This hole was deep. Cal felt his hands dragging along a smooth rock bottom. He felt as if he was slipping down a wall, grasping for an exit in a pitch-black room. The smooth rock crumbled and turned to gravel, and Cal clawed his hands into it. Though underwater, Cal’s only thought was to fight the current, to make it stop.
His lungs ached.
Water roared against his ears. His hands bit in the gravel for a moment. Darkness pressed in. Cal saw himself flapping like a flag in a stiff wind, like the one they’d flown the day he’d graduated from the academy. Guns saluting. Standing at attention. Sons given rare hugs by fathers.
This is a bad place to stay, Cal—Cal? What? Let go. I will not!
And then the river bottom crumbled in his grip.
Cal soon found himself washed up onto his hands and knees in a lapping pool of knee-deep water. Cal took in a warm breath of air. He looked down at the water, exhaled, panted. Water dripped from his hair and nose. He still held two handfuls of gravel in his fists. He smiled and dropped them in the water. And then he threw up.
When his stomach was emptied of river water, Cal crawled closer to shore where the water was only a few inches deep. He flopped onto his back and started to laugh. His senses felt intensely assaulted. It was as if he could smell the granite in the river, the tannins, the limestone. The air he breathed was filled with miles of dark forest and moss and oak, abandoned birds’ nests, anthills. The stars were large in the sky, a terrifying map of blues and greens and yellows. And all of it rumbled through him, out of him. In the waning intensity, his body felt tired, so very tired. The exhaustion made him feel as if he might start crying right there in the water. Cal wasn’t a crier. He used to be, as a boy, but he could still hear the words of his swim-coach father breaking him of the habit sometime about middle school, telling him to suck it up, keep it in, don’t you dare let anyone see you cry. It was typical Coach. That’s what he and his friends called his dad in the years following middle school. And he heard Coach’s voice in his head all the way through his undergrad years, all the way through the academy, in all the alleys of Houston too. The voice always told him he didn’t measure up, and that he needed to keep this truth about himself a secret, just keep it in. Fake it till you make it. Don’t piss off Dad. Stop your crying. That voice made many decisions in Cal’s life.
Out of habit, Cal damned the tears in his eyes, and then took his flashlight from his vest pocket. The light still worked. He lost his pistol, and he didn’t even care. Somewhere back in those rapids, on that river bottom, a thought had come that terrified and thrilled him. He knew it now the way he knew he was lying in water. Something whispered during that black roar, You never did want to be a cop. Cal remembers the day he mentioned the possibility to his dad. They were driving back from a swim meet. His dad nodded approval, actual approval—That’s a man’s job, he said, turning the station on the radio—and something between them in the car seemed to lighten. So Cal pursued it, started telling himself and his friends and his teachers he was going to be a cop. But all he really wanted was his dad’s nod, the way his dad’s eyes seemed to say, if only for a moment, You got this. The thought hit him now with regret and sadness and anger all at once. The admission was terrifying, but hopeful too. He could actually quit this. And he could actually ask Tiffany Robins out on a date too. He could listen to her poems, fall in love, have babies. Cal’s breath stopped with that thought. The image of Tiffany, pregnant and beautiful, stunned him to silence, and Cal felt an overwhelming and urgent need to paint the trim on his cabin, fix the screen door, mow the path to the river, make sure the front steps were tight and level. He felt keenly responsible for whatever happened next, as if he’d nearly stepped off the edge of something, was yanked back, and now must step very carefully. A new sort of eagerness filled him. He had to do something right now, choose something new right now. He took the whiskey bottle from his pocket, uncapped it, shook its contents into the river, and pitched it up at the moon. The bottle splashed in the river.
“Do you see that?” he said, holding his fist to the moon in the sky. He dared it to speak. “Do you see that!”
Exhaustion and nausea came upon him again, and he let his head fall back in the shallow water. He was beaten and wet and had lost his firearm. If there was ever a moment he hadn’t measured up, this was it. But for some strange reason, he felt indescribably safe, free of condemnation. The moon hadn’t spoken. Cal had spoken, and wept too, and he didn’t care if anyone knew it. Just then, Cal heard footfalls in the water behind him, the jingle of tack. He felt warm breath against the side of his face, a wet muzzle. Cal closed his eyes and reached a tired arm toward the horse’s face, but his hand met thick fur, and a collar with tags on it. When the horse whimpered the way a dog whimpers, Cal sat bolt upright on his aching tailbone, fumbled for his flashlight,
