Biting the Moon (28 page)

Christ,
she thought,
what would Andi do?
And she knew in an instant what Andi would do: brazen it out. Take control before he did, dictate the direction of whatever exchange they would have. If she didn't, she would lose.
Don't let him put you on the defensive.
Mary asked, her tone as uninterested as she could make it, “What were you talking to Floyd about?”

That she wasn't denying she'd overheard them threw Harry off balance. He stood away from the tree. Quivering waves of apricot light combed the branches. With the light at his back, he was a darkness standing between her and the sun, and as if the familiar world were spinning away, the voices of the rafters drifted lazily toward her: the campfire, the people, the whiskey, the talk belonged now to that other world, one to which she'd had a key but had it no longer.

Harry said, “Nothing much. Floyd's been out with me before; he gets kind of—paranoid.” Harry smiled. “Why? What did you hear?”

How far could she go before she tipped the scale? “He sounded pretty mad.”

“He thinks you and Andi aren't experienced enough for this.”

He started moving toward her, and it was all she could do to keep from backing away. But she didn't. “Well, it's nice of him to be protective like that. Maybe it's because he has a daughter too.”

He watched her. “How long have you two girls known each other?”

What kept her from stumbling into a lie was her sudden awareness that he knew the answer. For she couldn't have known Andi before that night he'd picked her up in the truck. If Andi hadn't known where she'd been, there was no way for Mary to know. “Not very long. I met up with her in Santa Fe. We just hit if off, I guess.”

He was directly in front of her now and she could feel his heat. He put one hand on her shoulder, massaged the muscle. The hand was very strong. What she felt was fear of a different kind from what she'd experienced back there in Pistol Creek Rapids. That fear was mixed with a kind of elation. This fear was stark.

“Listen, you take care on this river. It's deceptive.”

He dropped his hand from her shoulder and stood there like a boulder, impossible to move, impossible to get around, unless you were water. So she stood too. “I don't think so.” She shook her water-tangled hair back, away from her face. “It's not trying to fool anyone. You just have to pay attention. You have to scout, and so forth. The river doesn't
mean
to be anything; it just is.”

Harry laughed. “Quite a philosopher, aren't you?”

Unsmilingly, she shook her head. But what she felt was for a moment she had him. She stumped him. He didn't know what to make of her.

Again, someone yelled for Harry, and they headed for the others. When she saw the campfire and the faces that ringed it, she was surprised she hadn't noticed that night had come on. Something was simmering in some sort of heavenly smelling sauce on the fire and the Mixxes were offering drinks around—martinis and scotch. Hard-core drinkers. Graham and Lorraine were sticking with beer.

Mary tried to avoid looking at either Floyd or Harry Wine, but her gaze was drawn to them; she couldn't help it. Floyd's expression was fierce as he watched Harry. But to look at Harry, one would think nothing had happened. He finished rubbing pepper and herbs into the steaks and put them on the grill. Then he moved about the fire with a can of beer and the ease he had mastered long ago, finally settling cross-legged next to Lorraine Lynch, who turned coy in his presence, looking up at him from under lowered eyes.

Over the drone of the others' conversations, Mixx was carrying on his love affair with his surroundings: trees, rocks, river, flora, and fauna. “Nothing like it, getting out of Dallas and back to nature. Here's the way I'd like to live, just breathe in that air, none of those damned fumes we got to breathe all the time. This is the life. Simple, uncomplicated, basic.”

“Basic?” said Lorraine, laughing. “I wouldn't call this food basic.” She waved her hand over the grill that held more tomato-blackened salmon, in case anyone could possibly eat seconds. There was a potato-and-cheese casserole and abundant vegetables to go with it.

“Me either,” said Andi.

While they savored everything in silence for a while, Mary struggled to keep her mind on something other than the implications of what she'd overheard in the woods, and so watched Bill Mixx light up a cigar with a thin platinum lighter. His Rolex winked in the firelight. His boots were undoubtedly hand-tooled; he had insisted on bringing them along. Was all of this finery some kind of sustenance? She was glad of the food before her, not so much because she was hungry but because it gave her eyes something else to look at besides Floyd. She was cutting up steak into tiny pieces when she heard the clipped end of something Andi was saying:

“. . . what Reuel said.”

“Reuel has too much damned time on his hands, you ask me,” said Harry, who was now sitting beside Andi, finishing off his steak. “He's got nothing to do except check the cars that come to the dump, so the rest of his time's taken up with dead-air talk.”

What, wondered Mary, had Andi said about Reuel, or what Reuel had told them?

“How far we going tomorrow?” Mixx fairly boomed, alcohol combining with his usual mulishness to make him even louder. “By God, I hope we hit some
real
white water tomorrow!”

“You thought that wasn't real today?” Harry smiled. “Felt real to the rest of us.” He winked at Andi.

He was simply too seductive; it was nearly impossible to keep from returning the wink—or at least from smiling. Andi did neither.

Mixx flapped his hand in dismissal. “I'm talking eight-foot drops and ten-foot holes.”

“You're on the wrong river, then, mister,” said Ron. “You want to try the Illinois, over in Oregon. There's a class-five rapid there that's got a solid wall on your right and boulders in front of you.” Ron and Randy were piling some delicious-looking, several-toned chocolate cake onto plates.

“Or the Gauley,” put in Graham. “You'll get holes there, all right.”

When Bill Mixx went on to describe his trips on the Green River, the bragging and exaggeration Mary had come to expect from him fell away, so that his words took on the ring of truth. There was no Mixx bombast, only a recounting of what happened.

Mary wondered if it might not be the same for the rest of them, perhaps for everybody: that in the face of real and true experience, the need to impress others and to project an image was forgotten, the experience enough in itself. She pulled her legs closer to her and rested her chin on her knees, listening. It was like when she was a child, sitting around a campfire, listening to ghost stories. The voices had a seductive pull to them, were not everyone's ordinary day-to-day voices. At least, that's how it sounded.

Graham Bennett was caught up in river memories too, enough to break through his customary silence to ask if any of them had ever run
the Alsek. None of them had; none of them, except for Harry, was at all familiar with the name.

“It's in the Yukon and Alaska. That one?” he asked. Graham nodded. “The Alsek's famous; it's famous for being unrunnable, is what I've always heard,” Harry said.

Graham smiled. “I wanted to take on Turnback Canyon. I wanted to, but it lived up to its name. I had to turn back. There's no river like the Alsek; at least if there is, I've never seen one. Even being in Alaska, I wasn't prepared for the ice. It was like another world. Running that river was like going back to the beginning of things.

“After about fifty miles of rapids—and the Alsek is all rapids—rapids without respite, except for this lake. A place like none I'd ever seen, it was all ice, a glacier, a wall of ice, blue ice. Tons of ice calved off the glacier and dumped into the water. So you can imagine. Ice like enormous boulders, only boulders that constantly moved. Foam thirty feet high and huge holes that would hold me if I flipped. I was always afraid of slamming up against a cliff. I seemed to be doing nothing much but roll-overs and roll-ups. And all of this ice shearing off the glaciers.”

The rapids that followed from the mile-wide river at one point were pinched between banks only a hundred feet wide, like an hourglass. The immensity of all that water and all that ice dwarfed whatever problems Mary had, or even the bigger ones Andi had, and made her feel almost ashamed for having them.

At one point, Graham said, “Going down the river was like being caught up in a parallel life.” He stopped abruptly. Even in the amber glow of the campfire, Mary could see he was blushing, thinking his philosophizing was going too far.

“Déjà vu,” Lorraine said.

“No, not that, or not only that. Have you ever been caught unaware by the sense you had another life, moving along beside this one?”

Mary looked at Andi, who was listening to Graham, rapt.

“Hey, you one o' them Zen Buddhists?” Bill Mixx was back in character.

Graham shook his head. “No, that's not what I mean. It's as if you were looking through the window of a train, seeing yourself on
another train, looking through a window. I felt my other life on other rivers—the Colorado, the Rio Grande, the Snake—was a different life. It's like I had one foot in each of these lives for a moment. I felt really frightened, as if I had stumbled on something I wasn't supposed to know.”

“Well, my heavens,” said Honey Mixx, with an uncertain laugh, “you make it sound like the Garden of Eden all over again, Graham.” Her laugh was more nervous than delighted.

Hearing Honey say that, Mary thought, How strange that people you had pegged as silly or uncomprehending should suddenly say a thing startling in its implications.

Then Lorraine asked, in that rather stiff way she had of speaking, probably from embarrassment that she was asking for attention of any kind, “Have you ever had fatalities on the Salmon?”

Mary saw Harry dart a glance at Floyd. He said, “Two or three times. Foolhardiness, carelessness, or—something unavoidable.”

“Such as what, Harry?” asked Mixx, with a benign smile, as if prepared to forgive Harry Wine in advance for carelessness.

“Boaters thinking they can take on Dagger Falls even though it's unrunnable. As far as carelessness goes—it's failing to close up your life jacket, Bill.” He smiled.

“He's got you there, Billy,” said his wife.

“That girl, the one who drowned a few years ago around here?” Andi tossed this out conversationally, as if she didn't really care about the answer.

Harry Wine certainly did. His look seemed to take in both Andi and Floyd, encapsulate them in some way, and then back off. It was worse than anger, that cold and distant look.

“Well?” Honey Mixx looked expectantly at Harry. “What happened to this girl?”

Oddly enough, it was the ordinarily silent Randy, handing the coffee around, who said, “A keeper. Her kayak got caught up in a keeper. She shouldn't have been out in a kayak. She didn't have the experience.”

That wasn't what Mary had heard. She kept on covertly looking from Harry to Floyd. Harry's expression now was mild and sad, as if he
honestly mourned the fate of the girl. “I don't think it was inexperience. She'd been on a lot of white water, some of the roughest. It was just one of those freak things that you don't know's going to happen until it does. Undercut rock on one side, the damned hole on the other. The keeper just opened up, sucked her down.”

Mary thought that was a rather trivial way of putting it and was considering saying so, when Graham Bennett stopped in the act of lighting the cigar Mixx had given him to say, “Charybdis.”

They all looked at him.

“Haven't you guys read your Homer?” On a long indrawn breath he got the cigar going. He snapped the lighter shut, said, “Scylla and Charybdis. The Greek version of a rock and a hard place.” He exhaled a stream of smoke that turned blue in the firelight.

•   •   •

It wasn't until they were rolling out their sleeping bags that Mary had a chance to tell Andi who Floyd was.

Andi just stared at her, speechless. Finally, she said, “Harry didn't have any idea of this before now?”

“Not from what I heard. I think he was totally shocked.”

“And it's pretty clear what Floyd thinks.”

“Yes. That it was no accident.”

“Then,” said Andi, “we better watch out for Floyd.”

Having shared her discovery with Andi, Mary felt a little better. She lay with her hands clasped behind her head, reliving the river trip, raising gooseflesh on her arms, thinking of the frigid water, the shouting, the crying, the wintry look of Andi's face. It was perfectly quiet now, except for a piercing bird cry or the hoot of an owl. The dead-white moon was so bright she could see its reflection through the canvas, and when she reached one hand upward, its brightness stained her hand. It was as if there was nothing—not canvas, not distance—between herself and the moon. She smiled and drank in the silence, beneath it the rush of the river.

It was probably never black-dark here, not with a moon like that.

She thought of Graham Bennett, floating down that river in Alaska—what was its name?—and pictured it as their own run between fir-covered canyon walls and a sky as blue as cornflowers, all transformed to
ice walls, ice caverns, ice boulders, even ice splinters in the foaming water. She thought of what Graham had said about a parallel life:

Going down that river
—the Alsek, that was it—
was like being caught up in a parallel life.

A parallel life.
Mary looked at the tent brightened by moonlight, wondering if that's what Andi had: two selves on different trains. Or were there parallel worlds? A world far beyond our comprehension, which must be the world inhabited by things like Jules and the coyote pups, one in which you stepped by accident, then realized it was dangerous to know.