There was a bodyjam outside of Sioux Falls. We’d just come over a rise, and there it was, a million bodies all clumped together, blocking the whole sea. We had to turn around, head south for a bit, but not into Nebraska, he’d said—never into Nebraska. There are a thousand waterspouts there, spinning up to the sky all the time. Waterspout alley was what he calls it. Everyone knew that. It was the talk of the Sea Queen Marie. Waterspout alley, from Nebraska all the way down to Oklahoma, rushing water and waterspouts all the time. Nobody survives that way anymore.
He lifted his finger out of the water though, and he just scowled at me. But now that I’m sitting here, and we actually made it to the Bighorns, I don’t think he was scowling at me because I said he was wrong. It was the turn of fate. We didn’t need any ice. We had enough other things to deal with. But there it was, and here it is. If we fall in now, we die. It’s that simple. There are no more life vests. Just the crack in the canoe, and the mounds of rock that spring out of the canvas. At least it’s daytime.
We finally decide to start moving again, before Russell even has the sleep he needs. I stare at his face, the long shaggy, brown mane, the emaciated, sunken eyes that when he’d been just a little bit plump were pretty and mesmerizing, even attractive. I try not to think about the fact that I’m attracted to him—that I was. Now, it’s hard to be. But every once in awhile, when he’s asleep like this, I can still feel that way. Like I want to cuddle against him like I normally do, but find something more there. Of course I could never say anything to him. He could be my Dad, he says. It’s clear he’s not interested in me. And those kinds of thoughts are artifacts anyway, part of the veneer. It’s been eroding. Despite the fact that we’re still going, that he still has hope we’ll make it across the water, all the way down through Wyoming, past Denver, and to Leadville, and find the city above the waterline, I can’t help but acknowledge that it’s all part of the veneer. That’s Russell’s source of strength, it seems. The veneer. He talks about it like it’s an artificial piece of shit, and like we’re animals, and that everything is random, and we’re fucked and all—but at the same time he still makes the veneer sound like something romantic. Like it amounts to humanity, and all that we are, and that if we can get to Leadville, we can be a part of it again.
The way he talks about it sometimes, I don’t know why he wants to keep it going so bad. The veneer is stripped away when nature takes over, he says. It’s really like a thin surface we’ve built up over millions of years on top of our primitive minds. And the rain has washed it down to nothing. Yet we move on, and he keeps worrying about me.
It’s not that I don’t think I’m attractive either. I’ve had a lot of offers for sex, and the food that goes along with giving it out. But Russell hasn’t let me do it. At first I never wanted to anyway, from everything he told me. Sex is part of the veneer. A layer that’s gone. Meaningless now.
But part of me wanted it, to at least try it. I felt ashamed about it after awhile, when I got into an argument with him that we needed the food, and that we could get medicine for it this time. The offer had come from a young man in Rapid City who didn’t look deranged, or creepy like all the others. I had wanted it so bad. But Russell said no. And since then, I haven’t bothered to think much about it.
I’ve seen him watching me while I sleep. The first time it happened I started up, bolted away, and he had to calm me down. It wasn’t that I was scared of him—it was that I thought he was a bandit. Every other time when he watches me sleep, and I notice, I pretend like I don’t. I let him keep on looking.
It’s now, when I’m looking at him, I realize that, even with the ghostly face, he’s still as attractive as ever to me. It’s as I wonder how he could never have wanted me when I’m lying asleep and he’s watching me that I see the face eaters.
There are two of them. Then three. They stand up atop a ridge about two hundred feet from us. They’re moving fast. I know right away they want us. They really do want to eat us. The veneer is all gone in them. I move over to Russell and shake him. He’s usually quick to respond, knowing we have to be on our guard, but the trip from Rapid City has worn him down. He’s no longer himself. He slowly opens his eyes, slowly recognizes what I say, as if the altitude has gotten to him. But he’d said we wouldn’t get altitude sickness, we are acclimatized. It doesn’t seem that way with how slow he stands up. I look back to the face eaters. They’re running now.
“They don’t have a boat,” says Russell finally.
He’s right. They’re charging, but we’re right at the water, and our canoe is right here.
“They should have waited till dark,” he says. He goes down to the water line. I stay up behind a boulder watching, keeping an eye on things while he unties the rope. The nylon rope is about as precious as our hardtack. If we lose that, we lose the canoe. He takes his time. He has to. I break down the tent in less than a minute and fling it in. The runners get a little bit closer. I think I see them squinting. They’re running west, right into the smear behind the clouds that is the sun. There is a lot of daytime left, but Wyoming’s sky is huge, and things in it change too fast for me to be sure.
I see one grinning. He looks mad, like if he doesn’t get us he’ll turn on his friends and start eating them right away. The others just look sickly. Like Russell’s starting to look. They trip a few times, but keep coming. Only about fifty feet away now and Russell calls my name. I turn around, and he’s waving me down. I run to the edge, watching my step, eyes glued to the trash bags taped around my sneakers. It’s easy to slip on the rocks with these plastic shoes, and it’s even easier because the mud’s flowing. As I hear grunting, I descend a bit faster, and too fast, and start to slide. Somehow, Russell jumps out of the boat, steadies me, and guides me the rest of the way to the canoe. I don’t know how he risked it, because the canoe could have pushed off without us. But he did. I fall back into the canoe and it rolls heavily to one side. Immediately, I start bailing.
When you’re not rowing, you’re bailing. When the rain’s on medium, you can take a break once in awhile, unless there are waves. When it’s on high, you can’t. A week in it and we’ll die, it’s just that Russell doesn’t see it that way yet. I dump the water over the side using one of the bright orange buckets we picked up in Rapid City. Its color is the only life here. The four inches of rain on the bottom of the canoe start to go down. I look up. Russell is heaving, worse than usual, thrusting the oars into the water, pushing us away from land. Gaunt faces stare at us, and one looks as if he’s ready to jump into the water after us.
I’m about to say something to Russell to make him laugh, because these depraved face eaters have become so common now that there is a delirium that starts each time you escape from them. But before I can speak the mania-ridden comes in. He goes wading in to his knees, then just dives forward, dropping his head into the frigid water. I see his soaked head pop back up about ten feet away, and he moves deeper into the brown to get us. I look around to see where we might find refuge. Another one of Hesse’s heads is poking up a couple hundred feet away. We can make it there in ten minutes. But this guy just struggles into the ocean of rain. The others, desperate but not insane yet, watch with him hope, as if they expect him to reach us.
He starts to swim in a direct line toward us. Russell doesn’t even look back—he just keeps pumping, and his breaths sound horrible. I think he’s worse than he’s been telling me. I wonder if he really is getting the infection again. Rain splashes in little fountains on the back of the man’s head when it protrudes from the brown, and he raises his arms to stroke. Then another stroke. He is trying very hard to catch up to us, and he’s moving fast enough that I say something to Russell.
He’s coming.
Usually, saying something just works in reverse, and slows Russell down, so I let him work silently most of the time when we’re running for our lives. But I’ve never seen anyone this possessed. He plows through the canvas at about half our speed, making tiny swells. I realiz
e that in just a couple more strokes, he’ll have come too far out to make it back.
When the first gasp comes, Russell finally turns his neck to look back. He only gives the man one second of his time though, just enough to recognize that he’s drowning, and then he returns to the oars. He rows, pushing us along through the water, no faster and no slower. The hope in the faces of the man’s friends, back on the rocky shore, looks like it’s fading now. I can’t be sure, but I think I see one of them close his eyes. The gasps get louder, and I can’t take my eyes away from the drowning one. The maniac strength is gone now, but his head is still above water. He’s realized how far he went, and how cold it is. He knows it’s the end. His eyes look wild, and he stares at me. I hear him whimper, and wonder if he’s crying, but the sound isn’t coming out right because of all the water he’s spitting up. Maybe he’s thinking about the mistake he made, and how it will be the last thing he knows in the world.
I watch the head go under for the first time, and he makes a turn, like he’s going to try to make it back to the island. But he can’t, he doesn’t even move that way. He just sort of jerks and rotates, his body frenzied and writhing, clawing at the sky, like a magical ledge might materialize to keep him alive a little while longer, maybe even save him.
Then his head goes under again, and we’re almost thirty feet away. I stopped thinking about saving people a long time ago, after the Sea Queen Marie went down, and I don’t even beckon Russell’s attention. I know if I do, he won’t look anyway. But still, even though I’m cold, ruthless, conditioned now to feel nothing, except the need to keep Russell and me alive, I shudder when I hear the man yelp, a cry that’s crystal clear. He says, “Help me!”
I listen to the plea no one cares about, and watch the head go under for the third, and then fourth and final time. He swallowed a big gulp of water that time, I could tell. Aboard the Sea Queen Marie, Cap’n had told us all one night, after a long festival of plays and songs, with a roaring fire to dismiss the notions that we were living in a hell, what drowning is like. He said you don’t actually breathe in water most of the time. I had a hard time believing that, but some of the others had seconded the fact. He said you try to breathe, and that your throat closes shut, because it’s a reflex, the body’s last desperate attempt to save itself. Then, you suffocate. It might even be pleasant, Cap’n said. When the brain stops receiving oxygen, it’s only be a minute until lights out.
The man’s flailing body doesn’t seem pleasant to me. But then, right at the end, it kind of does, as he gently slides underneath the brown. The wet forms on the shore start walking back the way they came, almost sad, maybe not because they lost their friend but because they lost a perfectly good two day’s sustenance. Either way, Russell finally speaks.
“They’re getting the boat,” he says. I already know that. I want to mock him, remind him he was wrong about them being drowned, mainly because I’m mad at how much he’s heaving. He never used to struggle so much to row. Now, it’s as if he’s faking it, pretending like he has no strength. But it’s real. And I can’t deal with that, so I mock him anyway.
“Told you they were alive,” I say.
But he doesn’t look up like normal. No flash of his handsome smile. He keeps his head down, like he’s really concentrating. And he keeps on grunting. I don’t know if he’s thinking about me worrying that he’s not doing so good, and that I might ask to take over rowing, so all he says is “Bail.” He’s tired. His voice is gruff.
I start to bail, and watch the permanent gray overhead. It’s medium gray, which means medium rain. The sunset, really just a smear of brighter gray, golden in one long band, doesn’t cheer me up like it usually does. I worry about the week on the water, but even more, I worry about tonight, and how we’re going to fend off the second attack if they come back and find us. Looking south, in the direction we’re heading, I don’t see any more islands past this one we’re going to. Just open brown, and rain, and gray forever, all the way to the Rocky Mountains, that I’m told exist somewhere that way. If we have to shove off again, there’s no going back. I take away the horizon, the view of the future, and clear everything out in favor of the bright neon bucket, and I bail.
Chapter 2
I watch the mountain we’re leaving behind recede. It’s dirty, a mound of muddy rock, a lot like my clothes. I haven’t had a change of clothes in three weeks. Russell thinks that we might get sick a lot faster if we don’t find new clothes soon. I really don’t give a shit, because right now Russell seems like he can’t even row. He slumps down, then picks the oars back up, pushes them again into the water, digging, but it’s like he doesn’t find anything there to push against.
I ask if he’s okay, and he nods, but we’re not moving anymore. The blear of the sun is still high, so I’m not afraid of stalling out on the water in the dark. That happened a few times. Every time it’s happened so far there haven’t been any waves. It wasn’t too bad. But I realize now that I’m going to have to take over the rowing. And I don’t know if he’ll be able to bail.
“Take the antibiotics,” I say, and I take the oars from him without any protesting, pushing his body off of the rowing seat, sitting in it myself. Two inches of water sloshes around at my feet as I move. The ice is gone. Maybe I imagined it. He moves to my seat and lies down.
“Russell, bail,” I say. He still doesn’t respond. I look ahead to the mountain top we’re heading for. It’s a mix of stone and slush, one of the lowest lying strips I’ve seen in the Bighorns. Sometimes I can’t tell if we’re in a lake, or if we’re in the real water—the everlasting stretch. But I’ve never had to deal with the rain alone. And he looks like he’s about to die on me.
“Bail, bail,” I say. I press into the water with the oars, feel the familiar ache in my back and my legs. The water cooperates and the canoe starts to move again. We’re gliding to the last edge of the mountain range. Beyond this, there’s nothing. And I know I can’t make it over 500 miles south alone.
On my head I’m wearing a plastic tarp, taped around my shoulders to keep it in place. The rain slides off, funneling right into the canoe. I can’t even keep my eyes on the island ahead because I’m too worried about the rising water at my feet. I don’t know how high it would have to get to sink. But with each stroke, the canoe is feeling more sluggish, like its struggling to move.
“Russell!” I yell. I only hear the rain in response. Everywhere are a million tiny fountains splashing freezing cold water. The key to life. The thing that wants us dead.
When I first met Russell, and he was plump, jolly, and altogether unconcerned with the bleak world that surrounded us, he used to talk about God a lot. He said he was quite a religious man once. He believed in the spiritual power of a connection with God. He used to tell me I should pray, and sometimes I pretended to for him. I could never help but feel like I was talking to nothing, the rain maybe.
Some people said that Poseidon was the only god now, and that he had killed all the other gods. Russell explained that they meant the ancient god of the sea, the one that had caused all this to happen. But it wasn’t Poseidon, he’d assured me. It was just the sun.
The numbers he always talks about, 15 inches a day, 5,400 a year, stopped being accurate a long time ago. He confesses this once in a while, and declares that we really know nothing about the real depth of the rain sea now. He says he can’t be sure that what we’re looking at is really the sea at all—maybe it’s just like this east of the Sierra Nevada mountains, he says once in a while. The Pacific hasn’t connected yet. Just a Great Lake. I don’t really care one way or the other. I just want something warm, and something dry. The Sea Queen Marie had been those things for such a long time, and then after that, Sioux Falls and Rapid City. But when we left Rapid City, I sort of knew we would never be dry and warm again.
The gray clouds cover the sky night and day, and I can tell its past noon because the smear of the sun, visible on a good day, is starting to fall again. It’s telling wh
ich way is west, and we can tell from that which way is south. As long as a gale doesn’t blow up, Russell started saying three days ago, a new mantra.
The crack on the side of the canoe looks a little bigger, as if its widening somehow, even though we haven’t hit anything. The water is growing higher in the boat. I think about the timing. Russell says the timing of things is everything. Because it won’t be winter for another month, we can make the trip to Leadville in time. But I’ve already seen ice crystals. No snow though. That’s a good sign, he says.
I dig the oars in again, and watch the last island grow bigger as we approach it. Russell is useless now. I hear him breathing really loud, like he can’t catch his breath. He coughs a little bit. I’ve been ignoring his cough for the last few days, because I know he won’t take the antibiotics. I’m thinking about forcing them in when he’s asleep. I don’t want the cough to mean what I’ve seen it mean for everyone else—the long fever, the sweating when it’s cold, the in-between period when life and death separate and leave a pale, rolling eye nightmare that trembles through the whole body.
I know we can make it now. The muddy rise is showing itself, the place where I’m going to attempt to land the boat. I’ll need a rocky bank, something to throw the nylon around. This last island looks all mud, like it’s ready to wash into the brown canvas, slowly pushed down by the endless drops.
On the Sea Queen Marie, Cap’n said that the climate has changed too. It isn’t as cold anymore. There is less shielding or something, and despite the constant clouds, the sun is getting through in a worse way than ever before. I’d seen some of the boils on the passengers, the ones who said they’d come up and east from the top of Texas, Amarillo I think. They had come through The Great Plains nine years before getting to Marie, through part of waterspout alley. By now it’s a raging crush of water there, they had warned. Russell took it to heart. We have to avoid the Plains at all costs he said after that, and has continued to say ever since. But the Bighorns are on the edge of the Plains, and I know it. Really close. We can’t drift too far east when we push out for Leadville. We’ll be swept in.
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