Those were times.
“C’mon,” I say to myself. I’m sweating and coughing and woozy but I’m making my hands keep on spinning. Manchee’s barking at the wood to try and help it along.
And then a little finger of smoke rises from the hollow.
“Ha!” I cry out. I protect it from the wind with my hand and blow on it to make it catch. I use some dried moss as kindling and when the first little flame shoots out it’s as near as I’ve come to joy since I don’t know when. I throw some small sticks on it, wait for them to catch, too, then some larger ones, and pretty soon there’s a real fire burning in front of me. A real one.
I leave it to burn for a minute. I’m counting on us being downwind to keep the smoke from Aaron.
And I’m counting on that wind for other reasons, too.
I lurch my way towards the riverbank, using tree trunks to keep me upright, till I make it to the dock. “C’mon, c’mon,” I say under my breath as I steady myself to walk down it. It creaks under my feet and once I nearly pitch over into the river but I do finally make it to the boat still tied there.
“It’ll sink,” says the boy, standing knee-high in the river.
I hop in the little boat and after a lot of wobbling and coughing, I stand up in it. It’s rickety and narrow and warping.
But it floats.
“You don’t know how to steer a boat.”
I get out and cross the dock and make my way back to the settlement and search round till I find a flat enough piece of wood to use as an oar.
And that’s all I need.
We’re ready.
The boy’s standing there, holding the things of mine in each hand, rucksack on his back, no real nothing on his face, no Noise that I can hear.
I stare him down. He don’t say nothing.
“Manchee?” I call but he’s already at my feet.
“Here, Todd!”
“Good boy.” We go to the fire. I take the stick he found and put the already burnt end into it. After a minute, the end is red hot and smoky, with flames catching on the new wood. “You sure you can hold this?” I say.
He takes the non-burning end into his maul and there he is, best ruddy dog in the universe, ready to carry fire to the enemy.
“Ready, friend?” I say.
“Weddy, Thawd!” he says, mouth full, tail wagging so fast I see it as a blur.
“He’ll kill Manchee,” the boy says.
I stand, world spinning and shining, my body barely my own, my lungs coughing up bits of themselves, my head thumping, my legs shaking, my blood boiling, but I stand.
I ruddy well stand.
“I am Todd Hewitt,” I say to the boy. “And I am leaving you here.”
“You can’t never do that,” he says, but I’m already turning to Manchee and saying “Go on, boy,” and he takes off back up the bluff and down the other side, burning stick in his mouth, and I count to a hundred, loud, so’s I can’t hear no one say nothing and then I make myself count to a hundred again and that’s enough and I lurch as fast as I can back to the dock and the boat and I get myself in and I take the oar onto my lap and I use the knife to cut away the last of the raggedy rope tying the little boat in place.
“You can’t never leave me behind,” the boy says, standing on the dock, book in one hand, knife in the other.
“Watch me,” I say and he gets smaller and smaller in the shimmering and fading light as the boat pulls away from the dock and starts making its way downstream.
Towards Aaron.
Towards Viola.
Towards whatever waits for me down the river.
There’s boats in Prentisstown but no one’s used ’em since I can remember. We got the river, sure, this same one that’s sloshing me back and forth, but our stretch is rocky and fast and when it does slow down and spread out, the only peaceful area is a marsh full of crocs. After that, it’s all wooded swamp. So I ain’t never been on a boat and even tho it looks like it should be easy to steer one down a river, it ain’t.
The one bit of luck I got is that the river here is pretty calm, despite some splashing from the wind. The boat drifts out into the current and is taken and moves its way downriver whether I do anything or not so I can put all my coughing energy into trying to keep the boat from spinning around as it goes.
It takes a minute or two before I’m successful.
“Dammit,” I say under my breath. “Effing thing.”
But after some splashing with the oar (and one or two full spins, shut up) I’m figuring out how to keep it more or less pointed the right way and when I look up, I realize I’m probably already halfway there.
I swallow and shake and cough.
This is the plan. It’s probably not a very good one but it’s all that my shimmering, flickering brain’s gonna let me have.
Manchee’ll take the burning stick upwind of Aaron and drop it somewhere to catch fire and make Aaron think I’ve lit up my own campsite. Then Manchee’ll run back to Aaron’s campsite, barking up a storm, pretending he’s trying to tell me he’s found Aaron. This is simple since all he has to do is bark my name, which is what he does all the time anyway.
Aaron’ll chase him. Aaron’ll try to kill him. Manchee’ll be faster (Run and run, Manchee, run and run). Aaron’ll see the smoke. Aaron, who fears me not one tiny little bit, will go off into the woods towards the smoke to finish me off once and for all.
I’ll float downstream, come upon his campsite from the riverside while he’s out in the woods looking for me, and I’ll rescue Viola. I’ll pick up Manchee there, too, when he circles back round ahead of a chasing Aaron (run and run).
Yeah, okay, that’s the plan.
I know.
I know, but if it don’t work, then I’ll have to kill him.
And if it comes to that, it can’t matter what I become and it can’t matter what Viola thinks.
It can’t.
It’ll have to be done and so I’ll have to do it.
I take out the knife.
The blade still has dried blood smeared on it here and there, my blood, Spackle blood, but the rest of it still shines, shimmering and flickering, flickering and shimmering. The tip of it juts out and up like an ugly thumb and the serrashuns along one side spring up like gnashing teeth and the blade edge pulses like a vein full of blood.
The knife is alive.
As long as I hold it, as long as I use it, the knife lives, lives in order to take life, but it has to be commanded, it has to have me to tell it to kill, and it wants to, it wants to plunge and thrust and cut and stab and gouge, but I have to want it to as well, my will has to join with its will.