Read Online Where the River Ends by Charles Martin - Free Book Online
Authors: Charles Martin
Tags: Fiction
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back around and ambled down the side road to the underside of the bridge. Residue of an old campfire, charred logs, cigarette butts and shards of brown bottles littered the bank.
The ground beneath the bridge looks like something out of a
Mad Max
film. When the construction team finished with the overpass, they dumped all the used concrete and rebar into the river. Discarded beer cans and Sprite bottles floated between the jagged edges of busted, Buick-sized concrete chunks and waterlogged cedars caught in the cracks.
Then there’s the river herself.
You ever walked into one of those seventies bars, something you’d see in an Austin Powers movie where long strands of beads are draped from every doorway? To get in, you have to slide your hands through, push them aside with your forearms and slip in without snagging your shoulders on the beads. Getting into the river is a lot like that. Scrub oaks, twenty feet tall, sewn together with itchy vines and Spanish moss swimming with red bugs, hang over the river forming a nearly impenetrable canopy. The exceptions are air and pinholes of light. The gnarled trees rise up out of the bank, lower their branches, span across the bluff like a fence row and interlock their leaves with prickly pointed palmetto bushes.
She is protective of herself—and those who enter her.
The river trickles more or less southward out of Moniac across fallen deadwood, through beaver dams and around cypress stumps. At Moniac you can jump across, and she’s rarely more than a couple feet deep.
I turned under the overpass, parked beneath the bridge—out of sight of searching helicopters—and unloaded. The rain let up, sun broke through and began burning the mist off the water. But that was short-lived, because the sheets of rain returned about the time I started carrying Abbie across the grass to the canoe.
I stepped down into the river and slipped on a slimy rock—bouncing Abbie like a Raggedy Ann doll. As many times as I’ve stepped into this river, I should’ve known better. I laid her in the bottom of the canoe atop a sleeping bag. Using the tent poles, a blue tarp and some nylon parachute cord, I rigged a makeshift tent from the bow to midway down the canoe. Her feet might get wet, but the angle of the canoe in the water would keep her face elevated and the opening in the rear would shed the rain and allow me to keep an eye on her. I changed her fentanyl patch, giving her a constant medication feed for seventy-two more hours. The patch was a lot like those worn by people who are trying to quit smoking. It was waterproof, allowed her to shower, bathe and even swim. In Abbie’s case, though, the patch contained a pain medication called Duragesic that helped knocked the edge off. It was what I called a base-layer medication, because if the pain escalated, we’d need other layers. I locked the Jeep and stood beneath the overpass. As I stared out into the rain, a daddy longlegs walked across my foot. Few know it, but it’s one of the most poisonous spiders known to man. Only problem is that its mouth is too small to bite a human.
I filled the trailing canoe with everything I’d piled into the back of the Jeep, then covered it with the second tarp. I made one final run to the Jeep and grabbed the bright yellow Pelican case. Next to Abbie, it was the most important item in the canoe.
I DON’T THINK G ARY had been all that happy to see me when I’d knocked on his door. It was the middle of the night. He appeared in a robe and sleepy haze. “Abbie okay?”
I explained what we were doing while he made coffee. He blew the steam off his cup. “You know you’re nuts.”
He scribbled three prescriptions and handed them to me. I shook my head. “Gary, I can’t fill these.”
“Why?”
“Because the folks at Walgreens will be on the phone for three hours making sure you meant what you wrote and by then, the senator will have gotten a whiff and he’ll know something’s up. We’ll never
The ground beneath the bridge looks like something out of a
Mad Max
film. When the construction team finished with the overpass, they dumped all the used concrete and rebar into the river. Discarded beer cans and Sprite bottles floated between the jagged edges of busted, Buick-sized concrete chunks and waterlogged cedars caught in the cracks.
Then there’s the river herself.
You ever walked into one of those seventies bars, something you’d see in an Austin Powers movie where long strands of beads are draped from every doorway? To get in, you have to slide your hands through, push them aside with your forearms and slip in without snagging your shoulders on the beads. Getting into the river is a lot like that. Scrub oaks, twenty feet tall, sewn together with itchy vines and Spanish moss swimming with red bugs, hang over the river forming a nearly impenetrable canopy. The exceptions are air and pinholes of light. The gnarled trees rise up out of the bank, lower their branches, span across the bluff like a fence row and interlock their leaves with prickly pointed palmetto bushes.
She is protective of herself—and those who enter her.
The river trickles more or less southward out of Moniac across fallen deadwood, through beaver dams and around cypress stumps. At Moniac you can jump across, and she’s rarely more than a couple feet deep.
I turned under the overpass, parked beneath the bridge—out of sight of searching helicopters—and unloaded. The rain let up, sun broke through and began burning the mist off the water. But that was short-lived, because the sheets of rain returned about the time I started carrying Abbie across the grass to the canoe.
I stepped down into the river and slipped on a slimy rock—bouncing Abbie like a Raggedy Ann doll. As many times as I’ve stepped into this river, I should’ve known better. I laid her in the bottom of the canoe atop a sleeping bag. Using the tent poles, a blue tarp and some nylon parachute cord, I rigged a makeshift tent from the bow to midway down the canoe. Her feet might get wet, but the angle of the canoe in the water would keep her face elevated and the opening in the rear would shed the rain and allow me to keep an eye on her. I changed her fentanyl patch, giving her a constant medication feed for seventy-two more hours. The patch was a lot like those worn by people who are trying to quit smoking. It was waterproof, allowed her to shower, bathe and even swim. In Abbie’s case, though, the patch contained a pain medication called Duragesic that helped knocked the edge off. It was what I called a base-layer medication, because if the pain escalated, we’d need other layers. I locked the Jeep and stood beneath the overpass. As I stared out into the rain, a daddy longlegs walked across my foot. Few know it, but it’s one of the most poisonous spiders known to man. Only problem is that its mouth is too small to bite a human.
I filled the trailing canoe with everything I’d piled into the back of the Jeep, then covered it with the second tarp. I made one final run to the Jeep and grabbed the bright yellow Pelican case. Next to Abbie, it was the most important item in the canoe.
I DON’T THINK G ARY had been all that happy to see me when I’d knocked on his door. It was the middle of the night. He appeared in a robe and sleepy haze. “Abbie okay?”
I explained what we were doing while he made coffee. He blew the steam off his cup. “You know you’re nuts.”
He scribbled three prescriptions and handed them to me. I shook my head. “Gary, I can’t fill these.”
“Why?”
“Because the folks at Walgreens will be on the phone for three hours making sure you meant what you wrote and by then, the senator will have gotten a whiff and he’ll know something’s up. We’ll never
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