IG HAD A FRAGMENTARY MEMORY of the time he was underwater that he later assumed was false, because how could he remember anything about it if he’d been unconscious?

What he remembered was everything dark and roaring noise and a whirling sense of motion. He was poured forth into a thunderous torrent of souls, ejected from the earth and any sense of order and into this other, older chaos. He was in horror of it, appalled by the thought that this might be what waited after death. He felt he was being swept away, not just from his life but from God, the idea of God, or hope, or reason, the idea that things made sense, that cause followed effect, and it ought not to be like this, Ig felt, death ought not to be like this, even for sinners.

He struggled in that furious current of noise and nothing. The blackness seemed to shatter and peel away to show a muddy glimpse of sky but then closed back over him. When he felt himself weakening and sinking away, he had the sense of being grabbed and tugged along from beneath. Then, abruptly, there was something more solid under him. It felt like mud. A moment later he heard a far-off cry and was struck in the back.

The force of the impact shocked him, knocked the darkness out of him. His eyes sprang open, and he stared into a painful brightness. He retched. The river came out of his mouth, his nostrils. He was turned on his side on the mud, ear against the ground, so he could hear what was either the pounding of approaching feet or the slam of his own heart. He was downstream from the Evel Knievel trail, although in that first blurred moment of consciousness he wasn’t sure how far. A length of black rotted fire hose slithered across the liquid earth, three inches from his nose. Only after it was gone did he know that it had been a snake, sliding past him down the bank.

The leaves above began to come into focus, flitting gently against a background of bright sky. Someone was kneeling beside him, hand on his shoulder. Boys began to crash into sight, tumbling through the brush and then hitching up when they saw him.

Ig couldn’t see who was kneeling beside him but felt sure it was Terry. Terry had pulled him out of the water and gotten him breathing again. He rolled onto his back to look into his brother’s face. A skinny, sallow boy with a cap of icy blond hair stared expressionlessly back at him. Lee Tourneau was absentmindedly smoothing his tie against his chest. His khaki shorts were soaking wet. Ig didn’t need to ask why. In that moment, staring into Lee’s face, Ig decided he was going to begin wearing ties himself.

Terry came through the bushes, saw Iggy, and put on the brakes. Eric Hannity was right behind him and ran into him so hard he almost knocked him down. By now almost twenty boys were gathered around.

Ig sat up, drawing his knees close to his chest. He looked at Lee again and opened his mouth to speak, but when he tried, there was a bitter snap of pain in his nose, as if it were being broken all over again. He hunched and snorted a red splash of blood onto the dirt.

“Excuse me,” he said. “Sorry about the blood.”

“I thought you were dead. You looked a little dead. You weren’t breathing.” Lee was shivering.

“Well,” Ig said, “I’m breathing now. Thank you.”

“What’d he do?” Terry asked.

“He pulled me out,” Ig said, gesturing at Lee’s soaked shorts. “He got me breathing again.”

“You swam in for him?” Terry said.

“No,” Lee said. He blinked, seemed utterly baffled, as if Terry had asked him a much more difficult question: the capital of Iceland, the state flower. “He was already in the shallows by the time I saw him. I didn’t swim out for him or…or anything really. He was already-”

“He pulled me out,” Ig said over him, would have none of Lee’s stammering humility. He remembered quite clearly the feeling of someone in the water with him, moving close beside him. “I wasn’t breathing.”

“And you did mouth-to-mouth?” Eric Hannity asked, with unmistakable incredulity.

Lee shook his head, still confused. “No. No, it wasn’t like that. All I did was smack his back when he, you know…when he was…” He floundered there, didn’t seem to know how to go on.

Ig continued, “That’s what made me cough it up. I swallowed most of the river. My whole chest was full of it, and he pounded it out of me.” He spoke through gritted teeth. The pain in his nose was a series of sharp, bitter shocks, little electrical jolts. They even seemed to have color; when he closed his eyes, he saw neon-yellow flashes.

The gathered boys looked upon Ig and Lee Tourneau with a quiet, dumbstruck wonder. What had just transpired was a thing that happened only in daydreams and TV shows. Someone had been about to die, and someone else had rescued him, and now the saved and the savior were marked as special, stars in their own movie, which made the rest of them extras, or supporting cast at best. To have actually saved a life was to have become someone. You were no longer Joe Schmo, you were Joe Schmo who pulled Ig Perrish naked out of the Knowles River the day he almost drowned. You would be that person for the rest of your life.

For himself, looking up into Lee’s face, Ig felt the first bud of obsession beginning to open in him. He had been saved. He had been about to die, and this pale-haired boy with questioning blue eyes had brought him back. In evangelical churches you went to the river and were submerged and then lifted up into your new life, and it seemed to Ig now that Lee had saved him in this sense as well. Ig wanted to buy him something, to give him something, to find out his favorite rock band so it could be Ig’s favorite rock band, too. He wanted to do Lee’s homework for him.

There was noisy crashing in the brush, as if someone were driving a golf cart toward them. Then the girl, Glenna, appeared among them, out of breath, her face blotchy. She bent at the waist, put one hand on her round thigh, and gasped, “Jesus. Look at his face.” Her gaze shifted to Lee, and her brow furrowed. “Lee? What are you doing?”

“He pulled Ig out of the water,” Terry said.

“He got me breathing,” Ig said.

“Lee?” she asked, screwing up her face in an expression that suggested utter disbelief.

“I didn’t do anything,” Lee said, shaking his head, and Ig could not help but love him.

The pain that had been beating in the bridge of Ig’s nose had flowered, opening behind his forehead, between his eyes, penetrating deeper into the brain. He was beginning to see those neon-yellow flashes even with his eyes open. Terry sank down on one knee at his side, put a hand on his arm.

“We better get you dressed and back home,” Terry said. He sounded chastened in some way, as if he, and not Ig, were guilty of idiot recklessness. “I think your nose is broken.” He looked up then at Lee Tourneau and gave him a brief nod of acknowledgment. “Hey. Looks like maybe I was full of shit back on the hill. Sorry about what I said a couple minutes ago. Thanks for helping my brother out.”

Lee said, “Skip it. It’s not worth making a big deal.” Ig almost shivered at the calm cool of it, his unwillingness to bask in the appreciation of others.

“Will you come with us?” Ig asked Lee, gritting his teeth against the pain. He looked at Glenna. “Both of you? I want to tell my parents what Lee did.”

Terry said, “Hey, Ig. Let’s not and say we did. We don’t want Mom and Dad to know this happened. You fell out of a tree, okay? There was a slippery branch, and you face-planted. That’s just…just easier.”

“Terry. We have to tell them. I’d be drowned if he didn’t pull me out.”

Ig’s brother opened his mouth to argue, but Lee Tourneau beat him to the punch.

“No,” he said, almost sharply, and looked up at Glenna with wide eyes. She stared back at him with much the same look and grabbed strangely at her black leather jacket. Then he was on his feet. “I’m not supposed to be here. I didn’t do anything anyway.” He hurried across the little clearing to grab Glenna’s chubby hand and tug her toward the trees. With his other hand, he carried his brand-new mountain board.