The River at Night(60)

Wordlessly, together, we decided that the next drop spent on the raft would kill us, so we jumped.





41


A black vortex of water siphoned me down, then flipped me around so many times and so fast that when I tried to lift my head to breathe, up was not up. I forced my body to turn but was pummeled back in the direction the water wanted me to go. My head bump-bumped along what—the bottom?—as I grappled for light and air. I glimpsed a patch of brightness and kicked off toward it, but something big and heavy and soft fell on me. Dark purple shorts, black tank top, swirling black hair. Rachel. For long, harrowing seconds her body tangled with mine, both of us frantic. Her ass and arms in my face, she blind and kicking. We freed ourselves from each other, and she vanished in a whirl of bubbles. Beaten and scraped, I shot up and ate the air. Huge, greedy gulps of it as hard water smacked me, pasting me like a lover against a rock face of some kind. I could breathe, but water firehosed so mercilessly at my face I could not orient. I thought I heard myself scream, but it could have been any of us; it could have come from inside my own head.

My hands swept across the moss-slicked basin looking for purchase, but the water was alive and sucked me back and down into the seething heart of the bowl. Again I churned around and around like a sneaker in a washing machine, and I knew I would drown unless I could somehow hook on to the lip of the thing and flip myself out and down to the next stair.

As I swept around the belly of the basin, I fixated on the feeble light flickering down from where I’d emerged before. I tried to time it. At the light I flung both arms up to latch onto anything that was there to stop myself. I burst out of that water like a breaching whale. Immediately one arm wedged in a crevasse in the rock wall while the other flailed again and again over the edge of the bowl. I hung there like a puppet, my shoulder slowly dislocating. A corkscrew of water drummed into my back as my arm began to slide out of the crevasse.

Over the rim of the bowl, water sluiced down a chute for several yards to the next stone stair, then dropped out of sight; this next horror my goal. No sign of Pia or Rachel. A sheer rock face next to me shot up fifteen, twenty feet. Below me, the water hauled at my hips and legs and feet; the cauldron wanted me back. I had an impulse to laugh, it was all so insane. Me against this devil, how silly to even go to battle. With a sick sort of strength, I worked one knee up the side of the slippery chamber and, using that leverage, lunged forward to grab a whip-slim sapling growing sideways out of a fissure in the rock wall of the canyon. My other arm slipped from between the wet stones.

The laughing thing was over. Crying and praying, all I asked of the young tree was to hold me until I could free myself from the churning waters that yearned to suck me down. Hand over hand I hauled my body up. With sickening dread, I felt the tree begin to detach from the rock. For every inch I gained, a root would loosen and break free from its mooring, scattering the mulch and moss it clung to. Screaming, I pulled myself up and over the lip of the bowl, the sapling in my arms as I tumbled forward down the stone chute.

Arms out straight, I cascaded steeply down and landed hard onto a plate of stone where I felt something important in my arm go before I was dumped back into the river proper. A crazy braiding kind of water shot me along. It pounded me in places on my body I never knew existed, and I fought to swing my feet forward as Rory had said to do, but where was forward here? I tried to touch along the bottom, but the water whooshed me up. Finally I got my feet out and up, but Satan had more stairs—smaller ones now, drops of two and three feet—for which I was weirdly grateful. At least by now I had learned to keep my head up and out and curl forward when I slid over rocks.

I dropped down the last stair and was ushered along over smaller boulders and between them, just helpless fleshy flotsam tumbling along. I knew my arm was broken but I couldn’t look at it. Just held it close to me, a white flame of pain clutched to my chest.

Pia screamed my name. Thank God, she was alive! I glanced a few yards to my left, saw her spread-eagled against a boulder trying to climb up and out. Her shoulder was covered with blood, pulsed with blood. She reached out for me, but I faced the wrong way to grab her hand with my good arm so I swept by her.

I floated along now with a purpose: get myself out. I slapped at the water with my right arm, trying to aim myself the least bit toward the bank, and with some dread, dropped my legs and feet a bit to push off whatever was coming at me so I could start to control my route. Arctic-cold currents mixed with just cold ones now, and oddly warmish ones, all of them running along my body with an eerie knowledge of it. Every now and then, my feet hit bottom and scooted along it as if I were in some watery wheelchair, and in that way I scuttled closer and closer to the bank.

I looked up. To my left, Pia sprinted along a sloping ridge of stone that flattened into overlapping sheets of shale. She was keeping pace with me.

I kicked myself into an eddy, working my body into an area of shallows where the water felt unrecognizably kind. It sparkled in a waist-deep pool the green of old bottles. I realized I could stop fighting and had to redefine myself as something not under the river’s command. I was a pitiful ball of pain.

Pia scrambled over the shallow rock steps. She ran splashing into the water toward me while I was still summoning the strength to stand. Blood coursed from a long, ugly cut across her shoulder, running down her arm and hand and pinking up the water near me.

“Are you okay?” She bent down to help me, comfort me, lift me, I don’t know.