Right of Thirst

by Frank Huyler

  An hour passed, and she began to whistle tunelessly, as if unaware of what she was doing. For most of the morning we were all like that; aware of one another, but also lost in our own thoughts. The mind wanders at such times—it goes back and forth, as if released, here and there, present and past. Sometimes there was the outside world, the white stroke of a distant waterfall, or the sudden angular presence of a tiny tree on the rock wall two hundred feet above us, where somehow a blown seed had stuck, and other times there was nothing but the interior, whatever it may be—the unconscious mind, spilling out memories like so many colored marbles on the floor. In and out I went, thinking about the path ahead, or trees on hillsides, and then my dog at home, and what we’d manage for lunch, and the invading tribes of prehistory, with their Asian off-colored eyes, whose genes had somehow also been blown up these gorges and found purchase. It was dizzying, in a way, and impossible to keep track of, and I imagined a graph of my own thoughts, each thought a single point, scattered like seed corn on a table, some revisited again and again, glowing, and others only once. Elise whistled on, just ahead, and Rai, for his part, simply continued, deliberate and steady. The others felt like shadows behind me.

  It went like that—flights of memory, then back in the moment. Over and over again I found myself looking at her, then at the ground passing beneath my feet. The ridges changed as slowly as an hour hand above us.

  Later that morning, at a bend, we came to a footbridge across the river. The bridge was made from logs—four of them, irregular, rough, lashed together with rope, the whole of it resting on loose stone pilings. From a distance, it looked dark and unnatural. There was no railing of any kind, and the logs themselves were slick from the spray of the river, which boiled under them. The path itself was so little used that often there was no trace of it along the riverbank—it eased in and out of existence. But now this, a crude and miraculous bridge, like an artifact.

  The logs were large ones, weathered and cracked, yet there were no such trees anywhere nearby. Someone must have carried them there. The bridge was entirely unexpected, and reminded me somehow of Elise’s solar shower, which she had lashed to the outside of her pack.

  “Who put it here?” I asked Rai.

  “The local people do this,” he said, “where the river is too deep and you have to cross.”

  “How old is it, do you think? It looks like it’s been here for a long time.”

  “I don’t know,” he replied. The bridge was not a compelling object for him, but it fascinated me. The logs might have been there for fifty years, or more—in the dry air, despite the spray from the river, the wood probably would last forever. No doubt the ropes lashing it all together needed to be replaced every so often, and the pilings repaired from time to time, but whoever did this work was nowhere to be seen.

  “Is there another village around here?”

  Rai shrugged in his familiar way.

  “I don’t know,” he repeated.

  It was a bad bridge, I thought—treacherous, the logs unimproved in any way, without a railing, over a section of river that looked both dangerous and deep.

  We crossed it one by one, carefully. First Rai, then Elise and me, then Ali and his nephew, and finally the soldier. The logs were slick, and shook beneath our weight, and the rapids flashed in the gaps between them. I eased myself out, placing my boots carefully, knowing all the while that I wasn’t going to fall off, that I’d make it fine, as the others had done.

  The soldier, however, did slip midway out, and the weight of his load became evident, pulling him to one side for an instant, spinning his arms for an anxious moment. But he recovered well, and he joined the rest of us on the far bank, laughing as he stepped off the end of the logs onto the sheets of gravel again.

  From the other side of the river, I could see why the bridge had been necessary—the bank disappeared just past the bend, and the river ran close along the valley wall, which was steep enough to make walking impossible. But where we stood, the valley widened, and there were more cactus and scrub pines, some of which came to our shoulders. The ground, in places, was sandy, and the ridges, on that side of the river, were several hundred meters away. For a while we were walking on a kind of plain. In a few minutes, the bridge was out of sight, and the path once more became difficult to follow.

  “There are flies,” Elise said, and as she spoke I was bitten also.

  The flies themselves were unfamiliar to me—gray rather than black, longer and thinner than horseflies, they stung fiercely. Suddenly they were everywhere. We were getting lower, I realized—the vegetation was increasing around us, inching farther away from the river’s edge, and now this. They came for us by the dozen. Several times, when I slapped them before they’d bitten, there was a scarlet smear of blood. Undoubtedly it was the blood of animals—mountain sheep, foxes, and birds—but I thought of the army also, passing that way only a few days before, and wondered if some of it was human.

  We walked fast, slapping at them, waving our hands around our faces, but then, as the valley wall closed with the river again, as the pines thinned and disappeared, the wind picked up, and the flies vanished as quickly as they had come. It was a blessed relief. One had bitten me on the tip of my little finger, and it itched and throbbed until I dipped it into the icy river.

  We slowed down again. The sun was directly overhead, and already, though perhaps we’d descended only a few thousand feet, it was noticeably warmer than it had been. Lower, I knew, it would become hot, but then it was simply pleasant, in the cool air, with the river clenching and unclenching beside us—strips of white water, followed by long sheets of calm. The valley had narrowed again, and was as it had been. Rai and the others moved ahead of us down the trail.

  “You have these experiences,” Elise said suddenly, turning to me. “And sometimes they are very strong ones. And then they are over, but you cannot say what they mean. And then you have other ones. And you cannot say what they mean. You just go on. Maybe you are happy, maybe you are scared, maybe you are sad. But you want to say, I learn this, or I learn that, or I understand better. But maybe you don’t understand better, and it is not so easy to say what you learn and what you don’t learn. Do you know?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I do.”

  We continued in silence for a while.

  “I’m so glad I met you, you know,” I said, quietly. “You’re a wonderful young woman. You’ve given me hope. Whatever happens I want you to know that.”

  “Thank you,” she said, awkwardly, beginning to blush in the sun. A moment passed, and then finally she turned to me.

  “It is okay,” she said. “What happened. It was nice. But no more. I need to tell you this.”

  “Why?”

  “For me it is not the same,” she said, simply. “I like you. But not so much in that way. And there is Scott, also. I am feeling a little bit guilty. It is too confusing. So I’m sorry.”

  I looked at her, and though my face flushed, I had been expecting her words all morning.

  “It’s all right, Elise,” I said, after a moment, with difficulty. “But I want you to know it meant a lot to me. I hope I didn’t take advantage of you, and please forgive me if I did.”

  She stepped up close, and put her hand on my arm.

  “I did not do it because I felt sorry for you,” she said, looking at me intently. “I did it because I wanted to also. And I liked it also. It felt very nice.”

  “Thank you,” I replied, before turning away. I knew I was on the edge of tears, and I wanted very much to hide this fact from her. Her kindness, her concern for my dignity—I felt entirely naked before her, and a wave of longing passed through me. Not only for her, but for my own past as well, for Rachel, and the choices I’d made, and those early years, when I was handsome and strong and full of my own promise, when we loved one another, and our son was coming, when the future was bright, and the path was straight.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  The river was growing la
rger as we descended, joined by thin streams tumbling off the walls, and we passed the mouths of several branching gorges that released little rivers of their own into the channel. Several times Rai consulted his map to be sure we were on the correct path.

  I asked him how many days were left.

  “We are not going fast,” he said. “So perhaps four. But there is no hurry.”

  Both Ali and his nephew had adjusted to their loads, or so it seemed, and walked without much difficulty, talking to one another from time to time. Elise and I mostly stayed together, as we’d done since we started, and Rai kept a few paces ahead. For the most part we didn’t speak, but I was always aware of her anyway, and from time to time, when I’d regained myself enough to struggle for normalcy again, I’d point something out—another bush high on the cliffs above us, a strip of ice, a collection of cactus flowers. She’d look with interest, intent, and smile at me, her eyes very blue against her burned cheeks, her hair growing blonder in the sun.

  “This is very nice now,” she said, at lunch, when the sun was out again for a while and the wind had died down. “I like these clouds.”

  It was, and I tried my best to focus also on the moment, to let time pass as slowly as I could. I felt as if I was paying very careful attention to something I knew I would think back on for years. By mid-afternoon, the valley had narrowed enough for the sound of the river to thunder back and forth in places between the walls, and the path began to rise up the rocky hillside above it. It became harder going, the trail undulating up and down, and the load carriers began to fall behind. Several times Rai stopped, tapping his foot, waiting for them to catch up, at which point he would set off again without giving them time to rest.

  Sometimes the path rose quite a good way above the river—perhaps thirty or forty feet, and in places the hillside was steep enough that I could look almost directly down at the water. For the first time, however, the path had obviously been improved; it was wider, and better marked.

  At one point, as we waited for Ali and his nephew again, Rai turned to me.

  “I am sorry,” he said. “I have made a small mistake.”

  “About what?” I asked, looking down the narrow gorge in the distance. It was a spectacular thing, the river churning in the canyon, spray in the air.

  “We should have stopped earlier,” he said. “I was not sure where we were. But now it will be several more hours before we can camp. It will be a long day.”

  I was feeling fine, and took a sip of water more from reflex than from thirst.

  “It’s all right,” I said. “It’s early enough.”

  “Are you feeling okay?” Rai asked Elise, who had joined us, breathing lightly.

  “Of course,” she said, giving him a look, peeling a strip of sunburned skin off her wrist and inspecting it. She let the skin fall, and it spun down to the ground like a tiny gray leaf.

  Ali and the others appeared. They looked tired, and so Rai let them sit and rest for a while before continuing.

  Rai had underestimated his mistake, however, because several hours later we were still walking and there was no end in sight. The trail, if anything, rose up and down even more steeply. My shoulders ached, and the sun was only just visible over the high walls of what had become a steep canyon. But there was no turning back at that point. Rai periodically apologized.

  “I’m sorry,” he said again.

  “Don’t worry,” I replied. “If we have to, we’ll just sleep along the trail.”

  But I could see that his error upset him. At times, we were high above the river, and at other times we were nearly beside it, walking in and out of icy mist. Nonetheless, the trail remained clear, and there was little sense of risk. Ali and his nephew were both wearing out, though. I could see it clearly in their faces, and the way they released themselves from their duffel bags when we rested. Even the soldier looked weary, heaving his enormous pack up and down and up again.

  Then the sun retreated below the walls, and it quickly got colder, and the whole canyon retreated into twilight. By then Rai was clearly looking for any area that might serve as a resting place for the night. But it was all loose rock, a hillside steep enough to use one’s hands, and a narrow corkscrew of a path along it. Soon it would be fully dark, and we would have to resign ourselves to sleeplessness, sitting on the cold trail with our legs off the edge, with nowhere comfortable to lie. My body ached, and Elise looked drawn as well, though full of the endurance of youth, and no doubt she could have continued all night if necessary.

  It was becoming rapidly unpleasant. I could only imagine what Ali and his nephew must have felt—several times Rai called out to them, pausing for their reply before continuing on. “Maybe we should just stop,” I said. “It doesn’t look like it’s getting any better.”

  “When it is dark,” Rai replied, “we will stop. It is only a few minutes more.”

  So we continued, in growing darkness. The path was too narrow to walk together. Rai was ahead of me, Elise forty of fifty feet behind, followed by the soldier. Ali and his nephew were last in line.

  At one point, the path rounded a large boulder protruding from the hillside. The boulder was chest high, and extended a few feet out over the trail. I stepped around it easily, looking down at the river as I did so—it was a few dozen feet below, but the incline was not any steeper than it had been for hours, and I passed by it without a thought.

  A few moments later I heard a cry, followed by a rattling of stones. I heard it clearly, and turned around to look back, but saw nothing.

  Then someone began to shriek in the darkness behind me, and Rai came sprinting back toward me, his flashlight playing across the rocks as he ran. Someone had fallen in the river. For a heart-stopping moment I thought it was Elise.

  After a few dozen seconds—it could not have been more—Elise appeared behind me, and I realized, from his nephew’s screams, that it was Ali who had fallen. I felt a terrible kind of relief. The boy sat wailing and striking his head with both hands. The soldier, to my surprise, crouched sympathetically beside him, rubbing his shoulder. Elise stood a few feet away, clutching her arms tight, and I was shaking as well.

  “Stay here,” Rai said, quickly, turning away.

  “I’ll come with you,” I said, but he shook his head.

  “No. Stay here. I will look for him.” And with that, he was gone.

  There was nothing to do but wait. A few minutes later it grew so dark in the canyon, shielded from the stars, that I could barely see my hand before me. The dark pinned us to the ground.

  It was the boulder—suddenly I knew it. The boulder must have caught his pack, and knocked him off balance. He was tired, the pack was heavy, and he’d lost his footing, fallen perhaps to a knee, the heavy pack rising up his shoulders, and then it had simply twisted him over the edge, down the slope, and into the water. I’m not sure, of course—no one saw the exact moment when he slipped. He had passed right under me, but I’d missed him. I must have been looking back along the path. Had I looked down, I would have seen him in the foam and spray, tumbling, all his chances gone. But I had not looked down, and he had passed like a ghost below me. He was tired, the light was bad. It happened quickly. And so on.

  My chest felt thick and heavy. My fingers and lips tingled. I was breathing hard. I noticed all these things, even as I realized that there was no hope for Ali, that he had gone into the freezing torrent with at least fifty pounds strapped to his back. He would have had only an instant to comprehend what was happening before the first few breaths of foam, and the blows of the rocks, and the weight on his back, dragged him under. I’m sure he couldn’t swim, though that hardly mattered. Probably he did not even feel the cold—only the shock of it, like the jaws of an animal, or a knife through a fingertip.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Rai, to his credit, took a very long time. It was several more hours before I saw the bead of his flashlight down the canyon. It came and went, winking on the trail, growing nearer all the while
, splashing along the rocks, and finally he was back among us, his face drawn and strained.

  “I could not find him,” he said. He looked pale and exhausted.

  “But maybe he is alive,” Elise said. “Maybe he is on the bank. It is possible. We should not give up.”

  “He’s not alive,” I said, more bluntly than I intended. “But if he is, we’ll find him in the morning. There’s nothing more we can do tonight.”

  Periodically, Ali’s nephew would wail and beat his fists against his head. He’d stop for a while, then begin again. At first, my heart went out to him entirely—his open grief, unrestrained, seemed purifying and honest. But as the hours passed, and the boy continued, I grew profoundly tired of it. I wanted him to be quiet, to stop reminding us, to let all of us settle back against the rocks in our sleeping bags, and get what rest we could. But he wouldn’t let us. He sobbed on and off all night, moaning, and I nearly said something. I didn’t, of course. Instead I crouched, and bore it, as we all did.

  At Rachel’s funeral, I had kept myself together, standing beside Eric, holding his hand, both in our suits. He had cried, but almost silently, and I had taken my own tears back to the house. All this wailing and gnashing of teeth—as the night passed, my view of it began to change, and I began to suspect that it was perhaps, in its own way, as dishonest as the stoicism I’d shown. Surely there was an element of performance there. If so, Ali’s nephew did it well, and moaned all night.