“Taffy,” he called, trying to control his voice, the edge of hysteria there, of fury. “Come!”
But Taffy didn’t come. Taffy never budged, except to contort himself (he was a male, Riley saw now, the sheath of the organ, the tight dark balls like damson plums) so he could reach up and scratch his chin with one back paw. Riley looked up and down the tracks, a long tapering V to the vanishing point in either direction, then called again, again without response. Maybe if I turn my back on him, he thought. Or maybe—and here he felt embarrassed with himself, because what was he now, a dog whisperer?—maybe he should just say fuck the whole business. Let the dog take his chances. Right. Fine. He swung abruptly round and made his way through the damp grass to mount the porch of the dead man’s house and see if he could find the means to make himself a cup of coffee.
He wasn’t really tracking the time, but it must have been around noon or so, the sun high overhead and the dog frisking back and forth across the lawn, chain in tow, when he looked up from his coffee and toast and his eyes came to rest on the canoe where it lay overturned on the dock. He’d been reading a very dull book, trying not to think beyond the next dull paragraph, wondering how he was going to get through the rest of the day, and there it was, this vision: the canoe. It was just the thing he needed—to get out on the river, clear his head, let nature be his guide. What could be better? The sun-spanked waves, the breeze fresh out of the north, a little exercise—he could always use the exercise, and really, how often did he have the opportunity to get out here on the Hudson, the river of his boyhood, of his connections, of his past, of Lester? All right. A plan. A definite plan.
It took him a while to find the paddles, secreted as they were in the back of the garage behind a six-foot-tall rusting metal cabinet that contained the other boating things: blue flotation cushion, orange life vest, various fishing rods, crab traps, gigs and landing nets. He took the cushion, a spinning rod and a tackle box stocked with Ted Marchant’s lures—why not?—balanced a paddle over one shoulder and crossed the lawn to the dock. If he didn’t bother with the life vest it was because he never bothered with life vests—he knew what he was doing, and even at his age (he would be fifty-six in December, though officially he admitted only to fifty) he was a strong swimmer, had always been, and for a moment he saw himself in his twenties, racing Lester out to the raft on Kitchawank Lake over and over again, one sprint after the other, the loser having to swig a shot of the tequila their girlfriends, leaning over the edge of the raft, held out for them even as they laughed and cheered and kicked up a froth with their pretty, tanned feet.
The canoe—aluminum, indestructible—was surprisingly heavy, but he managed to flip it over, stow his gear and slide it into the water before lowering himself into it and equalizing his weight. In the next moment he was stroking hard against the tug of the current, the first strokes the best, always the best, all the power gone to your shoulders and upper arms in a flush of resurgent joy. It was sensational. Transformative. Dip, rise, dip again. He must have been a hundred feet from shore when he realized he’d forgotten a hat, which would have been nice to have to keep the sun out of his face, and his water bottle too, but that wasn’t a problem because he wasn’t going to stay out that long. Cruise up the river and back again, forty-five minutes, an hour. Max. Though, admittedly, he did feel a bit dehydrated and maybe hungover into the bargain, and the thought flickered in and out of his mind that he might paddle up the river to Garrison, to the bar there, and then drift back down when the tide reversed, but that was too ambitious . . . no, better to keep it simple.
Ahead of him on the right, just past the promontory where the last of the twelve houses sat, was a low trestle that gave onto the marsh on the far side, and he paddled for the entrance, thinking he’d do a little exploring. Meg had taken him back there the last time he’d visited and he remembered it as a magical place, alive with birds of every description, turtles stacked up like dinner plates on the butts of half-submerged trees—and better yet, the sense of enclosure and privacy it held, as if you were miles away from anyone. The point, he realized, as he dug the paddle in and flew across the gray froth of the river, was that Lester was dead and he wasn’t. He was alive, never more alive. The burden of grief was a burden we all carried—Lester! Lester!—but there was this too, this living in the moment, the sunstruck chop, the breeze, the scent of the wildflowers clustered round the mouth of the trestle till it could have been a bower in a Rossetti poem. He flew for it. But then, drawing closer, he saw that the tide was up higher than he’d realized—the space seemed barely adequate for the canoe itself to pass under, no more than three feet of vertical clearance, if that.
Riley, for better or worse—worse, actually—never backed down from a challenge, and once he’d made up his mind to shoot the entrance, he just kept going. At the last moment, he slid down supine on the floor of the canoe and let the inrushing current carry him, which wouldn’t have been a problem if he’d arrived fifteen minutes earlier, when he would have had another two or three inches between him and the concrete belly of the trestle. As it was, he could have glided right through if he’d been in a kayak or riding a surfboard, but unfortunately the twin high points of the canoe, at bow and stern, struck the ceiling with a sound like grinding molars, the current dragging the canoe forward till finally, a dozen feet from the far side, it stuck fast.
He saw his predicament and experienced a moment of regret, but regret wasn’t going to get him out of this, was it? The water was streaming in and soon it would engulf the entire space, right to the ceiling, or at least that had to be a possibility, didn’t it? All right. No need to panic. He raised his arms and pushed hard against the concrete above him and the boat edged forward, scraping in protest. What he hadn’t counted on—but he hadn’t counted on anything, just acted, and acted stupidly, suicidally, really—was the unevenness of the structure, which, as it turned out, had subsided ever so imperceptibly on the far side, not that it was any of his business, but what, exactly, was wrong with the maintenance people on the New York Central Line? Didn’t they inspect these things?
Whether they did or not, the fact remained that he was stuck. On his back. In a space that was like a coffin, with the tide rushing in and no more than a few spare inches of clearance between him and the cold gray lid above him that might or might not have been home to various spiders and biting insects and water snakes too, an example of which had just whipped past him in a display of muscular urgency. What else? The cold. The smell of mud, muck, the decay the river fostered and throve on, and all at once he was remembering the story his father had told him of the drowned woman in Annsville Creek whose corpse had floated to the surface in a twitching scrum of blue-claw crabs. This was serious. He was in trouble. He was going to drown, that was what was going to happen, and he could already see the headlines—Author Drowns in Boating Accident—and the pre-packaged rudiments of his obituary: his books, his wives, the early promise, the bloated middle years, the prizes, the checks, survived by his loving wife. Minutes, that was all he had till the water started pouring in over the gunwales, but in that moment he could picture the newspaper account as clearly as if he were sitting at the big oak table in the kitchen at the farmhouse, the overhead lamp bright and his reading glasses clamped over the bridge of his nose.
He’d often wondered how he’d respond in a crisis, at the same time praying he’d never be obligated to find out (and how was it for Ted Marchant, protecting Nadine with the shield of his own body in the millisecond before the AK rounds split him open?). To this point, the closest he’d come was some thirty years ago in the company of Lester, both of them drunk on cheap scotch and saturated with the triumph of their selves and their wise ways and the hipness that cloaked and absolved them, when the lip of the dune they’d been sitting on gave way beneath them so that they were rudely plunged into the ice bath of San Francisco Bay, but—and here was the charm—wound up none the worse for it. So all right. The water was rising but he wasn’
t panicking—he was too humiliated for panic. He was just—concerned, that was all. And amused. Struck between the eyes with the force of his own stupidity—of all the millions of deaths that come raining down each and every day of our lives, how many involve aging novelists trapped under train trestles in canoes?
We fear death because all we know is life, and once you’re alive the safest bet is to stay that way. He knew that, subscribed to it as a principle, and it provided his motivation now. What if—experimentally—he were to tip the canoe ever so slightly, purposely letting the water in so he could gain another six inches to free himself and take his chances in the water before the air gave out? He could do that, but then his wallet would be soaked and his clothes ruined, yet what were wallets and clothes when he was so close to joining Lester and Ted Marchant in the Land of the Dead? Nothing, nothing at all. Still, he did take the time to wriggle out of his jacket, shirt, jeans and hiking boots and ball the whole business up in one hand as he pushed hard off the ceiling, found the surge of the water and squeezed into it . . . yes, and Jesus, it was freezing!
A lesser writer than Riley might have said something like “Time stood still,” but that wasn’t it at all, not even close: time accelerated. One instant had him in the canoe, passively awaiting his death by drowning, and the next saw him flailing his way through cattails and muck, his shirt, shoes and jacket gone but his jeans—and wallet—still clutched sopping in one hand till he reached the high stony embankment some previous generation had erected here in the backwater to carry the locomotive freight. It wasn’t easy, his feet battered, the stones slippery, a dense growth of briars and poison ivy impeding his way, but finally, too cold and wet and residually shaken even to curse, he was able to pull himself up by stages and emerge on the tracks, and so what if he was in his Joe Boxers and his shoes were missing? He was alive, alive all over again.
He didn’t say a word to anyone, not the old man bobbing in his boat or the two women sitting in lawn chairs at the house across the way. He just limped up the tracks in his bare feet and wet underwear, and here was the dog to greet him, dashing by with its length of chain rapping at the rails, and of course it was inevitable that in the interval yet another train would come hurtling by to rake him with its tailwind, faces pressed to windows, a young girl waving—waving, for god’s sake—and he, nothing else for it, waving back.
After the funeral, once everyone had exhausted their praise for the emotional intensity of his eulogy and the tears had dried and the drinks circulated, he bowed out early, pleading a headache. He and Caroline drove back to the rented house on the river, where the dog, its chain reinforced, twisted round and round the steel post Brian had pounded angrily into the ground just that morning, and they spent all of ten minutes throwing their things together and bringing the suitcases down to the car. Then Riley locked up, gave the dog a wide berth and hurried across the lawn to leave the key under the mat at Meg and Brian’s before they could get back from the reception or wake or whatever you wanted to call it. The tear-fest. The slog. The canoe had unwedged itself on the turn of the tide, but Riley hadn’t been there to recover it. He didn’t leave a note. If Nadine noticed it missing he’d send her a check, no problem, glad to do it, in fact, glad to help out, but no sense in worrying about that now.
Traffic was light and they made good time. Caroline was silent most of the way down, but her face was composed and she looked good—better than good—in the black velvet dress and single strand of pearls she’d worn for the funeral. They checked into the Algonquin, the only hotel where he really felt appreciated, a homey place, a writer’s place, and while Caroline went down to see about theater tickets he settled in a chair by the window, high above the crush and grab of West 44th Street. For a long while he gazed out into the grayness, then he picked up the dull book he’d been working his way through, found where he’d left off and started reading.
YOU DON’T MISS YOUR WATER (’TIL THE WELL RUNS DRY)
A light rain fell at the end of the second year of the drought, a female rain, soft and indecisive, a kind of whisper in the trees that barely settled the dust around the clumps of dead grass. We took it for what it was, and if we were disappointed, if we yearned for a hard soaking rain, a macho rain crashing down in all its drain-rattling potency, we just shrugged and went about our business. What were we going to do, hire a rainmaker? Sacrifice goats? There were vagaries to the weather, seasonal variations spurred by the El Niño Southern Oscillation and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and the Northern Hemisphere Hadley Cell, and certainly the dry years would be followed by the wet in a cycle that had spun out over the centuries, the eons. Daily life was challenging enough—people had to go to the dentist, sit in traffic, pay taxes, cook dinner, work and eat and sleep. It would rain when it rained. No sense worrying over it. Nobody gave it much thought beyond the scaremongers in the newspaper and the talking heads on the television screen, until the third year went by in a succession of cloudless days and no rain came, not male, female or androgynous.
It was that third year that broke our backs. We began to obsess over water, where it came from, where it was going, why there wasn’t enough of it. It got to the point where everything that wasn’t water-related, whether it was the presidential election, the latest bombing or the imminent extinction of the polar bear, receded into irrelevance. The third year was when it got personal.
For our part, my wife, Micki, and I had long since cut back our usage, so that when the restrictions came we were already at the bare minimum, the lawn a relic, the flowerbeds, once so lush, nothing more than brittle yellow sticks, the trees gaunt, the shrubs barely hanging on. If before we’d resented the spendthrifts with their emerald lawns and English ivy climbing up the walls of their houses, it was all the more intense now. When those people were forced to cut usage by thirty percent, they were dropping to the level at which we’d already arrived, and so our thirty percent cut amounted to a double penalty on us, the ones who’d been foolish enough to institute voluntary cuts when the governor first made his appeal. Not only was it insupportable—it was deeply unfair, the sort of thing that made a mockery of the notion of shared sacrifice. I began shaving dry, with only the spray foam to moisten my beard, and Micki stopped using makeup because she couldn’t abide the waste of having to wash it off. When our son came home for spring break (from Princeton, where it rained every other day) Micki taped a hand-lettered notice to the bathroom door: If it’s yellow, let it mellow; if it’s brown, flush it down. Next morning, when he turned on the shower—the very instant—I was there at the door, pounding on the panels, shouting, “Two minutes max!”
He was a good kid, Everett, forthright and equitable, and if he had a failing, here it was revealed: He’d actually turned the shower on. I couldn’t believe it. And neither could Micki. She and I bathed once a week—in the tub, together—then used the bathwater to wash the clothes and bedsheets until finally we scooped up the remainder in plastic buckets and hauled it out to moisten the roots of our citrus trees, which were my pride and joy and the very last thing that would go in the vegetative triage that had seen the lawn sacrificed and then the flowerbeds and finally even the houseplants. At dinner that night (a hurried affair, Everett eager to go out prowling the local watering holes—bars, that is—with his cohort of friends who were likewise home on spring break), I tried to smooth things over and deliver a hydrological lesson at the same time. “Sorry if I overreacted this morning,” I said, “but you’ve got to realize it’s the whole southwest. I mean, there just isn’t any water. At any cost. Anywhere.”
The sun was caught in the kitchen window, hanging there like an afterthought. It was warm, but not uncomfortably so. Not yet anyway—all that still lay ahead.
Everett looked up, his fork suspended in mid-air over a generous portion of green curry shrimp and sticky rice takeout. He shrugged, as if to say he was fine with it. “I should have known better,” he said, dipping his head to address his food.
“I hear they’
re recommissioning the desalination plant,” Micki put in, hopeful, always hopeful. She had her hair up in a do-rag and was wearing a white blouse that could have been whiter.
“Two years minimum,” I said, and I didn’t mean it to sound like a rebuke, though I’m afraid it did. I was wrought up, all the little things of life magnified now, the things you take for granted during the good times. That was how tense the situation had become. “And something like nine million dollars, not that the money has anything to do with it—at this stage people’ll pay anything, double, triple, they don’t care—”
“But you can’t bleed a stone,” my son said, glancing up slyly.
“Or squeeze water out of it either,” I added, and we were all three of us grinning, crisis or no.
So we had a sense of humor about it, at least there was that. Or at least at first anyway. Still, as much as I loved my wife and enjoyed seeing her au naturel, two in a tub was a crowd, and I’m sure she must have felt the same though she never said as much. She was a good sport, Micki, and if my knees were in the way and the water felt faintly greasy, she made the most of it, but for me the weekly bath began to feel like a burden. “Remember the old days?” I’d say, soaping her back or kneading shampoo into the long dark ropes of her hair. “You know, when you could just get up with the alarm and step into the shower before work?” And she would nod wistfully, the water sloshing at her armpits and the tender gaps behind her knees, before heaving herself out of the tub to snatch up her thrice-used towel. I’d give her a moment, my eyes averted, then ease carefully out of the water to drip-dry and wield the bucket. Was this good for our sex life? Or was it too much of the usual, her body shorn of mystery so that when we did finally slip between our graying sheets at night, all I could think of was the tub and the soapy slosh of wasted water? I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe that was part of the problem, but I found myself reaching out for her less and less, I’m afraid.