The River - Peter Heller Page 0,3

with spinach instead of Canadian bacon.” She’d adjusted her glasses. “Benedict?” she’d said. “Yes? No?” and they’d both burst out laughing and Keri had reached over and patted him on the shoulder. He knew what eggs Benedict was. He said the pat burned like a brand and that afternoon he’d changed his flight and flown home. It was sugaring season anyway, one of his favorite times, and he helped his father boil in the little sugar shack along Sawyer Brook.

Sometimes they boiled all night. At dawn the sun washed the patchy snow in a rose light, and the daybreak wind rattled the dried leaves of the oaks and the bare branches of the maples, and he heard the rush of the snowmelt brook, the songs of the nuthatch. The fire crackled under the long pan of clear sap and he and his dad didn’t say much, but he was aware enough—he’d read enough fiction, he guessed—to realize that these might be the best hours he and his father ever spent together.

He also came to see in the long hours of trying to work through his heartache that maybe he had been just as ruthlessly shallow and opportunistic as she had been: she’d wanted to indulge in a local boy who wore flannel shirts and could fish and cut wood and was as at home sleeping under the stars as she was in a five-star suite, and he’d wanted to date the daughter of a star who moved through the world like a different species. But really she was just a young girl who was far from home and probably scared, and he was much more cultured than he let on and had spent more hours in the art museums of Boston and New York than he cared to admit. He just had never had eggs Florentine.

He came to the conclusion one morning walking the sugarbush of Dusty Ridge that he and Keri had never really been friends and that they had rarely laughed. That was sad.

Jack’s story was simpler. He had known Cheryl since second grade, when her father came to the valley to take over as police chief, and they were best friends, and now she wanted to get married and have kids and he realized that she was the best kind of woman and that he was already bored. He’d written her the Dear Jill letter in May, and when he’d said he hoped they remained friends forever he meant it.

So both Jack and Wynn had digested their share of bewilderment, and maybe there was a heavy place like a stone inside each of them. Wynn would never admit that he’d been in love and that Keri’s scorn had been a gut punch. Or that maybe he hadn’t dated in the first two years of college because he was gun-shy.

They drifted. Jack kept slicing the cheese and the sausage until there was none left. They ate like wolves. The good thing about a canoe trip is that they didn’t have to be shy about provisions. They had two three-foot plastic barrels stuffed with enough food probably to get by even if they never caught another fish.

“They must be paddling down to Wapahk,” Jack said. That was the village they were headed for: the plan was to paddle this last lake that emptied into the river, then the river for a couple of weeks, then take out at the little settlement at the mouth of Hudson Bay.

“Or they’re just paddling the lakes up here and they’ll get picked up. Them and the drunks.”

They thought about that. It occurred to them, though neither of them spoke it, that with the fire coming the safest thing would be to catch a flight out of Blueberries Lake. They’d flown in to the first lake on floats and they could take off on them, too. Because this evening or tomorrow morning this most northerly lake would pour into a river. And when they left the lake behind and paddled into the tongue of current that became the Maskwa there would be no going back. They would ride the swift V of moving water into the channel and they would be committed to paddling all the way to Hudson Bay. There would be nowhere on the large but constricted river to land a floatplane until they were near the mouth in two weeks. But. They could not stay up on the lake because they had no radio or sat phone to contact