by John Larison
She had taken off her waders and was now lying beside him. She had her arm over her eyes. It was like she was on this rock all alone.
A breeze came up the canyon now, a breeze stronger than the typical afternoon thermal. He opened a hand to it, feeling its chill, feeling the potential in its gusts. “We should probably get a move on.” Winds, if they became too strong, could strand a drift boat, the river ferrying one way, the wind ferrying the other. In those cases, an oarsman could have real trouble lining up on a rapid.
She didn’t sit up. A moment passed and he started packing up the food. Then, “How should I do it?” she asked. “How do you find the courage? That’s what I need to know.”
“Courage?”
“Yeah, I mean, that’s what it boils down to, right? Thad is a kind man, and he’s never done me wrong, but I can’t go on with him. It’s bleeding me.”
“Bleeding you?”
“I don’t know,” she sighed. “Maybe I’m just too young to be married. Or maybe I’m just not made for marriage. I’m thinking it’s that one.”
He lit a cigarette, thought of that ring in his pocket, the other one on her thumb. He understood something of this. He remembered what it was like to feel shackled by a relationship. And he also realized what this was: a last chance. “I wasn’t made for it either,” he said. “But then something changed in me.”
She sat up, and found her sunglasses, and looked off downstream. “Did you come to know yourself better? Is that why you realized you needed it? Maybe if I understand myself better, I’ll see why Thad and I should stay together?”
He sat up a little straighter as if that might facilitate honesty, and said, “I came to realize how selfish I’d been. How I’d disappointed the most important people in my life. That I’d blown it. And that made me not want to blow it again.”
She rose and walked to the edge of the rock and looked down at the water below. The wind was tossing her hair. Her toes were inches from the lip. “Are you saying I shouldn’t leave him?”
He pointed at her feet. “Step back from there, sweetie.”
She didn’t seem to hear him. “It’s the courage that I need. I know what I’ll say. But I need the courage to say it. God, it is just so much easier to sabotage a relationship than to exit one properly, isn’t it?”
He was desperate to give her some morsel of advice that would put the whole situation in context. And yet, he had nothing. “Sabotage is no good.”
She blocked the sun with her hand. “I almost cheated on him once. That’s what a coward I am.” She had turned and looked right at him at the word “coward.” “I always sabotage the relationships that matter.”
“Don’t do that, don’t cheat.” Again, he pointed at her feet. “Step back from there, Riff. It’s a long way down.”
“Annie,” she corrected. “That’s my name.”
A gust lifted the flatbread and carried it off the rock and out of sight.
“How did you leave?”
He steadied himself with a long even breath. “Listen, Annie, I’ve never left anyone. They leave me. I’ve been left so many times …”
“Because you cheat.” It didn’t sound like a question.
He stood, smudged the remainder of his cigarette on his wading boot. “I want to have all sorts of fatherly wisdom, I want to be that man, I’m trying. But I’m a wreck and I don’t know shit about how to live in this world. Except you’ve got to be straight with him. If you’re honest, he might come to understand. If you’re not, he’ll despise you forever. That’s all I know.”
She was staring at him with a scary coldness. He put the remaining food back into the cooler. When the wine wouldn’t fit, he nearly threw it across the river. “We really should get going.”
“Please stop it,” she said. A horsefly buzzed them, and she swatted at it aimlessly. “How long are you going to hold your lie?”
He saw that the ring he’d given her wasn’t on her thumb any longer—it was in her hand.
“When Thad’s father died, I realized how little I really knew. About you, and about me. Can’t we finally be honest with each other? If not now, then when?
“There’s been this lie between us forever,” her voice shook. “You paint yourself as the victim, and you hide behind that. But please. I’m here because I want to start fresh and I want to do right and I want you in my life. Please, stop hiding from me.”
He chuckled, because he wanted to say the perfect thing but was lost trying to find it.
She took his hand and placed the ring he’d given her in his palm. “I can’t take this. I can’t pretend any more. I love you, Dad, but I don’t want a ring. I want the truth.”
The ring felt as light as paper, as flammable too. He closed his hand around it so he wouldn’t have to see it. “What do you want to know?”
“Start with then. Start with why Mom moved away.”
“You want to know what happened, Annie?” The anger in his voice surprised him. “Your mom got a bug up her ass that this valley wasn’t cosmopolitan enough for her daughter, and she packed the house and put you in the car and drove you away from me forever.”
She turned away from him.
The ring in his hand: “And you’d do the same thing right now.”
She didn’t turn back. She wasn’t even facing him.
He sidearmed the ring. A shard of light against shade. “‘Sacrifice your lives.’ Shit. Where do you come off?”
A long moment passed, and she said nothing, until, “Okay, Hank. Maybe you’re right. We should get a move on. As you say, this wind is picking up.” She was gathering her things, and he realized how straight the line was from this rock to tonight’s airplane.
He reached for her. “Forgive me. That wasn’t fair.”
She pulled away, as if to scoff, Was any of it fair?
He lit another cigarette. And was struck by a memory of his own father lying prostrate in his coffin, that fuckup of a man who dodged them with a bottle and manipulated their mother and left the remnants of his cheating in the back of the family car, struck by what he felt in that moment when he was supposed to feel rage or pity. Confusion. That was what he felt. Am I like you?
“You hold on to all these theories and myths about yourself,” she said, “and you don’t pay any attention to what you’ve really done. We’re the same that way. And that scares me.”
“We’re not the same. You’re better.” He took her hand in his, and remembered what he always wished his own father would have said to him. “Annie. I blew it. I fucked up and I ruined everything. And I wish every day that I’d done things differently. I wish I’d been a better man.” She turned from him. “But you’re not like me. You have what I’m missing. I can see it—”
“Stop,” she said. “Just stop.”
His own father never admitted the cheating, even after Hank found him with some woman behind a bar. We were looking for her necklace, he had said. Looking for her necklace, as if his father assumed him dumb enough to believe that. Part of the man’s myth: that every human being, including his own children, was a peripheral character in his story.
Just stop. “I cheated, okay? That’s why she left.”
She wasn’t saying anything, so he kept going because this is what she wanted. “We were going through a rough patch, your mom and me, and there was this kayaker from Portland, I can’t remember her name, but we really connected, and this led to that.”
Annie put a hand to her sternum, as if standing before a mirror and seeing a terrifying reflection.
“And later,” he continued, “there was a woman from town, a waitress. That one was off and on.”
“For how long?”
“Several …” He almost said weeks. “Years.”
Caroline was right; he loved whichever woman was appreciating him most. He’d never left a woman, but he’d cheated on almost every one of them. It wasn’t the sex he was after, though maybe he thought it was in the moment. But now he knew it was the intim
acy. To linger in a moment with no past and no future, a moment of contraction and expansion that so overwhelmed the dark loneliness haunting him. The cheating was something he felt bad about, but not something he dwelled on. Back then he considered it part of who he was, a man with needs, a force—just like the river will always return to the sea.
Back then. Who was he kidding?
Because he’d cheated on Caroline. Only two years before. He’d come clean to her, which he’d never done with anyone before. She’d told him to “fuck off and never call again,” as he deserved. But he hadn’t let her go. For once, he hadn’t quit. Caroline was different, and he was different then too; O’Connell had died because he told him to stand on that wet ledge. Hank sent her notes with flowers and brought her meals when he heard she had caught the flu. For months it kept up like this, him trying to amend this crime. After she let him back, though, she had always maintained a barrier between them. She might invite him for a night, they might share a bed, but she never again offered what he wanted most: to share her life.
He told himself she was just that way, and found evidence in her past to support this deduction. But really, he knew, didn’t he? He’d caused this. He and no one else. She had offered him everything, and he’d consumed it all and gone looking for more.
“But why”—Annie’s eyes were wet now—“did you let me go? Why didn’t you fight for me? Why have you never, not even once, fought for me? Why only call on my birthday? Do you know what that’s like? Do you know how it feels when your father doesn’t make an effort? What’s wrong with me? Please, tell me?”
He took her in his arms. “Oh god, there’s nothing wrong with you. Hear me, Annie: These years, I haven’t come to you because I haven’t wanted to face me.”
A minute passed, and she pulled away and looked him in the eyes, and he was afraid of what she might say next, so he spoke first. “This wind.”
“Yeah. This wind.”
*
THE WIND CARRIED the roar of the Falls up the canyon, the thunder of water mashing against rock. The gusts were so strong now that he had to turn the boat around and oar downstream to make any progress, and as they neared the rapid, he saw why. The canyon walls opened here, catching the wind and funneling it through the river channel.
He remembered arriving home to Rock Creek after an afternoon of lustful but insular sex. He remembered lifting Riffle and twirling her in the air and avoiding Rosemary’s eyes, especially when Riffle said, “Where were you, Daddy?”
Annie now sat in the front of the boat, the hood of his coat pulled up and blocking any sight of her. He heard echoes of Cornell ’77. Born in the desert, raised in the lion’s den.
Just above the Falls, he backed the boat onto a small patch of gravel and shouted against the wind, “I’m going to scout a line!”
Annie stayed in the boat, unmoving.
There was a Chinese proverb Caroline had told him once, something about water always overcoming. Place any obstruction in the path of water, and it will find a way around. More than that, it will eventually devour the obstruction. “Think of Wikkup Canyon,” she had said. Water always appears to be surrendering, and yet it never surrenders. Water always arrives because of its willingness to bend.
The water here had no options but to rush down the chute, bending left first, then dividing around a cabin-sized boulder, before rejoining and bending hard right and dropping over a lip into a gravy train of head-high waves.
He was here partly to scout the line, but mostly to find Annie a way around. He didn’t want her in the boat, not with these gusts. As the boat rounded the boulder, it would be blasted with the full force of the wind, a wind powerful enough to shear the tops of the waves, as it was doing now, and blow them upstream. He’d have to keep his line and push forward at the precise moment if he was to make it off the wall. If he hit that wall, he’d never straighten in time for that last drop. This was too much risk for his daughter.
And yet, he couldn’t find a way around the cliffs, not in a half hour of scaling up and down. He even hiked back upstream checking for a gap in the canyon rim. There was nothing that didn’t require ropes and anchors.
“You were gone a long time,” she hollered when he returned. He could tell by the sound of her voice that she’d been concerned. If he was gone, how would she get out of here?
The world was huge and rolling and his mouth was bone-dry. He’d fucked up and broken his routine and run a section he shouldn’t have run and here was his daughter hating him and in grave danger. “It’s fine. I’ve run it before. It looks worse than it is.”
He thought of the ring out there somewhere, tumbling in the current. His daughter was safer when she was out there somewhere living her own life—the farther from him the better.
He turned his attention back to the rapid and tried to force out all the doubts, all the self-loathing, all the pain of her contempt. She was a client. He owned these oars. He knew this water. And he knew the secret, that every rapid is run the same, one move at a time: Straighten at the top, push, push, ship the oars through the first squeeze, push, push, push, quarter left, pull, pull, straighten, and ship—they would smack there against the rock and the wind would strike—push then quarter right and pull into position, push like hell and hope the boat makes it over the waves and around that wall and then line up for the drop. If they made it to there, he’d just have to stay straight and the gravy train would carry them through and into the pool. It would happen fast, but it would happen. He’d done it before, and he’d do it again.
Besides, this worry was a good thing, the body’s natural caffeine; it was giving him the fast reactions and powerful strokes he would need to keep them in line and upright.
Double-check the floatation bags and bowline. The oar locks. The extra oar. The vests. He tightened his own, then reached a hand to Annie. “Here, pull that strap.” She did, and then he lifted the vest as he’d done when she was a child to be sure it wouldn’t come over her head.
She was looking at him now, and he couldn’t make heads or tails of her face. “What?”
“You’re nervous.”
“So are you.”
“But you’re the guide.”
He took his seat and stretched his shoulders and loosened his neck and spit in his hands and worked his grip on the oars. He was good at one thing in life, and this was it.
They were halfway to the lip when he called, “I’ll get you out of here. Don’t worry.”
She turned and hollered, “What?”
“Nothing, forget it.” There wasn’t time now.
They were between gusts, thankfully, and the boat was keeping its line. More important than any single move, he reminded himself, was keeping the oars working in power position, at shoulder level and within reach. Form before stroke.
The current caught them and pulled them over the lip: like being released from a slingshot.
*
BLACKNESS AND RINGING and cold and bang bang bang. Who was there?
You’re fucked now, Patrick O’Connell said. His voice riding a darkness spawned from the roar. You shouldn’t have brought her here and you shouldn’t have gone left around that boulder, and now you’re fucked.
What happened?
Live by the sword … Really, though, it’s your kid that I’m feeling for.
There she was, running through the grass toward him after he’d failed to come home the night before. Summer morning, the dew climbing the sunlight, an ethereal veil just out of reach. She did a cartwheel, and yelled, “See Daddy! See what Mommy taught me!” That’s when he felt it.
O’Connell’s voice: A cubic foot of water weighs sixty-four pounds. If you were forced to hold only the H2O that exists in the column of atmosphere between your person and the limits of space, only that thin slice of airborne water, you’d be pressed into a wafer of flesh.
But this was far heavier than water. What he was holding was the weight of his failure, the weight of fractured succession: He hadn�
��t cheated Rosemary as much as he’d cheated Riffle.
There’s only one thing that matters in this world, Hank. You know that. And you knew it then too.
*
A SANDALED FOOT on fingers. Cold steel against skin. And bang bang bang.
He could feel it like a distant memory: the rush of wind in his face, the pillowy bounce of the boat riding curls of white water, the feeling of unstoppable momentum. He could feel it, but he couldn’t place it. Or himself. And where the hell was O’Connell?
Gagging, and rising. A dark figure grunting. Punching the oar at something. His mouth tasted metallic and this boat was leaning and there was the river coming right at them, surging over the gunwale. He must have lost his footing (had he been kneeling?) because then he was on the bottom again, coughing at a lung load of water.
Trapped. Pinned against a rock. And Patrick O’Connell was doing his best.
Hank tried to say, “Faster,” but he heard nothing of the sort. He looked up to see Caroline dropping the oar into the lock and pushing hard on one stick. They were moving again, and he could tell they weren’t straight to the current because the boat was wobbly, but there was the unmistakable freedom of the drift—and he heard a voice much like his say, “Straighten out!”
“How!”
How to straighten a boat. How. It was so simple, and yet there were no words.
And then terrifying speed and the floor rising up and punching him in the face. They were slowing, slowing, slowing up a wave, and he knew they weren’t straight by the pace of the climb and he knew they were in trouble. But then they were accelerating again and a wall of water broke over the gunwale, so much that he was floating inside this boat which was floating on some river, and he turned to see the sunlight illuminating her.
Riffle was at the sticks. It was Riffle oaring this boat. She had come back to him.
*
AFTER THE FUZZ cleared, there was the nausea. “You’ve lost a lot of blood,” Annie said. She was poking at the tear above his ear. He could feel the pressure, but none of the pain.
