The River at Night(53)

Pia went up and touched it with a kind of reverence. Leather straps and sinew braided into rope bound a dozen pine logs of roughly uniform size and shape. At both ends, a single log crossed the parallel ones, binding the raft snugly. Shreds of colored plastic, flattened soda bottles, strips of tire, bright patches of canvas had been woven into it. It looked as cheerful as a bright quilt, but also terrifically strong.

“You made this?” Pia asked.

“Yes,” he signed.

Sandra walked around it. “You did a good job. Really good.”

I think Dean may have blushed.

“When did you make this?” I asked.

“Two summers,” he signed. “Secret.”

Rachel plopped down wearily on a hollow log. “I don’t get it. You made a raft. Why didn’t you use it?”

He looked at her an extra second, as if parts of her were coming clearer to him. “Scared,” he signed. “World hurts, Mom says.”

“He says he’s too afraid, basically,” I said. His face in a certain light, especially evening light, looked like that of an old man. Deeply furrowed cheeks, a worried brow.

“So why now? Why bring us along?” Rachel asked.

Dean reached into his satchel and unwrapped the package of photos, shuffled through them. Gazed down at the waterlogged faces. “Family,” he signed, and handed the photos to her.

Rachel made no move to take the pictures. “Are they your family, Dean?”

He signed, “Yes,” and then, “I don’t know.”

“When was the last time you saw them?” I asked.

“Eighteen summer,” he signed.

I translated the little I knew for my friends.

“I think we’re the first people besides his parents he’s seen in eighteen years,” Sandra said.

Dean reached down and yanked Rachel up by one arm. She squealed in protest—grumbling about how the raft seemed too heavy to stay afloat—but no one else moved as he led her to one side of it. He motioned to Pia to pick up the opposite side. He didn’t have to tell Sandra to take the position at the front, next to me.

“No time,” he signed. “Go to river now.”

Dean grabbed the raft by one corner and hauled it up with a grunt, resting most of its weight on his strong, wiry back. Even though he bore the bulk of it, we stopped a few times to rest and switch positions. But we were polite with each other, our spirits beginning to brighten even as we labored under the heavy load. We rolled the raft end over end, half dragged it, half carried it, banging it into trees and each other, the bark scraping our shoulders and the palms of our hands, but we made progress, dropping down steadily toward the sound of the river.





36


Dean waded waist-deep into calmly moving water and stood staring down at the amber flow. Water striders skated across the surface dragging silvery threads of light. Utterly spent, we sat or lay down on the brief pebbly beach. The raft leaned against the encroaching woods.

When I replayed the scene in my mind a few seconds later, I still couldn’t recall seeing Dean’s arm move. First he held nothing, then a brown trout wriggled in his hand, as if magically placed there. I stood and looked down into the water. Three brook trout held their own in a row in the current, their white gills fluttering tenderly in the flow. Dean gripped his fish by the tail and slapped its head down hard on a rock face, just once. It lay glassy-eyed and still.

He slipped a knife from his belt and gutted the fish, sliced off the gills, sawed off its head, and scaled it. Glittering silver coins floated swiftly downstream. He split the fish open on the rock, cut it into four pieces, and handed us each a section.

“Eat,” he signed, which we all pretty much understood. He made the signs for “no,” “fire,” and “time.”

None of us complained. We each ate our share and thanked him—including Rachel—then rinsed our hands in the drift. Mine tasted like wet rocks and moss, barely like fish at all. I realized I felt marginally stronger not from the size of my portion—couldn’t have been that—but because I had eaten something so recently alive.

Dean secured the raft to a tree with one of its braided leather ropes. Grunting, we all manhandled the awkward thing to the water, where it fell with a colossal splash. It was so heavy part of me never believed it would float—that Rachel was right—but it bounced to the surface and bobbed there like the sweetest salvation we had ever seen.

I’m sure it was the sight of the raft in the water that lifted our spirits to the point where we could actually make fun of each other for a few minutes. The mood lightened the most it had since Rory died.

“Hey, Pia,” Rachel said.

“Yeah?”

“Remember the time we all went parasailing off the Keys in Florida because you said it would be a great thing to do, and you told the guy it was all right to let us all out to—what was the maximum? Two hundred and fifty feet?”

Pia rolled her eyes. “Here we go.”

“And then,” Rachel went on, “the next day we learn that the guy got shut down because the ropes and gear he was using were flawed and not up to regulation or whatever, and that the day before we went up, two people died and he never told us? Remember that?”

“Yup.”

“Well, that was pretty fucking stupid too.”