in my lap and take a nap?”

  “You sure?”

  “I’m sure. Do as I say.”

  He took a last sip of soda, settled next to her where she sat, and put his head in her lap. It was what he had wanted to do more than anything, really. He was surprised that she had known his secret desire and could so readily accommodate it, which was a talent of hers from the start. Anna understood him, and that was one reason why she was so precious to him. To be understood was a glorious thing, Atwater thought. He felt the softness of her thighs against his cheek, smelled the creamy sunscreen she’d applied, and wished he could find the right words to thank her as her cool fingers touched his forehead and ran through his hair to massage his scalp, ministering to him with a tenderness that he had always craved deep in his soul but had rarely encountered.

  “Does that feel good?” Anna asked, smiling down at him.

  “Better than I could ever say.”

  “Dear, dear Mr. Atwater.”

  He fell into a dozey sleep. In the torpor of the afternoon, he had hallucinatory dreams that blazed through him at great speed, one after another, and he hardly noticed when Anna gently nudged him off her lap and slipped the folded tablecloth beneath his head. She was not there when he woke some fifteen minutes later, but he could hear her in the bushes. He stretched and yawned and brushed some grass from his hair, feeling pleasantly restored. Yellow jackets were buzzing around the picnic
basket, and he swatted at them with a napkin. Other canoes were on the river now, launched from the campground, and he watched them go by with their cargo of boisterous folks on holiday, young men stripped to the waist and young women in revealing bikinis, with wet-furred dogs on their prows.

  He was loading up the canoe when Anna reappeared. She had sweated right through her shirt, he saw, and the top button of her shorts was undone. She seemed bewildered, blinded by the sun. Her legs were trembling so wildly that Atwater thought she might collapse.

  “You need to get me to town as soon as possible,” she told him evenly. “I need to see a doctor.”

  “What is it?” he asked, taking her arm to steady her, but she could not or would not say. Instead, she broke away from him and lay down in the bow of the canoe.

  “I can’t talk about it, Arthur. There isn’t time. Let’s go,” Anna begged him. “Can we just go?”

  He did as she asked. He had no other choice. The river looked different to him now, though, broader and more intimidating. It looked endless, really. He paddled as hard as he could in the sloggy current, stroke after stroke, and assured himself that everything would be all right. Anna was just suffering from some womanly complaint she couldn’t properly explain to him. Soon there would be a town on the horizon, there would be answers and solutions, and they would go back in time to the clearing among the cottonwoods and be at peace together once more. Atwater told himself all that over and over again, but he didn’t honestly believe it, not deep down, and when Anna asked him to bring her the bottled water in the picnic basket, he reeled at the sight of the reddish stain at her crotch and knew she must be hemorrhaging.

  “Don’t worry,” she said to him, her face ashen. “It’s not bad. It doesn’t hurt.”

  He paddled on hopelessly, rounding yet another bend and shooting forward on a tide of white water that pitched him into a canyon strewn with deadfall, the wrack of winter storms. Trees had blown down from the granite cliffs and were lodged against boulders and knitted into barriers, piled up to form obstructions. Again there was the whack of waves against the aluminum hull. Spume showered over them and made it difficult for Atwater to see. He swerved to miss a redwood pinned between two rocks, only to collide with a big dead fir that knocked the canoe sideways and into a precipitous drop. He was in the center of some pluming haystacks and used his paddle as a brace to right himself, praying that the bow wouldn’t go under. He saw Anna clinging tightly to the gunwales. The bow took a huge dip and seemed for a few seconds to be sinking, but it rose at the end of the drop, and they were out of the haystacks and into an eddying pool.

  Atwater bailed with his bleach bottle. He threw buckets over the side, berating himself, the river, and the fates. This is where your foolish love has led you. This is what you get. This is what you deserve. Arm-weary, he knelt in the stern and kept paddling. Ahead the river was growing wider and ever more still, and he saw the town of Carson Valley in the distance on its pretty bluff. He had never seen it that way before, from that particular angle, had never in his life approached it in a spirit of welcome.

  “We’re almost there,” he said to Anna, and she offered a weak smile, her shorts now richly stained with blood.

  They were soon at the town beach. With the very dregs of his energy, Atwater hopped from the canoe and dragged it scraping onto the shore. Anna leaned on him getting out, asked for the tablecloth, and tied it around her waist. Shaken and vulnerable, she looked profoundly beautiful to him, stripped of every attitude. From a pay phone in the parking lot he called her father, and the old man arrived in less than five minutes, hastened by the urgency he must have heard in Atwater’s voice.

  “Anna?” Torelli asked, his dismay evident at the sight of his daughter. “What is it?”

  “I need a doctor.”

  “What happened? Arthur, what the hell happened here? She’s got blood on her shoes.”

  “Please, not now,” Anna insisted. “Just get me to the hospital.”

  Torelli helped Atwater lift the canoe into the bed of his truck. They were in such a hurry that they didn’t bother to secure it with any rope. They piled into the cab, with Anna seated between them, and the old man rushed over to Carson Valley General. There, Anna was ushered behind closed doors, where an intern examined her, after which an immediate summons went out for Ed Sawyer. Atwater was left to wait with Torelli, confined to a chair in a sterile, airless room that grated against his every sense. He sat hushed and uncomfortable for a few minutes until the old man spoke.

  “Tell me what this is about, will you, Arthur?”

  “I can’t. She wouldn’t say.”

  Torelli’s voice cracked. “You must have some goddam idea.”

  “I asked her, Victor.” Atwater was short with him. “I already told you, she wouldn’t say.”

  “Some kind of female problem, is it?”

  “It appears to be.”

  They sat for more than two hours together, taking turns to get up and pace, before Ed Sawyer finally joined them. He told them straight out that Anna had suffered a miscarriage, described the procedure he had performed, a simple D&C, and expressed his sympathy. She would recover quickly and would not have any ill effects from the surgery, he said, although they would keep her overnight, just as a precaution. She was exhausted and in shock from so much sun.

  “You can go in if you like. Anna’s conscious and alert. But don’t stay too long. Don’t tax her.”

  Atwater felt something in him spin and recoil. He couldn’t bear to face her. “You go ahead, Victor,” he said abruptly. “I’ll come and get her tomorrow morning.”

  “She’ll want to see you, you know.”

  “Tomorrow,” he insisted.

  “All right,” the old man said with annoyance. “But it’s a hell of a stunt to pull! Go on and get out of here.”

  Then Atwater was striding away from the hospital, his head aching with confusion. This is where your foolish love has led you. This is what you deserve. The image of Anna in her stained white shorts, standing before him on tottery legs with such pleading in her eyes, tore at his heart. He truly could not bear it. He could not rectify it. There was nothing he could do, nothing at all, so he walked along the river and over a bridge to the town square, where the only taxi that operated in Carson Valley was parked at a curb, its driver asleep at the wheel. He engaged the cabbie’s services for a flat fare of fifteen dollars and rode in the backseat angry and saddened through familiar vineyard country to the darkness of the farm, returned again to his mortal condition, slipping into it with the utmost regret, once again alone.

  15

  Sun, water, and blood—those were the images that swirled through Anna Torelli’s mind while she lay in her hospital bed. The images blended at times into a single seamless element as bright and colorful as a psychedelic fragment, eerie, vibrant, and unsettling. All night she drifted down the river in that canoe, all night the horror of her trip stayed with her. She had been torn from the simple everyday world into a world of consequences, yanked abruptly out of her fantasies by a crashing dose of reality. She felt disconnected, at loose ends. Only Atwater, her partner in this sad episode, could bring her any solace. He would hold her, and they would talk it over and soothe each other. So Anna believed.

  She waited for him in the morning, but he didn’t come to her. The hours went by—eight, nine, ten o’clock—without any trace of him, and she became anxious and impatient, wanting desperately to be rescued and restored to her proper place among the healthy ones. When she heard some footsteps outside her door at last, she sat up in anticipation, but it was her father who knocked politely, clean-shaven as if for a special occasion and toting a small suitcase with some fresh clothes for her. He moved about in a slump-shouldered way, laboring under a conscript’s unwilling sense of duty and muttering to himself while Anna got dressed. He took her by the elbow and guided her to his truck even though she had no serious pain, just a slight tenderness all over that was due as much to trauma as to
her surgery.

  “Where’s Arthur?” she asked him directly.

  “He had to run over to Napa on business. That’s what I’m supposed to tell you.” Torelli fiddled with his key chain. “Ah, hell, Anna, I can’t figure out what’s up with him. He’s as skittish as can be.”

  Her spirits sank. She should have known better than to expect Atwater to make it easy for her. His view of things was one-dimensional, held in the purest possible contrast of black and white. He had a man’s hammering need for reasons and would demand the sort of logical explanation that she could never give him, not in a million years.

  The old man drove through town at a cautious crawl, double-checking himself at every stoplight and intersection. How odd, Anna thought, that he should be so sensitive to her fragile state, especially since she showed no outward signs of distress. All her scars were internal this time, located in the mass of conflicting feelings that were still collecting around the miscarriage. It was an accident, of course, merely the breakdown of a biological process that was beyond her control, yet she had a child’s desire to pretend that it had never happened whenever she remembered Atwater’s anguished look and his frantic paddling attempts to shepherd her to safety.

  Her father sat in silence, his eyes fixed on the road.

  “Don’t be upset with me, please,” Anna said contritely. “I’m ashamed enough as it is. I made a mess, I know.”

  “It is that,” he told her, with a sigh. “But you’re not the first person to get pregnant by mistake.”

  She stared out a window, a finger drawing patterns on the glass. “Arthur must be angry with me. I don’t blame him, I guess.”

  “I doubt he’ll hold it against you,” Torelli assured her. “He’s a grown man. It’s not like you led him down the primrose path.”

  “That’s true, I guess,” she said, but then the doubts set in again. “It came as a shock to him, though. I kept it a secret from him.”

  The old man glared at her. “Why would you do a thing like that?”