Fish lifted his head from the sand, his mouth open.
“I said shut up, Fish!” Anger flashed in Bread’s eyes, righteous anger, and yet there was kindness in it somehow. “The knife!” Bread yelled. “Give it over so I can do what you won’t!”
Fish caved. Tears welled up in his eyes. He didn’t have the courage to tell Bread the truth. Fish was too much of a coward to face any more wrath today. His throat clamped shut. He’d just lie there and die. Hide and wait, cling to the sand. He reached into his wet pocket and pulled out the barlow. Bread snatched it away. The revolver still sat in his belt. Bread adjusted it, shook his head at the sand, and walked back toward the remains of the raft.
Fish let his head hit the sand and stared out at the river. The storm had blown the raft into a side channel, and the slower water was littered with cattails and branches, tufts of grass, peppered with raindrops. Mats of pine needles collected like puddles. The river seemed not to care where the raft went, or why it was going where it did. The image of Bread’s dad hitting the floor came back to Fish, the way that blast filled the room like lightning, left it ringing and silent. The man crumpled forward so easily. It was as if there hadn’t been anything in him in the first place that kept him standing. But there had been something in him, and the bullet ripped it out of him, and it had mattered. The world had spirits in it. When that sow bear came, Fish had rarely felt such triumph. Something good is. Something evil is, too. It mattered that that sow saved her cub. It mattered that Fish killed a man. It mattered that Fish was a liar. But what mattered most right now to Fish was that Bread stay alive, that he keep inside of him whatever it was that bullet tore out of his dad. It mattered to Fish that Bread keep going, even if he didn’t know why, or to where.
Fish rose to his knees and looked at his friend. Bread was hip-deep in water, pushing a section of the raft to shore that hadn’t been completely wrecked. It looked to be about five or six logs wide. It floated, sort of. They could ride it. Between the two of them, they still had a flint, a knife, a gun, and four rounds. They could keep going.
Fish stood and made his way toward Bread. He stumbled. His stomach hurt and his legs tingled, but he found a way to totter forward and splashed into the water beside Bread. Without speaking, Fish leaned into the raft with both hands and pushed it. With both boys pushing, the raft moved easily. The logs were still bound together loosely, waterlogged but floating.
“We got more rope?” Fish asked. On the beach lay a pile of logs Bread had already collected.
Bread nodded, looked at Fish warily. “There’s some tangled rope on them logs. There’s no way to rebuild it like it was.”
“This will do,” said Fish.
The boys stooped lower to push the raft up to the beach. As the raft nudged onto the sand, Bread shook his head in disbelief. Then a grin broke through.
“What?” said Fish.
Bread rolled his eyes. “What, he says.”
Fish brushed sand from his hands, worried that he was no longer welcome in this.
“You’re a yo-yo, Fish,” said Bread.
“You’re a yo-yo,” said Fish. “I’m a beaver.”
Bread grinned, handed the barlow knife back to Fish.
It was good to see Bread smile. It made the world feel less wrong. Fish unfolded the blade and wiped it on his jeans. He decided to wait until the raft was rebuilt to tell Bread the truth about his dad. That way, if Bread abandoned him, at least Bread would have a boat, a way to get out of the woods. Fish moved toward a tangle of logs and began freeing rope.
The boys worked in the steady rain for a couple of hours. The time went quickly. They had only seven logs to tie together, and the waterlogged rope, though it was heavy, was more limp and easier to work than when it was dry. While they heaved and tugged and sliced, Bread talked about whether he’d rather be a tank driver or a tank gunner when they got to the armory, and Fish let him dream. This might be the last day on earth Fish knew the joy of a friend. And if he was going to lose it soon, he wanted this moment to take with him into exile. Bread went on and on. Firing the gun had its obvious merits, but so did running the tracks. Both boys knew how tank treads worked independently of each other, how tanks could spin on a dime, crush bunkers, jump trenches. Eventually Bread decided that he’d like that best, having those giant treads in his hands.
“Giant robot feet,” he said. “That’s what driving that tank will be like.”
While he talked about it, Fish got the sense that Bread knew they weren’t actually going to drive any tanks, that he knew he was running toward a lie. At first the thought scared Fish. How much did Bread know? Fish stood still in the rain and watched Bread out of the corner of his eye. Did he know his dad was dead, all the stories Fish had made up for all these summers, all the excuses about his dad having another deployment? Bread had to know. But then, why was he here? With that thought a new hope dawned in Fish’s mind. Of course Bread knew. Only a fool would believe otherwise. Which meant Bread, too, was fighting some vague fight for something unseen, unknown.
Bread stopped working. “What?” he asked.
Fish bit his lip and then scowled at the ground. He felt tears coming into his eyes. If Bread did know about his dad all this time, then his silence was too great a kindness. Bread stood there dripping wet, concern on his brow, already great. He had a bad father and was still this good. Fish’s grandpa was right about him.
“What?” Bread asked again.
“I just—” said Fish. “I’d love to be the tank gunner, if you want to run the tracks.”
The concern fled from Bread’s face and he nodded, as if a solemn decision had finally been sorted out. Fish wiped his eye on his soaked shoulder, folded his knife into his pocket, turned his attention to the diminished but completed raft.
“What do you think of her?” asked Bread.
The raft was about ten feet long and six feet wide. It looked tippy compared to the prior craft. It also looked tired. The ropes were soggy and frayed. Strips of cedar bark hung like a wet beard in the water. Fish stepped on it with his foot. The whole thing wavered a bit. They hadn’t secured a ridgepole this time. It was just seven logs woven alongside one another. Near its bow, if it could be called that, lay a coil of about forty feet of spare rope. Two muddy push poles lay in the sand beside it.
“Well, it needs a name again,” said Fish.
“The Poachers’ Hope of Lantern Rock is still a good name,” said Bread.
“Needs more now,” said Fish. He looked downriver. They couldn’t be that far from Ironsford now. This was their final stretch, and then, who knows? The river was so wide here, and the sandbars so numerous, it hardly looked like a river at all. But because of the debris marking the nearly imperceptible flow, all they’d have to do to make their way through is choose the channel where the leaves and logs flowed fastest. The realization made Fish feel like crying again. Here was this river rooting for them, saying in a voice so much quieter than the storm—Come this way. There is more. Fish felt the same odd comfort he felt when his mom prayed, a warmth within the cold. He didn’t want to trust it. But maybe that storm wasn’t God after all. Maybe God was in this whisper. Maybe God was in the river. It was a miracle they still had a raft and a place to take it.
Bread broke the silence. He held up his hands as he spoke, as if offering a blessing to the boat and a challenge to the sky. “Here floats,” he said, and then spoke slowly, “The Last Stand of the Poachers’ Hope of Lantern Rock.”
“You’re getting good at that,” said Fish.
Bread smiled. “It’s good, right?”
“It is.”
“Beaver warriors,” said Bread.
Fish nodded. “Beaver warriors,” he said.
The boys basked in the rain until they heard something in the air. At first it reminded Fish of the storm, and a lump formed in his throat. He didn’t know if he could bear another. But when he listened more closely, and assured himself that the wind hadn’t stirred, he thought it
sounded more like a whine, a hum, a moaning from upriver.
“Boat!” shouted Bread, ducking and pointing as he said it. Fish saw it at once. Several hundred yards distant, a boat crossed a channel between sandbars and cattails. Bread and Fish bolted toward the shoreline and crouched in the reeds. The boat disappeared behind an island, then reappeared, its motor grating and popping and leaving a blue trail of smoke on the black water.
“I don’t like this,” said Bread. “Who is that?”
“He won’t see us,” said Fish. The boat was in the channel along the opposite shore. It disappeared and reappeared, moving quickly. “From where he is, our raft’s just gonna look like a log. There’s lots of logs.”
“I don’t like it is all. I don’t like someone being out here.” Bread drew a sharp breath, blew it back out between his lips.
Fish studied the boat as it crossed an open section of water. It was a flat-bottomed duckboat, the same kind everyone else used on this river, the same kind Fish’s grandpa had, and Bread’s dad. Fish didn’t know of any major boat landings, but there were plenty of backwoods paths that led into the river at various places. A person had to drag his boat in through muck and briars. Duck hunters came out here. Muskrat trappers. Fish squinted. The boatman rode with a rain hood pulled over his eyes. The hood stayed facing forward, and then it turned, slowly, and that dark mask seemed to stare right at him. Fish couldn’t explain why, but the dream he had of the antlered man, the scarecrow on the poachers’ island, came back to him as he stared into that black hood. It sent a shiver up his spine and he found himself holding his breath. Slowly, the hood turned back downstream, and the motor sputtered on, and soon all that was left of the boat was a disturbed wake of water and smoke. The boatman hadn’t spotted them. The dread of Fish’s dream hung in the cattails.
“I think it’s a trapper,” said Fish. “Ironsford must be closer than we think.”
Bread trembled. “I can’t breathe,” he said. His back twitched like a horse’s hide.
“What’s wrong?”
“I just got”—he tried to smile—“really cold, you know? Got cold all of a sudden.” Bread tried to shrug, but the movement was muted by his shaking. A memory came to Fish’s mind of a time the two boys hid in the garage rafters while Bread’s dad tore through it, stone drunk, tripping over tool chests and smashing bottles.
“It’s all right, Bread. The boat’s gone. He’s gone.”
Bread folded his arms more tightly around his chest. He nodded. Swallowed.
“I think we shouldn’t wait to shove off,” said Fish. “It’s getting dark out.”
Bread nodded.
“Beaver warriors,” Fish reminded him.
Bread nodded again, cow-eyed, sitting in the cattails.
AFTER TIFFANY EMERGED FROM THE CEDAR FOREST AND BAILED THE remainder of rain and river from their canoe, she tightened the ropes on their gear. Miranda sat silently near the riverbank, her arms hugging her knees. Tiffany asked if she was ready to go and saw in Miranda’s eyes the weight of shame and condemnation, a flash of spite too: Go where? they seemed to say. But Miranda just swallowed, nodded nearly imperceptibly, looked out at the rain-pocked water, and stepped into the bow lightly and silently, giving Tiffany’s arm the weakest squeeze as she passed.
Paddling through the aftermath of the storm made Tiffany grow quiet as well, out of awe and fear amid the greenish calm. Thunder still pealed in the distance, and the rain fell, but there was no more breeze, and Tiffany soon became lost in the spell of paddle strokes and undulating river grass. The air felt cooler than the river, and the river carried a thick litter of leaves and branches. The world seemed somehow both broken and refreshed. Tiffany filled her lungs. Looked downstream. She felt hope. The air felt hopeful. The canoe still floated. They were underway, her paddle clunking against the gunwale with each brace stroke like a slowly beaten drum.
They crossed the open water and reentered the marsh plain from where they turned back. It would be dark soon, and their progress was slow, but for an hour or more Tiffany followed the bright green constellations of floating maple leaves down the black water, moving with the candied current through the greater channels. Their way was hidden by the surface of things, guided by deeper currents. The channels looked identical, they all had the same stands of cattails growing at their edges. But some channels moved the leaves and some did not, and so Tiffany found the way through.
“Can we stop?”
The sound of Miranda’s voice surprised Tiffany.
“If you need to,” she answered. In the distance, Tiffany could see the forest rising up on the far side of the marsh plain. She’d prefer to keep going, to exit the marsh and arrive at a single channel again.
But Miranda nodded. There was grave tiredness in her body.
“Okay,” said Tiffany. “I’ll find a spot.”
Tiffany glided the canoe around a bend of cattails where the river split in three. In the distance, on the right side of the river, Tiffany made out what looked to be large sandbars, and when her eyes moved to the shoreline, her paddle stopped midstroke. Miranda saw it too. Her good hand tightened on the gunwale.
Opening before them in the growing dusk lay a half-mile-wide stretch of shore that had been ravaged in ways Tiffany had only seen in newspapers. Pine trees were snapped and stripped of their needles—some treetops were missing, others dangled in the rain at awkward angles. Some trees lay flat against the ground, their rooted skirts revealed. The scene reminded Tiffany of the time a classmate broke his shinbone clean in half on the playground, how she and all the other kids gawked at the foot, the way it dangled from the boy at so unnatural an angle.
Tiffany paddled forward into the slough. The leaves didn’t move on the water here, and in places pine needles floated in mats so thick the water looked like solid ground. Tiffany aimed the canoe toward a large sandbar and cut a path through the debris. She spotted a stand of hardwoods set well back from the shore. The branches were bare as winter. In some places the cattails had been stirred to mud. In others they stood erect. A cedar grove was pressed flat, all except a single younger tree. Tiffany had heard of tornadoes behaving like this, selective almost, flattening every home in a trailer park but leaving a glass case filled with knickknacks untouched.
Miranda faced forward. Her shoulders shook. There was nothing Tiffany could say. Miranda’s son was out here, somewhere, in this devastation. Or was he? Was it possible the boys were already back in Claypot, eating cookies with Constable Bobby? She could almost see it, Bobby with cookie crumbs on his lips, poking a radio’s transmitter again and again—Sheriff? Sheriff? Bobby to Rover. And for that matter, was the sheriff even out here anymore? Tiffany took one or two more paddle strokes, too tired to consider at length the thought that she and Miranda were floating around out here for no reason, everyone else back in town. She shook it from her mind. The possibility was real, but her gut told her otherwise. There was something odd about that storm, the way it rose up and broke over them so violently—and the near miss with the boatman too—and the way Miranda’s spirit seemed pushed so hard it’d been hushed. Tiffany felt they were in the right place.
When the canoe grated against the sandbar, Miranda let out what sounded like pain.
“Are you okay?” Tiffany asked. She told herself she should have beached more gently. She’d forgotten about Miranda’s injured wrist.
Miranda gasped again, clutched both gunwales, and moaned, staring down at the loosely packed sand of the beach. She scrambled out of the boat, and on her hands and knees started patting the sand. Then she pressed her sandy fingers to her lips, her hair dragging. Tiffany couldn’t tell if she was laughing or crying, and the scene raised the hair on her neck. She stowed her paddle and rustled through the bag near her feet for a flashlight. Dusk had come. She didn’t want to be alone in this darkness. Miranda had been through a lot. Too much maybe. Thunder pealed in the distance. Tiffany was alone with a madwoman.
She felt the smooth heft of the
C-cell Maglite, removed it from the bag, and aimed it at Miranda. In a snap of white light, the world grew small. What was left of the sky and the broken trees disappeared. Tiffany saw only the pointed bow of the red canoe, a sandbar strewn with leaves, and a weeping woman sitting on her denim hip, lifting and dropping fistfuls of muddy sand. Tiffany felt fear, and then noticed something odd about the sandbar. Surrounding Miranda in the sand, everywhere, were the shadowed rims of hundreds of small indentations, like crescent moons in negative, like heels and toes.
Heels.
And toes.
Tiffany shouted aloud, “Footprints!”
She sprang from the canoe, forgetting the stern was still afloat, and plunged down into waist-deep water.
“Footprints!” she yelled again, wading for shore. She fell to her knees next to Miranda and studied one of the indentations with her flashlight. Sure enough, there was a boy-sized footprint, and as she ran her light a few yards up the beach, she saw more and more of them. Despite the rain, the prints seemed fresh, and upon closer inspection there were clearly two different pairs of shoes, one with a deep zigzag pattern running from instep to heel, and the other flat-bottomed and worn.
A triumph rose in her body that felt physical, in the same way that running those rapids felt physical, the way that strange warmth arrived in that storm. Tiffany didn’t feel chilled now, or even wet. Her body hummed. She felt like leaping. She looked to Miranda, who was too overcome to smile or speak, just patting one of the footprints with the zigzag in it.
“It’s Fischer,” Tiffany said.
Miranda could only lift her head enough to nod.
“They’re here. Miranda, we found them.” Tiffany laughed. “We found them!”
Miranda closed her eyes and exhaled rattling breaths through her lips. She patted the sand, lowered her forehead to it.
Tiffany couldn’t wait, but as she stood to search the beach, Miranda reached out and grabbed her ankle. She swallowed heavily before she could speak. “Forgive me,” she whispered, and it was all she could manage to say or do.
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