River Run

by Toni Dwiggins

  Walter turned back to Reid. “Anything you might recall would be helpful.”

  “I can't remember.” The words a cry.

  He looked, I thought, beyond confused. He looked bereft. I suddenly regretted pushing him.

  Walter moved to the bed and reached for the water glass. He changed his mind and patted Reid's shoulder. “They were close friends?”

  I wondered if Walter was thinking about his own close friendship with Reid. Truncated.

  “Close enough,” Reid said. And then, like he was choking on the words, “If I knew where to tell you to look...”

  “Let's see if we can figure it out, together.” Walter peered at the calendar on the wall, then his focus came back to Reid. “According to your trip permit, you'd been on the river for three days. So you camped two nights. Does that help? Any idea where you tied up the last time—when you ran into trouble? Lunch stop? Or was it later? Found a campsite?”

  Reid, too, glanced at the calendar. “First night... North Canyon.” He appeared to be searching his memory. “Second, near Nankoweap. Beyond that...” He shook his head.

  Beyond that, I thought, is where it counts.

  I said, “Let's come at it another way. The bow line was tangled on the deck, on top of a zipper baggie containing rock chips. We've ID'd them as Tapeats Sandstone. Did you gather them, at that last anchorage?”

  He took a long moment. “I might have.” He took another drink of water. He appeared to be gathering his energy. “Once a geologist, always a geologist.”

  I got that. “Are you practicing now?”

  “I just talk the talk now.”

  “How so?”

  “Show and tell.”

  “Tell who? The other rafters?”

  He nodded.

  “They're geologists?”

  “Fishing buddies.”

  I recalled the tubed fishing poles on the raft.

  “I tell them how the river carved the canyon.” Reid's voice was growing stronger. He managed a half-smile. “I see myself as its champion.”

  “And the Tapeats? Would that be the show part?”

  “If I had it in hand. Props help.”

  “So you do remember?”

  “In general. It's the Grand Canyon. Nuff said.”

  Not quite. “Mind if I spin you a scenario?”

  He raised his good hand. Rubbed his eyes. “I don't think...”

  “I'll make it short. You collect the Tapeats chips, bag them. For show and tell. But it's time to leave. So you go aboard the raft and put on your vest, maybe dropping the baggie. And then...would you be the one to untie the bow line?”

  He gave a strained nod. “I liked to sit bow. Watch for places for my rock talk. So I handled the line.”

  “And the others? Would they be aboard first?”

  He flipped his good hand. “Varies. Like herding cats.”

  “Okay. So you've got the line and for some reason you drop it, onto the deck. Throw it? Some upset on the beach? And the raft drifts away. And you all go in the river to catch it. But you're the only one wearing a vest.”

  Reid had gone pale.

  Walter shot me a warning look.

  I ignored it. “Reid? Could it have happened that way?”

  “I don't know.”

  Walter stepped in. “Reid, I've been thinking something—maybe it will help.”

  Reid turned from me, to Walter.

  “I understand the head injury could have caused your memory trouble. But here's another explanation—and it might explain that upset at the beach.” Walter asked, gently, “Are you still troubled by that that phobogenic reaction to snakes? The amnesia?”

  Reid sucked in long breath. He slowly nodded.

  “Could that be what happened? On the beach? A snake?”

  Reid tried a smile. “If I could remember, I'd tell you.”

  “Well if it was a snake, don't worry. You might recall something, in time.”

  Reid nodded.

  “But don't push it.”

  Reid tried for another smile. “Yes, doctor.”

  And then he closed his eyes.

  REID DOZED OFF AGAIN, for a couple of minutes, and Walter stood gazing out the window. Lost in the past. Conflicted over the present.

  Time to go, I figured.

  I prepared to nudge him but his phone nudged instead.

  He answered, listened, and then said, “I see.”

  Whether it was the phone ringing or Walter's brusque tone, Reid came awake.

  Walter said, gently, “That was Martin Atherton—chief over at Grand Canyon. The SAR team found a rafter, about five miles downriver from where your raft eddied out. From where we found you.”

  Reid whispered, “Alive?”

  “I'm so sorry.” Walter added, carefully. “I believe he was one of yours.”

  Reid's jaw tightened.

  “Not just because of the location. The thing is, Reid, the search team found a baggie of rock chips in a zippered pants pocket.”

  Reid's breathing turned ragged.

  I thought, holy shit. Reid said nothing about collecting other rocks. About fishing buddies collecting rocks. Where? I would have asked, but the heart rate monitor was ramping up and Walter put a hand on my arm again.

  Walter asked. “Those chips? More Tapeats? Something else?”

  Reid made a choking sound, a gasping sound.

  The line on the EKG screen spiked.

  Walter bounded for the door, yelling for help before he got it halfway open.

  I stayed where I was, watching Reid, watching the EKG, prepared if necessary to undertake CPR, but a nurse rushed in before that became necessary. Right on the heels of the nurse was an orderly with a crash cart and then a doctor with her name in script on her lab coat, and I was all but shoved out of the room.

  Just like in the cop shows, I thought.

  CHAPTER NINE

  WE WAITED.

  First, we waited outside Reid's room for Dr. Kosek—a stern woman with a shellac tan and red hair in a tight ponytail—to tell us that Reid was stable. And heavily medicated.

  No more questions.

  We asked for and received Reid's clothing and shoes and PFD, for analysis back at the lab.

  Then we went to the cafeteria and waited for the rafter's body to be airlifted to the county morgue, awaiting notification that we could come collect the zipper baggie of chips.

  While waiting, Walter phoned Superintendent Martin Atherton to tell him that the rafters camped near Nankoweap the second night, to establish the upper boundary of the search area, to pass along to Ranger Molina and the SAR team. Hopefully, they could make a rough estimate of how many river miles the raft could likely have traveled before the ill-fated stop on day three. The discovery of the rafter's body was not going to help with the lower boundary. It had been found about five river miles downstream from where the ghost raft eddied out.

  While waiting, Walter got a call-back from Martin to say that Neely had heard about the discovery of the rafter, and had talked Martin into talking Pete Molina into allowing an HGP interview with the search team.

  I was relieved to hear that the film crew would not be joining us at the morgue.

  While waiting, we ate sesame-seed bagels and cream cheese and bananas and washed that down with tolerable hospital coffee. We'd had a hasty breakfast of power bars and orange juice a couple of hours ago, before leaving our Bright Angel rim cabins, and we were hungry.

  Indeed, the cafeteria was busy with hospital personnel breakfasting.

  Life goes on.

  We made desultory small talk until we ran out of that, and then I said, “It's odd that Reid didn't mention another rock collection.”

  “His memory is impaired.”

  “Yeah.” But he'd seemed to remember collecting the Tapeats. And nothing else? Once a geologist, always a geologist. I regarded my partner, whose face showed the strain of the visit, and decided not to push it.

  Walter stood. “I could do with another
cup of coffee? How about you?”

  I nodded.

  We caffeinated ourselves further, and waited.

  And finally Walter's phone rang.

  WE DROVE THE SHORT distance to the Coconino County Medical Examiner's Office and Morgue. It was a one-story building with a mansard brown roof and yellow stucco walls, that cheery color so popular in Flagstaff.

  Inside, the walls were off-white.

  The attendant at the desk was a smiling young man with a shaved head and tattoo sleeves on both arms—Steve, who had phoned Walter with the summons.

  “Got something new for you,” Steve said. “An ID on the body.”

  I said, “That's fast.”

  “Facebook. I found his page. Well first, I'd had a good look at the deceased's face. So I, uh, called a friend over at the Canyon and got the names from that rafting trip permit, then I went ahead and did a search. Your rafters are on Facebook. Well, except for the guy in the hospital. He didn't have a page.” Steve shook his head. “Who doesn't have a Facebook page?”

  I smiled. “The ID?”

  “His name's Frank Hembry.”

  No further question, then. The rafter was one of Reid's fishing buddies.

  “This way.” Steve led us down a hallway to a closed door.

  He opened it.

  From where we stood, at the doorway, I saw the standard exam room, all bright lights and stainless steel. There was a sheet-covered body on the exam table. Cold air seeped from the room, into the hallway. The air brought the earthy odor of the man on the table.

  Steve turned to us. “You want a look at the deceased?”

  It's not that we hadn't seen death, ugly death. I'd once seen the dead body of a dear friend, whose mouth I had to probe to extract mineral grains. She was laid on the cold metal table. I did the job. But I'd been gutted.

  Here, now, there was no need to look at the deceased.

  Walter said, “We're just here for the contents of the pocket.”

  “Hey, gotcha.” Steve nodded. “Dude's pretty banged up, anyway. Little decomposition underway—some degloving of the hands. You know, the skin. Good news is there wasn't much bloating yet. The current took him into a side eddy where he got tangled up in branches—that's what the report says. So he didn't stay hidden and down long enough for bacteria to really get going and... So. The contents. SAR found the baggie in one of those zippered cargo pockets, you know? It was bulging, so they looked. Found the rocks—kinda weird, huh?”

  We nodded.

  Steve moved into the room and took a padded envelope from a shelf and returned, softly shutting the door.

  When he held out the envelope, I read a tattoo on his inner arm. One word. Vita. Latin, for life.

  “Thank you,” Walter said, taking the envelope.

  “Sure thing. Poor dude. I see them on the table.” Steve hiked a shoulder at the exam room. “I mourn a little. Can't help it.”

  “Nor should you,” Walter said. “Good man.”

  OUTSIDE THE MORGUE, in the sunny parking lot, we eyeballed the Hembry chips and called the gray rock shale. A fully different rock from the chocolate-brown Tapeats Sandstone. This was good. This shale was another data point. Another shot at narrowing the neighborhood we were hunting.

  Further analysis was best done in the lab.

  Walter pushed the speed limit on the drive to the Canyon.

  Back in our rim-cabin lab, Walter set to work examining the clothing and shoes and vest we'd brought from the hospital, on the chance that some telling minerals still adhered. Claiming the job of analyzing his old friend's personal effects.

  Leaving the shale to me.

  I dumped the Hembry chips into a specimen dish. There were seven, as opposed to the twelve Tapeats chips in Reid's baggie. Difference in availability, I presumed. How many are there for the picking up?

  The Hembry chips were bigger, ranging from about forty to sixty millimeters.

  I put one under the scope and began to characterize it. Fine-grained, grains of silt and sand and biotite mica and calcite. A mudstone shale. I used a scalpel to snap off a tiny corner, revealing an unweathered face that was darker gray. That color said the shale was carbonaceous, thanks no doubt to the millions of microscopic animals and plants that had decayed when this mud was beneath an old sea.

  Upon weathering, the shale would lose most of its organic carbon.

  I also noted a few whitish crystallized stringers embedded in the gray matrix. Once this stuff was cemented into rock, and fractured by later mountain building, the fractures were filled by these white minerals.

  The crystals had a translucent rim. I figured I knew what I had here, but to differentiate this white stuff from other white mineral stuff, I did a quick and dirty field test—although I was in the lab and not the field. Sometimes quick and dirty does the job. I chose the largest stringer and raked it with my fingernail, leaving a scratch. Okay then, this stuff was about a two on the Mohs mineral hardness scale, because anything up to a two is soft enough that it can be scratched with a fingernail.

  This was gypsum.

  I gave the Hembry chip a provisional name: gypsiferous shale.

  To confirm, I'd use the XRF.

  First though, I turned to the Park Service collection of Grand Canyon rock samples in search of a comparison.

  I hunted for several minutes.

  And then I got our geologic map of the area and spread it on the coffee table.

  I was puzzled.

  And then surprised.

  I must have made a sound, because Walter glanced at me and I held up a wait-for-it finger and he nodded and went back to his work.

  I opened my laptop and started Googling.

  And then I went back to the map on the table, and then I went back to the chip under my scope. And I said, “Whoa.”

  Walter turned to me. “Whoa, what?”

  I told him.

  He raised his bushy eyebrows. “Are you certain?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That makes no sense.”

  “Yeah.” I added, “You getting anything from Reid's stuff?”

  “Silty river wash.” He grunted. “And not much of it.”

  I went back to work. I put four more Hembry chips under the scope. Three were essentially the same as the first, but the fourth had something new. Striations stood out—marks of a cutting tool. And that made a certain sense, given what was in the matrix of the fourth chip.

  I said, “Whoa. Bigger whoa.”

  This time Walter got up and came over and took his own look through the ocular of my scope. And then he cracked a smile and said, “Follow it.”

  Yeah.

  It took me another couple of hours, all told—during which I used the XRF and failed to find any hidden trace elements. During which Walter phoned Martin Atherton and gave him an update and promised a further update when I'd finished the Hembry analysis, during which we took a break and had a snack of cheese and crackers and pears, neither of us ready to speculate on the surprising Hembry rocks, each of us expectant nevertheless.

  And then my email pinged and I opened it and read and I couldn't help myself, I nearly said whoa yet again but whoa didn't do it justice.

  So I just said, “Holy shit.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  THE OTHERS WERE ALREADY seated in the conference room at Park Service headquarters when Walter and I arrived.

  Superintendent Atherton looked wary. Walter hadn't explained, on the phone, what we'd found. Better face to face, he'd told Martin. I assumed that's what Martin had subsequently told the HGP crew, when he called this meeting.

  So here we all were, face to face.

  Justin wore his skeptic's expression. Edgar sat forward, ready for anything anybody wanted to pitch. Neely wore her winning smile, no doubt because she'd gotten a dramatic interview with the SAR rangers on film.

  That why her laptop sat on the table? Ready to show off a segment for Lost Rafters?

  That story was about to get stranger.
<
br />   I felt the specimen dish of shale chips weighing down the cargo pocket of my pants. I glanced at the rock tower at the far end of the otherwise utilitarian room, which said this is headquarters of Grand Canyon National Park. I'd admired it when we first arrived at the Canyon and gathered here with HGP and the superintendent.

  The rock tower was going to make a good prop, I suddenly thought. My own show and tell.

  Martin beckoned us inside. He was a tall thin man with a narrow face and white hair that cascaded over his forehead. He put me in mind of a tall hunting bird, perhaps a snowy egret. He waited until we took seats and then he asked, “Do those Hembry rocks tell us what we need to know?”

  Walter answered. “No.”

  Martin's tall thin frame slumped.

  Neely jumped in. “Then where do we go from here?”

  “To a ground rule,” Walter said.

  Neely cocked her head.

  “Reid Lassen's 'death'—off limits.”

  “Walter! Don't you want to know what happened?”

  “Not on film.”

  “SAY YOU'RE MAKING AN omelette.” Neely rested her elbow on the pine-veneer conference table and anchored her chin with her thumb and forefinger. It was her let's-think-outside-the-box look. She leveled her gaze at Walter.

  Walter folded his arms.

  “And then,” she continued, “someone comes into the kitchen and presents you with a lovely black Perigord truffle. Are you going to continue with the cheese omelette in progress? Or are you going to saute that truffle and lift your omelette to the next level?”

  Damn me, my stomach growled. It was in the neighborhood of dinner time and the only edibles on the table were raisins and peanuts and chocolate-covered almonds. Trail food.

  I said, “What's wrong with a cheese omelette?”

  She turned to me. “Nothing's wrong...until you see that truffle. Wrong would be to leave it on the kitchen counter.”