“Guess you’ll have to be cutting back on the Pall Malls.”

“There’s a fucking idea. I could go for one right now.” He managed a smile. “Okay, pardner, what next?”

Before I’d jumped, I’d hoped that the two of us might manage to pull ourselves around to the other side of the tower, where the current would be milder, and make a swim toward shore. But I realized now how hopeless that was. The whirlpool was too strong, the sides of the tower were slick as a mirror, worn smooth by years and years of pounding, and in any case, Bill wasn’t going anywhere. He was barely holding on where he was, and from the color of his face, I seriously wondered how long he’d stay conscious. The cold would help awhile, but then it wouldn’t. Fifty-five degrees, tops: general lore said a couple of hours at the most, assuming you could keep yourself moving, which we couldn’t: the two of us were pinned to the tower like a couple of donkey tails, icy water pouring over our bones. Already I could feel it eating away at my edges. So, an hour, but maybe not even that: if Bill passed out, or let go of the bar even for a second, that would be the end of it.

“What’s next is, we sit tight and enjoy the scenery. I sent Mike and Carl to fetch the cavalry.”

“Carl? Mike I understand, but what you send that old lard-ass for?”

I paused to squirt a mouthful of water. “They’ll make it fine. All we have to do is stay put. Think we can get you out of those waders?”

Which proved tricky: With Bill’s left hand all but useless, he couldn’t keep hold of the bar and reach down to his boots at the same time. For a while he tried kicking them off, then scraping his heels against the side of the tower, but he couldn’t get any traction in the fast-moving water. And they were far below my reach.

“Just great. This is how they’ll find me, pants around my knees.”

I could see how exhausted he was. “I’ve got an idea,” I said. “I might be able to pull the boots off if I could use both feet. Pull yourself in and let me try to get behind you.”

The trick was reaching one hand around him to grab the bar on the other side. But the instant I let go, the current twisted me back toward the opening. A dozen times the same thing happened, no matter what I did.

“Fuck.” I was out of breath from exertion, my teeth chattering like somebody tapping out a code. “It isn’t going to work.”

“No, it will,” Bill said. “I’ll let go, so the current pulls me toward you, then you can get your arm around me. Use my weight for leverage.”

It was chancy, but I saw how it could work. One thing for certain; the waders had to go. Sooner or later, somebody would come to help, and with his waders bunched around his feet, Bill couldn’t maneuver at all, even to grab hold of a towrope.

“We’ll have to time it right. Let go on my mark. One…”

He nodded tersely. “Two…”

“Three-”

Bill released the bar, and I let my left hand drop; as I spun out from the wall, pivoting on my right hand, Bill crashed into me in a backward hug, and for an instant, as we tangled together, I thought I was going to lose my grip and send us down the drain for sure. But then I felt the pressure of his weight twisting us upstream, and I thought: bingo. With a stab of my left hand I found the bar again and I hauled us both, face-first, back against the tower, Bill wedged into the narrow space between me and the wall.

I took a gulp of air. “This should do it, I think. Hang on.”

I wrapped my feet around his boots. A couple of hard yanks and off they came, bubbling to the surface a second later, two bodiless legs spinning in the vortex. I watched them go shooting down the drain.

“Better?”

I could no longer see his face, but I felt him nod. His energy was gone. We’d been in the water at least twenty minutes, Bill a little more; I couldn’t look at my watch to make sure, but I could tell from the light that it was past seven. I knew my hands were sliced to ribbons on the rebar, though the pain was vague, and I was glad that the cold had spared me at least this. I dipped my face to take a sip of iron-tasting water that made my fillings hum.

“Okay, then,” I said, and felt a shadow on my neck that meant the sun had slipped behind the mountains. “Now we wait.”

But thirty minutes stretched to sixty, then ninety. I knew that Mike and Carl had gotten lost, either on the trail or driving back to town. Apart from a yell every once in a while from Pete, followed by my terse reply, no one spoke. Held in my arms, Bill seemed to doze, and for a few minutes I did, too, my hands somehow holding fast to the bar; I opened my eyes to see that the first stars were out, pinpricks of light in an otherwise vast and featureless sky, and it suddenly seemed curious to me, curious in a way I cannot express, the simple fact of stars. I knew I was cold, my body temperature was starting to fall, but somehow this understanding seemed to have no importance, no relationship to physical fact. I was so cold it almost felt like being warm.

“Joe?”

“Right here.”

“Nobody’s coming, are they?”

The right thing to say was, of course they are, just hold on a little longer. But the cold had softened my resolve, and there seemed no reason to lie. “Something must have happened. I thought they’d be back by now.”

“Joe, I don’t think I can stay awake much longer. I’m all fucked up here.”

“That makes two of us. I can’t even feel my hands anymore.”

“That’s not what I mean.” Bill’s voice had an empty sound, like something was missing inside it. He let a moment go by. “I hope you don’t mind,” he said then, “but I’m going to let go of the bar.”

“Not a good idea. I can’t hold on without your help.”

“Joe, listen. It’s not your fault. I shouldn’t have been horsing around up on the dam like that. I’m deadweight, but I know you, you could hold this thing all night if you had to. Just let me go.”

I stiffened my hold on the bar to make my point. “It’s not going to happen.”

“Sure it is, buddy, sure it is. You’ve got a family to think of. What’s your girl’s name? Kate? Do the right thing, Joe. Think of Kate and let me go.”

The cold or the late hour or just the hopeless mess I’d made of things; think of Kate, he said, and so I did. Kats, my mind said, wherever you are, your old man’s in a bit of a jam here. You’re one smart cookie. You’re my Kats. What the hell do I do now?

It was a kind of prayer, I suppose, this sending the mind outward, and what came back to me was a memory of our trip together that spring, to California-we’d rented a car after all, to drive up from LA to San Francisco on the coast highway-and a moment, purely happy, when we’d stopped at a turnout near San Clemente to stretch our legs and look at the view. Beside the roadway there was a little picnic area, with weathered tables and rusty trash cans, everything wind-blasted and not a tree in sight, just sea-smoothed rocks and banks of ice plant reclining like steps to the water; we took a table and sat, drinking bottled water and passing back and forth a little baggie of yogurt-covered peanuts that Kate had bought that morning at a health-food shop in Santa Barbara. All of it: the place itself, so beautiful and barren; the ache in my back and eyes from hours on the road; the taste of water and the peanuts, the yogurt sweet as cake icing over the hard saltiness of their interior; and the feeling of the two of us sitting there without speaking, without needing to. It was as if something opened inside me, a kind of boundless love. I hadn’t been back to California for twenty years, not since the day I’d stepped from the restaurant in Santa Monica and begun my journey home, and I suddenly thought it would be all right if she knew, that it had always been all right-that the time had come at last to tell her the real story, about that year.

“You know, it’s nice here,” she said, looking out over the water.