River Claim

The fresh drying paper was in a cedar chest under the window, stacked in clean bundles tied with string. Hesk told her which bundle, and how many sheets, and then he sat on his bench and watched her do it, because getting up again would have opened the cut.

She did it by the battery lantern. She took down each half-dry gray sheet from the rack and laid it on the table, and then she opened the books that were drying on the far shelf, the ones with pages still wavy from some old leak, and slid out the damp sheets from between the leaves and slid in the fresh ones. It was slow work. It was the kind of work she was good at. She did one book, and then another, and the room got darker around the lantern until the windows were black and she could see her own reflection in them, small and bent over, in gloves that were much too big.

"You've done this before," Hesk said.

"Every week. Our basement floods." She turned a page. "Not like here. A pipe. But the boxes are on the floor because there's no money for shelves."

"Your city has no money for shelves."

"My city has money for a crane at night."

He was quiet for a moment. When she glanced up, he was looking at her with his head tipped back against the wall and an expression she couldn't read.

"You're angry," he said.

"I've been angry since September." She closed the book and tied the cord. "I just didn't have anything to be angry with."

She went to put it back on the shelf. Her stomach made a long, loud sound in the quiet hall, and she stopped with the book in her hands.

"When did you eat?" Hesk said.

She thought about it. "There was a granola bar at the checkpoint."

He made a noise in his throat and pointed at a cupboard beside the stove. "Bread in the tin. Fish in the jar. Don't eat the cheese, it's Tull's, she'll know."

---

The bread was dark and heavy, and the fish was smoked and salty and came in a glass jar with a hinged lid. She found two tin plates and a knife and made a kind of sandwich on each plate, and brought one over to him, and sat down on the floor with her back against the table leg and ate hers with her fingers. It was the best thing she had eaten in a long time. She said so.

"It's Tull's fish," he said. "Everybody says that."

"Does she know you give it away?"

"She'll know." He ate half his in two bites and set the plate on his good knee. "She knows everything that happens in this hall. She'll come back and look at the floor and say, you had a guest, and the guest sat there, and you gave her my fish."

Lenora laughed. It came out louder than she meant, and she put her hand over her mouth.

He watched her. In the lantern light his eyes looked more gold than amber, and the shadows under his tusks were very dark. He had a way of looking at things for longer than people usually did, as though he was reading them.

She lowered her hand.

There was a smell in the room. She had noticed it at the river, under the blood and the mud, and put it away. She had noticed it again in the hall in the afternoon, when she was kneeling in front of him with her hands on his leg, and put it away again. It was warm and a little like cedar and a little like something she couldn't name. It wasn't the hall. It was him. And it was stronger now, in the dark, with the windows shut, or else she was paying more attention to it.

She was also aware, in a way she didn't like, that she had been leaning toward him for the last several minutes without deciding to.

"Can I ask you something," she said.

He went still. "Yes."

"There's a smell." Her face was getting hot. She kept going anyway. "Since the river. I thought it was the blood, or the adrenaline, or I don't know. It's not. It's you. And I keep..." She stopped. "I keep noticing it."

He looked down at his plate for a while.

"Among my people," he said slowly, "it has a name. We call it the pull. When two people might be..." He stopped, and started again in a different place. "Sometimes, early, the body knows something before you do. You smell it. Both of you. It doesn't mean anything has to happen. It just means something could."

"Is that what this is?"

"I think so. For me, it is." He set the plate down on the bench beside him. "I noticed at the river. When you put your hand on my leg."

"You didn't say anything."

"You were busy keeping me from bleeding to death."

Lenora sat on the floor with her sandwich in her lap and tried to decide what she felt about this. Mostly she felt warm, all over, from her face down. Under that she felt something like relief, as if she had been carrying a box that turned out to have a label on it.

"Some of my people treat it like a law," Hesk said. "Like once you feel it, it's decided." He shook his head, once. "I don't. I treat it like weather. It's there. You notice it. You still decide whether to go out in it." He looked at her. "You don't have to do anything about it. Guest right doesn't change. I just didn't want you thinking you were going strange."

"I thought I was going strange."

"You're not."

She ate the rest of the sandwich. It gave her hands something to do. When she was finished, she got up and took his plate and hers to the basin behind the curtain and rinsed them, and came back, and stood by the table looking at the row of blue-corded books on the shelf.

"I want to start the petitions," she said.

"Now?"

"I can't sleep yet."

He nodded at the shelf. "The newest ones are on the right."

---

The petitions were different from the flood book. They were bundles of loose sheets, not bound, each one tied in its own blue cord, each with a label on a slip of paper tucked under the knot. Most of the labels were in the Bend's language. Some had English underneath, in the square hand she was beginning to recognize as Tull's.

She took the newest bundle to the table and untied it.

The first sheet was a complaint about a net crew from upriver setting lines in the Second Landing's water without asking. The second was about who would pay for a skiff that had sunk at the lock while it waited for a city tow to go through. The third was about the channel markers. It was dated June. Markers moved in the night, third time. Request to the checkpoint that the city survey crew be told to stop. At the bottom was a row of names and marks, thirty or forty of them, some signed in the Bend's script and some just thumbprints in ink.

Clipped to the back of it, with a rusted paper clip, was a sheet of city letterhead.

Lenora knew the letterhead. She knew the font. She had typed hundreds of letters on it herself. It said that the city acknowledged receipt of the Bend's correspondence regarding navigation markers, and that survey activity on the river was conducted under the authority of the Office of the Superintendent of Records and Waterways, and that the city considered the matter closed.

It was signed D. Mraz, Superintendent.

She read the signature twice. Then she got her satchel and took out the photocopy she had brought from the archive, the last page of the city's flood book, with the line for April and the stamp under it. INCOMPLETE BUT ADEQUATE. Initialed beside the stamp, small and neat: D.M.

She laid the two sheets side by side on the table under the lantern.

"That's the same man," Hesk said. He had leaned forward on the bench to see.

"That's my boss's boss." She heard her own voice come out flat. "He's on vacation. He's in Florida until the end of the month. He sent everybody a picture of a pelican."

"He signed the letter saying the markers were none of our business."

"And he signed the book saying there was no flood." She sat down. "And the survey crew works for his office."

Neither of them said anything for a while. Outside, the river moved against the posts. A long way off a dog barked, and another one answered it.

She put her finger on the date at the bottom of the city letter. July. Two months after the barge. One month after the petition.

"I need copies of all of it," she said. "Every petition about the markers. Every one with a city letter clipped to it."

"That's most of the bundle."

"Then I'll copy the bundle." She picked up her pencil. "I've got until sundown tomorrow."

Hesk watched her for a moment. Then he reached up, without standing, and turned the battery lantern on the table a little toward her, so the light fell on the page instead of across it.

She copied until her hand cramped, and shook it out, and copied more. The hall got colder. At some point Hesk got the blankets out of the chest by hooking it with his good foot and dragging it across the floor. She laughed. He put one around her shoulders without asking, and then sat back down again and put the other one over his own legs. She didn't stop writing. She pulled the blanket tighter.

She was on the eleventh petition when he said, very quietly, "Lenora."

She looked up.

He wasn't looking at her. He was looking at the black window over the river, and his whole body had changed. He was sitting up straight on the bench with his head turned, listening, the way the heron had stood on the bank that morning.

"What?"

He held up one hand. She stopped breathing to listen.

At first there was nothing. The river. The posts. Then, under that, faint and getting louder, she heard an engine. A small one, an outboard, coming up the river slow, with the low uneven sound of a motor turned down as far as it would go.

Hesk reached over and switched off the lantern.

The dark came down all at once. Lenora sat with the pencil in her hand and the blanket around her shoulders and couldn't see anything at all. Then her eyes adjusted, and the windows turned from black to dark gray, and she could see the river through them, and out on the river, a light.

It was a work lamp, white and harsh, on the bow of a small boat. It moved slowly upriver, sweeping across the water, and then it stopped. It was out in the middle of the river, in front of the Bend, where the red-and-white marker post stood up from the water. She could see the marker in the edge of the lamplight, crooked, exactly where Hesk had put it back that morning.

Someone in the boat leaned out and put their hands on it.

Hesk stood up.

He did it all at once, the way he had stood up at the river, and she heard the breath go out of him and saw him put one hand on the wall. Then he took it off the wall and reached down beside the bench and came up with the broken boat hook, with its yellow pole.

"Hesk. Your leg."

"Stay here."

"You can barely walk."

"Stay here." He was already at the door. "You're a guest. You're on claim. Whatever's in that boat is from your side of the river. If they see you here, it's worse for you, not better."

He put his shoulder to the swollen door and it scraped open, and cold air came in, and then he was gone, and she heard him on the ramp outside, uneven, one heavy step and then a lighter one and then a heavy one.

Lenora sat there for maybe five seconds.

Then she got up, with the blanket still around her shoulders, and went to the door in her socks.

---

The ramp was wet and cold under her feet. She went down it far enough to see over the railing, and stopped, holding on to the rail with both hands.

Down below, Hesk was at the end of the walkway, where it ran out over the water nearest the marker. He was standing with the boat hook held across his body in both hands. He hadn't said anything. He didn't have to. The work lamp had swung around and found him, and he stood in the middle of it, enormous and very still, with his bandaged leg and his broken tusk and the yellow pole, and his shadow went out behind him huge across the planks.

The boat was maybe thirty feet out. There were three people in it. Two of them were in orange city rain gear, with reflective strips that flashed in the lamplight. One of them had both hands on the marker post, and had frozen there, looking at Hesk.

The third person was sitting in the stern beside the outboard. He was older, heavyset, in a dark windbreaker and a ball cap. He had a clipboard on his knee.

Lenora knew him.

She knew him from the picture of the pelican. She knew him from the Christmas party, from the annual report, from the framed photograph in the lobby of the records building where he stood beside the mayor cutting a ribbon. She knew the neat, small D.M. on the stamp in her satchel.

Dennis Mraz was supposed to be in Florida.

He was sitting in a city boat in the middle of the river, at midnight, with a clipboard, watching his crew pull up a channel marker.

The man at the marker said something she couldn't hear. Mraz didn't answer him. He was looking past Hesk, past the end of the walkway, up the ramp.

The work lamp swung after his eyes. It went up the planks, up the railing, and stopped on her.

She stood in it. Socks and a borrowed blanket and ink-stained hands holding on to the rail. She couldn't see anything past the light. She could only hear the outboard, idling, and the water.

Then, across thirty feet of black river, very clearly, in the voice she had heard give the welcome speech at every staff meeting for six years, Dennis Mraz said her name.

"Ambler."