The River at Night(38)

“Yes, we can.”

I couldn’t help recalling a remark Rory had made earlier in the day as he was loading up the raft, something like You can carry a lot in a raft if you’re smart about it. I had a feeling this wasn’t what he meant.

“I’m getting really cold,” Sandra said. We all turned to look at her. Her lips were purplish, and she was white as paper against the gravelly beach. Of all of us, she was the most sensitive to cold, wrapped in a sweater even on the warmest days. We gathered around her. Rachel and I knelt on either side, massaging her arms and shoulders. Pia sat at her feet and rubbed and slapped at Sandra’s legs, then helped her take off her water shoes and nestled her feet in her armpits.

“This can’t happen,” I said. “We have to stay warm.”

Sandra nodded, teeth chattering. Rachel took off her own vest and covered her with it.

“Is that better, Loo?” I asked.

She nodded. “I’m okay.”

“All right,” Rachel said. “Let’s go take care of Rory. Then we have to find a way to live through the night.”





23


I’ll never know why I was assigned this position, but it was me who supported Rory’s head as we dragged his body up the bank from the beach. His rough braids, heavy with river water, draped across my forearms as I cradled his head in my hands. The weight of it stunned me. Pia, her emotions passed or suppressed or just saved for later, grimaced with her load, her long arms encircling his wide chest. Rachel and Sandra each grappled with a leg, but no matter how much we heaved and maneuvered, reassigning body parts and weight loads every couple of yards, one of his arms dragged through the ferns behind us.

We laid him down at the crest of the bank, on a shaded, flattish area where we guessed the ground to be a bit softer. The fact that we now overlooked the spot where he died was lost on none of us, I believe, but at least he was above it, on dry land.

“So now what?” I said, placing his head as gently as I could on the dirt. Picking it up again was beyond imagining.

“Now we dig,” Rachel said.

“With what?” Sandra said softly.

The act of moving him had worked down the orange shorts a bit at his groin, where under the fabric his penis arced and pointed toward his right leg, now bent as if he were leaping over something. We all stared at a fresh-looking tattoo of a winged, arrow-pierced heart with R&A etched in baroque letters just above the first few curls of pubic hair.

“This isn’t right,” Pia said. “We can’t bury him here.”

“He’s dead, Pia. It was an accident.” Rachel gingerly straightened both his legs. “We bury him here. For now.”

“There’s no way I’m going to—”

“We have to put him where the animals can’t get him.”

Pia covered her mouth and blinked. Sandra reached up and patted her shoulder. I’m not sure Pia felt it.

“We’ll mark it with rocks or something, leave something tied to a tree by the river so we can find this place again.”

“Pia,” I said as gently as I could. It came out as a whisper. “It makes sense.”

She didn’t answer, but we made our hands into claws and scratched into the earth next to him, which got us only an inch or two down before roots and small stones made it impossible to continue. I took off my helmet and used the edge to scrape a deeper hole—we all tried—and made a bit more progress. Pia slipped her belt out of her shorts and scraped at the ground with the buckle. In the end we had a Rory-length and -width depression in the dirt, serving-platter-deep, and maneuvered him into it, painstakingly keeping him faceup per Pia’s insistence.

“Hold on,” Rachel said. “We should take his vest.”

“No,” Pia said.

“We need everything we have to keep warm.”

“This is fucked,” Pia said under her breath, but helped us roll him side to side to free the vest from one arm, then the other, before we settled him back down, arranging his arms by his sides. His skin felt chilled now, like the river. Nothing we wanted to touch. His fingers had started to curl, as if in a death-slow attempt to hold on.

We split up to gather rocks and pine boughs, whatever we could find to cover him. Thorn-studded brush lacerated our shins, but moving helped us keep warm. Sandra, now wearing Rory’s life vest over her own, found a couple of logs that she dragged up the bank and arranged alongside him. Rachel assigned me to build a cairn on the river to mark the spot.

As I stepped from rock to rock lugging stones to pile far enough out in the river to be seen, something tan and white twitched in the leaves near the bank. A young buck stepped delicately into a shallow eddy, glanced at me as if I were nothing, then dropped its velvet-antlered head to drink. The rocks shifted in my arms; I dropped one. Before I took another breath, the buck had turned to run, hooves clattering on river stones, before it crashed into the brush with a flash of its white tail.

As I balanced the last rock on top of the cairn, I remembered with a swoon the chocolate I’d bought at the store and stashed in one of the zippered compartments of my life vest. I took it out. Examined my prize. A froggy miniature Mr. Goodbar, half out of its wrapper. I ate it quickly, facing away from the bank, as if someone were watching me. A profound thirst followed. Head down, I hurried back to the shore.