Use Somebody

by Beck Anderson

  I smile. “Glad to see you’re an optimist. Should we get going?”

  She grabs up a pile of gear on the counter and motions to a similar pile. “You’re not a ‘learn from someone else’s mistakes’ type, are you?”

  “If anyone’s going to get pounded into the dirt, it’s going to be me. I want all of life or fate or the universe’s undivided attention.”

  “Let’s go fish and hope we can stay under destiny’s radar.”

  I can’t help it. “I’ve got it all under control. No worries.”

  She shakes her head again, but I spy a tiny upturn of the corners of her mouth. It might officially rate as a smile. It’s a good start.

  We get out to the parking lot with our gear as Kevin/Kramer pulls a truck to the curb. He hops out and hands Macy the keys.

  “Our ride for the day? We could take our rental.”

  “I’d prefer to drive. I know where we’re going. And I trust me. I don’t know if I trust you to actually get us to the correct river.”

  We load in, and I sit back. Macy tries to talk to me about actual fishing details. I listen enough to say “uh-huh” at appropriate intervals. But really I’m waiting to get to know Macy.

  She is quiet though, and we make most of the almost-hour drive to Henry’s Fork in silence or in brief bouts of conversation about what’s hatching and whether I can tell the difference between a caddisfly and a mayfly.

  We finally pull off the main road. “Are we there yet?” I try for humor.

  “Cardiac Canyon. This is a good stretch.”

  “Any reason it’s called that?”

  “If you’re running it in a boat, there are two sets of falls about eight miles downstream. That would give anybody a heart attack.”

  “Let’s not do that, then.”

  “You brought waders, right? We’re wading.”

  I nod. “Hence, the waders.”

  She crinkles her eyebrows. “Don’t say ‘hence.’ It’s not your kind of word. Please.”

  “Fine.” If this is how she’s going to play it all day, I’m not going to make much progress in the getting-to-know-Macy plan or the apologize-and-win-her-with-my-charms plan. She needs to think I’m charming for that to work.

  Maybe she can tell she’s burst my bubble. “C’mon. This is one of my favorite stretches to fish. I don’t bring everyone here. You have to pay attention, because with the water high we can’t fish all of this. Some of it will be too much.”

  “Not for you.”

  “Even for me.”

  We come to the river. It’s rocky, upstream and downstream. We seem to be in the one place where we can edge into the water without falling in. The river cuts a deep-v into the mountains surrounding us.

  “Pretty.”

  “This is pocket water. And even in the middle of the busy season, we might have this stretch to ourselves today.”

  I follow her to the river’s edge and get my waders on. I listen closely as she warns me about losing my footing, or disregarding all of her warnings and setting foot into a surprisingly deep pool. By the end of it, I don’t feel much like fishing at all.

  “Macy?”

  “Yes, Mr. King?”

  “You didn’t bring me here to drown me, did you?”

  She tilts her head to the sky and laughs, loud and long. When she’s done, she looks at me over the sunglasses on the bridge of her nose, straight-faced. “No.”

  So I’ve got that going for me.

  I work to be her star student for most of the morning. I creep slowly up on trout, I cast upstream, I even crouch down to avoid spooking the fish that I want to hook. I am a true protégé.

  We take a break at lunch, but in the shadows of the canyon, it’s clear we’ll be able to fish into the afternoon. There’s no sun bearing down, lulling the river into a warm afternoon siesta. It’s still cold and wild.

  She leads me to a bend in the river. She stands still for a minute, looks upstream and down, and I can see her stand a little taller.

  I wonder if this is a favorite spot. I try to attend to what might be attractive to her about it.

  A large rock slab with moss and ferns and trees growing out of it makes up the shore opposite us. We stand on a rare flat piece of shore, an emerald patch in a rocky quilt. Below us are rapids, and from the looks of it by my untrained eye, the rapids seem deep. They make up a short stretch of the river before it flattens and widens into shallow riffles. But here in front of us the river splits into two pools.

  She points at the pool closest to us. “This one you can fish without even wading. If you cast upstream from the big boulder, you can keep most of your body hidden from the fish and still get a lot of good casts into the water.”

  I point to the other pool. “What about that pool? You’d have to wade halfway into the river to get to it.”

  She pulls off her ball cap for a minute. “But if I edge downstream, see how the bottom isn’t too deep? I can get over there without getting in over my knees.”

  I don’t like it. The river is so high, it roars. We actually have to raise our voices over the tumbling water. “You’ve fished this before. Have you fished it when the flows were this high?”

  “Hundreds, heck, even thousands of times, probably.”

  “You sure it’s a good idea?”

  “It’s a great idea.”

  “It’s your favorite spot.”

  She blushes. “Maybe.”

  “Well, let’s do it, then. Lame-ass Mr. King the newbie will fish the easy side. Am I allowed to put a toe in or will I ruin the whole river for you?”

  “Swear jar.” She smiles. “No, you can wade upstream after you’ve worked the pool from the rock. It’s allowed. Just keep your eyes open.”

  I wave her off. “I know, I know. I heard the ‘scared safe’ river lecture.”

  I think it’s probably a half hour, maybe forty-five minutes, when I give up on casting from the rock and edge upstream in my waders. It takes a while to get used to navigating the current in them. My legs feel bulky and slow.

  Macy’s in heaven. I’d call it hog heaven, but maybe there’s some fishy term for it. Fly heaven? She makes big, beautiful loops of her line, and she lays it out across the other pool.

  I stop and watch her.

  She hooks one. The line bends, hard.

  “It’s a big one!” She turns and looks at me over her shoulder, and I can see what Macy must have looked like when she was little. The grin on her face is sheer innocence, pure joy. I wonder who taught her to fish. Where is that person now?

  I give her a thumbs up and watch.

  She’s not kidding—the fish must be massive. The rod bows, almost a C, pulled by the fish she’s hooked.

  Maybe because she looked over her shoulder at me, maybe because it’s a bigger fish than normal, but Macy loses her footing for a minute and has to step forward into the pool.

  It’s one step, but where she was in to her ankles, she’s now in the water up to her thighs. And it rages around her, piling up in angry white eddies and waves around her legs. She tries to edge backwards, but she’s just wading farther into the rapids.

  “Macy! You okay?” I turn and start to make my way toward her, pull my line from the water and snap the hook on one of the guides on the rod.

  She works her rod, but she’s still struggling against the current and the strong fish, and she’s in motion. Her feet aren’t planted. I don’t like it.

  She’s stubborn, damn it, and she still thinks she can land the fish. I can see her look down, in the water around her feet, looking for that footing that will help her get some leverage against the fish pulling so desperately in the other direction.

  “Macy! The current’s too strong! Just cut the line and let him run!”

  She doesn’t even look up. The water is too loud. I start to wade closer, and I notice that my heart pounds. Sweat chills on the back of my neck.

  I don’t know very much about rivers, or fishing, but I know people. I can read fac
es, and what I see, in the next split second on Macy Shea Summerlin’s face, is the knowledge that she’s gotten herself into trouble she can’t get out of. Fear. Fear is in her eyes and finally, finally, she looks up, across the rushing river to where I am, waist deep in my fucking awkward-as-hell waders.

  She needs help. She looks right at me as she lets go of the rod completely, off balance, and is knocked over by the current.

  She’s little, she’s barely over five foot, and the river’s too strong for her right here.

  There’s no way in hell, if she wasn’t fishing with me, would she have taken that chance, put herself in a position where she was going to swim.

  Her waders will fill in a moment, drag her to the bottom with the current, and drown her.

  I push down current, let the river carry me a bit, and I can see the shallows coming up on my left. If I can get to her quickly enough, I’ll be able to drag her to shin-deep water myself.

  Her blonde head submerges fully now, and I’m three big strides away from her.

  “Macy! Macy!” I scream, hoarse with panic.

  Her hand comes up, fighting and clawing to find a hold, a way to pull herself up out of the current.

  I throw my hands deep in the water, just below the spot where I last saw her hand, stick a foot out, hoping to block her progress downriver.

  My knee bends backward, pushed and hyperextended by a body.

  Macy.

  I grab and pull hard, and the force of the current fights me for her. My hands are numb, the ice of the water biting at them. I use my elbows and hook her under her armpits and pull up as hard as I can muster.

  Finally, she comes loose, her body up out of the water, the current unable to trap her anymore.

  “Macy!” I pull her into my arms, hold her out of the water as I try to figure my path out of the river.

  She doesn’t move, limp. I can’t do anything for her here, in the middle of the river. I have to get to shore.

  Five steps down river, the river shallows out and the bottom silts up, the slippery jagged river rocks giving way to firm pebble and sand.

  I push hard, aware that my waders have taken on a lot of water. Macy’s body feels cold and still.

  The bottom changes, and I am only knee-deep now. I look up and down the river bank. There’s got to be someone that can help us. I start yelling again, yelling for help this time.

  No one. The storm clouds overhead have opened up, and now the rains come down.

  At last I get her to shore and throw her up on the grassy bank. I scramble up next to her and get a straight look at her face. Her lips are blue, and I can see slivers of white between both pairs of eyelids. No pupils.

  She looks dead.

  I sit her up and give her five hard, rib-breaking back thrusts. Then I lay her gently back down and sweep two fingers to the back of her throat, clearing her tongue and anything else out of the way.

  I give two rescue breaths and start chest compressions.

  “Macy! Macy!” All I can do is scream her name while I count in my head, and one, and two, and three, as I press down with the knot I’ve made from my two fists.

  It’s probably forty seconds. It feels like an eternity. But suddenly, she gags, hard, and contracts into a ball, rolling on her side in the fetal position. She coughs, vomits up water, and cries, sobs, and I feel tears of relief streaming from my eyes. I strip off my coat, frantically searching the pockets for my phone.

  “Macy, Macy.” I lift her into my arms, looking for her eyes on mine.

  “I’m here.” She shakes in my arms, violently shuddering.

  “I can’t get reception here. I’ll drive us. Are you all right?”

  She can only nod. I run with her in my arms to the truck. Her body still wracked with cold and adrenaline, I can hear her teeth clacking together in between her coughs and sobs.

  I get us into the cab and start the truck with her on my lap. I turn the heat on high and turn up the seat warmers. I strip off my wet shirt and wrap my arm around her, rubbing her back briskly with one hand. The feeling’s finally coming back into my fingers.

  “Macy, breathe for me. We’ve got to get you warm. You need to breathe.” I pull her so close to me, hoping to still the shudders of her body.

  Her tiny blonde head, and the way her arms are folded up in mine, I have a vision of her as a bird, feathers wet, unable to fly, tremble-fragile and terribly vulnerable.

  I hold her on my lap as I drive back to civilization, terrified. I have no idea what to do beyond getting her breathing and warming her up. What comes next is beyond me. And I don’t know where help is. The only place I know is the lodge, so I drive in that direction.

  I don’t know how long it takes. I speed the whole way, as fast as the turns of the highway will let me. The cabin of the truck is sweltering to me when she finally stills, curled tightly against my chest.

  “Macy?” I stroke her curls, not sure how responsive she is. I’ve yet to get any signal on my phone. The highway all looks the same to me, scrub and sage and a river on one side of us.

  “I’m here.”

  “That’s the second time you’ve said that. You have to tell me—where’s the fire station? The EMTs? You have to have a rural district around here somewhere with paramedics. Please think.”

  “I don’t need—I just need to get warm.”

  “You drowned. You were blue.”

  “I’m here.” She moves her arms, wraps them around my torso, presses her hands against my back, wraps herself more closely against me. Her face turns, and I can feel her cold cheek against my chest.

  “This is bullshit. Bullshit.” I have no options here. I drive to the lodge.

  When I get to the lodge, I carry her up the steps at a full run. “Andy! Get your phone! Andy!”

  The rain’s stopped finally, in the deepening dusk, and the doorway is a gold rectangle when he opens it. “What the hell’s going on?” He pulls me inside, and I start barking orders.

  “Get Tucker. He’s trained. He needs to look at her. We need to call for an ambulance.”

  “Don’t.” Macy speaks, weakly, as I try to pull all of her sopping layers off of her. The thermal shirt she wears is still ice cold, despite the full-blast heat of the truck.

  Tucker is above me. “What happened?”

  “What’s hypothermia look like? She wasn’t breathing when I pulled her out. On my count it was two sets of rescue breaths and maybe thirty chest compressions before she started breathing.”

  Todd stands behind Andy. “I didn’t think you were supposed to do rescue breathing anymore. Was he supposed to do that?”

  “You really, really need to shut up, Todd.” I would punch him in the mouth if he were closer.

  Andy speaks up. “There’s a cardiologist staying in the main lodge. Todd and I’ll go get him. Tucker, does she need an ambulance?”

  He stands tall over me and Macy. “I can’t tell. I’d feel better if the doctor looked her over. Her vitals are okay. The pulse’s a little thready for my taste.”

  “She’s still so cold. What about hypothermia?”

  “Just get me warm, for Jesus’ sake.” Macy croaks.

  I look down at her. Her face is still too grey. “You don’t speak. Your bullshit tough girl act almost got you drowned over a fucking fish. No talking.”

  She smiles. A tiny, tiny smile. “I’m grounded?”

  I feel better. She’s giving me attitude, she can’t be too close to death’s door, right? “Yes, you’re definitely grounded. Don’t talk.”

  I drive her back to her apartment. She lets me pull her close, keep her held next to me with one arm. Every so often her whole body shudders, and I hear her teeth clack together violently. I look down each time, and she smiles faintly. I see her shoulders square as she wills herself to stop trembling.

  “I wish you would’ve just stayed. I could’ve put a cot in front of the fire. You need to stay warm.”

  She shakes her head. “It’s June. I’m fine. I�
��ll be fine.”

  We pull into her parking lot, and I help her into her apartment.

  “Thanks for the ride.” She stands in the middle of her living room, waiting for me to leave.

  “I’m not leaving yet. I’m going to wait while you take a hot shower, and then once you’re settled, I’ll go.”

  She frowns. “Since when are you the boss?”

  “Since you almost died. You’re grounded, remember? Stubbornness has its consequences.”

  She sighs. “Fine.”

  She drifts into the bathroom, and I hear the light click on. I stand close, in the hallway, listening to make sure everything’s fine. She’s right—since when did I get so bossy? Protective, actually. When did this girl make me want to protect her? I feel the weight of that on my shoulders as I remember the weight of her body, cold in the water.

  “Jesus.” In the bathroom, she sucks air in through her teeth.

  I take two long strides and push the door open. “Macy? What is it?”

  The fluorescent light flickers a little. She stands in front of the bathroom counter in sweats and a bra.

  “Geez.” She raises her left arm.

  “Damn.” I look where she’s now gingerly poking with the tip of one small finger.

  Her whole side, from armpit to waist, is black, blue, purplish-red. Bruised like a side of meat.

  “Dang. No wonder it hurts so bad to take a breath.”

  I turn on my heels. “Put your shirt back on. We’re going to the hospital, like I said we should from the start.”

  “What hospital? I don’t want to drive to Idaho Falls. All the doc in the boxes are closed. There’s nothing, Mr. Bossy Pants. Nowhere to go.” She pulls the shirt back on.

  “Fine. Are you going to shower then?”

  She comes close to me. “You know what? Will you help me get settled, like you promised?”

  “Sure.”

  She leads the way down the hall, calls to the dogs. “I usually kennel them up, but I like the idea of them sleeping at the bottom of the bed tonight.”