We took in his words.
“She told you that?”
“Listen,” he said. “Listen to the water.”
“What?”
“She told me yesterday,” Kelly said.
It started with cursing. You could taste anger in the air, taste it on your tongue. We’d been had. Kelly didn’t have two worlds. He had one, ours, the lesser. “You evil liar,” Chet Mason told him. Kelly babbled on. Everyone howled at him to quit.
“She told me today.”
We shut him up the only way we could. He slid and danced under our hands. Reed had to take off his belt and hit him with the buckle. Grabbing hold of crazy arms and kicking legs, we flung Kelly into that blind, sucking roar. He flopped in with a smack.
Raw white noise. Kelly was gone. Had we really done it? The Gauley took him under. We blinked wildly at one another. No one said a thing. Let it drag him to the ocean.
The river made a shushing sound. We hadn’t kept track of the days. Sweet’s Falls trickled down to nothing. The Army Corps had lowered its levers. The water was placid. A carnival ride unplugged. Kelly floated to the surface, sputtering, blinking at the sky.
Gauley Season was over. He paddled to the riverbank and pulled himself ashore with fistfuls of cattail. Bloody, he managed a grin and gave us a thumbs-up.
Nothing’s painful as embarrassment. Our credulousness stung like bedsores. Even now we nurse those wounds.
Outlandish as it was, Kelly’s story nagged at you. There were three witnesses: two dead, the other lost in that white country of madness. Could it be true? Part of you wanted to believe Kelly flipped the raft on purpose. Kelly and the girl — rafters and locals, one people — a beautiful story. That is, a mawkish lie. If Kelly Bischoff can’t equal them — to know their names, brush their lips, be loved, respected — no one on Pillow Rock can. Once again, the world let us know what we are. Swallows in flight. The rasp of shoes. Kelly built himself a legend on that. He believed. Maybe he’d come to cherish the girl out of a terrible guilt, which can midwife the strongest, most wretched kind of love into the world. Those cold nights on the Route 19 overpass, he believed. For a man like him, like us, one mistake — one botched run over the falls — could ruin him forever. It wasn’t entirely his fault. When they signed the papers, the rafters delivered their lives into Kelly’s hand, they bought the thrill of giving yourself over to a stranger, and the bill came due. And we were the ones who chose Kelly, after all, one of ours. We let the girl die. When Chet Mason reached for Kelly’s hand, we damned him to his own true life. A life with us. But Kelly couldn’t let go of the dream. He couldn’t join in our quiet decline.
Soured by it all, we gave Pillow Rock back to the rattlesnakes. Now, we let them lie coiled to soak up the heat like powerful conductors.
We found ways to occupy our time: machining engines, welding catch-gates, jacklighting deer. The lesser waters no one coveted, so we dove off the cliffs at Summersville Lake till the state fenced it off. Then we cut the wire with bolt cutters — the West Virginia credit card — and dove at night, our jacklights trained on green water, attracting a fine mist of moths and mayflies.
Yet Gauley Season never ceased to be part of our year. The rafters buy potato chips and high-test, they flag us down for directions, but they don’t miss us, our catcalls from the rock. They palm tips into knowing hands, book next season’s trip, tighten luggage racks on foreign cars. As we do our chores, we imagine the shredding water, the cry of clients, the slur of rubber on stone. They slalom down Sweet’s Falls with nothing but the growl of water in their ears. We hate them. We hate them with the fury that is the same as love.
The rafters notice a single man perched on the granite. Shirtless, Kelly Bischoff raises a hand or touches a hat brim. A wise, gray-bearded fisherman gone down to ply the waters. Hair lank, skin mottled like a Plott hound’s. Bedraggled, harried by weather and briar, the river guide has earned this lonesome place by great effort, by true compass. Stalwart, wiry, keen of limb. A true mountaineer, rifle-true. But they know no better. The river guide has made good on his mortgage. With the yellow tusks of a bulldozer, he breaks the mountain. He draglines the coal.
The river guide cups his hands and calls to the rafters, but they can’t hear, they tip over the falls and lose sight of him in a joyous crush.
The nude crag of Pillow Rock, stripped of its people, scrawled and scrimshawed in the shit of swallows. They don’t know that we — the true fishermen — will not return until season’s end, rods ready, faces hard, when the heavens part, the rotors of helicopters mutter their staccato hymn, and we receive the silver benediction of government fish.
TELEMETRY
ON A GOOD DAY, SURGERY LASTS three minutes or less. Today’s takes longer. Kathryn has an audience.
They don’t touch the fish at this point — they try to handle them as little as possible — but for the girl, Kathryn makes an exception. She wets her hand in a clear plastic bucket and lifts the stunned fish from the net. A wild brook trout, with a beating heart no bigger than a ruby. The girl leans in to wonder at the gently heaving side, the cool, vermiculated skin. It comes to life and squirms in Kathryn’s hand. She grips down — gentle, but firm. The girl squeals a little. She can’t be more than seven. She has the kind of light blond hair that darkens with age. In ten years she’ll pick up a picture of herself and see a stranger.
“Wet your hand,” Kathryn says.
Kathryn has to stop thinking of her as the girl. Her name is Shelly. Kathryn’s never been able to see children as real people. She wonders what this says about her. Shelly puts a tentative finger to an adipose fin, a sleek belly, a black mouth.
In Kathryn’s first summer on Back Allegheny Mountain, the trout and the bright scalpel made her squeamish. Fear of killing something so delicate, so rare. Two years later, the work is rote. She has to remind herself of the beauty of the place: its rich pelt of red spruce and wildflowers, its pools of glacial blue, each set like a sapphire in the spiky ring of a beaver dam. She doesn’t notice the sweet balsam on the wind, or the river smell, equal parts iron and moss. The odd bear will wander through camp and savage a cooler, reminding her of what the mountain still is. The Monongahela National Forest begins a mile downstream. A ski resort owns this land, ten thousand acres. So far, they have left this part undeveloped — or underdeveloped, as the Chamber of Commerce says.
“You better toss him in.”
A male voice behind them. Gary, bossy as always, is standing knee-deep in the Shavers Fork of the Cheat River. It laps at crudely mended neoprene waders. Lifting the electroshock wand high overhead, he reaches a free hand down to the river. He takes a palmful of water and rubs it over his face. Water droplets gather in a patchy beard, each a prism.
“By the book, by the book,” he crows. “What would the University Animal Care and Use Committee say? Ain’t you a member of said committee?”
Kathryn rolls her eyes. Shelly smiles at that. Kathryn dumps the trout into another plastic bucket, cold creek water dosed with a clove-oil solution. An anesthetic and antiseptic. Shock, drug, cut. A wonder it doesn’t kill them. The trout swims in a lovely sinuous line, resting on nervous fins. Sleek skin the color of mint and coal-fire. The trout lists to its side, loses equilibrium, and floats to the surface. Kathryn scoops it up.
Her scalpel licks its side, below the ventral line. A clean incision, millimeters.
“Give it here.”
She takes the telemetry device from Shelly’s palm. A mechanized pill, clear and crammed with minute machinery, with a fiber-optic tail. It recalls the sterility of good hospitals, all mankind can accomplish. Kathryn slides it into the incision. Shelly winces.