Ruthless River

by Holly Fitzgerald

  Fitz slid the photos into the bag.

  Beside them I shoved in a pen and my budget booklet, wrapped in plastic, to replace my journal. In it I’d write the date and weather and anything important. Without it we could lose track of the days. Knowing the dates somehow implied a future. My journal, thick with memories of our adventures over the past few months, was too big to take. There was no point to those memories if we didn’t survive, although the journal, if found, might provide solace to our families.

  The black bag bulged, zipper wide open. Fitz looked skeptical.

  “Here, let me try.” I squeezed the sides of the bag inward as Fitz pulled the zipper. The bag wouldn’t close.

  “The slickers are taking up a lot of room,” he said.

  “But we’ll need them to keep dry or we could get sick. Remember what happened on the way to Puno?”

  We’d traveled eight hours in the back of an open truck to Puno, an Andean town in Peru, with sheets of rain falling on us all day long. Fitz and I had gotten the chills because we didn’t have slickers. Luckily, scotch, hot showers, and a warm bed had prevented us from becoming ill. We might not be so lucky today.

  “Okay. What can we take out?” Fitz was impatient to go.

  After we removed the clothes and towels, the zipper finally closed. We slid the Bolivian and Peruvian cash, our passports, and traveler’s checks into our money belts so if the camera bag went overboard we’d still have our identification. We would need that if we ever saw civilization again—when, not if.

  Fitz looped the canteen’s strap around the belt of his jeans, which were rolled up to his knees. I’d pulled on my jeans and sleeveless white polyester shirt. The jeans would pad our knees as we squatted on the little raft, and would give us some protection against cuts from underlying boughs and rocks if we had to get into the water. They wouldn’t protect us from the tiny candiru. We both wore Panama hats to shade us from the pounding sun. Like Huck and Jim, our feet were bare.

  The little raft was slick with algae and misshapen; its four timbers were half waterlogged and cut at varied lengths, curved and bumpy. Yesterday we’d been so encouraged to retrieve it from the swamp that we hadn’t noticed its flaws. Now we wondered how long it could hold us.

  We climbed onto the small raft, trying not to rock it as we knelt to balance our knees between the logs. Fitz was in the stern, I in the bow, uncomfortable already. Still grasping the side of the Palace with our left hands, we juggled the black bag into position between us. Our weight submerged the raft a couple of inches, and within seconds our legs and buttocks and the bottom of the camera bag were wet. The water felt warm.

  Fitz grabbed a board he’d found in the swamp to serve as a second paddle because our rudder-paddle was too big to handle on the little raft. We pushed off.

  “Good-bye, Pink Palace!” I called out as we paddled away.

  But there was no time for cheering. We had to fight the current immediately. As we moved forward a few yards I recalled how hard it had been to paddle even a canoe upriver or against the wind on Eagle Lake. Our family gathered there each summer to enjoy the clear, clean water where the sun sent its bands of gold down fathoms; to relish hot dogs cooked on an open fire, and board games at night; and to jump the twenty-five-foot cliff into the bottomless lake for fun and to prove our bravery. It’s where I’d brought Fitz to get to know my family before we were engaged. He had jumped, too.

  We struggled up the channel, sweeping our paddles deep, hard, and quick, over and over, encouraged by the late-morning sun and a slight breeze. My hat protected me from the glare, but perspiration dripped from my face. I wanted to rip the hat off, but I didn’t dare take a second away from paddling. Already my arms screamed “Stop!” but I knew the raft would swirl backward and we would lose every inch we’d gained. With so little nourishment, I thought, we had but one chance to succeed.

  Fitz and I fell into a rhythm, singing, “We can do it, yes, we can!” like an army running chant that kept our spirits up and our paddles in sync. I pushed through the current, singing until I couldn’t anymore. Always the goal was to make it around one more bend. But with each bend we conquered, the current grew stronger and harder to fight. We were quiet for a long time, except for our heavy breathing and the stroking of the paddles.

  “This must be like boot camp,” I finally gasped.

  “In boot camp you go home to a cot and a mess hall.”

  The jungle seemed almost benign as we concentrated on moving forward a few feet at a time. There were no more splashes or frightening sounds, just the gentle twittering of small, colorful birds.

  As we approached another curve, water gushed over the front of the little raft. We quickly shifted from kneeling to sitting, and wrapped our legs around it so it wouldn’t shoot out from under us. I felt like I was riding a slippery porpoise.

  “Hold on!” Fitz called.

  “I’m trying!”

  We reached out and clutched tall, wheat-colored reeds sprouting out of the channel. Round and smooth, they didn’t pinch our palms like other stalks had. Slowly, hand over hand, we pulled ourselves along. They looked like a regal mass of soldiers, towering fifteen feet above us, feathery plumes rippling in the breeze. We pulled ourselves to the next cluster of reeds, where we hoped the current would let up.

  It didn’t. When we were halfway to the next bend, Fitz nodded toward a passage among the stately reeds that appeared wide enough to paddle into. “Let’s try inside there.”

  It was gentle paddling within the reeds. I breathed long, slow breaths, noticing how drops fell from the paddles into the serene water. A breeze, light as breath, twisted the solemn soldiers guarding this marsh, nodding their heads. My muscles relaxed as I inhaled the aroma of silty mud. A different scent, thick and dank, emanated from the jungle. This quiet water and the bright sun dancing in its reflections was almost cheerful, a surprise respite to rebuild our strength. My stroking was meditative now, synchronized with Fitz’s.

  We hadn’t always been so synchronized. Memories of our day trip to Block Island washed over me. We’d caught a ferry from New London. A row of ornate nineteenth-century hotels and shops came into view as we entered Old Harbor. But what really caught my attention was the line of tandem bicycles flanked by waving colored plastic flags.

  Smiling up at Fitz I softly sang: “We’ll look sweet upon the seat of a bicycle built for two.”

  His eyes darted toward the bikes. “You’re not thinking…”

  “It’s so romantic!” I implored. “You’re the guy I was meant to ride tandem with. As a kid singing that song, I always imagined doing this.”

  The shaggy-haired man at the bike shop, jeans slipping off his hips, seemed dubious when we asked for a tandem. “Are you sure? I have regular bikes, too.”

  “Oh, yes. It will be great,” I said. It hadn’t occurred to me that riding a tandem bike required a knack.

  “Is it that difficult?” Fitz asked.

  “It will take getting used to. Then you’ll be fine.” I had the feeling Fitz didn’t believe him.

  Fitz straddled the tandem up front, feet firmly on the ground. “I’ll hold it steady while you hop on,” he instructed me.

  When we raised our feet to pedal the bike, we immediately keeled to the left. “Pedal!” Fitz hollered.

  “I am!”

  The bike skidded sideways, balking like a badly reined horse. We were nearly righted when we slid into the center of the road after Fitz inadvertently braked.

  “What are you doing?” I protested. “I’m trying to pedal and you’re braking!” We were about to crash.

  “Watch out!” yelled a man in a rusty truck, honking his horn as he maneuvered around us. “If you can’t ride, get off the road!” He then gunned his engine.

  Fitz yelled back an expletive.

  We moved to the side of the road and glanced up the steep pavement that would take us out of the village. How would we get momentum while coordinating our very different leg lengths?

/>   Just then a child and his dad breezed by on a tandem. “We need to be synchronized,” Fitz urged.

  We both counted, “One, two, three,” and pushed off. My feet and legs were aching it was so hard to pedal.

  “What gear are you in?” I cried out as the bike wobbled slowly along.

  “Gear? I’ve no idea. Never had one with gears.”

  So that’s why I felt as if I were pushing a monolith up this hill.

  “Watch out!” Fitz yelled as the front tire hit a large pothole. We collapsed to the pavement, bike crashing down on top of us, forcing cars to brake abruptly. Horns blared. People drove around us, glaring. One man clambered out of his car to see if we were okay.

  Shamefaced, we walked the tandem the few yards back to the shop and talked the man there into a refund. We then found a café where we drank a cold beer and ate lobster at a table on a porch overlooking the harbor.

  “We’re coming out to the fast current again,” Fitz said, eyeing me rubbing my lips together from the memory of lobster. The small raft floated toward the end of the soldier-like grass. “Want to tie up and have some of that soup?” he suggested. “I can’t stop thinking of food.”

  “Me neither,” I said.

  We tied up to a cluster of reeds and each ate a teaspoon of cakey powdered soup washed down with water.

  —

  Ready to start again, I felt my jaw set, determined to succeed. I squeezed Fitz’s hand.

  His face was as tense as mine felt, but he looked at me straight on. “Okay, Hol?”

  Leaving the relative safety of the marsh, we pushed out into the channel, resuming our hard strokes. We paddled half the afternoon, driven by instinct, like migrating animals, an inner force driving us forward as the sun crossed the sky.

  Finally, when I thought I couldn’t stroke even once more, we spotted a resting place up ahead. A mound of driftwood was caught in an elbow curve of the channel. Hundreds of dead trees had been thrown on top of each other against the flooded forest, washed down here, just like us.

  Tears sprung to my eyes. “We’ll be able to rest.”

  The thought of feeling something solid under my feet propelled me across the thirty yards of water. As we banged into the logjam, I reached out to massage the first log I touched, as if it were North American soil.

  None of the logs budged as we tied up and climbed onto the woodpile. Our legs shook with cramps. We stood up to stretch before lying down. The huge logs were the closest thing to land we’d felt in days. I lay on my stomach, curved my arms around a weathered trunk, and hugged it.

  Fitz sat, watching a bird fly overhead. He muttered that if the storm had pushed us into this curve with these other logs, we would have saved a day going back up this channel.

  I felt the smooth driftwood with my hand, watched drops of my sweat fall onto it. “I know. We could say, ‘If the storm hadn’t happened…if the plane didn’t crash…if we hadn’t missed the boat.’ It’s like dominos that won’t stop falling.”

  Fitz gave a short laugh and shook his head. “Luck like this has got to change!”

  He slid the canteen off his belt and handed it to me. The water tasted good. When we’d both finished it off, I filled the canteen from the channel then dropped two halazone tablets down its neck to dissolve. It would take twenty minutes for the water to purify.

  Fitz lit one of his few remaining cigarettes, still dry inside their plastic wrapping in the tin, along with the matches.

  I looked around and wondered where we were in this green and muddy maze. How far had we come in comparison to how far we still had to go? Were we making any headway at all, or were we fools even to try? We stared at the widening channel, then Fitz turned toward me and said, “I think we’re doing great, Hol.”

  “Shoot, this is like running up mountains on your hands, Fitz.”

  His mouth started to curve up, wiggling his mustache. “You make me smile, despite everything,” he said, rubbing his hand along his unshaven chin. “You’ve got to have the will to face this kind of thing.” He pulled me to him. “You’ve got it.”

  “You do, too, Fitz. You’re amazing. I always knew you were.” I held his gaze. He leaned down and kissed me.

  Looking across the swampy, vine-enmeshed bay, I wondered how deep the water was around the islands of trees growing out of it and even along the barrier of jungle. It could have been twenty or one hundred feet. Our pole never touched bottom. None of the trees bore fruit that I could see. I heard a large splash a few yards away, then another and another. Did I really have the will to get back into the channel? Who was I kidding? Whether I got back onto the little raft or stayed on these logs, I was trapped either way. My mind whirled to Fitz and Vietnam. Maybe he understood this jungle better than I did. “Does this look like Vietnam?” I asked.

  “Some, but we never had this flooding.” He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. Then he sighed and sat quiet for a while. “The situation in ’Nam was totally different,” he continued. “One thing, we had the radio to bring help when we needed it.”

  I scanned the jungle behind me, wondering if anyone was out there, for good or bad, then wondering how Fitz had coped with the incessant awareness that he might be shot at any second. It seemed no one was near here, either to help us or to shoot us. I caught myself. Fitz must be depressed enough without my probing. “Fitz, I didn’t mean to bring up Vietnam…”

  “It’s okay.” He put his arm around me. “You’ve got your own personal watchdog.” His voice tightened. “We were never lost in ’Nam.”

  I looked up the channel to see another bend ahead, teasing me that the river might be around it. “The aduana will radio Riberalta,” I said. “They could send out a plane anytime now.”

  “Maybe he went to lunch and forgot all about us,” Fitz replied.

  The aduana was our anchor to the outer world. It’s his job to radio ahead, I wanted to say. He has new equipment that he wants to try out. But Fitz and I just sat in silence, occasionally scooping muddy river water over our hot heads with our hands. What a horror, I thought.

  After a while I reached into the side pocket of the camera bag and slipped out the photos of Liza and Zelda. The power of the images surprised me. “We have to get home.”

  Fitz nodded, the raw, noontime sun burning his face. He pulled on his hat and stored the photos in the bag. “It feels good to sit on something solid, but we better get going.”

  “I just want to hug them again,” I said urgently.

  “You will.”

  As I locked my legs around the little raft, I clung to thoughts of our family.

  Chapter 17

  Dead Tree

  The little raft kept us wet all day, a curse and a blessing. Water lapping over us made it difficult to paddle forward, but it kept us cool in the tropical heat. Our bucking bronco seemed as tired as we were, as if it wanted to slip into defeat and go back with the current. Sometimes we had to get in the water and swim in order to push it over logs. Swirling algae, fish, and other creatures bumped me. Had the candiru wormed up my jeans? Shuddering, I tightened my sphincter. After a while I resigned myself to the fact that there was nothing I could do about it if they were going to come. Afraid the next touch could be something deadly, I tried to concentrate on finding dry land.

  By late afternoon we’d still found none. Not even a logjam. With the sun dropping, we had to find shelter. We couldn’t sleep on the submerged little raft. Fitz and I decided our only choice was to sleep in a tree. It had to be a strong tree with branches low enough for us to reach. Such a tree would not be easy to find.

  We spotted a ghostly one up ahead. It was tall, but not too tall, rising leafless among green trees, its gray shadow reflected in the water. It was majestic, with gnarled bare branches. A few entangled vines draped the limbs, which showed no obvious sign of rot. The tree wore root buttresses like a dress, tapering from waist to water.

  “What do you think?” Fitz asked.

  “Let’s check it
out.”

  We moored the raft against the trunk, swinging the rope around the first limb that was low enough for us to grasp. As I looked up, my heart thumped so loudly I could hear it.

  When I was seven, my dad had built a tree house in a maple tree at the edge of the woods behind our home. I’d watched him winch up lumber for a large floor and sheets of plywood for the walls. It had a ceiling, two windows, and a trapdoor with a hook so we could let in people who knew the secret password. Everyone knew the secret password.

  My sister, our friends, and I would hoist up food and messages in a basket by rope and pulley. We had peanut butter sandwiches and a thermos of milk. Some days, I’d lie on the tree house floor, reading books and imagining pirates below. Once we slept in there, protected by the glow of the light from the house’s back door. Mom left it on so that we could follow it home if we got scared. We lasted an hour or two.

  Reaching up to the first branch of the ghostly tree, I felt a spurt of energy thrust me back to all the trees I’d ever climbed.

  Fitz was the opposite. He feared heights, probably because he had fallen down several flights of stairs when he was two or three. He’d tried to overcome this by becoming a paratrooper, making at least nine jumps. Although he’d forced himself to face his fear, he still fought panic when looking down from a ladder or a roof. He didn’t complain and would climb if necessary, but I would go up first to find decent limbs for us to sleep on.

  Fitz helped push me up to the first limb, four or five feet above the water, the little balsa rocking.

  One hand leaning against the trunk for support, the other grasping the limb above me, I jiggled the branch with my legs, testing it. No cracking sounds. “It’s strong. But a little low.”

  “Go up. In case of caiman,” Fitz suggested.