The River Burns

by Trevor Ferguson

  “Give me an example,” he suggested, “of how you’re so complicated.”

  “You poor lamb,” she said.

  “Just one example.”

  She mulled that over. The question was fair, she considered, and to answer was fair to him. “Okay. Just one example. I think your father is hot. I don’t mean cute, or that I admire his rugged good looks. I think he’s attractive. At least to me. Hot.”

  He wished he never asked.

  “Restroom,” Tara announced, and unwound from her chair. Then she leaned over him while standing and indicated the endless cascade of water into the gorge below. She whispered, “Down there, where the water slows, where it’s deep enough to have a dip? My first night here, I swam in the moonlight. Nude. Think about that while you’re moderating your ambitions for the evening.”

  While she was gone, Ryan called for the cheque. Waiting, watching the steady tumble of smooth black water, he grinned. He knew that she was perfectly correct in one instance, and wondered if his father told her things about him that tipped her off. Complicated women were his undoing a few times in the past. He thought that he won her over for a moment during their discussion, but as always, she could not part company until she attained the upper hand. A compulsion with her, he gathered. A complication. He chuckled silently to himself, knowing that he didn’t mind. At least, for the time being, not yet.

  18

  Belinda proved kind to Jake through a good portion of the night, until he fell into a deep, remorseful slumber. He accepted that he had lost his life. Later he awoke intermittently, both exhausted and restless. To readjust. She slept in such odd positions, mainly on her tummy, with her mouth askance emitting a strange clatter and blast. Several times he had to shove her off him—a foot once, an arm, her breath from his face—but he gathered that this is what people did when they slept together, especially in a bed that drastically sagged in the middle, bodies harnessed by that sad gravitational pull. He’d never previously slept overnight with a girl while reasonably sober and the enterprise proved surprisingly revelatory to him. Once he was afraid he couldn’t breathe, and failed to figure out if he was having a bad dream or if he was quietly suffocating against the press of her back.

  In the morning, Jake was awake for a while yet didn’t budge, couched in her comfortable softness and oblivious to the world. He considered going for a piss, only to crash and snore. Then he was wide awake, startled and disoriented to discover that he and his new girl were not alone.

  “Skootch? That you?”

  In the morning shade in a corner of the room the tall man seemed to levitate inches off his seat, his hands as high as the top of his nose at rest on a walking stick. Flies alighted upon his skin. Although he seemed immune to their trespass, Jake Withers did catch him blow one away with a gust of breath.

  “Dude, put some clothes on. Mother of God, you’re giving me a hard-on just looking at you over here.”

  Hastily, Jake yanked up a sheet, a motion that gave Belinda cause to stir.

  “What’re you doing here?” he demanded.

  “Waiting for you to wake the fuck up, what do you think? Trying to resist masturbating myself.” He tapped his stick four times, a ­hollow-sounding beat. “Do you do that, Jake? Cast your seed upon the dark waters, like a sailor boy? Across the dusty earth like some randy farmer lad?”

  “Fuck off.”

  “Oh my. He’s got his dander up. Anyway I agree. Enough dillydallying. You slept so long a fellow might think you never been inside pussy before. Let’s get a move on, man. We’re sailors today.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me! Get dressed.”

  “Get the hell out of the room first,” Jake insisted, the sheet wrapped tightly around his midriff.

  “What? Are you Presbyterian now? Get up!”

  “Get out!”

  “Jesus!”

  Jake wasn’t sure if Skootch was storming out or just doing a pantomime of storming out, but momentarily he heard him opening the fridge door and shaking cereal into a bowl, so he couldn’t be in any genuine bad mood. He dressed quickly and Belinda was awake now, not the least concerned about her nudity as she stretched her arms and yawned, then grinned. “Kiss me,” she said. Then she picked grit from an eyelid.

  He kissed her anyway.

  “Mmm,” she said.

  He didn’t know if she was referring to their time through the night or the morning peck but either way he accepted her murmur as being complimentary.

  “Skootch is here,” he said.

  She examined what she’d scraped from her cornea. “What’s he want now?”

  “Maybe just breakfast.”

  “He’ll want more than that. He always does.”

  Jake was pleased that she put something on as she got out of bed, before padding across the floor in her bare feet to tramp outside to the communal outhouse to pee.

  “Kid!” Skootch was yelling, so he ventured out to the kitchen.

  “What do you want, Skootch?” Jake asked him.

  “We’re sailors today. Have you seen my raft?” He was all but nude and scratching the back of his naked right thigh.

  “What raft?”

  “Upriver. Not far. A short hike for a fit man. We’ll sail her merrily downstream into town. Me and you. Moor her up there. Consider it a project.”

  “Oh yeah?” Jake shook out cereal for himself, Cheerios, although as he poured the milk he felt the urge to urinate intensify. He started into the cereal and caught a dribble down his chin just as Belinda returned. A cat slipped inside in the nick of time as the ill-fitting screen door thunked shut. Belinda topped up the cats’ bowls while Skootch bored in on a second helping. “How big is this raft? What kind of raft?” Jake asked.

  “It’s fucking enormous,” Belinda attested on her way through to the bedroom to get dressed. “Why are you moving it, Skootch?”

  He answered with his mouth still full of Cheerios. “Because I can.” He chewed and swallowed, then explained. “Occurred to me in my sleep. Call it a revelation if you want. The bridge is gone now. So I can sail downriver as clean as a whistle. There’s no structure to stop me. Except for deadheads.”

  “Deadheads?”

  “Logs stuck in the water from the old days. Know any sea chanteys, boy?”

  Belinda came back to the bedroom entryway, where a light curtain hung in lieu of a door. Struck by a thought, she said, “The rapids.”

  Skootch winked. “Don’t worry your pretty little head about anything so trivial as the rapids. Thanks for your input, though. So sweet. But Jake will see us through! He sure looks like a river rat to me. Doesn’t he to you?”

  Skootch was positively beaming, and Jake wondered what Belinda would say, whether or not he looked like a river rat to her, too, as he stepped outside to piss on the forest duff.

  ■ ■ ■

  The plan, initially, foresaw setting up shop in the centre of town to catch tourists disembarking from the train. Mrs. McCracken went so far as to erect a table under a sun umbrella, then sit on a folding chair to await the locomotive’s telltale toot. Yet before the train arrived, she abandoned the strategy, and decamped to the road leading up to the old covered bridge which was no more.

  An inspired move.

  Sitting alone in the railway yard she began to feel foolish. Hot under the sun, she felt her confidence ebb. Something did not seem right. She gleaned that she would probably come across as an old kook on a mission, and not in any way that she could turn to her advantage. She’d find it necessary to pontificate and argue, relentlessly urging people to sign her petition. How else would she keep the throng from slipping away, to have their fun, or from avoiding her altogether? At the bridge entrance, on the other hand, she need not say a word. The silence of the missing span would speak for itself and for her cause. As many tourists per day as once tramped upon th
e old relic now visited the austere vacant space, for the fire made the national news and the site—where nothing remained to be seen—was suddenly a landmark for prurient interest.

  On her table, Mrs. McCracken placed stones with enough heft to guard her collection of photographs against the breezes. Pictures of the bridge in flames. She needn’t initiate a word as the minions arrived. They gazed upon the vacant space and the river. They checked out the snapshots in her collection. They smiled, and read the petition with interest. They signed, while she sat comfortably under the protection of trees and did little more than smile.

  She was further inspired. As the train made ready to depart, that was the appropriate time to set up shop by the locomotive. By that time of day, word would have circled around. Visitors would be less suspicious, more friendly. Some might urge their travelling companions who’d not signed to do so. What’s more, while they were waiting, she’d sell pies. And lemonade. And make a mint.

  Locals contended that her idea was absurd, that no level of government in a million years would rebuild the old covered bridge to re-create the very problem they were failing to resolve. And doing it privately was financially ludicrous. The wood alone would cost millions, the labour, thrice that. Yet outside visitors were both more open-minded about such matters and less influenced by garish opinion. They wanted the bridge back. They thought it was a grand idea. They were willing to sign a petition to make it happen. Especially because the old lady seemed so sweet.

  While they were at it, a number of travellers, just before they climbed back on the train, surely would purchase her lemon meringue. Her strawberry-rhubarb. The apple crumble. Mrs. McCracken felt giddy with the joy of her idea. “Nothing ventured, Buck!” she advised her cat after her first foray by the bridge, for she was giving herself an hour off before returning to the rail yard. “You watch! More than nothing will be gained.”

  ■ ■ ■

  “Does it even float?” Jake asked.

  “I think so,” Skootch speculated. “Though it’s been a while.”

  The raft, about fifteen feet square, supported three levels of shambles stacked one on top of the other. A banged-up kitchen stove and a ceramic toilet with its lid a-kilter stood out in plain view. The deck was littered with baseball bats and ropes and children’s toys and a set of aged downhill skies without the bindings and what appeared to be a small car’s axle. The edges of the planked deck were rimmed with slices of frayed truck tires retrieved from where they’d blown out on highways. A flag of a foreign country Jake could not identify flew on a leaning wood mast erected in pieces and bound together. Scraps of wood, junk pottery, and bicycle parts were piled in what might charitably be called the bow. The first storey of the teetering plywood shack growing out of two-thirds of the raft housed sleeping quarters. A mattress slept inside. The room reeked. Above that level, up a wood ladder hammered to the outside walls, a space purported to be a den, although it could serve as a kid’s playroom as only small fry need not duck the low ceiling. An old sofa and an even older armchair and a simple wood bench toppled onto its side welcomed adults who slouched in, but any such visitor, Jake saw, first stepped over a litter of junk. On the outside, black tarps were fitted as eyebrows above the windows, which could be lowered into place during a storm, although Jake guessed that the interior would then feel much like a coffin’s.

  The ladder ascended to the roof, what Skootch called the sunporch.

  Broken-down old patio chairs were strewn about up there, the webbing on one busted clean through. A squirrel skittered off as they arrived.

  “We can sun-bake in the nude!” Skootch exulted.

  “You can,” Jake corrected him. Then he asked, “So it doesn’t float?”

  The forward edge of the craft rode upon mud.

  “It might. Probably it floats. We won’t find that out until you go.”

  “Me? I go?”

  “Look. Somebody has to meet you with lines to grab her as you sail past. Otherwise you’ll sail on down the river and never stop. So that’ll be me. I’ll volunteer. Because I know ropes. I’ll moor you to the shore in town.”

  “That’s only if it floats, if it gets that far and through the rapids.”

  “You can swim, can’t you?”

  Jake could not deny that he could swim.

  “But what if I can’t catch the line you throw me?”

  “Then I’ll throw you another! Anyway, you’ll catch it. Know why?”

  “Why?”

  “You won’t have a ton of choice. It’s catch a line or sink, Jake.”

  “Shit,” Jake said.

  “Okay,” Skootch concurred. “We’ll fix her up some, make her look pretty, then you’ll sail her down the beautiful Gatineau River into Wakefield.”

  Every engine onboard—and there were several, Jake calculated, as he looked around—appeared unattached to any fuel source, and in any case heralded its shabbiness, already culled for critical parts.

  “With what form of propulsion?” he inquired.

  “The current, Jake. You told us you saw that bridge sail away? If a dumb-assed burning bridge can sail downstream, imagine what a raft can do! A houseboat built for the purpose! You’ll be our riverboat captain, Jake. Think of the adventure. The whole town will watch as you surge through the rapids, they’ll cheer as you come ashore. You’ll be a local hero, boy. You’ll make the news.”

  “As long as it’s not on the obituary page,” Jake said.

  “God Almighty, I wish I was you,” Skootch attested.

  ■ ■ ■

  Late afternoon settled upon the town. Nothing seemed at risk to Ryan Alexander O’Farrell as he drove down Main Street. Tourists were dispatched back to the city aboard the steam train, and the evidence from the day confirmed a creeping worry: the train wasn’t booked to capacity. The lack of a covered bridge perhaps eroded the visitors’ numbers, a trend likely to worsen as time went by.

  While Ryan received the official count from the train’s conductor, no one else noticed the 16-percent drop in passengers. Tourists remained ubiquitous throughout town, and the corresponding fall in revenues would only show up over time. If the numbers indeed went further down, then passions might rise.

  He drove out of town into a keyhole residential development, where he spotted Samad Mehra in his trucker’s garb, mowing the lawn. Ryan stopped the squad car in front of Samad’s house and donned sunglasses and a trooper’s hat. He did not do this routinely, but he wanted to strike a badass pose.

  Spotting him, Samad turned nervous. Conspicuously, he cut the power to his lawnmower, and as the engine sputtered to silence he was searching around, as though contemplating a mad dash.

  “Hey, Samad,” Ryan said. Stopping in front of him, he put his hands on his gun belt.

  “How’s it going, Officer?” Samad asked.

  Ryan coughed up laughter, surprised by that remark. “Officer! You never call me that.”

  Samad was nodding and Ryan half expected him to bow. “I don’t know what to call you.”

  “So then you know why I’m here,” Ryan said.

  Samad looked away, then nodded yes, then shrugged, unable to decide.

  Ryan helped him out. “You’re right to think that this is an official visit. You’re a smart man, Samad.”

  “What’s up?” Samad asked. He kept glancing back at his house to see if his wife was watching, or if she would be out soon to help.

  “I’m trying to add up how many guys it took to burn down the bridge. Any guesses? There’s Denny, you—”

  “Me!” The man seemed apoplectic, and clamped both his palms on his chest.

  “You carry that extra fuel for hunting. So it was you and Denny—”

  “He’s your brother!” Samad cried out.

  “What’s your point?” Ryan asked.

  Samad looked clueless.

  “Nice
lawn,” Ryan mentioned.

  “Thanks.” Samad gazed across it. They both did.

  “Do you fertilize?”

  “Oh yes, believe it, I fertilize. I weed to exhaustion. Joce, she won’t let me use chemicals. Not even the legal ones. I keep the grass thick. That solves my problems. No creeping Charlie. My neighbours? Dandelions. On my lawn, not too many. Did I tell you? You can go look. Go. Look. My fuel barrel is full.”

  “Say what? Your fuel drum? You mean on your truck?”

  “It’s full.”

  Through the dark glasses Samad could not be certain that Ryan was glaring at him, but he felt uncomfortable looking back at himself reflected on the twin lenses. They were mirrors and he wanted to tell him so. “You know what that means, don’t you, Samad?”

  “What does that mean?” he asked.

  “You filled it up after it was emptied. I’ll check, but I don’t expect to find your truck on a video gassing up. I won’t find a credit card trail.”

  “No, no. You are right. You will never find that.”

  “Because you’re a smart man, like I said. You located a full forty-­five­­ gallon drum out in the woods somewhere, didn’t you, at one of your old job sites? Filled it ahead of time and then refilled your own from that, so nobody’s suspicious. That’s good. On the other hand, that makes this entire episode premeditated. That’s bad. Isn’t it, Samad?”

  “No. Yes!” He shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know. Wait. I don’t understand you, Ryan.”

  “You went there after the bridge burning and refilled your drum. To make it look like it was never empty. But only a really dumb cop would fall for that one. You don’t think I’m that dumb a cop, do you, Samad?”

  The suggestion mortified Samad. “No, no, you’re a smart cop, Ryan. Officer. Officer Ryan.”

  “So André Gervais was the third guy with you. Who was the fourth?”