In the Heart of the Canyon (21 page)

And as they swirled downstream, Amy twisted around to mouth the words “Oh my god.” JT managed to steady his boat, and they watched Abo and his paddlers narrowly skirt the hole, all six wooden paddles jabbing randomly in the froth, and then Dixie ran it exactly as he had, coming a little too close to the wall, but everyone made it through safely, and JT allowed himself the thought that they were going to have good, safe, fun runs all day long today; luck was on their side, the sun was hot, and the water was fine, and he could already hear Dixie playing her guitar under the starry sky tonight, when it was all behind them.

Amy knew it was the wuss boat, with Ruth and Lloyd in the back and herself up front. She told herself it didn’t really matter. And she was able to believe that, until she looked over at the paddle boat after they ran Granite and saw that Abo had handed out whimsical hats, colorful foam visors in the forms of ducks, frogs, and birds; at which point she could no longer deny that they’d been chosen as an exclusive little club, and she wasn’t in it. She’d been allocated like a meat cooler.

Amy stroked the dog’s ears. She told herself not to dwell on it. And she reminded herself that even if she’d been chosen for the paddle boat, she might have had to decline, for her stomach was still bothering her. She started to open up her day bag for the Tums, but JT warned that they were coming up on Hermit. Was Hermit the one with the wave train? What exactly
was
a wave train? She looked downriver to see a long chevron of white water. She hugged the dog tightly, ready for what lay ahead. She wanted the ride of a lifetime.

But instead of heading straight into the rapid, JT angled the boat, and Amy found that they were skirting all the big waves. She looked back in disbelief. Did JT mean to do that? Then she looked over and saw the paddle boat, the A Team, taking it right down the middle, bucking through the giant waves, whooping and screaming as they
rose and fell; she looked back at Ruth and Lloyd and realized: of course JT meant to take this route.

Wuss boat, she thought. Gramma boat.

But Amy was good at putting things behind her. She’d done her job this morning by keeping the dog in the boat, and she reminded herself that silly hats didn’t make an A Team. She thought of high school and how it was full of A Teams and B Teams, and it seemed to her that being here, deep in the heart of the Grand Canyon, she could certainly escape that high school habit of classifying everyone. Where else would it have such
little
relevance, as down here?

They ran another rapid, and then she saw that JT was steering the boat toward a rocky debris fan on the right. Across the river, jagged cliffs rose out of the water, glossy black, shot through with glittering veins of pink granite. Second by second, the volume of the roar rose, doubling upon itself until it had drowned out all other sound.

“Is this Crystal?” she shouted to JT.

But JT was already out of the boat, looping his line around a rock to anchor the boat.

“Keep your life jackets on,” he instructed everyone as the other two boats pulled in. “Anyone wants to take a quick scout, follow me. Hey. Dog. C’meer.” He slipped a rope through the dog’s bandanna.

The paddlers clattered out of their boat. “Hey, honey!” Susan exclaimed. “How’d it go?”

In the wuss boat?
“Fine,” Amy replied.

“Wasn’t Hermit a blast?”

No. We skipped Hermit. Because we’re the WUSS BOAT
. “Hermit was cool,” she said.

“Let’s not dawdle,” said JT, and he led them up through prickly brush that clawed at her legs. When they reached the edge of the overlook, Amy followed JT’s gaze. Large rocky snags tore the river apart, shredding it into long fingers of white water. How did the guides tell one section of chaos from another?

“… punch on through and keep hugging the right,” JT was telling
Dixie. He had one arm around her and was pointing with the other. “There’s your marker. Stern first.”

“Could you fill us all in?” Mitchell asked.

The plan, JT explained, was for a run down the right side, where the water was not so rough. This meant avoiding the entry tongue that angled off to the left at the top of the rapid—for the tongue would carry you straight down into the Hole. Which was not where you wanted to go.

“Why don’t we just hug the shoreline?” Evelyn asked.

“Because it’s not a quiet shoreline,” JT replied, “and if you actually
hit
the shoreline, you could ricochet off, and one of those diagonals will take you into the Hole.” The safest route at this water level, he explained, was through a narrow channel that ran to the right of the Hole but avoided the shore.

“That’s the plan, at least,” he finished with a grin.

“Where’s this Hole you keep talking about?” Amy asked.

JT pointed. Amy searched, but still, the whole river looked wild and messy and mean below that first drop-off—until she realized that that
was
the Hole; she was looking straight at it, a gaping cavity where the water rolled back upon itself, a geological vortex that could swallow you in a second.

For the first time on the river, Amy was able to picture, clearly, how very small she would be, at the bottom of that vortex.

The plan was for Dixie to run it first, and then Abo. JT would go last, running rescue if needed.

He sculled with his oars and watched the two boats ahead of them. “There she goes,” he murmured, watching Dixie’s boat pick up speed. The boat pivoted and cut to the right and then vanished into the waves. Fifteen seconds later, it bobbed up at the bottom of the rapid, all passengers on board. Dixie stood up and waved.

JT maneuvered his oars to steady their direction. “Okay, Abo,” he murmured, “show your stuff,” and now the paddle boat followed in Dixie’s wake, with Abo in back sitting up so straight that he seemed to have grown an extra few inches. He dragged his paddle, angling it now
and then, and the paddlers stroked calmly, and then suddenly Abo gave a shout and up front Peter shot forward from the hips, the others quick to follow: torsos, arms, and paddles all moving in synchrony to guide the boat down along the right side of the river, disappearing and then emerging from the spray to join Dixie at the bottom. Over the din of the rapid, Amy heard faint whoops and hollers.

JT braced his feet. “Okay, guys. This is it. Hold on tight. Amy, got the dog?”

All around, skirmishes danced on the surface, and everything seemed pretty harmless—until Amy looked over and saw the long lean muscle of water broaden slightly and then drop off at a sharp angle, down into a huge ragged pocket of foaming backwash, a monstrous upstream wave that had probably been breaking nonstop ever since the first flood rolled the giant rocks into the river. It was twenty feet wide and who knew how deep, bigger than anything she could have imagined from shore, and she knew in an instant just what all the fuss was about.

The boat rocked to one side. A wave splatted against her shoulder. They were cruising close to shore now, but everything was racing by, a blur out of the corner of her eye. She tightened her grip on the dog.

And then maybe the river relaxed. Maybe JT overcompensated for something. But in the middle of one of his heaves, they broadsided a great ridge of water that drenched them. Amy crouched and with her free hand tried to wipe her lenses. Then there was a sharp jolt from below as they snagged on something—something hard, because Amy could feel it under her knee. The boat buckled, and water began pouring in over the tubes.

“Highside!” JT yelled, struggling to hold on to his oars. “Amy! HIGHSIDE!”

Amy lurched forward—or up: it was hard to tell with the boat rising at a forty-five-degree angle. Her foot slipped, and she heard the squeak of rubber as she sprawled forward. She tried to get a foot brace but couldn’t find anything firm except the downside tube—and if she pushed against that, it would bring in more water.

“Highside!” JT kept yelling. “Get up there!” Ruth scuttled across to
join Lloyd, but JT waved her back. “Stay where you are!” he shouted to Ruth. “AMY! HIGHSIDE! NOW!” Amy grasped the chickenline and pulled with all her might, but she simply couldn’t move, and the boat continued to rise.

“The dog!” Ruth cried.

Then Amy heard a clunk as JT dropped his oars. In a flash he scrambled up, braced his feet against the pile of gear, and leaned forward to grab the shoulders of Amy’s life jacket. He gave a swift yank, and at the same time her feet found the edge of something firm. The next thing she knew, she lay sprawled on top of JT. Their hats knocked brims, and she was afraid she was going to crush him, but he squirmed and wiggled them up over the tube as far as he could. Now she was looking straight down into rushing water—water that suddenly came looming toward her as the boat dropped and leveled out.

And that was all, basically, that Amy remembered of Crystal. She wasn’t aware of JT scrambling back to his seat. She didn’t hear Lloyd hollering gibberish. She was only aware of ducking down into the damp well of the boat as they thrashed about, with someone’s dirty socks floating loose, water bottles dangling, a pair of Teva sandals swinging from their clip.

Then all the thrashing stopped. The boat kept spinning; dizzily she peered over the edge into calm, blue-black water. They glided up to the other boats, and the guides all stared at one another. Then they burst into laughter.

“How did
that
happen?” Dixie exclaimed.

“I was sure you guys were gone,” Abo declared. “I told my paddlers, ‘They’re gone. They’re toast. They’re history, folks.’ Dude,” and he shook his head. “You were two feet from the Hole!”

Amy whipped around. “Where’s the dog?”

“I’ve got him,” Ruth called out. There he was, plastered against Ruth’s leg, panting happily.

JT picked up his water jug and drank deeply. “The water got squirrely on me,” he marveled. “Then I hit that rock.”

“What rock?” said Dixie.

“Well, it sure felt like a rock,” said JT.

“Your hat, doll,” said Abo, tossing Amy her pink baseball cap. She caught it and put it on and wished she could vanish, for she had just figured it out. It was
her
weight that caused the boat to snag,
her
weight that made them tilt. Any minute JT was going to start yelling at her, for being such a FAT PIG. They should never have allowed her to come on this trip in the first place.

As if on cue, JT asked her how she was doing.

“I’m sorry. I couldn’t get a grip,” she said meekly.

“Hey You did great.”

“No, I didn’t!” Amy exclaimed. “I almost made us flip!”

JT shrugged dismissively “It’s never one person’s fault.”

It was in this case
, Amy wanted to say. And she flashed back on the image of her lying on top of JT—smooshing him, really, all 237 pounds of her; of burying her face against his neck for the briefest of moments (warm skin, creased and tacky and smelling of maple); and she thought that he was an awfully good man, a better man than any she had ever met, the kind of man she hoped one day would see her for the person she was, underneath all this flab.

I
t astonished Peter how easy it had been for Abo to get laid last night. Pretty girl shows up on the river and boom, off she goes with the paddle captain. He saw it with his own eyes, Abo heading upriver after everyone else had gone to bed. Was this their first time? Or had they already slept together?

Peter sensed there was an awful lot of sex in the life of a river guide. Probably every time you went down the river, you fell in love with someone and had a lot of great sex. It occurred to him that he might inquire, while he was here, about getting his guide’s license. It couldn’t be all that hard; the way he saw it, you simply made friends with gravity and let the water do the work.

It was early evening on the day they’d run Crystal, and Peter and Amy were, at the moment, sitting on the edge of Dixie’s boat, drinking beer and listening in as the guides talked about their day in the Big Ones. Peter could barely keep his eyes off Dixie, who was twisting herself into a pretzel on the side tube. Her blue sarong lay crumpled in the well. Peter wondered, were he to get a sunburn, if Dixie might lend him that blue sarong to drape over his shoulders.

“So are we stopping at Shinumo tomorrow?” Abo asked.

“That’s the plan,” said JT. He was wearing a pair of black drugstore glasses, which sat crookedly on his nose as he made notes in a three-ring binder. “Everybody loves a waterfall.”

“Prime Christmas photo op.” Dixie untangled her limbs and popped open a can of Olympia, nearly causing Peter to swoon. Eyes closed, can tilted to her lips, a quick sparkle of lager—Dixie was the girl on a greeting card he’d received long ago. He felt like God had just invented the five senses, for him alone.

“How much you want to bet we get a card from the Compsons next Christmas,” said Abo, “all four of them, standing in front of Shinumo Falls.”

“Maybe Mitchell would like to take another group photo,” Dixie suggested, which prompted a chuckle from JT and Abo.

JT twisted back to Peter and Amy. “Cover your ears,” he told them.

“Lemme ask you,” Abo said. “Is Mitchell really writing a book? Because if he is, I’m worried. What if I’m in it? What’s he going to say about me?”

“He’ll say you drink too much,” said Dixie. She turned on her side and began doing leg lifts. Peter had to use all the self-restraint he could muster not to look at the hollow at the top of her thigh.

“You think I drink too much, Boss?”

“Only after Crystal and Lava,” JT replied.

“Oh! Well, then it doesn’t count,” said Abo, opening another beer. “Peter. Amy. Catch,” and he tossed a can to each of them.

“Mitchell drinks a lot of gin,” Amy volunteered.

“We know,” said all three guides in unison.

“And he doesn’t share,” Abo grumbled.

“Okay, Abo,” JT said. “That’s enough.”

“I’m just saying.”

“Zip it.”

“We don’t mind,” Peter said.

“Well, I do,” said JT.

“Speak of the devil,” said Dixie.

Up on the beach, Mitchell and Mark were doing push-ups, clapping between lifts.