Run River Read online

  2

  Everett sat on the dock fifteen minutes before Lily came. He heard her long before he saw her, because now at one o’clock the moon was entirely down. Although house lights flickered on the water downriver, the mile and a half of McClellan riverfront showed only the even flash of the Coast Guard channel markers; the light on the dock was gone, burned out he didn’t know when. Remind Liggett, he thought, abruptly alarmed about the dock light. (A dock light first, a torn fence next, maybe the pump goes off and loses its prime: before long the whole place would come crumbling down, would vanish before his eyes, revert to whatever it had been when his great-great-grandfather first came to the Valley.) Through the growth of oak and cottonwood Everett could see a single light on the third floor of the house; the lower stories were blocked out by the levee.

  During those fifteen minutes Everett thought only of the dock light (Liggett should watch these things) and of the hops. Although he still held his father’s .38-caliber revolver in one hand, he did not think about that, any more than he thought about Ryder Channing’s flashlight, still burning, its thin light filtering through three inches of muddy water, caught there in the tangle of roots that showed where the current had undercut the bank. Next week they would be taking the hops down, stripping the vines from the strings. Each August, just before picking, Everett was suffused with a single fear, an apprehension specific in exactly the sense that nightmares are specific: the unshakable conviction that his kiln would explode as the hops dried. He could never sleep during the week the hops were drying. Sometimes he would go downstairs and sit all night in the kitchen, because he could see the kiln from the kitchen window. It was not, this or any year, that the loss of the crop could ruin him: he had fewer acres in hops this summer than any since his father’s death, fifteen years before. There was no longer any money in hops: everyone on the river was getting out of them. “It’s a combination of factors,” he had tried to explain, repeating by rote what the buyers told him, to his sister Sarah and her third husband when they came through in June on their way from Philadelphia to the Islands. (“Not Honolulu, Everett,” Sarah had corrected him. “Maui. Oahu’s been ruined for years.”) “Your shares aren’t paying what they used to pay because we aren’t making what we used to make. For one thing people aren’t drinking as much beer as they used to drink. For another the brewers are making what they call a lighter beer, using fewer hops.”

  The loss of the hops would not matter to Sarah. Nothing about the ranch had ever mattered to Sarah. But Everett had seen little all week but that familiar image: his drying kiln burning, the flames breaking out against a night sky and still (impossibly, as in a nightmare) throwing no light into the dark. It would happen this year for certain, he thought now.

  When he heard Lily he sat perfectly still, aware suddenly of the .38 in his hand, the blood on the sleeve of the Dacron suit Lily had bought for him at Brooks Brothers in San Francisco. He heard her high heels on the wooden steps down the river side of the levee (Jesus Christ, he thought with abstract tenderness, high-heeled shoes to get screwed on the beach), heard her pushing aside the oak branches, heard her call his name.

  Everett, she called, long before she could have seen him on the dock. She called him, not Channing, answering the question he had never asked: would she hear the shot and come to him or would she come as usual to meet Channing; would she come to him, knowing, or would she come to Channing, come clean and unaware from the shower where she had been maybe twenty minutes before, come intending to take the boat downriver half a mile, meaning to lie there with Channing on the stretch of sand where Knight and Julie gave beach parties. (He had heard the shower when he went into the house to get the gun. Standing in their bedroom after he had taken the gun from the drawer, he had watched the steam through the open bathroom door, had listened to her humming a song to which she could never remember the words, we will thrive on keep alive on/just nothing but kisses.) Well, she had heard the shot and come to him: she had called Everett.

  Still holding the gun, he got to his feet. Lily stood in the clearing by the dock, looking first at him and then at Channing’s body where it lay sprawled over a rotting log. In that moment before either of them spoke, it occurred to Everett that Lily was not as pretty as she had once been. No one had ever called her beautiful, but there had been about her a compelling fragility, the illusion not only of her bones but of her eyes. It was not that her eyes were any memorable color (hazel, her driver’s license must say), any extraordinary shape. It was simply that they seemed larger than anything else about her, making her very presence, like that of someone on a hunger strike, a kind of emotional claim. It exhausted him to look at her now: her eyes were too large.

  “I guess he came here to meet you,” Everett said, swiping at a mosquito with his free hand. He did not look at Channing’s body.

  She did not speak.

  Unable to think, Everett wished that they could go back to the house and to bed; he wanted to make her a drink, bourbon with crushed ice the way she liked it, sit with her in the dark calm beneath the mosquito netting.

  “There was no need,” she said finally, her voice barely audible. “No need.”

  She began crying then. Everett stood watching until her sobs took on the helpless, automatic quality which meant that she was losing control, crossing an invisible border into some unmapped private terror. Sudden or expected death, the sight of a stranger planting daffodil bulbs, or the recollection of some commonplace, forgotten afternoon (say when they had taken the children to look at the seahorses in Golden Gate Park and the seahorses had been gone) could tap Lily’s reserve of hysteria. (“That’s how people should live,” she had said about the planter of daffodils; he had suggested that she set out some daffodils around the house.) He wondered without interest if Channing had ever seen Lily cry. He supposed he had. He supposed every son of a bitch on the river had.

  He laid the gun on the dock and walked over to her. Her sweater had fallen from her shoulders, and he stooped to pick it up from the dirt. It was a pink cashmere sweater that belonged to Julie; one of the name tapes Lily had bought when they sent her down to school at Dominican was sewn in the neck. Julia Knight McClellan. Julie was as pretty now as Lily had once been. Although her fine, almost white blond hair had always reminded Everett of his sisters (“She may look like Sarah but she looks nothing like the way Martha looked,” Lily had said this summer, nearly screaming. “I don’t know how you can even say that”), Julie looked, on the whole, more and more like Lily: she moved the way Lily moved, had even the shy, hesitant smile which by now was only a mannerism for Lily. (Only about an hour ago, at the Templetons’ party, had he not looked across the room to see Julie brush a strand of hair from her face with Lily’s own rapid, tentative gesture? Lily, he had thought, his face suddenly cold with relief and shame, in that instant between seeing the gesture and realizing that it was not Lily at all, but Julie. Until that moment when he thought he knew he had refused to ask himself where Lily was. Only then did he realize that he had not moved from the room in half an hour, had stayed there deliberately so that he might believe Lily to be on the terrace, or downstairs in the room with the piano. We will thrive on keep alive on/just nothing but kisses. Julie had been wearing a white dress cut low in back, and he had stared at her sunburned back as if he had never seen it. What he had never before noticed was that her back was exactly like Lily’s. You could see the small bones. Both Lily and Julie stood very straight, holding their narrow shoulders back as if to hide the bones. He had been staring at Julie’s back as if in trance, wondering with intense irritation why she had not worn a dress which covered her bones, when he felt someone’s hand on his shoulder. In his irritation, he jerked away; it was Francie Templeton. “You need a drink, Everett,” she had laughed; he smiled and put his arm around her bare shoulders. “Sure, Francie,” he had said. “Sure I do.”) She was already gone then, he thought now, trying for the first time to make chronology of it.

  The wind w
as rising off the river, breaking both the quiet and the still heat, disturbing the dry leaves and splashing water against the dock, rocking the little cruiser in its mooring, knocking Channing’s flashlight free from the tangled roots and into the drift of the water. Willows whiten, aspen quiver. It was the only line of verse Everett knew: he had learned it maybe thirty years before and he did not remember who had written it or what followed it, but often when the wind came up on the river he found himself repeating it in his mind. Once in Colorado he had seen aspen trembling, miles of them, and had wanted them for the ranch.

  He brushed the leaves and dust from Julie’s sweater and wrapped it again around Lily’s shoulders. If a wind comes up when the kiln burns, he thought distantly, the house could go. He stroked Lily’s hair, imagining the flames flashing down through the windbreak of eucalyptus, catching the immense dusty growth of ivy on the north walls, smoldering, then flaring up irrevocably through the entire wooden frame of the house. He could not get it out of his mind that Lily would be trapped in the fire, and he shut his eyes in vain against the ugly image of her fragile bones outlined in the incandescent ruin.

  “You knew,” she said finally, her dry sobs mixed with coughs now. “You knew there wasn’t any need.”

  He recognized her plea and could not answer it. He wished that he could comfort her (there was no need, Lily, no need, you weren’t involved, Lily, count yourself out), because she had not, in fact, been involved. Now that it was done, now that Channing lay dead between the river and where they stood, it seemed to Everett that none of them, least of all Lily, could have been involved; that all of them, he, Lily, and Channing, had simply been spectators at something that happened a long time ago to several other people.

  “You shot him,” Lily whispered.

  Everett nodded, abruptly exhausted. Maybe she didn’t realize, he thought, inert with the new possibility that he would, after all, have to explain it to her. (He had thought they were at least done with that, had thought she realized that for once she had something worth crying about.) Maybe she just now figured it. Then he saw that she was looking beyond him at the dock where his gun now lay, and realized that she was doing no more than framing a question: what would he do now.

  He had not thought of there being alternatives, solutions, next steps. Although he could not now focus upon how it had happened or what would happen next, he seemed to have known all along, as surely as he knew about the kiln fire, not only that it would happen but that everything he knew would be obliterated by it. Lily meant something else: you shot him, she meant. Now what.

  It occurred to him that Lily had always been keyed to picking up pieces, peculiarly tuned for emergency. What eluded her was the day-to-day action. She would not buy a dress without his approval, but she had driven into the hospital without waking him the night last Christmas when they called to say that Julie had been in an accident after a dance. She had gotten a respirator down on the dock in ten minutes the night his sister Martha drowned. And once, years and years before, she had literally saved Knight’s life: he had been playing with Knight on the grass when Knight crawled away and tore his foot open on a broken Coca-Cola bottle. He had knelt there for whole minutes with Knight in his arms, helplessly watching the blood spurt clear red on the grass. Then as now, he could not think. (That time it had been Lily who had seen them from the house, had come running with a dishtowel and had known how to make the blood stop, and finally shoved Everett and the baby into the pickup and had driven twenty-five miles in to the emergency hospital in Sacramento, her foot down on the accelerator all the way in along that twisting river road. Knight nearly died and he might have died anyway, there in the waiting room of the hospital, if Lily had not slapped the attendant and screamed I don’t give a goddamn what the rules are you’re going to help my baby whether he’s a resident of the city of Sacramento or whether he’s not and you’d better get to it or my father’s going to have every one of you on trial for manslaughter. On the way home, with Knight in her lap, she had begun crying for the first time: she had forgotten, she said, that her father was dead.)

  Lily’s hands were on his arm.

  “Did Ryder have a gun?” she whispered.

  “I can’t hear you,” Everett said harshly. Why did she whisper, knowing full well that there was only one person for miles around (Julie and Knight would still be at the Templetons’, and Liggett and the Mexicans in town; it was Saturday night) and that this one person, this single listener, the topic at hand, was dead.

  Lily had stepped back and was staring at him.

  “I mean you don’t have to whisper,” he said, brushing a mosquito from his face.

  “I said did he have a gun.”

  “What do you think? You think he had a gun? He wasn’t out here for the goddamn pheasant, was he?”

  “He threatened you.”

  Everett looked down the river. “No,” he said. “He did not have a gun and he did not exactly threaten me.”

  “He might have, you see.” Lily spoke slowly and clearly, as if to the children when they were small. “He could have threatened you.”

  Running for her life, Everett thought. He did not say anything.

  “He’d been drinking and he might have come out here and tried to—” She broke off and looked away. “Tried to hurt me.”

  “Sure thing,” Everett said. “That’s a nice one. You think the smartest Jew lawyer in California could find twelve friends and neighbors between here and Stockton who’d believe you hadn’t asked for it?”

  “We could make the reasons.”

  “Listen,” he said. “You listen to me now, this once, and mind what I say. It’s not as easy as that. There aren’t any reasons. I don’t want that.”

  “It’s a little late for choosing.”

  “You don’t see. I don’t want that.”

  “What is it you want,” she said without inflection.

  He looked down the river. What is it you want. He had wanted to go away with her, for one thing. The idea of going away had been weaving itself into the fabric of his daily life for months. He had not in the beginning (say in April) thought of it as a trip, a possibility, something which might easily be arranged by travel agents, steamship pursers, airline clerks; even by July, his desire had acquired neither the brilliantly attainable colorings of travel posters and Holiday magazine nor the subtler, more exotic pastels of Rand-McNally cartography. The want would strike him briefly, and at odd moments: while he talked price to the hop broker, or waited for someone to answer the telephone. Even before the idea took real shape, he had begun to count on it: when we’re gone, he would think without perceiving that he had thought it.

  But a trip was not much to want. More than that, he had wanted this summer to do something with the children; he had not. In a few weeks Julie would be going back down to Dominican, and all he could remember of the summer was the heat. That was all he could make of it now: the heat, and Lily lying upstairs with the shutters closed against it, and Julie coming in jumpy from it, and how it had bothered Sarah when she came through in June, and how the coolest place was down in the dust among the hops. The house had seemed too small all summer. Three floors, seventeen large dark rooms, room enough for three generations of his family before him: the house had not seemed, this summer, big enough for the four of them. It had been the heat. (“I didn’t remember the heat this way,” Sarah had apologized breathlessly to her husband. “When you’ve lived where it’s green you forget how it is out here. You realize it hasn’t rained since April and it won’t until September? You realize that?” As disturbed still as he had been when Sarah first went away, Everett had said that if she wanted to see green, she had only to look out into the hops. Counting the new system they were spending maybe ten thousand dollars this summer keeping those hops green. “That’s exactly my point,” Sarah had said.)

  It had been the heat, and Sarah, and the way the summer had begun. Everett had wanted to find some way to talk to Julie, to tell her that h
e would take care of her, that she need not be frightened of anything. He had not even found a way to tell her that she drove too fast. He had once seen her doing eighty in the Lincoln on the river road. And Knight would be going East, alone. It was not that Everett minded. Although Princeton had not been his idea he thought it a good idea; he even thought that he might have liked, himself, a year somewhere other than Stanford. But he knew that Knight considered the trip back East less an interlude than a beginning. No matter what Knight said, he was not thinking of coming home to the ranch. What is it you want. Whatever he had wanted, none of the rest of them did. Before his grandfather had died, he had told Everett’s father that the riverfront and the other ranches, some seven thousand acres in all, were to be divided equally among his three grandchildren: Sarah, Everett, Martha. Although they had sold off some here and picked up some there, they still had the riverfront and they still had about seven thousand acres, all controlled by the corporation, the McClellan Company. (There was even a corporate seal, although Julie had broken the stamp years ago, trying to make an imprint on a leather suitcase.) Since Martha’s death, Everett and Sarah had each owned half of the McClellan Company, and Everett had managed all of it. Knight would hold even more land than that. All the old Knight orchards would come to him through Lily, and he would probably have everything up for sale before the ink was dry on the papers. (It had been Knight who had first pointed out to Sarah that the piece immediately upriver from the ranch was a tract called Rancho Del Rio No. 1 and the piece immediately downriver, developed a year later, a tract called Rancho Del Rio No. 3. “They’re just biding their time,” Knight had laughed, “waiting it out for Rancho Del Rio No. 2.”)