Where the River Ends - Charles Martin [13]
“I remember.”
Several sizes of waterproof map cases hung along the checkout counter. Guides use them to keep the maps dry until their minds knew the river better than the map—which occurred after a few seasons on the river. I needed the map less than I needed the bag, but it had been a while so I took both. The map would confirm the GPS readings and vice versa. I pulled the newspaper article from my shirt pocket, slid it into the map case and sealed it shut.
With the car loaded, I turned to Gus. I owed him a bit of an explanation. “How you been?”
“Well, I’d prefer to be standing in an eighteen-foot Hewes flats boat somewhere in the Keys where cell phone reception was nonexistent, but”—he waved his hands across the store—“stores don’t tend themselves.”
“Sell the painting. Buy the boat. Take a vacation.”
He nodded. “Maybe one day.” He shook a pebble out of his Teva. “You sure you don’t want to talk about it?”
“The doctors sent us home.” I pulled a paddle tether off a hook on the wall and began playing with the slipknot. “Whatever you hear in the coming week, it’s probably only half true.”
I tore a sheet of paper off a pad I kept in the car, listed everything I’d just loaded into the Jeep and wrote my credit card number on the bottom. “It’d be better—for me—if you’d wait a week or so to run my card.”
“You need some money?”
“No, it’s just that there will be some people paying attention and I don’t want them to know where I am yet. They’ll know soon enough.”
“You in trouble?”
“Not the kind you’re talking about. Least, not yet.”
He folded the invoice and tucked it in his shirt pocket. “Next month.”
“Thanks, Gus.”
I stepped into the Jeep and buckled my belt. Gus hung on the door and stared down the highway. “I was thinking about your mother the other day.”
“Oh yeah?”
“That was one lovely lady. I ever tell you I asked her to marry me?”
I shook my head and laughed. “No.”
“Said she’d been married and it didn’t take. Besides, she liked me too much. Said once I got to know her, I’d take off.” He was quiet a minute. “I think she done right by you.”
“She tried.”
Gus used the parking lot as a staging area for all the folks that rented from him. After outfitting everyone with life jacket, paddle and kayak, we’d load the kayaks and canoes into the river from the side of the parking lot. A short walk downhill to the beach and put in. It was shallow enough to launch but not so deep that if someone tumped or capsized they couldn’t stand up. He stared down over the water. “She loved this river. Thought it was something special.”
“That, she did.”
He put his hand on my shoulder. “It is, you know.”
“Some would say it’s nothing but a low spot in the earth’s crust—where all the junk drains out.”
He slipped his hands in his pockets. “That’s one way of looking at it.”
“You got another?”
He nodded. “Yup, but you’ll remember soon enough. She can remind you far better than I.” He shook his head. “The river never changes. It may alter its path a bit, but it never changes. It’s us who change. We come back here and we’re different. Not it.”
“When I was a kid, Mom told me that God lived in the river. I used to lay on the bank, real still, waiting for him to surface.”
“And when he did?”
I laughed. “Jump on his back and choke him until he answered a few questions.”
“Careful what you wish for.”
A breeze rattled through the treetops bringing a coolness with it. “Gus, I’m sorry to come to you like this.”
He shook his head and picked at