The two blondes laughed, talked, and texted, all at the same time. John tried not to be too obvious about hanging on against the rough ride. He hated being on the river, especially at this speed. Looking at the extravagant white wake behind them only made his foreboding grow. Other boats flashed by, boats they could collide with. It happened all the time. The inner gyroscope of his mind was calibrated to disaster. The river could be as much as forty feet deep and so soupy thick you couldn’t see two feet in front of you if you tried to swim underwater, a river filled with two centuries of effluent from the Industrial Revolution, and god knew how many dead bodies. Dead bodies from the gangster glory days of Newport, Kentucky, the carp and catfish having long since picked them to skeletons, the remains from yesterday’s mishap upriver. When the river ran at flood stage in the early spring, all manner of mayhem ensued. Once he had been sitting at one of the floating restaurants when the river was running high and fast and had glanced over to see a dead pig slip by. It was not a flying pig. Every now and then, one of the restaurants was lost to flood season.
“You okay?” Heather patted his arm.
“The river makes me superstitious.”
“Oh…”
John’s biological father had a sailboat in Boston, and took him out on it when he visited in the summers. A few years ago, the man had decided he wanted to be part of John’s life again. The sailboat and the open sea really frightened John. And the company of his stepbrother and stepsister, such as it was, and his father’s chirpy young girlfriend of the moment-they all looked alike, attractive, and slender-made him feel even more alienated from the world. His father looked like the kind of man Zack would become at fifty, right down to the flawless blue eyes. He despised such men.
By this time, Zack had come about and brought them back downtown, then they turned south into the mouth of the Licking River. As the boat slowed, the dread in John’s middle eased.
“Brought along the Zodiac in case we picked up more to party,” Zack said to Heather, indicating the small craft he was towing. John’s real father owned the exact same boat and had taught him how to pilot it in Boston Harbor. The man had done it, John knew, to help him overcome his fear of the water. Part of John wondered if he had also done it out of a streak of cruelty. But John had mastered the Zodiac out of spite, even if it didn’t fully cure his sure knowledge of the sorcery of the river. He even grew to like the little craft. It was similar to ones used by Navy SEALS.