“Me?” Josie exhaled softly. “Oh yeah. Sure. All the time.”
“Okay, so give me an example.”
Josie took a long time choosing one, and Kara knew she was deciding whether to tell her a real one or to just offer up a placeholder. Finally she said, “When I was twelve, my dad tried to teach me to roll a kayak. We were in Puget Sound. My parents had friends up there with a house right on the water. Thing was, the kayak was fitted out for one of their boys, a younger and smaller kid. So my butt wedged way too tight in the cockpit. My dad thought people learned by trial, so he secured the skirt and flipped me.”
“With no instruction at all?”
“He gave a verbal description of what to do. Basically, you fold your body forward, so your heavy head is up on the deck of the kayak, and then you do a maneuver with your hips. But it’s not intuitive at all.”
“So his method of teaching wasn’t going to work.”
Josie surprised Kara by shrugging, as if she were not quite willing to disagree with her father. She said, “I didn’t learn to roll the kayak. Not that weekend, anyway. But you asked about fear. Hanging upside down in the water, completely locked in that too small kayak, that scared me. Shitless.”
Kara felt a moment of drowning, as if she were the one trapped upside-down underwater. She nearly gasped the next words, as if breaking to the surface. “What happened?”
“Dad waited for as long as he thought was safe and then flipped me back upright. Of course I thrashed because by then I was totally panicked. It’s difficult to right another person in a kayak, especially when they’re not cooperating.”
“Did he get mad?”
Josie looked up at the stars, and so Kara did, too.
“No. Not mad. He never loses his temper. But he never lets go of a plan, either.”
“So he made you try again.”
“Again and again and again. I didn’t get it until the following summer. I count it as one of my biggest failures.”
Kara thought that was kind of intense. “Still? I mean now?”
Josie glanced at Kara and then laughed. “I guess I could let go now, huh?”
Oh, those tawny eyes. Kara had been looking for a mountain lion this whole trip, and here she was, on a ledge with a cougar-eyed woman.
“You love risk.” Kara wasn’t sure whether her observation fit with the conversation or was a total non sequitur, but if it didn’t follow, it might lead.
At first Josie thought Kara had said “You risk love.” She unscrambled the sentence in her head and then answered. “No. I don’t. It’s not risk I love. In fact, I don’t like it much at all. I love knowledge that mediates risk. That’s why it upset me so much I couldn’t master that kayak roll. I knew it’d make me much safer in the boat. It would reduce risk.”
Kara put a hand on Josie’s tanned forearm, let herself pet the blond hairs.
Josie looked at the hand, swallowed audibly. She didn’t move her arm away.
“In fact I hate risk.” Josie spoke emphatically. “Risk is driving on the freeway. I mean, you can learn the rules of driving, but you’re at the mercy of all the bozos also driving, and god knows how many of them are high or drunk or just plain stupid. Risk is letting people interpret your story for you. Risk is—”
“Who’s interpreting your story?”
Josie looked at her, the sweetest and rarest expression of confusion on her face.
“I mean it,” Kara said. “Who right now is interpreting—or misinterpreting—your story?”
“No one. Not now. I’m on the river.”
“What you mean is, human beings are fucking unpredictable.”
Josie nodded. “Yep. That’s what I mean.”
“I love how you love the river.”
Josie nodded again.
“Tell me your romantic history. With people.”
“Nah.” But she smiled.
“Why not?” Kara asked.
“Why?”
“Have you ever been with women?”
“Sure. I’ve been with lots of people.” Kara didn’t like her cavalier tone and pulled away her hand. “But I’ve never been with a firefighter.”
Then Josie, who didn’t like risk, who hated the unpredictability of humans, leaned in and kissed Kara, the sunburned roughness of their lips hot and tinged with lingering sunscreen. The women’s muscles lengthened with touch and the pain in their bruises deepened against the cragginess. Later they lay on their backs holding hands for a long, long time, Josie feeling as if she were six years old and Kara feeling as if she were twelve, both women alternately feeling solemn and worried, giddy and free. Overhead, the sky darkened to charcoal, the stars tiny fires in the agave roasting pits of ancient time.
Several of the women saw him leave at dawn, long before the sun’s rays reached into the canyon. Marylou was making coffee, softly singing Cat Stevens’s tune about morning breaking. Maeve was chopping apples. Paige was sitting on the toilet bucket, which had a good view of the river. He left the tent behind, maybe as a decoy or maybe as a humanitarian donation for Brynn.
Clutching a single dry bag, he walked right by Laurie who was on the beach, at water’s edge, rinsing out a bandana. She didn’t speak to him. After a sleepless night thinking about her cockamamie conversation with the man, she felt exposed and sour. He didn’t acknowledge her either, passed on by as if she were invisible and hefted himself over the boulders on his way to his boat. Laurie thought he was getting some food to contribute to breakfast. Or maybe clothes for Brynn. They probably made up last night.
It was Josie and Kara, who’d spent the entire night on the ledge, who saw him untie the boat and push off. The two ravens were back, but now they seemed to accept the pair on their cliffside, pacing on their little black stick legs, as if guarding the lovers. When Josie said, “Look,” the birds hopped to a higher vantage point and cawed. They watched Howard in his boat, leaning back with the two oars in his hands. He pulled hard. A moment later, he was gone.
Howard rowed with everything he had, his heart thudding like a stone along the river bottom, thinking only escape, escape, escape. That woman’s words, you foolish old man, rang in his ears, an endless loop, and he hated her for saying them while simultaneously being grateful to her. Because of course she was right. Not even right—she didn’t know what she’d uncovered. But she’d broken the spell. The foolish old man spell. It wasn’t until after talking with her and climbing into his tent alone that he considered Brynn’s revelation. “I know who you are, Howard. I know what you do.” And still it took him several hours to fully comprehend. Lying there alone, without her beautiful distraction, having witnessed her—yes, call it what it was—hatred for him, thinking back over the last few months, what’d she’d asked for, looked at, insisted on, always while offering herself as a trade, he saw how easily he’d been taken. Worst of all, she’d gotten what she wanted, everything.
Foolish old man didn’t begin to say it. He’d fallen into the oldest trap in the book.
That didn’t stop him from being hurt, from thinking of her pale thighs with a sorrow far more poignant than the situation called for. Those lit eyes, beseeching him. The open-mouthed laugh, her appreciation of his science jokes, even when he had to explain the punchlines. That couldn’t have all been acting. It couldn’t have been. Even so, she’d used him. Played him to harvest all kinds of information. Fool!
Howard rowed. He never stopped rowing, no matter how much his shoulders and back ached. There were no more serious rapids, just long stretches of pools and gentle flow. Some riffles, and he was glad for them, because they helped rocket him along. The pain spiked down his neck and spine, but still he pulled through the water as fast as he could make the big clumsy rubber raft go. How he wished he’d brought along a motor!
He had moments that day when he thought his foolishness extended even to this crazy-paced getaway. Who exactly would make chase? Not her. Couldn’t he ease up? Did he really have to run?
Yes. Because s
he couldn’t be acting alone. He knew there were people who would stop at nothing. And so there were other moments, ones that lengthened into hours, when he feared snipers on the clifftops, men lying in wait, ambushes set up in the dark shadows of the side canyons. He felt like a targeted man. She was a scorpion.
Brynn slept in, sprawled on top of the sleeping bag and tarp in the sand, and no one dared wake her. No one wanted to be the messenger about Howard’s abandonment. They all watched, from afar, with peripheral vision and quick discreet glances, as she finally jerked awake, stood and stretched, bobbed her head back and forth to crack her neck.
She didn’t even look at his tent, at what used to be her tent, as she walked down to the beach where the women were finishing breakfast. Marylou handed her a plate of scrambled eggs, fried potatoes, and apple slices. Brynn took it without thanks. She sat in a vacated camp chair and dug in, as if she hadn’t eaten in days. When finished, she stood, washed her dish, and shoved it in the dish bag. By now everyone was silently watching, a little appalled by her nonchalance and also alarmed by what was dawning on them: this brazen young woman now belonged to them.
“Where’s Howard?” she asked, as if just now noticing his absence.
It was Marylou who stepped up. “He left.”
Brynn’s mouth dropped open as she looked back at the tent. She scanned the cliffs as if he might have made his escape that way, and then turned in a full circle, finally staring for a long time at the flowing river, the whole while looking as if she were swallowing back strong feeling. “He took the boat?”
“Yes.”
She pressed her lips together and nodded slowly. “Well. What now?”
She obviously was talking to herself so no one answered. They weren’t surprised when they saw last night’s anger return to her face.
“I suppose you believed what he told you,” she announced to the whole group, turning as she spoke to include everyone. “I heard him droning on last night about his heart and the canyon.”
Six women stared.
Brynn coughed out a laugh. “Geology prof in Flagstaff. Oh, the magic of floating through time!”
Paige said, “He’s not?”
“He’s lucky I didn’t strangle him. Throw his body onto that blue floating nightmare of a boat and shove his corpse down the river.” Brynn threw her arms in the air, raised her face to the canyon rim, and let out a prolonged scream.
Her anger was shocking. It was also clearly genuine.
Kara asked, “Are you okay?”
Marylou couldn’t believe this. What now, indeed. They couldn’t exactly leave her here on the beach below Lava Falls. They’d have to take her the rest of the way to the Diamond Creek takeout. And then what?
No one knew what to say. So they started loading up the boats. By the time they shoved off, their guest maybe a little contrite as she sat on the stern tube of one of the rafts, the heat had climbed to well over a hundred degrees. It was going to be a very hot day.
“There’re some amazing petroglyphs,” Josie said, “downstream a ways. Anyone want to stop and see them?”
“Yes!” Kara shouted.
That one word, voiced by a woman who glowed like the moon, caused a shiver to run under Josie’s skin, despite the heat.
The two women smiled boldly at each other.
“I’m thinking,” Laurie said, “given the circumstances, maybe we should just keep going, get to the takeout sooner rather than later.”
“I vote for that,” Paige said.
“I’d love to see petroglyphs,” Maeve effused.
Marylou shrugged, unwilling to cast the deciding vote.
A few hours later, Josie rowed to shore and tied up her boat, announcing, “Petroglyphs for those who want. We won’t be gone long.”
Everyone, even Brynn, went on the short hike to see the ancient art. The silence of the morning on the river continued as the women climbed the hill in the stifling heat and even as they arrived at the rock face covered in etched drawings. A snake. A hand. A beast. A human figure. Someone, or maybe several someones, hundreds of years ago, had had urgent stories to tell. Maeve wished with all her heart she could interpret those stories, understand the messages that had been scratched into rock for future humans to interpret. She hovered her hand over each image and closed her eyes, willing the story to transmute from rock to skin.
Josie knew the other women were suffering in the extreme heat, and she was glad they’d mostly had cooler weather over the past two weeks, but just for today she gloried in the swelter. Classic canyon weather. The wrens were singing their hearts out this afternoon, that clear, descending whistle, as they fluttered in and out of the trees, creating their own breezes. Josie ran her fingers through Kara’s hair.
Kara could have been looking at petrified rattlesnake shit for all she cared. Just being with this woman. Knowing this rock solid love. Come on so sudden. She thought she could live on this metaphorical river, in the heart of that Edward Abbey line, “Joy, shipmates, joy.”
Tears ran down Laurie’s face. With the fiction of Howard having been ripped away from her very active imagination, she was left with the unbearable loss of her mother. Yet these pictures. She viewed them as cries of help, screams into some unforeseen future, and here they were, the future. Holding all this pain in her heart was agony, but it was easier—why couldn’t she ever remember to apply what she knew professionally to her own life?—than working so hard to push away the pain. Howard was right: This canyon, this river, they blast your heart open.
“Thank you,” Paige said to Josie, and everyone knew she meant for bringing them to see the petroglyphs. Paige felt unaccountably happy. She’d endured so many traumas in the past days. And yet the trip had been epic and she’d survived. More, she felt a fresh sense of clarity, like a swift current, and knew that it would guide her next decisions.
Yes, Marylou sang. As the women filed back down the rocky trail to the waiting boats, all of them quietly joined in. This land is your land. This land is my land.
Perhaps, had the women known that those minutes viewing the petroglyphs would be the last peaceful ones they were to enjoy for a long time to come, they might have lingered, communed longer with the ancient stories and voices, maybe even prayed.
They found seven ravens perched all over their gear and the rafts. As Josie shooed them, they cawed, their voices hoarse with warning, their flights steeped in urgency. Most of the women laughed. Maeve looked around for what might have alarmed the huge black birds.
Just moments later, as they settled into their ongoing wash down the river, Maeve’s eyes were drawn to a spot on the water, not far from the boats, and there she saw the floating body of a dark-skinned girl with the barest swell of a child in her belly. Her black hair fanned on the surface of the water. Her blank eyes looked upward, unseeing, at the torpid sky. The girl had been dead for hundreds of years, and Maeve immediately understood that no one else could see her. The girl who wasn’t really there, an apparition.
The canyon widened now and the sky overhead grew so much bigger than it had been in days. One more night’s camp, followed by a last half-day float, and they’d be at Diamond Creek where Raymond, the Hualapai outfitter, would meet them, pack up their rented gear, and haul them back to Flagstaff. The heat was insufferable and the women dragged their feet and hands in the river whenever they could, dumping hatfuls of cold water over their heads and shoulders.
In the late afternoon, long after the sun reached its zenith and began arcing toward the horizon, a commercial plane flew into their view, coming from the east. Sunlight glinted off its steel skin, flashing like a welder’s sparks, far above the women on the river. At the moment the plane was directly overhead, it did a startling thing. The plane made a U-turn, leaving a huge horseshoe of exhaust streams bloating in the pale sky.
The women made weak jokes about why a plane would turn around so abruptly, so completely, in the middle of a flight. But the heat kept them from thinking too hard, from talki
ng much at all, as they all just wished for the relief of evening, the setting sun, a possible breeze.
A couple hours later, as shadows deepened on the canyon walls, a fleet of fighter jets breached the span of sky, the roar of their engines louder even than the river. Kara, Paige, and Maeve each had seen visions on this trip, and they knew they’d seen visions, so they looked around to see if anyone else saw and heard the fighter jets. They did. Everyone craned her neck, all faces turned upward. The lean darts flew in formation, in a big V like geese, but sinister rather than whimsical. Long after the jets were gone, the women stared up at the white streaks, as if they were glyphs in the reddening sky.
The canyon wrens were silent. The ravens too stood voiceless on the shore, their black wings folded against their sides, their obsidian eyes shiny with unease. The women heard only lapping water.
They rowed all night, the dread pitted in their stomachs compelling them to get out as fast as they could. Something had happened. They needed to know what. They needed to know if their families were safe. Maybe what they’d witnessed was just some silly coincidence of airline emergency and military practice. But they needed to know. As they took turns rowing by starlight, the river easy now, the air cool, they talked quietly, recalling each of their camps, agreeing to set up a photo sharing site and telling funny stories about the toilet bucket and failed meals and the night Paige’s tent blew away. Sometime in the early morning, a partial moon rose, glossy as a severed pearl.
They arrived at Diamond Creek a bit after dawn. Of course the outfitter wasn’t there yet. He wasn’t expected until later that afternoon, but at least they’d reached a place with a road, with access to civilization, even if they didn’t have a vehicle themselves. Everyone tried her cell phone, but there still wasn’t a signal. They found pockets of shade and lay down to wait.
No one came. Afternoon dragged into evening. No other river parties arrived. The outfitter didn’t show up. The sun passed from east to west, the heat persisted, and another fleet of fighter jets flew overhead. All this while, Brynn sat at a distance from the other women, her mouth a grim line and her skin a bright red. Apparently she’d forgotten to put on sunscreen today. She looked uncomfortable and nervous.
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