Run River Read Free

inviolable on that walnut bed from five o’clock until the following morning.

2
    Everett sat on the dock fifteen minutes before Lily came. He heard her long before he saw her, because now at one o’clock the moon was entirely down. Although house lights flickered on the water downriver, the mile and a half of McClellan riverfront showed only the even flash of the Coast Guard channel markers; the light on the dock was gone, burned out he didn’t know when. Remind Liggett , he thought, abruptly alarmed about the dock light. (A dock light first, a torn fence next, maybe the pump goes off and loses its prime: before long the whole place would come crumbling down, would vanish before his eyes, revert to whatever it had been when his great-great-grandfather first came to the Valley.) Through the growth of oak and cottonwood Everett could see a single light on the third floor of the house; the lower stories were blocked out by the levee.
    During those fifteen minutes Everett thought only of the dock light (Liggett should watch these things) and of the hops. Although he still held his father’s .38-caliber revolver in one hand, he did not think about that, any more than he thought about Ryder Channing’s flashlight, still burning, its thin light filtering through three inches of muddy water, caught there in the tangle of roots that showed where the current had undercut the bank. Next week they would be taking the hops down, stripping the vines from the strings. Each August, just before picking, Everett was suffused with a single fear, an apprehension specific in exactly the sense that nightmares are specific: the unshakable conviction that his kiln would explode as the hops dried. He could never sleep during the week the hops were drying. Sometimes he would go downstairs and sit all night in the kitchen, because he could see the kiln from the kitchen window. It was not, this or any year, that the loss of the crop could ruin him: he had fewer acres in hops this summer than any since his father’s death, fifteen years before. There was no longer any money in hops: everyone on the river was getting out of them. “It’s a combination of factors,” he had tried to explain, repeating by rote what the buyers told him, to his sister Sarah and her third husband when they came through in June on their way from Philadelphia to the Islands. (“Not Honolulu, Everett,” Sarah had corrected him. “Maui. Oahu’s been ruined for years.”) “Your shares aren’t paying what they used to pay because we aren’t making what we used to make. For one thing people aren’t drinking as much beer as they used to drink. For another the brewers are making what they call a lighter beer, using fewer hops.”
    The loss of the hops would not matter to Sarah. Nothing about the ranch had ever mattered to Sarah. But Everett had seen little all week but that familiar image: his drying kiln burning, the flames breaking out against a night sky and still (impossibly, as in a nightmare) throwing no light into the dark. It would happen this year for certain , he thought now.
    When he heard Lily he sat perfectly still, aware suddenly of the .38 in his hand, the blood on the sleeve of the Dacron suit Lily had bought for him at Brooks Brothers in San Francisco. He heard her high heels on the wooden steps down the river side of the levee (Jesus Christ , he thought with abstract tenderness, high-heeled shoes to get screwed on the beach) , heard her pushing aside the oak branches, heard her call his name.
    Everett , she called, long before she could have seen him on the dock. She called him, not Channing, answering the question he had never asked: would she hear the shot and come to him or would she come as usual to meet Channing; would she come to him, knowing, or would she come to Channing, come clean and unaware from the shower where she had been maybe twenty minutes before, come intending to take the boat downriver half a mile, meaning to lie there with