Nothing Gold Can Stay (4 page)

“Dude, I’ll spare you the details,” Donnie says, “but he’s been dead at least a couple of days.”

Donnie reaches into the paper bag and takes out some bills.

“His billfold was on the bureau. Forty-six dollars that he’ll need no more than this,” he says, reaches back into the bag and takes out a dental bridge, lays it on the dash beside the pack of cigarettes. “One that old has some prime gold in it.”

Donnie stuffs the money in his jean pocket and wads up the paper bag and throws it on the floorboard. The jar is between his legs and he grips it with his left hand, uses his right to twist the metal ring. It doesn’t give. He taps around the rim with the flashlight and tries again. I hear the rust grind as Donnie unscrews the ring. After he pries the lid off with the screwdriver, he takes the dental bridge off the dash and drops it in with the teeth, reseals the jar as best he can, and sets it between us.

“Damn,” Donnie says, still breathing hard. “That old man works our asses off even when he’s dead.”

The dirt road ends and I turn right onto 19-23. We cross over the bridge and come into town, everything shut down except the Quik-Stop. We pass the bank, its sign lit up with the time and temperature.

“Hell, it ain’t but one thirty and we got money,” Donnie says. “I vote we go on over to Asheville. There’s a place Jody Barnes told me about that don’t shut down till daylight hits the windows. We’ll find two girls who’ll party with us, cash in come morning, and party some more.”

I don’t have a better idea so I say okay.

“Want to clean up first, put on some nice duds,” Donnie says, “or let the girls know from the start the rough outlaws that we are?”

“Let’s go on,” I say.

“OK,” Donnie says, “but let’s run by Marvin’s first. It’ll make for a better ride.”

I don’t answer, just turn right at the stoplight and drive toward Marvin’s. I watch the headlights race ahead of us. Even going through town, we haven’t met a single car or truck. Usually I’d figure that as some good luck, but tonight it feels more like a judgment.

“What’s got you so quiet?” Donnie asks after a while.

“That dental bridge,” I say. “You shouldn’t have taken it.”

“Why the hell not?” Donnie says. “We’ve stolen a thousand times more from live folks. If you’re going to get all sorry about something, be sorry for them it matters to. It sure as hell don’t matter to that old man.”

Donnie slides a cigarette out of the pack and lights it, takes a couple of drags before he speaks again.

“Are we through talking about this?”

“Yeah,” I say.

“Good.”

In a couple of minutes we pull into Marvin’s driveway. The front porch light comes on and I dim the lights and cut the engine.

“I’ll be back in a minute,” Donnie says and takes the jar with him.

He steps up on the porch and Marvin opens the door, nothing on but a pajama bottom. He doesn’t look happy to be woke up, but he and Donnie talk a few moments and Marvin opens the door wider and steps back.

Donnie comes out a few minutes later with the jar in one hand and a pill bottle in the other.

“Son of a bitch was pissed at first, it being so late and all, but he sure changed his tune once I showed him the jar and he got his scales out. Three and three-quarter ounces. What does that come to by your ciphering?”

“Forty-five hundred.”

“Exactly,” Donnie says, “though Marvin had to tally it on paper. Anyway, we put four thousand of that in his pocket and he’ll charge us twelve. We sell to some of those hotshot punks over at the high school at twenty and we’ll glide a long while. It ain’t like we got to decide right this instant, but I’m telling you, it all sounds like a sweetheart deal to me.”

Donnie rattles the pill bottle.

“Hell, Marvin didn’t even want the money for these. Just said not to worry, that we’d settle up later. Get us some beer to wash these down with and we’ll be riding the magic carpet all the way to Asheville.”

We head back through town and pull into the Quik-Stop. A bell tinkles when we enter and a man comes out of the stockroom. The place seems to change hands every other week, so it’s not surprising I’ve never seen this guy. No one else is in the store or parking lot and he looks nervous as Donnie opens the cooler, takes out a six-pack.

“This is enough, don’t you think?” he says, and I nod.

We’re heading for the counter when Donnie notices the rack of fishing equipment at the back of the store. There’s a couple of dusty Zebco rods and reels leaning beside the rack. Donnie gives me the beer and picks one up to check the price, clicks the button to see if the line comes out smooth, and does the same to the other.

“We’ll come back for these when we get paid,” Donnie says.

“It’s two o’clock,” the man at the counter says. “I’m closing now.”

Donnie turns, the rod in his free hand.

“Your sign says you’re open all night.”

“I’m closing now,” the man says again.

He glances out at the parking lot and you can tell he’s wishing hard someone would pull in, or even drive by. But nothing is moving out there. It’s just him and me and Donnie under the store’s bright lights.

“Take the beer,” he says. “It’s free.”

“Well, that’s neighborly of you,” Donnie says, and sets the rod down, takes the beer from me.

“Is it Christmas or something?” Donnie says, a big grin widening on his face. “Everywhere we go people are giving us stuff.”

“Go now,” the man says.

As Donnie heads toward the door, I pull a five out of my wallet and step toward the counter. The man raises a hand as if to fend off a blow.

“Go now,” he pleads.

“Okay,” I say, stuff the bill in my pocket, and follow Donnie out to the truck.

I pull out of the parking lot. As soon as we’re out of town, Donnie hands me a pink, takes one for himself. I put the tab on my tongue and let it lay there. Donnie opens a beer and hands it to me.

“Drink up,” he says.

The OC’s coating starts to dissolve. Its bitterness fills my mouth but I want the taste to linger a few more moments. As we cross back over the river, a small light glows on the far bank, a lantern or a campfire. Out beyond it, fish move in the current, alive in that other world.

Something Rich and Strange

S
he follows the river’s edge downstream, leaving behind her parents and younger brother who still eat their picnic lunch. It is Easter break and her father has taken time off from his job. They have followed the Appalachian Mountains south, stopping first in Gatlinburg, then the Smokies, and finally this river. She finds a place above a falls where the water looks shallow and slow. The river is a boundary between Georgia and South Carolina, and she wants to wade into the middle and place one foot in Georgia and one in South Carolina so she can tell her friends back in Nebraska she has been in two states at the same time.

She kicks off her sandals and enters, the water so much colder than she imagined, and quickly deeper, up to her kneecaps, the current surging under the smooth surface. She shivers. On the far shore a granite cliff casts this section of river into shadow. She glances back to where her parents and brother sit on the blanket. It is warm there, the sun full upon them. She thinks about going back but is almost halfway now.

She takes a step and the water rises higher on her knees. Four more steps, she tells herself. Just four more and I’ll turn back. She takes another step and the bottom is no longer there and she is being shoved downstream and she does not panic because she has passed the Red Cross courses. The water shallows and her face breaks the surface and she breathes deep. She tries to turn her body so she won’t hit her head on a rock and for the first time she’s afraid and she’s suddenly back underwater and hears the rush of water against her ears. She tries to hold her breath but her knee smashes against a boulder and she gasps in pain and water pours into her mouth. Then for a few moments the water pools and slows. She rises coughing up water, gasping air, her feet dragging the bottom like an anchor trying to snag waterlogged wood or rock jut and as the current quickens again she sees her family running along the shore and she knows they are shouting her name though she cannot hear them and as the current turns her she hears the falls and knows there is nothing that will keep her from it as the current quickens and quickens and another rock smashes against her knee but she hardly feels it as she snatches another breath and she feels the river fall and she falls with it as water whitens around her and she falls deep into the whiteness and as she rises her head scrapes against a rock ceiling and the water holds her there and she tells herself don’t breathe but the need rises inside her beginning in the upper stomach then up through her chest and throat and as that need reaches her mouth her mouth and nose open and the lungs explode in pain and then the pain is gone as bright colors shatter around her like glass shards, and she remembers her sixth-grade science class, the gurgle of the aquarium at the back of the room, the smell of chalk dust that morning the teacher held a prism out the window so it might fill with color, and she has a final, beautiful thought—that she is now inside that prism and knows something even the teacher does not know, that the prism’s colors are voices, voices that swirl around her head like a crown, and at that moment her arms and legs she did not even know were flailing cease and she becomes part of the river.

The search and rescue squad and the sheriff arrived at the falls late that afternoon. Two of the squad members were brothers, one in his early twenties, the other thirty. They had a carpentry business, building patios and decks for lawyers and doctors from Greenville and Columbia who owned second homes in the mountains. The third man, the diver, was in his early forties and taught biology at the county high school. The sheriff looked at his watch and figured they had two hours at most before the gorge darkened. Even so the diver did not hurry to put on his wet suit and air tanks. He smoked a cigarette and between puffs talked to the sheriff about the high school’s baseball team. They had worked together before and knew death punched no time clock.

When the diver was ready, a length of nylon rope was clasped tight under his arms. The older, stronger brother held the other end. The diver waded into the river, the rope trailing behind him like a leash. He dipped his mask in the water, put it on, and leaned forward. The three men onshore watched as the black fins propelled the diver into the hydraulic’s ceaseless blizzard of whitewater. The men on the bank sat on rocks and waited. With his free hand, the older brother pointed upstream to a bend where he’d caught a five-pound trout last fall. The sheriff asked what he’d used for bait but didn’t hear the answer because the mask bobbed up in the headwater’s foam.

The brother tightened the slack and pulled but nothing gave until the others grabbed hold as well. They pulled the diver into the shallows and helped him onto shore. Between watery coughs he told them he’d found her in the undercut behind the hydraulic. She had been upright, her head and back and legs pressed against a rock slab. Only her hair moved, its long strands streaming upward. As the diver had drifted closer, he saw that her eyes were open. Their faces were inches apart when he slipped an arm around her waist. Then the hydraulic ripped free the mask and mouthpiece, grabbed the dive light, spiraling it toward the darkness.

The diver told the men kneeling beside him that the girl’s blue eyes had life in them. He could feel her heart beating against his chest and hear her whispering. Before or after your mask was torn off, the sheriff asked. The diver did not know, but swore that he’d never enter the river again.

The younger brother scoffed, while the older spoke of narcosis though the pool was no more than twenty feet deep. But the sheriff did not dismiss what the diver said. He too had seen strange and inexplicable things involving the dead but had never mentioned them to others and did not choose to now. We’ll find another way, he said, but that river has to lower some before I allow anyone else in there.

The diver had trouble sleeping afterward. Every night when he closed his eyes, he saw the girl’s wide blue eyes, the flowing golden hair. His wife slept beside him, her body curled into his chest. They had no children and now he was glad for that. He had seen a picture of the parents in the local paper. They had been on the shore, within thirty feet of the undercut that held their daughter, the expressions on their faces beyond grief.

On the third night, the diver fell into a deeper sleep and the girl came with him. They were in the undercut again but now the river was tepid and he could breathe. As he embraced her, she whispered that this world was better than the one above and she should never have been afraid. He emerged in his wife’s embrace. It’s just a bad dream, she kept saying until he quit gasping. His wife closed her eyes and was quickly asleep, but he could not so went into the kitchen and graded lab tests until dawn.

The girl remained in the river. Volunteers cast grappling hooks from the banks and worked them like lures through the pool or stood in shallows or on rocks and jabbed with long metal poles. Some of the old-timers suggested dynamite but the girl’s parents would not hear of it. The sheriff said what they needed was a week without rain.

The diver slept little the next few nights. In class he placed the students in small groups and had them discuss assigned chapters among themselves. He knew they talked about the prom instead of pupae and chrysalides, but he didn’t care. On the third afternoon, he skipped the teacher’s meeting and sat alone in his classroom. The school, emptied of students, was quiet, the only sound the gurgle of the aquarium. He would never speak to anyone, not even his wife, about what happened in the classroom’s stillness, but that evening he told the sheriff he’d dive for the girl again.

Days passed. Rain came often, long rains that made every fold of ridge land a tributary and merged earth and water into a deep orange-yellow rush. Banks disappeared as the river reached out and dragged them under. But that was only surface. In the undercut all remained quiet and still, the girl’s transformation unrushed, gentle. Crayfish and minnows unknitted flesh from bone, attentive to loosed threads.

Then the rains stopped and the river ran clear again. Boulders vanished for weeks reappeared. Sandbars and stick jams regathered in new configurations. The water warmed and caddis flies broke through the river’s skin to make their brief flights before falling back into their element.

The sheriff called the diver and told him the river was low enough to try again. The next day they walked the half mile down the path to the falls. There were five of them this time, the sheriff, his deputy, the two brothers, and the diver. The sheriff insisted on two ropes, making sure they stayed taut. The water was clearer than last time and offered less resistance. The diver entered the abeyance as though parting a curtain, the river suddenly muted.

She was less of what she had been, the blue rubbed from her eyes, flesh freed from the chandelier of bone. He touched what once had been a hand. The river whispered to him that it would not be long now.

When he returned to shore, he told them her body was gone, not even a scrap of clothing or bone. He told them the last hard rain must have swept her downstream. The younger brother said the diver should go back and search the left and right sides of the falls. He argued the body could still be there. The deputy suggested they lower an underwater camera into the pool.

The sheriff shook his head and said to let her be. The men walked up the trail, back toward their vehicles, their lives. The midday sun leaned close and dazzling. Dogwoods bloomed small white stars. The diver knew in the coming days the petals would find their way into the river, drifting onto sandbars and gilding the backs of pools, and the diver knew some would drift through the rapids and over the falls into the hydraulic. They would furl amid the last bones and like the last bones they would finally slip free.