by Nevada Barr
The picture of the lovely young woman leading the wretched old cow was such that Anna couldn’t help being moved, and any trace of annoyance at Cyril for balking authority evaporated.
“Hey!” Carmen shouted, and began to run.
Lori and Chrissie had wandered up to the bottom of the cliff to watch the bovine events and left their posts at the raft. The river had risen and lifted it from the rocky shore. The stern wagged in the current like the tail of a living thing trying to break free of its moorings.
“Damn,” Anna whispered, and she and Paul ran after the guide. They caught it just as the river was taking it for itself and hauled the raft up onto the shore. Lori and Chrissie had not bothered to tie the raft before they’d abandoned their posts. Nor had they packed up the chairs they’d taken out to lounge in.
Anna curbed her anger because Carmen had none. Maintaining safety and equipment was the charge of the guide, and Anna could tell she was mad only at herself for forgetting her primary responsibility in the adventure of saving the cow.
Food boxes rearranged, Easter was toppled over onto the stern of the raft and lashed in place, her horns wrapped and duct-taped in towels to keep them from goring the rubber. The entire process took forty-two minutes. The river had risen half a foot in that time.
“Put on your life jackets,” Carmen said, all traces of humor gone from her. “We’re in for a wild ride. Once we’re past the rockslide it will get easier.”
Debris washed from the riverbanks upstream floated by at an alarming speed and the vacation/adventure cheers that had met the guide’s first announcement of the rigors of the rapids were not repeated.
On the water, Anna felt a degree of relief. The rain, the cow and the rising Rio Grande had her nerves strung out. Moving made her feel as if they were making progress. The power of the river was a palpable thing, not only in the pull of the oar but in the muscular feel of the water as it swelled against the cliffs on either side, mounding against the rock, pushing over submerged stones with the oily grace of a giant serpent. Entering Santa Elena Canyon Anna had been struck with the force of the Rio Grande. That had been but a paltry thing, the river fed by rains pouring down the mountain streams from the Coahuilas was that slumbering beast roused to action, the sword that cut through solid rock and rolled house-sized boulders as if they were children’s toys.
“We’re going to beach the raft just around that big rock,” Carmen said after they’d been on the water a quarter of an hour. “There’s a good place there to scout out the rockslide.”
Carmen shouted directions as they rounded the rock and even Lori and Chrissie followed them as best they could, their silliness ameliorated by fear. “Lighten up!” Anna called to them. “This is going to be fun.” Cyril laughed but the other two girls looked as if their definition of fun did not include rain and rocks and rapids. Anna had seen too many tourists in the same state to hold it against them. The realization that, in the backcountry, an indifferent god is in control of one’s life came as a shock to most people.
The strand of beach that Carmen used to scout the rapids was reduced to a ribbon under the coming water. They eased the raft to the back of this natural breakwater and beached it. Carmen led the six of them to the last bit of exposed land. From there they could see the beginning of the rockslide.
Enormous blocks of stone had tumbled from the cliffs above and scattered into the river, forming chutes and divides in the water as it found its way through. “A few things,” Carmen said. “We want to stay in the center going in here. If we don’t we can wrap the raft around a rock. The water can wrap one of these things around a boulder like you’d wrap Saran Wrap around an onion. Once the raft fills with water there’s hardly any force on earth that can peel it back off the rock. If we get caught by the rock, it’s not the end of the world. We lean into the rock to keep the upstream edge of the raft from getting flooded and we ease ourselves off. The rock is our friend. Hug it.”
As she laid out the route they would take, Anna watched her traveling companions. Paul looked high: alert and keen, a half smile on his lips. Cyril and her brother were nervous but excited. Lori had the look of a terrified sheep. Lori was an abdicator, Anna guessed. The type that, under stress, abdicates responsibility for themselves and becomes childlike, expecting others to take care of them.
Chrissie was a study in personal misery, the drowned cat, the clown with the pie in his face, Carrie at the prom, her dress drenched in pig’s blood. Anna didn’t doubt that, had Chrissie suddenly been granted Carrie’s power, there would be hell to pay.
Easter merely looked resigned. Her horns wrapped up in towels, her legs tied, she lay quietly on the stern of the raft and watched them with what Anna hoped was trust and not terror in her great brown eyes.
“Everybody ready?” Carmen asked.
Nobody said they weren’t.
“Okay, time to have fun,” the guide said.
This was not white water as Anna knew it. Going into the maze of boulders in Santa Elena Canyon, the water did not froth and break, it bulged with sinewy strength, forming muscular ridges around the stones. The Rio Grande was a male river, testosterone fueled, mover of mountains. The farming out of the waters of the Colorado River up north had robbed it of some of the fierceness it once had and it lazed when the water was low but one could still feel the underlying aggression.
Today the river was flexing and stretching, in an exhilarating rush to the sea, people and stones and trees be damned.
Carmen was in the stern with Easter piled around her like a dusty brown bolster. Steve, then Anna, then Lori rowed on the American side of the raft, Cyril, Chrissie and Paul on the Mexican side. “We want to be in the middle,” Carmen reminded them, “then, past that boulder, pull hard to the right.”
“Aye, aye, skipper,” Steve said.
The raft was heavy with the addition of the cow but not overloaded and they slipped neatly into midstream. “Oars on the right,” Carmen called. Paul and Cyril and even Chrissie rowed, turning the bow neatly into the current. The Rio Grande lifted them and in a rush they surged toward the great slab of shale that divided the waters. “Hard right, hard right,” Carmen shouted, reinforcing the plan she’d made on shore.
Paul and Cyril pulled hard on their oars. Chrissie, transfixed as a mouse eye-to-eye with a snake, did nothing. The oncoming boulder had paralyzed her. The stern was swinging to the right and Anna couldn’t see the reason for it. Chrissie’s failure to row would not make or break a turn. Running rapids was a sport as much of the mind as of the body. Between them Paul and Cyril had enough strength to control the raft.
“Row left,” Carmen shouted. Anna had already dug her paddle deep, pushing a wide arc, trying to force the bow to point downstream. Steve had never learned to steer a canoe or raft and paddled straight ahead. Lori sat unmoving, her paddle thrust in the river nearly to her knuckles. Lori was serving as an unofficial rudder, the raft pivoting on her blade.
“Lori,” Anna said sharply. “Row.”
The young woman woke as if from a dream, looked back at Anna, her oar slipping from her hand and racing downstream ahead of them. The paddle crashed into the first rock and eddied away to the left. With the freakish suddenness that can turn an adventure into a disaster, the raft was against the rock, with Paul’s, Cyril’s and Chrissie’s oars trapped between rubber and stone.
“We’re okay,” Carmen was shouting over the lowing of the cow and Chrissie’s shrieks. “Lean into the rock, don’t let the upstream side take on water, into the rock.”
The raft steadied. The river held them fast but they were upright. “We’re okay,” Carmen said. Then the equation shifted. A dark shape bore down the river on a collision course with the raft pinned against the rock.
“It’s going to hit us,” Chrissie screamed.
“It’s a garbage bag,” Carmen screamed back. “We’re okay.”
Chrissie could not hear her and she scrambled to get out of the raft. The upstream gunwale dipped and
the river poured in. Lori was gone in a second, taken from sight into the rapids. Cyril held on long enough to grab Anna’s life jacket and yell: “Easter!” before the current snatched her away.
“Go, go,” Paul was yelling at her. “Forget the damn cow.” Easter was panicked, tossing her head back and forth weakly and bleating. The towel had torn free of one horn and was unwinding from the other in a sodden flag that slapped her and scared her more with each toss.
She couldn’t leave it to die a slow death from water-boarding, or, if it was lucky, the raft would flip and it would drown faster.
“I got the head,” Carmen said, and began pulling the slipknots they’d used to anchor an unresisting Easter in place. Anna’s body was out of the raft and the current wanted her bad. She hooked one arm over the fat gunwale and pulled at the line holding Easter’s back legs with the other.
“Cow!” Carmen shouted as the rope came free and several hundred pounds of beef struck Anna, pushing her beneath the brown water. She’d seen Easter coming in time to take a good breath. Rolling herself up like a hedgehog, she hugged her knees with one arm and her head with the other. A hoof or hip or shoulder bone clipped her, sending her spinning. Then she was just with the river. Her life jacket popped her to the surface and she came out of her protective ball and pointed her feet downstream so she could fend off solid objects.
Things had happened so quickly that by the time she had the luxury of thought it was too late. The current was too great to swim back to see if Paul and Steve and Carmen had cleared the wreckage safely and too swift to make her way to the bank until it let her.
As she rounded the boulder the raft was crucified against, a lump almost the same brown as the river rose from the depths. Anna stopped floating and swam after the cow. The beast was trussed and so weak she didn’t worry about intentional harm, though she did worry about accidentally getting gored. Four good strokes and she was next to Easter. She grabbed the cow’s horns, letting the rest of the animal lead their way downstream, Anna’s legs trailing behind, the cow’s nostrils barely above water.
The rockslide was less than a hundred yards in length and within a minute had spewed Anna and the cow out onto relatively flat water. Steering the cow like a sled, Anna kicked to shore. Farther downstream, she saw Lori then Cyril, one on either side of the river, emerging from the water. Lori stumbled as if she were blind, and let Carmen, who had her by the upper arm, lead her.
Steve was okay, Anna was sure. He’d waved as he floated past her and the cow. There was no sign of Chrissie or Paul. At this point, Anna didn’t care a whole hell of a lot about Miss Chrissie. Had it been a choice between rescuing her or Easter, Anna would have had a tough decision to make.
Paul had to be upstream; Anna would have seen him if he’d passed her coming down. A horrifying image of the raft turning turtle, sucked down and pinned by the river, Paul trapped beneath, loosened her bowels.
“Have you seen Chrissie?” Carmen called as Anna pulled enough of Easter from the water that the cow could breathe and would probably not get washed away.
“No. I’m heading back.” Pushing the wet hair from her face, Anna trotted up the bank toward the jumble of boulders that shouldered both sides of the river where the slide provided such fine entertainment for the tourists.
A scream stopped her.
“Chrissie’s alive,” Anna said sourly.
Before she had to leave a child screaming for help to check on her husband, Paul floated into sight and crawled gasping from the river.
“Raft’s gone,” he said. “Easter got a horn in it. It and all the gear are gone.”
Anna met him at the water’s edge and started helping him off with his life vest. Guilt ate at her that she hadn’t stayed to help, hadn’t somehow made it back, that she’d floated cheerily downstream steering a cow while Paul hung back trying to save their gear.
The scream came again. In the instant Anna had laid eyes on Paul all thought of Chrissie had flown.
“Chrissie,” Anna said before Paul could ask.
Chucking the vest, he began to run down the shoreline toward the noise, Anna and Carmen on his heels. “Stay here,” she shouted at Cyril, Steven and Lori as they passed them. Cyril nodded. She was in the process of untying the cow’s legs. Apparently, she valued the life of Easter slightly more than she did Chrissie’s. Lori stood next to her, so close she was in the way, doing and saying nothing.
“I’ll go with you,” Steve said, and none of them argued. He loped out to join them, his long thin legs showing the ungainly grace of a colt’s.
A smaller slide of boulders marked the end of their beach. Anna and Carmen, more agile than the men, were up and over them first. Chrissie was on the other side. Apparently unhurt, she stood near the water by a strainer woven of tree branches and reeds. When she saw them she pointed at the strainer and screamed again.
“Chrissie’s always had a way with the English language,” Steve said as he slid down the rock and landed lightly beside Anna. Paul landed with a thump and a grunt.
Anna was tired and, seeing no blood gushing from Chrissie’s mouth, she walked the last ten yards to where the girl stood, gawping like a landed trout.
“What you got?” Anna asked easily, expecting a snake or drowned nutria.
“There,” Chrissie managed a word with her point.
“God dammit!” Anna breathed. A woman’s body was tangled in the branches, her face only inches above the water, her dress washed up, exposing her legs and her very pregnant belly.
NINE
The strainer had formed between two rocks, one on the shore and one fifteen feet out into the water. An uprooted tree had been caught between the boulders and served as the net that caught smaller debris until a dangerous tangle of limbs and twigs and reeds and garbage was created.
The cause of Chrissie’s screaming was nearly dead center, the current holding her fast to the strainer. Her hair was long and black and so intertwined with the nest of debris that had seined her from the Rio Grande that she seemed part of it, the human face of a nature god with the swollen belly of rebirth mocked by death. One arm floated free, the other was threaded up through the tangle as if she was trying to hold her face above the water.
Anna started to wade in.
“Don’t!” Carmen ordered. “Let me.”
Anna knew what she was thinking. “Law enforcement ranger, EMT,” she said, then pointed at Paul. “Sheriff.”
Carmen nodded and Anna thought she saw a flicker of relief in her eyes. Guides were better equipped to deal with the emergencies of the living than the dead. “Wait till we get a line on you,” Carmen said. “The undertow on a strainer can be something. Sucks you right in with the rest.”
Anna suffered a vision of a thorny cavern filled with corpses and was about to send Steve back to the raft for the line when she remembered.
“No line,” she said succinctly. “No raft.”
“Jeez,” Carmen said. She had forgotten as well. The guide should have looked silly: fingerless gloves, black silk long johns worn under her shorts to protect her legs from the sun, Mexican-made hat, brim sagging with water. She didn’t; she looked in her element, at home with the rain and the river. “Human line then. I’ll anchor. Cyril, Steve, Paul, then you.” Chrissie wasn’t included in the roster but, this time, there were no complaints.
Steve loped back upriver to collect his sister from where she’d been left with Lori and the sacred cow.
Anna waded a ways into the river, Paul at her side.
“To get her out we’re going to have to cut the hair off,” Paul said.
“That should be fun.” Anna’s Swiss army knife had scissors but the blades were scarcely an inch long. “Did you lose your pocketknife?”
Paul patted the many pockets of his cargo shorts. “No.”
Paul kept his blade sharper than Anna kept hers.
“She’s either been dead awhile or died recently,” Anna said, realizing she sounded like Maxwell Smart playing
at Sherlock Holmes. “I mean rigor has either not set in or it has passed off.” She pointed to where the woman’s free arm waved easily in the current, the hand and fingers undulating as if they’d already abandoned human form and become part of the river.
“We should leave her where she is,” Anna said. “I doubt she is a rafter nobody bothered to mention went overboard. Crime scene and all that.”
“She’s probably from Mexico,” Carmen said. “And got washed down the river trying to cross to have her baby in the U.S. In the villages there isn’t a doctor or hospital, pharmacy, nothing like that. If they have the baby here, they get some medical attention and the baby is an American citizen. Pretty nice birthday present.”
“A wetback,” Chrissie said, and Anna wanted to slap her till she realized the girl wasn’t insulting the dead, she understood for the first time where the slur had originated. Swimming the Rio Grande.
“If we leave her, the next raft down will have a nice surprise,” Paul said.
Anna hadn’t thought of that.
Steve clambered over the rocks upstream, Cyril with him and, drifting in their wake like a sorry little ghost, Lori.
Carmen stood on the bank and held Cyril’s wrist in both her hands. Cyril and Steve locked hands on each other’s wrists, beginning the links in the human chain. Paul didn’t take Steve’s proffered arm but began unbuckling his belt. As he buckled it around Anna’s waist, she said, “You’re going to lose your pants.”
“Better my pants than my wife,” he answered.
Gripping the leather in one hand, he took Steve’s in the other and Anna waded in.
The water where the woman had been caught in the strainer nearly reached Anna’s sternum. She could feel the hungry strainer trying to swallow her, drag her feetfirst beneath its ragged teeth, and was glad of the sturdy leather belt around her and the feel of Paul’s knuckles against the small of her back.
“Pieta,” Paul murmured behind her.
Up close, the woman’s youth and loveliness shone through the graying mask. Eyes closed, features relaxed, her face was a perfect oval, the eyes dark-lashed and wide set, her mouth full but with a softness that was more maternal than sensual. Either her belly was bloated or she was very long into her pregnancy. Anna had seen more than her share of dead bodies and she’d never held motherhood to be particularly sacred. She’d never been one to coo over infants; but this woman touched her deeply and she felt a sting of tears.