Jack could imagine the two Texans paddling hard in his and Wynn’s canoe and reaching the rock island in the bend before the infamous Last Chance Falls, heading toward shore. And…
And the man Pierre waiting, loaded, for two men in their Kevlar nineteen-footer. Waiting head down behind his cover, and…there it was, the canoe, correct length and color—the boys! Sitting ducks, no gun in sight! His blurred, uncorrected vision plenty good enough at forty yards to see two male figures steadily paddling. Patience, brother, waiting until they were maybe thirty, twenty-five yards off the shore, rising up, shotgun leveled—fire! Pump, fire, pump, fire…until he had emptied the six shells in the Winchester Marine, the men torn open and flung sidelong, the canoe flipped, a bobbing loglike hull in the main current, tugged toward the horizon line, tipping over the lip of the cataract. Gone.
Smashed and drowned.
Pierre would think that if she was still with them he wouldn’t have to worry about her either. She would have been lying half alive in the bottom of the boat, she would be battered to death and submerged in the terrible falls.
The odds of finding bodies in this big river, in this remote territory, were pretty low. But if they did, if the authorities mounted an ambitious search and there were gunshot wounds, he could say that the boys had attacked their camp, kidnapped her, he ambushed them, it was survival, self-defense, he was trying to rescue her.
Jack replayed how Pierre would shoot the two men from Texas thinking they were he and Wynn, and then Pierre would pack up his camp, relieved that it was finally over, his megafuckup, and he would go straight to the village elders and start spouting lies.
Jack’s plan. Why he had stolen their boat. Why Wynn was dead. Everybody he loved most, he killed. One way or another. Hubris killed them—his own. Always.
* * *
Still, he’d have to wait a day to let it play out. Wait upstream with a woman who was clearly dying, and with the body of his best friend.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
He didn’t wait a day. She was dying and he couldn’t just sit. At what he figured was noon he shoved off.
Jack paddled. He saved the motor, the battery, for the upstream wind he knew would come. He paddled the green woods, the woods with birds. With a fat kingfisher flying off a limb, lilting along river’s edge, perch to living perch. A lone osprey. He watched the woman, curled into the thwart, maybe sleeping, too pale, breath shallow—he watched the back of her raingear for the slight lift of an inhalation and sometimes he couldn’t see it and he said aloud, “Please, please breathe. Breathe…” He paddled harder than he ever had in his life. He did not look at his friend’s curls ruffling in the wind, the almost ginger curls alive in the breeze as on any day, Wynn’s head, Wynn’s cheek on his arm where Jack had laid him in the front of the boat as if sleeping.
If he saw the woods, the gravel bars, the steep banks sailing by…he paddled. His hands and arms went numb. His mind, too. His thoughts untethered and it was as if he were paddling blind.
* * *
On the day of his mother’s service Jack woke at first light and in the fog of waking remembered why he had to get away. He dressed and hurried out of the log house. A June morning with a mist lying in the tall grass of hayfields that waited for the first cutting. He could smell the sweetness in the grass. Above a low ridge scattered with junipers he could see north and east the snow ramparts of the Never Summer range floating in the wash of the first sun. He turned. The barn across the yard was decorated with bunches of pine boughs and cattails, bouquets of dried wildflowers nailed to the frame around the big door. Many neighbors had come by the day before and brought handmade wreaths of spruce and fir, armloads of every flower that now bloomed and could be gathered.
He could not look at them. He went through the barn. The swept concrete, the empty stalls, the smell of horses. Mindy, his mother’s mare, was not there. He went through and out the back and climbed the rail fence into the pasture. The horses were scattered, heads down. In the mist it looked almost like they were feeding in pale water.
She was down at the bottom of the field where the pasture dropped off into the willows on the banks of the Fraser. The heavily dewed grass wet his pant legs to the knees. As he got closer he could hear the big-boned quarterhorse tearing at the bunched grass, hear her huff, and then he could smell her. She was the color of a saddle wet with rain.
He walked to her and she lifted her head and turned. He said, “Hey, girl. Hey.” He put a hand on her neck and she pushed into the side of his cheek with her nose and her hot breath puffed into the collar of his shirt. Her right foreleg was wrapped with bandage. When she stepped to him she lurched as if hobbled. He leaned his forehead into her at the base of her neck and she stayed still. He let his hand travel lightly over her rippled ribs, which the vet said had been broken. She did not flinch. She was his mother’s favorite horse. She let the boy lean into her.
Jack stood with her. He didn’t make a sound. He leaned into her and inhaled. Here was the last place his mother had been. Before the crashing water. Been at peace. Humming along with his father, who sang. He thought that. You were here. Now you’re not. He would have given his own life gladly to hear her sing to him one more time. He put his face hard into the mare’s side and let himself go. He wrapped his arms around the mare’s neck as best he could. He didn’t move.
After a while Mindy turned suddenly and lurched into him and he saw his father coming over the sunlit pasture.
He was wearing a sport coat and he didn’t say anything. He didn’t say, “I’ve been looking for you.” He came up to the boy and the mare and he put one hand on his son’s head and one on the flank of the horse and just stood. Stood for a while. Jack wished they could stay like that. Finally his father said, “It’s time.”