by Benjamin Chappalow

After Will and I found that dead sheep floating in the water, my parents wouldn’t let me swim in the French Broad anymore. Will took it hard. I tried to soften the news by telling him jokes. You know, back when it didn’t stink, they used to just call it the Broad River. He kept his mouth in a tight line. I ended up watching him swim from the shade, the water a thick brown that hid him when he went under. He showed up sick to school the next day, refusing to go home. Ms. Humboldt had me walk him to the front office, to the bathroom without Sharpie on the walls, and I watched the chocolate milk he drank at lunch swirl around the toilet basin. “Nothing wrong with a river,” he kept saying. “We’re all drinking from it.”

He soon built a fort by the riverbank. It was just a bough of branches and old plywood leaning against a birch tree. He threw a ratty blue tarp over it all to keep out the rain and filled its holes with leaves. Glass Coca-Cola bottles lined a semi-circle around it with light dregs of rainwater at their bottoms. Inside the fort, he kept mismatched cushions, waterlogged magazines with curling pages, a half-eaten chocolate bar, and a stained duvet cover. I forced a smile and told him it was impressive.

“Something, ain’t it? Get to be outside. Free.” It wasn’t much of a difference — inside or outside — the little fort looked so much like his family’s house. Loose boards, holes in the roof. His house always had kids and furniture spilling into the yard as if all that yelling pushed them out. 

I asked what he’d be doing out here. 

He pulled out a yard-long stick from behind the fort. It dangled a dead dragonfly on the end of a long piece of fishing twine, the kind you’d find wedged in the brambles along the meander.“Fly fishing,” he said. “Here, I’ll show you.” He rolled up his jeans above his knees and waded in. He told me to join him. “You’re not swimming in it. You’re above it. Just your feet.”

I dipped a foot in and watched it disappear. I had thought it’d be colder. Our feet in the water looked webbed, the outline of our toes fading together, like the platypuses in Ms. Humboldt’s class. He cast and flicked the line around, the dragonfly floating with the current. Occasionally he pulled it in to retie the knot. 

“You got to be real still,” he told me. “Still and quiet.”

He didn’t move. I didn’t either. We stayed like that a while, like we got smoothed into everything touching us — the uneven rocks digging under our feet, the water flowing between our legs, the wind blowing in the tar smell from the coal plant’s ash pond. A fish did come, but it was a small thing floating belly-up, scales shining in the murk. Will tried to pretend he didn’t see it, but when it drifted up and bumped against his leg, his mouth drew tight.