rest in peace man who, at the age of 16—before he knew anything about counting calories or fat grams, and before anyone had thought to take time-lapsed photos of double cheeseburgers and French fries—had been awarded a position at the new McDonald’s restaurant in his hometown—a town of 1,600 people nestled at the bottom of a spectacular valley, over which 5,000-foot mountains towered—and subsequently took orders at the cash register and filled cups with fountain drinks and salted and scooped fries for basically the same customers every day, many of whom could read but not pronounce the word “fajita,” and so they said—no kidding—things like, “Can I get me one a them breakfast fah-jee-ters,” so the deceased punched in the order and while customers fished for change the deceased adjusted his visor, which he wore because this particular franchise had been out of baseball-style-caps, which meant that he’d been granted the distinction of being the only male employee who sported a visor, thus making him feel even more self-conscious than he already did, in part because he’d never really known or hung out with anyone his own age in his hometown, other than the few kids who went to his church or attended the two-room church school where he’d taken his primary education, and now, having returned one summer from the Christian boarding school he attended, the deceased was taking orders alongside a mind-bogglingly beautiful girl named Misty, who had blond hair and colt-like arms, and whose face, in the deceased’s mind, was indistinguishable from the faces of models he’d seen in magazines, which meant that—from his perspective, anyway—there was no reason why Misty couldn’t—or shouldn’t—have thrown her visor to the ground and stomped it with her manager-approved generic brand black tennis shoes and said, “See ya later, suckahs!,” except that, well, she had a boyfriend, a kid who worked as a cook in back, a totally average—if not slightly dopey looking—quasi-mustached dude with grayish brown hair who, for all the deceased knew, treated her like a queen, a guy who’d end up proposing to Misty, had maybe already proposed, since—now that the deceased thought about it—he seemed to remember something about an engagement ring, a slender gold band bearing a diamond-shaped stone, sitting on Misty’s long and delicate ring finger, but that was years ago and honestly the only thing the deceased could be said to remember for sure about this job were the things he did over and over again, like salt the fries and punch the buttons for soda and retrieve cardboard-sheathed apple pies from the warming station and make soft serve cones (assuming the machine was working, which it often was not) and enter Dan What’s His Name’s order into the register, which was always a number three, a Big Mac value meal the man ordered to go, and which he toted back to his beige Jeep Cherokee, whose ashtray—the deceased would eventually discover—preserved a mound of gray, tooth-imprinted, dried-up Nicorette gum, all chewed and spat out by Dan himself, who was so impressed by the fact that the deceased would have his meal punched in as soon as he walked in the door that, during one crucial visit, Dan would hand the deceased a business card, whose front featured the words “White Water Express” and a drawing of four life-jacketed stick people in a puffy-looking raft, which itself had been borne aloft upon an iconic wave, after which, Dan had said, “Let me know if you’d like to switch jobs, because I might be able to work something out for you,” an offer the deceased thought about for two whole seconds before accepting, and so he quit his job at McDonald’s and began driving every day out of town to a rural community named Granny Squirrel, parking his mom’s 1987 Subaru wagon in a gravel lot, inserting a time card into a clock in a back room of the Outpost—a green-roofed building with fake log siding—after which he began the day’s varied duties, which may have included the inflation of rafts and the hanging up of damp lifejackets in a sour-smelling shed and the cleaning of motel rooms where those rafters who wanted to spend the night slept and the flipping of hamburgers for beach-towel-skirted guests down at the pavilion or the making of reservations or manning the front desk or cleaning the lounge, which consisted of an old floor Zenith and fly-ridden leather couches whose cushions had burst open, or driving Dan’s Jeep Cherokee back to McDonald’s to retrieve supper for Dan and the crew of rafting guides or cleaning out an old house Dan had bought where the guides could camp, as the house had crickets and old mattresses underneath of which the deceased had found a copy of Beaver magazine from the 1970s but not running water or toilets or a front door that would lock or even stay shut, and in this way the deceased eventually worked his way up from outpost lackey to raft guide, despite the fact that the deceased did not call himself, as many of his co-workers did, a “paddler,” did not own a canoe or kayak, and did not enjoy dancing to the Grateful Dead on somebody’s paint-splattered boom box, did not drink beer, and did not—at least at this point in his life—have the least bit interest in smoking marijuana, an activity which the other guides—a chubby, good-natured ex-Boy-Scout named Chris; a droopy-lidded girl named Debbie and her boyfriend Steve, who had bladelike calves and drove a tiny blue Datsun; a shortish dude named Todd with a beaklike nose and long blonde hair; and a mean-faced guy named Keith—participated in several times throughout the day, whenever one of the aforementioned people said something like, “Hey, you guys wanna to play some baseball,” which was code for “Do you want to take a toke off this one-hitter I just packed,” the answer being, “Sure” or “I’d love to play” or “I could go for some baseball,” and whoever wanted to would disappear into the loft above the front desk, especially if they were about to embark upon a trip down the river, which all the guides took turns doing, unless it was a Wednesday, because on Wednesdays everybody was guaranteed a trip, because on Wednesdays the staff of White Water Express took four hundred boy scouts down the river, and on one of these Wednesdays in particular, the deceased was in charge of a boatload of kids—imagine a movie like Stand by Me or The Goonies or E.T., one in which an iconic group of kids, each playing a character so beguilingly peculiar, each with their own idiosyncratic charms like chunky teeth or bad haircuts or glasses that made their eyes appear gigantic—five of them piled into a huge blue raft, its rubber scorching hot in the sun, and now picture this: the deceased winning their hearts by asking the kids on the left to paddle forward and the kids on the right to paddle backwards, thereby pulling a series of 360s, and also teaching them how to slap their paddle blades all at once against the water and create the sound of a giant whap!, and splashing the boats of their fellow scouts whenever they came near, and at one point, the deceased had drawn the boat up to shore to wait for the boats that’d gotten stuck on rocks or were paddling slowly or for whatever reason had been going slow, and there, on a root extending into the water, sat a brownish snake, sunning itself in the sun, a specimen that the deceased called the boys’ attention to, followed by whoops and hollering, and the deceased raised his paddle above his head and brought it down expertly against the snake’s neck, instantaneously severing its head from its body, both of which plopped into the river and were carried away, while the boys in the boat shrieked with joy and began to chant, “Our guide’s the best” and “Our guide’s number one,” a designation that the deceased was happy to have achieved, at least with this boat, as he was still a rookie, and therefore still got himself into unpleasant situations, like when he was piloting a boat full of what could only be described as fat people—a fat dad and a fat mom and their two fat daughters—and they were coming around a corner, a place where the rapids battered a giant boulder, and if everybody didn’t paddle, you’d drift straight into the rock, which is exactly what this boat did, in part because the deceased had screamed, “ALL FORWARD,” but nobody in the boat did as the deceased had shown them during the safety talk, they did not hold the T grip at a vertical angle, they did not dig deep into the water and pull back, instead merely dipping their paddle blades beneath the surface, and so the raft popped and the mom and dad fell backwards, knocking the deceased out of the raft, and the half deflated boat drifted downstream, with the two fat daughters shrieking in terror, and, inexplicably, throwing away their paddles, which the deceased would never be able to make sense of, just like he’d never be able to understand why, when he piloted the raft with the scouts in it over a place referred to as “The Bump,” he had failed to lock his sandaled feet under the rubber raft rung, which meant that he lost his balance and fell backwards, much to the horror and chagrin of his scouts, who, even as the deceased swam back to the boat, were revealing expressions of terror and disbelief, and as he paddled through the frigid current, he knew they would be forced to re-evaluate their previous views regarding his position atop the hierarchy of river guides, and that they would have no other choice but to come to the unfortunate conclusion that he—their once-trusted guide—had, in the end, failed them, and therefore he could not be counted—as they might have initially (and inaccurately) assumed—among the very best