“Dead,” Terry said, with his wounded hand clutched up against his chest.
“How’d he get dead?” Jinx said.
Before we could answer, I saw Mama poke her head out of the hut.
“I been worried sick,” she said.
“We’re all right,” I said.
“Did you say Constable Sy was dead?” Mama asked, keeping herself mostly inside the hut, away from the rain.
“He is,” I said. “But we didn’t do it. And we got to heave off and go, cause someone’s coming after us that might be worse than Constable Sy.”
“Who’s coming?” Jinx said.
“Skunk,” Terry said. “You were correct in your assumptions about him being real. He’s not only real, we’ve seen him and he’s seen us, and-”
Terry held out his hand.
“What in the world?” Mama said from the confines of the hut.
“He chopped off my finger with a throw of a hatchet,” Terry said. “Had I not chosen in that moment to turn my head and adjust my body slightly, I would have taken that hatchet to the skull.”
Then Terry went to his knees, settled there for a moment, carefully placing his lard can full of money beside him, and then he fell flat on his face.
“Well,” Jinx said, looking down at Terry. “I had this whole brave story I was going to tell. About how the rain come and washed away the boat paddle that was stuck up in the sandbar, then washed away the bar. How we nearly got swamped, and fought the rain to get tied off. But with there being a Skunk, as I said there was, and you two done seen him, and Terry coming in here with part of his finger chopped off, falling out like that, it sort of takes away from it. I’ll just say we had a hard time of it.”
Mama had come out of the hut now, and she and me rolled Terry over and looked at his finger. It was just the tip of it cut off, but he had lost some blood, and that combined with the savage nature of our adventure had worn him out.
I didn’t feel so spry myself. I put my can down, and Mama and Jinx and me got Terry pulled inside the hut. It was tight in there, and we didn’t go in with him, just sort of pushed him inside, next to the reverend, who I could see was stretched out on his back, not moving.
I said, “Is he dead?”
“No,” Mama said. “He’s where the dead go before they let go of their body.”
Mama crawled inside the hut and got some rags out of one of the bags that was up in there, and went to tying off Terry’s finger. Terry was awake now, but he wasn’t frisky.
I got the cans and took those and put them inside the hut, back behind the reverend. Mama was still tying up Terry’s hand. She looked at the cans, said, “I suppose that’s May Lynn and the money.”
“Yep,” I said. “And so far we’ve made sure not to mix them.”
I crawled out then, and me and Jinx got the raft untied from the bank. Jinx had been smart enough to tie the rafting poles down with twine on the side of the raft, and now we cut them loose and took them and pushed off into the river.
The rain was still coming, but it was coming less and less now. The river was not near as brisk as it was before. When we got pushed off good, Jinx took to the rudder and I walked from side to side on the raft, poling it as much as I could until the pole didn’t touch bottom. It was hard to see what was coming, but we went along well until light came. I first saw it through the trees, a sweet pink glow, and then a bright-red warm apple swelling up to fill the sky.
It was a good thing to see, that light, cause things look and seem better in the light, even if that ain’t always the truth. But, like Jinx once said to me, “At least when it ain’t dark you got a better chance of seeing what’s sneaking up on you.”
The sky may have been lighter, but the river was near dark as sin and stuffed with limbs and leaves. I saw a dead possum float by, and a snake that had somehow died in the storm. The air smelled full of the earth. Eventually the sun was up high enough that the water seemed less coffeelike and more like milk with chocolate in it. Birds started chirping and flying between trees. The day warmed and mostly dried my damp clothes.
I took my turn at the rudder, and Jinx came to sit up front, waiting for when she might need to use the pole or the paddle to guide the raft. Mama came out of the hut with her bag and pulled it open and took out some dried meat I hadn’t known was in there. She gave us some of it. The meat was damp where the sack had got wet and the moisture had bled through; it was pretty swell nonetheless. We didn’t have any fresh water, though, and right then I would have kicked a bear in the teeth for some.
Terry finally crawled out of the hut and came over and had some of the dried meat.
“You all right?” I said.
“I am tolerable,” he said, holding up his bandaged hand.
“The reverend moving in there?” I asked.
“He farted once,” Terry said, “but except for that physical exclamation, he’s as quiet as the grave.”
“I fear he won’t live,” Mama said.
“He ain’t had it no worse than the rest of us,” Jinx said.
I, of course, knew what had happened to the reverend, and knew all that had happened since then had happened on top of how he felt about himself. It was too much for him. It was like one too many bricks had been piled on him and that last one had broken him down. I didn’t mention this, because nobody knew I had overheard his business, and I didn’t think it was time to bring it up.
The river was still flowing well, and the sun was drying my clothes. I was beginning to feel right positive. I had begun to think things were going to shake out all right, and that we were away from Skunk and would soon be someplace where he couldn’t follow.
I was starting to think about the money again, and what I could do with it. I thought about May Lynn’s ashes as well, though there was a part of me that was still mad because I felt those damn ashes in that can had tried to drown me, and I think I was jealous of her, even in death.
Now the river tapered, and I began to hear this rumbling noise. It was so loud I thought maybe it was thunder again, and that we were in for another rain. But when I looked at the sky it was bright and blue as could be, and the only clouds up there were fluffy white, without so much as a shadow of rain.
“What’s that?” I asked Terry, who was standing next to me.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“It’s the river,” Jinx called from her place at the rudder.
We was in a very narrow stretch now, but the water was really moving, the way the last bit of something will race through the bottom of a funnel. There was a wider spot beyond, and it had about a ten-foot drop-off that hit right where the water was swirling around and around like someone using a spoon to mix something up in a bowl. It roared like it was angry.
“Whirlpool,” Terry said.
Now, I didn’t know a lot about whirlpools, but I had heard a story Don told about a boy he used to swim with that had got caught up in one and sucked down, and had drowned before anyone could get to him. Wasn’t no one could swim down in that whirlpool after him, cause if they did, they wouldn’t come up. Don said they had to wait for the water to spit him out, which it eventually did, dead as last year’s news.
“There ain’t no way around it,” I said. “We got to go into it.”
On either side of the whirlpool the bank was not soft, like it usually was, but there was big flat rocks that looked like they was stacked on one another, pancake-style. I was trying to figure the best thing to do when Mama came out of the hut, wobbling from side to side. “We’re gonna capsize,” she said.
This wasn’t information we needed. It was pretty clear that if things didn’t change, this was indeed what was going to happen. And since the only thing that could change our situation was a miracle from God-a real one, where the raft was picked up and carried over the whirlpool and set down in calm water-things looked grim.
We was short on miracles that day, but we wasn’t short on water. The raft went over that drop-off and we sailed out in the air with a lot of force, like a dried cow patty being tossed. The raft came down on the water hard. I heard the hut groan. I heard the reverend’s body smack around inside of it. Logs creaked and heaved, and then we was swirling around and around, fast as if we was inside a rolling car tire. Once I looked out to see that Jinx was in the water, having been thrown free, and she still had the rudder handle in her hand where it had broken off. Next thing I knew the raft was going down and the water was rising up on the sides of it. I had somehow ended up on my belly, clutching at the lumber that was nailed to the logs.