With a single step
I can clear the whole forest,
empty the river—Debisu
My vision blurs and my gut flips. I’m zoning out. I’m as good as dead.
“Ladies, we’re gonna shoot ourselves some waterfowl here tonight,” Overshort says.
With me a sitting duck. Despite the cold, I’m drenched in sweat.
Sounding detached, Overshort says, “This’ll be like a delay round. Mansion, after Quince here yells ‘Ready,’ you’ll have up to three seconds before I start firing. You won’t know how many seconds, though.” He lowers the gun.
I won’t gamble on three. On still wobbly legs, I take off, limping, running blind. Zigging, zagging, I try to stay low but pain makes a half-crouch agony and I straighten.
“She didn’t say ‘Ready,’” Overshort yells and the first charge explodes to my left, lead hail. Startled crows take to the air, squawking. I catch some shot in the shoulder, yelp with pain but I don’t stop, don’t slow. I run squats, torturous squats. Nikki shouts, “Did ya get him?” and I charge even harder through the foliage. Birds abandon their roosts, small animals flee my advance—squirrels, a raccoon, a fox? Roots trip me, the moss is slippery. Bushes whap my legs, low branches scratch my face. With my hands tied I can’t push them aside, can only keep my feet going and head down, pinballing from tree trunk to tree trunk.
Or are the tall structures on either side of me buildings, the surface under my feet asphalt? Where am I? Is the haze before my eyes riparian mist or gun smoke? Am I at the river’s edge or on Terminal Road? Running from Overshort or Shrike? Unable to use my arms for balance, I skid into a tree. I break my fall with my birdshot shoulder, waking angry nerves that adrenalin had put to sleep, and clench my teeth against the pain.
“Did ya get him?” Nikki calls again.
“Shut up! I can’t hear,” Overshort hollers back.
Hear. Of course! He can’t see in the dark any better than I can, he’s aiming by ear. If I take him at his word, that he’s not much of a field shooter, he won’t be good at this. Now, how to make tracks without making noise?
Afraid to make another move, afraid not to, I stand frozen. Overshort gets off another shot. It grazes by so closely that I can feel the heat, smell the powder, hear the pellets punch wood and snap twigs.
“Where is he? I don’t see him,” Nikki says.
“Shut up!” Overshort fires twice more in a sweep which I escape by mere feet. There’s a second of relative silence while he reloads. He fired four shots. Was the gun fully loaded before he started shooting? Damn, I wish I knew!
“He’s getting away,” Heidi cries.
“If he does it’s your fault,” Overshort replies. “Why didn’t you yell ‘Ready?’”
Why didn’t she?
“Well, where is he?” Nikki asks. “Do you think he’s trying to make it back to the car?”
I haven’t been, although I could probably find it. I’ve been running roughly parallel to the river. To reach the car, I’d have to break cover. Besides, once there, what would I do? There’s no way I could get into the car much less drive with my hands tied, couldn’t get loose in time to make an escape. But Overshort might not see it that way. I scout out a stone and punt it toward the road with a kick worthy of the Superbowl. It costs me a lance of pain but the stone clears the bushes and crash-lands into the grass a satisfying fifty yards away.
“Yes,” Overshort hollers, and blasts his way through the brush toward the sound.
I sprint in the opposite direction, plant my feet heel first, a hunting stealth technique. My newly-wounded shoulder burns. I feel light-headed and wonder if I’ve lost a lot of blood.
“Where is he?” Nikki’s voice is faint.
Overshort says, “I was sure he ... I heard him!”
“Must have been an animal,” Heidi says.
“An animal?” Nikki echoes with alarm.
“A chipmunk or something, Nikki, dammit,” Overshort says. “Back the other way. Nikki, use that damn gun of his, huh? Shoot anything you see.” His voice is already close.
I hear an abortive click. Nikki wails, “It’s still jammed!”
My amusement is short-lived. I have run down a blind alley. An impenetrable thicket bars the way ahead. The hunting party rapidly approaches to my right and rear. To my left, the river courses in its bed, dark as cold coffee. There is only one way to go.
No time for second thoughts. I roll into the water. The shock of the cold immobilizes, steals my breath, and stuns my muscles, but it clears my head. I had some vague plan to hide in the shallows, submerged just under the surface but I am already in deep water. Saturated shoes, holster, and clothes pull me down like lead weights. I toe off the shoes but with my hands bound can do nothing about the holster or the jacket. With outraged muscles in knots and tortured lungs gasping for air, I frog-kick to the surface, try frog-kicking upriver, away from Overshort. The jacket slides off my shoulders down onto my arms, snags at my bound wrists and slows me like a parachute. I have to stop every few seconds and lift my face out of the water to breathe. I could be running up a down escalator for all the headway I’m making. From my apartment window, the river never looked this fast. How do salmon do this upstream swimming? Out of breath, I stop to rest, kick to keep from sinking.
“Mansion, you can’t hide,” Overshort yells. “There’s three of us and only one of you and we have all the ammo.” He fires off a few rounds to prove it.
Heart pounding, I renew my efforts to swim. Instinctively, my arms try to stroke and I find that the same water that turned my jacket to dead weight has made the stockings binding my wrists flaccid. I work them loose. Lightning bolts of mind-paralyzing pain accompany the return of circulation to my hands but it’s not as bad as having to put weight on numb feet. I shed the jacket and holster.
I start to swim in earnest and find no power at all in my left shoulder, only pain. The entire onus of stroking falls on the right arm which is not up to the task and I pull to one side like a car with a bad alignment. I use the worthless left arm as a rudder and swim that way until the sounds of the hunting party become reassuringly more distant.
Adrenalin has carried me far but now I’ve exhausted even that. It’s is all I can do to keep moving. Teeth hurt from chattering, ears ache in the cold air. The water, at first too cold to taste, now coats the back of my throat with the flavor of dead fish, rotted wood, old tires, fuel oil, and God knows what pollutants. I have swallowed so much it swells my stomach.
My plan had been to swim upstream and come ashore at the boat launch where the scullers put in. Now that seems an impossible dream. I’m sore all over and tired, so tired. The urge to stretch out and simply float for a while is irresistible but the minute I quit struggling against the stream it washes me back toward where I started in half the time it took me to swim it.
All I can do is “go with the flow.” I turn and float downstream.
As I near the point at which I entered the water, I hear the three pursuers shooting along the bank. I breathe deep and dive. The deep water is even colder than at the surface and I have to force myself to stay under its dark cover. Finally out of breath, I surface a few yards downstream, float quietly with the current and listen for the hunting party. From the sound of it they don’t appear to have moved far or noticed I’ve passed them. Encouraged, I renew my efforts to swim, this time aided rather than impeded by the current.
Not for long. Fatigue returns with a vengeance and I long to sleep. It’s hypothermia. The danger is I’ll fall asleep without even realizing it. If I do, I’ll drown or Overshort will catch me but I’m too tired to care. A nap, just a tiny nap ... I’m not even aware that I’ve fallen asleep until I try to breathe under water and have to struggle back to the surface, spewing river water and stifling a gag.
I fight to stay awake the way I do when I meditate, by paying attention to each moment, to each breath. In and out, in and out. It’s hard work. It’s said that the mental effort made by Zen monks meditating in their frigid mountain caves generates so much body heat they can turn ice into steam.
A sensation of acceleration jostles me from reverie. I’m moving faster, much faster. No, the water is moving faster, carrying me with it. Why? I raise my head and get my bearings. In the distance, light close to the bank silhouettes tall buildings. Where the hell am I?
The buildings are the profile of the Shays’ Landing condominium townhouses. In building it, the developers straightened and narrowed the river’s natural contours, causing the water to run faster.
If I can make it to the condos, I can find help. Someone to call the police, and an ambulance. I swim toward the condo across the current but it’s too fast, too strong for a one-armed, one-legged paddler. The bank could be miles away instead of yards.
Fighting the river drains me. The current carries me away from the bank, toward the middle of the river, downstream and away from rescue. My next chance is miles away where the river runs under the bridge to come within feet of my own Riverbank Road, but I won’t make it. My leg, my shoulder, my swimming arm are limp noodles. Sleep. Sleep now.
Relaxed, I slip down, down. All is pleasant—until imminent drowning awakens the instinct to survive. I stroke back to the surface, renew my struggle toward the bank ... and hit the wall, literally and figuratively.
Energy depleted, in dismay I flounder before the retaining wall the Shays’ Landing developers installed to shore up the riverbank and prevent erosion. Even with my arm extended straight up, the wall’s top edge is still six inches past my fingertips, six inches that could be six hundred. The river bottom is too far below me to push off from.
In despair, I look down river for an easier beachhead but I know this is it. I have to make it here, there won’t be another chance. Digging deep into my muscles, I frog-kick, trying to propel myself up and out of the water but with each try I fall increasing short of the goal, groaning in desperation. Long scrapes sting in stripes from shoulder to waist. My shirt is shreds.
Scrapes. What scraped me? Kicking, fighting currents that want to drag me downstream, I probe the sheet pilings. Below the surface a brace runs horizontally across the interlocking sheets.
I’m no mountaineer but I have done a little rock-climbing. I can do this. To make myself as light as possible, I pitch my wallet and keys onto the bank, wriggle out of my shredded shirt. Though cold air glazes wet shoulders, the sensation of water against bare skin is liberating. I breathe, imagine myself weightless and slick, picture myself a torpedo breaking the surface tension of the water, the grip of gravity. Putting everything I have into one mighty kick, I propel myself up against the piling. Toes scrabble for the brace, not quite wide enough to stand on. Half-pushing, half-pulling, I stretch to scale the sheet piling. My fingers contact ...a rope? I tug on it. A piece comes off in my hand and I nearly lose my perch on the brace.
It’s not a rope but some kind of vining plant. Wild or part of the Shays’ Landing landscaping? Either way, it might be just enough help. I stretch my good arm, elongate my torso and my good leg. My fingers find the dangling plant. Pulling with my good arm, pushing with my good leg, knotted muscles screaming, ready to tear, I clamber up and over the wall and collapse, gasping, onto the grass. I puke river water until I’m empty, then retch dry heaves. Lightheaded, I rest until the cold on my back warns me that I can’t relax, won’t be safe until I get shelter and get dry. Pocketing my wallet and keys, I creep toward the light. Crawling with a bad leg and worse shoulder is impossible so I get to my feet and lurch ahead.
To no surprise, the Shays’ Landing main gate is locked. As I stand there struggling to stay upright, the headlights of an approaching car advance down the road toward me. I raise my arm to wave, then stop, suddenly paralyzed. Overshort? Could he have seen me go into the river, followed my flight downstream?
The car slows. I scuttle back toward the river. There’s a loud thud behind me. I hit the dirt. Headlights cut an arc along the end of the street. The white of headlights turns to the red of taillights as the car turns one-eighty and goes back the way it came.
When they have vanished, I return to the gate by cautious inches. Now a stack of Criers tied with plastic twine lies at its foot. The slow-cruising vehicle was the newspaper carrier’s car, the thump the sound of the papers hitting the sidewalk. Soon, I realize, someone will come to distribute them throughout the complex. Until then they will dry me, cover me. I drag them over to where sheltering junipers hug the brick wall, work the papers loose, use some of them to blot wet clothes and the rest as blankets. Just before I fade out I catch the headline: SMOKIN’ DEAL—CAR LOT TORCHED.
After what seems like an hour but is probably just a few minutes, heavy footsteps approach the gate from within the complex. A flashlight beam on the pavement precedes the clank of the automatic gate.
“Oh, Lordy, look at this mess, newspapers all over,” a deep female voice says. “Damn kids, I catch ‘em I’m going to—hey! Hey you!”
Who, me? I want to say. My mouth opens but nothing comes out except a croak.
“Move along now. Folks pay too much to live here to have bums sleeping on their sidewalk.” The woman steps into the light. A puffy brown parka with a Security Service patch on the sleeve makes her short, wide body even stockier. She waggles her flashlight at me as if the beam itself will push me away. “Move along now or I’ll have to call the police.”
“I am ...”
“Say what?”
“Police.” Under the soggy newspapers I fumble with icicle fingers for my wallet.
“Now you stop that. Don’t be doing that here,” she says. “I told you to stop!” She produces a cell phone and calls the police before I can reach my identification.
I lie back and wait for them to arrive.