Jacob Schrodt
I’m disappointed, borderline annoyed, to find Sailor and the kids waiting beneath the information kiosk. They could’ve been halfway to the falls by now, leaving me to go it alone and, thus, giving me a grievance, a way to deflect and redirect in the coming showdown. Instead, here they are: backs turned, assessing the trail map, the rules, the warnings. A light rain is falling, the final drops from this morning’s downpour. Above the canopy of Appalachian forest, gray clouds govern the afternoon sky.
“Ready to roll?” I say. “I don’t want to be stuck out here in the dark.”
My nine-year-old, Martha, turns with a pinched look on her face, an increasingly familiar reconfiguration of her features that, as of late, has me worried my little girl has been swapped for a teen. With her arms crossed, she says, “And whose fault would that be?”
***
On our drive up the mountain, I was (for the third time today) placed on hold by a customer-support agent who assured me he would do all he could to resolve my problem. My problem in this particular case began hours earlier at the hotel. I was on the toilet, thumbing through the day’s headlines, when I learned of the collapse of a cryptocurrency exchange on which we had invested over twenty thousand dollars. Immediately, in a state of shock, I told Sailor.
“You were on your phone?” she asked.
Her response, it should be noted, came with a degree of merit. My non-emergency use of an electronic device was in violation of what we had agreed would be an “unplugged” weekend away. But her failure to see the relevant issue left me dumbfounded. The investment, after all, had been made using all the inheritance she received months earlier when her mother passed.
“Sailor,” I said. “If this isn’t an emergency, I don’t know what is.”
And so, arriving at the trailhead for our scheduled hike, after spending all morning on the phone making calls, scouring articles about Ponzi schemes, hoping for answers, assurances, I remained in the car, awaiting the support agent’s return—admittedly for quite some time—while my family lingered in the rain, only to give up when my phone’s spotty signal gave out entirely.
***
They amble over from the kiosk. My youngest, Winston, clings to Sailor’s leg, pressing his face to her hip.
“What’s with him?” I ask.
“Bears,” Martha says.
Sailor rolls her eyes—at her daughter or son or me, I can’t say.
I place my hand to Winston’s head, tussle his damp hair to show regard for his fear. In recent weeks, thanks to the emergency response drills forced upon him at school—and perhaps my commitment to meeting his budding curiosity with something close to honesty—a growing list of existential threats have taken hold of his vulnerable mind. Fires, tornadoes, active shooters. Distant thunder is now an omen. The flicker and shriek of a passing ambulance confirm suspicions. Each night before bed, I assure him the doors have been locked and the alarm system armed, all in exchange for his willingness to sleep. Poor Winnie. My beautiful, tenderhearted boy. He is six years old and coming into knowledge of a world filled with monsters.
“If we see any bears,” Sailor says, her voice drained of expression, “the sign says we’re supposed to make a lot of noise and walk away slowly.”
“Good to know,” I say and squat to Winnie’s level. Down here I take a moment. The sooner we reach the falls, I figure, the sooner we return to the car and get off the mountain and back to the hotel and into better cell coverage. Behind me in the parking lot, ours is one of only a half dozen vehicles. I listen for shouts or hollers or any other sounds of distress one might make when crossing paths with a fearsome animal. I hear only the faint, unworried patter of rain. “Hey, buddy,” I finally say. Winnie turns from his mother’s leg, considers me with teary eyes. “I really don’t think we’ll see any bears. All the other people out here right now, hiking up to the falls—they’ve already scared them all away.”
***
We set off. I take the lead, establishing a brisk but reasonable pace. Fallen limbs and sodden leaves litter the rain-wrecked trail. I sidestep puddles and avoid where the sludge is thickest and implore the kids to do the same. I’m either unheard or ignored. Within seconds, Winnie is ankle-deep in brown water, his boots and legs splattered with mud. Martha breaks first, then her brother, both sputtering with nervous laughter. I look to Sailor, hoping for backup, an ally in my frustration. She shrugs, seemingly unbothered, her mouth a neutral line.
We follow the trail toward the white-noise refrain of rushing water and come alongside the Catawba River. The whitecapped surface rips and rolls, stumbling past as if escaping from danger upstream. We pause to let the kids throw stones. The rain has all but stopped, leaving the early-autumn air fragrant but oppressively warm. Sailor removes her jacket and, with an outstretched hand, offers to take mine. She shoves the garments inside her backpack, which is already overstuffed with an array of parenting essentials. Tissues and wipes, crackers and fruit snacks, Band-Aids and bobby pins. With survivalist foresight, she brings the bag any time we go anywhere with the kids.
Instantly I’m aware of my own disutility and offer to carry the load.
“I’m good,” she says and cinches the straps to her shoulders.
So be it, I think. As it stands, the morning’s news has already placed enough weight on my shoulders. That is to say: the investment idea was solely mine. A new digital token affiliated with a large and, thus, (I assumed) reputable crypto exchange. An asset that had (so far) doubled in value and was certain to (at worst) double again or (in all likelihood) triple in the coming months. A sure bet was how I put it to Sailor, contesting her cynicism with overripe bits about financial sovereignty and the need for protection against inflation, concepts I had only recently encountered on YouTube. Admittedly, I was excited. Excited to know something others didn’t. Excited to help my family get beyond the grind of living month to month. Excited to once again be excited, to see light at the end of what had become a dark tunnel for all of us. For months I had been without work and had fallen into a deep state of depression, which often left me stranded on the couch for days. Sailor and the kids, however, carried on with haunting resiliency. Appointments were kept, mouths were fed, bills were paid. At my lowest, I found myself in a panic anytime Sailor even spoke to me, convinced our conversation—almost always about my wellbeing—would end with the presentation of legal documents awaiting my signature. Suffice it to say, the marital bed had grown cold. But then her mother died. In my mind, leveraging the inheritance was the most obvious and efficient way to move us ahead. For Sailor, who endured my proselytizing for weeks, capitulation became the path of least resistance, the quickest way to shut me up.
***
We cross a metal bridge spanning the rapids and hike the ridge high and away from the river’s banks. Winnie, it seems, has already abandoned his initial reservations. He leads the way now, frolicking along in hops and skips, pausing only to examine the most flamboyant of lichen-coated trunks. He brandishes tree-limb swords and assails the low-hanging leaves and sings to himself a song I often sing for him before bed.
“Come and sit by my side if you love me”—Whack!—“Do not hasten to bid me adieu.” Whack!
From a few steps in front of me, Martha asks, “How much longer until we get there?”
I tell her we have, by my estimation, about ten more “how much longer until we get theres” to go, and her head slumps forward.
“Hilarious.”
There was a time, I want to remind her but choose not to, when by simply crossing my eyes or altering my voice I could make her squeal—back when she would join me on the couch and for no reason at all squeeze my arm and say, “Daddy,” as if I’d returned home from a years-long conflict overseas, back when I hung the moon with M-shaped pancakes and piggyback rides and warm, damp washcloths pressed gently to her skinned knees.
“But remember the Red River Valley”—Whack!—“and the one who has loved you so true.” Whack! Whack!
***
I slow my pace until Sailor appears at my side. The humidity has frizzed her hair. Sweat dazzles her cheeks. Somewhere low in the sky, the sun evades the clouds and shines faintly through the leaves and dapples her face with a soft golden light. She avoids my gaze.
“The service is shit up here,” I say. “I’ll have to call again tonight.”
Her eyes are cold and blank but, at the same time, focused, as if locked on something far away, somewhere over the heads of Martha and Winnie and beyond wherever it is the trail is leading. My jaw stiffens. Her frigid response to the whole thing has, in my view, turned unreasonably harsh.
“I couldn’t have known the place was run by criminals,” I say, adding, “so this clearly wasn’t my fault.” Though, in truth, one could easily argue otherwise. The investment, hyped (by me) as safe and sound, was made largely based not on research but on hurried speculation (i.e., a panic buy, a frantic pull of the trigger motivated by a fear of being left behind while the rest of the world made out like bandits). For all I know, the matter is settled. And what’s done is done. And the money is forever gone, zeros and ones trafficked through a digital labyrinth as mystifying to me as the network of roots beneath my feet. Even so, I say, “I’m not worried about it. We’ll get the money back.”
Sailor shakes her head. Finally, she speaks. “I make plenty of money.”
***
“Look!” shouts Winnie. His voice is distant, scattered through the foliage, and only now do I notice he has managed to put thirty yards between himself and the rest of us, well beyond the reach of my immediate protection. He jabs a finger through the air. “Puppy!”
Up ahead, an older man dressed in a dark blue raincoat, his hair disheveled and gray, descends the trail with a waddling gait. He holds a closed umbrella in one hand, a leash in the other, and is pulled along by a skittering dog no larger than a football. Winnie crouches in the middle of the path, signaling his intentions. The old man shows little expression but reveals a clear disinclination to oblige in the way he maneuvers around my son, the extra steps he takes before coming to a reluctant stop.
Upon reaching them, I’m immediately riveted by the old man’s face—more specifically, the numerous tufts of grizzled hair branching and whirling out from his mottled nose and ears, his frazzled brows, like those of a mad scientist, so comically unkempt.
“You’re very kind to stop,” Sailor says. The old man forces a smile but says nothing in return, so we stand around and watch the dog—a brown, scruffy, rodent-faced Pomeranian—scramble in and out of Winnie’s fumbling hands. Inwardly I’m counting down from ten—ten seconds, and I move this show along—when Martha, ignoring the unspoken (though seemingly obvious) agreement to reticence by all, gives voice to the awkward moment.
“Excuse me, mister? My brother was wondering if you’ve seen any bears.”
Something shifts in the old man—a slight uncurling of his posture, the subtle reformation of his frowning lips into a grin. In a stiff, gravelly voice, as if speaking for the first time in years, he says, “I have,” and instantly Winnie is standing. “In fact, little girl, I see one right now.”
Winnie yelps, bolts for Sailor’s leg. Martha grips my arm. The old man barks a laugh, and the Pomeranian yips and yaps and whips about on the pulled-taught leash like an overworked kite. Reflexively I scan our surroundings but find the area devoid of any obvious threats.
“I’m sorry,” the old man says, coughing. “Felt I had to do it.” He points the tip of his umbrella toward the ground. “Believe it or not, that’s his name. My dog’s name is Bear.” He leans in closer to Winnie, who is now half-buried beneath Sailor’s arms. “Little boy, he’s only a teddy.”
“Okay,” I say and feign a laugh, though I feel the old man has more than squandered my charity. I gently squeeze Winnie’s shoulder. “He was teasing, buddy. He hasn’t seen any real bears.”
“No, that’s right,” the old man says, working his hand down the length of the leash, shortening the dog’s lead. “I’ve seen nothing scary like that.” Then he bends and scoops the dog into the crook of his arm and, without a word or gesture goodbye, sets off down the trail, his body teetering with every step.
For a moment, nobody speaks. We can only watch. The four of us remain clustered in place, all seemingly overcome by a hypnotic state of immobility. Finally, with the old man out of earshot, I say, “Really, Martha?”
“What?” Martha snaps. “All I did was ask—”
“You were trying to get your brother worked up.”
“No I wasn’t!”
“She couldn’t have known,” Sailor says.
“She knew,” I say, though stammering because already I’m doubting my accusation. “She knew exactly what she was doing.”
“I did not! That guy was weird, and his dog was gross.”
“Can we please go back? I really want to go back.” With his head cradled to Sailor’s stomach, Winnie’s voice is faint and muffled, his weariness muttered into the very flesh from which he entered the world. And I suppose, in a way, I sympathize with him—I too would be relieved to abandon the hike, to postpone the falls for another time, another trip, when the river will, I suspect, spill over the cliff’s edge in the same manner it does today. But I play a neutral position (“I’m cool either way.”) and the decision falls on Sailor.
***
We haul ourselves up the muddy slope in silence. I nod my hellos to the other hikers—two teenage girls holding hands, a middle-aged man and woman with trekking poles and matching sun hats—walking past in the opposite direction, making their way back to the parking lot, all showing wide, cheerful faces. What, I wonder, is the source of all their smiles? Is it the falls from which they are leaving? Or the places to which they are returning? Or is it something else entirely?
Soon we come to where a wide creek, fed by a small waterfall, has flooded over the trail. At the water’s edge, seated on the smoothed topside of a boulder, a trim but imposing man, perhaps in his late thirties, not much older than myself, dries his bare wet feet with the legs of his socks. His attire—a prodigiously pocketed khaki short, a forest-green hooded jacket, a trucker’s cap branded with a fish-shaped patch—projects a sort of outdoors authority, like one of the dummies on display in the window of a sporting goods store. I’m bending to untie my laces, when Sailor takes Winnie’s hand and the two venture out into the water still wearing their boots.
“Shouldn’t we—”
“You can get them wet,” Sailor says.
I keep my head down, avoiding the onlooking eyes of the man on the rock—embarrassed, I suppose—as if by some unwritten rule of civility, my family owed the guy, this complete stranger, the courtesy of trying things his way.
Martha toes up to the edge of the creek and studies the path of boulders and stones beneath the water.
“It’s you and me,” I say. But she starts across on her own.
I remove my socks and roll my pants halfway up my legs. Boots in hand, I wade in, and the water, much colder than I expected, sinks its teeth into my skin. I bumble forward over the craggy stones and moss-slickened cobbles cluttering the creek bed. My progress is frustratingly slow. Seeing that Sailor, Winnie, and Martha have reached the other side, I try for a quicker pace but slip immediately. My foot rolls inward, my ankle outward, and with my leg now filling the space between two unyielding rocks, I nearly fall in.
“You okay?” Sailor asks. I detect real concern in her voice. But her pressed lips and heavy eyes convey something closer to vindication, the same I-told-you-so look she calls upon whenever one of the kids, after failing to heed her many warnings, gets themselves injured. I regain my footing. The pain in my ankle is alarming—best-case scenario, a minor sprain.
“I’m fine,” I say and hobble across.
***
A sign indicates we have a third of a mile to go. With every other step, a warm packet of pain corridors up from my heel and through my knee before dissolving into my hip. But my boots and socks are dry, and for this, considering the remaining climb and the inevitable descent, I am grateful.
Far below us, the river courses through the canyon. Our footfalls thump a jumbled cadence on the wooden planks of yet another bridge. The sun dips behind the hills, leaving the trail shadowed and the treetops crowned with a fiery orange light. We clamber over toppled trunks and exposed roots and boulders the size of sofas. The sound of surging water grows louder. Finally we turn the corner of a switchback, and the forest splits open, and the gray-emerald sky pours in, and Winnie yells, “We’re here, we’re here!”
Catching our breaths, we gaze skyward. The upper river, some one hundred feet above us, surges beyond a precipice and flows down a blocky outcrop, spilling over tiers of moss-covered rocks and fracturing into an elaborate cascade of white tendrils.
“It’s really pretty,” Martha says. And I’m struck by the smallness of her voice against the roar of the falls, the simplicity of her words for a scene capable of supporting a more pretentious description. I place my hand gently to her back. To my surprise, she leans toward me and rests her head against my side.
“What do you think, Winners?” Sailor asks, caressing the nape of Winnie’s neck.
He answers with a slow nod of approval. “Can we have our snack now?”
***
We pick seats amongst the large boulders near the plunge pool. Sailor pours crackers into cupped hands, and we each take turns drinking from her water bottle. Clouds of spray waft over us, tickling our rosy faces. Martha and Winnie shed their jackets and jump into the water and wander out toward the falls. A moment later, Sailor lets out a laugh.
“What?” I ask, though I’m not sure I want to know.
She looks at me, incredulous, shaking her head. She says, “The dog’s name was Bear?” And I’m relieved to hear her say it, to hear her laughter, to laugh along with her now. I’m relieved not to talk about the money or my unemployment or the futility of crossing streams without boots or anything else from the ever-growing list of my misfortunes. I want to stay here for a while, here with her, and do nothing but agree.
I say, “Out of all the days, right? Like what are the odds?”
Nearby, Martha and Winnie scoop handfuls of pebbles and silt from the pool. They raise their hauls toward the sky as if bestowing offerings to the falls, and the tiny bits of earth spill from their fingers and ooze down their arms, the echoes of their untroubled cries filling the gorge.
“Glenn once told me I was a lucky kid,” Sailor says, jarring me out of the moment. Her laughter is gone. She is seated cross-legged, completely still, staring blankly across the water. “I was lucky because, someday, as he put it, I would get to die.”
My impression of her father, the man she refers to only by his first name, comes from a scarcity of accounts. Glenn was gone long before I came into the picture, and Sailor goes months, sometimes years, without ever mentioning him. But from what I know of him—that he was a deadbeat who forbade Sailor’s mom from having her own career, her own car, her own friends; that he upheld his authority with spoons and belts and, on occasion, the back of his hand; that he squandered his finances on craps and roulette; that he lost his job and marriage and the custody of his children all in the same year and drank his liver beyond function and died alone in a motel bathtub—it comes as no surprise that he would burden his daughter with such a morbid quip.
“‘Do you know why you get to die?’” Sailor says, now mimicking the low, boisterous voice of a bullish man. “‘It’s simple, Skipper. You get to die because you got to be born.’”
Returning to her own voice, she says, “He told me that the amount of possible people allowed by human DNA was something astronomically higher than the number of actual people who have ever lived. His point was that most possiblepeople are never born.” She pauses a moment and takes a drink of water, her eyes still fixed on the falls. “It’s not like it was his original idea or anything. Glenn was a fucking idiot. I think he thought I’d feel motivated by it, but all I ever felt around him was afraid—afraid that I was stuck, that I was bound to him forever.”
She takes another drink and runs her hand over the corner of her lips.
“The odds, the odds,” she mutters, closing the cap on the bottle. “Anyways—apparently, the odds of your existence are like one in four trillion.”
She packs away the bottle and zips closed the bag and calls for Martha and Winnie to retrieve their jackets. I’m watching her, waiting for her to pause, to look at me, to offer me a chance to respond. But the invitation never comes, and I’m not even sure I would know what to say, because I’m not sure I know what’s been said. She stands and loops the straps of the backpack over her shoulders. She’s moving too quickly. I stay put, feeling certain there is something unfinished about the moment, something unexplained, that suddenly there is more at stake than just the money. A cold heaviness fills my stomach. The tingling in my foot looms like a veiled threat. She steps around me, bounds across the stones, and retakes the trail where the kids join her.
Getting to my feet, the pain is immediate, nearly unbearable. I take several steps but have to stop. Something, I can now tell, is broken. I linger for a moment, keeping weight off my injured foot, and watch in disbelief as Sailor and Martha hike away, fading into the trees, their heads never turning to see if I’m following behind. I consider calling out. Wait! Wait just a fucking second! But a chilling debility comes over me, an affliction akin to stage fright. I’m in the middle of the woods, wounded and exposed, and can’t bring myself to make a sound.
Winnie remains. He edges toward the pool’s rim, wet and shivering. He’s a gift, my son. A reassuring light in a dark world. He’s a good, brave boy. “Dad,” he says, scanning the trail before looking back at me, his voice trembling. “I think Mom is leaving.”
#
Jacob Schrodt is a freelance musician and emerging writer. His work appears in The Forge, SWING, Star 82 Review, Jerry Jazz Musician, J Journal, and elsewhere. As a drummer, he has recorded on over a thousand projects ranging from Grammy-winning albums to animated storybooks. He lives in Middle Tennessee with his wife and two children.