Crime of Privilege: A Novel (17 page)

“Into the movies.”

“People say he has the magic touch.”

I recoiled at the image.

“In any event,” he said, “Jamie was more or less showing off the product.”

That got him several seconds of dead air while I tried to figure out why he was telling
me this.

Chuck Larson sighed. “You still looking for Paul McFetridge?”

“I am.”

“Try Stanley, Idaho, Georgie,” he said. “Two Rivers Whitewater Rafting Company.”

I wondered if I had passed some sort of test. You saw Jamie and you behaved yourself.
Here’s your reward, good boy.

SALMON RIVER, IDAHO, June 2008

I
T WAS A SMALL PLANE, A TAIL-DRAGGER WITH NO WHEEL IN THE
front. It held the pilot and would have held five passengers if one of the seats
was not filled with gear. We landed on a dirt runway that required a very sharp left
bank in which the pilot seemed to exult. I had the feeling the whole flight up from
Boise to this pinprick on the map known as Indian Creek had been worth it to the pilot
just so he could make that bank.

The first three passengers who disembarked were greeted with a smile and a welcoming
handshake. I got an “Oh, shit.”

It did not come right away. Initially I got a smile, then the smile faded, replaced
by a look of confusion, then recognition. Then, “Oh, shit.”

We shook hands nonetheless. I wondered if he would hug me, as I think we had done
when we last saw each other. But Paul McFetridge was raised an Episcopalian. In my
experience they don’t like to touch, preferring to sing boldly instead.

“Paul.”

“Jesus.”

“Not quite.”

“The hell you doing here?” He was still holding on to my hand.

“Came to go rafting.”

“So is this, like, a coincidence?”

Paul McFetridge’s hair was very long and pulled back into a ponytail. Curly and springy
hair does not fit well in a ponytail, and his was no exception. He could have been
carrying a pillow on the back of his head. His features had grown lean and hawkish
over the years and he had developed something of a stoop, so that his neck seemed
to project forward and his shoulders curled slightly inward. His was no longer the
look of a college tennis player with a hundred-twenty-mile-per-hour serve.

“I called your mother.”

“She knew where I was?”

“She said you were a”—I did my best to imitate her voice—“ ‘river … guide.’ ”

He let go then. He searched my eyes.

“I got divorced recently,” I said. “I’m on my own. So when she said that, I thought,
‘What the hell, I’d like to go whitewater rafting,’ and I figured if I was going to
do it, especially by myself, I’d try to do it where you were. At least I’d know somebody.”

I had practiced all of this. I thought it went off well. But McFetridge kept waiting
for more. And then, finally, he asked, “Where you living?”

I told him I was a lawyer on Cape Cod, and he thought about that before clapping me
on the back and telling me we’d better get my gear down to the river and meet the
others. This was not his company. But he was the senior guide on this trip. The one
who knew the river best. It was up to him to get things going, keep folks organized.
Don’t worry, though. We’d have plenty of chances to talk. Catch up. Remember old times.

WE WERE SUPPOSED TO
have put in twenty-five miles upstream and done a series of class IV rapids, but
the snowfall the previous winter had been heavy and the roads that the outfitters
needed to get in their
equipment were still blocked and so we put in at Indian Creek and had a short and
leisurely run on the first day. There were twenty of us paid participants and about
seven crew members, two of whom floated down ahead of us each day to set up camp.

We were given a lecture before we started. The river, we were told, was exceptionally
high and the water flowing exceptionally fast. There were few rocks sticking out and
even fewer drops. The danger was getting caught in a hole, a depression formed by
subsurface boulders, where the raft would tip on its side and stall, perhaps dumping
paddlers out. If we got dumped, we were told, it was necessary to get out of the hole
any way possible. Do not allow the swirling water to circulate you. If you are pulled
down, form a ball and try to drop all the way to the bottom, then spring back up again
at an angle. The guides will get you a rope as quickly as they can.

I got into a raft with five other folks and McFetridge sitting in the stern with a
pair of oars. We paddled when he told us to paddle, stopped when he told us to stop.
There was little to it on that first day, little danger, little required output by
the paddlers, so little that I had the feeling he did not really need us to propel
the boat as much as he wanted us to think we were.

McFetridge talked to everyone in the raft as we went forward, me no more than anyone
else. I was confident he knew what he was doing. As a student and an athlete he had
always known what he was doing, and he had never acted as though anything required
particular effort or concern. Things would work out for McFetridge. They would work
out for his friends … unless he and his friends wanted the same thing, in which case
his friends’ interest was of no consequence. I pictured myself going over. I pictured
myself going into one of those holes. I pictured McFetridge continuing to guide the
boat right on down the river.

WE CAMPED FOR
the night at a place called Marble Ledge along the left side of the river. I was
given my own tent, for which I was grateful. First day on the voyage and most people
clung to whomever they came
with, which left me on my own. I climbed a very steep hillside that was covered with
thousands and thousands of yellow flowers known as arrowleaf balsamroot. I got about
halfway up the slope, sat down on a rock that gave me a good view of the river, and
wondered what I was doing there.

O
NCE, SHORTLY AFTER MARION AND I GOT MARRIED, WE WENT
to a party at Mitch White’s house. It was the only time I was ever there. He lived
in the town of Dennis and it was a perfectly nice home, the kind you might see in
suburban Boston, with a two-car garage and a manicured lawn. It was not the type of
house that could be found on the Cape prior to the latter part of the twentieth century,
but Mitch and his wife did not know that.

Mrs. White’s name was Stephanie, a sharp-featured woman who wore pointy eyeglasses
and was possibly hiding an impressive figure under a consistently dowdy wardrobe.
Like her husband, she was mid-forties and seemed slightly bewildered by the rush of
time. She knew things were supposed to be done a certain way and that was the way
she did them. Utensils were wrapped in napkins and set out next to a stack of small
plates at the end of the dining room table, which was covered with a tablecloth that
sported images of lobsters and clams. The real things were not among the array of
hors d’oeuvres that were carefully arranged on the table, but the tablecloth images
paid homage to their place of origin.

Stephanie, despite her seeming lack of savoir faire, scared a lot of people. She had
an edge to her, and while she did not say much, she tended to stare at other people
rather intensely, as though she was
waiting for some criticism that she knew was probably justified and for which she
was already planning a response.

She and Mitch had a son, a broad-shouldered twelve-year-old with a toothy smile. One
could only assume that Stephanie had large brothers, because the boy had a lot bigger
frame than either of his parents. They dressed him up in a tie and one of Mitch’s
short-sleeved white shirts and had him serve nonalcoholic drinks on a tray. There
were local wines, one red and one white, but they were on a card table in the backyard
and partygoers had to go find those themselves and then pour them into plastic cups.

It was Marion’s first introduction to the attorneys in my office and when they discovered
where she worked she became the most popular person at the party. Later, she would
tell me she couldn’t understand why I didn’t have more friends among my co-workers.
Such fun people, she said, so convivial.

Shortly after 9:00, when Marion had drunk most of what was available to drink and
pried herself away from those desperately craving a Boston job with a prestigious
law firm, she sidled up to me and asked me to come with her. I had been thinking it
was time to leave, but she wanted me to accompany her to the second floor. People
had been going up and down the staircase all evening because there was only one bathroom
on the first floor and I figured she wanted me to guard the door so she could use
the facility upstairs. I didn’t think that was necessary, but I had nothing else to
do, so I went.

Once on the second floor, however, Marion wanted me to go into the bathroom with her.
She looked up and down the hallway, determined no one was watching, and pulled me
by the wrist. “Here,” she said, locking the door behind us. The same look was in her
eye that she had shown after she had fooled the cops in Old Town.

“What?” I said, hoping she didn’t really mean it.

She turned, positioned herself over the sink and in front of the mirror. She did not
touch the faucets, she just pointed her hands outward, placing one on each side of
the sink, and grinned mischievously into the reflecting glass.

When I did not react, she leaned farther forward, moved both hands to her hips, and
slowly raised her skirt all the way up until it exposed
her ass. She was wearing a satin thong. A skimpy, cherry-colored thong. Her mouth
opened, her teeth flashed in the glass. “You like?”

“Marion, we can’t do that in here.” But I was staring at the thong, the way it disappeared
between the rounded mounds of flesh.

“Fucking in your boss’s house,” she whispered hoarsely, looking over her shoulder.
“What could be better?”

“Put your skirt down, Marion.” But I was still looking at her ass, still imagining
where that tiny piece of cloth was going.

“Come on, Georgie—it will be fun.” She leaned even farther forward. She began to grind
her hips one way and then another.

“Jesus, Marion,” I said, my heart beating, sweat forming on my lip. “Get dressed.
I’ve got to work with these people.” I put my hand on the door handle, looked into
the mirror, and saw the disappointment on her face.

It was, I recalled as I sat on the hillside above the Middle Fork of the Salmon River,
the beginning of the end for my wife and me.

I
EXPECTED WE WOULD TALK THAT FIRST NIGHT ON THE RIVER
, but a makeshift bar had been set up and the booze kept flowing after dinner and
everyone, clients and crew alike, sat around the campfire as a group, telling stories
and staring into the flames. McFetridge was as friendly to me as he was to everyone
else, but he stayed on the other side of the fire. A woman crew member named Bonnie
sat next to him. They didn’t talk, didn’t touch, but I sensed an air of possession
on her part in the way she positioned herself, the way she looked at him.

Bonnie was five-feet-ten and sturdily built, with long, dark hair and a muscular stomach,
which she made constantly visible: a bikini top in the morning, a cutoff T-shirt in
the evening. In the outside world she might have been a landscaper, a physical education
teacher, a UPS driver. Here, there was no doubt she was the belle of the river.

THE NEXT DAY
I was told I was in Bonnie’s boat. There was a rough stretch of rapids, McFetridge
said, and she was going to need some strong paddlers. As before, the water was running
swiftly, and in the morning I was never sure if she really needed me or not. But I
sat in the key paddling seat, right front, and when she told me to go forward, I went
forward; when she told me to backpaddle, I backpaddled; and
when she told me to dig, I dug, setting the pace for the five other paying guests.

We broke for lunch and had elaborate sandwiches that we put together from an extensive
smorgasbord of meats and cheeses and condiments, chased down by cans of beer, and
then in the afternoon we hit the rapids. There was an oar boat ahead of us being manned
by one of the paid crew, then our boat went next. We watched the oar boat bounce around
and oohed and ahhed as it readied itself. Bonnie said to go forward, and suddenly
we were skimming downstream twice as fast as we ever had before.

Bonnie shouted to paddle hard and we did, or at least I did, as a four-foot wave smacked
the front of the boat and washed over us. She screamed, “Left back!” and the three
of us on my side stroked forward while those on the left were supposed to backpaddle.
Something went wrong. We turned too sharply and took a wave broadside. “Right back!”
she screamed, and I planted the oar on my hip and pulled backward with all my might.
The bow swung and all of a sudden the other side went vertical and one of the paddlers
went flying over the gunwale as the raft shuddered to a halt, caught on a huge sloping
rock just beneath the surface. “High side!” Bonnie yelled, as water poured in on us
and the two of us remaining on the right abandoned any effort to do anything other
than scramble up to where the others were. The raft shifted, the stern went clockwise,
and we shot off backward, dropping almost straight down, Bonnie frantically pulling
at the oars, her head turned about one hundred eighty degrees over her shoulder, searching
for her lost rafter, her voice beseeching everyone to get back to their stations.

We hit something hard and it jarred all five paddlers into the middle of the boat
as another huge wave hit us like a car crash. I crawled back to my position in the
front and tried to paddle, tried to get a rhythm, but I seemed to be the only one
doing it. Wave after wave rolled into and under us and in between swells my paddle
was grabbing nothing but air. We were up for an instant and then plummeted down into
a depression as suddenly as if we were on a roller coaster and once again the left
side caught and snapped straight upright. There was a cry behind
me and first one paddler and then another flew out of the boat. “Grab them,” yelled
Bonnie, but they were gone. It was all I could do to hold on myself as someone from
the left side smacked into me and went overboard. There was a scream of panic and
a fifth rafter went out as the boat continued to wobble on its side. It was a man,
the only other good paddler, the one who had been in the left front. I reached for
his life vest, but the water wrenched it out of my fingers the moment I touched it.
I threw my head back and looked for Bonnie to tell me what to do. It was just her
and me. She was still holding on to the oars, even though only one of them was in
the water, and she was looking directly at me without the slightest indication she
knew what came next.