The Best American Mystery Stories 2014 (41 page)

Greg said, “That sounds like a story to me.”

“It’s just what they say.” Kelly knew the rafters were obsessed with fact. They paraded it at him again and again. “Would have been a mercy to kill her.”

“That’s so callous,” the dead girl said.

“No. Animals aren’t afraid to die. They just want to make another thing just like them. If they can’t, they go someplace lonely and pine. Like here,” he said, gesturing to the unraveling tapestry of rock, root, water, and vine. “Water?”

She unscrewed the cap and took a drink. She wiped her mouth, cocked her head at him.

The trail narrowed. She kept flicking him little looks.

Hands scrabbled for holds. Calves burned with acid. “One more bend,” Kelly hollered. There, Great Swallow Falls, 30 foot tall. It sluiced over a mossy lip of stone and sent a misty perpetual rainbow into the air: a fisherman’s cast net frozen midthrow. The world smelled of cold, rich limestone. Swallows nipped stoneflies. The colored hoop shimmered.

The dead girl showed Kelly how to work the switches on her camera. “Wait, show me again,” he said, grinning. She slapped his arm. “Pay attention.”

Kelly snapped a picture of father and daughter, perfect for the Internet. “Think that’s nice, you ought to see the next one.” Each falls more riveting than the last: deeper drop, darker hues, emerald, topaz, Prussian. The swallows piping like bone flutes.

Panting now, Greg said he couldn’t go on. He sat on a log, nursing warm spots that promised to blister.

“But the last one’s the best,” Kelly said, pointing ahead. Now the trail ran vertical, just a thin trough of root and rubble through jagged stone. A deer couldn’t run it. The ground called for a more agile animal, say a bobcat, a lean leaping ghost with splayed pads and tight haunches.

The dead girl wanted to try it. Kelly promised to bring her right back.

Greg hesitated. “It looks dangerous to me.”

“We take people every day. Amanda be fine.”

“Take your camera,” her father called after.

Kelly led her around the bend. “You got to climb up this little rise to get there.”

Her face went slack. “Are you serious?”

“Grab hold of that laurel, Amanda. That plant there. There you go. Give you a boost.”

Kelly gave it—touching her!—and she pulled herself up. Over the rise, she saw the last waterfall. It was nothing more than a tiny gurgling delta. She began to laugh.

She turned around and found Kelly there. He had a dusky look, shards of coal dust embedded in his face. Nine years in the Haymaker Mine, riding the mantrip into the belly of the mountain. At night his skin leaked metal. He woke to blue slivers on the pillow. He kissed her open mouth. She felt his beard and its pleasant rasp on her skin. Swallows singing through the air, soft blue sickles. And the two worlds touch, in a way we always hoped could happen. Kelly jumped the wall. He became one of them.

“I turned that raft over. I turned it over on purpose.” Kelly popped a finger into his mouth and began to chew at the nail.

“My God,” said Reed, on the edge of hysteria, “them people fucking trusted you. My God, that’s fucking awful, that’s
terrible
.”

Kelly stared at the river, the sculpted earth and water. He pulled the finger from his mouth. The air crackled with alarm.

“’Deed I did. Her dad was looking at us,” Kelly said. “He come up behind and saw.”

Reed went on mindlessly, “No, no, no.”

“I know these falls. Think I’d make a mistake right here? These falls is my bread and butter. Been over better than three hundred times. Been over them blindfolded.”

Everyone yelling,
What did he see? What was he gonna do?
Frenzied and shouting just anything that came to mind. No one could seem to ask him
Why?
but he answered anyhow. “I had to. I didn’t mean to drown her,” Kelly said. “Just her dad.”

That settled in. Chet was saying, “Hold on! Kelly, listen to me . . . you did it because he seen you and her?”

“She wanted me to get rid of him.”

“Wait—”

“She hated her dad. She didn’t care if he saw us. He wasn’t her kind. She was like us.”

We took in his words.

“She told you that?”

“Listen,” he said. “Listen to the water.”

“What?”

“She told me yesterday,” Kelly said and babbled on.

It started with cursing. You could taste anger in the air, taste it on your tongue. We’d been had. Kelly didn’t have two worlds. He had one, ours, the lesser. “You evil liar,” Chet Mason told him. Everyone howled at Kelly to stop.

“She told me today.”

We shut him up the only way we could. He slid and danced under our hands. Reed had to take off his belt and hit him with the buckle. Grabbing hold of crazy arms and kicking legs, we flung Kelly into that blind sucking roar. He flopped in with a smack.

Raw white noise. Kelly was gone. Had we really done it? The Gauley took him under. We blinked wildly at one other. No one said a thing. Let it drag him to the ocean.

The river made a low shushing sound. We hadn’t kept track of the days. Sweet’s Falls trickled down to nothing. The Army Corps had lowered its levers. The water was placid. A carnival ride unplugged. Kelly floated to the surface, sputtering, blinking at the sky.

Gauley Season was over.

Kelly paddled to the riverbank and pulled himself ashore with fistfuls of cattail. Bloody, he managed a grin and gave us a thumbs-up.

Nothing’s painful as embarrassment. Our credulousness stung like bedsores. Even now we nurse those wounds.

But outlandish as it was, Kelly’s story nagged at you. There were three witnesses: two dead, the other lost in that white country of madness. Could it be true? Part of you wanted to believe Kelly flipped the raft on purpose. Kelly and the girl—rafters and locals, one people—a beautiful story. That is, a mawkish lie. And if Kelly Bischoff can’t equal them—to know their names, brush their lips, be loved, respected—no one on Pillow Rock can. Once again the world let us know what we are. Swallows in flight. The rasp of shoes. Kelly built himself a legend on that. Maybe he’d come to cherish the girl out of a terrible guilt, which can midwife the strongest, most wretched kind of love into the world. Those cold nights on the Route 19 overpass, he believed. For a man like him, like us, one mistake—one botched run over the falls—could ruin him forever. It wasn’t his entire fault. When they signed the papers, the rafters delivered their lives into Kelly’s hand, they bought the thrill of giving yourself over to a stranger, and the bill came due. And we were the ones who chose Kelly, after all, one of ours. We let the girl die. When Chet Mason reached for Kelly’s hand, we damned him to his own true life. A life with us. But Kelly couldn’t let go of the dream. He couldn’t join in our quiet decline.

Soured by it all, we gave Pillow Rock back to the rattlesnakes. Now we let them lie prone to soak up the heat like powerful conductors. And we gave it to Kelly.

We found ways to occupy our time: machining engines, welding catch-gates, jacklighting deer. The lesser waters no one coveted, so we dove off the cliffs at Summersville Lake till the state fenced it off. Then we cut the wire with bolt cutters—the “West Virginia credit card”—and dove at night, our jacklights trained on green water, attracting a fine mist of moths and mayflies.

But Gauley Season never ceased to be part of our year. The rafters buy potato chips and high-test, they flag us down for directions, but they don’t miss us, our catcalls from the rock. They palm tips into knowing hands, book next season’s trip, tighten luggage racks on foreign cars. As we do our chores, we imagine the shredding water, the cry of clients, the slur of rubber on stone. They slalom down Sweet’s Falls with nothing but the growl of water in their ears. We hate them. We hate them with the fury that is the same as love.

The rafters notice a single man perched on the granite. Shirtless, Kelly Bischoff raises a hand or touches a hat brim. A wise, gray-bearded fisherman gone down to ply the waters. Hair lank, skin mottled like a Plott hound’s. Bedraggled, harried by weather and briar, the river guide has earned this lonesome place by great effort, by true compass. Stalwart, wiry, keen of limb. A true mountaineer, rifle-true. But they know no better. The river guide has made good on his mortgage. With the yellow tusks of a bulldozer, he breaks the mountain. He draglines the coal.

Against the glossolalia of the water, the river guide cups his hands and calls to the rafters, but they can’t hear, they tip over the falls and lose sight of him in a joyous crush. A plea is lost to history.

The nude crag of Pillow Rock, stripped of its people, scrawled and scrimshawed in the shit of swallows. They don’t know that we—the true fishermen—will not return until season’s end, rods ready, faces hard, when the heavens part, the rotors of helicopters mutter their staccato hymn, and we receive the silver benediction of government fish.

FROM
The New Yorker

I
N NEW FRANCE
, which people more and more called Canada, from the old Iroquois word
kanata
, Duquet was everywhere—examining, prying, measuring, observing, and calculating. Limbs and low-quality hardwood waste became high-quality firewood, and every autumn he packed twenty wagons full for the Kébec market and for Paris, when he could charter available ships with the promise of a good return cargo of tea or coffee or textiles, spices or china. Without the sure promise of a rich return cargo, he thought, let the Parisians freeze, for all he cared.

Leasing a Dutchman’s ships was well enough, but he needed ships of his own. In 1712, a business acquaintance in Boston, an Englishman named Dred-Peacock, connected him to an English shipbuilder and a new but promising yard on the River Clyde, in Scotland, joined to England by the Act of Union, in ’07. Duquet wanted a ship; the yard wanted wood.

“Regard the map, sir,” Dred-Peacock said. “It’s the closest point to the colonies—the briefest sailing time. There are signs of success on the Clyde, but they need good timbers. They will pay for them. It is an opportunity that cannot be neglected.”

There were good precedents in New France for trading with the enemy, but arrangements with the English and the Scots were still secret, complex, expensive, even dangerous. Yet Duquet knew that there was profit in selling to the English, despite their colonial aims. Duquet took the plunge and Dred-Peacock took a goodly share of the profits, which increased year by year. Fifty acres of oak were needed to build one seventy-four-gun warship, and the hardwood stands along the rivers of New France began to fall to Duquet’s ambitions. But he felt hampered by Kébec’s distance from the money pots of the world and by the ice blockage of the Saint-Laurent River in winter.

“Duquet, it is past time for you to consider shifting your business operation to the colonies,” Dred-Peacock told him as they sat over their papers and receipts in the Sign of the Red Bottle, near the wharves, the inn they favored in Boston. Never did Dred-Peacock present his ill-formed face to Duquet in Kébec; always Duquet made the trip south by schooner or by packet.

“Oh, I think on it,” Duquet said, swirling the ale in his tankard until it slopped over the rim, as if that settled the question. “I think of it often. I am of half a mind to do so, sir.”

“Damn, sir! It is quite time you acted. Finish with thinking and act. Every day those poxy whoresons of mill men push into the forests and gain control over the land. In Maine there are countless white-pine mast trees and lesser pines to be used for tar and pitch. You know there is a great market for these if you can get them on a ship bound for Scotland, England, or even Spain or Portugal.”

Duquet nodded, but his face was sour. He knew that Dred-Peacock saw him as an ill-bred boor, a creature from the depths. True enough, he had escaped a cramped childhood spent pulling rabbit fur from half-rotten skins, pinching out guard hairs, plucking the soft fur for quilt stuffing. As a boy he had coughed incessantly, bringing up phlegm clotted with rabbit hair. The fine hairs had settled on every surface, matted on his family’s heads and shoulders. Finally, in this clinging miasma of stinking hair and dust, his mother, choking blood, had lain on the floor as his father’s black legs scissored away into the night, and Duquet began his struggle to get away from France, to become another person.

Dred-Peacock may have sensed Duquet’s squalid beginnings, but his fantastic drive to make money was what interested the Englishman. Dred-Peacock went on, his voice vibrating, “Where there is a market, the businessman must act. And all this would be immeasurably easier if you operated from Boston rather than bloody
Kweebeck
. And with my help these affairs can be managed.”

It was obvious and timely advice, and yet Duquet hesitated to commit to leaving New France. He had valuable connections there, and a lifetime dislike of the English language, with its vile obscenities, and those who spoke it.

Soon several ships belonging to Duquet but flying British flags ran the seas between Portsmouth and Boston harbors and the ever more numerous Clyde shipyards. It was like walking on a web of tightropes, but the money flew around Duquet like dandelion fluff in the wind. He had only to catch it in his net. And share it with Dred-Peacock.

During the next decade Duquet began to acquire tracts of woodland in Maine. Dred-Peacock’s genius in the legal procedure of acquiring remote “townships” was immeasurable, and an old acquaintance from Duquet’s first years in New France, Jacques Forgeron, scouted out the best timberland. Forgeron, a surveyor when he could get work, a voyageur when he could not, had joined forces with Duquet in his earliest days. Together they had entered the fur trade, had paddled, portaged, walked, and sung the rivers of New France. Forgeron was something of a Jonah, who attracted foul weather, but he had a curious regard for the wild forest and often told Duquet that it could be the source of great wealth. This man cherished his measuring chains and could use one as a weapon, swinging it around and around until it gained velocity and the free end leaped forward to maim. And if he had used it in this way in France, the old days counted for very little. Now he was a partner in Duquet et Fils, perhaps even a friend, if a business tie between two friendless men could be so described.