Stillriver

by Andrew Rosenheim

  ‘I’m getting too old to climb a fence that high,’ said Michael.

  ‘Sit still,’ said Donny and, producing a key, went and unlocked the gate. He came back and drove through it, leaving the gate open behind them. ‘I’m an important man locally,’ said Donny, ‘worth seventeen hundred dollars an hour.’

  The track meandered through low bushes on either side that scratched the truck, until suddenly the terrain opened up, and they drove onto a flat pan of hard-packed sandy dirt, which ended in a long concrete slab – over a hundred feet wide – at one end of the lake.

  ‘That the dam?’ asked Michael, and Donny nodded. ‘I’ve never seen it before,’ said Michael, getting out of the cab, for it was tucked away in this recessed corner of the lake, out of sight of Fennville. The lake itself was small, less than a mile across in any direction.

  They walked out onto the narrow slab on top of the dam. ‘What’s that?’ asked Michael, pointing to the last forty feet or so of the dam’s top. It was lower and darker, the colour of olive fatigues.

  ‘That’s clay. That’s from the original dam here.’

  ‘You have got to be kidding.’

  ‘Haven’t you seen it used before?’

  ‘Sure I have,’ said Michael. ‘In the Philippines just before a monsoon washed it away. Tell me, is the lake always this high?’ He pointed at the surface of the water, which was only about a yard beneath their feet. On the other side, there was a good twenty-feet drop to the river, which was fed by water gushing from two drainpipes jutting out the side of the dam. From here the river ran for eight miles until it reached the scaffold-covered bridge at the Junction and then flowed into Stillriver Lake.

  ‘No, that’s why I wanted you to see it. The water’s higher than it’s ever been. If we get much more rain, it’s going to go right over the top. Back there,’ Donny said, pointing to the far end of the lake, where the Still entered from the east, ‘the river’s burst its banks in a couple of places.’

  ‘What happens if it comes over the top here?’

  Donny shrugged and turned round to face the river beneath them. ‘It’s never happened before, and there’s been a dam here since before the War.’

  ‘Shit, it’s not going to take a lot to get it over. Think what it’s going to do to the river level. That little bridge in Happy Valley will be under water.’ His voice started rising. ‘And by the time it gets to Stillriver Lake, Christ knows how high the water will be. It will knock your scaffolding all to hell, and probably shake the piers. If they move, the beam will go and the deck with it. Goodbye bridge. Jesus!’

  Donny was scratching his head and looking pained. ‘Hell, Michael, don’t start shouting at me. Why do you think I brought you here?’

  Now, standing in the Still with both hands against the dense pier of the Junction bridge, he thought hard about what would happen if the dam gave way. The resulting flow would be immense; if less catastrophic than he feared, it would nonetheless do damage on its way downstream to anything standing near the bank. And then reach this bridge, where from even superficial inspection he could see prospective problems. The abutments on either side of the bridge had been designed to sit on dry land, but now their bottom halves were below water. The current flow was fast along the banks, and signs of vortices suggested eddy flows which could scour away the sandy gravel surrounding these piers until the piers gave way.

  He’d brought his laptop with him from England, and with it he had access to some fairly basic analytic tools, but he’d left his field kit behind in a closet in Ealing four thousand miles away. He couldn’t conduct even a basic salinity test on the deck of the bridge, or use ultrasound to detect lethal internal voids below. So he tapped thoroughly and systematically with his hammer on the upstream side of the bridge and saw at once why they were replacing the concrete base of the piers since at least half of his strikes sounded hollow – sure sign of an internal void. They’d need to use properly reinforced concrete this time, with epoxy coating to inhibit corrosion. But the real issue lay in the other, downstream side, the one on the lake side, not now under repair. He knew he should wade back up to the bank, climb up in his dripping heavy waders, then climb down again on the far side. But the short cut under the bridge was too appealing, and he stepped tentatively forwards.

  This was a mistake. Even one step under the bridge was too many, for the current here, concentrated in the sudden narrowing passageway, was much stronger. He could not step back at all against the intensified flow; in fact he struggled not to be swept off his feet and carried downstream. The water absolutely thundered here, the noise magnified and reverberating within the tunnel formed by the piers. If he shouted out for help he doubted that Donny, standing almost directly above him on the road surface of the bridge, would hear. And if Donny did hear him, what could he do, since they hadn’t brought a rope?

  He moved very slowly, almost counter-intuitively, since the pull of the water made each step so easy to make – it would be fatal to accept its implicit invitation to move quickly, since within a matter of steps the pace would accelerate until your feet were literally racing ahead of you, unable to stop and grip the bottom, and all pretence to control would be swept away as whoof, they were swept out from under you. In the middle of the bridge the bottom sloped down sharply, and he gasped as water rushed in over his wader’s tops and moved quickly downwards to his boots, shocking him with its icy touch through his cotton shirt. Just as suddenly the slope bottomed out, and he found himself moving slightly uphill towards the far end.

  Then he was through, and used all his strength to move sideways against the current until he was out of it, safely behind the thick, protective abutment. He caught his breath and heard movement up above him, which turned out to be Donny, now leaning over the downstream, unscaffolded side of the bridge. ‘All right?’ said his friend, and Michael waved weakly to signify he was okay.

  After a minute he felt his strength return, and from his fishing bag he took out the chisel and the hand drill he’d found in the drawer at the top of the basement steps, laid neatly with the other tools – most over forty years old – that his father had stored there. With the chisel he knocked a thin chip out of the bridge’s side, a foot or so above the water level. He worked the hand drill in with a quarter-inch drill bit and drilled for about thirty seconds, astonished to find the interior amazingly soft and easy to pierce. He extracted the drill carefully, then looked at the soft powder worked around the bit. There was no point taking the sample home, since he didn’t have the right tools to analyse it anyway. But it was worryingly, dangerously soft. And there were cracks in the surface of the pier, several looking fresh and capable of widening. Using some of the wire, he worked lengths of it into the cracks, pushing until the pre-stressed wire would go no further. He bent each piece of wire at right angles to their bend marks, then clipped them and deposited them with his tools inside his bag.

  He looked up at Donny and nodded to indicate he was done. He took a big, safe step towards the shore, but instead of finding gravel found soft mud. Lifting his wader boot with a jerk he put his other foot forward and found a hole, a sudden absence of bottom which simply shocked him, until he realized he had stepped into a river void.

  His waders filled at once and somehow, suddenly, he was moved back into the mainstream rush, just below the bridge. He felt the intense cold of the water and its pushing, sudden weight as his legs sank suddenly into the void, and the boots of his waders scraped the bottom. He managed to keep himself from rolling over face down but then found himself turning sideways to the current and sinking into the river. He sensed he was in the very middle, too deep to touch bottom even if he could manage to stand up, which he couldn’t, and again he had to struggle to keep himself from rolling over.

  As he gasped for air and inhaled some water instead, he suddenly realized that he was very likely to drown, and saw only strands of dark blue around him, skeins of colour almost purple in their darkness. He felt a surge of panic, which was
followed by a sudden burst of concentrated thoughts – Don’t try and take the waders off – then a sudden image of Cassie walking on a Stillriver street – which one? – and then the face of the German engineer after he’d fallen off that bridge into the water and they had gone in to pluck him out and for the first time the man had seen that help was coming and no, he wasn’t going to die. And then a voice, shouting hoarsely, what memory was this? he asked himself almost whimsically. But it was Donny’s voice, and he was shouting the same thing again and again. What’s he saying? he wondered as he started to turn over again, and this time he could not resist the roll, his feet swinging round upstream and behind and his head turning over into the water, face down between his outstretched arms, and as he sensed this fatal final move into the river’s depths he suddenly thought swim! Donny was shouting swim! And he awkwardly kicked his right leg and then his left and lifted an arm up into the air and pulled back at the water, not daring to try and breathe, certain he would only inhale river, and he did this again, and discovered he was now moving himself as much as being moved, and then risked a large gulp of air that proved blessedly water-free and, already tiring, closed his eyes and moved his arms, the wader straps tangled and restricting his movements, and then kick kick kick and his right hand jammed into slimy ground, almost breaking his thumb, and he was safe.

  He crawled on all fours onto the little hillock of marshland that jutted out into the river here, and looking up he saw Donny running along the bank, his big boots splashing in the shallows. Michael stayed on all fours, like a panting dog, recovering his breath, too tired to disentangle the wader straps from his arms or take the waders off. Donny got to him, reached down and extracted his fishing bag, which was somehow still lopped over his shoulder, then helped him unravel the curled and twisted straps of the waders. Very slowly Michael stood up, supported by Donny, and let the waders slip down, water sloshing out of them. ‘You had me scared there for a minute,’ said Donny.

  Michael exhaled noisily and took a deep breath. ‘You weren’t the only one.’

  ‘I’m not quite sure what I would have told Cassavantes we were doing here. Much less explain to Cassie how I let you drown.’

  Michael stepped out of the waders one foot at a time, then picked them up by the boot end and turned them upside down until what seemed a bathtub full of water had cascaded onto his feet. ‘Well,’ he said cheerfully as he looked in some wonder at the river now flowing so unthreateningly beside him, then at the bridge upstream that had caused it all, then further back to the headland bluff of dense woods and brush, ‘you could always tell them I died for my county.’

  He said nothing about the river to Cassie the next day when he collected her and the children, and they drove north and east through the Back Country until they crossed the county line and moved into the national forest. They parked a quarter-mile off the road by the remains of a camp fire, and walked down along a soft needle path through a pine stand until they reached the south branch of the Pere Marquette river.

  He’d found one of his grandfather’s fishing rods in the basement, an old fly rod of Tonkin cane, whippy from years of wet fly fishing in fast rivers, and brought it along with a kid’s rod he’d also found in the basement. The last thing he wanted to do was wade in the river, but he forced himself, and after lunch spent twenty minutes in its fastest part, casting into a big pool on the far side until he felt at ease again. Get right back on the horse that threw you off.

  He got out and found Cassie sitting on the bank, reading the kids a story. ‘Catch anything?’ she asked with a smile, and he shook his head.

  He rigged the kids’ pole, and because he had forgotten a spade, took a kitchen knife from the picnic basket and cut out a large patch of soft turf, then dug down quickly and pulled out two worms before they got away. He baited the hook of the kids’ rod, and started with Jack, but the boy was soon bored and preferred throwing rocks to staring at a fishing line. Sally, on the other hand, took to it at once; she didn’t want to stop when Cassie said it was time to go. Michael commented he was surprised by her fervour.

  ‘Why?’ Cassie demanded. ‘Can’t girls like fishing too?’

  ‘Sure,’ he said quickly. ‘Why not?’

  She was frowning a little.

  ‘Cassie,’ he said plaintively, ‘don’t be like that. I didn’t mean anything. I’m just not used to girls. I didn’t have a sister. Once my mother died we were all boys in our house.’

  She nodded, but was quiet on the drive back. When they arrived at his house, she didn’t want to stay, and had her kids get into her car while she said goodbye to him. ‘Will I see you tomorrow?’ he asked.

  ‘Most likely,’ she said, and he saw that something was still wrong. She shook her head. ‘I’m sorry, Michael. I don’t mean to be this way.’

  ‘It’s okay, Cassie.’

  ‘No, it’s not. Let me ask you something. Is this what you want?’

  ‘What, seeing you? You know it is.’ He scratched his chin in a parody of thoughtfulness. ‘I could stand a few additions to the process, but I’m not complaining.’

  ‘Additions?’ she asked suspiciously. ‘What, you want other people around?’

  ‘No. But I was thinking it would be nice if maybe you stayed over one night. The kids wouldn’t mind a sleepover, I bet.’

  She shook her head. ‘I can’t do that.’

  ‘What if I stayed with you, then?’

  She shook her head again, to his great disappointment. ‘Not yet,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said wistfully, with an air of resignation he didn’t truly feel. ‘In high school you made me wait ten months before you went to bed with me, so I guess I can’t complain about a little delay this many years later.’

  ‘Is that what this is about? Going to bed with me?’

  ‘Sure,’ he said, not willing to let her treat him like a blind date.

  ‘You just want a fuck for old time’s sake?’

  He stared at her with disbelief. ‘You don’t have to talk like that to me, Cassie.’

  ‘Excuse me,’ she said sourly. ‘Sorry to offend your ears.’

  He caught her by the elbow, then thought better of it and let her go. ‘Listen you, where do you think I spend my time working? I work on construction sites. You can’t teach me much about bad language. It’s like Eskimos with all their words for snow. I can give you seventy-three words that all mean blow job.’

  Cassie laughed. ‘Well, what do you want then, if not sex?’

  ‘Who said I didn’t want it – among other things? Though I have to say, in my present condition of sexual deprivation going to bed with you is miles and away at the top of the list.’

  She had dropped the hard-ass pose. ‘I just feel old, Michael. I’m tired half the time and my bones ache and I’m worried about the kids and I’m worried about money and I’m worried about everything. You can’t want me that much.’

  Oh, are you wrong, he thought. For he positively ached for her, found in the very ageing that she cited as a fault something infinitely sensuous, lying in some zone of mixed libido and love. ‘Gi-rl,’ he said in the kind of Motown jive accent Kenny Williams had used as a teenager to make them all laugh. ‘I want to eat you up, bones and all. The best chicken is an old chicken. That’s what the man said, and I think you owe it to the man to let this man find out.’ He was glad to find her smiling. ‘I’ll phone you in the morning,’ he said normally, and watched as she drove away.

  As he stood by the fence – he would have to get to work on the yard soon – he looked at the house, suddenly picturing its rooms and the lives that had been lived in them. He saw the window on this side of his parents’ old bedroom, its blind pulled down, and pictured his mother lying there in the enervating final months of her illness. ‘Calf love never lasts,’ he heard her say, and he wondered now how he could be sure that his feelings for Cassie had survived both the years and the hurt she’d caused him. High school, their abbreviated time in college, Texas and
those furtive rendezvous – they looked like the tick marks on an emotional graph of their involvement. How could he be absolutely certain that he was in love with Cassie as she was now? How could he be sure that he wasn’t seeking what was no longer there?

  He was more aware of his resistance to change than Cassie or Donny would credit, and this awareness meant the changes in town – the kinds of stores on Main Street, the recent influx of retired people, the unprecedented prosperity of the place – jolted him but were also, he knew, good for him, since they knocked his nostalgic inclinations on the head. It was the same with the way he felt about Cassie. Enough of the coltish, funny, pretty girl remained to demolish any suspicion that she was now a different person altogether, but there were enough alterations that he could not conceivably think of her as the teenage girl he had first fallen in love with. She spoke her mind more forcefully than before, but her manner of speaking was almost always gentle, even when sassy, and her voice was still soft. She had kept her generosity about other people, and seemed able to live without envy, despite fifteen years of little money and no encouragement from Ronald to enjoy even those things money isn’t needed for: books, or her music, or the always-free enjoyment of looking around at the world she daily walked through. Her rampant curiosity remained, and she seemed to want to know everything about what she didn’t know and hadn’t seen. She had an appetite for life that Michael, not hungry for years, found energizing. For all his recent travels, all those years in the sophisticated epicentre of New York, he knew that he was learning more from her than she from him.

  Maguire phoned that night as Michael was eating a second piece of broiled chicken and drinking a glass of surprisingly good red jug wine. The detective came right to the point: ‘It’s blood on the bat all right. We’ve sent it for DNA analysis to confirm it’s your father’s, but I think we can assume it is.’