The paddle is the force that brings the rookie kayaker back up to the surface. You’re meant to sit upside down underwater when the skirt traps you in your seat, and then in a nice fluid motion, reach your paddle to the surface, swing it and snap your hip. But I didn’t have this “C to C” roll at all. I was seventeen and I taught myself to kayak, wore gear that didn’t fit, owned a paddle too short for my lanky arms. And when flipped over, I would fall into the odd motion of the current and let it take me. I would just watch the brown particles dancing between my head and the nose of the kayak.  

Now, on this dark and frothy Virginia river, I was overwhelmed even though I had been on this stretch of water a number of times. The water forced my boat into the center of the river. The squirrely current tugged in different directions. I took too many strokes, tipped over sideways, and then suddenly dipped under the water. This time I stayed under the surface for a long time, hugging my boat the first drop of the fall, then the second. The water muffled the senses, filled my ear canal on the first drop, and snaked its way up my nose, into my sinuses, on the second. There was the massage of the rapids.

Suddenly, the river’s bottom met my back and the water poured over the butt of my upturned kayak. The kayak turned, my head lifted a bit, and my face met a rock. I knew something had cracked inside my mouth—it felt as though I had pieces of a dinner plate in there. I pulled the handle on the skirt and kicked out of the boat, my legs getting caught between the skirt and the plastic. When I came up to the surface finally, the roll of the mountain ridge looked down on me and the river. My one leg was still stuck, but my shoulders were above water. I opened my mouth to yell for Matt, and my front two teeth fell into the water like coins.

When Matt came down, his inflatable kayak ducky flopping from too many drops and our homemade electrical tape patches failing, he was smiling, looking happier than I had ever seen him at school or at his house, where he fought with his older brother and seemed perpetually required to scrape white paint off of the shed. I had an old fishing life vest on, but Matt was bare-chested in the light—his pigeon chest was highlighted in the white glare. He only depended on his ability to swim.

When Matt coasted over the eddy line, he saw me and said, “Oh, Christ, Tyler, how did you do that?”

Cracking your teeth is painful, but I can say that I passed out based almost entirely on the fact that I had a vision of high school—I wouldn’t speak to any girl at homecoming without curling in my upper lip. And I had that next, terrible premonition that it wouldn’t stop there. My teeth were all going to fall out, one by one, and I would look like a picture my Mom had in which all of the great uncles and grandfathers had the kind of caved-in mouths that showed that there was nothing behind the lips.

Matt’s hands beat on my kayak trying to wake me. When I came to, his freakishly clammy and wrinkled hand held out my two teeth in his palm.

“They caught in your boat,” he said, and then looked worried, “Dude, we should get you home.”

I struggled up out of the water, pocketed my teeth in my life vest’s netting, and looked back to the falls. The rapid was as glorious as any class three rapid would be for kids with mismatched boats. My ancient kayak looked as though I should be boating in 1973 and Matt’s blow-up looked simply sinkable. Matt’s boat came from his dad, a second cousin of my mother’s. We didn’t know the title of our genetic relation—just some number of a cousin. We didn’t even look the same in any respect—he was shorter than me and I was gangly with thin ankles and wrists. In fact, we wouldn’t have even known we were related had my mother and I not been to a family reunion one day when I was nine.

Years later, Matt recognized me in the school lunch line when we joined the same high school, though how he knew it was me was unclear—I had grown several feet taller and my nose and face had stretched to be long and thin like my father’s—the father few people, not even me, had met. I looked even less like Matt’s side of the family. Really, Matt and I were only similar in how we both saw river water. It was a horizon line to be taken, an expanse of challenge. This made us come back to the river regularly in high school, even though we were the worst kind of rookies. It was amazing we made it down that piece of river at all.

We called this rapid “the falls,” though they weren’t really falls, more like rocky steps. The rapid seemed more vicious than it was with the path for the kayaks moving left to right. There was a gentle “v” in the current that led the boat to the left of the rocks and down into a deep pool. If you did it right, you’d make it down without much of a spray of hot water in your face.

But after one solid failure, the rapid seemed to just roll on itself, mocking me.

I spit blood and started to drain the kayak out from the bottom hole.

“How the hell did you do that?” Matt said.

“Shut up, man,” I said to the rocks.

Matt pulled his ducky boat up on shore, made me hold my mouth open, and inspected the teeth. They were broken down right at the gum.

He said, “How did you find the only mouth-shaped rock in the river?” and laughed.

I thought about hitting him with one half-closed fist to his jaw. Then a honking sound came up behind us. There, sneaking the easy way around the rapid, a white farm goose came kicking his way down the current. He looked sick, as though his feathers were losing their vibrancy in their layers, and his honk sounded desperate. When he passed by he called to us, loudly, his eyes on Matt and then me, then he moved on.

“What the hell’s the matter with him?” Matt said

“He looked starving,” I said.

“He’s in the wrong place for a farm goose.”

I shrugged, feeling the swelling gather under my lip and gum, the heat rising there.

“He’s probably embarrassed to see your ass in the water with your teeth floating around you,” Matt said.

I kicked out his leg and he fell to one knee. He was laughing as the rocks made little cut marks in his skin. Matt gave me a solid push, but it didn’t do much. He had very little anger toward me and I couldn’t understand it. How was it that I could boil over and Matt never boiled back?

I rubbed my gums and looked pathetic. Matt sat back next to me and rubbed his knee. The sun was covered up by a cloud and the goose was almost past a curve in the river.

“Let’s go,” Matt said, walking back to the water. He resituated himself on the ducky. The rubbery sounds of his boat covered up the sound of the white water.

“Yeah,” I said, nodding, “let’s follow that white duck ass.”

My kick to his knee didn’t matter then. We had four miles of hot water to go.

We set our boats back in the water and followed the goose for all of the miles we had left on the hot river as it flattened out over the landscape. There was kudzu here, draped over the young green woods and making umbrellas between the tree limbs. The mountains eased away from the river’s little valley and let the sun steam the water. We’d stop and drink the water bottles that Matt had tied in his boat, and the bird would be just ahead of us, looking for shade and something else. The goose circled rounded river rocks, followed eddies to the cooler air under the tree limbs, searched the horizon of the water. He probably was looking for food, but we took turns coming up with other reasons—maybe he was late, maybe he missed his flight, maybe he was looking for his gosling, and maybe he was horny.

_______________________________________

When I told my mother about my broken teeth later that evening in the kitchen, she demanded that I open my mouth to show the swollen gum.

She said, “If you had put them in your cheek and gotten to a dentist in an hour, then you wouldn’t have to get fake teeth.”

“Yeah,” I said, “but I was really far up river.”

“Kayaking,” she said, forcing the tone of her voice flat.

“Yep, kayaking.”

“Tyler, were you in your uncle’s boat?”

“Yeah, might as well have been, it was just sitting in the garage.”

Mom stepped back and looked down at her hand. She thought about her reaction while peeling at the fake plastic piece on her thumbnail. I waited, shifting my weight from foot to foot. I was accustomed to her brand of powerful, stubborn, single-mother worry.

“Well, I guess I couldn’t convince your Uncle Tommy not to go either. The teeth, though, you’re going to have to cover what the insurance won’t do,” she said, not looking up from her nails, “and feel damn lucky that we even have insurance right now.”

I pocketed the teeth.

“How’s that going to work?”

She shrugged and put on her vest for work with the nametag crooked on the right breast.

“Figure it out your damn self. If you’re going to go out and be an idiotic seventeen-year-old then you have to be a smart seventeen-year-old on your own dollar. Try,” she said, “Try to be different than your goddamn uncle.”

I would think about this later, the fact that she still thought of her brother as the stubborn ass who liked river water too much. Tommy was a bold boater, from what I could tell. He was the one who put the large scratches on the underside of my boat. He was the reason the paddle was cracking at its center. There was evidence of violent meetings with large river rocks, and hints of my uncle’s expertise in the way he added extra structure to reinforce the foot braces and boost the seat.

My Ma wouldn’t ever understand kayaking—what it felt like for my uncle, why it was worth it. I freaking loved it. Paddling down the river was always serenaded by hard rock love songs that played in my head. I loved it for the feeling of the water’s physics as it drove the kayak onward, dropping me down shelf after shelf of river pool. I could feel how my paddle could stir up the water and drive me onward. Even that feeling of death, giving into it under water in the white froth. That was worth it—to know what your heartbeat sounded like underwater.

I saw Uncle Tommy as another father figure I never met, but unlike my own dad’s unjustified absence, Tommy had a reason—a good reason—he never met me. Uncle Tommy wasn’t seventeen when he died. He didn’t have that excuse. He was twenty-four, and he had been paddling for years.

_______________________________________


The fourth time I went down the river that month, I had a gap where my teeth were meant to be. The insurance said they’d cover only half. I had to pony up the money for the rest of it. To do it, I sold my dirt bike and then there was really only one thing I could sell. This was my last time to kayak before I sold my uncle’s boat to save my grin.

When we started off, I had to tell Matt about the replacement teeth, the fate of the boat. When we were walking to the put-in, the pathway shadowed by tulip poplars, I told him sadly and petted the nose of my kayak as it rested on my shoulder, the cockpit cutting into my skin. He pulled his inflated boat behind, dragging thorns and vines that caught in the straps. Matt just shrugged in the way his side of the family shared—a subtle lift of just one shoulder.

“You gave it up awful easy, but I get it,” he said.

“You get it?”

“I get it, and I’d buy that piece-of-crap-boat off of you if I could.”

He stopped and pointed at me with his paddle.

“You’re giving up on the coolest shit anyone’s thought of doing in this county or this state,” he said.

“I need teeth,” I said, and he lowered the paddle.

“Well you’ll look pretty when you’ve got them, won’t you?”

Then he stomped up the path ahead of me. When I caught up with him, he had climbed into his ducky and kicked off from the shore already.

“C’mon, Pearly Whites,” he called to me.

He turned away to maneuver downstream. As I got into my cockpit, stretching the skirt along the plastic edge to keep my waist snug in the boat, I thought about Matt’s frustration. And he didn’t even have a ghost of an uncle to disappoint.

When we came to the falls, Matt was still far ahead, so he went first. I knew he was also worried about saving me again. I felt a bit of shame rise up at this thought, but I ignored it. Matt went down the falls easily, the loose tail of his ducky flopping too much. Then I paddled forward and met the rapid’s edge. I managed to hit a rock only once. This time, my paddle pushed me past it, and I let the current take me. At the bottom, my boat swept to the side where Matt sat in his ducky.

I was whole. I was above water.

I didn’t even notice why we were over in the calm eddy until I followed Matt’s eyes to the kayaker right in the biggest hole of the rapid. The white water lifted and crashed here purposefully and infinitely. The kayaker had a baby blue boat and a pink helmet and he drove himself right into the hole and played in it. He’d balance using quick cuts of the paddle blade into the foam, turning and dipping, then dropping out to the next roll of water. I had heard of this, but never seen it. The kayaker moved up the wake of a wave to surf its violent front before heading back to that hole in the river’s surface. I turned to Matt with my Holy freaking God expression.

Matt nodded.

Two more boaters went down the falls behind us, and I realized that they had a whole party here of five people in kayaks. They were walking a path along the opposite bank to run the falls again and again. There were even girls with bright red boats, their professional-looking paddles flailing along their path. Three guys, the oldest in the pink helmet, circled the bottom, waiting for a chance to surf. They all had matching vests, but it looked as though they all were at different levels of experience, some surfing and others watching nervously.

And then pink-helmet-guy saw us in the eddy. I’m sure we looked like bad luck in our hand-me-down boats and mismatched gear. We were timid too, just watching. He paddled over, his mouth in a tight bite like he had something he wanted to say, his eyebrows dripping river water, nose battered by kayaking accidents of past floats.

“Hey, you taking a chance in the surf today?”

“Just came to watch,” I called back.

“That’s good. You two shouldn’t be in this water without real life vests,” he said looking at Matt, and then at me “or at least life vests that fit, for sure. I don’t like huckers taking on crap they shouldn’t.”

“I might be a hucker, taking on new shit, but I know what I can and can’t do,” I shot back.

He looked uncomfortable, undid his skirt and then reworked it around his kayak’s cockpit at his waist.

“No hard feelings, brah. You just have to know when to take it easy.”

“I don’t need somebody giving a damn,” I said and immediately thought about taking it back. I wasn’t yet used to the kind of calls kayakers yelled at each other, the fatherly role the more experienced kayakers took on, the advice they would give to anyone willing to sit in the current and listen.

Matt shrugged one shoulder again.

The guy shook his head, turned his boat back around and went back to surfing. We watched him bounce around in the froth until he came out of the hole and lost his balance. He fell into the water and then popped back up on the other side performing the “C to C” roll like that’s how he came out of his Momma’s C-Section.

I was angry at myself now, and angry at the hole in my teeth that kept me from smiling, and even pissed at the relentless pour of water over each rock. That’s the kind of anger the age of seventeen seemed to bring without warning. My mind would singe itself briefly and then I’d move on from the emotion fast, even distract myself from it.

I dunked my head in the river. Matt gave a paddle-wave to the other boaters. Pink-helmet-guy waved back. We headed downstream into the shimmying air.

“You,” Matt said, “should have gotten in there with them, ’cause at least you could have. Me with my damn inflatable—I can’t do much.”

He smacked his boat.

The tension between us slipped away after our run-in with the boaters, and Matt wouldn’t stop talking on the four-mile paddle to the take-out. He somehow managed to overlook what a jerk I was and focus solely on the physics of moving up a river current in a wave surf. Two miles into the ride and I gave in to his excitement, even said, “Yeah, man, someday we’ll do that shit.”

We were still talking about surfing whitewater as we loaded up the boats and ignored the smell of something dead nearby. Matt was certain that we should be that guy, that kayaker with the pink helmet and broken nose. When I saw feathers and a loose body next to the take-out ramp, I didn’t say anything. I would only think about the goose later when I was about to fall asleep and I ran my tongue in the hole that gave a window to my lips.

_______________________________________

The next day, after waking up to an empty house since Mom had picked up an earlier shift, I made some calls around town. By eleven o’clock, I had a customer. He ran a local shop, and bought old boats, fixed them up by smoothing out the plastic with a big hot spoon and replaced the pads and seat. His name was Art, and he drove a rusted-out green van with no windows in the back.

It came up our driveway, dust trailing. He stopped right where I had the boat leaning against the chain link fence in the front. Then Art got out of the driver’s seat with the heavy gait of a retired paddler, oversized green t-shirt, ripped jean shorts low below his gut.

There was a certain experience that he seemed to display, as though every piece of river I had ever seen, he had traveled in his boat without caution. The way Art walked bowlegged showed that he was designed for a boat rather than land. As he took a fourth step, his knee cracked like ice—more evidence that the man had spent most of his life with his legs curled up in a kayak boat. He walked over, ran his wide hand along my boat’s edges and pressed on the butt of the seat.

I opened the screen door.

He said, “Where’d you get this damn thing? It’s old. Fiberglass.”

“It’s my uncle’s.”

I walked up and put my hand on the nose of the boat one last time.

“He ain’t going to be pissed that you sold it, right?”

“No,” I said, “He died. He died in it, actually.”

“Died in the boat?” Art asked. He looked up from a close examination of the seat.

“They found the kayak floating before they found him,” I said, then I realized this kind of honesty usually didn’t work when selling anything.

“Jesus,” he said, “Where’d he die?”

“The Green River.”

“When was this?”

“I don’t know. Ten or fifteen years?”

“What was his name?”

“Tommy.”

“Tommy?” he asked, and he shoved his head into the kayak to look more closely at the foot rests, “Jesus, I helped him put those in there.”

“My uncle?”

“Yeah, boating whitewater at the Green’s level—very few people can do that. It’s a small world when it comes to kayaking, but it was even more so back then. Back in the day.”

“You went on the water with him?”

“No, no, he just came to the shop when my Daddy owned it. Couldn’t decide how his feet should sit in there. I heard about the accident though, later. A sad one.”

“How’d he die? You know, on the river. I only know that they found the boat first.”

He looked up at me from inside the cave of the kayak where his head was still enclosed. He could probably smell my sweat rubbed into that old seat.

“He ran a hole full of rocks that were brand new after a storm. And people are wearing full face masks now because of accidents like Tommy’s.”

He pulled himself out of the kayak and looked at me intensely. His skin looked like shards of clay glued back together.

“Jesus,” I said.

“Ask any serious boater, any of them, and they’ll tell you it’s worth it.”
“Seems like sometimes, people don’t belong in white water. Like it’s just too crazy.”

“You’ve boated though before, haven’t you?” he said, and he looked at my incomplete teeth.

“Yeah.”

“Then you should know. You should know that even dying would feel worth it.”

I let that statement just sit there.

He spat and considered my kayak, then said, “Tell you what—I’ll give you good money for it as long as you don’t tell anyone that this one was a death vessel once.”

Of course I agreed.

_______________________________________

When the boat was gone and the money was exchanged, I had my mouth fitted with temporary replacement teeth while the base of the bridge they jammed into my gums was somehow bonding to my jaw. It felt odd—like a child’s idea of teeth were taking hold of my mouth.

At this point I was on my own. Matt was working at the pool since his boat had finally died from failed patches and the heat of his van. I had heard from him once or twice and it seemed like he hadn’t been more depressed in his life. We both lost our boats. We both lost our chance.

I had a different reaction. Even though I was relieved to have some teeth in the center of my mouth again, I regularly found myself having temper tantrums in the heat of the day. I spent my time just wishing my kayak would come back to me, and wondering what my Uncle Tommy would say.

I imagined him leaning against the front gate of the house and saying, “Damn, boy. Pearly Whites, you don’t get it, do you?”

I decided to stop imagining him when I realized that I couldn’t know what his voice sounded like.

My mother came home one day to me slamming tools around in the garage. I was supposed to clean it—that was my chore for the summer—but nothing was getting done. Instead I was throwing wrenches into a tool box—they were all mismatched and without purpose. One sounded loud and satisfying. I threw another, harder this time and it bounced off of a wall and smashed into a bottle of coolant. Then Mom came in and leaned on the wall to watch me, but I stopped and set the next wrench on the floor.

“I asked your Uncle Tommy,” she said, “to stop kayaking before he died.”

I said, “Oh yeah?” and glared at her.

I kicked the wrench on the floor and it slid across to tap the tool box at its base. Mom smiled.

“That’s right. He almost died on a river in West Virginia the season before. Got his boat pinned upside down, between two rocks. He couldn’t get up because the current kept him there, drowning him. They got him up with a kayak tow rope finally and had to give him CPR. He almost died right there and I drove up north to go get his ass. Nobody wanted to take him out on a river after he almost died.”

“What did he say when you asked him to quit?”

“We were in the car driving,” she smiled, “and he had the coffee in his hand that he always got with so much sugar and milk, it was like cloudy water. I told him and he said he couldn’t make any promises, so I turned the wheel and made his coffee spill all down his front.”

She laughed and said, “You get your anger from somewhere.”

We just looked at each other for a couple seconds and I decided that her methods of convincing me were not going to work. I could withstand her logic and memories of my uncle any day.

“Why aren’t you hanging out with Matt, anyway?” she said.

“He’s working.”

She went inside without saying anything else and headed to the kitchen to cool off under the ceiling fan.

I thought I was tough, but for weeks after hearing this story, I would have nightmares about getting pinned. In the dream, I’d be screaming underwater, the current running between the old gap in my teeth to fill my lungs as fast as the river could. Sometimes, I’d wake up screaming, but other times, the dream would let me escape. I’d pull myself up and out of the river, and the only way to get back to the shore was to walk on the other bodies of other kayakers, their flesh cold and low under the water’s surface. I’d take a leap, balance on someone’s back, and leap again. Then I’d balance on someone’s cold belly.

Usually, I woke up when I realized that it had to be a dream since our river never seemed that cold. By this point, I had my teeth replaced completely, the bridge a permanent feature in my mouth, and when I’d wake, I could feel the implants suddenly there.

On a day after a long night of these dreams, I was peeling the husks from corn for dinner. I always did this at the kitchen table and let the hairs fall all over the tablecloth. This is when the shop called the house and asked my mother if we wanted to buy my uncle’s boat back for any reason. The man on the line knew we might feel sentimental about it. I imagined the salesman version of Art’s voice hiding his desperation to sell a boat he shouldn’t have bought. My mother turned with the phone to her ear, and her back to the kitchen sink.

Then she looked at me as she spoke into the phone and said, “No, no. You all keep it.”

“Uh huh,” she said, and I looked down at my hands.

“No sir, we aren’t interested—but good luck in your sale—uh huh. Bye bye.”

She hung up.

I kept on taking off those husks, focusing on the satisfying pull of the corn out of its sheath rather than the sad hollow shell of my kayak sitting in a dark shop. As I pulled the hairs out from their little hideaways between the kernels of the corn, I told my mother about the goose, searching and searching until starvation. She listened half-heartedly as she cranked open a can of tomato sauce, and said, “It’s so strange that we can recognize when an animal is afraid of dying.”

She had the look of someone not quite connected to the conversation, like she was sitting in a waiting room somewhere, her eyes glancing off of me like I was a stranger waiting there too. She looked like this a lot, I had noticed—her shoulders permanently dropped. She hadn’t taken off her work uniform yet, which seemed to be a permanent feature as well in those days because she was a slave to two different stores, one of those little places that sold everything for a dollar, and the other a clothing store with tank tops for twelve-year-old girls.

And she was tired at least half of her day, usually the second half, so now I talked without her really listening. Granted, I wasn’t really paying attention myself as I thought over my uncle and Art, both of them desperate to feel water, even in lieu of life. But what was it in their lives to work for? Two jobs like Mom’s—that was a reason? Or just getting old? Losing teeth not from waterfalls, but from just bad dental insurance?  Living longer than an uncle? I sucked on my new teeth, focused again on the corn. The thoughts kept bursting through though, and I couldn’t hold back that thought of my Uncle Tommy who could cheat death on a real river rapid and still give up his life on another. He couldn’t live without river and I was the fool who couldn’t live without teeth.

The familiar mental blister flared up again. My fists clenched tight around the corn husk and I thought about busting my teeth off right there at the table, jamming my head down on the smooth table cloth over and over until my new front teeth came off of their stable little place in my gums.

 

Jessi Lewis is currently working through her Masters of Fine Arts in fiction at West Virginia University. Recently, she has purposefully attempted a collection of adventure sports in order to overcome her fear of heights and drowning. She can't help but sneak these fears into her work. Jessi Lewis has also published in Flyway and Ghost Town. She was honored with a Pushcart Nomination for her short story, “Walnuts.”