Eighty-Sixed : Chapter 2 - Yellow

Rain exploded against the river’s surface like gunshots.  Stinging rivets of watery bullets ricochetted into Jeremy’s face.  

“David!” he gasped.  “Hold on!”

Flailing in the swiftly moving current, Jeremy furiously cradled his brother David’s head like a football, tucked tightly against his shoulder. They bobbed in the foamy rushing currents, Jeremy gulping for air just before being pulled underwater once again.  Each time the current dragged him downward, Jeremy simultaneously pushed David above him so as not to be drawn down with him.  

David's body was lifeless, heavy, and limp like a sinker on a fishing line.  Jeremy desperately kicked with worn-out legs that burned like fire.  He scraped the water’s surface with his free arm, stroke, stroke, stroke.  All the while, with every panicked breath, the river tossed Jeremy and David further into darkness and the low-hanging canopy of trees.  Daylight had nearly disappeared. 

A deep gash was now visible across David’s forehead.  It poured forth with dark blood in a seemingly endless cascade.  Each time a hard wave poured over David’s face it would momentarily wash the blood clean away, only for it to immediately start flowing again in the same crimson rivulets, over David’s shuttered eyes, splattered like a port wine stain across his cheek. 

David was all dead weight, though he was not yet dead.

“Come on, David!” Jeremy shouted.  “Think of Olivia.  The kids!  The kids are counting on you.  Come on, man!”

The threatening temptation to succumb to the undertow, to drift downward like heavy lumbering stones, was nearly too much to fight. The water had almost taken them beyond the point where Jeremy could continue to fight.

“Come on, David,” he said again, and water filled his mouth so fast he almost couldn’t spit it out before being pulled under once again. 

Come on, David.

A little more than an hour before, just as the rain had swelled down in low dark clouds as the sun was swallowed away, David’s rented kayak had capsized less with a thunderous crash than a simple snapping crack.  David had scraped the craft, yellow and pointed on the ends like a floating fiberglass banana, across an unmoving rock hidden in a liquid shadowy cloak mere millimeters beneath the surface. 

Jeremy almost didn’t hear his brother cry out.  He was ahead a solid thirty meters when David shouted a muted swear that was swept away in the wind by the roar of the river. David frantically paddled forward, as if increased speed would improve buoyancy, but Jeremy could see his brother’s kayak rapidly taking in water and going down fast. In minutes the yellow kayak would be a permanent landmark at the bottom of the river.

David scrambled as the raging water continued its forward rush.  He twisted in his seat and pawed at the edges of the storage space behind him, clumsily unhitching the cables that held the lid shut.  He blindly pulled out gear and tossed food into the current as he struggled to extract the core of his equipment from the bottom of the kayak. 

“David, stop!” Jeremy called back.  “You’re losing provisions!” 

He’d cantilevered his own kayak to run perpendicular to the river’s path, madly paddling to maintain his position and close the gap between David’s craft and his own.

“I’m going to lose everything!” David called ahead.  His backpack wedged tightly, swollen thick with water, between the rubber-lined lips of the storage compartment. 

Releasing himself from the kayak’s harness, David pulled himself out of the hull and twisted around, balancing his knees precariously upon his seat, the kayak shifting ever more violently against the pounding of the water combined with David’s uncertain equilibrium. 

“Your paddle!” Jeremy screamed out as the equally yellow paddle, feebly balanced on the front of David’s kayak, slid into the water and roared toward Jeremy. 

David’s eyes were wild.  His full attention was on extracting his pack.

They were both moving now, David haphazardly coursed toward the river’s edge in jagged fits and starts while Jeremy slashed his paddle deeply against the current to close the gap between them before David’s kayak disappeared completely below the surface. 

What he’d do once he reached David, he did not know. Neither kayak was designed for two people. Thankfully, they both wore lifejackets, but once David was in the water there was little to keep him from being tossed down the river like a paper cup a mile or more before hopefully making his way out if he made it that far at all.

The gap between their kayaks was now less than ten feet, the shore with its overhanging brush line an equal distance away.

“I’ve almost got it!” David shouted over his shoulder to Jeremy.  With another solid tug the pack popped loose from the kayak. 

Jeremy had an arm stretched outward, aiming for David’s craft.  The rain fell now in heavier drops, slapping the surface with an unending rattle.

“Hah!” David called out.  He knelt high on his seat and spun around with his pack now held high over his head with both hands as if he’d just been handed the Stanley Cup trophy.

“David!” Jeremy shouted. “Sit down!”

At that moment a branch from the closing gap of the shoreline brushed just inches above Jeremy’s head and passed by him.  Jeremy watched in horror as the same branch crashed solidly against David’s face with an audibly snapping crack that flipped him backward out of the boat and into the water.

As Jeremy dove in after his brother, a rampage of conflicting thoughts and memories rocketed through his mind in a cacophony of sounds and images: 

Their decision to go on this backcountry adventure with their pittance of an inheritance after their mother’s death the year before. 

The time they’d once stolen Peppermint Patties from the local convenience store and were so ravaged with guilt they biked to confession that very afternoon. 

David’s wife and children, and what he could possibly say to them if they ever made it out of this alive.