A Kind of Flying: Selected Stories (45 page)

“How certain? How certain is my staying here, singing jingles for the next ten years? Come on, Doug: I want to be a singer.” She mounted the scooter and waited.

“You are a singer, Betsy. The best. I love your singing. And so, this is your move, right?”

She nodded.

“And it’s worth Mitchell?”

She started the machine and the blue exhaust began to roil up into the night. It wasn’t a real question and she was right not to answer. Through the raining flux of emotions, worry about Mitchell, love for Betsy, the answer had descended on me like a ton of meringue. I knew the answer.
It was worth it.
It’s funny about how the world changes and how art can turn the wheel. I had seen the Delsandros and I had seen my brother, a talented person, an artist, fly through the air to where I knew not, but I knew it was worth it. To be thrown that way in front of two thousand people, well, I’d never done it and I never would, but I know that Mitchell even as he squirmed through the terrific arc of his flight thought it was worth it. That’s what art is, perhaps, the look I had seen on his face.

Is this clear? I was annoyed to my baker’s bones at these two people and I wanted them to be mine forever. But they were both flying and I was proud of that too. I then climbed on behind my lost love, a woman who sings like an angel and drives a scooter like the devil, that is, Betsy, and I kissed her cheek. Just a little kiss. I wasn’t trying anything. “Let us go then,” I said, “and see if we can find our close friend Dr. Slime.”

DOWN THE GREEN RIVER

W
E WERE
fine. We were holding on to a fine day on the fine Green River in the mountains of Utah five hours from Salt Lake with the sun out and Toby already fishing, when his mother, Glenna, said, “We’re sinking.” She had been a pain in the ass since dawn. I wanted nothing more than to argue, prove her wrong, but I couldn’t because there was real water in the bottom of the raft. You’re supposed to leave your troubles behind when you float a river, but given our histories, that was a fat chance.

We were that strange thing: old friends. I’d known Glenna since college; she had been Lily’s roommate and there was a time when we were close as close. She had been an ally in my quest for Lily. We’d had a thousand coffees at their kitchen table and she’d counseled and coached me, been a friend. Then after college she had married my pal Warren, which had been her mistake, and I had not married Lily, which had recently (twenty-two days ago) become mine. Warren had not been good to Glenna. His specialty was young women and he used his position as editor of the
Register
to sharpen it. She had grown embittered to say the least, and I wanted now simply to cut that deal—old friends or not—call her a sour unlikable bitch and get on with the day my way; if I had known that she was going to be the photographer for the news story I was writing, I’d have stayed in town.

She had her suitcase—something that has no business even near a raft—balanced on the side tube, and she held her camera case aloft in the other hand. It was dripping. The suitcase made me mad. I was just mad. Glenna had been to Lily’s wedding a month (twenty-two days) ago. She had talked to Lily. Now I could see the water over the tops of her shoes in the deep spaces where she stood. It was not common to tear a raft on the gravel, but it happened. I looked downriver for a landing site. The banks were both steep cutaways, but there was a perfect sandbar off to the right side, and I paddled us for it.

After the three of us dragged the raft clear of the water and unloaded the gear, spreading it out to dry, I set Toby at the downstream point with a small Mepps spinner and went back to repair the raft. Glenna was sitting on her suitcase, checking her camera. Her goddamned suitcase. Warren had assigned me the story and her the photographs. “Floating the Green”—it would run in Thursday Sports.

I was trying not to think. I had taken the job to get out of town and because I needed the money. Warren said the photographer would pick me up at four
A.M.
, and there in the dark when I saw Glenna’s ’70 Seville, the same car she’d had at school, my heart clenched. We had all spent a lot of time in that car. And I knew she’d seen Lily. Twenty-two days. If I had been ready, been able to commit; if I had been thirty percent mature; if I had not assumed being more “interesting” than Lily’s other dates would keep me first, then I might not have been standing on a sandbar with my teeth in my lip. Did I want to ask Glenna a few questions? Does Lily miss me? Has she said my name? Where should I send her tapes? Yes. Would I? Hey, I had a raft to fix, and as I said, I was trying not to think.

Now sitting on her suitcase on a sandbar, she stretched and reached in her bag for another Merit, which she lit and inhaled. “How’d he talk you into this one?” she said as smoke.

“He mentioned the beauty of nature.” I waved up at the sunny gorge, the million facets of the exposed cliffs. “The clear air, the sweet light . . .”

“Bullshit, Jack.”

“The money, which I need.” I flopped the raft upside down. There were a dozen black patches of various sizes on the bottom, but I could find no new hole. Using my knife, I tested the edges of all the old patches, and, sure enough, one large one was loose. “What about you? You don’t need another photo credit.”

She pointed at Toby where he fished from the edge of the sand. “I’m here because you know how to do whatever it is we’re going to do and you can show it to Toby in some semblance of man-to-boy goodwill and something will have been gained.” She flipped the butt into the Green River. “About the rest, I could give a shit. If Warren wants me out of town so he can chase Lolita, so be it.”

I bent to my work, scraping at the old patch. I peeled it off and revealed a two-inch L-shaped tear. I wiped the area down and prepared my own new patch with the repair kit while the sun dried the bottom of the raft. I didn’t like that phrase
so be it.
There’s gloom if not doom in that one.

And sure enough, a moment later Glenna spoke again. “Jack,” she said. “Something’s happening with the water.” Her imprecision almost cheered me, then I looked and saw our sandbar was shrinking. Toby had reeled in and was walking back, stepping with difficulty in the soft sand.

“Jack,” he said. “The water’s rising.”

I stood still and watched it for a moment. The clear water crawled slowly and surely up the sand. The water was rising.

“My patch isn’t dry. Load everything on the raft as it is.” I set the cooler and my pack on the upside-down raft and Glenna put her suitcase and Toby placed the sleeping bags and the loose stuff in a heap on the raft. She paused long enough to snap a few photographs of our disaster.

The water inched up, covering our feet, lifting at the raft.

“We’re going to get wet now, aren’t we?” Glenna said.

“Yes,” I said. “Just hold on to the raft and we’ll float it down to the gravel spit.” I pointed downstream two hundred yards.

“Why is the water rising?” Toby said, laying his pole onto our gear.

“Power for Los Angeles,” I told him.

“Some guy’s VCR timer just kicked in so he can record
Divorce Court
while he’s out playing tennis,” Glenna said. “This water is cold!”

Finally enough water crept under the raft to lift it free and we walked it down into the deeper water of the fresh, cold Green River. “Jack,” Glenna said, blaming me for hydroelectric power everywhere, “this fucking water is cold!”

“Just hold on,” I said to Toby as the water rose toward my chin. “This will be easy.”

That is when I saw the next thing, something over my shoulder, and I turned as a small yellow raft drifted swiftly by. There were four women crowded into it. They appeared to be naked.

AN HOUR
later, we started again. We had clambered out of the river onto the gravel, unloaded the raft, and let the patch air-dry for thirty minutes while Toby and I chose our next series of flies, and Glenna, stripped down to her tank top and Levi’s, commenced drinking cans of lemon and cherry wine coolers. Then we turned the raft over again, reloaded it, and tenderly made into the river. I immediately pieced Toby’s fly rod together, attached the reel, and geared him up with a large Woolly Caddis, the kind of mothy thing that bred thickly on this part of the river. I clipped a bubble five feet from the fly so it would be easier, this early in the day, to handle. Sitting on the side of the raft, I began to organize my tackle, and I had to consciously slow myself down. My blood was rich with the free feeling I always get on a river. The sunshine angled down with its first heat of the day on my forearms as I worked, and I realized that my life was a little messy, but for now I was free. It was okay. I was now afloat in a whole different way. It was a feeling a boy has. I smiled with a little rue. Even in a life that is totally waxed, there are still stupid pleasures. It was morning, and I smiled; come on, who hasn’t screwed up a life?

Toby had a sharp delivery on his cast, which we worked on for a while as the raft drifted along the smooth sunny river. He was still throwing the line, not punching it into place, but he mastered a kind of effective half-and-half with which he was able to set the fly in the swollen riffles about half the time. It was now late in the morning, but there was enough shade on the water that the fishing could still be good.

I started working the little nymph in the quiet shady pools against the mountain as we’d pass. Once, twice, drift, and back. I saw some sudden shadows and I was too quick on the one rise I had. Glenna was sitting on her awful suitcase, back against the raft tube, her arms folded, drinking her coolers, quiet as Sunday school behind her oversize dark glasses. From time to time I had to set my rod down and avert the canyon wall or a small boulder or two in the river with the paddle and center us again.

Then later in the morning Glenna took a series of photographs of Toby as he knelt and fly-cast from his end of the raft. She was able, in fact, to film his first fish, a nice twenty-inch rainbow trout which answered the caddis in an odd rocky shallow, coming out of the water to his tail, and Toby, without a scream or a giggle, worked the fish into the current and fifty yards later into our now hot boat. He was a keeper, and Toby said, finally letting his enthusiasm show, “The first one I caught from a raft, ever.” I killed the fish on my knee, showing Toby how to tap it smartly behind the cranium, and put him in my creel.

“It’s awfully good luck to have the first fish to be a keeper,” I told him. “Now our nerves are down and we can be generous with the newcomers.” Even Glenna seemed pleased watching us, as if her expectations for this sojourn were somehow being met.

I thought about the article I would write. I could have written it without coming, really. I knew the Green by the back. I would talk about the regulations (flies and lures only—no bait); I would talk about the boat launch and the fluctuating river level; I would say take along a patch kit. I would not mention anything that happened next.

The sun had straightened into noon, and the fishing had slowed considerably. I had taken two little trout from pools in the lee of two boulders, handling them with exaggerated care for Toby’s information and then returning them to the water. Then, around the next bend, there was a long slow avenue of river and I found out I had been right about the four rafters. They had been nude. About a half mile down, under a sunny gray shale escarpment, there was a party in session. Eleven or twelve rafts of all sizes had been beached, and fifty or sixty people loitered in the area in a formless nude cocktail party.

“Fish this side of the raft,” I said to Toby, adjusting his pole opposite the nudists. Just as I settled him, with a promise of lunkers in that lane, Glenna spotted the other rafters and determined the nature of the activity. She was working down her third wine cooler, a beverage which evoked her less subtle qualities, and she cried out, “Check this out!”

A dozen or so of these noble campers sat bare-assed on a huge fallen log along the river, nursing their beers, taking the sun, watching the river the way people wait for a bus. I heard one call out, “Raft alert! Raft ho!” There was some laughter and a stir of curiosity about our little craft as it drew closer.

I wondered what it was about the wilds that made all these young lawyers feel impelled to take off their clothing. Is it true that as soon as most folks can’t see the highway anymore, they immediately disrobe? We came abreast the naked natives in an eerie slow-motion silence. They stopped drawing beer from the keg, quit conversations, stood off the log. Many turned toward us or took half a step toward the river. Glenna was leaning dangerously out of the raft on that side, another wine-cooler casualness (she was just full of wine coolers), and Toby had swiveled fully around from his fishing duties, striking me in the ear with the tip of his rod. I lifted it from his hands.

One bold soul strode down to the edge of the river, waggling himself in the sunshine. He lifted his cup of beer at us and called, “Howdy! What ya doing?” Behind him, still standing against the log, was a slender, dark-haired girl who looked a lot like Lily. She was about as tall and had the posture. Her breasts were pure white, the two whitest things I’d ever seen at noon on a river, a white that hurt the eyes, and her pubic hair glinted red in the bright sunlight. Oh, I don’t need to see these things. I need to fish and have my heart start again and be able to breathe without this weight in my chest. I could not physically stop looking at the girl.

“The same thing you are,” Glenna answered the young man. “Fishing with worms!” She laughed a full raw laugh back in her throat, leaning so hard on the side of the raft that a quick stream of cold river water sloshed in. As Glenna continued staring the man down and chortling, I thought, This is where it comes from: the devil and the deep blue sea. I am caught, for a moment, between the devil and the deep blue sea. I looked down into the crystal green slip of the river; the stones shimmered and blinked, magnifying themselves in the bent waterlight.

Slowly, we slid past the naked throng. It seemed a blessing that Glenna had not thought to take any photographs. I shifted some of the gear out of the new bilgewater and cast one terrible glance back at the girl and her long bare legs. The arch of her ass along that large smooth log caught my heart like a fishhook. Toby had collapsed like a wet shirt and was sitting on the bottom of the raft, soaking. He bore all the signs of having been electrocuted. I doused his face in a couple handfuls of river water to put out the expression on his face and sat him up again with his fishing pole and a new lure, a lime-green triple teaser which looked good enough for us to eat. I almost had him convinced that it was still possible to fish in this world when I heard Glenna groan and I felt the raft shift as she stood.