He looks around. “The mountains,” he says. “I love it up here. Even in July. Couldn’t live nowhere else. I’m done moving. When I was in the service, it’s all I thought of.”
They take in the ridgeline, the blue dusk. In the distance, far above the stands of red spruce, the best in the state, the cell tower lights. This is the signal, night is here, time for sweaters. The temperature can drop forty degrees when the sun goes down. Time for tin-punch constellations, and busy satellites tearing arcs in the sky. Even with the resort and the tower, this is the clearest night you can hope for east of the Mississippi, as close as you get to that ancient blackness.
Gary says, “Tell Kathryn that. She’s moving.”
“Moving? Where to?”
“I’m not sure. I was offered a position. At Arizona State.”
Nedermeyer whistles.
“That’s what I thought,” she tells him.
“What your folks say?”
“Good question.” She visited Tempe for a week, taught a class, presented her fisheries research. They loved her — in the swelter, the flatness. Concrete sprawl nibbling at desert, air-conditioning blasting you with its chemical bite. Everyone looking unhealthy and heat stunned and bleached. She could always come back east in the summer, stay with her mom. She tells herself this as if it solves everything. She doesn’t answer Nedermeyer’s question.
Gary’s half-drunk. He says, “You folks hungry? We’re making dinner.”
Michael and Kathryn look at him with curiosity, but he just grins back. So they make a second dinner, and the five of them eat together, filling out the portable table for the first time.
They begin sharing meals each night, but Shelly keeps on stealing. She and her father stay on for a week, then two. At first they share token supplies with the researchers — a sliced loaf of store-bread, peanut butter — till they run out of food. No one mentions it. Stranger things disappear: a battered water bottle, a bottle opener, a new jug of bleach for sterilizing materials. Nothing expensive: fly rods, the Bushnell rangefinder, and laptops stay put. It feels more like a game than a violation. A magpie of a girl. It doesn’t matter. In a week, Kathryn will make the thirty-mile trip to Elkins for supplies.
At this point, her research demands no more than two or three hours a day, so she spends time with Shelly — maybe she’s stealing out of boredom. Kathryn takes her swimming in the afternoons, something they both love. The others stay behind to play cutthroat euchre.
Kathryn lends her a towel, and they walk to the flat rock by a ruined trestle. The Shavers Fork of the Cheat is a shallow river, and even out in the channel, the water comes only to Kathryn’s breastbone. They bring biodegradable soap. They step over a pile of broken crawdads where coons made a meal. The sun is glorious. Mica glitters in the rock.
Kathryn feels hesitation — taking off her clothes with someone else’s child — but in a moment, they’re naked. She can’t imagine doing this in any other context. Shelly’s body is just becoming girlish, winnowing itself out of a child’s frame, but naked, she still has a child’s lack of self-consciousness. She doesn’t know to be ashamed. At seven? Kathryn worries for that, wondering if it has to do with how Shelly was raised. For her part, Shelly gazes full on at Kathryn, a grown woman, unabashed. Esteeming her, the loose breasts, the trim nest of hair. Kathryn doesn’t mind, children are curious, but when they’re in the water, she takes care not to touch the girl, not to graze a swimming leg. The rock is pleasant and hot. She loves being naked in the sun. If Gary would leave. Maybe he’ll volunteer for Elkins. She tries not to think of sex. She hopes Michael doesn’t ask about her father.
They ease in over rounded, mossy stones and find the water pleasantly cool, a touch under sixty. Shadows dart to the edge of the pool. Kathryn soaps herself, then hands it over. She wonders if Shelly would have washed otherwise. If Nedermeyer would have cared.
Shelly puts her hand to the current and carves out a white plume of water.
Kathryn closes her eyes for a moment — just a moment — and sinks under. Back at camp, surely, over cards, Nedermeyer is telling them about her father. It can’t be helped. It nettles just the same. Hell, Nedermeyer is probably related to someone at Green Valley Mine — probably related to her. No more than ten thousand people in Tuscarora County. When Kathryn was an undergraduate, her father died in the mines. Everyone knows how the miners were trapped behind a coal rib for eleven hours, before the expired rescue masks failed and methane saturated their lungs. Her mom: You have to come home, you have to come home. Kathryn remembers the phone call. At ten in the morning, she was still in bed, groggy from a party, hungover. She still feels guilty, it’s the one thing that can make her throat burn, make her cry. Kathryn borrowed a roommate’s car and drove half-drunk, the windows down. She arrived in the clothes she’d slept in, smelling of stale beer. The mine under a siege of news trucks. Shouts. The ragged sound of weeping. Parked cars lining the highway.
In the last minutes, her father scrawled a note in huge, amoebic letters: Don’t worry for us. We’re not hurting. It’s just like falling asleep. I love you all and I will see you in the next world. I will wait on you. Now her mother lives in that grim pillbox of a house, where her father’s hats are lined up neatly on pegs, his work boots nocked in a stand by the door.
A computer says her new office would be 2,100.6 miles from where she sleeps on this mountain. Her mother’s house, 43.1. She can leave all this behind. In one swipe of the ax.
Shelly snaps her awake with an awful, gut-shot howl. Oh God, she’s drowning.
Kathryn claws wet hair from her eyes. A snake shatters the water, a bolt of silver in its mouth. Then Shelly laughs at herself, and Kathryn does, too. It races off.
“He ate your fish!”
“That’s okay. We’ll track him, too.”
Thirty fish tagged per summer. They make adjustments for mortality. A crass statement: “Adjustments for mortality.” Science and its flat, brutal affect.
They climb onto the rock and dry themselves. Kathryn asks for the soap.
“I think I lost it.”
It’s hidden, of course, under Shelly’s folded clothes. Kathryn feels ill, and feels like she would never want a child of her own: the winsome liars. After a long grating pause, she says, “Shelly, if you need anything from me, you just ask, okay? Just ask me. If you want to have lunch or go swimming or get a ride back to town. No games, okay? Don’t be shy.”
Shelly says okay. Her voice is hollow.
“You don’t have to take things.”
Kathryn can feel it on her skin. That stinging blush. They are being watched.
“Get dressed. Quick. Someone’s coming.”
They drag on clothes. They listen. They stare at the laurel hell on the far bank. Nothing.
Kathryn tells herself it was a bear, a bobcat, a doe.
When they get back to the field, Michael has the stove primed, and Gary’s setting out plates. Nedermeyer isn’t around. Was he watching them?
He steps out of his tent palming a huge Vidalia onion he forgot he had.
They make omelets for dinner. Nedermeyer laughs at that, but they need to use the last of their eggs. Red peppers, green peppers, yolk yellow — all the colors of life.
He asks, “How you all paying for this operation?”
Gary — because he wrote the application — brags on the funds they’re receiving from the Fish and Wildlife Service, plus a grant from Mead-WestVaCo, a paper conglomerate trying to clean up its image. Trout Unlimited wants to “rebuild” the river, a multimillion-dollar project. A hundred years ago, companies dynamited the boulders and channels to turn the main stem into one big flume. The only deep pools left are a dozen places where railroad trestles cross the river, totally manmade. The winterkill is staggering.