The River at Night(34)

19


I burst out of the water screaming. A waterfall hammered the top of my head, forcing me back under, but I bent my knees and launched myself away from the rock face. Freed from the falling water, I was at the mercy of the current. It yanked me side to side, hurled me at rocks, and sucked me down. Gasping and sputtering, blinded by my wet hair plastered over my face, I somehow remembered the lawn-chair pose: I lay back and lifted my feet and kept my hands high.

As I hurtled toward a mess of fallen trees and boulders, I caught a flash of bright orange—Rory’s shorts. In horror I realized what I was approaching. The bottom half of his body floated up, his shorts pillowing with air, his head and shoulders pinned under the log, which was wedged solid in a jumble of branches and unforgiving stone. His forearm floated to the surface from a confusion of waterlogged tree roots. Bent limply from the wrist, his hand and fingers hung down, delicately moving in the rushing water as if he were testing its temperature.

I was tossed almost on top of him, though mercifully just to the left of his bobbing shorts, where I held out my arms to brace myself against the branches. Even in my terror the pain of my skin scraping raw against the bark and stones knocked the wind out of me. Torrents of water pounded at me in an attempt to sift my body through the strainer of branches and stone. River water foamed into my mouth until I gagged and lifted myself up high enough to breathe.

The log lay solidly across Rory’s back, an unbearable truth. The river roared like a freight train in my ears. I screamed something, maybe his name, maybe Pia’s, maybe Sandra’s, Rachel’s, God’s, I don’t remember. I took a breath and pushed myself down into the churning depths.

I’ve heard time slows down in situations like this. For me it did. I recall every detail, against my own will sometimes, helplessly.

Again the almost peaceful quiet underwater. Small sticks and leaves tornadoed by in the greenish murk. Rory’s white helmet glowed silver underwater, caught between the log and a puzzle of branches and roots, his dreads jerking crazily in the flow. His right shoulder was jammed at some terrible angle under the log; his arm lost under a tumult of stone. By clear effort of will, he turned his face toward me, half-obscured by the helmet. The one eye I could see was open wide, alive and pleading, his lips lifted off his gums and moving horribly, comically, by the relentless pull of the water.

I heard dull screams from above so I pushed myself up and away from him, a train of bubbles escaping my nose and mouth. Water smacked my face as I took a breath, punishing me; I gulped down more river. Above me, Pia and Rachel, sodden, squatted on the pile of fallen limbs, desperately reaching down to get a grip on the monster log that imprisoned Rory. But it was too big and their angle wrong.

“Where’s Sandra?” I coughed out.

“We don’t know!” Pia howled over the roar of the water, her bloodshot eyes full of horror.

Rachel reached down for me. “We looked but we can’t—”

“Get in the water!” I screamed. “Help me push it off him!”

Rachel scrambled past Pia, who sat momentarily frozen with one arm wrapped uselessly around the log, and let herself down next to me in the slamming water, eyes huge behind water-beaded lenses. Pia took one step—sickeningly—on the log that trapped Rory and slipped in. Without speaking, we took a breath and dropped down underwater.

We jammed our knees and feet into whatever crevices or breaks in rock or wood we could find to gain purchase and force our shoulders under the log, lifting with every muscle in our bodies. Straining, running out of air, we pushed. I felt as if we had submerged under a mountain and were trying to lift it. I could feel Rachel kicking at me as she fought to keep herself wedged in for balance. My face was now inches from his, close enough to see his one eye watch me with rapidly fading hope.

The log moved—in the wrong direction. It rolled farther down into the vise of branches and rock and forced him deeper under the debris. We fitted our shoulders and arms and hands under that fucking thing and screamed and cried underwater, bubbles streaming by as we heaved up with every last bit of strength we had.

Rachel and Pia burst up for air and thrust themselves back down, again and again, but I was able to hold my breath the longest. The third time they surfaced something passed between Rory and me. His eye gazed at me as I strained and pushed. There was a kind of love in it, or gratefulness. Something in him that believed in my power to lift that hellish log, a look of trust that stayed even after the eye clouded and most of the life drained away. And I couldn’t tell if it was the last conscious thing he did in his life or if it was the current, but his free arm moved toward me and his fingers swept across my cheek, gently and just once, then floated ahead of him and under the log, fluttering and waving at the water’s bidding.





20


When I finally exploded out of the water, gulping at the air, Pia and Rachel bobbed at the surface on either side of me.

“I think he’s dead!” I screamed at their stricken faces. Rachel’s glasses bent diagonally across her face, Pia’s helmet was dented and cracked. A cut above her eyebrow bled steadily. She blinked the blood away.

“Let’s get to shore and try from there!” Pia yelled over the river’s fury.

I reached up and seized a tree limb to hoist myself onto a rock but had no strength left. We all tried. It was impossible. Even Pia couldn’t deadlift herself up and out. We had no way to get to the bank except to go under Rory. I gestured to the others what we had to do; they nodded. I took the kind of breath I had trained myself to take before a dive—slow, deep, deliberate—and thrust myself down into the swirling depths and reached under him. My hand found a branch just under his chest and I pulled myself down into darkness, eyes squeezed shut this time, and muscled my way through the current and to the other side of him, his vest grazing the back of my neck.