“Great,” Casey says, sounding distracted. He’s switched to looping the vine over his shoulder, gathering it into a large, loose coil before cutting it again. “Should be enough for that, anyway—come on!”
Together they race back over to the riverbank, where Todd is looking more and more petrified by the minute. Will doesn’t blame him; the tree has started to make some really upsetting cracking noises.
“Sandy!” Casey calls over the rush of river and rain; Will glances at him, wondering how on earth he expects the other man to hear him across the water, and then realizes Casey’s put him on speakerphone. “Will found—a rope, sort of. I’m going to go get him, and Will’s gonna stay here in case?—”
“No,” Will says, the awful realization washing over him all at once, “it can’t be you. It has to be me.” Casey opens his mouth to argue, but they don’t havetime, so Will snatches the vines with his bare hands after all—oh, well—and, as he wraps it around his waist and ties it off, snaps, “Just think about it for a second, will you? You’re bigger than me; I’m pretty sure you’re stronger than me, too. If I get to Todd and the tree breaks, or we go in, you’ve got a chance of pulling us both back. Me? Nah. We’d all end up in the river together.” He tosses Casey, whose face is creasing with obvious disagreement, the other end of the rope, such as it is, and says, “Also, and this is important: If you let me drown in there, I’m going to kill you, so I recommend you keep track of that end, all right?”
Then, swallowing hard and before Casey can reply, he turns around and hops up onto the felled, failing tree trunk. The way it’s swaying in the river had been, from the banks, slight but somewhat unsettling—from here it’s downright sickening, and he realizes immediately that he’ll be thrown off if he tries to walk across it. Swallowing his fear as well assome of his pride and at least a third of his dignity, Will crouches down on the tree until he can lie basically flat across it, and pull himself along the trunk in a half-realized army crawl.
“You don’t have to do this!” Casey’s voice already sounds further away than it had from the ground, fading as Will inches further out over the water. “Whatever you’re trying to prove, letmedo it, you idiot, at least I know what I’m?—”
“Shut up!” Will calls back to him. “Let me focus!”
At this point, Casey either listens to him—a miraculous first, if so—or, more likely, Will simply stops being able to hear him over the rush of water. Either way it’s just as well. Grimly, as he inches his way across the tree to the spot where Todd’s dark hair is just visible, Will thinks that he’d probably have fallen in by now if he could still hear Casey, sent to his death by an inability to keep himself from turning his own head to glare.
Will tries, as he goes, not to think of that summer after Walter Gramlich died, when it was all anyone talked about. Will tries not to think about the sound of the water or the creak of the tree or the furious rabbit-beat of his heart in his eardrums, thumping out the time. He tries not to think about the stinging sensation in his hands, irritated by the vine and now, he suspects, scraped bloody on the tree bark, or about the fact that he’s not sure he’s ever been quite this cold before. He tries to think, instead, about how it would feel to be Todd Gunderson right now, shocked and alone and scared, half-drowned, too deep in the nightmare of the experience to realize anyone is even there to help him. Will can’t be scared right now, because if he were Todd Gunderson, he would want whatever adult was coming to help him to be strong. Hearty. Unafraid.
Will is, in fact, utterly, chokingly terrified, but he’s reasonably certain pretending he isn’t is at least half the battle.
He reaches Todd eventually. The tree is swaying alarmingly now, and Will slides sideways as far as he dares, half to get close enough to be heard over the water, and half out of a desire tocling briefly to the tree trunk like a human barnacle. All he succeeds in doing is delivering a nasty surprise to Todd, who, not expecting a human face to abruptly appear next to his own in this situation, helpfully says, “AHHHH!” and then, in case Will missed it, “AHHHHHHHH!”
“Hey! Todd! It’s me, Will, from lunch.” Will basically screams this to be heard over the water before realizing, seconds too late, that it’s a completely asinine thing to say in the circumstances, but there’s nothing to be done about it now. “I’m here to get you out of this, okay?”
“You?” Todd says. His voice is a squeak of terror, which, while understandable, is not very flattering.
“Me,” Will confirms, and then, in case it helps, adds, “and Casey. He’s on the bank; he’s tied to me with a—well—it’s a vine, basically, but it’ll hold. You’re going to climb up, and?—”
Todd whimpers, shaking his head, and cries, “I tried tobefore,okay, the current’s toostrong, it’ll pull me back down?—”
“I got you,” Will says, and offers Todd a hand. “Come on.”
The next few minutes are, not to put too fine a point on it, an agony. In spite of a strong verbal offense, Will becomes increasingly sure as he attempts to haul Todd up out of the churning river that he is going to fail miserably and doom them both to a watery grave. The current, as Todd warned, is incredibly strong, and Todd’s also nearly Will’s height, despite being decades younger. In the end, it’s only on sheer spite that Will manages it—after so many years of refusing to go to the gym, it would be such an indignity to cause his own death and someone else’s due to a lack of upper body strength. That, combined with several previous minutes’ effort on inching Todd ever so slightly higher on the log, gives Will the burst of energy he needs. With a huge, grunting breath, he throws as much of his weight as he can into one last heave, and manages to get Todd onto the top of the log.
Both of them lie there, gasping, getting their breath back, fora second. But they don’t have seconds to spare; the minute he has air in his lungs again, Will says, “All right! Come on! Let’s go!”
“Don’t want to,” Todd says, in a small voice; he is, Will notices, clinging to the tree quite tightly. “Can’t move.”
Will takes a deep breath, wanting to sound reassuring and steady and not like he’s going tofreak outand startscreamingif they don’t get off thisprecarious login the nextfifteen seconds. That’s what his father would have done—freaked out, and yelled at Will, and made it worse—and Will’s surprised to find within him an untapped well to reach for now, of the sort of things he’d always wished the man might say instead. “I know you’re scared, Todd, but it’s all going to be okay. Casey’s here, and your dad, and all you have to do is make it a couple more feet, all right? You don’t have to stand up or anything; you can just crawl along the trunk, okay? And—here.” Quickly, he yanks at the dangling vine until he can loop a section of it around Todd’s wrist. “Now you’re tied to Casey on the shore, and I’ll be right behind you. You can do this, Todd; I know you can. Take it nice and slow if you need to, just get moving, all right?”
“All right,” Todd says, in a small voice. “All right.” And then, thank God, he starts to crawl.
He goes, in Will’s opinion, a bittooslowly, but it doesn’t seem the time to point it out. Still, as they inch their way back towards the riverbank, Will can’t quite escape the knowledge that time is running short. The sways are getting larger—what little hold remains between land and tree is slipping away—they’re nearly to the shore, inches away, Casey close enough that he could almost wade in and grab them, but any second now?—
“Todd, jump!” Will calls, and Todd freezes, flinches; God, they don’t have time towait. With a snarling noise he wouldn’t have expected himself to make, Will shifts his own grip on the tree, grabs Todd by the wrist, and, using his legs to generate asmuch momentum as possible, throws them both towards the riverbank with a desperate, frantic abandon. And as they fly through the air, arms windmilling, Will hears the tree let out one last groan of defeat, and, at last, leave the land entirely behind.
TEN
The drive back to the market parking lot isn’t themostawkward car ride of Will’s life. It is, however, second only to a van ride back from some field trip or another when Will was in ninth grade, during which he had been taking an innocent nap and woken up to the realization that Missy Pruitt and Kyle Jackson were hooking up in the seat next to him. He has to give it to those two: That was a worse situation than this one.
However, in that unfortunate instance, Will had decided his best course of action was simply to continue to pretend to be asleep. That option is decidedly not available to him here, and to be honest, Will thinks it would be an improvement if it was. They’re sitting three across in the cab of Casey’s pickup, Will in the middle because it felt rude to make a traumatized teenager suffer another indignity; Todd’s dripping underneath the blanket Casey hauled out from beneath the passenger seat, not that it matters. It’s not as though Will isn’t basically soaked again himself, the brand-new, pristine sweatsuit transformed into a mud-streaked, rain-weighted horror. He’s achingly aware that there is nothing between him and Casey but a few scant inches of space and some soaking wet fabric,but he’s trying his best not to be. Instead, he’s watching the water slip and slide in little droplets across the worn brown leather seats for something to do, since Casey’s doing most of the talking.
The conversation…ranges. Sometimes Casey’s stern, even harsh: What was Todd thinking, going out on that bridge with those kids, even if they were joking? Didn’t he know better? Hadn’t Casey taught Todd better himself, taught him to respect the power and danger of the natural world?
But then at other moments, Casey’s softer. Gruffer. He’s so glad Todd’s okay; he doesn’t mean to yell, it’s just that it was such a scary thing; he hopes Todd will still come to him for help and guidance. His voice breaks once or twice, and Will has to look out the window and think,If you pretend to be asleep, William, it will make you look even weirder than if you just don’t make eye contact with anyone. No one wants to make eye contact with you, anyway! It’s a moving car! Be normal! Be neutral!
But Todd, somewhat understandably in Will’s opinion, is surly and sharp and irritable and embarrassed, more prickly than Will thinks he would be usually. It’s not really like Will has such a sense of him—some of the awkwardness of the car ride is the fact that, halfwaytothe car, Todd had turned to him and demanded, “Okay, seriously,lunch guy, why are youhere, what ishappening,” which, while fair, had been demoralizing.
Todd and Casey, on the other hand, obviously have quite a close relationship, and one Will clearly doesn’t know the half of. There’s not much he can think of to say that wouldn’t sound, at best, overly familiar and, at worst, incredibly stupid, so he mostly sits quietly and tries not to flinch too dramatically when Todd, unhappy and lashing out, snaps something like, “I mean, it’s not like I’ve seen youaroundso much,” or, “What else are we supposed to do with our free time, then, huh? You got any thoughts, Case?” It’s obvious that these jabs land for Casey, forall Will doesn’t have the context to understand why; it’s clear in his face, the way his breath hisses in.
