The River Burns (2 page)

Ryan O'Farrell was leaning back against the front-side fender of his vehicle, ankles crossed, arms comfortably folded over his chest. He was wearing his policeman's baseball cap, but otherwise decked out in civvies, jeans, and a short-sleeved, teal, soft cotton polo.

“Nice of you to not bring your gun,” the man said.

“So we're both underdressed for the occasion,” Ryan remarked.

Save for a thin deer-hide vest better suited for an adolescent half his size, and a torn flag of denim shorts, worn loosely, slit up the sides and cut away as though every stitch of excess fabric was abhorrent to his nature, the man with the darkly bronzed skin sat in the dirt, as carefree and as confident in his minimal attire as the policeman in his off-duty garb. Ryan noticed a bicycle resting on its side down in the ditch.

“That's new,” Ryan pointed out.

“It's not stolen.” The man went by the name Skootch.

“Did I infer that it was?” Ryan asked. “But you inferred something about my brother. Do you want to spill the beans or go on talking in riddles?”

Although on the ground, Skootch sat on a level higher than the road or Ryan, at the top of a bank above the ditch. Behind him stood the thick forest that provided a livelihood for so many, and for him a home.

“Rumours aren't riddles,” Skootch contested.

“They're lies. Not worth the time of day to listen to.”

“Sometimes that's true. Sometimes truth is in the listening.”

“Now we're back to your riddles.”

Skootch untangled his limbs and rose up from the ground. He was tall, as skinny as a sapling. White whiskers speckled his chin.

“Why oh why, Ryan, did an acquaintance of mine get sent to the pen? Christ, Ryan, three to five?”

“Know him well, did you? Do business with the man?”

“Ryan, he was a reserve outfielder. I won't miss him that much. But apparently your putting him away inspired my third baseman to skedaddle. A middle-of-the-night type thing. He went all paranoid on me. At this point in the season, where am I going to find someone to play third? Unless, you know, you want to make a comeback.”

“You didn't ask me out here to play third base.”

“I wanted this meeting because stories are making the rounds. Call them rumours. But truth flies around wherever it flies. Out of the mouths of babes or out of the mouths of babbling idiots sometimes, you just never know. If it's true, it's true. If not, then no harm is done if I give you a heads-up anyway.”

“Go on.”

“Like I said, it's your brother. Denny's one hothead mother.”

“I'm not sure that he is.”

“Some loose talk gets spun. People say he might take matters into his own hands. Commit an act of veritable destruction, something of that nature.”

“Skootch—”

“Why would I tell you this, Ryan, if I didn't have our own best interests at heart? Yours and mine, both? I've got nothing against Denny. You know that. I'm partly squealing on him for
his
sake. So he can be stopped. I believe he needs to be stopped. I don't like it that you put my third baseman away—”

“Your reserve outfielder, actually.”

“Same difference. I need a third baseman now because of it. You know what team I'm playing this week, couldn't you have waited? Anyway, I don't like what you did but this is not about that. It's about Denny. All I'm saying is what you already know. If he shoves, there will be some push back. It might not be insignificant. You know what I'm talking about, Ryan.”

That's all that the policeman needed this summer, a running battle between loggers and conservationists with his own brother at the forefront. Ryan took the other man seriously.

“So you're hearing that this is about Denny. Reliable sources?”

“At first I wasn't so keen to believe it myself. But word has a way of going around until it sounds convincing.
Various
sources. You know that I move in mysterious ways. I keep strange company.”

The man skipped down the steep slope into the ditch and righted his bike. He pushed it up the embankment so that he emerged on the road just in front of the police car. He lifted a leg over and seated himself, the bike looking ridiculously small for a man with such long legs. He scratched his dribble of chin whiskers.

“How about,” he asked, “if you leave my ball club alone for a while? You've done your damage. Now leave us alone until the season's over. As a favour to me, who's just done a favour for you. Anyway, you've got worse things to think about now than my team's record.”

“I don't have a clue what it is, nor do I care.”

“Like I believe you. But you've got a bigger problem to think about now and I'd appreciate it if you concentrate on that, for all our sakes, and for more goddamn reasons than baseball. I'm trying to keep the peace here, Ryan. Just like you. I'll see you around, okay? Thanks for the visit. It's been a slice.”

He paddled the bike with his feet awhile before he raised them onto the pedals, then he was soon zipping off down a hill and out of sight.

Ryan watched him go, then stared off into the dark woods. The sun was coming up warm. He returned to his car, started her up, did a three-point turn, and drove back to town and another day on the job, feeling uneasy.

2

S
o, too, was wizened old chirpy Mrs. McCracken an early riser. Townsfolk assumed her good habit had formed through forty years of getting up early to teach children the geography of their planet, and Mrs. McCracken willingly suffered that perception. Privately, went her theory, as long as people remained sufficiently gullible to believe that load of bull roar she was spared further embarrassment. Following the terribly premature death of her husband, Mrs. McCracken started waking up an hour earlier each morning than her previous custom. Schoolwork had nothing to do with that. Four decades later and within the month following her retirement, she commenced getting out of bed an hour earlier still, school not being the instigator of that routine either. Nor did Buckminster, her tabby, precipitate the new regimen, although she was fond of blaming him. “That cat!” And while she needed to be up at a reasonable hour to tend to her newest occupation, baking pies, folks weren't going to consume her wares or even make a purchase before noon. Mrs. McCracken got up early for one reason only. She was lonely. Flat-out fatigued by solitude. Being full of zip and the town's busybody ameliorated her condition, but any time spent in bed while awake was difficult to bear. Once an eye cracked open she was up and at 'em, usually three steps ahead of her alarm clock.

Her full name bloomed as Alice Beauchamp McCracken. Not a soul called her Beauchamp. Only the government, the bank, and one or two credit card agencies knew it to be her middle name. Yet no one had called her Alice in such a dreadfully long time either. Peers who might have done so were now deceased, and a few younger people whom she believed called her Alice once upon a time had since succumbed to the common weal. She was Mrs. McCracken to the world, to the point where she'd begun to refer to herself only that way. When introduced, a fairly rare occurrence, whether she was meeting a Dick, a Mary, or a Siobhan, she replied, “I'm Mrs. McCracken, how do you do?” Schoolteacher force of habit, perhaps. Upon spying a bill or an official notice that carried her given name or even the first initial, she was oddly surprised, as though the address must be a typographical error.

And yet,
Alice Beauchamp McCracken
one day would be inscribed upon her gravestone. She'd made the arrangements.

A scooter morning. Fresh berries. She'd beat the heat and arrive at the fields early, be back in time to bake a blueberry pie. Mrs. McCracken started up her Vespa GTV 250, a scooter that could truly scram.

She lived near the old covered bridge and, obedient to its rules to a fault, slowed down and came to a complete stop before traversing onto the wood surface. The same could not be said of the vehicle approaching from the opposite end. This early, she had no clue whom the interloper might be, but he was under an obligation to stop and to ascertain that he would indeed be first onto the single-lane bridge. He was not first, not by the length of her scooter, and he was not waiting for the vehicle travelling from the opposite side of the river, namely Mrs. McCracken on her Vespa, to cross the bridge ahead of him. They were on a collision course, and knowing full well that she possessed the right of way Mrs. McCracken would not back down. If it meant that her full name was to be inscribed on her gravestone sooner rather than later, so be it.

The car, an old roadster she soon established, an antique, seemed to be of similar mind, the difference being that only Mrs. McCracken on her scooter would be shunted off the bridge upon impact over the side rails and through the half-height opening into the rapids below while the old green roadster, a heavy Studebaker as it turned out, might suffer, at worst, a scratch.

Not even a dent
, Mrs. McCracken calculated as she sped along.

Maybe she'd end up a very big muss on the windshield.

That might turn his stomach. He'd be sorry then.

The prospect, perhaps, caused the Studebaker to begin to slow, which allowed Mrs. McCracken to honourably do the same, and the two headlong adversaries stopped at the bridge's centre, the scooter's wee front tire a speck away from the car's bumper.

“You're in the way!” the driver, an older fellow with a shining pate and white paintbrush moustache, called out. She could not yet distinguish his florid, chubby face through the windshield but knew that she didn't know him.

“I started across the bridge first and you never stopped!” Mrs. McCracken berated him. “Obey the rules! They are put in place to be obeyed!”

“Move to the side, for crying out loud! We can both pass by!”

“This bridge is one-way-at-a-time only. Back right up right now or I'll have the police here quicker that you can say,
How did I wind up in jail today?
”

That charge got him out of his car and he slammed the door as if to confirm his position. She nearly broke out into laughter, he was so short, except that that would be unkind. “You got to be out of your freaking tree, lady!”

“
A
, freaking is not the name for any tree. Nor do I believe it serves as a legitimate adjective for any object, animate or not. And
B
, I am not out of my tree because I have never been in one. Now, return to your car as a gentleman ought to do and back this monstrosity up!”

“Monstrosity!” He failed himself then, actually looking at his vehicle to detect if there might not be some merit to her defamation. “Monstrosity?”

“Fine,” Mrs. McCracken backtracked. “I'll withdraw the insult. Uncalled for. Back up your fine antique car, please, sir. I'll tell you why you must if you really want to know.”

He was beginning to appear amused. “Tell me why. I'm interested.”

“This is quite a small town. Not a village. But small. The police know me. They do not know you.” She removed her cell phone from her berry-picking pack strapped to the rear seat and held it up to a strobe of sunlight slicing through a gap in the ancient roof. “Shall I awaken an officer at this hour?”

The visitor looked at his car, at the scooter, and at the acerbic old woman.

“What are you doing on that thing anyhow? You must be eighty.”

“I am not,” she told him, strident for the first time, “
eighty.
”

“Lady, I've got a car show to get to. Near the city. Something tells me, the only way I'm going to get there is to back up. So I'll tell you what.”

“Do that. Tell me what,” Mrs. McCracken encouraged him.

“I'm going to back up.”

“Fine. That'll be just fine,” she determined.

“Fine,” he agreed, and got into his car, and backed up.

When he reached the other side and steered off to the oncoming lane, Mrs. McCracken scooted on by him heading uphill without a word, a flash in the sunlight, her dress a yellowy-white flag in the breeze, her blue helmet ablaze, then she was gone. This time, the driver checked who was coming—no one—before driving onto the old covered bridge.

3

D
enny called it smoking, although he rarely lit up anymore. Smoking meant just hanging with the guys and the morning found him by the old covered bridge where he and his friends Samad and Xavier waited in line with their big rigs. The guys still smoked and he had a tendency to stand downwind so the scent would find him as the others puffed away. He might breathe in deeply but he didn't call it inhaling exactly.

Quitting was his idea. He did it of his own volition and without prodding when Val first got pregnant. He didn't want her smoking, so he didn't either. Harder for her than for him. He still missed it, though, and the other guys could tell. The easy part was driving smoke-free in his cab. The hard part was hanging out with the guys and having a few beers after a ball game. He could crumble pretty easily but he never did in any big way, even though he and Val were done with making babies, and despite allowing himself a once-in-a-blue-moon smoke with a beer. He was feeling so jumpy inside his skin today he felt like having that smoke. He knew to resist when the urge was strongest. The urge. Strange, that. As if something living inside him craved a different life.

Denny shuffled a stone around with his toe and munched an apple pinched from his lunch pail. He looked up as another logging truck, out of sight, geared down for the stop and the protracted wait.

He sneaked a deep breath of secondhand smoke.

Having shed his jacket, he was now feeling the heat of the sunlight on his bare forearms.

The driver of the last truck to arrive was another close pal, André Gervais, who came down the hill, swinging his arms high as he did whenever he walked down a slope, as though he needed the motion to keep up with the momentum of his runaway hips, pulled along by his belly's ample ballast. As he moved, the flesh on his face jiggled down into his jowls. He joined the truckers who were waiting for the bridge to clear—except that it wasn't clearing. A family stopped in the middle of the old covered bridge and the father was coaxing his kids from the car to gaze upon the rapids rushing below. The dad held up his youngest to spy the water above the half wall.

“Oh, pitch a tent, why don't you?” Denny muttered, just loudly enough for his pals to hear. Also waiting to cross from their side was a plumber's van and a pair of sedans that appeared to be travelling in tandem. The drivers were out of their cars, gabbing, but neither smoked. To Denny they looked like men who'd never smoked, but he didn't know why he thought that way or why the presumption made him feel indifferent to them. As though he'd never say hello unless they did first and probably they never would. Denny spoke so that they couldn't hear him, just his pals. “Play a round of mini-putt, for Pete's sake. Cook up a barbecue while taking food out of the mouths of my kids.”

Samad Mehra commiserated with him on the thoughtlessness of tourists. He'd arrived from Delhi as a pensive child, a man now of diminutive stature who admired Denny and could be counted upon to agree with him whenever he held to an opinion. Denny did not necessarily admire that trait in Samad but he accepted it and came to expect it. Xavier Lapointe was apt to pick an argument just for the fun of being ornery, but this morning there was no disputing the annoyance they faced. Xavier couldn't believe that anyone could so freely waste people's time as that family was doing, and if the tourist dad didn't get a move on in one second flat he was going to walk down there and either make him move or remove him altogether.

“I pity his kids,” Xavier said.

“How come?” Samad asked him. He was expecting a serious reply.

“It won't be pretty when I go down there and toss the dad over the side. Those poor kids, to see their dad wash away like that.”

“Scar them for life,” Denny noted.

“That's what I was thinking,” Xavier concurred. “It's a shame.”

“The sooner you get it over with . . .” Denny suggested.

Samad was chuckling to himself, but when he looked at Xavier's face he grew worried.

“X,” Samad said. He knew that his friends could be rash, and feared that they might misbehave in his company some day. His wife often warned him about that very thing. She didn't trust men in groups without women.

“Don't X me,” Xavier said.

“Oh, he's going,” Denny foretold. “Soon as he's finished that smoke.”

“Soon as,” Xavier agreed, and Samad worried more.

Arriving, letting his arms flop down to his sides, André Gervais assessed the situation in a jiff and said to everyone, but pointedly to Denny, “Hear about it? The company got the government to agree on a public meeting. Finally.”

He was speaking French and when he finished chewing his apple, Denny spoke French back to him. “What kind of meeting?”

“A meeting meeting. What other kind is there?”

“What'd they say about it, anything?”

“They said not to get our hopes up. Not too high anyway.”

“Oh, that kind of meeting,” Denny said, and Xavier and Samad laughed.

The tourist was packing his kids back in his car so Xavier stayed put. Crushed his cigarette butt under his boot. “Know what I'd like to do with a guy like that someday?” he asked, in English now. They freely switched languages with no apparent cues. “Give him a dose of his own medicine.”

“Like how?” Samad wanted to know.

“One truck blocks one end, another blocks the other end, and he has to sit on the bridge until we decide to move. Except we go for lunch instead, have a beer afterwards. He has to hold his kids over the side to go wee-wee. He has to listen to them bawl because they're hungry and thirsty.”

“Wee-wee?” André asked. “Wee-wee?”

Xavier said, “Shut up.”

“Wee-wee?” André repeated, making Samad laugh.

Xavier got defensive. “I got kids of my own. You got to talk like that.”

The tourist family left the bridge, finally, and the driver of the first truck in line, who'd been napping in his cab, got ready. The big diesels collectively rumbled in idle, but now the driver tapped his accelerator and just the sound of a diesel being summoned gave Denny a charge. He looked around as if afraid that the others might detect how absurdly ecstatic he was feeling at that moment. He didn't know what was wrong with him today.

The turn was a tight fit for a big truck and they watched as the rig went wide around the bend to get the back end through. The driver took it slowly. The way the old bridge creaked under the weight of the cab then sagged as the load of logs was shouldered by the trestles, the diesel coughing up black smoke from the stack, and under that cacophony the rush of the river as it fell through the rapids, the full scene under the heat of the sun churned in Denny as a physical sensation, as if the pistons were calibrated with the rapids and in tune together, causing him to vibrate. André nudged him out of his daydream.

“What?” said Denny.

“Go to that meeting,” André urged.

“If we can't get our hopes up, what's the point?”

“You're the one who said it, Denny. It's been your argument. First, take the legal route. Then nobody can complain.”

He was known to say that.
First.
The legal route was proving to be a dead end.
Then.
He said it often.
Nobody can complain.

“Yeah. Maybe.”

He didn't want to think about the legal route because he didn't want to think about the alternative. The bridge was a major pain. The worst sort of bottleneck. None of them were living the lives they imagined for themselves when they were kids together playing on the river, imitating their dads who drove logs down to the mills every spring and fall. Those big log drives were spectacular to witness and this river, the Gatineau, was the last to see them disappear. Environmental issues precipitated the change. Instead of driving log booms on the water, they were driving trucks. Only the world didn't catch up to that shift, and they were forced to cross the river on a bridge unfit for the weight of their vehicles or the new volume of traffic. The bridge needed to be replaced but had its own diehard backers, those who wanted the relic to remain forever, for the sake of tourism and for their eternal heritage and for its own exquisite beauty.

Denny held nothing against heritage or beauty but the bridge was useless.

He craned his neck. He wondered if he was not feeling so odd to himself these days because he had so much to gain and so much to lose and he was balancing right on that fulcrum, not knowing which way his life would tilt. One moment's adrenaline-induced excitement flipped into the next moment's tumble down a steep descent.

Over the hill came Mrs. McCracken on her scooter and she parked right down in front of everyone in the space vacated by the rig that was now on the bridge. Nobody minded. She'd go ahead of the next truck and no one counted her as a separate vehicle so that both truck and scooter could cross simultaneously as long as she went first. If she went second someone on the other side might not see her and turn onto the bridge after the truck passed and smash her. They had everything worked out. As a rule, no other vehicle was allowed on the bridge with a heavy truck even if they were going in the same direction, and now that a truck from their side was crossing they'd wait for the next vehicle coming from the other side before the plumber's van was allowed to cross. It's how their days went now. Mostly just waiting to cross. They told the government it was inefficient, but so far no one was listening and this was how they got to spend their working hours, hardly making a dime.

Mrs. McCracken switched her motor off, peeled off the helmet, and fluffed her white hair that she wore curled. Samad called down to her, “Blueberry pie today, Mrs.?”

“Freshly picked blueberries,” Mrs. McCracken emphasized, “are the key.”

“Bake trucker-sized pies,” Denny advised her. “You'll make a mint.”

She wasn't sure if that meant they should be bigger or smaller.

“Something we can eat on the go,” he explained.

“Tarts!” she chimed in.

“Bigger,” he said. “A tart's not trucker-sized. Bigger than a tart, smaller than a whole pie.”

“Oh, I see,” she said. She seemed to be thinking about it.

“Depends on what kind of tart you're talking about,” Xavier pointed out. “I like mine small and curvy.”

“X,” Samad forewarned, worried.

“What?”

“It's Mrs. McCracken.”

“School's out, Samad. She's not going to give you the strap.”

“I might,” Mrs. McCracken let it be known. “Did you hear the rumour that the school gave me a strap as a retirement gift? That one went the rounds.”

“Good for a laugh but I never believed it,” Xavier said.

“I never denied it,” Mrs. McCracken pointed out. “But you're right. You're not in school anymore. A lot of good it did you when you were. In any case, you're allowed an occasional double entendre, even when it is in my presence.”

“Double what?” Xavier asked. “Espresso?”

Samad and Denny laughed.

“You boys,” Mrs. McCracken said.

“Oh God, no. Don't tell me,” André said. He seemed stricken.

They looked where he was looking and his pallor and trepidation was such that even Mrs. McCracken gazed in that direction. On the other side of the bridge a bus was destined to cross next. Rather than proceed at a fitting pace, slow enough, the elderly passengers disembarked and were proceeding to walk across. A few were being pushed in wheelchairs. Among those who walked were the sprightly and the spry and a number of them kept up a good pace, yet others demonstrated a lethargy, or the carnage of difficult knees and hips, and so hobbled along while still others appeared barely ambulatory.

“What the hell is that?” Denny asked.

“I heard about it,” André intimated. “Had to see it to believe it.”

Denny noticed the two men who owned sedans moving closer to them to observe the activity on the bridge and he no longer felt his previous antipathy.

“Heard about what?” Denny asked.

“Fuck,” Xavier said.

“Language,” Mrs. McCracken chided him.

“Those inspectors? Out to check the bridge? At first we thought they were on our side.”

“Government inspectors you're talking about?”

“Highway Department, whatever. So there's a new regulation now. Buses have to off-load before crossing.”

“What the fuck for?”

“Ryan O'Farrell! Language!”

“Ryan's my brother, Mrs. McCracked. I'm Denny. You never could keep us straight.”

“What did you call me?” she demanded to know.

“You started it.”

“They have to off-load,” André explained. “After the passengers cross on their own, then the bus drives over empty. So passengers won't be on board if the bus falls through the bridge.”

“Fuckin' hell!”

“Mr. O'Farrell!”