The River Burns (34 page)

20

A
flicker ticked across his mind.

Shadow simultaneously dimmed the windowpane in his fitful sleep. Denny flinched.

Cloud smudged the moonlight shining through leaves, a shimmer created by the flight of a dashing nocturnal shade, that tinkering in his craw, a flicker which, now gone, left him in some subliminal distress. An ethereal crimp that he endeavoured to put out of his head. Yet the thought, undefined, returned on its own wing. He would need to confess to himself and argue the matter through, to begin by acknowledging that he indeed entertained the notion that
the old bat's dead, which makes her idea for a new old bridge deader
and yet, a residual instinct failed to release him from an abject worry.

In part, he didn't mean to call her an old bat, and regretted that, too.

Sorry. You were a real sweetheart. I bet nobody's called you that for a while.

He remembered a time, during Christmas holidays, returning from an outdoor skating rink. He was about seven or eight, as he recalled. Mrs. McCracken was coming his way and he just got scared. She frightened him, her authority, her austere countenance intimidated him, to run into her outside of school without the safety of others around was terrifying. He thought about crossing the street to avoid her but knew that she'd give him heck for not crossing at the corner, but then her feet went out from under her and Mrs. McCracken landed on her backside in a wink. Denny stood still for an instant, too surprised to react, but when she experienced a hard time surfacing he raced over. “Ohh,” she was saying, “Oh my.” Tears derived from the shock of her pain. The two of them worked together to get her back on her feet and then she asked him to please help her home.

She walked with a deep limp and sometimes when her left leg took her weight she exclaimed, “Ow!” He went all the way home with her, the woman steadying herself by keeping one hand on the little boy's shoulder.

Once she was in her door she thanked him, dried her eyes and wiped away a few sniffles on a tissue, and looked as though she was going to be all right. The best she could manage was a cautious shuffle, though. Denny waited at the door to see if she could sit, and when she did, a question simply jumped out. “Where's your husband?”

She looked at him from her sofa, still red-eyed.

“Everybody calls you Mrs.,” Denny explained himself.

“Gone to his rest, Denny. Much too early, gone to his rest.”

Denny said, “Oh.” Then he left the house and ran a long way home until he was out of breath. He walked slowly the remainder of the way, wondering about being at rest. The memory of the day impressed him for its clarity as he considered that Mrs. McCracken was finally at rest herself, and thinking about it, he continued to fidget and fret.

The next morning, sleep-deprived, he showed up for work after the drive north to his new harvest field to learn that he had reason to be out of sorts. A fellow driver named Roy with whom he rarely shared a word, yet who seemed remarkably sympathetic towards him, told him that with Mrs. McCracken gone quite a few people were rousing themselves to support her cause. His wife, Roy said, told him so.

Glum, Denny O'Farrell thanked him for the heads-up.

And smiled as he walked away.

Oh, sweetheart.

He should have known. Just because old lady McCracken passed on didn't mean that she actually was going to leave town, or leave him alone.

Good on you, McCracked,
Denny muttered to himself, perhaps out loud, before he thought to bite his tongue. He really didn't want to encourage her.
You old bat.

■   ■   ■

From a distance, someone might
assume that Skootch remained oblivious to the very scene he so diligently created the day before. Tidying up his raft from the chaos of its rambunctious descent through the rapids, he remained chagrined by the loss of a few items overboard. As he kept no inventory and possessed only a rudimentary memory of such artefacts he was feeling their absence as a vague and generic loss, rather than as the diminishment of any specific need.

Yesterday, under the noses of two visiting cops, Ryan O'Farrell, and a crowd of onlookers, he reamed Jake out for the material losses. Then the three policemen talked to a shaken, soaked, bleeding, and seemingly disoriented Jake Withers. They wanted to talk about the old bridge, and what he'd seen. He'd left the bar early that night, he told them, after a single beer following his ball game—he'd hit a double, he said—because he didn't want to drink a lot and drive, and what a beauty of a lie that was. Skootch positively beamed with pride. That's when Ryan asked him to step off the raft until the interview was over, and then he was going to talk to him about
all this
, meaning the dilapidated raft. Jake went on to tell the police that he saw the fire and blared his horn and saw nothing and no one else. A cop was the next person to the scene and that was that, the bridge burned. The cops were noncommittal in their responses, and wrote down his personal information, but ashore Skootch guessed that Jake was doing just fine from the titbits he overheard, and why shouldn't he shine? Right through the interview he was sticking to the simple truth.

Then Ryan approached Skootch on shore. “So what the fuck is this?”

“My yacht,” he explained. “A public riverbank, Ry. Anybody can moor here. To save you the trouble I already checked. There's no law against it.”

“Not yet,” Ryan said, then he carried on with his new SQ pals.

Now, a day later, assessing the rearrangements to his gear, Skootch put together a plan. He selectively differentiated between the changes which were beneficial to his accommodations and those which ought to come undone. Half the time he couldn't remember where his stuff used to reside anyway, so a number of objects ended up in fresh locations, such as a swizzle stick stuck in the maw of a clay marmalade cat, and a banjo, stripped of its strings, hanging from a pot rack that was stepped on its side and strapped over a window as an awning. Busy with the housekeeping, he wore only the skimpiest of genital thongs over which hung small flaps, front and rear. Casual viewers compared his attire to fig leaves, and one wag among the many who observed him commented, “I think I can make out his figs.” His long legs and astonishingly lean torso were baked to a reddish clay after the summer's exceptional heat. Calves, arms, and shoulders were nibbled by bugs but he showed no remorse, whereas a few people observing him were wont to scratch the itch, and scratched themselves in sympathy. Children—boys in particular, but a few girls also—formed the core of his rapt audience, yet he paid no one heed as eventually he retired to his penthouse balcony under the sun. He took his ease on a warped and ragged patio divan while reading, many noted—as if such a thing was incomprehensible for a man of his appearance and reputation—the morning newspaper duly delivered by a paperboy.

Someone pointed out that he was studying the business section.

When an attractive young woman emerged from the lower grotto, the whole of his visible world, so it seemed, gasped. A sufficient reaction that Skootch looked up, to see what on earth just transpired. Children stood with their mouths agape. One exclaimed, “There's two of 'em on that thing!” The boy's dismay was countered by a stern look from Skootch which dictated that he be left alone, but as he did not insist on it, or actually say so, folks lingered awhile.

■   ■   ■

“Why me?” he begged.

Jake Withers and the other tree huggers nestled in the woods, concealed by foliage, tormented by bugs. Before them lay a clearing, dusty and remote, where truckers a short distance from their rigs gobbled lunch.

In attire not so dissimilar to that of his mentor, Jake Withers bristled at the suggestion that he was a gutless maggot. He wanted to know why he could not be assigned to the group who were going to spray-paint trucks, that seemed the lighter chore. Instead, he was assigned to the firebombing brigade. Now he wanted to know why he was selected to commit the first defiant act by throwing the first torch. Not being rewarded with an answer, egged on by the unsolicited rebuke of those who swarmed beside him—
“Why are you such a gutless maggot?”—
he took a breath, struck the rag of his Molotov cocktail in the small fire at his feet
—“Are you man or vermin? Prove to us you're one or the other!”—
and fuelled by his rampant fear he ran. Raced the burning wick to the parked logging truck where he hurled the gasoline-filled bottle, accurately enough using his third baseman's good arm, a mere toss across the infield. Just like that, liquid flame swam over the truck and its cargo of timbers and Jake fled back to the safety of the woods and to the wonder of his new and unsolicited life.

After him, more cocktails arced through the air, like cannon fire of old, though silent. The miscreants hurried back to the refuge of the forest, where they paused to watch the flames lay siege to the three fully loaded rigs. They waited. And waited still. They were disappointed, for the fires did not impress them. Raw logs, the timber not yet hewn and still green, do not readily ignite, they found out, their dismay palpable. After their planning and the thrill of execution they earned only the shouts of truckers who'd been enjoying the quiet of the hour at a picnic table to amuse themselves. But no great flame. No incendiary romance.

Until something happened.

A logger would later explain that his vehicle carried three jerry cans of gasoline to service a generator in the field, that they were strapped to the rear of his cab. In the acute heat, they ignited and in succession exploded. First the cab caught fire, flames licking through the open windows, seats suddenly engulfed. The intensity of that heat combined with the Molotov fires created a localized inferno. Somewhere in its systems a gasket on a diesel line or a section of rubber hose melted, and so the fire welcomed a steady leakage of fuel to cook the rig. That one truck would be destroyed, and Jake Withers and his crew of ragamuffin, self-proclaimed ecoterrorists celebrated their trophy.

He anointed this as the grandest day of his life.

Jake had no clue how it all transpired, how he was transformed into this new being, nor did he care.

His heart stammered in his chest. He'd never known such exuberance. He could not believe what he did. Neither could Belinda, who took his face in both her hands and kissed him, hard on the mouth, her tongue digging up into his palate. Then they both ran. They scooted. They leapt roots and swung from a convenient branch to propel themselves farther on their way. Like playful jungle chimps. They ran and tumbled and laughed and scampered through the native woods. After a while, along with others, they stopped and bent at the waist to catch a breath, then hoots and a few happy hollers lifted them on their way again, gambolling through the mottled sunlight to a benevolent freedom.

■   ■   ■

Atop his raft, champion to
the vista he surveyed, Skootch heard sirens unfold from the fire hall, first, soon from the police station also, as the first responders charged off. An audience turned away from him to trace the sounds. He noted the direction the emergency vehicles headed, on into the woods, their sirens eventually fading, and returned his attention to the sports section of his paper, studying box scores from last night's Major League games.

■   ■   ■

Hours later, at a hardwood
planing mill, Detectives Maltais and Vega relaxed by the forest's edge. As the next truck drove in they ­observed it park. The big engine rumbled and shook and issued a gush of air, a whale surfacing from the sea, before it lapsed into silence. Maltais worked a kink from his shoulder blades. The driver climbed down from the cab and moved off while a forklift swung around to claim the prized load. Both detectives gazed across the dusty compound to a small administrative hut where the sun reflected brightly off the door's small windows. An inspector there stepped out to give them a nod, their signal that the driver they wanted to speak to had just pulled in.

The driver, André Gervais, uncapped a bottle of water and spread himself out upon a picnic table's bench, his arms running along the tabletop, his knees apart so that his inner thighs could catch a scant measure of coolness. He saw the two men amble towards him, they seemed in no hurry, and knew who they were before they showed their badges to prove it.

“Son of a bitch,” André said.

“How's it going?” Detective Vega asked him. “A hot one, eh?”

“Hot enough,” the trucker agreed. “Been hotter.”

“Some summer. This heat. The humidity, eh?”

Maltais chose to take a load off, sitting down on one end of André's bench. “I'm Maltais,” he said. “The Mex is Detective Vega. You're André Gervais?”

The trucker sputtered his lips in an attitude of nonchalance.

Vega gave him the benefit of the doubt. “Tough day?”