The River

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The night was dark. The waning moon had come and gone, settling down like a curve of bone in a west where no smoke lingered. The stars and the flicker of northern lights on the eastern horizon had been doused in clouds. The campfire had nearly expired. Jack had let it die down. And he had let Wynn sleep. Wynn: laid out under the frost that never came, stretched out in the open under a night that smelled like rain, sleeping on the beach so he could let Maia have privacy in the tent. Wynn, who had said, “Cap, wake me in two hours. Let’s do two-hour shifts tonight. No one’s going to have any problem passing out.” Jack had promised and sat by the fire with JD and watched the man drink. The two with their rifles lying beside them on the stones.

JD had offered, proffered the now half-full bottle of bourbon by the neck, and Jack had taken the bottle the first two times. He knew with drinkers that the first impression was the thing, that once you started knocking back with a serious drinker they’d just assume you were with them all night, matching them slug for slug, even if you never took another sip. To a drinker, everyone else in the world was a partyer, too. So he got JD launched, which wasn’t hard because the two fishermen had probably been drinking all day. Jack wouldn’t have been surprised if one of the boxes in the canoe was solid fifths.

Brent had hit the hay early, muttering, “Big day tomorrow,” and keeping whatever thoughts to himself. JD drank with a steady sullenness. Between bouts, he swung his head and watched Jack from under his brow, and if he wanted to ask what the hell had happened with the girl, et cetera, he restrained himself, but he turned his head to the tent more than once and Jack had the strong impression that it wasn’t just because he had burning questions. There was a young woman lying in there, however injured. That’s the sense Jack got.

Jack watched him like a wolf. He was smelling the man as much as watching him. Smelling him getting more stewed, watching for signs of fatigue. He needed these guys, and he wasn’t going to screw it up. A light wind came up, moving downstream, and it chilled his back. Good. An owl hooted. Single hollow notes whose cadence Jack followed to keep himself awake. But they never formed a pattern, except that in their staggered randomness they seemed to probe a night of velvet depths and echoing solitude. He stirred up the fire and added wood to keep the heat coming, more to lull JD than to warm himself. He needed to stay awake.

And he did, barely.

There’s a certain stillness before dawn. A caesura. The fire was a heap of dusted embers. No wind. In the lacuna between outbreath and inbreath even the owl hushed. The sipping of the river seemed to drop an octave. Fuck. Jack’s head jerked up. He must have passed out. Even he couldn’t vanquish the exhaustion of the past couple of days. He must have slept sitting up, slumped over the rifle in his lap, and now he stirred and his head twitched up, and he shook it and straightened his back against the stiffness. Fuck. He sucked in a draft of cold air. Something had woken him. Wha—?

He heard an animal. Tussling, squeaking near the woods. He swung around. It wasn’t the woods, it was…what? There was Wynn, stretched flat on his back, dead to the world on the stones. It was no animal. He heard squeaking and a muffled cry and looked farther in the half dark and saw the man JD’s boots sticking out of the unzipped door of the tent.

He moved. If he had ever moved that fast—he scooped up the rifle and was at the tent in twelve strides. The man’s gun was lying on the rocks. He kicked it away over the stones. And then in one movement Jack shifted the grip on his rifle and slammed the butt into the man’s kidneys. An explosive grunt. In the next second he was dragging him out by his belt with one hand, and when his head was clear of the flap he heard him utter, “Not! Not what you think!” and Jack dropped him like a bale of hay and with both hands he swung the stock of the Savage 99 hard across the side of the man’s head. An awful thwack and the man slumped to the stones.

He heard crying and reached back into the tent and whispered fast, “It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s Jack. We’re leaving now, getting away.” He put his hands in and half pulled, half urged her out. She was awake, thank God. She was swimming up out of some nightmare. Her eyes unblurred and he could see that she was replaying the last minutes like a film, he could see her mind spinning fast. She gripped his arm in the near dark and nodded. She stood. Shaky. He reached past her and pulled out the pad and sleeping bag and crumpled them in his left arm.

“We’re going, we’re going, we’re leaving,” Jack whispered, harsh. “Can you walk?”

She nodded. She was breathing hard, maybe hyperventilating. “Okay,” he said. He took her elbow with his right hand and guided her fast, as fast as they could, down toward Wynn and the shore. When they got to the sleeper, Jack released her and crouched, shook Wynn hard, moved the cap off his face where it lay and shook, and when Wynn uttered “Hey,” half in sleep, he put his hand over his mouth.

Wynn groaned and his eyes sprang open and Jack’s fingers went to his lips. Wynn blinked twice, then nodded in his bag. Jack made a downward pressing gesture with his open hand—Keep it superquiet.

Wynn roused himself and picked up his pad and sleeping bag and followed, confused. The three of them were now in the dark like ghostly revenants of the river upstream, the upstream side of the creek where everything was burned and the trees were bone. Because they moved without sound and were lit only by starlight, and were so depleted and rattled by the past days that they walked to the water’s edge in a hitching trance. Two did. Jack urged them on. They headed for the boats. Jack held Maia’s arm and kept looking back at the dull glow of coals that was the remains of the fire and at the shadow of the wall tent. They moved toward the boats and then Wynn drifted right, down toward their canoe, and Jack whistled without sound, just a hushed blow, and jerked his head, kept moving toward the Texans’ square-tail beached twenty feet upstream. Maia hesitated. Jack tugged her elbow and she followed. They tiptoed as best they could over the stones. Jack felt for the slung rifle on his back and piled in the sleeping gear and went swiftly to the bow and lifted and began to push and slide the men’s canoe. Very slowly, easing the hull so it barely scraped. Maia stopped. She swayed on the beach and lifted her hands. A questioning gesture, even in the dark. Jack pointed to the stern, which was in the water, pointed, emphatic: Get in. Put his finger to his lips again. He got the boat nearly free of shore and then Wynn said, full-voiced, “Hey, hey, Jack. What the fuck? Why’re you taking their boat?”

He was standing almost to the water halfway between the two canoes, holding his bundled sleeping bag and pad. “Let’s take ours.” He was backlit by a sheen of river suffused with starlight.

“Jesus, Wynn!” Jack hissed, just above a whisper. “C’mon! Shut up and get over here!” He looked back past the fire. The dark shape of JD, crumpled on the rocks, was moving, straightening. Fuck. “Maia, jump on. Now! In the center.”

She did. Somehow. More a fall than a jump, but she was in. Jack shoved. The hull of the men’s canoe grated loudly. The bow cleared rock and floated free. “Wynn, get in! Now!” He was no longer whispering. He was walking his hands quickly down the port gunwale to the stern, wading heedlessly hip-deep into the river and he vaulted into the stern. He heard a clatter of stone and saw JD standing, getting his bearings, heard the curses. Jack found the push start on the grip of the motor and pressed it. He’d grown up trolling with these suckers. It clicked and whirred and started, thank God. He thumbed the reverse lever and twisted the throttle as the canoe was being swept upshore with the eddy current, revved the prop and backed the boat to where Wynn was standing like a fucking tree, his arm spread out in protest. Jack glanced up the shore past the embered fire and saw JD swaying, looking for his gun. He was probably trying to clear his head. Oh man. “Wynn!” Jack shouted now and the night echoed it back like the owl’s sad hoot. “He tried to rape her! Get the fuck in! Now!Now!Now!Now!” and out of the corner of his eye he caught the movement. In just a couple of minutes the air must have grayed just enough, gathered the grains of light enough, because he saw the man, the fat man, bolt from the big tent, moving fast, surprisingly fast, not to them but to their little tent and JD, his one shout, “Sonofabitch!” a cry of protest at every cross-grained turn of events, and he shoved JD sprawling again to the rocks and swept up the rifle. Maybe Wynn saw him too because he lurched out of his paralysis—he leapt toward the water and the rifle cracked, a single sharp note, and Wynn spun and flew backward into the river.

If Jack shouted nobody heard, the shot reverberated and deafened. He revved the throttle, the boat jumped back, and he let go the motor and somehow leaned and doubled to water with both hands and hauled in his buddy by shirt and shoulders, dragged and dumped him over the lip of the gunwale, hot blood running over his cold hands, and more shots split the air and thudded into the hull. He flipped the lever forward and twisted and the canoe lurched and then he was gunning for the top of the eddy and the guard rock there and angling hard into the passing current, aiming for the tightest line around the bend. Upriver. He was going upstream, not down. Wynn was gasping and moaning, eyes rolling, and the woman screamed and the motor blared. The man must have been emptying the magazine because another shot split the air and another shattered off the back of the engine cover and stung Jack’s hand. Fat Man could surely shoot in the near dark. As they rounded the bend and out of range they heard the primal roar, something between a demon’s growl and an animal scream, and one more shot, and Jack thought that maybe Brent had just blasted JD on the spot for sheer frustration and he hoped he hadn’t. He knew he hadn’t. Because Brent was essentially a decent man who had just shot a decent kid. Because Jack had stolen their boat.