Jack had the Jetboil going before I was fully awake.
“Nobody wanted to share a three-person pad,” he said to nobody in particular while pouring ground coffee from a Ziploc bag. “Three-person. Right there in the name.”
“That would only work out for one of us,” said Em.
“Exactly.”
Lux was at the entrance when we packed the car.
“I don’t know when they were dumped,” he said. “But they were made to last.”
We drove back out the way we came. I could see him in the rearview mirror, waving his right hand.
Kyle and Lyle’s was dark. Chairs were up. A handwritten sign on the door that read, “Probably closed.”
The Walmart next to it was closed too.
The Waffle House was packed. One waitress working the whole floor, carrying six conversations in her head at once. She got to us without looking up from her pad.
“How you doing?” I asked.
She looked up then.
“I wanna kill myself.” She clicked her pen. “What can I get ya?”
County General had the particular smell of institutions that had stopped apologizing for themselves.
Mike was in a bed by the window. The TV was on — a news segment, a correspondent standing in front of a convoy, talking about coordinated regional operations, unified command structures, the expansion of civilian militia networks into infrastructure management. Mike had the volume low enough that the words blurred into texture.
He looked at Jack when we came in.
“Took you long enough.”
“We brought breakfast,” said Jack. He hadn’t, but Mike didn’t call it.
Mike’s shin was in a boot, elevated. He looked at it the way mechanics look at an engine they’ve already diagnosed — past the inconvenience of it, already calculating the timeline.
“Six weeks,” he said. “Maybe eight. Bone’s clean though. Just the one fracture.”
He said it like that was almost good news, which to Mike it probably was.
I put the knife on the tray beside him. He picked it up, turned it over, checked the blade without being obvious about it.
“Hold on,” he said. He reached over to the nightstand and came back with a quarter.
“Old rule,” he said.
I took the quarter.
Jack told the loading-up-the-boats story the way he told all stories — starting in the middle, circling back.
“Show up at your mama’s, you’re not on the porch. Not answering your phone. I’m standing there with the trailer—”
“Yeah,” said Mike. “At the time I was the only one getting laid.”
Em was looking at the TV. The correspondent had moved to aerial footage now — a series of checkpoints along a state highway, organized, spaced evenly.
Mike glanced at us. At the window. Back at us.
“So,” he said. “Where you headed.”
“Checking out some access roads,” said Jack.
Mike nodded slowly.
“Take the canoe,” he said. “Key’s on my ring, the green one.” He looked at Jack. “Don’t scratch it.”
“When have I ever—”
“Every time.”
The gate was where the old logging road met the highway. Rusted, padlocked, a chain wrapped twice around the post for good measure.
Jack got out first and tried it anyway, like the chain might be more polite than it looked.
“Ram it,” he said.
“It’s my car.”
“Sedans are basically tanks now.”
“Why don’t you ram it with your truck.”
“I don’t have my truck. Duh.”
Em was already walking away.
We walked around the gate through the brush. The road had gone soft in places, half-reclaimed. It took maybe ten minutes to reach the water.
The river was up. Recent rain had pushed it past its usual line, the current moving fast and brown, carrying small branches at a clip that made the whole thing feel less like water and more like volume. We stood on what was left of the bank.
Nothing to see. Not from here. Not with the water like this.
“We need the boats,” I said.
Jack nodded. “And the magnet.”
We walked back to the car.
We got back to the motel a little after one. The heat had settled into the kind of thick afternoon stillness that made everything in the parking lot look slightly underwater.
Aaron was on his knees near the new half court, a chalk line in one hand, measuring something off a tape another guy held taut for him. Sweat through the back of his shirt. He didn’t look up.
A few yards over, the kid from the ice machine was working a cooler line into one of the supply trucks, laughing about something with a girl who’d climbed up to sit on the tailgate. She said something and he laughed too hard at it, the kind of laugh that’s mostly about who said it.
Nobody looked up.
Jack backed the truck to Mike’s shed on the second try. The canoe went in the bed, nose over the tailgate. Em ran the straps. Jack pulled each one after her anyway. She let him.
My kayak was already on the car. The battery was in the day hatch.
The magnet was in a five-gallon bucket with the rope coiled on top, the rope stiff with old mud. I put it behind the seat. The vinyl was hot enough that I loaded everything one-handed, the other hand holding the door away from my leg.
“Don’t scratch it,” Jack said, in Mike’s voice, to no one.
We stopped once for ice and gas. The cashier had a fan aimed at her face and didn’t turn it.
At the logging road the chain was the same as this morning. We carried the boats around the gate through the brush. The canoe took two trips of arguing.
The river had dropped maybe a foot. Still brown, still moving. The bank where we’d stood was half gone, sheared to a lip of roots.
Em went in to her ankles and stopped sinking at the calf. “Mud’s soft.”
“How soft.”
“Boot soft.”
We dropped the boats off. Jack and I drove both vehicles down to the next access, a fisherman’s pull-off Jack knew about, county-maintained back when there was a county to maintain it. Left the truck there.
We launched from a gravel spit thirty yards down from the bank. Em steadied the kayak with both hands while I got in, then gave the stern a push. She got in the canoe while Jack held it.
Then Jack. He got one leg in, the canoe left without him, and he sat down in eight inches of water holding the gunwale. Nobody said anything. He wrung his shirt hem out and got in on the second try. Em braced her paddle against the gravel.
I dropped the magnet on the first straight stretch.
The first pass, it came up with fence wire, ten feet of it, rusted to lace. The second pass, nothing. The third, a catch that stopped the rope dead in my hands — rebar, a whole footing of it, and it took both of us and the current to give it back.
Fourth pass, nothing. Fifth, a shopping cart, upside down, a beard of weed on the basket. Jack looked at it a long time like it might be wearing something. It wasn’t.
The current pushed the boats downstream of every throw. Half the work was paddling back to where the rope went in. My shoulders quit keeping count around the twentieth pull.
Sixth pass, something heavy. Slow, dead weight, no scrape. We worked it up together, hand over hand, not talking. It broke the surface as a rock the size of a microwave, magnet stuck to a vein of something in its side.
Em put it in the canoe. “Souvenir.”
Nobody laughed. Nobody threw it back either.
Another clean pull. Another. The rope came up dripping and lighter each time.
“We’re dragging downstream of it,” Em said. “Current’s got us before the magnet hits bottom.”
The pulls slowed. Between them, only water sounds and Jack’s knees cracking when he shifted on the seat.
Shopping cart. Fence wire, another length of it. A hubcap Jack identified by decade — “Late nineties. Civic, maybe” — and put back.
The sun came off the water at a lower angle. Copper in the sky started fading to indigo.
I coiled the rope over my elbow on the last pull. The magnet had collected a fur of iron grit, soft to the thumb.
At the take-out, fireflies were already flashing their signals along the banks. Jack backed the trailer grade in one try. Boats up. Straps. The truck bed slammed shut.
“Tomorrow,” Jack said.
“Tomorrow,” said Em.
The rock rode home in the canoe.
(FIN)
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