The swamp where they had shot ducks on their way upriver had by now been drained. Concrete culverts diverted the river past a vast shopping center, from which the sounds of Muzak reached them above the distant rumbling of the storm, and drainpipes set in the concrete walls poured colorful waters into the Hassayampa. They paddled through rainbows of oil. What looked like the corpse of a baby, stiff and bloated in a drift line farther downstream, proved to be only a rotten rubber doll.
Even the Indian reservation had changed. The stands of mature white pine along the rivers bank had receded, or else been transmuted during their absence into the sprawl of low, rustically modern summer homes that now stared wide-eyed at the raging Hassayampa, as if the dwellings themselves were fearfully certain of being swept away to join the flow of flotsam.
They beached the canoe briefly where they had cached the mastodon tusks on the way upstream. The logs with which they had built the cache were slimy with mud and dying algae, and mice had gotten to the ivory during their absence. The man studied the tusks, fascinated with the random, delicate scrimshaw work left by the rodents’ teeth. When he squinted, it almost seemed that he could read the tusks—as if some ancient historian at the dawn of ideography had left a message for him here, a code of nips and slashes. But the storm was still visible upstream, thumping in the distance, and questions of legibility would have to wait. They loaded the ivory and pushed on with the strength of the river at their backs.
Then the Hassayampa widened, approaching its mouth. It seemed to slow. The storm was well behind them now, so fast had they run the chutes. They had even outrun the runoff: here at the river’s end, the water was clear. The boy, paddling at the bow, braked the canoe to a swirling halt. He pulled a fly rod from his pack and began to assemble it.
“What are you doing?”
“We can’t come home empty-handed,” the boy said. “Not after all this time.”
The man stared down through the glassy surface. Fleets of bluegills maneuvered through the weed. A largemouth bass lay solid and heavy in the shadow of a sunken log. Turtles sunned themselves on the stumps near the shore, where a great blue heron stood silent and steady, waiting for frogs.
The boy fished for an hour, while the storm drew nearer. He caught bluegills, yellow perch, a white crappie and one fairsized bass. When the string was of a respectable size, they beached the canoe and unloaded their gear. Not much of it, when they stood back and looked at the pile. The man stuck the Luger into his waistband, at the small of his back, and then draped the bearskin over his shoulders. Better to hide the weapon: he didn’t want to scare the neighbors. The tusks worked well as crutches. The boy carried the fly rod in one hand and the string of fish in the other.
They walked slowly away from the river, toward home.
Epilogue
HUNK SQUATTED on his heels in the dark beside the Hassayampa. The rain had swept through, though the lightning still illuminated the wet cliffs and the racing river from time to time. Hunk kept his eyes on the water. Anytime now, he thought. He had squatted there all day, impervious to the weather, watching the flotsam spin past. Trees, bones, bloated carcasses of the drowned. Now he saw a flash of white in the darkness upstream.
It flashed again, closer.
Hunk walked into the river and waited. It was the body of a man. He grabbed its wrist as it rolled by and dragged it up onto the skull-sized stones of the shore. He laid it on its back and straightened as best he could the broken, rock-torn limbs. Then he waited some more.
The thunder boomed, rolling away downriver.
The eyelid flickered. The nostrils flexed. The chest rose, fell, rose again. Then the lid lifted completely and the black eye swam into focus.
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