Where the River Ends - Charles Martin [63]
Abbie poked her head up. “You better stop this boat.”
“Honey…”
“Don’t ‘honey’ me. You stop this boat or I’m dancing with Chef Boyardee over there.”
I beached the canoe just down from the sparks of the bonfires and lifted Abbie to her feet. She swayed as the dizziness eased. She hung her arms around my neck while nearly a hundred people danced in unison across the beach or in the water. She smiled. “I’ll walk on the tops. You dance on the bottoms.”
“Deal.”
We danced along with everyone else through “Freebird,” then Waylon and Willie’s “Good Hearted Woman,” ending with Don Williams’s “Lord I Hope This Day Is Good” and AC/DC’s “You Shook Me All Night Long.” By the end, Abbie was laughing, singing along and hanging on me. I lifted her and we finished the dance carrying her along the beach. I hadn’t eaten all day so when the airport truck finally cleared off the bridge, I laid her on the sand and collapsed next to her. Chef Boyardee appeared over my shoulder, stuck his hand out and said, “Name’s Michael, but everyone around here cause me Link.” He handed me a paper plate holding two of the largest, drippiest and best-smelling cheeseburgers I’d ever seen. He said, “Eat up. And welcome.” He pointed at a cooler on the back of his truck. “Got sodas, beer, water, you name it. Make yourself comfortable.” He took two steps away and then turned back. “Something wrong with your face?” Abbie laughed. I nodded. “Yeah, mosquitoes.”
“Dang! That hurt?” I heard Abbie laughing behind me.
“A bit.”
“You ’ont some medicine?”
“Yeah.”
He slung open the diamond-plated toolbox atop his truck and pulled out a first aid kit. “Ought to be something in there.”
I dug around and found two Benadryl. “Thanks.”
Abbie eyed the box, her right eyebrow pulling up the edge of her lip. “You didn’t happen to find a cure for cancer in there, did you?”
“No, fresh out, but maybe we could pick one up at the next Wal-Mart.”
She leaned back and kicked her feet up. “That’d be nice. Let’s do that.”
IN THE NEXT THIRTY MINUTES, I downed four burgers and tried to get as much fluid into Abbie as she could stomach.
We kept to the shadows, watching the circus perform around us. Eventually, I asked Link, “You all do this every Friday night?”
He laughed, crushed a beer can single-handedly and quickly popped the tab on another. “Ain’t you been watching the weather?” I shook my head. He pointed his beer toward the sky in a general southwesterly direction. “Hurricane Annie. She was stalled over the Gulf but it’s looking like she’s coming northeast and ought to be here in a couple of days. Thought we’d have us a welcoming party, seeing as how we got us a bull’s-eye printed on our forehead.”
He was quiet a minute. Chewing a bite of sausage, he said, “We heard of you.”
That wasn’t good. “You did?”
He nodded and took another bite—mustard and pork grease were smeared across the corners of his mouth. “Yeah. Seems some folks back upriver seen you slipping through. Thought it a might strange that someone would be paddling this far up. Most folks don’t put in ’til St. George. Unless’n they know the river.” He stared at me. “Which, judging you by the looks and”—he chuckled—“that hat, you been here afore.”
I nodded. “Been down it a time or two.”
“Given the time you’re making, I’d say you’ve been down it more than just a time or two.”
This could go one of two ways. Folks down on the river were rather protective of themselves and their privacy. They lived with an inherent distrust of anyone resembling a politician, salesman or journalist. That