Marry or Burn (14 page)

“OK, I guess,” said Ray, with a defeated look at Stark.

 

“HEY, LOOK WHO'S here.” She had come down the path in the dark, by herself. “Look at this river.”

Stark said, “This isn't the river. This is a spur. New.”

“‘
Well it's not deep nor wide
,” she sang, “‘
but it's a mean piece of water, my friend.
' You know that song?”

“I do not,” he said.

“‘Kern River.' Merle Haggard. ‘
I'll never swim Kern River again
,'” she sang. “‘
It was there that I met her, there that I lost my best friend.
' I was awake. I looked out the window and I saw you out there. Then I didn't see you. I thought,
Gotta be a path goes down that hill because he's
gone
.
I don't know, I got a creepy feeling. You can hear this thing really loud in our room. The room we're in, at the front.”

“The river's high,” he said patiently. He was going to have to
talk to her. If a woman got up in the middle of the night, you would have to talk to her. “It's made a whole new channel.”

“Look at that moon. Ah.” She held up her arms. “You've been here before. A new channel, you say.”

Clouds had swept apart to show the lopsided moon, hanging at the top of a cottonwood, so bright it seemed it had arrived with a hiss, like a lantern. The woods were thin here, and the moon was so bright it had dropped black shadows into them.

“There are pictures of you, in our room.” She had to raise her voice to be heard over the water.

“What's that?” he said, as if he couldn't hear.

“Pictures. Under the glass top of the dresser.” So the guy hadn't taken her into the master bedroom, where he must have been before. They were in Kelly's old room. Kelly, the little one, the sentimentalist, with her photo collages and scrapbooks. “You know the ones I mean?”

“What ones?”

“All these family pictures. Two kids. Girls.”

“Is that right?”

“They look like they live here. The man looks like you, a younger you.”

He sighed.

“It is you.”

“If you say so.”

“Is this your place?”

“No.”

“Whose place is it?”

“Rosalie's.”

“Rosalie who? I don't know her, Ray knows her.”

“He appears to.”

“Why do you say it like that?”

“Rosalie is a good friend of mine,” he said.

“Why did you come down here?” she said sternly. He could hear the voice of the firefighter.
Climb down. Do as I tell you.
“Were you going to jump in the river?”

“Was I—? Maybe I still am.”

“I have my EMT,” she said.

“That's good, if I do.”

“I told Ray I got the feeling you were going to jump in the river.”

“And what did he say?”

“He said you weren't. He said you probably came to finish some report.”

“And that would be pretty lame, in his opinion,” Stark said. “For a guy to do. Only you decide the guy is going to drown himself.”

“You never know what somebody will or won't do. I used to guide on the Colorado. Some people—seems like they fell in on purpose. And fur-ther-more, ha ha, I figured it out. You're the husband, right?”

“I was. You're on the case. Are you a private investigator?”

“Yeah. I'm whatshername. Prime Suspect. Actually I'm a firefighter.”

“I'm willing to bet he is too.”

“Yeah. It'll be hard on our kids.”

“Your kids.”

“We're getting married.”

“No kidding. Congratulations.”

“Thank you,” she said with a tuck of the dimple. “How about you? What do you do, Phil? It's Phil, isn't it?”

“I'm a lawyer.”

“I knew it,” she said.

“Is that a fact?”

“How do you know when a lawyer's lying? He's moving his lips. Sorry. Lawyers can't get a break. But hey, the ones I know are great guys.” The dimple kept coming and going, but a girl like this, however she carried on in her own life, could be suddenly, mercilessly intolerant and proper. Yes, his daughters had taught him this, and a young woman or two who had turned on him.

“Lying would be something you frown on,” he said.

“Not really,” she said airily. She was getting into the spirit of things. She was not as simple as he had thought.

“Did Ray see the pictures?”

“No. I put my stuff on the dresser.”

“Why didn't you show him?”

“I didn't feel like it. Why didn't you say you were married to Rosalie?”

“I'm not.”

“She has a different name. I've heard it. I don't know what it is but it isn't Bernstein.”

“I know that.”

“So she took her own name back?”

“You're a very curious young lady.”

“Nosy.” She grinned. “I am. I'm whatshername.” She put on a British accent. “Get me everything we have on the Bern-steins. And a shot of Scotch.” Then she said, “You were down at the river when we got here. You used to come here a lot, I bet. I know you did. It's in the pictures. There was a beach.”

“Out there, underwater. The river is supposed to be on the other side of that, where you see the cottonwoods. It's still coming up.”

“Snow melt. We had that hot week. That's all it takes, up in the snowpack. River ever get all the way up to the house?”

“It never got anywhere near
this
high. Global warming.”

She eyed him. “Ray doesn't believe in global warming.”

“Why doesn't that surprise me?”

“What? You just now met Ray. Everybody likes Ray. Everybody.”

“Especially you. You're going to marry him. You're going to marry a jerk.” He was as surprised as if Katya had come up behind them and growled the word.

“Wait a minute. You don't know Ray and you don't know me. What is this? What's your problem?” Still she didn't walk away.

“The guy's a jerk.”

“You better explain that.”

“Just ask him. When you leave tomorrow. Ask him if he's a jerk. See what he says.”

“No,” she said.

“You're asking for it, if you marry him.”

“Wait a minute, buddy. You know nothing about this man. You have no idea how brave he is, how he'll risk himself. Why am I talking to you? Hey, you're a lawyer. What do you know about anything good?”

“He's a jerk.”

“Quit it.”

“Jerk.”

“I don't like that,” she said. She stepped close, the way a man in a bar would, to start a fight. He knew that from movies; no one had ever squared off with him in a bar. “I don't like that one bit.” She poked him in the collarbone with her fingers straight, as if she were playing a scene in a movie. She seemed to be kidding, or at least half kidding.

“Nevertheless,” he said.

“
Nevertheless?
” she said, crowding him. “
Nevertheless?
” She was bigger than he was. She poked him again. He stepped back, off-balance, and the next thing he knew he had stepped into water knee-deep and slipped. He had gone sideways. How had
that happened? But he was getting his footing. Then he couldn't get his balance at all and he was off his feet, going over.

His whole body gasped at the cold. First floundering and then rolling and then the thing swallowed him.

“Your feet!” He could hear her yelling. “Get your feet out front!” That was it. So the feet would hit and not the head. The time it would take to turn himself bore no relation to the speed of water. Ahead, this water was going to join the full force of the river. Something whacked him in the shoulder but it was too late to grab for it. He couldn't see and water had filled his throat. He was a thing to be filled. His legs crossed and recrossed, the feet were wrong, not in front of him. His shoes were off. Something with an edge tore past one leg. Tree stumps. The draw was where the stumps were. He knew where he was but now he was choking. It was too late. His shoulder ran against something loose and clashing, snagged on it.

A weight bore against him, rolling him up. She was in the water with him. “Gotcha!” she said. With arms like pliers, she was dragging him. From the splashing she seemed to be wading.

“Beaver dam!” At least she was out of breath. She had him splayed on the ground, with stones under his back. “Old beaver dam! So—yeah! So hey, the river has
so
been up this high. Beavers!” His eyes were glued shut. From the sound of it she was hanging over him, panting, stripping water down the legs of her jeans with her palms. She sat down. “I beat you to the dam! You had some close contact. Got some scratches. That's fast water.”

He lay there with his limbs contracting and letting go. He wasn't cold. He got his wet eyelashes apart. He was in a half circle of flagpoles. No. Aspen: slim trunks pale as X-rays. Against the dark pines—the river had come up to the woods and some way in—the aspen showed tiny half-clenched leaves. The moon straight up was so bright he squinted.

“Hey, don't sue me,” Beverly said, vigorously rubbing her arms. “Hey, Phil. Don't say I pushed you in a river and you lost your ability to earn your living as an attorney-at-law.”

Why should a remark like that have a steadying effect? It seemed a way she might have hit on to comfort him.

“My shoes,” he said.

“Forget the shoes,” she said. For a moment it seemed there might be enough comfort in the world to get him through.

“Jesus!” It was Ray, running and shouting. “What's going on? Are you all right?”

“See? I was right,” Beverly said calmly. “He jumped in.”

“I mean
you
!” Ray yanked her up and against him. “Bev! You
lived
out here, goddamn it.
Flood stage
, baby. You heard the radio. There's range cattle going down that river. You could both—be in there—right now.” He was rocking her from side to side. “Jesus,” he said finally, holding her at arm's length. “Jesus, Bev. You had to do it. I know that.”

He let her go and squatted beside Stark. “Hey, fella,” he said. “You. Hear me?” Stark coughed and rolled his head. Water ran out of his ears. “Sure, cough. Puke. You're OK. Thanks to her. Do you know that? I want to say something to you. Do you see what you were up to here? You don't
do
that. No. You got it all wrong.”

“Ray,” said Beverly, not really chiding him. She smiled down at Stark with a bold cheerfulness. She had gone in, after all. She had done that, gone into fast water, pulled him out. With the little pit in her cheek she smiled at the matter of the beaver dam that would have caught him anyway, the matter of her having pushed him.

“I don't know,” said Ray, shaking his head. “Jeez. You need help.”

Now Beverly had squatted too, to rough his wet hair back and forth, the way a coach might after a game. Ray rocked back on
his haunches. “Nothing's so bad you have to jump in a river, buddy.” He squeezed Stark's shoulder.

Stark let out a moan. Now he was cold, but he wasn't going to get up. He was going to lie there awhile before he made any effort. He was the one on the ground, the one in trouble. He couldn't think how long it had been since he was the one lying down, with somebody bending over him, figuring out what the hell was wrong.

S
HE WAS A young married woman who fell in love.

The man desperately wanted to take the place of her husband. He made scenes: he pled, commanded, threatened suicide. The trouble was that although she had fallen in love so suddenly, she also loved the man she had married, who was in the dark about what was happening and didn't even know the time had come for scenes.

Love, love. The same word for different things. Who can be sure what it is that is being felt? Love, like so much helium blown into a balloon. The further trouble was that, of three balloons, her husband had been blown fullest, stretched thinnest.

Having no way of knowing this, and weighed on by the truth, she confessed everything to him, even her suspicion that the miscarriage they were grieving, away in his family's place by the lake, had been the lover's baby and not his.

It was summer, the war was going on, and she was away for a last weekend with her husband before he was to go overseas. But in the morning, when he put on his uniform, instead of leaving for his train he drove the car down the boat ramp, where it lolled onto its back and sank to the bottom of the lake.