Nick VanNuland

On Tuesday, when Paradise swelled and washed over its banks and onto the bike path behind Joseph Plaza, the bridge unmoored and shifted as designed and drifted a little ways with the westward current. Three days of heavy spring rains and snowmelt from the mountain caused the flooding, the magnitude of which, according to Kenny Byrne, the fifty-four-year-old Glaswegian pump operator at the Chevron on main, hadn’t been seen in thirty years. 

“They found a child that last time,” Kenny told Mrs. Bennet, who nodded and shook her head and shifted her left leg a little as she swiped her card at the register. “A drowned little girl. Horrible,” Kenny said, and Mrs. Bennet shook her head and nodded and made grave utterances and left the Chevron station to fill her car with thirty-dollars-standard-fuel-grade gasoline. 

A mix of workers from the City Parks Department and the Paradise River Environmental Protection Organization — PREPO — worked to right benches, to mark trees and shrubs with pink ribbon, to blockade the bike path that led to the now inaccessible bridge with temporary fencing and caution tape. Kenny stood on the edge of the Chevron lot while the station was slow and smoked and spat once or twice in the border grass and watched the workers dig in the banks and place sandbags and talk with each other and point at various things.

The child that had drowned the last time the river expressed itself would be thirty-four now, Kenny thought, and he lit a second cigarette because no cars had yet pulled into the station. Kenny was working at the Chevron that morning the girl had been found. The then twenty-four-year-old Scottish immigrant who, as he was known to tell any and all who inquired, had “thrown a dart at a map in a pub,” then watched through the dusty gas station windows as police stood at the banks of Paradise and spoke to each other and into radios and pointed and made various gestures to the paramedics from the Volunteer Fire Department.  

A bicyclist and amateur photographer had ridden down to take photos of the flooding and had spotted the girl face down on the bank, her legs floating a little in the wash. It was due to the yellow coat the girl wore, a birthday gift from her grandmother, that radiated lamp-like through the grey-brown muck and tangle of the flooded riverbed. Nora, Kenny remembered from an article in the Three Forks Gazette, was the child’s name. The name of the amateur photographer he couldn’t recall. 

As Kenny watched the cleanup operation, a crisp white sedan with Washington State license plates pulled up to pump number two. A man wearing a well-tailored mahogany suit emerged from the driver’s side door. He was tan and handsome, somewhere, Kenny thought, around thirty years old, and the way he first smoothed his clothing and corrected the sides of his hair, regarding his reflection in the sedan’s side mirror, revealed that he was not from Three Forks. Likely Seattle, Kenny mused, and he dropped his cigarette and squished it under his heel and raised his hand to the man who gave a smile and a nod and wave in return. 

“No rush, brother,” the man said. He held the door open as Kenny ambled inside the station and behind the register. 

What Kenny knew of Nora’s death had been pieced together from the front page of the Three Forks Gazette and from various locals and police that came through the Chevron. As it was told, Nora had left her home in the night through the front door which had been left ajar by her father who had returned home from the bar at the bottom of the hill, that morning having been fired, and had fallen asleep on the couch. Three Forks, a town built on and among the four hills surrounding the convergence of the three forks of Paradise River, had two bars—Four Hills, the dive, and South Fork, the preference of a wealthier class.

Nora’s father had favored Four Hills, both for its proximity to home and the caliber of clientele. Her mother was a nurse who worked nights, and Nora spent the days with her grandmother who, when the incident occurred, was asleep in the spare bed in Nora’s room when the girl pulled open the door and ran laughing through the rain in her new yellow coat and rainbow print pajamas toward the swollen river. 

“Was there a flood?” the man said at the register. Kenny rang him up for fifty dollars of gasoline and a Butterfinger. 

“Yes, sir,” Kenny said. 

“Wow,” the man said. He looked out the window. “It looks pretty bad.” 

“A little,” Kenny said. 

“How did the bridge get over there?” The man gestured in the direction of the bridge with his head while his hands unwrapped the candy bar. 

“It’s designed to detach and float when the river gets too high. If you look, you can see the buoys. Those grey, round things there on the bottom.” 

“Wow,” the man said. He bit his candy bar and chewed. “I’ve never heard of that.” 

“Water would wash over the old bridge when it flooded so they installed the buoys,” Kenny said. “That’ll be fifty-four sixty.” 

The man in the mahogany suit tapped his card in the pin pad. A notice said declined. “Oh sorry,” the man said. “My tap hasn’t been working lately.”

“I can plug in the numbers,” Kenny said. 

“Right on. So, when did they build this bridge?” 

Kenny typed the man’s card information into the register computer, then gave it back. “About thirty years ago,” he said. “Receipt?” 

“Don’t need it,” the man said. He smiled wide. Bits of chocolate clung to his teeth. “By the way, where’s your accent from?” 

“Glasgow,” Kenny said. 

“That is too cool,” the man said. “I’ve been wanting to go to England. How is it?” Kenny smiled back. “I don’t remember,” he said. 

Kenny stood at the edge of the Chevron station lot and watched the white sedan drive away. The workers from PREPO and the City Parks Department sat on folding chairs or stood and ate burgers. A local restaurant with a mobile kitchen in a converted horse trailer catered the lunch break for the river clean up and Kenny watched them and smoked and spat once or twice in the border grass and adjusted his blue Chevron uniform shirt once or twice when he felt it grow uncomfortable on the back of his neck.