The Gorge
Page 5
Carlyle opened his note pad. “What do you think about what happened in the lodge just now?”
“Blake’s death is a damn shame, but it isn’t a case for the authorities.” Carlyle said nothing. “You don’t see it that way?” Bognor asked.
“I think it may be too early to close the books on this one yet.”
“Are you serious? The kid was blind in one eye.”
“I’ve read all the accident statistics. There’s never been two fatalities a week apart on the same river.”
“What are you saying, Ric?”
“Marshall runs a professional operation. His people are well-trained. They go to rescue clinics and have a two-day refresher course every season.”
“They never make mistakes?”
“Hardly ever.”
“What about Sanders? That was pure bad luck?”
“Sanders didn’t screw up in Mixmaster. Some clients have no business on that river, but the guides know what they’re doing.” Carlyle shut his note pad. “And I don’t believe that what happened is just terrible luck.”
“Doesn’t it seem like Blake shouldn’t have been out there at all.”
“But he worked for almost two years without any trouble,” Carlyle said. “How did that log just happen to fall right where it was guaranteed to clobber someone? Are we missing some underlying pattern here?”
“Where are you going to start?” Bognor said.
Carlyle turned toward his truck. “I guess I’ll have to go back to the gorge. Where everything’s gone wrong so far.”
Four
An hour past dawn on Friday morning, needing time to decide how he would handle Gus Burton, the outfitter he was riding with today, Carlyle pulled off the road a dozen miles west of Warrensburg. He shut off the engine, left his truck, and crossed the road to an embankment overlooking the Hudson.
Although unleashed from the six-mile canyon, the Hudson was still an impressive river. Unable to contain all the rain and snowmelt that poured into its tributaries, the river crashed against mid-stream boulders and overflowed both banks. Blocks of snow and ice, leftovers from a five-month winter, were strewn haphazardly up and down the valley.
Just as he finished his coffee, Carlyle heard a car pull up behind him. A voice cut through the air. “Sir. Please go back to your vehicle.” Carlyle turned away from the embankment and spotted a sheriff’s green and white sedan parked behind his truck.
The voice became more persistent. “I said, step this way, please.”
Carlyle crossed the road and walked toward the cruiser.
“Do not approach me. Go to your vehicle and wait for my instructions.”
Three minutes later, Caleb Pierce appeared next to Carlyle’s truck. He was wearing a crisp green uniform, tinted aviator glasses, and a thick Sam Browne belt holding a Maglite, a Glock, and pepper spray. “May I ask what in hell you were doing just now, sir?”
“Caleb, what’s going on?”
Pierce placed his left hand on the roof of Carlyle’s truck. “Do you realize that if someone had hit a patch of ice a minute ago, the paramedics would have had to peel you off the guard rail?”
“You can’t be serious?”
Ignoring Carlyle, Pierce stared at the notes in his booking log. “State records say that you committed a serious moving violation some time ago.”
“They keep records going back ten years?” Carlyle’s violation, a four-point speeding charge, had been his first traffic stop ever.
“Just hand over your license and registration, please.”
Carlyle pulled both documents from his wallet.
“I thought we’d seen the last of you yesterday,” Pierce said. He handed Carlyle’s license and registration back through the open window. “These roads can be treacherous. You’ll want to be more careful next time you leave Albany.” He turned and walked back to his patrol car.
As Carlyle pulled onto the road, he looked back and saw Pierce entering the details of their encounter into the State Motor Vehicle Complaint Data Base.
When Carlyle drove into the parking lot of the Silver River Outfitters twenty minutes later, he saw Burton shouting orders to his crew. Carlyle left his truck and the two men shook hands. “I just ran into Pierce,” Carlyle said.
“So, you finally met the Dentist.”
“The Dentist?”
Burton said that ten months ago, Pierce, on DUI patrol, had arrested Michael Shillings, a married father of two little girls. “Shillings mouthed off, and Pierce used his baton to remove the guy’s front teeth.”
“He’s a piece of work all right.” Carlyle pulled his gear from his truck. “Thanks for letting me ride with your outfit today.”
“If Mussolini had a hundred bucks, I’d sell him a ticket. I told Molly you’ll be with Jesse Simmons. Go inside and see her.”
Carlyle entered a small A-frame, crossed a screened front porch, and walked up to a desk covered in river rescue videos and outdoor magazines. “I’d like to sign up for the trip,” he said to the middle-aged woman standing in front of him.
“Could have fooled me, sweetheart,” Molly Carson said. “I thought you were on your way to a photo shoot.”
The woman had some tough miles on her. Years of smoking unfiltered cigarettes had creased her face. There was a portable oxygen tank somewhere in her future.
“Stay around after the trip,” Carson said. “I’d like to show my old man what purdy looks like.”
She was five foot eight and a bit under a hundred and ten. Her tight jeans, wool shirt, and pile vest were tattered. Carlyle guessed ex-fashion model, Midwest born, fed up with New York City, living on twenty acres planted with alfalfa and high-quality weed.
Carlyle laughed. “Sorry, I’m spoken for, ma’am.”
“Course you are. I haven’t had the pick of the litter for years.” She handed Carlyle a registration form. “Done this before?”
“Years ago. I brought my own gear.”
“Good for you. We get rookies wearing cotton and fancy new mesh sandals. They get cold real quick. Twenty minutes into the trip, their nuts are so small you can hardly see ‘em.”
Carlyle laughed. “No problem for me there.”
Carson pushed a generic one-page release of liability form across the desk. “Sign here. This tells your family and your goddamn lawyer that we warned you this was a life-threatening activity and you were too dumb to take it seriously.”
Carlyle signed the waiver form and handed it back. “Where do I find Jesse Simmons?”
“Outside somewhere. Find the guy who looks like he was put together by a backhoe. If he’s red in the face and swearing like he stepped on a nail, that’s him.”
“Sounds like a real sweetheart.”
“Do not get that man angry. He means well, but he’s got more rough edges than a young bull on his way to the knife. You mind my asking why you’re riding with Simmons?”
“I’m told he’s the best guide you’ve got.”
“He’ll keep you safe, but he’s no Gandhi, that’s for sure. Now get the hell out of here. I’ve got a bunch of flatlanders coming in any second.”
Carlyle walked outside and saw twenty or thirty clients milling around the front yard. Silent, clutching their gear, a few looked like they’d just learned the Hudson was filled with barracuda. The rest, guys in their twenties, were swearing, telling filthy stories, or terrorizing their more timid companions. When Carlyle had worked up here, he’d watch these people, all mouth and no guts, freak out once they hit the gorge. Everyone, he’d learned after a year or two, is gutsy in the abstract.
Carlyle spotted Simmons immediately. He was medium height, not an ounce of it fat. He carried three flares, a river knife strapped to his right thigh, a string of carabineers, a rescue belt containing seventy-five feet of high-tensile rope, a diver’s watch, a high-definition whistle, several prussic loops, and z-drag equipment.
Three men and three women, their eyes fixed on the ground, stood silently around him.
“You’re late.” Simmons turned his back on Carlyle and addressed his crew. “This isn’t some Disney World ride. There’s no guarantee you’ll come back with all your fuckin’ teeth in the right place. But if you do exactly what I tell you, I may be able to keep you safe today.”
An hour after they dropped their raft into the Indian, Simmons’s belligerence, which had been designed to drive the timid ones back to the bus, quickly vanished. Using both precise paddle strokes and brute force, he waltzed his boat around obstacles that seemed likely to send his people into the river. When he couldn’t avoid hydraulics completely, he allowed himself to take the full brunt of the freezing water that exploded into their boat.
Halfway down Indian Head Rapids, he shouted, “We’ve got to go around these fucking boulders, people, not bounce off them!”
Simmons never became the least bit pleasant that day. “Pay attention now,” he growled just above Guide’s Hole. When the crew got lazy a few minutes later, he said, “You will follow my instructions or you will die, goddammit.”
Carlyle knew that the river had climbed to five feet this morning, a foot higher than it had been last week. Almost three thousand cubic feet of water per second was now rushing toward the gorge. Waves erupted all around the raft as it hurled down the Indian. By the time they got to the Narrows, with a dozen tributaries disgorging snowmelt into the canyon, Burton’s clients would have a month’s worth of stories that wouldn’t need to be exaggerated.
Carlyle, meanwhile, kept a close eye on Simmons while scanning ahead for unfamiliar hazards and anything that seemed out of place.
Freezing spray, the kind that turns exposed flesh white, filled the air and made Carlyle’s lungs seize up. The river’s numbing cold penetrated his dry suit and all three layers of wool, pile, and polypro underneath. He couldn’t imagine what the others in their boat, who wore only cotton gloves and thin wetsuits, were feeling.
When they stopped to rest for a minute, Carlyle noticed that Simmons wasn’t wearing neoprene gloves. “Aren’t you cold?”
Simmons stared at his hands. “Nah, not really.”
“Your fingers are white.”
“They always look that way after a manicure.”
Carlyle knew you had to be a bit crazy to do this kind of work. Most guides, especially those who had thought they were too talented to be carpenters or roofers, began their careers in macho mode. But once they’d seen teeth lying around their boats like spilled Chiclets, even the most belligerent guides settled into the arduous task of learning this demanding profession.
Simmons resumed his Captain America act as soon as they hit the river again. “Pay attention, now. I get docked ten bucks every time a client drowns.” A couple of minutes later, he said, “If you paddle like pansies, I’ll spank you.” Although Carlyle didn’t like Simmons’s attitude, he understood that it had a single purpose: to keep his inexperienced clients reasonably dry and out of danger.
For six or seven minutes—an eternity for those who’d never been down a river like this one—the boat careened down through Gooley Steps, a chaotic landscape of boulders and backwashing waves.
After they punched through the strong current where the Hudson joined the Indian, Carlyle asked Simmons to take a break just above Cedar Ledges and let him get out for a few minutes.
Simmons smirked. “You got a weak bladder?”
“What did Burton tell you about cooperating with me?”
Simmons slewed the raft toward the right side of the river. “Let’s take five, ladies.”
Carlyle stepped out onto the bank, ducked under the yellow DEC tape and, watching for anything out of the ordinary, slowly walked downstream toward the spot where Blake had died. When he reached it, he looked for the log he’d come to examine but couldn’t find it. He glanced around. Was he in the wrong place? The rocks, the sloping forest floor—this was the only place along the chute it could have been. But where was the log?
He studied the ground where he had last seen it. Clumps of snow fallen from trees obscured any tracks or drag marks that might have been there. When he brushed away a patch of snow, he found a thick layer of dead leaves still there. He turned and, for a good two minutes, studied the forested hillside.
He then walked down to where they had pulled Blake out, found nothing new, and headed back to the raft.
It took Simmons and his crew thirty minutes to go from Cedar Ledges to Entrance Rapid. When they reached the gorge itself, Simmons said, “Two hundred yards downstream, there’s an Everest-sized boulder on your left. Don’t ask me what happens if we hit it. Immediately after that, you’ll see six huge waves in front of you. Let me do the thinking. Just keep your heads down and paddle like this is the fucking Zambezi and the river is filled with snakes.”
As they entered the Narrows, Carlyle, his eyes fixed on Simmons, knew he was watching a performer at the top of his game. Simmons was like one of those stocky, thick-fingered Russian pianists, both self-confident and agile, bull-rushing his way through a Brahms piano concerto. He sat on the edge of the back tube, his upper body arched out over the water, perilously close to thrashing waves, the weight of his entire body secured to the raft by a narrow foot strap. Every time the boat threatened to drop into a hydraulic, he plunged his guide paddle a bit deeper into the agitated whitewater surrounding their raft.
After their sprint through Carter’s Rapid—another four minutes of neck-snapping maneuvers—Simmons, breathing heavily, pointed his boat toward an eddy on the river’s right side.
This rest stop couldn’t possibly revive the clients, thought Carlyle. The thermometer on his jacket read forty-nine degrees. Snow falling from the trees settled on his helmet and shoulders. His feet were sitting in ice-cold water that sloshed back and forth across the bottom of the raft. The crew, aware they still had over an hour until this ordeal ended, must be wondering how much longer they could endure these conditions.
Simmons ran the final two miles of the gorge without mishap. Because it was too dangerous to approach Greyhound today, they skirted the two-foot trench and let the current push them slowly south, past a deserted garnet mine, derelict cabins, and an abandoned railroad trestle running over the river, while Simmons explained to his clients why this region had, as he said, “fallen into the shitter.”
In the past ten days, two of Marshall’s better guides had made fatal errors, but Simmons, a part-timer, had performed flawlessly today in harsh conditions.
Burton’s entire crew, exhilarated after a day battling whitewater, pulled into North River at three that afternoon. Carlyle thanked Simmons and Burton for their help, and hurriedly changed into street clothes. Looking for a place where he could think quietly for an hour, he drove to a barbeque joint overlooking the Hudson just outside of North River.
Grateful that nobody in the restaurant recognized him, Carlyle found a table in a deserted corner of the raucous dining room, pulled a laptop from his briefcase, and entered the details of his trip with Simmons. Still, other than the missing log, nothing stood out. Nothing unexpected had happened in the rafting itself, not even a minor mishap or close shave.
He reread his notes for Sanders’s and Blake’s last trips. Reliving the morning of the first accident, he imagined Sanders to his right, sitting on the back tube, and tried to recall the interval between the time he’d last felt the young guide next to him and when he’d heard him hit the water. Sanders hadn’t simply fallen out of the boat, he’d exploded out. If the frayed strap had unraveled, Sanders’s foot would have merely slipped out of it and he’d have probably ended up on his ass in the cockpit, not in the river.
His mind churning, Carlyle next wrote the names “Sanders” and “Blake” in separate columns on his evidence list. He then tried to visualize every detail of the events the morning each man died. Thinking of what might have caused their deaths, he wrote equipment failure, unpredictable
weather, inadequate training, unexpectedly high river levels, alcohol or drugs, crew error, and poor judgment.
Then, tuning out the noise from a group of fishermen who’d just come into the restaurant, he closed his eyes for several seconds and visualized both convoys of rafts as if next to each other. His eyes popped open and a chill swept through his body. He added boat order to his list, threw a sawbuck on the table, grabbed his stuff, and bolted out of the restaurant.
Carlyle raced over to the South Mountain Lodge and, without knocking, marched into Marshall’s office. “We have to talk.”
“Can’t you see I’m busy?” Maps, DEC files, account books, and aerial photographs of the gorge covered Marshall’s desk. A picture of his mother, standing outside a ski lodge in Switzerland, was on the wall behind his head.
Ignoring his comment, Carlyle pulled out a chair and sat down. “Think back. Did you switch boats with Sanders at the last minute?”
Marshall sat up straight. “How’d you know that?”
“What raft was he supposed to be in?”
“The green monster.”
“Why wasn’t he driving it then?”
“There was a ton of ice on the river on Saturday. His boat’s a real pig, so I gave him mine. It’s much more maneuverable.”
“The one with the defective foot strap.”
Marshall hesitated for a moment. “So what?”
“Did anyone see him fall out that morning?”
“Betts was right behind the two of you. He said Sanders did a high brace when he came up to Mixmaster, back arched, extended out over the end of the boat, inches from the river, steering like crazy. Then, bam, he just disappeared.”
“Where’s the boat now?” Carlyle said.
“Somewhere out back.”
“Show it to me.”
“I haven’t got time for this shit. Why don’t you go pester Bognor or that fascist deputy of his.”
“If you don’t cooperate, I’ll let Raines take over this investigation.”
Marshall pointed a finger at Carlyle. “Are you threatening me?”