The River

18

In the night, that first night, he learned some things about himself.

Not all of them were good.

He had not slept the night before except to doze kneeling next to Derek, and he had worked hard all day on the raft getting it ready, and when the sun went down and the darkness caught him he could not believe how much he wanted to sleep.

There was a partial moon — a sliver — which gave enough light to see the river, or at least make out the main channel, but the light didn’t help.

Each time Brian’s eyes closed to blink, they opened more slowly, and each time he had to fight to get them open.

The mosquitoes helped for a time. They came out in their clouds with darkness before the evening cool slowed them and Brian tried brushing them away from his face and Derek’s, but it was like trying to brush smoke. As soon as his hand passed they settled again, whining in the darkness and after a bit he just let them eat and kept paddling.

Sleep would take him between strokes of the paddle; it would stop him so his arms would fall and the paddle would stop and lay in his lap. Then he would shake his head and snap out of it and start paddling again just in time to make a turn, at least at first. Halfway through the night nothing worked anymore and his eyes closed and stayed shut.

He dreamed mixes of things.

His mother came to him, sitting on the other end of the raft.

“It’s all right,” she said. “You can let go now — it’s all right.”

And her voice was so soft, so gentle and soothing that he wanted to let all of it go, not to be here. Not even in the dream.

He was not sure how long he slept, but when he awakened the raft was drifting on a large, flat plain of water, bobbing sideways.

There was no sign of the river.

In the faint moonlight he could see no banks, knew no direction to travel.

“But…” he said aloud. The sound of his voice startled some animal and there was a loud splashing to his right.

A large animal, he thought — perhaps a moose. That meant there was a shore, then, a bank for an animal to run on — close.

So use thought, use logic. Use it. Think.

The river was flowing generally southeast. It must have widened into a lake.

The moon.

The moon was straight overhead when he went to sleep.

Now it was down a ways to the right.

Down to the west. Like the sun it rose in the east, set in the west.

The moon was about halfway down from overhead in the same direction as the splashing animal.

So.

Brian threw water in his face.

So the river had widened into a lake, but he had moved along the west bank. If he kept moving the raft with the paddle he should come to where the river narrowed again, and pick up the current.

He started paddling, the raft moving sluggishly now that there was no real current. He bore to the right, moving the raft sideways as he paddled until he could just make out the shoreline in the darkness — outlined in the moonlight — then he straightened and started paddling again, steady, reaching forward with each stroke, bending at the waist, two on the right, two on the left.

While the raft followed current well, because the logs stuck down into the water and were not streamlined, for the same reason it moved with the paddling horribly.

“It’s like paddling a brushpile,” he said to Derek. “Nothing seems to move.”

And in truth it was very slow. He was not moving more than a mile an hour and he wished he could read the map in the darkness. He didn’t remember this lake, or wide place, or whatever it was, but if it was two miles long it would take two full hours at least to cross it.

Two on the left, two on the right.

He slogged forward and with the rhythm of the paddling his brain settled into numbness again and soon he was in the same trance that had led him to sleep.

This time he stayed awake, but the hallucinations grew more and more intense.

He saw the raft as a canoe and felt it fly forward with each stroke until he was leaving a wake of fire, firewaves curling out from the front of the raft and he worried that it would catch the logs/canoe on fire and burn them up and how could water be on fire anyway?

He would shake his head and then see his mother again at the other end of the raft. She would change into his father, who was smiling and beckoning him to paddle faster and faster; and then Derek’s breath grew louder and louder until it filled his head, the lake, the world with the rasping sound of his breathing, and Brian could hear Derek’s heart as well, pounding on the logs of the raft, echoing until all he could hear was the keening rasp of Derek’s breath and the pounding of his heart….

He would shake his head and the raft would be jerking forward in the faint moonlight, Derek lying on his side, Brian leaning forward at the waist, two on the left, two on the right, the paddle pulling at the water in swirls. Three strokes, four, and he would be under again.

At one point something came swimming up alongside the raft — a muskrat or otter or beaver — cutting a V in the water as it swam next to Brian, and in a fraction of a second his mind had turned it into the head of some beast, some underwater monster with its toothed head weaving back and forth getting ready to attack, to sweep over and take him off the raft with huge teeth; and he set the paddle down and grabbed for the spear to kill the monster, make it go away before it could eat him, and he shook his head and the vision disappeared as the animal dived and the monster was gone and he was alone with Derek again. He picked up the paddle and worked again, leaning forward….

The bad thinking came sometime toward morning. He did not know how it started and would never know how it started and, later, did not wish to remember it when he did.

Two nights without sleep tore at him and the raft seemed bolted down as he tried to get it along the edge of the lake to where the river moved again. Somewhere there, as he tried to keep the raft moving and fought sleep, there came the idea, the wild idea, the sick idea.

The raft moved slowly because it was heavy. What made it heavy, sank it into the water so that it could not move, was the extra weight of the man tied in the middle. If the man were gone — if the man were gone it would be lighter and he could move fast and it would be better.

It would be better if Derek were gone. What was the difference? He was dumb enough to rise up and get hit by the lightning, and he should be gone.

Brian looked down at the still form and thought the thought; and it was so awful that he did not believe he was thinking it, but it was there, the thought.

If Derek were gone.

Just gone.

None of this would have happened if Derek weren’t there — not any of it. And if Derek were gone… gone somehow in the water, gone down and down….

“No!” He nearly screamed it and the sound of his voice snapped him awake, alert, and he touched Derek’s leg to make certain he was still there, that Brian hadn’t cut him loose in the night and that he would always be there and that Brian would never even think the thought again. Not even for an instant.

“All the way,” he mumbled, reaching with the paddle again. “We go all the way together.”

He paddled another half hour, fighting sleep and then at the same time he felt a coolness that he knew was morning coming and he saw that the eastern sky was beginning to lighten.

He stopped paddling, looked at the sky and was amazed at how fast the dawn came. One moment it was so dark he couldn’t see Derek on the raft and the next he could make out the bank, see the trees in the gray light of dawn.

And they were moving.

The banks were moving along, even though he wasn’t paddling. He’d done it, he was through the lake and had moved back onto the river and the current had him.

“Thank you,” he whispered, and realized when he said it that it was another kind of prayer and that he was grateful not just for the river, the current, the movement — but the other thing as well.

Coming through the night with Derek… grateful that he had made it.

“Thank you.”