One more pull and Cal was up on the rock, flattened and spent. Rain pelted the side of his face. In his immediate field of vision, he saw Tiffany, legs folded, her palms flat on the wet rock, too winded to speak. To her left knelt a boy in a wet flannel shirt, looking at Cal with astonished eyes.
“Dale Breadwin,” panted the sheriff. He rolled painfully to his side and placed a heavy hand on the boy’s knee, patted it. “You okay?” he asked.
The boy nodded, and Cal tried to smile at him.
“Your bud here?”
The boy shook his head, and Cal frowned, looked at the rock. The scene took no great sheriff to discern. Two boys on a raft. One boy left on a rock near a falls. Cal felt exhaustion take his body, his mind too. There was nothing to say. Nothing could be done. It was over. Cal felt a knot rise in his throat. He rolled onto his back and hid his eyes with his forearm. He found Tiffany’s lap with his free hand, began to quietly weep. He wept for the past few days of briars and rivers and horses. He wept for the sight of that boy Fischer, and Dale, pushing off with that raft, how he’d seen that boy’s eyes. He wept for Houston and all its wasted time and hope. Tiffany took his hand and held on to it. Her fingers were soft and cold. Cal let out a slow, shuddering breath, let his head rest on that humming rock, and fell asleep in the roar and rain.
FISH RESTED HIS FOREHEAD ON THE BACK OF HIS HAND, UNABLE TO lift himself. He threw up river water. The air burned in his lungs. He didn’t know how long he’d been here, or how he got here from the bottom of that river, or where here even was. His heart banged in his chest and neck. He couldn’t tell what was hurt. He was just throb and puddle and fire. He tried to lift his head again, but it was still too heavy.
When he first hit the base of the falls, he thought he had died, so absolute was the darkness and weightlessness and breathlessness. His limbs freewheeled. His body spun through the hiss, pricked full of holes like the universe itself. Dying felt like the cosmos, some part of him thought, the cosmos at the beginning of things, only darkness and light and water. It wasn’t until Fish hit the river bottom, hit it hard on his right hip, that he remembered he was underwater, that he’d gone over the falls, and that he wanted to live. He tried to swim, but his arms and legs seemed wrenched in every direction. He opened his eyes, but there was no light. He opened his mouth to scream, but it filled with water. The desire to inhale was terrifying. Fish fought it and fought it, tumbled on in the gravel and stones. And just when he thought he could fight no longer, when his lungs seemed physically unable to remain so empty, he felt himself borne by a strange and powerful current. It boiled up from beneath him and lifted him like a leaf in a gust of wind. Fish bent and spun upward through the water column. He saw flashing lights, dappled and amber-colored. He saw froth and foam. Then he felt air rush in, heard his own breath as the river surged and spat him onto a smooth stone surface.
Fish found himself lying flat on his stomach, above water, hugging the flat curve of a massive stone rising from the river. Stunned and panicked, Fish dragged himself along the stone, scraping his nails against the marbled surface, his knees and toes propelling him forward. A few yards onto the stone, he looked back and saw a giant pillow of whitewater churning near the rock face like a fountain, a miraculous spring.
Fish waited for his heart to slow. He could still feel its pulse knocking in the back of his throat. He moved his arms and legs experimentally, flexed his fingers. They worked. He drew another rattling breath. How long had he been under? He had no way of knowing. He rolled on his side and looked up at the sky. Lightning shot through it, slowly somehow, and Fish felt as if he could see individual raindrops spinning and throbbing as they fell, blackened and jeweled in so much light and darkness.
Fish drew his knees under himself and rose to his feet. His hip hurt, and he felt as if he had a cut on his face, but everything was too wet to tell if it was bleeding very badly. He took his bearings. Whitewater charged down either side of the island. This part of the island was low in the water, sloping downward until tucking itself back into the current. Upstream, Fish saw where the two main channels of the falls converged, the smaller cutting into the larger before colliding with the island.
The island had the footprint of a large house. Fish followed its shoreline. Near its center rose the island’s highest point, a fifteen-foot ledge of rock. The face of the ledge revealed rounded-out hollows and bends where the river had carved it long ago. Some looked large enough to provide shelter, and Fish took
