“How far off we talking?”
Raleigh gestured with his swinging fish. “Two minutes. Right down there.”
“Not no two minutes, though. Ten, more like. Look, the blush is already going on this brown,” Shirley began, but Huck was already ratcheting the brake with one hand, cutting the magneto with the other. The engine dieseled a bit and shuddered still, and he heard the dull hum of the river all the way up here.
Shirley ran his eyes across the rusted shell of the T. “You sure this heap’s liable to start again?”
Huck fell even with Raleigh, flashed a snake-oil grin. “Nope.”
“Liar.”
“Want a second opinion?”
“Har har. You ladies is going to an awful lot of trouble for a gol dang truck tube.”
They went down off the roadway across a swath of cheatgrass greening through the dead stalks of winter, the bitterbrush and sagebrush greening up, too, and the meadowlarks trilling everywhere. The Bull Mountains loomed like a fortress a few miles off, snow glinting yet on the high northern rims. Otherwise the world had warmed.
They dropped into a wash and kicked out a cottontail, which raced ahead and cut and bounced pell-mell like a rubber ball and finally vanished down a hole. The rush of the water rose up louder with the close of distance, not a roar but a hiss, like midnight static after radio sign-off. Raleigh and Shirley walked upriver and cleared a willow brake and threaded their poles through the cottonwoods to get to the gravel along the bank.
The river had already come down from its peak—Huck could see the runoff line a foot or so up the rocks on the far bank—but ripped along anyway brown and fast and high. He saw a butterfly flash in the sun, saw it flit and dip and dart. Mourning cloak, first of the year. That line of azure jewels down each black wing, that yellow edge. Then he saw the body.
Half sunk and bobbing with the racing flow of the Musselshell, in a snarl of dead limbs and flotsam and jumbled planks lodged and upended, akimbo as the wreck of a raft. A torso in a dark suit with one swollen sleeve now visible, now not with the action of the water. A half-submerged cottonwood sweeper nodded and flexed, the root ball still partly attached to the bank.
“Could be a tire tube. A big one, out of a tractor.” Had to be. No, a sleeve—there it was again and now gone. Huck squinted and stared and tried to convince himself his first sense had been true. The longer he looked, the less he could swear to.
“Yeah, it could be a tire tube, but it ain’t. It’s a dern body.”
“Tube,” said Shirley.
“Corpse. Black suit.”
“Okay, look at it. Look. Right . . . now,” he said, when the convex edge of this conundrum lifted again with the water, breached again in its eddy of foam and debris. “That is an inner tube.”
“Huck? What say you?”
The figure again went under. A pair of mergansers rocketed down the corridor, careened and splashed crazily to a landing just downriver. The hen had a topknot like a woodpecker’s. “I can’t, either way. Could be a tube, yeah. But. It could be a dern body.”
“Now hold on already,” said Shirley. “This here’s enough of a goose chase.” He walked to the nearest cottonwood, eyed the crotch ten feet up. He leaned his cane against the trunk. “I’ll go up and shimmy out on that limb, get a topside look. Settle this nonsense once for all.”
“You’re gonna fall right in the dern drink. That’ll make two bodies in here.”
“Not likely. On either count.” He studied the crags in the heavy bark, found holds for fingers and toes, and started up. He missed a grip and dropped to the ground once, then tried again and dropped again. “Huck,” he said, “you’re bigger’n this runt. Why don’t you give a hoist.”
“Well, you’re bigger than the both of us,” said Raleigh. “Stouter, at least. Why don’t you hoist me?”
“Because it’s my idea. Plus I don’t trust your judgment.”
It was true Huck was big for his age, or tall anyway. Fourteen and he already stood above most men, certainly an inch or more over Shirley. Gangly as a sandhill crane, too—the only pants that fit for length were invariably agape at the waist, cinched into place with a belt that had additional holes in the tongue.
He could see this sparring going round and round, the shadows stretching longer, the day pinched shorter. He stepped over and wove the fingers of his hands into a basket. “You can both climb a tree, for all I care. Let’s just get somebody into the air.”
“You’d be the man to know, Slim,” said Shirley, and he put his foot in the web of Huck’s fingers and clambered up at the hoist, and Huck pivoted his shoulders and shifted his hands under Shirley’s heft and started to push, and Shirley no sooner got one grip on the crook of the tree than he let out a yowl like he’d been snakebit.
Or bee-stung. A handful of honeybees boiled out of the fork, and Shirley launched flailing and hit the ground scrambling. Huck both glimpsed and felt something thud against the bone near his eye while his breath caught for a jolt that never came, and he found himself pounding gravel right along with the others.
They stopped and caught their breath at the mouth of the wash.
“Left my rod,” Shirley croaked. “Jeez, look at my hand. Like a dern catcher’s mitt. Bastards got me in the neck, too.”
Shirley pulled his hand away and studied it as though the palm might reflect a duplicate of the wound at his nape, what showed to Huck as a rising red boil with an angry white center, the pinprick of the stinger like a bull’s-eye. “This ain’t good, boys. Last time I got stung I about choked to death. Swelled like that dern truck tube down there. Doc said I dodged a bullet.”
Raleigh had relaxed his hold with the fish and now the pale, skewered mess of them bled down the leg of his pants. “So what do we do?”
Shirley looked at him. “Cross our fingers and hope flyboy here can fire that Liz again. And get to it while I can still suck some dern air.”
They made their way up the draw. By the time they crossed the cheatgrass the red poison at his nape had worked around to his throat and up into his jowls, a mix of bruise and flush. His lips had ballooned, although his eyes appeared to shrink into slits. He looked like a pumpkin impaled on a barber pole.
Huck felt the anxious smack of his heart, felt a bead of sweat down his ribs. “Almost there,” he told Shirley. He pointed at the T, slouched in the lean of the sun. “I’ll run ahead, get her going. You want to keep walking?”
Shirley shook his head. He’d begun to wheeze like an engine sucking a vacuum. “Thung thwullen,” he said. He pawed at his eyes with his good hand. “Can’t thee thit.”
Raleigh’s peepers, on the other hand, were wide as moons, his mouth taut as a strop. Huck said, “You want to stay with him? Wait, no—come ahead. You’re gonna crank.”
They started to run, and the sprint went weirdly as if in a dream, seemed to occur in two cosmic places at once. On the one hand, he and Raleigh both ran and ran for what felt like agonizing eternity without ever closing the gap, the Ford always just ahead, just ahead, no closer and no closer and no farther away, either, with every long, desperate stride.
On the other, they seemed to appear at the car in an impossible jolting instant, as though they’d never made the physical dash at all but somehow catapulted not merely over the cheatgrass but also across the very plane of time itself.
Some trick of the mind, some distorted phase of panic. The rush of fear in the blood.
The fish hit the bed with a damp thud, and Raleigh went running for the front. Huck jolted back to himself, scrambled behind the wheel.
Raleigh looked at him across the hood.