The River at Night(48)

“Oh my God, she actually fucking lost it,” Rachel moaned. “She lost the fucking phone. . . .”

“Keep your voice down!” Pia hissed. “She lost the phone. There’s not a goddamned thing we can do about it. It could be anywhere.”

Sandra began to sob.

I took a step toward Rachel, my arms rigid with rage by my sides. “I can’t believe you hit her. What the fuck is wrong with you?”

Rachel sank down to her knees onto the rotted corn. “We are so fucked, oh my God. . . .”

“The phone was dead anyway!” Sandra cried. “I showed you—”

“What were you going to do, Rachel, plug it into a tree or something?” I said.

“Maybe it wasn’t dead! Maybe it just wasn’t on or something!” Rachel choked a little with laughter or tears, I couldn’t tell which. Her shoulders sagged. “I can’t believe this.” She took off her wrecked glasses and wiped the one good lens on her filthy shirt. “I’m going to die sober after all. What a shame.”

“I must have torn my vest in the stream,” Sandra said, tearing up again. “We could go back and look. . . .”

Exhaustion rolled through me hard, and for a few seconds I felt as if I were going to pass out. Nausea rippled up from deep in my gut, but passed, with nothing to retch. My field of vision narrowed, and all I heard was the sound of Sandra weeping, the buzz of insects, and the ever-present rumble of the river. I couldn’t seem to get enough air to my brain. But the sensation didn’t last. An odd fizzing energy and determination replaced it. We were alive. Probably fucked big-time, but unlike Rory, still walking around, still breathing.

“You guys need to stop crying and slapping each other and screwing around,” I said. “It’s time to think, okay? Figure out what to do next.”

Pia started to walk away.

“Where are you going?” I asked.

“To take a freaking piss.” She disappeared among the hulking stalks.

Rachel stayed in a lump on the ground. “I’m sorry I slapped you, Sandra,” she mumbled. “That was fucked-up of me.”

Sandra wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and blinked. “It was dead.”

“I believe you. It doesn’t matter. I’m sorry.”

Pia burst back through the corn. “Guys, you have to come see this. I found the raft.”





32


We barreled through the rotted crop, stalks flying back and slapping us as we sank deeper into a quicksandlike muck. Each step released a reptilian perfume, the rich black carbon of decay. We arrived at a flattened section where the corn had been trampled over by something or someone. Just yards away the river rumbled by, wider now, calmer.

“Oh, God,” Sandra said as she approached the raft, which was barely recognizable as such. “Look what they did to it.”

Stripped of all our gear—dry bags, tents, sleeping bags, food, even oars—our salvation lay flat and sad in the mud. Like a desecrated body, it had been repeatedly slashed: only long, angry ribbons of bright canvas and black rubber remained. Even the cheerful blue handles had been sliced off, an obscene touch. I recalled what Simone had said about wasting nothing.

Pia picked up a few lengths of rubber and let them drop back into the mire.

“What are you doing?” Rachel said derisively, confounded.

“Just . . . wondering if there’s something we can use, I don’t know.”

Rachel shook her head and trudged toward the river, past the wreckage of rubber and canvas, the ground sucking at her shoes as she went. I paused at the raft, stunned and struck by the violence that had been hazarded upon it, before hurrying to catch up with her.

Her glasses stored on a neighboring rock, Rachel stretched out belly down on a sheet of slate suspended over a bubbling eddy, head and arms invisible as she splashed water on herself and drank out of cupped palms. We all followed suit; I felt marginally better afterward.

I looked at the river. Here it stretched close to fifty feet across, flowing tamely and with a serenity we had not yet witnessed. I could almost picture barges making their way down it; certainly there was enough room. I remembered Rory’s words and sat up. “We’re at the Mississippi!”

Pia looked up at me, her face and hair dripping.

“Don’t you remember what Rory said about what would happen after the Flush?”

She shook her head, blanching at the sound of Rory’s name.

“He said there’d be five or six miles when we’d swear we were on the Mississippi, and then—”

“Satan’s Staircase. That I remember,” Rachel said.

I got to my feet, excited. “But then that’s it! That’s the last big water. Don’t you remember? He said there’d be some small stuff, then the takeout at the Willows. That’s tomorrow. We just need to keep going!”

“We must have walked a couple of miles last night, who knows . . .” Sandra trailed off.

“So . . . twenty more miles of walking?” Rachel said.

“I can’t,” Pia said. “I mean, I have to rest a little. Sleep for an hour. I just have to.”

The day was heating up fast and the sun beat down on us. Under a coating of mud and grass stains, Pia looked a sickly white. Her face shone with sweat.