by Neil Hetzner
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
A Row and then a Row
Joe starts awake in the thick pitch black dark with the rough skin of callused fingers rubbing his lips.
“It’s okay. It’s me.”
In the silence of the underground space, Blesonus’ whisper sounds like distant thunder. Joe, after being pushed and nudged, rolls his cold crampy body, as unwieldy as a memfoam mattress, into a sitting position.
“You’re lucky I found you. What are you doing down here?”
Joe is far too groggy to make up much of a story.
“I couldn’t sleep. I wandered off. I was going left, right, left right, but I forgot. I ended up here and just stopped—both because I was tired and because I was afraid that the farther I went the worse off I’d be.”
Blesonus sniggers in disbelief, “For a smart boy from a fancy school, your penmanship isn’t too good.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’ve left some t’s uncrossed and some i’s undotted. Like the thumbprints. The pot of paint. Anyone lost in a cave is going to follow passages that go up, not deeper. You told me your school has prided itself on the honor of its students for two hundred years. Why not just tell the truth and say that you were trying to escape.”
“Do you have a light?”
Joe hears a rustling, then, Blesonus’ face and a small section of the tunnel appear in the algae green glow of a lumenaid.
“I wasn’t trying to escape. I was just trying to explore enough so that if, or when, I do want to escape, I will know how to get away.”
Blesonus tousles Joe’s hair in a way that makes him feel very uncomfortable.
“From what I can see, you still have more to learn. You should thank Mother I found you. While we Greenlanders know the whole mountain, there are many tunnels where no one goes for weeks. You could have died. The cold down here is patient. It doesn’t kill you in hours like it might above if you were out in bad weather, but in a day or two, without proper clothing, it will slowly, but absolutely surely, drain your life away.”
By now, Joe is alert enough to know that his best response is to be both meek and beholden.
“You’re right. I am lucky. You’re a good friend. I’m lucky to have you watching over me. How did you happen to come looking for me?”
“I was up. I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking about how delicate our lives are here. When I fell, it wasn’t just tea and salt that was lost. I also lost my sense of belonging. You go along day by day thinking things are the same, but everyday things change, but, usually, a day’s change is too small to be seen. It took that fall for me to understand that what we had here for years and years was a true community. The threads that bound us were of the tightest knit, the strongest mesh. Now, that’s gone. We have no community, only a fiefdom, a little duchy run with fear and shame by our mad duchess.”
Blesonus’ voice has dropped below a whisper.
Joe Fflowers has lots of experience with the power that a wedge can have when carefully placed and firmly tapped. He often has practiced that art at the family dinner table. And, certainly the rock walls around him give eloquent testimony to the power of something small, but sharp, being able to destroy something much larger than itself.
The boy touches the woman’s wrist. After a moment, she covers her light. They sit shoulder to shoulder inside their black blanket and whisper. More than an hour passes before they rise and Blesonus leads her charge back to the Kin.
At dinner that night, a meal of chewy grain and faded greens, Joe looks at the faces and torsos of the twenty-eight women seated around the table. Despite Blesonus’ revelation that everyone in the room, with the exception of himself, is female, he is having a very hard time accepting that. There are seven at the table who, if he were asked to categorize, he would have said were men. With their short hair, broad shoulders and cheeks that look like they are darkened by more than just the shadows cast by the flickering torches, what else could they be?
From the care with which the portion of salt that he saved is dispensed and the obvious enjoyment that it brings, Joe guesses that it has been awhile since salt has been on the table. As he methodically chews the half-cooked porridge until it forms a paste soft enough to swallow, Joe wonders how long this folly can endure.
It takes Joe several days to complete his plan. When the time comes, he stuffs his pockets with a map Blesonus has made for him and two lumenaids. He fills the small canvas bag she has given him with with licorice and dried cherries. He takes his pak and coat, and, just before dinner, stashes them in a shallow alcove past the entrance of the fourth turn of his escape route.
Near the end of the dinner, after he has eaten his fill and more, Joe loudly interrupts Rholealy as she tells a story to make a joke. The first time he does it, she turns her head and stares. The second time, the old woman raises two gnarled fingers, then, cuts a swath through the air. After the third interruption, those sitting along the benches began to squirm in anticipation of the reward for incurring Rholealy’s wrath. The crone motions to Joe.
“You, boy, come here.”
Joe shakes his head in dismissal as he reaches for another apple, not that much smaller nor more wizened than the face of the woman who summons him.
“Now, boy.”
Joe slowly rises, then saunters around the corner of the table. As he approaches, Rholealy takes the wisteria vine staff she uses to walk and raises it as a weapon. In a movement as fluid as lifting an opponent’s stick on the ice, Joe grabs the staff, rips it from the old woman’s hand, and flings it across the room. The sharp sucking noise of shock fills the room. When Rholealy raises her thin arm to strike him, Joe pushes it aside and forces the crone’s face down into her porridge.
The immediate outcry at this unthinkable outrage is followed by sudden and complete silence.
A dozen of the Greenlanders trade glances with one another before six women rise up to come to the aid of their leader.
Joe dismisses their efforts with a wave of his hand.
“Why protect this old witch? She’s weak.”
When Rholealy attempts to lift her head, Joe holds it down and pushes it back and forth on the plate as if it were a piece of bread mopping up gravy.
“Weak. And insane. Your poor mad queen. She’s ruined your Kin, your lair, your beliefs, your best hopes. Look.”
Joe takes Rholealy’s glass of cider and pours it on her head.
“This is whom you fear? Depose this fraud. Get yourself a real leader.”
As she and Joe have rehearsed, Blesonus jumps up from her place, hurries across the room, grabs Rholealy’s staff and runs at Joe with the stick raised high in the air, “How dare you! Leave! Now!”
Joe backs away from the threat, pushes through the door and hears the hoped-for cheers as he races down the gloomy tunnel toward his gear.
It takes Joe more than two hours to make his way to the opening which leaves him closest to the Hudson River. During those long minutes, he battles his doubts that Blesonus actually has helped him to escape rather than wander lost until he weakens and dies far beneath his world.
When he finally crawls out of the needle-eyed opening and slides around the rocks and through the brush that hide the mouth of the tunnel, Joe is overwhelmingly relieved to be free and glad to see that the night sky is as clear as it had been during the day when he and Blesonus had decided that the time was right. With clear skies and clean air, the half-moon throws enough light that Joe can keep moving. The bolt-hole he has exited is at the top of a steep grade of rough-edged rock with a scattering of spindly scrub eking out a life from the soil trapped in the clefts of the rocks. As Blesonus had explained, to conceal its presence, there is no path leading from the tunnel’s opening. Joe catches his breath as he studies the terrain before him and tries to pick a way which will lead him safely down the mountain.
To the south, the proud youth can see a sinuous break in the forest, which he assumes is the logging road Blesonus has advised he use as his escape rout
e. Even though the abandoned road is overgrown, supposedly, it will lead him to a county road, which, after eight kliks, will bring him close enough to the river that he will be able to hear it.
It is after midnight, and all the licorice and cherries have been eaten, before Joe comes to the edge of the Hudson. The kayak which he steals from under the porch of a ramshackle cabin is ancient. Cocooned in cobwebs, its cockpit filled with rotted pine needles, the green polypropylene of its surface cracked and checked like a Renaissance painting, it does not reassure Joe with its seaworthiness. But, within an hour after launching it into the Hudson, Joe is confident enough that he tightens the skirt and steers the quirky boat away from the shoreline he has been cautiously hugging. He veers toward mid-stream to catch more of the silvery current hurrying on its way south.
Long hours later, as the sun awakes with a long pale yellow yawn, Joe shouts with joy at the warmth that yellow promises. His body is violently shivering from the mist and spray which has been coming off the river and burrowing its way inside his coat. Throughout the night’s slow hours, the colder the stripling got, the more spastic his paddling became and, consequently, the more river water bounced off the skirt and onto his coat. However, even as Joe’s body grew colder, his thoughts became more feverish.
The old Joe Fflowers is gone…and he can’t be found now because his i-tag is gone, too. The old Joe is gone and this new, unnamed, boy is free. Truly free. He can go anywhere. He will need more money than what he brought from school, but there are ways to get that. Easy ways. He is alone, but not lonely. He never wants to see his family again. He is tired of being hidden and protected from the world, like a miser’s hoard, because of his family’s wealth. He is tired of being told what and how he must be. He is free…except for his looks. With all the Fflowers money, there will lots of people looking for him. He will need to do things to his face and hair so that he won’t be recognized. But, like the money, that can be easily done. He recalls the Greenlander women who he thought were men. First, he will change his looks and, after that, he will change himself. He will become someone else. Someone who makes his way in the world because of what he does and not because of who he is.
When the sky is just shy of full light, Joe falls off the current and heads toward the shoreline. Although there is almost no possibility that anyone can know where he is, he doesn’t want to take a chance that Blesonus has betrayed him or that another of the Greenlanders has signaled someone to look for him. He hugs the edge of the ever widening Hudson until he spies a rough-shingled cottage nestled in a small opening carved out of the woods. After landing, dragging the kayak out of the water, and stashing it behind a rat’s nest of debris left behind by a past flood, Joe holds to the shadows of the woods as he makes a horseshoe reconnoiter of the cabin. Not until he is certain that the cabin is uninhabited does Joe draw close and peek into the windows. A minute later, he uses a rock to break a small pane and unlock the window. Ten minutes after that Joe is asleep in a glorious cold, damp, sagging, musty smelling bed.
As Joe’s legs spark and quiver, as his arm muscles tighten from the paddles’ pull, Joe’s mind dives ever deeper into a dark, safe place.
When the escapee finally awakes, slowly and reluctantly letting go of a color-saturated image of an immense piece of cake, cake with an aroma of vanilla so intense that he can still smell it after waking, the sun is far along on its journey to the west. Joe wakes relieved, but ravenous and with arms that weigh too much to move. Finally hunger exceeds enervation. Taking his time as he rolls his shoulders and flexes his aching hands, Joe pokes through the sagging cupboards. Next to the sink, he finds chain saw oil, mosquito repellent, mouse traps, and candle stubs in a cookie tin. In a shallow cupboard meant to hold guns, back when guns were legal, he discovers jars of sesame butter and grape jelly and three vacpacs of quinoa and curry soup. Not sure of how to safely open the gas line to the stove, Joe eats the soups cold. Even cold, he thinks they taste better than anything he has eaten with the Greenlanders.
The sun still has a way to fall but the western shore already is in shadow when Joe puts the kayak back in. In the same way as he had paddled the night before, he begins with caution, but as the sky turns to slate and shale and the forest’s shadows lengthen, Joe follows their progress away from shore.
The runaway gives a hoot of satisfaction when the moon rises and he can see that it is bigger than the night before. It excites him that already he is enough of a riverman that he can recognize the day’s difference—he doubts than anyone else at Dutton could do it. He also is comforted with the knowledge that as he makes his way south and the river grows in size and strength that the moon, too, will grow with it. He begins to sing as he skims his way along—the same songs that would get mangled coming home from a hockey win. For the next few minutes Joe’s thoughts switch from wanting an audience to watch his adventure, to wanting teammates to share it, to being happy that he is the kind of man who can make his own solo way.
The runaway has been paddling for several hours when he notices that he is having trouble keeping the kayak on course. The Hudson’s ever broadening rolling surface is fractured into a million watery moonlit hills, rills and valleys. A current of warm southerly air is buffeting the prow of the kayak as the wind fights its way across the current. Twenty minutes later, clouds, looking like sideways clusters of the darkest grapes, hurtle across the sky. Joe is so busy keeping the kayak pointing south that the clouds almost reach the moon before he realizes that he is about to lose his light. That tardy insight comes when he is hundreds of meters from shore. He pulls hard to angle his way back to the western bank and safety, but that angle puts the freshening winds right on his prow.
After a minute of slow progress, Joe decides that the safer course is to paddle across the wind rather than directly into it. He digs in on his port side until the kayak points toward a bump of land far down river on the eastern shore. When Joe tries to cross through the middle of the river, he can feel the current grow stronger through the thin skin of his boat. A powerful stream of water within the river itself takes hold of the kayak and shoots it downstream. When Joe redoubles his efforts to push through the current, the kayak slips sideways. In a split second, a well of water builds up behind the kayak’s port side. Joe leans against the rising gunwale. He digs in his paddle but it is too late. The kayak rises up, hovers, and flips over. Although Joe is already cold from his hours in the river, that cold is nothing compared to what he feels when his head and torso plunge into the Hudson’s black swirling waters.
The shock tries to paralyze him, but even as he loses control, Joe starts his own rescue. Dozens of times over the years at his summer camp, he has practiced kayak rollovers and recoveries. When his head goes under, his lungs are full. He shifts his fulcrum from left to right. He knows that the secret of a recovery is not to panic and to continue the momentum of the rollover. In camp, during the day, with warm, still lake water and counselors all about, a capsize had been fun. A quick way to cool down. You are right side up, a moment later upside down and a moment after that, right side up again. All in friendly water.
Now, suddenly, the water is angry. Angry and black to blind him. Angry and cold to slow him. Angry and fast to exhaust him. And…Joe realizes as he struggles to right himself while hurtling down the massive surge of water…the water has an ally. His winter coat, which has kept him mostly warm and mostly dry, has turned into a millstone. Its bulk and sodden weight works to keep him upside down. As he twists to bring the kayak broadside to the current so that the force which flipped him over will help to right him, the coat, now like a spongy anchor, thwarts his efforts.
Joe is so caught up in his fight against coat and current that his lungs are already white hot and desperately hungry for oxygen even before he decides to open the skirt so that he can escape. His fingers fumble and fumble again until all of Joe’s attention is drawn to some unfamiliar part of his brain which is screaming at him to open his mouth.
First, yello
w spots and then oozing patches of red crowd in from the edges of his tightly closed lids. Joe’s hands let go of the paddle so that they can tear at the coat. The thought occurs to him that even though the Hudson is tormenting the kayak, it really is benign. It is the coat that wants him dead. He rips at its snaps and tears at the nelkro that is strangling him.
In his ears, a sound louder than a descending jet shrieks at Joe to breathe deep. When he fights off that command, his tormentor changes to the softest whisper. Take a breath. Just a sip. Just a sip. Just the smallest sip. In his mind, filled with a thousand jumbled images, like debris from a flood, Joe sees his coat sleeves writhing in the water like lamprey eels, like leeches, come to take his arms. In horror, he flails his arms first to evade their attack, then, pounds them in counter-attack.
Just as the eels let go, red spreads full across his eyelids like a stunning sunset. The shriek is back again. It pierces his ears and this time Joe does as he is told. He opens his mouth to take a sip…just the slightest sip.