The River Burns (11 page)

“What?” Jake asked. “What?”

“That jacket. That coat. You must be swimming in sweat.”

Jake finally looked down at himself, to see what he was talking about. The jacket, never intended for summer use, was indeed uncomfortable. Under it, his shirt was soaked through. Even his tie looked damp.

“What are you dressed up like that for to come down here?”

No ready explanation came to mind. “This is a business call,” he said. “But a friendly one just the same. My name is Jake Withers, and I represent the Rathbone Company?”

“The Rathbone Company! My God. The Rathbone Company!”

Jake Withers first thought the man was barefoot but noticed now that he wore sandals with soles no thicker than skin. He'd seen sandals like those for sale—buffalo hide, as he recalled. He didn't know why that stuck with him. He supposed that they were better to have on than just going barefoot.

He guessed that the man was about ten years older than him, mid-thirties or so. His face was weathered, gaunt, the eyes proportionally large even when he appeared to be squinting half the time. He was smoking still and now Jake noticed the peculiar scent.

“Do you know,” Jake asked, both surprised and encouraged, “the Rathbone Company?”

“Sounds like you sell fertilizer. Do you?”

“No.”

“Because the Rathbone Company sure sounds like shit to me.”

Jake Withers found himself with nothing to say.

“Seriously, friend. What did you come down here to sell me?”

The young man knew that he no longer wanted to say. If he could simply get back in his car, turn around, and drive away, he would. Given that his car wasn't going anywhere, he assumed that he wasn't as well.

“Maybe I could think about a discount,” Jake said.

“Save yourself the trouble. I appreciate an honest bargain as much as the next guy, but I'm not one to haggle. Can't stand it. One time, I picked up this box, see, it was just an empty box, in a flea market. I didn't even want to buy it, it was an old box, a crate really, nothing more than a battered worn-out milk crate, except that it was old, but I was looking at it and when I saw the price I couldn't believe it. ‘Twenty bucks!' I hollered. I didn't mean to attract attention to myself, I was just so surprised. I mean, it was just an old crate. The seller says, ‘Okay, fifteen.' What? I was so embarrassed to be haggling for something I didn't even want, I gave him the twenty. Then I went down the line and sold it to another dealer for ten. Cost me ten bucks for my dismay. So, no, I don't haggle much.”

Jake Withers stared back at this man of the forest with the gnarly face in his skimpy garments and mosquito-infested skin and crazy story and found out that he still couldn't manage anything to say that would make sense. The man was holding out the smoke to him. Jake waved it off.

The man inhaled and squinted, held the smoke in his lungs, and studied him with his squinty yet oversized eyes. Streaks in his eyebrows and a crust of grey whiskers under his chin belied evidence that he didn't look old enough to be turning white.

The man finally exhaled, and asked, “So what do you want to sell me?”

Jake looked up at the track he'd just come down. “Well,” he said.

The man waited.

“Maybe I could— Maybe you'd like to have your driveway paved.”

Time seemed to drift away, like the smoke from the fires in the camp. Jake Withers felt pinned by the gaze of the stranger before him, unable even to adjust his posture, let alone move. Behind the man, smoke from those strange fires curled skyward, unimpeded by any breeze, and amid the cabins and fires women and men saw to tasks or basked in conversation or watched over children who played. Jake Withers was thinking that the children were quiet kids and that the women, who weren't wearing much in the heat either, were suntanned. He entertained the notion that they were
sun-kissed
and he didn't know what prompted such a weird idea and hoped he wasn't blushing. Then he was finally released from the moment by the broadening smile on the face of the man before him, a spell broken, and he was set free.

“That's pretty funny, Jake,” the man said, although he wasn't laughing himself. “My name is Gordon. A few friends call me Gordo but more often I get called Skootch, on account of my last name is Skotcher. They call me other names that I don't want you to repeat out loud in polite company so I'll let those go. So,” he concluded.

Jake waited. Then he said, “So?”

“You're stuck.”

Jake agreed. Then he thought to say something clever, and came up with, “That's because you need a new paved driveway.”

This time Skootch reared back and enjoyed a good laugh. He clutched his stomach, which Jake noticed was muscled and taut and suntanned, unlike his own which was none of those things. He used to be athletic but that time was only a memory now. “That's a good one,” Skootch said, coming closer. Then closer still, until he touched Jake's shoulder and turned him, pointing back up the hill.

“See, that stream trickles down through here and I suppose, I suppose, we could put in a culvert and let the road go over the water instead of the other way around, but—and you can do this in the dark once you know how—when you feel the hard stone that jangles the car, then you know to veer left, that lets you pick up the harder mixed gravel and keeps you out of the mud. So, no, we don't need our driveway paved. Not today. Not this week.”

Both men, as if responding to a cue, took a long look at the predicament in which the right rear wheel of Jake's car found itself.

“That'll take some pushing,” Jake said.

“One unholy mess,” Skootch concurred. “A lot of spinning mud. We won't even discuss the inconvenience of pushing you out in this heat. Holy.”

Jake considered the news. He didn't know where he was. If he phoned for help he wouldn't be able to direct how help could find him. But he doubted there was a phone around. This excursion was going to cost him dearly.

“I guess,” Gordon Skotcher ascertained, “if you came down here trying to sell snow to Eskimos, which, frankly, makes more sense than trying to pave my road, then you're a desperate man. In your heart. Desperate, and in the wrong business. Is this the final frontier for you, Jake? Is it? Or are you starting out in life? Answer me honestly now, because I could use a man like you.”

“What do you mean?”

“What do I mean about what? Honesty?”

“No. That you could use a man like me.”

Him staring at Jake's sunken tire caused Jake to do the same.

“I don't judge you,” Skootch said. “The Rathbone Company, I might judge them someday. But I don't judge you. Everything in life is sales. We're buying or selling, it's got to be one or the other. Say you don't disagree with me.”

“I don't.”

“One of my clan has moved on, Jake. I need someone in sales. I can find you a good territory. Easy work. You can keep your jacket on. Keep your car. That's what makes you valuable to me, in a sense. Your car. Even your jacket. In any case, your look. This is the day that changes your life, did you know that?”

“What do you want me to do exactly?”

“Exactly? Sales, Jake. That's it. Not even. Deliveries, really. But deliveries is sales. Are you trustworthy? That's what I need to confirm here.”

“What do I deliver?”

“What do you want to ask me a question like that for, Jake? Seriously, now. What did the Rathbone Company say that you'd be selling for them when they set you up to pave the world? To take beautiful green grass and bury it under that ugly black asphalt gunk?”

“I know what you want me to deliver,” Jake Withers told him. And then he said, “I'm not naïve.”

“Jake. Look. Over there. What do you see?”

He saw the smoke and cabins and people in their daily lives.

“Woods. Cabins. The river.”

“No, Jake. Seriously. Seriously now. What do you really see?”

He took another look, wondering what it was he was supposed to see but obviously did not. He began to concentrate more keenly on what he'd seen before, but was noticing more acutely now, and thought that he might be on the right track. At least, he knew what he was seeing now. Could this be what Skootch meant? Could he dare say it?

“What do you really see, Jake?” Skootch was whispering now. “Tell me what you really see.”

He coughed, and thought it through. “Women,” he admitted. “Girls.”

“Women,” Skootch repeated. “Girls.” He let that settle. “Many are spoken for. Some are not. A few are in transition, or they will be someday. Women. I would say, if you're not too superficial about these things, that this statement is entirely true—they are beautiful women. Now, I've only got one more question for you, Jake, and it's neither here nor there. I'm just hoping, I guess, that you can help me out in more ways than one. Do you or do you not play baseball?”

Jake shrugged.

“What does that mean?” Skootch inquired.

“I haven't for a while. I used to be pretty good.”

“Jake. Are you yanking my chain here? What position?”

“Third.”

Gordon Skotcher spun in a circle three times. Then he shouted out for those in the clearing to hear. “He plays third!”

“You need a third baseman?”

“Yes! Jake! I mean, we need a ninth player, but if you also play third, that makes you heaven sent. Quit your job, Jake. For God's sake, come and work for me! Say yes. I'll pay you way more than the Rathbone Company ever promised and they probably lied. Keep the car, keep your silly suit. The girls will forgive you once they get to know you and find out that you play third. Can you hit? Don't tell me. Let it be a surprise. We'll find out tonight.
You play fucking third? Holy shit!
” He did another spin. “Listen. Quit Rathbone, but keep whatever they gave you. Company ID. A catalogue. Samples? Is there such a thing as sample asphalt? Whatever. Just in case you get stopped someday, that's who you are, their representative. Do you realize how perfect you are, Jakey-boy? Do you have any idea?”

“How much,” he wondered, “will I make with you?”

“Name your price, Jake! I bet I can double it.
Everybody! Hey! He plays third!
”

In the clearing, mainly men but a few women as well raised their arms in quiet, and largely disinterested, celebration of this pronouncement.

“Come on, Jake,” Skootch said. “We'll get you shoved out of here. Then you can meet the ladies. I'll look after the introductions myself. We'll have a beer or three. Do you have your own cleats?”

How different his life would be, Jake Withers was thinking, if he never drove down this road. How unjust.

■   ■   ■

“You think it's junk,” Willis
said as they surveyed her alcove.

“I don't think it. I know it. It's junk,” Tara reiterated. She spoke softly, not wanting to overly antagonize him.

Willis Ephraim Howard was nobody's fool, although at times she was lulled into the mistaken sense that he could pass for one. He was correct to point out that the likelihood of her earning a living from one insignificant section of the store was remote. That reality needed to be addressed, and she was keen to move quickly to make her wee sector viable.

“Junk is not without value,” he maintained. “Some people buy this stuff.”

“Granted. I'm not throwing it out. But you do see our problem here.” Careful to include him, she did not want the solutions to fall only upon herself. “By concentrating the worst of the kitsch in one room, the space becomes an object of amusement for your customers. Amusement and derision. For some, even if they want to buy something in here, they won't, due to that stigma. How can someone buy something off these shelves if their friends are smirking at them just for looking?”

Willis conceded as much.

“Let's do this,” she pressed on. “Take the junk—our specialty items, we'll call them that—and make them disappear. Reposition them around the store. Spread out, they won't be an eyesore. Their impact will be diluted. People can still turn up their noses at this or that but without a stigma being attached to the entire inventory. Everything becomes part of the eclectic charm of the place.”

Tara found that when she explained things, Willis Howard was flexible.

Train travellers were arriving in waves, interrupting them. She smiled at the difference a day made. Yesterday she'd been a tourist. Today she was part of the scenery, and contested for market share.

Whenever she took a break from the store she ventured upstairs to the loft. Although small, the attic admitted ample light with a view of the river above the treetops. A kitchen nook was in place long before Willis Howard purchased the building, and while it was problematic for him to rent the space to just anyone, as the only entrance was through the store proper, in years past he leased the premises to students up for the summer as employees. Consequently, the room was not too shabby, brightly painted, and could easily be cleaned of its cobwebs and aired of a mild mustiness. The captain's bed was constructed in situ, with drawers beneath it, as getting any large piece of furniture up the steep and narrow stairs would prove too daunting. She planned to toss the single mattress, start fresh with bedding, but the other sticks of furniture—a wooden loveseat and a beanbag chair, a folding table and three hardback dining chairs—
why three?
—could remain for now. Standing by the window, watching the river flow, she couldn't believe her swift good fortune, nor the breadth of the tasks that lay ahead. Her new life, then—her grand adventure—had truly begun.

Other adventures could wait. Walking down the street for lunch turned out to be a case in point. Truckers honked as their big rigs crept through town. Yeah, big men in their big trucks with their big horns. They were probably married and those who weren't probably didn't have a word to say once their beefy palms were off their bellowing horns. So there was that. Then there was another guy, a cop, who stopped his car and looked once, twice, as if sizing her up for a prison cell, before he drove on.
No. Not a prison cell.
Normally she wouldn't glance over but a police car tricked her into thinking that something official might be up. But no, just another guy giving her the eye, so she walked on. That kind of stuff could wait, but in any case, she knew policemen from her days in court and none of them particularly appealed.
Firemen, though. Ah. Maybe.
He was cute, though. Really cute.
Probably married, the creep.
She smiled through lunch, wondering about the breeze her grin sailed in on.