“Well, that’s still stupid! You’ll have a good forty years left. That’s not one dog, that’s at least five!”
“You can’t replace Colonel!” Spencer argued. “How often do you find a German shepherd mix that thinks you smell like cocaine!”
“Well, maybe you’ll find a Yorkie that thinks you smell like bacon,” Theo shot back. “Did you ever think of that? Here’s a Yorkie, looking for his perfect human, and his perfect human isn’t there because he jumped out of a helicopter with his dying German shepherd. You know what that is? That’s plain selfish!” Oh, ducking shells, he was going to have to reposition that flap of skin and meat next. Okay, one, two—
“Self—”
Theo pulled.
“—ish! Holy fucking shitballs, Woodchuck, the motherfucking hell!”
“Selfish!” Theo argued back, poking and prodding and using Spencer’s absolute indignation and adrenaline to give them both strength. “You would deprive a Yorkie of its soulmate—”
“I may not even like little dogs!” Spencer snapped, but Theo had his doubts.
“Oh, that’s a lie. Anybody who would plan to be buried with his German shepherd like an Egyptian pharaoh doesn’t discriminate dog breeds. You’d love that Yorkie or that Chihuahua or that Shih-Tzu or that Chocolate Lab like it was your long-lost son!”
“Augh!” Spencer cried out, right as Theo tucked the whole thing back where it might belong.
Theo sat back on his heels and looked at Spencer’s bone-white face, a few tiny freckles standing out on his cheekbones that might ordinarily have been missed. Spencer’s eyes were squeezed shut, and for a moment, the only sound was their breathing and the rattle of the heavy rain on the branches above.
“That the worst of it?” Spencer asked in a small voice.
“Yeah,” Theo acknowledged. “I’m gonna unwrap the gauze now and dress it. You gonna make it?”
“Sure. Just… you know. Don’t want a damned Yorkie. Still think going out with Colonel is a better idea.”
“And I think you’re stupid, but I figure we’ve got a few hours until we’re rescued, and I can change your mind.”
“Can’t change my mind if you don’t got an animal of your own,” Spencer taunted. He’d pushed up a little, keeping his weight on his elbows, and was turning his face to the sky, his eyes still closed.
“I’ll change mine if you change yours,” Theo said, although that made no sense. “Except you have to change sooner.” He breathed out and picked the gauze up. “Because I’m not going through all this for you to throw my work away in the lifespan of a dog, even if he’s only a little stupid.”
He started wrapping the gauze and was surprised to hear Spencer’s rusty chuckle.
“How do you know he’s only a little stupid?”
“Well, like you said, he’s not one-hundred-and-ten percent, because if he was, he’d know you weren’t cocaine. But if you fell out of the helicopter and he didn’t follow you, there must be something going on up there.”
The chuckle intensified. “Aren’t you clever. Although, you might want to give your Junior Woodchucks some credit. I think they were holding on to him when I fell out.”
“Why were they holding him?” Theo asked. “Although they must have loved that. Errol especially—he and his dad have like six Labrador retrievers.”
“I dunno,” Spencer breathed in and out carefully while Theo worked. “I guess I figured they were kids. They were freaked-out. Colonel chills me out, so he might do the same for them.” He let out a long, shaky breath as Theo finished and wrapped the tape tight. “Boneheaded move, probably,” he breathed.
“Well, was possibly not so bad until you fell out of the copter,” Theo said, giving him a brief smile. “How’d that happen, again?”
“My flight suit gave.” He sighed, not looking at his leg but obviously thinking about it. “It was probably getting thin and worn—bad move, that. Not taking care of my equipment. Elsie’s gonna chew my hide.”
Theo double-checked his work and went to strip off his gloves, hiding a tiny ping of disappointment. “Elsie? Your wife?”
Spencer’s snort gave him a little hope when there was probably none to be had.
“God no. My flight partner. We went through basic training together, our stint in the Air Force. We got out and have stuck like glue ever since.”
“Sounds like marriage to me,” Theo said, gathering the used supplies into the med waste bag and the tubes of antibiotic and bottle of hydrogen peroxide into their container.
“Her boyfriend might object to that,” he said. With a groan he pushed himself up so he was sitting. “You got some Advil in your ice chest there, Woodchuck? A little bit of painkiller and I think I might not be dead weight.”
Theo tucked everything into the ice chest, including the medical waste bag. “You sure you don’t need to rest?” he asked, and Spencer looked up and shook his head.
“You and me got better things to do,” he said, and his jaw was so tight he was probably forcing his teeth not to chatter. “We’re getting to the part where the tree limbs are going to be a problem, and I think we should cut one or two of the long ones off so we can steer.”
And with that, he shoved himself to his feet, clinging to the guardrail for dear life.
Up a Lazy River
SPENCER took the ibuprofen gratefully, washing it down with a bottle of Gatorade Theo kept in his magic ice chest. Spencer was hoping it would help with the pain—and the spots that had danced in front of his eyes as he’d stood up—but even more, he was hoping it would help with the fever he could already feel raging under his skin. Theo had done his best with the hydrogen peroxide and the ointment, but he was dressing a wet wound in the rain—he didn’t really have a chance.
He grimaced as he set aside the empty bottle, knowing the ibuprofen was going to burn a hole in his stomach until he ate something, and his eyes caught on the sodden cardboard boxes, one of them marked as granola bars.
“Hey, Theo,” he said, gratitude singing like the hallelujah chorus in his veins. “Those wouldn’t be real granola bars, would they?”
Theo had been gathering a saw and a hatchet from a little wooden compartment built into the porch, and Spencer wondered whether that was due to resourcefulness or stunning good luck.
“The real kind,” Theo said. “But good reminder. I’m going to put these and the MREs in here with the tools. Don’t know how long those boxes will last.”
Spencer took a step away from the guardrail to help him, and Theo waved him away. He set the tools down carefully in front of the box to keep them from being washed off the deck, and set the cardboard boxes with the supplies in the wooden box.
When Theo ventured his way across the creaky raft, he had two granola bars in one hand and the tools in the other.
“Here’s to lunch,” he said. “If we can get this thing sailing on a smooth path for a while, we can treat ourselves to turkey stew in a foil pouch.”
Spencer laughed a little as he took one of the bars from one hand and the hatchet from the other. He rested the axe, head down, against his foot and balanced it there with his arm while he used his teeth to rip off the wrapper from the food. “I’ll take it,” he said. “One of my bosses got stranded on a mountain in the snow once. He and two guys lived for a week on six packets of broth and a couple of protein bars. This is like room service right here.”