White and Other Tales of Ruin

As he watched Max beginning his descent, Roddy started shaking. Something squirmed in his stomach, scraping at his insides with claws so sharp that he wondered whether he’d swallowed something else along with the water from the jungle leaves. Every step they took, their route was becoming more difficult. Plants sprang out of nowhere, rocks sharpened themselves on their fear, trees melded trunks to form almost impenetrable barriers. Everything conspired to make their progress more hazardous.

Yet he felt guided, by an insistent and heavy hand.

He knelt down gently, head swimming, and then he knew that he had been brought here to die on this small cliff. He would fall and smash his skull on the rocks below, and while Max tried to scoop his brains back into his head Roddy would look up at the sky, and see a moon he did not recognise slowly appearing against the blue, a ghost emerging from the mist, mocking him as his world went dark.

“Roddy!” Max called. The others were already scrambling down the slope, and before his panic could take hold Roddy slipped and slid down to the gully floor. He did not fall, he did not die, but neither did he feel elated. He sensed the land laughing at him, amusing itself with the mild deceit it had planted in his mind. The stream was the sound of that laughter.

It was gently flowing, cool and fresh, and at its deepest it came up to their chests. It twisted and turned in its little valley, disappearing downstream around a rocky corner curtained by overhanging plants. The men stripped and bathed. There were no dead things here. Perhaps the remains on the beach had been drowned further downstream, to deter any visitors from venturing inland. But here, the air was clear of the taint of decomposition, and the sun still found its way through the leaves and branches to speckle their damaged skin.

The water was fresh. Butch tasted it, then gulped it down. Even Norris smiled and refrained from passing some derisory comment.

“Water, water, everywhere,” Max said. Roddy smiled, because he knew what Max meant, and Norris grinned in confused acknowledgement of his eventual acceptance. They all drank and swam, and washed away dried blood and caked dirt.

When they had finished, they climbed from the gentle waters to lie out on the bank and let the sun dry them. Butch remained in the stream. He bobbed in the current, floating a few feet, standing, doing it again.

The surge came from nowhere. Without even a sigh to announce its appearance, as if air and water conspired to fool the men’s senses. Butch turned and stared upstream at the rolling, tumbling, refuse-laden wave of water ploughing towards him. It frothed, like a rabid sea monster angry at the irony of its affliction.

Roddy stood, absurdly conscious of his nakedness. He opened his mouth but nothing came out. He felt a draining flush of hopelessness, the same feeling he had experienced watching his ship split and sink. No hope, he had thought to himself then, no hope at all for anyone left inside.

Now he thought the same. Except he whispered it as well, like a prayer to the dying. “No hope.”

Just before the water lifted Butch from the stream bed, he glanced at Roddy, and suddenly his eyes were very calm, his expression one of equanimity rather than fear. It was a split second, the blink of an eye, because then the wave swallowed him in a flurry of limbs. His head broke surface several times, but he could only utter bubbles. The men watched helplessly as Butch was tumbled away from them, mixed in with the wood and weed and dead things also carried along by the surge.

Roddy started running along the bank. Stones snapped at his bare feet. Breath caught in his throat, possessed of sharp edges. But Butch was firmly in the water’s grasp, and it held him close and low, attempting to drown him even before he struck the wall of the gully further downstream. Roddy tried to shout, but his voice was lost in the angry white-water roar. He sensed the others following him. Their company made it all seem more futile.

He could have made it, Roddy thought. He could have swum to shore. It was impossible, of course. But it seemed that for Butch, even the intention to survive had been absent.

In the waters, jumping from the foam, speckled red for brief instants, Roddy was sure he saw tiny snapping things. It may have been the boiling water itself, spinning Butch in its violent grasp. Or it could have been something in the water with Butch, but surviving there, belonging there, revelling in the violence.

Butch was swept under the overhanging trees and plants, just before the stream twisted out of sight. For the instant before he was pummelled into protruding rocks Roddy saw him, eyes closed, mouth wide open. His bruised face had been struck by something, and he was drowning in blood as well as water.