Rock Bottom (Em Hansen Mysteries)

by Sarah Andrews

  Danielle said, “And how do you wash your hair now?”

  “In the sink, like any sane woman!” Jerry threw back her head and laughed. “Heavens, but I do love it here. There’s nothing like getting out into nature!” In a tone she might use for suggesting that I put on more sunscreen, she added, “But you’d better keep an eye on that Wink fella, so he doesn’t injure your stepson.”

  Danielle laughed. “Compulsive bastard.”

  “I thought I was the only one who noticed,” I said stupidly.

  Danielle’s laughter tightened. “His behavior is pretty hard to miss.”

  I glanced over my shoulder. Wink had gotten his mitts on the Frisbee and was making a simple game of disk-toss with Julianne into a contact sport. The man had annoyed me at first, but that annoyance was now turning to worry.

  We passed another hour at Redwall Cavern in relative peace, then loaded back into our various vessels and headed a short distance downriver in search of that night’s campsite. As I climbed back aboard our raft from the safety of terra firma, I decided that Jerry was right about my growing confidence. I only had to run my mantras through my head once. Impulsively, I took a seat in the bow next to Brendan and gave him a hug.

  Olaf paddled by in his kayak and spoke to Fritz. “We’re not camping at Little Redwall, are we?” he asked.

  “I was thinking we would,” said Fritz. “Why?”

  Olaf shivered. “Mice!” he said. “All over the place, mice. They have a little highway up against the rock wall at the top of the sand beach. It’s a narrow campsite, so you can’t get away from them, and all night long they’re scurrying back and forth just inches from your tent.”

  Mungo rowed his raft up close to join in the discussion. “Grow a pair,” he said simply, then pulled hard on his oars toward a rather narrow beach against an abrupt rock wall, chuckling all the way.

  Youth has its own way of dealing with stress. “Yeah, Olaf!” Brendan called, and held his hands up to the sides of his head like a pair of mouse ears, wrinkled his nose, and squeaked.

  Diary of Holly Ann St. Denis

  April 3

  Dear God,

  I am writing from the banks of the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon! I always wanted to go here and now here I am! Praises be to You, Lord! And I see Your love in every turn of the river, twig, and face of rock. This will be my very special baptism. We launch tomorrow and will float on this river for TEN DAYS!!! This is the best Spring Break from school EVER!!!! Mom said life gets better after you turn fifteen, and SHE WAS RIGHT!!!!!

  Mom wasn’t too interested in taking this trip, I could tell, but “Uncle” Terry got her to come. I thought things were going to settle down after “Dad” Amos died, but Terry picked right up where he left off in oh, so many ways. But more about the river. We’ll be floating on the river for ten days! Camping!!! Singing by firelight in Your holy canyon! Terry says we will see direct, incontrovertible evidence of Noah’s Flood. Wow! I will be so close to You!!!

  Okay, gotta go Lord, Mom’s calling. She says we have one more night in the motel up the road to “get our pretty on,” then it’s ten days with no hot showers. She says that we’ll all be in those thin tents packed so tight that there will be no privacy. She thinks that’s awful but I think it’s GREAT! “Uncle” Terry will have to, as Mom says, “keep it in his pants” for TEN BLESSED DAYS!!!

  APRIL 4: CHAMBERED NAUTILUS

  An early stop the next morning was Nautiloid Canyon, so named because the shells of wonderful, cone-shaped chambered sea creatures lay fossilized in the limestone there. They had been eroded smooth with its surface, fortuitously sliced open end-to-end so we could see their insides. I couldn’t spot any at first, but then Don Rasmussen dripped water on them from his canteen and they stood out plain as day. He led Brendan, Mungo, Jerry, and me about the area pointing out one fabulous specimen after another, greeting them like old friends.

  Brendan peered at these creatures with suspicion. “What are they?” he asked.

  Don was a kind, nurturing sort of guy by nature, tall and smiley and all rounded at the edges, and he took to the task of educating Brendan with gusto, settling his gaze on the lad with the eyes of a loving granddad. He said, “They’re close cousins to the modern squid, but the squid doesn’t have this external shell. This animal had long tentacles that would have stretched out here.” He traced imaginary appendages, dangling from the wide end of one of the cones along the rock.

  “You mean, like the giant squid that ate the whaling ship in the movie?”

  Jerry, who was standing near her husband, smiled at the image.

  Don nodded. “Well, I haven’t seen that particular movie, but yes, the nautiloid’s tentacles would have had sucker discs on them, much like the modern-day squid, I imagine. We don’t get to know exactly, because those soft tissues were not fossilized. But we can see a lot from the hard tissues that tell us that their anatomical structures were much like modern nautilus shells, except that instead of being straight, the modern ones spiral up. On this one you can see the casing along the siphuncle, which was a long strand of tissue. You can see that it stretches all the way back here to the narrow end, where the animal first lived. As it grew, it repeatedly moved forward and secreted new shell and built a partition walling off the earlier part. He left the siphuncle back there so he could empty the water from the empty chambers as he built the new space.”

  “Sort of like a soda straw?” Brendan asked.

  “Not exactly. He sucked the water out, but not like you and I suck on a drink. He used the suction of osmosis. He would increase the saltiness of his blood in the siphuncle, and that made the water move from the more dilute chamber into his blood. At the same time, gas diffused from his blood through the siphuncle into the emptying chamber.”

  “You mean like he was farting?”

  Mungo chuckled appreciatively.

  Don smiled, understanding the workings of the thirteen-year-old male mind perfectly. “I could go into a dissertation on how farting works, and what it does for you—you wouldn’t want to hold on to that pressure!—but what’s important is that when you fart you are releasing pressure, while what this critter was doing was lowering his overall density. He was making his shell into a flotation device.”

  “Did he pop to the surface?”

  “No, the idea was to maintain the exact density of the depth of water in which he lived, so he could swim effortlessly.”

  Brendan suddenly stood up and glanced around at the scattered fossils as if they had begun to squirm. In a small voice, he said, “Were they bad?”

  Don straightened up, surprised. “Why do you ask that?”

  “Because they’re fossils. They died.”

  “We all die,” Don said softly.

  “But I mean, God killed them.”

  Mungo closed his eyes as if he’d suddenly developed a headache.

  Don said, “I’m afraid you’re going to have to explain what you mean by that, son.”

  Brendan launched into a tumble of words. “Mom says that fossils are these creatures who were sinners and God killed them all with the Flood, and so maybe this one was nasty and ate his brothers or something, and so he had to go, see? And that one over there, well … I mean, God had to have his reasons. Mom says there’s a reason for everything!” He slapped the knuckles of his right hand into the palm of his left for emphasis.

  Don said, “Oh, I see. You’re talking about the Book of Genesis and Noah’s Flood. These creatures died a long time before then.”

  “How long? I want to know!”

  “These nautiloids were alive during the Paleozoic Era of geologic time,” Don said soothingly. “Paleozoic means ‘old life.’ Specifically, the Redwall and all the fossils in it were deposited during the Mississippian Period of the Paleozoic Era. Round numbers? Three hundred fifty million years ago.”

  Brendan stared at Don as if he were a face on a television set.

  From the beach where the boats were tied up,
Danielle’s voice rose to a holler. “Luncheon is served! Sandwiches! Dried fruits! Prompt, courteous self-service!” I glanced her way. She had laid out breads and cold cuts and sliced tomatoes and probably the last of the romaine lettuce we would see until we could resupply at Phantom Ranch ten days into our trip. She leaned forward and wiggled her arms as if they were squid tentacles with which she would snatch up her food.

  Don reached out to put a hand on Brendan’s shoulder, but the boy turned and headed down toward the beach.

  As one person, Don, Jerry, and Mungo turned to me. Jerry said, “What’s the story there, Em?”

  Now I opened my mouth and words tumbled out, just like Brendan. I said, “It’s tough. He’s a good lad—bright, intellectual, caring—but he’s not like either of his parents. You can see that his dad is smart, but in a different sort of way, a doer instead of a thinker. And Fritz is built on heroic proportions, and he flew jets; imagine following in those footsteps.”

  “And his mom?” Mungo asked.

  I winced. “She’s all about the looks. No, that’s not fair. She cares about social position, and looking good is part of that, and she really is a dish just the way nature made her, and when she throws on the afterburners, she is a knockout! But Fritz did not walk the path she expected of him. She was an officer’s daughter, and she married an officer herself, expecting the same life.”

  “A life she knows how to live,” said Jerry kindly. “She’s a practical woman.”

  “In a manner of speaking. Anyway, she wasn’t happy when Fritz quit the military and launched into a less predictable life, so she dumped him and found someone else, but she acts like she was the injured party.” I took a deep breath, feeling a little like I had told a secret that wasn’t mine to tell.

  Mungo said, “She’s religious, I take it.”

  “Yeah, well, I guess she’s all about the church now. She was always a little on the pious side, but when she remarried it was like a suit of armor she climbed into. She wears the Bible the way some vets wrap themselves in the flag.”

  Mungo asked, “What denomination?”

  “Something … Christian … I don’t know exactly. To be honest, I can’t keep them sorted out. I try to stay out of it.”

  Mungo said, “Some denomination of Christian fundamentalist, then. The other brands have names that are easier to keep sorted out, like Presbyterian and Episcopalian.”

  Jerry said, “And Fritz?”

  I said, “His religion is flying.”

  Mungo said, “So Brendan’s caught in a crack between his parents’ points of view.”

  I said, “I’m sure they disagree on a lot of things, and I don’t want to judge.”

  Don said, “We’ve heard about Fritz’s flying. He runs an air charter business, am I right?”

  “Yes.”

  Jerry said, “It’s great that he could get enough time to take a nice break, then. And to bring his son! It’s the perfect time for a father and son to have a nice manly experience together.”

  I looked down the shore toward the line of boats, where Brendan now sat alone, straddling the bow of his father’s raft, tossing pebbles into the water while his father played at rock climbing with Olaf and Gary. Togetherness seemed to have its limitations.

  APRIL 5–6: NANKOWEAP

  Things seemed to improve when Brendan rowed his first rapid—a glorified riffle, to be precise, but not in his eyes—on the morning of our fifth day on the water, officially becoming a boatman. Fritz was deliriously proud, and the lad about broke his face grinning.

  It was a lovely day of cobalt blue skies and brick red cliffs reflected dark upon the waters. I watched swallows flit above the river and heard the long, spiraling call of the seldom-seen canyon wren. We told jokes and swapped stories, calling out punch lines from one raft to another, and lunched on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, pretzels, and beer.

  Later in the day we made landing at Nankoweap, a broad beach formed where a large side canyon leading in from the west had created a delta. We’d been on the river for five days getting into the groove of the daily loading, rowing, and unpacking, and it was nice to make a break in the rhythm and set up camp knowing we did not have to grunt all our gear back onto the rafts the following morning. We would lay over for a day and just relax and explore.

  It was our turn to cook, and I did my best, but mostly Fritz gave me directions, like “chop these veggies” and “fill this pot with water.” Halfway through the job of cooking, a storm whipped up and crashed down on us. Clouds had built during the afternoon into a steep, dark cumulonimbus that chose our position in time and space to open up with an astonishing microburst, a sudden and fierce downdraft that grabbed our folding cook table and the stoves on it and hurled them against a tree. I counted myself lucky that I had not yet turned on either stove and thus the water that splashed across my legs was not boiling, but one of the stoves was broken beyond repair, and we were all doused with huge drops of rain as we grabbed equipment and ran for our tents.

  “I’ll break out the sat phone and get Faye to order a new stove,” Fritz said, as we huddled together inside the thrashing tent.

  “I’d like to say hi to Faye when you’re done,” I said, remembering her plan to report any dirt she had dug up on Wink.

  The storm soon abated, and in spite of my shortcomings, we served up a dinner of smoked beef sausages with sautéed vegetables on a bed of creamy polenta. No one complained, and none was left when it was time to wash the pots. After dinner Fritz dug out the rented satellite phone from the ammo can in which it was housed and stretched out across the starboard tubing of our raft to watch for a satellite. “There’s no reason to switch this thing on until I see one,” he told me, as I found an equally comfortable lounge spot across the bow. “The rental company gave us two batteries, but on close inspection here one of them is already half used up, so I have to husband our use of it in case we have a real emergency.”

  “Scoundrel rental company,” I said.

  “I’m sure it was just an oversight.”

  “An oversight that could render the sat phone useless, you mean.”

  “There’s one,” Fritz said and switched on the phone.

  The satellite was a pale, luminous dot in the sky moving from east to west. By the time we spotted it, it was already halfway across the narrow slot of sky that stretched between the soaring canyon walls, and it would take only a few minutes for it to transit to the other side.

  “Faye!” Fritz said when she picked up. “Get Hakatai Mattes to buy us a new stove and bring it to us when he joins us at Phantom Ranch, okay? You got it?”

  The satellite had set. Fritz began to pack away the telephone.

  I said, “I’ll wait for another satellite and call her back. You know, make sure she got the message.”

  Fritz smiled. “It’s a nice enough evening for satellite watching,” he said, sliding over toward where I was resting. He bent and gave me a kiss that said that gazing at the heavens was the last thing on his mind.

  I lay on my back softly tickling his neck, momentarily forgetting all about moving dots in the sky, but the image of Wink’s assault on Brendan flashed in my mind, popping open my eyes just in time to spot a satellite as it appeared over the rim. “There’s one!” I said and switched on the phone.

  Faye answered right away. She said, “Your guy Oberley should be jailed for false advertising. He did matriculate at Princeton—he must be bright to have gotten in—but he’s not going to get any kind of a doctorate there. The scuttlebutt my cousin was able to get for me was that the department ‘urged him to find like-minded people elsewhere.’ That’s code for he was off the rails somehow. He was trying to prove some kind of gooney ideas, and he got into a fight with his thesis committee over them.”

  A pattern began to click together in my head as I remembered Wink checking the list at the launch ramp and searching the access road. “Anything to do with ‘creation science’? That’s code for—”

  “N
o, his research wasn’t into evolution, it was the age of the earth. And tell Fritz I’ve already got a stove here on the Internet. It looks—”

  The little dot of light had set over the opposite rim of the canyon, taking Faye’s voice with it. I handed the phone back to Fritz. “She says she’s got a good stove on order.”

  “Good. But what’s that got to do with creationism?”

  “Don’t ask and I won’t trouble you with the answer,” I said.

  Fritz gave me another lingering kiss, put away the phone, and then got up off the raft. He took me by the hand and led me on a walk through the tamarisk along the shore, letting the quiet power of the high rock walls and the brilliant stars of the night sky above them embrace us. “Enjoying yourself?” he inquired.

  “This is wonderful.” I gave his hand a squeeze.

  A network of trails led through the tamarisk brush that grew thickly near the shore. We had chosen the campsite farthest downriver and had placed our portable toilet at the extreme end, for the sake of privacy, around a bend in a small path. Short pathways led to more secluded tent sites. I noted that Julianne had set her tent farthest upriver from our gathering space, and quite close to the stretch of beach where the rafts and dory rode the current. Two of our party had been sleeping on their boats: Mungo because he snored, and Wink, whose connection to his dory was almost that of an umbilicus. Julianne’s tent faced out onto the water overlooking Wink’s craft.

  Fritz held firmly to my hand, drawing me along a path that curved parallel to the river, and presently we came within earshot of another campsite. The party there was getting pretty rowdy. Feeling mischievous, we took a seat on the fallen trunk of a boxelder tree where we could secretly both listen and watch.