The River

by Peter Heller

But really she was just a young girl who was far from home and probably scared, and he was much more cultured than he let on and had spent more hours in the art museums of Boston and New York than he cared to admit. He just had never had eggs Florentine.

So both Jack and Wynn had digested their share of bewilderment, and maybe there was a heavy place like a stone inside each of them.

They could barely feel the breeze on their left ears and cheeks and it moved the fog over the water with a timeless languor as if there never had been a time without fog and there would never be one again. It seemed to be lightening.

Overnight it seemed summer had surrendered to fall.

They’d even left their watches, trusting their sense of time to the sun and stars when they could see them and to their bodies’ rhythms when they couldn’t.

him. Just as Jack was comfortable with heights and exposure, Wynn loved to be immersed whenever he could, and never minded the chaos of whitewater—it’s when he seemed to come most alive.

Jack chalked it up to landscapes of origin—he was raised in the heart of the Rocky Mountains and that’s where he was comfortable. High desert, higher peaks. Wynn’s world had been a country of brooks and rivers, ponds, lakes; a world of water.

There is no place I’d rather be, he thought. And also: Something is not right. He could feel it on the back of his neck, almost the way the hair prickles and rises just before a lightning storm in the Never Summers back home.

This was different. It prickled on his skin like a specific and imminent danger which he could not place.

For Jack, stuff like cold and hunger didn’t have a value, good or bad, they just were, and it was best if they didn’t last that long; but if they did, as long as one survived them, no harm, no foul.

Jack turned his head. In the bright sun his dark eyes were clear and full of lights.

There’s always relief in committing to a decision, even when there’s no choice.

The last light slid down to the edges and slipped onto the silvered lake which bore it without a ruffle.

Merwin describes the sun going down believing in nothing, and how he hears the stream running after it: It has brought its flute it is a long way.

What he loved about poetry: it could do in a few seconds what a novel did in days. A painting could be like that, too, and a sculpture. But sometimes you wanted something to take days and days.

He looked out over the water that held the bruised rose and grays of dawn.

Wynn noticed that the smells were different now—it smelled like a river, like moving water, a colder, cleaner scent, and he pulled it into his lungs, from where it seemed to run through every capillary of his body, and he felt happy.

guess he means like plants that put all their energy into brilliant flowers and not the roots.”

The pool was darkened by clumps of a fine dark grass that waved along the sandy bottom like hair.

He held it lightly in the shallow teawater at his feet and marveled at the intricate crinkled green patterns on the top of its head, and wondered again how natural selection could have scribed them.

Not just that Wynn was bigger and heavier or stayed in the water wherever he could, but in their styles: Jack made his casts with an offhand grace, as if he were barely watching the line, he gathered it and stepped while taking in the wider circle of the banks, the woods, he cast with near indifference; the loop was always clean but sometimes low over the water and sidearm.

The man studied Jack. It was an assessment, a measuring. Jack also smelled fear. He shook his own head as if to clear it.

Tears streamed on his sunburned cheeks and dripped off his lightly bearded chin. They fell to the dark stones and blackened them with drops like rain.

The fleets of cloud had thickened rank on rank and it was now an almost unbroken overcast to the far horizon.

He thought how here, in the lee of the trees, the water was almost slick with calm, how the waves didn’t start for over a hundred yards out.

For the first time Wynn looked at her. Not at the sum of her injuries but as a person lying in the weeds beside him.

The fire cracked and popped and hissed, and when the wind eddied back toward the woods he could smell the smoke and it smelled like life.

His favorite time was early May, when the slopes were a sea of white apple blossoms that perfumed the air with a scent so delicate and sweet he thought it might be the most enchanting smell on earth. Autumn, too, in the fields and woods, mid-October, the earth smells of fallen leaves slick with rain, of tall grasses and stony trails wet with cold rain and the cold stone smells of the brooks surging with the rush of all-night downpours. That smell was unbeatable.

He hoped it held off. He hoped the sense he had of things slipping toward disaster would blow away like the clouds.

Out there, in the felted blackness, was only sound.

Jack thought that if he never saw this shoreline for the rest of his life, or one like it, he’d be fine. It was some vortex that kept sucking them back, or the voices were, hers and his.

It was like a semaphore: OK.

The swift shadows striped them with running stains that flowed over without a snag and suddenly cooled the air, and were chased upstream by the next sweep of sunlight. Wynn stopped and watched the cloud shadows run and thought that there was something beautiful in the cabin in the clearing in the running sunshine. The crashing of the river had become white noise, and strangely, looking around him, he thought the place was held in a rare silence.

Half the river on the near side poured into a wide chute that unleashed over the first high ledge and battered itself to white on the way down and pummeled the foaming water beneath it in an exploding hole that rolled back on itself.

It was an achievement-free zone, which Wynn was coming to realize is where most of his joy happened. Making constructions on the riverbank was the same.

And the eagles. They seemed to mark the canoe’s progress from the gray spires of dead spruce, spaced downriver like watchmen on some lost frontier, sometimes just the unmistakable shape of the hooded predator, sometimes a scraggly limb and a huge stick nest.

The walls of mixed woods, of pine, spruce, fir, tamarack, birch, they were bulwarks of brooding silence that could shadow any intention.

He also noticed that somehow in the concord of effort he forgot himself. The pain of it.

Jack took his minute and said, “Your problem is you’ve got faith. In everyone, in everything. The whole universe. Everyone is good until proven bad. You’re kinda like a puppy.”

made Wynn think of Leo back home, his black Lab, when he was having a nightmare.

Except that now their muscles were tired and sore and the wind came in flat gusts upstream or quartered across from the northwest and then they could smell the smoke with the intensity of a campfire that blows in your face.

The sun lowered to the tops of the tallest spruce and made a molten fringe of the trees; it seared and spindled them as if they had already burned.

The day at its end—burnished in the last reluctant light—seemed to warp and twist and twang like a bent saw blade.

Because that’s what it reeked of. Charcoal. They could not see the fire, no plumes clouded the stars, no glow like some city crowned the trees, but it reeked of burned-out forest and scorched ground, and all night they heard the flurry and peeps of birds flying over.

The night was clear. No clouds tonight, no moon, but a swarm of stars like sparks, against which flew the high wind-strewn shadows of the birds. Steady wind from the north.

They ate blueberries and felt the exhaustion rise in their bodies like a ground fog and they knew they needed to catch fish or some other animal.

The swelling had come down today and he could see the planes of her cheeks for the first time, the bruising now a blush of pink edged with purple or black like something slowly smoldering.

Maybe he thought that way because he could smell the burn, strong when the wind shifted a little more from the west.

It was mid-August and the little river was low and green over the myriad colors of the stones. It flowed gently in the flats and in the riffles it fell with the capricious release of a man whistling as he rode.

He slept usually as soon as his head hit the pillow or rolled-up jacket, he slept easily and hard because, Jack figured, his conscience was clear and he had faith in the essential goodness of the universe and so felt cradled by it.