The River - Peter Heller Page 0,17

for a few weeks. Except for the noise. The rapid was so loud they almost had to shout to be heard.

“Yo!” Jack called over the roar of the falls. “Just hearing that sonofabitch makes me need to pee.” The thunder throbbed and thumped and if you listened closely you could parse out the rush of a ledge, the sluice beside it, and the crashing hydraulic beneath. A thousand violent sounds.

“Right?” Wynn said. “Wonder how we’ll sleep. I can feel it in the ground.”

“Fine, because we don’t have to try to run the damn thing.”

Maybe somebody could—run it. In a kayak. It was probably Class VI, a series of ledges with a massive amount of water pouring through. It looked like the North Sea in storm being spilled down a staircase. Maybe seventy feet top to bottom and ramped over an eighth of a mile. One rock island in the middle, the size of a rowboat, supported one gnarled and stunted spruce. The living fact of it trembling there in the middle of the mayhem only made the cataract more terrifying.

The sun broke through a reef of cloud and lit the falls, blazing the snowy whitewater and somehow sharpening the sounds, and Wynn thought it was beautiful, too. The way sheer rock ridges are beautiful, and avalanches.

There were blueberries. As the sunlight swept over the cabin it warmed the low groundcover around it and loosed the scent of the fruit and the tang of Labrador tea. The blueberries covered the clearing. And they were ripe. A fire might be coming and the frost might have landed early, but right now the country felt unbridled and wild, and bountiful, and mostly benign. The funk and low-grade fears of the morning had passed. They felt like themselves again.

They went back through willows and alders for the small dry-bag packs, the lifejackets and fishing rods, the gun. It was a short enough walk around the falls, maybe four hundred yards in all. They’d haul the canoe out and leave it where it was until morning. The Kevlar boat was light and it was just as easy for one of them to flip it up on his shoulders and carry it. Easier for one. The center thwart was wide and yoked for carrying. They made a pile of the four barrels and a dry bag on the bluff overlooking the rapid. And then they sat against the bag and just enjoyed the sun soaking them from over the woods across the river. It’d be gone in a minute, more clouds were coming. They noticed how instantaneously the afternoon cooled in the shadow, but for now they could sit with nothing to do but close their eyes and let the sun warm their eyelids. Probably four or five more hours before it dropped over the trees. In a few minutes they’d make camp and then pick enough blueberries to make pie. Their version of one, made in a frying pan with Bisquick and brown sugar.

“You wanna fish?” Wynn said without opening his eyes. “There was a good-size creek right above where we took out.”

“Be good to have a pan fry tonight, huh? Brookies and blueberries.” As soon as Jack said it, it sounded corny. “How come something so good just sounded so lame?”

“Professor Paulson said alliteration was dangerous if you don’t know how to use it.”

“Seems to me you could say that about anything. A frying pan or a car jack.”

Wynn thought about it. “Paulson said there was a principle in aesthetics: the more you prettify something, the more you risk undermining its value. Its essential value.”

“I don’t know what that means.” Jack tossed a pebble over the edge of the bluff. “Sounds like something a professor likes to say. I guess he means like plants that put all their energy into brilliant flowers and not the roots.”

“I guess.”

“So what if the value is already there? A strong and beautiful woman puts on makeup. So what?”

“Maybe if she puts on too much she could look cheap.”

“But she’s not cheap, is she? She’s still who she is.”

Wynn looked at his buddy. Jack had this way of questioning platitudes, dogma, authority. Jack thought most of his professors were zombies.

They lay back on the bag in the sun and didn’t say anything. After a minute Jack said, “What’s the dude’s definition of danger anyway? When he said using alliteration can be dangerous.”

“Yeah, right?” Wynn, eyes closed, felt around him until his palm lay on a small