Run River (2 page)

Although she did not suppose that Knight would have brought any new books about either Columbus Iselin or Mad Dog Coll, even to simply sit in the dark and watch the lights on the levee road would be better than going to Francie Templeton’s, where everyone would be hot and someone would drink too much and say something with a familiar edge to it; going to river parties had become unpleasantly like watching reel after reel of badly focused home movies, the prints a little frayed by wear.
Here’s the kitchen and there’s Joe Templeton, trying to pour Francie’s drink down the sink; look, Francie’s stamping her foot and it’s not even midnight yet; watch now, here comes little Jennie Mason, looking in the garden for Bud Mason; remember that, because next you’ll see Jennie Mason (who, in a sequence spliced out of this reel, unfortunately but naturally misinterpreted Bud Mason’s presence in the garden with Lily McClellan) being comforted by Everett McClellan; that’s Everett, there in the long-suffering suit
. You did not even need audio. You could count on little Jennie somebody, could count on all the same faces, all the same games; at one of Francie’s parties last year, when Ryder Channing had announced belligerently that he owed money to five of the ten men in the room, it had occurred to Lily that she had been to bed with seven, and in four cases could not remember exactly when or where. They were all, now, one error in taste. Although she had not been to a river party since June, she could remember what had happened after that one with the same distorted clarity that hung about the whole of June: it had not been the first party she had deserted for a hotel room, but it had been the first party she had deserted for a room at the Senator, which she thought of, still, as her father’s hotel. Her father had liked the Senator bar, and several times when she was small he had taken her there for lemonade with grenadine. (The morning after that party, clutching Everett’s pillow to her stomach, she had dug her fingernails into her arm until the skin bruised, but by noon, driving to the lake by herself, she had begun again to see it all as Everett’s fault. It would not have happened had Everett been at the party instead of home brooding about his sister; none of it would ever have happened had Everett been there.)

You better cut it out
, Ryder Channing had said in June, that day at the lake which had been part of the trouble, and although Ryder was the last one to have said it, Ryder was right. A party could begin it all again—two drinks, someone from out of town, Everett ignoring her, that was all it would take—and when Everett came upstairs at four-thirty she told him that she did not want to go to Francie Templeton’s.

“It’s too hot. You go if you want.”

She was brushing her hair, pulling it down over her face, trying to find the gray Julie had claimed to see among the dark. Lily could not imagine herself with gray hair: in the first place she was not yet thirty-seven and in the second place she had always imagined her style to be striking frailty. You could not, with graying hair, look strikingly frail; you could only look frail.

“Knight and Julie are going,” she added.

Everett sat down by the window. Both his face and his khaki shirt were splotched with dust and sweat. “I think you should go. They’re expecting you.”

“I have a headache,” she said mildly. “I can’t help that, can I. I mean that’s what anybody’d have to call an act of God, isn’t it. Even Francie Templeton. You’ll catch cold if you sit by the fan in a wet shirt.”

“You and your mother.”

“It’s congenital. I read it in the
Reader’s Digest
. Five New York doctors. How to Make Headaches Work for You. Anyway. You go.”

“All right,” he said without interest. “All right.”

Everett began whistling tunelessly through his teeth. Only that and the whine of the electric fan broke the silence. Lily was aware that he did not take his eyes from her bare arms as she brushed her hair.

“We could go away this winter,” he said abruptly.

“Go away,” she repeated. “Go away where?”

“We could take a trip. We could take one of those boats that keeps going for forty-one days or something. We could go to Alaska or Australia or Europe or someplace.”

“Not Alaska, baby. I mean it couldn’t be much fun to go to Alaska in the winter.”

“Somewhere,” he insisted.

“Australia. Imagine.”

“Listen,” Everett said. “I’d like it. We’ve never done that, gone away together. For a long trip. It’ll be good for you.”

It was unlike Everett to want to go away. Since the war he had left the ranches only for occasional weekends, growers’ meetings, funerals down the Valley; one might have thought him some agrarian Ivar Kreuger, guardian of an ephemeral empire in need of constant control, split-second manipulation. Although she had wanted him to go abroad with her and the children when they went the summer of 1957
(There’s no point if you don’t go, Everett, baby, there’s no use in sending me off alone, it’ll only be the same when I come back, please, Everett)
, he had refused.

“Could you get away?” she asked now.

“I think so.” He stood up and opened a shutter. “Anyway,” he added. “You and Julie could go.”

“She can’t leave school. She has to study for her College Boards and besides she thinks she’s in love. She thinks she’s going to get pinned to that Beta from Berkeley. I doubt that she could tear herself away long enough to see us off at the boat.”

“You don’t mean that boy she had up here.”

“That’s right. That very one.”

“I didn’t like him. You know I didn’t like him.” Everett paused. “He looked like a little wop in that jacket he wore up here.”

Lily said nothing. The boy was six foot two, an inch taller than Everett; was almost as blond as Everett had been at his age and as Knight was now; and had worn, one day in July when he drove up to see Julie, a madras jacket identical to one hanging in Knight’s closet. Everett had not liked him because he had made a drink for himself and offered one to Julie.

“Anyway,” Lily said finally. “That’s not the point, for me to go with Julie. I mean is it?”

“A trip would be good for you,” Everett repeated without looking at her.

“It would be just like before.”

“We’ll see,” he said. “A long vacation.”

She leaned back against the walnut headboard of the bed until the carved leaves cut into her back.
A long vacation
.

Sitting down beside her, Everett took the hairbrush from her hand and began to brush her hair. When she let her head drop against his arm he put the brush down and began massaging her shoulders.

“Julie said she saw gray,” Lily said.

“That’s not so bad, is it?”

“She thinks it would be distinguished. She thinks it’s very distinguished of you to be getting gray. Very distinguished and about time. I told her forty was not generally considered the other side of the mountain, and she just looked at me.”

Everett kneaded the muscles in her neck. “There’s nothing wrong with Julie.”

“I never said there was. That helps my headache.”

“Get in bed,” he said, still holding her shoulders.

She pulled back the sheet with one hand, slid the straps of her slip down with the other, and kicked off her straw sandals. Lying on the sheet, she watched Everett close the shutters again and take off his clothes. She had always liked the rangy way he looked without his clothes. He was the only man she had ever seen whose bones looked right to her.

“Oh, Christ,” she whispered as she reached for him. “Everett, baby, we’re so tired.”

Before he was finished she began to cry, a tearless weeping compounded in part of pleasure, in part of weariness, and long after it was over she still clung to him, her shoulders moving in faint convulsive sobs, her legs caught around him. (They could lie together now only in the afternoons or in the middle of the night, after both had been asleep; not since the first years of their marriage had they been able to turn out the lights and turn to each other. Some pride overcame them instead, some reticence or aversion. Each, over the years, had read a great deal.) Nerveless, Lily lay listening to the fan, to the mosquitoes, to Knight’s car outside the house; listening without moving to the persistent ring of the telephone and finally to the knocking on the bedroom door.

“Your ma’s sleeping, Knight,” China Mary called up from the kitchen; “she don’t want no telephone callers now. You tell him he can call back.”

“Call back, hell,” Everett murmured, half asleep. “Why’d they answer it at all. Why don’t they turn it down so they don’t hear it ring.”

“Why don’t you go to sleep,” Lily whispered, kissing his cheek. Everett’s aversion to answering the telephone had seemed, when they were first married, a great compliment:
we won’t have it known, dear, that we own a tel-e-pho-own
. It had taken her almost two years to see that it had nothing to do with her, that Everett was about the telephone exactly the way he was about the mail, as wary as if he were investigating night noises at the basement door.

“You lie still a minute,” she added, “and I’ll get you a drink.”

Although she would just as soon have sat on the bed whispering with Everett and drinking bourbon for another hour (the telephone rang twice again), they did, eventually, go downstairs for dinner. Julie was late, coming in some time after the artichokes with her face flushed and her eyes bright, a cotton shirt pulled over her swimming suit and a faded pink grosgrain ribbon tied around her wet blond hair (she had driven Mrs. Templeton’s T-Bird and talk about
power
on the
pull
out—
not
automatic,
a straight-stick T-Bird
if you can imagine), and somewhere between the artichokes and Julie’s arrival Lily took the telephone call, told Ryder Channing that she could be home, later on, which could have been easy enough but
count on her
. Everett did not ask who had called (he knew, he always knew) and as she saw the heat and tension tightening the vein on his forehead she knew that she had to say something. What she said, elaborately casual in that rush of confused guilt and love, was that she might go to the Templetons’ after all.
Count on her
. Never mind. Some of the tension left Everett’s face and it would be all right. She could take her own car, leave early (she did, Everett knew, have the headache), meet Ryder on the dock but only for a few minutes; figure out, later, some way to make it all right, make everyone happy. Dinner, at least, had been saved. Nonetheless, she began to wish immediately that she had never answered the telephone at all, began to wish that she and Everett could have stayed in bed while the sun gradually left the room and the crickets began and the night wind came up off the river (they had done that sometimes the first year they were married, stayed in bed in the falling dark, not talking, drinking a little now and then from the bottle of bourbon Everett always kept by the bed); began to regret that they could not have lain inviolable on that walnut bed from five o’clock until the following morning.

2

Everett sat on the dock fifteen minutes before Lily came. He heard her long before he saw her, because now at one o’clock the moon was entirely down. Although house lights flickered on the water downriver, the mile and a half of McClellan riverfront showed only the even flash of the Coast Guard channel markers; the light on the dock was gone, burned out he didn’t know when.
Remind Liggett
, he thought, abruptly alarmed about the dock light. (A dock light first, a torn fence next, maybe the pump goes off and loses its prime: before long the whole place would come crumbling down, would vanish before his eyes, revert to whatever it had been when his great-great-grandfather first came to the Valley.) Through the growth of oak and cottonwood Everett could see a single light on the third floor of the house; the lower stories were blocked out by the levee.

During those fifteen minutes Everett thought only of the dock light
(Liggett should watch these things)
and of the hops. Although he still held his father’s .38-caliber revolver in one hand, he did not think about that, any more than he thought about Ryder Channing’s flashlight, still burning, its thin light filtering through three inches of muddy water, caught there in the tangle of roots that showed where the current had undercut the bank. Next week they would be taking the hops down, stripping the vines from the strings. Each August, just before picking, Everett was suffused with a single fear, an apprehension specific in exactly the sense that nightmares are specific: the unshakable conviction that his kiln would explode as the hops dried. He could never sleep during the week the hops were drying. Sometimes he would go downstairs and sit all night in the kitchen, because he could see the kiln from the kitchen window. It was not, this or any year, that the loss of the crop could ruin him: he had fewer acres in hops this summer than any since his father’s death, fifteen years before. There was no longer any money in hops: everyone on the river was getting out of them.
“It’s a combination of factors,” he had tried to explain, repeating by rote what the buyers told him, to his sister Sarah and her third husband when they came through in June on their way from Philadelphia to the Islands. (“Not Honolulu, Everett,” Sarah had corrected him. “Maui. Oahu’s been ruined for years.”) “Your shares aren’t paying what they used to pay because we aren’t making what we used to make. For one thing people aren’t drinking as much beer as they used to drink. For another the brewers are making what they call a lighter beer, using fewer hops.”

The loss of the hops would not matter to Sarah. Nothing about the ranch had ever mattered to Sarah. But Everett had seen little all week but that familiar image: his drying kiln burning, the flames breaking out against a night sky and still (impossibly, as in a nightmare) throwing no light into the dark.
It would happen this year for certain
, he thought now.

When he heard Lily he sat perfectly still, aware suddenly of the .38 in his hand, the blood on the sleeve of the Dacron suit Lily had bought for him at Brooks Brothers in San Francisco. He heard her high heels on the wooden steps down the river side of the levee
(Jesus Christ
, he thought with abstract tenderness,
high-heeled shoes to get screwed on the beach)
, heard her pushing aside the oak branches, heard her call his name.