“Ahhouuu.”
Milt gave a dare-danger howl as he and Allen sculled in place until Broker and Sommer pulled abreast of them. Then Milt brandished his paddle at the storm. This show of bravado rankled Broker who was gauging the power of the onrushing wind in the way the pines were cranking at the north end of the lake.
“Cinch those vests tight,” he shouted.
Milt sat up abruptly as the full might of the squall exploded around them and the lake erupted into something like a horizontal rapids. Wide-eyed, chastised, he turned to Broker. Ten yards away across the bucking water, there was no mistaking his sober assessment: This is some serious shit we’re in.
“No mistakes, no mistakes,” Allen shouted.
“Dig it,” Sommer yelled. Half turned, with one hazel eye flaring over his shoulder, he raised his paddle to drive it into the gray slope swelling up to his front. The stiff wave-three feet high-crashed over the bow and showered him in ice water. The next wave reared, coiled, and Broker leaned into his paddle and watched it come. It had never been warm. Even in summer. For thousands of years that gray water had cherished a geologic memory of its glacier mama.
“Paddle,” Broker yelled. “Stay into the wind.”
“No shit,” Sommer yelled back, his voice giddy with excitement, and they met the wave head on, riding a choppy boost of adrenalin.
Milt swung in so close the canoes bumped gunwales. His powerful twelve-inch wrists drove his paddle in a foaming sculling motion and, freed from his landlubber plodding, he danced on the water. His face clenched in a diagram of practical fear under taut control and formed a question: What do you think? His eyes measured Sommer and Allen, who wore braced but game expressions.
Broker looked from Allen to Sommer, back to Allen: What about Sommer’s guts?
Allen shrugged: Have to.
“Fuck you guys,” Sommer snarled, digging in with his paddle.
They sailed on the plume of a wave, dropped into the trough, and the plunge set them all paddling furiously to keep pointed up wind.
They had less than ten inches of freeboard on the heavily loaded canoes. One slipup abeam of these waves and they’d take a boatful of water. If they capsized, the wind would batter them back down the lake. The life jackets would keep them afloat but hypothermia would do them in before they washed up on the far shore.
One look into Milt’s eyes confirmed it: dumping a canoe in these conditions, this far out, was a death sentence.
“Can’t take a chance on turning back,” Broker shouted. He stabbed his finger toward a blur in the distance where a rocky point jutted into the lake, about a quarter mile to the left front. Milt nodded, concurring. He could see the waves peter out on the lee side.
“Tricky. We’ll have to quarter. .”
“What?”
“Quarter. Off the wind,” Milt shouted again.
“Understand,” Broker nodded vigorously. Then he braced himself and paddled into the freak storm as sleeting rain slashed at his Goretex parka and threatened to freeze, turn white, and blot out his vision.
Jesus. The plunging winds split sideways, sheared off, and scissored slapdash patterns through the water-moguls here, herringbone there. Broker tried to line up Sommer’s green parka with the end of the point that appeared, then disappeared, playing peek-a-boo. This practical exercise in dead reckoning did nothing to mitigate the swooping ant-on-a-twig sensation as the tiny canoe rode the big water.
Abruptly the wind shifted and they found themselves in an eerie acoustic shadow. Sommer threw a look over his shoulder and his expression was vital, happy almost; danger had peeled years from his face. “Hey, Broker, tell me. .” his voice boomed in the lull.
“What?”
“You voted for Ventura?”
“You’re fuckin’ nuts.”
Sommer’s wild eyes flashed and his reaction to a world that was determined to kill them was to grin, as they wobbled in the belly of a wave with the next crest coming at eye level. Tons of gray-green lake water slid an arm’s length from their faces and they were. . laughing.
“Stephen Crane. Great line. End of Red Badge of Courage,” Sommer shouted sentence fragments in the gusty wind.
“Huh?” Broker strained to hear.
“They met the Great Death. .”
“Hey, fuck your Great Death.”
“. . and found that. .”
“Found?”
“. . was just the great death,” Sommer roared.
“Fuck him, the horse he rode in on, and the colonel who sent him,” Broker shouted.
“See, it goes easier when you lighten up,” Sommer shouted back.
Which was true. They fell into a powerful slot, pulling together, riding rather than fighting the water. The wind shifted back full force, plugging their ears; but a hot fear now greased their muscles and they were gaining distance. Broker saw the point much clearer now. “Hey, we’re almost. .”
Sommer answered with a wild bray of pain. Teeth bared, he braced his arms on his paddle athwart the gunwales and trembled.
Fear flipped in Broker’s chest from tonic to paralytic. “You gotta. .”
“Jesus,” Sommer bellowed.
“Paddle. .” Broker screamed.
Sommer’s eyes revolved, immobilized by the pain. The bow started to swing. The next wave. .
“Don’t quit on me, goddammit!” Broker roared.
Sommer gritted his teeth, straightened up, bent stiffly to the work, and powered them into the wave.
Broker hollered, “You okay?”
Teeth clenched, Sommer swore, “Fuck you, paddle.”
“We have to. . quarter. Off the wind,” Broker yelled.
Sommer looking over his shoulder at Broker, shook his head. Can’t hear. Broker stabbed his paddle through the air to give the angle and direction.
“Angle left,” Sommer shouted. Broker nodded his head vigorously.
A wave battered them every two seconds, the crest pulsing in one direction, the trough pulling in another. As they teetered on the crest, they were shoved back by the stiff-arm wind. Leaning forward, they muscled a hole in the blast and plunged down. The waves clubbed Broker’s arms as he extended his J-stroke, adding a sweep to propel the canoe to the left, to cut an angle across the trough. Then he reversed sides and swept his paddle to straighten up into the wind as they climbed the next roller. He was trying to compensate for Sommer’s reduced strength, and the added torque invited tendon and bone to separate.
But they had the technique, and Sommer settled into a jerky but steady paddle as, wave by wave, with total concentration, they crabbed to the left.
They went blind in the drenching needles of spray for whole parts of minutes and could only cling to the direction of the wind. Squinting into the gray shuttles of water and foam, Broker saw Milt’s canoe heave up out of a trough with Allen, a resolute figurehead, paddling doggedly in the bow as Milt bent with grim power in the stern.
Reach, dig, pull, recover. Reach, dig, pull, recover. They clawed for the point on a parallel course.
Five minutes of progress. Ten. Then another spasm crippled Sommer and he cringed over in the bow. His paddle absent, they wobbled, broached a wave, and took on water. Broker’s arms and shoulders cracked as he redoubled his paddling to plow back into the wind. They were losing forward motion, slipping back into the belly of the wave.
They seesawed in the trough and suddenly it was Broker’s turn. For a long, terrible moment he sat frozen, gripped by vertigo and muscle strain, unable to lift his paddle. His forearms were bowling pins, the muscle and tendon fused in spasms. He couldn’t feel his hands or his fingers. His arms had gone numb below the elbows.
They were going to swamp on the next wave.
Sommer turned in the tossing canoe and saw Broker struggling to raise his stone arms. Broker would never forget the way Sommer’s raging eyes willed themselves calm.
Strict with duty, Sommer faced forward and stretched his long arms to the paddle in a powerful sweep. The canoe nosed up into the onrushing wave. The muscle spasm passed and Broker raised and swung his paddle. But he was mostly on the rudder. Hatless, parka hood cowled at his throat, blond hair streaming, Sommer’s powerful arms dug a zigzag trench up and down the waves.
Broker couldn’t tell the time and his head was a clutter of migraine splinters. He knew they were soaked and freezing and way past complete collapse. Water sloshed in the canoe up to their shins and made the boat handle like an iron barge. But they were close, within fifty yards of shore, in among geysers of spume breaking off the rocks. Then it was thirty more yards, then twenty. The waves played tricks with Broker’s eyes and the rocks heaved up around them like huge pitted molars, salivating foam. But strength was flowing back into his arms. When he heard the keel scrape on granite he knew it was going to be all right.
“Sommer, man; you saved our ass,” he shouted in relief.
Sommer had nothing left but a growl of pain. Spent, he pitched forward and crumpled into a ball.
Then he dropped his paddle.
Broker watched the paddle vanish, a streak of yellow in the gunmetal foam. Now the bow rose, swung around without Sommer’s paddle to nail it down, and they rolled sideways and took on a gunwale full of water, and the next wave crashed over them. A ton of ice water slammed into Broker and squashed the air from his lungs.
And they went under.