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like he wasn’t moving but rather just bobbing up and down. He pressed the transmit button on the radio. “Guys, it feels like I’m hung up on something here, some bushes or something.”
    Sam’s voice crackled back to him, “No, I’ve got you in sight, you’re in the current now and moving pretty quickly.”
    “Are you sure? It doesn’t feel like it.”
    “Yes, I’m sure. Remember what we said about staying loose.”
    “Yeah.”
    “We’re in the truck now and driving alongside the river. Jesus, you’re going fast. We’re going to run ahead now to get the boat into the water, so we might be out of range for a few minutes, but we’ll be waiting for you beneath the falls.”
    “Uh, okay.”
    “Just a second …” There was a pause. Cindee’s voice came over the radio.
    “Lester, everything is going to be okay, you know that, don’t you?”
    “Yeah, Cindee, I do.”
    “Good.”
    “See you at the bottom,” Lester said. There was no reply. Probably the truck had already sped up, out of range.
    What Lester hadn’t anticipated was how little there was to do. He couldn’t see out of his barrel, he had no idea how far he was from the falls, and it didn’t really matter anyway because here he was trussed up and unable to steer or do anything except wait for a sense of falling. His only contribution to this undertaking was to sit in this barrel and feel terrified. Just sit still and
feel
. Powerless and immobile.
    The barrel should have had a rudder of some sort, some way that the barrel could be steered. He could have insisted on that. And a little window that he could look out of. If it had just those things then this would not be quite as preposterous a thing to be doing.
    The barrel began slowly rotating. This was Lester’s first clue that he was entering the turbulent area above the falls. He didn’t know how long it would take now, and then the barrel began bucking up and down like a mechanical bull and then abruptly it stopped.
    Cindee and Sam were already in the pool beneath the falls, in the Boston Whaler that Sam had rented. The barrel appeared as a tiny black dot far above them and they both sucked their breath in when they saw it. It hung for an instant at the lip of the falls and then it was in mid-air and it fell. Like it weighed four thousandpounds. They both watched it closely through binoculars right up until the barrel disappeared in the foam. It was unexpectedly tiny-looking in the great plumes of water. Studying the bottom of the falls, they saw only water bouncing up and around more water, and there were no silver floating cylinders anywhere at all.
    “Do you see it?” Sam called out.
    “No, do you?” Cindee answered. They both searched the pool beneath the falls frantically. Both felt as though they couldn’t breathe. Over and over again they motored as close as they could to the whirlpool at the bottom of the falls and peered into the curtain of water and saw nothing at all. “Jesus Christ,” Sam said. They drove back and forth and around and around and did not speak to each other. They hung their heads over the gunwales of the boat until they were nearly underwater and the waves rose up and broke over them and Cindee and Sam were wiping water from their eyes. It seemed to Cindee that this could not be happening, but she had thought that about different things and of course it could be, and it was.
    After two hours they gave up and motored back to shore to call the police. They climbed the stairs that led to the observation point. There was a pay phone there. They stopped and looked back at the water swirling around and around and not expelling Lester or the barrel.
    “What do you think happened?” Cindee asked.
    “I don’t know. Maybe it fell too deep and hit bottom. I didn’t really take into account how fat he was.”
    By this point Lester’s barrel was already five miles downriver, fetching up on a sandbar, and jerking to a halt. Blood oozed from Lester’s ears and