The rapids that followed from the mile-wide river at one point were pinched between banks only a hundred feet wide, like an hourglass. The immensity of all that water and all that ice dwarfed whatever problems Mary had, or even the bigger ones Andi had, and made her feel almost ashamed for having them.
At one point, Graham said, “Going down the river was like being caught up in a parallel life.” He stopped abruptly. Even in the amber glow of the campfire, Mary could see he was blushing, thinking his philosophizing was going too far.
“Déjà vu,” Lorraine said.
“No, not that, or not only that. Have you ever been caught unaware by the sense you had another life, moving along beside this one?”
Mary looked at Andi, who was listening to Graham, rapt.
“Hey, you one o’ them Zen Buddhists?” Bill Mixx was back in character.
Graham shook his head. “No, that’s not what I mean. It’s as if you were looking through the window of a train, seeing yourself on another train, looking through a window. I felt my other life on other rivers—the Colorado, the Rio Grande, the Snake—was a different life. It’s like I had one foot in each of these lives for a moment. I felt really frightened, as if I had stumbled on something I wasn’t supposed to know.”
“Well, my heavens,” said Honey Mixx, with an uncertain laugh, “you make it sound like the Garden of Eden all over again, Graham.” Her laugh was more nervous than delighted.
Hearing Honey say that, Mary thought, How strange that people you had pegged as silly or uncomprehending should suddenly say a thing startling in its implications.
Then Lorraine asked, in that rather stiff way she had of speaking, probably from embarrassment that she was asking for attention of any kind, “Have you ever had fatalities on the Salmon?”
Mary saw Harry dart a glance at Floyd. He said, “Two or three times. Foolhardiness, carelessness, or—something unavoidable.”
“Such as what, Harry?” asked Mixx, with a benign smile, as if prepared to forgive Harry Wine in advance for carelessness.
“Boaters thinking they can take on Dagger Falls even though it’s unrunnable. As far as carelessness goes—it’s failing to close up your life jacket, Bill.” He smiled.
“He’s got you there, Billy,” said his wife.
“That girl, the one who drowned a few years ago around here?” Andi tossed this out conversationally, as if she didn’t really care about the answer.
Harry Wine certainly did. His look seemed to take in both Andi and Floyd, encapsulate them in some way, and then back off. It was worse than anger, that cold and distant look.
“Well?” Honey Mixx looked expectantly at Harry. “What happened to this girl?”
Oddly enough, it was the ordinarily silent Randy, handing the coffee around, who said, “A keeper. Her kayak got caught up in a keeper. She shouldn’t have been out in a kayak. She didn’t have the experience.”
That wasn’t what Mary had heard. She kept on covertly looking from Harry to Floyd. Harry’s expression now was mild and sad, as if he honestly mourned the fate of the girl. “I don’t think it was inexperience. She’d been on a lot of white water, some of the roughest. It was just one of those freak things that you don’t know’s going to happen until it does. Undercut rock on one side, the damned hole on the other. The keeper just opened up, sucked her down.”
Mary thought that was a rather trivial way of putting it and was considering saying so, when Graham Bennett stopped in the act of lighting the cigar Mixx had given him to say, “Charybdis.”
They all looked at him.
“Haven’t you guys read your Homer?” On a long indrawn breath he got the cigar going. He snapped the lighter shut, said, “Scylla and Charybdis. The Greek version of a rock and a hard place.” He exhaled a stream of smoke that turned blue in the firelight.
• • •
It wasn’t until they were rolling out their sleeping bags that Mary had a chance to tell Andi who Floyd was.
Andi just stared at her, speechless. Finally, she said, “Harry didn’t have any idea of this before now?”
“Not from what I heard. I think he was totally shocked.”
“And it’s pretty clear what Floyd thinks.”
“Yes. That it was no accident.”
“Then,” said Andi, “we better watch out for Floyd.”
Having shared her discovery with Andi, Mary felt a little better. She lay with her hands clasped behind her head, reliving the river trip, raising gooseflesh on her arms, thinking of the frigid water, the shouting, the crying, the wintry look of Andi’s face. It was perfectly quiet now, except for a piercing bird cry or the hoot of an owl. The dead-white moon was so bright she could see its reflection through the canvas, and when she reached one hand upward, its brightness stained her hand. It was as if there was nothing—not canvas, not distance—between herself and the moon. She smiled and drank in the silence, beneath it the rush of the river.
It was probably never black-dark here, not with a moon like that.
She thought of Graham Bennett, floating down that river in Alaska—what was its name?—and pictured it as their own run between fir-covered canyon walls and a sky as blue as cornflowers, all transformed to ice walls, ice caverns, ice boulders, even ice splinters in the foaming water. She thought of what Graham had said about a parallel life:
Going down that river—the Alsek, that was it—was like being caught up in a parallel life.
A parallel life. Mary looked at the tent brightened by moonlight, wondering if that’s what Andi had: two selves on different trains. Or were there parallel worlds? A world far beyond our comprehension, which must be the world inhabited by things like Jules and the coyote pups, one in which you stepped by accident, then realized it was dangerous to know.
The tent was no longer bright. Like a cloud passing in front of the moon, something stood there in the path of the moonlight, blocking it.
Something or someone had come up on them without making a sound. Mary stopped breathing. The shape could have been an animal—a deer or even a mountain lion. Or it could have been a man.
Mary almost preferred the mountain lion.
34
Morning came early, bringing with it a violet glow on the horizon. Carefully, so as not to wake Andi, Mary eased herself out of her sleeping bag and out of their tent, taking her clothes with her. She dressed hurriedly among the red cedars, her jeans catching on brambles; through the hawthorn, thickets of wild rose, and cinquefoil, the early sun filtered a violet light. She finished and walked to the river, rubbing her arms in the cold, looked across it at the mantle of fog moving through the alpine firs clinging to canyon walls; the junipers along the rocky ledges and the tall syringa bushes were shrouded in it. A spectral forest. Here and now the water was a dazzling green like shot silk.
Nothing stirred; no one woke. Graham was zipped up, stretched out beneath one of the firs whose feathery needles were blanketing his sleeping bag. Bill Mixx, who’d also opted not to sleep in the tent but outside, had made his bed in a tangle of yellow cinquefoil. When she looked around the camp, at the silent people in the sleeping bags and little tents, she thought they were like the dead, like casualties of war.
She felt groggy and so bent down and dashed icy water onto her face. While she did this, she watched a hawk rise, level off, and wheel like a glider above her. Then she sat down, leaned her chin on her folded arms, and simply watched the river. She wondered about those first explorers who had put boats in this water a hundred years ago. And a hundred years before that, the river had looked this way. Mary thought that if she had lived near its bank all her life, she might think nothing ever changed. Or if it changed, with high water and low water, with surface dangers that became hidden dangers, the river simply became more or less of itself, not something different.
It was awful to think that Floyd’s daughter had died in this river, and worse to have to wonder (like Floyd had to) about the truth of what was reported to him. It made Mary more afr
aid for Andi. She was uncompromising and tenacious; she clamped onto things and refused to let go: the mountain cabin, the persecuted Labrador, the river, and Harry Wine. She was so zealous. It seemed almost a religious zeal at times that kept her going.
Yet how could she be anything else? Mary thought that if her own history had been obliterated and had only begun back in a Santa Fe bed-and-breakfast, she’d probably be trying to work it out with the same fervor. She closed her eyes and tried to imagine waking up in unfamiliar surroundings, wondering where she was, wondering who she was, thinking it a dream, and finding the dream didn’t end. What would she do? Scared to death, she would go to the police or to a hospital. And yet . . . would she if she knew a man calling himself Daddy might be looking for her in both places?
But surely he wouldn’t have gone to the police, not if he’d abducted her. The police in several states would have been notified of her disappearance, wouldn’t they? The hospitals? Very likely the same thing.
The question came again: Why hadn’t Andi asked either for help? Instead, she’d taken the incredibly difficult route of trying to piece her past together by asking people who couldn’t really help her beyond feeding her bits of information, but the information itself was suspect.
Behind her, Mary heard sounds. They awoke almost simultaneously. The Mixxes were making a production out of getting up, as they did about everything. Honey chattered away about the “simply glorious, glorious morning,” while Bill Mixx bellowed out the news that they were up and the others ought to get a move on.
Breakfast was almost ready. Randy was overseeing the gravy and spooning up some fresh pears; Andi was in charge of the biscuits and the coffeepot. In combination with the crystal-clear air, the cooking smells were wonderful.
Everyone was hungry. It must have been the altitude that did that, for Mary had thought after polishing off that chocolate cake she wouldn’t eat again for a week. The biscuits were hot and crumbly, and disappeared under their layer of gravy almost as soon as they were served up. Honey Mixx made a comment about having to starve herself after this trip. Mary supposed Honey had been fifteen or twenty pounds overweight all of her middle-aged life and was always apologizing for it.
The coffee was strong and slightly bitter when taken with the sweet waxiness of the pears. Mary knew it was partly the air, partly the excitement that made things taste so good.
When they were on their second cup of coffee, Harry Wine talked about the trip today, how far they’d go. “Maybe to Tappan Falls, Tappan Rapids. You’ll like that, Bill.” His smile was slightly sardonic. “We’re going to get into rapids a little tougher than yesterday. Ron’s gone to scout, see if things have changed much. The danger here is that the water can get very high and very powerful. So we’ve all got to be alert to some sharp turning, and the banks narrowing, and drops in elevation.”
Honey Mixx asked, with her usual coyness, “Is it really treacherous? I mean, could someone get killed?”
Mary saw and felt Harry Wine’s hesitation. She had her eyes on Floyd, whose expression didn’t change.
“Any body of water’s potentially dangerous if it’s deep enough to drown in. What I want to do is redistribute the weight in the boats.”
Mary hoped that didn’t mean taking off tents and sleeping bags Randy had already taken down and stashed on the raft.
“I’d like another man in our boat with the girls, a good paddler.” Before Graham Bennett (who was more experienced than the others) could say anything, Harry went on, “Floyd, how about it? You’re good.”
Of course, Floyd nodded. He struck Mary as being a man who’d agree to any challenge, a prideful sort of man; now it was more than pride that moved him to agree.
Andi was standing up with a coffee mug in her hand. She tilted the mug carefully so that the dregs of the coffee ran out very slowly; the tipping of the mug struck Mary as a queer, mannered movement that held in it a sense of reckoning. Then Andi raised her eyes and looked at Mary. The morning sun on her face turned her eyes to quicksilver.
The utensils and plates were collected, quickly washed off by Lorraine and Honey Mixx, and packed away. Harry made certain the fire was out, and Randy saw to it that no litter stayed on the ground.
Before they piled into the two rafts, Harry’s cellular phone beeped, and he put it to his ear. Mary thought this funny: roughing it with a cellular phone on your belt. It must be Ron calling from downriver. He listened, nodded, shoved the phone back into the holder on his belt. Then he said to all of them, “There’s a sharp bend coming up maybe a half mile or so ahead, and the canyon walls narrow there, so we’ll try to stay to the outside to keep from getting swept into the rocks.”
Floyd certainly did redistribute the weight. Mary could feel the difference and it felt good; it was as if, being so much lighter yesterday, they had also been careless and cavalier in their treatment of the river. Kids playing dangerously with holes and standing waves. Floyd’s presence made her feel there was something solid now, something to depend upon. It was ironic, since his presence might even mean more danger.
The movement of water was almost placid for a while. Mary loved the quiet, no one talking, the regular rhythm of the paddles dipping, rising, shedding water as bright as sprays of sunlight.
Nobody spoke until Andi broke the silence, shouting, “Look!” She pointed to the far shore where several bighorn sheep had come down from the canyon’s granite walls to drink at the river’s edge. The sheep did not appear to notice the rafts, or did not care. When they were done drinking, they turned and began their vertical climb up the rocky cliffside as if their hooves were glued to its stony corrugations. Once near the top they clung like gray ghosts to outcroppings of rock. For anyone who had not watched their upward climb, they would have been impossible to find in all of that granite camouflage.
“That’s rare,” said Harry Wine. “Rare to see bighorns. So high up, they’re near unreachable. Look over to the right a little, past those whitebark pines, and you’ll see a couple of mountain goats. Look at them go.” Mary did. It was hard to believe their acrobatic climb, so swift and surefooted. Harry said, “They’re real temperamental, they can hardly even stand one another.” He laughed. “Like people.”
There was a stretch of flat water, and the raft floated it calmly. Then from around the sharp bend to the right came the first murmur of rushing water, which soon built into a thunderous roar that echoed off the canyon walls. There was a fury below her that Mary didn’t want to see. Harry kept the raft as well as he could to the inside, going around the curve, and he yelled about heading for the narrow tongue of water between the rocks. But he couldn’t avoid a steep hole on that side, and they fell into the drop. Then the banks of the river narrowed and the current picked up speed. Mary found herself looking at standing waves twelve feet high shooting straight up into the air. She opened her mouth, but fear stoppered her throat. It was a world made of churning water, water boxing them in. Suddenly, she was tossed into it with all of the violence of a gunshot. She exploded out of the water, went straight up with the wave, and seemed to hang there, unsupported and thinking, I’m going to die; but instead of terror she felt exhilarated in a way she had never felt before, released from some dreadful responsibility. A moment later she was slammed down into the water again, unable to stop the black descent of her body until suddenly someone else had her and was yanking her out. It was Floyd.
She half lay, half sat on the bottom of the raft.
“Happens all the time,” Harry said.
It enraged Mary, this trivializing of her near drowning. “Not to me it doesn’t,” she said, her tone icy.
Andi, though, looked terrified and hugged her and got even wetter in the process. It was a big display of emotion for Andi. Her face inside the hard helmet looked small and white, and she felt so delicate. Mary had always thought of Andi as strong, but that strength was more mental than physical; she thought now that if Andi were to go over the side, nothing at all would pull her back t
o earth.
When she raised up to sit in the stern, she looked back to the other raft. Honey and Lorraine both had their hands cupped around their mouths and were yelling some message of either comfort or concern that Mary couldn’t hear. But it made her feel better.
Andi yelled to Harry, “Is there anything worse up ahead?”
“We’ve never lost anybody, I guarantee,” he yelled back.
That was like hearing you’d never get a hotfoot in hell.
Harry said it would be a good place to stop; there was a campsite not far down on the right bank.
Mary was still shivering; she was glad to stop at the camp. Dry clothes, food.
• • •
After she put her wet jeans and T-shirt to dry on a rock in the sun, Mary returned to help with the food. Andi and Harry were kneeling on the ground, starting up a fire. The way she knelt there beside him as he was trying to blow embers of charcoal and thin willow branches into flame—it was so physical, thought Mary. Andi’s shoulder was pressed against his, and she mimicked the way he was using his mouth as a bellows. She laughed in response to something Harry said. He had inclined his head so that it nearly touched Andi’s, and the low murmur of their voices didn’t reach beyond the fire.
Covertly, Mary watched them as she separated the chicken breasts from the waxed paper between them. Even cold they looked and smelled wonderful. Randy was pumping up the fire to grill them. Harry now had his hand on Andi’s head, ruffing up her hair, the sort of horseplay that signaled that you really mean to be doing something different, something sexual. Mary looked around to see if anyone else was watching them and saw only Lorraine, looking daggers at them, probably jealous as sin.
Biting the Moon Page 22