Borderline (6 page)

“Damn,” she said aloud, and again shook herself. Maybe a slight coup contra-coup injury of the brain would have the effect of electrodes pulsing shocks into her frontal lobe.

A feathery willow and a boulder as big as an Airstream trailer marked the entrance to the bathroom. Carmen had been right. She knew it when she saw it. The sandy creek bed angled away into the hills and Anna stood on a gentle shoulder of land. Rocks and trees formed a high wall on one side. On the other was the river, bending wide and smooth into a towering rift in the rock. A room with a view.

The sun was low in the west. The last of its light struck gold from the shale wall and turned the subdued greens of the desert a brighter shade. Above the cliffs the sky was a turmoil of clouds, round and fierce, their bellies sagging close to the mesa. Sunset fired their edges and cast deep purples into their ephemeral canyons.

Don’t waste this
, Anna told herself.
People are not all there is to the world.

 

 

T
HE night CONSPIRED to help Anna hold on to her fragile resolve. There was a moon, not quite full, but bright enough through the clear air to cast shadows. Though she cooked on a two-ring propane stove, Carmen had built a fire in the fire pan and there was the comfort of sitting around a blaze sipping wine from plastic cups and listening to the murmur of the Rio Grande. Coyotes sang briefly and bats came out, swooping low over the creek in search of insects. The towering clouds that had followed them all day surrounded the moon as the last of the chocolate Oreo cake was consumed and a wind smelling richly of rain blew from the northwest.

“Everybody put their flies up?” Carmen asked. Cyril, Lori, Chrissie and Steve scrambled up and disappeared behind the willows and rocks sheltering the kitchen area. “Looks like we might get wet tomorrow,” Carmen said. “Did you notice the river’s come up since this morning? It’s been raining in the Coahuilas. Most of our water comes from there.”

“I didn’t notice,” Anna said, but as she spoke she remembered the sticks and leaf litter and occasional plastic water bottles floating past the raft. When rivers rose they washed the banks clean, pushing whatever floated downstream.

“We should have a good run tomorrow. In a way, it’s easier when the water is higher. There’s more between the raft and the rocks.”

A woman screamed.

Paul and Anna were on their feet before it had time to echo from the cliffs. Steve’s voice melted through the willows. “Lori is harassing the wildlife,” he called to one of the others. “She’s freaking out a national park spider.”

“It was about to bite me,” Lori hurled back.

“Correction,” Steve called to an audience lost in the rocks and trees. “She was harassing
and
feeding the wildlife. I think there are big fines with that.”

The sheriff and the priest and the ranger sat again in the folding chairs.

“What do you guys do when you’re at home?” Carmen asked. “Red lights and sirens?”

Paul laughed. “It shows?”

“You two jumped like hunting dogs hearing the whistle.”

Before the fire burned itself out, and long before Carmen and the others went to bed, Paul and Anna walked hand in hand to their tent. While she had been setting up the groover, Paul had cleared an area of horse apples, nestled their tent between three boulders, and arranged the dry-bags with their personal gear on a rock the right height for a bureau.

“You’ll sleep better if you bathe,” he said as they unzipped the tent’s fly.

Anna looked back toward the river, not anxious to walk over the muddy banks to bathe in the muddy water.

“Sponge bath,” Paul said.

“Do I stink?” Anna laughed.

“No,” Paul said seriously. “I just wanted an excuse to touch you, but you will sleep better.”

Anna knew that. She took off her clothes, stood obediently on a flat stone and let Paul wipe the day from her skin. In the moonlight, intermittent now that the clouds were on the move, she watched his square strong hands as the cloth drew cool water down her arms and across her breasts, then turned that he might wash her back. They zipped their sleeping bags together but did not make love that night; they let it flow around them. Anna fell asleep with her head on his shoulder and her hand on his heart as the wind teased music from the tent’s fly.

T
hey woke to gray skies but no rain and, to the east, blue began to peek through the overcast. In the mountains and canyons of the Chihuahuan desert it was hard to predict the weather. Not only did each elevation, each mountain, make its own, but with rock and hill and cliff and distance it was impossible to see what was coming. Big Bend was immense and in its canyons people saw the land and sky with the truncated view of ants in high grass.

Without the sun the temperature was hanging in the low sixties. Anna wrapped her head in an old shawl she’d carried at least a thousand miles and used for everything from a pot holder to a snake catcher and went down to breakfast. She could hear Cyril’s laugh and Chrissie’s high-pitched shriek that served duty as an indicator of levity, horror, great fun and, on the few occasions Steve bothered to flirt, a willingness to mate.

Carmen’s voice filtered through the hilarity: “What do you call a female boatman who does her job and does it well?”

“Lazy.”

Anna smiled and tucked her shawl into the front of her down vest. She’d not given much thought to the lives of the outfitters, especially the women in what was traditionally a testosterone-heavy field. From things Carmen had mentioned, Anna knew that boatmen came from all over the country during the season—December through the middle of March when the river was high—but a stalwart few stayed year-round, most living in the town of Terlingua and getting by as best they could.

“What do you call a boatman without a girlfriend?” Carmen was saying as Anna joined the party around the breakfast preparations.

“Homeless.” Carmen delivered her punch line while flipping a pancake, as polished as any showman.

“What’s the difference between a boatman and a large pizza?”

“The pizza can feed a family of four.”

“We are all here,” Carmen said as she served Anna two pancakes from her griddle and pointed her toward the butter and syrup.

When they’d settled, the guide said: “This morning’s float starts out pretty easy. The first couple miles are flat water. Then we get to the rockslide.”

A ragged cheer went up from the narrow twins. The rockslide—and there were rapids of that same name in most rivers Anna had run—was rated at anywhere from a class II to a class IV, depending on the water levels in the canyon.

“I heard from one of the other guides before we set out that the slide was at about a level three when he went through it,” Carmen went on. “But that was two days ago. I’m guessing it will be nearing a four if it hasn’t gotten there already. The river’s up from last night even. Not much, maybe two inches, but when the canyon starts squeezing the water it can go up fast. Before we hit the slide there’s a good place to pull over and beach. We can talk more about it then and I can show you how we plan our run, depending on what the water is doing.”

They breakfasted sumptuously—float and bloat, Carmen joked—broke camp and again took to the water, this time wearing life vests. The scrap of blue that had struggled so mightily against the clouds lost the fight and the sky was marbled with silver-gray and black. Anna felt the boil of the thunderstorms in the air and reveled in it. Ozone levels were high and she enjoyed the tingling in her blood.

The raft rounded a bend in the river and floated into the view they had enjoyed from the groover. Anna found her breath being stolen by the sheer height of the cliffs they were heading into. They rose a thousand feet into the sky on either side of the turgid brown water, straight and true as if a cosmic force had cleaved them with one mighty blow of an ax.

“Wow,” Anna heard someone breathe and realized it was her.

“Awesome,” Lori said.

Anna had heard her use that word in reference to the chicken sandwiches and guacamole they had had for lunch, Brad Pitt and Carmen’s straw hat. This time the word was apt, describing that which induces a sense of awe into the beholder, a sense that there is a greater force at work than human minds can conceive. There’d been a time Anna believed in a god or gods of some sort. Meeting Paul had reintroduced this illusive and intoxicating possibility into her soul. Recently, though, she had retreated to the loneliness of the ungodly, the lights on, lights off logic of the atheist. When a light was turned off it didn’t go elsewhere to light the rooms of others in worlds to come, it just ran out of fuel and was no more. Much as she wanted to believe it was otherwise for people, she could not. Less could she believe, if other places on other planes existed and were policed by supreme beings, that they would by choice let the rabble of the earth invade. Should there be a heaven it would probably have a border patrol that put Homeland Security to shame.

They slipped into Santa Elena Canyon and the subtle sounds of birdsong and wind in the reeds faded. Even the water lapping against the sides of the raft seemed hushed. Deep and channeled through a narrow gorge of stone, the river boiled beneath them, but its surface showed only the bulge and twist of enormous muscles under a glassy-smooth skin that gleamed where it powered around submerged rock and slipped sharp as knives undercutting the shale cliffs. Anna felt its tremendous strength beneath her and for a moment had a terrifying sense of riding the back of a mythical serpent, a sentient creature who knew parasites sat on its skin, took of its forces without asking.

The momentary fear brought with it a sudden desire to make an offering to the river gods. A libation of wine would be closer to tradition, but Anna hadn’t the courage to ask for the stuff. Instead she uncapped her water bottle and poured half a cup over the side. Like to like. Surely a Tex-Mex river beast would appreciate bottled water from New Jersey.

“Are you okay?”

It was Paul. He turned just as she was dumping part of her drinking water into the Rio Grande.

“Just appeasing the nymphs,” she said.

He smiled and returned to his paddling. Paul was good that way; he understood sacred duties.

Cameras were pulled from personal dry-bags and the canyon was reduced to digital images to be viewed once, if ever, then never again. Anna seldom carried a camera and only took pictures of dead bodies or other predations. Images of incredible beauty she lodged firmly in her brain, recorded only by her eyes. That way she knew she would revisit them more often.

A mile into Santa Elena, and deep into the internal silence with which the canyon graced her, Anna heard the broken cry of the desolate. A thin creeping moan that penetrated the bones beneath the ear, too low to vibrate the drum or move the air. She stopped paddling, resting the oar across her knees, the cool river water running from the blade down the shaft to insinuate itself beneath her hand. Steve was telling a story about Cyril and a stray cat destined for the pound and the needle who barricaded themselves in the family bathroom for three days. Chrissie was taking pictures, the camera held in front of her as if its two-by-three-inch screen was all she could take in of the canyon. Lori was telling Carmen about a river in New York that was “awesome,” and Paul was watching Anna.

None of them had heard it.

Anna smiled at her husband and he blew her a kiss that hit warm and thrilling in various parts of her anatomy. Turning her face once more downriver she opened her senses, a prying apart of the gray walls that had risen up around her mind to stave off thoughts of what lay in the pit.

Nothing.

Hallucinations weren’t alien to Anna, particularly aural hallucinations. A creative brain frolics in unreal playgrounds, sometimes the devil’s, sometimes those of the angels. She returned to paddling, more a dipping of her blade to seem like a working member of the group than actually moving the raft along.

After several minutes it came again, a sound so sorrowful and hopeless it cut to the heart.

“Shhh,” she hushed the others.

“What—” Cyril began.

“Shhh!”

They fell silent. Lori and Chrissie looked strangely afraid, like children out after dark, frightened by what might be waiting.

“There,” Anna said. “Did you hear it?”

The cry had been louder as the raft floated nearer where desolation began.

“Easter,” Carmen said. “She’s just past where the canyon wall juts out. We’ll be able to see her in a minute.”

They rested their paddles and stared at the canyon walls ahead as the river carried them past the bulging shale formation to their left. The push of stone caught and slowed the waters of the Rio Grande, letting the sediment drop and forming a small beach. Bermuda grass, long and green and looking soft as gargantuan moss, laid claim to the high ground. Two Mexican tobacco plants, as big as small trees, lifted their broad leaves toward the sky.

“I don’t see anything,” Chrissie complained.

“Look up. There.” Carmen pointed to a place high on the cliff.

“It’s a cow!” Cyril exclaimed. “There’s a cow in the middle of the cliff!”

Anna saw it then. Three hundred feet or more from the riverbed a cow, so starved its bones could be seen even at this distance, stood on a ledge, bleating forlornly.

“It’s a bull,” Steve said. “Look at its horns.”

“Mexican cows have horns,” Carmen told him. “She’s been up there a couple months.”

“How did she get there?” Lori demanded. “This is nowhere and you can’t get here from anywhere.”

“We had a lot of high water in February and she must have fallen in the river and gotten carried into the canyon. We find cows in here once in a while,” Carmen said.

“The water couldn’t have been that high,” Anna said, staring at the poor creature marooned halfway between heaven and earth.