The Best American Mystery Stories 2014 (40 page)

It hurt to see Kelly out of the rafting game. And yes, maybe we’re guilty of feeling something special for Kelly, of yoking our fortunes to his. We rooted for him. He showed what our kind could accomplish, if given the chance, in this sly new world. We could go toe-to-toe, guide with skill, make that money. We were just as good as outsiders, almost equals, we weren’t just white mountain trash. The sting of the rafters’ uneasy looks when we pumped their gas or offered directions—with a few more Kelly Bischoffs, why, all that would end. Now, nothing.

Then, December. Reed Judy was driving the overpass, making for the tavern at Clendenin Mill, the one that burned last year. A lone figure was washed in the spastic glow of headlights and sucked back into the darkness. Reed pulled over, grit and snow popping under his tires. The man walked up to meet him.

“Can I give you a lift?” Reed asked.

“No, bud. Just taking a look at the river.”

Reed heard the Gauley muttering in its dumb winter tongue, but the canyon was black, no river there. He could see the distant warning lights, like foundered stars, where the dam stood low in the sky. Where it divided river from lake. He asked, “You sure? It’s blue-cold out.”

“Oh, I’m parked down at the turnaround.”

It was Kelly.

“Suit yourself,” Reed said.

“You Steve’s boy? The welder?”

“Yeah.”

“You don’t look like your mother.” Kelly pinned him down with a stare. “Say—you were down there that day. You drug the river. I know you did. Down to Meadow Creek.”

Reed panicked, lied. “No,” he said. “Don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Yes, you do. You seen her. Amanda Stallings.” Kelly winced. “Did she look okay? God, she was a good girl. She wasn’t tore up too bad, was she?”

When Reed didn’t answer, Kelly said, “I didn’t mean to drown her.”

“Course you didn’t! Nobody said you did! You don’t have to say that.”

Kelly said mournfully, “I don’t think you understand,” and said no more.

Telling it around, Reed itched a particular place on the back of his hand. “Looks like he’s aged twenty years, he does.”

A month later Chet saw Kelly on the overpass, hands clamped on the rail. When Chet told the story, he fidgeted and blushed. The sight had shaken him. “I thought about hitting him with the truck and saving the poor crazy son of a bitch from . . . from . . . I don’t know.”

And this was something to say, because in a place with so few people, each life was held precious, everyone was necessary. We saw Kelly again and again that winter. State troopers made him walk the line. He was not drunk. “Kiss my red ass,” he cried. “Public right-of-way.”

We waited for him to jump.

Every night the dam drew Kelly there. To avoid Route 19, we looped far out of our way, over the crookedest mountain cuts. It hurt too much to see him. But others were vigilant. Every morning the dam operators of the Army Corps—three lonesome, demoted engineers—scanned the banks and the tailrace with binoculars. They had a pool going as to when Kelly’s lifeless body would finally wash up. That sortie out of the powerhouse was the high point of their day. This, after all, was a backwater post.

Lyndon Johnson, a president we loved, dedicated Summersville Dam in 1966. Before cutting the ribbon, he made a joke about losing his pocketknife on the way and maybe having the Secret Service throw up a roadblock at the Nicholas County line to find whoever had pocketed his Schrade—too fine a thing to leave just laying around—since he reckoned all West Virginia boys come out of the womb knowing a good knife when they see one. We laughed and Lyndon took out a bandanna and swabbed at his brow, looking like any worried man.

Acres of virgin concrete. Smooth, vertical. The dam was tall as the face of God. There was nothing else to compare it to. Nothing of such stability, such mass.

The rising waters flooded the village of Gad, home to a store, a filling station, and three hundred people. Eminent domain moved them, even the dead from their graves. (When Kelly stood on the overpass, was he trying to see his mother’s village through 90 feet of water? No. He was thinking only of the girl.) Quietly, later, Gauley Season was created in 1986 by an act of Congress. We had no idea how life would change.

Over unruly rivers and hogbacks, the rectangular Gauley River National Recreation Area was placed like a stencil. It’s shaded aquamarine on the maps. Lord—maps and new maps. The rapids had names before the rafters came: Glenmorgan Crossing and Mink Shoals, Gooseneck, Mussellshell. They brought a new language: cubic feet per second, highside and chicken-line, hydraulic and haystack. They renamed the rapids: Insignificant, Pure Screaming Hell, Junkyard, the Devil’s Asshole. Unwritten, our names flew away like thistledown on the wind. Except for Pillow Rock. Our fathers named the rock for the river drivers napping there in the sun after a punishing morning of busting jams and poling logs downriver. We snuck to the foot of the overpass and spray-painted in green neon,
PILLOW ROCK AHEAD
!!! The last thing a rafter sees before tipping over the falls. So the name remained.

True, the release goes against nature. Gauley Season scours the river, blasting fish from their lies, eyes agog, air bladders ruptured. Even so, Gauley Season brings certain benefits. To atone for the fishery’s death, the Department of Natural Resources grows California rainbow trout in hatcheries and drops ten thousand pounds into the canyon by helicopter. The fish have nubby snouts, open ulcers, and tattered fins from rubbing against the concrete raceways. Gray trout, we call them. They taste like they’ve been stamped out of cat food, but they’re free. Come spring, we watch them rain and smack the waters. We cast hooks until every last one’s caught and creeled. Sometimes the fish hit the rocks as the helicopter swoops away. Raccoons revel in the blood. They lick their wiry hands, fumbling them in an attitude just like prayer. They rejoice.

“There he is!” an engineer cried. “You win, Sully! He jumped! He finally jumped!”

The others ran out of the powerhouse. He adjusted the parallax of his binoculars in a gloved fist. “Shit. False alarm.” What he thought was Kelly was a dead deer twisted—twisting—in sunken willows.

A year passed as they do, quickly, as if in a dream or a coma. We thought of the dead girl and her father less and less, or tried to.

Snow and thaw and rain. Hay was cut in the fields, sallies hatched off the river in lime-and-sulfur clouds, deer grew their velvet crowns. September gleaned a cool wind from the Alleghenies. Labor Day weekend, Pillow Rock gathered its people. We hollered as the Army Corps opened up the gates. Upriver, the beating of ten thousand hooves. We inhaled the water’s breath of iron and cedar.

A standing wave broke over Sweet’s Falls. The river augured and torqued, a muscular green. Shards of flotsam and jetsam: broken sycamores and garbage bags, bleached timber, a child’s tricycle. A water-bloated calf wheeled downriver, eyes blue as heaven.

The air crackled with anticipation. Gas stations and hotels and campgrounds had pitched their banners early:
RAFTERS WELCOME
,
COLD BEER HOT SHOWERS
,
ASK ABOUT OUR GROUP RATES
. This would be a record-breaking season. The
Washington Post
had featured us in their Sunday magazine. The headline read “
Montani Semper Liberi
.” “West Virginia’s secret is out: the number-two river in America, number seven in the world. One question remains. Can the whitewater industry save this place?” With the glee of discoverers, they told of the spine-rattling third-world pike that is Route 19. That wasn’t so bad—maybe the Department of Highways would be embarrassed and put in for federal money. What nettled most were the things they plucked out to describe: junk cars in the river, raggedy bearhounds jumping in their kennels, crosses at Carnifex Ferry that say
GET RIGHT WITH GOD
and
THERE IS NO WATER IN HELL
. All eye-battering, all to be laughed at. Didn’t talk about the landing we poured, the oil-and-chip road we laid for their wobbling, overburdened shuttles. “Relax,” Mayor Cline said. “Sometimes the fire that cooks your food burns your fingers—you can’t bitch.” It’s dog Latin, the state slogan. We are, it says, always free.

Kelly Bischoff walked down the fisherman’s trail in a ragged red backpack.

Pillow Rock went silent.

Work-blackened jeans, dirt in his hair. He peeled off his shirt, shook it of coal dust, and folded it with care. The words
Sweet
and
Sour
were inked in cursive blue over his nipples, with arrows offering up directions. A black panther climbed his bicep, claws drawing stylized blood. A Vietnam mark. He shucked his boots and tucked his cigarettes, wallet, and keys into them. Finally he pulled out a penknife and snagged off his workpants to the knee.

“You’re back among the fold,” Reed said to him.

Kelly smiled. “Good to see you all.”

“You working that strip job?”

“Yes I am,” Kelly said, looking side to side, daring anyone to say a word against it.

“Jesus Was Our Savior, Coal Was Our King. Say, you probably haven’t watched from this angle.”

Kelly said, “I seen them go over. Nineteen seventy-nine, it was. Fishing here. Seen Philadelphy Pete Dragan go over Sweet’s, back in them too-big green army rafts. Said,
Hell, I can do that
.”

Kelly watched the falls, apart from the rest. What could he read there? The water herded yellow foam into the backwater, a rancid butterfat color, thick enough you could draw your name in it with a fish pole. Where we’d saved four lives last year. Five if we counted Kelly’s. Hard to tell if we should or not. If Kelly longed for his old life, he did not say. He just watched the water’s horseplay like he could augur it. Maybe he could.

Rafters! We waved and hollered as usual, but Kelly radiated a complex silence. So we grew quiet, not so joyful, and the day grew old. Shadows slithered on the rock. One hundred ninety-seven rafts. Not a one drowned. Clouds came and snuffed our shadows. The air had a little bite to it, so we pulled on sweaters and packed to leave. Slush tipped from coolers, the last orphan beer cracked and drained. Kelly just sat there.

“Them are your people,” we said, waving at the last raft.

Kelly shrugged. We gave Reed Judy some hopeful looks, so he hunkered down next to our fallen idol. “You coming? We’re going to Bud Shreve’s, grill some food. Be fun.”

“No, I’ll set here awhile.” Kelly rummaged around his backpack and found a gray surplus blanket. Was he too good for us?

“All right, bud. You hear about the blind kid up here got bit by the rattlesnake?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Least he didn’t see it coming.”

Kelly smiled and looked at the ground. “That’s a good one,” he said. Didn’t even flinch; there was hope for him yet. But then he whispered something that turned Reed pale and bloodless—and that Reed wouldn’t tell about till years later. “You’re the one lied about Meadow Creek,” Kelly said. “Lied about finding her. Why would you do that to me?”

We left him there as the drawknife of dusk peeled back the world.

In heirloom fifteen-verse ballads, lovers of the drowned flung themselves in, so their bones could frolic and mingle. But Kelly never trucked in old ways. Instead he sat with us.

For the rest of the season, Kelly was the first on Pillow Rock and last to go. Word went round he’d slept there through the weekends, under a ragged tent of laurel. “But he looks to be shaving,” someone said. Sure enough, he never missed a single raft. He perched there like an osprey. When the maples flared, he began telling stories of the dead girl.

It was hard not to listen. He’d sidle up if you broke away to piss or get another beer. She wanted to be an environmental lawyer, he said. She was an athlete. Once she ran a mile in five minutes and thirty-two seconds, a fluke—her average was six-fifteen. She stayed with her father weekends and summer. She loved dogs. “Oh, who doesn’t?” Chet asked him.

On a coolish day in October, for the first and only time, he spoke to us as a group. Our numbers had trickled, as they do at season’s end. Kelly chewed his fingernails, his thumbnail. Sucking the taste from them. Then he spoke.

In Bethesda, the dead girl’s home was the size of . . .—he struggled for comparison—. . . of the county courthouse, the one with the statue of Nancy Hart, who seduced her jailer, shot him in his stupid mouth, and brought back a Confederate cavalry to burn the town. Why did our forefathers raise a statue to someone who destroyed them? Our people fought at Carnifex Ferry. Left the trees full of minié balls, as much lead as wood, so they grew hunched and buzzardy under their mineral burden. We sparred and set the boats on fire. They whirled like burning flags in the night and snuffed themselves hissing in the Gauley. Why not a statue to that?

“That’s history,” Kelly said. “Pull your head out your ass.”

“Nothing happens no more. Day in, day out.”

He said, “You have no idea.”

“Idea of what?”

To prove us wrong, Kelly plucked up and spoke—confident now. He explained the last day of his rafting career.

When they broke for lunch in the canyon, Kelly offered to lead any stouthearted rafter up Barranshe Run to see the five falls, a stair-step of cataracts up the mountainside.

Hours from drowning, Greg Stallings asked, “Is it far?”

“Little bit. Just follow me, Greg. Anybody else?”

The group sat at a table made of the raft turned turtle. One stood up: the dead girl. Kelly kicked his accent up a notch. “A young thing. Great. You’ll lead the pack, Amanda.”

“I can take it,” she said, with a measure of pluck.

Kelly looked the dead girl over: strong legs, sleek lines. “You can carry her up there on your back,” he said, appraising her like a foreign coin. “She still your little girl, right?”

Greg smiled. The others waved them on, faces full of sandwiches and potato salad, bright in their water-sport clothes—chartreuse and pylon orange, same color as the Powerbait we sling to the government trout.

Ascent. The two of them did what Kelly did, clutching the same wet points of rock, the same dry patches of moss for footholds. The trail stitched itself in and out of the creek, where trout danced like Salome in the tannic water. Smell of rotting wood. Squelch and rasp of wet tennis shoes on rock. Kelly explained that Barranshe Run was named for a sow black bear that never whelped a single cub. “No one ran their dogs on her, ever, even when she was reelfoot and gray. Don’t know why. We kill lots of bears here.”