Chapter 13
IRIS
We left at four minutes after six. I'd been up since four-thirty, which I hadn't told him, sitting in the dark kitchen with coffee I didn't want, listening to my own house.
Doyle came out at five with the pack already loaded from the night before and checked it again anyway on the kitchen floor, item by item, out loud, which took nine minutes and was not about the pack.
He called the station at five-fifty and got a machine, called again at six and got a man, and stood there with the phone against his ear and his cap in his other hand like he was talking to a bank.
"Open," he said, hanging up. "He says the wind comes up after two. Says if we're on it early we're fine."
"Then we'll be early."
Three hours and ten minutes up — the interstate for two of them, then the two-lane, then the road that follows the creek and can't make up its mind which side to be on. The color started about an hour and a half in.
I hadn't been up there since I was nine years old and I did not recognize one single thing.
Not a curve, not a barn, not a store. Forty-five years is forty-five years, and everything I had was a child's version anyway, which is mostly the smell of a car and the back of my mother's head.
Then we came around the shoulder of the hill where the parking area is and I saw the gap in the trees where the gorge opens, and it went through me hard enough that I put a hand on the dash.
"You all right?" Doyle said.
"Park."
Nine cars in the lot at nine-twenty. Forty-four degrees and windy down there, which meant worse up on the ridge.
Doyle got the pack out, took the wool hat out of the top pocket and handed it over without a word, and I put it on without a word, and neither of us said anything about how I'd told him it was October and I wouldn't need one.
The bridge is a quarter mile in on a graded path, and you hear it before you see it.
It's a hundred and some years old, wood deck and cable, and it moves in the wind and makes a low creak that comes up the trail to meet you.
There's a sign at the head of it with the weight limit and a number: six persons at a time.
I stopped there.
"You want a minute?" Doyle said.
"I want to go across."
The deck is maybe four feet wide. The gorge under it runs a hundred and thirty feet down to water that's brown that time of year, moving fast over rock.
And the whole span sways. Not a lot, not dangerously — a live sway, every step going out ahead of you along the deck and coming back.
My mother held my hand across this bridge in 1981 and told me not to look down and I looked down.
Doyle went behind me instead of beside me.
I hadn't asked him to. He just fell in back there and stayed a good six feet off.
Every so often the deck would take his weight and I'd feel it in my knees.
That was the whole conversation we had for a hundred and ninety feet.
Halfway out I stopped. There was nobody else on it.
The wind came up the gorge from the south with the smell of wet rock in it, and the deck moved under me the way a boat does at anchor.
A hundred and thirty feet down, the water went over rock too far away to hear properly.
I stood there a while, and Doyle stood where he was and let me.
On the far side I had to hold on to the rail post until my legs came back and agreed to be legs.
"Okay," I said.
"Okay?"
"Okay."
The trail past the bridge climbs. The young man on the phone was right that it isn't the distance.
Two pitches, one right after the bridge and one about two-thirds along, and the second one is switchbacked and rooty and mean.
I set the pace and took the little steps I take, and Doyle stayed behind me with thirty pounds on his back.
On the second pitch his breathing changed and I did not slow down.
He'd have known why, and I'd told him I wouldn't.
At the bench I stopped and turned around. "Sit."
"I'm fine."
"Sit down, Doyle. I'm sitting."
So we sat, and he got out the water, and his right leg went straight out in front of him with the boot heel dug in, which is what he does when the knee's yelling and he doesn't want to say so.
"Talking or yelling," I said.
"Talking loud."
"We're forty minutes out."
"Then I'll be quiet for forty minutes," he said, and got up, and went on ahead of me four steps before he remembered and dropped back.
The color was at the top of it, and that part was luck, the only luck in the whole day — first week of October in a dry year, and when we came out of the trees at the overlook the entire far wall of that gorge was going.
Not one color, which is the thing I'd forgotten.
There's a yellow that's nearly white, and about four reds, and the rust one, and then the black-green of the hemlocks stitched down through all of it to the water.
There's a rock shelf at the overlook with a rail along part of it, and we had it to ourselves the first twenty minutes.
One party had turned back at the bench, a man and his grown daughter, and we'd passed them coming down, both of them cheerful about it.
Doyle set the pack down and came and stood next to me at the rail, and he didn't say anything.
Not look at that. Not the elevation, not the mileage, not a story about Denny, not a joke, not are you warm enough, not we should have brought the good camera.
Not one word. He stood next to me in the best part with his hands on the rail and let it be the best part, and I don't know for how long — long enough that my ears got cold under the hat, so ten minutes, maybe more.
"She was thirty-four," I said.
"Your mother?"
"Thirty-four when she brought me here. I've been fifty-four for eight months and I keep doing the math wrong on her.
" I had both hands on the rail. "She had a Ford Pinto.
Blue. There was a hole in the floor on the passenger side you could see the road through, and she put a piece of plywood over it and told me it was a footrest."
Doyle laughed one breath. "A footrest."
"She had an answer for everything and not one of them was true."
"She worked at the shirt factory in town till it closed, and then she cleaned at the school.
And one Saturday in October she got me up at five in the morning, put me in that Pinto, and drove two and a half hours to walk me across a bridge.
I didn't work out till I was about forty that she'd have had to plan it for a month.
Gas money. Trading a shift. She packed us bologna sandwiches and we ate them right here on this rock, and she let me have both halves of hers because I was a bottomless kid. "
"You never told me that."
"I've never told anybody that."
"Iris—"
"Thirty years, Doyle." There wasn't any heat left in it.
"I've had that in me for thirty years and never once got to the end of telling it, and I've figured out why, and it isn't a mean reason.
It takes eleven minutes and there's always something coming.
There's always a load-out or a truck or a joke or the crew or supper. It needs somebody standing still."
He didn't say anything for a second. Then: "I'm standing still."
"I know. That's why you're getting it."
So I told him the rest — the windbreaker two sizes too big that had been my cousin's, the way she smoked and would turn her head to blow it away from me and never once worked out that turning her head didn't do a thing.
And what she said at this rail, which I've never been sure I remember right, but which in my head has always been, Now you've seen something, Iris.
Now you can't say you haven't. She died at sixty-one.
Doyle knew her four years and she liked him fine.
A couple came up the trail behind us around eleven, in their thirties, matching jackets, out of breath, and the woman had a real camera on a strap. I watched them about three seconds longer than was polite.
"Would you take a picture of us?" I said.
She said of course. Doyle started to do his thing where he waves people off, and I put a hand on his arm and he quit.
I gave her my phone and we stood at the rail with the gorge behind us, and he put his arm around me.
Through his jacket I could feel his hand shaking, which it hadn't done on the bridge or on the second pitch.
"Okay!" she said. "On three?—"
"Get the bridge in," I said.
She looked at her screen. "It's — the bridge is way down there, ma'am, it'll be tiny?—"
"Get the bridge in. It's the whole reason."
So she backed up two steps and crouched and got it: two people at a rail in bad hats, a gorge on fire behind them, and down in the corner of the frame, small as a splinter, a hundred and ninety feet of cable and wood.
We ate the sandwiches on the rock — ham, because that's what was in the refrigerator, and he'd cut them in half on the diagonal, which he has never once done in his life, and which I did not mention.
Getting back down took two hours and ten minutes, because that second pitch is worse going down and I made him take it sideways, and he did it without one word of argument, hanging on to saplings like an old man, which he is going to be.
At the head of the bridge he stopped and stood a second with his thumbs under the pack straps, looking back up the way we'd come.
"Iris."
"What."
"That's one."
"That's one," I said.
We'd talked about driving home. It's three hours; we'd have been in our own bed by nine.
What we did instead was take a room at a place on the two-lane eleven miles down, nine units, gravel lot, forty-eight dollars, run by a woman with a parakeet in the office.
Doyle came out with the key on a diamond of plastic and said, "It's got two beds, that's all she had," and I said that's fine, and it was, because we've been sharing one for thirty-three years and we're not shy.
There was a radiator under the window that ticked when it cycled.
He fell asleep first, the way he has every night since 1993, flat on his back with one arm off the side, and I lay there listening to that heater tick and didn't sleep for a good while, and I was not unhappy.
When I put my hand out in the dark he was already reaching. We didn't talk about the list once.
The morning after we got home, Sunday, I got the pen off the counter — the blue one out of my purse, the one I take on the route — and Doyle got his black one out of his shirt.
We took the frame off the nail, laid it on the kitchen table, and got the back off.
He ruled the second column with a straightedge, right-hand side, top to bottom, and headed it in his hand: with I.
Then item eight. I put my pen on the paper and he put his hand around mine, and we made one checkmark in that column together — one stroke down and one up, both of us pushing.
The two inks went over each other in the same line, so you can't tell where his starts.
It's the only one on the page like that. It's a little crooked.