We burst out of the woods, freed from a prison of green. We found ourselves in a field of rotted cornstalks, once taller than houses but now slumped over in tortured shapes, their moldering leaves grazing the soil as if anxious to return to it. I tried to imagine how the crop came to be, if it had once been part of someone’s prized farm. Now abandoned, the corn grew wildly and on its own every summer, only to sink back on itself, a ghost harvest. The field was roughly square, bordered by woods that seemed bent on taking over. Waist-height pines and alders encroached on the putrid stalks.
Stupid with fatigue, we stood gaping around, our clothes torn and black with mud. Though it was a relief to see beyond three feet in front of me, the reality of being out in the open raised the hair on the back of my neck. Sandra hugged herself and wandered off to a sunny spot, lifting her face to the light. The field droned with insects. Grasshoppers whirred by at eye height to land on the drooping stalks, grooming one hairpin leg with the other. Clouds of mosquitoes and no-see-ums swarmed and dined on us, but none of us had the energy to fight them off.
“Hey, Sandra,” Rachel said hoarsely, approaching her. “Let’s see the phone.”
Hands on hips, she peered through her one lens at Sandra as she unzipped her vest pocket and reached her hand down and right through a vicious-looking rip in its side. Her fingers wiggled. She lifted her head, face pale as death.
Rachel squinted at Sandra’s pocket with her good eye. “So where’s the phone?”
“I don’t know, it’s gone, it—”
“Where’s the fucking phone?” Rachel slapped Sandra hard across the face.
I stiffened. Pia took a step back as if she were the one hit.
“I don’t know, I don’t know. . . .” Sandra looked all around her on the ground, as if she would find it there. As if the world worked like that.
“Oh my God, she actually fucking lost it,” Rachel moaned. “She lost the fucking phone. . . .”
“Keep your voice down!” Pia hissed. “She lost the phone. There’s not a goddamned thing we can do about it. It could be anywhere.”
Sandra began to sob.
I took a step toward Rachel, my arms rigid with rage by my sides. “I can’t believe you hit her. What the fuck is wrong with you?”
Rachel sank down to her knees onto the rotted corn. “We are so fucked, oh my God. . . .”
“The phone was dead anyway!” Sandra cried. “I showed you—”
“What were you going to do, Rachel, plug it into a tree or something?” I said.
“Maybe it wasn’t dead! Maybe it just wasn’t on or something!” Rachel choked a little with laughter or tears, I couldn’t tell which. Her shoulders sagged. “I can’t believe this.” She took off her wrecked glasses and wiped the one good lens on her filthy shirt. “I’m going to die sober after all. What a shame.”
“I must have torn my vest in the stream,” Sandra said, tearing up again. “We could go back and look. . . .”
Exhaustion rolled through me hard, and for a few seconds I felt as if I were going to pass out. Nausea rippled up from deep in my gut, but passed, with nothing to retch. My field of vision narrowed, and all I heard was the sound of Sandra weeping, the buzz of insects, and the ever-present rumble of the river. I couldn’t seem to get enough air to my brain. But the sensation didn’t last. An odd fizzing energy and determination replaced it. We were alive. Probably fucked big-time, but unlike Rory, still walking around, still breathing.
“You guys need to stop crying and slapping each other and screwing around,” I said. “It’s time to think, okay? Figure out what to do next.”
Pia started to walk away.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“To take a freaking piss.” She disappeared among the hulking stalks.
Rachel stayed in a lump on the ground. “I’m sorry I slapped you, Sandra,” she mumbled. “That was fucked-up of me.”
Sandra wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and blinked. “It was dead.”
“I believe you. It doesn’t matter. I’m sorry.”
Pia burst back through the corn. “Guys, you have to come see this. I found the raft.”
32
We barreled through the rotted crop, stalks flying back and slapping us as we sank deeper into a quicksandlike muck. Each step released a reptilian perfume, the rich black carbon of decay. We arrived at a flattened section where the corn had been trampled over by something or someone. Just yards away the river rumbled by, wider now, calmer.
“Oh, God,” Sandra said as she approached the raft, which was barely recognizable as such. “Look what they did to it.”
Stripped of all our gear—dry bags, tents, sleeping bags, food, even oars—our salvation lay flat and sad in the mud. Like a desecrated body, it had been repeatedly slashed: only long, angry ribbons of bright canvas and black rubber remained. Even the cheerful blue handles had been sliced off, an obscene touch. I recalled what Simone had said about wasting nothing.
Pia picked up a few lengths of rubber and let them drop back into the mire.
“What are you doing?” Rachel said derisively, confounded.
“Just . . . wondering if there’s something we can use, I don’t know.”