Читать книгу Canoeing with Jose онлайн

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I pulled José into my apartment, looked up and down the street, and bolted the door.

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The nights following this drama with José were stormy, with violent winds that lulled me to sleep the way unsettled weather always has. I didn’t hear much from him after the night he went after Sonic and crashed at my place, and I prayed that no news was good news.

In the meantime, I had decided that I was going to Hudson Bay, and José had agreed to join me. Planning for the expedition was still in the early stages when, on a morning that smelled like lightning and damp earth, I received a call from my friend Greeny, whom I had known since nursery school. He reported that a massive branch had fallen and smashed through my canoe, which was resting on sawhorses behind his house in Minneapolis.

I exhaled in a vaguely accusatory way. “Now what the hell am I going to paddle to Hudson Bay?”

I sped across the Lake Street bridge to his house on the other side of the Mississippi. The canoe, a 17-foot Royalex hull with ash seats, thwarts, and gunwales, had been with me since my sister Hawk gave it to me more than a decade earlier, when she moved to Colorado.