“I thought he was a Wall Street banker.”

“Banker? Sort of. Right now, Jamie’s making a lot of money for a lot of people in nontraditional investments.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Something to do with mortgages. Sub-prime mortgages. Don’t ask me, but folks at that party all want to invest with him. So now he’s thinking of branching out.”

“Into the movies.”

“People say he has the magic touch.”

I recoiled at the image.

“In any event,” he said, “Jamie was more or less showing off the product.”

That got him several seconds of dead air while I tried to figure out why he was telling me this.

Chuck Larson sighed. “You still looking for Paul McFetridge?”

“I am.”

“Try Stanley, Idaho, Georgie,” he said. “Two Rivers Whitewater Rafting Company.”

I wondered if I had passed some sort of test. You saw Jamie and you behaved yourself. Here’s your reward, good boy.

1

.

SALMON RIVER, IDAHO, June 2008

IT WAS A SMALL PLANE, A TAIL-DRAGGER WITH NO WHEEL IN THE front. It held the pilot and would have held five passengers if one of the seats was not filled with gear. We landed on a dirt runway that required a very sharp left bank in which the pilot seemed to exult. I had the feeling the whole flight up from Boise to this pinprick on the map known as Indian Creek had been worth it to the pilot just so he could make that bank.

The first three passengers who disembarked were greeted with a smile and a welcoming handshake. I got an “Oh, shit.”

It did not come right away. Initially I got a smile, then the smile faded, replaced by a look of confusion, then recognition. Then, “Oh, shit.”

We shook hands nonetheless. I wondered if he would hug me, as I think we had done when we last saw each other. But Paul McFetridge was raised an Episcopalian. In my experience they don’t like to touch, preferring to sing boldly instead.

“Paul.”

“Jesus.”

“Not quite.”

“The hell you doing here?” He was still holding on to my hand.

“Came to go rafting.”

“So is this, like, a coincidence?”

Paul McFetridge’s hair was very long and pulled back into a ponytail. Curly and springy hair does not fit well in a ponytail, and his was no exception. He could have been carrying a pillow on the back of his head. His features had grown lean and hawkish over the years and he had developed something of a stoop, so that his neck seemed to project forward and his shoulders curled slightly inward. His was no longer the look of a college tennis player with a hundred-twenty-mile-per-hour serve.

“I called your mother.”

“She knew where I was?”

“She said you were a”—I did my best to imitate her voice—“ ‘river … guide.’ ”

He let go then. He searched my eyes.

“I got divorced recently,” I said. “I’m on my own. So when she said that, I thought, ‘What the hell, I’d like to go whitewater rafting,’ and I figured if I was going to do it, especially by myself, I’d try to do it where you were. At least I’d know somebody.”

I had practiced all of this. I thought it went off well. But McFetridge kept waiting for more. And then, finally, he asked, “Where you living?”

I told him I was a lawyer on Cape Cod, and he thought about that before clapping me on the back and telling me we’d better get my gear down to the river and meet the others. This was not his company. But he was the senior guide on this trip. The one who knew the river best. It was up to him to get things going, keep folks organized. Don’t worry, though. We’d have plenty of chances to talk. Catch up. Remember old times.

WE WERE SUPPOSED TO have put in twenty-five miles upstream and done a series of class IV rapids, but the snowfall the previous winter had been heavy and the roads that the outfitters needed to get in their equipment were still blocked and so we put in at Indian Creek and had a short and leisurely run on the first day. There were twenty of us paid participants and about seven crew members, two of whom floated down ahead of us each day to set up camp.

We were given a lecture before we started. The river, we were told, was exceptionally high and the water flowing exceptionally fast. There were few rocks sticking out and even fewer drops. The danger was getting caught in a hole, a depression formed by subsurface boulders, where the raft would tip on its side and stall, perhaps dumping paddlers out. If we got dumped, we were told, it was necessary to get out of the hole any way possible. Do not allow the swirling water to circulate you. If you are pulled down, form a ball and try to drop all the way to the bottom, then spring back up again at an angle. The guides will get you a rope as quickly as they can.

I got into a raft with five other folks and McFetridge sitting in the stern with a pair of oars. We paddled when he told us to paddle, stopped when he told us to stop. There was little to it on that first day, little danger, little required output by the paddlers, so little that I had the feeling he did not really need us to propel the boat as much as he wanted us to think we were.

McFetridge talked to everyone in the raft as we went forward, me no more than anyone else. I was confident he knew what he was doing. As a student and an athlete he had always known what he was doing, and he had never acted as though anything required particular effort or concern. Things would work out for McFetridge. They would work out for his friends … unless he and his friends wanted the same thing, in which case his friends’ interest was of no consequence. I pictured myself going over. I pictured myself going into one of those holes. I pictured McFetridge continuing to guide the boat right on down the river.

WE CAMPED FOR the night at a place called Marble Ledge along the left side of the river. I was given my own tent, for which I was grateful. First day on the voyage and most people clung to whomever they came with, which left me on my own. I climbed a very steep hillside that was covered with thousands and thousands of yellow flowers known as arrowleaf balsamroot. I got about halfway up the slope, sat down on a rock that gave me a good view of the river, and wondered what I was doing there.

2

.

ONCE, SHORTLY AFTER MARION AND I GOT MARRIED, WE WENT to a party at Mitch White’s house. It was the only time I was ever there. He lived in the town of Dennis and it was a perfectly nice home, the kind you might see in suburban Boston, with a two-car garage and a manicured lawn. It was not the type of house that could be found on the Cape prior to the latter part of the twentieth century, but Mitch and his wife did not know that.

Mrs. White’s name was Stephanie, a sharp-featured woman who wore pointy eyeglasses and was possibly hiding an impressive figure under a consistently dowdy wardrobe. Like her husband, she was mid-forties and seemed slightly bewildered by the rush of time. She knew things were supposed to be done a certain way and that was the way she did them. Utensils were wrapped in napkins and set out next to a stack of small plates at the end of the dining room table, which was covered with a tablecloth that sported images of lobsters and clams. The real things were not among the array of hors d’oeuvres that were carefully arranged on the table, but the tablecloth images paid homage to their place of origin.