John opened his overnight bag and took out a ring and a small plastic box. The face of the box had a micro switch and two LED’s, one red and one green. A short loop of wire extruded from one end. He slipped the wire over the doorknob, letting the capacitance alarm hang free, and then pushed one of the buttons. The green LED lit.
John slipped the ring over his right pinkie and then touched the doorknob with his left hand. The green LED went out and the red one lit. Simultaneously, the ring gave him a tiny jolt of current. Satisfied it was working properly, John reset the alarm.
He went around the room, turning off all the lights except for the one between the beds. Then he turned the covers down on Caitlin’s bed before going back to the window.
A few minutes passed, and the bathroom door opened. He didn’t turn around. Her reflection, dim in the reduced glow of the single light, came out wearing a short slip. She hung her clothes on hangers and came up behind him again.
When she spoke, he could feel her soft breath melting the frost on his nape. “Thanks for turning down the covers.”
Her lips gently touched his cheek. “Good night, John.”
He murmured a good night and watched her reflection walk to the bed.
How many months had it taken him to be able to think about her without feeling the wrenching pain in his gut? How many times had he wanted to look her up and convince her to leave Scott? Even now, the moment she walked into the Gleaning Cube, he had to restrain himself from rushing to meet her. What was it about her that affected him like no other woman in his entire life? He’d had lovers, more than a few, but none had ever made him want to give everything else up, just to be with them.
He stood alone, staring out at the pounding surf, thinking back a dozen years and about all the might-have-beens.
***
The thunderous roar of water against rock filled John Blalock with anticipation. His pulse quickened, and an uneasy smile creased his stubble-darkened face. Sitting in the bow, he gripped the nylon safety line and watched as their yellow and black Domar raft neared the tongue of Crystal Rapids. At flow rates greater than 40,000 cubic feet per second, the Crystal was the most dangerous rapid on the Colorado.
The pair of rafts drifted between great cliffs along a river whose surface danced from a barrage of raindrops. Like the others, John wore a sturdy life vest over his tee shirt and shorts. His feet were partially covered by well-worn sandals.
Glen Phillips, the leader of their little expedition, adjusted the oars in the locks. This was Glen’s third trip down the Canyon, but only he and Steward Phillips, John’s roommate who manned the oars in the second raft, had ever traveled the Canyon before.
Leaning back, John stared upwards into the warm rain at steep canyon walls topped by a barely visible strip of rain-filled sky. Here and there, pink veins of Zoroaster Granite shot through the massive cliffs of gray schist that rose jaggedly from the water. A thousand feet up, the gray altered to ledgy layers of Tapeats Sandstone, which in turn was topped by four thousand feet of Paleozoic cliffs. The Canyon was a marvel of nature, a place of almost unimagined beauty.
Even the Canyon’s beauty couldn’t keep John’s thoughts off the Crystal.
A chuckle came from his left.
Caitlin Maxwell’s raven hair hung from beneath a Colorado Cellars Winery cap and draped across the back of her orange life vest. She was nearly as tall as John’s own five foot ten inches and her skin was tanned two shades darker. Her large blue eyes were cheerful, and she showed a wide stretch of perfect teeth as she smiled.
She leaned close so she wouldn’t be overheard. “Hey, cheer up. It can’t be as bad as Glen’s making out. He’s been through it before.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure, at least not under these conditions. Did you ever read Michael Ghiglieri’s book `Canyon’?”
She shook her head.
“He’s a professional guide. His book describes a run down the Canyon. He put a lot of pages into detailing Crystal’s dangers.”
John pointed downriver toward the rapids. “You see, the only relatively safe path is to hit it hard on the right side. But if we get off the right edge of the tongue, we’ll be in trouble because that feeds into New Wave. From there, the tongue cuts left into the Slate Creek diagonal then rollercoasters into Crystal Hole.
“Still, the greatest dangers of Crystal are below the Hole if we get flipped. Besides the hypothermia, there’s the chance of getting trapped under the boat and drowned. Beneath the Hole is a submerged island of boulders called the Bone Yard. If you fall in, don’t forget, keep your feet up and pointed downstream. Stay high in the water and wait for a calm section to try for shore.”
He lowered his arm. Caitlin stared at him for a moment, and then she laughed and put her right hand on his bare leg. “Don’t worry so much, John. Life’s too short; you have to enjoy what you find.”
Her touch sent a shiver through him. Why did she have to be engaged? It would have been better had he never met her. Anything would be preferable to watch her marry someone else. Damn, but his timing was bad. Three months. If only he’d met her three months ago. It would have been enough time to convince her she should drop Scott and marry him instead. Three, no two months, perhaps even one month, but there was no way to convince her in so short a time. Now only a week remained before the end of the trip at Diamond Creek, a dozen miles upriver from Lake Mead.
Lake Mead.
Where her fiancé waited.
Damn him anyway. If Scott hadn’t broken his leg in a rock climbing accident, he would be on this trip, and John would be home; warm, dry, and working on his doctoral dissertation.
As they accelerated into the rapids, the cacophony of water clashing with stone grew until it drowned out normal conversation.
In running rapids, entrance is everything. Either you’re lined up properly for the safest possible run, or you’re not. There is no second chance. John glanced back at Glen. Glen was a few years older than most of them and had made the Canyon trip twice before, but always as a passenger, not a guide. John mentally shrugged. You had to trust your oarsman. He held their lives in his grip on the oars, and the rest of them could do nothing unless he called for assistance.
The tongue carried them between enormous boulders washed down the Crystal Creek tributary over three decades ago. In the bow, the impact with the first standing diagonal drenched John and Caitlin with frigid water. The raft pivoted off the diagonal as Glen struggled with the oars to keep the bow downstream. They struck the second diagonal before they were straight. It absorbed their momentum and cast them off toward the right shoulder of New Wave.
They were drenched, again and again, as Glen struggled to keep the raft to the right of the channel.
The raft shuddered as it collided with a boulder. Chilling water cascaded over the side striking John with tangible force. He held his breath and squeezed his eyes shut to clear the water. The front of the raft rose out of the water for a moment before plunging down into another trough. Frothy water spilled onto John’s legs and pooled around his sandals. A boulder loomed to his right. The raft compressed against the rock’s smooth side, bounced off, and continued into the next slot.
John held tight to a rigging strap and wondered what he was doing there.
They skirted the edge of New Wave barely avoiding its dangers. The raft surfed sideways into the Slate Creek diagonal. The impact threw Caitlin from her seat; John caught her arm and held her upright until she regained her balance.
“Forward!” Glen yelled.
John and Caitlin scrambled onto the lip of the bow as the raft pivoted. Their weight helped pull the bow off the wave, and they swept on.
“Hole!” John shouted and pointed toward the trap.
“I see it. Hold on, this is going to be close.”
The raft swept toward the hole. Glen rowed furiously. They inched right, away from danger. John relaxed; they were going to make it past.
Then some variation in the current moved them to
o far right. A moment later they crashed into a granite outcrop. The jarring collision sent them spinning back left.
Before Glen could straighten the raft, the current forced them sideways into the massive standing wave of Crystal Hole.
The force of the impact nearly threw John off the bow. He clutched at the rigging strap while the raft spun into the hole formed by an enormous boulder hidden just beneath the water’s surface. The raft slammed into the wave again, and the river sucked the rear end under the surface, only to spit it out moments later.
They bobbed up with teeth-jarring acceleration. For a second, John thought they were going to pull free, but the vortex sucked the rear of the raft back down. It was the absolute worst situation on any run. The other raft might be able to toss them a line and pull them free, but there wasn’t time. They had to free themselves before the churning water ripped their raft apart.
Everyone hollered at once. Glen shouted instructions, but the two men in the stern had enough trouble just staying in the raft.
John grabbed his paddle and turned to help Glen push away from the hole.
He froze. Caitlin wasn’t sitting next to him.
She wasn’t anywhere on the raft.
His first thought was that the hole had sucked her into its maw. It happened sometimes. And sometimes the hole would bounce a person in and out for hours before some slight deviation in the current would spit their lifeless body free of the trap. No. Not the hole. She couldn’t be there.
He saw a flash of color in the water a hundred feet down river. The bright orange of a life vest rapidly receded through the rapids.
Without thinking, John yelled to the others and dove in after her.
He didn’t know what compelled him to dive in, she’d been on as many raft trips as he had and she seemed able enough. If he’d stopped to think about it, he probably would have stayed in the raft. That was the logical thing to do. Let the other raft recover any swimmers. But John reacted without thinking.
The force of his leap had carried him beneath the surface for a moment before the buoyancy of his life vest popped him up. Being splashed by fifty-degree water is not the same as being immersed in it. It was a numbing cold.
Twenty yards downstream, he could see Caitlin. She had remembered the drill and had lined up properly, but to catch up with her John would have to swim.
She was already entering the Bone Yard. He couldn’t swim in there. He’d have to hurry.
The life vest impeded his movement, and he was still far from her when he reached the first rocks of the Bone Yard. The river looked like a liquid version of the moguls on the extreme slopes at Copper Mountain. John stopped swimming and brought his feet around in front of him. His sandaled feet struck something unseen, compressing his knees back against his life vest and spinning him sideways.
The current forced him under, and an enormous impact against his chest forced the air from his lungs. Swimming hard, he tried to reach the surface, but the spinning, agitated current disorientated him. Several more impacts left him battered and barely conscious before he finally broke the surface. Oxygen starved, he gasped while swirling into another crest and inhaled almost as much water as air
The rush of air brought a stabbing pain to his chest. He coughed out water and inhaled again.
He floated lower in the water now, and bits of his vest’s floatation material littered the water around him.
Meteoric stars shot across John’s vision as he looked for Caitlin. He swept between two boulders that protruded menacingly from the water and then caught sight of her. She struggled with a length of orange and black cord.
He yelled, and she turned in his direction. Drawing back her arm, she cast the line toward him.
It fell far short.
He swam toward it, trying to reach it before the next set of rapids.
Caitlin was already into the run when John managed to get a grip on her line. He looped it around his left hand as they tumbled through the cold, muddy water. Although the line was no more than forty feet long, he rarely saw her for the first few minutes.
He lost track of the number of times the current slammed him into boulders, but twice more he hit them so hard that the spasms of pain shooting through his chest caused him to lose his grip on her line. Each time it slipped through his numb fingers until it reached the end he’d looped around his wrist. Each time he had to restart the torturous process of slowly pulling them closer together.
Breathing became difficult. The pain in his chest massed into burning agony with each inhalation and for the first time, he realized that he could die. Not tomorrow. Not years from now. But in the next minute. He could feel the panic seize his heart.
But panic could kill him faster than the river. He forced it from his mind and concentrated on closing the distance between them.
After an indeterminable period, his hand brushed something at the end of the rope. It was Caitlin. He pulled her to him. Her eyes were closed, her face slack. An angry welt blossomed above her right eye. John gripped the back of her vest and looked for an eddy.
In the raft, he could spot eddies without much trouble. But that was with his eyes three or four feet above the water line and, in the raft, he had the power of the oars to push whatever direction he chose. Here, they were under the surface of the river as often as not and had almost no ability to push in any direction.
They must have been miles farther downriver before John saw an opportunity to hit an eddy. It was a small eddy and John didn’t see it until they were on top of it. He almost let it pass, but he was beyond fatigue and couldn’t go on. He’d been knocked into near unconsciousness on several occasions and had swallowed enough water to float the S.S. Minnow. No matter how small the eddy was, he knew it had to be this one or none.
They entered fast, too fast. Their momentum nearly carried them through the eddy, but John got a grip on one jagged edge of a boulder and held tight, as it felt like his shoulder would separate. Every cell in his body screamed at him to rest, but he knew he had to keep moving. With one hand, he pulled them along the boulder until they reached the back of the eddy.
His feet found purchase on a sandy bottom. He staggered to the water’s edge and then up a small embankment where he collapsed to the dirt. He was desperate to rest. His muscles ached more than he could ever remember, but he had to check Caitlin first.
She was still breathing. He felt her limbs and torso for breaks, nothing seemed broken.
It was late afternoon, but the sun had long since dropped below the rim of the canyon, and with the heavy rain, there was next to no light. John took the small Mag-Lite from the clip on his belt and twisted it on. In its light, he could see splotches of red on her clothing. As he played the beam over her, he realized the stains were from the lacerations on his hand. Blood flowed freely from the hand he’d used to grip the rock. He shined the light directly on his palm. There were several gashes crisscrossing its surface, but none looked serious.
He sat down beside her and pulled her eyelids back. Her pupils were dilated unevenly.
John shined the light around and found they were at the mouth of a small canyon. He turned upstream hoping for some sign of the rafts, but there was only the river.
Standing there in the rain, John realized how cold he was. Even with all his exertion, the river had sucked the heat from his bones. He was beginning to shiver. He...They needed dry clothes and fire, but all he wanted to do was lie down and rest. He couldn’t, not yet anyway. If he lay down now, neither of them might live to see the sunrise.
He made sure Caitlin couldn’t roll back into the water, and then walked up the gorge following the muddy stream that flowed through it. The gorge widened significantly, and he soon found a copse of juniper and piñon with enough dead wood for a good fire, but everything was wet. A little farther on, he found an overhang that provided protection against the driving rain. There he also found a little dry wood. The protected area was small, but it would have to do.
He returned to the river.
When he bent to lift Caitlin, a stabbing pain went through his ribs like an eight-inch butcher’s knife. He screamed and dropped to his knees. When the wave of pain receded, John tried again. She weighed no more than one hundred and forty pounds, but even with the thick layers of striated muscles that won him the state heavyweight wrestling championship in high school, he couldn’t lift her.
John took a firm grip on her vest and dragged her up the canyon. Each step caused him to grimace in pain, but he clenched his teeth together and focused. One more step, just one more step and he could stop. It wasn’t a long trip, not more than a hundred yards, but it seemed to take hours.
Staggering forward, he found himself humming the lines to “Radar Love.” It was one of those old songs that could swim around in his mind for days without relief.
Finally, they reached the outcropping. John left Caitlin against the cliff side, as far from the rain as possible, and then collected enough dry wood to get a fire started and made a pile near Caitlin. After breaking the smaller pieces to get enough splinters to serve as kindling, John arranged them neatly beneath the larger sticks. Taking his old Zippo lighter from its pocket, he struck it with shivering fingers. His grandfather had carried the brass Zippo through Europe in World War II and had passed it on to him when John had convinced him to give up smoking. John carried it as a lucky charm.
The wood caught and burned well. When the fire burned steadily, John went out into the rain and dragged more sticks into the lee of the overhang.
When he thought he had enough he checked Caitlin, she was still unconscious. Her skin was cold, and she was shivering. Hypothermia was a more immediate threat than the concussion.
Each of them carried a small emergency kit clipped to their belts. Besides the bandages, antiseptics, and a couple of food bars, it held a metallic rescue blanket folded into something the size of a napkin.
His teeth chattered uncontrollably as he tore open the sealed packages and laid the blankets on the dry sand.
The Phoenix Egg Page 8