Pocket Water

The problem, how to achieve the right balance in the gas, had been plaguing Roy Ketchum all day as he hiked through the North Washington woods with his daughter at the very cusp of spring. He was closer than ever. His results had been consistent for six months, and then, out of the blue, the old inconsistency in the data. And with this new, but all too familiar, failure gathered the growing unease that his hypothesis was wrong.

“Dad, can we make camp up there?” his eight-year-old daughter called from twenty feet ahead of him. Her thin, nail-bitten finger pointed at a craggy ledge that jutted out over the river, dark and tough against the lighter boulders that fastened it there, balanced like a black cowboy boot in a silver stirrup.

“No, Hon,” he said. “It’ll be too cold and windy up there. Plus you could roll right off into the river.”

“But it’d be like real camping. Roughing it like Grandpa always said.”

“No, it’s too dangerous.”

“But dad…”

“I said no!” he snapped.

Lucy’s cherub smile fell and her gray-green eyes cut a line across the muddy ground.  She whirled from her father and ran up the path. Roy watched the bottoms of her yellow rain boots flick around the rocks. The hood of her light blue jacket fell down her back exposing her mess of curly dark locks, just like Carla’s. “Luce, don’t go too far!” he called, “blow your whistle if you feel lost!” Roy rubbed his forehead with his palm. He had a headache from the early morning scouring of the data. If it wasn’t possible to find the right balance—which was really an exact imbalance—both precise and flexible, then he'd have wasted eight years of his career. Eight years—the length of Lucy’s life! Two years longer than his marriage to Carla.  Five neutrons more than the electrons that bounced about in the alternative fuel…

A loud whistle broke him from his reverie of moles and mass, not the shrill plastic safety whistle around Lucy’s neck, but one much more human and guttural.

“What was that?” Lucy’s head popped up from her perch atop a rock on the river’s edge.

“Lucy, get off that rock!” Roy shouted. Carla would slice his fingers off if he let anything happen to her.

The whistle rang out again, this time louder and with a higher pitch. Lucy sat on her bottom and slid down the dry side of the rock to the shore. She jumped up like a rabbit and darted upriver in search of the whistle, the source of which Roy now recognized, pulled from the deep dark recesses of childhood memory: an exact imitation of his father’s whistle calling for him in the woods or after a great play on the baseball field.

The leaves and branches rustled nearby and the whistle lowered to a loud roar that echoed across the river. A large, burly bald man sprang from the trees.

Lucy screamed as the man picked her up and swung her high above his shiny head.  “Grrrrrr!!!” the man growled into her stomach, sending her howling with laughter.

“Uncle Buzz! Put me down!”

He swung her over his shoulder like hunted prey and started marching towards Roy. “I scared ya, didn’t I?”

“You did not. I knew it was you all the time from that puny whistle of yours,” Lucy said, her words muffled into his back, her yellow boots kicking his belly. Buzz swung her down in front of her father.

“Hello, Roy.” Buzz outstretched his hand.

“Been a long time,” Roy said. He hesitated, running his eyes over Buzz’s beard and bald head. His full face and muscular frame relaxed Roy—Buzz had gained needed weight since the last time he’d shown up on Roy’s doorstep unannounced, needing money and a place to stay.  Roy slowly met his brother’s hand and pumped it up and down.

“A year and seventeen days to be ‘xact,” Buzz said.

“Can I see your knife, Uncle Buzz?” Lucy asked, fiddling with the leather buckle on the side of his belt.

“Sure,” he said, just as Roy simultaneously answered, “No.”

Lucy dropped the buckle and darted off to the river.

“Where’ve you been?” Roy asked, searching his brother’s eyes.

“Checked myself into a place called St. Mark’s in Spokane.”

Roy nodded.

“Been staying in the cabin the last month. Fixed it up a bit. Y’all up for the weekend?”

“I was planning to fix the porch,” Roy said.

“All done.”

“You came up here in the snow?”

“That’s what snowshoes are for, brother!” Buzz beamed. “Thought you’d be coming up round the first thaw.”

“I wish you’d told us where you were.”

“Sorry if I worried you. I thought it’d be better if we didn’t have contact for a while.” Buzz paused and looked past Roy to the rushing river behind him. “If I didn’t give you the option to help me.”  

“How could disappearing be better? What do you think I told Lucy when she asked where her favorite uncle was?”

Buzz cast his eyes downriver at Lucy. She was playing a game where she stretched her hand out and then slowly lowered it into the rush of white water. When splashed, she whipped her hand back and shook off the spray. Buzz sighed. “I don’t know.”

“All you had to do was tell us where you were. I know how these places work, Buzz.  You’ve got to think about other people, too.”

“I agree, in hindsight. At the time, though, I was muddle-headed. Didn’t want to cause anyone any more grief.”

Roy frowned, searched Buzz’s face again. “It was only a few months after Dad died, so I told her you’d taken a job on a fishing boat.”

“I have one lined up next week in Alaska. Hauling Salmon. Be headed out then.”

Roy nodded.

“I’m better out there. I can roll out there,” Buzz smiled his broad, shiny smile. “But I’m getting my land legs. You’ll see.” His smile rose through his dimpled cheeks and lit up his blue eyes—the same smile Roy had watched win over men and women and children and dogs. The smile that had convinced friend after friend to sacrifice time, money, work, and even their own wives to try to help him get clean and stay in a space, pocketed away, buffered from his inner sea.

Roy’s own mouth twitched—it was impossible not to smile back at such charisma and delight, and as his own smile broke he felt lighter, at ease, and excited for the day to come, though his head fought the pleasure and whispered for him to remember. In the past his brother had stolen, then pawned Roy’s TV, computer, lawnmower, microscope, and video camera with the first film of Lucy as a baby left in it. None had been recovered. 

“Do you want me hangin’ ‘round this weekend, or do you want me to split?” Buzz asked.  His gaze was that of their father’s: creamy blue eyes caught in dark rims as if they didn’t belong there, like a fish caught in a net. And his voice was the stern, serious tone of their father, laced with Buzz’s own pitch of “have mercy on me.”

“Dad, look!” Lucy pointed to the rapids just as a silver trout leaped from the white foam into a glassy pool.

“SHAZAM! Let’s go get our rods and bait up!” Buzz’s voice switched back to the effusive tone of their youth.

“Yay!” Lucy ran up and gave Buzz a high five.

“All right, brother?” He raised his eyebrows at Roy while the shadow of their father crowded his eyes and voice again.

“All right,” Roy said. Lucy beamed as she twirled in her blue coat and yellow boots.

They gathered their packs and hiked upriver to the family cabin that their father had carved out of the wilderness. Lucy chatted away with her uncle, and Roy tried to direct his thoughts back to the problem of the imbalance of the gas, but all he could think of was how Buzz was like his formula—a few months of serenity and then bam! Out of whack again. But this time it had been a year and seventeen days. Maybe that was long enough. The requirement for his experimental fuel to be certified was consistent data for a year. Perhaps Buzz had stabilized.

At the cabin Roy inspected Buzz’s handiwork. He had replaced the old, porous screen door with a new, tightly woven one. Five new hardwood planks shone bright and pale next to the old weathered planks on the porch. In the kitchen Lucy spied the new wooden island on wheels.

“This is awesome!” She pushed it in a circle then spun it like a top.

Roy placed his hand on her shoulder to stop her. “What about the roof?” he asked his brother.

“Had to wait for the thaw for that. If you want we can hike into town and get the shingles tomorrow.”

“Take too long—I promised Lucy we’d fish most of the day.”

“I’ll hike into town myself tomorrow and get the supplies. It’ll take longer than a day, anyway. Best get started.”

“No, Uncle Buzz, come fishing with us!” Lucy pleaded. Buzz looked from Lucy to Roy.  “Please!” she cooed, grabbing his big hand in her little fingers.

“All right, Lucy Lu. The roof can wait one more day. Let’s hope it don’t rain!”

“Yay!” Lucy clapped her hands then shimmied up the loft ladder to roll out her sleeping bag.

“You just sounded exactly like Dad,” Roy said.

Buzz laughed. “Being up here makes me remember him so clearly.” He paused. “I hear his voice, see his walk. I can even still smell him in the cabin.”

“Old Spice, burnt pine, cigar smoke, and peppermint,” Roy smiled, inhaling deeply.

“Exactly,” Buzz said. “And B.O.! Man could he stink after being up here a week with no shower!”

Aftershave! The thought jumped into Roy’s mind like the trout in the river. Juney had given him new aftershave for his birthday last week. Perhaps the odor had affected his data—mingled with the fuel and changed its properties? It was a possibility. He slapped his forehead.  How stupid of him! He should have known better than to put on new cologne and walk into the lab. But she had been so excited about it. “Put it on. I want to sniff your neck,” she’d said.  Juney, who was twelve years his younger, a former student who had approached him after she graduated and calmly said: I find brilliant men attractive. You seem like a stable and nice family man. I don’t want to waste my twenties and thirties waiting for the creeps my age to grow up. 

“Bro, yo, Brother man, where’d you go?” Buzz was snapping his fingers in front of Roy’s face.

“Dad took too many risks,” Roy said.

Buzz nodded. “But he lived a heckuva full life!”

“Catch me!” Lucy said, dangling her legs off the loft.

“No, Lucy, come down the ladder.” But she had flipped and lowered herself down by her hands, kicking her feet in the air and giggling. Buzz grabbed her by the legs and lowered her down in a fit of giggles.

“Lucy!” Roy enunciated each word with precision. “You are not allowed to do that!  You try that again and you won’t be allowed to sleep in the loft!”

Her giggles faded and her freckled face paled. She leaned against Uncle Buzz.

“Listen to your dad, Luce,” he said, stroking her dark curls. “He’s a smart man and he doesn’t want you to get hurt.”

“I wish I was a fish,” she said. “Then you could flip without worrying about falling.”

“Our father was a fish,” Buzz said. Lucy’s eyes widened.

“Come on, Buzz,” Roy said.

“No, really… it was like he came from the water himself. He was the best fisherman I ever saw. He thought like a fish in pocket water—like those eddies we saw today. He knew just where they would be all the time. And if he missed one, he could guess where it had been before and where it was going: whether it was treading against the current in a rapid, feeding on what was pulled through the vent, or taking a rest in a glassy pool.”

“I miss Grandpa,” Lucy said.

“When you were a baby Grandpa called you Lucybear,” Roy said. “’Cause you were calm and happy and gentle until you were hungry and, then… watch out! GRRRR!” He curled his hands and went in for the tickle.

Lucy collapsed in giggles.

“Get your gear together and let’s go find some pocket water,” said Buzz. “We’ll show you what he showed us, Lucybear. We’ll imagine being trout: how they think, where they go.”

“I’m Lucybear,” Lucy said. “I’m a bear hunting trout.” She rounded her little hands into claws and swiped at an imaginary stream. The brothers laughed.

Back on the path Lucy ran ahead. Buzz suggested they hit Miller’s curve. “Good pockets after the thaw. Hungry fish.”

Roy disagreed. “Too much volume to the water there this time a year. Water’s so broken the fish won’t be able to see the nymphs.”

“They’ll see ‘em all right. You just gotta know how to play ‘em. First a drag cast, then a fast, short plunge and dangle it back toward you. They’ll notice.”

“That’s called being passive/aggressive.” Roy arched his left eyebrow and met Buzz’s gaze, but Buzz stopped in his tracks and pointed because behind Roy’s head he saw Lucy slip off a boulder.

“Lucy!” he yelled and bolted past Roy. Roy spun and ran after him.

They scrambled over the little rocks and then climbed the big boulder. On the other side Lucy’s legs were wedged between two rocks as tall as her. She was bent over scooping the white water in her cupped hands.

“Lucy!” Buzz shouted. He’d scaled the boulder first. “Stop that—you’re too close. The current could snatch you.”

Roy scrambled to his side. “Lucy!”

“I’m a bear! This is how bears fish.”

“You aren’t a bear. You’re a little girl who is being very bad.” Roy lowered himself down to the rocks and lifted her from her trap.

“Grandpa said I was a bear. He called me Lucybear!”

Roy deftly hopped from rock to rock until they were on dry land. He sat her on her feet and placed his hands on her small round shoulders. He pushed his red face a nose away from hers.

“Do you know what else Grandpa did?” he demanded, squeezing her shoulders. “Do you really want to know what a smart, brave man he was?”

Lucy’s face pinched and she hiccupped over a sob.

“Roy!” Buzz called in a warning tone.          

“Do you?” He shook her shoulders and tears broke down her round face.

Roy released his grip and hugged her to him. “Oh, Lucy, don’t cry. It’s all right. It’s just when you do things like that you scare me. I love you. I want you to stay right by my side for the rest of the day. If you want to go anywhere you have to ask me first. OK?”

“OK,” she said between sniffles. He took her cold, wet hand in his and they continued hiking upstream. Buzz followed them. All three studied the river.

Roy calculated its volume in his head by measuring the height and strength of the rapids against other times of year—say August when it was usually at its lowest. It was currently mid-April, and the snow was still sloshing down the mountains. The river brimmed its banks, threatening, but gravity always pushed it forward, creating high white pocket water rather than flooding the shores. If only he could figure out a way to harness this power for his inert gasses.  It was theoretically possible. Gas was just a wink away from liquid. Just a few subtle properties—a shift of electrons here, a shake of neutrons there—why couldn’t he figure out a way to release the energy? Just because people had always used fossil fuels didn’t mean there wasn’t another way. Mass displaced volume…

“Daddy look!” Lucy pointed just as a trout leaped from the river. She seemed to possess an animal instinct for knowing when they would jump. His little girl, as soon as he felt he knew her, would shift and change before his eyes, an unharnessed, evolving mystery.

“See where he landed—that’s a glass pocket,” Buzz explained. “He’ll rest there for a while, then he’ll probably leap again or scavenge the food sources that get swept up in the eddies and pools around the rocks. See where the water changes color from that greenish brown to bluish gray—that’s a change in depth. There'll be some fish around there. Wherever there are edges, breaks in pattern. These babies like change. They get the most food where it’s the most complicated.”

“I want to fish that rock, right there,” Lucy said. “Daddy, will you tie my fly?”

“I think it’d be better upriver a bit.”

“No, I’m thinking like a bear. Here’s better.”

“All right,” Roy set down the tackle box and began tying her yellow and orange fly.

They walked to the foamy pool each commenting on the sight:

“It looks like snow,” Lucy said.

“It looks like a chemical reaction,” Roy said.  

“It looks like trout heaven: so broken that it’s whole,” Buzz said.

Roy and Lucy both regarded him curiously as he continued with his fishing paradox: “It’s perfect pocket water—now the bubbles are so thick that the fish can’t see you. Course you can’t see them either, but that blindness is what helps you get close. You want to keep a short, taut line, so mend often. Line control is essential. Keep your rod tip high. A pocket water strike is usually explosive. You’ve got to be prepared. Keep your knees a little bent at all times to keep your balance.”

They began fishing the pocket water, hovering over the nooks and crannies of those rapids for the rest of the afternoon. They called to each other to describe fish hits, runs, misses, hiding places, deft escapes, and nimble catches. The men’s voices murmured over the river like organ pipes, and Lucy’s rang like a bell. They returned to the cabin with three trout each.

*          *          * 

Later that night, lying in the warm darkness of the loft, Lucy listened to their leaving. Her father’s steady footsteps balanced in time and then her uncle’s shuffling rhythm, placing more weight on his left foot, so that his right quickly followed like an echo. The screen door creaked open and then shut slowly and tenderly in its frame. Earlier, her father had instructed her if anything should happen, if she needed him at all, to shoot off the flare. They wouldn’t be far away, just about thirty yards, at the bend in the river where the night fishing was good.

Over grilled trout and fire-baked potatoes that evening, she’d listened to her dad and uncle reminisce about night fishing when they were young. They’d made it sound glorious. Uncle Buzz recalled a mythical catch of a silver-bellied jumper when her grandpa had let it lead him all through the rocks until he found a clearing and got stable enough to reel it in and land it. It took all night. Dawn was just creeping in when he finally got that big baby to shore. After this story her dad had grown sullen.

“If he’d taken one-third of those risks,” her father said, “he’d still be alive today.”

“It was just one slip,” her uncle said, tilting back on the hind legs of his chair. “It could have happened to anyone. Even someone who didn’t take half those risks.

Her uncle and father eyed each other. The tension rose between them, her father leaning forward on the front legs of his chair and her uncle leaning on the back of his so that if either wavered, one would fall off his chair.

“He was off trail,” her father said leaning back. The back legs hit the floor with a thud, pulling her uncle forward on all four legs of his chair.

“Have you seen where he fell?” her uncle asked. “Did you even bother to go look where they found him?”

“I didn’t need to.” Her father shook his head.

“I did. Last week. I was picturing him falling from a cliff or something. You know the last thing he saw was the blue sky rushing away from him, but no. It was like falling downstairs. A tiny grade of a slope. Just slick from icy rain.”

Lucy had never heard the details of her grandpa’s death. Only that it was a hiking accident in the woods a year and a half ago, just before the first snow.

“He shouldn’t have been out in icy rain miles from camp alone.”

Buzz sighed. “Who are we to make that call? He loved it up here. He died where his heart lived.”

“Yes, but he neglected everyone else when he left for weeks at a time.”

“You don’t have any appreciation for the mystery in other people…” Buzz started, but his brother cut him off.

“And you don’t have any grasp of reality.” Roy raised his voice. “Any respect for other people’s limits and responsibilities.”

Both men were on their feet then. Lucy glanced from one to the other. She wasn’t scared.  She was relieved that they were finally having it out. In her experience anger simmering under the surface was way worse than the fight when it finally came. Since once it was over, it was over. That boiling-under-the-surface anger and resentment never went away between her parents. They slipped slowly into silence and then, when they had nothing left to say to each other, they got divorced.

She watched the tableau with interest.

“You exhausted our mother. You bled the life out of her,” her father said.

“She was sick,” her uncle said, darkness invading his eyes.

“She would have lived a lot longer if you hadn’t worried her so much.” Her father’s voice rasped like a knife through fabric, “you took her for granted.”

Uncle Buzz lunged at her father, tackling him to the floor. Their shadows wrestled against the fire-lit walls. As they tussled, Buzz yelled, “Take it back!” But her father made no sound. They fought in a familiar way, remembering strengths and weaknesses. Buzz finally got the advantage and pinned his older brother.

“Are you going to take it back now?”

“I’m calling it how I see it,” Roy said, struggling against the wrestler’s hold until he got some leverage and they rolled across the floor again. Lucy jumped to her feet to get out of the way of the roll. They were like children. Like little boys. She clapped her hands and blew the white whistle around her neck like a gym teacher.

The brothers heaved, broke apart, and glared at each other.

“I’ve done a lot of selfish and bad things,” Buzz said, jumping up. “But it just ain’t fair hanging the death of our mother around my neck. Don’t do that to me, Roy.” Her uncle’s face pinched, and his voice wavered as if choking back tears. It was only then that Lucy began to feel afraid.

“Hey, hey,” her father caught his breath and climbed to his knees. He looked up at Lucy and then at Buzz. Heaved a deep breath. “All right. I take it back. That’s not how it was.”

Her Uncle Buzz’s eyes shone, lakes lit up by the moon. “I am truly sorry. For all of it.  All the pain I caused.”

Her father didn’t respond right away, but he held Buzz’s gaze for a long, calculating moment. Lucy’s heart raced.

“I need you to believe me,” Buzz said.

“I believe you,” Roy said.

Buzz reached out his hand and pulled his brother up. They embraced, arms clenched tight around each other's backs. Lucy felt a rush of relief.

When they pulled apart Lucy asked, “Was Grandpa ever afraid?”

Her uncle and father both turned to her as if remembering she was there and said “never” in unison. Their father had always said: death is with you at all times, like your shadow. The sooner you befriend it, the larger your life becomes.

Uncle Buzz started to tell Lucy this sentiment, but her father interrupted, “She’s too young.” But Lucy begged, so Buzz finished.

Now in the silent darkness of the loft, Lucy, who had gone to bed no longer afraid, assuring her father she would be fine alone while they fished just outside the cabin, began to ponder her grandfather’s theory. Soon, the realization that she too would one day die throbbed in little Lucy’s eight-year-old consciousness. Death seemed limitless. There was heaven, but that was limitless as well. She tried to imagine it by imagining other physical realities that pulsed without borders—the sky or the sea or loose water such as when the river flooded its bed. There was no stopping it from taking over what was previously formed and shaped as nature willed it or as man made it. In a flood all bets were off—trees were uprooted, cabins dismantled, cars washed into the abyss of the current. But even floods had limits. Even the blue sky changed at some point to black space and white stars. So, space was perhaps the closest thing to death. But even space had some physical definition: planets, stars, black holes, suns, meteors, asteroids, movement. Human beings could fly through space, orbit, land on the moon.

Lucy’s heart quickened. What did her grandfather mean by making friends with such emptiness? She wanted to grab the flare and shoot it off so that it lit up the dark space of sky with a myriad of colors. She wanted to hear the zip and pop and watch the woods light up beneath its glow. She climbed out of her sleeping bag and quickly dressed. She lowered herself rung by rung down the ladder loft.

There, where her father had left it, lay the flare on the kitchen table. A cigarette lighter rested next to it. She picked them up, one in each hand. Her racing heart slowed as she flicked the rough edge of the cigarette lighter. Nothing. She flicked it three more times and got it lit on the fourth try. The little yellow flame, laced with blue and green, danced in the dark. She put the flare back on the table, tucked the lighter in her pocket and left the cabin.

Outside the night air nipped at her face. She pulled her scarf up over her mouth and cheeks and donned her gloves. The moon was bright and almost full, so it was easy to see the trail to the river. Her yellow boots rubbed against the leaves and twigs grown tight and brittle in the cold. Her ears pricked at the sounds of the wind through the bare trees, the occasional scurry of a nocturnal creature, the hoot of an owl.

Soon the woods opened to the river like the doors of an ark bearing her treasure. Lucy breathed deeply. Her uncle and father were right—the river was magical, dark racing beauty in the night under the moon. The darkness glimmered: instead of soaking in light, it radiated it back. Little whitewater crests danced like sequins on a lady’s fancy dress. In the moist, fresh air, Lucy could smell the fish in the river like she imagined a bear could. She saw her father and uncle upstream resting against a group of large boulders, their lines short and taut in the swirling pools. Lucy breathed in again and the smell of trout filled her nostrils. That’s not where they are, she thought—they’re down here, in that big glassy pool, resting. She knew this fact like she knew she was hungry or tired, as she imagined her grandfather had known.

She thought of heading upriver to advise her father and uncle who were leaning arm to arm, their backs resting against a boulder so that only their heads were visible from Lucy’s vantage point. But, on second thought, a brighter idea came to her. It flickered like an ember in the darkness, but soon flamed inside her like a warning flare. She would prove to her father and uncle that she was the best fisherman, as skilled as her grandfather and as deft as a bear. Once she caught the fish, she would carry it proudly upstream to where her father and uncle still waited with their impotent flies.

She crept quietly towards the glassy pool.

The moon shone full and bright, yet clouds covered its path. Eventually, the wind picked up, the clouds rolled away, and the moon lit the river like a silver sun. Lucy saw the fish then, a grandfather of a fish resting in the cranny of some shallow rocks. He was fat and long and white with a pink stripe across his middle. His gills sucked and heaved.

Lucy gathered her breath, took aim, and plunged both hands into the icy water. The fish squirmed, but Lucy caught him, his powerful muscular body writhing in her hands. But her glory was brief. “Dad!” she yelled, sensing that the fish was too large, strong, squirmy, and slippery for her to carry upstream to her father and uncle. She possessed the instinct and swiftness of a bear, but not the strength, claws, or teeth to secure her catch.

She called again, louder, “Dad!” as she took one step forward on a slippery rock.

Her father and uncle turned just in time to see Lucy struggling with a white fish half her size. It sprang free of her grasp as she slipped on a rock. Both the fish and Lucy plunged into the racing water. Roy and Buzz dropped their poles and scrambled over the rocks towards her.

Lucy landed in shallow enough water that she was able to dig her feet in the gravel and push herself up, but her instinct for saving herself was not as strong as her desire to recover the fish. She scoured the water around her, taking steps deeper out of the pocket and into the current. But the fish, born free in that water, raced away from his would-be captor.

She took one step too far.

Roy’s scream pierced the quiet night. His daughter disappeared beneath the swirling rapids, swept downriver. Roy raced the bank straining to keep his eyes on the light blue coat that dipped and bobbed in the foam. Meanwhile, Buzz dove into the current, letting it take him.

As he scrambled over the rocks Roy calculated what to do. If he could somehow get downstream before she did, he could grab her as she swept by. Lucy, who had picked a fish up out of the river like a bear! How did she do that? Lucy, he called to her in his mind, grab something! Help us save you. Why hadn’t he been the one to jump in after her? What kind of father was he? Where’s Buzz?

And then the clouds parted and the moon shone brightly on the river and caught a sliver of Lucy’s light blue coat—she had grabbed something. She seemed to be clinging to a makeshift raft—what looked like part of an old beaver dam wedged between two rocks.

“Hold on Lucy!” he yelled. “Dad’s coming!” His desperate heart surged with hope. But when he reached the bank beside her, he panicked anew. Lucy’s weight was pulling the loose dam apart. He wagered he had only seconds to do something and he didn’t know what that something should be. If he pulled on the dam from his direction, he would likely pull it apart sending her back into the current. If he climbed out on the rocks his arms wouldn’t be long enough to reach her. The only feasible thing was to try to find a solid place to stand downstream, judging precisely where the current would pull her.

“I’m going downriver,” he told her. “When I call your name, let go and let the current take you, OK?”

“No, I’m scared!”  

“Don’t be scared. Trust me, you can do it!”

“No!” Panic flashed in her eyes.

“Let the current take you like a fish,” Roy said. “Don’t fight it. Float. Float on your back. Just relax. I’m going to catch you. I’m going to catch you like a bear.” Her eyes cleared in recognition.

“When I call out your name, let go. Got it? When I call out your name.”

She nodded.

Roy rushed along the bank. He had to think like a bear. He had to decipher the river’s mystery and know where to stand to catch his daughter. What did speed, velocity, mass, volume, atoms, moles, neutrons, inertia, and friction mean now? They were just words. Even in the moonlight, it was hard to see the little ripples, breaks, and swirls; foam was his only clue. He stopped when he found a glassy pocket twenty feet downriver. He waded in up to his waist. The water was ice cold, but he no longer felt temperature.

And then they came. He had not called yet, but here came Lucy and Buzz, barreling down the rapids. Buzz had her in his arms, holding her head above water as he was pulled under, over and over again. Roy waded up to the next eddy. Seeing their position in the water helped him estimate with as much confidence as possible where he should be. “Pass her to me! Pass her to me!” he called hoping his brother could hear and see him.

His brother looked up and they locked eyes. When they came close, with what seemed like grizzly strength, Buzz shoved Lucy out of the foam to her father, who caught the blue hood of her coat. Roy tugged the slippery fabric until he could link his hands under her arms. He lifted her ashore while Buzz was swept downstream into darkness.

Roy stripped Lucy of her wet clothes and bundled her up in his relatively dry down jacket. Holding her shivering body close to him he walked downriver calling his brother’s name. The darkness edged closer and the wind bit through his wet jeans. “Buzz!” He called one last time and then turned to take his shivering daughter back to the cabin. Once inside he put on the tea kettle and built a quick fire. He helped Lucy into her footie pajamas and wrapped her wet hair in a dry towel.

He served her a cup of hot tea and then reached for his cell phone. “Lucy, will you be all right by yourself for a little while? I’ve got to walk down a bit to get service, so I can call for help for Uncle Buzz.”

She nodded. “I have the flare.”

“Good girl. You’re very brave.” He kissed her on the forehead.

Back in the night he watched for the bars to climb on his phone as he called Buzz’s name again and again into the pocket water and the moon and the dark wilderness below.

Meanwhile, a mile downriver, Buzz Ketchum crawled out of the current like some ancient fish who’d just sprouted lungs and legs. Sopping wet, he clung to the shallow rocks to catch his breath. As his breath slowed, his senses rallied, first touch—he was chilled to the bone, and his hands and arms were raw from knocking into, scraping, and grabbing rocks. Then the night sounds came to him—the rush of the river, the call of owls. He pulled himself up so that he was standing, then took heavy barefooted steps to the muddy bank. The current had claimed his shoes. He stood wiggling his toes in the mud until he felt the sensation of pinpricks.

He looked upriver and studied the moon glowing rounder and brighter than before. Like a giant eye, she seized him with her gaze. Buzz felt dizzy and acutely alive. He had no desire for a hit, a drink, or even a smoke, but what gripped him like a hand squeezing his heart was the idea that he could simply… disappear. He could walk to town and get some shoes and dry clothes and then keep on going, no longer a burden to his family. In death his family would remember him as the uncle who saved Lucy, not the filcher, the swindler, the liar, and the addict. He could be free, completely free from his past. He could be reborn from the waters, baptized in martyrdom. The thought was tantalizing, soothing, liberating. He turned towards town.

But as he trod through the slush and refrozen snow, shivering, flinching in the wind, he felt a vibration in his chest that crescendoed in strength and timbre until he finally recognized the sensation as noise. He stood still and listened to the buzzing: it was the sound of his only brother calling out his name. 

Anne Evans writes poetry inspired by her walks with her dogs along the South Platte River. Her fiction explores humans and their environments: familial, social, and natural, set in the American South and West. She received her MFA from George Mason University. A finalist for the MidAmerican Review Fiction prize and Brick Street Press Fiction contest, her short stories are featured in Relief and the Southern Anthologies, Mad Dogs and Moonshine, and Fireflies in Fruitjars. She has poems published in Canary: A Literary Journal of the Environmental Crises, The Book of Matches, Triggerfish: a Critical Review. She teaches Literature in Englewood, CO.

Published January 15 2024