“Dad! Rope!” he yelled, holding the rope high overhead.
Bread’s dad struggled to keep afloat in his poncho and boots but had managed to uncover his face. He dipped and bobbed toward the lip of the falls, his bandaged head and hands flailing. He spotted his son.
“Dale!” his father yelled, dipping into the water and spitting it out. “Help me! Dale!”
Dale Breadwin launched the rope to his father. It uncoiled through the lightning flashes and landed like a fly line. Bread’s dad took three panicked strokes and clutched the rope against his chest. The rope lost slack and lifted from the water, a taut line between father and son.
Bread slipped and went under. The rope slackened. He came back up on new footing, and the rope tightened again. Bread’s dad dangled and spun. Bread leaned back and screamed from the effort.
“Dale!” His dad spat water from his mouth.
“Swim!” yelled Bread.
“Dale!” shouted his dad.
Bread was underwater again. And when he came up the rope stayed slack, and both Bread and his dad were in deep water now, drifting toward the falls. To their left rose the cliff. To their right, the outcropping of rock where the buoy rope snagged.
Fish was already running. He leapt into the water, untethered the raft, and pushed it into the current. He was no swimmer, but he might be able to reach them with the raft. He rolled aboard, grabbed a pole, and started pushing the rocky river bottom as hard as he could. Under power, he moved faster toward the falls than the swimmers.
“Bread!” Fish yelled. “Swim for the rock!”
Bread turned in the water, keeping himself untangled from the rope as best he could. His eyes grew wide when he saw Fish coming down with the raft. Bread backstroked against the current with one arm to slow their progress. Downstream, Bread’s dad sank and resurfaced, attached to the rope.
“Bread, the rock,” yelled Fish. “Swim for the rock!”
Bread lifted the rope in his hands. “My dad!”
Fish looked at the outcropping. He could make out the buoy rope much better now. It was wrapped tightly across the back of the boulder, held by the force of the falls. Bread could make it there if he let go. If he didn’t, they’d all die. Fish made a decision.
“I’ll get him!” he shouted, and Bread stared back from the water.
“I’ll get to him!” Fish repeated. “I promise! Now swim! Swim!”
A bolt of lightning shot directly overhead. It made the water crackle.
Bread released the rope that tied him to his father and swam hard for the outcropping. Head down, his flattened body glided smoothly across the troughs and peaks of rolling black swells. He swam as fast as Fish had ever seen him.
Fish looked back downstream. He judged he was about twenty feet from Bread’s dad, maybe sixty from the falls. He narrowed his eyes in the rain and jammed his pole against the river bottom. He felt it connect with the rocks and pushed the raft downriver with all his might. He lifted it and found bottom and pushed again, accelerating the raft toward the falls and Bread’s dad. He knew what lay ahead. It was death. The falls roared. The lightning crackled so brilliantly it illuminated the river bottom, the rocks and boulders, the clinging crayfish. Fish saw clearly. This act, he knew, would release him. He promised he’d get to Bread’s dad, and he would. Bread would keep swimming and live on, knowing he tried to save his father, knowing he was good even if his father was not. And Fish would go over the falls, having kept a promise, having offered life to his friend with his own. Fish was not a poor damned thing. Bread was not a poor damned thing. They were not forsaken. Fish gave himself over to it, the abandon of it. There was nothing left to fear. Fish pushed even harder against the river stones.
The man’s boots rose to the surface, kicked, then disappeared again. He faced the falls, backpaddling, panicked, his left arm a tangle of rope. Fish was ten feet away from him, the falls thirty. The depth of the canyon gaped before them. The river rose and fell through glass black waves.
Fish repositioned his pole. The pole found bottom. Lightning illuminated stones. Fish yelled for Bread’s dad to turn around, leaned into the pole with his full weight, then leapt toward the front of the deck. Fish landed hard on his stomach and reached out into the water. Bread’s dad turned upriver, went underwater, lifted his hands. Fish grasped his wrists, and the man grasped his.
Fish had him.
The man’s face emerged in the darkness. The water had washed the bandage free, and the bloody gauze hung loosely across his nose and mouth. The uncovered eye was blood red, cut through with river channels and lightning bolts. And just where the crease of his eye met his temple, the stitched and bleeding track of a wound ran back toward a torn ear. The cut followed the arc of his skull, a vein pounding next to the wound. The bullet had only grazed him, Fish knew, and with it knew he never was a killer.
Five feet from the lip of Ironsford Gorge, the weight of the man dangling from the raft spun it just enough for Fish to glance upstream. Equidistant from the falls and the rock—ten feet from death and ten feet from life—Bread’s body still sliced across the surface like a streak of light. He kicked and reached. Kicked and reached. As Fish watched Bread’s hand plant itself firmly on solid rock, he felt the raft roll to his left. It
