He was pretty sure there wasn’t a gay man in a good fifty-mile radius, and if there was, well, why would any other gay man want to live in Sticky, Oregon?
Theo figured he’d be okay. It wasn’t like he even knew what he was missing.
And at this moment, holding on to the porch railing with the kids and making sure Thelma had a good grip on the rope he’d given her, finding a boyfriend was the last thing on his mind.
“We’re still going up!” Maisy said, her voice wobbly, and Theo clamped down some on his fear. No use coming at the girl again.
“Yeah, sweetheart, I know. This here’s a valley. The water’s going to keep coming up until all of it is out of the lake above us.”
“Oh God,” Skeet muttered. “That’s a real big fucking lake!”
Theo decided to let Skeet’s language go, this once, on this clusterfuck of a day. “Yessir, it is. We are going to rise up for a bit, and then the current is going to carry us down toward town.” The roar of the water and the storm, which had blown up again with literally lightning speed, was almost deafening, and his eyes shifted in panic mode to see exactly how sturdy this makeshift raft was going to be. “I would like to find a way to keep us from drifting too far. We don’t want to go too much into the woods, or it’ll be hard for them to find us when the water goes down. And we don’t want to go bumping about too much either, because the trees could eat us for lunch. Our best bet is to look for something we can tie the raft to, but not until the water’s a little higher.”
“What’ll we use to tie it?” Errol asked. Theo tried to keep his smile in place as the boy chewed on a thumbnail, his arms wrapped around his body. All the kids were wearing sensible clothes—sweaters and windbreakers, jeans and boots—in the cold March rain, but these kids had no body fat and super quick metabolisms. They were going to get too cold to help soon enough, and Theo wondered if he should break out the blankets now instead of later.
“Garden hose,” he said, sounding like he was sure that would work. Well, it was one of the nice stretchy nylon type hoses—maybe it would. “It’s got that hand sprayer on it and it’s firmly attached to the porch itself. It’s perfect.”
He was lying. He knew it. If there was a hell, he was going to hell for lying to these children. But if he didn’t stay calm, they wouldn’t stay calm, and they didn’t have a chance in any hell if he didn’t stay calm.
“Okay,” he said, trying not to swallow too hard. “See that oak tree we’re coming toward?”
They were up past the main trunk now and about even with the heavy branches—and coming toward it fast!
“Yeah?” Skeet asked, his voice quavering.
“We’re going to hit it,” Theo barked. “Everybody brace for impact!” He took two unsteady steps toward Thelma and called to the kids. “Grab something!” he said, taking hold of Thelma around the shoulders. “Now!”
The porch had a sturdy rail, thank God, because that’s all the kids had. Still, nothing could prepare him—or them—for the jarring, terrible sound of the branches and the wooden platform as they collided. For a moment, they were whirled around, spun by the branches and the tide of the flood as it roared from the base of the dam toward town. Theo held tight to Thelma, gratified by her fingers digging into his biceps as she cried out. He kept his eyes on the kids, all of whom were hugging the porch, exclaiming in pain as they were mercilessly buffeted by the wind, water, and wood.
Finally the jarring stopped, and Theo checked on Mrs. Andreas, patting her hands carefully before running to the garden hose.
“Kids!” he called, hoping nobody had suffered more than bruises. “Kids, we’ve got to secure this now or we’re going further into the woods, and we’re toast!”
“Got it, Mr. Wainscott!” Errol called, grabbing the sprayer.
“You’re still pitching for the Cougars?” Theo asked, pretty sure Errol had a better chance of landing the sprayer over a branch than he did.
“Yessir.” He frowned, hauling the thing behind his ear in a classic hard-pitch stance. “But I think Maisy might do better. She’s on the girl’s team, and they do slow pitch. Maisy?”
“I can try,” she said, smiling bravely at Theo. Theo gave her a brave smile back, hoping he was forgiven for yelling.
“Trying is good,” he said. The porch/raft gave another lurch, and Maisy took the sprayer quickly as Theo hauled at the winder to give her plenty of slack.
“Where do you think I should aim?” she asked. Skeet got behind her, probably too close, but then the boy had harbored a torch for most of their freshman year, and sighted beyond her right ear.
“See that big Y-shaped crotch?” he said. “It’s higher than us by about ten feet. It’ll give the boat some room to go up and play out the rope some more before we have to cut ourselves loose.”
Maisy gave him a grateful smile, completely oblivious to the boy next door. Theo and Errol shared an eye roll, but then Maisy was winding up the pitch, and everybody had to get out of her way.
It took her four tries, and Theo suspected it was because she was freezing and hungry and stuck on a shifting surface. He was about to get her a blanket and some food when she planted both her feet, gritted her teeth, and made the damned throw. The three teenagers whooped and jumped up and down and hugged, and Theo sank down into a crouch next to Thelma.
“That was close,” the old girl said, sounding as relieved as he felt. “You’re right. I don’t think we could have made it if we had to go bashing about those trees.”
Theo nodded and took stock of the water. The rate of rise had slowed—now that they were about ten feet up, the recreational lake that had been trapped in the hills above them by the dam was no longer crashing down. But the lake was—as Skeet had noted—fairly large. This was not nearly as high as the water was going to get in the next couple of hours. Theo looked at the garden-hose sprayer lodged solidly about ten feet above them.
“We’ve got about an hour,” he said, almost to himself. “An hour and a half, maybe, before we get higher than that thing and we have to think about cutting loose.”
Thelma leaned her head back against the guardrail. “Well, that’ll give us an hour to pray for a miracle,” she said, and Theo had to give it to her. There wasn’t really a better way to spend the time.
TWO hours later, he’d fed everybody, given them water, and wrapped them in the wet wool blankets. Wool was a decent insulator, though, even when it was wet, so the kids may not have been comfortable, but they weren’t shedding body heat by the joule, either. They were all sitting in the middle of the raft, except for Thelma, who was as comfortable as they could make her on the ice chest. Theo had started them on camp songs, just to keep their spirits up, and hadn’t mentioned, not even casually, the fact that they were almost higher than the branch they were tethered to, and they were going to have to cut themselves loose soon.
Turned out, he didn’t have to.
Their raft—which had been blessedly stable for the past two hours—gave a creak and a groan and one of those heart-stopping lurches, and all the kids went sprawling on the deck. They figured it out right quick.