“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 hotter 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,
