The grocery store in Salmon carried everything in a can or box plus fresh summer vegetables and fruit in bins on the sidewalk. Tom Bracken, the owner, was friendly, pot-bellied, and usually flushed with a pink-tinged face and bald head. When he spoke, he squinted to underscore his interest in whatever anyone had to say. He could recite quantity, brand, and cost of food that any recent customer bought, including Quinn Bass who’d purchased twelve small cans of chunky pineapple. Tom Bracken had the memory of an idiot savant. He also made enough money during tourist season to winter in Manzanillo, Mexico.
“When they moved over here from California, there was a stir. I thought we might have a riot in Salmon. Nobody ever seen an ebony-and-ivory family except on TV. A few dumb rednecks got excited. But if you asking me, I’d rather have a heap of decent coloreds than one piece of white scum. Nobody more decent than Marnie Bass.”
“You remember when we used to visit?” Kate pulled out a photo of Ruby taken in seventh grade.
“Sure, I remember.” He stared at the photo of a smiling child with lots of hair. The girl he saw with Quinn was grown up, curves and all. “Tall, I grant you that but black, Indian, Mexican, damn if I know. She stood on the sidewalk with a big hat while the Bass boy was in here buying out the store. He didn’t answer when I asked where he was headed. ‘Shopping for the end of the world?’ I asked.”
Besides groceries, Tom’s official business was the business of everyone who entered Salmon. “I drove out to the Bass place after Marnie called. Didn’t see boy or girl. Somebody in trouble?”
Tom pulled on his ear. If there was trouble, he wanted to be the first to know. He prided himself as town crier: first to know, first to tell. His store was a crossroads of information. He collected newspaper clippings of rafting mishaps, hunting accidents, lightning strikes, rodeo casualties, and bear and wildcat attacks. He himself was an attraction. If anyone in town was lonely or bored, they were welcome at Tom’s store.
“I saw one of them amphibious assault crafts in the yard. Maybe a pump and a few beat-up rocket boxes. Check with the rangers at Corn Creek. If they’re on the river, the rangers will know.”
In the afternoon, Kate and David made the two-hour journey to Corn Creek, passing miles of potato and soybean fields until they reached the shady dirt road that paralleled the course of the river. To David’s educated eye, the water was running high and fast.
“They wouldn’t go out there alone,” Kate said.
“Ruby already ran away. If the river was a way to keep running, she might take her chances.”
“I know Quinn has more sense.”
“Maybe, maybe not,” David said. At Quinn’s age, he and friends cut out after exams and drove from Berkeley to the Rogue. Ill-equipped and unprepared, reckless and unskilled, their first day on the river, David almost drowned. A friend broke a leg and had to be helicoptered out. They all came back sick with bronchitis and giardia.
“Do you think they’re out there?” Kate asked.
David now believed what Kate believed. When they left Zamora, he thought she was in a dangerous state of mind. He came along to protect her from disappointment. Now he saw the logic of Ruby finding her way to Quinn. Kate trusted her instincts about Ruby. David trusted Kate. He guessed they’d come and gone although the rangers had no record. As for permits, cancellations meant there were a couple available onsite.
The river spoke to David. It awakened a liveliness in him. The Main Fork’s technical rapids were not so difficult. He’d rafted the Salmon in the past.
“If they’re on the river, we have to go,” Kate said.
By the time they returned to town, they’d decided on a course of action. While David went to rent equipment, Kate returned to Tom Bracken’s store with a list of supplies.
“Looks like you’re going out on the River of No Return,” Tom chuckled. “We enjoy calling it that, although some folks get spooked. Indians used to claim that no one who ventured downstream was ever seen again. At least, that’s what Lewis and Clark heard. It’s running fast but your husband won’t have a problem. It sounds like he knows what he’s doing. Maybe 19,000 CFS, maybe more. This time of year, it’s usually eight thousand. We seen worse. They’ll be a few accidents whether it’s running high or low. That’s what keeps life interesting.”
He yammered as Kate zipped up and down the aisles.
“Your husband sounds like he knows what he’s doing,” Tom called out.
“He’s not my husband,” Kate said.
“I remember when you’d come to visit Quinn’s mother.”
“My husband was Marnie’s first cousin.”
“You drove from down south somewhere?”
“New Mexico,” she said.
Tom recalled Ruby. She was a beautiful child.
“I forget your last name.”
“Ryan,” Kate said.
“I got a bunch of coincidences marching through this store on a daily basis. Folks discovering folks they haven’t laid eyes on in twenty years wind up in this place for cosmic reasons. It’s one of them power spots they talk about. This morning, a couple of guys was in here from New Mexico, name of Ryan.”
Kate half-listened as she inventoried canned vegetables and fish, bags of nuts and dry fruit, cartons of eggs, packages of bread, bacon, pasta, and quarts of bottled water, soda, and beer.
“Sorry?” she turned to Tom.
“Ain’t that something? Two Ryan gentlemen from New Mexico stopped in this morning.”
“Odd,” Kate said.
“Good-looking guy with lots of hair, one of those Clint Eastwood types. Asked if I knew where some colored people lived. That kind of question, I don’t answer. I told him he had the wrong town. The fellow told me he had a friend who lived here name of Paul Jones. I told him I knew everybody. Never heard of Paul Jones. He went to write me a check for five bottles of tequila. Of course, we can’t accept such things. It’s a shame you can’t trust nobody. When he put his checkbook on the counter, I saw his name, Edwin Ryan from New Mexico.”
Kate stopped. “Edwin Ryan? You sure?”
“In a car with New Mexico plates. Kinda hobbled around.”
“Said he’d been in a hunting accident. Going out on the river to relax and fish. Had a young man along to help him.”
“Young man?”
“College kid who told me about this vegan craze. He follows it like a religion. He told me I could purify myself if I stopped eating enchiladas, pizza, ice cream. I asked how a man was supposed to live like that.”