Floodplain

A short story by DW Wilson
February 22, 2012
DW Wilson was the winner of the 2011 BBC National Short Story Award—and, at age 26, the youngest ever. His fiction and essays have appeared in literary magazines across Canada, Ireland and Britain, and his debut short story collection, Once You Break a Knuckle, will be published by Bloomsbury on 12th April. The stories take place in the Kootenay Valley in British Columbia, where Wilson grew up, and hinge on issues of redemption and regret.

“Many of my characters are looking back at their pivotal moments, and those are not always happy moments,” Wilson says. “‘Floodplain’ is a little different in that the narrator ends up having to look forward, but the themes are pretty much the same: heartbreak, loss, and that unbridgeable gap between being a tough guy and having feelings.”




The summer before my girlfriend Vic left for university, me and her put the final touches on a marsh-raft we’d banged together from the top of an old Benz 230 and cull-lumber she hijacked from jobsites. It was a beauty, that raft—two hundred and eighty-two pounds of piss oil and vinegar, a real lover’s ride. I’d screwed a headboard to the stern and matted rubbergrip to the floor, and me and Vic used nylon rope—purple, same colour as her hair—to tether a rain barrel at each end: the pontoons. Vic said the beast wouldn’t be too aerodynamic, and then she cackled and said, —Or maybe hydrodynamic! We even flew a flag: the HMCS Rat Bag, sexiest marsh-raft a’floating. About everybody we knew didn’t see why we’d sail the marsh, since you couldn’t row, since you couldn’t even catch a wind. But that was the point, Vic said. You had to muck along with a piece of PVC pipe. You had to grease your elbows for it. That’s the way Vic rolls: she works with what she has, builds stuff herself and then sees how far it’ll go. Vic believes that if you want to love something you have to put the effort in, no matter what.

We were at my buddy’s house, this panelboard bungalow with a bunch of broke-down cars rusting on the lawn. The backyard opened onto the marsh, which Vic said was actually floodplain from the Sevenhead River. Vic had wanted to sail out there since grade school—just float on the groundwater while the knotgrass shuffled around you and all the little sounds cricketted in the dark. See, Vic loves marshes, loves the environment in general. She was going to school to learn about swamplands and peat bogs and subterranean lakes—what she called the “unseen things that keep the world going.” I like the environment too, don’t get me wrong, but it makes me uncomfortable, because you can never see it all at once—eventually part of it disappears, goes invisible and out of sight, not like a car, or a boat, or a house. Those are just there. I’m not afraid of the dark, I’m afraid of what I can’t see.

So, as the sun petered out behind the Rockies, we pushed off. Vic showed me the motions to do with the PVC pipe, called it punting, said the people in England did it; basically, you push off the mud like a pole-jumper, except without the jumping. She sat down on the futon we’d bolted to the floor and fished a mickey of whiskey from our liquor tub. Then she unfolded the futon halfway to bed form, so she could recline. Meanwhile, I moseyed us across the water.

—You smell like an engine, she said after a while.

—That’s what I am, I said. —I’m the motorboat.

The raft rocked with a waterbed’s kilter. The air smelled like earth. When I moved the pipe it made a sound like when you stir soup. Vic looked so pretty, there on the futon in the low orange light. She’d donned her brown ballcap and like always wore her sexy logger coat and her lazy eye was acting up. Vic’s the prettiest girl ever, and I have a lot of experience in this matter, so I would know.

—Come sit down, Vic said, and waved the whiskey to entice me. —We can float a while.

The raft swayed when I joined her and Vic smacked me in the chest, because she didn’t want to end up wet. She smiled when she hit me though, and right then I knew I’d miss the way we horsed around. That raft was part of something, but I don’t know how to describe it. Me and Vic had been friends for so long and we’d always talked about sailing away. It’s like you can wait forever to do what you want most and then suddenly it’s too late, it’s out of sight.

—Glad we got this done, Vic said.

—Me too.

She swigged whiskey—a big, tradesman gulp. —You OK, Dunc?

—Just thinken, I said, and took the bottle. It was shitty, but that’s not the point.

—I’m not leaving you.

—I know.

She patted the HMCS Rat Bag like you would a good dog. ?—When I visit, we can sail.

—I’m glad we got it done, I said.

She punched my shoulder —two small taps. On the horizon, the low sun made the Rockies have a red rim, like a glowworm, or a stove element. A soft wind wheezed over the marsh and the reeds tilted like goosehairs. Vic shifted beside me and I sniffed her scent of citrus shampoo, her scent of skin and sweat.

—What’dya wanna do? Vic said. She swayed the whiskey between her thighs.

—Guess we could have sex, I said, and she belted me again, flashed me this smile so I could see all her teeth. The prettiest smiles show the most teeth—I believe that.

—God, you’re such a boy, Vic said, and gave me a shove, and I rolled with it and she came with me, landed with my arms around her. I figured that was the sign and slid my hand under her shirt, but she kicked out, tumbled us over the raft and over the edge.

My shoulders clipped the pontoon. There was a second of weightlessness, of Vic’s wide boyish grin. Then: the marsh—cold and heavy, a darkness that gulped up the world, that sopped the air from my lungs, its weight like a winter coat. The marsh gargled, bore me toward the floodplain, and my lips puckered and my tongue grazed the mussely skin of my inner cheek.

Then I reached out, mudblind, and found Vic in the darkness. I couldn’t see her or hear her or smell her, had no sense of space, but I grabbed her around the ribs and dragged her to me—and suddenly we were as close as we used to be, sixteen again, and best friends again, rowdy and reckless and desperate to dredge up some excitement. And I could’ve floated there and held Vic forever, you know? Not under the water, but held her to me, you know? That’s what I wanted: to be near her, to watch her do all the things she does in that weird way she does them—to know, I guess, that Vic was still Vic. Maybe that’s all it takes to get what you want—maybe you just need to lose your whole sense of the world except for what matters most.

Then I had to go for air.

The marsh only reached my nipples, and when I surfaced some bullrush gummed to my eyebrow. Vic popped up a second later. She was shorter than me, so she tilted her chin up to get her nose and mouth out of the water. I still had my arms around her. Clumps of moss stuck to her cheeks and tufts of knotgrass tangled her hair. I wiped the moss off and expected her to smile, or say thanks, but instead she said, —Duncan, in a scary sober way, in the way you say a person’s name to tell them their dog has died. —Duncan, she said again, and her voice cracked. —I’m stuck.

One of the worst moments of my life, no lie. —You’re OK Vic, I said on instinct, on hope. —There’s no waves or nothing. The water won’t get higher.

—OK.

—What’s stuck?

Vic spat water, almost hit me in the eye. There were mud-specks on her lips, like freckles. Her hair seemed like a sick person’s. —Something’s got my foot. —Probably it’s grass, I said. —Just need to cut you loose. —You’re holding me up, she said. —You can touch. —I can’t. —You can touch, I said. —Just need to cut you loose. Then I went down into the darkness, traced my way along Vic’s leg, ran my hands over her denim shorts and her tensed quads and their bare, cold skin. I felt the scar that spanned from inside her thigh straight to her knee, the result of biking into a parked car—I was there for that, I helped her hobble to the hospital. Down, and down I went, over her shinsplinted shins and her calves seizing tighter than a windlass, the rim of her sport socks and her unlaced sneakers, until, at last, I touched the gristly vegetation that bound her to the marsh. I kept a pocketknife—still do. Part of me wondered how long the marsh had waited for this—if it’d wanted to take her since gradeschool, if Vic was meant to stay there. Then I sawed the knife against the grass, and as the fibres split and the grip slackened, I saw, for a second, the trajectory of it all, there in the darkness: the raft-ride to shore, Vic getting smarter and happier, first a biologist, then a schoolteacher, a tree planter, an environmentalist and, eventually, an old woman grown used to an empty home. And I realised I’d cut her free, and more than that: I’d set her free. Of course Vic would leave me. I mean, look at me. Vic had always been leaving me.

***

Afterward, we stripped naked since our clothes needed to dry. The sun had long disappeared behind the Rockies but there was a sliver moon, so I could see the shadows of her ribs, the outline of her breasts. Occasionally, bursts of light flared in the distance, and Vic called them bioluminescence, technically, but Will o’ Wisp for fun. We shared the whiskey and we shared body heat. Vic smelled like marshwater and mud, but her hair smelled like citrus shampoo.

She stretched out so I could see her tough stomach muscles. Her purple hair flopped over her ears. In the pale light it looked jet black, like an emptiness. Not that it made her unpretty—that’s not possible. I scuttled my fingers across her stomach and she swatted me, halfhearted, and my fingers hiked the moguls of her ribs and breasts. It all felt off though, like we’d done this before—which we had, but that’s not what I mean.

Vic grabbed a fistful of knotgrass so she could crack stalks of it in two. —Do you think anywhere on Earth has more of nothing than here? she said, and swept her hands over her bare legs, same way you’d operate a lathe, her whole body stretching out and in, her shoulders rolling like oars. I brushed moss off her collar bone, rubbed her neck, played with her earlobe and expected her to smack me. Instead, she smiled a sad smile, like when you remember a dead person being funny.

—Thanks for saving me.

—I didn’t save you, Vic.

She scruffled my hair. Vic’s the only person in the world I’ll ever let touch my head—well, her and my dad, so only her. ?—You’re a complex guy, Duncan.

—Nah, I said. —I just like you a lot.

In the distance another light burst like lens-flare through the reeds, like that famous painting everyone hangs in their bathroom. Vic put her hand on my knee, which is a sign, but I didn’t care to act on it. I don’t know why, since it’s what I wanted right then, except all of a sudden I understood a whole bunch more than usual, like what Vic meant by complex and why she had to go to university and the way it could’ve turned out if it had all turned out different.

Vic rapped her knuckles on my kneecap. —I’m gonna miss having you around.

—I can come visit.

—It’s not the same, she said. A strand of hair flopped on her forehead and she blew it aside with one sharp breath. Then she leaned on her elbows, left my leg alone. —It’s like everything’s changing. But you’re not changing, you’re still Duncan. And I’m afraid you might get left behind and I’m afraid I’m not gonna see you anymore. Of being lonely, or something.

Vic didn’t face me as she spoke. She looked out at the marsh, at the distant dark mountains as uniform as gears and the knotgrass growing in clumps above the floodplain. I bet she remembered this place as bigger than it was, as mysterious. I bet she remembered all the time we’d wasted there, as inseparable as oysters. I put my hand between her shoulder blades and rubbed my thumb down her spine. In profile, her eye twitched at the corner—from the wind, I guess.

—Everybody likes you Vic, I said. —You won’t be lonely.

She looked at me, her tongue pinched between her teeth. I hoped her lazy eye might appear again since I think it’s cute and I hoped she might say, —Nobody likes me like you like me, and I hoped I could kiss her and have sex with her and find a way to go to the west coast with her. Instead, she loosed a long breath and snapped more knotgrass in two. —Thanks Duncan, she said, but I don’t know what she meant, except she didn’t mean thanks.

Vic shifted nearer me and I looped my arm around her shoulders and hugged her close. I kissed her head. The wind whistled in off the marsh but we let it whip us, let it give us gooseskins. For the first time in my life I realised how one day I might not be able to do this with her, even just sitting there. Vic dug her fingers into my side, squeezed me with her strong skinny arms. We stared at the marsh and the mountains that bust up the horizon like teeth, waiting for those flares of orange to wiggle between the reeds. As night settled in, the marsh got darker and darker, like a deep liquid hole. It makes you feel small, that darkness, makes you want to be bigger, not physically bigger but somehow else—makes you want to want stuff less. But wanting stuff is never enough, not on its own. Take that from somebody who knows. Me and Vic were both looking at the same Will o’ Wisps and the same sweep of marsh, but I got the impression we each saw two completely different things.