“Very little, and no, just tell me what to do.”
“Hop in front, then. I’ll push us off. Wait. Do you want to pray?”
Tiffany shook her head.
“I’ll pray,” said Miranda, and folded her hands over her heart. “God,” she said, “be with us.”
“That’s it?” Tiffany expected something with a bit more gravity, given the seriousness of the endeavor, and given the way she’d already heard Miranda pray in the truck on the way back from the hospital. The woman was flighty.
Miranda nodded. “Hop in.”
Tiffany had no fear of water. She could swim fairly well, but the river was cold, and black, and the canoe felt awfully unsteady as it glided out into the current and nosed downstream. Tiffany clutched at the gunwales. The world was dark and fluid. She heard Miranda’s paddle stir the water, turning the canoe, and it felt to Tiffany as if they were tipping.
“Relax,” Miranda said. “Just let your hips absorb the roll. Don’t fight it.” The paddle stirred the water again, and the boat rocked again, and Tiffany deliberately forced herself to relax and loosen her grip on the sides of the canoe.
“That’s it,” said Miranda. “One with the water.”
“I have canoed before,” said Tiffany, “at a girls’ camp.” She looked out at the shoreline. Its shadows passed by very quickly. Already, the place where they’d put in was out of sight. The current pulled powerfully into the wilderness.
“Did you like it?” Miranda asked.
“We flipped.”
There was silence for a moment. Tiffany thought she heard Miranda smiling. “Tell you what,” Miranda said, “don’t paddle for a while.”
Tiffany wasn’t planning on it.
“Just sit and get used to it,” said Miranda. “Enjoy the stars.”
The river drifted on, and the stars—once Tiffany allowed herself to notice them—were indeed beautiful out here. The sky had a curve to it, an overturned bowl cupping the earth and pricked with light. Again, there crouched the Great Bear. They made their way past one bend and then another. Tiffany realized how in control of the canoe Miranda really was. With only the smallest stir of her paddle, she’d turn the boat sideways in the stream and glide it back toward the river’s center, then back off the momentum and angle downstream again. Tiffany turned around and realized Miranda rarely took her paddle out of the water. She left it there, stirring, stirring, back and forth, feathering the blade as she moved it, prying and drawing. The woman was a boater. After a half hour or so, Tiffany grew accustomed to the motions and began to truly relax. The air was cool. Tiffany rummaged for the scarf she’d packed in her bag. With the warmth of the scarf around her neck, and stars drifting through the branches, Tiffany recalled that she hadn’t slept for a long time. The rhythmic stirring of the water seemed to bring order to it all, and Tiffany was struck by the odd sense that she was exactly where she was meant to be at that moment, floating down a river filled with stars on a planet floating in space. It made her feel childish, wonderstruck in a dreamy campfire sort of way. She thought about Cal, too. He was out here somewhere, and she couldn’t help but imagine he was searching for her, and she for him, like a story she’d read long ago.
“Do you ever think about boys?” Tiffany asked, breaking the long silence. Her voice seemed contained in the darkness, as if the words she spoke were for the darkness and Miranda alone. It reminded her of whispering secrets to imagined friends under a blanket, and she felt again the weight of her old loneliness. It comforted and hurt all at once. It was a place she’d trained herself not to go.
Miranda’s paddle stopped its stirring, and suddenly Tiffany realized how cruel her words could seem to a widow searching for her son. She’d been too caught up in the sight of the stars. Too tired and dreamy. She’d forgotten where she was, whom she was with, what had been lost.
“Forgive me,” she said.
The paddle stirred the water. “No, I understand what you meant.”
They drifted past a half-sunken tree.
“Tell me,” said Miranda.
“When I was in middle school, boys wouldn’t talk to me, but that didn’t stop me from hoping.” She stopped. “This is silly, though. I should be quiet.”
“It’s not silly. Please, talk.”
“I used to imagine a boyfriend who could see me, you know? It was more than attention. I wanted to be known. I imagined us parking a car out by the river, hidden by the tall grass, fireflies everywhere, and I could talk and he would listen and nod, his eyes wide in the dark. And the way I imagined it, he would want to listen. He would want to see me. And he’d listen until he knew everything there was to know.” Tiffany laughed at herself. “There were times I imagined it so long, I ran out of things to tell him, and we’d just look at each other. In a way, that was the best part.”
The shadow of an owl passed overhead, tipping its wings through the cosmos. Miranda stopped paddling and Tiffany sensed that the woman was actually listening to her. She felt both grateful and ashamed. The owl lifted up out of sight, and Tiffany had a realization that Miranda could become an actual friend. That’s who this madwoman was. That’s why Tiffany felt so deeply for the fire in her eyes. It’s why she played getaway driver in her dad’s pickup. It’s why she was here in a canoe, floating a dark river and searching for sons. Miranda could be a friend. Tiffany looked at the mirrored river in front of her, the stars in it. The thought of friendship warmed her, but she didn’t trust it. She’d trusted that warmth before and been burned by it. It reminded her of lunchrooms.
Miranda lifted her paddle from the water and balanced it across the gunwales. She reached down by her feet and picked up a milk jug filled with tap water. She took a small drink, capped it again.
“I once heard a woman describe marriage,” she said. “At my old church, before my husband died. She said when you first meet your lover, there is nothing but romance. We’re blind to flaws.” The paddle skimmed the water, bit again. “And then one morning—this takes about six months, sometimes much less—you wake up next to a man who groans when he gets out of bed, and limps off to the kitchen and then the bathroom, in his boxers, so he can drink coffee while he poops.”
Tiffany snorted, and then covered her face because of how loud it sounded. “So, that’s the truth of the fairy tale, then.”
“No, it’s not,” said Miranda. “It’s not the truth, even if it seems that way. I think about my husband, how the deployments were exciting at first—the distance it created—because when he came home we were new again for a time.” Miranda pried against the water, and the canoe nosed toward a right-hand bend in the river. “My husband used to get lost, distracted. And I found I could never talk him out of that, but I could summon him, offer him a palace, gates wide open. Don’t laugh, this is about more than what it seems. Everything is. That’s what I’m trying to say. Everything is spirit. It’s hard to remember, but when he and I knew it—my God—that man would kill lions on my behalf. Call me old-fashioned. I know what is good.”
Tiffany liked this woman very much. And she liked the idea of Cal wrestling a lion, and then walking toward her with hunger in his eyes and sweat on his neck. Her old imagined boyfriends seemed totally insufficient.
“And then we forget again!” Miranda went on, like she was trying to describe some wonderful and elusive flavor. “It’s a mystery how beautiful we can be, and how terrible too. We catch glimpses only. But it’s there. We’re not just poor damn things. Even if it feels true, it’s not the truth. There’s more to us, more for us, right now, right here, in this.”
Tiffany sat quietly a moment. She didn’t know what to do with all of that, but she had always felt, from her anonymous youth through her hungry summer, that she was worth more than the world suggested she was. She once sat in a moonlit tent, eating a stolen hard-boiled egg, and found herself marveling at the sight of her hand lifting the thing to her mouth. There seemed something miraculous about it, about just existing, that demanded to be acknow
ledged, celebrated even.
“I’ve heard your dad say that,” she said. “Poor damn things. He seems like a good man. People like him.”
“He is hard, but yes, he is good. Mom said it was Korea. I wish I’d known him before. I saw pictures. His smiles were bigger then. For as long as I knew him, though, he demanded peace and quiet. He loved us and was good to us. I never doubted his goodness. But there was distance. We could never rock the boat. It was hard to be a teenage girl and never rock the boat.”
“Yes.”
“But I knew he’d be good for Fischer. I knew the farm and barns and fields would be good for Fischer, for his heart, and maybe Fischer would be good for my dad. After my husband died, I watched my son wilt. I barely caught it in time. This quietness came over him. This fear of things. I knew I had to get him out into something bigger than himself, bigger than his mom. Boys need to shake their manes, as my dad used to put it. He was right. It’s been good for Fischer, this place. Do you know, he came back so changed after that first summer, so much like his dad, smiling again, proud too.”
Tiffany sensed a change in Miranda’s voice. She’d struggled with the last few words, brought back no doubt into the present, her boy lost in a forest. He was probably cold and hungry and scared. He’d shot a man. During their ride back to Claypot, Miranda described her encounter with Jack Breadwin in the hospital. His scalp was shaved and bandaged, and the left side of his face was bruised all the way down to his jaw. But that wasn’t the ugly part. The ugly part was his eye. Only one red eye looked out from the bandages, the other was covered with a patch. He was awake enough to know who she was and who her son was, and she saw fear and hate fill that eye. She rebuked him there in that hospital bed. Shouted down whatever “foul thing” lived inside him, pleaded with the humanity in him to pity his son, who was now fleeing down a river. Shame on you, she shouted. Shame! Ashes! She used these exact words as she recounted the story, which made Tiffany grow quiet. She tried to imagine Miranda saying such things at Jack’s bedside, and then leaping from a window. Miranda wept for most of the ride home, praying softly, sometimes loudly, tears streaming down her face.
“Come on,” said Tiffany, picking up her paddle. “You better teach me how to use this thing.” She dipped the blade into the black water.
Miranda remained quiet.
“Miranda,” declared Tiffany, “I give you my word that we are not stopping this canoe, not for sleep, not for food, until we have your son.”
Miranda nodded, wiped her eye, looked at the riverbanks. She inhaled and exhaled forcefully. “We’ll have to stop in a few miles,” she said, “before the rapids by the islands.”
“Before the what?”
“I feel like praying,” Miranda said. “Yes, let’s pray.” She lifted her paddle over her head with both arms outstretched. She took a massive breath.
Tiffany bit her lip. Here came the gravity.
Miranda raised her voice and called on the Father to place a hedge of protection, his own spirit hand, around the boys. She declared the canoe and the river anointed in the divine presence of the Holy Ghost. She invited Jesus, high priest, to intercede on their behalf, to bring the full work of his cross between them and any evil thing coming against them. She reminded the devil of God’s terrifying majesty, his ferocious power. She reminded the darkness that she and Tiffany were God’s daughters, loved and guarded with insatiable jealousy. She shook her paddle at the stars as she spoke, at the forest, as if power flowed from its shaft. The river trembled with her voice, and Tiffany couldn’t tell if the woman was frightening or beautiful. It felt like watching a storm approach, roll in, bend the trees in half. It really was a thing to behold.
“King Jesus!” Miranda yelled into the forest, beating her paddle skyward, and Tiffany worried she might upset the canoe. She worried about what kind of church Miranda went to. She worried about why she didn’t want it to stop.
“King Jesus!” Miranda cried. “Yes, King Jesus!”
As if in response, howls erupted from the river’s edge. Not far beyond the bank in the darkness of the cedars, the wailing of a pack of coyotes pierced the night. Their yips and cries filled the forest and then fled, tumbling away like demons downriver. Miranda lowered her paddle. Smoothed her denim dress across her lap. She let out a contented sigh.
“Yes,” she said. “That is better.”
CAL LOOKED UP FROM THE PILE OF TINDER HE’D BEEN ATTEMPTING to light. Jacks looked up too, cocked his head toward the sound. Coyotes, Cal thought. They were far off. The sound might carry for miles on a night this still. The forest seemed quiet tonight, calmer somehow, and Cal was growing accustomed to it. If he had heard coyotes the night before, he would have lit up the shadows with his flashlight. But even after these short two days in the wild, he’d become accustomed to the sounds, or lack of sounds, the loneliness. He had braved a rushing river, been bucked from a horse, made a decision to ask Tiffany on a date, and nearly had the boys. It was amazing what a man could sort out in the woods. Besides, he thought, turning back to the task at hand of starting a fire, he had Jacks with him now, Jacks’ keen eyes and ears, and nose, too, which had led him to the boys’ bikes and a chewed-up cedar tree. He imagined a man could sleep more soundly in a forest while a dog kept vigil at his side. He smiled at his dog, shook his head. How did Jacks get out here, anyway? Was Tiffany here somewhere? Cal thought it over and decided she couldn’t be. Jacks must have run away. Sniffed him out. Cal couldn’t begrudge that kind of loyalty, yet he felt sorry for Tiffany’s sake—she’d worry—but all would be well very soon. Just another day or two, and then Cal would walk out of the forest with the boys, and Jacks, and he would stride up to Tiffany and scoop her waist and take her out to dinner.
Cal became aware he was smiling dreamily at his dog, alone in the dark, and the fire hadn’t been started. He shivered and resumed his work. Fire was becoming increasingly important. The night would have been cool even if he had stayed dry, but the swim at dusk had chilled him to the bone. After letting the boys slip, Cal waded to shore through the muck and cattails, and pushed his way slowly through the thick brush of the riverbank. Thorns stuck in his feet, and after picking them out and dressing again Cal had to warm his hands in his pockets for a few minutes before peeling some bark and rummaging through the horse’s saddlebags. His matches had been ruined in his swim down the rapids the previous evening, and he found himself muttering, “Come on, come on, please be there,” as he searched blindly through the depths of the saddlebags. Eventually he felt what he was looking for—a two-inch-long rod of ferrous metal tied to a sharp-edged rectangle of steel. The whole unit was no larger than a nail clipper, but it was all-important. His early faith in Teddy was vindicated. The man had placed a flint and steel in both their saddlebags. Cal smiled when he found it. “Divvy the gear,” he said to no one in particular. The horse shifted its weight, blinked its giant eye.
Cal studied his little pile of cedar bark. The moon was up now, and nearly full, and it provided enough light to work. He’d been on a few Boy Scout trips as a kid, but he hadn’t really been into earning merit badges, and he usually opted for a lighter or match when it was his turn to start the fire. Once, when it became apparent that his scout leader wouldn’t remain quiet about his need to learn the flint, a young Cal secreted a Bic lighter in the folds of his uniform. He made a big show of wanting to work alone, and after a few feigned strikes of the flint, he reached down and lit a thread of birch bark with the Bic. He remembered cupping the tiny flame with his hands and blowing on it until the smoke rose into his face and the fire grew hot. His scout leader was proud.
“What kind of scout cheats at fire-making?” Cal asked himself. He shook his head and laughed. “A scout who wants to eat hot dogs already,” he answered. Cal’s stomach growled. There were two cans of tuna and four cans of beans in the horse’s pack. Cold tuna would work, but after that swim, with the ache and chill of the river still in the knuckles of his hands, a hot can of brown beans next to
a fire sounded a whole lot better.
Cal bunched up the cedar bark again so it made a little pile next to a tepee of twigs. The dried twigs looked white and brittle in the moonlight, like chicken ribs. He was so hungry. Cal held the ferrous rod in his left hand, with the rod’s tip buried in the cedar bark. With his right hand he pressed the sharp edge of the steel against the rod and prepared to strike it toward the tinder. He’d experimented with the thing a few times to get the hang of it. With the right amount of pressure and speed, the steel’s edge threw an impressive shower of yellow sparks from the rod, but he couldn’t figure out how to keep from knocking over his tinder pile in the process. He’d make sparks, knock over the tinder. He’d regather the tinder and strike at it harder, and then knock over the tepee of twigs as well. This time he stroked more gently, and a few yellow sparks landed on the tinder pile. He watched the silvery bark for any sign of a glow. One of the sparks seemed hopeful. It landed in a successful position and glowed for a moment, just the smallest pinprick of orange. Cal’s eyes grew wide and ravenous, but then everything faded again to moonlight. Cal, impatient, stroked the rod again and knocked over his tinder pile.
“Son of a—” He stopped himself. Jacks looked at him with a question in the tilt of his head. “No need to get upset, Jacks. Getting upset won’t help.” The horse gave a slight whinny from the shadows and sounded like it was chuckling. Cal sat up on his haunches and turned toward the noise. “Well,” he said, “I don’t have to talk to you anymore, do I?” He paused for effect. “No, I do not. I got Jacks now, and Jacks ain’t rude.” Cal turned back to the fire, the lack of fire, and sighed. Cold tuna sounded brutally unsatisfying. It didn’t seem right, lying out under the stars with a dog and a horse, eating a cold can of tuna.
Cal heard the coyotes again. Jacks’ head perked up. The coyotes yipped and yipped, noisy as blackbirds, their yips breaking into howls and ending in prolonged silence. Cal had heard that when coyotes rally and howl and then go suddenly quiet, that’s when they begin to hunt. He pictured them now, out in the brush and the moonlight, their noses to the ground, rooting out mice and rabbits. Cal thought of the boys. He was glad they had the raft. They would be safe if they just stayed on the river.
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