by Holly Green
“What?”
“Should we pull over so I can duck into the woods?”
“Are you kidding me? It’s just pee. Do it in the canoe.”
Constant forward motion.
Dad once paddled with a guy who would hang his bare butt over the back of his seat, take a dump on his paddle, and fling it into the river. I wouldn’t go that far. But there’s no reason to stop the boat for pee.
John Cullen still hasn’t missed a stroke. And now I really need to pee, too.
“So you don’t care if I pee in the boat?” he asks.
“Not in the boat.” Gross. The image of his pee sloshing around my feet. Seriously. “Go over the side like a normal person.”
“OBVIOUSLY,” he says. But he doesn’t stop paddling. I think—I think he has stage fright.
My bladder pulses.
A couple of minutes pass.
“If you’re not taking a break, I am.” I tuck my paddle beside my seat and grab the blue plastic urinal I keep tethered to the brace in front of me. I pull my shorts aside, open the slit I cut into the upper thigh of my tights, pull my underwear aside, and put my urinal in place. It’s basically a small plastic pitcher. I relax all the right muscles.
The river flows all around me, but nothing flows out.
I give it a little push.
And another.
Damnit.
“You okay back there?” John Cullen asks.
Which just makes the muscles clench tighter.
His head starts to turn.
“Don’t!” I drop my urinal and put my clothes back in place. Honestly, I’ve never had a problem peeing in a boat before. “You should just get it over with,” I say. “You’re making it into a bigger deal than it is.”
He holds his paddle to the side with one hand as I start paddling. The boat gets heavy without his help and I have to pull harder. I call a hut just so he’ll know he’ll need to switch sides when he’s finished. I bet it’ll take forever for him to get sta—
Oh. My whole body stiffens. I train my eyes on the trees on the opposite bank, but I can’t escape the rhythmic sound it makes hitting the river.
How did he do that so fast?
And then it’s in my head again. It’s not even like I haven’t seen it before. There are pictures of us in the bathtub together. We used to pee in front of each other all the time. And when we got older, he was the first one who wanted to change separately. I didn’t care. But I keep seeing him at Rio Vista, his shirt clinging to muscles I didn’t know he had, and his wet shorts—somehow knowing it’s exposed to the elements up there grates at me.
And it shouldn’t. It really, really shouldn’t.
1:07 P.M. SATURDAY
Even from back here I can see the water splashing up around the nose of the canoe, and over the dips of our paddles in the water, I hear the unmistakable sounds of something caught on the bow. John Cullen keeps paddling, oblivious to the stick or algae or long grass or whatever it is up there, creating drag and making us work harder.
“Are you gonna knock that off the boat?” I ask.
“Knock what off?”
“Whatever’s strung across the bow up there.”
He does nothing.
“It’s cutting a wake,” I say.
“I thought that was because we’re going fast.”
“It’s creating drag. Slowing us down.” I wait for him to knock it off the boat. But he doesn’t. Maybe he doesn’t know how. Geez. “Slide the blade of your paddle up against the front and knock it off.”
He leans forward, holding his paddle like a sword, and makes a couple of fumbling attempts before he finally gets whatever it is off the nose. The front wake is gone when he starts paddling again, and I don’t care if he couldn’t tell the difference. I know the boat is moving faster.
We round a bend, and there they are, maybe a hundred yards ahead. They’ve switched from their double blades to single-blade paddles, but their yellow shirts are unmistakable.
“This is it,” I tell John Cullen. This is our chance.
Dad always says the easiest time to pass someone is when they don’t know they’re being chased. He always loved seeing the other boats scramble to speed up when they realized he was about to overtake them.
This is how we have to pass Tanner. And we have a beautifully straight stretch of river to do it in.
“Quiet as a mouse,” I say. “Silent huts. Switch sides every seven strokes.” It’s obvious he wants this as much as I do because he gives a swift nod and doesn’t say anything about me trying to be in charge.
He sets a quick pace and he keeps his good form. We paddle in unison. Quietly. Stealthily. The boat surges forward with each pull. We glide past trees. Past logs full of turtles. Every seven strokes we switch sides. We’re like a machine.
With each stroke we inch closer to my brother.
And my brother hasn’t noticed.
My chest inflates.
This. Is. Glory.
Up ahead a fallen log stretches most of the way across the river. Tanner’s boat stays right. There’s enough room for them to lie down under it. By the time they reach the log, we’ll be in striking distance. We might even be passing them. There’s enough room for both boats. And I wouldn’t mind shoving them around a bit for payback.
Almost there. Our nose pulls even with their stern. We inch forward until it’s even with Hank in the back.
Hank’s head swivels. He catches sight of John Cullen and startles before he turns his whole body and catches sight of me. His eyebrows fly up under his hat.
“Head in the boat, Hank,” Coop calls from the front.
John Cullen pulls even with my brother and then past him, but he keeps his eyes on the water. His head doesn’t turn.
Tanner twists and his eyes grow wide when they catch mine.
“What the …” he starts as Coop and John Cullen both lie down in the boat.
“Down!” Hank shouts at my brother.
Tanner lies back just in time, and I lie back, hugging my paddle to my chest, and look at the clear blue sky. My seat is almost even with his by the time I glide under the huge trunk of a cypress tree. A few strokes and I’ll be in the—
Thunk.
The boat shudders to a stop. I stare at bark as my brother slides ahead of me.
What the hell just happened?
“What the …” John Cullen says.
“What’d we hit?” I slide forward in my seat until I’m clear of the tree. I crouch in the footwell in front of my seat.
“Nothing.” He pokes at the water around the bow with his paddle. “There’s nothing there.”
My brother’s already ten feet ahead, turned around looking at us.
His laughter cuts through the air.
I dig my paddle into the water and pull. The boat doesn’t move. It has to move. I can’t let him get away. I bounce up and down, jostling the boat, but it’s still stuck. Now he’s fifty feet ahead. He can’t get away. I backsweep in a wide arc, trying to pull us off whatever it is. The stern should move, even if we’re caught on something up ahead, but it doesn’t. At least, it barely does.
I twist and slice into the water behind me with my paddle. It hits something taut. I jab around above and below, and then I know.
“The rudder is caught up on something.”
“Okay. What do we do?”
“I’ve got this.” I slide my paddle into the water to check the depth. I’ll be able to touch, and the current is slow. Should be safe enough to get out. I slide the paddle under my seat. Where’d I put my knife? Crap. No. Tanner was going to carry his pocketknife.
I’m out here without a knife. How could I be so stupid?
No. This doesn’t have to be a disaster. I put a hand on each gunnel, half stand, and lower both feet into the water. The left gunnel lifts my shirt and scrapes my stomach as I slide into the river, but I don’t care about the pain.
I’m chest-deep when I hit bottom and carefully step my way towar
d the rudder until something hair thin presses into my stomach. Fishing line. If I’m lucky, this will just be a matter of sliding the fishing line off the front of the rudder. Over in a minute. We’ll have caught up to Tanner in another five.
My right hand slides over the bottom of the boat to the rudder, and there it is, a giant tangle of it. My stomach sinks. I tug it down, but the line holds tight. It doesn’t move. I jerk it, and it cuts into my fingers but stays where it is. I run my hand around the joint where the rudder connects to the cables. The line is tangled in the mechanism.
My left hand bobs up and down with the top of the boat. The rudder moves in my right. John Cullen splashes into the water.
“What’s going on here?” he asks.
I push on the top gunnel, enough to tilt the boat to the side, but it doesn’t move. It’s caught too tight.
“Where’s your knife?” he asks.
“Tanner was going to bring the knife,” I mumble.
“What was that?”
“I don’t have one!”
“You should have told me.” He goes back to his seat and returns holding a weird pair of bent scissors over the surface of the water.
“What are those?”
“Trauma shears. Gonzo swears by them.”
Why does Gonzo use something called trauma shears?
I put out my hand to take them so I can start hacking away at the fishing line, but John Cullen swims around me to the other side and reaches both hands under the water.
“I was going to do that.” I reach underwater to take the shears from him, but he pushes me away with his shoulder.
“Watch it. These things could take a finger off.”
Neither of us can see what he’s doing under the surface. His eyes drift shut. His mouth pulls to the left. I’d forgotten about how his mouth always did that when he was drawing. I’d forgotten how I would watch him take a pencil and paper and spill the contents of his head onto the page. A T. rex chasing us down a riverbank. Us climbing a building to meet King Kong. Us, in a hot-air balloon, flying over kangaroos in Australia. Always the two of us together on the page.
After our dads fought, I chucked most of those drawings in the recycling bin.
He opens one eye and glares at me. “It doesn’t help, having you stare at me,” he says, before he squeezes it shut again.
My gut twists. I hold my hat with my free hand and plunge under the water. It’s so cool on my face and in my hair. I resurface facing downstream and swim a little farther away from John Cullen. It’s not like I wanted to stare at him. I just want to be out of this mess. And since I don’t have any other way to be useful, I go ahead and pee. I don’t like the way the warmth fills my clothes, but I fan the waistband of my shorts and tights to let in fresh water, and soon enough, it all washes away.
Tanner is so far downriver I can’t even see him anymore. We blew our chance.
“Take this,” John Cullen says.
I swim back to him. He holds out a wad of fishing line. His hands plunge back into the water after I take it. Another moment’s work and he holds up another tangle of line. The back of his hand is golden and dotted with freckles. The edges of his squared-off fingers are wrinkled with water. Back when we were kids, his hands were softer. His fingers thinner.
For one stupid second, I imagine what it would feel like now, to have his fingers laced between mine.
“That’s it,” he says. I shake that ridiculous thought out of my brain as I take the line from him and add it to the rest.
With my free hand, I pull on the gunnel. The boat glides forward.
“Checking my work?” he asks.
If I was checking his work, I would feel around the mechanism to make sure there weren’t any tiny pieces of line left to gunk up the works. But I can still see his drawings in my head. They were so careful. So precise. He wouldn’t leave anything behind.
We climb back into the boat and John Cullen sets a quick pace, but not as quick as it was before. Our paddles splash in the water. I call our huts. Every time we turn a corner I scan ahead for my brother.
He’s not there.
1:46 P.M. SATURDAY
Around every turn I think we’ll see the Highway 20 bridge in Fentress. And not long after that, we’ll see our bank crew at Leisure Camp.
The claps and yells of spectators up ahead fill my ears. We must be close to the bridge. And we must be closing in on another boat. And then we’re passing by kids wading in the river and people on the shore and a boat getting supplies from their bank crew, we’re under the bridge and paddling through twists and turns, dodging tubers, and I’m holding my breath through a cloud of cigarette smoke. We turn a bend and see the crowds of people at Leisure Camp, floating in tubes and sitting with their lawn chairs planted in the water, their shade canopies set up right in the middle of the shallow parts of the river. A couple of kids splash in front of us and John Cullen backsweeps to keep from hitting them.
I can remember when we were kids, Mom waiting for Dad in the shallow water here, with me hanging on to one of her legs, letting the current push me, and Tanner doing the same on her other leg.
I steer us toward a sandbar in the middle of the river. Erica and Gonzo are belly-button-deep in the water beside it.
It’s 2:04 p.m.
Dad’s not here.
“When did my brother come through?” I ask.
Gonzo checks his watch. “About twenty minutes ago.”
Twenty minutes? The fishing line couldn’t have cost us more than seven. Maybe ten. They’re flying. They must be double-blading again to be going that fast.
“Making good time. Last we checked you were in twentieth place,” Gonzo says, like he hasn’t just delivered a huge blow to us. He and Erica switch out our water jugs, take our trash, and give us food.
I throw my melted ice sock in the milk crate and grab a fresh one. I cringe at the cold as I drape it around my neck, but after the initial shock, it’s cool bliss.
“Hey, Cully,” Erica says.
John Cullen twists in his seat to look at her.
“Gonzo told me you did that T. rex windmill on Highway 80. That thing kills me it’s so good.”
John Cullen’s face lights up like a flashlight, and I see an echo of that kid he used to be. “Thanks for that.”
Erica examines my trash bag. A line forms between her eyebrows. “You can’t live off GU, you know.” She pulls something from a plastic bag she’s had tucked under the strap of her tank top and hands me something. “Eat this.” It’s an empanada and it’s still oven warm.
Gonzo holds one out to John Cullen and says, “She made your favorite.”
“The beef ones? ” John Cullen asks, snatching the empanada out of Gonzo’s hand.
“Our stops have to be quick,” I say for everyone to hear. “No time for snacks. We should be moving already.” I bet Tanner and the Bynums were in and out of here in under two minutes.
But John Cullen is already saying, “So freaking good,” like he’s in ecstasy or something. He waves his half-eaten empanada at someone on shore. “Thank you!” It’s a mumbled yell through a full mouth.
“See Mrs. Gonzales over there?” Erica points to shore at a woman who must be Gonzo’s mom.
Mrs. Gonzales cups her hand around her mouth and calls, “I’m so proud of you, Cully! Good job, Sadie!”
But now John Cullen’s body is rigid.
“That nice woman made you empanadas,” Erica continues. “Are you going to break her heart by not eating them?”
I shove half the empanada into my mouth and start to chew. It’s spicy beef with something a little bit sweet, and it really is heaven.
I wave a genuine thank-you to Mrs. Gonzales. These are the perfect Odyssey food. They’re self-contained, and she even made them small enough to eat in a few big bites. She smiles and waves back.
“Just ignore her,” Gonzo mumbles to John Cullen, and they both glance toward the shore.
I can’t imagine that they’re
talking about ignoring Mrs. Gonzales. My eyes slip past her to the girl sitting in a low lawn chair in the shallow water of the gravel shore. Watching us. Allie Davis. Tan and blonde in a tiny black bikini.
I chew quickly before swallowing. “Who’s she following?” I cram the rest of the empanada in my mouth.
“Huh—oh, Allie?” Erica asks.
I nod while I chew.
“I think she’s following you.”
I stuff my food into my cheek with my tongue. “Us?”
Erica shrugs. “She was at Cottonseed and Staples. She packed it in as soon as you left both times.”
I didn’t see her at Cottonseed.
But maybe someone else did.
A solo woman in a C-1 cuts right by us, rocking our boat with her wake.
I have to focus. My brother is putting distance between us and now we’re going down in the ranks.
“Time to go,” I announce, busting up the conference going on between Gonzo and John Cullen.
Gonzo’s pompadour is wilting. He pats John Cullen on the back. “Don’t let her get into your head,” he says as John Cullen raises his paddle. “Think about riz-dee.”
John Cullen shakes his head as he picks up his paddle and takes his first stroke.
We pick our way through the rest of the sunburns and potbellies and the smoke from the grills piled high with sausages blowing over the river. We almost hit a tent pole to avoid a dog. When the noise and the people are all well behind us, I ask.
“What’s the deal with you and Allie Davis?”
“There isn’t one.”
“Well, I’m not the one she’s been following all day.”
“It’s not me, either,” he says.
“She’s distracting you.”
“Salad,” he says, pushing away a low tree branch hanging over the water. It swings back and I duck my head to keep it from smacking me in the face. Twigs and leaves scrape across the top of my hat.
We both duck under another low branch, and then he says, “Don’t worry about Allie. I’m handling it.”
“Is she the reason we flipped at Cottonseed?” I ask.
The only sound is our paddles in the water for three … four … five strokes.
I stop paddling, and after a few strokes he glances back at me.
