In the Heart of the Canyon (27 page)

“Now wouldja look at that kid?” Mitchell said.

“Who?”

“Sam!”

Amy glanced at the paddle boat, where Sam had taken up the middle post, right behind Peter. Sam was sitting up straight, alert as a soldier. His shirt cuffs were buttoned, and his chin strap looked tight enough to choke his skinny adolescent neck.

“A far cry from the boy who lost his sandal the first day, don’t you think?” Mitchell asked. “I’m actually glad he got to paddle today. He’ll remember this run for the rest of his life. And boy, will he have earned bragging rights back home.”

Amy was tempted, for one second, to take a picture of Sam and Peter. But she didn’t want JT to know that she had her camera out. And she didn’t want Mitchell to know, either, lest he request that she take his picture. She couldn’t say why, but she felt that an authorized photo would lack meaning and value. It had to be taken on the sly.

She mentally planned out the composition of the picture. She wanted to catch Mitchell at his most alert, maybe a silhouette of his head, with all that foamy water in the background. She felt the silhouette angle would capture his pomp. Man at the Prow. Captain Mitchell. Maybe they could photoshop a different hat on his head. What would John Wesley Powell have worn?

The oarlocks creaked as JT rowed away from shore. Abo’s boat was up ahead, Dixie’s behind. Far above, on the hot rocks, another set of scouters gazed down. Now Abo’s boat began to pick up speed, and suddenly Abo gave a shout. Six torsos shot forward. Paddles flashed. The boat dipped down, nosed up, then rocked dangerously to one side
before disappearing into the ocean of froth below. Amy couldn’t tell if they were safe or not. And she couldn’t hear anything because the roar of the water was increasing exponentially. She wondered how JT would know if Abo had had a safe run or not, before it was their own turn.

Which it was, now. Amy crouched lower. She could see nothing but silky dark water, yet the roaring was just below, and it grew more deafening with each passing second. The fact that there was no turning back, that they could only go forward—that they were now committed to the run, like it or not—suddenly seemed profound to Amy, and she felt as though the river was sharing some ancient, simple secret with her, one that only those who’d slid down the tongue into this particular rapid could comprehend.

Next to her, the dog panted a happy dog grin from between Mitchell’s clenched knees. Amy glanced up at Mitchell. She should take the picture now, she realized, before they dropped. And it was a perfect shot: Mitchell’s small head topping a vastly distorted orange life jacket.

They were picking up speed, and Amy knew she had only seconds to take the picture. With a flick of her wrist, she caught the camera in her hand and scooched down further. She squinted through the viewfinder.

It was, indeed, going to be a perfect shot.

Later, JT would ask himself if he’d left something out of his safety instructions. Did he not tell them all to hold on? With both hands? Tight?

And wouldn’t a normal, reasonable person put it together that unless you had three hands, you couldn’t simultaneously hold on with both hands and take a picture?

Did he have to spell everything out?

It happened to Ruth every time in Lava: that primal, gargly scream coming from the bottom of her belly as the V-wave came crashing down upon her. It was cold and powerful and right on target, a free-standing
waterfall in the middle of the river. She just screamed and screamed and screamed, and then remembered to pick up the bucket and bail.

Mitchell was squeezing the dog between his knees so hard that he thought he was going to crush the poor animal. Still, with that first big downward lurch, he was unable to keep the dog from skidding out of his grip when he shifted his feet to keep his balance.

He never even saw the dog go over.

S
usan was so thrilled to be a member of the paddle team for Lava that she forgot to give Amy the customary hug before they boarded their separate boats. By the time she remembered, the lip of the rapid was fast approaching, and she scolded herself for being superstitious. A mother’s hug wasn’t going to keep Amy safe at this point. Amy was going to keep herself safe.

Beyond the lip, the water dropped off into a mad, boiling sea. Sitting in the front left, Susan wedged her foot into the footcup and watched Peter, who was sitting across, for the slightest twitch—for although in theory she expected to hear Abo’s commands herself, she trusted her eyes more than her ears.

Nevertheless she heard Abo’s first command loud and clear.

“Forward!” he shouted, and in one smooth motion Susan dug her paddle deep into the last bit of sinuous black water. They hit the first wall of backwash, which left them jabbing blindly with their paddles. Okay, Susan thought. We can manage this.

And then the boat plummeted straight down into the deluge of the V-wave.

In all the other big rapids, they’d been able to plow straight through the waves. But Lava’s V-wave captured them in its curl. Oceans of water poured down upon them. Susan screamed as the force seemed to erode her flesh. They didn’t go forward or backward; nothing moved, and everything moved. She felt utterly useless; the one time she probed with her paddle, the force yanked it back, so rather than risk losing her paddle or getting her arm torn from its socket, she clutched the shaft and hunkered down and didn’t even bother to try.

“Don’t let up! Come on! Hard forward!” Abo yelled. His voice came
from high above, as though he were standing over her—and maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t, Susan had no way of knowing whether the boat was pointed up or down or level. Then they slammed into something and the V-wave lessened; now the water merely sloshed over her shoulders. The boat pitched again, and Susan felt her foot get wrenched from its cup. Frantically she wedged it back in.

“Keep going!” Abo yelled. “Hard forward!”

And then, drawing on some reserve that she didn’t know she had, Susan straightened up and dug down with her paddle one more time, taking the next blast head-on, and found that by doing so she regained both her balance and composure. Again and again she dug her paddle deep into the oncoming waves, and at some point, she felt the resistance that told her that her paddle was catching; she was helping to steer the boat, to propel them out of the chaos and into the smooth black current where it was calm.

A collective cheer rose up.

“Fucking Maid of the Mist!” shouted Abo, standing and jouncing the boat like a child. “You guys are awesome!”

“I thought I was going to drown!” Sam crowed.

“That’s one heck of a lot of water,” Mark observed.

“Buckets!” Evelyn cried. “Buckets and buckets and buckets!”

Breathlessly Susan searched upstream. From where they were now, Lava looked like the open spillway of a vast industrial dam. Had they really paddled through all that?

Sam was asking if they could drag the boat up and run it again.

“Sure we can,” said Abo. “Long as you do the loading and unloading.”

“Seriously?” said Sam.

“I’m never serious, Sam. Haven’t you learned that by now? Everybody watch JT,” said Abo.

Their amusement park hilarity fell silent as they watched JT’s boat vanish into the curl of the V-wave. It reared up, then disappeared again. All they could see was the occasional flash of an orange life vest. Hang on, Amy, Susan thought.

Then like a beast JT’s boat rose up out of the froth, water draining
off all around, and there was JT half-sitting and half-standing as he struggled with the oars.

“What’s he yelling?” asked Evelyn.

Susan couldn’t hear anything. Upstream, scouters were racing down the path to the water’s edge. Suddenly there was a thump and clatter in the back of the boat as Abo dropped to his seat.

“SWIMMER!” he shouted. “Paddles in the water! Move it!”

“Who is it?” shrieked Sam.

Susan tried to locate Amy by her pink hat. JT’s boat was bucking so much she couldn’t see anything.

“Forward! Left turn! Stop! Goddamn it! Left again! Follow Peter, you guys, come on! Forward! Stop!”

The contradictory directions came so rapidly that, try as she might, Susan couldn’t keep up. In fact, nobody could coordinate any kind of group effort at all. They needed to break out of the eddy fence, that boundary between upstream and downstream currents, which in this case was sharp and distinct, two rivers scraping by each another in opposite directions. But their paddling was clumsy, and every time they neared the edge, they got caught and dragged back upriver. She kept trying to get a glimpse of JT’s boat, to make sure Amy was safe.

“Don’t watch JT!” Abo shouted. “Just paddle! Come on! Put some more juice into it!”

Somehow, somewhere, they found a collective burst of energy, and in three communal strokes, they broke through. The boat shot forward and swung around, and they were headed downstream. Gone was their elation. They were on the biggest river in the world, and someone had fallen overboard, and Susan was doing a pretty good job convincing herself that it wasn’t Amy; it was probably Ruth or Lloyd, who were old and infirm and had misjudged their capacity for strength—

Until she saw the flash of pink, bobbing in the water less than twenty feet away.

Peter saw it too. He leaned over and extended his paddle out as far as he could, and with a bit of maneuvering, he caught Amy’s cap on the fat wooden blade and swung it around and dropped it on the pile of gear in the middle of the paddle boat.

T
he main thing Amy was aware of when she slid off the boat was the sudden cessation of earthly noise. Everywhere there were bubbles: gray and white, big and small, spinning like another galaxy all around her. She felt somebody grab her ankle, skin against skin; then, whoever it was let go, and she flailed some more and managed to bob up to the surface. The boat, however, was gone. She looked this way and that and tried not to panic.

Then, right smack in front of her, two stories high and wide as a city block, loomed a giant wall of water.

Down she went, tumbling and swirling and spinning into a cauldron of darkness. She felt like Alice going down the rabbit hole. She had no idea which way was up and which way was down; she felt her shin hit something sharp and saw a flash of yellow. Something punched her in the stomach, then it swung her around and punched her in the back. She needed air, but only once did she surface into that sea of sloppy waves, gasping and swallowing water before getting sucked down again. Without any air, her lungs felt shredded, the emptiness so excruciatingly painful that she would have sucked in anything—water, air, light, the vapors of Mercury—just to fill them up and erase the pain.

This is it
.

I cannot hold-my breath any longer
.

She was all set to give in to the urge, to breathe in gallons of cold, dark water, when some force grabbed both of her feet, spun her around and around, and in doing so sucked her down where no human being had been before. This was no rabbit hole; this was the inside of the inside, deep and dark and bottomless. And at that point, her initial
panic gave way to terror, as a spidery black creature muscled its long tentacles around her tiny body.

This is what its like to die, she marveled.

What happened next, she would never know. Maybe it was a fractal of light. Maybe it was a lone bubble that happened to catch under her chin on its way to the surface. Whatever it was, the water turned gray instead of black, and then it turned white instead of gray. Oblivious to the pain in her lungs and her gut and her leg and now her head as well, Amy kicked and flailed and pulled at the water and finally broke through the surface, where the ragged, enginelike bray that filled her ears seemed to come from a herd of wild animals, rather than from her own windpipe as she sucked down that first lungful of silvery bright air.

Nothing would ever, ever taste so sweet.

Only after filling her lungs repeatedly did she remember JT’s instructions that first day.
Look for the boat
, he’d told them;
put your feet up and lean back
, and so she looked for the boat. She looked for
any
boat but saw nothing except a blurry-looking shoreline that tilted one way and then another. Another wave sloshed over her, and she panicked that she was going back under again. But it was a little wave in comparison, and she stayed above water, sculling and riding the giant waves: this was one time when it helped to be so fat, another time being in the Minnow class at swim lessons and everyone saying,
Look at Amy float, it’s so easy for her
, and Amy feeling proud, she was only seven and didn’t have any clue what was making it so easy for her, but of course her mother did, and her mother looked embarrassed—

A flash of red.

It vanished, then loomed up beside her face. A silver paddle, a black-gloved hand, a white beard beneath a yellow helmet. He was yelling something, tipping and sloshing, and she couldn’t understand. Then his hand grabbed hers and folded it over a knotted lump, and she found the power within herself to hang on, and they were slicing through the ocean, and the shoreline stopped tilting, and the fat white tubes of a raft appeared just as a gaggle of hands reached for her life jacket and pulled, pulled harder, and finally hauled her up over the
tubes, letting her slop down into the soupy well of the boat, where among the buckets and the straps and the Nalgenes and a floating tube of sunscreen and a cluster of hairy ankles, she lifted her head and began to cough.

And didn’t stop coughing, it seemed, through all that was yet to come.

B
elow Lava, on the right side of the river, lies a long sandy beach. Often river runners will pull in here, stoked high on the rush of running Lava; they might finally eat the lunch they couldn’t seem to manage earlier, or pop a beer as they recounted their twenty-second, adrenaline-laced ride.

But there was no middle-of-the-day beer drinking in JT’s party that day. The guides beached their boats and hammered their stakes, and everyone else unzipped their life jackets and tried, though it was not possible, to stop the ringing in their ears.