Tiffany grinned and clasped Miranda’s hand.
“You stay here,” she said. “We found them. We found them.”
Miranda released her grip, and Tiffany was gone like a shot. The excitement of a search fulfilled, the joy of getting to see that mother wrap her boy in her arms, was too great to contain. Tiffany smiled as she jogged up the sandbar, laughing to herself. Those boys had no idea of the smothering that lay in store for them.
She noticed the tracks led in and out of the water at times, but always moved farther toward shore and a hedge of cattails.
“Fischer!” Tiffany yelled into the night. She ran the beam of her flashlight toward the cattails, out into the water, and back toward the other end of the sandbar. “Fischer! Your mom’s here! Fischer!”
Tiffany jogged again and came across a pile of three or four stacked logs. Amid the logs, the footprints intensified. Bits of rope were strewn about. Tiffany picked up one of the bits and studied it in her light. It’d been cut with a sharp knife. She followed the footprints beyond the pile of logs and noticed that the toes of the shoes faced both ways. The footprints went into the cattails, and while Tiffany shone her light into the shadows and stalks, she could see very clearly where the footprints came back out and headed to the log pile.
She returned, called Fischer’s name again, and then she realized what the boys had done, what they’d built. On a path leading toward the water, the toes of the boys’ shoes dug heavily into the drag marks of logs. In the water itself, the floating mat of pine needles remained parted. Tiffany followed the path with her light. It cut a weaving arc through the slough toward the main channel and disappeared beyond the reaches of her light.
Tiffany pinched the flashlight in her armpit and cupped her hands around her mouth.
“Fischer!” she bellowed into the wet blackness. She inhaled deeply and yelled again, sustaining his name for the entirety of her breath. They’re gone, she thought. Her heart fell, but she knew they were close, and she was determined now to paddle all night, all morning, for the rest of her life if needed.
She heard footfalls approaching her, a panting breath. She turned toward the canoe. “We’ve got to get back in the river, Miranda.” She lifted the light toward where Miranda’s footfalls jogged to a stop. “The boys aren’t here. Theeeeaaahhhhhhhhh! Eeeaaahahhh!”
Tiffany’s mouth screamed. It could do no other. There in the sickening light of her flashlight stood a winded man, hunched over and panting, soaked to the core and filthy. His face was mottled and scratched. A string of red welts ran from his cheek to his ear. Mud was smeared from his forehead to his open mouth. Between panting breaths, he grinned at her, and then lifted his hand and stepped toward her.
Tiffany was done screaming. She gripped the end of the heavy Maglite like a baton and brought an overhand swing down hard on the man’s hat. She felt it connect with a crack and the man stumbled backward. She attacked again, terrified as the whipping baton met the man’s neck and hands and then his huddled spine.
“Tiff, stop!” the man cried out, which for some reason made Tiffany more afraid and hit him even harder.
“How do you know my name!” She landed another crack near his tailbone, and the man howled in untold agony and rage.
He caught the next blow with his hand and wrenched the flashlight free, catching Tiffany by her wrist with his other hand, which pulled her down on top of him. She fought and kicked. She bit a mouthful of shirt.
“Tiff! It’s me—it’s me!”
Tiffany froze. Her breaths came as fast as her heartbeat. She realized she was gripping the man’s shirt with both hands, still biting it too. It smelled of pine and horse and sweat. She looked up at the face in front of her, caught squarely in the beam of the light. Through mud and welts and days of stubble, there was Sheriff Cal, grimacing at her.
“It’s me,” he said.
She held tight to his shirt and felt lost for a moment. There was too much happening. Miranda weeping in the sand, the footprints, and then this attacker—Cal?—this man panting beneath her. She felt the rise and fall of his ribs.
“Oh!” she said. She was trembling. “Cal?” She released his shirt and flattened it against his chest. “Are you hurt?”
Cal winced. “Yes. I am.”
Tiffany remembered she was lying on top of him and scrambled off.
“Cal, I—” She collected his hands in hers and began to help him to his feet. He groaned and she dropped him on the sand, which made him groan even more, for which she apologized.
He sat himself up, looked around for his hat, not yet ready to rise to his feet. Tiffany knelt alongside him.
“Tiffany,” he said, “what are you doing out here?”
“I came with Miranda. We brought a canoe. To look for the boys. And to find your—” She stopped, remembering the bad news she had to tell him about Jacks, which seemed so distant and insignificant now. Nevertheless, she did have to tell him, and had thought through about fifteen different ways to break the news, and now she had to tell him after beating him with a flashlight. And that face of his, that beautiful square face. This forest had been bad to him. But good too. She couldn’t make sense of things.
“Sheriff, I lost your dog.”
Cal shook his head, and Tiffany’s heart sank.
“Cal, I’m sorry.”
He kept shaking his head and rubbing his neck as she apologized. “No,” he said. “You didn’t. I mean you did, but you didn’t.”
With a spray of sand, Miranda burst into the orb of light, racking a pump shotgun as she did so. She leveled it at Cal’s chest.
“Back off, pervert!” she said, ferocity in her voice.
Miranda raised the muzzle up into the night sky and loosed a deafening round of twelve-gauge buckshot. Spark and flame erupted from the muzzle. Cal hit the dirt. Tiffany sprang from where she knelt. Miranda racked the pump gun again and leveled it at Cal, who was very nearly burying himself in the sand, yelling, “No, no, no, no, no!”
Tiffany leapt between Miranda and Cal.
“Don’t! It’s the sheriff, Miranda! It’s the sheriff.”
It took a moment for Miranda to lower the muzzle. Her eyes flicked from Tiffany to Cal and back. The three remained in deafened silence for a time.
“Miranda,” said Tiffany, “meet Sheriff Cal.”
Cal got up, painfully, to his feet. He stooped, painfully, and picked up his hat and used it to slap the sand from his jeans.
“What is wrong with you two?” he said. “Beat me down. Blow my ear out. Damn it!”
“Cal, she didn’t know who you were.”
“I know that.” He spat.
Miranda held out her good hand and cradled the shotgun with the other. Cal shook it.
“Nice to meet you, Sheriff,” she said, wincing.
He nodded and released her hand and then punched his fist into his squashed hat and put it on his head. “You’re injured,” he said. “Are you okay?”
“I am, and I’m sorry for shooting,” said Miranda. “I just thought—”
“I know what you thought, and you had every right to think it. I was just excited to see somebody, anybody, to see you,” he said, glancing at Tiffany when he said it. He seemed to catch on the words a bit as he said them, so he waved his hand in the air to clear it. “I was glad to see you all brought a boat.”
Tiffany looked into his eyes when he spoke of her, and looked away when he said he was glad she brought a boat. It was ridiculous. She’d just pummeled the man with a flashlight, and now she worried whether he loved her. It was foolish, but she didn’t care. He looked even more handsome muddy and bug-bitten, like he’d been fighting bears. She wasn’t afraid of how she felt anymore. She wasn’t afraid to trust the warmth, to gather it along with all the fear. She wanted her weed-patch rental in Claypot. She wanted her poems and small kitchen table. And she wanted him.
“Do you know where my father is?” Miranda asked, tucking the shotgun under her arm. “And have you see
n Fischer or his friend? They were here. We found footprints.”
Cal nodded. “Yes, and yes, and yes. Look, I still don’t understand what—”
“And what were you saying about the dog? Sheriff, I lost your dog,” said Tiffany.
Cal rubbed the back of his neck again, tried to roll it and test it a bit. “We just saw the boys. They left here less than an hour ago. And you didn’t lose my dog.”
“Where, Sheriff? Which direction!” demanded Miranda.
Cal nodded at the river, but held his hands out when Miranda took a step toward the water, as if she were about to drop the shotgun and swim for them. “Everyone hang on just a second. I’m trying—”
“Did they swim?” Miranda asked.
Tiffany spoke up. “They took a raft.”
“A raft!” said Miranda. “What raft?”
“They built one,” Tiffany informed her.
“How?” said Miranda, and then, turning to Cal, “Sheriff, I demand answers.”
“Now everyone hang on a second,” Cal said. “I’ve been out here for days, and I’m tired, and hungry, and I lost my pistol, and found my dog, and got bucked from a horse—and by the way, I had to arrest your father and then unarrest him because it did me no good. And before we go any further, you both may as well know that the second we get out of these woods I’m not sheriff anymore, so please stop calling me—”
“You found Jacks!” Tiffany exclaimed. “And what do you mean you’re not sheriff anymore?”
Cal opened his mouth and closed it.
“You arrested my father? What for? And what horse, Sheriff? I don’t see any horse.”
“Yes, and yes, and no. Would everyone just—dang it, my neck hurts!”
Everyone stopped talking. Cal’s yell echoed. Miranda shifted uneasily, until a mare whinnied from beyond the riverbank, near the broken stand of hardwood.
Cal took a breath. “First, Miranda, do you think you can still ride?”
Miranda nodded. “Better than I can paddle.”
“As I was saying, the boys headed downstream. Teddy took off after them onshore and asked me to stay here. That’s when you showed up.”
“Why did you stay?”
Cal took a breath, let it out. “Teddy said I’d slow him down, and if I never ride a horse again it’s too soon. Also, if the boys hit a dead end in this slough and circle back, I’ll be here. It’s less than ten miles between here and the gorge, and Teddy’s headed downriver where he can cross over to the left bank. I sent Jacks with him, in case his nose becomes useful.”
At the mention of the gorge, Miranda took one step back from the circle of light.
“That horse, Sheriff. Is it tied in those trees?” she asked, moving away into the shadows.
“What? No, that horse ain’t tied.”
Miranda let out a piercing whistle.
Cal took a step toward her. “So now that you’re here, I’m thinking the plan might be for you to ride on and join your dad, and Tiff and I could paddle downriver. We’d be able to get on both sides of the boys, upstream and down. Miranda?”
There was no reply. Miranda was gone.
Cal took off his hat and slapped his leg with it. “Wow—if that woman isn’t just like her father.” Cal spat the words. “Get on the horse. Get on the horse. Logging road my ass!” Cal gave up and sighed. “Tiffany, how are you? It’s good to see you. Really good. I’m glad you’re okay. Are you okay? I’m sorry I scared you.”
“You saw the boys? You really saw them?”
Cal rubbed his neck and pointed with his hat. “Teddy and I came bursting out of those cattails as the boys were pushing out into the main channel. We yelled. They saw us and pushed on even harder.”
“I don’t understand.”
“They think they’re on the run, Tiff.”
“From whom?”
“From me.” The sheriff looked at the ground for a moment, at the hundreds of little footprints. Tiffany saw fear in his face, and sadness too. She took a step toward him.
“Are you okay—Cal?”
His eyes met hers.
“Yeah.”
“You look tired.”
“I am. I am very tired.”
Tiffany placed a tentative hand on his wet jacket. He looked at it, and at her. She wanted to tell him everything, about herself, her youth and her poems, last summer, about all she’d been thinking about him. But she realized that he hadn’t known any of her thoughts. He hadn’t been with her in any of her daydreams. To him, she was just the woman who worked at the gas station, the one who lost his dog, or didn’t lose it. She had lived out the entire romance in her mind, and he wasn’t there for a moment of it, and now she realized she didn’t know who he was either. The thought caught in her throat. They were strangers.
“Cal,” she asked, “what did you mean when you said you weren’t going to be sheriff anymore?”
“I want a different life, Tiff.”
The way he answered, so quickly and harshly, made Tiffany’s heart fall.
“Oh,” she said.
The sound of hooves pounded to a stop behind them. Tiffany turned the flashlight and saw Miranda, high and wild-looking atop a horse, the shotgun slung across her back, reins held in her good hand. In order to ride, she’d hiked her denim skirt all the way above her hips. Long, shining legs stood powerfully in the stirrups. The horse seemed enlivened to have a good rider on it again. It huffed and paced back and forth in Miranda’s hands, eager to find its direction and run. The fire was back.
“Sheriff, here is the plan,” said Miranda. “You and Tiffany will follow the boys down in the canoe. I’ll catch up with my father. We can get on both sides of them before the falls.”
Cal shut his eyes and mouth, and then opened his hands in acquiescence. “That sounds like a really good plan.”
“You said they’d left about half an hour ago?”
“About that.”
Miranda nodded. Her eyes were already downriver. Tiffany knew that if Miranda could get to the boys, they’d stop running.
The horse paced and stomped its feet. Miranda turned it. “Tiffany, give me that light, there’s another in the boat.”
Tiffany handed it over, and Miranda wound the reins around it so she could hold both with one hand.
“Listen closely,” Miranda said. “When you get to the gorge, there will be a thick rope strung across the river. It marks the first falls. It floats on red buoys from the right shoreline to the main island. Do not cross it. There is no surviving that gorge in a canoe or in anything else.”
The horse turned and stomped again and Miranda corrected it.
“Go, Miranda,” said Tiffany, and Miranda’s face tightened in pain.
“Sheriff, did they look okay?” Miranda asked. “Did the boys look hurt?”
“The boys were fine,” he said.
Miranda shut her eyes and opened them. She was giving thanks, Tiffany knew. “I will meet you both at the gorge,” said Miranda. “Do not cross the rope.”
And with that, she turned the mare and kicked her heels into its side.
“Hyahh! Hyahh!” she yelled—leaving Cal and Tiffany standing together in the drizzle and darkness, watching the beam of the Maglite race ahead of the galloping horse, over the sandbar, through the cattails, amid the trees and forest downstream. Miranda sped through the trees like a flying spirit, spurring and shouting—“Hyahh! Hyahh!”—a mother after her boy, majestic and terrifying.
“Jesus,” Cal said, still watching her.
“You have no idea,” Tiffany said, and turned her back on Cal and walked to the canoe alone. A different life, she thought. She had no need of a man desiring a different life.
Sixteen
“THIS ROPE IS TOUGH!” IN THE DARK AND RAIN, BREAD STOOD in the water and sawed at a wrist-thick rope strung across the river. The rope floated on buoys between the mainland and a rock island dotted with cedars growing from its plateau top. A new wave of thunderstorm had come, less violent but hotte
r somehow, more lightning in it—and as the storm came on and the rain began pocking the river, the raft ran afoul of a buoy in the dark. The buoys were red and oval and the size of bathtubs. Each was painted with bold white letters the boys could read in the lightning strikes: Danger—Dam 100 Feet—Do Not Cross. The buoys were arranged in such a way that the rope draped between them at water level, too high to cross over and too heavy to lift to get under. Fish was thankful for it, as it gave them an excuse to shelter for the night and plan their next leg. He was wet and sore, and the relative dryness of an island of cedar trees beckoned. But after the boys pulled their way along the rope to land and climbed to the downstream peak of the island where sheer cliffs fell away into whitewater, Fish realized there was no next leg of the journey, at least not by river. The boys sat for a time on that peak, stunned by what the rope had spared them. Fish felt sick to his stomach. The sound of the roaring river mixed so thoroughly with the sound of thunder, he was sure they wouldn’t have heard the rapids at all. The first drop was fierce, vertical. It made the rocks hum.
The island they stood on was twenty yards wide. To his right, the lip of the falls stretched several hundred feet from the island to the mainland, its whitewater interrupted by an outcropping of rock. The falls fell about fifty feet. Tongues of whitewater lashed upward and outward, all of them boiling at the bottom before surging downriver. From the left side of the island spilled a second channel through a series of sieves and logjams. Downstream of the convergence, the water remained white and thunderous. Lightning flashed, and Fish saw a stretch of river the length and width of a football field, marked by vertical cliffs on either side, with two or three craggy islands dividing explosive currents. The water seemed to fight itself. It tumbled into pits. It bellowed. It hissed and leapt. It beat against the faces of the islands in giant, upswept pillows of water. Downstream of the islands, the entire river disappeared again, presumably over another falls, sprays of water rising into the lightning.
Fish’s knees trembled up on that peak. And he knew it wasn’t only because he was wet and cold. The rapids spoke of something great and terrible, a storm of water that had churned for ages. The boys sat silently for a few minutes more, then walked in silence back to the rope and raft, wiping water from their faces. When Bread first asked for the barlow knife, Fish assumed his friend wanted to shave some bark or make a feather stick for a fire. Cutting the buoy rope was beyond reason. Bread’s pretense in doing so, that some possibility still existed downstream, was infuriating to behold.
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