Take Me to the River

by Will Hobbs

  “Get over here now, you two!”

  “I got it,” I told Rio. “You stay in the boat, too, okay?”

  “I promise. And thanks for everything, Dylan. You’re true blue. It’s been awesome running with you.”

  “Knock it off,” I said. “We’re going home with stories to tell.”

  Carlos glowered at us as we reached the boat. “What were you two doing back there?”

  “Throwing up,” I said.

  He laughed cruelly. “Wipe your mouth. I can see that you were.”

  I helped Diego into the front of the raft. Still on the shore, Carlos hesitated. Thinking about where he was going to ride, I guessed.

  Carlos tucked his pistol under his waistband, climbed aboard, and went to the back. He should have been afraid of losing his gun to the river in water this rough, but apparently it hadn’t crossed his mind. It was time we caught a break.

  It was easy enough to guess why he didn’t want to ride up front with me and Diego. He thought I might try to shove him overboard in the heat of the action. He wanted things just as they were, with me up front taking care of Diego and him at the opposite end. I couldn’t reach him and Rio couldn’t see him.

  Rio climbed in, took his seat, took a deep breath. He told me to untie, and to hold the boat at the shore until he was ready.

  I did as I was told, taking a few deep breaths myself. I had to have faith in my cousin. Whatever he was up to, he had it under control. My job was to stay in the boat and make sure Diego did the same.

  The boat was rocking like a racehorse ready to run as I held it and secured the coiled tie-rope around the grab line. “Now listen, everybody,” Rio said. “Listen real good. Did everybody see that logjam?”

  “I didn’t,” Diego said. “I was afraid to look.”

  Rio’s chuckle was rueful. “That’s just as well, Diego. Here’s the deal. There’s one really bad thing about this rapid—some logs in the middle of the river. Soon as we go over the edge, we’re going to be heading right for them. I’m going to be pulling hard to go to whichever side of the logjam looks best. Probably toward the Texas side. If something happens—if I get tossed out or lose control of an oar—and we get swept against those logs, the boat will flip over.”

  “Texas, quit talking like that.” Carlos scolded from his perch on the stern.

  “Listen, there’s something we can do if that happens. If the raft is swept against the logs, we have a chance to survive if we time it just right. If we’re going to hit the logs, I’ll yell ‘Jump!’ at the last second. If I yell ‘Jump,’ don’t hesitate—the boat’s gonna flip. We have to get onto the logs as fast as we can. That’s our only chance. Jump on the logs and climb to the top of the pile.”

  “That’s enough!” Carlos barked. “Get in the boat, Carolina. Let’s get this over with.”

  “Not until Rio says he’s ready,” I fired back.

  Rio took another deep breath. He closed his eyes. He exhaled.

  “I’m ready,” he announced softly. I wished he’d said it with more conviction.

  I gave the raft a small push and climbed aboard. I made sure Diego’s life jacket was cinched tight to his harness, and I checked my own cinches. Carlos saw me doing that and thought better of keeping his pistol in his waistband. He quickly stowed it in his backpack. By this time we were already at the head of the eddy and Rio was pulling into the current. There is only one word to describe that look that was back on Rio’s face: fierce.

  Rio Bravo Robbins, I thought. Be bravo, Rio. Be bravo.

  Rio pulled hard to reach the middle of the flooding river. The sky was blue, I noticed, nothing but beautiful blue. Pretty quick we could see over the brink of the rapid to the logjam waiting below, not at all far below.

  As we went over the brink, the flow narrowed and accelerated. It was all a blur, we were going so fast. The water got rough, waves crashing from both sides. Rio cocked the front of the boat toward the right side so he could start pulling to the left. He was going to try to clear the logjam on the Texas side, like he said.

  The turbulence was worse than I’d ever seen, and the logjam was looming. I glanced back at Carlos. He was keeping low, hanging on with a death grip.

  Rio kept fighting left and was making good progress, but suddenly the turbulence ripped the right oar from his hand. Instantly, the raft was out of control and we were in deadly trouble, closing on the logs at a high rate of speed. Rio reached forward for the oar handle. He managed to grab it and got back in his seat and starting rowing for all he was worth.

  Rio had lost his angle. In the seconds it took to regain it, we were half again as close to the logs. Now he was pulling left again, but he wasn’t going to make it. We were seconds from impact on the far left side of the logjam. The trunks of the trees were dead ahead.

  It looked like we were going to be swept into the logs broadside, at the worst possible angle. The full length of the raft would take the hit, and if it did, it was going to flip just like Rio had said.

  Diego tried to rise, to get ready to jump. It took every last bit of faith I had in my cousin not to get ready myself. I held Diego down. I made sure he wasn’t going anywhere.

  At the last possible second, with a mighty pivot, Rio spun the raft. I saw the back of the boat swinging around. It was the back of the boat, and the back of the boat only, that was going to take the hit.

  Carlos was in a crouch, backpack on his back, hanging on with both hands but poised to leap. “Jump!” Rio roared, a fraction of a second before the boat bumped the logs. Carlos leaped, and timed his leap well. He landed on one log and scrambled to the one above.

  Along with the tremendous jolt we took, we got a terrific bounce. Rio dug hard with both oars, and we pinballed around the Texas side of the logjam, barely out of reach of a tree branch sawing up and down in the river. We were free of the logs and hurtling downstream through the fastest water I had ever seen. Rio and I looked over our shoulders to the receding logjam, where Carlos, who had whipped off his backpack, was reaching inside for his gun.

  By the time he had it out, and was able to aim, two-handed, we were almost out of reach downriver where the canyon was bending left. “Get down!” Rio yelled, and all three of us went to the floor of the raft. Over the pounding whitewater, we heard the bursts of gunfire.

  Soon as the firing ended, Rio climbed back into his seat and regained the oars. We turned the corner in the canyon and Upper Madison Falls disappeared from view. “We’re free!” I hollered. “You faked him out, Rio! We’re free, Diego! He can’t touch us now!”

  Rio had his hands full with another rapid, Lower Madison Falls. We took some whitewater over the bow, but it was all washed out—no rocks, no holes, no logs.

  Below Lower Madison, the three of us were out of our minds with relief, whooping and hollering and jumping for joy. The adrenaline wasn’t going to stop anytime soon. Rio let go of the oars and stood up on the rowing seat, doing a victory dance. I was pumping my fist and Diego was doing the same.

  Rio dropped back into his seat, grabbed hold of the oars, and rowed hard for shore. We landed on a new-made sandbar and tied the boat three ways from Sunday to the trunk of a mesquite. Then we totally lost it. All that pent-up fear gave way, and we went crazy-wild throwing ourselves down, jumping up, and throwing ourselves down again. I lifted Diego up high, and he pumped both his fists. I put him down, and Rio grabbed him and swung him around and around. We both told him how incredibly brave he had been.

  Shaggy hair flying, Rio ran to the end of the sandbar yelling, “I’m alive! I’m alive! I’m alive!”

  Diego and I took up the chant, and we ran up and down the sandbar, too, yelling, “We’re alive! We’re alive! We’re alive!”

  I nearly had to tackle Rio to slow him down. There was something I had to ask him. I barely had the breath. “Going into the logjam . . . did you lose control of the oar on purpose, because you told Carlos we’d be in huge trouble if you did?”

  Rio, too, was heaving
for breath. “That was the plan, and so was bumping the logs with the back of the boat, and faking him into jumping, but I didn’t realize how little time there would be! When we were going into the logs broadside, I didn’t know if I had enough time to spin the raft! I knew we’d be goners if I couldn’t get that oar back fast and make the spin!”

  “Desperate times call for desperate measures, and you pulled it off!”

  Diego, we realized, was no longer celebrating. He was staring upriver so intensely I thought he had spied Carlos coming after us.

  That’s exactly what he was worried about. “Let’s get going!” the boy pleaded. “He has a life jacket on! What if he comes after us?”

  We told him that wasn’t likely, given the ferocity of the whitewater he would have to jump into, but we couldn’t be sure. We got back on the river and Rio started pulling for home. The takeout was twenty-five miles downstream. On this racehorse-fast current, we could get there before the day was done.

  Chapter 23

  What the Chopper Saw

  RIO KEPT THE RAFT in the fastest current, pushing hard for home. The sun was shining and the skies were blue. Eighteen miles below Lower Madison, we emerged from the towering Lower Canyons. The cliffs shrank to no more than a couple hundred feet high. There were cattle on both shores; this was ranching country. The ebbing river was already a couple feet down from the tops of the new sandbars it had created.

  We counted up the days. It was hard to believe, but this was only our sixth. With just eight miles to go in our 116-mile journey, we had spent only five nights out. We had planned on nine. Ariel wasn’t scheduled to meet us at the Dryden takeout until noon on the tenth day.

  Was there any chance she might come sooner?

  Most likely she would, we figured. She knew our ten-day schedule was based on low water.

  Might she be at the takeout already?

  The chances of that were south of unlikely.

  Even so, we wanted to get off the river in the worst way. According to Rio, there was a fish camp at the takeout. He’d waited there for his dad to come off the river a couple of times. There might even be people there.

  “What kind of amenities does this fish camp have?” I wondered aloud.

  Taking a break from the oars, Rio reached for his water bottle. “It’s got a ramada with a metal roof and no walls that makes shade for a bunch of picnic tables on a concrete slab. Off to the side, there’s a fish-cleaning station and a barbeque grill. It has good, clean water that arrives via gravity feed from a holding tank next to a windmill. Anything else you wanted to know?”

  “If we have to kill the next three or four days there, do you think we could catch some fish?”

  “I don’t see why not. We’ve got juglines and Zote Soap.”

  I asked Diego if fried catfish sounded good to him. He said it did. Rio said he thought we could also scare up a snake. Diego didn’t think much of that idea. Rio said we could slow-roast a cow overnight, underground, if we could catch one. Diego smiled but he didn’t laugh. Good try, I thought. Rio was trying to distract Diego from succumbing to the grief he was feeling over his father.

  We still had a few rapids to run, Sanderson Canyon Rapid and Agua Verde Rapid. Rio had me take the oars for both. I slopped through with zero style points.

  In the bottom of Agua Verde Rapid, we spotted the trail to the Mexican village a mile south. Rio and I exchanged glances, picturing all too well what would have happened to us here had he not been able to shake Carlos.

  Pretty quick, we had our sights on the river gauge pictured in the guidebook. Only six or seven feet of pipe were showing between the instrument box under the solar panel and the river below. In the photo, the flow gauge was closer to thirty feet above the river. Rio couldn’t wait to get home and find out how much water we’d been running on.

  As we drifted by the gauge, our eyes went to the metal ramada downstream, the fish camp at the Dryden takeout. “You’re on your way home,” I said to Diego.

  First thing, we walked up to the fish camp to see if Ariel might possibly be there. She wasn’t. The place was deserted. Even though we weren’t expecting any different, it was still a disappointment.

  We returned to the raft for our gear. Rio said we wouldn’t break down the raft until Ariel drove in. We would need it for setting out our juglines when the river slowed down enough that we could fish it.

  We made supper as the sun was setting. We still had some soup packets and a box of mac and cheese. After supper we played Hearts. From the picnic table where we sat, we watched the bats begin to work the river. They included mastiff bats with wingspans nearly two feet across.

  It got so dark we had to break out the candles to keep playing. I asked Rio if he thought the twenty-mile road from the highway to the river would be dry enough the next day, if Ariel got the notion, for her to come in and pick us up. He remembered it as caliche clay—no gravel—and said it would take at least another full day before anybody could drive in. We might have to go on that snake hunt he was talking about.

  When it came to our sleeping arrangements, I inflated our two ground pads and announced that it was my turn to go without. “Deal,” Rio agreed. I made do with a bed of cane tops, and arranged my sleeping sheet on top of that. At least I had something between me and the concrete.

  It wasn’t the most restful night of my life. The other two slept like the dead while I relived the events of the last couple days. It was impossible to get my mind off of Carlos. He was out there, and maybe he wasn’t where we thought he was, stranded on the logjam and waiting for the river to go down. He might’ve swum off it, like Diego was thinking. Maybe he found another boat. He might be sneaking up on us in the dark.

  It was exhaustion, finally, that shut down my overworked imagination. I woke to the rising sun warm against my eyelids. Rio and Diego were still asleep. I got up and walked down to the river. It looked like it had dropped by half. I wondered if it might be fishable already. A beaver, of all things, was swimming upstream along the Mexican shore.

  Two hours later Rio and Diego still weren’t up, and I was bored out of my skull. I was about to start making some coffee when I heard something. One second it wasn’t there and the next second it was. “Chopper!” I yelled. Rio leaped to his feet and so did Diego. All three of us went running from the ramada into the open. I was expecting a Black Hawk.

  The sound was coming from upriver. Here came the chopper. It wasn’t black, and it wasn’t military. It was red and white. I grabbed a life jacket off the gear pile and waved it wildly around my head. “That’s Big Bend’s chopper,” Rio said. “Big Bend National Park.”

  The helicopter landed in the parking lot off to the side of the fish camp. When the rotors stopped turning, two men stepped out. Rio identified them for me before running to shake hands. The pilot, in a flight suit, was Tony Medina. The one in the Park Service uniform was Rob Baker, the Big Bend River Ranger.

  I looked around for Diego. He had retreated to the shade of the ramada, where he was sort of hiding. I caught up with Rio, and I got huge handshakes, too.

  “You guys,” the pilot said. “You have no idea how good this feels.”

  “Oh yes, we do,” Rio assured him.

  “I flat-out don’t believe that you’re here!” exclaimed Rob, the River Ranger. “The takeout is the last place we expected to find you! You ran the river at the height of the storm?”

  “I’m afraid so,” Rio said. “How big did the water get?”

  “It came close to topping the ’58 flood. The Dryden gauge peaked yesterday at forty-seven thousand six hundred cubic feet per second. The upper half of the Big Bend didn’t get nearly the rain. The storm passed us by to the east, heading north—Terlingua got only an inch. It was the Lower Canyons that got hammered. You should’ve seen the satellite photo.”

  “Plumb ugly,” the pilot chimed in. “This morning was the first time we could fly. The National Weather Service is estimating that the Lower Canyons got fifteen inches.
”

  “I believe it,” I chimed in. “It was something to see.”

  The River Ranger suddenly got all serious. “Here’s what we need to know right now. Below San Rosendo, just past the cliff, we spotted a red canoe at the shoreline. Figured it must be your Mad River, Rio. When we got to Upper Madison, we saw a man in a life jacket sitting on top of the huge logjam in the middle of the rapid, and started wondering if the canoe was his. We have no idea who he is. He didn’t fill out a permit. Did you guys run into him? We’ve called for a rescue chopper—do you have any idea who that is?”

  “A murderer, a kidnapper,” Rio replied, and pointed their attention to Diego, who had retreated to the farthest, darkest corner of the ramada.

  Rio was only beginning to bring them up to speed when the pilot, who’d heard enough, ran to the chopper to get on the radio. Earlier, he had called for a search-and-rescue chopper. Now he had a warning to get out: The man on the logjam was an armed and dangerous Mexican national, the suspected kidnapper in the abduction of the judge’s son at the lodge in the Sierra del Carmen.

  We asked the River Ranger if he knew of the fate of Diego’s father. “He was the only one of the three judges who survived,” Rob said. “That’s what the newspapers and TV and radio are reporting. His clerk sitting next to him got killed, but the judge was only wounded, and not critically. He was evacuated to a hospital in Mexico City, and is doing well. The other three hit men, by the way, were killed in a running gun battle, with the help of our Army Rangers. The manhunt for the fourth is still on. This is going to be big news, guys, huge news!”

  Rio and I headed over toward Diego. “You’ve been like a big brother to him,” Rio said. “You should be the one to tell him.”

  Diego was in the farthest corner of the ramada, where he sat at a picnic table with his head down. He lifted his head as we approached. Tears welling, he said, “Do they know anything about my father? Did they say anything?”