The Banks of Certain Rivers

by Harrison, Jon

  “I’ll be over in a minute.”

  Finally, before putting my phone away for good, I call Lauren. Straight to voicemail again.

  “If you get this, and you’re still up, call me,” I say, trying to sound more alert than I’m beginning to feel.

  I slip the phone back into my pocket, and it isn’t long before Alan, wearing a camping headlamp, rolls up to the fire pit on his bicycle. He draws a bottle of wine from a folded blanket in the basket, followed by a pair of travel coffee mugs, both of which he fills nearly to the top. He hands me one of the mugs, tapping his own against mine as he takes a seat next to me in the ring of folding chairs.

  We’re mostly quiet as we sip good wine from plastic mugs in the early night. My mind goes fuzzy and the fire becomes like something I would see in a dream. I can’t look away from the glowing core of it, and other than Alan pointing out flight numbers and destinations of the airliners passing over our heads, not much is said as we sit and watch the fire die before us.

  From: xc.coach.kaz@gmail.com

  To:w.kazenzakis@gmail.com

  Sent: September 12, 7:18 am

  Subject:rain

  _____________________________

  It’s been steadily raining for nearly a day now, and I feel like I can’t wake up. I feel like I can hardly open my eyes, but I can hear the rain through the roof. I’d be happier if it was snow, but I’m not quite ready for winter yet.

  But, now that I think about it, I guess you kind of hated snow sometimes.

  I just want all of this to go away. I honestly don’t know what’s going to happen.

  Terrible sleep, but I still feel like I can’t wake up.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  It’s still raining as I groggily force myself from my bed to see Chris off to school Friday morning. Brown puddles have spread over my drive and into my yard, rippling with falling rain as I watch my son’s car disappear. It’s strange to not be going with him.

  Outside, the rain falls in sheets, and puddles form along the sides of my house. I decide I should take a run, choosing to wear tights instead of shorts with a rain jacket and a thin nordic ski cap over my head. The thermometer outside my back door reads forty-four degrees.

  Rhythm comes slowly today. I head toward town, giving the high school campus a wide berth, and trot down Purple Street in Old Town. The eponymous house is quiet, the scaffolding is gone, and the work trailer has been pulled away. Only the scuffed up grass in the yard gives a clue that anything had gone on there.

  The sky lightens and the rain eases to a light mist, and I can no longer see my breath. My now-soaked hat feels like too much, so I pull it from my head and stuff it down the front of my shirt. As I do so, a friendly dog, fur wet and tongue lolling out of his mouth, bounds next to me for a moment before getting bored and returning home.

  The town is quiet, and I may as well be invisible.

  Forty minutes out and a bit south of Port Manitou, I decide it’s time to loop back home. This time I do skirt the high school athletic fields, and Kevin Hammil’s biology class, it looks like, is out doing some sort of fieldwork by a tree. The kids stand in the drizzle bunched together like penguins, hoods pulled up over their heads and notebooks clutched in cold, sleeve-shrouded hands. Kevin sees me and, hesitating just a moment before letting himself do it, lifts his hand in a silent greeting. Some of his kids call out to me.

  “Hey, Mr. K!”

  “Come back to school soon, Mr. K!”

  “Python died, Coach! Giving him a proper burial!”

  There will be no discussion of snakeskin boots; that’s not enough reason to stop. I don’t wave back, either. I run, back out of town and into the farmland, and it feels like nothing before I’m home again. Hands on my hips, breathing deeply, I slow to a walk and come up my drive.

  Back inside the house, I fill an old chipped mug with coffee, and wager with myself over who will call first with a report on the certain-to-be-devastating article in today’s Bungle. Could be Peggy, could be Alan. I bet it will be Alan. He doesn’t really have anything better to do.

  The answering machine is flashing, but I don’t bother to look at the number on the display.

  I put on the same oversized jacket I wore last night, grab my mug, and stand out on the back deck. The field is wet, the ground is saturated, and the line of trees at the back end of the field is softened by a light mist. The trees and grass are still green, mostly, green with splashes of yellow and amber, the dusty colors of early autumn and so, so pretty through the fog. Whatever happens, I have this. I can always come to look at this.

  There’s a motion at the edge of the field that makes me freeze: a tortoiseshell tomcat slinks out from the line of brush and sets across the field in a stiff-legged trot. The cat looks just like one Wendy used to have, so much that I actually call out the long-dead pet’s name.

  “Otto?” I call, my voice lifting at the second syllable, the way Wendy used to say it. “Otto?” The cat pauses and lifts its nose before scurrying away, off through the rain and out of my view.

  The Olssons always had barn cats around, and Wendy, through her childhood, usually had one—against the wishes of her father—that she’d adopted to domesticate and spoil. When we moved back to her farm she resumed the habit, and Otto was the cat she chose when we finished our house and moved over from the basement.

  I’d never been much of a cat person; we’d always had dogs when I was a kid. But Otto chose us, I suppose. Barely larger than a kitten, he started hanging around while we were building the house, and it wasn’t long before Wendy started letting him in to feed him. Begrudgingly I became pretty fond of the cat, and over time it seemed to be my lap he found the most comfortable when he needed a place to hang out, or my shoulder the best place for him to curl up against at night.

  “See?” Wendy would say. “He likes you. And he wouldn’t seek you out if you didn’t like him back. They can sense that, you know. So there’s no use in you trying to deny it.”

  She was right, but I kept up my act of grumbling acceptance. Otto went out during the days, we’d call him in at dusk, and while he was usually prompt about coming in, those occasional evenings he was late in coming home I always seemed to be the one to stay out to wait for him. I’d call his name into the insect-buzzing darkness, and finally he’d gallop out of the night, home from his adventures, and bound up the deck. I’d pick him up and say his name while I scratched his neck before bringing him inside to deposit him on Wendy’s stomach while she read in our bedroom.

  One year, during winter break, Otto went missing. Chris was in the first grade, just a little guy then, and we’d gone down to spend Christmas at my parents’ house. I’d arranged for one of my students to housesit for us and feed the cat, and on Christmas Eve when she showed up Otto made a break for it. The poor girl called us in tears to let us know; she’d tried and tried to get him back in, she explained, but he wouldn’t come back. I told her it was fine, he’d probably spend the night under the deck and be waiting for her when she came the next day. But he wasn’t waiting. Not that day, or the day after that, or the next day when we returned home. Chris and I wandered the orchard, calling his name, while Wendy called the animal shelter and all the veterinary clinics in the area.

  Chris found Otto’s collar in the brush line at the far end of our field, and his chin trembled when he handed it to me.

  It had been a mild early winter and the ground was bare, our first significant snowfall was forecast for New Year’s Day. I went out by myself on the last day of the year to search, once in the morning, and again in the afternoon, and went over to talk to the workers building a house on the property next door before they knocked off for the holiday.

  “You guys see a cat around here? He’s big”—I formed a shape with my hands—“and kind of multi-colored.” They shook their heads. Back home, Christopher’s eyes filled with tears, Wendy put up a good front, and I felt sick to my stomach. Outside, the temperature was falling, and the weather se
rvice issued a winter storm warning starting noon the next day. Ten to eighteen inches of lake-effect snow were forecast. It wasn’t much of a New Year’s Eve. Chris couldn’t sleep, and he crawled into bed with Wendy and me.

  “Will Otto come back home?” he asked us.

  “I don’t know if he’ll come home.” I told him. “He might not.” I didn’t want to lie to him, and tears began to roll down his cheeks. “He’s been away for five days now. That’s a long time.”

  “Do you think he’s dead?” Chris asked.

  Wendy was trying with all her might to keep from breaking down at the sight of our heartbroken son. “It’s hard to tell with a cat,” she said, her voice quavering. “Sometimes something frightens them and they hide. He could come back after a long time. Or maybe some nice person found him and is taking care of him.”

  “I want him to come home,” Chris said. “I’d give back my Christmas presents if Otto would just come home.”

  This, of course, put Wendy over the edge, and I followed not long after that.

  “I’ll go out tomorrow morning,” I promised him, wiping my eyes with my thumb. “Before it starts to snow.”

  I set out the next day after breakfast, walking the orchard once—and one more time again—getting down on my knees and peeking under the bushes where we’d found his collar.

  “Otto!” I called. “Otto!”

  I walked along the highway in the ditch, to the south and to the north, looking through the frost-covered weeds for any sign of him. If I found him here, I wondered, killed by a car, would I tell Christopher, or Wendy, even? Maybe it would be better for them to think he’d found a new home. That would be an acceptable sort of deception, I thought.

  “Otto!”

  I reached the fence line at the northern end of the orchard, and turned to walk among the trees for a bit, up along that bank of the Little Jib River. Could he somehow be down in the stream bed? Nothing. I didn’t think he’d ever even ventured that far before. I returned to the highway, resigned to the loss of the cat, and started home.

  When I was just about back to my drive, I heard a shout behind me.

  “Hey!” a man called, jogging toward me on the pavement. He was clad in heavy canvas work pants and a paint splattered jacket; this is how I first met Alan Massie. “Hey, were you the guy looking for the cat?”

  “Yes?”

  “I think he’s in my house. The one we’re building up the road.”

  This seemed too good be true, and I tried not to get excited.

  “Is he big?” I asked. “Brown and white and orange?”

  Alan nodded, and my excitement grew. “I found him upstairs last night,” Alan said. “He didn’t want to come down, there’s been a dog hanging around. I think the dog chased him in.”

  I followed Alan to the house under construction up the highway, trying to keep my hope in check. It really couldn’t be. There was no way it could be.

  “I was talking with the contractor this morning, I told him about the cat, and he said some guy had been looking….”

  Inside, the house smelled like raw lumber, just open framing with no drywall hung yet, and Alan pointed up into the rafters.

  “He hasn’t moved from up there all day.” Sure enough, it was Otto, and he let out a pitiful meow when he saw me.

  “Otto!” I called, sincerely overjoyed. He was perched on some framing over a window, and he yowled and yowled as I approached him.

  “Oh, wow, my wife and son…thank you!” I shook Alan’s hand, and we introduced ourselves to each other. “I’d better…I don’t think I can carry him back without him flipping out. Let me go get his carrier.”

  “I’ll make sure he doesn’t go anywhere,” Alan said.

  I ran home through spitting flurries, and Wendy met me in the garage. She must have seen my smile as I flew up the driveway.

  “You didn’t...is it Otto? You found him? Where was he?”

  “I’ll tell you when I get back.”

  I ran back with the little cage, and Alan erected a ladder so I could climb up to reach the cat. He felt skinny under his fur, but he purred and purred, and I gave him a good scratch before putting him into the carrier. Alan walked back to the orchard with me. Chris and Wendy met us in the yard, and Chris practically turned cartwheels with excitement.

  “Otto’s back! Otto’s back!” Chris shouted as he danced around us.

  “Let’s get him inside, Chris,” Wendy said. “He’s probably very hungry.” She gave Alan a hug. “Thank you so much. Are you the new neighbor-to-be?”

  It turned out we had mutual friends, and we made plans to get together sometime. When Wendy learned Alan and Kristin had two daughters, the first thing she asked was if they liked to babysit. We always had a hard time finding good babysitters back then.

  That night at bedtime Chris climbed into his bunk, and Otto hopped up via the dresser, curled against our son and began to purr with a throaty rumble. My wife and I stood in the doorway and watched them for what felt like an hour; Wendy even got her camera to take some pictures. I put the camera on Christopher’s dresser and set the timer and jumped up into the bunk with my son and wife. We smiled broadly—Chris holding the cat up under his chin—and the flash popped.

  I wish I knew where I’d put any of those photos. It’s been a while since I’ve seen them.

  We left Chris and the cat to sleep. In our own room, Wendy propped herself up on some pillows in bed to read while I peered out the window to try to gauge how hard the snow was falling.

  “That cat,” Wendy said, dropping some papers flat on the down comforter. “I really didn’t think we’d see him again.”

  “I had a feeling,” I said.

  “What are you talking about? You were ready to give up yesterday.”

  “I just had a feeling I’d track him down.”

  “Oh, that’s right. I forgot I’m married to Neil Kazenzakis, Indian tracker.”

  “Stop it,” I said. I undressed and got into bed, and Wendy picked up her papers and started looking over them again.

  “What are those?” I asked.

  “It’s from Northern Michigan. The CPA Program. I can do it in two years—”

  “Do you want to do it?”

  “Maybe,” she said, and she rolled to face me. “But I’d need your help. I’d need your help with the house. I’d need your help with Chris. I can’t run this place and go back to school at the same time.”

  “Are you saying somehow I don’t help out enough?”

  Wendy just looked at me.

  “Okay,” I said, rolling away from her to turn off my lamp. “Whatever. Whatever you need.”

  “I didn’t mean it like that.”

  I stared at the ceiling, starkly illuminated by the light on Wendy’s side of the bed. “Just tell me what to do. You tell me, and I’ll do it.”

  “Dammit, Neil, you should know what to do anyway. Why should I have to ask you to do this stuff?” She clicked out the light and the room went dark. We were silent for a while, feeling the weight of the darkness, then Wendy spoke again.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I just feel overwhelmed sometimes. I know you work hard.”

  “No, I’m sorry. I want you to get your CPA. If you want to do it, I want to help.”

  “Thank you. It’s just—” Wendy sighed and closed her eyes. “God, that cat.”

  We said nothing more, and slept soundly for what felt like the first time in days. Dreamless sleep while the snowstorm built outside. But at four in the morning—precisely four-zero-zero, I looked at the clock—I was awakened by a thud and a cry from Christopher’s room across the hall. The moonlight, diffused by the heavily falling snow, seeped into our room with a soft blue glow.

  “What is it?” Wendy mumbled.

  “I’ll check on him.”

  A steady whimper came from Christopher’s room. It must have been a bad dream, I thought, a monster not tucked in with the night. Entering his room I was confused by the fact that his cryi
ng came from the floor and not from high in his bunk, and by a strange rich smell filling the air. I knelt down and reached through the darkness, and my fingers touched the bumpy curve of his spine.

  “Chris, kiddo, are you okay?” I rubbed his back and turned him toward me, and the whimpering didn’t stop. A warmth flowed onto my bare chest as I held him to me, and my skin prickled in the instant I realized the warmth and the cuprous smell in the room were from my son’s blood.

  “Chris, what happened?”

  Wendy came to the doorway. “What’s going on?” she asked sleepily.

  “Don’t turn on the light,” I said. Thinking about it, I’m not sure why I told her that. I must have been I was afraid of what I’d see. I helped Chris, still softly blubbering, up to his feet, and guided him out of the room. “Come on, kiddo. Let’s go to the bathroom.”

  “What is going on?” Wendy asked again, her voice a little higher now. “Neil?”

  “We’re going into the bathroom,” I said. Chris and I went in first, and through the flicker of the hallway nightlight and my sleep-clouded vision I saw a darkness over my chest and underwear as well as down Christopher’s pajama shirt.

  “Chris,” Wendy said, a flicker of anxiety in her voice. “Are you—”

  “Don’t turn on the light, yet, don’t turn on—”

  The bathroom filled with harsh brightness, and Wendy gasped while I nearly swooned: blood ran from Christopher’s mouth in a continual flow, and his lower lip hung slack from his face like a donkey’s.

  “Oh my God, what happened?” Wendy cried, rushing forward, putting her hand to her baby’s chin. My knees went weak and I eased myself to the edge of the tub. I’d seen people bleed before, profusely, even, but seeing my own son hemorrhaging like this was too much. It was like he was vomiting blood, non-stop, and I looked at my feet and took some deep breaths.

  “I feel…a flap in my mouth,” Chris managed to say.