Nobody Floats It This Time of Year - Part One: 2018 (3)

He went under the deck with his head tipped back and the phone held up, and the drops came down out of the dark one at a time and struck his face. He didn't wipe them off. The girders went over him, and the gray cups of the swallows' nests, and then the sky came back, and the hollow doubled roar of the water fell away behind him into the ordinary rush of the creek.

He didn't look back for a long time. When he did, the bridge was a black lattice against a sky only a shade less black, and at the foot of it the glow stick was a green point, small and steady, getting smaller.

He held the phone close to his face. His thumb was too cold to work the screen. He breathed on it and held it in his mouth until it hurt, and the screen woke.

He scrolled back through the evening. It went by under his thumb in reverse, in jerks and flashes: his own gray face, wet, and the beam of the headlamp swinging through branches. Then the bridge. He stopped there and let it play.

The headlamp's white light on the pier. The rust stains running down under the bolts. The heart, gray. On the far pier, the bleach jug knocking in the rebar. His own hand came into the frame, wet and pink and still working, and broke the glow stick, and shook it until it lit.

"So you guys can see where we've been," his voice said. It was a good voice, easy and warm, the voice of a man who is getting what he came for.

The glow stick went up in its arc and came down on the ledge and rolled against the wall.

"That's the thumbnail right there."

He stopped it. He scrolled forward to the end, to the last thing he'd recorded, and let that play: gray light this time, the weaker spread of the phone. The rust stains. The heart. The bleach jug in the rebar. The ledge, and the glow stick lying on it against the wall, burning.

He watched the two of them one after the other. Then he watched them again.

He locked the screen and held the phone against his chest with both hands.

"Okay," he said. Nobody answered him, and he didn't say anything else.

---

There was no signal. There had been none since the store. He looked anyway, then put the phone back up in front of him and went on down the creek inside the gray circle of its light.

He said it out loud once, very quietly, his jaw going so hard he could barely make the words: "It's another bridge." The creek took the sentence and didn't give anything back.

He thought about getting out. He turned the light on the banks and looked at them for a long time as they went by. They were cut clay, red going black where the water had soaked it, straight up for six or eight feet and laced across with roots, and above the clay the laurel grew so thick it looked like a wall someone had built. Here and there a tree leaned out over the water with its roots in the air, holding on to nothing. There was nowhere he could climb out with one good hand, and nowhere to go if he did, and the landing was downstream. The woman had said so. You'll know the landing. There's a light on a pole.

He kept watching the dark ahead for a light.

The cold was in him now, inside, in the middle of him, and it had a weight. His legs over the front of the tube had gone heavy and far away, as if they belonged to someone sitting in front of him. His teeth chattered in fits and stopped and started again, and when they stopped it was worse, because then he could hear how quiet it had gotten.

The owls had stopped. He couldn't remember when. There were no frogs and no insects. The small ticking sounds the woods had made at dusk were gone. There was only the water, talking to itself over the stones, and the dry patter of leaves coming down out of the dark onto the surface around him. Once, on a breath of air off the left bank, he smelled something sweet, burnt sugar, like a pan forgotten on a stove. Then the air moved and it was gone. Now and then one landed on his face or in his lap, and every time it did, his whole body jumped.

---

He saw the light a long way off.

It was ahead of him and above the water, a white glow up in the trees, a single soft bloom of it with leaves moving in front of it, and his breath went out of him in a sound that was almost a laugh.

"There it is," he said. "There it is. That's the landing."

He dug at the water with the one paddle and the bare hand, and the cold went up his arm like a nail, and he didn't care. The light came closer. It was low, too low for any pole, caught in the crown of something lying in the water, and as he came around the slow bend he heard, under the ordinary rush of the creek, a hiss, a seething, the sound of water being forced through teeth.

The fallen tree lay across the channel exactly as before. The trunk ran from the left bank nearly to the right, gray and slick, the water humped up glassy against it and pouring under. On the right, the crown of it lay in the water, shaking, every branch combed by the current. And in the crown, hanging by its strap from a branch above the water, his headlamp was still burning, its beam pointed straight up, lighting a cone of yellow leaves that turned over and over in the dark above it.

He stopped paddling. The current didn't. It brought him on toward the tree at the same patient speed it brought everything.

He went right again, toward the light. He didn't decide to. His body went where the light was. The branches took hold of him and turned him and held him, and the water came up over the back of the tube and into his lap, and he got his good arm up out of it and reached.

His fingers touched the strap. He felt them touch it. He told them to close and they didn't. They lay against the elastic like something that belonged to someone else, white and stupid in the lamp's light, and then the current took the tube and pulled him through and out the other side, and the strap slid away across the backs of his fingers, and the lamp swung on its branch and went on burning, pointed at the sky.

He didn't turn around to watch it this time.

---

When the creek had straightened and gone quiet again, he turned the phone on himself.

He didn't know why. It was the oldest habit he had. His face came up on the screen in the gray light, and it was not a face he would have used. The skin was the color of putty. The lips were dark. His eyes were looking somewhere just past the lens, and he made them look into it.

He started to say "Hey, guys," and didn't.

"My name is Brody Pruett," he said instead. He said it slowly, getting each word around his jaw. "My car's at the bait store at the put-in. It's a gray Civic. Ohio plates. I put in at six-oh-four. It's," and he looked at the corner of the screen, "it's nine-fourteen. I've gone under the bridge twice. I lost my headlamp at a tree that's down across the creek, and I passed it twice too. I'm going to keep going downstream. I'm looking for the light on the pole." He swallowed. His mouth was dry, with all that water around him. "If somebody finds this. That's where I am. That's where I was."

He held the phone there, looking at himself, for what felt like a long time.

"Cut that," he said.

He heard it come out of his mouth. He sat in the dark and heard it go away across the water, and his own face looked at him out of the screen with its dark lips pressed together, and he reached up with his good hand and stopped the recording, and then started it again, because it was his only light.

---

After that the creek was long and quiet and he couldn't have said how long.

There were pools and shoals and pools again. There were bends where the laurel reached out over the water and dragged its wet leaves across his head, and shallows where the tube grounded and he had to rock himself free with his heels. There were long stretches where the water was so still and so black that he couldn't tell if he was moving at all, and the only proof was a leaf beside him on the surface, and then the leaf drifting a little ahead, and then the bank going by.

He checked the battery and it said thirty-one percent. He didn't check it again.

He tried counting the shoals, to have something, and lost count at nine. Twice he thought he saw the light on the pole, a pale shape up in the trees, and it was the white trunk of a sycamore, peeled, catching the edge of the phone light. After the second time he stopped looking up.

Once, in the middle of a pool, he put his bare hand down into the water to paddle and touched something.

It was soft. It gave, and it was cold, colder than the water, and it moved away from his fingers without any hurry at all. He brought his hand up out of the creek and held it against his chest with the other hand closed around it, and he didn't put it back in.

He didn't speak again. The phone went on recording the gray circle of water in front of him and the sound of his breathing, which had gotten fast and shallow and loud, and which he no longer heard.

---

He heard the bridge before he saw it, the way he would have heard a voice he knew.

It came up out of the ordinary rush of the creek: the water going hollow, doubling, the roar of it thrown back off concrete and steel. It came up out of the dark ahead and around a bend, and the current turned with the bend and carried him toward it, and nothing he did with the one paddle and the one dead hand changed the speed of it at all.

He lifted the phone. The light found the near pier, rising out of the creek, and the long stains of rust, and the heart sprayed in paint the gray of old teeth. Below it, the ledge.

The ledge was empty.

He held the light on it and it stayed empty, a bare step of concrete with a little leaf litter on it and nothing else.

Then he saw the green.

It was above him. It was up at the rail of the bridge, high over the creek, a small soft smear of green light at the height of a man's chest, and around it, faintly, the green showed him the dark diagonals of the truss. It hung there, still. Something was holding it.

Above it there was a shape.

It stood at the rail with the light held in front of it at the height a hand would hold a thing, and the light lit the underside of whatever held it and stopped there, and above that it was only a shape, the shape of a person standing still, darker than the dark behind it. It didn't lean on the rail. It stood facing him the way a person faces someone coming up a long road toward them, waiting for them to arrive.

The phone light couldn't reach it. He held the phone up anyway, as high as his arm would go, shaking, and the gray light went up a little way into the dark under the deck and died there, and the green light at the rail stayed where it was.

Then, slowly, the light moved. It came out over the rail, out over the creek, held a little farther out, a little lower, over the water where he would pass. Over the place where he would go under.

He heard himself make a sound. It wasn't a word.

He went for the far pier. He drove the paddle into the water and pulled with everything he had left, and kicked with legs he could barely feel, and the tube turned, slow, slewing sideways across the current. The current didn't want to let it. It pushed him along toward the black mouth under the deck with the same unbothered strength it had pushed him all night. He pulled again. The tube swung. The broken footing came up out of the dark ahead of him, the tilted slab with the rebar curling up out of the water and the bleach jug knocking in it, and he aimed himself at it, because it was the one thing in the creek that wasn't going under the bridge.

He hit it hard.

The tube struck the slab and rode up onto it and stopped, and for a moment, a single moment, he was held there, out of the current, upstream of the deck, with the water piling up white against the back of the tube and the concrete solid under him.

Then he heard the rubber go.

It was a sound like cloth tearing, but deeper, and slow, and he felt it through his whole body before he understood what it was. The rebar had gone into the side of the tube under him. He felt the tube sag on that side, and then the sound changed. A roar of air came out of the tear, hot against his leg, the breath of the tube going out of it all at once, and the black rubber folded in under him like something kneeling, and the cold water came up over his waist, and his chest, and the slab went out from under him, and the creek took hold of him again.

 

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