Paul Cleave - The Killing Hour

Floating or drowning-I can’t tell the difference now and don’t think it matters. My grip on Jo weakens with each knock I take and I’m so cold I can’t tell if her fingers are still clutching me.

As the water pulls us down for seconds at a time, I drift and so does my perception of time. More boulders, and I slam into them, but there’s no pain. I wonder if death will have feeling. My eyes close and open, but there’s darkness either way. I hardly feel a thing when my cold body comes to rest against a fallen tree. Thick dead branches cradle me above the water as my feet dangle in the current ahead. The tree bridges the width of the river. Jo is trying to claw herself from the water. I lean my face against the tree, scratching it on the bark. I watch as Jo comes toward me. Her arms reach for my arms. I kick at the water while she tries to pull me from it, and when I’m closer I clutch at branches and bark and pull myself along as though climbing a sideways ladder. This woman I kidnapped, this woman I’ve nearly killed, is trying to save me. Maybe this is why I love her.

The current swirls around my legs, begging me to join it, but it had its chance and lost. My feet touch the riverbed and I continue forward, and soon the water is only up to my waist, my thighs, my knees. When it’s around my ankles I collapse, my body slapping into the muddy bank. I look back at the water. Landry is pinned against the tree, but it’s too dark to tell which way he is facing.

I roll onto my back. The rain drums against my eyelids. I think about my warm bed-lying in it with a hot water bottle between my feet and another behind my back. All I want to do now is go to sleep. I start thinking of a Friday or a Saturday night, so I can sleep all day and then the next. I close my eyes. Something touches my face. It’s frightening away my sleep. I open my eyes to see Jo slapping me. Only I can’t feel it. I can see it, but that’s all.

“Come on, Charlie, wake up.”

I am awake. Can’t she see that? I try to tell her, but it’s hard since my lips and tongue no longer work. Somebody must have removed them.

“Charlie!”

She slaps me hard and again I open my eyes. Does she really think this kind of tough love is going to work? I brace my elbows against the ground and try to tilt my body upward.

“Charlie!” Jo’s slapping me again and I open my eyes again. I know she’s angry at me, but this is all too much. I’m no longer propped up. She needs to save herself rather than hanging around just to abuse me.

I explain this in careful detail. “Juss wev’m ere.”

“You got me into this mess, Charlie. You can help get us out of it.”

She stands and grabs the front of my wet shirt. My body bows forward as she pulls. I reach up weakly and grab hold of her arms. My mind is still a maze of confusion. My right eye is aching-it feels as though somebody has stapled it directly into the socket, only backward. The inside of my head is pounding, over and over, over and over. I manage to sit up and with more of Jo’s encouragement I force myself onto my knees, then onto my feet. I hang on to the nearest tree to get balanced and then on to Jo as we make the first steps. And I’m exhausted. We rest against a tree. Now we have to pick a direction.

“How far do you think we’ve traveled?” I ask. I stutter the sentence out. My teeth keep chattering. Any harder and they’re going to break.

Jo shrugs. “What time does your watch say? Mine isn’t waterproof.”

I look at my watch, but can’t make anything out. I hold it up to my eyes and try to focus, but it’s no good-it’s just a blur of hands and dashes. Jo seizes my wrist and holds it in front of her face.

“It’s two sixteen,” she says.

“Late.”

“My watch says two ten.”

“It’s a cheap watch.”

“Exactly. It would have stopped when we dived in the water. We’ve been on the bank for probably four minutes. That means two minutes in the water.”

Two minutes in the water. The river was close to the cabin, but so what? There was a track we took that was barely a track and we walked it for maybe ten minutes. Easy to find if you know where it is. And when it’s daylight. And dry. I think harder, then realize some of what she’s trying to get at. We’ve come downstream toward the cabin. We’ve crossed the distance much quicker than if we’d walked.

“How far can you go?” she asks.

“Further than you.”

We both doubt it, but say nothing.

We carry on, but it’s barely a minute before we’re hit with a gradual slope. We struggle against it, often supporting ourselves against trees and each other. Some feeling begins to return to my legs and arms, but not my feet or hands. The slope becomes steeper as we walk further. I’m hoping, when the slope levels out, that we’ll be near the makeshift track. Then all we have to do is turn right and we’ll find the cabin. Or left.

My feet have gone, but my toes remain-ten individual spears of pain ready to be snapped off. This little piggy went to market. This little piggy drowned. And this little piggy caught pneumonia and died. I remember Landry telling me the cabin was a minute from the river, but I don’t know how much that’s going to help. The trees form a tent that keeps the rain off our faces, but not the wind. If we don’t get out of our wet clothes and find somewhere warm we’re going to die. It’s that simple. With each passing second we’re slowing down. Jo’s wrist tells us time has stopped. My watch suggests differently. I don’t know which one to believe. My jeans are so wet I can hardly bend my legs.

I quickly explain what Landry told me.

“Then we follow the river,” she says.

“Yeah, but which way?”

“Which way do you think?”

“I don’t know. If we go left we might end up where we started. We should go right first at least for a bit. We can always turn back.”

She looks at me long and hard, knowing we don’t have the energy to turn back if we go the wrong way, and in the end decides to follow my advice. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s because I’ve fucked up everything I’ve done this week so I’m due for some decent luck. We turn right and start moving, doing our best to stay parallel to the water, using only its sound as a guide. The trees get thinner and closer together. I want to turn them into firewood, want to burn down the whole lot. We stumble between them, breaking our way forward. It looks similar to the track we’re looking for. Lots of black. Lots of trees. Lots of roots. We carry on in silence, watched by the night and the small, wet, unhelpful creatures living in it. Kathy and Luciana are watching me too. I can feel them, but that’s all.

My foot snags on a root, and as in the early minutes of Monday morning I fall onto my hands and knees, only this time I don’t lose hold of a tire iron. I roll onto my back and look up at the trees. Jo kneels down next to me. She rests her head on my chest and I can hear her labored breathing. I want to put my arms around her and think back to better times, but those times have gone, they are gone and the forest is here replacing them and the killing hour has arrived.

I close my eyes and look for Kathy and Luciana and hope that Landry isn’t there too.

Darkness and death aren’t as scary as I thought. No Heaven, no Hell, just a place with no feeling or time or emotion. A dark place with a soft sound and cool air and, best of all, it doesn’t hurt.

“Wake up, Charlie.”

I was wrong to be frightened. Wrong to think that death was going to be an eternity of torture and mayhem. Wrong to think that I wasn’t going to like it. Hell, it isn’t even boring. Had I known this before, I never would have struggled.