“Hey Karl! Is that you?” Emilio hollers, confident the barrel shaped figure is his erstwhile companion. The figure walks up to the side of the shimmering brown river and shouts across.
“Emilio! I’ve found you, thank God!” Tears of relief roll down Karl’s face.
He can just make out Emilio, who is waving in front of a small flickering campfire. The trees behind him are blacked out as the light starts to fade.
“Yeah man! You gotta cross, we're gonna need to camp here tonight. I’ve made a fire and got the tent set up and everything.” Emilio yells through the concave arches of his palms.
“How am I gonna cross? It’s like the goddamn Atlantic Ocean out there and I only ever did my twenty-five meter swimming badge!” Karl sizes up the enormity of the task at hand.
“Just wade out as far as you can and then swim the rest of the way.”
“I’m not swimming in this river! There are probably piranhas and snakes and shit in there.”
“What?” Emilio struggles to make out what Karl is saying.
“I said the goddam creature from the black lagoon’s probably lurking around here somewhere under this river of shit.”
Karl stares at the dark water in horror, the clicking sound of a thousand hidden crickets growing oppressively loud as his imagination conjures endless horrific scenarios of what is loitering beneath the river's surface.
“No, you’ll be fine!” Emilio reassures. Karl is not convinced. The river seems so wide that the task is overwhelming him. He eventually realizes that the more time he stands thinking about it the less likely he is to overcome his fear, and so without further thought he edges closer to the side of the bank and dips his foot in the river, which is warmer than he had expected.
“Please God, no Piranhas.” Karl closes his eyes, clenching his hands together in prayer. Slowly he begins to wade out, shivering and whimpering with each unbalanced step. His clothes clench his body and grow heavy as he starts to become submerged. A loose reed slides past his arm as he gets shoulder deep, causing him to jump out of his skin, terrified.
“Oh my God, what the hell is that?” Karl whips his arm out of the water before realising what the harmless object is, although it does little to restore his calm.
“You ok out there?” Shouts Emilio, seeing the commotion.
“Oh yeah! I’m having a fucking ball out here! You should try it sometime!” Karl wisecracks, trying to concentrate on Emilio’s figure, as he steadily becomes immersed up to his neck. Karl assumes a tiptoed position until his feet start to sink into the mud, causing him to push himself out into the unknown depths and start swimming, trying to keep his chin above the water. The underlying current begins to drag him to the right, making it hard for him to keep his head afloat. Feeling the additional pressure he kicks harder.
“Keep going, Karl, your doing great. You're already a quarter of the way across!”
As Emilio is walking along the bank following Karl’s trajectory he notices a disruption in the water fifty meters further to the right from where Karl is swimming. Assuming it is fish feeding at the surface he thinks nothing more of it. As Karl swims across the dark surface he leaves a strong white fizzing wake behind him. Emilio notices a disturbance in the water once again, only this time he can make out the tail of a large fish. A black fin then emerges, slicing gracefully through the water's surface. The fish seems to be attracted by Karl’s frantic splashing as he struggles his way through the murky water. Emilio squints, trying to make out exactly what the fish is, because the closer it draws towards Karl the bigger it seems to become. Emilio then realizes something that he had not considered before. He realizes that the dorsal fin headed toward Karl belongs to a shark. And the only kind of shark that could possibly survive in fresh waters is the Bull Shark, notorious for its hostile disposition. Emilio recalls a documentary about Bull Sharks getting trapped in river systems, miles upstream from the open ocean.
“Hey Karl, you’d better start swimming faster buddy, you’ve got company!” Bellows Emilio, watching Karl flapping in the middle of the river. “Quicker, Karl, I think there's a flipping Bull Shark in the water!”
Karl is oblivious, his frantic splashing literally drowning out Emilio’s words. The muscular fish lingers nearby, before making a few agitated lunges, homing in on Karl’s kicking legs. Karl, unaware, kicks the shark on the nose, deterring it for a moment. The eight-foot long shark circles back around. Karl sees the shark's dorsal fin as it circles him. His limbs go numb and his mind explodes with anxiety as he frantically looks over his shoulder to try and spot the shark’s whereabouts. The shark darts at him, thrashing through the water and brushing up against him. Karl clings to the shark as it passes and is dragged for a few seconds through the water at speed, screaming in terror as the shark jerks its gaping mouth about, trying to get a grip on the struggling passenger.
Karl is just forty feet from Emilio’s side of the river. Desperately searching for a sharp object that he may be able to harpoon the shark with, Emilio grabs at a fallen tree branch and rushes out into the water towards Karl, who dips below the surface. Fear and fatigue make way for survival and as the shark comes in close, Karl turns and punches. The punch lands on the shark’s sensitive snout, disorientating it briefly. The shark swims out wide and circles around again. Seeing Karl within ten feet of the riverbank Emilio sets himself. The shark homes in on Karl’s arm. Emilio edges closer, submerging himself up to his waist. He waits for the shark to raise his snout and then thrusts the pointed stick into the shark’s face, narrowly missing Karl’s arm and perforating the shark’s lower jaw. The bulky fish thrashes violently, trying to dislodge the branch. Emilio grabs Karl, pulling him up the muddy bank, slipping several times as he struggles to gain a foothold. Lying on their backs, their chests convulsing, Emilio and Karl look up at the dark sky. Emilio levers himself up onto his side with his elbow and sees the branch that’s wedged in the shark’s jaw moving across the water's surface wildly.
“Like seriously, when does that ever happen, Emilio? A shark! In the goddam river! That’s just my luck. The one time I have to cross a fuckin river and there’s a prehistoric son-of-a-bitch in there. And there I was worrying about snakes.” Karl rasps, struggling to catch his breath and coughing up gritty river water.
“It was a Bull Shark, it must have been. No other shark could survive in these waters.”
They get their breath back, then make their way silently over to the fire, which is besieged with pests hovering around its radius, attracted to the light. Emilio strips down to his underwear and hangs his clothes on a stick that he has dug into the ground. He looks at Karl with a rare feeling of humility.
“I’m sorry, Karl” He speaks quietly.
“I’m ok, don’t worry about it!” Karl throws a stone into the fire.
“I’m sorry for dragging you out here! For putting you on that shark’s menu.” Emilio is deeply remorseful as the scale of the situation is brought home to him.
“You saved my life, man.” Karl replies.
“I nearly got you killed!”
“You know what, Emilio, I think somewhere out there, a miracle happened. I felt like God was guiding me somehow.”
Emilio smiles fondly at his friend.
“Look Emilio, let’s just find that plant and get the hell out of here.”
“Yeah, I hear that, man!”
“Emilio! Do you believe in God? I really mean it, I think he saved my backside out there!”
“Woah, that’s a heavy subject for you, Karl. I never heard you talk about religion before.” Emilio is surprised.
“I know! It's just when you come close, it makes you think. So, do you believe?”
“I’m a man of science, Karl. I need evidence, something I can measure and see with my own eyes. But having said that, I’m open to the idea that there could be something else, a highe
r power perhaps. Not a man with a long white beard, just a power or a presence we could never comprehend. If people do choose to follow a religion and take something positive from it then that’s great.”
“So do you believe in God or not?”
“Not really, Karl, but that’s just my opinion.”
“So if you don’t believe in God, what do you think happens to you when you die?”
“Well, this is why I love science Karl. It gives me great comfort when thinking about death. You see, according to science, everything is eternal, nothing ever ends.”
“How do you work that one out?” Karl is sceptical.
“Well, everything in the universe is made out of a kind of energy. You, me, a grain of salt, this grass we’re sitting on, everything, right! Now energy cannot be created or destroyed, it just changes form. So the very fabric of what we are all essentially made out of simply goes on forever, including our spirit and consciousness! So what do you think of that?”
Karl looks out across the dark river, deep in thought, before replying.
“I think that as long as I don’t piss my mom and stepdad off too much, then I’ll go to heaven.”
Emilio laughs. For once he doesn’t care if Karl isn’t seeing things from his point of view, he’s just relieved he got out of the river in one piece and that he is by his side.
“So, I guess we better try and get some rest.” Emilio looks over at the small blue tent.
“I don’t think I’m going to be able to get any sleep tonight, Emilio. My mind is still in that river. I can’t stop thinking about that shark, man. I have to be honest, it really shook me up.”
“Yeah, I hear you, Karl. We should at least get in the tent and zip it up, to protect us from getting bitten by anything.”
“Man, couldn’t you have brought a bigger tent?”
“This was the smallest most portable one I could find that was snake proof.”
“Snake proof?”
. “Yeah, I ordered it from an Australian website. It’s snake and scorpion proof.”
“Hey, I forgot to ask, are you ok, man? I was so scared when you fell from that bridge. That was one hell of a drop. I was so scared I'd never see you again.”
“Yeah, I’m fine. Luckily I didn’t land on any rocks. I knew you'd find me if you followed the river downstream, although as it was getting dark I started to have my doubts.”
Something large slithers across the mud and drops into the river. The boys fall silent. A sound from the trees behind them, primitive and visceral, fills the space left by their voices.
“The rainforest gives me the creeps, Emilio. Did you say this tent was snake proof?” Pangs of anxiety stab at Karl.
“Yeah, snake and scorpion.”
“Ok. I think you're right, we should get in the tent.”
The boys’ climb into the tent in their soggy underwear and sit awkwardly, trying their best to distance themselves from one another as they sit upright, leaning back on the tent’s dark canvas. By the early hours they doze off, bolt upright and exhausted.