The boat veered left and an overhanging branch nearly swept them into the water. The supply raft swung out in a swift current and was bobbing ahead of them on the river.
Neither Raheem nor Kyle had rowed a boat before. Raheem was bigger, though, and much stronger, so it made sense he was on the oars. Unlike Kyle who was two grades behind him although the same age, Raheem was an athlete. He had long arms and legs and ropey muscles. He ran track and played football and basketball at their middle school. Recently, he’d decided to let his hair grow out naturally and it looked like a small black bush on his head, Kyle thought. Raheem kept his back to the bow and pulled hard and the boat went this way and that.
“This ain’t working worth shit,” Raheem said after he’d thumped the front of the boat into a half-submerged stump. “I can’t see anything.”
Kyle wasn’t sure what to do. He was seated in the back facing Raheem. It was hard to see through his friend or over the bow of the boat to call out hazards. And he couldn’t move to the front because they’d stacked it high with their gear. He was glad there were no rapids in the water like he’d seen on television or they’d already be swimming for their lives, he thought.
“You gotta help me with directions,” Raheem said to Kyle. He was already breathing hard from rowing so hard.
Kyle asked to try it.
Raheem rolled his eyes but the two changed places. The boat rocked from side to side as they did.
Kyle sat on the wooden bench facing the front. Rather than row, he dipped his right oar into the river until it got stiff to the touch. The bow of the boat swung that direction. When he raised the oar the boat continued to float on a line.
“We don’t have to fight the river,” Kyle said. “We can let the current pull us along. It’s fast enough that all we need to do is steer and keep us away from the trees on the bank and the rocks in the river.”
Raheem said he was impressed.
The boat overtook the supply raft and soon the raft was behind them were it was supposed to be.
The sirens got louder as they floated through Grimstad. Kyle caught glimpses of sheriff’s department SUVs with their lights flashing up on the bluffs. The column of smoke was now flattening out in the sky and it looked like a giant black T.
He glanced at the few homes along the river as they floated by, hoping no one was looking out at them. He was glad they had waited until Monday, until school resumed, before they embarked on the adventure. There were fewer people out and about during the week.
*
AFTER HALF AN HOUR, the sirens faded although he could still hear them in the distance behind the boat. The quiet hush of the river took over: slow flowing water, the lap of it against the hull of the boat, a splash when he lowered one oar or the other.
The sun broke out of the clouds and bathed them in yellow light. The river turned from dark gray to green in an instant. Just as fast, the temperature seemed to warm ten degrees.
As they floated around the first big bend they encountered a dozen geese who paddled ahead of them in formation. When the boat got closer a secret signal was sent and they all took off in a noisy cacophony of honks and flapping wings.
“That was cool,” Raheem said. “Where’s that .22? Maybe we ought to shoot one of ’em and have goose for dinner, bro.”
“Do you know how to cook a goose?”
“No,” he laughed.
“Me either.”
Kyle recalled the only time he’d ever seen a dead goose. It was two years before when his mother was alive and living with T-Lock, her boyfriend at the time. T-Lock’s pal Winkie went hunting and brought them a huge dead goose. Kyle had never seen such a huge bird up close before. He’d been fascinated with the depth of the feathers on its breast and the size of its stiff black feet.
When Winkie left, T-Lock marched the carcass out to the dumpster and threw it inside.
T-Lock, Winkie, and his mother. All dead.
To Kyle, it sometimes seemed like he’d made them up in the first place.
*
KYLE COULDN’T GET over the feelings that grew within him as they floated further away from town. The river sounds came into sharper focus. The early fall colors of the trees seemed more vibrant. He could smell the musky vegetation on the banks and the cold metallic odor of the river itself.
The whole world was opening up in front of him, it seemed.
When he looked over at Raheem he could see that his friend felt the same way. He was beaming.
“This is so fucking cool I can’t believe it,” Raheem said. He was lounging in the back of the boat with his feet propped up on the bench seat and his fingers trailing in the water.
“Just think,” Raheem said. “We could have been in that school right now doin’ nothing. But look at us. LOOK AT US!”
Kyle grinned and closed his eyes for a moment, drinking it in.
CHAPTER
SIX
TWENTY MINUTES BEFORE and a half mile away from the industrial park, Amanda Lee Hackl was washing breakfast and dinner dishes in the sink of her kitchen when she heard a distant boom. Then another, bigger boom that shook the glass in the window over the sink and rattled the china in her hutch.
With her hands in the warm water, she leaned forward and peered out the window and squinted. There was nothing much to see: empty lots in a subdivision on a bluff filled with wide empty streets and unfinished houses and lots stacked with building materials that were starting to gray and warp from exposure to the sun and the weather. It was obvious that the subdivision had been created rapidly, started, and then stopped.
That she and Harold were the only actual residents on the block could be chalked up to her husband’s unerring gift for bad timing in all things financial. She was still bitter about it. He’d convinced her to pour their life savings into the down payment of the show home they now lived in before the developer finished the subdivision. That way, Harold said, “they’d be on the ground floor of something great!” So they sold their double-wide and moved. A month later, the bottom of the oil market fell out and the developer and his employees scattered into the wind.
When asked where her home was located, Amanda liked to say that she lived in the “Subdivision of Sadness.” Especially when Harold was there to hear her say it.
So hearing anything outside, especially two explosions that rocked the house, was unusual and, she thought, interesting.
Because it gave her something to do.
*
AMANDA WAS A STOCKY BROWN-HAIRED woman wearing a Santa Claus sweatshirt, jeans, and Crocs. She loved the Christmas season so much that she decorated her house earlier every year and she wore festive clothing in the early fall because it made her happy. Now that she’d been laid off from her job at Walmart she had very little to do after Harold went to his job delivering parts in the Bakken. She’d tried to knit, quilt, sew, and do needlepoint, but she found out she hated them all. She’d listened to nearly every audiobook in the Bakken County Library, many of them twice.