“Damn good. The best.”
Hunter told us to give them some room. He lowered his voice and began to question.
“I had one beer,” Kelly said, more loudly than he should have. “Washed down my sandwich at lunch. Ask anybody.”
The blond woman who’d been wringing her hair spoke up. “You drank three of them,” she said, putting a nice little snap on her words. “You put them away fast.” She turned to Austin. “He had at least two. Then he sneaked off at lunch with them and—”
Kelly said, “Christina, this is between me and the police. You’ll get your turn.”
We blushed at the mention of her name, like they’d admitted something sexual. Austin’s pen quit scratching.
The blond woman walked over to Kelly. “I have something to say and it’s my right.”
“Aw, shut up.” Then he called her something that made us cringe, even the deputies.
“I’d like to speak to you in private,” Austin told her. “All you people go. Come on, get.”
She spoke in low tones, her hands fluttering in a crippled-dove dance.
Slowly, we folded our towels but didn’t stray far. Kelly sat off to the side like the condemned. Austin talked into a radio pinned to his shirt. “Blond teenager, female, fifteen years of age. Male, forty-three years of age, scar through his eyebrow.”
The sun weakened. As the temperature fell, the air began to smell like rain. Deputies said go on home, they didn’t need no more statements, though we’d have been proud to give them. The coolers pissed final streams of melt-water, and we made our exodus, one by one. A drizzle fell. Kelly sat in the back of a Crown Vic cruiser on the overpass, head bowed against the seat in front of him. The drizzle turned to nickel-hard rain, and we heard the blades whapping long before we saw. The helicopter dipped into view. Pterodactyl-ugly, it switched on a searchlight and circled many times. Then it swooped away, called back wherever it came from. The rain turned to roaring curtains. Faintly, the music of rescue disappeared over the ridge.
We found the dead girl wrapped around a bridge abutment at the mouth of Meadow Creek. Her skin was bleached canvas-white by the waters, her eyes pressed shut. For that we were thankful. The rafters aren’t supposed to see this stretch of river. It’s a world away from Pillow Rock. Here, Meadow Creek sloughed mine-acid into the Gauley after any good rain. It streaked rocks orange and sent a cadmium ribbon of yellowboy unspooling downriver. No fish, no life. The sight of it could make you cry.
“You guys ought to pull on gloves.”
We waved off the sheriff and waded in. Hadn’t we been raised to treat our hands like tools, our tools like hands? Blue jeans drank up water and darkened.
We built a chain of ourselves then pulled her from the shallows, her hair tangling like eelgrass around hands and arms, refusing to let go. On the green table of pasture, we laid the dead girl’s body: coltish, young, trim as a cliff-diver’s. An athlete. Her hair twisted into a wet question mark. One leg tucked under her at a funny angle. We pulled down her shirt where it had ridden over her small breasts. Leaves in her hair. “Walnut leaves,” someone said.
She looked okay for someone who’d been traveling all night. We wrapped her in plastic and carried her to the road. Sheriff said, “Sure glad Kelly ain’t here to see this.”
Everyone nodded. It was a solemn occasion. It felt almost holy, to carry a visitor’s body in the morning light. None of us had touched one before.
The dead girl’s picture found its way into the newspaper, pixilated and gray. She was a high schooler from Bethesda, Maryland, her father a midlevel administrator at the Federal Department of Labor. The mother an ex-wife. Her father was Greg Stallings. We never found his body. We learned the things we did not know. Amanda.
You couldn’t have gotten all the leaves out of the dead girl’s hair. Not even if you’d sheared it off.
With her death, life changed, a little. Insurance payments were made, rumor and accusation leveled, a dram of ink spilled in the papers. Kelly Bischoff sold his company to a fellow from Connellsville, Pennsylvania, who owned a northern operation on the Youghiogheny and the Cheat. Seventeen of Kelly’s people went on unemployment and COBRA, drawing as long as they could. Connellsville had his own guys. No one made big lawsuit money off her death; rafters sign risk papers beforehand, absolving companies of blame. So earth turned, bears scouted their dens, the Army Corps eased their levers down. The river returned to its bed.
We have a tenth of the mining jobs our fathers had.
But Kelly had connections. He found work running a dozer at a strip mine — a fitting job, where he dumped blasted rock into the valley, staunching creeks and gullies with tons of shattered mountaintop. He crafted a featureless flatland where the governor promised malls, industrial parks, golf, chain restaurants. A new round of permits cleared the EPA.
It hurt to see Kelly out of the rafting game. And yes, maybe we’re guilty of feeling something special for Kelly, of yoking our fortunes to his. We rooted for him. He showed what our kind could accomplish, if given the chance, in this sly, new world. We could go toe-to-toe, guide with skill, make that money. We were just as good as outsiders, almost equals, we weren’t just white mountain trash. The sting of the rafters’ uneasy looks when we pumped their gas or offered directions — with a few more Kelly Bischoffs, why, all that would end. Now, nothing.
Then, December. Reed Judy was driving the overpass, making for the tavern at Clendenin Mill, the one that burned last year. A lone figure was washed in the spastic glow of headlights and sucked back into the darkness. Reed pulled over, grit and snow popping under his tires. The man walked up to meet him.
“Can I give you a lift?” Reed asked.
“No, bud. Just taking a look at the river.”
Reed heard the Gauley muttering in its dumb winter tongue, but the canyon was black, no river there. He could see the distant warning lights, like foundered stars, where the dam stood low in the sky. Where it divided river from lake. He asked, “You sure? It’s blue-cold out.”
“Oh, I’m parked down at the turnaround.”
It was Kelly.
“Suit yourself,” Reed said.
“You Steve’s boy? The welder?”
“Yeah.”
“You don’t look like your mother.” Kelly pinned him down with a stare. “Say, you was down there that day. You drug the river. I know you did. Down to Meadow Creek.”
Reed panicked, lied. “No,” he said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yes, you do. You seen her. Amanda Stallings.” Kelly winced. “Did she look okay? God, she was a good girl. She wasn’t tore up too bad, was she?”
When Reed didn’t answer, Kelly said, “I didn’t mean to drown her.”
“Course you didn’t! Nobody said you did! You don’t have to say that.”
Kelly said mournfully, “I don’t think you understand,” and said no more.
Telling it around, Reed itched a particular place on the back of his hand. “Looks like he’s aged twenty years, he does.”
A month later, Chet saw Kelly on the overpass, hands clamped on the rail. When Chet told the story, he fidgeted and blushed. The sight had shaken him. “I thought about hitting him with the truck and saving the poor son of a bitch from, from — I don’t know.”
And this was something to say, because in a place with so few people, each life was held precious, everyone was necessary. We saw Kelly again and again that winter. State troopers made him walk the line. He was not drunk. “Kiss my red ass,” he cried. “Public right-of-way.”
We waited for him to jump.
Every night the dam drew Kelly there. To avoid Route 19, we looped far out of our way, over the crookedy mountain cuts. It hurt too much to see him. But others were vigilant. Every morning, the dam operators of the Army Corps — three lonesome, demoted engineers — scanned the banks and the tailrace with binoculars. They had a pool going as to when Kelly’s lifeless body would finally wash up. That sortie out of the powerhouse was the high point of their day. This, after all, was a backwater post among backwaters.