Randy had gone to set up a portable toilet back behind some bushes. He instructed them to stick the red flag into the ground when they were using the toilet and to take it down when they weren’t.
There was an old pump house not far from the place into which they’d settled. It sat near a sand-lined basin made by an eddy and edged by bitterbrush and broom grass. The pump still worked; Mary found the water cold and sweet, unlike any other water she’d ever drunk.
Andi was sitting beside Harry, and if the others noticed how closely she stuck to him, they’d probably have put it down to a schoolgirl crush. Both Honey and Lorraine found as many excuses as they could to consult with Harry. Both of them had a fair knowledge of rivers and rapids, to judge from the remarks Mary overheard.
Floyd Ludens kept himself slightly apart, as usual. Mary noticed he didn’t eat much: a slice of pizza, no salad. There was beer, too, but Harry advised them all to be careful of it. Mixx pooh-poohed this as he did most injunctions to be careful. Still, he didn’t drink more than a bottle and a half. Ludens didn’t drink any; he just kept on leaning against a big pine with that same purposeful expression on his face but nothing in his eyes, which seemed locked in a permanent squint. Mary went over to him.
“Do you do this much?” She gestured toward the rafts.
He shook his head. “Been out with Harry Wine a couple times, that’s about all.”
“Here? On the Middle Fork?”
“Middle Fork, Main, once we did the Selway. That’s a lot rougher.”
“Then I’m glad we’re not on it. This one’s rough enough for me.”
Ludens smiled, asked her where she was from, and they carried on a superficial information-gathering conversation from there. Then he asked her about Andi, and why the two of them were there—that is to say, in Salmon.
Mary searched her memory to dredge up whatever lie Andi had told. Oh, yes, to visit relatives. That was close enough, so that’s what she said.
“She puts me in mind of my daughter.” Floyd nodded toward Andi, who was still talking to Harry.
What on earth, Mary wondered, could Andi and Harry find to share between them for all of this time? What topic of conversation could they find to keep them so wrapped up?
“Looks like her,” Floyd went on. “Does she have a lot of experience river-rafting?”
“Her? Oh, sure.” Mary tossed it off. “She’s floated the Gaunty—” No, that wasn’t exactly the name, but when Floyd didn’t correct her she went on. “And Hell’s Canyon, she’s done those rapids. Oh, she’s been everywhere.”
He smiled. “Sounds like my daughter, too.”
Harry decided that “some of you need to hone your paddling skills.” He didn’t look directly at Mary and Andi, but since they had made absolutely no showing at all of their “paddling skills,” Mary assumed the comment was directed largely at them. The women spent another half hour or forty-five minutes getting a lesson from Harry, who was a tough teacher.
It was midafternoon by the time they shoved off again, after reloading the rafts. Since Andi wasn’t giving up her seat beside Harry for love or money, Lorraine Lynch once again sat in the rear of the raft with Mary. And talked, talked about books, about rafting, about students at her college—talked and talked until Mary almost hoped the raft would wrap around a rock. She found this hard to picture, but Harry had warned them often enough against it. Then she was afraid her idle wish might be answered, because up ahead she saw big rocks jutting above the water and heard Harry exclaim, “Hell!” He looked up, over to the bank, and said something about Ron that Mary couldn’t hear over the sound of the heavy rush of water. It didn’t look as if there was enough space to float between them. The biggest of the three rocks, the center one, seemed to be heading right toward them.
Andi shouted, “We’re going to hit!”
“Sit down!” yelled Harry.
Before they could slam into the rock head-on, Harry took a pull on one oar and spun the boat into a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn. This pushed the raft past the rock and had them moving into a tongue, stern first, headed downstream.
A flume of water bumped them over a rock bed and through a narrow passage with a sharp right-hand turn at the bottom. Harry kept to the outside to keep out of the shallower water, which meant they were going faster. Coming out of this turn, they nearly rammed a shelf of rock that Harry managed to clear only through a quick backward pull. But what bothered Mary was what she saw in front of them: a lot of frothy white water that meant a place full of rocks for one thing; for another, maybe a big drop, but they couldn’t see it because of the turbulence. As they picked up velocity, Harry shouted at them to use back strokes to slow the raft to keep from wrapping around a huge rock that Mary could only now just see. She paddled as hard as she could to keep the raft from dropping sideways into the hole. From this they seemed to glide, to fly into the clear green pool before them. The change was breathtakingly quick.
Harry was laughing, but even he sounded nervous. “Sorry about that. Jesus, wasn’t like this last year.” He stood up to watch for the other raft, saw it, waved. “Those guys are good, best I’ve ever had.”
Mary was soaked; Andi was spluttering, wiping spray out of her eyes. All three of them looked back to see how the second raft was taking the rocks. She couldn’t see behind. Ahead, she saw mist rising from the water and then their raft dropped and hit a reverse wave. Somehow, Harry kept the boat from spinning or capsizing and they were moving forward again, doubly drenched. Mary couldn’t find a dry spot on herself.
“Hit a hole,” Harry called back to her, and flashed her a smile, as if she wouldn’t have known they’d hit one without being told. He turned again to watch the other raft and couldn’t see it.
“Where is it?” asked Andi.
“They’re all right,” Harry said, as the boat behind them, having been tilted by the waves so that it stood nearly straight up, now came shuddering down, slamming against the water.
The faces of these “veteran” white-water rafters in the other boat looked a little drawn and white. Mary was glad, for once, that her boatman was Harry.
She hoped the cooler made it through all right. She was already hungry again.
33
Mary was relieved when they finally stopped at the campsite where they’d spend the night. While she helped off-load the waterproof bags, the other raft came in, towing the freezer of food behind it. Mixx got out, proclaiming the rapids were nearly as good as the Payette and the scenery almost as spectacular as along the Rio Grande.
Harry had set down two of the bags at the far end of the campsite, and the twins dragged the freezer out of the water. Andi helped Harry unpack the provisions. Mary pulled their sleeping bags out, carried them over beneath a tree, and started unrolling them. The tree was near them, which is why she chose it. She heard Andi, apparently talking about Santa Fe and the coincidence of his picking her up on that road between there and Albuquerque. Harry was stacking small plastic trays that reminded Mary of airplane food but, considering the lunch they’d had, probably wasn’t. He said nothing but “Get out that flour over there and the sugar,” before he took the armload of food over to Ron and the campfire.
Mary took the opportunity to say to Andi, “You’d better be careful of what you talk about. It’ll just make him suspicious.”
“I want him to be. He might do something.”
“Like try to drown you? Swell.” Mary shivered. “My God, I’m cold; I have to get out of these clothes.”
Andi didn’t appear to be aware of the cold. She retained her pellucid calm and set the small bag of flour on the ground as Harry started back.
Mary looked around and into the trees, wondering where she could change. She had another pair of jeans and a sweater in her duffel bag but didn’t much like the idea of going behind bushes. She went deep into the trees, loving the silence after the thunderous river noise. Sequestered in a grove of pines was a tumble-down prospector’s shack, the roof partially
fallen in. Life and gold or the hope of gold had fled from it long ago. She considered using it to change but decided it looked too good a hiding place for snakes. She went instead to the other side of a big ponderosa pine. Standing in its shadow and in a big patch of fool’s huckleberry, she yanked on the dry jeans, zipped them up, pulled out a heavy sweater, and, still bending over, looked at the base of the tree. It must have been a husking place for squirrels, as it was littered with shucked cones.
Her head came up as she heard a rustling of leaves and branches, signifying movement. Mountain lions was her first thought, and she stiffened, heart racing.
What she heard was Harry Wine’s voice, coming from inside the old shack. “Atkins? . . . insane” was all she heard.
“Is it?” The other voice belonged to Floyd Ludens. “You’re not . . . happened three years ago.”
Mary was frozen in place, kneeling there. Floyd’s voice held a threat as cold as the river.
“For Christ’s . . .” Harry’s voice rose. “. . . fucking paranoid.”
“What if I told you I had a letter from . . . ?”
A bark of laughter, and Harry said, “You’re nuts.”
The register of their voices went down, leveled off, so that Mary had to strain to make out any words. Carefully, slowly, she moved a few feet nearer the shack. She heard Floyd say, distinct and sharp, as if he meant to carve the name into the night, “Peggy.”
A silence followed in which neither man moved or spoke.
Peggy Atkins?
In her mind, she heard Floyd’s voice again: like my girl.
Someone called out, either Ron or Randy, for Harry to get over there and do the steaks.
Mary heard them leave the shack and heard feet move across the forest floor and, in another minute, heard Honey Mixx cry out something about the wine to Floyd.
Laughter rose and fell away. Hurriedly she finished dressing, pulling the sweater over her head and tugging it down. Then she shook out her hair and found herself looking straight at him.
Harry Wine was leaning against a tree, as if he’d just materialized before her eyes. The sun was at his back, making its bright descent through the branches of the trees, and for an instant its richly diffused light obliterated his features, cast him as a silhouette, a shape of darkness. Mary thought she saw, behind his nearly perfect form and face, dust and ashes, old bones calcified. He slouched against the tree as if he owned this place, yet he looked like he didn’t belong here.
Christ, she thought, what would Andi do? And she knew in an instant what Andi would do: brazen it out. Take control before he did, dictate the direction of whatever exchange they would have. If she didn’t, she would lose. Don’t let him put you on the defensive. Mary asked, her tone as uninterested as she could make it, “What were you talking to Floyd about?”
That she wasn’t denying she’d overheard them threw Harry off balance. He stood away from the tree. Quivering waves of apricot light combed the branches. With the light at his back, he was a darkness standing between her and the sun, and as if the familiar world were spinning away, the voices of the rafters drifted lazily toward her: the campfire, the people, the whiskey, the talk belonged now to that other world, one to which she’d had a key but had it no longer.
Harry said, “Nothing much. Floyd’s been out with me before; he gets kind of—paranoid.” Harry smiled. “Why? What did you hear?”
How far could she go before she tipped the scale? “He sounded pretty mad.”
“He thinks you and Andi aren’t experienced enough for this.”
He started moving toward her, and it was all she could do to keep from backing away. But she didn’t. “Well, it’s nice of him to be protective like that. Maybe it’s because he has a daughter too.”
He watched her. “How long have you two girls known each other?”
What kept her from stumbling into a lie was her sudden awareness that he knew the answer. For she couldn’t have known Andi before that night he’d picked her up in the truck. If Andi hadn’t known where she’d been, there was no way for Mary to know. “Not very long. I met up with her in Santa Fe. We just hit if off, I guess.”
He was directly in front of her now and she could feel his heat. He put one hand on her shoulder, massaged the muscle. The hand was very strong. What she felt was fear of a different kind from what she’d experienced back there in Pistol Creek Rapids. That fear was mixed with a kind of elation. This fear was stark.
“Listen, you take care on this river. It’s deceptive.”
He dropped his hand from her shoulder and stood there like a boulder, impossible to move, impossible to get around, unless you were water. So she stood too. “I don’t think so.” She shook her water-tangled hair back, away from her face. “It’s not trying to fool anyone. You just have to pay attention. You have to scout, and so forth. The river doesn’t mean to be anything; it just is.”
Harry laughed. “Quite a philosopher, aren’t you?”
Unsmilingly, she shook her head. But what she felt was for a moment she had him. She stumped him. He didn’t know what to make of her.
Again, someone yelled for Harry, and they headed for the others. When she saw the campfire and the faces that ringed it, she was surprised she hadn’t noticed that night had come on. Something was simmering in some sort of heavenly smelling sauce on the fire and the Mixxes were offering drinks around—martinis and scotch. Hard-core drinkers. Graham and Lorraine were sticking with beer.
Mary tried to avoid looking at either Floyd or Harry Wine, but her gaze was drawn to them; she couldn’t help it. Floyd’s expression was fierce as he watched Harry. But to look at Harry, one would think nothing had happened. He finished rubbing pepper and herbs into the steaks and put them on the grill. Then he moved about the fire with a can of beer and the ease he had mastered long ago, finally settling cross-legged next to Lorraine Lynch, who turned coy in his presence, looking up at him from under lowered eyes.
Over the drone of the others’ conversations, Mixx was carrying on his love affair with his surroundings: trees, rocks, river, flora, and fauna. “Nothing like it, getting out of Dallas and back to nature. Here’s the way I’d like to live, just breathe in that air, none of those damned fumes we got to breathe all the time. This is the life. Simple, uncomplicated, basic.”
“Basic?” said Lorraine, laughing. “I wouldn’t call this food basic.” She waved her hand over the grill that held more tomato-blackened salmon, in case anyone could possibly eat seconds. There was a potato-and-cheese casserole and abundant vegetables to go with it.
“Me either,” said Andi.
While they savored everything in silence for a while, Mary struggled to keep her mind on something other than the implications of what she’d overheard in the woods, and so watched Bill Mixx light up a cigar with a thin platinum lighter. His Rolex winked in the firelight. His boots were undoubtedly hand-tooled; he had insisted on bringing them along. Was all of this finery some kind of sustenance? She was glad of the food before her, not so much because she was hungry but because it gave her eyes something else to look at besides Floyd. She was cutting up steak into tiny pieces when she heard the clipped end of something Andi was saying:
“. . . what Reuel said.”
“Reuel has too much damned time on his hands, you ask me,” said Harry, who was now sitting beside Andi, finishing off his steak. “He’s got nothing to do except check the cars that come to the dump, so the rest of his time’s taken up with dead-air talk.”
What, wondered Mary, had Andi said about Reuel, or what Reuel had told them?
“How far we going tomorrow?” Mixx fairly boomed, alcohol combining with his usual mulishness to make him even louder. “By God, I hope we hit some real white water tomorrow!”
“You thought that wasn’t real today?” Harry smiled. “Felt real to the rest of us.” He winked at Andi.
He was simply too seductive; it was nearly impossible to keep from returning the wink—or at least from smiling. Andi d
id neither.
Mixx flapped his hand in dismissal. “I’m talking eight-foot drops and ten-foot holes.”
“You’re on the wrong river, then, mister,” said Ron. “You want to try the Illinois, over in Oregon. There’s a class-five rapid there that’s got a solid wall on your right and boulders in front of you.” Ron and Randy were piling some delicious-looking, several-toned chocolate cake onto plates.
“Or the Gauley,” put in Graham. “You’ll get holes there, all right.”
When Bill Mixx went on to describe his trips on the Green River, the bragging and exaggeration Mary had come to expect from him fell away, so that his words took on the ring of truth. There was no Mixx bombast, only a recounting of what happened.
Mary wondered if it might not be the same for the rest of them, perhaps for everybody: that in the face of real and true experience, the need to impress others and to project an image was forgotten, the experience enough in itself. She pulled her legs closer to her and rested her chin on her knees, listening. It was like when she was a child, sitting around a campfire, listening to ghost stories. The voices had a seductive pull to them, were not everyone’s ordinary day-to-day voices. At least, that’s how it sounded.
Graham Bennett was caught up in river memories too, enough to break through his customary silence to ask if any of them had ever run the Alsek. None of them had; none of them, except for Harry, was at all familiar with the name.
“It’s in the Yukon and Alaska. That one?” he asked. Graham nodded. “The Alsek’s famous; it’s famous for being unrunnable, is what I’ve always heard,” Harry said.
Graham smiled. “I wanted to take on Turnback Canyon. I wanted to, but it lived up to its name. I had to turn back. There’s no river like the Alsek; at least if there is, I’ve never seen one. Even being in Alaska, I wasn’t prepared for the ice. It was like another world. Running that river was like going back to the beginning of things.
“After about fifty miles of rapids—and the Alsek is all rapids—rapids without respite, except for this lake. A place like none I’d ever seen, it was all ice, a glacier, a wall of ice, blue ice. Tons of ice calved off the glacier and dumped into the water. So you can imagine. Ice like enormous boulders, only boulders that constantly moved. Foam thirty feet high and huge holes that would hold me if I flipped. I was always afraid of slamming up against a cliff. I seemed to be doing nothing much but roll-overs and roll-ups. And all of this ice shearing off the glaciers.”
Biting the Moon Page 21