The River (9 page)

Brian looked at the sun.

It was mid-afternoon. Dark was still five or six hours away—not that it mattered. Once they started they would have to keep moving, even through the night if they could.

Time was everything.

The river left the lake at the south end, a good half mile away. Rather than try to move the raft across the lake, he decided to pull it around the edge in the shallows and he started moving along the shore.

The raft followed easily and Brian let himself feel just the slightest bit positive for the first time since the lightning had hit them.

The raft seemed to work well. The weather was holding. They had a map.

And most of all, Derek was still alive.

They had a shot at it.

T
heir luck held.

Where the river left the lake it cut a deeper channel in the soft bottom. It took Brian half an hour to move the raft down the side of the lake, pulling it along by hand, and where the river exited he moved to the left shore and stopped for a moment.

One last thought. He could still go back. It would be easy to take the raft back around the lake, and possible—though certainly not easy—to drag Derek back up to the shelter. Once they were on the river, with the current, he would not be able to work back.

But he hesitated only a moment. Any choosing was already finished and he shook his head.

It was done.

He climbed onto the back of the raft, kneeling at Derek’s feet as he had before, and used the pole to push it away from the bank and out into the current.

The river was sixty or seventy feet across, leaving the lake, and the current at the sides seemed a bit slower. It caught the raft and pulled the nose around, so it aimed downstream but along the edge, bouncing against the bank and sliding beneath overhanging willows and brush.

Brian used the pole—the bottom was four or five feet down—and pushed the raft sideways out into the center.

It hesitated, seemed to hold for a moment as if trying to find the current, then the moving water caught the logs and the raft started to move.

Inside of thirty feet it was matching the current, or close to it, and Brian watched the banks sliding past as the raft moved silently down the river.

“We’re on the way,” he said to Derek. “It’s working and we’re on the way.”

For a hundred yards the river moved straight, then curved hard to the left around a small hill where Brian quickly found that a log raft is not the same as a boat.

The current was not fast—as he had guessed earlier it was about the speed of a person walking—but it was steady and strong. The logs were heavy and once they were moving in a direction they were hard to turn.

As a matter of fact, Brian thought, watching the bank at the end of the curve come at him, they were impossible to turn.

The river curved left and the raft went straight, cut across the curve, and jammed into the bank.

The jar of the sudden stop, even moving slowly, rocked the raft and Derek rolled against the lashings and almost fell in.

Brian leaped forward on the raft, fell on Derek and held him while the raft lurched, slid sideways, and settled against the bank, where it stuck in the dirt and brush on the edge of the river.

One hundred yards and they were stopped.

Brian slid off the raft—waist deep in the water—pushed it sideways back out into the current, climbed back on and sat for half a minute while the river curved back around to the right and the raft jammed into the left bank.

Another fifty yards. One hundred and fifty yards and they were stuck twice.

Brian swore.

“I’m going to have to improve this or we’ll be a month on this river.”

He worked the raft into the middle again and it started to move.

This time, as they came into a shallow curve and the raft started to move straight, he waited until the raft was close to the shore and used the pole to jam into the bottom and fend off.

He still shot wide on the turn, but they didn’t jam into the bank and by the fifth curve he had found a way to use the crude paddle to steer the raft.

He would come in close to the shore on the inside of a curve, then as soon as the raft was around it he paddled the stern over and aimed it down the center of the river, and fought to keep it in the middle.

They still did not always stay in the center of the best-moving current, but as the afternoon wore on Brian found that by frantically paddling through each curve he kept the raft moving almost at the speed of the current and away from any brush or snags on the sides of the river.

It worked, but the river curved almost constantly, moving through small swamps and beneath overhanging trees so thick it seemed to be a jungle, and he was constantly fighting the raft.

Inside of three hours he felt his back and arms aching, and knew that if he didn’t stop to rest a bit now and then he would never be able to make it.

He decided to stop every hour for ten minutes. Derek had told him once that that was what the military did on long marches—a ten-minute break every hour—and by the end of the fourth hour he was more than ready for it. As it happened the break came when the river straightened out, so he didn’t lose any time. The raft kept sliding as he leaned back and rested his arms and back.

He used his hands to cup water into his face, rubbing the back of his neck. The evening sun was still hot when it hit him as they came out of the patches of shade made by the trees on the bank, and the cool water on his neck refreshed him.

“Let’s see how we’re doing.” He opened the briefcase and took out the map. The river was accurately drawn—or seemed to be—and as near as he could figure it they’d come about eight miles.

Not as good as he’d thought. Eight miles in four hours. Two miles an hour. That meant fifty hours.

Two full days, on top of the day they’d just used making the decision and getting ready to go. Four days without water for Derek.

He looked at the unconscious form and saw that the sun had burned his neck where the skin was exposed.

Well, if Derek couldn’t drink, Brian could still keep him cool. That might help.

He took his T-shirt off and soaked it in the water. Brian used it as a cloth to wipe Derek’s face and neck with cool water during his break.

This ordeal was amazing to him, and he wondered at how it could be. Things happened so fast, changed so fast. Derek had been—
no
, he thought—Derek
was still
one of those people who seemed so . . . so alive. He was eager to learn, happy, bright.

He seemed indestructible.

Even now, lying on his side on the raft in the evening light—his chest rising and falling as he breathed—he looked like he would wake up any second.

Cut down—that’s how Brian thought of him. He had read a history of the Civil War and the author had written about the men being “cut down by fire.”

That’s how Derek looked to Brian now—cut down. How could that be?

Here he was, no different really, had been in the same place at the same time and he was all right, and Derek was cut down.

He wiped Derek’s face several times. All this time the raft had kept moving, and when his break was over he saw that they were coming into another bend.

He put the T-shirt back on, wet, and picked up the paddle and started to work, swinging the stern of the raft, keeping it in the middle of the current.

It would be dark in an hour or so, but he thought that it wouldn’t matter. His hands were raw from the rough wood of the paddle and he thought that it wouldn’t matter either.

All that mattered now was to keep moving.

I
n 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.