About the Author (27 page)

Suddenly: the river’s mouth, an opening some fifteen feet wide and overhung with mournful, drooping willow fronds. To the naked eye, the water’s surface looked smooth, glassy. But I could feel its dark, invisible tug. Something was sucking us into the river’s bowels, pulling us inexorably forward. Shadowy trees moved above. She could have screamed blue murder, and no one would have heard her. But it was still too soon to act. I had to wait for the perfect opportunity, when her attention was diverted, her gun pointed away from me.

But she was being careful. Rarely did she take her eyes off me, and only then to scan, nervously, the riverbank. Occasionally we encountered barriers to our progress upriver: beaver dams or fallen tree trunks. When that happened, we had no choice but to portage around the obstruction. I would steer the canoe over to the riverbank, and she would climb out onto dry land, the gun trained on me at all times. We would then lift the heavy boat and stumble over the uneven riverbank, past the barrier, then put it back in the water and continue on.

We had completed our third such portage when Les, predictably enough, grew exasperated.

“For
fuck’s
sake,” she cried from her position at the front of the boat. “We
must
be getting close to the fucking border by now!” She scanned the riverbank as it glided past. Then she pulled out Alain’s crumpled, hand-drawn map and bent over it, studying it. Her gun, I noticed, was now pointed at the bottom of the boat. Could I possibly . . . ? Should I attempt to . . . ? But then her head shot up, and her eyes blazed. “Hey,” she said. “What’s that sound?”

I stopped paddling. I heard a wavering, rushing tintinnabulation.

“Rapids,” I said.

“Right!” Les exclaimed. “Alain said the border was right near some rapids. We’re about three miles from the border. All
right
!”

I resumed paddling. The moment, I felt, was close at hand. The sound of the rapids rose, as if someone were turning a volume dial toward its maximum setting; they were just beyond a bend in the river ahead.

Then they appeared: spiky whitewater boiling away in a moonlit clearing. Les threw a glance at the smoking tumult of water and rocks, then whirled back to me.

“Okay,” she said, raising her voice above the roar. “Park this thing. We’ll walk the canoe past this shit.” She jerked a thumb over her shoulder.

“We’re fine,” I called out.

“
What
?” she shouted—either because she genuinely had not heard me above the crashing water or because she was unable to believe what I had said.

“We’re going to shoot them!” I caroled.

She raised the gun, pointing it dead center at my forehead.

“Park this fucker
now
,” she shouted.

“Get ready!”

I plunged the blade into the water and pulled hard. I saw, in a sudden gash of moonlight, her eyes go wide in terror. Afraid to meet the rapids with her back to them, she scrambled around in her seat, turning her back to me, and gripped desperately at the gunnel with her free hand. The gun, forgotten for the time being in her right hand, waved in the spray and foam. The boat’s prow tilted up like the high end of a seesaw, hovered for a moment in the air, then dropped into the white current. She screamed. I twisted the paddle, guiding us between two large rocks. The stern sat down hard, jarring my coccyx. A cascade of spray broke over the prow, dousing us. She flinched, and the baseball cap flew from her head, and I saw, with a clarity impossible in the rush and chaos of the rapids, the back of her small, unprotected skull. Deafened by the torrent, I felt time slow to a standstill, and I was able to study the way her wheat-blond hair, flapping around her shoulders, was streaked with darker bands at the roots, where it whorled from a greasy, uneven parting at the crown.

I pulled my paddle from the froth. A necklace of glinting droplets slid in slow motion past my eyes as I swept the blade in front of my face and raised the weapon over my shoulder. She was entirely at my mercy. My heart filled with the almost sexual ecstasy of my total power over her. And I had plenty of time. I had an eternity in the churning vortex of the rapids. I took aim at the crown of her head. I readjusted my grip on the paddle, like a baseball slugger about to uncork a home run. An internal voice—frantic, hectoring-screamed, Do it!
Do it! DO IT
!

But I did not do it—
could
not, I suppose—and in that moment of hesitation, the boat rammed a rock, just off the port side. Dashed sideways, I started to go overboard. I righted myself with a wrench of my shoulders. Another rock loomed. I stuck the paddle into the foam and furiously back-paddled; the heavy boat veered right, taking in water over the gunnel. With a bump and another splash of spray, we wriggled past the obstacle, and then the canoe, which had been rolling from side to side, bucking, and rocking, leveled out and subsided into the river’s black surface. As abruptly as we had entered the rapids, we were through them.

I clattered the paddle into the bottom of the boat and hung my head. Closed my eyes. The rushing sound of water diminished behind us. Les was shrieking. She had
told
me not to shoot the rapids! She’d nearly lost her gun! She’d nearly fallen into the water! We both coulda been killed! “Oh, fuck,” she added, on a hushed note of horror. “
The dope
!”

I opened my eyes and looked up. She was scrambling around in her seat, searching for the bundle that she’d stowed in the prow. “It’s here!” she gasped, hauling the package onto her lap. “But it’s fucking wet!” She looked at me. “Man, if this shit is ruined, I’m gonna shoot you! I’m going to fucking kill you!”

She ordered me to pull over to the riverbank.

I no longer had the will to defy her. I picked up the paddle and steered for the shore. She ordered me out of the canoe. I stepped out onto the sandy bank. She pointed with the gun, directing me up onto a section of grass. I followed orders. She then clambered out with her package, scrambled up onto land, and squatted near the base of a tree. She tossed the gun down and started to undo the package.

“Start praying, buddy,” she said.

The stretch of river in front of me was a single sliding glass panel, like a drug dealer’s car window. I did not pray. I did not care what she discovered when she opened her package. I watched, wearily, as she laid bare the mound of powder. It glowed an unearthly bright blue-white in the darkness. I was not in the remotest bit interested, yet I found myself asking, mechanically, “How much would someone pay for that much cocaine?”

“Not
coke
,” she said. She moved her face close to the powder, gingerly inspecting it for signs of water seepage. Then she lifted her head and said, not without a smirk of inane pride, “It’s smack.”

“Good for you,” I said. “That ought to destroy plenty of lives. But I guess it’s worth the lousy ten grand Alain is paying you.”

She shot me a how-pathetically-out-of-touch-can-you-be? glance. Then, in tones that suggested that I was an imbecile for not having guessed the truth, she told me that she stood to make a hell of a lot more than ten grand. Last week Alain had offered her the chance to upgrade to “investor.” He’d promised her a 200 percent return on her stake, plus the promised ten thousand for delivery of the goods to Canada. All she had to do was pony up some of her own cash. She had given him fifteen thousand, all that remained of the blackmail money I had paid her. “So this is like a
way
bigger deal than some dumb—”

She fell silent. “What was that?” she hissed. A look of intense paranoid suspicion had seized her features. Her eyes darted to and fro for a moment, then settled on mine. She snatched up her gun.

“I didn’t hear anything,” I said.

Then I
did
hear something. The crack of a twig. Granted, a stealthy, muffled crack, but a crack nonetheless. As if something, or someone, were advancing toward us through the woods, very slowly.

I got to my feet. I looked into the dense trees. It was impossible to see anything. I looked over at Les. She was hurriedly reassembling the package. She cast quick, nervous glances around her.

Then she got to her feet, too. She clutched the package to her chest with one hand. With the other, she trained the gun into the trees. “Okay,” she whispered. “Let’s get into the boat.”

We moved down the bank. She had just paused at the water’s edge to gesture at me with her pistol when a flash lit up the world, and I saw a portion of a tree trunk beside her erupt, spraying into the air a handful of toothpicks. For a confused instant I thought she had somehow accidentally discharged her gun. But when she screamed and ducked, I finally realized that we had been shot at.

Then we were scuttling, crabwise, together, down the riverbank. There was another explosion—this one directly in front of us—and then something that sounded like a hornet sizzled past my ear, and we veered hard right, into the black woods. We straightened from our scrambling crouch and ran. They followed. There had to be three or four people stampeding through the woods after us. Flashlight beams materialized like laser trails and probed for us through the darkness, casting aureoles of leaf and branch shadow against the forest ahead. A beam caught me, and immediately I heard gunfire, and another bullet sliced open the air beside my head. Running, Les turned and took aim at the waving illumination of the flashlights. A jagged tongue of flame shot from the end of her outstretched arm. The flashlights went out. Behind us I heard a strangled cry: “
Merde
!”

“Fucking
Alain
!” Les said, gulping for breath. She squeezed off a series of shots into the blackness. “That fucker set us
up
!”

Black boughs whipped across my face, slashed at my cheeks, gouged at my eyes. A mud patch sucked at my shoe, almost pulling it off. Tree trunks reared up. I deked around them. I scrambled on all fours up an incline, clawing at the loose rocks. The girl hung with me, struggling alongside. They were gaining on us. We cut left and slid down a steep slope. At the bottom was a stream; we splashed through it and clambered up the opposite side. We emerged into a clearing. Our pursuers had momentarily lost the scent. I heard them blundering around in the stream. She clutched my arm.

“Can’t—can’t—” she gasped.

“Come on,” I said, pulling at her.

We sprinted across the clearing, then entered a dense section of woods on the other side. There we paused for a moment to listen. I could hear them scrabbling up the slope toward the clearing. I looked, in desperation, at Les. She was still clutching the package, gripping it in the crook of one arm, like a halfback with a football.

“That’s what they’re after,” I said.

I grabbed the bundle. She caught at it with her free hand. We tugged, and it tore open. White powder cascaded like sifted flour and billowed into the air. She looked down in astonishment, then back at me. She raised her pistol to my face and pulled the trigger. It emitted a flat click. And again. She’d used up her bullets.

I pulled the package free of her grip and hurled it into the clearing, toward the sound of the approaching feet. She looked at me—a clinging moment. Her brow stiffened in animal resolve, and she stuffed the gun into her waistband, then darted back into the clearing, where the bundle of heroin had plummeted to the forest floor, trailing an arcing comet tail of floating powder. She was gone, into the teeth of our pursuers. Her last gamble.

I turned and ran. I heard their cries ring though the forest:

“
Voilà! Elle est là
!”

“Oui!”

I heard a fusillade of shots, as if they’d opened fire on her with a regiment of machine guns. I did not turn, but it was easy to picture her caught in the triangulated flashlight beams, in the fatal glare, as her body jerked and writhed on the ground. I ran on unpursued, free, alive, as the guns, in a diminuendo of haphazard
pop
s, gradually fell silent behind me. I heard our pursuers’ voices raised in noisy hubbub. Two widely spaced shots rang out. Then: silence.

I kept running. I do not know how long I ran. My feet were like blocks of cement, my chest was a column of fire, my throat ached with the effort of trying to suck oxygen from the humid forest air—but on I ran. Eventually—ten minutes, an hour later?—I saw, through the trees ahead of me, a pinprick of light. At first I took it for a flashlight. I halted and crouched low. But the light was fixed, unmoving. A street lamp!

I staggered forward, beating aside low-hanging branches. I arrived at the edge of the forest. I stepped out through a scrim of trees. The sky opened above me.

I was standing on the margin of grass that bordered a stretch of empty two-lane highway. Some twenty yards away, a faded billboard carried the image of a cartoon dromedary, a cigarette protruding from his penile snout. Beneath him were the words,
Camel Filtre
. The transposition of the last two letters was my sole clue that I had crossed the world’s largest undefended border, into Canada.

Limping, torn, bleeding (but alive!), I moved along the shoulder of the highway. I had no idea where I was going. But the momentum of pursuit had still not drained from my nervous system. I hobbled on for perhaps fifteen minutes until, arriving at the top of a grade, I saw, below me in a dip of the land, a small building. The sign out front said Motel. I stumbled down to it and pushed through the plate-glass door.

Behind a desk of wood-grained plastic sat a porcine, black-haired, red-lipped lady of, perhaps, sixty. She gasped at the sight of me
. “Calice tabernac
!” she said. I limped to the counter. I knew that I had to explain my bruised and bloodied condition. Using part English, part high school French, and part mime, I described how I had been on a rock-climbing expedition (gripping at imaginary cracks in an imaginary cliff face), taken a
mauvais
fall (tumbling my hands one over the other), lain unconscious until
la nuit
(pillowing my head on the back of my joined hands), but
finalement
awoken (eyes popping open) and walked (swinging my arms, lifting my knees) out of the forest until I got here
—“ici”
(pointing at the linoleum tiles of the motel’s foyer).