The River Wild

by Denis O'Neill

  Tom sunk down beside the tree trunk, picked up a lance he had fashioned from a branch, and took a few more strokes with his pocket knife on the point of the weapon. The branch was green and strong. Where he had carved away the bark to form the point, the wood gleamed white. Tom set the lance atop the rock. He lifted a club he had cut from a tree stump and tested its heft, two handed. It was like an Irish shillelagh, except the head was the size of a grapefruit, not a baseball. Tom took a swing with the club. It felt strong, potentially lethal. He placed the club on the rock beside the spear. Then he climbed up onto the rock and hoisted the stump in two hands. He backed up a step to put more tension on the rope. He peered upriver through the canopy of cottonwood leaves and river’s edge brush. He waited.

  ** ** **

  On board the raft, Gail took stock of everyone’s positioning. She back-oared slowly, to gain time as she glanced around for potential weapons or booby traps she could fashion to aid Tom’s ambush—whenever, and from wherever it would come. The oars, she knew, she could wield as needed. An actual lethal weapon—her hatchet—was a lunge away, visible in the mesh net of her backpack at Deke’s feet in the bow. The anchor line was scattered at her feet. She looked back and glimpsed the anchor itself—a ten-pound pyramid of lead, jam-cleated in place, dangling off the stern. She smiled at Roarke, seated side by side with Terry. Knowing any attack would come from shore, she discretely eyed the angled limb of the giant cottonwood and adjusted their course so the raft would float beneath it. In the bow, Deke removed the .22 from the plastic trash liner he had wrapped it in. He opened the chamber and slid in six bullets. He nonchalantly glanced at Gail. He closed the chamber, rewrapped the revolver in the trash liner, and shoved it in his belt above his butt. Then he sat upright, closed his eyes, and let the sun warm him.

  Tom glimpsed the raft through the thicket of cottonwood leaves and branches and watched it to gauge its speed. He counted silently in his head. When the nose of the raft edged into view, just upriver of the overhanging limb, Tom drew a breath, took in Deke’s head above the log he held, led him just a little given the current, and released the log. It swung out from the shadows of the bank and slammed into Deke’s shoulder and head, knocking him out of the raft.

  Terry watched it unfold before him. Almost in slow motion, he leaped to his feet. Gail was ready with the oars. She back-paddled with one and fore-paddled with the other—jerking the raft—knocking Terry, ass over tea kettle, off his feet. Gail snatched the loose end of anchor line and took two quick wraps around Terry’s flailing ankles. She secured the loops with a half hitch, then jerked the line out of the jam-clete, releasing the anchor. Under the cottonwood boughs, Tom tossed the shillelagh onto the beach. He uncinched the second rope and stuck the knot between his legs. He grabbed the lance in his right hand, and held the rope with his left. He gauged the speed of the raft once more, then stepped off the rock. The tree limb groaned with his weight. Tom held the lance in his right hand, like a medieval jouster. The shaft of the weapon was wedged between his arm and body. Tom sailed through the air.

  Terry staggered to his feet just as the anchor hit bottom and took hold. Propelled by the current, the raft continued its forward motion until the slack in the anchor line ran out, stopping the raft abruptly, jerking Terry off his feet once more. The raft’s altered trajectory threw Tom’s targeting out of sync. Instead of an intended deadly collision with Terry, he landed clumsily in the now stationary bow of the raft, crashing into Gail, who was fumbling for her hatchet. Roarke yelped involuntarily when he saw his father, his face splashed with joy. “Dad!” Tom got to his feet first and raised his spear, two handed overhead. Wild eyed, he lunged at Terry, who partially evaded the blow as he scrambled onto the side of the raft. The crude lance pierced his upper torso and emerged just under his right shoulder blade. He thrashed wildly to get out of the raft, but his lassooed foot was held tight by the rope and the jam-cleat. Gail cleved the rope with one swing of the hatchet, sending a skewered Terry overboard.

  Roarke, facing downstream, saw Deke surface and begin to dog paddle groggily for shore. “Deke’s getting away,” the boy hollered, pointing.

  “What about Terry?” Tom asked Gail.

  “He can’t swim,” she said.

  Tom vaulted over the bow of the raft and splashed toward his shillelagh on the bank. He was a man possessed. He grabbed the weapon and turned to finish off Deke, who was nearing the bank. The log had opened a gash over his left temple. Blood streamed down his face.

  Terry, in deeper water and screaming in agony, turned over and over—thrashing grotesquely. First one end of the lance poked the surface, then the other. Then he was still. The body slipped below the green, even current. There was a slight rippling—reflecting one last twitch or reflex below the surface—then the water was still. Only Terry’s blood was visible, floating downstream in an ever-expanding red stain. Gail leaped back into her rower’s seat and stroked for all she was worth to help Tom.

  Gagging and gasping, the nonswimming Deke finally touched bottom and struggled for dry land. Ten yards away Tom hobbled toward him. Maggie joined the fray, barking like crazy from the bank, frantically scrambling upstream and down, unsure where to be or go.

  “Mom, it’s Mags!” Roarke screeched in a voice as shrill as it was joyful.

  Deke, in chest-deep water, fumbled for his .22 stuck in his belt. Tom, frantic to reach him before he could reach the gun, splashed toward the fugitive, alternately staggering, sinking to his knees, regaining his footing on the uneven bottom. Deke finally unwrapped the revolver and swung it on Tom. Tom froze, a body-length away, gripping the shillelagh in both hands. He fought to catch his breath, to quell his disappointment. Deke held the gun upright, then twisted it sideways, gangster-style. He smiled malevolently—in control once more. He and Tom just stared at each other for the longest moment. Deke was visibly baffled—imagining himself to be looking at a ghost.

  “Goddamnit, Tom. Do I gotta kill you again?”

  Gail took one last mighty stroke, propelling the raft faster than the current, closing the distance between her and Deke. She shipped her oars and picked up the hatchet. Deke cocked the gun and sighted Tom at the end of the short barrel.

  “You gotta stay dead this time,” he said. His finger closed on the trigger.

  Gail—channeling Ma Morgan—reared back and let the hatchet fly. Hatchet throwing wasn’t on her list of outdoor skills, but the distance was short and the goal was more diversionary than deadly. The hatchet spun through the air… handle over blade and thudded into Deke’s rib cage. It didn’t stick, but its impact was enough to knock him off balance. He staggered awkwardly, lowering both arms into the water to help him regain his footing. He didn’t see Tom bring the shillelagh down on his head, knocking him out cold. Tom stood over the bobbing body, his club raised in case another blow was needed. There was a look in his eye as fierce as the River Wild.

  “You want a piece of me?” he rasped through swollen lips. Tom swayed unsteadily, momentarily losing his footing. He lowered his face closer to Deke. “I can’t hear you,” he whispered. “You want a piece of me?!” He closed his eyes; he was about to pass out. He straightened up and took a deep breath. He began to drag Deke ashore by his hair.

  Maggie, looking down from the bank, suddenly stopped wagging a happy tail. Her fur stood on end. She lowered her head and growled at Tom. Her lips were curled, her fangs bared. “It’s okay, Mag, it’s me,” Tom said, soothingly.

  Maggie snarled in an evil, foreboding way, as if she were rabid. Her growls grew louder and louder as Tom approached the bank. Terry surged out of the river behind Tom, holding a rock over his head. The lance stuck out of him, front and back; blood flowed freely from both wounds. His face was grotesquely twisted.

  Gail screamed from the raft, “Tom … behind you! ”

  Tom released Deke and whirled. As Terry started to bring the rock down, a shot echoed across the water. A bullet slammed into Terry’s chest, staggering the big man. He
held the rock in both hands, but his eyes were glazed with surprise. He looked past Tom, toward the riverbank. Detective Lieutenant Bobby Long, gripping the saddle of his horse Marlene with his knees, cranked the lever action on his Winchester and fired again. The second round shattered Terry’s forearm, driving him backwards, forcing him to drop the rock. The lieutenant cranked the lever once more. He urged his horse forward with his knees. Marlene slow-stepped to the edge of the river. Long trained his rifle on Terry in case another shot was needed. Terry lurched like a drunk, trying to find his footing on the uneven river bottom. He peered at the state trooper with the most quizzical expression. How did it come to this? Then he keeled over.

  30

  The ear-piercing rhaaaaaannnnnng of a chainsaw could be heard all the way down to the water’s edge. In this case, it was a welcome intrusion. Trooper Heston steadied the saw through the last slice of the toppled pine blocking the logging road. With the help of a dozen other state troopers the obstruction was cleared. It’s fair to say there were more vehicles backed up on that logging road than had been on it in the past five years: ten Montana State Police vehicles, two wilderness Search and Rescue Emergency vehicles, the local coroner, two pool press vehicles, and three local TV vehicles from station outlets in Great Falls and Helena.

  ** ** **

  Within an hour, the logging road—where it dead-ended at the river’s edge—looked like a makeshift takeout location, with vehicles parked everywhere. Marlene had been returned to her trailer. Trooper Noel watched Terry’s stretcher get loaded into one ambulance. Deke was next. An oxygen mask covered his face. His wrists were handcuffed to a stretcher carried by four troopers. Lieutenant Long stopped the men before they slid the prisoner into the back of a second ambulance. He leaned over Deke and just looked at him for the longest time. Then he pulled a laminated card out of his shirt pocket and looked deliberately at the copy. If he had been a religious man, he might have sensed an exorcism of demons, fleeing his body. When he finally spoke, he said to Deke, “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you.”

  ** ** **

  Gail spread out the lieutenant’s map of the river on the hood of a trooper’s cruiser. Lieutenant Long, Sergeant Noel, and Ranger Thompson Littlebuck leaned in. Gail pointed out the Ten Mile Campsite where they were supposed to meet Jim and Peter and had encountered Deke and Terry instead. It was ten miles below the put-in at Hot Springs. “We were going to meet there because it was an easy float for Jim and Peter and a fishy place to stop. The plan was they’d spend a day getting there, then have a whole day to wade fish, waiting for us. I didn’t give it too much thought when Deke and Terry told us the story about Jim cutting himself and the two of them deciding to row out. It just seemed like bad luck. The raft and the camp gear were rented, so it wasn’t as if Deke and Terry had pretended the gear was their own gear. Mostly, I was just worried for our friends. I have to say Tom was suspicious from the start.” A sudden sadness welled up within her. “I had been telling them for years how special this river was…. This was the first time we were able to put the trip together.”

  The lieutenant put a comforting hand on her shoulder. “They’re not dead until we find the bodies. Maybe they just knocked them out and tied them up.”

  Gail looked haunted. “Deke showed us Jim’s credit card after they took us hostage … said it was a terrible thing to expire before your credit card.”

  “You have to remember Deke’s a pathological liar. Is there an easy way into that campsite by land?” the lieutenant asked Littlebuck.

  “It’s pretty rugged. I think jet boating in from Hot Springs would get you there quicker.”

  “Let’s redeploy the SWAT team,” Long told Trooper Noel. “Comb the site. Maybe get some dogs in.”

  The mention of dogs triggered a memory for Gail. “Just before we left the site that morning,” she said, “Maggie got into something on the hill behind where we camped. She was barking like crazy. It wasn’t like her. Tom went to get her, and now that I think about it, Deke hustled after him … supposedly to help. I don’t know. Maybe it was nothing …”

  Trooper Noel moved off to get on his walkie-talkie.

  “I’m staying until we find Jim and Peter,” Gail said. She brushed away tears. “But what do I tell their wives, Lieutenant? They don’t know anything’s wrong.”

  Bobby Long had endured more than his share of mayhem and misery. As a kid he had viewed life as mostly fun. Now, a long way downstream, he had come to accept the opposite: that life was mostly hard, and fun was the exception. Once you figured that out, it put disappointment in perspective. “Tell them the truth,” the lieutenant told Gail.

  “Their husbands are missing on the river, and there’s the possibility of foul play. We’re dispatching men to the site where they were last seen.”

  ** ** **

  Photographers took pictures of the raft, and of Tom and Gail and Roarke and Bobby Long, each involved with different activities. Even Maggie got her own close-up. The lieutenant told a circle of reporters—print and online media—that two other people, friends of the MacDonalds’, were missing. Their names were being withheld until next of kin could be notified. Search and rescue efforts were commencing even as they spoke. “We will continue to update you on those efforts.”

  When asked about the manhunt and final ambush, the lieutenant said, “It was mostly good police work, a little luck … and maybe a voice in my head. Tell you what, though, what those folks endured to get off this river, to survive … her getting them down the Gauntlet alive at her age … the Gauntlet! I’ve had the best white water guys in the West, half her age, tell me they’d rather take their chances with a black mamba bite than tackle that piece of hell. Him escaping and never giving up … a city guy, basically, with no experience in the wilderness, with no hope … climbing cliffs, swimming rivers, somehow figuring a way to save his wife from those two … that’s the story. I was insurance and happy to provide it. But their story … that’s the one you want.”

  Roarke was telling a piece of it at the river’s edge to a cameraman and female reporter. He had one arm slung over Maggie. “I wasn’t scared most of the time because Mom, you know, used to guide on this river. She knows what she’s doing. And Pop … ” Roarke caught a glimpse of his father having his back and ankle attended to by medical personnel as Gail supervised, “he really kicked some butt.” He was bursting with pride.

  “Pretty good for a guy from Brookline Village.”

  One of the medical personnel asked Tom if he wanted to be carried out on a stretcher. Tom told him crutches would do. The team measured, altered, and provided a set. “Can you give me a few minutes?” Tom said somberly. He and Gail made their way to the water’s edge, away from the chaos.

  For the longest time they just stared at the river. Then Tom said, “You know that what happened here changes us, forever.” Gail half-smiled acknowledgment. “Of all the things we’ve ever done, this resets everything. Nothing will ever be the same.”

  Relief and sadness rushed through Gail like runoff, overwhelming any ability to contain or explain its flow in a meaningful way. “How is it,” she wondered, “you can live for so long, and all of a sudden your life gets measured by one thing? Maybe it didn’t change us as much as it revealed us.” She looked at Tom.

  “If either of us had given up hope, or stopped trying,” Tom told her, “we wouldn’t be here. You realize that. Not me on that cliff, or you when you thought Deke had killed me or in the Gauntlet. If either of us had given up we’re not having this conversation.”

  Gail wrapped an arm around his waist. “If we didn’t give up out here, why would we give up anywhere else?”

  “We won’t,” Tom told her. “But what about Roarke? How does he ever get over this?”

  “Same thing. We don’t give up. We don’t give up loving him. Exposing him to new things. Teaching him what we know. Telling him there are bad things and bad people in the world, but they
don’t make you who you are. I wish he hadn’t seen what he did,” Gail said, “at his age, but he did. … So you hope the old saw is true: that what doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger. Same for us.”

  For a long moment they just listened to the sweet hush of the slow current.

  “It’s tamer down here than it was where we put in,” Tom said.

  “Yeah, rivers are like that,” Gail said. “Marriages, too. You just have to buckle up for the rough spots.”

  Tom stuck both crutches under one arm and pulled Gail close against him. “I’ve been thinking about those basics you were talking about that first night on the river. Getting the shit kicked out of you is a good catalyst. Staring down a griz. Coming within a breath of drowning. Going through what we’ve gone through, we should be talking about them. They’re so important.

  “I know,” Gail said softly. Her heart spilled over with renewed hope. She started to cry, to let the emotions flow out that she had kept in check for so long on the river—emotions she had to manage, she knew, to stay alive; but now she had to let go to begin the healing.

  The river flowed and gurgled. Sun dappled its surface through the canopies of cottonwoods. Songbirds chirped. A trout rose and made a ring. Gail knew that in a river’s life, this was old age for the River Wild—the slow, meandering part before it emptied itself into something bigger than it was—the Missouri, a few miles downstream. It was the same for people.

  “There were northern lights last night,” Tom said. “I saw them.”