We
came up on the sandbar, and I motioned to my panicked friend the
sandbar and driftwood – could it have been the root or rhizome?
Not, of course, the rhizome referenced in Deleuze and Guattri's A
Thousand Plateaus “Introduction: Rhizome”
- but that has nothing to do with this... Funny how your brain
operates when you're in Panic mode. Anyway... Her
eyes became huge round saucers as she nodded frantically. Too
frantically. The creepy man saw her movement and to where her eyes
were fixed.
“I
don't think so,” he said, drawing out a large hunting knife, rusty
(or bloody) and as big as I'd ever seen a knife.
That's
when my fight or flight response finally came to life – well, my
fight response. I jumped to the sandbar and grabbed the driftwood.
It was about two feet long and heavy. Adrenaline, however, made the
weight seem less than it really was. My friends jumped out of their
tubes and came to stand beside me and my makeshift weapon. The man
jumped out of his boat and eased toward us.
“Looks
like mine is bigger than yours,” I said, eliciting a gasp and a
smirk from my friends. “Back off, buddy. You can't get near
enough to use that thing, big as it is. So just hop back in your
boat and leave.”
He
growled then, as feral and animalistic as I'd ever heard from a
human. Then... he lunged.
My
friends both screamed and I – I say I, but it was more like I was
watching my body from above as it moved itself- swung the branch with
all my might. The branch made contact with the grungy head and the
knife flew from the man's dirty hands and landed less than an inch
from my feet.
The
man fell to the ground and I saw blood soaking into the sand around
him. I marveled at my strength, but somehow didn't believe in it.
“Oh,
man.” My deer-in-the-headlights friend pointed to the driftwood
and I saw something that initially I hadn't – there was a long nail
sticking out of the wood, and it was still lodged in the redneck's
head.
Clean-up
was simple. It was like taking an adventure, together, but different
from the ones we'd taken before.* Cover the bloody sand with clean,
set the boat adrift downstream, and toss the driftwood into the
deepest part of the river we could find. And, of course, the body.
I rolled the body into the river and used another dead branch to push
him as far down and out as I could.
There
were big storms the following week; the river rose a almost four feet
and the current ran fast and strong, washing everything away from its
original resting place. I never heard anything about the missing
man. Officials found the boat, unregistered, about 5 miles from that
sandbar, where turtles liked to sunbathe, where dragonflies flew,
where alligators rested.
The
river is teeming with life.
Life...
...and death.
No comments:
Post a Comment