Cowboys Are My Weakness

by Pam Houston

  I worked fast and silent, wondering if we were doing the right thing and knowing if we died it would really be my fault, because as much as I knew Jack wanted to go, he wouldn’t have pushed me if I’d said I was scared. Jack was untamable, but he had some sense and a lot of respect for the river. He relied on me to speak with the voice of reason, to be life-protecting because I’m a woman and that’s how he thinks women are, but I’ve never been protective enough of anything, least of all myself.

  At nine-fifteen we untied the rope and let the river take us.

  “The first place that looks campable,” Jack said.

  Nine miles an hour is fast in a rubber raft on a river you’ve never boated when there’s not quite enough light to see what’s in front of you. We were taking on water over the bow almost immediately, even though the map didn’t show any rapids for the first two miles. It was hard for me to take my eyes off Jack, the way his muscles strained with every stroke, first his upper arms, then his upper thighs. He was silent, thinking it’d been a mistake to come, but I was laughing and bailing water and combing the banks for a flat spot and jumping back and forth over my seat to kiss him, and watching while his muscles flexed.

  My mother says I thrive on chaos, and I guess that’s true, because as hard a year as I’ve had with Jack I stayed with it, and I won’t even admit by how much the bad days outnumbered the good. We fought like bears when we weren’t on the river, because he was so used to fighting and I was so used to getting my own way. I said I wanted selfless devotion and he took a stand on everything from infidelity to salad dressing, and it was always opposite to mine. The one thing we had going for us, though, was the sex, and if we could stop screaming at each other long enough to make love it would be a day or sometimes two before something would happen and we’d go at it again. I’ve always been afraid to stop and think too hard about what great sex in bad times might mean, but it must have something to do with timing, that moment making love when you’re at once absolutely powerful and absolutely helpless, a balance we could never find when we were out of bed.

  It was the old southern woman next door, the hunter’s widow, who convinced me I should stay with him each time I’d get mad enough to leave. She said if I didn’t have to fight for him I’d never know if he was mine. She said the wild ones were the only ones worth having and that I had to let him do whatever it took to keep him wild. She said I wouldn’t love him if he ever gave in, and the harder I looked at my life, the more I saw a series of men—wild in their own way—who thought because I said I wanted security and commitment, I did. Sometimes it seems this simple: I tamed them and made them dull as fence posts and left each one for someone wilder than the last. Jack is the wildest so far, and the hardest, and even though I’ve been proposed to sixteen times, five times by men I’ve never made love to, I want him all to myself and at home more than I’ve ever wanted anything.

  “Are you bailing? I’m standing in water back here,” he said, so I bailed faster but the waves kept on crashing over the bow.

  “I can’t move this boat,” he said, which I knew wasn’t entirely true, but it was holding several hundred gallons of water times eight pounds a gallon, and that’s more weight than I’d care to push around.

  “There,” he said. “Camp. Let’s try to get to shore.”

  He pointed to a narrow beach a hundred yards downstream. The sand looked black in the twilight; it was long and flat enough for a tent.

  “Get the rope ready,” he said. “You’re gonna have to jump for it and find something to wrap around fast.”

  He yelled jump but it was too early and I landed chest-deep in the water and the cold took my breath but I scrambled across the rocks to the beach and wrapped around a fallen trunk just as the rope went tight. The boat dragged the trunk and me ten yards down the beach before Jack could get out and pull the nose of it up on shore.

  “This may have been real fuckin’ stupid,” he said.

  I wanted to tell him how the water made me feel, how horny and crazy and happy I felt riding on top of water that couldn’t hold itself in, but he was scared, for the first time since I’d known him, so I kept my mouth shut and went to set up the tent.

  In the morning the tent was covered all around with a thin layer of ice and we made love like crazy people, the way you do when you think it might be the last time ever, till the sun changed the ice back to dew and got the tent so hot we were sweating. Then Jack got up and made coffee, and we heard the boaters coming just in time to get our clothes on.

  They threw us their rope and we caught it. There were three of them, three big men in a boat considerably bigger than ours. Jack poured them coffee. We all sat down on the fallen log.

  “You launched, late last night?” the tallest, darkest one said. He had curly black hair and a wide open face.

  Jack nodded. “Too late,” he said. “Twilight boating.”

  “It’s up another half a foot this morning,” the man said. “It’s supposed to peak today at seven.”

  The official forest service document declares the Selway unsafe for boating above six feet. Seven feet is off their charts.

  “Have you boated this creek at seven?” Jack asked. The man frowned and took a long drink from his cup.

  “My name’s Harvey,” he said, and stuck out his hand. “This is Charlie and Charlie. We’re on a training trip.” He laughed. “Yahoo.”

  Charlie and Charlie nodded.

  “You know the river,” Jack said.

  “I’ve boated the Selway seventy times,” he said. “Never at seven feet. It was all the late snow and last week’s heat wave. It’s a bad combination, but it’s boatable. This river’s always boatable if you know exactly where to be.”

  Charlie and Charlie smiled.

  “There’ll be a lot of holes that there’s no way to miss. You got to punch through them.”

  Jack nodded. I knew Harvey was talking about boat flippers. Big waves that form in holes the river makes behind rocks and ledges and that will suck boats in and hold them there, fill them with water till they flip, hold bodies, too, indefinitely, until they go under and catch the current, or until the hole decides to spit them out. If you hit a hole with a back wave bigger than your boat perfectly straight, there’s a half a chance you’ll shoot through. A few degrees off in either direction, and the hole will get you every time.

  “We’ll be all right in this tank,” Harvey said, nodding to his boat, “but I’m not sure I’d run it in a boat that small. I’m not sure I’d run it in a boat I had to bail.”

  Unlike ours, Harvey’s boat was a self-bailer, inflatable tubes around an open metal frame that let the water run right through. They’re built for high water, and extremely hard to flip.

  “Just the two of you?” Harvey said.

  Jack nodded.

  “A honeymoon trip. Nice.”

  “We’re not married,” Jack said.

  “Yeah,” Harvey said. He picked up a handful of sand. “The black sand of the Selway,” he said. “I carried a bottle of this sand downriver the year I got married. I wanted to throw it at my wife’s feet during the ceremony. The minister thought it was pretty strange, but he got over it.”

  One of the Charlies looked confused.

  “Black sand,” Harvey said. “You know, black sand, love, marriage, Selway, rivers, life; the whole thing.”

  I smiled at Jack, but he wouldn’t meet my eyes.

  “You’ll be all right till Moose Creek,” Harvey said. “That’s when it gets wild. We’re gonna camp there tonight, run the bad stretch first thing in the morning in case we wrap or flip or tear something. I hope you won’t think I’m insulting you if I ask you to run with us. It’ll be safer for us both. The people who flipped yesterday were all experienced. They all knew the Selway.”

  “They lost one?” Jack said.

  “Nobody will say for sure,” Harvey said. “But I’d bet on it.”

  “We’ll think about it,” Jack said. “It’s nice of you to offer.
”

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Harvey said. “But I’ve got a kid now. It makes a difference.” He pulled a picture out of his wallet. A baby girl, eight or nine months old, crawled across a linoleum floor.

  “She’s beautiful,” I said.

  “She knocks me out,” Harvey said. “She follows everything with her finger; bugs, flowers, the TV, you know what I mean?”

  Jack and I nodded.

  “It’s your decision,” he said. “Maybe we’ll see you at Moose Creek.”

  He stood up, and Charlie and Charlie rose behind him. One coiled the rope while the other pushed off.

  Jack poured his third cup of coffee. “Think he’s full of shit?” he said.

  “I think he knows more than you or I ever will,” I said.

  “About this river, at least,” he said.

  “At least,” I said.

  In midday sunshine, the river looked more fun than terrifying. We launched just before noon, and though there was no time for sightseeing I bailed fast enough to let Jack move the boat through the rapids, which came quicker and bigger around every bend. The map showed ten rapids between the put-in and Moose Creek, and it was anybody’s guess which of the fifty or sixty rapids we boated that day were the ones the forest service had in mind. Some had bigger waves than others, some narrower passages, but the river was continuous moving white water, and we finally put the map away. On the southern rivers we’d mix rum and fruit juice and eat smoked oysters and pepper cheese. Here, twenty fast miles went by without time to take a picture, to get a drink of water. The Moose Creek pack bridge came into sight, and we pulled in and tied up next to Harvey’s boat.

  “White fuckin’ water,” Harvey said. “Did you have a good run?”

  “No trouble,” Jack said.

  “Good,” Harvey said. “Here’s where she starts to kick ass.” He motioned with his head downriver. “We’ll get up at dawn and scout everything.”

  “It’s early yet,” Jack said. “I think we’re going on.” I looked at Jack’s face, and then Harvey’s.

  “You do what you want,” Harvey said. “But you ought to take a look at the next five miles. The runs are obvious once you see them from the bank, but they change at every level.”

  “We haven’t scouted all day,” Jack said. I knew he wanted us to run alone, that he thought following Harvey would be cheating somehow, but I believed a man who’d throw sand at his new wife’s feet, and I liked a little danger but I didn’t want to die.

  “There’s only one way through Ladle,” Harvey said. “Ladle’s where they lost the girl.”

  “The girl?” Jack said.

  “The rest of her party was here when we got here. Their boats were below Ladle. They just took off, all but her husband. He wouldn’t leave, and you can’t blame him. He was rowing when she got tossed. He let the boat get sideways. He’s been wandering around here for two days, I guess, but he wouldn’t get back in the boat.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Jack said. He sat down on the bank facing the water.

  I looked back into the woods for the woman’s husband and tried to imagine a posture for him, tried to imagine an expression for his face. I thought about my Uncle Tim, who spent ten years and a lifetime of savings building his dream home. On the day it was completed he backed his pickup over his four-year-old daughter while she played in the driveway. He sold the house in three days and went completely gray in a week.

  “A helicopter landed about an hour ago,” Harvey said. “Downstream, where the body must be. It hasn’t taken off.”

  “The water’s still rising,” Jack said, and we all looked to where we’d pulled the boats up on shore and saw that they were floating. And then we heard the beating of the propeller and saw the helicopter rising out over the river. We saw the hundred feet of cable hanging underneath it and then we saw the woman, arched like a dancer over the thick black belt they must use for transplanting wild animals, her long hair dangling, her arms slung back. The pilot flew up the river till he’d gained enough altitude, turned back, and headed over the mountain wall behind our camp.

  “They said she smashed her pelvis against a rock and bled to death internally,” Harvey said. “They got her out in less than three minutes, and it was too late.”

  Jack put his arm around my knees. “We’ll scout at dawn,” he said. “We’ll all run this together.”

  Harvey was up rattling coffeepots before we had time to make love and I said it would bring us bad luck if we didn’t but Jack said it would be worse than bad luck if we didn’t scout the rapids. The scouting trail was well worn. Harvey went first, then Jack, then me and the two Charlies. Double Drop was first, two sets of falls made by water pouring over clusters of house-sized boulders that extended all the way across the river.

  “You can sneak the first drop on the extreme right,” Harvey said. “There’s no sneak for the second. Just keep her straight and punch her through. Don’t let her get you sideways.”

  Little Niagara was a big drop, six feet or more, but the run was pretty smooth and the back wave low enough to break through.

  “Piece of cake,” Harvey said.

  The sun was almost over the canyon wall, and we could hear Ladle long before we rounded the bend. I wasn’t prepared for what I saw. One hundred yards of white water stretched from shore to shore and thundered over rocks and logjams and ledges. There were ten holes the size of the one in Double Drop, and there was no space for a boat in between. The currents were so chaotic for such a long stretch there was no way to read which way they’d push a boat. We found some small logs and climbed a rock ledge that hung over the rapid.

  “See if you can read this current,” Harvey said, and tossed the smallest log into the top of the rapid. The log hit the first hole and went under. It didn’t come back up. One of the Charlies giggled.

  “Again,” Harvey said. This time the log came out of the first hole and survived two more before getting swallowed by the biggest hole, about midway through the rapid.

  “I’d avoid that one for sure,” Harvey said. “Try to get left of that hole.” He threw the rest of the logs in. None of them made it through. “This is big-time,” he said.

  We all sat on the rock for what must have been an hour. “Seen enough?” Harvey said. “We’ve still got No Slouch and Miranda Jane.”

  The men climbed down off the rock, but I wasn’t quite ready to leave. I went to the edge of the ledge, lay flat on my stomach, and hung over until my head was so full of the roar of the river I got dizzy and pulled myself back up. The old southern woman said men can’t really live unless they face death now and then, and I know by men she didn’t mean mankind. And I wondered which rock shattered the dead woman’s pelvis, and I wondered what she and I were doing out here on this river when Harvey’s wife was home with that beautiful baby and happy. And I knew it was crazy to take a boat through that rapid and I knew I’d do it anyway but I didn’t any longer know why. Jack said I had to do it for myself to make it worth anything, and at first I thought I was there because I loved danger, but sitting on the rock I knew I was there because I loved Jack. And maybe I went because his old girlfriends wouldn’t, and maybe I went because I wanted him for mine, and maybe it didn’t matter at all why I went because doing it for me and doing it for him amounted, finally, to exactly the same thing. And even though I knew in my head there’s nothing a man can do that a woman can’t, I also knew in my heart we can’t help doing it for different reasons. And just like a man will never understand exactly how a woman feels when she has a baby, or an orgasm, or the reasons why she’ll fight so hard to be loved, a woman can’t know in what way a man satisfies himself, what question he answers for himself, when he looks right at death.

  My head was so full of the sound and the light of the river that when I climbed down off the bank side of the ledge I didn’t see the elk carcass until I stepped on one of its curled hooves. It was a young elk, probably not dead a year, and still mostly covered with matted brown fur.
The skull was picked clean by scavengers, polished white by the sun and grinning. The sound that came out of my mouth scared me as much as the elk had, and I felt silly a few minutes later when Harvey came barreling around the corner followed by Jack.

  Harvey saw the elk and smiled.

  “It startled me is all,” I said.

  “Jesus,” Jack said. “Stay with us, all right?”

  “I never scream,” I said. “Hardly ever.”

  No Slouch and Miranda Jane were impressive rapids, but they were nothing like Ladle and both runnable to the left. On the way back to camp we found wild strawberries, and Jack and I hung back and fed them to each other and I knew he wasn’t mad about me screaming. The boats were loaded by ten-thirty and the sun was warm. We wore life jackets and helmets and wet suits. Everybody had diver’s boots but me, so I wore my loafers.

  “You have three minutes in water this cold,” Harvey said. “Even with a wet suit. Three minutes before hypothermia starts, and then you can’t swim, and then you just give in to the river.”

  Harvey gave us the thumbs-up sign as the Charlies pushed off. I pushed off right behind them. Except for the bail bucket and the spare oar, everything on the boat was tied down twice and inaccessible. My job was to take water out of the boat as fast as I could eight pounds at a time, and to help Jack remember which rapid was coming next and where we had decided to run it.

  I saw the first of the holes in Double Drop and yelled, “Right,” and we made the sneak with a dry boat. We got turned around somehow after that, though, and had to hit the big wave backwards. Jack yelled, “Hang on, baby,” and we hit it straight on and it filled the boat, but then we were through it and in sight of Little Niagara before I could even start bailing.