William did a double take at Keith’s familiar black shirt, his black Levi’s, his bola. What went through his mind first, at the speed of light, was that Jasper had died and Keith was the messenger. But he killed that thought fast, because no one knew where William was. Ruth knew he was in Stanley, but not about his campsite by the river. Only Ed knew that. And Mim.
“You were looking for me?” Keith bounced on his haunches, grinning.
It was all some big practical joke. William looked wildly around, half expecting his family to come out shouting.
“I’m Patrick Anholt.”
William might as well have been in a total whiteout for the sense he could make of where he was and what was happening. The disbelief. The belief. He could not connect what he saw with what was being said, with what he knew. Patrick Anholt. Mim had said, “His name is Patrick.”
“I’m your brother.”
“You’re Keith Brink.”
“Right, and I’m the brother.”
Don’t open your mouth, William told himself; it was the only strategy he knew. Call it lockdown. Call it anything. The point was to give himself time to get his head around any of it. Do what’s real first. He’d left his clothes in the tent, and he went inside to get them; he was on autopilot. To get dressed, he went around the back, where he didn’t have to look at Keith Brink. His mind raced. He had to concentrate on putting on his shirt, doing everything slowly, not saying a thing, stepping into his pants, pulling on his socks and a sweatshirt.
“You can call me Keith if it would be easier,” Keith yelled to him.
William came back to the front of the tent, shook out his towel, and laid it across the bush to dry. He brushed his teeth using the water in his Nalgene bottle. Not calling you anything, he thought. He spat into the grass. Everything in him, every synapse, firing in an attempt to understand. Failing. A week ago William was Jasper Carteret’s son. Now he was nobody. Now Keith Brink was his brother.
“You came looking for me, man,” Keith said with the petulance of a whining kid, as though what this was about was who had come looking for whom. “You came to my house. You talked to Mim.”
William screwed the lid back on his water bottle and replaced it inside the flap to his tent. He felt the red strike of anger and pushed it away. He told himself to count to ten. And then count again. He took a few steps toward Keith for a better look. He found in Keith’s face the same slight underbite. The same angular chin. Why hadn’t he seen that before? He stepped away, held open his hands.
“I wanted to know my mother’s people. Is that so wrong?” Keith said.
His mother, William thought. His mother was my mother. “Are you for real? There are better ways to do that than lying your way in.”
“Bad timing, man. What can I say? I got to Hartford right around the time Pony died.”
“But you said you knew her. You spoke at her funeral.” He was standing over Keith now, looking down.
Keith evaded William’s eyes. He poked in the ground with his finger. He looked up. “I always thought you didn’t come looking for us because you didn’t give a shit. Why would you come looking for people like us when you had the good life?”
“Why use a different name?” William asked. “Why lie about everything?”
“I never meant to, I swear. It just happened. Keith Brink is the name of a kid I knew in Little League. I always liked the name. Brink. You know, brinksmanship and all that. Getting to the edge. Keeping your nerve. You can understand that.”
“Don’t tell me what I can understand.”
“You’re my brother. That counts for something.”
“Sure as hell counts for Mira.”
“We can go up to the Merc right now and call her long-distance,” Keith said. “Ask her yourself. I never touched her.”
“Why did you lie about it all?” William threw his head back and looked up at the sky. The big sky. The everywhere sky.
“Look. You’re not going to take a swing at me, are you?”
William pulled a folding chair from in front of the tent and dropped it a distance from Keith Brink. He sat down. “Start talking.”
“You have another chair?”
“No,” William said.
“Okay, okay.”
While Keith settled himself against a tree, William took the guy’s measure. They had the same body type, but Keith was heavier. Running to fat, from the tug at his shirt. Not muscle. So he’d be slower in a fight. William had the agility.
“I was six when I found out,” Keith said. “It was January, cold as hell. My dad was shoveling the walk up to the house. I had a snow fort down at the street that I made from what they plowed up, six, eight feet of the stuff. I wasn’t supposed to do that, so I hid while my dad was out there. He didn’t know I was in it. He kept saying, ‘Livvy.’ I saw him dig in, pitch the snow, and say it again. ‘Oh, Livvy.’”
“He called her Livvy?” William said, remembering the photograph and Livvy 1968 written on the back.
“I made the mistake of asking Mim what ‘Livvy’ meant. Big mistake. When Mim found out my dad was saying her name, she said, ‘Livvy is the name of that whore of a mother of yours.’ From then on, whenever Mim got pissed off, which was often, and she wanted to let my dad or me have it, it was all about that. Always about Olivia. Mim said Olivia had run off, taken her dying baby, and left me behind. That dying baby would have been you, I guess. Mim said Olivia was a gold digger and ran off with a rich guy from back east. But I always had the memory of my dad out there, mowing the lawn and saying her name. And he wasn’t saying it out of hatred, I knew that, and I thought Olivia couldn’t be that bad, right? Although he never talked about her. Not ever.
“I started looking through their stuff after that. Their drawers and closets, and there wasn’t much. Mim raised me, mostly. My dad cooked in the summers for river trips, and in the winters he took farming jobs in the Sonora. He’d be gone for long periods. She’s crazy, Mim is. I’m glad I don’t have her blood running in my veins. I’m glad I come from better stock.”
“What did he die of?” William asked. “Your dad.”
“Cancer.”
“Of the what?”
“Prostate. He let it go. Knew he had it and let it go. He wasn’t a guy to listen to doctors.”
“Anything else the matter with him?” William asked.
“The usual. He had ulcers. High blood pressure.”
William nodded. “He ever say anything about me?”
“Like I said, he thought you were dead. We all did.”
William could hear the river in the distance. The man had never bothered to find out one way or the other.
“I went east some years back,” Keith said. “I drove by that house of yours. I couldn’t believe it. I parked around the corner and walked by. I walked all around those blocks. Yards like golf courses, kids playing. I stood in front of your house and thought, Score one for Mim. She was right about one thing. Olivia hit pay dirt. I lost my nerve. I wanted to ring the doorbell, but I lost my nerve. I called her on the telephone instead, said I wanted to meet her.”
“And?”
“And nothing. She said she didn’t know what I was talking about. Which figures. She didn’t want to upset the apple cart. I can understand that. I really can. Don’t get me wrong. I was disappointed. But I understood where she was coming from. You hear about that all the time. It’s not uncommon for birth parents to deny a child’s existence.”
“That was it?”
“That was it. I came back here. Bear in mind, I didn’t know about you. I believed Mim, that you were dead. I thought I had half brothers and sisters, maybe. But never a real brother.” Keith wiped his lower lip with his thumb. “My dad had a cabin. Well, your dad, too. This will take getting used to, won’t it? Our father. Our mother. Anyway, cabin’s not much, three sides and a roof, more of a lean-to. Mim doesn’t know about it. My dad and I used to go there all the time. Maybe that’s something you’d like to see. I think if you saw his cabin, you’d understand a lot more about him.”
“Like?”
“You’re a climber, right? Hiker or whatever.”
“So?”
“So you do that because it’s where you want to be. Simple. The cabin is where our dad wanted to be. Would have lived in it if he could have.”
“He was a hiker?” William asked.
“Fishing. White-water. I take after him,” Keith said. “Done a fair amount of river swamping myself.”
Some Cub Scouts were pitching a tent twenty feet away. They had pretty foul mouths. A whistle blew somewhere nearby.
“It’s a hell of a lot quieter up at the cabin,” Keith said. “Only sound is the great Salmon River. Makes this look like a trickle.”
William wasn’t sure. Maybe they could go into town, find a bar, and talk. And yet there was a cabin. Secret, in the mountains. His father’s cabin, the place his father loved. The pull was irresistible, Keith or no Keith. “How far is it?” he asked.
Keith helped him strike camp. He said they’d need to take both vehicles—William’s car and Keith’s truck. Keith explained that the cabin was on the Salmon River, and there was no more beautiful place in the world. “It’s half yours, you know. Mim won’t part with anything of his, but I will. And like I said, she doesn’t even know about the cabin.” He was eager as they packed William’s gear into the trunk of his car, excited about showing this place to William, about the times he and his old man had gone up there together and how in any other family, that would have included William, and wasn’t that something?
William followed Keith out of Stanley and along some secondary roads. The drive took longer than he’d expected; the roads were narrow and pitted. It was also quite a distance. William’s thoughts couldn’t keep up with the speed of what was happening. Here he was, driving behind his brother in the middle of Idaho, but his thoughts were way behind. Did he buy what Keith had said? Maybe it added up and maybe not. On the one hand, if Keith did just happen to arrive in West Hartford around the time Pony died, William could understand his reluctance to come forward in light of her death. He could also understand Keith’s curiosity about the family and why he’d attend the funeral. And he obviously hadn’t bought any painting from Pony. That part was all a lie. He’d never even met Pony, if William was to believe him now. So why did he speak at Pony’s funeral? Why lie about knowing her in front of everybody that day, especially in front of the family he wanted to know? And why take up with Mira? By now Keith had had a couple of months to come forward, but he hadn’t. What did he want?
Ahead, Keith swerved onto a dirt road, and William followed until the road ended at the river. He parked his rental car in some brush, hidden against thieves, and got into the cab of the truck. Keith explained that the best way to get to the cabin was on the river, using his inflatable kayak.
“The best way or the only way?” William asked.
Keith grinned. “Okay, the only way. We could ferry over, but we’d get moved too far downstream, and then we’d have to walk back up, which you can’t do. It’s too dense. This way we can relax, put in a few miles above the cabin, and take out a mile or so below. Trust me.”
They doubled back along the roads they’d come on for a time and then along a better two-lane road. Keith said there wouldn’t be any rapids to speak of, nothing over a category two at this time of year. And even if there were, it was no problem. He could read water easier than he could read a book. William was in good hands. Keith was loud, talking over the roar of the motor, gesturing large with his free hand, mostly about Stanley and the town and what it had been like growing up there, and about the lodgepole pine infestation that was browning out the hills, and he’d slow to point out one area or another where all the evergreens were the color of rust. “It’s the topic out here,” he said. “One of these days, it’s all going to catch fire, and all those million-dollar homes hidden away up there will go up in smoke.”
He swung off the main road onto a dirt two-track, and they bumped fast down it for a couple of miles. William heard the river before he saw it; he knew about its pitch, that it dropped seven thousand feet from the headwaters to its confluence with the Snake. He got out of the truck and went to the river’s edge. The Salmon was like frothing blue steel. And looking downriver, you could almost see its downward cant.
As they readied the kayak, a good-size two-person inflatable, William studied Keith again surreptitiously. Keith, he thought, wasted energy; he used too much effort on small tasks.
“Technically, we’re not supposed to be doing this,” Keith said over the roar of the water. “These days everybody needs a permit, which is bullshit, if you ask me. But we’ll only be on the water for a couple of miles, and I haven’t been caught yet. Those river trips come by five or six a day sometimes. Every one of those guides is ready to turn in somebody for outlawin.’” He grinned at William. “Easterners like you, mostly. Liberals. Kids. Think it’s their job to police our river. ‘Take only photographs, leave only footprints.’ Give me a break.”
“So your dad worked on the river,” William said.
“He did a lot of stuff. No one thing. Your dad, too, by the way. You’ve got to get used to saying that.”
They worked smoothly together, loading the kayak, strapping down the gear. They set off, William in front and Keith behind. The water pulled them quickly away from shore, and they shot out into the middle part of the river, where the current was swift. William felt a sudden rush. God, it was spectacular. And fast. They rocketed along, digging in their paddles to keep a straight line. Keith shouted out commands: Left turn, right turn, left back, right back. During a period of flat water, William raised his paddle and laid it across the bow of the kayak. He realized with a start that no one knew where he was, and now his rental car was miles downstream, with no indication he was so far upstream from it. No one else knew that Keith Brink was Patrick Anholt.
“River left!” Keith thundered from behind. “Paddle like hell!” William dug in, impressed at how sure of himself Keith was on the river. Mercurial.
They eddied out into a backwater at the shore. “Big strainer downriver,” Keith said. “I’ll point it out later.” They pulled the kayak up the bank and behind some trees, in case a river trip floated by. William followed Keith a few hundred feet up from the river by a path through dense growth.
The cabin sat on a ledge overlooking the river. It had three sides and a thatched roof and was built crudely of rough-hewn logs. The front was a makeshift wall of stone piled shoulder-high, with an opening to walk through. “Go on in and look around,” Keith said.
William stepped inside, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness. It smelled damply of wood smoke, and it was cold. Something seemed to slide sideways inside him at seeing it all. His father had built this place with his own hands. He had breathed this air. There was a rotted tarpaulin on the floor, a small woodstove, and a pile of split wood beside it. A large pot hung from a hook overhead. William took it down and ran his hands over it, fingering the dents, the burned underside. He replaced it carefully. Two metal plates and two forks lay on the floor. He crouched and ran his hand over those as well, trying to picture the man who had used them. His father’s fishing gear hung on the back wall. A small sheet of paper caught his eye. It was pinned to a beam. He read it in the dim light. TO DO was printed across the top in big letters. Stove cold. Set kindling. Matches. William touched the writing, which had been done with force in pencil, the letters deep in the paper.
It felt both foreign and familiar, being in this place where the ghost of his father hung everywhere, a man who liked to live in the woods. A man who could build things. A stranger but very like himself. He wished his father might have known about him, that he’d become strong, a climber, and that he was most at peace in the mountains. Would his father have loved him, knowing that?
“So what do you think?” Keith’s bulk filled the door.
“Nice,” William said.
“It’s yours whenever you want to use it. This is all wilderness. Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness. It gets no better than this. Come on. I want to show you something while there’s sun.”
Keith led the way out behind the lean-to to a steep, densely overgrown switchback that zigzagged up an incline. As they went, William could hear that Keith’s breathing was labored. The rise was steep, no question, maybe a two-hundred-vertical-foot gain in a quarter of a mile. Keith was full of contrasts. Powerful on the water, weak on the climb. When they got to the top, it was fantastic: a rock outcropping with a view for miles in three directions. Below them, the Salmon glittered in the late sun like a silver ribbon twisting through the mountains. “What do you think?” Keith asked him. “Is this great or what?”
“It’s great,” William said. And for a few moments he felt at peace with everything, here in his father’s place.
“I knew you’d like it.” Keith had his back to William and was rocking on the balls of his feet, his fists planted into his sides.
“So what do you want?” William asked.
Keith swung around. “What do you mean?”
“From us, from my family, from me.”
“Nothing.”
“Come on. You come all the way east two times, and you don’t want anything?”
“You came all the way west,” Keith said.
“Different,” William said.
“Don’t give me that. It was you who called Mim awhile back and wouldn’t say who you were. She’s not stupid, you know.”
“She wouldn’t have told me,” William said.
“That’s right.” Keith made a show of checking his watch. He took the lead again going down, and William followed, keeping a wide berth between Keith and himself so he wouldn’t be right on the guy’s heels. Keith was slow and jerky in the way of people who didn’t trust the terrain. He hung on to tree limbs, and in a steep place, he knelt on a rock instead of staying on his feet, the way he should. William enjoyed finding fault with Keith. The knee thing was key; a knee could slip.
Back in the lean-to, Keith put a few pieces of wood into the fire circle out front and lit it. He offered William some Scotch he kept hidden in a well under the tarpaulin. He opened a can of nuts. “I’m going to show you something I never showed anybody.” He dug into the hard dirt floor at the door of the cabin, using a large trowel. He unearthed a small metal box that contained an envelope, which he gave to William. “He kept it here,” he said. “Mim never saw it.”
July 4, 1972
Dear Larry,
By the time you read this, I’ll be far away.
I’ve felt frightened for a long time now. I’m worried for William’s safety, and for mine. Patrick is the one you love.
I made up my mind last week. You won’t even remember it and yet it was the deciding moment for me. You and Patrick were in the kitchen eating your dinner. William was with me as always. Patrick won’t eat in my presence as you know. William went in to join you. I must have been mad to let him. You looked up. “Look. It’s the troll,” you said. Patrick laughed. Why did that matter so much? You’ve done far worse. But I knew in that moment I had to leave.
Patrick worships the ground you walk on. He says terrible things to me, imitating what you say. And do. He’s struck me, but then you know all about that. He’s my own flesh and blood and yet I have no choice. This is a terrible decision, but I have no other choice. William will be damaged if we stay.
You’ve caused the divide, Larry. How many times have I told you that William’s development is within normal bounds for a premature baby. The doctor says he’ll catch up at two or in adolescence. You’ve made clear you don’t care about William. Like a weak calf, you said. Sometimes it’s better to get it over with.
You’re pitiful. You’re worse than pitiful.
You decide what to tell Patrick. I’ll never tell William. I’ll see to it that he never finds you and never suffers at your hands again.
I loved you once, Larry.
Olivia
William reread the parts about himself. Premature? He walked to the edge of the clearing and looked down through the trees to the river. Catch up at two or in adolescence. As a kid, he’d been so small. In grammar school, he’d been the smallest and thinnest, always made to sit in the front row in school. This in a family of giants. The girls came along smart as whips. William had had to try so hard. And the physical stuff. God, how he’d worked, lifting weights in his room late into the night. Pushing himself. Testing himself. Whittling his body. And he’d succeeded. He despised weakness both in himself and in others. And all because he’d been premature.
Keith squatted on his haunches and shook his head. “You were pretty sickly,” he said.
William tensed and flexed his hands, reminding himself of his strength. “You never answered my question, Keith. What do you want?”
“You walk like him, you know. I was watching you. I noticed that at the funeral. You’re probably like him. He could be a son of a bitch. I’ll bet you can be, too. I’m more like my mom. I love saying that. My real mom. She knew what she wanted, the big house, the rich husband, and she went after it. I admire her for that. I’m able to do that.”
“She wasn’t like that,” William said. “Not at all.”
“I want in,” Keith said. “To answer your question.”
“In what?”
“The family,” Keith said. “It’s my family, too.”
It was laughable, actually. It was nuts. “You could have told us that.” William crossed the clearing to the point where the path led back down to the river. He could see water through the trees. More water, he thought. He could hear the uneasy sound of the river. On the other side of the river was his car, his safety. “He ever pull you off a fence at a swimming pool?”
“Sure did.” Keith laughed. “Held me under if I didn’t get it right. But that’s another story for another time. The way I read that letter is that if it hadn’t been for you, she would have stayed.”
“It wasn’t me. It was him,” William said. His mother had done the only thing she could. She’d taken William to save him. She’d loved him because he was weak and he needed protection. Not the greatest thing to find out about yourself. But it explained things, like how he always expected the other guy to have the advantage.
“There would have been no Mim.” Keith’s voice was like a front coming in, a change in the weather that signaled danger. The guy was unstable. He was standing, arms outstretched, a cunning smile. “I was the better brother,” he said. “I was the good brother. The strong one.”
“What do you say we get going before the sun goes down?” It had been a mistake to come up here. “We can talk as we go. Talk when we get back.”
“You scared of me?” Keith asked.
“It’s going to get dark fast.”
“You didn’t answer the question.”
“No,” William said. A lie. “I’ll get us some water for the fire.”
“Suit yourself,” Keith said.
William looked in the lean-to and found an empty bleach bottle. He made his way down the embankment, weighing his risks without knowing for sure what they were. The exposure here was the river, the miles ahead of them. William was a strong swimmer, but strength didn’t matter. You couldn’t buck a current with strength. You had to ride it out. As he made his way down the path, he reviewed what he knew. If he ended up in the water, he needed to go feet first. Don’t fight it. Ease over to the shore. The unknown was Keith.
They’d stowed the kayak behind some trees, and William pulled it out to look it over in what was left of the light. He checked for the paddles, but they were gone.
“Looking for these?” Keith asked from behind him.
William swung around. Keith was holding both paddles.
“You weren’t thinking about leaving without me, were you?”
“Why would I do that?” William said.
“I got the fire,” Keith said. “Buried it with dirt. We can push off. I want you in the front again.”
They shoved off. Now the river was a hungry black, and the mountains rising to either side cast giant shadows. The water was loud. William dug in his paddle blindly, straining to see ahead for obstacles, dangers. Keith was quiet, unlike when they’d come. No orders. No running off at the mouth about growing up in Idaho. Nothing. They coasted awhile. The water was swift but not dangerous. And it was cold against William’s skin through the thin plastic of the kayak floor. In the shoals, rocks close to the surface knocked against his shins.
He heard the sound of the rapid before he saw it. A faint sound, lower and deeper than the regular rush of the river.
“It’s nothing,” Keith shouted forward.
“Let’s stop and take a look,” William shouted back.
“Hell, no,” Keith shouted back. “I’ve done it hundreds of times, man.”
“I haven’t,” William said. “We’re pulling over.” He paddled hard and alone, pulling the kayak out of the current and into quieter water without any help from Keith. He jumped out and landed knee-deep in the cold water.
“You’re being a candy ass here,” Keith said. “I know where all the holes are. We run a course right down the middle, between them. I’ll tell you what to do.”
“I’m not going down that blind.”
“You’re no brother of mine,” Keith said.
William made his way up a steep incline and walked to a point beyond the bend in the river where he could see the rapids on the other side. They showed up as frothing grayish water against the dark river. They were big. “I thought you said nothing more than a category two,” he said.
“That’s a cat two,” Keith said, scrambling up the path behind him.
“I don’t think so,” William said.
“You don’t know much about moving water,” Keith said. He was behind William, standing too close. William stepped back from the edge instinctively. Keith pointed to the left, to the point just after the bend. William knew the rapid Keith pointed to was higher than a two. “We’ll come in up there. We’ll keep right for a bit. Then ferry left. That wave you see”—Keith pointed downstream about twenty feet—“is a hole. We want to miss the hole.”
Looking down at the water, William felt his bowels loosen, as they had that day on Peekamoose. His stomach churned. Keith continued, “As soon as we’re around it, we need to head right again, and fast, so we can go down the middle. It’s against the current there, but if we stay left, you see, we run into a pulse against the canyon wall.” William studied the scene. He did the thing he knew how to do. Use his head. He repeated to himself what Keith had said, making a mental diagram. A zigzag shape. Start right, move left, drop around, below the hole, then move right again and shoot down the middle.
“You don’t believe in life jackets?” William asked as they made their way back to the kayak.
“This is Idaho,” Keith said.
William had no choice but to get in the kayak again. The water ran slow around the bend toward the rapids, like a big easy pool. Then it seemed to rise, as if gathering strength for what lay ahead. Small eddies swirled about the kayak. “Paddle up,” Keith said. “Let it take us for now. It’ll pull us right.” William lifted his paddle from the water and waited, his heart racing. The sound of the rapids grew louder as they rounded the bend. Ahead, the water frothed and roiled. It looked nothing like it had looked from above. His stomach heaved. He was trying to see where the hole was that had been so clear from above, like a big smile. At this level, the water just churned wildly. But they were being pulled slowly to the right, as Keith had said.
Suddenly, as though hooked from beneath and thrust forward, the kayak picked up speed. “Left turn,” Keith shouted behind him, and William dug in his paddle on the right side of the kayak, using all his strength. The water fought back hard, pushing them downriver, toward the rush of water that was the hole. “Harder,” Keith screamed. William felt a sharp, stabbing pain at the center of his back, between his shoulder blades. The kayak spun. He was looking upriver. It came again, the stab in his back. He felt himself lifted as if in slow motion, airborne from the kayak. And then, smooth as a knife, he was underwater in a rush of gray bubbles, sucked down.
He shot to the surface, too stunned to take in air, and was pulled under immediately, down where everything was black, and then the quick wash of gray at the surface, and this time, yes, the gasp for breath, but right down under again. The next time he saw the kayak nearby in calm water. Keith was watching. Doing nothing. William was pulled under again and knew. Keith wasn’t going to help. The stab in his back had been Keith’s paddle. Keith had done it on purpose, and now William was in a hole. They called them Maytags for a reason. He let himself be pulled under again, was shot to the surface. It had a rhythm, like a washing machine. You had to let it take you and not fight it. Like a riptide. Like everything. Don’t panic. Think. He remembered a diagram he’d seen of a hole. A stick-figure swimmer was angled downward, toward the river bottom, not the top. William let himself be taken up and shot down a few more times. He caught brief glimpses of Keith, arms folded, grinning. William took a breath and, at the bottom of the cycle, using all the strength he had, stroked downward toward the river bottom. Immediately, he was in calmer water. He tucked and turned feetfirst downriver. He wanted to scream, to whoop at how he had outsmarted Keith, but he kept his mouth shut. He sculled left until he could feel the riverbed under his feet. Once secure, he crept toward shore. He was psyched. He was alive. He was on dry land. And he was going to get that son of a bitch if it was the last thing he did. He understood now what Keith must have meant. For Keith Brink to be “in,” William would have to be out, because only William knew who Keith really was. It was possible that not even Mim knew he’d gone under the name of Keith Brink or that he’d been back east.
Upriver, he saw light on the water. A beam swept the far side and the near, tracing the river’s banks. The water was calm through that stretch, allowing Keith to pull over on one side and then the other, flashing his light about. It was a powerful beam, one of those big-battery halogen jobs. Keith was taking his sweet time looking for William. Looking for William’s body. Keith knelt in the bow of the kayak, leaned forward, shone his light into eddies and inlets.
William crouched in the water, not daring to move. He didn’t trust himself to win a fight with Keith. His only way out was to hope Keith would pass by him. The light approached as Keith let the kayak slip downriver, closer and closer. William crouched lower in the icy water as Keith swung into an eddy, just a few feet away. He found William with his light. “Damn,” Keith said.
William tore from the water and up the bank, counting on his speed and on the time it would take Keith to get out of the kayak. When he was far enough up the bank, hidden behind some trees, he risked a quick look back. Keith was still taking his sweet time, tying the kayak to a tree. William felt along the rising slope. He scrambled up on his hands and knees. He counted on Keith’s lousy cardio to slow him down. Keith called out his name, and William turned to see how close he was. All he saw was the light.
The ground underfoot was soft with pine needles, and William scrambled while Keith’s light panned from behind; it found him just as he reached a place where he could go no farther. A rock face rose straight up. He tried to head back down toward the river, but Keith was below him now, moving up and across, ever closer. The light approached, blinding him. William covered his face. Keith dropped the beam but kept coming. William had only one option: He bolted. He scrambled down the slope but fell and rolled, and the next thing he knew, he’d come to a stop, and Keith’s foot was pressed hard into his neck. William grabbed Keith’s leg to throw him off, but Keith was too heavy. A rock dug into William’s shoulder blade, causing breathtaking pain. Keith flicked off the light. “You keep asking me what I want. First off.” His foot pressed more deeply, causing William to gag and cough. Keith let up a bit. “I’m the kid’s father. Andrew’s father.”
“Aw, come on, man.” William tried to twist away. “No way.”
“You want to hear this or not?” Keith’s foot bore down hard again. William thought his jaw would break. “I went back there a few times, and two years ago I hooked up with Pony at a bar. She was drunk. What can I say? I came back this year, and damn if she doesn’t have a kid.” Keith leaned into William’s face. “And damn if the kid isn’t mine.” William tried to twist away, but Keith’s sneaker pressed his face sideways and into the dirt. It was true about Pony’s drinking. Pieces of information began to click into place. Her e-mails to Katherine. The timing. “It was you up at the lake that day,” William said.
“Of course it was me. You people are slow on the draw. I go with our sister’s theory about Pony, by the way. The fat sister. She had it right.”
“Her name’s Tinker,” William said.
“What’s that?” Keith blinded William with the light, laughed, and turned it off again. “Pony could have done a lot to help herself. She could have seen it my way. I gave her a chance. Call me old-fashioned, but when people have a baby, they get married, right? But hey, I’m getting ahead of myself.
“May twentieth this year I went back east to see you people again. I parked out front of Pony’s place in Manchester. I was just checking things out. I liked her. But she saw me parked out there and came slamming out the door with that baby on one hip and said, ‘What the bloody hell are you looking at?’ She threatened to call the cops on me. She didn’t know who I was. You believe that? She had no memory of me. I was pissed. I mean, how would you like it if that girlfriend of yours forgot your face? Bad. So I told her who I was, the guy from two years ago? And she got this look on her face. Oh, man. She went white—and I knew right then it was about the kid. That it might be mine and she knew it. I knew I had her. I had leverage.” Keith’s foot relaxed a little. William pulled in a breath quietly. “Here’s the thing, William. I thought all I wanted when I went back east that first time was a look at you people, maybe get to know you. But now it’s different. Now I have a son. I want to be part of it all. Hell, I deserve to be part of it. That Fond du Lac place. I love it there. I deserve that. Not as just a friend of the family but as one of the heirs.”
It felt to William as though Keith had let his weight sag against something, a tree maybe, because of another change in pressure. “I can understand that,” William managed to say.
“Yeah? You can? I thought you would. Pony didn’t.” Keith’s foot slipped again, enough that William could take one deeper breath. Keith explained to William, his voice more thoughtful now, that he had given Pony proof of who he was. He had shown her the same letter he’d shown William, and his birth certificate, which listed Olivia Murphy as his mother. He’d shown her the picture. He laughed. “She had a very big problem all of a sudden. She’d fucked her half brother. She had to throw up. I know she did. She swallowed it. She wouldn’t leave me alone in the room with the kid. She kept saying, ‘What am I going to do?’ like it was all up to her, and I said, ‘Excuse me, but I think you mean ‘we.’”
“Your baby, too,” William said.
“Fucking A, William. People get married. I was in. It was easy.”
William thought he might be sick himself. “How did Pony react to that?”
“She said fine.”
“Doesn’t sound like her, Keith.”
“Okay, she needed time to think it over. A few days later, I called. She was on top of her game. Everything was cool. She said I should go up to Fond du Lac.” Keith’s foot slipped lower on William’s neck. “I go all the way up there, William, and what does she do? She freaks out. She won’t get out of the water because she’s naked. She wants her clothes. What kind of a reception is that? Long story short, I picked up the kid. My kid. And she stands right up in the water and says come on in.”
“Was that you who called her?”
“You bet. I thought I was going to be late, but then I wasn’t. But anyway, like I said, she stood up in the water, and I said, ‘ That’s more like it.’”
William understood now. If Pony had known there was danger, and she must have, she had no chance with Keith on land; her advantage was in the water. If he was going to threaten Andrew, she’d done the only thing she could.
“So I swim out to the raft after her. I don’t know where the hell she is. There one minute, gone the next. I go up on the raft, and then I hear her under it. She starts going back and forth. Under the raft and then out. I mean, what the fuck? She’s explaining to me how it’s going to go down whether I liked it or not. She wasn’t going to lie about anything. She’s going to tell the whole thing about what happened and about who I am. The whole nine yards. She’s going to start with you and then tell Daddy and the fat sister and Mira. I couldn’t let her do that. I’d be crucified.”
“What did you do?”
“She’s just treading water out there, calm as a cucumber, saying that crazy shit. What else could I do? I went in after her.”
“How?”
“How do you think? I jumped her from the raft.”
“And she got away.” William knew exactly what Pony had done. She’d wanted him to go for her. She had tucked her chin before Keith had her in a hold. She was out of his grasp before he even knew it.
“She didn’t get away. I let her go,” Keith said.
Bullshit, William thought. Just as she’d done with William, she would have approached Keith underwater. She’d had the upper hand. She’d had all the cards right then. It was the drowning game in spades, the martial arts of swimming. But something had gone wrong. She should have won.
“Bitch grabs my feet,” Keith said. “She’s trying to drown me. I’m going down like a stone.”
“She wouldn’t have hurt you,” William said.
Keith jabbed William’s neck with his boot. “You weren’t there, William. She was trying to hurt me, all right. She was trying to drown me, but God was with me that day. I think I’m going to die, and then I feel that chain and I reach out for it and latch onto it and I don’t really know how it happened. I was trying to shake her loose, and all of a sudden she lets go. I’m free. I got up on the raft so I could see down. I could see her. She was caught on that chain, all right.”
“You killed her,” William said.
Keith flicked on the light and into William’s eyes. The glare was inches away. William had to turn his head. Keith turned off the light. William concentrated on exactly where it had been. “Whatever,” Keith said.
The flashlight came on again, exploding in William’s eyes, but this time he was ready. He rolled away, jumped to his feet, swung with his left hand, and knocked the light from Keith’s hands. It bounced and spun down the slope toward the river. William groped for Keith in the darkness, found him, and pulled him to his feet. Keith swung and cocked William’s shoulder. William felt his fist connect with Keith’s soft belly, a satisfying hit. He did it again. He felt Keith’s body fall away. He waited, breathing hard. He heard Keith retch. Then he felt himself being tackled. He was thrown down, and he rolled toward the river and to the light where it had come to rest, its beam illuminating grasses along the bank.
William scrambled, crawling as fast as he could on all fours to reach the light before Keith did. He grabbed it in both hands, turned, shone it in Keith’s face. Keith’s shirt was ripped, and he was staggering toward William but had to shield his eyes against the assault of the light. William had the advantage now. Oh yes. He had the light. He kept it trained on Keith, who dropped to his knees, groped for a stone, and flung it. The stone hit the light but missed William. William turned off the light. Everything went black. The only sounds were the rush of the river and Keith’s harsh breathing.
William worked his way up the riverbank, then turned on the light again. Keith turned, stupidly openmouthed. William was almost enjoying this. With the light out again, he climbed partway up the slope, flashed the light again, and again took Keith by surprise. He had to get to the kayak before Keith did. He needed to get out of there, cross the river, and find his car. He spotted the kayak maybe twenty feet downriver. He climbed higher and flashed the light on and off to draw Keith toward him. Then he moved through the darkness, heading down, letting gravity take him at an angle back to the water. He didn’t shine the light again. Now he didn’t want Keith knowing where he was.
But he wasn’t quick enough. Keith had found the kayak, pulled it from its mooring, and was already out on the river. William trained the light on it. Something wasn’t right. The kayak was going in a loose circle. Keith had no paddles. That was it. He was lying across the bow and stroking with his hands, but something else was wrong. The thing looked deflated. When they’d shoved off earlier in the day, it had been gorged on air. Now it sagged. Keith’s weight at the front tipped the rear up. It looked like a child’s toy spinning along as the river built speed.
William expected to feel satisfaction but felt none. He scrambled up the bank. A trail ran along the Salmon, little used but good enough. He ran alongside the river, keeping his light now on the path ahead, now on the kayak, which angled and spun from one side of the river to the other. It stalled in eddies, caught on rocks, and shot out. All the time, Keith lay across the bow, frantically trying to guide it, aiming one way and then another. The thing kept losing air. William could hear the roar of another rapid coming up. He waded into the river as far as he dared, to the edge of a swifter current, and waited until Keith was closer. “Throw the line,” he yelled to Keith, shining his light. “Over here.” But Keith lurched and tipped as the kayak spun quickly downriver and farther away. William was trained to help people, not to kill them, not to let them die. Keith Brink. His enemy. His brother. He couldn’t let it happen.
Staying close to shore, William ran, stumbling, through the water, keeping his light trained on the kayak. He needed to get downriver of it. Keith’s arms were no match for the current. The kayak was lower in the water, Keith’s body mostly submerged.
Around a bend, a huge evergreen had come down. It must have fallen years earlier from much farther up, slid down the hill, and landed halfway across the river, bringing down other trees and brush, forming a massive barrier across the trail and a good half of the river. It was a godsend, a last chance for Keith before he hit the rapid.
Holding the light, William climbed the trunk and tried to make his way through the dense tangle of branches out to where it lay in the water. He cast the light upriver and panned the water. He spotted the blue and yellow of the kayak, barely afloat and moving along like a leaf on a current. He panned once more for Keith and found the pale terrified oval of Keith’s face moving toward him with the current. William waved the light, meaning for Keith to come that way. But Keith was frantic, panicked, as he tried to swim wide of the tree. In an instant he was shot forward into the dense suck of branches. William shoved the light down his shirt and used both hands to claw his way farther out the length of the tree, shouting, screaming, over the roar of the river that he was coming. He’d be there in a second. He would help. But he made no progress. It was like fighting through a solid wall. He pulled out the light, shone it ahead, hoping to catch sight of Keith pulling himself out. Instead, Keith lay on his side, entwined in the snarl of branches. The water roiled and frothed over him. His arm was raised up by the current and let down again. William lay on his stomach and reached out to grasp Keith’s hand, but it was hopeless. Keith was being sucked back down and held under by thousands of tons of water.