The Country Ahead of Us, the Country Behind (15 page)

“Good,” said Carl. “Then we’re okay.”

“We’re okay,” Floyd agreed. “Still, we got these extra beers here just in case. And an opener. For emergency situations.”

He pulled the dripping burlap sack out of the water, grinning.

“Sort of like a first-aid kit,” Carl said.

“Sort of,” Floyd said. “You might say that. You might say that was the case.”

They shoved out. The river took them, gently at first, but unstoppable, Carl realized. The straight trunks of strong pine trees rose around them; sun glinted off snow in the high far mountains; the inner tubes carried them over the surface of the Little Nelson and the sun kept their bellies warm. When they came to places where boulders had fallen out of sheer hillsides they beat their hands against the current until the inner tubes began to revolve. That way, anything they hit they’d bounce off of.

They rode along. Their tubes caromed off of one another. Floyd’s nose had gotten sunburned already, but he didn’t seem to notice at all. They rolled over the water effortlessly, as in a dream, flowing around obstacles, ignorant not so much of imminent danger as of the weakness and smallness of human beings. The current kept them together in this: a pair of spilling, rushing teenagers.

They went through their first set of real rapids. Floyd yelled his way through the white water. Carl felt himself lifted from his inner tube. Under the water it was unsettlingly quiet, impossible to tell which way was up.

Jesus Christ
, Carl’d said to himself.

It was beautiful and terrible all at once. His thigh smashed against a rock. His back smashed against something, too. He was moving too fast now. Tiny bubbles were everywhere. The silence was complete, he was rolling along underneath the river now, or inside of it rather, and here was a true view of how things went, he told himself, here was what the river was in its secret truth. He had no control anymore.

When he came up at last—out of nowhere, as if by
magic—his tube was a little bit ahead of him. He caught up with it, levered himself on, and rode downriver again in the white-yellow sunlight.

“Hey, Floyd!” he screamed out happily, ecstatically, over the screaming, tumbling white water.

Carl drove into second-growth forest. The pavement ended and the gravel began, popping underneath the tires. They curled around a wide bend now, and through the trees Carl saw the Little Nelson sparkling.

“There she blows,” he said. “Look through the trees there, Louise.”

Louise peered up from her knitting. She had a sweater three-quarters finished in her lap, something for the granddaughter of some friends they played bridge with. The sweater had pine trees and reindeer knitted into it—exactly the right thing for a girl’s Christmas gift. But the girl, Carl knew, wouldn’t appreciate it. She was away at college, somewhere in the East, where it was impossible for her to know about a thing like that.

“I don’t see any river,” Louise said, peering through the passenger-side window, needles fixed in midair.

At the North Fork Campground Louise undid her seat belt, then stood where Carl could see her in the side mirror—blinking behind her glasses at him, no doubt. He backed the camper neatly into its spot, Louise directing him with the utmost seriousness between the thick trunks of Douglas fir trees. With her hands waving the way he’d taught her she looked like one of those fellows on the deck of an aircraft carrier, and in the small disc of his one hundred and eighty
degree mirror she appeared as some kind of hallucinated monster gesticulating to a sunset that couldn’t care less. But that was all right. His first wife had never gone camping at all. In the old days he’d hiked into the back country, a fisherman. His first wife had often been moody about that, but when he came home she’d been happy to see him. The cancer in her lymph nodes had killed her slowly. Three years, all told, it took for her to die. He had seen men die in the snows of the Hunsrück, seen boys blown apart in Korea, then come home to watch his wife die.

He had married Louise to have some company—he knew that, so did she. It was true that she was overweight, she was nothing to look at, but what difference could that make to anyone? He had come, quickly, to be fond of her, inexplicably, and he knew she wouldn’t betray him in any way, or demand things, or impinge. She had her own simple pleasures. Knitting, for example.

“I’m going down along the riverbank,” Carl told her when the camper was leveled and blocked up on two-by-fours, the gas line hooked up, the water tank filled. “I’ll be back in two shakes of a leg.”

Louise said, “Well, be back in a jiffy then. I’m going to get busy here and put supper on.”

She smiled at her husband. She squeezed Carl’s forearm.

“Anything wrong?” she asked.

“Not really,” Carl answered.

“Well, don’t jump in down there.”

“I won’t,” Carl said. “I’m too old to jump.”

They both laughed at that. Carl put the flask of scotch in his pocket and wandered out into the fir trees.

*  *  *

They’d gone over two little waterfalls. The descent from the high country was too fast, too sudden: impossible to make sense of, slipping past, slipping behind. Carl fell from his inner tube twice more, Floyd twice altogether. Past the canyon below Pinto Rock they’d pulled up on a sandbank and stretched out in the heat of the sun. Carl thought hard about things. He was drunk and the river was dangerous. Three of the beer bottles had been smashed in the rapids, but that left nine between the two of them.

They got up and floated on together. There was nothing quite like it, Carl decided, utterly happy with himself. There were stretches where they laid back with their hands behind their heads and stared up into the mountaintops circling the valley. In the bends the tubes seemed to seek out deep water—wherever the current went, they went. It was magical, the water deeply cold and swarming with light, the air unruffled and warm. The sun, though, had moved noticeably lower toward the mountains in the western sky.

Until now they’d seen no one, not even fishermen.

They bobbed down into the slower water beyond the North Fork, past the place where the North Fork and Middle Fork meet. They opened two beers and floated along with bottles in hand, watching the bank at the campground.

“Look at that,” Floyd said.

Families were camped there. People suddenly. Kids ran among the trees. There were picnic tables covered with checkered picnic cloths. There were cars and women holding babies. A boy, fourteen or so, watched them longingly from the end of a spruce log that had fallen into the current. People sat in the sun above the cutbank, eating hot dogs and looking at the watercourse.

“Jesus,” Carl said, feeling his nakedness all of a sudden. “We’re down at the campground already.”

“How can it be?” Floyd answered.

They floated on, right past the campground, past the sorry people huddled there, down where the river was broad and quiet.

“So long, suckers!” Floyd had yelled.

“Christ Jesus,” Carl whispered.

He was too drunk now. His thigh felt numb and unserviceable where he had smashed it. Everything was changing. Everything was different. The water was a green color now full of mud and gick and slime—deep and sullen water, ugly water. There were bugs suddenly. The tubes moved very slowly. On either side of them stood silent willow trees.

“Hey,” Carl said. “Let’s get out of here. Let’s go back.” But then it occurred to him that to travel upstream was not likely or hardly even possible.

“Let’s finish the beers first,” Floyd insisted.

He hauled the burlap sack up between his legs and settled it onto his belly, dripping.

“Five left,” he said. “Three for you and three for me.”

They drank, dutifully. It was intensely quiet in the low country, quiet and hot, quiet, slow and lanquid, too still. Carl felt the tight pain of the sunburn in his shoulders. The only sound was the buzzing of the deer flies.

“Give me another,” Carl said after a while. But he was only drinking now because he had to.

He opened his bottle—and then, because they had worked together all summer in the forest, and because their journey downriver was nearly over, because they had gone fishing together and lived in the same house at the edge of the mountains, because of a lot of things, not the least of
which was the fact that Carl was as drunk as he had ever been, he told Floyd now that he would die for him.

“Did you know that, Floyd?” he said—overprecise about it, too drunk. “I’d die for you. If I ever had to. I mean in the war or something. I’d
die
for you. Just so’s you know.”

“Same here,” Floyd insisted from his tube. “Me too, Carl. The same goes for me, just for the record, buddy.”

They made a blood pact in the shallows. They cut their palms open with a broken bottle and shook hands like soldiers, swearing. “I’d die for you. I swear it. God damn it,” Carl said. “Hell yes,” Floyd had answered.

They were too drunk to feel embarrassed just then. And they didn’t know any better anyway. They would only feel embarrassed sometime long afterwards—Carl for a long time, long after he’d gone to Seattle, long after everything else in his life had changed.

The river kept getting wider and slower—as if the flatland accepted it only grudgingly. Carl saw backwaters, eddies, marshes and pools—all the complications of a great river. The sun fell lower, the air turned oppressive. There were no trees now. There was marsh and marshweed at first, and then blackberry bush, and finally they came out into cultivated wheat fields, where farmers rode in rows on combines taking in the summer wheat.

At last the river turned into a lake—an enormous void of still water. And then they were
in
the lake, a dam at its end, in plain sight not far off.

After supper, after the dishes were cleared away, Carl went once again to the riverbank. He settled down with his back
against a log and looked at the water aimlessly. What was there to see? He drank his scotch in sudden draughts, like medicine, bravely. He drank most of it. He had a beer in his jacket pocket, so he drank that, too.

He got up and found a boulder above the cutbank. He sat there, looking out at the places where he and Floyd had floated past with their drunken curses, down toward where they’d made their drunken vows, up into the bend where the two forks meet, toward the high roaring stretch of river where they’d begun their journey together. It had been a sweet journey, he thought now. He didn’t want to forget about it ever. Even the ridiculous promises had been sweet. He
would
have died for Floyd back then. He’d been dumb enough and young enough for ridiculous things.

But now it was night, years later. The sun had set already, the stars were out—pinpricks in the overwhelming darkness of the skies. On the opposite bank a grove of birches had been cut down by spring runoff. Now the whole grove lay half in the river, a jumble of sticks rotting slowly and only barely reflecting the wild watercourse.

Straight above him Carl recognized Arcturus, the star in the middle of the heavens.

Nothing is going to change here, Carl thought—even though most things had changed already. And he wished he had never seen Floyd in the pie section. He wished it had never happened. Nobody needed that kind of reminder. Nobody deserved a jolt like that.

He went in. He and Louise sat at the table playing rummy and eating Cheese Flips. They played eight games before Louise took up her knitting again. Carl drank two cans of beer, slowly. They spoke of his daughters for a while—one was separated from her husband. Her husband was filing for
divorce for some reason. Carl had not understood it. His daughter had called from somewhere in Wisconsin. A small town where a friend of hers lived.

He checked the gas before he got into bed. It was a Saturday night, ten o’clock, in August. The campground was chock-full: music and voices, cars rumbling by, people laughing as they moved toward the toilets behind their flashlight beams. Carl listened hard for the sound of the river, but the river was too far from there—one hundred yards, at least, through the fir trees.

They’d arrived late and taken one of the poorer campsites, far from the music of the Little Nelson. Carl regretted that now.

In bed Louise kissed him on the jaw, twice. “Cheer up,” she said. “You’ll go fishing tomorrow, Carl. Cheer up now, all right?”

He told her that he loved her. “I’d be lonely as hell without you,” he said. He kissed her ear, her nose.

“You’ve been drinking whiskey,” Louise answered. “You’ve been drinking and now you’re full of bologna, Carl.”

Carl was a light sleeper. It was his habit to stay up and worry nights. In fact, it seemed to him he hardly slept anymore; he couldn’t seem to get the hang of it. And there was that picture in his head of Floyd at the Last Stop. Maybe he should have said something after all. Maybe Floyd would have known how to explain things.

He sat up, grunting, and pulled his pants on. He was still drunk, too drunk to lay in one place at least. He tied his shoes in the dark. He pulled his jacket on and went out with the flashlight. He made his way between the fir trees, stumbling once on a dead branch, fumbling a little in the clammy darkness, until he’d made his way down to the edge of the
Little Nelson River, where he stood listening to the endlessness of it.

Floyd!
he said to himself.
Floyd! Jesus Christ!
But then he looked above him and there was Arcturus, Arcturus and about a million other stars, all shining in their mysterious way.

It made him feel better, seeing that.
Let the river rush and pour
, he thought; a river is a very small thing beside a star, after all. There were no words for it he could utter to himself, except that a star seemed the right sort of solace for a man going on seventy.

The Flower Garden

W
hen I was young—seventeen—I had a paper route which I remember as a meandering through early summer, a ritual pilgrimage along old broad streets beneath maples just shooting out a soft haze of fresh buds. With my papers in their drapesack striking off my back and belly, and with a thick load of rubber bands coiled over my knuckles, I’d hike alone across the east side of town, rolling my papers tightly in thirds as I went and tossing them high in delicate arcs to land lightly in doorways and on porch steps. My route took me where the homes were large and venerable and still, where the lawns were broad and insistently manicured beneath the new-budding maples. Wherever I went, timeworn and meditative old men stood by and watched me behind the glitter of sprinklers, or pulled weeds mutely with a bland concentration, and plump-armed women in cotton dresses and tough black shoes hovered busily under clotheslines, dropping white sheets into deep wicker baskets.
From eyes made large and watery by spectacles they watched me half-amused, half-sad and sentimentally, the women with wooden clothespins in their mouths, the men clutching garden spades and weeding forks or lawn rakes. As I walked I would catch the hot fruit sugar fragrance of the pies that baked in their kitchens, or the powdered soap smell of the drying sheets, or the mint-and-tinder scent of lawns mowed too often, and I would hear the lazy clinking of occasional wind chimes. Hummingbirds and blue jays gathered at feeders and a gold light fell out of a blue sky, intensifying, somehow, the stillness in everything.