The River Wild

by Denis O'Neill

  Roarke joined Deke and Terry on the edge of the ledge where the water was only a foot deep. When Tom’s head popped up again, he screamed, “Find her, Dad. Find Mom!” His face was tear-streaked.

  No one saw Gail’s head rise up ten yards behind them from a pothole the size of a manhole cover carved by hydraulics into the ledge. The water was a little deeper there, maybe two feet. Gail gasped for air in silent sucks. The soundtrack of the river covered up those breaths, as well as the slight splashing as she rose up through the pothole and crouched at its edge. She eyed the men and Roarke. She spied the handle of her .22 poking out of the back of Deke’s belt. She eased her way downstream in a half crouch. Deke and Terry were staring into the pool as if mesmerized. Gail eased up behind Deke and snatched the weapon. Deke whirled around, startled. Gail aimed the .22 at him and backed up a few steps to get more clearance.

  Roarke’s face exploded happily: “Mom!” He scrambled toward her before Deke thought to grab him.

  Tom’s head appeared once more behind Deke and Terry. He saw Gail holding the gun, with Roarke beside her. His smashed-in face brightened. He breast-stroked downstream and climbed onto the ledge far away from the fugitives. He gave them a wide berth as he made his way to Gail and Roarke.

  “How’d you do that?” Deke asked, baffled. “Goddamn, you do know this river.”

  “Tom, get Roarke and get in the raft.”

  Deke and Terry started to edge apart.

  “Don’t move, or I’ll shoot,” she warned them. Her words were firm, but her eyes darted and danced nervously. Her gun hand quivered.

  “I doubt it,” Deke said. He stepped toward her. Gail clamped a second hand on the grip and drew a bead on Deke’s forehead. She started to back up toward shore and the rafts. “Hurry, Tom!” she shouted.

  Tom hoisted Roarke into the front of the raft.

  “Now take the hatchet and slash the other raft!”

  “You don’t want to do that,” Deke said, shaking his head.

  “Sink it, Tom!”

  “Darlin’, you’re doin’ the wrong thing. I’m telling you the truth.”

  “Shut up! Do it, honey.”

  Tom grabbed the camp hatchet and slashed away. The Avon collapsed into a heap of rubber.

  Gail glanced over her shoulder at Tom and Roarke. “Row into shallow water.”

  Deke shook his head and stepped closer toward Gail. Then he reached into his pocket and held up a fist. He turned the fist palm up and opened his fingers slowly. Six .22 bullets were visible.

  Gail’s face fell for moment, then, “Nice try. You can keep all the extras you want. They’re no use without a gun.”

  “I may not be the hottest thing on the river,” Deke said, “but long ago I figured out that running rapids with a loaded pistol in your pocket was a shortcut to the soprano section.”

  Tom and Gail exchanged anxious looks. “He’s lying,” Tom said. “He’s good at it.”

  “I’m going to take that as a compliment, Tom. I’m also going to give Gail to three to show me what kind of attitude she’s got. One …” He took a step toward Gail. “Two … ” He took a second step.

  “I swear I’ll pull the trigger, Deke! You know I will.”

  “Make it easy on all of us … three.”

  Deke stepped even closer, taunting her. Gail’s finger squeezed the trigger. CLICK. A terrible click. Panicked, she squeezed again. CLICK. CLICK. Deke’s hand closed over Gail’s. He bent her wrist back and forced her to the ground.

  “Go Tom! Take Roarke … go!”

  Tom dipped his oars in and pulled for deeper water. He felt a horrible dread in his stomach. The situation at hand was too overwhelming to consider in a logical way: Row away and save Roarke. They need Gail to get down the river so they won’t kill her. I can get out and get help before they can get off the river. Maybe …

  Deke dragged Gail by the wrist closer to the water’s edge. “Look at her, Tom! You’re looking at her for the last time if you do what she says. And that’s the truth, too. Just like the bullets.”

  “Save yourselves!” Gail yelled defiantly. “I love you, Roarke! Go!”

  Tom looked back and forth between Roarke and Gail. The boy shook his head. Tom’s swollen face trembled with indecision. The current tugged his raft slowly downstream. Roarke abruptly threw himself out of the raft and began swimming to his mother.

  Gail’s body sagged. She shook her head. “No, honey. Go back. Go back with Dad. Get downriver!”

  “I’m not leaving you the way we left Maggie.”

  Tom’s shoulders sagged. He dipped his oars in the water and took the first stroke toward shore.

  Gail wailed, “Noooooo!”

  Deke released his grip. She slumped into a fetal heap on the beach, her body wracked with sobs.

  20

  Terry held a bottle of Jim and Peter’s whisky in one hand and an armload of tinder and wood under his arm. He stepped across the fire pit, dumping the wood like a water drop from a firefighting plane. The wood, a mix of dry pine cones, dead limbs, and needles settled into the embers. Combustion took only a matter of seconds. The dry fuel and pine tar crackled and flamed up, sending sparks into the air. “Last night,” Terry said, already drunk. “Calls for a little celebration.” He took a seat on a log. “Maybe we should have an awards banquet. They do that on these kinds of river trips don’t they?”

  Deke ignored him. He sat nearby, studying a topo map of the river, chewing on a hot dog, sipping a beer. Tom and Gail sat across the fire from Terry, hands bound behind their backs, Roarke between them.

  Gail glared at Terry. “Why’d you have to come to this river? … To this beautiful place? Why?”

  Terry only smiled. Deke took a last chomp on his hot dog. “Our first choice was Canada,” he told Gail. “But then we figured they’d figure we’d make that move. So we made ‘em think it was. Him more than them, probably. There’s one trooper who’s not going to be too happy.“ The prospect of Lieutenant Bobby Long busting a gut put a momentary smile on Deke’s face. He took a long pull on his beer. “Hated to give up the car, but they were probably onto that, anyway … so we ended up here.”

  “But now I’m wondering, after looking at this map, if Montana’s finest might be figuring if we did get on the river, where would be the first place we could get off?” He held the map in front of Gail and pointed at the takeout. “Which is right here, according to Roarke. The good news is there’s a car there we have the keys to and can find once we aim the clicker at the parking lot and see who blinks back. A car that’s supposed to be there and driven away. The bad news—and like you, Gail, I always like to know what the bad news might be—is that there might also be a welcoming committee, providing someone was smart enough to figure out what we did, especially after coming up empty-handed at the border. It’d kinda be a prime lie for law enforcement, you know. I now know what a prime lie is because I heard you tell Roarke it’s that place on the stream where a confluence of food, oxygen, and shelter makes it the place where the biggest fish hang out. If I were a big fish with a badge and a gun, and this was the first and best place to gobble up whatever was coming down the river, wouldn’t I be there? Especially if the big fish was carrying a grudge, for some reason. Not to mention that ranger we saw. What if he started thinking about how stiff our little group was, how beaten up Tom’s face was, and what if he did see Tom’s SOS before I could step on it but didn’t say anything because he knew we only had one place to get off and reinforcements might be a good idea. You know what I’m saying?” Deke tapped the stretch of the river below the takeout. “Roarke called this the Gauntlet. Said it was what made the River Wild really wild. What if we bypassed the main takeout, to be safe, and went down here to this logging road at the bottom?”

  “You can’t do it,” Gail said.

  “I know I can’t,” Deke said. “But you can.”

  “It’s suicide. Do you know how they describe class VI? Nearly impossible. Any attempt will result in injury,
near drowning, or death.”

  “But Roarke told me you ran it once.”

  “Yeah, a million years ago. When I was a little crazier, and I didn’t have a family to worry about.”

  “Exactly my point,” Deke said, carefully refolding the map. “Now you do have a family to worry about.” He tapped his temple with a finger, then backed off.

  Terry took a sip of whisky and handed the bottle to Deke as he walked by. His ingrained anxiety about the wilderness—and all its creatures lurking within—had given way to the power of drink and the expectation that the end was in sight. It made him happy. Gregarious. Horny. He walked over to Gail and knelt beside her. “And tomorrow, after you get us through those rapids … or those rapids below those rapids … ” He stroked her cheek. Gail recoiled. “Just you, darlin’ … and me.”

  Tom lunged at him. Terry, even drunk, was ready. He smashed his forehead into Tom’s head, sending Tom slumping backward like a crash dummy. Terry peered at Tom. “You sure got a big appetite for getting beat.” Then he stood, looked at Gail once more. “Better rest up.” He staggered off.

  “Sorry, Mom,” Roarke said softly. “He was asking about the river before all of this happened.”

  Gail smiled at him. “I’m glad you know the river, honey—want you to know the river. That’s a good thing.” She glared at the retreating Deke. “Deke!” she shouted. Deke stopped but didn’t turn to face her. Gail’s eyes burned with hate. “You better know something about the woods.” Deke hoisted the whisky to his lips and drank. Gail’s voice trembled, “You better know there’s an order out here … a balance. Everything has its place. The rocks, the river, the fish. The trout eats the mayfly and the hawk eats the trout. But nothing kills for nothing. It’s been going on this way forever and ever.” Silence. The fire crackled. The river whooshed. Gail spoke with a new resonance; to her, this was religion. “Somehow. Somewhere. Sure as rain. If you break that order, you will be broken! ”

  Deke casually removed the .22 from his waistband and placed the barrel to his head to mock Gail’s prediction. “Might as well just get it over with then,” he said to the sky. He walked back and squatted in front of Gail. “Maybe, you’re right,” he told her, “but there’s a lot of laws. And I’ve spent a lifetime breaking most of them.” He calmly touched the barrel of the .22 to Gail’s forehead. “But the one I like the best, the one I believe in the most, is the law of relativity. And right now, relative to you, I kind of like my position.” He mouthed, Pow. He smiled and returned the gun to his waistband. “Midget—in the tent!”

  Roarke wrapped his arms around Gail’s neck. “I love you, Mom.”

  “I love you, too,” Gail said.

  Roarke wrapped his arms around his father. “Everything’s going to be okay, Pop.”

  Unseen by Deke, his hand searched out Tom’s, transferred his palmed gift knife to his father’s hand, then closed his father’s fingers over it.

  Tom squeezed his fingers tightly around the knife. He hugged Roarke. “I love you. You make me so proud.”

  Roarke looked at Tom’s beaten face. “And you always make me proud,” the boy said. “Love you, too.”

  “Okay. Everybody loves everybody,” Deke said, impatiently. “Terry and I love you all, too. It’s a big love fest on the river. You walkin’ to your tent, little big man … or do you want a ride.”

  Roarke popped up and walked past Deke, giving him a wide berth. Deke handed Terry the .22. “Okay campers, lights out. Big day tomorrow.”

  Tom and Gail struggled to their feet; their bound wrists made it difficult to stand. Deke took Gail by the elbow and led her to the tent. He waited for Tom to climb in with her and wiggle into their sleeping bags. Then he zipped up their sleeping bags, and then Roarke’s, and lashed each bag with a length of rope. “If you gotta pee, call the guard and get a hall pass. Sweet dreams.” He backed out of the tent and zipped up the front flap. He walked past Terry en route to their tent. “We’ll shorten the shifts to two hours. You take the first. Wake me for the next.”

  Terry threw more wood on the fire, then dragged his own sleeping bag to the base of a nearby pine tree. He wiggled his legs into the bag, got comfortable with the pine trunk as a back rest, and took a sip of whiskey.

  ** ** **

  A few hours later, a breeze stirred in the canyon as a near-full moon peeked over the cliff across the river from the campsite. It angled its brittle, blue-gray light onto the river through the pine boughs, giving them new definition, and onto the colorful tents, brightening them like Chinese lanterns. The fire had been reduced to a bed of coals. A sudden gust made them burn fiercer, hiss softly. Pine boughs danced overhead. Terry snuggled deeper into his sleeping bag, its warmth, combined with the inner glow of whisky, conspiring to put him to sleep.

  In Tom and Gail’s tent, moonlight filtered into the dark space as if it were on a rheostat, filling the space with a warm glow. It reflected off the tip of the knife blade Tom poked though his sleeping bag. He sawed the blade up and down, working his way through the restraining ropes. The blade looked like a shark fin moving across the bright-blue shell of his sleeping bag. Tom patiently sawed through the remaining rope and sat up. He unzipped his bag with his now-free hands. He heard Gail’s soft breathing, and peered at her face visible in the oval head hole of the mummy bag: it was lined with fatigue and given over to sleep. Roarke, too, was asleep.

  Tom crawled out of his bag, gently touched Gail’s and Roarke’s heads—almost like a blessing—and slowly unzipped the front flap to minimize noise. He slipped out of the tent, zipping the flap behind him. On his knees, he glanced at Deke’s tent: all was quiet. He looked for Terry, didn’t see him, then crawled to the far side of his tent for a different vantage. Terry was asleep beneath a towering lodgepole pine. The full moon emerged from behind fast moving clouds. Tom flattened himself to the ground. Moonlight brightened the campsite like a prison beacon. Tom waited. When a new thicket of clouds raced toward the moon, he pushed himself onto all fours. He started toward Terry, gripping the knife in his right hand. Hand forward. Knee forward. Stop. Listen. Other hand. Other knee. Stop. Listen. Terry sputtered in his sleep. Tom dropped once more to the pine needles.

  The upstream wind grew stronger, softly rustling the boughs of saplings and towering pines alike. Tom looked up. From his angle, the shimmering, feathery lodgepole limbs wiped the black sky momentarily free of stars. They reappeared when the gust subsided. Tom waited until Terry’s breathing evened out again, then he rose up once more onto all fours. He gauged the distance to his prey: only a few more yards. He took a deep breath and inched ahead. Hand. Knee. Stop. Other hand. Other knee. Stop. Terry’s boots loomed in front of him. Tom lowered his torso to the ground and crawled to one side of the inmate, to get in a better striking position. Satisfied, he pushed himself to his knees once more. Then he eased onto his haunches. Terry’s sunburned face was angled away from him. He lay on his back, offering a big target. His right hand held the .22. Tom swallowed hard and raised his knife hand overhead. Being a moral man, the thought of what he was about to do—kill another man—gave him sickening pause. He lowered the knife and wondered, Is there any other way to save my family? Maybe just knock him out with a rock. … He looked around and saw only a smooth carpet of pine needles. Time was of the essence. Back to Plan A. It was self-defense and would surely be viewed as such in any court of law. But nature’s law was what consumed him now. Was he violating Gail’s dictum that nothing killed for nothing? But this wasn’t nothing. This was survival. A taste of blood from his puffed and cracked lip reminded him. He raised his knife.

  The fugitive’s eyes popped open. He blinked once, twice, then suddenly sensed Tom’s presence. Tom drove his knife hand down just as Terry reflexively rolled away, throwing up his left forearm instinctively. More than one prison attack had honed his survival instincts. His arm deflected the blow, but the blade drew blood. Terry tried to retaliate by lashing back with his other hand—the one holding the gun—but the gun wen
t flying as he swung wildly at his assailant.

  Tom drove the knife a second time, but the convict tumbled away from the blow. He struggled to kick himself free of the sleeping bag. Tom pounced a third time, hoping to press his advantage. Terry grabbed both of Tom’s wrists and threw him back with ease. He grabbed the flaps of his sleeping bag in both hands and yanked them apart. The bag split in half. Terry scrambled to his feet as Tom got to his and advanced on the inmate in a crouch. Terry swept up the sleeping bag and wrapped it around his forearm as a shield. He angled that forearm toward Tom. The men circled one another. Tom held his knife warily, the advantage of surprise now gone. Terry enjoyed his visible discomfort. “You are a glutton for punishment.”

  Tom lunged with the knife. Terry deflected it with his padded forearm and the blade sliced the fabric, loosing down feathers but doing no damage. Tom’s eyes darted to the ground, searching for the 22. He spied it, but Terry read his intentions and sidestepped to put himself between Tom and the gun. Terry began to step toward the weapon, eyeing Tom all the way, daring him to attack. Tom made one lunge, but Terry swatted it away with the forearm and hit Tom with his other hand. Tom staggered backward. His chances of beating Terry to the gun were nil. He bolted.

  He ran past Deke’s tent and plunged into the semidarkness of brush. The moon burst free of clouds once more, lighting his retreat. He hurdled a fallen log, blocked branches with his forearm, and staggered in a downstream direction through the thicket of saplings. Terry picked up the .22, shook off the sleeping bag, and gave chase. The moonlight gave him a brief, clear shot. He aimed and fired. The bullet ricocheted off a pine trunk a yard from Tom’s head, striking him with bits of bark. Tom yelled, thinking he had been hit. He zigzagged as he ran. The temporary brightness gave him a course to follow even as clouds raced in once again to muffle the moonlight.

  Terry stopped in the middle of their campsite. “Deke!” he shouted. “Deke! He’s getting away!” Gail and Roarke sat bolt upright in their tent, both still bound in their sleeping bags. Gail saw Tom’s bag was empty. She heard a second shot, then Deke’s and Terry’s frantic voices. “Tom?!” she shouted. “Tom, are you okay? Where are you?! Tom!!!”