30
They hold to the safety lines affixed along the top of each side of the boat—the grab ropes—and discuss their options in shouts as they rise and fall, bobbing and wheeling on the swift current’s undulations. They can’t guess where they are or how fast they’re moving or how much time has passed, but they reckon it’s still a few hours till daybreak. They have to get off the river before then or risk being spotted by a riverside search party or a helicopter. The canyon walls are getting lower, the visible sky is widening, though they still can’t see the moon. They’re hoping that when the banks flatten again the boat will get swept into another accumulation of debris, but on the Mexican side this time, and they’ll be able to achieve the beach as before.
Even if they don’t run into any brush, Axel says, as soon as the river’s calmer they can paddle to the bank. Once they’re on Mexican ground they’ll find a road and hitch a ride or walk if they must to the nearest pueblo and from there somehow get in touch with Cacho’s people.
What about the rapids he mentioned, Cacho wants to know. What if they hit those first? Axel says he isn’t absolutely sure there are any bad rapids ahead. Could be they entered the river below the last of them. He tells the kid not to worry, they’re not riding a tree limb anymore.
“Even with an air chamber blown, look how good we’re doing! This thing’s like a big life vest! What the hell, we hit white water we’ll just ride it out till the current eases again and then we paddle over to the first flat bank!”
“Yeah, right, nothing to it!”
Which is when they discover they’ve lost one of their paddles. But Axel is confident he can get them ashore with the remaining one.
The canyon walls soon shrink into short, fragmented bluffs, exposing a gibbous moon, the river agleam with its light. And then the meanders begin to contract, their bends following more closely on one another and tightening the current into greater rigor and the boat moves faster and faster. The river loudens as they round a sharp bend and the boat sways on the current’s flow over a wide rock and they plunge off a sudden short drop, both of them yelling in fright, holding tight to the grab ropes, and the boat hits with a jarring splash and leaps forward on a raging white-water rapid.
They rocket downriver, pitching, yawing, whirling, gripping the ropes, flopping about on the flooded deck, gulping the sodden air, their shouts lost in the white water’s boom. The current lashes them through the wider rock passages, the boat caroming off the larger boulders and wobbling over the smaller ones, now almost capsizing, now momentarily aloft before smacking down again. They run up against a high rock that tilts them precipitously and Axel falls hard against Cacho and the kid tumbles overboard with a yelp. Then the boat is upright again and all Axel sees of him is a fist still tight on the grab rope and faintly hears his gasping cries. Cacho’s head bobs up over the hull for a second as he tries to pull himself aboard, then drops from sight again.
Axel lunges to the right-side grab rope and holds to it with one hand and reaches down with the other and snatches a fistful of the kid’s shirt at the shoulder and leans back, pulling hard, the boat reeling every which way and parting his ass from the deck with every buck, each time nearly tossing him out. Cacho’s head again comes up, hair plastered, eyes wild. He works his arms into the boat, Axel still pulling on his shirt, and he’s got one leg over the hull when the boat plunges over another drop, a long fall that feels like they’ve gone off the edge of the earth. The boat hits the water nose-first with its rear still arcing forward in the manner of someone launching into a handstand, and the kid is flung away.
Axel feels himself parting from the deck and for a second sees his feet against the moonlit sky, the airborne boat ahead of him, and then he’s in the water too and shielding his head with his arms, bouncing off rocks and only dully conscious of the impacts. The overturned boat precedes him through a series of passages and then vanishes and he follows it over another steep drop, and then he’s underwater, tumbling in the current, not knowing up from down, wild with panic and sure that he’s about to drown … and then he’s at the surface again, gasping and spinning, glimpsing the bright moon, flailing to no effect against the river’s force, the muddy water mashing into his mouth as the rapid carries him as easily as a leaf. It whips him in an outward arc and he flashes past a stretch of open bank and then tears through a stand of reeds that lash his face and dim the moonlight. His collar snags around his neck and arrests him, cutting off his breath and holding him faceup and outstretched on the river’s pull, legs flapping.
Thrashing like a hooked fish and clawing at his collar, he’s strangling even as he’s looking at silver fragments of sky above him through a mesh of leafy tree branches.
“Stop fighting me! Reach up! Reach up and grab my wrist!”
Cacho!
Heart banging, his eyes feeling about to pop from their sockets, Axel puts a hand behind his head, finds the kid’s hand locked on his collar, and grasps his wrist. The collar eases on his neck and he sucks deep breaths broken by hard coughing.
“Hang onto me till you can reach up to the tree!” Cacho yells.
As the kid slowly draws him rearward against the river’s drag, Axel is able to crane his head enough to see him holding by one hand to a low branch of an overhanging tree, struggling to keep his feet against the rushing current at his waist, the black bank but a few feet past him. Snarling like a weight lifter at every tug, groaning in pain whenever he puts too much pressure on his bad foot, Cacho pulls him within arm’s length of a low branch and Axel seizes it. “Got it!” he cries in cracked voice. He lets go of Cacho’s wrist and grabs onto the branch with that hand too. A dipping swirl in the current yanks his feet down and bumps them on a hard bottom and then slaps them out again. The water here is only about thigh-high, but the current is far too strong to permit footing.
They have to work their way to shore by arm strength from handhold to handhold along the branch. Then Cacho’s up on the bank and reaching back for him and they lock hands and he drags Axel out of the river and into a dark stand of trees. Coughing and gasping, they crawl out onto the open bank, fall on their bellies, and roll onto their backs, chests heaving, relishing the feel of solid earth under them. The moon blazes on them from a sky now almost cloudless, the flat bank whitewashed in its light.
“Huh?”
“We’re on the right … right?”
Axel can hardly hear him through the rapid’s rumble and is so dazed with exhaustion he doesn’t grasp what the kid’s asking. He coughs and turns to look at him. “Are we … on the right?”
“What? … That’s what … I’m asking you! … We got off on the right, didn’t we? Not, maybe, you know … the wrong side?”
“The wrong …? Oh, man, you …” It’s a labor to talk.
“What?”
“Listen! … We got off on the … right-hand side … correct side … Mexican side…. We’re in Mexico.”
“Oh, man, that’s good! … Because, you know … if we were in Texas again … I think I’d rather be caught … than go back … in that fucking river.”
The kid says something more in a tired slur and Axel doesn’t catch it but doesn’t care. It feels so grand to lie still, eyes closed, do nothing but breathe.
Through the sound of the river comes the high yipping of a nearby coyote, and then the cries of a pack of them in high chorus. He thrills to the sound, which he hasn’t heard in over ten years. There are lots of coyotes in Terrell County, of course, but people shoot them for fun, so they tend to silence except at night, when you’re in the cell block and can’t hear them. This is the first one he’s heard since his transfer ride to the Zanco Unit in a TDCJ bus with the window glass raised outside the steel mesh, a late-night drive during which they heard the madhouse yowlings of coyotes off and on for most of the trip. A gray-whiskered con sitting next to him had said it was the freest sound in the world. “Except for a wolf,” the con added. “Wolf howl is kick-your-ass free.”
He wonders how long they’ve been lying here. “Hey?” he says. “We gotta get moving at first light…. find a road … pueblo.”
Cacho’s asleep.
Then he’s asleep, too.
He’s awakened by the swelling sound of a helicopter. He scrambles over to the trees, Cacho crawling up beside him. They crouch in the cottonwood shadows as the chopper approaches, its racket swelling. It passes close to the trees, a spotlight flashing against the tree cover but not penetrating it. And then it’s gone.
“Madre mia,” Cacho says. “I about had a heart attack. No more under the stars for me.” He crawls about in the shadows, testing the earth with his hand, finds a satisfactory site, and lies down.
Axel stays put, too. It takes a while for his pulse to settle. After a time he says, “Hey?” just to see if Cacho’s still awake, and gets no answer. He wonders how the kid could drift off again so easily. And a minute later is once again asleep.