The River (3 page)

Tiny waved to me and flashed me the thumbs-up from behind the counter in his Minit-Mart. I had been speedy, but that didn’t matter to me now, because I had to turn around and go back. I allowed myself to trot a few paces, Thor matching me, Trixie and Bailey bounding energetically behind. I would sprint again at the ranger station.

But halfway there, Thor’s crooked sonar shot up. He wasn’t looking in the direction of Ranger Dave’s raccoon—he was looking down the embankment at the river.

I stood next to him and peered over the edge. The noise! It was so loud here!
Lost lost lost
… I could feel it building in my head, pulsing, pacing my heartbeat to its own rhythm.

Just below the rapids was a little eddy, a pool no larger than me. There was something sticking out of it, something an unnatural shade of blue. Whatever it was had snagged on a log and was making circles in the water.

I think I knew what it was even then. But I told myself: no. I told myself: it has to be something else. An abandoned dog, maybe. A tire. A canvas bag. A rusty bicycle.

Then I thought: Someone else must have seen this before me. I can’t be the first. Even now a competent neighbor is dialing 911. Then I remembered the lackadaisical way Ranger Dave drank his coffee and the thumbs-up Tiny flashed me when I ran past. No one could see what I was seeing and still saunter and sip coffee.

Then I realized:
I
was here.
I
was the help.

I climbed down the embankment, jumped in the eddy and unhooked the blue rain slicker from the log. The body stopped circling and the feet began to point downstream. I put two hands directly under the armpits. What I gripped was cold and sickeningly squishy. I pulled with all my strength. The body was still stuck.

I heaved again and there was a
plop
! Like a suction being broken, and the body came free. I pulled it out of the eddy and flipped it over on the bank.

The scalp on the side of her head flapped, her hair opening and closing like a trapdoor. I patted it back into place because I couldn’t look at it. And not because it was gross (there was no blood underneath, only swollen flesh), but because the effect was so awful it looked tacky, like a toupee.

Her face was brown with muddy water and I cleaned it off as best I could. Underneath, her features were bloated and pale. Her eyes were open but they weren’t looking at anything. Unfocused, they looked like white jelly.

I grasped her wrist, looking for a pulse. Her skin was no colder than mine. I brought my watch up to my face and began to count her pulse. Nothing. I couldn’t get a vein. I tried her neck and I still couldn’t find it. My hands were so shaky, I was bungling this.

Maybe I should go straight to CPR. I straddled her and pressed my palms into her sternum. Muddy water spewed from her mouth, but nothing else happened. She didn’t move; didn’t see.

What was I doing wrong? Maybe there was an obstruction. I turned her head to the side, plunged two fingers into her gunky mouth, and pulled out more mud and a couple of pebbles. Still no reaction. I reached further and further back into her throat. I kept thinking: I’m going to gag her.
Come on
. Why wasn’t anything happening? Maybe I wasn’t using enough force. I pulled my fingers out of her mouth and whacked her on the back, softly at first, then harder and harder. When I finally gave up and let go, she rolled onto her back like a log. Her arm flopped away from her body. It was as though she didn’t have any bones.

I rocked back on my heels. I had to be missing something. This was the world’s most incompetent rescue. Later, when we were both back at the inn sipping hot chocolate she was going to nail me for sure. Karen didn’t have any patience for my City Mouse ways. She would think there was no excuse for not being up to date on my CPR, just like there was no excuse for not knowing which way was north at all times.

I looked up. North didn’t help me here, where the trees made a canopy of everything and moss grew on every side of every trunk.

So what was I supposed to do next? I pulled off my jacket and covered her cold body. I was out of ideas. Thor, above me on the banks, had stopped whimpering and was now howling loudly, nose pointed at the low, gray sky. Trixie and Bailey joined in. Behind me, the river’s voice swelled.
Lost!Lost! LOST!
The howling and the rapids rose to one giant shriek that made my head throb, and I finally knew, because everything around me told me so, that I had failed.

I took the bank in two leaps. Here was something I could do: I could run. I could get help. Maybe it wasn’t too late. I took off past my pack to Ranger Dave’s.

I thought I had run quickly before; that was nothing compared to now. Now I ran so fast and my legs were so cold I couldn’t even feel them touch the ground.

I flew.

Even as I ran I knew she was dead, but that wasn’t the part that made me hysterical. It wasn’t even that the body was small, or that it wore a familiar blue rain slicker: it was the cross-shaped scar on the forehead—the same scar she’d gotten two months ago bouncing on a trampoline by the Kid for Sale sign.

3

There’s probably something you should know about Karen, which is that she was mine. Not literally, of course. She was ten years old. I would have had to give birth when I was in grade school.

No, Karen was mine in a way that her brothers and sister were not. She was my guide, and I was her rescuer.

I first met Karen last August. I’d been living in Hoodoo for three months. Patchworks had been rodent-free for two. Mom’s café and the Astro Lounge were already thriving, thanks to a sign on the highway:

G
AS
F
OOD
L
ODGING

CLAIRE SEVERANCE’S

P
ATCHWORKS
I
NN

3 M
ILES

That Saturday the weather was still good, the river was low, and risk of forest fire was high. I was a mile into my run when I heard crying. I closed my eyes and the listened. It wasn’t the river. The river noise was gentle and atmospheric: the kind of ambient sound you’d hear in a psychiatrist’s waiting room. (Unfortunately, I knew exactly what that was like from waiting for my dad.)

No, the crying was coming from somewhere else.

I drew up to the house with the Kid for Sale sign in front and the sound grew louder. We’d driven past this house before. I knew the sign meant
baby goats
for sale, and not the children bouncing on a trampoline in the front yard.

But that day one of them was off the trampoline and wailing in the gravel driveway. She was the source of the crying.

I slowed my pace and walked up to the girl. She was sitting in a heap with her back to me. There was no one else around. “You’re okay, right?” I said, more to myself than her. I didn’t want to stop—I wanted to keep going. I had no desire to know my neighbors.

Then the little girl turned around, still wailing, and I saw that her forehead was a mass of blood and gravel, drenching her cheeks and pooling in her eyes. I didn’t know what to do. I only knew I couldn’t stand still. “Stay here,” I told her. “I’ll be back with help.”

I sprinted up the drive to a small red house. The front door was open and I knocked lightly. Inside, a short blond woman was putting away groceries (canned tomatoes, canned beans, canned mushrooms—Mom would have had a fit. Canned beans she could probably understand, but she said canned mushrooms tasted like rubber).

“Excuse me,” I said.

She turned to me; her face was thin and haggard, and it fell a bit, as though she knew what I was going to say before I said it.

“I think your little girl fell off the trampoline.”

She placed a can on the counter and it rolled off and into the sink. She didn’t even notice.

“How bad is it?” she said. She sprinted past me out the door.

“It could just be facial cuts,” I said, and even as I said it I knew it wasn’t very comforting.

When we reached the girl, still squalling, the mother placed an arm under each of her daughter’s armpits and heaved her to her feet. “Let me see,” she said, pulling the girl’s bangs away from her face. I couldn’t help noticing her hair was sticky and didn’t come away easily. The kid screamed. “Come on now, hon,” the mother said, her face white with anxiety even though her voice was calm and confident. “What would Sacagawea do?”

That seemed to be the magic formula. The crying, which had been pitched to a screech, slowed to a sniffle. Then, without a word to me, the two of them ran back up the drive.
Slam
! The door closed behind them, leaving me out in the cold.

I didn’t run again for a moment, just stood there, leaning on the Kid for Sale sign, feeling as though I’d just been Tasered. Behind me, small goats chewed on short, sparse grass. What, I wondered, just happened? Nothing ever happened to me on my run. I was invisible and I liked it that way. I didn’t have to smile for the guests, or worse, smile for my parents, who needed me to be okay with the move even though I wasn’t.

The next week when I ran past, the trampoline was gone and there was a man standing by the sign. He wore heavy work boots splattered with paint and a flannel shirt rolled up at the sleeves. He looked like a kind but competent woodsman, the sort who could take an ax to a wolf’s stomach, or take pity and
not
cut out the heart of a lost and sniveling princess.

“Hey,” he said. “Ted Armstrong.”

He held a large white paint bucket out to me.

I was pretty sure he was talking to someone else, but there was no one else around. Just an alpaca in the field across the street eating hay with a great counterclockwise grinding of the jaw.

I took the bucket and looked inside. There was a stack of freshly picked huckleberries giving off a warm, tart scent. Mom would have a conniption over these, putting them into crumbles with peaches or rhubarb or just on their own under puff pastry.

While I was still inspecting them, the man was inspecting his watch. “You’re late, Ronnie,” he said. “You’re usually here at 8:09. It’s 8:11.”

I frowned and looked up. “How do you know my name?”

The man smiled a kindly woodsman smile. “Are you kidding me? Your mom is big news around here. Everyone knows who you are. We’ve been watching you run for months.”

If he hadn’t seemed so earnest I might have been creeped out. But he
did
seem earnest so I decided to cut Kindly Woodsman Guy a break. He was probably just curious.

He continued: “Ranger Dave says your form’s good but you’re lazy. What do you think this is? A walk in the country?” He chuckled at his own lame joke.

“Who’s Ranger Dave?” I asked. I should’ve thought to ask: and why does he care whether or not I’m lazy? This was before I understood that he was almost as big a celeb as Mom was, not only because of the high-profile rangering, but that in his own day he’d been a world-class runner himself—even trained at U of O with Alberto Salazar—and that he coached track and cross-country at Hoodoo High.

But Mr. Armstrong didn’t seem to hear me. “Karen! Come say hello to your rescuer.”

It wasn’t until he called that I’d noticed the kids—the human variety—running around the yard playing something that involved dogpiling anyone who had a ball.

From the bottom of the dogpile emerged the little girl I’d stopped for last week. Her clothes were light but sturdy—a T-shirt and shorts. Her T-shirt had a picture of dappled horses galloping past a fence. Her build was that of a kid who’d gotten a growth spurt but hadn’t filled out yet. Her knees were knobby and brushed against each other as she ran, her elbows jutted out like chicken bones. She had a blunt brown haircut that reminded me of some guy from a sixties band. A Beatle. A Monkee. A Who.

“Show her your face, hon,” Mr. Armstrong said. Karen pulled back her bangs. There was a line of Steri-Strips underneath, making a huge lopsided cross. No stitches. Nothing other than these skinny, transparent bandages which—I’m sorry—
begged
to be picked at. If I were ten years old, I would be hard-pressed to keep my fingers off those things. Let’s face it: if I had that many Steri-Strips I would be oozing right about now.

“Do they itch?” I asked.

“Only when I think about it,” she said, pulling her bangs down. “You know, in school and stuff. But not around here where there’s so much to do.”

I blinked. “You’re kidding.
Here
?” I said. It just slipped out. There was
nothing
to do out here. Other than run, that is. The boredom was enough to make a person want to learn to appreciate watery beer and date a guy who chewed Skoal.

But Karen looked at me and her brown eyes were afire with enthusiasm. “This morning Kevin found coyote prints. It was so cool. Coyotes usually don’t come this close to houses. Come see!” she said, and she reached out and put her fingers in my palm.

Her hand was hot and calloused and dirty. The hand of a kid who didn’t mind digging for worms. And yet I didn’t pull back.

Mr. Armstrong broke her grip and patted her on the head. “Now now, Karen. What did we talk about? Ronnie has to shave some time off her 10K if she wants to make the cross-country team.”

I couldn’t help doing a double take.

“I’m not going out for cross-country. I’m just running.”

“Uh-huh,” Mr. Armstrong said, eyeing me critically. “Tell you what: there’s a mile between here and the Ranger Station. See if you can run it in nine minutes. It’s slow, but it’s a start.”

Back off, I thought. If I want to run slow, I’ll run slow. But thankfully I didn’t say it. Whatever else was up, this guy thought he was doing me a favor by pointing out my faults. Not that I liked being patronized, but he
had
given me fruit.

“Oh, right, the berries,” he said, taking the bucket out of my hands. “Leave them here and you can pick them up on the way back.”

I considered. I hadn’t ever thought about speed, but why not? It was something to do.

I turned to go but then Mr. Armstrong stopped me again. “I almost forgot to ask: could you babysit for us tonight? My wife wants to go to the Tiki Hut for a drink. It wouldn’t be long. Just an hour or two. Those pink Scorpion Bowls are really potent. I think they sugar them down.” He paused and considered. “Anyway, we don’t drink much and the wife doesn’t play pool so we should be home by eleven.”

My lips were already forming the word no. I didn’t babysit. Ever. Let alone for four kids. Four kids
without
a trampoline to help them get the wiggles out. What would they have to jump on? Me, probably.

But then a strange thing happened: Karen, the girl I rescued, ran back to join her brothers and sister, but before she did, she waved at me and smiled. “See ya,” she said. Her smile was broad enough to melt ice caps. And for the first time since we’d moved, I started to feel at home.

What had her mother called her when she was trying to quiet her? Sacagawea? Everyone in Oregon knew about Sacagawea, the native guide on the Lewis and Clark expe-dition. She blazed the trail with a bazillion stinky guys in coonskin hats and fringy jackets and no showers and with a baby strapped to her back, too. Without her, Lewis and Clark might have wound up in Peoria.

Karen caught up to her brothers and sister, her face crossed by Steri-Strips that could come off easily in a scrum.

Brave. Very brave. Definitely Sacagawea.

“What time do you want me?” I asked Mr. Armstrong.