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If Bobby’d had his way, no one would have ever known about that trip he took down the Cahulawassee. He’d have buried it deep, deeper than they buried that fucker Lewis killed, deeper than they sank Drew. As deep as the lake drowned that cold and beautiful river. (It had been beautiful, he couldn’t pretend he didn’t understand how Lewis felt about it.)
But he’d told some of the guys back at the agency about his trip before he’d left. They’d kidded him that he didn’t seem like the roughing it type, and he’d laughed right back and told them about the air mattress. Afterward, it was in the papers, the local ones at least. For the second time, he’d had to come up with a story to tell anyone who asked.
As it turned out, he didn’t need to have bothered. It’s easy to not talk about a thing when everyone thinks they know why you don’t. So terrible, four men go into the woods and waters, and only three come back. Nobody knew he’d never met Drew before that trip. Bobby accepted everyone’s muttered “Sorries” with a muttered “Thanks,” and that was that.
The rest of it, nobody ever needed to know. Lewis and Ed would never tell—they stood to lose the most. (But not really, Bobby thought before he could crush it down. Killing was what men did. Killing like Lewis and Ed had, that was something a man could even be proud of. It had been right, and it had taken courage. If their friends found out, if the world found out, it would only make them admired more. Even if they went to jail, they’d be respected. If everyone found out what had happened to Bobby—what had happened to Bobby, not what Bobby had done… Well. That would be a different story.)
But it was done. Drowned. Buried. Lewis and Ed knew, but Bobby never needed to see them again. A few weeks, and Bobby didn’t even hurt any more. There were no scars, not like Lewis and Ed had. (It felt so wrong that Bobby didn’t have scars. A scar was proof of battle. A man could be proud of his scars.)
It was as if it hadn’t happened at all.
If no one knew about a thing, if it left no trace, if he put it out of his mind, it might as well never have happened. It would be drowned. Buried. Gone.
“Who wants to be the first to fall?” Jameson asked brightly.
Everyone looked around, trying not to catch the coach’s eye. Bobby looked down. If he looked around, he’d see those goddamn trees.
It had been a bait-and-switch, that’s what it had been. His insurance agency had done team-building retreats before, so he’d assumed this would be like the others: a weekend of doing dumb activities in the day and getting drunk at night, maybe picking up a girl in the hotel bar if you were lucky, concluding in a banquet of rubber chicken and sales awards.
The sales awards were the worthwhile part. They predicted year-end bonuses. Bobby was good at his job. He knew when to joke and when to be serious, and when he told people you never knew what could happen and it was best to be prepared, they believed him. He always got a sales award, and he always got a bonus. If it meant taking a little joshing and groaning when it was his turn to fall backward, he was fine with that.
He wasn’t fine with this retreat. They’d followed the directions, and they’d arrived at a hotel, and then they’d been loaded into a bus and taken to a goddamn camp site with goddamn tents already set up.
It would build character, that asshole Jameson had said, grinning with white teeth that Bobby wanted to punch out of his head.
It would shake them out of their ruts, he said. Bobby wanted to shake him till he broke. He could picture it, how he’d look with his bones twisted up like a discarded doll.
Everyone moaned and groaned, but they were already there and it wasn’t as if they could leave. A couple of them, some brown-nosers but also a couple of the younger guys, even seemed excited at the prospect of character-building by making fires and pitching tents and roasting marshmallows, for all Bobby knew.
At least they wouldn’t be fishing. He couldn’t hear any rushing water, and he didn’t see fishing poles.
At least they weren’t out in the real wilderness, either. They’d passed through a town not far back that had been a real town. The people were normal people, not fucking hillbillies. It had been a pretty little town, and he’d thought they might do wine-tasting or something. He’d actually started getting excited, before the bus turned onto a dirt road.
The last time he’d been on a dirt road…
Buried, he told himself. Drowned. Might as well have never happened.
“I’ll go,” Bobby said, just to have something else to think about.
A chorus of groans rose up, and he jeered, “Maybe I shouldn’t trust you, huh? Aren’t you strong enough to catch me?”
Asshole Jameson launched into a motivational speech as Bobby stepped up on to the tree stump. The last time he’d done it, it’d been a chair. He’d pretend it was a chair. He closed his eyes, so he wouldn’t see the woods, and fell backwards.
They caught him, of course. All of them together—how could they not? It had nothing to do with trust.
Trust was believing that three men wouldn’t ever tell about the man you shot, back when two of them had no guilt of their own to conceal.
Trust is believing that Ed and Lewis will never tell about what happened to him, and never would even if they weren’t relying on his silence too.
Trust was hours in cold that sharpened into pain, never able to sleep because if he even dozed off he’d slide right off that slippery rock, slapping Lewis to see if he was still alive, and hearing him mumble, “I know you won’t let me die.” Bobby had never known if Lewis had known who he was or thought he was Ed. But still. That was trust, even if not in him.
“You okay, Bobby?” one of the guys asked.
“Yeah, yeah, of course,” Bobby said on autopilot, with no idea why he was being asked. For a moment he didn’t even know where he was. Then Jameson and his white teeth came into view, and Bobby remembered and grinned and straightened. “Who’s up next? If I can trust you pussies to catch me, none of you should be scared!”
Everyone fell and was caught. Jameson gave more motivational speeches. Some of the guys cracked jokes. The brown-nosers said they really felt inspired. They did a scavenger hunt, and the brown-nosers said they were having so much fun. Bobby wasn’t, but he was okay. Wandering around looking for clues was just a dumb game, even in the woods. It was nothing like anything else that had happened in the woods.
They tried to start fires, but only Jameson could do it. It was okay though, he told them, they really tried and now they knew how to handle setbacks. They cooked over a fire and they ate what they’d cooked, and that was fine too. It was food out of cans, not a fish you’d seen someone shoot and clean and cook. That had been the best fish Bobby had ever eaten. Even now, even after everything, he could remember its clean taste. It was like the river made flesh.
They sat around the fire and roasted marshmallows and played “two truths and a lie,” only all of Bobby’s were lies. Probably all of everyone’s were lies, even the brown-nosers. Even Jameson’s. There was no truth here. There was no trust.
Truth was what he told his customers, even if he did dress it up so it didn’t sound terrifying: that everything you have and everything you are can be taken away in an instant. One moment you’re stretching your legs on a riverbank, and the next moment something happens that splits your whole life in two. From that moment on, everything is Before and After. And no matter how much you wish you could wind time back and make a different choice, Before is the place you can never go back to.
He staggered to his feet. Everyone was looking up at him. Had he said something? Or were they looking up because he was the only one standing?
“Gonna go take a leak,” he announced.
Bobby did take a leak, and then he watched from a distance until everyone was getting up and wandering off, and then he headed to the tent where he’d tossed his overnight bag. The tents varied in size and there were plenty of them, and he’d picked one of the smaller ones in the hope of having it to himself. It had worked, he saw. His bag was the only one in it. Just him and his bag and an air mattress and the woods and a bunch of men he didn’t give a good goddamn about. Cozy.
Instant broad, he thought. I said that Before.
The thought of lying down on it made him nauseated. He sat on the floor of the tent, which was too small to stand up in. He could sleep where he was, and not even bother to get undressed. No one would ever know.
The cold air on his bare skin when they’d forced him to strip—no one would ever know about that. No one else would ever know, anyway. Ed knew. Lewis knew.
Ed knew other things, too. He’d seen Bobby struggling in the dirt, crawling. He’d seen how he hadn’t fought, how he hadn’t grabbed the rifle, how he’d colluded in his own humiliation. Squeal like a pig— God! Ed had heard him squeal.
Humiliation was as hot as the water of the Cahulawassee was cold. It burned. It burned so bad, it felt like it could kill you. It ought to kill you. Just as he had when it had happened, as he had right afterward, as he had every time he stopped dumping dirt and pouring water over it, he felt a dull, dazed bewilderment that it was possible to feel such an intensity of shame and not have it stop his heart.
Drew was drowned and those fucking hillbillies were dead, but Ed and Lewis knew. Even if Ed and Lewis had died, as they easily could have, Bobby would still know.
That was what couldn’t be drowned or buried. He’d heard himself squeal. He’d never stop hearing it.
He wished he was dead, just to make it stop. To stop it from having happened. To stop from remembering it, remembering Ed watching, remembering Lewis knowing.
He should’ve let the hillbillies shoot him.
But he wasn’t that kind of guy. He wasn’t a fighter. He was a man who’d been so scared of death that he’d given himself to something worse than death. The fate worse than death. He’d always thought that was just a euphemism, like “going to see a man about a horse.” Now he understood. It really was worse than death. Not the… even in his own mind, he had to force the word out… the rape itself. That had been horrible, but if that had been all, maybe he could have lived with it as a physical injury and a crime. It was the rest of it that he couldn’t bear. The humiliation. The knowledge of others. The knowledge of himself.
Bobby abruptly couldn’t stand to be in the tent with that goddamn mattress for one second longer. He shoved his way out, nearly collapsing it, and stood in the darkness of the woods. There were woodsy noises all around him, rustles and stuff. He could see more than he’d expected. The moon was full, maybe. But it wasn’t only the moon. The sky wasn’t black with glittering stars, it was a dark purple-gray. Lewis had talked scornfully about light pollution, and Bobby guessed that was it. He could see the tents, and the bus that had brought them there, and even the dirt road.
He was walking along that road before he even made the decision to do so. The feeling of his feet hitting the dirt steadied him. It was something real that was outside of his own head, something that was in the present rather than the past. He could focus on that and on nothing else. Drowned. Buried, and the dirt on its grave stomped down flat with every footstep.
Bobby was mildly surprised when he reached the town. He hadn’t been heading for it specifically, though he was sure as hell glad to be in it. There were people on the streets, though not many. There were lights in some windows. A bar was open. There was a pay phone on the corner.
He’d never gotten undressed that night, but he hadn’t dressed for the wilderness either. What you wear to a retreat in a hotel wasn’t what you wore to camp, something that asshole Jameson had worked into a number of speeches on life being full of surprises and learning to work with unexpected circumstances.
Bobby was shivering. At first he’d shivered so hard while he was holding Lewis that he’d hurt him, jarring his broken leg. He’d been relieved when he’d stopped. It hadn’t started up again until much later, when they’d gotten out of the river. Strange.
Lewis would know why, probably. Lewis knew a lot of things. Lewis had saved him once, even if he’d mostly been saving Ed. Lewis had given him a choice, after all his other choices had been taken away.
He wasn’t sure how he ended up in the phone booth, but he didn’t bother with the phone book. Lewis had given him his phone number and he’d stared at it so many times, thinking about calling and then deciding to pile more dirt on instead, that he’d accidentally memorized it.
“‘lo?” The voice was blurred with sleep, but unmistakable.
“It’s Bobby.” He hesitated, uncertain what to say next, and then realized that Lewis might not know who he was. “Bobby Trippe.”
The next time Lewis spoke, he sounded much more awake. “What’s going on? Where are you?”
“I’m in a phone booth.”
“A phone booth where?”
That was a more difficult question to answer. He had to describe the way he’d come, which meant he had to explain about the bait-and-switch retreat, and then he had to peer outside to look at the cross streets and an address. It was only when he’d finished that he realized that wasn’t what Lewis had been asking at all. “Never mind. I shouldn’t have called.”
“Bobby, stay there. Okay? Don’t go anywhere.”
Bobby was left holding the receiver, with the dial tone ringing in his ears. Was Lewis really going to drive from wherever he was to wherever Bobby was? He called back to tell him not to, but the phone just rang and rang. He must have already left.
Bobby pressed his forehead against the cold glass and waited. There didn’t seem to be anything else to do. It didn’t feel as if very much time had passed before a car pulled up and Lewis got out. He wore a long coat and he used a cane, but otherwise he seemed unchanged from the man who’d set out to see the river before it was murdered.
“Come on,” Lewis said. “Get inside. You must be freezing.”
Bobby got into the passenger seat. It was warm inside. He felt as if he’d abruptly woken up from a dream. It wasn’t as if he’d sleepwalked into town, exactly, but… maybe something like that. “Sorry. I don’t know why I called you.”
“No?” Lewis looked him over with those frank dark eyes that seemed to see more than other people’s did.
Bobby shook his head. “There was something I was going to ask you, but…”
“Spit it out.”
With an awkward shrug, Bobby said, “When you broke your leg, I was shivering. My clothes were soaked and I wasn’t moving to warm myself up. But when it was night, it got so much colder but I stopped shivering. I didn’t start up again until the sun was out. Why was that?”
He thought he saw Lewis give a little flinch. But his voice was even when he said, “If you’re cold and you stop shivering, it means you have hypothermia. It’s a danger sign. It means you should get out of the cold.”
“Well, I could hardly do that.”
“No. I never thought you would. Not once.”
“I couldn’t have. We were trapped in the gorge. Maybe you don’t remember…”
Lewis started the car. “I remember.”
They drove for a few minutes before Bobby realized that they were heading back toward civilization, not going away from it. “You’re going the wrong way.”
“No, I’m not. I’m taking you to my house. I have a sofa bed.”
“I’m supposed to be at the retreat.”
“It’s a shitty retreat,” said Lewis calmly. “So call up tomorrow morning and tell them you got the shits. No one will want details.”
Bobby was startled into a laugh. “Good one, Lewis.”
Lewis’s face was starkly illuminated by a freeway light. Dead white, like he’d been in the gorge when there was enough sun to see. “You weren’t trapped in the gorge. There were rocks you could’ve traversed—”
“What?”
“Climbed sideways,” Lewis said curtly. Now he was in shadow again. “Or you could’ve gotten back into the canoe. But it didn’t even occur to you, did it?”
Bobby shook his head.
“I told you, I remember.” White light, white as bone. Bobby had seen the sharp edges of Lewis’s shattered bones. “You know about the Maya?”
Bobby shrugged. “They had a calendar?”
Lewis’s face was dark, but Bobby was sure he was rolling his eyes. “They believed that the gods gave their divine blood to humanity, so humanity needed to give blood back to the gods. The men would drive stingray stingers through their dicks—”
Bobby winced. “Fuck that.”
“—and pierce their cheeks and lips and tongues. They drove stingray stingers and cactus spines all the way through. Sometimes they pulled a rope of thorns through their tongues.”
“Jesus! You got a point to this?”
“Men used to endure pain as a sacrifice or ritual. We don’t do that any more. I used to wish we did.”
“You used to wish we stuck spikes through our dicks? Man, I have never wished that.”
“Not that specifically.” Lewis sounded annoyed. “Forget the dicks. It was the test that I wanted. If there’s no war and no blood sacrifice and no coming of age ritual, then we turn to hunting and rock climbing and white water rafting. But without true tests, we never know exactly what we’re capable of.”
“Well,” Bobby said. His throat felt thick, but he forced the words out. “You know, Lewis.”
“I know I can kill a man.” He spoke impatiently, as if it didn’t much matter. “But that’s only one side. The other side is endurance. Bearing pain. I thought I could do that.”
“You did do that.”
“No, I didn’t!” The words exploded out of him. Lewis stepped down hard on the gas. Dark and light flashed by. “I lay there and I told myself this was it, this was my test, I’d be like the Mayans and I’d endure in silence but I screamed, Bobby. Every time I told myself it didn’t help and I wouldn’t do it again, and then I’d hear myself, those sounds coming out of my mouth—”
Those sounds coming out of my mouth, Bobby thought.
“Come on, you broke your leg. There was bone sticking out! Of course you screamed.”
Lewis’s eyes glittered, flashing as the lights flashed. “I told myself I could endure anything and I couldn’t. I didn’t even come close. The only thing I had control over was keeping my fucking mouth shut and I didn’t. Ed played the game, you played the game, and I quit.”
“Me? What are you talking about? I didn’t kill anyone. I wasn’t hurt. I just…” I just squealed like a pig.
“You sat there with me all night, in cold that could’ve killed you, and you held my hand and talked to me and kept me awake and didn’t let me die, even when I wanted to just to make the pain stop.” Lewis turned to stare straight at Bobby, not looking at the road at all. “That night was your test as much as it was mine. And you’re the one who passed.”
“Yeah, Lewis, because my fucking leg wasn’t broke!”
To Bobby’s relief, he turned back to the road with a dissatisfied shrug. “There’s a stone carving of a Mayan queen pulling a barbed rope through her tongue. A woman did that, Bobby.”
“Maybe she screamed,” Bobby said. “Maybe all those Mayans did. What makes you think they didn’t?”
He’d seen Lewis unable to speak for pain and weakness, but this was the first time he’d seen him simply at a loss for words. He opened his mouth, then closed it and drove in silence. A few minutes later, he turned off the highway and drove a few blocks, and then parked. When he got out of the car, he held on to the door to take his cane out of the back seat.
His house was warm inside, like his car. Bobby sat down on the sofa and watched Lewis prowl around the kitchen. He handed Bobby a beer, took one for himself, and called back, “You want some dinner? I have venison stew. I could heat some up.”
“You shoot that deer yourself?”
“Of course.” Lewis took the stew from the fridge, poured it into a pan, and lit the burner without waiting for Bobby’s answer. As it warmed, the stew smelled rich and savory, not clean and clear like that fish he’d shot. But they’d both smelled wild. You couldn’t get that smell in a supermarket or restaurant.
They ate ravenously, though they’d both had dinner before. But it was closer to morning than night by then, and the stew was very good.
Glancing up from his bowl, Bobby said, “I’d rather have venison stew and beer and a sofa bed than stoic silence with a stingray stabbing my dick.”
Lewis snorted. “Getting sorry I told you that.”
“Don’t be. I wish…” Bobby wanted to tell Lewis some of what he’d been thinking, some of what had climbed out of the shallow grave he’d dumped it in and driven him to walk miles to that phone booth. But exhaustion had hit him like a truck. He knew what he meant, but he couldn’t find the words. “I wish…”
“We all wish,” Lewis said. “As long as we’re alive, we wish.”
He made up the sofa bed for Bobby, then went into his own bedroom and closed the door. Bobby looked out the window at the night sky. There was even more light pollution here, no doubt offending Lewis every night, than there had been at the retreat. He thought of Lewis, alive and wishing. It had never occurred to him to think of that night when he’d maybe saved Lewis’s life as a test of either of them. If you ate, you took a shit. If your leg was shattered, you screamed. It was only how things worked.
Maybe, just maybe, if a man with a gun told you to squeal, you squealed.
As he drifted into sleep, he felt as if he was falling. But he trusted that someone would be there to catch him, and he slept without fear.