by Peter Heller
The men were no fools. Nothing like Jack had thought on the first encounter on the lake. They made a big meal with wordless efficiency. Brent even deigned to peel potatoes they fished from a plastic burlap sack. Salted lake trout and potatoes and steamed carrots, and a bouillon gravy JD stirred up in a frying pan with flour and some nameless oil. Jack and Wynn let Maia sleep and set up the little tent so she could move into it later. As soon as she woke they’d feed her. The boys ate with ravenous hunger. Nobody said much. If JD and Jack kept track of where the rifles were at all times and kept them close, nobody let on that they noticed.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The night was dark. The waning moon had come and gone, settling down like a curve of bone in a west where no smoke lingered. The stars and the flicker of northern lights on the eastern horizon had been doused in clouds. The campfire had nearly expired. Jack had let it die down. And he had let Wynn sleep. Wynn: laid out under the frost that never came, stretched out in the open under a night that smelled like rain, sleeping on the beach so he could let Maia have privacy in the tent. Wynn, who had said, “Cap, wake me in two hours. Let’s do two-hour shifts tonight. No one’s going to have any problem passing out.” Jack had promised and sat by the fire with JD and watched the man drink. The two with their rifles lying beside them on the stones.
JD had offered, proffered the now half-full bottle of bourbon by the neck, and Jack had taken the bottle the first two times. He knew with drinkers that the first impression was the thing, that once you started knocking back with a serious drinker they’d just assume you were with them all night, matching them slug for slug, even if you never took another sip. To a drinker, everyone else in the world was a partyer, too. So he got JD launched, which wasn’t hard because the two fishermen had probably been drinking all day. Jack wouldn’t have been surprised if one of the boxes in the canoe was solid fifths.
Brent had hit the hay early, muttering, “Big day tomorrow,” and keeping whatever thoughts to himself. JD drank with a steady sullenness. Between bouts, he swung his head and watched Jack from under his brow, and if he wanted to ask what the hell had happened with the girl, et cetera, he restrained himself, but he turned his head to the tent more than once and Jack had the strong impression that it wasn’t just because he had burning questions. There was a young woman lying in there, however injured. That’s the sense Jack got.
Jack watched him like a wolf. He was smelling the man as much as watching him. Smelling him getting more stewed, watching for signs of fatigue. He needed these guys, and he wasn’t going to screw it up. A light wind came up, moving downstream, and it chilled his back. Good. An owl hooted. Single hollow notes whose cadence Jack followed to keep himself awake. But they never formed a pattern, except that in their staggered randomness they seemed to probe a night of velvet depths and echoing solitude. He stirred up the fire and added wood to keep the heat coming, more to lull JD than to warm himself. He needed to stay awake.
And he did, barely.
* * *
There’s a certain stillness before dawn. A caesura. The fire was a heap of dusted embers. No wind. In the lacuna between outbreath and inbreath even the owl hushed. The sipping of the river seemed to drop an octave. Fuck. Jack’s head jerked up. He must have passed out. Even he couldn’t vanquish the exhaustion of the past couple of days. He must have slept sitting up, slumped over the rifle in his lap, and now he stirred and his head twitched up, and he shook it and straightened his back against the stiffness. Fuck. He sucked in a draft of cold air. Something had woken him. Wha—?
He heard an animal. Tussling, squeaking near the woods. He swung around. It wasn’t the woods, it was…what? There was Wynn, stretched flat on his back, dead to the world on the stones. It was no animal. He heard squeaking and a muffled cry and looked farther in the half dark and saw the man JD’s boots sticking out of the unzipped door of the tent.
* * *
He moved. If he had ever moved that fast—he scooped up the rifle and was at the tent in twelve strides. The man’s gun was lying on the rocks. He kicked it away over the stones. And then in one movement Jack shifted the grip on his rifle and slammed the butt into the man’s kidneys. An explosive grunt. In the next second he was dragging him out by his belt with one hand, and when his head was clear of the flap he heard him utter, “Not! Not what you think!” and Jack dropped him like a bale of hay and with both hands he swung the stock of the Savage 99 hard across the side of the man’s head. An awful thwack and the man slumped to the stones.
He heard crying and reached back into the tent and whispered fast, “It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s Jack. We’re leaving now, getting away.” He put his hands in and half pulled, half urged her out. She was awake, thank God. She was swimming up out of some nightmare. Her eyes unblurred and he could see that she was replaying the last minutes like a film, he could see her mind spinning fast. She gripped his arm in the near dark and nodded. She stood. Shaky. He reached past her and pulled out the pad and sleeping bag and crumpled them in his left arm.
“We’re going, we’re going, we’re leaving,” Jack whispered, harsh. “Can you walk?”
She nodded. She was breathing hard, maybe hyperventilating. “Okay,” he said. He took her elbow with his right hand and guided her fast, as fast as they could, down toward Wynn and the shore. When they got to the sleeper, Jack released her and crouched, shook Wynn hard, moved the cap off his face where it lay and shook, and when Wynn uttered “Hey,” half in sleep, he put his hand over his mouth.
Wynn groaned and his eyes sprang open and Jack’s fingers went to his lips. Wynn blinked twice, then nodded in his bag. Jack made a downward pressing gesture with his open hand—Keep it superquiet.
Wynn roused himself and picked up his pad and sleeping bag and followed, confused. The three of them were now in the dark like ghostly revenants of the river upstream, the upstream side of the creek where everything was burned and the trees were bone. Because they moved without sound and were lit only by starlight, and were so depleted and rattled by the past days that they walked to the water’s edge in a hitching trance. Two did. Jack urged them on. They headed for the boats. Jack held Maia’s arm and kept looking back at the dull glow of coals that was the remains of the fire and at the shadow of the wall tent. They moved toward the boats and then Wynn drifted right, down toward their canoe, and Jack whistled without sound, just a hushed blow, and jerked his head, kept moving toward the Texans’ square-tail beached twenty feet upstream. Maia hesitated. Jack tugged her elbow and she followed. They tiptoed as best they could over the stones. Jack felt for the slung rifle on his back and piled in the sleeping gear and went swiftly to the bow and lifted and began to push and slide the men’s canoe. Very slowly, easing the hull so it barely scraped. Maia stopped. She swayed on the beach and lifted her hands. A questioning gesture, even in the dark. Jack pointed to the stern, which was in the water, pointed, emphatic: Get in. Put his finger to his lips again. He got the boat nearly free of shore and then Wynn said, full-voiced, “Hey, hey, Jack. What the fuck? Why’re you taking their boat?”
He was standing almost to the water halfway between the two canoes, holding his bundled sleeping bag and pad. “Let’s take ours.” He was backlit by a sheen of river suffused with starlight.
“Jesus, Wynn!” Jack hissed, just above a whisper. “C’mon! Shut up and get over here!” He looked back past the fire. The dark shape of JD, crumpled on the rocks, was moving, straightening. Fuck. “Maia, jump on. Now! In the center.”
She did. Somehow. More a fall than a jump, but she was in. Jack shoved. The hull of the men’s canoe grated loudly. The bow cleared rock and floated free. “Wynn, get in! Now!” He was no longer whispering. He was walking his hands quickly down the port gunwale to the stern, wading heedlessly hip-deep into the river and he vaulted into the stern. He heard a clatter of stone and saw JD standing, getting his bearings, heard the curses. Jack found the push start on the grip
of the motor and pressed it. He’d grown up trolling with these suckers. It clicked and whirred and started, thank God. He thumbed the reverse lever and twisted the throttle as the canoe was being swept upshore with the eddy current, revved the prop and backed the boat to where Wynn was standing like a fucking tree, his arm spread out in protest. Jack glanced up the shore past the embered fire and saw JD swaying, looking for his gun. He was probably trying to clear his head. Oh man. “Wynn!” Jack shouted now and the night echoed it back like the owl’s sad hoot. “He tried to rape her! Get the fuck in! Now!Now!Now!Now!” and out of the corner of his eye he caught the movement. In just a couple of minutes the air must have grayed just enough, gathered the grains of light enough, because he saw the man, the fat man, bolt from the big tent, moving fast, surprisingly fast, not to them but to their little tent and JD, his one shout, “Sonofabitch!” a cry of protest at every cross-grained turn of events, and he shoved JD sprawling again to the rocks and swept up the rifle. Maybe Wynn saw him too because he lurched out of his paralysis—he leapt toward the water and the rifle cracked, a single sharp note, and Wynn spun and flew backward into the river.
If Jack shouted nobody heard, the shot reverberated and deafened. He revved the throttle, the boat jumped back, and he let go the motor and somehow leaned and doubled to water with both hands and hauled in his buddy by shirt and shoulders, dragged and dumped him over the lip of the gunwale, hot blood running over his cold hands, and more shots split the air and thudded into the hull. He flipped the lever forward and twisted and the canoe lurched and then he was gunning for the top of the eddy and the guard rock there and angling hard into the passing current, aiming for the tightest line around the bend. Upriver. He was going upstream, not down. Wynn was gasping and moaning, eyes rolling, and the woman screamed and the motor blared. The man must have been emptying the magazine because another shot split the air and another shattered off the back of the engine cover and stung Jack’s hand. Fat Man could surely shoot in the near dark. As they rounded the bend and out of range they heard the primal roar, something between a demon’s growl and an animal scream, and one more shot, and Jack thought that maybe Brent had just blasted JD on the spot for sheer frustration and he hoped he hadn’t. He knew he hadn’t. Because Brent was essentially a decent man who had just shot a decent kid. Because Jack had stolen their boat.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Wynn died as the sun broke over the trees. A clear morning, no fog and cloudless. He died staring up at the new sun while Jack tried to stanch the blood that welled out of his chest with every heartbeat. First with his bare hands, then with his two shirts, then with his own body, hugging Wynn tight as he died. Jack had gunned the heavy boat a quarter mile upstream and across the river and tied it to a scorched root and flung himself at Wynn, who by then was whimpering less, just gasping, bubbling, and staring up into his friend’s face and then past him to the sun, and Jack covered him and hugged him to his own chest and he died.
Jack howled. Howled into his own muffling arms—the scream that was not for Brent to hear. To the men downriver they had to be long gone.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Jack could see it in his mind’s eye: the rage. Breaking camp in silent fury. Loading the much smaller canoe with the cook box, the barrel of brined fish, the massive tent roll. No whiskey. Plenty of space in the nineteen-footer without the case of Ancient Age. Not a single bottle left. Maybe the most ire-inducing fact of all.
Reloading the rifle. Thumbing the cartridges in the magazine one by one, each with a curse and a prayer for more death. We helped them. We gave aid and succor to those sonsofbitches and look at what they did. Goddamn. Probably keeping the girl drugged or some such, some slave. Well, I plugged one, surely did, hope he’s dead. But why in hell did they go upstream?
The useless sentry, JD. Brent backhanding him maybe, full force across the already bruised jaw. Muttering maybe about how a professional drinker who can’t hold his liquor or holster his hard-on is the saddest thing on earth. Loading the pinewood-colored Kevlar canoe, shoving off, hellbent for Wapahk. Three days hence. Paddling with a will, because a) no bourbon, b) no food but a few salted fish, c) vengeance. The phone there in the village, the urgent call to the Mounties: Send a chopper. One injured or drugged girl, two bad men, one injured or dead. Because Brent was sure that the same laws held on a northern river as they did in Texas: if you caught someone stealing your horse you could shoot him dead, no questions asked.
Jack could imagine the two Texans paddling hard in his and Wynn’s canoe and reaching the rock island in the bend before the infamous Last Chance Falls, heading toward shore. And…
And the man Pierre waiting, loaded, for two men in their Kevlar nineteen-footer. Waiting head down behind his cover, and…there it was, the canoe, correct length and color—the boys! Sitting ducks, no gun in sight! His blurred, uncorrected vision plenty good enough at forty yards to see two male figures steadily paddling. Patience, brother, waiting until they were maybe thirty, twenty-five yards off the shore, rising up, shotgun leveled—fire! Pump, fire, pump, fire…until he had emptied the six shells in the Winchester Marine, the men torn open and flung sidelong, the canoe flipped, a bobbing loglike hull in the main current, tugged toward the horizon line, tipping over the lip of the cataract. Gone.
Smashed and drowned.
Pierre would think that if she was still with them he wouldn’t have to worry about her either. She would have been lying half alive in the bottom of the boat, she would be battered to death and submerged in the terrible falls.
The odds of finding bodies in this big river, in this remote territory, were pretty low. But if they did, if the authorities mounted an ambitious search and there were gunshot wounds, he could say that the boys had attacked their camp, kidnapped her, he ambushed them, it was survival, self-defense, he was trying to rescue her.
Jack replayed how Pierre would shoot the two men from Texas thinking they were he and Wynn, and then Pierre would pack up his camp, relieved that it was finally over, his megafuckup, and he would go straight to the village elders and start spouting lies.
Jack’s plan. Why he had stolen their boat. Why Wynn was dead. Everybody he loved most, he killed. One way or another. Hubris killed them—his own. Always.
* * *
Still, he’d have to wait a day to let it play out. Wait upstream with a woman who was clearly dying, and with the body of his best friend.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
He didn’t wait a day. She was dying and he couldn’t just sit. At what he figured was noon he shoved off.
Jack paddled. He saved the motor, the battery, for the upstream wind he knew would come. He paddled the green woods, the woods with birds. With a fat kingfisher flying off a limb, lilting along river’s edge, perch to living perch. A lone osprey. He watched the woman, curled into the thwart, maybe sleeping, too pale, breath shallow—he watched the back of her raingear for the slight lift of an inhalation and sometimes he couldn’t see it and he said aloud, “Please, please breathe. Breathe…” He paddled harder than he ever had in his life. He did not look at his friend’s curls ruffling in the wind, the almost ginger curls alive in the breeze as on any day, Wynn’s head, Wynn’s cheek on his arm where Jack had laid him in the front of the boat as if sleeping.
If he saw the woods, the gravel bars, the steep banks sailing by…he paddled. His hands and arms went numb. His mind, too. His thoughts untethered and it was as if he were paddling blind.
* * *
On the day of his mother’s service Jack woke at first light and in the fog of waking remembered why he had to get away. He dressed and hurried out of the log house. A June morning with a mist lying in the tall grass of hayfields that waited for the first cutting. He could smell the sweetness in the grass. Above a low ridge scattered with junipers he could see north and east the snow ramparts of the Never Summer range floating in the wash of the first sun. He turned. The barn across the y
ard was decorated with bunches of pine boughs and cattails, bouquets of dried wildflowers nailed to the frame around the big door. Many neighbors had come by the day before and brought handmade wreaths of spruce and fir, armloads of every flower that now bloomed and could be gathered.
He could not look at them. He went through the barn. The swept concrete, the empty stalls, the smell of horses. Mindy, his mother’s mare, was not there. He went through and out the back and climbed the rail fence into the pasture. The horses were scattered, heads down. In the mist it looked almost like they were feeding in pale water.