The River at Night(59)

But really, as fast as we were moving, we hadn’t seen anything yet. We hit another bend, swung around sharp, dropped down. The river began to seethe and boil with newfound energy. It felt malevolent, like it knew all our private terrors, like it relished just what a raw hand it was about to deal us. Rachel’s eyes grew wild; I knew her dread was even worse than ours—we could at least see what was barreling toward us. Rory had told us to always head into the rapids, but the idea seemed nuts. The mineral taste of water filled my mouth.

An island sprang up before us, this angry knot of crags and nested sticks like spears sticking out, and the river—we could feel it—wanted to impale us there. We moved toward it as if notched into a groove and shot forward by unseen hands. Pia scrambled to her knees and held out the oar. It hit me that she had some shit-crazy idea of knocking us away from the thing.

“Pia, stay down!” I yelled, but she didn’t listen or hear. The oar caught in the fist of rock, and the butt of it slammed back into her chest. She screamed, fell back, and rolled to the edge, one leg fully in the water, spray flying up at us. We spun around and hurtled on past the island.

“Wini!” she shrieked, her eyes sick with fear as I caught her arm and held on with nothing to brace me. Rachel grabbed my waistband with one hand, a rope with the other, heels jammed into the wood as I wrestled gravity and centrifugal force to drag Pia back onto the raft. My shoulders nearly wrenched from their sockets, but by God I had her, pulled her up hand over hand till I caught at her belt and heaved her toward me with a strength foreign to me. Pia tucked her legs up to her chest, rolled over to Rachel, and curled in a ball, shaking.

“Are you hurt?”

“I don’t know,” she cried as she struggled to get back up. She said something else, but the river erased her words.

“Get down!” I screamed. “Forget the oar!”

We huddled together as the raft spun again and nausea flooded me. I vomited hot bile between my knees while Pia moaned next to me. Dense forest receded from either side of the river as walls of pocked, chalky stone rose to replace it. The water lightened as the remaining sun reflected off the now-rocky bottom. The river quickened over it, as if encouraged by the smoothness to race even faster. Our view of the sky became a narrow cerulean corridor as the walls of the canyon continued to rise.

In minutes, the vertical bluffs cast their shadows across us and our sunlight vanished. As if fed by gloom, the water rumbled under the raft, foaming even between its logs, which had begun to loosen in their ties. Sound meshed together and echoed from everywhere, louder than our thoughts. We seemed to be sliding down a ramp over unseen boulders; I had a moment of hope that the water had become deep enough that we wouldn’t hit anything, that we had somehow seen the worst of it.

We skidded up onto something hard and sharp—a calved, knife-edged boulder. A terrible screech of stone tearing wood, louder even than the howling water. The jagged rock ripped out a section of log just beneath Rachel, who screamed and scuttled away from the hole under her. We balanced on the apex of the rock for several surreal seconds until the wood groaned as we unimpaled ourselves and dipped down the other side of the edifice and were carried away. Water lathered up through the gash in the middle of the raft, soaking us in one constant spray. The oar was gone.

Unable to utter words, we linked arms in a circle around the hole and turned to look downriver at what was coming. Glassy waves rolled under us. An outraged roar came from up ahead, a deep booming sound that thrummed in my jaw, and I thought, If these are falls, we are dead for sure. My limbs felt thick and stiff, and I’d never been so cold. My teeth clacked in my skull, and I pictured my skeleton in all its brittle, pathetic humanity. Rachel’s fingers dug welts into my forearms. She made a high, keening sound I don’t think she was aware of. I felt sure that Dean had never seen these rapids, because he would have known his raft would never survive them.

“Hold on, everybody!” Pia screamed.

The raft whipsawed around an elbow in the river, and then we saw them. A ladder of rapids descended in orderly horror down and down and out of sight around a turn. Just dropped into nothingness. Satan’s Staircase. Of course. No better name possible.

My stomach flew skyward as the raft smashed down on the first rock stair, like a piano dropped out a second-story window. With a wrenching screech, a three-log section at the front tore off and rolled under us, then popped up behind us as we crashed down to the next stair. We all watched the broken piece toss and roll furiously behind our battered raft, visions of Rory’s death haunting us, but we were moving faster than the lashed segment, and in seconds it caught between two rocks and hung there, water foaming and spraying out all around it.

“We have to jump!” Pia shouted, her eyes like a madwoman’s. I looked where she looked. We were a heartbeat from flying over the next stair, where the raft would dump us for sure.

None of us jumped. We clung to each other, screams stuck in our throats.

We shot over the watery cliff, and I felt the raft drop away beneath me. Rachel, utterly disoriented, pushed away from me even as I grappled to hold on to her. Pia let go of me to lunge for Rachel but lost both of us. For strange, long moments I was airborne in a cloud of hissing spray. Alone and falling.

I heard a crack and boom beneath me. I clattered down on the raft, my body a limp puppet, just a collection of pain and bruises and cuts. Half the raft had broken free. Rachel was gone. Pia fell like a cat next to me, her grace and strength serving her as never before. We clung to what remained of the raft—a section maybe four feet wide and six feet long, barely held together by the straps, like loose teeth in a diseased mouth. Together we looked out and down to the next stair, which dropped and disappeared into the boiling currents of a vast granite basin. A line of frantic water riffled at the base of the drop, endlessly curling back on itself.