Abbeville (15 page)

The next morning Karl slid a canoe into the water, held it steady for Cristina and Betty, and then began to paddle. Everywhere new trees shaded the banks, mostly spruce and deciduous varieties. Here grew a stand of conifers, one of them leaning off the bank so that its bottom branches swept the current. There stood some lovely fresh birches, grown safely above the reach of the deer. Where the trees hadn't filled back in, high grass had grown so lush that Cristina said it was hard to believe that this place had ever suffered the slash of steel.

“Will we see varmints, Daddy?” asked Betty.

“None we can't handle,” said Karl.

Up ahead, the banks closed in and the riverbed went into a steeper drop. The water became choppy.

“Hold on,” Karl warned.

They took the bumps easily. Betty whooped. Karl saw Cristina's knuckles go white on the gunwales. He paddled harder, biting into the rushing water to keep them in the center of the chute. In less than a minute the water flattened out again.

“I hope that's the last of that,” Cristina said.

“I hope not,” said Betty.

The second set of rapids came a mile or so downstream. This one rumbled past a high clay bank.

“Karl!” Cristina shouted when they were on the verge.

“Here goes!” he shouted back.

The canoe bounced. Karl kept paddling. Cristina was holding the gunwale with one hand and Betty's life jacket with the other. Karl remembered doing this stretch of the river many times, once on three strapped-together logs. Of all the places he had seen so far, this one was the least changed.

“That wasn't so bad, was it?” he said.

The water quickly flattened out into a great, moving sheet of amber.

“Look,” Karl said, pointing. A fish rose, leaving an expanding ring.

“He was a big one,” Karl said.

“Can we catch him?” said Betty, fairly bouncing in her place.

“There will be plenty of others,” Karl said.

His plan was to get as far as the riffles upriver of the rollway before stopping. The casting would be easy there, where he remembered the river flowing through a wide meadow so there would be no trees or bushes to tangle them up. It was near the place where he had lost a fish and the Indian had speared one. This time he would, by God, get his fish to the net.

Before that, however, he had to maneuver the canoe through the most treacherous water they were going to face. Up ahead the whole riverbed tilted to the left, dumping most of the flow through a narrow, rushing chute on the outside of the bend. At the far end lay an obstacle course of fallen limbs and low, overhanging branches.

As they approached, he pulled his paddle into the boat, letting the flat, silent current carry them. Then he reached down and freed the other paddle from under Betty's foot.

“Here,” he said, holding it out to Cristina handle first. “Make short, scooping strokes, all on the left side of the canoe. That will help pull us toward the inside shore and away from the snag.”

As he demonstrated, the canoe swung into the shallow water. Gravel scraped the bottom.

“What if I drop the paddle?” Cristina asked.

“It will float downriver and eventually get hung up in a snag,” he said. “We'll be able to retrieve it.”

“What will happen to us without the paddle?” she said.

“Just don't try to stand up,” he said. “No matter what.”

He could feel the current pulling them into its crease. White water was visible ahead. If the river had been slightly higher, it might have been possible to stay way over to the right, but the water there was so shallow that the gravel would have torn up the bottom of the canoe.

“Here we go,” Karl said.

They were pulled steadily to the left even with both adults paddling at full strength against the drift. The canoe wobbled as Betty shifted her weight up front.

“Hold on, Sugarplum!” Karl shouted over the rush. “Paddle, Cristina! Paddle hard!”

All they needed to do was to keep four or five feet off the bank, which would allow them to avoid the snags, sweepers, and deadfall.

“That's it! That's it!” he shouted. “We've got it knocked!”

Then suddenly Cristina stopped paddling and turned around.

“We're going to crash!” she cried.

“Not if we paddle!” Karl shouted. But it was too late.

Cristina turned forward again in time to duck, but Betty froze. Karl watched helplessly as a thick, crooked limb snatched her by the shirt and pulled her from the canoe.

“Daddy!” she cried as she went over the side.

Cristina looked back. She seemed to be screaming, but Karl could not hear her over the sound of the water. He leaned out and dug into the current with all his strength until finally he heard the grind of gravel against the bottom.

Only then did he permit himself to look at Betty, tiny and helpless against the headlong force of the river. He leaped out of the beached canoe and splashed madly in her direction, his strides shortening as the water got deeper and deeper.

Betty was holding herself just above the water, clinging to branches that jutted out just upstream from a deadly snag. The current helped by pushing her into the jutting limbs, though in the turbulence they trembled as if at any moment they might give way. She watched him moving upriver parallel to her. When he got above her field of vision, she tried to turn.

“I'm here, Betty!” he shouted. “Don't look for me! I'm here!”

The current pushed at him so hard that he had to put himself sideways so as to give it only his body's edge. He slid one foot, a baby step, then the other. The buoyant water made him light on the river bottom. The forces were in such delicate balance that so much as a doubt might have been enough to carry him away.

At some point he realized that he was not going to be able to reach her by wading. He stopped, looked down to where Cristina sat in the canoe, her face in her hands. He jumped.

In an instant he had Betty. The current pulled his legs downriver, curling him under her, until with a terrible crack the tree limb broke and they were both swept helplessly downriver.

His head went underwater, but he managed to kick away from the snag and hold her up above the maelstrom. Soon he was able to lie back, Betty on his belly, squirming but secure in his grip. His head came up and he gulped air. Then it went under again and he surrendered
until the force of the water began to ease and he could let his feet down and find the bottom.

He stood, lifting her in his arms and carrying her to the middle of the river, where the gravel rose. He knew Cristina would never want to come to this place again. But he did not feel close to death. He felt that he was close to the truth of his life.

T
HE WORST PART OF OUR REVERSAL OF
fortune was not that I had to adapt to it myself. My father had worked in the radio business, which had never given him much in the way of money, even when he served as the replacement man on the early-morning farm report. More than once an old gentleman in Abbeville told him that he brought the market to the town just as Grampa once had with his telegraph. I imagine that people wondered why such an obviously important man as my father drove such a rattletrap car.

So I knew I could make do with little. It was the effect on Julie and Rob that tore me apart. Even if I were to recover all our wealth and more tomorrow, I did not believe it would compensate for having to tell Rob that he would need to change schools.

“You can't do this to me,” he said.

“New Trier is a fine institution,” I said. “One of the best in the whole country. Everybody says so.”

“I'll be a nobody there,” he said, “just like I was before I transferred to Country Day.”

“That's just not true, son,” I said, though his crushing feeling of inadequacy had been the reason Julie and I had decided when he was in the fifth grade to transfer him out of public school.

“I know those kids,” he said. “They'll make me into a big joke.”

“You might be surprised at how much you've grown,” I said. “You are a different young man now than when you left public school.”

“What am I good at?” he said. “Name one thing.”

“You are a good person,” I said. “Start there.”

Rob looked at me as if I had confirmed the worst.

“The world needs all different kinds of people,” I said. “Not everyone has to be a star athlete or all-A student.”

“But everybody needs to be somebody,” he said, “which I am not, Dad. Let's face it.”

He saw that I recognized the reference and almost smiled.

“Nobody knows more about movies than you do,” I said. “I've heard you recite whole scenes from
It's a Wonderful Life
for your grandmother.”

We had encouraged him many times to do something with this gift. But he was terrified when we took him to the Piven acting school. He did not even last the first session. He was a strong swimmer who had qualified as a lifeguard. But he grew so self-conscious about his body that he would not try out for the swim team, let alone think about pursuing a job at the beach, where some pretty young girl might have taught him about himself the way Julie had taught me.

Then there were the music lessons, the terrible struggle to get him to dance class, where we had foolishly hoped he might learn to loosen up a little. At some point I began to think he was in agony over homosexual feelings. When I finally dared to mention this to Julie, she laughed.

“You haven't seen the magazines he keeps under his mattress,” she said.

Lately, though, it was more than dirty magazines she was finding there.

“He's smoking marijuana,” she said.

“Can you imagine anyone doing that?” I said.

“That was different,” she said. “It was never going to take over our lives. We had each other. But we know people who got hurt by it. They were the ones who were feeding an emptiness, the way Rob is.”

“I'll talk to him,” I said.

Though it was awkward, I did.

“Look,” he said, “for a few minutes it makes me feel good, that's all. You've got to know what I'm talking about. I mean, the '60s and everything. It's no big deal.”

“Your mother is concerned,” I said.

“I'll be a lot more careful,” he said.

My fear was that the transfer in the fall would push him toward something stronger.

“If New Trier doesn't work out,” I said, “we'll move.”

The fact was that we might have to anyway, to monetize some of the equity in our home and step way down on the mortgage.

“Is that supposed to make me feel better?” he said. “That I'm so lame that we may have to get out of town?”

“That you're so loved that we will do anything for you,” I said.

“Anything but keep me in Country Day,” he said.

“Anything we're able to do,” I said. “I'm sorry, but I seem to have dragged us all down. I feel terrible about it.”

“Join the club,” he said.

I kept going in to Bishop & Dodge every day. I don't know why. Conference rooms that before the bubble burst had been booked weeks in advance now stood empty. A residue of disillusionment had settled over the board tables like dust. You could have written your
name with your finger. But you didn't have to. The disaster already had everyone's name on it.

Some of my partners didn't even come in to the office anymore, preferring to count their losses in swizzle sticks lined up along a bar. Others hustled in early each morning as if they were still in a hurry and stayed late into the night because they simply did not know how not to.

The only part of the enterprise that remained busy was the law department, where one day I was summoned. There men and women waited on the reception couch and chairs. Others stood reading grim business magazines or staring blankly at the Bloomberg as it blinked away the tears. Oddest of all, people had begun to wear suits and ties and white shirts again. Business casual was history. It was as if, with all the starch taken out of a man's soul, he needed to have cladding in the cloth.

Solly Goldman's secretary appeared in the waiting area and nodded to me. I followed her to where the lawyer sat behind an enormous stack of documents.

“Pretty imposing,” I said.

“If we get five cents on the dollar for any of the shit you guys bought they should hang my portrait in the foyer,” he said. “Meanwhile lawsuits are flying around like bullets.”

“Shooting the wounded,” I said.

He stood and pointed me to the only two chairs that were unencumbered by paper.

“I don't know how to start, George,” Goldman said. “We've been neighbors how long?”

“At the office a decade,” I said. “In Wilmette even longer.”

“It may seem funny coming from an attorney,” he said, “but I basically believe in staying out of other people's business.”

“Am I in trouble, Solly?” I said. “Is one of those bullets heading my way?”

Goldman shifted in his chair.

“This is strictly personal,” he said. “I talked it over with Ginny for a long time last night because I wasn't sure. It's about Rob.”

He breathed out, and I breathed in.

“He's been having issues,” I said.

“Don't tell him this,” he said, “but Erin told me certain things that he said to her. I don't know whether to believe them. Kids can exaggerate so.”

“We already know about the marijuana,” I said. “I won't incriminate myself, but I have my reasons not to be all that bothered.”

“Erin told me you were going to pull him from the school,” he said.

“I don't know what else to do,” I said. “I don't have any cushion. The firm doesn't need me the way it does you, so I don't get any draw.”

Goldman was looking at me but not seeing anything. I was sorry I had gotten into money troubles. Everybody had those.