Upriver, scraps of neon: rafters. Dyes like that don’t appear in nature. Their paddles flashed like pikes in the sun.
Rafting brings in millions of taxable dollars a year. The commissioner says it’s the best thing to happen to Nicholas County since the Coal Severance Tax. “Coal was king,” he says. “Coal was king.” Men in their twenties and thirties and forties shouldn’t stand idle. We who’d lost our mining jobs would work in whitewater, plow that wet furrow. Nice thoughts. Invigorating lies. For our bread, we worked filling stations, timber outfits, hospice care, county schools. The two big successes among us, Chet Mason and Reed Judy, started a welding outfit out of Reed’s old, echoing barn. The rafting operators — from Pennsylvania, Oregon, Croatia — brought their own people and did little hiring, until Kelly Bischoff started Class Five. He hired locals. The papers gushed over Kelly. He’d graduated from Panther Creek High School. One of us. Ex-miner. He looked rugged-good and dusky on a brochure, glossy and smiling, holding a paddle. His mother’s from Gad.
On Pillow Rock, men and women spoke to one another, casual and cunning. Someone fiddled with a portable radio: white jags of static, the silver keen of a steel guitar. We pried open prescription bottles that carried names other than our own.
Too late for trout fishing, too early for squirrel season — time to sun ourselves like happy rattlesnakes and watch the frolic. Five weeks running in the fall, we did, every Saturday, every Sunday. Opening day was always best. Every few minutes, another raft tumbled over Sweet’s Falls and crashed in the shredding whirlpool. After a tense moment, the raft popped up like a cork in a sudsy bucket of beer. We cheered. Agonized faces glanced back, blooming with smiles. They loved us, or the sight of us. They held paddles aloft in pale, white arms and their orange helmets shined. Some claim we don’t care about those people, we just take their commerce. Not true. We wonder about their jobs, their towns, their faces, their names.
Kelly Bischoff swore he heard a cash register chime every time they tipped over the falls. I love clientele, he liked to say. Kelly moved between the two worlds, sleek as an otter. He knew us. He knew the rafters. Their names, their faces. He had everything you could want.
“Look, that one’s so scared he keeps paddling, not even hitting the water.”
Laughter tumbled down the rock. “What a jackass.”
“A happy jackass.”
“Would you do that?” Chet Mason asked a woman. “Go over the falls?”
“I’d love to scream like that. I never scream like that.”
“You hear that, Jason? Sounds like you’re not taking care of your husbandly duties.”
Reed Judy said, “You pay big money to holler like that. Old Kelly gets two hundred dollars a head. You got to come with a full raft, too. He got plenty of rafts.”
“How many heads is that?”
“Six in that one, not counting the guide,” Chet Mason said. “Slick as a hound’s tooth, Kelly is. Course, fall’s got to pay for winter, spring, and summer — that’s awful heavy math. There he is. That’s Class Five, that’s Kelly’s.”
The forty-seventh raft that day. Class Five River-Runners had blue-and-yellow rafts, same colors as the Mountaineers’ football team. We were proud of Kelly. After they sealed the Haymaker Mine, he mortgaged his house to start the outfit. Kelly punched out Mayor Cline last year at the festival. Wasn’t even drunk.
“Hey, Kelly boy!” We cupped hands around our mouths. “Hey, Kelly!”
He didn’t wave back, riding closer on the careening swell. The raft hit at a bad angle. Rocks scraped the wet, blubbery rubber. As it made the lip of the falls — in our bellies, we felt a feathery sympathetic tickle — the raft toppled and shook out bodies.
Quiet. Then the screaming. We bounded down to the water’s jagged edge, we tried to tally them, keep the numbers right. Neon tumbling in that gullet of foam, and one frail arm. We reached and missed and cussed ourselves. Reed managed to hook a belt and flopped a man onto the rock.
One disappeared under a boulder for a few sickening moments and shot out the other side. His mouth a hard circle.
With a strong crawl, Kelly led some into a backwater that bristled with logjams and lost paddles. Their heads broke the surface. The current sucked them back.
Kelly and the girl reached up at the same time. Chet Mason was closest. He had one set of hands. He hesitated for a millisecond. He reached for Kelly. “Got you.”
A sharp little yelp cut the noise. The girl’s helmet disappeared downriver. She was gone.
Young boys slid off the rocks like seals. Tethered with rope, they felt for corpses with their feet; we fished for the dead and walked the living — Kelly and four rafters — up Pillow Rock.
Like nothing had happened, another raft came tippling over the falls. The rafters looked surprised when no one waved. Supplicants, we circled the rock with prepaid cell phones raised in hand, trying for the best reception. Soon an ambulance squalled onto the overpass.
The rescued were quiet now. Hard to believe they’d been wailing, keening, moaning just moments ago. Flogged by the water, they looked haggard — pilgrims who’d been turned back from the country of the drowned. We sat them on beach towels and tried to give them sandwiches. They wore mere bruises and abrasions, but the paramedics nursed them just the same. One kept trying to slip a blood pressure cuff onto them. A blond woman with a tank top and a little too much sun wept and cussed in alternating jags. She did this while wringing water from her hair. She had a stiff, shocked look, like a cat you just threw in a rain barrel.
All the while, more rafts going over.
The survivors sat a ways from Kelly Bischoff. He shivered under a towel, smoking a damp cigarette. He’d stripped off his life jacket and spread it in the sun to dry. His hair, gone gray in patches, had grown out like a hippie’s. “Of all the goddamn things,” he kept saying.
“How many times you been over the falls?” Reed Judy asked him.
“Three hundred and thirty-one.”
“How many times you roll it over on you?”
“Three,” he said, pulling on the cigarette. “This was the third. My line was right.”
“Looked like you hit it funny.”
“My line was right. They let out 3,800 c.f.s. today. Too much river. That,” said Kelly, “is God’s honest truth.” He pressed his ear against the warm granite to draw out the water. He was shaking.
Deputies arrived. They were locals, Hunter Sales and Austin Cogar, young, crewcut, sweating from the hike. Austin stood by the survivors and jotted on a pad. “How old you say she was?”
“I don’t know exactly,” a rafter said. He was half of a whisper-thin couple who were holding hands on the rock. “She’s my friend’s daughter. She’s in high school.”
“Her name’s Amanda,” Kelly cried. It was sudden, like the fury of a wasp.
Everyone turned to him. Hunter took his arm and tried to lead him aside.
“I know all my clients,” Kelly said. He liked calling them by their names. It set things in motion, the tumbling of keys in locks. It made us feel unprivileged.
Hunter asked, “How you doing, Kelly?”
“I been better.”
“Turn a boat over, did you?”
“Looks like.” Kelly flicked the cigarette into the waters.
“Got good insurance?”