The River at Night(29)

He looked across the vast, humming river and laughed. “A bathtub! This is called riffle, if you need to call it something. It’s just fast, shallow water.”

Rachel picked up her oar, hefted it. “What about all this rain we’ve been having?”

“It’ll affect things, definitely. We’ll have to keep our heads up.”

She shaded her eyes with her hands as she looked at him. Stray coils of hair popped loose from her short ponytail, framing her face. “How many times did you say you’ve been down this river?”

“This’ll be my fifth run. I know it inside out.” He took a swig of Gatorade. “Anybody besides me know CPR, have first-aid experience?”

“I’m an ER RN,” Rachel said, fastening an elastic strap over the temples of her glasses. “Remember?”

“Right. Good to know.”

The sun beat down on us. My life jacket felt heavy and hot, and I started to get a little queasy. I could taste the processed pancake flavor in my mouth.

Rory dug around in one of the dry bags, pulled out a map, and laid it on the ground. We all gathered and knelt by it, studying it. It looked homemade, just a legal-size piece of paper, something printed off Google Maps and laminated. The river burst out of the top right corner, a fat blue line that narrowed as it turned and twisted diagonally across the paper, widening just before it continued off the page and forever, as far as I could tell. Squiggly green lines marked off elevations surrounding the river. No towns were marked.

Places along the river had been inked in with a steady hand. The Tooth marked a point where the river narrowed the first time; a few turns later a red X indicated The Hungry Mother (someone had crossed out the word fucker after Mother), followed by The Royal Flush, Satan’s Staircase, and—where the river grew wide—The Willows.

Rory snapped his head back and grinned, a signature cocky move that was beginning to wear on me. “Came up with those names myself. What do you ladies think?”

Pia laughed. “They’re awesome,” she said, her shoulder now grazing his. Perhaps he only moved in an effort to keep the map flattened on the ground, but he pulled away from her and dropped his finger on the top right corner of it, where the river was the fattest.

“We’re here. Today we travel . . .” His finger traced the blue line around the first narrowing, the Tooth; the second, the Hungry Mother; and third and twistiest of all, the Royal Flush. “Fifteen miles altogether. The Tooth and the Mother will be tricky but okay. I’m not sure about the Flush. We’ll scout it first, then we’ll either run it or portage. We take out around here tonight.” He jabbed at a place a third of the way across the map. “We set up there, camp. In the morning it starts out easy. There’s a long, calm five or six miles. It’ll feel like the Mississippi, but then it’ll narrow and get fast again around here.” He pointed at Satan’s Staircase.

“I don’t like the sound of that,” Sandra said.

“It’s a series of drops. Not bad. You guys’ll be old pros by then. In fact the extra water might help us in this case. Smooth it out.”

Personally, I was having trouble with the Hungry Motherfucker and the Tooth, but I kept my mouth shut.

“After the Staircase, there’s a lot of smaller rapids I didn’t bother to name, three, four miles. Some shallows, some swamp, some rime, like where we are now. We take out and camp at this place I call the Willows because there’s this grove of them. Really beautiful. On Monday we glide on down to our takeout, a mile or so, which is here.” He pointed toward the bottom left corner where a smiley face was drawn in. “My dad’ll be waiting for us with plenty of cold beers and tons of food.”

“I have one more question,” Rachel said as she got to her feet and brushed the dirt off her clothes. “Why are you hiding your gun from us?”

“Rachel, he’s not—” Sandra started.

Rachel held out her hand for silence. “Let him talk.”

Rory’s puppyish mood vanished. He ripped at the Velcro on one of the corner pockets of the dry box, pulled out a hard leather case, and opened it up. A pistol was strapped to one side while rows of handgun magazines filled the other.

Rachel frowned. “Still doesn’t seem necessary—”

He shut the case, slipped it back into the dry box. “It would be pretty fucking stupid to be out in these woods without a weapon.”

“All we’ve seen are raccoons and chipmunks.”

He snapped his life jacket closed, tugged hard on the straps to adjust it. “Just because you can’t see animals doesn’t mean they aren’t out there, watching. Smelling you. Moose? Bear? Wolves? They know we’re here. They’re watching us now.”

I felt my breakfast ripple up my throat. I barely made it up the bank and into the woods before it all came out of me, the bits of orange, blobs of pancake, all awash in syrupy-coffee bile. It was pure terror, I knew it. The sun baked the back of my neck as I heaved again, till nothing was left.

I felt a soft hand on my back.

“Are you okay?” Sandra handed me her water bottle. I took a swig, swirled out my disgusting mouth; spat.

I stared into the wall of trees, at the hidden creatures watching us. “I can’t do this. We’re not even talking to each other. It’s not safe.”