Lyndon Johnson, a president we loved, dedicated Summersville Dam in 1966. Before cutting the ribbon, he made a joke about losing his pocketknife on the way and maybe having the Secret Service throw up a roadblock at the Nicholas County line to find whoever had pocketed his Schrade—too fine a thing to leave just laying around—since he reckoned all West Virginia boys come out of the womb knowing a good knife when they see one. We laughed and Lyndon took out a bandanna and swabbed at his brow, looking like any worried man.
Acres of virgin concrete. Smooth, vertical. The dam was tall as the face of God. There was nothing else to compare it to. Nothing of such stability, such mass.
The rising waters flooded the village of Gad, home to a store, a filling station, and three hundred people. Eminent domain moved them, even the dead from their graves. (When Kelly stood on the overpass, was he trying to see his mother’s village through 90 feet of water? No. He was thinking only of the girl.) Quietly, later, Gauley Season was created in 1986 by an act of Congress. We had no idea how life would change.
Over unruly rivers and hogbacks, the rectangular Gauley River National Recreation Area was placed like a stencil. It’s shaded aquamarine on the maps. Lord—maps and new maps. The rapids had names before the rafters came: Glenmorgan Crossing and Mink Shoals, Gooseneck, Mussellshell. They brought a new language: cubic feet per second, highside and chicken-line, hydraulic and haystack. They renamed the rapids: Insignificant, Pure Screaming Hell, Junkyard, the Devil’s Asshole. Unwritten, our names flew away like thistledown on the wind. Except for Pillow Rock. Our fathers named the rock for the river drivers napping there in the sun after a punishing morning of busting jams and poling logs downriver. We snuck to the foot of the overpass and spray-painted in green neon, PILLOW ROCK AHEAD!!! The last thing a rafter sees before tipping over the falls. So the name remained.
True, the release goes against nature. Gauley Season scours the river, blasting fish from their lies, eyes agog, air bladders ruptured. Even so, Gauley Season brings certain benefits. To atone for the fishery’s death, the Department of Natural Resources grows California rainbow trout in hatcheries and drops ten thousand pounds into the canyon by helicopter. The fish have nubby snouts, open ulcers, and tattered fins from rubbing against the concrete raceways. Gray trout, we call them. They taste like they’ve been stamped out of cat food, but they’re free. Come spring, we watch them rain and smack the waters. We cast hooks until every last one’s caught and creeled. Sometimes the fish hit the rocks as the helicopter swoops away. Raccoons revel in the blood. They lick their wiry hands, fumbling them in an attitude just like prayer. They rejoice.
“There he is!” an engineer cried. “You win, Sully! He jumped! He finally jumped!”
The others ran out of the powerhouse. He adjusted the parallax of his binoculars in a gloved fist. “Shit. False alarm.” What he thought was Kelly was a dead deer twisted—twisting—in sunken willows.
A year passed as they do, quickly, as if in a dream or a coma. We thought of the dead girl and her father less and less, or tried to.
Snow and thaw and rain. Hay was cut in the fields, sallies hatched off the river in lime-and-sulfur clouds, deer grew their velvet crowns. September gleaned a cool wind from the Alleghenies. Labor Day weekend, Pillow Rock gathered its people. We hollered as the Army Corps opened up the gates. Upriver, the beating of ten thousand hooves. We inhaled the water’s breath of iron and cedar.
A standing wave broke over Sweet’s Falls. The river augured and torqued, a muscular green. Shards of flotsam and jetsam: broken sycamores and garbage bags, bleached timber, a child’s tricycle. A water-bloated calf wheeled downriver, eyes blue as heaven.
The air crackled with anticipation. Gas stations and hotels and campgrounds had pitched their banners early: RAFTERS WELCOME, COLD BEER HOT SHOWERS, ASK ABOUT OUR GROUP RATES. This would be a record-breaking season. The Washington Post had featured us in their Sunday magazine. The headline read “Montani Semper Liberi.” “West Virginia’s secret is out: the number-two river in America, number seven in the world. One question remains. Can the whitewater industry save this place?” With the glee of discoverers, they told of the spine-rattling third-world pike that is Route 19. That wasn’t so bad—maybe the Department of Highways would be embarrassed and put in for federal money. What nettled most were the things they plucked out to describe: junk cars in the river, raggedy bearhounds jumping in their kennels, crosses at Carnifex Ferry that say GET RIGHT WITH GOD and THERE IS NO WATER IN HELL. All eye-battering, all to be laughed at. Didn’t talk about the landing we poured, the oil-and-chip road we laid for their wobbling, overburdened shuttles. “Relax,” Mayor Cline said. “Sometimes the fire that cooks your food burns your fingers—you can’t bitch.” It’s dog Latin, the state slogan. We are, it says, always free.
Kelly Bischoff walked down the fisherman’s trail in a ragged red backpack.
Pillow Rock went silent.
Work-blackened jeans, dirt in his hair. He peeled off his shirt, shook it of coal dust, and folded it with care. The words Sweet and Sour were inked in cursive blue over his nipples, with arrows offering up directions. A black panther climbed his bicep, claws drawing stylized blood. A Vietnam mark. He shucked his boots and tucked his cigarettes, wallet, and keys into them. Finally he pulled out a penknife and snagged off his workpants to the knee.
“You’re back among the fold,” Reed said to him.
Kelly smiled. “Good to see you all.”
“You working that strip job?”
“Yes I am,” Kelly said, looking side to side, daring anyone to say a word against it.
“Jesus Was Our Savior, Coal Was Our King. Say, you probably haven’t watched from this angle.”
Kelly said, “I seen them go over. Nineteen seventy-nine, it was. Fishing here. Seen Philadelphy Pete Dragan go over Sweet’s, back in them too-big green army rafts. Said, Hell, I can do that.”
Kelly watched the falls, apart from the rest. What could he read there? The water herded yellow foam into the backwater, a rancid butterfat color, thick enough you could draw your name in it with a fish pole. Where we’d saved four lives last year. Five if we counted Kelly’s. Hard to tell if we should or not. If Kelly longed for his old life, he did not say. He just watched the water’s horseplay like he could augur it. Maybe he could.
Rafters! We waved and hollered as usual, but Kelly radiated a complex silence. So we grew quiet, not so joyful, and the day grew old. Shadows slithered on the rock. One hundred ninety-seven rafts. Not a one drowned. Clouds came and snuffed our shadows. The air had a little bite to it, so we pulled on sweaters and packed to leave. Slush tipped from coolers, the last orphan beer cracked and drained. Kelly just sat there.
“Them are your people,” we said, waving at the last raft.
Kelly shrugged. We gave Reed Judy some hopeful looks, so he hunkered down next to our fallen idol. “You coming? We’re going to Bud Shreve’s, grill some food. Be fun.”
“No, I’ll set here awhile.” Kelly rummaged around his backpack and found a gray surplus blanket. Was he too good for us?
“All right, bud. You hear about the blind kid up here got bit by the rattlesnake?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Least he didn’t see it coming.”
Kelly smiled and looked at the ground. “That’s a good one,” he said. Didn’t even flinch; there was hope for him yet. But then he whispered something that turned Reed pale and bloodless—and that Reed wouldn’t tell about till years later. “You’re the one lied about Meadow Creek,” Kelly said. “Lied about finding her. Why would you do that to me?”
We left him there as the drawknife of dusk peeled back the world.
In heirloom fifteen-verse ballads, lovers of the drowned flung themselves in, so their bones could frolic and mingle. But Kelly never trucked in old ways. Instead he sat with us.
For the rest of the season, Kelly was the first on Pillow Rock and last to go. Word went round he’d slept there through the weekends, un
der a ragged tent of laurel. “But he looks to be shaving,” someone said. Sure enough, he never missed a single raft. He perched there like an osprey. When the maples flared, he began telling stories of the dead girl.
It was hard not to listen. He’d sidle up if you broke away to piss or get another beer. She wanted to be an environmental lawyer, he said. She was an athlete. Once she ran a mile in five minutes and thirty-two seconds, a fluke—her average was six-fifteen. She stayed with her father weekends and summer. She loved dogs. “Oh, who doesn’t?” Chet asked him.
On a coolish day in October, for the first and only time, he spoke to us as a group. Our numbers had trickled, as they do at season’s end. Kelly chewed his fingernails, his thumbnail. Sucking the taste from them. Then he spoke.
In Bethesda, the dead girl’s home was the size of . . .—he struggled for comparison—. . . of the county courthouse, the one with the statue of Nancy Hart, who seduced her jailer, shot him in his stupid mouth, and brought back a Confederate cavalry to burn the town. Why did our forefathers raise a statue to someone who destroyed them? Our people fought at Carnifex Ferry. Left the trees full of minié balls, as much lead as wood, so they grew hunched and buzzardy under their mineral burden. We sparred and set the boats on fire. They whirled like burning flags in the night and snuffed themselves hissing in the Gauley. Why not a statue to that?
“That’s history,” Kelly said. “Pull your head out your ass.”
“Nothing happens no more. Day in, day out.”
He said, “You have no idea.”
“Idea of what?”
To prove us wrong, Kelly plucked up and spoke—confident now. He explained the last day of his rafting career.
When they broke for lunch in the canyon, Kelly offered to lead any stouthearted rafter up Barranshe Run to see the five falls, a stair-step of cataracts up the mountainside.
Hours from drowning, Greg Stallings asked, “Is it far?”
“Little bit. Just follow me, Greg. Anybody else?”
The group sat at a table made of the raft turned turtle. One stood up: the dead girl. Kelly kicked his accent up a notch. “A young thing. Great. You’ll lead the pack, Amanda.”
“I can take it,” she said, with a measure of pluck.
Kelly looked the dead girl over: strong legs, sleek lines. “You can carry her up there on your back,” he said, appraising her like a foreign coin. “She still your little girl, right?”
Greg smiled. The others waved them on, faces full of sandwiches and potato salad, bright in their water-sport clothes—chartreuse and pylon orange, same color as the Powerbait we sling to the government trout.
Ascent. The two of them did what Kelly did, clutching the same wet points of rock, the same dry patches of moss for footholds. The trail stitched itself in and out of the creek, where trout danced like Salome in the tannic water. Smell of rotting wood. Squelch and rasp of wet tennis shoes on rock. Kelly explained that Barranshe Run was named for a sow black bear that never whelped a single cub. “No one ran their dogs on her, ever, even when she was reelfoot and gray. Don’t know why. We kill lots of bears here.”
Greg said, “That sounds like a story to me.”
“It’s just what they say.” Kelly knew the rafters were obsessed with fact. They paraded it at him again and again. “Would have been a mercy to kill her.”
“That’s so callous,” the dead girl said.
“No. Animals aren’t afraid to die. They just want to make another thing just like them. If they can’t, they go someplace lonely and pine. Like here,” he said, gesturing to the unraveling tapestry of rock, root, water, and vine. “Water?”
She unscrewed the cap and took a drink. She wiped her mouth, cocked her head at him.
The trail narrowed. She kept flicking him little looks.
Hands scrabbled for holds. Calves burned with acid. “One more bend,” Kelly hollered. There, Great Swallow Falls, 30 foot tall. It sluiced over a mossy lip of stone and sent a misty perpetual rainbow into the air: a fisherman’s cast net frozen midthrow. The world smelled of cold, rich limestone. Swallows nipped stoneflies. The colored hoop shimmered.
The dead girl showed Kelly how to work the switches on her camera. “Wait, show me again,” he said, grinning. She slapped his arm. “Pay attention.”
Kelly snapped a picture of father and daughter, perfect for the Internet. “Think that’s nice, you ought to see the next one.” Each falls more riveting than the last: deeper drop, darker hues, emerald, topaz, Prussian. The swallows piping like bone flutes.
Panting now, Greg said he couldn’t go on. He sat on a log, nursing warm spots that promised to blister.
“But the last one’s the best,” Kelly said, pointing ahead. Now the trail ran vertical, just a thin trough of root and rubble through jagged stone. A deer couldn’t run it. The ground called for a more agile animal, say a bobcat, a lean leaping ghost with splayed pads and tight haunches.
The dead girl wanted to try it. Kelly promised to bring her right back.
Greg hesitated. “It looks dangerous to me.”
“We take people every day. Amanda be fine.”
“Take your camera,” her father called after.
Kelly led her around the bend. “You got to climb up this little rise to get there.”
Her face went slack. “Are you serious?”
“Grab hold of that laurel, Amanda. That plant there. There you go. Give you a boost.”
Kelly gave it—touching her!—and she pulled herself up. Over the rise, she saw the last waterfall. It was nothing more than a tiny gurgling delta. She began to laugh.
She turned around and found Kelly there. He had a dusky look, shards of coal dust embedded in his face. Nine years in the Haymaker Mine, riding the mantrip into the belly of the mountain. At night his skin leaked metal. He woke to blue slivers on the pillow. He kissed her open mouth. She felt his beard and its pleasant rasp on her skin. Swallows singing through the air, soft blue sickles. And the two worlds touch, in a way we always hoped could happen. Kelly jumped the wall. He became one of them.
“I turned that raft over. I turned it over on purpose.” Kelly popped a finger into his mouth and began to chew at the nail.
“My God,” said Reed, on the edge of hysteria, “them people fucking trusted you. My God, that’s fucking awful, that’s terrible.”
Kelly stared at the river, the sculpted earth and water. He pulled the finger from his mouth. The air crackled with alarm.
“’Deed I did. Her dad was looking at us,” Kelly said. “He come up behind and saw.”
Reed went on mindlessly, “No, no, no.”
“I know these falls. Think I’d make a mistake right here? These falls is my bread and butter. Been over better than three hundred times. Been over them blindfolded.”
Everyone yelling, What did he see? What was he gonna do? Frenzied and shouting just anything that came to mind. No one could seem to ask him Why? but he answered anyhow. “I had to. I didn’t mean to drown her,” Kelly said. “Just her dad.”
That settled in. Chet was saying, “Hold on! Kelly, listen to me . . . you did it because he seen you and her?”
“She wanted me to get rid of him.”
“Wait—”
“She hated her dad. She didn’t care if he saw us. He wasn’t her kind. She was like us.”
We took in his words.
“She told you that?”
“Listen,” he said. “Listen to the water.”
“What?”
“She told me yesterday,” Kelly said and babbled on.
It started with cursing. You could taste anger in the air, taste it on your tongue. We’d been had. Kelly didn’t have two worlds. He had one, ours, the lesser. “You evil liar,” Chet Mason told him. Everyone howled at Kelly to stop.
“She told me today.”
We shut him up the only way we could. He slid and danced under our hands. Reed had to take off his belt and hit him with the buckle. Grabbing hold of crazy arms and kicki
ng legs, we flung Kelly into that blind sucking roar. He flopped in with a smack.
Raw white noise. Kelly was gone. Had we really done it? The Gauley took him under. We blinked wildly at one other. No one said a thing. Let it drag him to the ocean.
The river made a low shushing sound. We hadn’t kept track of the days. Sweet’s Falls trickled down to nothing. The Army Corps had lowered its levers. The water was placid. A carnival ride unplugged. Kelly floated to the surface, sputtering, blinking at the sky.
Gauley Season was over.
Kelly paddled to the riverbank and pulled himself ashore with fistfuls of cattail. Bloody, he managed a grin and gave us a thumbs-up.
Nothing’s painful as embarrassment. Our credulousness stung like bedsores. Even now we nurse those wounds.
But outlandish as it was, Kelly’s story nagged at you. There were three witnesses: two dead, the other lost in that white country of madness. Could it be true? Part of you wanted to believe Kelly flipped the raft on purpose. Kelly and the girl—rafters and locals, one people—a beautiful story. That is, a mawkish lie. And if Kelly Bischoff can’t equal them—to know their names, brush their lips, be loved, respected—no one on Pillow Rock can. Once again the world let us know what we are. Swallows in flight. The rasp of shoes. Kelly built himself a legend on that. Maybe he’d come to cherish the girl out of a terrible guilt, which can midwife the strongest, most wretched kind of love into the world. Those cold nights on the Route 19 overpass, he believed. For a man like him, like us, one mistake—one botched run over the falls—could ruin him forever. It wasn’t his entire fault. When they signed the papers, the rafters delivered their lives into Kelly’s hand, they bought the thrill of giving yourself over to a stranger, and the bill came due. And we were the ones who chose Kelly, after all, one of ours. We let the girl die. When Chet Mason reached for Kelly’s hand, we damned him to his own true life. A life with us. But Kelly couldn’t let go of the dream. He couldn’t join in our quiet decline.
The Best American Mystery Stories 2014 Page 32
