by Holly Green
He keeps up his pace and we’re flying to the dam at the end of Spring Lake.
The dam is the first portage of the race, only a quarter mile from the start. It’s a bottleneck. The shore is already three deep with boats waiting to get out. Johnny Hink and his teammates disappear into the trees, carrying their three-man canoe. My brother probably came through a couple of minutes ago.
If John Cullen and I really get into sync, is there any chance we can keep up with them?
“Let’s go to the left,” he shouts above the mess, and I steer us to the side of it all, where there are fewer boats.
We nose toward the shore. I throw a leg on either side of the boat to steady it for John Cullen to get out. But he doesn’t. He backsweeps to the left, sending the stern into another boat.
“What are you doing?” I shout.
The boat rocks as he turns around. “Getting you closer to shore.”
Getting me closer to shore?
“Are you kidding me about this stuff?” I ask. “This isn’t a date, it’s a race.”
His chin jerks back like he’s been jabbed.
I slide out of the boat and it’s so deep I can’t touch. Cold water soaks into my clothes.
I saw him training with Brent this spring. I thought he knew what he was doing. I thought he took this seriously.
He puts his hands on the gunnels and climbs out. While he pulls the boat, I swim it forward until my feet find the muck at the bottom. He pulls the bow onto shore.
I bet we’ve been passed by ten boats.
John Cullen picks up the bow handle, and I take the stern. We carry our boat at a trot along with the other racers, forging a trail through the woods, but he’s all starts and stops and I’m jerked around at the back of the boat. Finally, we make it down the hill to the bottom of the dam.
Across the river in the calm, shallow water, people swim and spectate under the canopy of cypress trees. Sometimes as kids we’d play here together.
“You swim the bow out to the deep water, I steady the boat for you. You climb in, then I climb in.”
“Don’t tell me this stuff like I’m five,” he shouts, but he’s already wading into the water.
“You were smarter when you were five.”
“You two aren’t even going to make it to the first checkpoint like this,” says some woman, setting down her half of an aluminum.
She’s wearing flip-flops. What the hell does she know?
Calf-deep, I set my end of the boat in the water, climb into my seat, and put one foot in the muck on each side to steady the boat for John Cullen.
He’s watching the bowman of another boat climb in, and then he puts a hand on each of the gunnels in front of his seat, pushes down, and throws his body across the canoe. The boat rocks back and forth while he pushes and wiggles and twists over and finally gets his butt in the seat. He wiggles a bit, we both pull our legs in, and we go.
We paddle and I call the huts, and we pass the university where later today people will be sunning out on the lawn in swimsuits. Pass City Park and the place where all the tubers will put in later with their beers in coolers, getting drunk and floating downriver in a cloud of one another’s pee. Pass houses with balconies slung with hammocks.
The rushing sounds of the water and the noise of the paddlers and the crowd hit us before we actually see everyone congregated to watch at the dam at Rio Vista. It’s not much of a dam. Three small drop-offs making three big rapids, and a spillway down the center of each. Almost everyone portages the first rapid on race day, but some people jump back in and run the last two in their boat.
It’s another bottleneck when you’re coming from the back. Boats everywhere. Spectators everywhere. At least a hundred people are scattered all over the rocks, clapping and cheering.
“Let’s run it,” John Cullen says.
Such a Hink thing to say. All bravado and no sense. “Don’t be a dumbass.”
“Brent and I ran it all the time in training. It’s faster.”
It’s true. There’s a crowd of boats waiting to get out of the water, and nothing about portaging is fun. But it’s the better call here.
I hit the rudder pedal, steering the boat to the left. “Hut,” I call.
We finish our strokes and switch sides. The boat points left.
“Hey!” He draws us to the right. “We don’t have to wait in line this way.”
“Stop it!” I dig my paddle in on the left and backsweep, trying to pull the nose to the left.
He draws right again, overcoming the rudder and pointing the nose straight at the dam. “Half the boats here are running it!”
“I’m the one driving!” I shout, backsweeping again.
But now we’ve missed the takeout I wanted on the left and are headed straight toward water spilling over a wall of rock. We can climb down the rocks into the pool below. We’ll have to cut through the crowd, but we can still portage around the last two rapids.
“You have to climb out as soon as we get to the wall!” I shout.
“I know what I’m doing!”
What a lie.
Our nose bumps the wall. John Cullen scrambles onto the top of the rocks, water flowing around his ankles. He takes the front handle and scuttles forward while I climb out. Holding the handle for the back, I follow him down the slippery wall of rocks and get into my seat again. He jumps into his. That’s when I look ahead, about twenty feet across the water to the place I want to portage the next fall. There’s a couple with an aluminum blocking our path. The man is clutching his shoulder and the woman is grabbing the gunnels, trying to lift the boat all on her own. We won’t have space to get out and get around them.
“We’re running it,” I call. We’re coming from the left, which is good, because it’s the best angle for approaching the V at the bottom of the rapid. The sweet spot, where you know the water is deep and moving. “Line us up.”
He does a tiny draw to the side.
Here we go.
The nose tips down the spillway and I’m riding it down with a whump when everything goes sideways. We’ve tipped off balance. Damn. I lean left to stabilize us, but it’s too late. I fall out of the boat, clutching my paddle in a death grip. Cold water rushes around my face before I pull my way to the top. Water drips off my hat and my eyes and into my mouth as I gulp for a breath. John Cullen and his blue hat bob in front of me. The black hull of the canoe floats on top of the river.
My stomach drops with the water as I’m sucked down the next spillway. The water throws me left, right, and under before I surface and swim for the canoe. The river sends it into an eddy, where the water swirls back upstream. By the time I get into the shallow water, John Cullen is already there. Thank god his paddle is still in his hand.
He’s knee-deep in the river and his shorts cling to his body, and there’s a lump. Not like a boner lump. Just a regular lump. But it’s there, and now I can’t unsee it. And now the fact that John Cullen has a penis is in my head, which I never want to think about again.
“This is why we don’t run the rapid on race day!” I shout. “If you’d listened to me in the first place, we could have portaged all three!”
“Half the other boats here are running it,” he shouts back.
“And every one of those boats has run it together in practice. This is our first time on the water together.”
“So we’re not going to do anything hard? Are we going to portage Cottonseed? Maybe we should just walk our boat down the river? That would be—”
“Works better if you stay in the boat, Sadie,” shouts someone passing by. My stomach drops at the sound of the voice.
I whip my head to the left. It’s my brother.
Our eyes meet before he passes me and paddles away with the Bynums, their double-bladed paddles moving in unison.
I was in front of my brother?
9:17 A.M. SATURDAY
Works better if you stay in the boat.
My brother is the biggest jerk.
We have to catch him.
John Cullen and I flip the boat over and I shove my water jugs back in their holders. Everything else is still there. “Quick,” I tell John Cullen as we join the crowd paddling downriver under the canopy of cypress trees.
We used to play here together all the time, the three of us. Summer days we piled into the back of Mom’s Subaru and drove here. Weekday mornings, when there were fewer tubers clogging the river. We stormed the park a quarter mile up the road, playing until sweat stuck our clothes to our bodies, then we’d retreat to the river and jump in.
Usually, we chased one another around the water, climbed on rocks, splashed and tried to dunk one another. We’d sit together, arm to arm, on the rocks that dammed up Rio Vista, and watch the white-water kayakers in their short boats surf through the rapids of the falls, flipping upside down on purpose and popping up again without coming out of their boats.
There was this one day—I was seven. It was hot, as usual. We’d been out of waffles at breakfast. Everyone was tired and hot and grumpy with everyone else. And Mom was perched on a rock, reading another book about small businesses, because she was planning for her bakery. Tanner accused Cully of losing some of the pieces to one of his LEGO sets, even though we all knew it was Tanner who lost them.
“Leave him alone,” I said, slapping Tanner’s arm.
“You’re such a traitor, always siding with him,” Tanner said.
It was just the latest in a morning of fights, and I wanted it all to stop. For us all to get along. And then I had it. I pulled the rubber bands out of my braids and dunked my head. I rose out of the water folded in half, with my head and hair hanging down. Then I flipped my head back and stood, leaving a roll of hair right above my forehead, just like Ms. Trout, our assistant principal with her old-lady beauty-parlor style. I ducked out my lips. “Students who fight over LEGO sets will have to sit out at recess,” I said, using my best Trout voice. Making students sit out at recess was her favorite pastime.
Tanner laughed.
Cully laughed.
And suddenly everything was right again between the three of us.
It wouldn’t work now. Everything that’s gone down between the Scofields and the Hinks, between the three of us, it’s all way too much for a Ms. Trout impersonation to fix. I don’t even want to fix it. I want to get this boat to Seadrift as fast as humanly possible.
I want to make my brother sorry he ever said works better if you stay in the boat.
He and the Bynums are already out of sight.
I want to make John Cullen sorry he tried to take over. If he’d been a decent teammate, we’d still be ahead of my brother. I paddle as hard as I can, trying to burn holes in the back of his stupid head with my laser stare.
Which would be counterproductive if it actually worked.
“Faster,” I tell him.
“We should be pacing ourselves,” he says. “You know this is two hundred and sixty-five miles, right?”
“Shut up and paddle.”
We pass three boats on our way to Thompson’s Island, which splits the river in two.
“Left!” I call.
We follow a line of boats to the left and weave past two aluminums. The light is dim from the cypress branches that make a canopy overhead, and the air is cool. But the path is narrow and the water almost stagnant. The current slows. I take us too far to the left. The rudder scrapes the bottom and someone knocks us in the stern, jerking the boat forward.
“Sorry ’bout that!” I hear, but I don’t even bother to look for who it is. I still don’t see my brother.
We’re paddling hard to get out of the shallows, which slow you down, and we’re ducking under branches, and then we come to a stop, right before the portage, and wait two back in line while a team struggles to lift their long, four-person boat out of the water. Boats stack up behind us. Finally, it’s our turn. We push up to the front, parallel to the concrete barrier. The boat rocks as we climb out. Water drips off the boat as we lift it by the handles and jog across the concrete to the other side of the island. We feed the boat back into a tiny stream and follow it into the water, where we climb back in. It’s a short paddle, and then the bridge comes into view. People lean over the rail, cheering and waving. I don’t even bother to look.
“Current’s coming fast. Draw left, then right,” I shout, pressing hard into the rudder pedal, because we’re about to join a much stronger current, right as we make a ninety-degree left turn under a bridge. If the current pushes us too far, we’ll hit concrete. I steer us to the left, but as soon as I know we’ll make the turn, I even out the pedals to make the rudder straight. “Draw right! Draw!”
John Cullen reaches out too far, and I have to correct, but we keep paddling, and then we’re under the shadow of the bridge, and we make it through.
There are boats ahead of us, but they disappear behind the turn and I don’t see Tanner up ahead. We weave past a few more boats. And it’s not just boats. We dodge a pair of kayakers out with their fishing poles and a spectator who thinks it’s a good idea to stand chest-deep in the river on race day.
This section is constant drawing and backsweeping, navigating from one near crisis to another, and I usually love it. I’m usually listening to birds and frogs, but today all I hear are dips of our paddles in the water and other racers shouting directions at one another and my brother’s words echoing in my ears.
Works better if you stay in the boat, Sadie.
Jerk.
He’s getting away.
We come out of a bend where a small island splits the river, and I want to go left, like usual, but somebody’s upended a longboat on that side. It’s floating sideways, causing a traffic jam. Better to follow the four-person boat ahead of us on the right. Fours usually know what they’re doing. We pull up beside them. John Cullen is even with the third person in the boat.
Thud.
Their boat stops. All four bodies lurch forward.
“Log,” John Cullen yells with his paddle up in the air. Useless.
“Backpaddle!” I tell him as I do the same, pushing the water forward. It’s not enough. Thunk. The whole boat shudders as our bow hits and beaches on the log just under the surface.
“That was a surprise,” one of the guys next to us says, laughing.
I stick a leg in the water on either side of the boat to stabilize us.
“I’ll get out,” John Cullen says, hands on the gunnels. He swings his legs over the side.
“Use your paddle to check the depth.” Honestly.
I use mine to do the same and it hits bottom. Water pulls fast underneath logs like that. Jump out when it’s too deep and you can get sucked right under into god knows what.
The guys next to us climb out as John Cullen dips his paddle into the water and hits bottom mid-shaft. Another boat slams into the log, inches away on the other side. Right where I was about to climb out.
What did they think we were doing here, having a tea party?
“Watch it there,” John Cullen says, all fake friendly to the middle-aged man and woman.
“Dave! It’s Cully!” The woman’s face lights up as she calls to her partner in the back.
Their entire boat rocks as Dave perks up and says, “Cully!” like they’re old friends.
“Oh. Hey,” John Cullen says.
“We’ve already gone over twice!” the woman says. She’s the one he was talking to at the starting line. Only now her hair is dripping and her shirt is wet and stuck to her, making wrinkles across her back. Her partner’s, too.
“Yeah, that thing’s not as stable as your other boat,” John Cullen says as I check the depth on the other side, the empty one, and slide into waist-deep water.
I push the boat forward, but with John Cullen in the bow, it still sits too low in the water to clear the log.
“Hurry up and get out,” I say, rocking the boat and interrupting the woman’s story about how they fell out going under that bridge a few minutes ago. They
act like we’re here for fun.
“We’ll watch how you do it. Get a lesson from the pros,” Dave says. As if John Cullen has been doing this more than a couple of months.
The four-man is already on the other side of the log and the guys are climbing in.
“Check your depth before you get out,” I tell Dave, because even if he’s annoying, I don’t want one of these newbies to get sucked under a log on my watch.
John Cullen climbs out, balances on the log, and I push the boat forward a few feet across it.
“Thanks,” Dave says.
That’s when I see it.
1964.
In white vinyl stickers.
On the side of their boat.
“You gave them your boat?” I spit the words out and they taste sour.
Some random novices are paddling with my number.
“Oh my goodness, it was so crazy!” the woman says as her partner slides into the water. “A fight broke out under the tent yesterday, and some guys fell on our boat and broke it.”
I push the boat forward, past John Cullen, still standing on the log, water rushing past his ankles.
“We thought we were out of luck,” Dave continues. “We were talking to the race officials about getting our fee refunded, and then Cully came over and told us we could use his boat.”
“Such a nice boy,” the woman says.
Not too bright, this one. Does she even know he’s the one who landed on her boat?
“What a crazy welcome to this race, right? I mean, it’s such a fluke, I love it,” the man says as his wife pushes up on the gunnels to climb onto the log. She loses her balance and falls back into her seat.
“Wouldn’t have it any other way,” the man continues as John Cullen holds out a hand to help the woman out of her seat.
Their hands are almost touching when I shout, “No!”
Three pairs of eyes bore into me. Because I’m the only one who bothered to learn the rules.
“You get disqualified for helping people, unless it’s life or death. Same for accepting help. You could have ended our race right there.”
