Where the River Ends (28 page)

42

JUNE 9, AFTERNOON

A
fter our flight lesson, we returned to the cabin. While Abbie napped, I ran through the rain to Bob’s to ask for some coffee. When I got there, he pointed at the TV. “Looks like your buddies caught on.” He turned up the volume. On the screen, a reporter stood in a hospital room and held the microphone in front of a man with raccoon eyes, whose face was black-and-blue and whose nose had been taped up. His voice was nasal and he sounded as though he had a bad cold. It was Verl, the broad-shouldered, thick-legged troll that I hit in the face with the revolver. Next to him stood Coal Miner, or “Buf.” He was the first guy to walk in and stand over Abbie. I remember his face being shiny and he was wearing glasses. They hung on his face now, bent and held together with tape. Last time I saw him he was running out of the room with Rocket attached to his crotch. His voice at the time had been rather high-pitched. Currently, all he could muster was a cracked whisper. “Yeah, he come out of nowhere. Like a tiger or something. I never seen nothing like it. He was swinging shi—I mean stuff, and he was like a crazed badger or something.”

The reporter interrupted him. “What were you doing on the river when you encountered Mr. and Mrs. Michaels?”

Verl spoke up. “We’uz frog gigging.”

The reporter waved the microphone in front of a third man. It was Limpy, the tallest of the four with the high-pitched, devilish howl—the one Bob smacked in the face with the lumber. She asked, “Is this something you’ve done before?”

Limpy nodded. His mouth was a mess. One tooth up front was badly cracked and several others were missing. He whistled when he spoke. “Aw, yes, ma’am. Lots of times. Me and Buf here, we’s grown up doing it.” The camera panned across the three men. The only one missing was shotgun man—the guy that had hit me with my own shotgun.

She continued, “And how many frogs had you gigged by the time Mr. Michaels allegedly attacked you?”

Limpy scratched his head. “Done what?”

Verl, the self-appointed spokesperson, piped in. “Shut up, dummy.” His hands accentuated his mouth. “See, they’uz a storm coming and so the frogs felt the change in the baron-metic pressure and so we had us like fi’teen or twenty. And we wuz coming round this bend when we heard this screaming…” He snapped his fingers. “Sounded like a woman in distress.”

Bufort tapped her on the shoulder. “Dat’s right. Di’tress.”

Verl continued, “Anyway, we wuz paddling up ’er near Brickyard—not the racetrack but the ramp—and we seen dis feller and dis woman. She didn’t have no clothes on, and she looked real sick, you know, and he didn’t have no clothes neither. We thought maybe they’s part of that resort upriver. So we paddled by, uh…and then got on the cell phone and dial 911…cause, uh, she look sick, and then we wuz coming in close to the bank, about to get out of the boat when he come running off the bank like a…like a Ninja Turtle.”

Bufort’s eyes grew wide and he karate-chopped the air. “Yeah. A Ninja Turtle.”

Verl pointed at his face. “Smacked me in the mouth, broke Buf’s nose and it was just an awful mess.”

She held the microphone to her mouth. “So, he attacked the three of you.”

Bufort nodded, then shook his head. “Yes. Well…no. I mean he jumped us’n three and Pete.” He counted on his fingers. “That makes four.”

She stared at the three of them. “Tell me about Pete.”

“He got knocked out when Mr. Michaels hit him upside the head with a…a iron pipe.”

“Is he in this hospital?”

Bufort shook his head. “Naw, he’s home drinking beer.”

She nodded. “I see.”

Bob laughed. “This is better than reality TV.”

She placed the microphone in front of Verl. “And what about the frogs?”

“Oh they, uh…they jumped back in the water when he done tumped the boat over.”

She raised both eyebrows. “I thought you said they had been speared.”

Bufort poked her in the shoulder. “Gigged.”

Verl thought a minute. “Uh…yeah. See we gig ’em just enough to sting them so they’s knocked out. We’re sort of like sniper-giggers. And, uh…when the boat tumped, they come to and runned off.”

She said, “What do you do with them?”

Verl nodded. “We eat them. They taste like chicken.”

Bufort elbowed his way into the picture. “And ya’ll need to be careful ’cause he’s armed and dangerous.”

Verl pointed at the camera. “That’s right. Armed and dangerous.”

“I see. Thank you, gentlemen.” She returned to the camera. “Back to you, Sam.”

Sam spoke to his teleprompter. “Barbara, any idea where Abbie Eliot and Doss Michaels are now?”

Barbara shook her head. “If, in fact, these gentlemen encountered Abbie Eliot and Doss Michaels, then the best guess is that they are making their way down the St. Marys River.” She shrugged. “But given the storm, exactly
where
is anybody’s guess.”

Sam narrowed his eyes and spoke to a second camera. “We take you now to Senator Coleman’s home in Charleston. Senator, any word on the location of your daughter and have you had any contact with her?”

The camera showed her dad in the front hall of their house—eight microphones stuffed in his face. Oddly enough, Rosalia hung quietly behind him on the wall. She was looking down on him. The senator cleared his throat. “We’re zeroing in on their location. Getting closer, but Doss grew up down there, so he’s a step or two ahead of us. The storm isn’t helping much. As for contact with Abigail Grace, no. No one that we know of has had contact with Abigail Grace or Doss in over a week and a half.” I guess that means he hadn’t received Abbie’s letter yet.

Bob clicked off the TV. “What’s with the double names?”

“It’s a Charleston thing.”

He continued, “I don’t think anybody in their right mind is going to believe the story of the three stooges, but they just pinpointed you. And put it on national television. Listen closely. The helicopters are probably outside now.”

“You don’t know the half of it.”

43

W
e’d had hundreds of tests, each one confirming further improbabilities, but throughout that, there was always the hope of another test, another new medical development, another something possible that strung us along. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, midnight snack, we fed on hope.

While Abbie slept off the residue of chemo and radiation, I walked laps around the house and realized that something had changed. Something was gone. We’d stopped feeding. The buffet of options had been slowly taken away—one by one—leaving only empty stainless-steel trays and spent Sterno cans. Dying is one thing. Knowing you’re dying and having to sit there and wait on it is another. And having to sit there and watch someone who’s having to sit there and wait on it is yet another.

A few days passed. I circled the inside of the house, waiting on two phone calls while Abbie slept some of the toxins out of her system. Late in the evening, I walked out of my studio, climbed up into the crow’s nest and stared out across the expanse. The moon cast shadows on the water and the lights of Fort Sumter glistened in the distance. Moments later, my phone rang. I checked the faceplate and saw the Texas area code. “Hello?”

“Doss Michaels?”

“Speaking.”

“This is Anita Becker, assistant to Dr. Paul Virth.”

“Yes?”

44

JUNE 10

W
hen I walked back into the cabin, Abbie was gone. I checked the bed but only the stain remained. The fly rod leaned in the corner and her clothes sat on the end of the bed. I scratched my head. A few seconds later, the steps creaked. Abbie walked up onto the back porch wearing only the top sheet as a sarong. She sat next to me. I said, “Bob says the outskirts of the storm should pass through tonight.”

“Yeah.” She held a spotted tissue. Her temple vein was throbbing, visually enlarged. She slid a trembling hand under mine. “I want you to do something for me.”

“Anything.”

She led me down the stairs to the river’s bank. She walked carefully, stopping every few steps to catch her breath and not aggravate the pain between her eyes. She’d not napped long, because she had it all set up. She sat me in the chair, the easel at my fingertips. Pencils sharp and canvas white. She had aimed me downriver. A few feet beyond me, a cedar tree lie fallen—water-beaten, sun-bleached and smooth—stretched across the bank. The top side of the trunk rested about bench height. The stub of a single branch stuck two feet into the air, making a natural niche to stretch out and watch the river. Untouched and unbroken.

“Honey, I don’t feel like—”

She pressed her finger to my lips. “Shhhh…”

She kissed me, walked around in front of me, and sat on the cedar, crossing her legs. She let the sheet fall. It slipped down around her hips, exposing her scars, and lay across the tree trunk like a tablecloth. She untied the scarf and hung it on the tip of the branch stub where it flagged in the breeze. She dabbed her nose and stared into the tissue, turning it in her hands. Another whisper, “I’ve learned something in all this.” A single drop fell from her nose and landed on her thigh. “You don’t have to be beautiful…to
be beautiful.
” She raised her chin, inhaling, filling her chest cavity and flaring her pink nostrils and whispered, “Breathe on me.”

I
STARED A LONG TIME.
With my eyes and without. I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, held it a long time, found the one thing that made me want to look again and started.

Slowly, the image took shape. A charcoal outline on canvas. Like heavy fog lifting off the ocean after a storm. The sun burned it off. The way her toes curled into the sand, the right foot turned slightly in more than the left, the slim legs, long calves, knotty knees, drawn thighs, hollow hips, the hand clasped around a bloody tissue, the scars that barbwired around her chest, the yellowed, thin skin draped across her collar bone, the throbbing vine-thick vein on her neck, the flaky and cracked flaring nostrils, the purplish-blue vein pulsating on her temple, the white head, deep eyes, gray skin, the fatigue. Silhouetted against a backdrop of storm clouds, thunder and the river.

The hours passed.

I’d been painting long enough to know that each piece, if made well, can take on a life of its own. This piece had done something I’d not intended. It etched both her smallness—her shrunken, pale, sickly frame, the protrusion of her collar bone and the indentation of every rib, the matching cavities in her chest—while also capturing her enormity and her magnificence. Her larger-than-lifeness. Her I-am-not-my-cancerness. I sat back and looked at my sketch—the structure of what would become the one piece she’d always thought I could make. And there, beneath the tears, beneath the realization of what she’d just given me, it came to me. She whispered it from the canvas—the word that is my wife.

Indomitable.

At dusk, I carried her from the bench. She glanced at the canvas. “Took you long enough.”

“Sorry. Couldn’t get my subject to sit still.”

She tied the scarf back around her head. “Gee, that’s sort of a letdown. I thought you were just enjoying seeing me naked.”

“Well…”

Her breathing was labored and raspy. I set her on my seat, my feet sinking into the sand. She stared at herself, following each stroke, each shadow with her finger. After a minute, she nodded. “Not even Rembrandt…”

Her eyes were slits. She cracked a smile and fought the pain, pushing her lids upward. I asked, “Scale of one to ten?”

Her eyelids fell and she leaned against me as the rain began to smack the river.