Where the River Ends (21 page)

A
FTER A LONG STRAIGHTAWAY,
the river morphs again. Subtlety. Close your eyes and you’ll miss it. The long, cool sections of bleached beach become fewer and shorter, giving way to darker mud and the occasional fiddler crab. Palmettos mixed with poplar reach over the bank and dip their fronds in the water, protecting the bank, making access more difficult and requiring you to pick your way to the bank. A twelve-strand powerline crosses the river, buzzing with currents strong enough to reset your wristwatch and make your hair stand up when you pass beneath.

The Ralph E. Simmons Memorial State Forest starts a half mile south of Scotts Landing and runs seven miles along the river. It’s seven thousand–plus acres of sassafras, water hickory, yellow poplar and endangered plants such as hartwrightia, toothache grass and purple baldwina. Sprouting up amidst the long leaf pine and live oaks are blueberries, blackberries, sweet pepperbrush, cinnamon fern, orchids and, along the riverbank, pitcher plant colonies. Wildlife is rather plentiful. Everything from otters to gopher tortoises, deer, bobcat, turkey and ribbon snakes—not to mention cottonmouth moccasins and eastern diamondback rattlers. Locals claim to have seen black bear and the endangered Florida panther. Inland, the ground is sandy, with patches of dark musky earth that gives rise to gardenias, wild roses and the smell of turpentine.

For us, the Ralph E. Simmons brought rest because few people are found along its banks. We floated as much as the tide would let us.

C
AMP
P
INCKNEY
is a Georgia-side boat ramp a long way from nowhere. Regular visitors include kids on four-wheelers looking for a place to skim rocks or smoke dope. The tide is stronger here. And river tide is a lot like the flushing of a toilet—fast going out but slow to fill. Paddling downstream, we could easily manage four miles an hour. Five for shorter distances and only if I was focused. Against the incoming, we’d be lucky to average one and a half. Two would be a miracle. Add a headwind to the equation and we’d be backing up.

Abbie slept while I kept the paddle in the water and slung the canoe on the outside of the river where the current was faster. The less time I spent trying to steer, the more time I spent pulling. We passed Cooneys Landing, Elbow Landing and Horseshoe Island before rounding the last bend just north of Prospect Landing.

I pushed back my hat, scratched my head and watched the river slip beneath us.

If you’ve spent enough time in the river, you can tell the difference between when the flow pushes you along and when the tide pulls you out. Usually, if you’re coming around a corner and your stern swings around—or fishtails—you’re being pushed. If you come around that same corner and your keel cuts the water like it was on a rail, you’re being pulled. The difference is key: you can fight the push, but you’ve got to ride the pull.

The river can be a magical place. As much as I’ve been here, I still don’t quite get her. No matter how you hurry or how hard and fast you pull on the paddle, the river controls the tempo. She stretches every minute and steals back every lost second. Rivers do this naturally. They don’t give two cents about the destination, only the journey. It’s why they’re crooked. Name one straight river and I’ll show you a man-made canal. People make a big deal about how their watch automatically sets itself to atomic time from a tower somewhere in Colorado, but if we were smart, we’d set our watches to river time. We’d wrinkle less and wouldn’t grow old as quickly.

Abbie knew this. It might have been the one thing I’d taught her. She had looked at her list and then chosen the river not because it was her favorite place in the world or because she was a closet river rat but because it was the singular place on earth where time slowed down. Where each second counted. Where, if you paid attention, the sun would stop long enough to let you catch your breath.

Near lunchtime, I lifted the paddle out of the water, lay down next to Abbie and counted the clouds that slipped overhead.

Then I tried to stop the sun.

27

T
wo days later, we drove to the oncology center—the last day of summer break before school started. We walked through the sliding electronic doors and into the chemotherapy waiting room. That first second did a lot to combat the two-day pity party we’d been having. People of all shapes and sizes were waiting. Old, young, pretty, heavy, skinny, healthy, sickly, bald—all of America was sitting in that room. The chemo room is a big circular room filled with comfortable rockers, colorful cushions, colorful walls, colorful nurses and pale and yellowy-looking patients. The healthy and the damned. It is a weird, parallel universe. The sick live one foot in here, one foot out there.

Chemotherapy is a systemic therapy, meaning it attacks fast-growing cells all over the body. So while it attacks the cancer, it also attacks the cells that grow hair, heal wounds, color your skin, etc. It’s the reason why so many chemo patients look like the walking dead. Because parts of them are.

We signed in and sat next to a woman about Abbie’s age. They began talking and their stories were similar. That’s another thing we learned pretty quickly. While the types of cancer were different and in different stages, everybody’s stories were similar. Their diagnosis surprised them and, depending on lots of factors, they either had been or were fearful. Fear is the primary mode of transportation for cancer because
cancer
is the one six-letter word none of us ever wanted to hear. And if I had any doubts before, a quick look around the room confirmed what I’d already suspected. Cancer is the ultimate identity theft. It’s a vulture—it doesn’t care how old you are, where you’re from, who your daddy is, how much money you have or how important you think you are. It is no respecter of persons.

About half the women wore a hat, scarf or wig that some loved one had told them didn’t look fake. Most had lied. Those who still had their hair looked around the room as if afraid that they were next. And because cancer is a vulture, most were. A few of the women wore baggy shirts that had not been baggy when they bought them. Some wore bright colors, some neutral. All wished they were someplace else.

We’d been going there here a few weeks when it finally hit me. Admittedly, I can be a little slow. I thought to myself, Where are all the boyfriends and husbands?

Finally, I asked Abbie. She shook her head. It was one of those intuitive things that she knew without having to ask. “They left.”

Apparently, some do. Not all, not most, just some. I did meet some super-dads who were wearing three hats and had soccer-mom stickers plastered on the backs of their Suburbans, but I never got used to that picture of a pale, skinny, gaunt woman wearing a scarf, baggy clothes and connected to a clear plastic line with the empty seat next to her. A powerful statement about them and a pitiful statement about the men who had left them.

So I asked Abbie. “Well…” She looked slowly around the room. “If you married a face, a set of boobs or a couple of curves”—she turned to me—“and those are gone…” She shrugged.

Behind Abbie’s statement loomed a much larger question. One she was too afraid to ask. I had a feeling that the answer she was looking for might take months, even years, and was not verbal.

28

JUNE 5, AFTERNOON

T
he distinguishing feature of Prospect Landing is not the elegantly sloped concrete boat ramp, the Florida Cracker houses that bookend either side of it, the cows or their pastures that lead down to it, or the manicured rows of cathedral pine trees whose needles have been raked and sold to the home mulch market, but rather the back end of the yellow 1957 Chevrolet station wagon that rises up out of the water like a channel buoy. Word has it that a disgruntled housewife had come home to find her husband entwined with the neighbor. In revenge, she backed his ’57 Chevrolet out of the garage, punched the accelerator and in a move reminiscent of Sally Field in
Smokey and the Bandit,
tried to jump the river. It was his pride and joy and this was payback. Only difference was she had no bridge to launch her heavenward. Only incline she had was a mound of dirt next to the ramp. She hit it going about sixty-five, maybe seventy miles an hour, and pitched the hood upward only to quickly have the back end hit the same bump, which drove the front end downward. The car flew through the air like a plow, cut into the water and lodged into the pluff mud of the far bank, looking a lot like an errant Soviet-issued missile. It’s been there ever since. Locals dubbed it the “buttugly” station wagon, but that didn’t stop them from capitalizing on their neighbor’s bad fortune and stripping it for parts. Now it’s a rusted shell, no glass, no taillights or hubcaps, no tires and no engine. Somebody even took the steering wheel. Over the years, the weight of the steel frame has driven it further into the muck.

For me, the frame served as a marker. That may seem simple, but federal game and fish officers routinely used Prospect as a launch for their twenty-two-foot Pathfinders. They frequented it because it was seldom used, tucked out of the way and gave them quick access up-and downriver. We slowed, rounded the bend and I cut us in closer to the bank, skimming across the tops of paper plate–sized lily pads to slow our speed more. The rusted tailpipe of the station wagon came into view first, followed quickly by the boat ramp. The game warden’s truck and trailer sat parked against the far fence. He was nowhere in sight but his trailer was empty, which meant he and his boat were touring the river. I said nothing to Abbie, but started thinking about a place to spend the night.

We slipped past Walker’s Landing, McKenzie Landing, Colerain, Gum Stump Landing, Orange Bluff, Mallets Landing and the Flea Hill boat ramp. The problem with all of this was not our speed—in river terms, we were flying—but the number of people I’d seen. Houses rose up on stilts or were buried into the bluffs in nearly every square inch of river frontage. And down here, people expect you to wave. It’s like two cars passing on a dirt road. You wave. It’s just the way it is. Boats on the river are the same way. Wave and you’re noticed little. Don’t wave, and you’re noticed a lot. I waved without bringing attention, but sooner or later, somebody would put us together with the news reports. If we caught the tide right and my body didn’t give out, we could be in St. Marys in thirty-six to forty-eight hours. Miss the tides and it was anybody’s guess.

L
IKE
T
RADER’S
H
ILL,
Kings Ferry is a favorite among boaters, campers and joyriders. At its widest, it’s maybe a hundred and fifty yards across. They have a large floating concrete dock—because high and low tide can fluctuate by as much as five feet—a store and several houses built up close to the ramp. I didn’t want to pass it in the daylight. We floated until dark and passed through on the far side as the moon cracked over the treetops. That was both good and bad. Good because no one saw us. Bad because we missed the store and any chance at food.

Compounding the problem was the fact that I was deteriorating fast. I’d eaten sporadically and yet I was probably burning six to eight thousand calories a day. I’d long ago started eating away at my fat reserves. Not only was I growing weak, but huge blisters had come up across my palms, popped and were now raw and oozing. My sweat dripped down into the cracks, as did the water. And because the water was now tidal, it was also salty. Every time I dipped the paddle in the water, then flipped it over the opposite gunnel, the water trickled down and flowed across my hands.

While salt water hurt, it was not all bad. Salt water meant crabs. Blue crabs. And around here, blue crabs meant crab traps. It was a mortal sin to steal from another man’s trap. People had been shot over such a thing. I spotted several numbered white floats down the center of the river, lifted them over the side and stole every crustacean I could dig out. Five traps later, I had twenty-eight crabs. Abbie poked open an eye and said, “Isn’t that illegal?”

“Yep.”

“If those things clamp onto my toe, I’m coming out of this canoe.”

I took off my shirt, bundled the crabs inside and stuffed them behind my seat. They’d keep until the White Oak boat ramp at Brickyard Landing.

We slipped past Blood Landing and watched the moon reach full and high over Cabbage Bend. The moon lit the water in a hazy shade of blue and cast tall tree shadows across the water. The light brought out the water bugs, which in turn attracted the fish by the hundreds. We paddled through feeding frenzy after feeding frenzy. It was one of those rare occasions that would have been beautiful had it been any other time. Abbie climbed up, leaned against the side of the canoe and dangled her fingers in the water. All along the banks, the tree frogs croaked a summertime chorus that was answered by an occasional alligator and distant barking dog.

Years back, Mr. Gilman of the Gilman Paper Company donated several thousand acres of land for what is now the White Oak Plantation. It’s beyond exclusive. There’s a golf course, but you can’t play it. You can’t set foot on it unless you’re a president or somebody real famous. Drive up to the gate and they’ll instruct you in the finer points of a U-turn. Invitations are scarce and money won’t buy you entrance.

Word has it that somewhere in the 1980s Mr. Gilman met Mikhail Baryshnikov. A friendship ensued and Mr. Gilman built a dance studio for what became the White Oak Dancers. Made up of the best dancers in the world, they are quite possibly the most elite group ever to perform, which they have done some six hundred times around the world. It always struck me as odd that the pinnacle of ballet achievement and performance trains at a plantation in the sticks of North Florida.

My interest in White Oak had little to do with Gilman or the dancers but rather Brickyard Landing. White Oak rolls out of the oaks and crawls up to the river’s edge at a little concrete ramp and manicured landing tucked down in the woods behind a No Trespassing sign. Solitary needle-thin pine trees rise sixty feet high, swaying slightly in the breeze, but it’s the smell of the marsh that gives it away. It is here that the river changes yet again. Sandy beaches, scrub oaks and poplar trees have given way to wiregrass, pluff mud and oyster beds. It’s also the first place on the river where you can detect the tidal stain on the bank. Here it’s just two or three feet, but closer to Highway 17 and I-95, the stain will color nearly six feet on the bank. The smell brushed under my nose, the trees spiked the night sky above us and Brickyard Landing appeared on our right.

I cut the paddle like a rudder, pulled the canoe up the concrete and steadied Abbie as she stepped out. When I was working for Gus, there was this older guy—maybe eighty years old—named Russ who came around every morning with his pipe, newspaper and coffee. He was lonely, widowed by both his wife and dog, so he talked to us while we gathered the boats, life jackets and paddles. His skin was real thin and both his forearms were covered in sailor’s tattoos. He got them after he landed on the beach at Normandy and lived to tell about it. The skin had stretched and fallen in taut wrinkles and the voluptuous woman who had once stood there now drooped. Anyway, Russ was there most mornings, spinning stories and living vicariously through us. Every morning as we shoved off the bank, he’d push himself up out of Gus’s rocker, wave us off and then stand there, hanging on to the side of the wall while his arthritic knees quivered beneath him. Then he’d stroll home, looking forward to tomorrow morning.

Abbie stood, her knees quivered, she hung on me and I remembered Russ.

Behind us lay a grassy lawn, ankle-high in Bermuda grass. To our left sat a dark boathouse with a dock, screened in porch and bathroom.

The power had been turned off, but I found a candle and began searching the porch, where I stumbled over a large pot and propane cooker. I boiled about three gallons of water, dumped the crabs in and then I spread an old newspaper across the picnic table while Abbie dug two lemon-lime Shastas out of a pantry in the back. I boiled the crabs, dumped them across the newspaper, and we gorged. I looked across the growing pile of shells on the table and Abbie was sucking one of the legs clean.

I cleaned up our mess while Abbie found the shower. The bathroom was new and relatively clean. The shower looked like four or five kids could shower at once. It was a four-foot by eight-foot area with six showerheads all shooting toward the drain in the middle. I turned on the shower and, surprisingly, warm water ran out. Abbie walked into the middle, grabbed the soap off the wall, sat down near the drain and patted the tile next to her.

I sniffed my shirt. “That bad, huh?”

“You don’t know the half of it.” We showered until the soap grew thin and the water ran cold.

The main portion of the boathouse was a large great room with vaulted ceilings centered around a fireplace and a moose head hanging above the mantel. I pulled the pads off some of the benches on the porch, making us a pallet on the floor while Abbie toweled off. I helped her into her dry T-shirt, slipped on her socks and then zipped her inside the fleece sleeping bag. Didn’t take her long to fall asleep, so I rinsed out our clothes, washing them as best I could, and draped them over the railing to dry. That left me naked and tired, but not sleepy. I made some coffee and sipped in the silence while Abbie breathed heavily alongside me. The night air was surprisingly cool and damp on the concrete floor, so I lit a small fire in the fireplace and got lost in the glow of the coals.

Somewhere after midnight, a draft blew across the room, reigniting the coals and sending a small flame a few inches into the air. I stared into the darkness and let my eyes adjust. Behind me, a back door slid open and quietly clicked shut. Then I heard a footstep followed by a muffled whisper. I grabbed the revolver, back up against the wall and listened.

The first man walked into the room as if he was in a hurry. He stood about four feet from Abbie, staring down at her. If she knew he was there, she made no sign of it. The firelight reflected off his glasses and the oily shine on his face. The second man was taller and appeared to limp. The third man was broad-shouldered, thick-legged and walked like a troll. Their body shapes told me these were the same guys.

I pressed my right palm hard against the grip of the revolver and supported it with my left.

When the first man reached out and began to pull on the tarp covering Abbie’s feet, I extended the revolver and put pressure on the trigger. The hammer was at half cock when something hard smashed down above my left eye. The blow slammed me backward into the wall and sent the bullet into the ceiling above me. I fell and landed hard on my back in what was probably a utility closet.

I tried to stand but couldn’t. I couldn’t see out of my left eye, my right wasn’t much better and something warm oozed down my face. I tried crawling but could not force my hands to lift my own weight. The first man turned on a head-mounted light like a coal miner and ripped off the tarp, while a second began pulling on the sleeping bag. Limpy stood back and laughed in a high-pitched, devilish howl. Given the light from now two headlamps and the fire, I could see that a fourth man standing above me had just hit me with the butt of my own shotgun. He kicked me hard in the ribs.

Coal Miner said, “Look what we got here.” Abbie’s eyes were open but she made no movement and put up no fight. I tried to breathe but couldn’t. Coal-miner man knelt between her legs while the Troll grabbed her by the head, ripping off the scarf. He held the scarf up like a scalp then looked in disbelief at Abbie. “Bufort, she bald as a peach. Ain’t a lick o’ dang hair.”