Go-boy asked his girl to marry him.
He had just told me about it, about when he asked her and how—and I couldn’t believe it—and that’s when we heard his dad, in the living room, freak out.
It was five in the morning. We were in Go-boy’s room and I was sitting on his dresser, sideways. My feet dangled over a missing patch of fake wood grain, torn back like a bedsheet, exposing particleboard. I was telling him we needed to get to work because we were late, but he wasn’t hearing anything. Go was on his bed. His eyes were wound up like yo-yos ready to drop.
He’d been telling me about Valerie, how he was showing her how to use his boat the night before. He told her the throttle gets stuck sometimes. They drove out to the mouth of the river. I knew this was when he wanted to kiss her and how he wanted it to happen. He shut the engine down and explained that the fuel pump didn’t always work right and that you had to pump it by hand. She hopped into the driver’s seat. It just felt right, he said. Right then. Before she started the motor. So he asked her to marry him.
I was sitting on that dresser as he told me all this, not believing my ears. Go-boy was superexcited and I wondered if he’d ever had a girlfriend before Valerie. Then we heard his dad in the living room. He was screaming so loud it sounded like someone was cutting metal out there. Go-boy almost didn’t even react, like it wasn’t weird, and that was when I wanted to leave. But he got up and I followed him down the hall, walking on the little floor rugs with knotted string tassels, into the living room.
Go-boy had been telling me how his girl had said no. He was bummed at first. She didn’t even think he was serious, but he was. They were floating out there on the water in a small aluminum fishing boat, around midnight. Daylight was about to drop for a couple hours behind the north end of the ocean, adding that eeriness of a sunset nobody would see. It was graveyard quiet, the occasional slurping sound of a wave hitting the boat. Valerie said she didn’t know him very well. She said she was only nineteen, and they had just started dating. But Go said it felt right, that was why he’d asked her.
And then we heard that cutting-metal scream and I followed him into the living room. Then we saw his dad put Go’s four-year-old brother in a coma.
That was the morning the humpies came. There were thousands of them. Even more. They were in the river, jumping and splashing like it was raining size-nineteen Chuck Taylors. I was at the shore, sitting in my flatboat, waiting for Go. It was our first shift back working together after the one-week probation, and I was glad to be on his rotation again. We were supposed to motor upriver to the fish tower by five A.M. But the tide went out, and our boat wasn’t back-anchored, so it got beached. I tried pushing it alone but the damn thing was heavy.
Down the shoreline, two old guys stood around in rubber boots, heaping a gill net into their boat and talking and watching these fish jump. They stood on the mossy gravel shore, along with the seagulls and the random fish guts where the water had been a couple feet deep not too long ago.
“Lots,” one guy said to me, smiling, dropping waders and buckets into his boat.
I just nodded because this shit meant headaches for us up at the tower. It was tough enough counting these salmon from twenty-five feet in the air. It was tougher to know which kind was which. And now it would be a nightmare. It was like babysitting the entire river, keeping tabs on which ones swam upstream and which ones swam down.
The guy asked if I needed help with my boat, and I said no.
“It’s like ’94,” he said, firing up the motor and grinding away.
That was when I gave in and headed for Go’s house. I wouldn’t have gone there under other circumstances. Kiana hated me now and her boyfriend was threatening to kick my face in, so I was avoiding her. But I thought at five in the morning nobody would be awake. I’d nudge Go, and we’d be on our way. Instead Go-boy wasn’t even planning to work. I waited for him, thinking he’d give in and leave, but then we heard his dad and went into the living room, and things went to shit after that.
We didn’t work that day. We didn’t radio the tower to let them know what was going on. We didn’t call our bosses at IRA or Fish and Game. We didn’t do anything. I left Go’s place after we saw what we saw and went home and back to sleep.
When a cop showed up at our house, Mom was red in the face. She maybe knew the guy from high school. I was lying in bed, studio headphones blocking out all noise except the music in my ears. She came into the room, her mouth moving, but I couldn’t hear.
“Why are the cops asking for you?”
Her black hair was messy and she had a wad of gauze bundled around her seal finger, which if anything had gotten bigger. I wasn’t sure if she was embarrassed the cops were looking for her son or if she was embarrassed to be caught looking so disassembled.
“I don’t want this shit following you up here,” she said. “I’m not gonna put up with another thug living under my roof.”
I knew the cops were here to ask me about what happened to Go’s little brother, but a part of me couldn’t help worrying that maybe my shit really had followed me.
I walked past Mom and out the back door. Even if the cops were here to arrest me, she was still being unreasonable. Up here, where everybody knew everybody, she wasn’t concerned about her son ending up dead or losing his freedom for a stupid mistake; she was concerned about her son looking like a thug—getting that reputation. Everybody already knew her oldest son was in prison back in California because of some gang stuff. What if the second son turned out the same way?
She said, “Not under my house,” as I passed her and walked outside to tell the cops I didn’t know anything about Go’s dad and brother. And I didn’t know anything. I knew Go-boy a little bit, but not his dad. I didn’t know if what I saw was a typical breakfast scene at Go’s place or if the whole event was a freak accident.
I later learned that Go-boy’s dad was the calm in everyone’s life. Go-boy had been living with his dad since he was young, after things had gone bad for his mom. His dad had struggled with a drinking problem the year before Go-boy had moved in, but he’d quit for his son and hadn’t had another drop since. Go said his dad was the most stabilizing thing in his life.
A couple years after Go-boy moved in with him, his dad remarried, then adopted Kiana when she was just ten years old. Go’s dad was a history teacher in the ’80s and ’90s at the Unalakleet high school. He won teacher awards. He pushed curriculum to help prepare village kids for college. He became known as the guy who could find funding to help students fly out of Unalakleet for job fairs and college interviews (some parents even thought he used his own money when grants or fund-raising couldn’t help).
In the early ’80s, Kiana’s mom was one of his students, his star student, the type of girl who seemed to understand things before they were taught to her. It was Go’s dad who saw her skills and challenged her to work harder and strive for college, and after two years of extra tutoring, essay contests, and scholarship applications, she was accepted to a university in Seattle. At the time Kiana’s mom didn’t know the impact her teacher had had on her, not until she was into her freshman year, when the cold professors and triple-digit class sizes mocked her distance from Unk. This was around the same time she learned she was pregnant. While home over that Christmas break she decided she wouldn’t go back to school. The boy responsible was younger than her by a year and not interested. She had been raised by her grandparents, and they told her to stay in Unalakleet. It was the only choice. So she decided dropping out was what she needed to do, until she spoke with Go-boy’s dad. It was after a basketball game in the gym. They sat in the second row of the empty bleachers around half-court. She knew she wasn’t ready for a baby because she hadn’t yet experienced the world. Go-boy’s dad encouraged her not to drop out, and she didn’t. She returned to Seattle and gave birth to Kiana the following spring.
Kiana was taken by her great-grandparents in Unalakleet (she called them her parents), and by the time she was nine, her mother had graduated from college and married a man in Seattle and landed a job and a whole new family. Kiana’s biological mom and dad had forgotten about her, and when her great-grandma died, she was moved between relatives in Unk and Fairbanks—whoever could take her for a few months. Go-boy’s dad maybe felt responsible, or maybe just felt sympathetic, but either way he adopted Kiana when she was ten and gave her a solid home life, with a mother and a father and an older brother, and later, a baby brother she could help raise.
Why are they talking to you?” Mom said after the cop had asked me some questions. She was interested for real now. Word had spread throughout the day that Go’s four-year-old brother, Sean, was in a coma. A church group was getting together to pray about it at six o’clock. Mom had cooked meat loaf in an aluminum bread pan for Go and Kiana and their dad. Nobody knew what happened the way me and Go-boy did, and he wasn’t saying anything.
“Do you know something?” she asked.
I shrugged and turned away. Mom and me still hadn’t been talking to each other, and I didn’t plan on changing that.
She said, “There are a few different stories around town. I heard Sean’s been staying up past midnight. He walks in his sleep when he’s real tired.” Mom had removed the bandage from her thumb and was wiping down the counters with a wet rag. These kinds of stressful events, like big news and rumors, gave her a weird energy. “They medevaced him to Anchorage. He’s in a coma.”
I said, “I don’t know. And I haven’t talked to Go either.”
She told me nobody had talked to Go-boy, they couldn’t find him.
“These are the kind of freak accidents Go grew up with,” she said. “This one probably sent him off the deep end.”
She told me Kiana had discovered Sean lying on the living room floor. Mom added that her brother—Go’s dad—had always been a real heavy sleeper and was probably in his bedroom, snoring. It was his guess that Sean sleepwalked, fell, and knocked his head. He was devastated by the accident.
Go-boy wasn’t home, or at work, or anywhere.
Early that morning I had knocked on Go-boy’s bedroom window. We were supposed to work and the boat was beached and Go was a half hour late—the first time all summer. I knocked again and he parted the curtains and waved me in. The front door was open. I left my shoes in the entryway and walked through the living room into the hall. A kitchen light was on, even though the sun was pretty bright that early. Cheap plastic sports cups were everywhere in the living and dining room—basketball cups with pictures of players and their signatures. Dream Team, from way back, with Michael and Magic. Some football. Barry Sanders. A few commemorative baseball cups.
Go-boy’s bedroom smelled like coffee. There were a couple mugs half full on his nightstand. One was steaming. He had a notebook and it looked like he was writing a letter. In about five minutes he would tell me about asking Valerie to marry him and about how she’d said no. But right then his yo-yo eyes glanced up, quick, not even acknowledging I was in the room. Those eyes didn’t know what time it was—they hadn’t slept. And those eyes, on Go-boy, were unrecognizable.
Before this I hadn’t talked to Go for a couple days, not since his sister had bitched me out at the potluck. Go-boy was sitting next to me when Kiana grabbed my forearm and told me she was drunk when we had sex. Since then I had thought about all sorts of things I wanted to tell Go. Some were various forms of apology. Others were about my pop coming to visit and Mom’s bloated thumb. It shouldn’t have been that hard to talk to him. And what I needed to say didn’t even have to be profound, it just needed to be something, anything, but I ignored him, and he ignored me, and I had this feeling that everything would somehow have been different that morning if I had managed to tell Go what I needed to, days earlier.
When I hopped up on Go’s dresser, waiting for him to stop scribbling in his legal pad, I squeezed my fist open and closed, still feeling that sensation of Kiana’s thin fingers wrapped around my forearm, her nails digging into my long-sleeved shirt. There wasn’t a bruise or anything. It was a memory.
“We have to work,” I said.
He glanced up like he was surprised I was there. But right away he turned back to the notebook, scribbling a list with his left-handed grip and his elbow high.
I said, “Damn, dude, you don’t look good.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Maybe you’re sick.”
There had to be millions of those fish in the river. Those humpies. When they jumped you could see their fleshy bellies, silver and black fading down to pink. Before I went to Go’s place, when I was waiting at the shore, I sat in my boat and tried to count every one I could see and hear. But it was impossible. Like counting waves.
I thought about these things swimming in from the Bering Sea—a school of a million darting this way and that, covering thousands of miles. Every single one of them, down to the last one, could change the direction of the whole group. At least, that was how I imagined it. Fish are so nervous all the time. With their unblinking eyes peeled on both sides, any little movement by one freaks them all out. It’s a miracle they can end up at a single destination. It’s a miracle they don’t get so sidetracked that they never find a river to swim up and spawn in and never get to this single most important moment of their lives. It’s a miracle they’re not all extinct.
After me and Go saw his old man put the little kid in a coma, neither of us moved. His dad stumbled out of the living room, not even noticing we were right there, seeing it all. That was when I left. That was the way I left. Go-boy frozen. His dad swaying into the kitchen.
They lived in a HUD home on the northeast side of the village. Their house was set up on steel posts, about four feet off the ground—like many homes in town—near a place called Happy Valley. It looked like a neighborhood on an Indian reservation, at least compared to those I’d seen. Rows of lookalike houses. Yards and streets bare of trees or grass. Crooked telephone poles tying everyone together. Behind was a marshy area stretching a mile in both directions to the hills. I headed for Grandpa’s old house, where me and Mom stayed, over on the south side, where the river opened to the Norton Sound, to the Bering Sea.
I walked the long way home, down the dirt roads, zigzagging around muddy truck-sized puddles. To my right was the cemetery full of fireweed with white crosses poking above the brush, looking like a picket fence gone wrong. Behind that was the dark gravel runway for the airport. Next to one of the sheds, a forklift spun around, stopped by a plane, and unloaded a shrink-wrapped pallet.
Or maybe the forklift wasn’t running that morning. Maybe it was parked.
When Kiana called later that night, I told Mom I didn’t want to talk to her.
The cop had been back again around suppertime. He took me out to his truck and sat me in the front seat. Some older kids I recognized from playing ball at open-gym were walking past, and it made me feel weak to be in a patrol truck, to be restrained. The cop started the motor and spun the temperature dial over to red for some heat. He turned on his headlights, stroked his mustache, and asked me the same questions as before. Had I been at Go’s place that morning? Had I seen anything happen to Sean? Had I heard from Go-boy since?
Out the window I could see the mouth of the river where Go and Valerie had floated just before he’d asked her to marry him. It was the same place all those humpies were racing through to get up-river, to lay their eggs, and spawn, and make more fish.
The cop told me the seriousness of witnessing a crime. And then, when I still wouldn’t say shit, he told me neighbors had seen me leaving Go-boy’s house early that morning. But I was cool. I said I was there, but nothing weird happened. Nobody was awake. Go-boy was sick and didn’t want to work, so I walked home.
The disjointed events of that morning had been playing over and over in my head, and even though they were as vivid as anything I could remember, I still didn’t feel like I knew what had happened. Everything was so surreal. Dreamlike. Everything circled overhead before landing. Everything was still circling.
Truth is, I was waiting for Go to pop up and deal with it all.
The cop was quiet. I asked if I could leave, but he didn’t respond. He waited a little longer, then said, “Why didn’t you head to work after you left?”
That was easy. I said my boat was high and dry. Then I opened the truck door and went back into the house.
Mom told me I had to let her know what was going on, why the police were bugging me. She had this newfound sense of dominance since we’d moved here—rediscovering her power. I was just a small detail in that plan.
I grabbed a soda from the fridge and she was on my every move, checking right down the list. Did I steal something? Was I doing drugs? Did I get in a fight? Did I tag a building? Her accusations made me feel like she knew everything I had ever done. Her accusations made me not want to care.
“Nothing,” I said.
I told her the police were trying to find Go, which wasn’t a total lie. They had people out in boats and trucks looking for him. All his uncles had dropped everything and formed a search-and-rescue team. He had only been gone since that morning, but considering what had happened to his little brother, everyone was worried. And the cops even suspected him of hurting Sean. Go wasn’t at home or at the fish tower or at the basketball court or anywhere.
And I wouldn’t tell Mom the truth anyway. Seeing what I had had given me way too much responsibility. Talking about it would make it worse. I just wanted to forget the whole thing. I just wanted, now more than any other time, to go back to LA.
I went home after Go’s dad freaked out. But I didn’t sleep at all that morning. I lay in bed. Listened to headphones. I put one of my brother’s old tapes in the stereo. It was a blank, recorded for him by some friend. It said WICHO’S SHIT in marker. It was old-school rap. Stuff he listened to standing in front of the huge mirrors in our parents’ bedroom. He would put the tape in the stereo and dance in front of his reflection, wearing nothing but sweatpants and socks, kicking and jumping all over the mauve carpet, sometimes sparking from the static. This was maybe ten years earlier and I wouldn’t join him because I was seven or eight and the last time I tried he thought I was being funny and punched a charcoal bruise on my shoulder. This was serious. This was the place he tried new moves before he showed his friends, before he went to the junior high dances. I felt like I was backstage.
One of the songs on the tape started, Don’t fuck with the muthafuckin gangster poppin Glock clip, cuz when the clip is popped I’m gonna make the hit.
I thought about Wicho, at thirteen, listening to this, four years before he would load his own gun and shoot those kids. I thought of him in prison. I wondered if he was sorry. And I thought of Go-boy’s little brother, on the floor, four years old, not knowing what was coming, and Go-boy, seeing this, not knowing what he would do next. I thought about it all and then I imagined what it was like when Wicho shot those kids. Quick. Staccato cracks. The shots. The sun high in the haze. The echo of gunfire off a nearby fast-food restaurant. No other sound or human voices as Wicho ran off. I had never thought of this before. I shut the music off.
When Kiana knocked on our door that night, I knew it was her. People were always coming over to our place and just peeking in and hollering. Nobody knocked. But from my bedroom I could hear a thin little rap on the aluminum door, with thin little fingers. This was fifteen minutes after Mom told me Kiana was on the phone, when I said I didn’t want to talk.
Part of me was glad she was here. Not because I wanted to get lectured again or because I wanted her crying and asking me for help but because my muscles had been anxious all day. Because I wanted to get this drama over with.
The padded sound of feet came to my room. There she was. She looked like hell. Her throat was tensed like someone was poking at the undersides of her jaw with pencils. And even though the stress and sadness and all that stuff loomed over everything, I couldn’t help being aroused. I couldn’t help thinking of the night we had sex. I’d been pretty drunk that night and couldn’t remember anything that had happened except her. Those airbrushed forearms and fingertips. Her hipbones and the sides of her neck. That chin and jawbone, somehow smooth but sharp like the curves of an old Eldorado.
“Hey,” she said, exhaling.
I nodded her in. She sat on the carpeted floor, and when she did I realized how young she was.
“You okay?” I asked.
She was deep in thought, trying to put together something to say. It looked like she had been doing this all day, this thinking and explaining.
She said, “I know you were there this morning.”
I reached to the radio on my dresser, acting like I had something to do.
“Go-boy is missing,” she said. “We can’t find him.” She looked down at the ground next to her hip, her pointer finger twisting a loose string in the carpet, her knees pressed tight side by side. “I know you were there when Sean got hurt.”
“Where?” I said.
“I heard you two in his room. I heard my dad.”
After that we didn’t talk for a while. In my head, that cutting-metal scream sounded different knowing she had heard it. Now it was more a feeling than a sound. I pictured her in a closed room, lying in bed, blankets clenched and knotted around her neck. I imagined her eyes peeled like the eyes of those fish, ready to dart in any direction. And I still wanted nothing to do with this, but now I wanted somebody to snitch on her dad for me, to get some kind of justice.
“Please don’t tell anybody,” she said. She was looking at the wall behind me. “Don’t say anything about what my dad did. He didn’t mean to do it. He was drunk. It was an accident.”
I didn’t believe what she was telling me. Not then anyway. I wouldn’t have believed it even if she had told me the whole story of her stepdad—the teacher, the mentor, the recovering alcoholic, the adoptive father to Kiana, and later the man who lost his second wife—Sean’s mom—to a heart problem. The memory of what had happened to the little boy early that morning was too sharp. It was too real to be a mistake.
I remember hearing that cutting-metal scream from Go-boy’s bedroom as he was telling me about Valerie rejecting his marriage proposal. He didn’t say anything, and I didn’t either, we were both silent. It was the type of sound that infiltrated all the other senses—we could taste and smell and touch and even see it—and we both experienced this—and it yanked us right to the surface. We got up and walked out to the living room to see what was happening.
Go’s brother was on the floor. He was wrapped in an orange blanket, like a stork had left him on the front step but then dragged him into the house. He was half asleep, that tired-little-kid daze in his eyes. The carpet around was matted and full of lint, and the room seemed to tip everything toward him. The room smelled like old bananas. A New York Knicks cup, caked with soda syrup, was leaning sideways, tucked under the couch.
That was when Go’s dad appeared from the kitchen at the far end of the room. He was a terror. He raged under his breath, swaying side to side like he was on a boat, and he felt so close to us at that moment, like we could taste the moisture in his panting breath. He came swinging, throwing a glass ashtray straight at the little boy on the floor, hitting him in the head. And then he kept throwing more stuff. The ashtray knocked the kid out. It was a lucky shot because when he threw a wooden napkin holder and the remote control, at random, one ricocheted off the opposite wall and the other flew back into the kitchen. He wasn’t aiming at Sean or at anything, he was just throwing things for the sake of throwing.
But the messed-up part was that Go didn’t do anything and I didn’t either. In my memory, the distance between us and Sean—the fifteen feet—seemed close enough for one of us to reach out and block the ashtray. But we didn’t. We just watched it happen.
Kiana and me left the house. On our way out Mom gave me one of those looks. I don’t know what it meant, it was just one of those looks.
We walked down the road to the point. Kiana was a half step in front of me and I looked at the ground and watched the backs of her jeans drag on the gravel. We sat on an old telephone pole lying sideways that overlooked the mouth of the river and the ocean. I wanted to tell her it was just out there, not even a day ago, that her brother Go had floated in a boat and asked a girl to marry him. But I wasn’t the type of guy to be yapping. Pop was always telling me not to mess around in other families’ business.
She told me that when Go was little he used to run around the house naked with his arms raised above his head. He’d wear a fireman’s hat. She laughed when she said this, even though she hadn’t been a part of the family then—when Go had lived with his mom—she’d just seen pictures. “He was so cute,” she said.
And I thought about how tomorrow would come, and how Go might still be missing, and I’d still be the only one who knew what happened, what almost killed that little kid. Go-boy would be gone and Sean would be half dead and their dad wouldn’t even remember why.
The humpies were still jumping in the river, maybe not as strong as they were that morning, but close. I told Kiana I had watched them swim in. I told her that in thirty minutes the river had gone from calm to crazy. I was lying, but it didn’t matter because she didn’t care.
“Man,” I said, “where do they all come from?”
She didn’t answer.
“I wonder if they swim in from Russia, or Hawaii?”
Then we were silent again.
Kiana’s thin hand was sideways on her knee. She was wearing a white ring on her thumb, rotating it around and around with her index finger from the same hand. In the dim light, it almost glowed, looking to be made from some type of bone. The band was smooth and had a small, almost invisible hole carved through the thickest part, with two black dots on either side.
“Is that ivory?” I asked, pointing at her thumb.
She didn’t answer.
Upriver a boat stopped along the far shore and a lady hopped out, carrying ten-gallon buckets, and walked up to her drying racks. Underneath her miniature gazebo, fifty or sixty salmon fillets hung.
“Sorry about yelling at you,” Kiana said, shifting, and pulling her knee to her chest and then dropping it back down. I could tell it wasn’t easy for her to say that. If she hadn’t had a boyfriend, that would have been the moment to grab her hand or her thigh or something.
We sat a little longer, and I bet her she couldn’t count every single humpy that jumped. She didn’t try.
“I wasn’t really drunk,” she told me. “I lied. I wasn’t drunk at that party.”
I picked up a gilly—a broken chunk of glass that had been polished by the ocean—and massaged it between my fingers. Kiana was sitting on my right side, and I hoped she’d grab at that gilly and pretend she wanted it. But instead of taking it from me, she would hold my fingers, and our hands would drop between us, still locked. Then we’d weave them all together like a zipper and I’d set them on her lap. Maybe we’d kiss in a few minutes. Maybe not. I didn’t care. We could wait. We could just sit there like that, hold hands. Either way it would erase everything that had happened.
“So,” she said, “you promise you won’t say anything about my dad?”
I leaned forward, confused, dropping my elbows on my knees. Then I dropped that gilly and pulled my jeans legs up to keep them from touching the ground.
“Please.”
I would later understand how stressful this was for Kiana, how keeping the family together was her main priority, how it was more important to her than to anyone else. But while sitting on the telephone pole I couldn’t see that. I felt used. I felt she was messing with me. Maybe she was being honest—maybe she’d been sober at that party and was now sorry. I didn’t feel that way. Now I didn’t believe her.
I said, “I already told you, I wasn’t there.”
“Thank you.”
Then she got up and left me sitting.
The ashtray hit Sean’s head just above his ear and then rolled in a short half moon, bumping against the leg of the couch. It was emerald green with floating sparkles and caked with muddy ash residue. Where it hit Sean’s head it looked like it left a divot the size of a watch battery, for just a split second, before the swelling flared. Go-boy was standing in front of me. I saw it happen around his shoulder. To my right were the entryway and the door.
But we didn’t move. Go-boy’s dad threw that napkin holder and remote control, still screaming, then tripped a bit and caught himself on a lamp. Then he looked around like he’d forgotten what he was doing.
That was when I left. I grabbed my shoes and went out the door without even putting them on. The front step was muddy and my right sock got wet from my big toe to my arch.
After Kiana left me sitting on that telephone pole, I watched the humpies jump some more. In a week or two, all of these flapping and wiggling things would be dead. They’d become maluksuks, and they’d wash up on the beaches and sandbars like all of them before. Go-boy told me that when the humpies swim into the river from the ocean to spawn, they stop eating. He said the freshwater messes with them more than any other salmon. After a couple weeks, after they’ve dropped their eggs and sperm in all the right places, they become maluksuks, then die. Just like that. These things cruise around the ocean for years, healthy and alive, and then when they’re ready, when they group up and find their way to some river, they swim right in and die.
I figured I’d sit there on that telephone pole and watch them a little longer. They were right at the mouth of the river. They had swam some long-ass distance and were just happy to flip around. They didn’t know what was ahead of them. They didn’t know that all of this led to their death. But I imagined it didn’t even matter. They’d still swim up this river if they knew what it meant, because it was the only thing they knew how to do.