Biting the Moon (26 page)

The gas station was connected, in a rickety line, to a café. Behind this building was a barn, and from that direction came the sound of a dog barking. Mary wandered around to the back, where she saw a few animals—a goat and, farther off in the meadow, a cow—besides the dog, a long narrow animal with a prominent rib cage that reminded Mary of Jules. But the thinness here was attributable to the breed, which was at least in part whippet or greyhound. It was tied to a fence post on a length of rope that was, at least, long enough for the dog to get some exercise. Still, she thought of Jules. Mary supposed she would always be reminded whenever she saw a dog tied up.

When the dog saw Mary, it stopped barking and whipped its tail back and forth hopefully. She walked over to it, and it started leaping fitfully, straining at the rope. Mary rubbed its head and back. She wondered why the dog should be tied up, as it was clearly not a menace but only seeking attention.

After a few more pats, she walked back around to the front where Harry was filling the tank, standing with his back to the truck, arms folded, staring at the pump while the indicators ticked over. Andi came
out of the store with a couple of packs of gum (Teaberry, Mary was surprised to see); together they walked into the little restaurant.

It wasn't much, just some booths on one side, a few tables and chairs, and a Formica counter with stools, but it was clean and tidy and reminded Mary a little of the Roadrunner.

Behind the counter, a middled-aged blond woman with a nice smile and a fresh complexion stood talking with two men occupying stools and drinking thick white mugs of coffee. They were dressed similarly, in what Mary thought were Forest Service uniforms: tan shirts, darker trousers. The three of them seemed to be having a good time, their talk interspersed with laughter. It was so bleak along this road, so untraveled, that Mary wondered what they'd found to entertain themselves.

“Be right with you girls,” the waitress called out cheerily, plucking up some menus.

Andi called back to her, “There's three of us.”

The blond woman nodded, laughed at something said to her by one of the Forest Service men, and came over to their booth. “Girls? What can I get you?” She had put down silver wrapped in paper napkins and was turning to the tray she'd set down to retrieve the three glasses of water when Harry Wine walked through the door. He smiled. It was a winning smile, Mary thought, but it wasn't doing much to win over the waitress, who became perfectly still.

“Emmylou,” he said, nodding.

On her part, there was a pause, what Mary imagined people meant by a “pregnant” pause, one heavy with meaning, heavy enough to make you want to know what events had led up to it. “Hello, Harry,” she said. She found a pencil where she'd stowed it in her buttery-yellow hair and took the girls' order for hamburgers and fries and Cokes. Then she turned to him and asked, “What do you want?”

The menu still lay, slantwise, on the table. He hadn't looked at it, except now, to hand it back. “The usual, number six.” The impression given was of a long-standing relationship. He introduced them.

Her name was Emmylou Haines and it was clear she didn't like Harry's proprietorial ways. All of her movements were cool, deliberate, as if she'd prepared herself, rehearsed the meeting. Mary wished she could have intercepted the look that passed between them.

Harry asked, “How's Brucie?”

It was fractional, the time it took her to still her hand over her pad of order blanks, but it was clear she didn't like the question. Or, more likely, the questioner. “Fine.” She finished writing the order; probably she didn't need to, but the pencil gave her something to do.

“Coffee, too. Strong.”

From the way Emmylou looked at him, Mary thought she'd rather bring a cup of cold poison.

Mary watched her walk off, her back stiff. She wondered who Brucie was. Probably a child, Emmylou's own, but she wouldn't ask Harry Wine. Mary thought that even to be warned against him wouldn't be enough to stop a woman from pursuing him; she'd think it her great good luck that he could be so easily caught. He could, couldn't he? At least he'd give the appearance of being easy, since he probably would have no stake in the relationship. The stake would be all the woman's. Mary thought about Peggy Atkins and what Andi had read about her in the paper, and a knot took hold in her stomach so that when Emmylou returned with the food, the burger and fries no longer looked good to her. Harry's order was a club sandwich, and he ate it with gusto.

Finished, Andi insisted on paying for the lunch, outmaneuvering Harry, for the money was in her hand, together with the check; she slipped from the booth and headed toward the register. Mary followed, not wanting to have to make conversation with Harry in her absence.

Emmylou smiled at both of them as she spiked the check on a prong that held others and opened the cash register. “You girls going rafting, are you?”

Yes, Andi told her. Boundary Creek.

She handed over Andi's change and gave her a charged look. “Listen, you be careful, you hear?”

When she looked at Emmylou Haines's face, there was no doubt in Mary's mind of what Harry Wine was capable of doing. No doubt at all.

•   •   •

After they left the café and then the highway, they drove on a succession of rough and rougher roads. When Harry at last said they were
nearly there and turned off onto an even worse washboard road, Mary felt drugged, her whole body weighted, a stiff, leaden burden that would drag down any raft and her with it.

He parked the truck in a large lot edged by a thick wood of fir and pine. The launch was directly ahead of them. The sun at noon was hot, but here the trees nearly covered them in a dark canopy through which light barely filtered, and it was so cold that Mary shivered. The air was scented with damp earth and rotting leaves. She took in great gulps of it and wished she could bottle it, wear it like perfume. It smelled so
real
—that was the only word she could think of.

While the ranger checked Harry's permit, Mary and Andi began to unload the tents and the cold lockers, the big waterproof bags that held clothes, the sleeping bags, the boots—an astonishing amount of gear for a four-day trip that was supposed to be life simplified, even primitive. Andi handed down an armful of bright orange life jackets, and Mary stacked them on an outspread tarp. She was doing this when the van pulled in.

Its passengers spilled out, stretching their arms and legs as if they'd been traveling for days without letup. The “fellas”—Randy and Ron, whichever was which—carried the two rafts to the river and began rigging them. Floyd, Mixx, and Graham Bennett helped Andi and Mary with the gear.

The woman called Lorraine Lynch, whom Mary had decided was a teacher or a librarian, hovered by Mary's shoulder, uncertain what to do. What to do seemed pretty obvious to Mary and she'd never done this before. Mary learned Lorraine was not a teacher but a college bookstore manager. She seemed pleasant enough, although she was thin and nervous and not very pretty. A lot of her energy was exhausted in wasted motions: hands fluttering in air, or smoothing her hair, or
tugging at her paddling jacket, supplied by Wine's. The busy hands gave her an air of desperation, a woman living at loose ends. Given the way that she was eyeing both Graham and Harry, Mary was pretty sure she was right. She seemed not to want to attach herself to Honey Mixx, who was trying to stave off time's erosion with too much makeup and too-bright clothes.

When all the gear was off-loaded, Mixx (taking over, Mary wasn't surprised to see) picked up a couple of the heavy bags and told the rest of them to follow suit. Behind him, Mary and Andi picked up a cold locker, which was a real trial, and between them lugged it, following Bill Mixx. The others came behind with their burdens.

Harry Wine was directing Randy and Ron in the stowing of the gear. “No, put the smaller cooler in behind the passenger seat and we'll drag the other. That stuff there goes in the bow, and this time be sure you lash it down so the ropes aren't loose. We've got a net for the one—the locker goes under the
passenger's
seat, for God's sakes! Where's the net?” This last was addressed to the twin called Ron, who went to get it, while Randy stashed the tents and bags in the bow of the raft. They were medium-sized rafts, one perhaps a foot longer than the other. Six-man rafts, each fitted out with oars for one person, paddles for the rest of them. Mary wondered who would be sharing the raft where Harry would be manning the oars. She knew he'd choose Andi and, consequently, Mary herself.

Harry stopped to give another little pep talk and a drill regarding safety. “Use your float jackets and your common sense and you'll do fine. You planning on zipping that up, Bill, or setting a new style?” He flashed Mixx a smile, compromising the sarcasm.

The big Texan was standing smoking a cigar, his orange jacket on but the fasteners undone. “I hate wearing the damn things. They just get in the way.”

“I'm afraid you'll have to on this trip.”

Mixx referred to his jacket as a Mae West and laughed loudly over this tired old joke. Ron or Randy told him it wasn't that kind; it was a lot snugger and made for white water. Mixx fastened it up, grumbling. Mary supposed there'd be five in each boat and prayed that Mixx wouldn't be in hers. The third man, Floyd Ludens, was near Bill Mixx's
age and as quiet as the Texan was talkative. He'd taken these trips before with Wine's Outfitters. She'd like to have him in their raft. She got into her kapok-filled float jacket and found it wasn't as cumbersome as she'd expected. It was like a vest, a long one that zipped up the front and tied around the middle.

All accounted for, Harry divided them into two groups. Mary and Andi and Lorraine Lynch would go with him; the Mixxes, Floyd Ludens, and Graham Bennett would go with Randy and Ron. (Ron would be ashore scouting the rapid a couple of miles downriver.) Bill Mixx naturally had to make some heavy-handed joke about Harry keeping all the “pretty gals” for himself. Mary looked at Honey, his wife, who'd not been included in the “pretty gals” category, but she was merely smoking a cigarette and squinting beneath the shade of her yellow-beaked cap.

•   •   •

They hit white water right after they'd taken their positions, just as soon as the raft hooked around the first bend of the river. They negotiated a logjam and avoided getting pinned by Harry's taking care to run the left-hand side. This was her first taste of it, and if that was what the rafting world had christened a class-two rapid, she sure wasn't looking forward to any class three.

The next stretch of river was dark glass, untroubled water that Mary wished she could later return to in memory, if not in time and space. They were running between canyon walls so high that above them the sky looked no wider than a blue chalk mark, and she remembered from what she'd heard or read that the Salmon—middle or main—ran through a gorge even deeper than the Grand Canyon. Umber sunlight ran like water down the walls. She felt invisible and mortal in the midst of all this.

Suddenly, Harry shouted, “Get ready. There's a tailout!” Mary discovered what he meant when the raft hit a barricade of water that rose up and up until Mary was certain the raft was going to flip, but it didn't; it rode the wave and crashed down with a sound like skis hissing on downhill snow. There was a breath-catching break, and then another wave, this one not so tall, and then the raft bounced over a series of smaller waves. It was a roller coaster of a ride. The raft entered a tongue
and they slipped through like silk. Harry yelled, “We got to build up some speed before the eddy line!”

Mary turned to look at the raft behind, Randy manning the oars. It was all but lost in the foam and waves, but there were plenty of pleasurable squeals and shouts coming from it. She turned back to hear Andi yelling something and laughing. Andi made it sound as if she knew the river's obstacles, could read the river's moods; she sounded like she knew what the river was all about, its roar and mutability.

Only she didn't. It wasn't that she didn't understand what was going on. On the contrary, she had absorbed an amazing amount just from the book she'd bought in Santa Fe. But Mary doubted Andi's attention was on the river. This wasn't like the Texan's self-absorption, or Lorraine Lynch's scattered attention. Andi was so focused on Harry Wine nothing else could penetrate deeper than a surface pool of awareness.

The raft whipped around in the eddy and then broke through it, but the rapids did not let up. Neither did the rocks; to Mary it looked like a rock garden, with the canyon too narrow for much maneuvering. Harry signaled to the raft behind them, apparently to Ron, and he and Randy managed to get their raft to the bank. In the dip and thrust of the water, Ron got out of the raft. Then Mary remembered that Harry had said he'd “scout” places, and one of the places was called Velvet Falls.

As Harry was pushing off again, Mary asked him if Velvet Falls was ahead and he told her yes. She said she didn't hear anything, no sound of rushing water or anything.

“Why do you think they call it Velvet?” he called back. “I'd sit down if I were you.”

A few minutes later, standing on the broken rocks above, Ron signaled
Stop
or
Go,
Mary had no idea which.

Harry managed to find safe passage in a half-dozen places that looked from her position too narrow to slip a knife through. He could see things invisible to their eyes. Mary saw an enormous slant of roiling water ahead and Harry called back, “Lean into it and paddle, guys!” Mary did. It was impossible to see how the others were paddling in this spume like a blizzard of water and light. “Move into it, paddle
forward!” The raft slipped down the incline of water, then up the wave and down.

The water squeezed them against flat rocks to their right, and they blasted out of this narrow channel. It was then she heard the roar of water and wondered why they had been such imbeciles as to undertake this trip. There wasn't much time for wondering, though. They surfed to the left, then back to the center. Through curtains of foam, she made out that they were poised almost like that hawk or eagle she had half seen on the edge of air and there wasn't time to scream before the raft sailed out and plunged straight down and into a V-hole, the water caving in and slamming them around, nearly flipping the raft. But it didn't; Harry managed to get them back on course.