Where the River Ends (31 page)

48

JUNE 11, AFTERNOON

A
n hour later, we reached the bend that flowed into Reed’s Bluff. The water was moving faster than I’d ever seen it. It was the worst kind of water. Not rapids above but undertow below. The water here was forty feet deep and the volume was squeezing through, ripping a fast current. I threw the canoe into the flow, it caught us and began pushing the back end around. I dug the paddle in, fought it and pulled, but it was no use. The undertow swung the stern around, then the bow, then the stern again. The water swirled, billowing up from the bottom, and threw us into the mix. All the debris, the trees, logs and trash, had gathered in a hole just north of the bluff, swirling like in a blender. The canoe rammed the center, climbed onto the pile and I grabbed Abbie’s hand just as water spilled over the stern. The river flooded in, angry and violent, swamped my seat and then shot us airborne like a canon. I hit the water and began pulling upward, but the water pulled us down and apart. It flipped us, tumbled us, and then wrapped us together in a knot. I struggled for air but could not break through the blanket of debris that held me beneath the water. My lungs were screaming and when I reached for Abbie, she was gone. I clawed at the water, pulling and kicking, but I could not break free. Locked in a somersault, I desperately needed air. The bottom sat some forty feet below me. The surface only a foot above. But I could reach neither. My lungs closed in and the familiar stars returned.

Had it all come to this?

From below me, a swirl of water caught my foot and righted me. It lifted me like a bobber and freed me. My eyes broke the surface and I saw a flash of bathing suit. I took three strokes, grabbed Abbie’s foot, and dug my arms beneath hers, pulling her toward the air. She sucked in a breath and hacked, coughing. The bank was only ten feet away. A fallen tree reached out across the water. A single, leafless limb stretched through the air above me. I lunged, caught it and it broke. The two of us spun, flipped and twirled through the water. My shoulder slammed into the bank and the water flipped us again, but I held fast to the broken limb and Abbie. We turned a cartwheel and when my arm came down I slammed the limb into the soft bank. The splintered end spiked into the sand and momentarily anchored us. I looped an arm around Abbie’s chest, pulled and threw myself at the bank. The sand was soft, gave way beneath me and the water sucked us down again. I dug my fingers in, kicked with my toes, and inched onto the beach. Slowly, I pulled Abbie toward me. She was spitting blood and water—both of which had smeared across her face. Her breathing was short, raspy and the effort not to drown had exhausted her. She was a rag doll. I combed the beach but everything was gone. The canoe. The purple blanket. The revolver.

Only we remained.

Sixty feet above me towered Reed’s Bluff. It’s a sand dune that, for no apparent reason, rises straight up out of the water and runs east and west for nearly a mile. At the top, it might be five feet in width and the backside falls off as fast as the front rises. It’s dotted with scrub oaks and enough wiregrass to hold the sand together. It’s steep, but once at the top, you can see for miles. More important, you can see St. Marys. I needed to show Abbie. She needed to know we were close.

I cradled her and threw her arms around my neck. Her arms fell. “Hold on to me.” She made no response.

I dug my toes into the sand, pulled on the wiregrass and crawled up. Every few feet, the sand gave way, spilling away beneath us and forcing me to dig in further and pull harder. Climbing up took several minutes. Finally, I laid her on the narrow ridge, caught my breath, sat her up and let her lean against me. “Honey, look.” I held her arm out and pointed her index finger. “St. Marys. Just five miles. That’s all.” She couldn’t breathe through her nose without coughing.

“Hey…” I was reaching. Grasping. “When we get there, I’ll call the folks at M. D. Anderson. Maybe something’s opened up. We could have dinner tonight at Sterlings and fly out tomorrow.”

Her eyes cracked. She leaned toward me and patted my chest. “Doss…” Her whisper was faint and gurgled with fluid. “I’m dying. Not stupid.”

“You know about that, too?”

She nodded and spat. “Uh-huh.” Cracking a smile, she said, “You’re not a very good liar.” She locked her arms around me, kissed my cheek and whispered, “No scars.”

I stared out across the expanse. The wind blew in two directions, meeting in the middle. In front of us, the wind blew in from the northwest, rolling across the marsh grass that ran for several miles out in front of us. It blew southeast, bending the grass and tress toward us. Behind us, the wind rose up over the bluff from the southwest and moved northeast, pulling the limbs, branches, wiregrass and spanish moss, laying them out across the water like hair. We sat in the middle, looking out upon a world that had come to pay its final respects.

“Abbie…look. Everything is…” The world was bowing down, but she never saw it.

Her eyes were rolling back and her tongue grew thick and white. I checked her pulse and it was faint. Barely there. I slid back down the bluff and scoured the bank for the Pelican case, but it was nowhere. I ran up and down the bank, looking. How hard can it be to spot a yellow plastic case? I ran a quarter mile down the bank to where a tree had fallen from the bluff into the water. The current stripped it of its foliage but left the thin twigs: They poked into the water like fingers, slowing the flow. Tangled in the middle, floated a yellow box.

I dove in.

When I surfaced, I grabbed the box and fought the current back to the bank. I anchored a hand in the soft sand, pulled and spiked the other hand. Three pulls and I’d freed myself from the current that sought to wash me out to sea. I ran back up the bank, clawed and scrambled back up the bluff and dropped next to Abbie. I flipped open the case, cracked the seal on the last of the dopamine and shot it into the inside of her thigh—into her femoral artery. Then I cracked the dexamethasone and slid the syringe into her arm. “Abbie, please come back. Don’t go. Not yet.” Finally, I dug around through the discarded syringes and found one last Actiq. I read the label,
800 mcg.

I pulled off the wrapper and placed it just inside her cheek. The three medications went to work quickly.

She stirred. “Have you ever broken a promise to me?”

I stared off down the river. She traced the lines of my face, breathing as deeply as she could. “Then don’t start now.” I cradled her on my lap and we slid tandem down the sand. When we reached the bank, I laid her down and scrambled through the debris, looking for anything that would float. A piece of plastic, an old cooler, a chunk of Styrofoam. If I could keep her afloat, I could swim alongside and we’d make it. We could still make it.

I thought about a makeshift raft, but a raft would never make the turn at Devil’s Elbow. I ran a half mile one way, then a half mile in the other. I rummaged through every piece of trash and fallen limb along the beach. That’s when I found it.

Rammed into the sand on the south side of the bluff lay a squared log. It looked weathered, was tunneled along one side by worms, was rough hewn—maybe even by hand—and looked about twelve feet long. Most important, it was bobbing.

It was heavy, which would be needed in about six miles, so I ran back to Abbie, picked her up and carried all that I held dear back down the beach. We reached the log and I laid her onto it, draping an arm around each side, and we shoved off. I latched on to the front and kicked us into the current. It picked us up, straightened us and led us out.

From the front, I could steady the log, keep Abbie afloat and make minute changes to our direction. It also allowed me to look at Abbie. We’d been in the water a few minutes when she stirred. Blood dripped off her face and trickled onto the log where it mixed with the water and trailed behind us.

The river had overflowed on every side. The volume was unlike anything I’d ever imagined. As was its speed. Even without a paddle and with me dragging in the water, we were making five to six miles an hour. In normal tides, dragging like this would pull me across the top of razor-sharp oyster beds, slicing my legs and back to shreds. But the volume had changed that. The only problem with our speed was Devil’s Elbow.

The current and weight of the log kept us in the middle. Actually, we didn’t have much of a choice. The further we flowed, the more whitecaps we encountered. Soon, they were rolling over the top of Abbie. The good news was that they couldn’t swamp us. The bad news was they were nearly drowning me. I clung to the front and kicked with little effect. The waves crashed across us, tearing at my hands.

We floated a mile, then two, made the wide southward turn at Rose’s Bluff and, finally, headed due east into the last straight stretch before Devil’s Elbow. Around us, the bank was a feeding frenzy of redfish and tarpon. On each side, the water had covered up the pluff mud and driven the fiddler crabs from their holes. Some clung to the wiregrass with their one large claw while others floated helplessly along the water’s surface.

I heard it long before I saw it.

Devil’s Elbow is the last bend before you reach St. Marys. When the waters collide, the river makes a muted roaring sound like rapids. The waves grow two to four feet and foam with whitecaps—enough to swamp any canoe. When I was guiding, we learned to skirt the elbow by paddling wide south and slingshotting around it. The problem with the log I was currently holding on to was control. I couldn’t paddle wide and we’d miss the slingshot.

The sound woke Abbie. She grabbed my hand and continued to straddle the log with her legs. The water swept us up, pushing us through the center of the elbow. Water rolled over the top of us, crashed down on the center of us and pulled at me from all sides. I hugged the log, trying to keep it upright, but I’m afraid I had little effect. Fortunately for us, the log was so long and heavy, it rode through the elbow as much as over it. I gripped the log and felt finger grooves on the far side. I moved to the side, threw an arm around Abbie, dug my fingers into the grooves and hung on. We passed through the chop, turned left or northeast and for the first time, saw St. Marys in the distance. All the buildings were white and the masts of nearly a hundred moored sailboats soared into the air. I swam to the other side of the log and that’s when it hit me. The timber. The grooves were actually letters—carved into the wood. I looked a second time at the log, finally recognizing it.
Even pirates need God.
I retraced the grooves, finishing the sentence.
“…I will be with you.”

I kicked and pulled on the log, steering us toward the Florida side and pulling us wide of St. Marys. In the distance, news trucks with telescoping satellite antennaes sat parked along the dock. News personalities and their cameramen were set up on the dock, aiming out across the water. Mixed in with the debris, we floated some half mile away, relatively camouflaged. We drifted along the Florida bank, Abbie’s fingers locked into mine. It was dusk, and the sun had long since fallen.

Abbie lay her head on the timber and stared at the far bank. “Look at all those people.”

“Yeah.”

She coughed. “I think we caused some trouble.”

“It was no trouble.”

S
T.
M
ARYS SLIPPED BY.
Seagulls strutted along the docks and pelicans perched on rooftops waiting for the shrimp boats to return and empty their nets. Cedar Point appeared on our left, so I kicked into the current, cut us across the water and slid us across the top of the marsh grass and through the schools of mullet that had gathered there. They, too, were seeking safety. The water nudged us inward, gently lodging our one-log raft onto shore.

We’d done it. All the way from Moniac.

I lifted Abbie, walked up on the beach and knelt, laying her head gently on the sand. Rising above us stood thirty or so sunflowers, some eight feet tall and in full bloom. They had followed the sun as it had fallen behind the trees, and now they were aimed down at us.