“What did you say?” asked Bread.
Fish laughed through his nose, felt fire in his throat. “You didn’t know, did you?” He felt powerful and awful. He felt as if he were watching himself say the words, twist them up and wring them out, pour them on Bread. This was too much power, and Fish hated himself for possessing it, for freeing it. “My dad’s been dead for as long as you’ve known me, and you didn’t know it. You’re too stupid to know.”
“Are you telling the truth?” Bread trembled.
Fish trembled too. The river trembled.
“There’s nothing out here, Bread. There never was. There is nowhere to run.”
Bread swayed in the rain. He tucked his chin in toward his neck and closed his eyes. He clenched the barlow in his fist. Fish didn’t know if he was going to fight, but it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. It was over. They’d reached the end, standing in a river above a falls in a storm, alone.
“Go away from me, Fischer.”
Rain fell and filled the river. Fish imagined the water rising, the dark current filling his legs and arms. It filled his eyes and mouth and ears with silence, his stomach like handfuls of lead shot. He felt the way he did the night he learned his dad had died, the chasm opening underfoot.
“Bread,” he whispered.
Bread’s eyes stayed closed.
“Bread.”
“Go away from me, Fischer. Or I will kill you.”
Fish felt dizzy in the current, and he wished at that moment that Bread would kill him, just take it out of him and let the husk of his body breach the falls, whatever it was Bread needed to take to make himself whole again. But Bread just stood in the rain, breathing it in, swaying there in the lapping waves, the trees and cliffs pasted to the sky.
Fish left him.
He stumbled alone, uphill, into the interior of the island. He looked back at the river only once before entering the tree line, and saw Bread unmoved in the water, staring up into the rain, the knife in his hand, the gun in his belt, frozen in so much shimmering ice. Fish was too tired to cry. He didn’t even know if he wanted to cry—his body, his cold hands, everything was numb. He walked beneath cedars and over carpets of needles. He crawled up and over moss-covered rocks. He emerged and sat in the rain at the edge of the rock cliff above the rapids, crossed his legs, and let the rain soak him. He put his hands on the lip of the rock, felt the grit on his palms. He stared out at the horrible, watery divide that cut the earth, all of that aimless moaning and hissing. He wondered what it would be like to be in it, to just lean out a little farther, a little more. The thought made him reel and allowed his body to weep.
He wept over the lies he’d told. He wept over his killing hands. He wept over the tangles in it all, how the lies he’d told allowed him to live, allowed his father to live. What choice did he have? Fish leaned nearer to the edge. He let a small stone fall over, watched it swallowed by violence. Gone. Fish, in the space of a breath, had crushed all pretense by speaking into the air the ugly truth. And he didn’t wave his hands and wash it away like his grandpa did. He spoke it over them and let it stay. Your dad is dead. And so is mine. And no one is coming to save us.
Fish imagined his father watching him across the chasm of water. The eyes hovered, sad and ashamed, and then they turned away. Fish looked up into the rain and thunder at the mottled, lamplit clouds. He didn’t know if he was praying, but it felt like prayer. He didn’t know what to ask for, even as he pleaded, wordlessly, without meaning or direction. His heart simply moaned like the river, murmured like the sky. A single word eventually escaped his mouth. Help, he asked, sitting with his hands planted on that humming rock, eyes filling with black and white rain. Help.
An answer came from the water. It sounded like the thump of a car door, a dropped pail. Fish heard it again. It sounded less metallic this time, more plastic or wooden. It sounded hollow. He looked down into the river, but all he saw was white. He heard it again, this time to his right, and looked toward the main race of the falls. Something dark and round fled with the water, on top of the water. The object fell toward that churning hole, encountered a rock. Thunk. Lightning flashed. The river was white and the object red. Fish’s chest tightened. He looked to the top of the falls and saw a line of buoys floating free of their tether toward the gorge chasm.
Bread, thought Fish, and then he said it aloud.
Still tied to the mainland, the line of buoys spilled toward the falls in a giant sweeping arc. When it reached the precipice, the cable snagged at its middle on the rock outcropping. The line to the mainland snapped taut as the free end was claimed by the falls. Thunk. Thunk. Thunk. The torrent stripped the buoys from the line. One, two, three, four, five. The buoys rocketed downward, bounding, springing, then devoured.
Fish watched, frozen.
“Bread,” he said again, rising from his hands and knees at the cliff’s edge. Downriver, only two buoys reappeared, bounding toward islands.
“Bread!” Fish yelled. He ran back over rocks and through trees, wet branches tangling his arms and neck. “Bread, don’t do it! Bread! I’m coming with you if you go!”
FISH SPUN THROUGH A TANGLE OF PINE AND EMERGED BREATHLESS in the clearing lower down the island. He could make out the raft about twenty yards away, still tethered to the rock point. But where was Bread? Fish could
