Rough Draft: E Tan E Epi Tas
It was a dry summer in the double ohs, when Russell and I discovered my brother’s canoe under a tarp in the garage. It was a great dusty red sliver, speckled with mud and gravel-grains and we grabbed the faded lemon-lime garden hose from the hydrant and washed it damn near clean. My brother’s polyethylene canoe lay there on the hot cement of my cracked cement driveway and dried back down to a dull-red sheen as Russell and I hefted the plastic oars, waving them like great-swords or dopey phalluses as the sun baked us red as ground chuck.
I rolled down the windows of my rusted car, and we hefted the little red canoe on top, secured it with a byzantine mess of criss-crossed rope, and Russell sat in the back, with his too-big hands hanging onto it, the rope, to keep the canoe from sliding off. I turned the key and the engine kicked up and I fiddled the tuner on my radio and the station crackled anyway, bits of top forty from nineteen eighty-four punching through the static as I stamped on the gas pedal. My car kicked up white chalky rocks and trundled forward, zipping past irrigation pipe and grey-barked cottonwoods and budding cornstalks. Dust was everywhere, sticking to our teeth when we grinned. Russell sang along to the radio, and I slapped the side of the car while I steered, one-handed, down the road to the Republican River. The road was pure dirt, sunbaked into a series of ruts, dips and rises, like driving down the spine of the earth. The air smelled like dry alfalfa, musky and thick. Russell flexed his hand on the rope, and I stopped the car. The road had ended. We were at the treeline, sitting amongst a thousand curlicues of thin gritty earth, and we climbed out the windows and undid the byzantine knot.
The canoe slid easily off the top, making a sound like a whetstone on a pocket-knife. We hauled it up on our shoulders and stumbled through the treeline, dodging stinging nettles and fallen logs. Finally, we came to the river, wide and flat and slow. The Republican was opaque, a brown swirling night that swallowed us up to our ribs as we slid the canoe down the bank and into the water. The water was cold—later that summer it would be a lukewarm tea, but now it was cold, and we swore as gooseflesh formed on our milk-white chicken legs. We awkwardly climbed into my brother’s canoe, rocking it mightily, side to side, laughing as we felt it begin to tip dangerously. Waves rippled out from our little red lifeboat, and we grabbed our plasticine oars with the conviction of conquistadors and voyageurs, intent on conquering all the tree-fletched world before us.
At first we rowed with unbridled enthusiasm, impressed by our ability to move, to power onward, to test our mettle against the liquid river anvil. We chose narrow passages when islands split the river, skimmed close to fallen logs and other trouble spots, felt daring and strong and machine-precise. For a time, there was no longer Russell, a canoe, oars, me, there was only one—meat-powered polyethylene surging forward, cutting through the water like a gladius through a brown barbarian jugular. We stripped off our shirts and soaked our heads in the brown water. It trickled down our backs in fat pearls, mixing easily with our sweat.
It was hot. We stopped at a sandbar, ramming carelessly up on its bank and tying the rope to a sunken log. We lazed in the river, belly-up, toes wriggling through top-sand and down into the cool rivermud, which anchored us from the slow current. It felt good. A deer crossed the river, thirty yards up, bounding clumsily through, kicking up great big waves and making a roaring oceanic cacophony.
‘A deer. Lookit that.’
The sun began to lick the treetops and settle down like a flaming melon-eye, behind us. We strode loose-limbed up the sandbar and shoved off again into the water, intent on reaching Carter Bridge before nightfall. As we traveled deeper into the Republican, she turned on us, stymied us where once she had been so smooth and so sweet. We bottomed out and had to get out and pull through long sandy stretches. Then, first, Russell broke his oar, and I broke mine as well, trying to push through another shallow stretch, and we lost long, sun-filled minutes hunting for sticks long and thick enough to use as punting poles.
We swore hoary oaths and grunted and cursed the rasping scratch of polyethylene on sand. The sky grew dimmer, and blue dusk set on, though we seemed no closer to the bridge. The uncomfortable thought that we might be stuck out on the river in the pitch-dark began to niggle at the corners of my mind, manifesting as a soft-nausea. Still, the night was beautiful. The temperature had plummeted, and we shivered in our still-wet shorts, listening to a symphony of crickets and night-birds and the echoing unknown.
‘What if we don’t make it?’
‘We’ll make it.’
Russell shrugged. Stopping before the bridge meant crossing great, corn-packed fields and barbed-wire fences, barefoot as burdened by a mountain of red polyethylene. My arms began to ache clean through to the bone, but I kept paddling, even as Russell slowed his strokes and at times stopped all together. Never give an inch to the snakebacked river, not even in the face of night, not even with sunburned back and feet, not even when bug-bitten and rawboned.
I could see the moon. I leaned back and stared up at it and felt bonechilled. We drifted down the river, all precision and effort forgotten, ground out of our milk-skinned meat. We got stuck again, beached on another sandbar. Russell sighed heavily and stepped out of the canoe. Instead of getting back in, he grabbed that coarse rope which had earlier been criss-crossed and byzantine, swore at it, called out to it, ‘C-mere, you sumbitch.’ He began to pull the canoe down the river, making long, slumping steps in the shin-high water. I paddled softly behind him, trying to keep the rope from getting taut. We continued on like that, as the stars turned on, one by one.
Russell stopped in the water, legs splayed apart, shoulders drooping.
‘The bridge.’
He pointed. I jumped out and ran up beside him.
‘The bridge!’
‘Fuckin’ right.’
We laughed then, great big glorious gales of laughter, laughed breathless and heaving as we stumble-sprinted down the river into the waiting moon, dragging the canoe, waving our improvised paddles in victory. We had won.
We dragged the canoe through fifteen feet of stinking mud and cat-tail reeds, and hoisted the canoe on our shoulders.
‘You got it?’ He asked.
‘Yeah, I got it.’
We walked the last quarter mile into town, shirtless, mud-speckled, and grinning, modern-day hoplites, bone-dead and gloriously alive. Come home with your shied, or not at all.
