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2

A couple of hundred yards south to the Portland Spirit’s deck. Sounded like next to nothing when I was standing up above, my hips against the rail.

Here in the waters of the Willamette? With my whole body half-frozen and my limbs exhausted from basketball?

Looked like the distance to Brazil.

Nothing I could do though. I started swimming.

Sure, I was using the most awkward-looking strokes ever taken by someone attempting to swim, but they were all I could manage. My legs didn’t want to straighten all the way. My arms either. My whole body wanted to clench in and preserve what heat I had.

Plus, my lungs were bitching about this whole experience, and my heart was trying to settle the matter by pumping extra blood to every part of my body. Right. This. Second.

Slow, shivery and shaking, I started making headway.

I think I was probably rocketing along at the breakneck pace of a yard a minute when I heard someone call down to me.

“Hey, Jackass!”

The idea that the woman could have been talking to someone else never occurred to me.

I had to half-roll over to look up, and all my limbs pulled in immediately to try to conserve body heat.

Bad idea. I dipped under the water. I came up spitting water. Had to force my limbs into something like a treading water move so I could actually look up.

The woman calling to me was a cop. I like to think she looked more amused than disgusted.

“Yeah, you,” she said. She pointed. “Try the ladder.”

Sure enough, there were emergency ladders every so many feet along the edge of the river.

Not as close as I would have liked, but a hell of a lot closer than the Portland Spirit’s dock.

I started that direction.

Must have taken me even longer than it felt like, because the cop called down to me again.

“You gonna make it? I can call for help.”

“I-I-I c-c-c-c”

“Just swim, Jackass,” she said.

I think she hefted her radio then, but I had my whole attention back on getting to the ladder.

You know. Looking back on that moment, I think that reaching and scaling that ladder may have been the single most difficult physical feat of my life. I was that cold and that drained.

Still, these days, that’s saying something.

Of course, I didn’t actually climb over the rail on my own. By the time I got up close enough to try, the cop had lost her patience. Or she didn’t believe I could make it, which I might not have.

Either way, she grabbed me by one shoulder and the waistband of my shorts and hauled me over.

The drop to the concrete was much shorter than the drop to the river.

It hurt just about as much though.

At least, I think it did. Parts of my body were numb.

The cop threw a blanket over me. Thin, dark blue thing. Like one of those airline blankets, only larger. What warmth it gave was welcome though.

People applauded.

Wait. People saw that?

Sure enough, there was a small crowd nearby now, watching the cop save the idiot.

They didn’t hear the otter crying for help. They didn’t see my heroic effort at rescuing said otter. But my humiliating return to the surface? That they saw?

No justice in this world.

I huddled under the blanket on the scalding hot concrete while the cop looked at my eyes. Poked me a few places. Asked basic questions, first establishing that I wasn’t critically injured, but then trying to establish that I knew what year it was and so on.

Gee, a less confident man might have thought she questioned his mental stability.

Once I’d gotten enough warmth back into my body to stop chattering with every breath — and the crowd had moved on to something more immediately interesting — the cop asked the more serious questions. Name. Place of residence. The usual.

She wasn’t thrilled that I wasn’t carrying I.D., but she seemed to accept my explanation about just keeping money and my MAX card in my shoe while playing basketball.

Which finally got us to the question I dreaded…

“Want to tell me why you decided to go for a dip? This isn’t exactly one of the swimming docks.”

There were swimming docks?

Not the time to ask that.

I looked up into her brown eyes. Now that I wasn’t worried about dying, I could see that she was pretty. Dark skin, good complexion.

Of course, the look in those eyes said that I was an idiot…

“I’m not sure you’ll believe me.”

“Oh,” she said with a smile that didn’t have a lot of humor to it, “now I know I want to hear this.”

“Someone was calling for help.”

“Who?” she said, immediately alert and raising up the mic of her portable radio. “Is there someone else down there?”

“No,” I said, shaking my head. “Honest. I was wrong. I thought I’d heard a woman call for help but … there was no woman.”

For some reason, I couldn’t bring myself to tell the nice lady cop that I’d heard an otter crying for help.

“And you decided to jump in anyway?”

“I didn’t mean to. While I was at the rail, I … well, I saw an otter. And I thought it looked like it was about to get eaten by a…” — don’t say fish monster, Scott, don’t say fish monster — “shark—”

“No sharks in this river. The Columbia, yeah, sometimes, but not the Willamette.”

“That was what it looked like to me. So I threw my thermos at what I thought was a shark, and—”

“And you overbalanced and fell in.”

I gave her an embarrassed smile.

And for the first time, I got a smile back. A little one, but still. It was the first expression I’d seen from her that said anything other than “Jackass.”

“Well,” she said, giving me a hand and helping me to my feet, “anyone who’d do something that stupid to try to save an otter can’t be all bad.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“But,” she added, raising a warning finger, “let’s try to avoid doing that again, shall we? Last thing we need is good Samaritans drowning like idiots.”

“Right,” I said, chastened. Embarrassed again, even though warmth was seeping back into me. The warmth wasn’t enough though. My whole body was exhausted to the point that I wanted to lie back down on the warm concrete and just rest.

Plus, my stomach was screaming loud enough for food that my legs had started shaking in sympathy.

“You gonna be all right if I walk away now? You don’t look like you need an ambulance. Meal and a cup of coffee maybe. Still. Need me to call somebody?”

“Don’t really know anybody yet. Not local.”

She shook her head. “You’re from Cali, aren’t you?”

I winced at her use of the word “Cali.” In the Bay Area, that’s considered just shy of a hate crime. Like calling SF “Frisco.”

“Thought so,” she said, shaking her head at my wince. “Well, if you’re here visiting, enjoy yourself, but be careful. If you moved here, best learn a thing or two about the outdoors, or Oregon will eat you alive.”

“Thank you, Officer…”

“Martinez,” she said, and this time I was pretty sure her smile was amusement. “Maria Martinez.”

“Thank you, Officer Maria Martinez,” I said, bowing from the neck.

I whipped the blanket off with as much flourish as my tired limbs could manage. Held it out to her.

“Your blanket.”

“Not mine,” she said, smiling still as she shook her head. She pointed over to one side. “That gentleman was kind enough to loan it.”

I looked where she was pointing.

A homeless man, sitting on the bench. Watching us. On the skinny side. Deeply tanned, with wild gray hair. He wore two ancient, stained plaid shirts over at least one tee shirt. Good jeans though. Worn, but no holes or patches. And he had on decent brown hiking boots.

He had all his possessions in a duffel bag that looked older than he was, and this guy was probably pushing sixty.

He also had a dog. A little beagle, sitting at attention with its tail wagging furiously

The man nodded when I looked over. I nodded back.

Officer Martinez was walking away by this point.

“Wait,” I called to her. When she looked back, I said, “Haven’t seen my keys by any chance? I’m pretty sure I dropped them before I fell.”

She shook her head and kept walking.

“I have them,” the homeless man said. “Found them by the rail.”

I walked over to him. His dog immediately stood and started sniffing at me. Paced all the way around me that way, sniffing all the while.

The man didn’t seem to notice, though. His attention was on me. His eyes were hazel, and they had a … quality to them. His skin might have wrinkles and his wild hair lots of gray, but his eyes could have been the eyes of a newborn.

“Thank you,” I said, holding out the blanket. “I’m Scott Eagleson.”

The man nodded. Looked me up and down. Stood.

He frowned. Tapped the stubble on his chin.

He took the blanket and draped it over my shoulders.

“Sit,” he said, pointing to the spot where he’d just been sitting.

I noticed something then. He didn’t, well, he didn’t smell homeless.

I’d never spent much time around the homeless, but moving around the Bay Area — and especially running around the City (which is San Francisco, in case you don’t know) — they’re part of the background. And they pretty much always smelled dirty, sometimes of urine.

But this man, he had only a … musky kind of smell. Clean, but more like an animal than a man.

I sat where he’d pointed.

Still frowning, he looked me over. And not at the usual kind of places. He looked just above my head. Then down at my hands. Wrists. Then my feet.

“Stick out your tongue,” he said.

“I’m sorry?” I said, and my stomach seized in a growl that could probably have been heard all the way down in Monterey.

“Stick. Out. Your. Tongue. Then I’ll give you something to eat.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I said, starting to stand. “If anything, I owe you a meal. In fact, let’s—”

He pushed me back down with a gentle, but insistent pressure.

“Tongue,” he said.

His dog let out a single yap, for emphasis. The dog was sitting now, watching me with the same patient intensity as its master.

The man’s eyes looked as though he could wait forever.

How much more stupid could I feel in one day?

I stuck out my tongue.

The man nodded, as though he’d seen what he expected to see. He picked up his duffel bag. He also handed me a banana, though I didn’t see where he’d gotten it.

My stomach informed me that I was in no position to question the appearance of a banana. It was sweet and ripe, and I finished it so fast, the man had barely had time to start talking.

“You shouldn’t open them from that end,” he said. “The stem isn’t a pull tab. Next time, pinch the bottom and peel from there. That’s how monkeys do it in the wild.”

“Can I have my keys?”

“Keys,” he said with a small chuckle. “Yes. Exactly. You have more keys than you know. Walk with me.”

“Look,” I said, sounding just as spent as I felt. “I’m wet. I’m exhausted. I’m—

“Eat this,” the man said, shoving what looked like a small, lime green gumball into my hand.

To my own amazement, I popped it into my mouth without thinking.

Tasted like key lime pie. As I chewed, warm relaxation spread through me. Not like I might fall asleep, but more like I’d just woken up after a long, much-needed rest. Every muscle in my body felt good now. Energized.

This day was just getting weirder. Talking otters? Bizarre, otter-eating fishmen? And now, what, healing gumballs?

I had lots of questions.

Before I could try asking any of them, the man turned and started walking away from the riverfront across the grass. His dog immediately fell into step beside him.

And he still had my keys.

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