It wouldn"t even be that hard to do. He cooked. He kept watch while the man slept. Even if he didn"t have the knife, there were other ways. s.h.i.t, he could just push the b.a.s.t.a.r.d off the side of the raft.
Ramon had d.a.m.n near died in the river before, and he"d been nearer 211 211 sh.o.r.e then. Trapped out in the middle of the river, where the current was strongest, the other man would almost certainly drown. And if by some miracle he did reach land, there were redjackets out there.
And hundreds of miles to Fiddler"s Jump. It was the safest thing. It was the sane sane thing. thing.
He let himself imagine it. Standing up, pulling in the oar. Two steps, three. Then bringing the oar down fast and hard. He could almost hear the man"s cry, the splash, the gurgling scream. It would fix everything. And would it really be killing? Would it really be murder? After all, one Ramon went into the wild, and one Ramon came out. Where was murder in that?
Under what circ.u.mstances do you kill?
Ramon blew out his breath and looked away. Shut up, Maneck! Shut up, Maneck!
You"re dead! The man jerked his head back toward Ramon, distrust in the dark eyes. The man jerked his head back toward Ramon, distrust in the dark eyes.
"Nothing," Ramon said, raising a hand."Just caught myself dozing off."
"Yeah, well. Don"t," the man said. "We don"t have another oar, and I don"t want to have to push this sonofab.i.t.c.h to sh.o.r.e so we can look for one."
"Yeah. Thanks," Ramon said. And then, "Hey. Ese. Ese. You mind if I ask you something?" You mind if I ask you something?"
"You gonna tape it? Tell it to the judge?"
"No," Ramon said. "It"s just something I was wondering."
The man shrugged and didn"t bother to look back.
"Ask if you want. I don"t like the question, I"ll tell you to go f.u.c.k yourself."
"That guy you didn"t kill. The European?"
"The one I never saw and don"t know s.h.i.t about?"
"Him," Ramon agreed. "If you had done it-you didn"t, but if you had had. Why? He wasn"t f.u.c.king your wife. He wasn"t after your job. He didn"t go for you."
"Didn"t he? How do you know?"
"He didn"t," Ramon said. "I saw the report. It wasn"t self-defense.
So why?"
The man was silent. He tugged at his fishing line, let it play back out, and tugged it in again. Ramon thought that he wasn"t going to answer at all. When he did, his voice was dismissive and conversational.
"We were drunk. He p.i.s.sed me off. It got out of hand," the man said, dropping the pretense. "Just something that happened."
He had tried to back down, Ramon thought. The European had tried to get back to just name-calling. Ramon had been the one who set the terms of the fight. Something about the straight-haired girl"s laughter. That and the moment after the European went down, when the crowd stepped back. It was in there. Why could he kill a man whose death brought him nothing, and yet not not be able to kill somebody when he had everything in the world to gain from it? When his very life might depend on it? be able to kill somebody when he had everything in the world to gain from it? When his very life might depend on it?
Ramon"s twin caught four fish: two silver flatfish with blunt noses and permanently surprised mouths, one black-scaled river roach, and then something Ramon had never seen before, which looked to be equal parts eyes and teeth. That one they threw back. The man roasted the three edible fish while Ramon used the oar to keep the raft near the river"s center. Birds or creatures near enough like them to take the name called from the tops of the trees, flew overhead, skimmed down across the river for a drink.
"You know," his twin said, "I always thought it would be good to go out for a while. Live off the land. When I came out, I was thinking I"d stay out here three, four months. Now I just want to get back to Diegotown and sleep in a real bed. With a roof."
"Amen," Ramon said.
The man cut a hunk of pale flesh from the flatfish, tossed it in his hand for a moment to let it cool, and popped it in his mouth.
213 Ramon watched the tiny smile on the man"s lips and realized how hungry he was.
"It"s good?"
"Doesn"t suck," the man agreed, then paused, his head tilting a degree. And then Ramon heard it too-a distant low rumble, constant as a radio link tuned to an empty channel. They realized what they were hearing at the same moment. Water, an unthinkable volume of it, falling.
"East," the man said. "The east bank"s closer."
"That"s where the chupacabra chupacabra was." was."
"That f.u.c.king thing"s days behind us. Come on. East!"
Ramon grabbed the oar and angled the raft as best he could toward the eastern sh.o.r.e. The man pulled their meal free of the coals and then went forward to look at the river. The sound rose from a bare whisper, something hardly noticeable, to a roar that almost drowned out the man"s words.
"Hurry the f.u.c.k up," he said. "I can see it."
Ramon could too by now. A slight haze where the cataract threw mist into the air. Rapids, perhaps. A waterfall. But their raft wouldn"t survive even a small insult. He had to reach land.
"Come on!" the man yelled, then dropped to his knees and started paddling with his good hand, scooping water as if he could swim the raft to safety. Ramon"s shoulders were sore; his hands gripped the oar until his joints ached. The muddy bank inched nearer. The roar increased. The haze grew higher.
They were close, but they weren"t going to make it. The flow of the river was too fast, and the raft had no purchase on the water. Boulders were beginning to slide past them, the water breaking white over the stone. The roar was near deafening. The sh.o.r.e was four meters away. Three and a half.
Something in the water caught Ramon"s attention; a shifting. An eddy that meant something the back of his mind knew. Withoutthinking, Ramon switched his grip, pushing the raft away from the bank, aiming for the point on the river where the flow was . . . right right.
The bank edged away.
"What the f.u.c.k are you doing?" the man shrieked. "What the f.u.c.k are you-"
In the same instant, a sick, grinding sound overcame the cataract"s voice, the forward float shattered, and the raft lurched, throwing Ramon forward beside the fire pit. The other man nearly tipped into the water. The flow of water arced at the raft"s sides, an icy wave running over the back edge and draining between the loose branches. Ramon slid forward slowly, careful not to dislodge the raft from whatever had stopped their rush. A boulder just below the surface and sharp as the prow of a kayak had nearly split the front float. The stone still penetrated the bent and broken cane. A half meter toward the bank, and they would have missed it. Ten meters on, Ramon saw the streaks in the water where it gained speed as it prepared to fall.
His twin"s amazed and joyous whoop barely reached his ears, but the man"s pounding congratulatory slaps on his shoulders conveyed the meaning clearly enough.
He"d saved them. Precarious as their position was, at least they hadn"t died. Yet. Four meters of fast water still divided them from the land, but the raft was stationary.
"Rope!" his twin shouted in his ear. "We"ve got to get some rope to haul this pinche pinche motherf.u.c.ker onto the sh.o.r.e! You wait here!" motherf.u.c.ker onto the sh.o.r.e! You wait here!"
"What are you . . . Hey! Don"t-"
But the other man had already taken two long, fast strides and leaped out over the water. The raft shifted one way and then the other, the ruined cane float twisting. For a sick moment, Ramon was sure the other man had freed him from the rock, but the raft steadied. Ramon sat, waiting, with his back and belly aching with fear. Was the other man going to be able to get to sh.o.r.e, or would he be swept over the brink? And if he was, where the f.u.c.k did that 215 215 leave Ramon? And the raft itself, pressed up against the boulder by the constant push of the river, was like a coin balancing on its edge.
If the float gave way or the river rose, he was dead. And rope? Where was his twin going to find rope, anyway? They were in the middle of the wilderness. By the time he"d thought all these things, he saw the slick shape of his twin pulling himself from the water.
As Ramon watched, the man hauled himself up the bank, paused for a moment, head hung low, and then vanished among the trees.
Ramon squatted at the front of the raft, adding his weight to the raft"s in hopes of keeping the float stuck where it was, and also crouching down, ready to leap for the sh.o.r.e if it did come loose. But as time pa.s.sed, the sun pressing down on his back and shoulders, warming his skin and the cloth of his robe, his urgency and fear mixed with a strange kind of peace.
It was like one of those meaningless Zen stories Palenki liked to tell when he was drunk. He was trapped at the edge of a waterfall, on a raft that might come loose from its stone at any second, waiting for a man who was also in a sense himself to return from the wilderness with some scrounged tool that would save him-a man who would probably try to kill him if he knew the whole situation. And if he did make it out of here, it was a race to get to a city where his future was totally uncertain, where the law might, after all, still be after him, while genocidal aliens floated overhead. And what was he thinking about?
How good the sun felt.
Hours pa.s.sed. When Ramon"s legs began to ache from squatting, he took the risk of sitting. The raft still shifted to the side sometimes, but never enough to alarm him. His mind wandered. He remembered lazy, empty afternoons under the blazing Mexican sun, nothing to do but pray that rain would fill the cistern before it ran dry. It didn"t have the immediacy of a newly returned memory. It was just something that had happened to him once, when he"d been a boyon another planet. A school of fish sped past him, scales flashing green and gold under the skin of rushing water. Ramon didn"t know if they were all speeding to their own deaths at the falls ahead or if there was some trick they knew that would preserve them. There had to be some way that the inhabitants of the deep, fast flow of the river coped with accidents of geography like this. Perhaps it was only that when enough bodies were thrown out into the void, some few would survive; like seeds strewn over rocks, a handful might find a soil-filled niche. It didn"t matter if a thousand died so long as a hundred lived. That must have been what Maneck and its people had felt, throwing themselves at the sky.
Fish putting their faith in the river.
When at last his twin reappeared at the river"s edge, he had to shout and wave his arms to wake Ramon from his half drowse. He carried a coil of vine wound over one shoulder, thick as his thigh.
Ramon didn"t know if this was some plant the man had known of, the knowledge of which simply hadn"t returned to his own mind yet, or if it was a lucky discovery-and he didn"t care deeply. After a long series of gestures, Ramon understood the man"s intentions: he would cast the vine out to Ramon, tied around a small branch.
Ramon was then to haul enough of the vine onto the raft to throw the original branch back. When they"d made the double-strand fast to the raft and a tree near the sh.o.r.e, Ramon was to dislodge the raft and let the force of the river work against the constraint of the vines to swing the injured craft to sh.o.r.e. An ideal plan, so long as the vines were strong enough. It occurred to Ramon that the man"s standards for the risk might be more forgiving than his own, but there was no better plan.
It took three tries to get the vine across to Ramon and five more to return it to his twin on the riverbank. The man was grinning as he made their improvised rope fast to a tree. Ramon was less sure.
But even if the plan only got him nearer the sh.o.r.e, he"d be able to swim the shorter distance. When the man gave the high sign, 217 217 Ramon began rocking the raft from one side to the other, catching the flowing water from one direction, then another, searching for the combination that would dislodge the float. For long minutes, it seemed the raft was stuck faster than he"d imagined, and then, with a lurch, it came free. Ramon lost his footing as the vine pulled taut, the raft shuddering and tipping. The pile of firewood broke free, branches and twigs spilling into the river and bobbing away into the mist. On his knees, Ramon waited as the raft swung slowly in an arc, the lashed wood groaning and creaking under the unfamiliar strain. The man whooped as the raft touched the muddy ground.
Ramon leaped off the side, and together they hauled it up and out of the water.
"Good f.u.c.king work, pendejo pendejo!" the man said, clapping Ramon"s shoulder with his uninjured hand and grinning like an idiot. The roar of the cataract was so loud the man had to shout to be heard.
Ramon, half against his will, found himself grinning back.
"I thought there weren"t any falls on this river," Ramon shouted.
"There aren"t supposed to be," the man agreed. "But this far north, who checks the mapping programs? They missed one."
"Hope they didn"t miss any others," Ramon said. "Did you get to scout it out? How bad does it look?"
The man had. The roar and the mist were the products of two drop-offs, one a little more than three meters, the second not quite half again as much. The raft would have been torn to kindling. But after the cataract, the river seemed to be smooth and relatively placid again. The trick would be to carry the raft to the lower river and launch it again from there.
They took the vine and cinched the raft to a tree nearer where it had come to rest, hoping to keep it safe in case of an unexpected rise in the river. Then, together, Ramon and his twin set out into the bush. There were game paths where animals had pushed through to the fresh water, but none of the animals had been hauling a two-man raft. Ramon began to regret they"d made the thing as large as theyhad. Night fell before they"d discovered a good path, and they set up a makeshift camp.
"It"s going to be a real sonofab.i.t.c.h getting that thing down," the man said.
"Yeah," Ramon agreed. "Better than trying to make another one, though. Not much cane this far south."
"Think we can do it? Move the f.u.c.king thing?"
In the distance, something howled. It was a fluting, lovely sound that reminded Ramon of coyotes and wind chimes. He sighed and spat into the fire.
"Between us, we"ll do it," he said. "We"re tough b.a.s.t.a.r.ds."
"Probably couldn"t do it, just one of us, though."
"I don"t think so."
"Good thing I didn"t kill you back there, eh?" the man said. His tone was joking, but Ramon knew it was a joke with teeth. Remember, the man meant, that I had you at knifepoint. You live because I let you. It was the sort of thing he"d have said himself, to remind the constable who owed what to whom. Only now, seeing it from outside, did he understand how alienating and stupid it was.
"Good thing, yeah," he said, and smiled.
Chapter 21.
Morning found Ramon aching and tired. Through the boughs above him, the sky was gray. The breeze smelled heavy with rain. The other man had risen before him and was boiling a handful of honey gra.s.s.
Ramon yawned mightily, then rubbed his eyes. His elbow itched, so he scratched, feeling the hard knot of scar where the machete had bitten. It was almost its familiar size and hardness. He plucked the sleeve of his robe down to cover it.
"Storm coming on," the other man said. "Gonna be pretty wet by tonight."
"Better get moving, then," Ramon said.
"I was thinking we could hole up. Find someplace dry to wait it out."
"Good idea. How "bout Fiddler"s Jump? Dry enough there."
"We got days before we can even think of seeing people."
"We"ve got more of them if we screw around like a couple of schoolgirls trying not to get our hair wet," Ramon said. The other man"s gaze hardened.
"Fine," the man said. "That"s the way you want it, we"ll do that."
After they ate breakfast, the honey gra.s.s tasting rich and heavy as wheat after the boiling had burst the grains, Ramon and his twin mapped out the path that made the best sense. Unsurprisingly, they shared the same basic idea. The other man objected to a few of Ramon"s suggestions, but that was more for the sake of the objection itself.
"We"ll have to clear some of the brush. Maybe a sapling or two,"
Ramon said. "You want to give me the knife, we can share the s.h.i.t work."
"I can do it," the man said.
"Your choice."
When they reached the raft again, Ramon used the vines with which they"d pulled it from the river to make a simple yoke. When pulled from the side, the floats acted more like runners, and dragging it was easier than lifting the full weight. The man walked ahead, clearing what he could, or went back to the raft itself to lift it over the rocks and bushes with which it became entangled. The sun sloped unseen toward the top of its arc. The Enye ships peeked through the rare break in the cloud cover. The work was backbreaking, but Ramon pushed through the pain. His spine was screaming, his feet felt on the verge of bleeding, his shoulders were rubbing raw where the yoke rested, but it wasn"t like he was cauterizing the stump of his own lost finger. If he was capable of that-and, judging by the man, he was-pulling a raft through the woods shouldn"t be worth thinking about.
And as the hours pa.s.sed, he found the burden growing more bearable. The endless ache in his muscles became less a sensation and more an environment. The other man darted back and forth, 221 221 clearing the path ahead, lifting the raft and pushing it past the tighter spots when he went behind. Ramon didn"t speak much, just leaned into his task. He sensed that his twin was coming to respect him. He knew how much that would gall the man, and it put an extra strength in his back. He thought of Christ bearing his cross while the Romans beat him and the crowd jeered. The raft had to be lighter than that, and it wasn"t his own death waiting when he reached the water, but instead his salvation. He had no room for complaint.
The third time he stumbled, he barked his shin on a rock. The gash didn"t hurt, but blood slicked his skin. He cursed mildly and started to rise to his feet. A hand on his shoulder stopped him.
"Take a break, ese, ese, " the man said. "You"ve been busting your hump all day. It"s time for lunch." " the man said. "You"ve been busting your hump all day. It"s time for lunch."
"I can keep going," Ramon said. "No trouble."
"Yeah, okay, you"re a bada.s.s. Got it. Put your f.u.c.king leg up and I"ll go find us some food."