The River (4 page)

In the months that followed I babysat for the Armstrongs once a week officially, more if you counted all the times Karen showed up at Patchworks and wanted to hang out. How could I not? She made everything seem interesting and glamorous. “Hey, Ronnie. The periwinkles are on the move. Wanna come see? Kevin caught this garter snake and put it in his sock drawer. Come on, Ronnie, come look.”

I followed as Karen blazed the trail. If she was Sacagawea, then I was Lewis and Clark. I learned to appreciate things other than trash in the ditch. Thanks to her, I learned to spread out fish heads on the back lawn so Fred the Eagle would have a buffet lunch. I was able to pick out jasper and agate from the riverbed. I learned to cast critter prints and take them to Ranger Dave for identification. I learned the difference between petrified wood and plain rock worn into strata by the river. Once, I even found an old flint arrowhead. I gave it to Karen, of course. How could I not? She practically jerked it out of my hands with delight.

All these things we did together didn’t have anything to do with Vassar or debate or playwriting or wearing black. They had nothing to do with what I had before and was now lost.

But with Karen it hurt less. What I’d left behind was like my own line of Steri-Strips making a lopsided cross on my forehead. It itched terribly when I thought about it, but with her I rarely did.
How can you possibly be unhappy with so much stuff to do? Come on, Ronnie. Come look.

4

“Ronnie, what’s wrong? What is it?”

I stood heaving on the front porch of the ranger station, my hands on my knees. I couldn’t catch a breath. Ranger Dave was standing in the open door. Like the time I found Karen injured in her driveway so many months before, I had trouble forming words, and, like that first time, I didn’t need them. Ranger Dave threw on a utility belt with what could have been a gun or could have been a flare over his Dalmatian robe. His movements were deft. This was a man used to dealing with disaster.

“Did you call 911?” he asked.

I remembered the cell phone in my sweats. Why hadn’t I thought of it before? I showed it him, too numb and stupid even to press buttons myself.

“Do it now,” he said, dashing ahead of me down the porch.

“Do you have a first aid kit?” I found my voice; my heart slowed enough for me to form words. “She’s been in the river awhile.”

I didn’t explain who, but didn’t have to. I watched as Ranger Dave’s face seemed to catch fire then turn to ash in a matter of seconds. “Make that call,” he said ferociously.

He found a kit and sprinted after me as I talked to the “what is the nature of your emergency” operator. I don’t remember what I said or what she said, only that I got ma’amed a lot.

We reached the embankment and I was about to sprint back down to Karen, when Ranger Dave threw an arm across my chest. “Stay back,” he said. I thought: why? Not like I haven’t already seen it. Not like I haven’t already fished my fingers around in her cold, slimy mouth. But I did as he said and watched as he clambered down to get a better look.

He walked a circle around her, then crouched low and stuck two fingers into her neck, looking for a pulse.

“I couldn’t find the artery,” I called down. “And are you supposed to put three fingers or the heel of your hand on the sternum when they’re that little? I hope I didn’t break a rib.” But instead of working on her the way I had hoped he would, he took my rain jacket that was already covering her torso and moved it up over her face. Then he rocked back on his heels. He looked up at me and shook his head.

“Come on,” I wheedled. “You can bring anything back to life. I’ve seen it.
Do something!
”

He climbed back up to the street. “Ronnie,” he said, digging his fingers into my shoulders. “I’m sorry.”

I wrenched myself away. He had the moist, glassy look of someone who was about to hug me, and I didn’t want to be hugged. If he hugged me then somehow that would make it real, and I wasn’t ready to give up yet.

“This can’t be right,” I said. “Karen wouldn’t have an accident like this. She’s so sure-footed.”

“The river changes, Ronnie,” Ranger Dave said. “You can’t trust it.”

I stared down at the body on the embankment. And suddenly the whole horror of it hit me: she was lost.

I started to shake; then I started to snivel. There was some excess snot I couldn’t snort back up but had to let drip drip drip into my mouth. Then I gave up trying to contain the runny nose. Soon after, I gave up trying to contain the shakes and let myself rock.

That was when I let Ranger Dave wrap himself around me in a damp hug. And even then I wished he’d leave me alone. All I wanted to do was sink to the ground and curl up into a ball. “You don’t understand,” I said into his Dalmatian robe. “Who am I gonna follow now? I can’t follow her. Not through this.”

I knew that was the wrong thing to say but I couldn’t keep from saying it.
Me me me
. What was going to happen to
me
? My selfishness just made me cry all the harder. Karen deserved a better friend.

“Shhh,” Ranger Dave kept saying, patting circles on my back. “I know. I know.”

Then we heard one siren. Two sirens. A whole orchestra. An ambulance came. A Santiam County Sheriff’s car came skidding to a stop. Sheriff McGarry herself got out and climbed down the bank. She was a thin woman in her thirties with perfect auburn hair, no flyaways, and she sometimes saluted me when I ran past. If you saw her out of uniform you might think she was harmless and dateable, but when she pulled over drunk drivers she became a grizzly. I’d once seen her approach a drunk coming out of Phil’s Tiki Hut, trying to get his car keys to fit into the keyhole of his Chevy. “Sir, will you step away from the car, sir?” When he tried to brush her off she whirled him around and cuffed him in one fluid movement. No matter what the challenge, I’d never seen her rattled.

Until today.

She drew her fingers away from Karen’s neck. “God damn, this makes me sick,” she said, and pressed a button on a walkie-talkie that was strapped to her collar.

Her deputy, a guy with a top-heavy build and a Fu Manchu moustache, came over to Ranger Dave and me. “Which one of you found the body?” he asked. He had a big, authoritative voice that would’ve scared me if I could still be scared.

“Ronnie did,” Ranger Dave said.

Then the scary man did something that surprised me. He took off his see-through raincoat and draped it around my shoulders. It didn’t help keep me dry—I was already soaked—but it was a nice gesture. “I’m sorry you had to see this, hon. We’re going to need you to stick around so we can ask you some questions.”

I don’t like being hon’ed. I find it patronizing. But the way this man said it made me feel encircled, like a jacket. “Thank you,” I said.

Then the Lookie-Lous arrived. They must’ve heard the sirens and all crawled out. I didn’t know there were that many citizens in the whole town. Pasty faces; floral print; plaid, denim. Lots and lots of denim. I could make out Casey Burns’ mom, in a flannel nightgown and rainboots, a Members Only jacket held over her head like an umbrella. She motioned me over to her but I pretended I couldn’t see her. At that moment I hated her, I hated them all, pointing and shaking their heads. There wasn’t a one I would trust to lead me through the wilderness.

Then Sheriff McGarry and her deputy put up yellow tape everywhere and made the herd stay corralled, like cattle. A navy blue SUV with “Santiam County Coroner” printed on the side arrived. Someone handed me a cup of Styrofoam coffee, which was how I knew Tiny was there, too. Nobody made worse brew than he did.
He
couldn’t even drink it—he called it espresso and charged vacationers five dollars a cup. Ranger Dave acknowledged him with a wave and a smile, but I just looked away. I’d seen enough already that morning.

But I definitely remember the next part, which is that the Armstrongs’ truck pulled up and Mr. Armstrong got out.

“What’s going on?” He rushed the yellow tape.

“Sir,” said the deputy who’d given me his coat. “We’re going to need you to get back in your vehicle and go home, please. Let us do our job.”

“What job?” he said. “What’s happened? My little girl’s missing and someone said they thought she might be here.”

The deputy looked to me. I nodded once.

He turned back to Mr. Armstrong. “Go on home, sir,” he said in his scary, authoritative voice. “You’ll be contacted.”

“Ronnie,” Mr. Armstrong said, catching sight of me. “What’s happening? Just tell me: how many stitches is she going to need this time?” He tried to smile but his eyes were bright and watery. He needed reassurance to grasp on to, like a buoy, but I couldn’t give it to him.

Perhaps it was then that he noticed the coroner’s SUV, because Mr. Armstrong got belligerent. “Let me through,” he said to the policeman. “I want to see. I have to see.”

“Please, sir, not here,” the policeman kept saying.

I shrugged off the Hefty bag raincoat and let it fall to the ground. I marched forward, wrapping myself around Mr.Armstrong the way Ranger Dave had wrapped himself around me earlier. Mr. Armstrong tried to push me away at first. “Get away from me,” he said. “You’re not mine. You’re not Karen. Get me Karen.”

But he didn’t even try to move, and at last he slumped into me, his body racked with something more than sobs. It was as though huge chunks of him, like embankment, were falling away and churning into the ground under our feet.

Behind us the river was still shrieking; all around us were swollen clouds, making the air so dense we could hardly see, and that was okay by me. It blurred faces and voices.
Sir
,
I need you to step away
,
sir
.

I don’t know how long I held Mr. Armstrong up. It wasn’t long before he was as wet as I was. Ranger Dave offered to shelter us in the ranger station but neither of us let him lead us away. Instead we stayed outside, where a skyful of water, cold as lidocaine, was raining down.

5

After the police were finished with us and the neighborhood gawkers had crawled back to their warrens, Ranger Dave volunteered to drive me home. He had a mud-splattered SUV with these scratchy brown ponchos covering the seats.

By now he was out of his Dalmatian bathrobe and in his beige Forest Service uniform. He left the broad-brimmed Smokey Bear hat at home. “Are you okay?” he asked as I strapped myself into the shotgun seat. The scratchiness of the poncho worked its way through my clothes and into my back and thighs.

I nodded, but both of us knew it didn’t mean anything.

Ranger Dave smiled a weak smile, turned the ignition, cranked up the heat, and we were on our way.

Slowly, I began to realize that heat was a very bad idea. The rain-numbness was wearing off and the feeling returning to my limbs. As soon as the feeling came back, so did the memory: that
plunk
! sound Karen’s body had made as I pulled it free from the log, the pebbles that had dribbled out of her open mouth when I’d tried to do CPR, the way the side of her head had seemed to open and close like it was on a loose hinge.

It was too hot in here. I couldn’t breathe. I was going to be sick. Somehow I managed to get the window down and stick my head out of it, and threw up down the side of his SUV, getting watery vomit all over his Santiam National Forest logo.

Ranger Dave pulled the car to the side of the road and patted me on the back, his hands describing slow circles on my shoulder blades.

“Easy, Ronnie,” he said.

I stayed half out of the car for awhile, the rolled-down window practically chopping me in two at the waist. But that didn’t dam the flow of pukiness. I heaved even when I didn’t have anything left to bring up—just clear, frothy liquid, like whitewater.

“Sorry about your car, I’ll clean it up,” I choked.

“Don’t worry about that, Ronnie. We’ll let the rain take care of it.”

“She was just a little kid,” I said, making no move to get back in the car.

Ranger Dave sighed. “I know,” he said, and repeated in a whisper, “I know I know I know.”

“The river should be illegal.”

I heard Ranger Dave draw in his breath. “Usually I love it. But today I’d fence the whole damn thing if I could.”

It was still raining. The back of my head was being pelted and so, with the passenger window open, was the interior of Ranger Dave’s car. Those woolen poncho seat covers were going to shrink and smell like moldy alpacas. I pulled my head back in and rolled up the window.

“Take me home,” I pleaded.

Ranger Dave nodded and pulled the car back out onto the road.

I leaned my soggy head against the door, miserable. He didn’t understand. He was taking me east, toward Patchworks, when I wanted him to take me west, back to my old home—my real home—in Portland.

Believe it or not, I wasn’t always this whiny. I used to have things to look forward to—after-school activities where I didn’t have to devein anything or shovel anything or grout anything, and friends who weren’t already developing beer guts at the age of sixteen.

Before we moved to Hoodoo, Mom and Dad and I lived in a white Queen Anne–style house with purple trim and a wraparound porch in the funky northwest section of Portland, within walking distance of both Starbucks and Coffee People; Cinema 21, and a McMenamin’s pub and eatery for when I got tired of Mom food and just wanted a burger. The posters in my bedroom were of Mary McCarthy and Lillian Hellman, neither of whom (rumor had it) liked the other; both of whom were smoking and drinking coffee and wearing black. You could see the depth in their eyes. They hadn’t had the easiest, most traditional lives, but they were better artists because of it. They could flay open the human condition and look fabulous while they were doing it. And that was what I wanted. I wanted the sophistication of having many husbands or no husband at all, and I wanted to wear smooth velvet dresses and have deep red, almost purple, lips.

When I lived in Portland, that still seemed possible right down to the accessories.

Back then, my mom had her own cooking show,
The Flowerpot Cheesebread Gourmet
, on Oregon Public Television. She invited local celebs—politicians, Trail Blazers, news anchors, the pygmy marmoset keeper at the zoo—to appear with her and help her shove spicy drumsticks into a tandoori oven or chop cilantro for cool, puckery gazpacho. No one ever turned down a guest spot on her show. She was unfailingly gracious and fed them well.

I used to think of my father as the anti-Mom. He was an attorney with the Public Defender’s Office. The kind of guy who used words like
falsify
instead of
fake
. He certainly seemed happy enough, but now I wonder if Dad was ever truly happy or if he was merely satisfied and drowsy, like after a good meal.

Then I woke up one morning and the air was so spicy-sweet I thought it might singe off my nostril hairs.

Mom said the change in our lives wasn’t that sudden, and that Dad’s break was a long time coming. She said maybe if we’d paid attention to the smaller things, the bigger thing wouldn’t have whacked us over the head the way it finally did. All I know is that I will always associate ruin with the sticky-sweet smell of cardamom bread.

One morning last June I woke up at six and could smell the change in the air. I opened my window because inside had become close and airless.

I wandered down to the kitchen where I found Mom and Dad. Mom was wearing her OSU Beavers T-shirt and boxer shorts. Her brown curly hair was winging out around her head, like clusters of purple-black grapes. Dad was in his favorite fleece robe and sitting at the table in the breakfast nook. His short blond hair was matted against his head as though he’d been running his fingers through it for hours. Most of him was pale, but the skin under his eyes was the color of coffee grounds.

I watched from the doorway as Dad buried his head on his arms. “What have I done?” he mumbled. Mom stroked his back and shoved in front of him more cardamom bread, spread thick with honey butter. Then he’d start crying again and Mom would have to reapply her bread cure, like aspirin.

“I don’t know why you’re taking it so hard,” Mom said. “You were just doing your job.”

At this point I was tired of lurking in a doorway, so I came in stretching and rubbing my eyes as though I had just woken up.

“Hey,” I said. “What’s going on?”

The two of them looked up. “Nothing, honey.” Mom patted me on the arm and shot me her comforting celebrity-chef smile. “Have some cardamom bread.”

Dad sat upright. “That’s not strictly correct,” he said. “It’s not
nothing
.”

“Come on, Paul. Stop beating yourself up. This guy was no worse than some of the creeps you’ve defended.”

Dad snorted. “Yeah, well, I wasn’t suckered by
them
.”

Dad’s area of expertise at the public defender’s office was guys who were remiss in their child support. Deadbeat Dads, he called them. He said that most of them could hardly be called dads at all. He didn’t like any of them; wouldn’t invite one home for dinner—a big deal at our house. If he passed any of his ex-clients on the street, he didn’t even nod. All my father did was speed these losers through the courts as quickly as he could.

“He acted perfectly normal,” Dad said, talking about his latest deadbeat. “He’d been an alcoholic but he’d seen the error of his ways, and with the help of his church he wanted to atone for all he’d done.” The oven timer went off. Mom pulled another braided loaf from the oven as Dad picked at the thick slab of bread on the plate in front of him, making tiny efficient crumbs that were perfect spheres, the air squished right out of them.

“I wish you wouldn’t take it so hard, honey,” Mom said.

Dad pounded his fists on the table like gavels. “Not take it so hard? I helped him get his kids back, Claire. And that guy doesn’t deserve to be a parent. You didn’t see all the crap they pulled out of that house. There was bleach and rat poison everywhere. Then this whole arsenal. An AK-47 assault rifle in his closet. Pistols, shotguns…” He waved his hands around in the air as if he was surrounded by the weapons he was describing, and his only option was surrender. Then he crumpled like a used tissue. “Jesus,” he muttered. “There were little kids in that house. Kids that I helped him get custody of.”

There were a lot of things about his mini-rant that I didn’t understand. I got why firearms made him so uppity, but bleach? Rat poison? Was owning them really a prosecutable offense? What if the guy just had rats and hard-water stains?

Mom looked at me and then looked away. It was just a momentarily glance, but an unguarded one. For that moment she didn’t look confident and famous—she just looked tired and old. Then she started moving again. She was a deft cook, braiding and kneading and frosting, but it took all she had just to keep my father from falling apart.

Looking at the two of them should have been my first clue about how my life was going to be from now on: Dad paralyzed by his depression, Mom trying to shield me from it, but incapable of doing so. Her hands were too full. There just wasn’t any care left for me.

That morning I sat with Dad until after the sun was up. We didn’t talk; we didn’t eat; we didn’t go to work; we didn’t go to school.

“I’m going for a run,” Dad finally said, pushing himself away from the table. He stood up and threw away the white peak of used tissues that had piled up in front of him.

Three days later, Dad came home with our new “foster” family he’d repossessed from that last client, over my mother’s and my tepid objections. They weren’t technically fostered. They didn’t take our name and they still had a functional mommy—Gloria Inez, who seemed a fine woman but in need of a job for her green card; and her kids, Tomás and Esperanza. That was when I learned that Dad’s definition of
little kid
(as in “there were little kids in that house with the firearms”) included a teenage boy who was six foot six, brawny, and the only Latino I’ve ever seen able to dunk a basketball. Esperanza fit my expectations a bit more. She was seven, with large, frightened eyes and a thumb in her mouth that never came out.

One week after they squeezed in with us and bathroom time became a commodity, Mom remembered that she’d inherited a run-down inn on the banks of the Santiam River, and wouldn’t it be nice to get away? We could fix it up. Only enough to sell it since we never went there anyway.

But when we got there, a change seemed to creep over everyone but me. Tomás relished the room to stretch out. I once caught him standing in the living room, waving his long arms around, not hitting anything, a look of bliss on his face. He was the one who erected a basketball hoop in the parking lot.

Dad ran his hands lovingly over the wooden banisters carved into shapes of animals (brown bears, beavers, herons, eagles) and took over the rain-damaged basement, decorated it with black light posters and converted it into the Astro Lounge. Fixing the tap and filling it with Black Butte Porter, dark and foamy, was the only thing that brought a smile to his face.