Nothing Gold Can Stay

  She kicks off her sandals and enters, the water so much colder than she imagined, and quickly deeper, up to her kneecaps, the current surging under the smooth surface. She shivers. On the far shore a granite cliff casts this section of river into shadow. She glances back to where her parents and brother sit on the blanket. It is warm there, the sun full upon them. She thinks about going back but is almost halfway now.

  She takes a step and the water rises higher on her knees. Four more steps, she tells herself. Just four more and I’ll turn back. She takes another step and the bottom is no longer there and she is being shoved downstream and she does not panic because she has passed the Red Cross courses. The water shallows and her face breaks the surface and she breathes deep. She tries to turn her body so she won’t hit her head on a rock and for the first time she’s afraid and she’s suddenly back underwater and hears the rush of water against her ears. She tries to hold her breath but her knee smashes against a boulder and she gasps in pain and water pours into her mouth. Then for a few moments the water pools and slows. She rises coughing up water, gasping air, her feet dragging the bottom like an anchor trying to snag waterlogged wood or rock jut and as the current quickens again she sees her family running along the shore and she knows they are shouting her name though she cannot hear them and as the current turns her she hears the falls and knows there is nothing that will keep her from it as the current quickens and quickens and another rock smashes against her knee but she hardly feels it as she snatches another breath and she feels the river fall and she falls with it as water whitens around her and she falls deep into the whiteness and as she rises her head scrapes against a rock ceiling and the water holds her there and she tells herself don’t breathe but the need rises inside her beginning in the upper stomach then up through her chest and throat and as that need reaches her mouth her mouth and nose open and the lungs explode in pain and then the pain is gone as bright colors shatter around her like glass shards, and she remembers her sixth-grade science class, the gurgle of the aquarium at the back of the room, the smell of chalk dust that morning the teacher held a prism out the window so it might fill with color, and she has a final, beautiful thought—that she is now inside that prism and knows something even the teacher does not know, that the prism’s colors are voices, voices that swirl around her head like a crown, and at that moment her arms and legs she did not even know were flailing cease and she becomes part of the river.

  The search and rescue squad and the sheriff arrived at the falls late that afternoon. Two of the squad members were brothers, one in his early twenties, the other thirty. They had a carpentry business, building patios and decks for lawyers and doctors from Greenville and Columbia who owned second homes in the mountains. The third man, the diver, was in his early forties and taught biology at the county high school. The sheriff looked at his watch and figured they had two hours at most before the gorge darkened. Even so the diver did not hurry to put on his wet suit and air tanks. He smoked a cigarette and between puffs talked to the sheriff about the high school’s baseball team. They had worked together before and knew death punched no time clock.

  When the diver was ready, a length of nylon rope was clasped tight under his arms. The older, stronger brother held the other end. The diver waded into the river, the rope trailing behind him like a leash. He dipped his mask in the water, put it on, and leaned forward. The three men onshore watched as the black fins propelled the diver into the hydraulic’s ceaseless blizzard of whitewater. The men on the bank sat on rocks and waited. With his free hand, the older brother pointed upstream to a bend where he’d caught a five-pound trout last fall. The sheriff asked what he’d used for bait but didn’t hear the answer because the mask bobbed up in the headwater’s foam.

  The brother tightened the slack and pulled but nothing gave until the others grabbed hold as well. They pulled the diver into the shallows and helped him onto shore. Between watery coughs he told them he’d found her in the undercut behind the hydraulic. She had been upright, her head and back and legs pressed against a rock slab. Only her hair moved, its long strands streaming upward. As the diver had drifted closer, he saw that her eyes were open. Their faces were inches apart when he slipped an arm around her waist. Then the hydraulic ripped free the mask and mouthpiece, grabbed the dive light, spiraling it toward the darkness.

  The diver told the men kneeling beside him that the girl’s blue eyes had life in them. He could feel her heart beating against his chest and hear her whispering. Before or after your mask was torn off, the sheriff asked. The diver did not know, but swore that he’d never enter the river again.

  The younger brother scoffed, while the older spoke of narcosis though the pool was no more than twenty feet deep. But the sheriff did not dismiss what the diver said. He too had seen strange and inexplicable things involving the dead but had never mentioned them to others and did not choose to now. We’ll find another way, he said, but that river has to lower some before I allow anyone else in there.

  The diver had trouble sleeping afterward. Every night when he closed his eyes, he saw the girl’s wide blue eyes, the flowing golden hair. His wife slept beside him, her body curled into his chest. They had no children and now he was glad for that. He had seen a picture of the parents in the local paper. They had been on the shore, within thirty feet of the undercut that held their daughter, the expressions on their faces beyond grief.

  On the third night, the diver fell into a deeper sleep and the girl came with him. They were in the undercut again but now the river was tepid and he could breathe. As he embraced her, she whispered that this world was better than the one above and she should never have been afraid. He emerged in his wife’s embrace. It’s just a bad dream, she kept saying until he quit gasping. His wife closed her eyes and was quickly asleep, but he could not so went into the kitchen and graded lab tests until dawn.

  The girl remained in the river. Volunteers cast grappling hooks from the banks and worked them like lures through the pool or stood in shallows or on rocks and jabbed with long metal poles. Some of the old-timers suggested dynamite but the girl’s parents would not hear of it. The sheriff said what they needed was a week without rain.

  The diver slept little the next few nights. In class he placed the students in small groups and had them discuss assigned chapters among themselves. He knew they talked about the prom instead of pupae and chrysalides, but he didn’t care. On the third afternoon, he skipped the teacher’s meeting and sat alone in his classroom. The school, emptied of students, was quiet, the only sound the gurgle of the aquarium. He would never speak to anyone, not even his wife, about what happened in the classroom’s stillness, but that evening he told the sheriff he’d dive for the girl again.

  Days passed. Rain came often, long rains that made every fold of ridge land a tributary and merged earth and water into a deep orange-yellow rush. Banks disappeared as the river reached out and dragged them under. But that was only surface. In the undercut all remained quiet and still, the girl’s transformation unrushed, gentle. Crayfish and minnows unknitted flesh from bone, attentive to loosed threads.

  Then the rains stopped and the river ran clear again. Boulders vanished for weeks reappeared. Sandbars and stick jams regathered in new configurations. The water warmed and caddis flies broke through the river’s skin to make their brief flights before falling back into their element.

  The sheriff called the diver and told him the river was low enough to try again. The next day they walked the half mile down the path to the falls. There were five of them this time, the sheriff, his deputy, the two brothers, and the diver. The sheriff insisted on two ropes, making sure they stayed taut. The water was clearer than last time and offered less resistance. The diver entered the abeyance as though parting a curtain, the river suddenly muted.

  She was less of what she had been, the blue rubbed from her eyes, flesh freed from the chandelier of bone. He touched what once had been a hand. The river whispered to him that it would not be
long now.

  When he returned to shore, he told them her body was gone, not even a scrap of clothing or bone. He told them the last hard rain must have swept her downstream. The younger brother said the diver should go back and search the left and right sides of the falls. He argued the body could still be there. The deputy suggested they lower an underwater camera into the pool.

  The sheriff shook his head and said to let her be. The men walked up the trail, back toward their vehicles, their lives. The midday sun leaned close and dazzling. Dogwoods bloomed small white stars. The diver knew in the coming days the petals would find their way into the river, drifting onto sandbars and gilding the backs of pools, and the diver knew some would drift through the rapids and over the falls into the hydraulic. They would furl amid the last bones and like the last bones they would finally slip free.

  Cherokee

  With a green rabbit’s foot clipped on his belt loop, a silver four-leaf clover dangling from his neck, Danny has brought all the good luck he could find. As they drive past a billboard advertising Harrah’s Casino, his free hand caresses the green fur, maybe hoping luck really can rub off on you. Lisa remembers a story about a magic lamp that, once rubbed, grants three wishes. Danny would settle for just one—make the one hundred and fifty-seven dollars in her handbag turn into a thousand.

  “By what time Monday morning?”

  “Ten,” Danny answers.

  “Does the bank come and get it or do we take it to them?”

  Danny shifts his eyes from the road and looks at her.

  “We could win,” he says. “People do all the time. That woman from Franklin won twenty thousand on a quarter slot machine.”

  Lisa watches the end of the odometer slip from nine to zero. 56240 miles. That’s nine thousand more than when they’d bought the truck. Yet the Ranger looks every bit as clean as when they’d driven it off the lot eleven months ago. Every Sunday, Danny vacuums the interior with a Dustbuster, then washes the exterior. The tires glisten with Armor All. We really can’t afford it, she’d told Danny that day at the Ford dealership, but she hadn’t stopped the smooth-talking salesman from taking out his calculator and showing them that with the right financing they could. Lisa remembers how proud Danny had been when the last document was signed and the salesman handed him the key.

  Even before Danny’s hours got cut at the concrete plant, Lisa knew all it would take was a bit of bad luck—sickness or accident or layoff—to lose the truck. Lisa almost expected it, because she’d seen it happen to their neighbors at the apartment complex, to her friends, and to her own parents. She had kept those fears to herself though. Danny was a good husband. He’d been rowdy in high school, but once he and Lisa married he quit running with his buddies, quit smoking too. On Saturday nights when they went to The Firefly to dance and hear the band, Danny stopped at two beers. She’s got you living straight, some of his buddies said when he turned down a drink. Unlike a lot of her girlfriends’ husbands, Danny didn’t spend money on expensive rifles or fishing rods, fancy boots or belts. He took a lunch to work.

  Lisa drove the truck nearly as often as Danny did, and it was nice to finally have a vehicle whose radio and heater worked, that didn’t risk stalling at every stop sign. In their three years of marriage, they’d both worked hard, Danny pouring concrete and Lisa clerking at the Bi-Lo, but had little to show for it. The apartment they rented had old cigarette burns on the carpet and cracks in the ceiling, windows with views of more brick walls. Except for Saturday nights, she and Danny rarely went out. It was good to have something to show for the hard work. Danny acted proud as a child with a new toy, but that boyishness was what had attracted Lisa to him in high school. Even when Danny got into trouble, it was for something like skipping class or setting a frog loose in the cafeteria. Boyish also in that he always believed that the next time, unlike the last, he’d somehow get away with it.

  As they near Exit 81, more billboards appear on the roadside. On them, winners cup hands to gather spills of silver coins. Others spread bills in front of their faces like church fans and even the empty-handed laugh and smile. Danny releases the rabbit foot and clicks on the turn signal. He follows a line of cars onto the off-ramp and turns right like the others. More billboards appear, advertising everything from Santa Land to a gold and ruby mine.

  “I should have listened to you,” Danny says. “We wouldn’t be in this mess if I had.”

  “We needed something that wouldn’t break down every week,” Lisa answers. “If I’d been late another time, I’d likely be out of a job.”

  “But it didn’t need to be this new a truck. That was my wanting, not yours.”

  “I’ve enjoyed this truck as much as you have.”

  Lisa settles her hand on his upper arm, feels the bicep. Danny had been on the skinny side until he’d started spreading concrete, but now his arms, like his shoulders and chest, have thickened. When they dance on Saturday nights, those arms guide her so effortlessly that the weight of everything the week has laid on her, complaining customers, a crabby shift boss, is swept away.

  “I’ve learned from this, I swear I have,” Danny says, “even if we do win.”

  “Maybe we will,” Lisa says, wanting also to believe it could happen. She touches the rabbit’s foot. “It’s not for lack of trying.”

  They pass the wooden sign that says Cherokee Indian Reservation and the traffic quickly becomes more stop than go. Tourists fill the sidewalks, most carrying shopping bags, some lapping ice-cream cones or sipping soft drinks. A child in a coonskin cap tugs at his mother’s skirt. An old couple peer at a restaurant menu. There is something for everyone, one of the billboards claims, and Lisa sees that is so.

  “Damn,” Danny says. “It wasn’t near this big when I came last time.”

  Ahead, the hotel and casino loom, blocking out even the mountains. It’s the largest building Lisa has ever seen, and the brick exterior makes it appear impenetrable as a fortress. How could anyone hope to win against such a place, she wonders, yet as they enter the underground parking garage the first deck is completely full. They find a space on the second level and make their way across the shadowy deck to where bold red letters announce ENTRANCE TO CASINO like a final warning.

  In the lobby a guard stands by the escalator. He checks their IDs and nods them past. The escalator descends into a loud brightness, the smell of cigarettes. Acres of gambling machines spread out left and right. Men and women of every sort sit before them on stools, coaxing colors and sounds from the machines as speakers pulse a backbeat of old rock songs. Danny nods toward a bar. He gets a beer but Lisa says she’ll wait. Danny takes her hand and leads her into the nonsmoking section.

  “We ain’t got a player’s card,” Danny tells her, “so we have to use the slots.”

  “How many times did you come here?” Lisa asks.

  “Twice,” Danny says.

  “And you lost both times?”

  “Yeah,” Danny says as he sits down between two other players, “but third time’s the charm, right?”

  There is hope but also enough doubt in his voice to make it a real question.

  “We can bet one dollar or a hundred,” he says. “You okay with ten?”

  Lisa nods and takes the roll of bills from her pocketbook, gives him a ten.

  “Watch how I do this,” Danny says. “That way you can try too.”

  The machine sucks the ten-dollar bill out of sight. A bright-red cherry dominates the screen, beneath it the row of tumblers. Numbers that show winning combinations and their payoff are in the upper corner. The tumblers turn and resettle. Danny touches a button and only two tumblers spin the next time.

  “Nothing,” Danny mutters, and slides the next ten into the machine, then another, and another.

  Because of the racket around her, Lisa can’t concentrate enough to understand how the game is played, what should be saved or not saved, what combinations other than three in a row win. When she hands Danny the next ten, he asks if she
’d like to try.

  “No,” she says. “I wouldn’t know what I was doing.”

  “Like I do,” Danny snorts, and turns back to the machine.

  Lisa takes two more tens from the roll to have them ready, then looks around. A gray-bearded man is seated to their left, using only his right hand because his other shirtsleeve is empty. Vietnam Vet is printed on his camo ball cap. Opposite him is a guy wearing a black Metallica T-shirt. A long leather wallet protrudes from his pocket, its chain attached to a belt loop. He looks no older than Lisa. She waits for Danny to free another bill from her hand. When he doesn’t, Lisa looks back at the machine.

  The credit line has a 40 on it.

  “So we’re ahead?” she asks.

  As quickly as Danny nods, the 40 becomes a 30 and she can’t help but think just saying they were ahead had jinxed the spin.

  Danny pushes the button again. Two cherries appear and he saves them. The middle tumblers spin and a third cherry drops in between the other two. The machine whoops and chimes as 530 appears on the credit line.

  “You spun them right that time, son,” the one-armed vet says.

  The Metallica fan looks at Danny’s screen as well but says nothing.

  “Halfway there,” Danny says, and the slots roll again.

  The young guy loses and curses. He glares at the machine, then reaches for his billfold. Lisa glances at the vet’s credit line. It’s only two dollars but he seems more amused than angry when it slips to one. He wears a gold watch and Lisa is surprised to see over an hour has passed. There are no clocks in the casino, Lisa suddenly notices, windows either. A person could be down here and not know if it was morning or afternoon or night or even what day it was.

  Danny’s credit line goes down to 420 but after a half hour it’s back up to 640. He stands and places his hands on his hips, stretches backward.