The River Burns (22 page)

Denny watched them walk up the incline a moment, then returned to the anonymity of the trees and scanned the darkened bridge.

■   ■   ■

In her flimsy white nightclothes,
Mrs. McCracken opened her outside door a crack to admit Buckminster. Unfettered, he slouched in, not certain that he agreed with her assessment that he was in for the night. She pulled the screen tight to the jamb to insert the hook in its eye, and even as she did so moths regrouped on the screen and a June bug out of season landed. Then she shut and latched the inside door, too.

“Done,” she said.

Buckminster uttered an agreeable word and they both wandered through to the living room, where Mrs. McCracken returned to her cold cocoa.

“Something I cannot explain,” she ruminated aloud, quietly at first, “about that girl. She intrigues me, Buck. I admit it. So few young women do. Really, I ought to harp. I'm inclined to harp, giving up a career like that, doing so little with a fine education. How odd, don't you think?” As she awaited her cat's reply, Mrs. McCracken was suddenly aware that she'd ceased talking under her breath and was now at full volume. She sipped more cocoa, then lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper between her and the feline. “But I sense that it's not tomfoolery, Buck. Her lot in life is to be a serious person who is also given to some distraction. Not an easy combination to live with. A rarity in this town, male or female, don't you think? But the rarest are the women. She is, undoubtedly, a serious person, with some distraction. Poor thing. I don't know what's to be done about her, having to bear life with such an onerous condition.”

Buckminster circled his sofa pillow repeatedly, then quietly settled onto it. He yawned. Observed her intently.

“It's true. I really don't know what's to be done.”

Finishing her cocoa, she set the glass down and listened to the tree frogs sing. Such a racket. She tried to hear right through their song, for in the heart of this night she was sensing a rhapsody so distant and refined that even the frogs ceased their chorus to attend. She listened.

“I know,” she said. “It is that time.”

She wasn't in the mood to go up to bed just yet, despite feeling sleepy.

Buckminster let his chin droop down. Momentarily, his eyes closed. As she sat there, hearing the ticking of her downstairs clock as the frogs went mute and detecting also a high, distant, inexplicable drone, Mrs. McCracken's chin also dipped forward. A ways off, down along the riverbank, a tied-up dog that she presumed, illogically, to be a mangy mutt barked thrice, the last sound to register with any acuity before she dropped off asleep in the comfort of her chair. The cat, across from her, also slept.

■   ■   ■

Denny ran, stumbled, then sprinted,
breaking from the trees, shining a miniature flashlight, its beam dancing on the pickup's rear window. On the verge of shouting he restrained himself, noise a last resort. A risk to take only if they didn't see him. Samad caught the light slash across his mirror and braked suddenly, causing André to put a hand out to brace himself against the cab's roof.

“What the—?” André protested, too loudly for their circumstance. His words were cut off as he lost his balance and his chest struck the roofline.

“Keep your voice down,” Denny hissed and continued his quick jog up to Samad's window. André bent down to listen in.

Denny took a moment to catch his breath.

“There's kids,” he said.

“What?”

“Under the bridge. Toking up. I saw the flare from a joint.”

“They're making out probably,” Samad said.

“They better not be my kids,” André said.

“That's not the point!” Denny flashed. “It doesn't matter whose kids they are. Or what they're smoking. We might kill them, you idiots.”

“What do we do?” André asked.

Denny stepped onto the running board, clutching the inside of the doorframe and the outside mirror. “Drive across. Slowly. André, do nothing. Not now. Follow my lead when we're over there.”

He took the time to think this through, but he was feeling lucky. This might have gone badly if he'd been late to spot them, or not seen the flares of their smokes at all. He didn't know if the others were feeling as he did now, but the seriousness of their work caused the blood in his veins, it felt like, to sink into his heels. Like a heavy tar. Then Samad stopped on the other side off the end of the bridge and Xavier didn't know what was going on as he walked quickly up.

Denny stepped down from the running board and whispered to Xavier, “Don't say a word.”

“What would I say?” Xavier whispered back.

Denny stepped out onto the bridge. The three waiting men observed him in the breeze. A dim streetlamp down the road illuminated them, while shadows from the bridge's superstructure crisscrossed Denny. He didn't feel good about what he intended to do next, imitate his brother, but for several good reasons it was necessary. He toyed with calling the whole thing off because he was given an excuse now, this unbidden development, their risk factor increased. The gnarly, tight feeling in his gut and the blood pooling in his ankles reminded him that he was merely scared, and he argued with himself that to stop now would not be an act of wisdom necessarily, but one of fear. He could not halt what he was committed to do. He modulated his voice to be loud, clearly enunciated, authoritative.

“Okay, guys, I know you're under the bridge. I can guess what you're up to . . . what you're smoking. I can smell it up here. This is what we'll do. I'm driving down the road on this side and I'll wait five minutes. Then I'm coming back to check if you're still here. If you are, I'm bringing you in on a charge of vagrancy, assuming you've ditched your dope by then. Not much of a charge, but enough for me to inform your parents what you been up to tonight.”

A girl's audible gasp.

On his way back to the pickup, Denny shared a quick word with Xavier, then he and André walked down the road behind Samad's truck as it drove off a safe distance. Concealed, Xavier watched the four youths flee, two boys, two girls, as they crossed the bridge to beat it back to town. Once they were gone he went under the bridge to check that everyone fled, then he came back up and signalled to the pickup that the coast was clear. Denny waited to give the kids time to completely vacate the area on the other side, and only after he saw them well down the road was he willing to cross back over.

This'll work out, he thought. A minor complication resolved.

This'll work out.

Yet the night was wearing on.

The moon rising.

They'd lost precious time.

■   ■   ■

He used to say, “I've
heard the whispers.”

An acquaintance tested that refrain one time, asking, “What whispers? When? Willis, how did you hear these whispers? Nobody hears whispers that they're not meant to hear.” The casual friend worked in his field, a shopkeeper also, although not from his part of the country. They met at the same winter trade shows from one year to the next and initially he was expecting something to happen between them but nothing did, and for a while he blamed the other man for this but later put the onus on himself.

“What do you mean?” he asked. He was slightly tipsy at the time, happily in an evening lull that held no particular fascination for him.

The acquaintance leaned forward. He was a plump, handsome man, with clear pores and cheeks so smooth anyone might believe he was incapable of growing a whisker. “Who exactly,” he asked, “is whispering?”

Willis Ephraim Howard, Esq., learned something rather definitive about himself that night during the welcomed conversation: he was capable of fooling himself. He uttered that one declaration,
“I've heard the whispers,”
with such singular conviction and for such a long time that he convinced himself of its veracity. Confronted in a hotel bar in an American city—probably it was Chicago although trade shows blended together in his mind—he finally accepted that he'd never actually heard such a whisper. He collected no actual knowledge and not so much as a smidgen of evidence that anybody anywhere ever whispered about him in that way, currently or in the past. What he did was imagine the whispering to the extent that he came to believe that it was based on fact and experience, rather than on his own ingrained run-of-the-mill fear and gentle self-loathing.

The revelation made him giddy.

“I'm a fraud,” he confessed. “A lunatic!”

“You're drunk is what you are,” his gift store associate attested. “Oh, and something else.” The man pushed himself back into the comfy leatherette sofa, crossing one leg over the other. He wore bright yellow socks with an Argyle pattern. Willis wished at that moment that he could dare to wear bright yellow Argyle socks.

He also yearned to hear what the fellow would say next, as he presumed he'd be uttering words he was hoping to hear. But the man disappointed him.

“You're curious,” Willis was told, “but you're not keen.”

And that, he knew, struck by the blow, was God's own truth.

Months later, Willis surmised that the line could serve well as his epitaph. The assessment did not apply only to the matter in question, his sexuality, but also to how he conducted himself throughout life. He was curious, but he was not keen. About anything. No longer drunk or giddy, he found the verdict to be unrelentingly depressing.

On rare occasion, Willis experienced sex with men, finding the forays, not surprisingly, messy, rowdy, troubling, mildly humiliating, unpleasant in a perplexing way, and yet rather exciting. He slept with women also, occasions that were even more rare, and he also found those experiences messy, but tepid, and although they were pleasant enough, which surprised him, he failed to be particularly excited. The arrival of a fresh young woman in his shop altered this perception, of himself if not of sex, for he sensed that the curiosity factor was not really his big thing anymore. With her, he thought, he could probably discover a genuine enthusiasm. She already demonstrated that her presence made him irrational, he practically gave away half his store to her, even if the space was more accurately defined as an eighth and in due time he was supposed to be compensated accordingly. He liked to think that it was not merely the sexual fantasy—although he also acknowledged that he often chose to deliberately kid himself. So the sexual fantasy probably did count more than anything else, he decided, but until he actually delved into that for himself what he enjoyed the most, what he was
keen
on, as well as being curious about, admittedly, was the aura of her presence. For that was it. He wanted to bathe in that aura. He wanted to bask in its evident light. He wanted to see himself reflected in the glory and the glow he felt when mirrored in her company. Half jokingly, he once defined himself as a rudimentary narcissist, yet somehow this woman accentuated his narcissism to an excruciating, highly sexualized degree. She elevated him by articulating his pain.

Tonight he dwelled upon this remarkable twist. The insight was delivered to his consciousness, as if by e-mail or by FedEx, about thirty hours previously while he lay in his bath, and he virtually wore the premise as a fragrance since then. Now, with some of the lustre gone, he thought things through. Weighed the evidence and decoded his logic.
What do I want out of this?
he asked himself.
The personal, the business side, either one, what is it I want?
He welcomed the introspection, believing that he was delving into what could prove critical in his life.
What will I do, or give up, to get it? Sex is out of the question, okay, she's not about to give me
that
.
Willis was proud of himself to be asking such penetrating questions, for at long last he was keen about the answers.

He decided to make a list.

Then, right away, to make two lists.

At the top of one sheet of paper, he wrote,
What I Want.
And at the top of the other,
What I'll Do or Sacrifice to Get What I Want.
Before he was able to add anything to his lists, he turned over the first sheet of paper and at the top of the blank side wrote,
Why I Want What I Want.
Now he was working with three lists. A side to one of the sheets remained blank, so he turned it over and stared at it awhile.

He flipped the sheets several times, and then he underlined each of the three titles with a cursive flourish. Yet, as each minute ticked by, he was drawn to the one completely blank side more than to the others, so he put that one on top. He didn't know what to write there, but assumed that a new and pertinent title would soon dawn on him.

When nothing did, he stood and stepped over to the opposite side of the room to his liquor cabinet. A broad choice. He chose a Bailey's Irish Cream that he poured into a favourite snifter, then sat back down on his sofa. He sipped, and curled up, tucking his legs up under him and crisscrossing his arms over his chest. He stalled, but knew what was coming next.
Give it a few minutes,
Willis Ephraim Howard advised himself.
This'll pass. We'll see what's on the tube tonight. This will pass.

Rather than easily passing, his mood overwhelmed him, and Willis felt wretched. An abject ache in his chest gained intensity and although he knew what it was, just another onrushing accumulation of unhappiness, malaise, and depression, he worried that this was the big one, a heart attack that would drop him where he sat and rip him from his life and he'd be left with three blank lists and one blank page that even lacked a title, and regretted that these four sheets represented the sum total of his life. In the midst of his agony, that was the cruellest incision—that at the moment of his death, at the peak of his life, he wanted to inscribe what was important to him and was unable to do so, and that
blankness
, arriving at the very moment of his death, defined him, for at the crucial hour, that was exactly how he defined himself.