Where the River Ends

by Charles Martin

  She was frantic, but he was nearly three times her size. I tried one last time. “Sir…please, you’re hurting the girl.” He stuffed the watch in his pocket, backhanded me and began tearing at her jeans.

  He had her pinned down now. The crack of his butt was showing, he had exposed himself and he was pulling her by her long hair, threatening to snap her neck like a twig. The coughing told me she was having a hard time breathing. I took four steps, jumped on his back, dug my heels in and rammed both index fingers one knuckle deep into his eye sockets. He reached for his face, uttered some guttural thing that told me what I’d done was painful and turned on me.

  The good news was that he let go of the girl, allowing her to stand up and run. The bad news was that with her gone, and him knowing this, he was now left with me. His facial expression changed sort of like the Hulk, he was foaming in both corners of his mouth and I’m pretty sure I shouted something I wouldn’t have repeated in the presence of my mother.

  You ever see those videos of college pranks where fraternity brothers—hoping to imbibe a sense of brotherhood—dump pledges in those large tumbling dryers at the coin laundry and then laugh while their butts turned orbits around the room? For the next sixty seconds, that’s about how I felt—absent the fabric softener. Having rubbed me into the concrete, blackened both my eyes, busted my lip, and broken my nose, he lifted me over his head and threw me out over the handrail like some WWF wrestler. I helicoptered through the air and landed in the marsh where a blue crab was munching on the head of a mullet.

  Wrestling man’s eyes narrowed as I floated hip-deep in a bed of wiregrass, muck and what smelled like sewage runoff. He grunted, shoved himself back in his pants, turned and walked off—evidently he couldn’t swim. For the next twenty minutes, I wallowed and concentrated on the next breath. With no sign of him, I scraped my way to the railing, pulled myself out and hobbled home. Twenty minutes later, I locked my door, sat in the shower and calculated the cost of a trip to the emergency room. Absent health insurance, the numbers were a bit high. My head pounding, I swallowed four aspirin and looked in the mirror. My nose had turned sideways across my face and now looked more like a lightning bolt. I grabbed it between my right thumb and forefinger, pulled downward quickly and woke the next morning, a butt-naked snow angel sprawled across the first floor of my studio.

  Looking out between the slits that had become my eyes and then around the bulbous thing that was once my nose, I stared through the glass—some four feet away—and into thirty sets of rather wide eyes, three rows deep, staring, but not at my artwork. Thanks to the three 60-watt bulbs I had dangling from an extension cord above the artwork, I was lit up pretty well.

  I climbed the stairs, fell into bed and woke somewhere in the afternoon to a blood-crusted face, a pounding migraine and a note taped to the door. It read: “If you’re interested in a discreet yet artistic black-and-white photo shoot, call the number below. I have my own darkroom and studio. Philip.”

  I threw the note in the trash, swallowed more aspirin and called one of my classmates to find out what I’d missed. James Pettigrew was a street-smart kid from the streets of Detroit who wrote poetry when he wasn’t sculpting clay. When he picked up the phone, he was scanning the news online and not real interested in talking with me. Smacking gum, he cut me off. “You hear about last night?”

  “No.”

  “Senator Coleman’s daughter got singled out on the boardwalk while walking home. Some drunk behemoth jumped her and was trying to make her his wife when some unidentified stranger objected to the wedding and messed up his plans. Little while ago, the cops caught a guy that fits the description she gave of the attacker. He was carrying some cash and a pocketwatch that both jell with her story. No ID yet on Superman. Senator held a press conference this morning from the steps of the Capitol then flew home. Landed in Charleston just a bit ago.”

  “She okay?”

  “Whenever a six-foot, ten-inch man repeatedly backhands the face of the spokeswoman for one of the major cosmetic lines in the country—who also happens to have been voted by the New York Times as one of the hundred most beautiful faces in the United States—whose face, by the way, made the cover of three of the most highly read prime-time magazines in the country—well, what do you think?”

  Scenes from the night before flashed across my eyelids but the details were fuzzy.

  “Doss. Where you been? What rock you been living under? Abbie Coleman goes by the professional name of Abbie Eliot.”

  I knew I’d seen her somewhere before.

  I hung up, called in sick to work and hung the Closed sign across my front door. I’d collect my watch and wallet when the pain subsided.

  Financial problems aside, I needed a “subject” of my own. My senior project was due in two months and I had yet to land on a subject. Most students had been working on theirs for weeks. Further, it was well known around town that senior art majors paid their subjects by the hour. That, too, was a difficulty for me.

  Compounding the problem was the “nude” assignment. To graduate, every senior was required to present a portfolio of twelve pieces showcasing their best work—one of which was to be a nude piece. Some of my classmates acted like they had joined the art program for this very reason: they got to hang out a sign that read something like, “Hey, I need a nude subject for my senior portfolio.” To make it seem more official and more legitimate, they’d rent out a swanky studio, drape a sheet across a wire forming a backdrop, hang a spotlight, play some new-age music and buy a bottle of wine with a screw-off cap. Then they’d schedule several “sittings” that lasted a couple of hours and included a lot of serious looks and casual small talk. Some of my classmates milked this thing for all it was worth because it was the only way they’d ever get a girl to take her clothes off. Two types of girls showed up: the first was the adventuresome freshman—sometimes a sophomore—who was stretching her wings, wanting to try something new and usually angry at her dad. She usually showed up with a friend, a little giggly and the smell of alcohol on her breath. The second was the experienced senior or first-year graduate student who showed up alone, angry at an ex-boyfriend and armed with thoughts of finding herself. Nice girls and cover girls just didn’t come knocking.

  So, in truth, the problem was not finding someone, but finding the right someone. And then there was one other thing. I just had a problem with someone I didn’t know walking in and taking their clothes off. I mean, who does that? What kind of person walks into a room with a stranger, strips down to her birthday suit and stands there while you walk all over her with your eyes. I realize we’re supposed to be focused on our subject and studying the “form” but that’s just the problem: I’ve yet to meet a woman who can be reduced to a form. Form can’t be extracted from the essence like some broth reduction.

  In the history of mankind, no single person yet has learned to swim by having the strokes explained. At some point, they dive in. In art, that diving has nothing to do with holding a brush, pencil or chisel. It’s something your heart does and only then will your hand follow. You, me, any artist, cannot take the beauty that is woman and transfer it to any medium, be it canvas, stone or, least of all, film. Problem was, my art teachers had no idea what I was talking about. They thought art started in the hand and traveled up the arm and into the heart. They had reversed the process. Art flows out, not in. Though, I will say, if you’re empty, not much will flow out. Which might have been their problem to begin with.

  In my education, every assignment was run through some Cartesian filter in which we sat back, scratched the stubble on our chin and “thought” about the art before us. We used that filter to reduce the work to a series of strokes, shades and hues. What kind of nonsense is that? Whatever happened to “Wow! That’s beautiful.” I’m not slamming the process of perfecting a craft, I’m slamming the idea that you perfect a craft solely by studying the craft. It’s a sickness that I’ve been trying to avoid since I first picked up a brush or pencil. />
  ’Course, all this philosophical conversation never got me very far with my professors. Especially when it came to the nude. There was no getting around it. They just looked at me and raised their eyebrows. Paint the sucker! They thought my objections grew out of a dislike for hard work. So I invited them over, and those same eyes grew wide. My work ethic was in tact. By the age of eighteen, I had produced a larger volume of work than most of them had in their entire life, proving that my mom was the second-best teacher I ever had. I had come to art school having already learned most of what they hoped to teach me. Most of them had no idea what I was talking about. Was I an idealist? Absolutely. But once they saw the amount of work I had produced, and was producing, they could not argue with my work or craft. For me, the craft wasn’t the point. The point was the point. And most never understood that. Most of them were infected with a sickness they didn’t know they were carrying. And worse yet, didn’t know they were transmitting.

  Despite my soapbox rantings and self-righteous indignation, I needed to graduate and they stood between me and that walk across the stage. Had it not been for the fading memories of my mother, I’d have told them to shove their sheepskin. Which brings me back to the nude.

  In defense of my stubbornness, I had been looking for two things: the right face and the right figure. That’s all I wanted. One face. One figure. And preferably, the two went together. I had always felt that God made a few perfect ones, so I was waiting to find her and then have that face sit still long enough for me to fumble through my inadequacies and capture it and her on canvas.

  Okay, in truth, I was afraid. Afraid that whoever sat there would see right through me, would see that I didn’t know what I was doing, that I was intimidated, and when they stood up, walked across the floor and stared at my work—at themselves—they’d laugh at my attempt. In the psychology books that’s called a fear of failure, and when it came to my art—more specifically, the nude—it paralyzed me.

  Completely.

  6

  JUNE 1, 5 A.M.

  We pulled out of Gus’s and passed through St. George on our way to Moniac. St. George is made up of one railroad track, one grammar school, one gas station, one restaurant, one four-way stop and one post office. I stood in the intersection, scratching my head, trying to remember where they’d put the post office when I heard what sounded like a prop plane flying low above me. It buzzed overhead and I thought, What crazy nut is flying in this weather? Then I could have sworn I heard singing. The lights on the wings shot straight up, turned, barrel-rolled and spun earthward. About a hundred feet off the highway in front of me, it leveled out, righted itself and landed. It was an open-cockpit, bi-wing plane and reminded me of the Red Baron. Its fuselage was a gleaming sky blue and its wings yellow. It crossed the railroad track like a car, and then pulled to a stop at the intersection. The pilot waved, lifted his goggles and then pulled into the gas station directly up to the twenty-four-hour, self-serve pump. He cut the engine, ran his credit card through the machine and starting pumping gas. When finished, he threw a piece of hail out of the cockpit, pointed upward and hollered, “It’s hell up there. Think I’ll take the long way home. You mind giving me some help?” I crossed the street and he said, “Just push,” so I leaned against the wing. Surprisingly, it rolled rather easily. He nodded, said, “She’s pretty light.” He pulled down his goggles and said, “Thanks much,” then took a long look at the car where Abbie lay sleeping. Then he started talking to someone I couldn’t see. He cranked the engine and, just like he was driving a Cadillac on a Sunday afternoon, rolled east down the highway. After nearly a mile, he rocketed heavenward where the two blue wing lights disappeared into the darkness.

  ABBIE WANTED HER DAD to know where we were, but didn’t want to call him. A letter would tell him what he needed to know without giving him a chance to control the outcome. She licked the back, slid the letter inside, sealed it and handed it to me—it was the single sheet of yellow legal paper that had been sitting on the bedside table. I pulled into the post office, and was peeling a stamp out of the book when it hit me. We needed time. The problem with the post office is that they were efficient, which meant he’d get this letter in a day or two. I needed them to deliver it next week. Preferably, late next week. I turned to Abbie, “You mind if I buy us a few days’ time?”

  She shook her head and forced a smile. “Just as long as it gets there.”

  I walked around the building to the drop box and reversed the addresses. Meaning, I addressed it to us, at our house, and wrote the return address as his. Then I peeled off the stamp and dropped it in the box. Without the required forty-one cents postage, it’d spend a few days in post office wonderland while they took their sweet little time tossing it around, angry that it didn’t have a stamp and enacting justice—or rather revenge—on whoever sent it. Further delaying its inevitable return. Then they’d stamp it “Insufficient Postage” in bright red ink and finally, out of sheer mercy to the poor miscreant soul who had mistakenly sent it, return it to the address in the top left-hand corner—which is exactly what I wanted. When Abbie’s father saw this, he’d know I’d bought myself some time, because he’s not stupid. And he’d know that I knew this about him and then he’d cuss me for being too cheap to buy a stamp, but given the list of faults he kept on me, this wouldn’t make the top fifty.

  Twenty minutes later, we pulled onto County Road 94 heading west to Moniac—a map-dot left off of most maps.

  Moniac is called a “community” because it’d be ridiculous to call it a town. It sits due south of the Okefenokee swamp, twenty-seven miles east of Fargo and twelve miles west of St. George, which puts it smack in the middle of nowhere. It’s little more than the intersection of highways 94 and 121, Lacy’s Country Store, a bridge and a dead pecan orchard. With a little tailwind, Tiger Woods could probably hit a ball with his driver from one end to the other. Around here more people talk on CB radios than cell phones.

  Most folks drive through without every knowing they’ve been here. Despite this, it’s the bridge that’s significant.

  Below it flow the headwaters for the St. Marys and the first put-in outside of the Okefenokee. Most paddlers will tell you the river isn’t navigable for another thirty miles until she rounds the bend at Stokes Bridge and heads due north, but skip it and you miss something beautiful. Sort of like giving birth to a teenager. You might be glad you avoided the diaper stage and the terrible two’s but you’d miss a lot.

  We crossed the bridge, swung back around and ambled down the side road to the underside of the bridge. Residue of an old campfire, charred logs, cigarette butts and shards of brown bottles littered the bank.

  The ground beneath the bridge looks like something out of a Mad Max film. When the construction team finished with the overpass, they dumped all the used concrete and rebar into the river. Discarded beer cans and Sprite bottles floated between the jagged edges of busted, Buick-sized concrete chunks and waterlogged cedars caught in the cracks.

  Then there’s the river herself.

  You ever walked into one of those seventies bars, something you’d see in an Austin Powers movie where long strands of beads are draped from every doorway? To get in, you have to slide your hands through, push them aside with your forearms and slip in without snagging your shoulders on the beads. Getting into the river is a lot like that. Scrub oaks, twenty feet tall, sewn together with itchy vines and Spanish moss swimming with red bugs, hang over the river forming a nearly impenetrable canopy. The exceptions are air and pinholes of light. The gnarled trees rise up out of the bank, lower their branches, span across the bluff like a fence row and interlock their leaves with prickly pointed palmetto bushes.

  She is protective of herself—and those who enter her.

  The river trickles more or less southward out of Moniac across fallen deadwood, through beaver dams and around cypress stumps. At Moniac you can jump across, and she’s rarely more than a couple feet deep.

  I turned under the overpa
ss, parked beneath the bridge—out of sight of searching helicopters—and unloaded. The rain let up, sun broke through and began burning the mist off the water. But that was short-lived, because the sheets of rain returned about the time I started carrying Abbie across the grass to the canoe.

  I stepped down into the river and slipped on a slimy rock—bouncing Abbie like a Raggedy Ann doll. As many times as I’ve stepped into this river, I should’ve known better. I laid her in the bottom of the canoe atop a sleeping bag. Using the tent poles, a blue tarp and some nylon parachute cord, I rigged a makeshift tent from the bow to midway down the canoe. Her feet might get wet, but the angle of the canoe in the water would keep her face elevated and the opening in the rear would shed the rain and allow me to keep an eye on her. I changed her fentanyl patch, giving her a constant medication feed for seventy-two more hours. The patch was a lot like those worn by people who are trying to quit smoking. It was waterproof, allowed her to shower, bathe and even swim. In Abbie’s case, though, the patch contained a pain medication called Duragesic that helped knocked the edge off. It was what I called a base-layer medication, because if the pain escalated, we’d need other layers. I locked the Jeep and stood beneath the overpass. As I stared out into the rain, a daddy longlegs walked across my foot. Few know it, but it’s one of the most poisonous spiders known to man. Only problem is that its mouth is too small to bite a human.

  I filled the trailing canoe with everything I’d piled into the back of the Jeep, then covered it with the second tarp. I made one final run to the Jeep and grabbed the bright yellow Pelican case. Next to Abbie, it was the most important item in the canoe.