by Holly Green
I’m even with the log now, and John Cullen towers over me with narrowed eyes. His jaw muscles flex, and his neck is already flushing red.
Volatile.
It makes me miss that ten feet of boat between us.
I glance at my watch as I climb back in. Four minutes wasted.
We’ll never catch my brother like this.
9:45 A.M. SATURDAY
We hit the confluence of the Blanco and San Marcos, and the world opens up. We paddle into the wide, flat river with its steep banks and big sky. It feels like taking a deep breath when you didn’t even realize you needed one. It’s a break from hairpin turns and constant steering.
But not today. Today my body is tight and my jaw is sore. Ugh. I’ve been clenching. Our boat is jerky. We don’t get the smooth glide that’s the whole reason for being out on the water. The sky is perfectly clear and the sun beats down on my arms. Sweat trickles down my neck. And my brother is getting farther and farther away.
I’m tired, and we have 255 miles to go.
I rip a GU pack off the inside of the boat and suck it down. Too-sweet strawberry-banana all over my tongue. I tuck the packet into my trash bag before I grab my water tube from the bottom of the boat, sit back up, and get my paddle moving again.
Constant forward motion.
I bite the valve and take a hit of water. It’s cold and full of lemon-flavored electrolytes. I take three long pulls before I spit the tube back into the hull.
“Eat and drink,” I tell John Cullen, because he hasn’t taken care of either yet. We’ve got a long way to go and he needs to take care of this stuff or he’ll crash.
“I’m not hungry yet.”
“Doesn’t matter,” I tell him. “You need calories, water, and electrolytes. These are Odyssey basics.”
His paddle in the river is all the answer I get.
And his paddle in the river is all wrong.
It’s my job to make sure that I match him stroke for stroke, but I’m always coming up too short. And it’s not me. I know how to do this.
He’s fast. He’s strong. If he got his stroke right, maybe that would be the difference between catching Tanner and not.
“You’re leaving your paddle in the water too long,” I say. His whole body tenses, but he needs to know this. We’ll go faster. “You should pull out at your hip, but you’re going way past.” Water swirls around his blade and, “There! That’s when you should pull out and start a new stroke—there—and there.”
Nothing changes in his stroke, but the air is suddenly thicker.
Trying to match his too-long strokes is like having an itch that moves every time you try to scratch it. That’s what just being around him is like.
The concrete tower of Cummings Dam peeks out from behind the trees. We’re getting close to our next portage.
The tower is river left. Water rushes over the spillway, reaching between the tower and the middle of the river. At the bottom, it churns into a pit of concrete and rebar, construction debris leftover from when it was built. Terrifying when you really think about it.
From the spillway to the bank river right is a wall that stands a few feet above the water. We’ve got three portage options here. The safest and slowest ones involve pulling over on the bank river right. It’s a narrow strip of shore between the dam and the trees, and it gets crowded. You can portage through the woods or down a ladder. But lucky me, there’s only one other boat at the pipe.
The roar of the water spilling over the dam floods my ears as we pull in just right of the wall that juts out perpendicular from the dam. The pipe is on the other side of the dam, to the right of the spillway. It’s giant and runs at an angle from the top of the dam down to the water. The guys ahead of us are already walking on the concrete wall. They lift their boat and hold it balanced on the dam while one of them climbs down.
“Forward,” I tell John Cullen as soon as they start lowering the boat and there’s enough room for us to pull closer. We’re in, next to the wall that juts out, and I climb on top of it and walk to the edge of the dam, just a few feet from the second guy in the team ahead, careful not to get close enough to spook him or anything. John Cullen waits in the front for the boat to be out of his way.
The bowman from the boat in front is down on the ground now. The sternman holds the handle of his end and sits his butt on the pipe, ready to scoot down it.
“You’d be better off holding the stern rope,” I tell him. Obviously.
“I’ve practiced this,” he snaps as he scoots his body forward.
John Cullen is standing next to me on the dam now, holding the bow rope. “Don’t mind Sadie. She likes telling people what to do. Ask her when you should eat and take a bathroom break.”
“Shut up.” Now I’m the one snapping.
The guy on the pipe ignores John Cullen and slides most of the way down until his partner has stopped with the boat. He bumps against the stern, wobbles, and falls off a couple of feet above the concrete. Which is why you use a rope. The words are you okay are forming in my mouth when he gets up, grabs the stern handle, and climbs down, into the water.
My mouth opens and instructions for John Cullen almost come out, but I clamp it shut again. We’ll see how this goes.
We raise the bow of the boat and balance it across the dam before he climbs down the buttress to the platform below. I feed the boat down to him, using the pipe to support it, and then I use the stern rope to lower it farther before I climb onto the pipe and slide down it in a straddle.
We guide the boat into the water and climb in.
And I guess we managed to get something right.
But our paddling is still out of sync after the dam, when the river is wide and easy. We almost tip in a rapid my brother and I cruise through all the time. A few people clap and cheer at Westerfield Crossing. We paddle past the River Retreat and navigate some really shallow stuff and I have to kick us off a rock.
John Cullen rips an energy-gel pack off the side of the canoe. He groans. “I’m not even going to tell you what this looks like.” But he eats it and washes it down with some water.
We have to lie down in the boat for a low branch. Coiled on top, six inches from the boat, is a dark snake with white on its face. Cottonmouth. Water moccasin. Poisonous. Aggressive. My throat goes tight and my heart races as I glide closer and it stretches its head over the boat.
Don’t drop in the boat don’t drop in the boat don’t drop in the boat.
I sit up and turn back in time to see it slither off the branch into the water, but we’ve left it behind.
“Did you see that water moccasin?” I ask.
“Water moccasin?” John Cullen asks. “No.”
“It was half a foot from your head less than a minute ago.”
He shudders. “Just let me out of the boat now. I’m done.”
But he’s joking.
And then I remember—god, it’s so funny the way my dad tells it—
“Did I ever tell you a water moccasin chased my dad down the river once? It tried to bite his boat.”
John Cullen laughs, but he shakes his head. “That can’t be true.”
“That’s what I thought until he showed me the fang marks on the hull.”
“Now I really do want out.” He draws to the right, but he doesn’t mean it. He’s laughing.
And then I laugh. And we’re both laughing, and we’re on the river together, and it’s like when we were kids, swimming and splashing and having contests to see who could hold their breath the longest. His freckles got darker every summer.
As much as I hate to admit it, I’ve missed this. It’s like a hollow spot in my chest.
This race … This partnership …
Maybe it’s starting to work.
The cypress branches stretch across the river, making a tunnel. Blue sky peeks through the thin leaves. Dappled light filters through. Cypress roots tumble over one another into the water. But it doesn’t even occur to me where we are until we
round the corner to my family’s property.
He straightens up as soon as he sees it. His family owns the property inland of ours. This is one of the places we swam together as kids.
This is where Mom waited every year to give Dad fresh water and a tube sock full of ice. Tanner and I were always with her until two years ago when Tanner raced with Dad. Last year it was just her, and I got fresh water and a sock of ice for the first time.
She’s here, sitting on a rock on the side of the river. But this year there’s no water or ice sock. And this year Dad is with her. One hand is in his shorts pocket. The other holds the end of Mazer’s leash while my dog laps at water in the shallows.
And now nobody is laughing.
Mom’s face is tight. Dad’s eyes meet mine, and then they wash across the river to something on the other side.
It’s not until we’ve already passed them that Mom calls, “Doing fantastic, Sadie. Making good time.”
The year that Dad and Johnny raced together, I was eleven and Cully was twelve. We’d spent most of the race goofing off and splashing in the river while our dads paddled and our moms served as bank crew. By Monday, we were tired and sunburned and ready to go home.
The finish line was like any other finish line any other year. Twenty or thirty people buzzed around. A lot of race officials. Ten or eleven boats already lined up at the finish. Soaked and muddy racers napped under the pavilion. Some of the early finishers, the ones who had paddled in overnight, had retreated to their homes or hotels to shower up and get some sleep.
Dad and Johnny weren’t super fast that year, but they had set a decent clip. The app predicted they’d be in by three in the afternoon. We were at the finish with hamburgers and fries for our dads a little before two thirty.
Three o’clock passed with no sign of them, but it didn’t bother me. The bay took time. A rough bay could mean a lot of stops and starts. I didn’t worry when four o’clock or five o’clock went by, either.
Cully, Tanner, and I passed the time playing together on the grass. My brother had brought a baseball and gloves. We played catch. And when Tanner went around, trying to engage some of the racers in conversation, Cully and I tossed a Frisbee. Cully sketched and I did a book of mazes and word searches. When we got hot, we jumped in the water and swam.
The moms sat in lawn chairs, binoculars in their laps, staring out onto the bay.
The burgers sat in paper bags beneath their chairs.
It was six when Mom finally told us our dads’ tracker app had been off for the last two hours. My stomach twitched.
Around six thirty, another boat made it in, a solo, and Mom asked whether he had seen Dad and Johnny.
“Nah,” he’d answered. “I haven’t seen anyone since the Wooden Bridge.”
My stomach grew heavier.
It was around seven thirty, after Leslie Hink had gone out to pick up dinner and another boat came in saying they hadn’t seen Dad and Johnny and my gut sank to somewhere around my knees, that Cully’s hand slipped into mine.
I knew that hand so well, even though it had been years since I’d held it in mine. Since Andrew Haggarman said that us holding hands made Cully my boyfriend. Gross. That was the last thing I wanted at eight. It was the last thing I wanted at eleven. But before that, holding Cully’s hand had been as natural as holding my mom’s or my dad’s.
At that moment, though, waiting at the finish, holding his hand was like being wrapped in a soft blanket. Warm and familiar.
But there was something different about it, too. Even though my hand must have grown, too, his had grown more. His fingers were thicker between mine. He still had the same pencil callus on his middle finger, but now his whole hand was rougher—calloused all over from an entire spring spent working on the tree house.
We held tight, until Mom jumped out of her seat, binoculars up to her eyes, shouting, “It’s them!” Everything inside me loosened. We ran to the seawall and sat down, legs dangling, waiting for the speck on the water to turn into our dads.
Dad’s face wasn’t just tired when he paddled in. It was tight. Angry. At the finish, he rocked the boat hard, tipping to the side and dumping himself and Johnny out. Tanner splashed in to carry the canoe out. The dads climbed the steps, and then Mom met Tanner on the stairs and helped him carry the boat out of the water. Mom and Tanner set the boat under the wooden awning, and then it was hugs all around. But when Mom pulled out her camera for a picture, Dad ignored her, turning to face Johnny. Cully’s hand found mine again and squeezed. The hate between them hung in the air like a cloud of poison.
One look at the way they stared each other down, the way Dad’s and then Johnny’s eyes fixed on my hand, wrapped warm and tight in Cully’s—I knew it was all over. No more sneaking over to read books together after lights-out. No more splashing in the river. No more goofing off, putting fake spells on each other in the back of the Subaru while Mom ran errands. No more tree house. The Scofields and the Hinks, me and Cully, it was all in the past.
10:39 A.M. SATURDAY
We’re closing in on a slow-ass tandem when we turn a bend and see the old red mill high on the hill. Which means Cottonseed Rapids is close. Which means wipeouts and crowds. Everyone wants to see one of the most difficult rapids of the race where the most spectacular wrecks happen.
This boat in front of us has their form all off. It would suck to be stuck behind them if they wreck. The river is narrowing. We need to make our move now.
“Let’s pick it up and pass them,” I yell to the front.
John Cullen answers with a faster, stronger stroke. I pull harder to match him. The boat surges forward with every hard pull. My muscles burn. The splash of our paddles in the water fills my ears. I adjust the rudder pedals so our nose points between the other boat and some rocks on our left. The river narrows ahead, but we have enough room to squeeze past them.
Gaining.
Gaining.
He’s even with their sternwoman. I adjust the rudder again, pointing the nose a bit to the right so we don’t hit the rocks.
The quiet dips of paddles in the water reach me just before the boat plows into view. Double blades fly through the air as they push their way between our boat and the other tandem. Their boat glides close. Too close. A blade just misses John Cullen’s head. He pulls left to keep from getting hit and bam. Our nose slams into a rock. Our boat stands still.
“Sorry about that,” calls one of the guys from the three that just passed us. They wear highlighter-yellow shirts.
My insides boil at the sight of my brother and the Bynums. Assholes. They did that on purpose.
But when did we get ahead of them?
John Cullen pushes us off the rock with his paddle.
“Your brother’s a jerk,” he says.
“That’s why we have to beat them.” I wait for him to agree or give a hell yeah, but he doesn’t.
We catch up just in time to see the tandem approach the rapid. People cheer. “Go, boat fifty-five!” someone yells.
“You’ve got to draw hard on the right when we pass that first rock,” I say as I line us up for the rapid. Maybe we shouldn’t be running this. The thing is, you’re not going to win the race by running Cottonseed, but you might lose that way. But portaging will slow us down. And anyway, Dad will find out if we do. He might even be here to see Tanner. We’ll look like failures if we portage.
“You heard me about drawing, right?” I ask, because honestly, he could at least say something.
“Can’t you tell when I’m ignoring you?”
“You can’t ignore me! We’re supposed to be a team.”
“You don’t want to be a team. You want to be in charge.” He takes a harder stroke than he needs to. The boat rocks.
We pull past the two RV chassis lodged on the right bank, left over from a flood. Water breaks over a rock in front of us, and I steer us left of it. Our bow hits the rapid. A rush of water pushes us toward a rock on the left.
“Draw! Draw!”
I yell.
John Cullen draws right. I grunt with every forward stroke, pulling with everything I have, fighting to keep us away from the rock. It’s not enough. Just as the back half of the boat grates against it, I do the last thing I can. I pull out my left leg and push us off it with my foot. Water bouncing off the rock sends us in the other direction, and we’ve lost almost all our momentum. I dig in hard with my paddle to get us moving again.
“Power!” I yell, and the current picks us up again, sending us straight toward another rock.
“Left! Left!” I push the rudder pedal left. The nose of the boat careens toward an even bigger rock. I backsweep as he draws, and we scrape past it.
“Power!” We both dig in and paddle forward as hard as we can. It wasn’t pretty, but we’ve made it through. The current is slower now, pushing us toward a smaller rock in the middle of the river. Pressing the rudder pedal is enough to keep us off it.
On the sandbar to the right, another team kicks a huge dent out of their boat. That’s the beauty of paddling an aluminum canoe. Carbon fiber is lighter, but much less forgiving.
My brother’s boat is already out of sight, but they can’t be far. I take a couple of relaxed strokes. That’s enough of a break. I pull hard again. We need to catch my brother.
But John Cullen has gone stiff, his head locked on the shore, turning as we move forward.
“Head in the boat!” I call. He’s supposed to be my eyes up front.
The boat jolts to the side, and there’s the scratchy resistance of the hull scraping against something in the river as we tip. I lean left and try to stabilize with my paddle, but water is spilling over the gunnels, and we’re sliding into the river.
AGAIN.
How am I ever going to look my dad in the face?
The hull floats low in the water. I bob with it under a huge fallen tree that three kids sit on, their legs dangling down.
“Dude, what were you looking at?” one of the kids asks John Cullen as we float beneath her bare feet.