Where the River Ends (30 page)

Dressed in fraying cutoffs and half a bikini, Abbie looked like she did the first time we made this trip. Bob was still dressed. He lifted off his purple robe and laid it across Abbie like a blanket. I extended my hand. “Thank you.”

He nodded. “You know they’ve probably got people camped out on all the bridges.”

“Yeah.”

“Can you get around them?”

“Don’t know.”

“I don’t think you’ll get very far.”

“Never thought we’d get this far.”

Bob said, “Call me anytime. I can land her on a dime.” He pushed us off the bank, I reached deep into the water and pulled, staring forty-six miles and a lifetime in the face.

46

JUNE 11, 1 A.M.—THE LAST DAY

O
n the Florida side, the river had overflowed its bank by a wide margin. What was once a hundred feet across might stretch out a half mile now through pine trees and palmettos. It reminded me of pictures I’d seen of the Everglades. Given my experience with the river, and limited knowledge of how it drained, most of that rain had yet to hit the river. It would do so in the next twenty-four hours. By morning, the river would be unrecognizable. Even to me. The further we went, the faster it would flow. That meant I couldn’t necessarily judge our progress by known landmarks. Some yes, but I’d have to rely on the flow.

With enough flow, we could average as much as eight miles an hour. In a canoe on the river, that’s like breaking the sound barrier. The good news was knowing that much water would shut down the bridge at Highway 17. That only left the overpass at I-95. If we could slip beneath that, or around it, we had a shot. I knew they’d have people looking for us, but I’d worry about that when we got there. We could always travel under the cover of night, and with enough debris in the water, maybe we had a chance.

’Course, the debris could slow us, too. With the water rising to new levels every minute, it was picking up limbs and trash and sucking it all into the main flow of the river. In some places, where the water circled and swirled, the trash would accumulate, forming a mangled patchwork the size of a football field. Or several. While it might camouflage us, it could also hide the surface of the water. And if we ever got turned over—swamped—I wasn’t sure that we’d ever get it right again.

We’d been in the water two hours when I heard the motors coming. Along the Georgia side, somebody had planted eight palm trees in a row. They were older, mature and their fronds dragged the surface of the water. I ducked in behind the fronds, pulled hard and snapped two of them in half, letting them fall behind us. Two Pathfinders, moving at a good clip, raced upriver, spotlighting the banks and water in front of them. Their light washed over us, but the palms broke our outline. They disappeared, their wake shook the canoe and I backed us out. Things just grew more complicated.

An hour before daylight, we passed what I thought was Coopers Neck Road, but between the darkness and the water, it was difficult to tell for sure. We slipped beyond the roofline at Mount Horeb Baptist Church. It, too, was underwater. Oddly enough, the baptismal was not. Painted white, made of cement blocks stacked eight high and surrounded with a lead pipe railing, it sat on a higher grassy hill. Currently three wood ducks floated in circles behind the railing.

The last several hours I’d paddled at close to ninety percent. The river had transformed overnight and flowed unlike anything I’d ever known. I did what I could to keep the bow pointed downriver, but the constancy of that spent me. In paddling terms, I was cooked.

Before daylight, we reached Brickyard Landing and slipped by on the other side—recapturing the sixteen miles we lost when Bob took us back to his place. The increased flow of the river had negated the incoming tide. I couldn’t tell if it was coming in or going out because so much water was flowing out. Normally, along this part of the river, a black stain registers along the marsh grass indicating how high or low the tide had risen or fallen, but the water was several feet above what was once considered high tide.

While I felt we could slip by White Oak and its seven miles of shoreline, we still had two remaining hurdles. The bridge at Highway 17 and the bridge at I-95. The senator was no dummy. He’d have people on both bridges. Probably news cameras, too. If we got lucky and slipped beneath the first bridge, we had only five miles to go before we reached the bigger bridge—and bigger problem—at I-95. The interstate bridge was tall, giving them a clear view upriver long before we got there. Further, the water was wide and the bank was muck, marsh and oyster bed, allowing no place to hide and no place to rest. To make it, we’d have to shoot the center, which meant we’d be silhouetted against the reflection. A lot like those ducks circling the inside of the baptismal pool.

But twelve miles on the other side lay Cedar Point. Given the fact that I was sure he’d received Abbie’s letter by now, I was pretty well assured he’d be in St. Marys. Maybe even Cedar Point, if he could find it. I was so tired, I really didn’t care.

Sitting there staring over the water, paddle resting across my legs, I realized that I was way past tired. Tired beyond my bones. For some reason, all of it, everything, chose right there to press me into my seat. It was the first time I’d ever sensed the presence of the revolver at my back for a purpose other than those outside of me.

It was a dark place.

So many times I’d wanted to tell her. To explain how Heather got into my room and what had happened. I had convinced myself that she was better off not knowing. Unless, of course, her dad had already gotten to her. In which case, she had lived in doubt of me and we were living inside a cat-and-mouse mind game in which we pick at each other’s scabs. But if he hadn’t and I brought it up, and it was all news to her, then I was cutting her when there was no cut before.

I had no easy answer.

“Abbie?”

She cracked her eyes and smiled at me. “Hey, Band-Aid.”

“I need to tell you something.”

She shook her head. “No you don’t.”

“But…you need to know that…”

She opened her eyes. They were glassy and bloodshot. She shook her head and held out a stop-sign hand. “You mean Heather?”

“You know?”

She nodded. “Heather came and saw me. Told me about dinner. Apologized. We had a good cry over it. She said you were”—Abbie rested her head on her hands and pulled her knees into her chest—“everything she’d ever wanted in a husband.” She swallowed and reached for my hand, placing it on her chest.

“But, honey…”

Her whisper fell. “Doss, you’ve never wounded me.” The words were hard to come by. “No scars.”

R
ESTING PEACEFULLY
on the Florida side, a long-bed Ford sat backed up to the water where a buzz-cut kid dangled his toes, a cane pole and a frantic cricket. On the beach next to him, he’d lit a fire and was slowly smoking the fish he was catching. While the world flooded around him, he didn’t seem to have a care in the world—a picture of me twenty years ago.

He was drinking an RC cola, eating a MoonPie and listening to an old Keith Whitley tune: “When You Say Nothing at All.” It was one of our favorite songs.

Abbie heard it, too. She stirred, tapping the side of the canoe with her toe. I flagged him and cut the canoe toward the river’s edge. “Caught anything?” He nodded and glanced at the fire. He tipped his hat back and scratched his chin, sizing me up.

I beached the canoe and lifted Abbie. The nosebleed trickled again, so she pulled the scarf off her head and dabbed her nose. When she did, his expression changed. He reached in his cooler, twisted off a top and handed me a soda. I lifted it to her lips and she sipped. She smiled, the cola dripping off her chin. “Mmmm…good.”

The kid picked at his tooth with a toothpick and whispered, “You that guy? The one on the news?”

I pushed my hat back. My left eye was still puffy, swollen and tender to the touch. “Yeah.”

He tilted his head sideways. “You don’t look dangerous.”

“Don’t feel it.”

“You seen them two Pathfinders?”

“Yeah.”

“I reckon they looking for you.” He looked south toward Highway 17. “I hear they got folks camped out on the bridge at Highway 17. And I been hearing helicopters, but they sound fu’ther off. Maybe the in’erstate.”

I nodded, thinking to myself.

“You got a plan?”

“Not really.”

He said, “You know Miller’s Creek?”

Miller’s Creek used to run up around the south side of the bridge, through the marsh, and skirt just under the lowest section of the bridge on the Florida side. But when they finished the bridge, the construction crew dumped all the used rebar and concrete into the middle of the creek, protecting the base of the bridge but blocking off the creek. I nodded. “Used to until they dammed it up.”

He shook his head. “Not anymore. The tree-huggers found out. Said it wasn’t eco-friendly. Whatever that is.” He swigged and chewed. “Gov’ment came in and cleaned it up.” He stared at the canoe. “You might give it a try, get to the other side without nobody knowing.”

I didn’t know whether to trust him or not, but I didn’t have many options. Given the look of him, chances were good that the kid knew this part of the river better than me.

“Many thanks.”

47

JUNE 11, MORNING

A
bbie was snoring quietly. I wanted to wake her, but sleep was good. When she slept, she felt no pain. The water was alive around us—a combination of water rising rapidly through the oyster beds and game fish feeding on the fiddler crabs driven from their holes. On the shoreline, four rows of neatly planted cornstalks rose above the surface of the water. I don’t know how tall they were, but they had tassled and corn floated above the water’s surface. In the air above us, a great blue heron glided silently. He flapped his wings once over the span of the river, landing somewhere in the marsh beyond. Further in the distance, I heard the whine of a chainsaw and the buzzing of a tree cutter.

Here marsh leads from the river’s edge for nearly a half mile before it reaches dry land. It’s a flooded wasteland. Nothing but wiregrass, pluff mud and muck. Even the treetops flatten out. The smell of the marsh was thick and pungent mixed with a whiff of pine and salt.

From underneath the blanket, Abbie stirred. She pulled it down off her face, dabbed her crusty nose and faked a smile. “You tired?” The slurring had faded temporarily, but the blood had returned.

Every inch of me hurt. I shook my head. “I’ll paddle you to China if you keep talking to me.”

She closed her eyes. “I’d like that.” Along the bank, the cicadas tuned up, singing their singular psychedelic tune. She raised her hand above the gunnel of the canoe and pointed at the noise. “Any chance you can get them to be quiet? It’s starting to match the ringing in my head.” Not twenty feet away, a male cardinal quietly hung on a single blade of wiregrass.

The sun came up bright and piercing over Cabbage Bend. The glare was painful. By mid-morning, we had reached the railroad trestle at Highway 17. Fortunately, the river had flooded the banks and now flowed across the road. The water covered the concrete columns of both the trestle and the bridge and was washing through the huge gears that turned the trestle. An orange light was flashing quietly at the top. Beyond the trestle was an old fish house. It sat up on stilts and two old cars had always been parked beneath. Draped in fishnet and made mostly from cedar logs, the house was octagonal and shot full of holes. If the cars were still there, I couldn’t see them, because the water had reached the underside of the floor. Every few seconds a wave would reach the house, rise up through it and send water streaming out the bullet holes. A deer carcass had become wedged in the rafters beneath the house, its head bobbing with the water. An alligator was locked onto the hind quarter of the carcass, spinning and ripping off large chunks.

Above us, wedged into the gears of the trestle, was a black pig carcass. Its legs had been crushed or cut off, eyes gouged out, one tusk had been broken off, its stomach was bloated and ten trillion flies were swarming the air around it. The air beneath the bridge was thick with dirt daubbers by the thousands, pigeons, purple martins, and the sound of chimney sweeps—though I didn’t see any.

I paddled slowly, watching the water around me as much as in front of me. A dragonfly sputtered next to us. A second later, a fish popped it from beneath, flipping it over where it lay motionless—belly up.

We slipped by Scrubby Bluff, where the water had flooded the marsh and spread around us for miles. The old homes built on the bank—those built before code required stilts—sat flooded with water flowing in the kitchen windows and out the front doors.

Before us, the river wound south, then turned back hard north and ran due east under the bridge at the interstate. I hugged the Florida bank for almost four miles and cut into Miller’s Creek when it opened on my right. It carried us away from the main flow of the river, maybe close to a mile to the Florida bank where the pines rose up. We hugged the bank, padded with pine needles that muffled the sound, and then slipped along the rocks that formed the foundation for the interstate. Flashing lights lit the apex of the bridge. There were men on top with what looked like cameras, and men in uniforms were directing traffic on the southbound lane. They’d closed off one lane, causing what looked like a nasty traffic jam north of the bridge. I brought the canoe up under some trees and tied her off, thinking. Above me, on my right, some thirty feet up the bank, sat the interstate. We had maybe a hundred yards to go before a hard right turn would shoot us under the bridge. If they had people under the bridge, they’d be on the Georgia side, because the Florida side was too narrow. No place to stand.

People used the bank beneath the bridge at I-95 for all sorts of purposes, most of which weren’t legal. Trash covered the bank, outlined with palmettos, tall dead oaks and a sandy beach, and at the far end sat a stone circle around a much-used campfire. In the sky north of us, along the highway, towered a sign for a truck stop and cheap gas. It was a landmark we could see for four miles before the bridge and five miles after. If you were with a slow group, you could paddle nearly a whole day in the shadow of that one sign.

I tied off and found myself dozing. I don’t know for how long. The crumple of metal and the shattering of glass woke me. I looked up and saw a small plume of white and black smoke. The men standing along the bridge stepped away from the rail. I didn’t wait. I pushed out of the trees, pulled hard on the paddle and sprinted. I paddled fifty yards. Then seventy-five, and finally, when the water opened up on the right, I cut hard into it and shot the canoe back into the flow that carried us under the bridge. We drifted under the southbound lane, then the northbound and back into the sunlight that silhouetted us against the river. I turned back, afraid of what I’d see. Standing on the bank was a kid about four years old. Cowboy hat, Spider-Man T-shirt, two-holster belt, a plastic sword wedged in the belt, knee-high boots, pants at his ankles, peeing a high-arcing stream out into the water. His dad was bent over his shoulders, struggling to hold his pants under the flow. Hoping he’d just be quiet, I waved. Guess I was wrong. Tells you what I know about kids, because he said, “Look, Daddy.”

His dad shook his head and didn’t look up. “Not now, son. Just pay attention to what you’re doing.”

We’d come twenty-eight miles. My skin was sunburned, hot to the touch, and my hands were raw. Most of my fingers were bleeding around the nails where the constant pressure had split the skin. Touching the paddle was excruciating, much less pulling on it. I watched the kid grow smaller while the wind swirled around us.

We snaked through the S-turn, slipped through the tips of the marsh grass, passed out of the shadow of I-95, cut the corner and headed for Crandall—a public boat ramp tucked up into the woods and owned by Georgia Power. If I kept my head and paddle down, we could skirt the edge and not be seen from the bridge, because at this point the river was a half mile to even a mile wide. In the distance, southeast of us, white smoke poured from the tops of the smokestacks of the paper mills in Fernandina. The smoke billowed then faded south. At night, the stacks send sparks shooting up through the smoke. When I was working for Gus, we called it the light at the end of the tunnel.

While Crandall is public, few know about it. It’s a wide, deepwater ramp made of crushed oyster shells. Huge oaks tower above a grassy bluff where years back somebody built a stone picnic table and drove a four-inch, free-flowing well deep into the aquifer. I wanted the water. Another half mile and we slid onto the ramp. The water was whipping through her, so, steadying the canoe, I lifted my right foot onto the ramp and was nearly crippled by a piercing pain. The pain brought up a wave of nausea and a black circle crept in around the edge of my eyes. I gabbed the bowline, stepped out of the boat and pulled as I fell. The boat swung into the current, then slid quietly onto the shells. Fish skeletons littered the ramp. Some were three feet long and other than the heads, had been picked clean. I tied off the bowline, lifted Abbie from the boat and limped her to the table. My foot was throbbing and staining the grass behind me. I laid her across the table, propped up her head on a red plastic inner tube and then turned on the spigot at the well. Around us, forearm-thick bamboo grew up through the live oaks and water oaks competing for the same sun. Growing wild amongst the trees were camellia, azalea and mimosa trees. Above us, shading Abbie, spread a crape myrtle in half bloom. It’s branches were heavy with hundreds of berries that would soon burst and bloom in pink bouquets. Under pressure, the well coughed air, bubbled then shot sideways some eight feet, making a decent shower for an Oompa Loompa. The water flowed rusty for several seconds, finally turning cold and clear and smelling of eggs. I drenched my head, then filled a water bottle, returning to dab Abbie’s lips and bathe her face. After she’d sipped, I sat on the bench and looked at my foot. A four-inch fish bone was sticking up through the center of my foot. It was thick, maybe three millimeters, and had pierced the sole of my Tevas. I un-velcroed the sandal and lifted my foot, pulling out the bone. The hole bled and painted the bottom of my foot and sandal red. I held it beneath the water and pulled the bone out of my sandal. I drank long and deep and soaked my hat, letting it drip on my sunburned neck and shoulders.

The sun was falling and I knew we didn’t have much time. I placed Abbie back on her pallet and pushed the bow into the current. It caught us and we shot off the bank. I tried not to look at my foot. The bleeding had slowed but the skin was sticky.

Northeast, the red-brick chimney of the deserted iron factory rose some hundred feet or more into the air, marking the north side of town. Between it and me, swaying above the mirage of the marsh, the masts of a hundred or more sailboats moored at the marina shimmered in the sun. If the senator’s people were anywhere, they’d be standing on the dock, binoculars poised to spot us.

From Crandall, the river winds around five S-curves to Reed’s Bluff, where the water flows deep and dangerous. Beyond the bluff, the river stretches nearly a mile before it is joined by Burrell’s Creek. The two merge, forming a narrow mess called Devil’s Elbow. Once through the elbow, the river flows past the marina, past the fish houses and restaurants and then to Cedar Point, where she slingshots to the ocean.

I looked behind us. Fourteen years had led to his. Seven miles were all that remained. Seven impossible miles.

The sun, once high and hot, now sat low in the west, threatening to slip behind the treetops. And though I tried, I could not stop it.