And Ratnose came—slowly, ever so slowly, still shaking his head, like some great shark hooked deep in the gullet, shaking his head to the dim, dawning realization that he has swallowed something strange: he has swallowed death. And Ratnose came slowly, slowly out into the current. His face, wet with spray or sweat, began to crumble, to dissolve like clay in the rain. His eye seemed to spread like a pool, like the ink of a squid dissolving in the water. Ratnose came out into the deeper water, and the current caught him by the waist, dragging him slowly, then a bit faster, then faster still, into the race. The tension of Ratnose’s line against Tilkut’s ankle began to ease—there was slack. Tilkut reached down into the water and felt his way down the leader to the fly, then ripped, ripped again—and the fly came loose. Free!
Ratnose spun into the edge of the whirlpool, his head up, rolling. His eye was still on Tilkut. He went around the edge of the whirlpool, around again, closer to the vortex. Then he began to sink. His eye seemed to grow beneath the water. It was still fixed on Tilkut. Ratnose sank, his jaws working, into the heart of the whirlpool, out of sight. . . .
Tilkut watched the line melt off his reel, accelerating with the momentum of Ratnose’s body as it fell down the Suck Hole; watched the backing race and blur; braced himself for the shock when the line would part—snap! Then, using the fly rod as a wading staff, he started for the shore.
His son stood on the bank, next to the motorcycle. The engine was turning. He had the Luger in his hand and his eyes on the crowd. Some of the women screamed. Tilkut saw that Twigan was crying. Hunk’s face was impassive, but his hands were empty of weapons. Only Fric had a rifle. His face was bone-white and his hands trembled on the stock.
“Don’t try it, hippie,” said Runner. “I’ll blast your guts out your ass hole.”
He swung a leg over the saddle. Tilkut crawled up behind him.
“Can you handle the Luger while I ride?” Runner asked.
“Kuh, kuh, kuh, kuh . . .” said Tilkut.
“Okay,” said Runner, “I can do both. Let’s get out of here, Pop. I’m not much for long goodbyes.”
He let in the clutch, and the bike jumped away from the river.
50
THEY RAN the ancient game trails that flanked the Hassayampa—the rutted, dusty routes of bison and mastodon, aurochs and elk. Game flushed ahead of them in panic or else stood frozen, wide-eyed, in the thickets as they passed. The manticores watched sternly from their perches in the drowned, dead trees beside the river. The boy did not see them—he was too busy, too happy with the ride. He threw his body into the corners, leaped the wallows, vaulted the ruts, playing the gearbox like a church organ. The man did not see them either. His eyes were locked out of focus, at zero or infinity, he did not know which. All of his concentration was directed to the act of breathing, which had now become a work of the will. He knew his arms were wrapped around his son’s waist and that his feet were on the pegs, but he could not feel it. So he did not worry about balance. He worried about breath. Could he get it in this time? Slowly, aching, cold. Then, could he get it out this time? Just as slowly, just as cold.
He lived inside his lungs, down there with the bright blood and the bellows roar of diaphragm and alveoli, a world of tubes and flowages. He grew familiar with the gurgle of his heart, imagining somewhat whimsically that it approximated the sound of the river past which he was flashing without sight or sound. Was it day? Was it night? All the same to him. He knew he was probably sweating as his body tried to pump away the poison, that he had probably voided his bladder in unconscious obedience to the orders of his kidneys, but he felt neither wet nor dry. Somewhere along the way he vomited, feeling rather than tasting the faint sting of bile at the top of his nostrils. It did not matter. What mattered was air—elusive air; neutral, impartial air—a substance that could not be begged or bought or coaxed, but could be gained only by concentration, by hard work. He worked at it.
Then, after years of hard labor, his nerves began to awaken. Gradually at first, just the faintest of tingling in his wrists and along his legs. His jaws began to ache, as if he had eaten a mountain. His eyes accepted the light; his optic nerves screamed like a fire victim. Then his larger muscles. Someone was lashing them with nettles, shoving nettles down his throat, up his nose, pulling them through his arteries. Another someone had skinned his head and was pouring alcohol over it, was now skinning out his back, his arms, his legs, pouring the fire over his raw flesh. He could not bring himself to scream. He yelled curses instead.
But that too went away. He was left with a gnawing ache in his ankle, the ankle that had been bitten by the poisoned fly. It was dark. His son was feeding the campfire, and the rumble of the Hassayampa underlay the crackling of the flames. The bike was parked not far away, glittering red and silver in the firelight. A game bird turned and sizzled on a greenwood spit.
“Peacock,” his son said. “He flushed off the trail up into a tree just before dark. I headed him with the Luger and figured we might as well stop here for the night and eat him.”
“How long have we been . . .”
“A week tomorrow morning.”
“Then we must be nearly home.”
“We’re about a day’s run by the bike, but I’m down into the reserve already. No more gas after that. We’ll have to steal a boat.”
“You can stash the bike and come back for it later with some more gas. But I don’t think we’ll find a boat around here, and my ankle feels kind of septic.”
The boy looked away. Then he busied himself with the game bird. Then he looked at his father’s legs, wrapped and lumpy under the bearskin.
“Well,” the boy said, “I better tell you now. I had to take it off. Your right foot, halfway down the shinbone.”
The man sat there for a long, long minute. He wiggled his ghost toes. He was afraid to look under the bearskin.
“Shit,” said the man.
“It was that or your whole leg when we got home,” the boy said. “Or probably your life. The goddam gangrene was in there. You didn’t seem to be feeling anything—I slapped you around some and stuck you a bit with the knife—so I figured it was as good a time as any.”
“Shit,” the man said again. “Oh, shit. Oh, dear.”
“Well, it’s done,” the boy said hotly. “It’s better than having your tongue cut out.”
“I didn’t mean that; it’s just . . .”
“I know, I know.”
“I mean, what I should be saying is ‘Thanks.’ How the hell did you do it?”
“I figured it out. It was pretty easy, actually. Do you want the details?”
“Sure.”
“Well, getting through the skin and the muscles was a cinch—do you know how many muscles you have in there, in the calf? You’ve got about six of the bastards, all of them tough—but I had a good edge on the knife. I’d cranked on a tourniquet just below your knee, really wound that baby down tight. There was a lot of blood at first, but it all drained out. You were moaning and rolling around, so I had to tie you down. Still, that ketwai poison was a pretty good anesthetic. I don’t think you were feeling much pain—maybe just having bad dreams.”
“I was living in my lungs, I think.”
“The bone was tough. Bone is a lot tougher than you’d imagine. And the shinbone is a tricky sonofabitch, a lot of angles to it. But there was still a good bite to the meat saw. You know that Swedish wire job you use on big game? I remember how I nearly threw up the first time I watched you using it, on the bear I killed up the river there. The sound of the wire going through bone. But it didn’t bother me a bit this time. In fact, there were a few little splinters when I finally got through it, and I filed them down with the file we use on the ax.”
“Christ.”
“But the tricky part was how to close off the blood vessels. They were staring at me like so many little mouths, waiting to be filled with something. I remembered from my books that back in the days of the Napoleonic Wars and the America
n Revolution, they would stick the stump in a bucket of boiling tar to sear the arteries and seal them. But we didn’t have any tar close at hand. Then I thought of a red-hot bar of steel, but I couldn’t find anything big enough to cover the surface of the stump at one shot. Until I thought of the bike.”
“How’s that?”
“I ran the bike like crazy, burned up a quarter of a tank of gas doing it, and when the tailpipe was so hot that it popped water when I sprinkled some on it, I rolled your stump against it. I figured there couldn’t be any bacteria on the pipe, not at that heat. It seared the arteries and veins just as neat as you’d please.”
“I’ll be damned.”
“You know what it smelled like?” the boy said, grinning. “It smelled just like roast pork.” He laughed.
“You’re a hard sonofabitch,” the man said.
“Damn right,” said the boy. “You made me that way.”
51
THE BIKE RAN dry just before noon the next day. It was hot and buggy on the lower stretch of the river, so after he had hidden the motorcycle as best he could in a canebrake well above the high-water mark, the boy cut his father a crutch and helped him to a promontory where the breeze would keep the mosquitoes and blackflies down. Then, sticking the Luger into his waistband at the small of his back, he started downriver looking for a boat. He was lucky. Not an hour from the point, he came upon two fishermen in an aluminum canoe. He hailed them and they paddled over, helpful concern on their faces. As they came closer, the boy could see they were city dudes, wearing fancy fishing vests and expensive wool shirts, with gaudy flies in their caps.
When they had beached the canoe, he drew the Luger and ordered them to start walking away from the river.
“You rotten little hippie!” said one of the men, a fat, red-faced fellow with a pencil moustache. “I told you, Willie, these fucking . . .”
The boy stared hard at the man and made a gesture with the Luger. He wondered what the man would say if he shot him in the kneecap. The men stalked off, muttering and looking back anxiously over their shoulders. The boy emptied the canoe of their fishing tackle, but kept the stringer of smallmouth bass they had caught. There were no tents or sleeping bags or axes or gas stoves in the canoe, so they must have a camp somewhere nearby. If they couldn’t find it, they deserved to die. At least, they wouldn’t be out anything for the canoe; it was rented.
The boy paddled the canoe back upriver to the place where his father lay snoring among the bullrushes. He built a fire and cleaned the bass, then fried them and woke his father. After they had eaten, they pushed off. There was still an hour or so of daylight. . . .
As they slid back down the river the next morning, the boy felt his heart sicken. So many changes while he was gone! Not just in him, but in the river itself. Opposite Kurlander, where his father had first hunted aurochs, the pink and blue of a trailer park spread on the banks of the Hassayampa. Power shovels and backhoes stood in orderly yellow ranks near the first pilings of a bridge that would soon span the river. He saw two boys about his own age throwing rocks at an oil drum that was drifting, half submerged, in a backwater near the left bank. The boys wore cutoffs and tie-dyed tank shirts, and they flipped the bird at the canoe as it went by.
They met a ski boat—a powerful, buzzing Campbell—trailing a woman in a black bikini whose hair whipped behind her in the wind: long, black hair like Twigan’s, but the woman had something glittering around her throat, maybe diamonds. The driver waved at them, a beer can in his hand. The woman tried to jump the wake, but fell in a great splash, laughing.
The Hsien-ho Gorges had been tamed and renamed. A dam was rising at the bottom, and the place had new management, a recreation group that called itself Big Skid. The worst of the rapids had been dredged and rechanneled, and for only $150 a year it was possible to buy a seasons ticket that entitled the canoeist to membership in the Skid Club (“Free Skid Flicks Every Night!”), transportation for canoe and party from the foot of the gorges back to the put-in dock, and a bonus crash helmet sporting the club’s colors (International Orange and green). A campground capable of handling 1,200 vehicles had been cleared and hot water piped in at the confluence of the Buffalo and the Hassayampa. Its motto: “The couple that woos together canoes together.” The World Whitewater Championships would be held at Big Skid later that summer.
“How’d your dad lose his foot?” the attendant at the put-in dock asked when the boy was ready to leave the store.
“Split it with a hatchet, chopping firewood,” he answered, hefting his bag of groceries. “You sure you haven’t got any fruit rolls?”
“Not a one,” said the attendant. “We only stock the essentials, for real outdoor livin’.”
They camped one night at the edge of the Porcupine Mountains. A new highway had come through during their absence, so the boy hitchhiked over to see old Otto, the onion farmer. When he returned, shortly before dawn, the man awoke.
“What happened? How’s the old man?”
“He’s dead. Got run over by a snow plow sometime last winter. They’re putting up a development where he had the farm.”
“What about What’s-her-name—you know, the fat laundry lady? Helgard.”
“Gone.”
The man lay silent for quite a while. He could smell the beer on the boy’s breath.
“Did you bring me a beer?”
“Sure.” The kid handed a beer to his father, but it was warm. The man drank it anyway.
“Dead and gone,” he said, finally, “dead and gone. All the good part of it, that is. Like my foot, for instance. Hey, I’ve been wanting to ask you, what finally happened to . . . it? I mean, what did you do with it?”
“I threw it over in the bushes, and something came along in the night and took it. I think it was a coyote. I could hear it growling and crunching on the bones all night long.”
“Well,” the man said, “they like rotten meat.”
The man sipped his beer. Dead and gone, he was thinking.
“Even Ratnose,” he said finally.
“What do you mean?”
“Dead and gone. A damned shame, in a way. He was a tough bastard, old Ratanous. I got to like him there, towards the end.”
“I liked him too.”
The man threw a few more sticks on the fire and poked at the coals. It was a clear night, but he did not want to look at the stars. He wished he had another beer.
“Do you have another beer?” he asked the boy.
“Not a one,” the boy said. “But I’ve got some crait.”
“Give us a slug,” the man said. The boy went over to the canoe and came back with a canteen. The man unscrewed the cap and took a long pull from the neck. “Ah,” he said, “that’s just fine. Listen, before I get too high on this stuff, there’s something I wanted to ask you. Maybe it’s not the right time, and maybe I even know the answer already. But I want your words on it. Why did you leave there? Why did you take me out of there? Why did you leave your girl and your—well, position? You were a hero up there, and Ratnose himself told me you would ultimately become the chief. Down here . . .”
“Yeah,” the boy said, “down here. I don’t know. A lot of it had to do with Ratnose. At first I really was scared of him, and then later I saw that he was trying to help me, so I got to liking him. And then I got to liking his woman—or girl, I guess you’d say—Twigan. And then I felt I had to take her away from him, I wanted her that badly. Or maybe I just wanted to show him something. But whatever it was, I got her, and then I knew that sooner or later I’d have to go up against him. I didn’t like that notion. It was easier to go up against you, and I did. Then you went up against Ratnose. So in a way, I copped out: I let you do my fighting for me. I owed you that. And besides, you’re my father.”
The man sat silent, washed in a wave of sadness. For a moment there, he had been Tilkut again. The Bear God. Huge, omnipotent, fearsome in his righteous, blessed madness. Now the feeling was gone, drained away, like the wat
ers of the Hassayampa itself, pouring tame through the freshly dynamited channels of the Big Skid. He knew it would never return. Taking his crutch, the man limped down to the riverbank and watched the Hassayampa roll past. Far upriver he could see storm clouds gathering, a black wall ticked with lightning that spread slowly over the sky. Idly, he cursed his missing foot: no more Tilkut, no more hunting, no more wading the high trout streams in the early spring, with the redwing blackbirds bouncing on the naked branches, the smell of warm mud and willows . . . What was it Ratnose had said? A man is the sum of his scars.
He limped back to the campfire. His son held up something bright for him to see: the dump truck. “She gave it to me as a memento,” the boy said. “How do you like that?” The man could see he had been crying.
“It’s raining upriver,” the man said. “The water will be up by morning, very fast. We’ll be home by suppertime.’’
52
THE FOLLOWING MORNING, the river was very fast indeed—fast and high and commensurately safe. They ran with the runoff from the storm, which still grew behind them, slow-moving and grumbling with fire in its belly. They swerved like a silver leaf through the uprooted trees, borne on the boiling brown water, through scum lines of junk—beer cans, Clorox bottles, popsicle wrappers, old shoes, wrecked piers, wayward outhouses. They swept past the mouth of the Menomonee, where the man had trapped muskrats and raccoons so long ago. A gutted, abandoned Cadillac lay hung up on a tangle of driftwood at precisely the point where the smaller river joined the large one. It rolled on the conflict of currents like a stranded, sunburned whale.
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