'We hit a capsized john boat You OK?'
He nodded and palmed water from his eyes. 'Where we at? In relation to Lindy?'
The chart had been flung out with Harry. The rain pounded straight down now, hissing on water and swamp grass and drumming the body of our forlorn craft. I closed my eyes and tried to recall the markers.
'Maybe a quarter mile. Only problem is' I looked across thirty yards of surging water 'we're on the wrong side of the river.'
I studied the water in the fading light, the same width from bend to bend. Swim up and into the flow, I thought, fighting the current like a riptide, never stopping; swim straight across and I'd end up hundreds of yards downstream. If I wasn't pulled under.
'Show me how to swim,' Harry said.
'It's not like that, bro,' I said, watching a fifty-five-gallon drum tumble down the channel like a pop can.
'There was this community pool when I was growing up,' he said. 'They showed me how to dog-paddle. And I've got this' Harry pointed to the yellow vest, the brightest thing in miles, incandescent. It was probably rated for someone a hundred pounds lighter. The white straps were too short to girdle his belly; they hung at his sides in a grotesque parody of a straitjacket.
'That ain't dog-paddle water, Harry,' I said. 'For you it's drowning water.'
'What the hell is it for you?'
'Just wet, Harry. Don't worry.'
I tore my shirt off, the buttons landing in the water, tumbling faces drowned in an instant. The rain pelted harder. It stung my bare shoulders like rock salt dropped from a roof. I stripped to briefs, a shoulder holster with the Beretta, a belt with an extra clip and a five-inch Buck hunting knife in a leather scabbard. There was a.30 Marlin in the boat, along with a 12-gauge, but every added ounce put me closer to the bottom. I had two good legs and about one and a third arms. It had to be enough.
The philosopher Heraclitus said you can never step into the same river twice, meaning by the time you step in a second time the water has changed. He was trumped by Parmenides who said you can never step into the same river once, it's changing as you step. I went through a thousand rivers before I got waist deep in the warm opaque water, vortices swirling on the down-water sides of my legs. Leaves and debris clotted against me and foretold the river's stranglehold before I'd even begun my journey.
I looked at the far side, dark trees cutting into purple sky and all shrouded gray by the rain. I thought of Ava, in a box in the middle of nowhere with a maniac, the rain pounding his delusions deeper into his skull. I took a deep breath and dived into the current.
It was worse than I'd imagined.
CHAPTER 35
He stood on the foredeck and looked across the marsh into gray light fading toward a black as lush as velvet. No stars or moon, no lights.
Sometimes he could he see lantern light from a fish camp a quarter mile downstream, but the old man who used the camp walked with a cane and listened with a hand behind his ear. A lucky old man: Had he been a threat, Mr. Cutter would have syringed a heart attack into the old man's veins like he'd done to the grinning pervert he'd sent Caulfield.
The depraved monster had approached Mr. Cutter at a bar when he was shadowing Nelson. It had been wonderful to lure him, inject him, push the simple explosive device into him with a broom handle. It was delightful what one could create with the powder from three shotgun shells, a sawed-down flashlight tube, a spark-trigger, a foot of monofilament, and a treble fishhook.
'My fingers? Where are my fingers?'
Willy Lindy smiled at his recollection of Caulfield's first and last autopsy. The devious young pathologist had tried to steal Mama's ordained job from her the one that brought her back to Willy.
Now he was safe in his own world. Made even safer by the rain. The universe had given him his boat back, returned Mama, and now protected him from the outside world, allowing time. Time for Willy, time for Mama. Two weary travelers united in atonement, when sins of the past would be clarified through the revelation of image, redemption washing their souls in scarlet waves, leaving them safe and alone and together forever.
He heard Mama making noises in the engine room below. She'd want to know what was going on. He'd best go and tell her.
Show her.
'Cars! Watch out!'
I was halfway across, muscles screaming and burning, eyes blinded by grit and garbage, when the uprooted stump tumbled over me. It was the size of a car, its root system clutching as it rolled me under, roots like pliable iron, inescapable, like being welded to the face of a locomotive high balling beneath an ocean. I ripped and clawed at the tendrils surrounding me, pulled, tore. Screamed in my head.
A roar of bubbles, distorted sounds. The burn of fingernails peeling away.
The stump shuddered and spun and jammed me like a dredging shovel into the thick muck of the bottom, sponge-soft at the top, thick and sandy beneath. Mud filled my mouth and nose and ears as I waited for the crush, an orchestral roar blaring in my head. I skidded along the bottom with my final taste of life pouring from my lungs, thinking, My last moment: bubbles across my face.
The stump shuddered again, and rotated upward, taking forever before it broke the surface. Rain and beautiful air, me sucking it past the mud and sand, choking, vomiting, but air. I screamed at the clutching roots, wrenched. The stump rolled me slowly toward the sky as my hands scrabbled to discover where I was bound.
The shoulder rig, my mind screamed… tangled.
I fought the binding with torn fingers. Then heard the sound of splashing carrying through the rain. I saw Harry in the river, a dozen feet from shore, sixty from me and moving away, white plumes rising as he slapped the water. Seeing me overtaken by the stump, he'd dived in, found attempting to swim is more destructive than not swimming at all.
'Go back!' I screamed. 'Harry, stop!'
I watched in horror as the current sucked him out into the main channel, spinning, splashing, choking. The stump rolled me down toward the water again.
'Hold your breath and float,' I shrieked. 'Your body wants to float.'
His head disappeared, but broke the surface seconds later, ten yards farther downstream. He was slowly rotating, as if in a whirlpool, moving away. He went under again.
After that only flat and relentless water.
I cursed and wailed and tore at the harness straps, the water rising up my legs. It was just straps now, the Beretta scraped away by the bottom. My torn hands couldn't work the release, fingers like smoke at the ends of my arms. Water raged across my chest.
The knife was still at my waist. I fumbled it loose, pressed it between my palms, and sliced furiously at the straps.
At my neck, water…
A snap of nylon and water filling my mouth again…
Free. Floating in the river, gasping, the stump tumbling to the depths, roots slashing the surface. I felt the thunder of its crushing skid against the bottom.
When I spun toward the far bank the knife fell from my bleeding fingers. I struck out wildly for it, catching the grip across my palm.
I couldn't grasp it, could never hold it as I swam. I was gasping and shaking too hard to clamp it in my teeth. Kicking hard, treading water, swirling downriver, I angled the point between the flesh and the meat high on my thigh, jammed my palm against the pommel, and thrust.
The knife slid into me and stuck hard.
I howled like a man possessed by whirlwinds and swam past anything I ever knew as pain, reaching the far side of the river bleeding, rigid with cramp, blind with mud and rage. I cried until my eyes cleared and crawled in
