whinny, a long bloodcurdling shriek. Jones came in and looked up at him, puckering her snout, then she sat and dragged herself toward him by her front paws, wiping her rump on the floor. She probably had worms. He went out and strode across the clearing, then pushed through the blackberry bushes and ferns, following the route of his hose. Jones came after him. The house stood to his right. Below, a donkey was in the corral along with the Goods' chestnut mare. Lafleur paused, looking. Mrs. Good and her daughter stood watching the animals. The mare trotted around the corral along the inside of the fence, her flanks darkened with sweat. The donkey, a big one, was an obscure color, not black exactly and not quite gray. It followed the mare. The two came around Lafleur's side of the corral. It was too much for Jones, who charged, barking wildly. The mare shied. The donkey danced sideways. Mrs. Good wheeled to shout at the dog, but Lafleur, moving to the corral, beat her to it: “Jones!”
He stopped next to Mrs. Good and she looked at him out of the corners of her painted eyes. She was chewing on a matchstick. The donkey followed the mare across the corral, then the two began to circle again. The mare had a gash on her flank. The animals passed under the shade of the cottonwoods at the far side of the corral. Coming out of the shade and into the low slanting sunlight, the donkey changed from black to a steam color with russet in it. The donkey was the color of dark tea, deep and changeable according to the play of light. “A donkey?” Lafleur said.
Mrs. Good took her matchstick out of her mouth and stroked the side of her nose with its flattened end. “We're making a mule.”
“A mule,” Lafleur said. He looked from her to the animals, then back again, wondering—Why? “Mind if I use your phone?” he said. He disliked troubling the Goods for their telephone. He disliked the trouble Jones gave them. Actually, he rather disliked the Goods themselves, wife, daughter, and husband, a rug salesman who never seemed to be home. He especially disliked the way Mrs. Good seemed to regard him—as the landlord. It made him feel like a target.
“Feel free,” she said. She was a solid woman who looked as though she had been inflated inside her pants and white cowboy shirt. She had red hair and plucked black eyebrows. The daughter, who stood on the other side of Mrs. Good, leaned forward and peered at Lafleur.
“Is Al up there?” he said.
Mrs. Good grinned at him, holding the matchstick between two front teeth. “Hell, no.”
The mare and donkey came around again and the donkey pushed the mare against the fence and bit at her head. The fence creaked and Lafleur instinctively stepped back. The mare snorted and spun, bent her head down. The donkey slipped behind and tried to mount her, but the mare broke free and pranced along the fence again. Jones leaned against Lafleur's leg. Puffs of clouds had begun to drift in. The earth in the corral was churned up and black, and the leaves on the cottonwoods and bushes and the rocks down near the river gleamed in the light. Over the river, visible through a clear space beyond the corral, an evening mist had begun to gather. A narrow, cocoon-like cloud floated above the river. Near the bank a sand spit extended into the water and a blue heron stood at the far edge, waiting for fish.
Nicole!
This was another reason he disliked troubling the Goods. The shed, so long as he stuck to the beaten path between it and his pickup, protected him from this view. Nicole had been playing on that spit with Andy. Tricia had been there, watching the two younger ones. They had a bucket and were dipping it into the water, catching minnows. Lafleur and Penny had been down at the back of the toolshed, barbecuing chicken. They'd come out from Portland for a weekend picnic, as they often used to do. The children had been schooled against the river, which in its heart had tremendous force. He remembered checking on the young ones there. Nicole was squatting with the bucket, her brown limbs dark against a yellow bathing suit. He saw her there now and felt a wrenching, and tried to force out the image. He gazed at the heron, then turned when Mrs. Good spoke: “That mare's a twitch.”
He glanced past Mrs. Good at her daughter, who was watching the animals intently. The girl was about seventeen and built not unlike her mother, but more tightly, closer to the bud, a distillation of the mother. He caught himself running his eyes down the girl's body. “That's a big donkey,” he said.
“He's a mean damn Abyssinian jack,” Mrs. Good said.
Lafleur smiled. This procedure didn't seem right. It seemed there should be a cage or a smaller corral, at least, or straps, or some such rigging to keep things under control. He wondered if Mrs. Good had any idea what she was doing. “Kind of rough,” he said.
“We had him shipped up from Redding, California,” Mrs. Good said. She leaned toward him and thrust out her chin and tongued her matchstick to the corner of her mouth. “Got here yesterday. If this takes, the mule's going to be worth a bundle, you bet.”
As she spoke, the donkey went for the mare's neck, but the mare came back, rearing and pawing at the donkey's head. Lafleur and the two women stared. The donkey went up with the mare and bounced a hoof off her head, but the mare went under him, biting at his chest, and nearly toppled him. He came down on her sideways. His leg muscles bulged and he bit at her neck and tried to work around to her hindquarters. Lafleur felt his leg muscles tightening. The mare jumped out and whinnied. The hair on Lafleur's neck prickled. The mare had cuts on her head now. The donkey spun and kicked her in the flank. The thud of it resounded and echoed back from the house. The donkey kicked her again and she bounced against the fence. The fence creaked and sagged. Jones nuzzled Lafleur's leg and he pushed her away. He found himself breathing heavily. The mare and donkey began to circle more quickly, blowing and kicking up chunks of mud. Their hooves thocked. Lafleur felt their warmth as they passed. Their sweat smelled pungent.
He looked down at the heron. It had its toes in the water, its neck outstretched, and its bill tilted downward, as is the way of herons in waiting. For as long as he could remember that sand spit had been there, though it changed its shape annually, and its elevation, and sometimes its position because of the flux of the changing banks and big river that surrounded it. Herons had fished from the spit, too, for as long as he could remember. He had played on the spit as a boy, and had fished from it, just as his children played on it when the family came down. He remembered what he wished not to remember, what came at him whenever it wanted to, and came with the force of a dream: himself bending over chicken pieces on the grill, and hearing cries, the voices of the girls, Tricia near them and Nicole's remote-sounding voice, and hearing Penny next to him suddenly gasping, then screaming—“Nicole!”—and himself straightening up, turning, knowing instantly that something was terribly wrong, and looking and seeing her out in the water, out in the current, and himself not moving, freezing, disbelieving, trying to get himself to move, then moving at last, finding himself right on Penny's heels. He remembered Penny's skirt and hair, askew and wildly fluttering, and her shrieking as she ran—“The tree! The tree!”—pointing at a dead cedar that had fallen into the far side of the river at a bend Nicole was headed for.
He'd seen Nicole's face coming up and going down, and her hands thrashing. She knew how to swim, but not in that fast, roiling water, not strongly enough for that. Her yellow bathing suit bobbed. At the spit he looked down into Tricia and Andy's stunned, wide eyes, and into Penny's face, sharp and agonized, then back down the river at Nicole. She bobbed past the tree. Penny waded into the water, and he broke into a run along the bank, crashing through the shrubs and stumbling on the rocks. He stopped to strip off his shirt, then ran again, then stopped and pulled off his trousers and shoes, and went in, swimming, though he was not a strong swimmer. He hoped to swim strongly enough to ride the current and catch her, but moving into the current, feeling its pull, he marveled at it and despaired, and heard Penny's voice behind him, from the bank, he thought, a thin wailing whipped around by the breeze—“Nicole! Nicole!” He'd seen her in front of him, the yellow spot bobbing crazily up and down and rolling in the mud-colored river, grown small, going around a bend, and he rushed around the bend, driven by the wild, inexorable current, turning head over heels in the water, then he glimpsed her again, the yellow dot still precisely the same distance ahead of him, small and lightweight. His limbs were going dead, and without thinking to do this, or willing it, he'd moved out of the heart of the current nearer the shore where the water had less force. He flailed and raised