Episode 280 · The River

The red line went to the top of the glass at one in the morning and stayed there.

Zora held the thermometer to the lamp and turned it, as if the number might be hiding on the other side. Fifty was as high as it went. Nobody had ever needed more on this river.

— There’s a long one in the hut, she said. For the summer gauges. It goes to a hundred.

— Then you won’t need it, Varren said.

She looked at him. She went up the steps to get it anyway.

He stayed at the railing. The steam came off the water in a solid wall now, gray in the lamp and black beyond it, and the far bank was gone, and the bridge was gone after the first arch. The river had a smell he did not know, flat and mineral, like a kettle boiled dry. Under the pontoon the current had changed its voice. It had been talking all day. Now it was muttering.

The ducks went at a quarter past one.

They went all at once, without a signal he could hear, hundreds of them off the water together, and the noise of their wings was so loud and so close that he put his arm over his head. Then they were gone upriver, into the dark, and the open water around the pontoon was empty and steaming and very fast.

Zora came back down with the long thermometer and the lamp, and stopped on the last step, and looked at where the ducks had been.

— They know something, Varren said.

She did not smile.

He took the lamp from her and held it while she let the long thermometer down. Her bare hands on the cord. He watched the steam close around them and thought how much he would give for her to be the kind of woman who left a job half done.

— Sixty-two, she said.

He took her by the arm.

— Up.

— One more. At two. I need the curve, Varren, I need to know if it’s—

— Up, he said. You can read it from the top. You can read it from the bridge. You can read it from the moon. Not from here.

She let him take her up. Halfway she turned and looked back at the measuring board, white with its black marks, standing in the water at the foot of its pillar the way it had stood every morning since before either of them came, and he saw that she was frightened for it. Not for herself. For the board.

At the top of the steps his chair was still standing where he had put it in the morning. Zora sat down in it without being asked, with the notebook in her lap, and wrote sixty-two, and the time.

Lights were coming on along both banks.

He heard windows first. Then a door, and a man’s voice asking what that smell was, and a woman’s voice telling him to come away from there. Somewhere on the far side a dog barked and kept barking. On the bridge, in the steam, a flashlight came out over the water and swept along it and came back and stopped, pointing at the pontoon. He knew how it was held. Halloran held a flashlight the way he held a tray, level, from the elbow.

The old voice had not come back since the chamber. He wished it would. He would have liked, for once, somebody who knew.

He did not know what was under the river, not really. He had been down there more times than he could count, to the room with the pillar and the stone table, and the first time he had come up with a pale blade in a cloth. Two nights ago he had watched the thing in that room closed by a man who was trying not to close it. He had felt it pull out through the rock like a tide going out. Afterward the room had gone cold. He had felt it on the stairs going up, the warmth gone out of the stone like out of a stove left overnight.

Cold down there. And up here, this.

At two Zora stood up from the chair and went to the top step with the long thermometer, and he went with her and held her coat in his fist from behind, the way you hold a child at a railing.

The cord went down into the steam. She counted. She drew it up.

— Eighty-one.

She said it in her reading voice. Then she sat down on the top step, quite suddenly, as if her knees had been told before she had.

He crouched beside her. The steam rolled up the steps toward them and he put himself on the river side of her without thinking about it.

— It’s going to boil, Zora said.

— I know.

— It can’t. A whole river. It can’t, there isn’t— She stopped. You’d need— I don’t even know what you’d need.

He did not know either. He put his arm round her.

She was shaking now, all of her, the way she did afterward. The work was done. There was nothing left to read that she did not already know. He held her the way he had held her gloves, one hand between his palms, until her fingers curled against his, and he felt the one life in her, small and asleep, under his hand, and thought, very clearly, Not this one. Whatever it costs. Not this one.

He had thought it about other people, in other lives. He had always meant it.

Below them, at the foot of the measuring board, the water began to move strangely. Small bubbles first, a string of them, rising along the pillar where the board was bolted on. Then more, coming up all over the black surface in the lamplight, each one a little pop, like rain falling upward.

A wave of heat came up the steps. It hit his back and his neck and the hand he had put up between it and her face, and he felt the skin on the back of that hand go tight, and kept it there.

Zora was looking past his arm at the water. Her face was wet with steam and nothing had touched it.

— Varren, she said. Look.

He looked.

The bubbles were not at the board any more. They were everywhere, from the pontoon out into the dark and under the bridge where Halloran’s light had stopped moving, and a sound was coming up off the water over the windows and the dog and the shouting on the far bank, a sound he had heard all his life on every stove in every kitchen and never once from anything this size.

Then the river began to boil.