Borderline (7 page)

“See the ledge? She keeps going up farther and farther to get food,” Carmen said. “Every time I come through she’s worked her way up a little more.”

“Why doesn’t it thirst to death?” Steve asked.

“She eats the cholla. There’s enough water in the cactus to keep her alive.”

“Why doesn’t she just walk back down?” Chrissie asked, sounding slightly annoyed at the cow for making such a fuss of its predicament.

“No incentive, I guess,” Carmen replied. “The food behind her has already been eaten.”

“That and the fact she has cow brains for brains,” Steve said.

“Pull in,” Anna demanded suddenly. “Beach the raft.” She began to paddle hard. The trip was a leisurely one, the outfitters making a three-day adventure out of a twenty-mile trip that a canoeist could easily do in a day, and Carmen was in no hurry. She helped steer the raft onto the rocky shore. Anna and Steve were out first, pulling it from the water.

Anna had no idea what she was doing, only that they couldn’t float by, snapping pictures at the tormented soul on the cliff face. She couldn’t stop the man she had killed from stalking her in nightmares. She could not stem the tide of evils flooding from man’s cruelty. She couldn’t save the women in the Sudan. Some days she despaired of saving herself from a darkness that seemed to be encroaching from all sides. But surely, God dammit, she could save one poor pathetic cow.

If she couldn’t save it, she wouldn’t pass it by, leave the poor thing to be pointed out to more tourists as it crept ever higher, grew ever thinner, cried ever more weakly until, finally, death came as a blessing and the guides in passing canoes and rafts pointed out the vultures gathering on the high ledge where Easter was served as an
alfresco
luncheon.

“We have to get the cow down.” Anna was not asking for permission or discussion. She was issuing an order.

“Yes!” Cyril said, pumping the air with her fist in an overused gesture, the origin of which was mostly forgotten.

“We become vaqueros,
mis amigas
,” Steve said. “To the rescue. What a trip!”

“How?” Chrissie nearly whined.

Lori said nothing.

Paul looked alarmed and Anna knew it was not for the cow or for himself. He hated it when she put herself in danger. He was old school. When they walked together in the street, he walked on the outside so marauding automobiles would have to go through him before they could lay a bumper on his wife.

“It’s been done,” Carmen said speculatively. “I don’t know about getting cows off cliffs, but I know a few have been rafted out of the canyon. The river district ranger, Fred Martinez, took one out last spring.”

“How much line have we got?” Anna asked the guide.

Paul groaned. “Oh Lord, there’s two of you. You and Anna. You two are going to scale a cliff to rescue two hundred pounds of hamburger, aren’t you?” He put both hands over his face.

“You can stay here,” Anna offered.

He looked at her in exasperation. “Right. Like I would do that while you bull-wrestle on a cliff ledge.”

“Three or four hundred feet,” Carmen said. “We carry extra.”

“For cows?” Lori asked, sounding both amazed and appalled.

“For whatever,” Carmen said.

“Anna, did I not hear you say once that free climbing was a fool’s sport?” Paul asked.

“We don’t have to climb,” Anna said. “We can walk up the way Easter walked up.” For the first time in what seemed like forever, but was only since the previous winter, Anna knew what had to be done and how to do it. The rescue of the cow unfolded in her mind with complete clarity. The others, even Paul, were relegated to the status of tools, valuable, useful tools like the lines-become-ropes and the lettuce in the cooler designated to be salad for their supper.

“Paul, you and Steve will come with Carmen and me. You three stay down here and rearrange the gear so there’s a level place to load Easter when we get her down.”

“I’m going with you,” Cyril said.

Momentarily nonplussed by the mutiny, Anna stopped unlashing the cooler from which she intended to commandeer green, cow-tempting foodstuffs. She blinked twice, clearing her mind’s eye of its single-minded pursuit. Fleetingly, she was aware that she was not General Petraeus and this was not the 10th Airborne Division. “Sure,” she said. “Change your shoes. Everybody, change your shoes except Lori and Chrissie, you can keep your Tevas on.”

Having liberated the lettuce and a bunch of celery, Anna dug her sneakers out of her dry-bag and swapped her river shoes for them. Carmen put the celery back in the cooler.

“Okay, right,” Anna said. “One head of lettuce should do it.”

“I take it you have a plan,” Paul said.

“Yes. It should work if Easter is as weak as she looks. The ledge isn’t all that narrow; it can’t be or she’d never have gotten that far up.”

“You’d be surprised,” Carmen said.

Anna ignored her. “We go up the way Easter did. We turn her around with the lettuce lure and hobble her if we can so she won’t bolt. She follows us and the lettuce down. Once we get her on the beach, we get her on her side and immobilize her. Carmen will tell us where best to lash her to the raft.”

“Wow. Me, the guide, the paid leader of the expedition, will actually get to make a decision,” Carmen said.

Sarcasm tinged the boatman’s words, but only very faintly. Carmen was nearly as keen as Anna to get the cow down. What her motives for this altruism were, Anna didn’t know and didn’t care.

“Yes,” Anna replied seriously, too focused for humor or working and playing well with others not of like mind. She would have shouldered the coils of rope but Paul had already picked them up. Anna took the lettuce and broke the head in two, giving half to Carmen. “This will keep her from getting it all in one bite and losing interest in us.”

Anna trotted across the beach and began scrambling up rocks to where the ledge started about ten feet above water level. “Stop!” Paul called as she found the ledge and stood.

“What?”

“Wait there.” His voice was harder than Anna had heard it before and penetrated the thickness of her determination. She waited.

When he got to the ledge, he stepped ahead of her, between her and the distant cow above. “I’m going first.”

She opened her mouth to protest.

“Don’t even try,” he said. “I grew up on a dairy farm, remember? Cows are decent beasts but they are not that bright. If she bolts toward us instead of further up the cliff, there might not be room for everybody. If the choice comes up, she’s going over, not you.”

Anna didn’t like it. Didn’t like being slowed down. Didn’t like being protected. Rebelliousness fired up in her belly and sparked in her eyes. Paul stared it down.

“Right,” she said. “Let’s go.”

A breath of air wheezed softly from behind her left shoulder where Carmen had crowded onto the ledge. A veteran guide, she’d seen enough of marital discord to feel relief when the storms were averted.

The ledge was several feet wide at the bottom and had a floor of polished stone. Sediment was deposited in the holes and cracks from high water and blown dirt, and opportunistic desert plants took root in the shallow planters. The cholla cacti were grazed down to nubs and what little Bermuda grass had made it up to the ledge was eaten down to white roots.

Paul started up, Anna following. Behind her she heard Cyril and Steve clamber onto the ledge to trail behind Carmen. Five was too many, Anna thought. At Easter’s elevation the ledge might not be wide enough for that many people and one cow. This quixotic quest could end in tragedy if the rescue went sour. Anna did not want that on her conscience, but doubted they’d go back if she told them to, so she shoved the thought into the back of her mind. Already crowded with the things she would not think about, the dim recesses of her skull must look like an overstuffed closet. Should the door fail, the flotsam and jetsam of her id would come tumbling out. That thought, too, she shoved in with the rest.

Distracted from her misery by the strange phenomenon of human beings creeping up her path, Easter quit crying and lowed soft questions at them.

“She sounds like she knows we’re coming to save her,” Cyril said.

“She sounds like she knows we’re coming to feed her,” her brother retorted.

“I wonder if animals hope,” Cyril mused. “Can you hope if you live in the moment?”

“They live in the moment you open the cat food can,” Steve said.

The climb was growing steeper and Anna could hear their breath coming harder between their words. She would remember not to count on them for brute force. Paul was powerful and Carmen was a rock. Along with her, they could do the heavy lifting if there was any to be done. The twins would be ideal for holding the offerings of lettuce, she decided.

“Poor old Easter will end up in a beef fajita,” Paul said.

“No she won’t!” Cyril declared.

“Are you going to lock it in a bathroom with you till the president of Mexico grants it amnesty?” her brother asked.

“I might.”

Anna laughed. She hadn’t laughed much in a while and it felt wonderful. She reminded herself to take it up again.

Paul laughed then and Anna knew he was happy because she was, and felt the rush she always did when she realized how much he loved her.

T
he ledge they followed was rapidly narrowing and the river had grown ribbon-thin far below them. Lori and Chrissie and the raft looked small as toys in the bottom of the canyon and the cliff-dwelling swallows flew by them at eye level. Cyril, Anna noticed, was hugging the wall, and Steve was trying not to. The ascending path they followed was a couple of feet wide, three or four feet in places, but with a drop of several hundred feet and no guardrails, it was not a place for the acrophobic. Anna hoped nobody froze and had to be carried out. Panic struck some people that way, rendering them temporarily catatonic. If it did, they’d have to wait their turn. Easter had priority.

“Let’s stop and catch our breath for a minute,” Paul said, and stopped. He wasn’t breathing hard. Neither was Anna, but it was a nice wide patch on the ledge and the footing was even, a safe place to pause and firm up the rescue plan.

Easter was about sixty feet away, ahead and slightly above them on the ledge. Seen this closely, it was clear the poor cow was on her last legs. She held her head so low her jaw was scarcely an inch from the stone. Bones poked her skin into tents at shoulders and hips and her ribs could be counted at a glance. More than a living, breathing cow, she looked like one of the desiccated corpses of cows Anna had seen at various times in the deserts of Texas and Mesa Verde, the hide shrunk around a skeleton, guts and blood and muscle long gone.

“I don’t know if she’ll make it down,” Carmen said. “Look at the way she’s swaying. We may be looking at a dead cow.”

“No,” Anna said. “Easter has hidden reservoirs of strength.”

“Secret powers?” Steve asked.

“Pity the nonbeliever,” his sister said. “If you squint you can see her cape.”

“What do you want to do, Anna?” Paul asked.

“Let’s get a rope around her horns with you behind her on one end and Carmen in front on the other, that way, if she gets the energy up to try and bolt you can control her to some extent. I’ll take the lettuce and see if I can induce her to walk down.”

“What should we do?” Cyril asked.

“Stay out of the way.”

There was a protest but Anna heard it only as murmuring, no more troubling to her than the sigh of the wind across the canyon rim or the purr of the river below. She, Paul and Carmen uncoiled the rope then recoiled it, half to Carmen and half to Paul. In the center, Anna fashioned a simple loop.

“You can hold the lettuce,” Carmen said kindly.

“Keepers of the Kale of the Sacred Kine,” Steve said.

“Give us some slack,” Anna told Carmen and, Paul leading, the loop in her hand and Carmen feeding out line from her half of the rope, they walked toward Easter. Horns that had looked stubby and sweet from a hundred yards were sharp and intimidating up close and on a narrow ledge with a three-hundred-foot drop to one side.

“Don’t even think about getting gored,” she said to her husband’s back.

“I am thinking about it. I am thinking about avoiding it at all costs. Don’t you even think about getting near the cow till I’ve got her head,” Paul said.

Anna said nothing.

“You’re thinking about it,” he said. “I can feel you thinking like cats running up and down my spine. Let me get her head.”

“Stay on the cliff side,” Anna said unnecessarily. Paul was a prudent man, not given to rash decisions. He approached Easter the way he did drunks and poachers and frat boys bent on killing each other, firmly and kindly and, above all, carefully.

This time the worry wasn’t warranted. The cow barely had the strength to roll her eyes in his direction as he sidled in between her and the cliff and grabbed hold of her horns. As Anna slipped the loop over them so Paul and Carmen would have a degree of control over the animal, Paul was not keeping the poor starved thing still so much as holding her head up for her.

The rope in place, Paul moved several yards up slope and gripped his end so, if needed, he could stop or slow the animal if it surged forward. Carmen closed the gap to ten or fifteen feet downhill from Anna and the cow so she could control it if it bucked back toward Paul.

Easter stood shaking, head hanging to her hooves, making no move to help or hinder their efforts. But for the occasional eye roll or weary twitch of her hide it seemed she hardly knew they were there.

“Okay,” Anna called to the twins. “I’ve got a job for you. Bring me the lure.”

“Lettuce sherpas,” Steve said. “For this our parents are paying full tuition at Princeton.”

Both of them came forward and they crowded a bit close for Anna’s liking but she said nothing. The danger from the cow seemed slight. “You want to lure her?” she asked Cyril.