Thuggiana by Gregory Ashe

Author:Gregory Ashe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hodgkin and Blount
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

We Fools of Nature

This story takes place before A Fault against the Dead.

1

“Auggie! Grab it!”

Auggie looked up from his phone in time to see the aluminum canoe drift away from the shore. The rope, which he was pretty sure had been under his foot, slithered out into the water. Auggie stumbled after it, the cold water of the river splashing under his steps. By the time the water hit his ankles, though, a current caught the side of the canoe, spinning it—and the rope—even farther out into the river. Auggie stared. Then he looked over his shoulder.

Theo came sprinting down the launch, gravel crunching underfoot. If his bad knee slowed him down at all, he didn’t show it—maybe all that PT was paying off. He cut diagonally toward the riverbank with an explosive, “Fuck!” and then he was trampling the weeds and rushes as he raced downriver.

It had all happened fast, but Auggie thought Theo had only been wearing one shoe.

The truck was starting to make a dinging noise, so Auggie walked up the launch. He climbed into the driver’s seat. He shut the door. The dinging stopped. He looked around.

They were alone, and the day was hot and blue, the gravel so bright that it left an afterimage when Auggie turned his head. Early June in Missouri wasn’t supposed to be this hot, but, of course, a heat wave had struck on the exact same weekend as the float trip that Theo had been—what was the polite, boyfriendly word for pestering? Nagging?—that Theo had been nagging Auggie to go on for, oh, a little over two years. Auggie would have suggested waiting, but they couldn’t push the float back. Fer had booked Auggie’s return ticket with several murderous-sounding threats, peppered throughout by what Auggie took to be a quasi-legalese phrase “failure to appear,” and so the float had to be this weekend, heat wave or not.

Auggie angled the A/C toward his face. He considered how deeply and truly and devotedly he loved his boyfriend. Enough, apparently, to endure two whole days of swamp ass. And, by extension, swamp crotch. And, although Auggie wasn’t sure if the technical name differed, swamp pits. Swamp forehead didn’t really seem like a thing, but he was definitely past the stage that his mother would have called glistening.

In the rearview mirror, the rushes stirred. A moment later, Theo appeared, hunched over on the bank as he crabbed sideways. It took a moment for Auggie to realize why: Theo had to bend over, one hand on the side of the canoe, to drag it upstream. Then Theo broke free from the rushes, coming around the cut in the bank where the gravel launch angled down into the water, and Auggie had a clear view, thanks to the mirror, of the fact that Theo was sopping wet. Auggie let out a noise that was, he realized with a degree of removed embarrassment, shockingly close to what a cartoon dog might have made—ruh roh came pretty close.

Theo, in only one shoe, limped across the gravel.

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