Farther out on his limb, the mother opossum rustled its way through leafy branches and squawked at its babies. Every so often it would peer out to see if Nick had left. It always seemed disappointed when he hadn’t.
The water level seemed to be dropping a little. The sodden tops of bushes were more visible. The water had ceased to run with its earlier swiftness, now lay still and dark, its surface reflecting the bright rays of the sun.
After sitting on his limb till his body felt like a giant cramp, Nick decided to climb a little higher and discover what might be seen. He clambered higher, heaving and sweating as he pushed his way through tightly woven branches.
This was really the sort of thing the snake would have done much more easily.
The tree began to sway under Nick’s weight. He was panting for breath, and he decided he had climbed enough. He planted his feet carefully and looked around.
Leaves still obscured much of the view. He pressed branches down, tried to clear the sight lines. North and south stretched trees as far as he could see. West he could see an opening, a flat space covered with water, but he couldn’t tell whether it was the river, a field, or a clearing.
He turned east, and a chill shivered through his blood. There, across a flooded field, was the shattered Mobil station where Viondi had died. Its white, blue, and red sign still swung above the brown water.
The Mobil station was no more than a half-mile away. Nick thought he’d wandered much farther in the dark. He must have been tracking in circles once he got among the trees.
There was no sign of the cop or his car. Or of Viondi. Or of any other human being.
He was king of the tree and all he surveyed. He gave a bitter laugh.
The sun was hot on his head.
Nick slapped at a biting ant and decided he might as well climb down. He found it harder to force his way down through the vegetation than it had been to climb up through it. He drove his way between branches, using his weight to force branches aside. He paused as he discovered the opossum below him, heading upward. They stared at each other for a moment, and then the opossum opened its mouth in a snarl, showing a surprising number of very sharp teeth, and then scurried off onto a side limb, its rat-tailed babies still clinging to its fur.
Nick felt like grinning for the first time that day.
He dropped back down to his old limb, then paused a moment to stretch, carefully testing his muscles. The wound on his left arm had stiffened, and the climb had set it bleeding again.
Standing in the tree, testing his muscles one by one, he almost missed the kid in the boat. He would have missed him, if he hadn’t seen the white script, Retired and Gone Fishin’, through a gap in the leaves.
He knelt on his bough, looking at the boat in surprise. It had passed him in near silence, a big black aluminum boat with a shattered windscreen and no motor. In another few seconds, it would disappear into the flooded grove. A white kid stood in the stern, shoving the boat along with a long pole. His back was turned to Nick, and he clearly hadn’t seen him.
“Hey,” Nick said, and then, louder, “Hey!”
The kid jumped and spun around, and Nick felt a sudden knock at his heart.
The boy’s face and hands were striped with black and red, as if they’d been horribly burned.
*
The man’s voice, coming out of the empty cottonwood grove, nearly scared Jason out of his skin. He turned wildly, almost losing his grip on the pole, and stared out into the trees. He couldn’t see anyone.
“Where are you?” he blurted.
“Over here.” The voice was a bit more gentle. Jason shaded his eyes and looked in the direction of the sound, and he saw a disheveled black man crouched in a tree, a kind of horror in his staring eyes.
“Can you turn that boat around?” the man asked. “And get me out of this tree?”
Reluctance tugged at Jason’s heart. “I guess,” he said.
A stranger. An adult. A black man. Any of these would be reason to be wary.
He poled the boat around while he argued with himself. What were the odds that the guy was some kind of criminal or pervert? Here in the middle of a disaster, stuck up a tree in a flood?
It shouldn’t matter, he argued, that the guy was black. It wasn’t that he didn’t like black people, he thought, he got along with the black kids at school just fine, even though they tended to keep to themselves. It was just that he didn’t know who the hell this guy was.
Jason sighed. The stranger was a man needing help in the middle of a disaster. What more did Jason need to know?
As Jason poled the boat closer, the details of the stranger’s appearance grew less encouraging. The man was splashed with mud and, maybe, blood; his clothes were dirty and torn, and his hair was sticking up in weird tufts. He was unshaven, his eyes were bloodshot, and his skin was covered with lumps.
Well, Jason thought, the guy’s been chased up a tree, none of that is necessarily his fault.
But he found himself poling more warily, watching the treed man as the boat turned a circle and drifted slowly toward the cottonwood.
And the man, Jason saw, was watching him, with a peculiar intent pop-eyed stare that made Jason nervous. And then the man’s expression eased, and he laughed.
“Boy,” he said, “what you got on you?”
Jason looked down at his arms. “Mud,” he said. “I was getting sunburned on the river, so I covered my skin with mud from a mudbank.” The man laughed, and Jason felt self-conscious. “I saw it in a movie,” Jason said.
“I saw your face covered with that stuff, I thought you’d been burned in a fire,” the man said. “Scared the hell out of me. I was afraid I was going to have to get you to a hospital.”
Jason smiled. “Sorry.”
“We don’t find any shade, I’ll have to find a mud bank myself.”
It was news to Jason that black people got sunburn— how could you tell?— but he supposed the man knew best.
The bows of the boat floated up beneath the treed man, and he carefully lowered himself onto the foredeck. The boat bobbed under his weight, and Jason took a step to keep his balance. Jason’s passenger walked in a crouch across the foredeck, then dropped into the cockpit.
“Thanks,” he said.
“S’okay,” Jason said.
The man brushed mud off the passenger seat, then sat. He moved his left arm with care, as if there was an injury. And it looked like blood.
“I’m Nick,” the man said. “Nick Ruford.”
“Jason Adams.”
Nick Ruford nodded. “Glad you got me out of that tree. I was afraid I was going to starve up there.” He licked his lips, looked down at the plastic bottles rolling in the bottom of the boat. “Is that drinking water?”
“It’s from the river. It’s all I’ve got to drink.” He hesitated. “I drank some, and I didn’t get sick.”
“Guess I’ll stay thirsty a little longer. Got any food?”
“No.” Jason pushed with his pole, swung the boat around. The leaves of submerged bushes scratched against the boat’s bottom.
“What’s this stuff?” Indicating the broken boards that Jason had piled in the cockpit.
“Things I picked up out of the river,” Jason said. “To paddle with.” And then he added, “Do you know where we are?”
The stranger seemed surprised at the question. “In Tennessee. Not too far north of Memphis.”
That far, Jason thought. That far in one night. It took over an hour to drive a car from Cabells Mound to Memphis.
“You look surprised,” Nick Ruford said. “Where do you come from? Kentucky?”
“Missouri,” Jason said. “Cabells Mound.”
“Where’s that?”
“I must have come sixty miles overnight.”
The stranger looked dubious. “As the crow flies? The river doesn’t move that fast. Not even if it’s in flood.”
Jason looked at him. “It moves that fast now. I went through two stretches of rapid, and moved real fast the rest of the time.”
A new light dawned in Nick Ruford’s eyes. “Rapids, huh,” he said. “Bet you’re glad you’re out of it now.”
“The rapids were scary, yeah.” He remembered that second rapid, swirling close to a bank just as it began to cave in, a hundred feet of Mississippi mud falling into the river at once ... the splash had been enough to knock the boat back into midstream, out of danger, but if he’d been there a second earlier or later, the boat would have capsized.
In the morning, when the speed of the river began to slow, he’d found some plastic soft drink bottles floating in the river, and he’d used them to bail. It was slow, waiting for each bottle to fill before emptying it overside, but he had nothing else to do.
Eventually Jason had come aground on the left bank of the river. He was beginning to get sunburned by then, and he’d covered his exposed skin with red mud. He’d found the pole— it was stuck in the crown of a broken levee, just standing there, he didn’t know why— and he’d used it to pole the boat along until he came to a break in the levee big enough to pole the boat through. Which he’d done, hoping he’d find civilization on the other side, but he’d found nothing but wilderness.
Nothing but wilderness, till he found Nick Ruford up a tree.
The stranger licked his lips. “This your boat?” he asked.
Jason shook his head. He didn’t offer any further explanation. He didn’t want to think about Mr. Regan right now. There were a lot of things he didn’t want to think about.
He pushed, felt the pole dig into the Mississippi ooze, pushed the boat ahead. Let the pole fall back into his hands, not grabbing at it.
“How about your parents?” Nick asked.
“Well,” Jason said, “my dad’s in China.” He felt defiance rising in him, looked down at his passenger. “My mother’s dead,” he said. He could feel his jaw muscles tighten. “She died last night.”
The stranger held his gaze for a moment, then looked away. “Sorry,” he said.
“Not your fault.” Cold anger clenched at Jason’s stomach, and he looked up at the sky as he poled the boat forward.
“You know this area?” Jason asked. “Anyplace we can go?”
The stranger shook his head. “I’m from St. Louis. I was just passing through.”
“Well.” Jason shrugged. “Guess we might as well keep on.”
Jason kept the boat’s bow pointed south. Insects whined.
The sun lifted toward its zenith, and moist heat smothered the world.