Crime and Punishment at Belknap Hot Springs
Boulders. Pale flesh rocks. That’s what they looked like, the four of them standing waist deep and sweating, facing each other in the main pool. Two potato-faced teen boys, their father, their mother. In a black one-piece, fist on her hip, she pummeled them nonstop in Russian, the boys and maybe the husband, too. Who knows how long this had been going on? Hours. Years.
Now she had the older boy backed against blue tiles. He began to sag like a body-punched boxer who knows his legs are gone. Sentences without punctuation can do that. The father stared off, shaking his head. The boys had red pouches under their eyes. Then their eyes disappeared and squeezed out tears.
She never looked away. Steam drifted on the water. Just past the poolside garden where Spanish-speaking men who refused to raise their heads were putting in rows of nasturtiums and yellow carnations, the McKenzie River tumbled down from volcanic snow country and foamed noisily by. A few miles downriver, in the uncut forest where I’d been staying in a cabin, tremendous Douglas firs waited in the silent rocketry of their growth.
I edged to the far end of the pool. So did an elderly couple who couldn’t look away, though now and then they tried to study the high fir-tops along the river. A snail I’d spotted, glued to a tile just above waterline, pushed out its antennae and began to climb toward the lip of the pool.
Now the father was blubbering. What was this woman accusing them of? Conspiring to kill her mother with an ax? At least Raskolnikov was driven mad by his own voice. The younger boy had a linebacker body waiting to break out, though I think he knew that even years of pumping iron wouldn’t save him. A bald eagle fled upriver.
She kept on. How much worse would she be without these soothing waters, their healing powers, wellsprings deep in the earth?
The snail had crawled half an inch now, its antennae stretched so far out you’d think it could smell the dark soil of the garden, or knew the tumbling river was only a day or two away.
