Copyboy, page 15
If there is a hurricane you always see the signs of it in the sky for days ahead, if you are at sea. They do not see it ashore because they do not know what to look for…
* * *
The sound of the outboard changed as we moved into the current of the main channel. The small engine didn’t have to strain going downriver in the swift current. Phil looped the strap of the binoculars around her neck. I grabbed the sides of the boat with my arms outstretched.
I could see already how the river branched out into the different passes the General and the Captain had told me about. Southwest Pass. South Pass. Pass a’Loutre. Looking at a flat piece of paper on a table was not anything like looking at the real thing, like typing out a story was different from life happening around you.
“Are you sure this is a good idea?” I shouted.
“We’re almost there. Hang on.”
The current in the main channel grew more turbulent as it prepared to split apart to find the different passages to the gulf. I sat in the middle of my seat on the cushion, leaning to one side and then the other as the boat made its way in the confused river.
Phil threw one of the orange life jackets to me. “Put this on. We’re getting close. I’m going to swing round and hold us against the current when I think we’re about even with the marker.” She held the binoculars in one hand and steered with the other. I put my head and arms through the life vest.
Many times I had played out in my head how I would take four separate handfuls of ashes from the urn, releasing each one into the air as I said one of Mr. Spiro’s four special words that made up his Quartering of the Soul. I wouldn’t stutter since each word started with the nice s sound and, anyway, I planned to shout them as loud as I could. My plans had never included the ferocious chop of the river and a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico.
I put the duffel bag onto my lap and removed the urn. The tape held the top securely like the manager at the funeral home promised it would. Too securely. The urn had been in the hot trunk of my car for more than a week. The tape had melted into a goo that had hardened again.
Phil brought us around and backed off the throttle, holding the bow steady against the current. She nodded. I picked at the sticky tape with my fingernails as the boat bucked.
A new sound came from the river at the place with the strange name — Head of Passes. A loud sound. A harsh sound. Loud and moving closer. I didn’t look up. I concentrated on getting the top off the urn.
“No,” Phil cried.
I turned on my cushion to see a sleek boat with chrome exhaust stacks emerge from an outcropping of trees, heading straight for us at high speed and throwing up a violent wake. Even against the strong current, the bow of the boat’s planing hull was out of the water and charging toward us. Phil twisted open the throttle. The outboard’s propeller dug down into the river, raising the bow. The boat shot ahead, throwing me off my seat and back into Phil — and the duffel bag and urn into the river. Phil let go of the throttle grip to get her balance. With the sudden deceleration, water rushed in over the stern. The outboard engine hissed and sputtered to a stop. When I stood to try to locate the urn in the river, the speedboat raced by, missing our boat by inches. The giant wake heaved our small craft into the air. And launched me into the river.
When you dive into a swimming pool, you know what’s coming and it’s no big deal. When you are thrown into the river, your whole body hits hard and everything is out of place. The water felt neither warm nor cool. All I could feel was the sense of being captured and a sense of loss.
Losing the penny loafer on my right foot was my first sensation under water. I felt out of balance. I kicked off my other shoe as the life vest pulled me to the surface. Phil waved her arms wildly and shouted from the boat. I couldn’t understand her shouts. The current pushed us swiftly downriver through all manner of flotsam and dead trees. Upriver, the loud boat sped away, its name painted in gold script letters on the transom — Crazy Eights.
Phil yanked the starter cord with all her might. Again and again.
“Try to grab a snag,” I heard her shout. “I’ll come get you.”
I twisted and turned in the river as it carried me. Phil continued pulling the starter cord without success, but I realized that Phil and the boat were staying about the same distance away from me. We were both caught evenly in the current. I looked downriver and spotted the urn, floating toward the main current of the river and out to sea. I swam for it. Swimming against the river’s current would have been useless. Swimming with it gave me the sensation of flying over the water. Like a mullet.
Messenger.
I swam harder toward the sound of my name. The one that only Mr. Spiro used.
What should I do, Mr. Spiro?
I reached the urn bobbing in the current and wrapped both arms around it. Don’t fight the river, Messenger. The river will always win.
I closed my eyes, hugged the urn, and gave myself over to the fast-moving water.
Chapter 22
My right arm hugged the urn against my chest. With my left hand, I gripped a branch of a fallen tree with a few of its roots still anchoring it to the bank.
Blood streamed down my face and into my eyes. I didn’t have a free hand to wipe it away, but through the blur I could make out Phil as she steered her powerless boat into a small eddy by using her seat cushion like a rudder. She wrestled the boat between logs to the bank a few yards from where I hung on to the tree.
“Stay still,” Phil said when she reached me. She wiped the blood out of my eyes with the tail of her shirt. I thought of good questions to ask. Where was the blood coming from? If I was cut, how bad was it? Or maybe just one big question — what happened? — but I couldn’t form the words in my mouth, and it wasn’t because of a stutter or a sputter.
After Phil dragged me through the shallow water to a spot on the bank, she answered some of the questions I could not ask.
“Your head hit the rail of the boat. You have a nasty gash we have to do something about.”
Phil put her life jacket under my head for a pillow. She took off her shirt, folded it several times and put it on my head.
“Give me the urn,” she said.
I had trouble straightening my arm to let go of it. The urn seemed almost attached to me. She put the urn in the boat and then grabbed my arms and raised them over my head.
“Now, it’s important you keep pressure on your head with both hands,” she said. “Stay completely still. I’ll be right back.”
I turned my head to one side and squinted to see Phil in her bra slide down into the river near the boat.
She tied the anchor line around her waist, and for a reason I could not come up with, she dove under the surface. The line tightened in the current. She finally surfaced out in the river with two handfuls of mud and made her way back to the bank.
“Phil…”
“Stop talking now. You’re going to be okay. Just stay quiet.”
Phil kneaded the dark river-bottom mud back and forth in her hands and packed it on my head. The coolness of the mud felt good. She tore both sleeves from her shirt and tied them together for a bandage to keep the mudpack in place.
“You’re looking like a pirate now.” She put on what was left of her blood-soaked shirt. “I better keep my clothes on ’cause I don’t want you getting ideas about me out here on the river.” She smiled but it wasn’t her honest kind of smile.
The pulsating pain in my head increased the longer I lay on the bank. I could feel each throb as it approached in a steady rhythm.
The river was wide at Head of Passes. I looked at the out-of-commission boat and wondered if it was about the size of the one that the old man fished from in the Gulf Stream.
“Do sharks ever come this far up in the river?” The question came out of my mouth in a way that made it seem like I was not the one who was talking.
Phil gave me an odd look.
“Just the bull sharks that can live in freshwater.” She tightened the bandage on my head. “If you’re needing to worry about something, might be best to worry about gators instead of sharks.”
“I haven’t seen an alligator since I’ve been down here.”
“That’s how they like it.” Phil smiled. She changed the tone of her voice. “I’m just foolin’ with you. If there’s a hurricane on the way, the gators aren’t going to be the least bit interested in the two of us.”
Phil had used the word “hurricane” for the first time. She changed the subject.
“Jimmy had the look of a wild man when he sidewashed us. Probably high on something.”
“Was he trying to hit us?”
“No. That would have messed up his pretty boat. He wanted to scare us, sure.” She wiped a trickle of blood from my eye. “When Daddy hears what that couyon did, the Crazy Eights will find itself on the bottom of the river… with Jimmy LaBue likely in it.”
“How did I get to the bank?”
“That dead cottonwood tree with the big root ball reached right out and grabbed you as you were floating by. It held you long enough for me to get to you and pull you up on the bank.”
Phil explained that our outboard engine had sucked in water from the backwash and she was going to take off the cowling so the carburetor could dry out before she tried to crank it again.
“What if it won’t start?”
“Then you, me, and Miss Betsy will have us a double date tonight.” She smiled but saw I wasn’t smiling.
“Don’t worry. Daddy and He-Gene will come for us long before Betsy gets here. No need to worry about that, sure.”
When I tried to raise my head to wash the mud off my arms and legs, the river turned upside down in front of me. I felt like I was going to fall even though I was lying down. Phil eased my head back onto the muddy bank. She cupped water in her hands and washed me as best she could.
“Tell me this,” she said. “Why did you swim for the urn instead of toward the bank?”
I had the answer, but how could I explain? I pressed the mudpack on my head with both hands to try to stop the throbbing.
“My I-Powers were at odds,” I said finally.
The confused look on Phil’s face matched my own confusion of how to explain what I had just said. I knew what I meant by “I-Powers,” a lesson that Mr. Spiro had taught me about “intellect” and “intuition,” but my brain felt like it was full of the mud that Phil had just pulled from the bottom of the river.
I reached out to wipe a speck of river trash from Phil’s cheek, but my hand wouldn’t go where my brain told it to go. I closed my eyes.
I heard Messenger again from far away. Don’t fight the river.
Once more, I let myself float away.
* * *
Phil blew hard over and over again into the recesses of the small engine. I wanted to do something to help her, but my body was shaking so badly I knew it was no use. Any sudden movement of my head caused me to see double. My brain couldn’t make sense of what I was seeing with my eyes. The pounding in my head had turned into giants slamming home runs.
She snapped the small engine’s cowling back in place.
“Three pulls and it’ll crank. Garanti.” Her smile and her accent made me want to believe her. She gripped the starter cord with both hands and yanked. After a dozen or so pulls, each one more aggressive than the previous, the engine coughed and then chugged to life in a feeble idle. She played with the small screws on the carburetor until the engine smoothed out.
“I’ll help you into the boat if you can slide into the water,” she said.
I eased down the mud of the riverbank and grabbed the boat rail.
“Water is f----reezing,” I mumbled.
Phil grabbed my arms. “I’m going to lean away from you and pull. See if you can throw one leg over the side and roll in.”
On the third try I rolled into the boat.
“D----d----d----oes a hurricane m----m----ake the water c----c----older?” For once I could blame my stuttering on my teeth that wouldn’t stop chattering.
“Water temp is the same,” Phil said in a matter-of-fact tone. “You’re probably just running a little fever.”
In what seemed like a realignment of different parts of my brain when I settled into the boat, I had a strange desire to talk. To say anything. To babble. Sentences ran through my head before I could capture and make any sense of them.
“Phil, I have a truth to tell you.”
“Okay,” she said with some hesitation. “What’s this truth of yours?”
“You’re twice as pretty now as I’ve ever seen you.”
She shook her head.
“You need to sit down in front of me to cut down on wind resistance.” The order sounded like one from Captain Moreau.
“Know why you’re twice as pretty? I see two of you.”
My attempt at a joke was lame, but there was that truth to consider. She was beautiful and I had been seeing two of her like I saw two of everything else. I had no control over what I was saying. I couldn’t even tell if I was stuttering.
The engine labored as we continued into the teeth of the current in the main channel. Shivers ran through my body. I folded my arms across my chest. Phil pressed her legs against my shoulders as I sat in the bottom of the boat in front of her. She steered with one hand and with the other hand applied pressure to the mudpack on my head. I gripped the urn between my legs.
The current eased a bit when we reached the shallows running along the west bank. Phil dodged logs and snags with the throttle wide open. Clouds out of the south raced above us and the sky darkened. Phil kept her free hand firmly on my head. The throbbing kept time with the bow as it slammed into the river. I could feel the blood in my head trying to find new pathways, like the river trying to find new routes to the gulf at Head of Passes.
I wanted to tell Phil how Mr. Spiro had told me not to fight the river, but the words wouldn’t line up in my head. And then I remembered the nonfiction that Mr. Spiro wasn’t really here. He was only in the urn.
I felt Phil’s strong hand on my head and did the only thing I could do. I closed my eyes.
Chapter 23
Phil spoke from behind what seemed like a wall, with me on the other side in a dark room. “I knew they’d be looking for us.”
“Wh----at, wh----at d----o you see?” My eyes had been closed for most of the trip upriver. I blinked several times to try to get them to focus. The small engine labored.
“I see Daddy and He-Gene on the dock with their binoculars. I think I see Ray Patton, too.”
“The G----eneral? Are we in New Orleans?”
“No, we’re back at the marina. I’ve never seen the place so crowded. Boats are stacked up everywhere waiting to haul out.”
“H----ave I b----een asleep?”
“More passed out than sleeping.” She squeezed my shoulders with her legs. “Hold on for just a few more minutes.”
Phil steered away from the shelter of the riverbank for a more direct route to the marina.
“Feel that?”
“No.” I didn’t shake my head for fear my mudpack would come off.
“The current has eased in the main channel. I can feel it in the throttle.” She took her hand on and off the rubber grip. “Old timers round here say the start of a storm surge will slow the current, even make the river run backward. We might be in for a good blow from Betsy.”
The marina was a football field away.
“Can you climb up on your seat?”
I gripped the urn to my chest. I managed to lift myself up on the seat with one hand.
Phil momentarily took her hand off the throttle and stretched both arms straight out. She waved them in large circles like she was a bird trying to take off. Captain Moreau signaled back from the dock by raising one hand above his head and making tight circles with it.
“What was that all about?”
“Just letting them know we’re going to need first aid. Uncle Gene keeps a kit in his boat.”
The Captain motioned for his daughter to pull in to the dock, where he hung on to a ladder with his feet in the river. Phil throttled back and cut the engine.
“What happened, Philomene?” the Captain said.
“Help me get Vic out of the boat first,” she said, letting me hear for the first time the concern in her voice.
I handed the urn to the Captain and reached for the ladder, but missed it on my first try. Phil steadied the boat against the pilings. I reached out again and the Captain grabbed my arm. My bandage fell down over one eye and the mudpack, which had dried into a solid cake of blood, dropped into the river.
The General kneeled on the dock and grabbed my other arm. “You didn’t get sliced up by a propeller, did you?”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I don’t think it’s b----leeding anymore.”
The General pulled a white handkerchief from his back pocket, patted my head and showed a dark circle of fresh blood. He put the handkerchief back on my head and placed my hand on it.
“Keep pressure on it,” he said.
Phil leaned over the side of the boat to wash off the blood that covered her arms and hands.
“Are you hurt?” I heard Captain Moreau ask his daughter.
Phil shook her head. “It’s not my blood.”
The General guided me to a wooden bench built into the dock railing and helped me lie down. He pulled off his top shirt, wadded it, and made a pillow for me. He-Gene came running down the dock with a large first-aid kit.
“Uncle Gene was a hospital corpsman in the Navy,” Phil said. “You’re in good hands now.”
He-Gene pushed and probed the skin of my head that seemed to have a loose flap on it. He informed everyone that the cut ought to be sutured but had already started to close on its own.
