"Still Counting"

The boat was dying under him, and he knew the exact pace of it, because his hands had been counting the dying since the first hole.

He felt it in the tiller. The motor ran hot, eating the last of the fuel Márànata had poured into her, and the taped line let a fine mist of it up into the bilge so that the whole boat smelled of gasoline and the smell sat at the back of his throat. Water came in low where the rounds had gone through the gunwale at the brothel dock and slid side to side when he turned, and every gallon of it was weight, and weight was speed he did not have. She was an unfinished thing. Márànata had said a week. She had given him a night, and the night was using her up. He asked her for one more channel. She gave it, slower than the last.

The mangroves came down and shut the sky away. The water went to a green slit, root over root, and the only light was the spotlights of the boats behind, swinging white through the trees. His hands took the boat into the dark by feel, the way they took the oar across the lake before light, and they were counting---the bends, the strokes of the tiller, the seconds between one sweep of a spotlight and the next---counting without his asking, the way they always counted, and he let them, because the counting was how the boat got driven and there was no time to think about whose habit it was.

He took the first hard bend at the throttle's stop and cut into a side channel so narrow the gunwales took the roots on both hands, and behind him a patrol boat came into the turn too fast to read it. Its bow hit the mudbank where the channel bent. He heard the propeller come up out of the water and scream in the air and then bite the mud and tear off the shaft, and the boat slewed broadside and stopped hard and the men on it went forward into the dark. He did not look back at it. The terrain had taken it. The terrain did that, where the terrain was hungry, if you knew where to bring a thing to be eaten.

The second one he did not get clean.

He went for the curtain of hanging roots that hid the snake-path, the cut too tight for anything wider than a skiff, and he was into it and scraping through when the second patrol boat found the mouth of it behind him and did not stop and did not foul and did not wreck. It drove in after him and stuck---half in, the bow wedged, the hull grinding on the roots---but it did not die. It sat there in the mouth of the cut with its engine roaring and its spotlight pinned on his stern and its soldiers firing, and the rounds came down the length of the cut and into the water beside him and through the trees, and one took a piece off the engine housing a hand from his knee, and there was no clean thing he could do about it. No bend to lose it in. No shallow to break it on. He just had to be faster than men shooting from a stuck boat in the dark, and he bent low over the tiller and took the boat out the far end of the cut with the firing still coming and the spotlight losing him among the trunks, and that was all of it---not a kill, not a wreck, only distance and the dark and a boat full of angry men stuck in a cut behind him, which is not the same as a boat that has stopped being a problem. He let it go. A man could not solve every boat. A man could only outlive some of them.

Dákun stayed on him.

The patrol boats were Vanguard, and the Vanguard did not know this water, and the water sorted them out one way and another. He wasn't sure if Dákun was now Vanguard. He came up the cut behind in a swamp skiff stripped to a shell, low and shallow and built for exactly this, and he came through the hanging roots without slowing, because he had read the cut the same way Osogó had read it, from the inside, the way a man reads water he was born on. He did not fire. He had fired twice out on the open lagoon and missed each time by the width of a hand---close enough that Osogó understood the missing was not bad shooting; it was a man firing from a moving skiff at a moving boat and finding the arithmetic not yet in his favour, and choosing to wait for it rather than spend rounds on a thing he had not earned. He sat at his tiller with the rifle across his knees and his face giving up nothing, and he held thirty yards back, then twenty-five, and he did not hurry, because hurry is for men afraid the thing will get away, and Dákun had never once in his life been afraid of that. He did the work. The work was the boat in front of him. He stayed on it.

The motor seized in the next reach.

It did not cough and recover the way it had been coughing and recovering. There was a sound like a fist closing in a bag of gravel, and then the screaming stopped, all at once, and the boat came off her plane and settled and slowed and sat, and the silence where the motor had been was enormous. Fifteen years a ferryman. He knew the sound of an engine that would not start again the way he knew the sound of a man who would not get up. She was not a boat anymore. She was a thing in the water with him standing on it, going nowhere, the unfinished ribs of her bare under the gunwale in the dark, and the last object of the plan that had carried them off the dock at Mokili was finished.

He stood up in her.

There was a mudbank close on the left, black against the lesser black of the water, and the skiff was coming on, twenty yards, fifteen, and there was nowhere to take a dead boat and nothing to take it with. He let the tiller go. He did not reach for a paddle. A paddle is for getting somewhere, and there was nowhere to get to, and the only thing left moving on the water was the thing coming at him out of the dark.

Dákun closed the last of it and came aboard.

⁂

He came over the gunwale without a word and without hurry, and there was nothing of the leap in it, nothing of the cat. He stepped from the skiff to the dead boat the way a man steps from one stone to the next crossing a stream, because the gap was there and crossing it was the next part of the work. He had left the rifle in the skiff. A long gun is no use at the range he had come to fight at, and he knew it, and he had not brought it.

Osogó went for the rifle in the bilge, lying half-drowned under the slop of water in the bottom.

So did Dákun.

Their hands and their bodies came together over the wet boards in the dark, and the rifle was between them, and in the scramble of it---a knee, the boat rocking, water coming over the low side---the rifle went out from between them and over the gunwale into the black water, and the water took it the way the water takes everything, without any sound that mattered, and it was gone.

Neither of them watched it go. It was a thing that had been. The fight was a thing that was, and the old bodies knew the difference---the bodies that had learned this work in the same years, under the same men.

Then they were on each other.

It was not the clean thing the films make of it. There was no room for clean in a half-sunk boat, no footing on boards awash with water and fuel and the first blood, and what they did to each other was close and ugly and without shape.

Hands at throats and eyes.

A thumb driven at the soft of a socket.

A forehead going into a face and the wet crack of a nose and then another.

The boat pitched under them so that half of every blow was only staying upright on the failing thing while it slid them toward the water.

Dákun got a knee up into Osogó's side and Osogó felt a rib go and kept moving on it. He got an arm across Dákun's throat and Dákun got an elbow back into the rib he had just cracked, twice, and the second one took the breath clean out of Osogó and he held on anyway, and turned inside it, and drove his own elbow back into Dákun's ribs until he felt them give, and they went down together into the water in the bottom of the boat. And there they fought low and slow and terrible, two heavy men in a hand's depth of water, neither able to get the leverage to end it, each holding the other's killing hand off the killing place, and the boat went on filling under both of them.

He hit Dákun and Dákun hit him. He had been hit before---in the Hook, in the camps, by men faster and stronger than this. He had learned that most men spend their rage in the first minute and have nothing for the second. Dákun was not most men, and neither was Osogó, and the trouble with two men who are neither of them most men is that the thing does not end. It only goes on past the place where ending should have come. His eye was closing. His mouth filled with blood and he spat it into the water. One of Dákun's ears was torn loose and the side of his face was open to the bone and he did not seem to know it. They had both of them gone, long ago, past the place where the body keeps an account of its own damage. They had taught each other how to get there.

And then there came a moment where neither of them could do the next thing.

⁂

It came because the boat would not hold them up long enough to let it finish.

They had fought her down past the point where she could carry the fight. The water was over the boards and rising, the stern dragging, the bow tipping up, and the two of them lay against the high side of her in a hand's depth of water that was becoming two, spent, neither able to lift the other's weight off him, neither able to put the killing hand where the killing went, both of them breathing in the wet broken way of men with nothing left in the tank who are too far in to stop. The killing and the surviving had become the same difficulty. There was no strength left for either. So the moment opened, the way a moment opens when neither man can shut it, and they lay in the sinking boat in the dark and breathed.

His blood and Dákun's ran together in the water between them, and neither of them moved to do anything about anything.

His hands were counting.

He noticed it the way a man noticed a sound that has gone on a long time before you hear it---that under all of it, under the breathing and the water coming in and the far engines still hunting, his hands were counting. The inches of water. His own breaths set against Dákun's. The seconds the boat had left in her, the way he had counted the seconds between the spotlight sweeps, the way he had counted the strokes across the lake, the way---and here the thing he did not look at came up the back of his throat like the gasoline---the way the hands had counted in the years before the river, when the thing being counted was not strokes.

The hands had never stopped. He understood it lying there in the water with the man who had taught him half of what the hands knew. They had not stopped at the river. The river had not stopped them. He had walked down into the water to stop them and the water had spat him back and the hands had gone on counting, and all that had changed in fifteen years was the thing set in front of them to be counted. Strokes, instead of the dead. The living carried, instead of the dead made. The same hands. The same count. He had built a whole life on the back of believing the count had become a different thing, and lying here he could not find the place where it had. He could not put his thumb on the seam. And the not-finding was worse than the rib.

Dákun was watching him. One eye; the other gone to blood.

"You felt that," Dákun said. Wet. Slow. "Just now. Your hands."

Osogó said nothing.

"They never quit." The voice came in pieces, around the wreck of his mouth, and there was no triumph in it and no rivalry, nothing of a man who had won an argument. "I watched you across villages. I have watched you for years. You went into the river," ---he stopped, breathed, the breath bubbling in him--- "and you came straight back to the work. You only changed the name of it."

It was one ruined man telling another a true thing in the dark, and the other one unable to tell him back that it was false.

Because he could not. The hands counted. The hands had always counted. Kifu counted, and he was Kifu, and the fifteen years were maybe only a longer way of being Kifu, with a boat in the place of a blade.

The one thing that said otherwise was in the pouch at his belt, under the water now, the cold of it against his hip where his hand had gone a hundred times without his asking and went again now: the stone. His mother's. The thing he had carried out of a life he could not remember choosing to carry anything out of. The thing he had nearly put into a child's hand four nights ago and could not. The thing that did not count anything and was not for counting, that he had kept through every water that had ever tried to take it. He did not know why he kept it. He had never known. That not-knowing had been a small, quiet thing he lived alongside, and only now, with Dákun's true thing lying in the water between them, did he see that the not-knowing was the only argument he had against the man---and that it was an argument he could not make. You cannot hold up a stone in the dark and say this is the part of me that did not stay Kifu to a man who would see only a stone.

And he was not sure, himself, that it was true.

So he said nothing.

The silence held the two of them. It was the nearest thing to an answer he had, and it answered nothing, and Dákun, who had asked nothing, let it be.

The boat went on sinking. In a moment one of them was going to have to do something, and neither of them yet could.

That was when the first shot came out of the dark and hit Dákun in the chest.

⁂

It was not a sound either of them had made.

The shot came flat and final off the mudbank, and it took Dákun high in the chest, centre, and a second one followed it in before the first had finished---the way two shots come when the hand that fires them is in no hurry and very sure. He did not cry out. He had not cried out at anything Osogó had done to him, and he did not cry out at this. He looked down at his own chest, where the blood was coming up through the old scars, through the patterns the iron had put there in the years they had shared, spreading black across the grey, and then he looked at Osogó, the one eye, and his mouth opened, and whatever was in it did not come---because there was nothing in him to make the words out of, there never had been---and he went back off the high side of the boat into the water. The sound he made going in was not a splash and was not a silence. It was a giving-way. The water took him the way it took everything, without resistance, and closed over the place where he had been.

Osogó was already moving.

Because the shot had not been for him, and the next one would be. He understood it in the half-second. The rifle on the bank had fired on Oguku's tracker first---which meant the rifle did not belong to Oguku; and a rifle that did not belong to Oguku, firing on Oguku's man in the dark on contested water, was not the friend of anything afloat. It was clearing the water of everything that was on it, by a logic that did not know his name and did not need to. He felt the third shot before he heard it. The third shot did not chase Dákun down into the water where Dákun had gone. It adjusted. It came off the dead man and found the live one and hit the high gunwale where his chest had been a half-breath before, and that told him the last thing he needed to know about whoever was up there in the dark: that they were good, and that they were patient, and that they were still looking.

He went into the water.

He chose it. That was the thing he knew as he did it and would never afterward be able to unknow---that he had a half-second to go flat in the dying boat and be found, or to go over the side into the black, and that going over the side was a choice the way it had been a choice the first time, fifteen years ago, when there had been no rifle on any bank and no reason in the world but the one inside him, and he had walked down into this same water meaning not to come back up. He had chosen it then. He chose it now. The reasons were not the same and the water did not care; the water had never once cared why a man came into it, only that he came.

The water was cold and deep and it took him the way it had taken him fifteen years ago, closing over his head without resistance.

He went down. The bullets came after him, white lines of bubbles stitching down through the black and losing themselves in the silt, the rifle on the bank firing into water it could not read, and he went under them, deeper, where the light quit and the sound quit and there was only the cold and the weight of the whole river standing on his back.

Above him somewhere Dákun was going down too, turning, the water taking him. The boat was going down, the unfinished ribs of her filling. The rifle was on the bottom. All of it sinking through the same dark toward the same mud, and Osogó hung in the middle of it with his lungs beginning to burn and his hand gone, of its own accord, to the pouch at his belt.

The stone was there. The cold small shape of it, under his thumb. The one thing the water had never taken off him in fifteen years of trying. It did not answer anything. He held it in the dark at the bottom of his own grave, with a dead man sinking past him and a stranger's rifle waiting on the surface, and the stone did not tell him whether the hands that held it had ever stopped being Kifu's hands. The water did not tell him. There was no one left alive in the dark to tell him. And the question hung there with him in the cold, with no surface to rise to and break against.

His lungs burned. The burn became the old burn, the one from the first time---the burn the body makes when it has been told to die and has decided, without asking the man it belongs to, that it will not. He could stay down. He could let the burn have its way. He had wanted that, once, in this water, and the water had refused him, had pushed him back up into the light and the years and the boat and the girl and the long road to this exact cold dark with the same question still in it.

He was going to have to come up.

He always came up. The river always spat him back. It would spit him back into a rifle's eye, or into the dark beyond the rifle---he did not know which, and there was no way to know it from the bottom, and it did not change the one thing that was true under all the rest of it, the thing his burning body had already decided for him: that he would go up, because he always went up, and the river would let him, because the river was not finished with him.

It had never once told him why.