ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JÉANPAUL FERRO is a writer in Providence, Rhode Island. His work has appeared in Hawaii Review, Cortland Review, Barrelhouse Magazine, Portland Monthly, Pedestal Magazine, Southern Cross Review, and Review Americana. He is a four-time Pushcart Prize nominee and two-time "Best of the Net" nominee. His work has been featured on WBAR Radio in NYC. Plowman Publishing printed his book of short fiction, All the Good Promises, in 1994.
The Dead River
By Jéanpaul Ferro
Jack Linton had been floating down the Dead River for three long months now. Early in the morning, the sun would turn the crown of each wave a different hue of golden-brown, turning a flat black as each swell slouched down and became a rapid at Elephant Rock and Mine Field.
The river was ancient compared to a man, and each morning it seemed to get older; but at thirty-eight, Jack felt this enormous power come up within himself, something that he had never felt while he was working his nine-to-five job over the course of the past twenty years. Up in Maine, Jack could become the man he’d always wanted to be—fit and muscular with no one telling him what to do or how to do it.
Northern Maine was a beautiful sphere atop New England. White pines grew down in the valleys and up along the shoulders of the mountains and hills. Blue lakes dotted the landscape with horse-like moose and deer around every green corner.
It had been exactly three months—three months since he had left New London and Pfizer for the calm waters of Jackman, Maine. Three months of floating down the Dead River, the Kennebec, and the Penobscot. Three months of having to drive the old school bus through sylvan tracts of spruce to get down to the dam. Three months of trying to forget her when he could feel her in every second.
Being in Maine made Jack look at things differently now. Being a guide on a river instead of on some soft blue computer screen gave him hope again.
He first noticed it after working at the rafting companies for a couple of weeks. With the constant sun turning his hair the same color as a wheat field back where he grew up in a southern county in the black hills, he noticed that not only did he see himself differently, but everyone else saw him for someone he didn’t know he was.
“You’re a frontiersman!” one woman from Albany told him when they hit the big rapid on the Kennebec and the raft didn’t turn over.
“A real Renaissance man!” a woman from Georgia told him when he cooked steak for forty people one night.
“I wish my husband were like you,” a very sad twenty-something girl from Mississippi said as Jack hung up on a line all the wetsuits for the entire company one night after dinner.
Each time Jack soaked it in, parsed it, moved it around his veins and intestines, knowing he really wasn’t any different than any other man. It felt good having other people, especially women, especially women he would have been interested in, thinking he was someone totally different than the person he really was. This was the feeling that motivated every man. A man wanted power and money and prestige and fame for the same reasons. Wanted to be thought of as someone different and perfect and not as he was in the secret recesses of his mind at night.
The girl had arrived in late September with her husband and another handsome couple who’d bowed out of the rafting trip after the first day on the Dead River. All summer long he had been watching wives like this one.
“I want to sit back by you!” she shouted to him as she climbed into his raft on the last day of the excursion.
Jack nervously looked back at her husband. He had these humored eyes and this bulging fat face and swollen red neck that didn’t seem to match the subtle beauty of his wife. He was laughing with the man from Syracuse as they stood on the big rock beside the raft. The man from Syracuse had come here alone and the husband had adopted him for the weekend.
“He doesn’t care,” Jack heard the woman say half under her breath.
He looked at her. She stood in her blue and yellow wetsuit. She was blond and thin and flat-chested. There was something irresistible about her existence. He could see the pain she wore in her eyes. She was about twenty-six or twenty-seven, with an overconfident gaze, gray eyes, and a mouth always poised and ready to say something original. And she was a firstborn, like he was. He saw it the minute she walked up to him in the lodge and introduced herself. “Helene Thalhofer,” she said as she slipped her hand into his. “My friends all call me Kat.” When she said this he felt as through maybe they had known each other in another life—maybe somewhere on the Delta off in Tanis or on the northern Sinai coast in ancient Egypt.
He looked at her now as she sat in his raft. Her eyes kept surprising him. They were the same color as the Kennebec: blue like when the river flattens out around the corner and catches the last light of day on its surface. Her eyes unnerved him. All the eyes of the other women hadn’t moved him until now.
He helped her husband and the man from Syracuse down into the raft, then the six happy college kids who were up from Northeastern.
It was dark and gray out that morning. It was cold when Jack put on his wetsuit in the tent. There was a mist in the air and some of the leaves on the sugar maple and the yellow birch planted around the camp had already started to turn into their autumn shades of orange and yellow.
Jack took a deep breath as he untied the raft from shore. He pushed off away from the rocks. He straightened out, to maneuver with his paddle. He saw the man from Syracuse paddling the wrong way. “No! No!” Jack shouted over to him. “You’re not Dennis Conner. Do what I told you to do!”
The man looked back. “Sorry. Sorry.”
Quickly, the raft moved out onto the rapids.
Jack shouted the commands he had taught his novice crew back at the lodge.
They moved through the granite canyon and out into the open blue river.
Some days the wind would come up from the north and Jack could smell the bitter decay of the paper mill from up in the hills. But that morning the mist and the clouds blunted the smell from coming down.
The blond woman kept looking back at him instead of paddling. The rapids grew larger and more powerful and everyone was smiling nervously like at a great play or on a roller coaster.
Jack shouted more commands as the water broke and crashed over them. He turned straight on, right for the big twelve-foot rapid they called Magic. He knew he had to hit it straight on or risk turning the raft over.
“Go! Go!” he shouted.
Published October 2007