Perfect Family (25 page)

“River left!” Keith thundered from behind. “Paddle like hell!” William dug in, impressed at how sure of himself Keith was on the river. Mercurial.

They eddied out into a backwater at the shore. “Big strainer downriver,” Keith said. “I'll point it out later.” They pulled the kayak up the bank and behind some trees, in case a river trip floated by. William followed Keith a few hundred feet up from the river by a path through dense growth.

The cabin sat on a ledge overlooking the river. It had three sides and a thatched roof and was built crudely of rough-hewn logs. The
front was a makeshift wall of stone piled shoulder-high, with an opening to walk through. “Go on in and look around,” Keith said.

William stepped inside, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness. It smelled damply of wood smoke, and it was cold. Something seemed to slide sideways inside him at seeing it all. His father had built this place with his own hands. He had breathed this air. There was a rotted tarpaulin on the floor, a small woodstove, and a pile of split wood beside it. A large pot hung from a hook overhead. William took it down and ran his hands over it, fingering the dents, the burned underside. He replaced it carefully. Two metal plates and two forks lay on the floor. He crouched and ran his hand over those as well, trying to picture the man who had used them. His father's fishing gear hung on the back wall. A small sheet of paper caught his eye. It was pinned to a beam. He read it in the dim light.
TO DO
was printed across the top in big letters.
Stove cold. Set kindling. Matches
. William touched the writing, which had been done with force in pencil, the letters deep in the paper.

It felt both foreign and familiar, being in this place where the ghost of his father hung everywhere, a man who liked to live in the woods. A man who could build things. A stranger but very like himself. He wished his father might have known about him, that he'd become strong, a climber, and that he was most at peace in the mountains. Would his father have loved him, knowing that?

“So what do you think?” Keith's bulk filled the door.

“Nice,” William said.

“It's yours whenever you want to use it. This is all wilderness. Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness. It gets no better than this. Come on. I want to show you something while there's sun.”

Keith led the way out behind the lean-to to a steep, densely overgrown switchback that zigzagged up an incline. As they went, William could hear that Keith's breathing was labored. The rise was steep, no question, maybe a two-hundred-vertical-foot gain in a quarter of a mile. Keith was full of contrasts. Powerful on the water, weak on the climb. When they got to the top, it was fantastic: a rock
outcropping with a view for miles in three directions. Below them, the Salmon glittered in the late sun like a silver ribbon twisting through the mountains. “What do you think?” Keith asked him. “Is this great or what?”

“It's great,” William said. And for a few moments he felt at peace with everything, here in his father's place.

“I knew you'd like it.” Keith had his back to William and was rocking on the balls of his feet, his fists planted into his sides.

“So what do you want?” William asked.

Keith swung around. “What do you mean?”

“From us, from my family, from me.”

“Nothing.”

“Come on. You come all the way east two times, and you don't want anything?”

“You came all the way west,” Keith said.

“Different,” William said.

“Don't give me that. It was you who called Mim awhile back and wouldn't say who you were. She's not stupid, you know.”

“She wouldn't have told me,” William said.

“That's right.” Keith made a show of checking his watch. He took the lead again going down, and William followed, keeping a wide berth between Keith and himself so he wouldn't be right on the guy's heels. Keith was slow and jerky in the way of people who didn't trust the terrain. He hung on to tree limbs, and in a steep place, he knelt on a rock instead of staying on his feet, the way he should. William enjoyed finding fault with Keith. The knee thing was key; a knee could slip.

Back in the lean-to, Keith put a few pieces of wood into the fire circle out front and lit it. He offered William some Scotch he kept hidden in a well under the tarpaulin. He opened a can of nuts. “I'm going to show you something I never showed anybody.” He dug into the hard dirt floor at the door of the cabin, using a large trowel. He unearthed a small metal box that contained an envelope, which he gave to William. “He kept it here,” he said. “Mim never saw it.”

William reread the parts about himself. Premature? He walked to the edge of the clearing and looked down through the trees to the river.
Catch up at two or in adolescence.
As a kid, he'd been so small. In grammar school, he'd been the smallest and thinnest, always made to sit in the front row in school. This in a family of giants. The girls
came along smart as whips. William had had to try so hard. And the physical stuff. God, how he'd worked, lifting weights in his room late into the night. Pushing himself. Testing himself. Whittling his body. And he'd succeeded. He despised weakness both in himself and in others. And all because he'd been premature.

Keith squatted on his haunches and shook his head. “You were pretty sickly,” he said.

William tensed and flexed his hands, reminding himself of his strength. “You never answered my question, Keith. What do you want?”

“You walk like him, you know. I was watching you. I noticed that at the funeral. You're probably like him. He could be a son of a bitch. I'll bet you can be, too. I'm more like my mom. I love saying that. My real mom. She knew what she wanted, the big house, the rich husband, and she went after it. I admire her for that. I'm able to do that.”

“She wasn't like that,” William said. “Not at all.”

“I want in,” Keith said. “To answer your question.”

“In what?”

“The family,” Keith said. “It's my family, too.”

It was laughable, actually. It was nuts. “You could have told us that.” William crossed the clearing to the point where the path led back down to the river. He could see water through the trees.
More water,
he thought. He could hear the uneasy sound of the river. On the other side of the river was his car, his safety. “He ever pull you off a fence at a swimming pool?”

“Sure did.” Keith laughed. “Held me under if I didn't get it right. But that's another story for another time. The way I read that letter is that if it hadn't been for you, she would have stayed.”

“It wasn't me. It was him,” William said. His mother had done the only thing she could. She'd taken William to save him. She'd loved him because he was weak and he needed protection. Not the greatest thing to find out about yourself. But it explained things, like how he always expected the other guy to have the advantage.

“There would have been no Mim.” Keith's voice was like a front
coming in, a change in the weather that signaled danger. The guy was unstable. He was standing, arms outstretched, a cunning smile. “I was the better brother,” he said. “I was the good brother. The strong one.”

“What do you say we get going before the sun goes down?” It had been a mistake to come up here. “We can talk as we go. Talk when we get back.”

“You scared of me?” Keith asked.

“It's going to get dark fast.”

“You didn't answer the question.”

“No,” William said. A lie. “I'll get us some water for the fire.”

“Suit yourself,” Keith said.

William looked in the lean-to and found an empty bleach bottle. He made his way down the embankment, weighing his risks without knowing for sure what they were. The exposure here was the river, the miles ahead of them. William was a strong swimmer, but strength didn't matter. You couldn't buck a current with strength. You had to ride it out. As he made his way down the path, he reviewed what he knew. If he ended up in the water, he needed to go feet first.
Don't fight it. Ease over to the shore.
The unknown was Keith.

They'd stowed the kayak behind some trees, and William pulled it out to look it over in what was left of the light. He checked for the paddles, but they were gone.

“Looking for these?” Keith asked from behind him.

William swung around. Keith was holding both paddles.

“You weren't thinking about leaving without me, were you?”

“Why would I do that?” William said.

“I got the fire,” Keith said. “Buried it with dirt. We can push off. I want you in the front again.”

They shoved off. Now the river was a hungry black, and the mountains rising to either side cast giant shadows. The water was loud. William dug in his paddle blindly, straining to see ahead for obstacles, dangers. Keith was quiet, unlike when they'd come. No orders. No running off at the mouth about growing up in Idaho. Noth
ing. They coasted awhile. The water was swift but not dangerous. And it was cold against William's skin through the thin plastic of the kayak floor. In the shoals, rocks close to the surface knocked against his shins.

He heard the sound of the rapid before he saw it. A faint sound, lower and deeper than the regular rush of the river.

“It's nothing,” Keith shouted forward.

“Let's stop and take a look,” William shouted back.

“Hell, no,” Keith shouted back. “I've done it hundreds of times, man.”

“I haven't,” William said. “We're pulling over.” He paddled hard and alone, pulling the kayak out of the current and into quieter water without any help from Keith. He jumped out and landed knee-deep in the cold water.

“You're being a candy ass here,” Keith said. “I know where all the holes are. We run a course right down the middle, between them. I'll tell you what to do.”

“I'm not going down that blind.”

“You're no brother of mine,” Keith said.

William made his way up a steep incline and walked to a point beyond the bend in the river where he could see the rapids on the other side. They showed up as frothing grayish water against the dark river. They were big. “I thought you said nothing more than a category two,” he said.

“That's a cat two,” Keith said, scrambling up the path behind him.

“I don't think so,” William said.

“You don't know much about moving water,” Keith said. He was behind William, standing too close. William stepped back from the edge instinctively. Keith pointed to the left, to the point just after the bend. William knew the rapid Keith pointed to was higher than a two. “We'll come in up there. We'll keep right for a bit. Then ferry left. That wave you see”—Keith pointed downstream about twenty feet—“is a hole. We want to miss the hole.”

Looking down at the water, William felt his bowels loosen, as they
had that day on Peekamoose. His stomach churned. Keith continued, “As soon as we're around it, we need to head right again, and fast, so we can go down the middle. It's against the current there, but if we stay left, you see, we run into a pulse against the canyon wall.” William studied the scene. He did the thing he knew how to do. Use his head. He repeated to himself what Keith had said, making a mental diagram. A zigzag shape. Start right, move left, drop around, below the hole, then move right again and shoot down the middle.

“You don't believe in life jackets?” William asked as they made their way back to the kayak.

“This is Idaho,” Keith said.

William had no choice but to get in the kayak again. The water ran slow around the bend toward the rapids, like a big easy pool. Then it seemed to rise, as if gathering strength for what lay ahead. Small eddies swirled about the kayak. “Paddle up,” Keith said. “Let it take us for now. It'll pull us right.” William lifted his paddle from the water and waited, his heart racing. The sound of the rapids grew louder as they rounded the bend. Ahead, the water frothed and roiled. It looked nothing like it had looked from above. His stomach heaved. He was trying to see where the hole was that had been so clear from above, like a big smile. At this level, the water just churned wildly. But they were being pulled slowly to the right, as Keith had said.