In the Heart of the Canyon (4 page)

With each stroke, the oarlocks creaked. Dixie sat facing forward and pushed on the oars, rocking at the hip. Choppy little waves splashed against the side of the boat as they headed into rougher water.

“Is this a rapid?” Peter asked as they jostled along.

Dixie leaned into the left oar to keep the boat straight. “Just a riffle. Why? You worried?”

“Of course I’m worried,” said Peter. “I can’t swim. Just how cold is this water, anyway?”

“Forty-six degrees,” Dixie said. “Straight from the bottom of Lake Powell, courtesy of the Glen Canyon Dam.”

“You really can’t swim?” Evelyn inquired.

“Sink like a rock,” Peter declared.

“Didn’t you take swimming lessons as a boy?”

“I flunked.”

Evelyn couldn’t believe they let people come on this trip if they couldn’t swim. And why was he here if he had such dread of the water?

“Trout!” hollered Lloyd from the back.

Evelyn searched the green water but saw no fish.

Dixie asked where everyone was from.

“Cincinnati,” said Peter.

“What do you do in Cincinnati?”

“Water my mother’s peonies a lot,” said Peter.

Dixie laughed. “How about you, Evelyn?”

Evelyn allowed that she was from Cambridge.

“And what do you do in Cambridge?”

“I teach biology.”

“Don’t tell me you teach at Harvard,” Peter warned.

Evelyn allowed that yes, she taught at Harvard, which instantly put a stop to the conversation. This happened frequently; after fifteen years, she’d never figured out how much to say when people asked where she worked. If she volunteered that she taught at Harvard, she seemed to be bragging. If she held back, inevitably someone would coax it out of her, and then her attempt at discretion seemed snooty.

“I’m glad you don’t talk with a Boston accent,” Peter said. But before he could start in on
pahking the cah—
everyone felt the need to quote the stale little rhyme—there was a rubbery squeak from the back of the boat, followed by a thud and a cry of distress. Evelyn whipped around to see one of the old man’s pale, hairless legs poking skyward, with no sign of the rest of him.

“Lloyd!” his wife cried. In a flash Dixie shipped her oars and hopped back over the gear to help the man up, letting the boat simply float along.

“Are you all right?” Dixie asked.

“Well gee!” Lloyd exclaimed. “I don’t know what happened!”

“You have to hold on,” Ruth scolded, brushing at Lloyd’s sleeve.

“I was!”

“Tighter, then,” said Ruth.

Dixie scooted back to her seat and took up her oars again.

“Doggone hot,” Lloyd said.

Soon they turned a corner, and Navajo Bridge came into view. Five hundred feet above them, its dark lacy arch spanned the canyon walls. Tiny figures dotted the railing. It was hard to believe that just over an hour ago, Evelyn herself had been standing on that bridge, looking down. Yet here she was now, on the river itself, already initiated into the world of river runners. Evelyn gave a small, insignificant wave to those above. She felt herself dividing the world into
us
and
them
, those on the river and those not, sojourners versus the rest of the world. And it seemed somehow fitting to her, although she couldn’t explain why, that this dividing point should be the resting place for Julian’s golden heart.

Involuntarily she glanced down into the green water, half-expecting to see a flash of gold, knowing, even as she looked, what a silly, impossible thing that would be.

N
ever in her life had Jill Compson felt the sun burn so intensely. Not in Salt Lake City. Not in Phoenix. Not in Key West, where she’d grown up. It scorched her shoulders and made her skin feel painfully stretched. She splashed water on her arms, but the relief was fleeting, the water so cold that it too burned, and she regretted not wearing one of the long-sleeved shirts that she’d so adamantly insisted the boys wear, back at Lee’s Ferry. Sunscreen alone couldn’t possibly protect her skin, she thought.

Jill and her family were all riding in the paddle boat today, along with Mitchell and Lena from Wyoming. Jill hoped the boys were making a better impression today than they had the night before, at the orientation meeting. Over and over, she’d had to drag them away from the refreshment table and force them to introduce themselves to the other travelers. What kind of boys didn’t know how to make eye contact and greet someone by name? Her boys, that’s who.

Although why was she surprised? They hadn’t wanted to come in the first place. In fact, when they found out last spring that she’d planned this vacation, they’d made a big scene, claiming they couldn’t miss basketball camp. And she barely got any backup from Mark. “Shouldn’t you have checked with me before you paid the deposit?” he’d asked, right in front of the boys, giving them even more leverage. Eventually they negotiated a compromise, which included one week of private coaching, plus new video games for the eight-hour drive from Salt Lake City to Flagstaff—a drive that sorely tested everyone’s patience, so that by orientation time, Jill just wanted to retreat to a spa for the next two weeks. They had adjoining rooms, and well into the wee hours she could hear the boys jumping on the beds. Four times
she had to knock on the wall and tell them to turn the television off. Twice she tried with Mark to have an orgasm. Twice she failed. When she got up in the middle of the night, she looked in the bathroom mirror and wondered how, in the span of thirteen short years, she’d come to look exactly like her own mother: pinch-lipped and stern, and utterly without humor.

But today, like Evelyn, Jill was feeling a distinct thrill as they headed out from Lee’s Ferry. In contrast to the oar boats, where the passengers could sit back and enjoy the ride while the guides did all the rowing, the paddle boat required work. The boat was set up for six paddlers, three on each side with a mountain of gear running down the middle. As paddle captain, Abo sat perched in the rear, ruddering the boat with his paddle, calling out commands.

Jill and Mark rode up front, the boys in the middle, Mitchell and Lena in the rear. As they left Lee’s Ferry, Abo had them practice their maneuvers a bit, the boat going in figure eights until he was convinced they understood his commands. Then they headed down the river for real. The sun grew hotter, the river greener, and she finally felt with deep conviction that the trip had truly begun. Already the canyon rim seemed to be in another world, a world full of engines and asphalt, clocks and credit cards and news reports that didn’t really matter.

After Navajo Bridge, the gorge began to deepen, with blotchy maroon cliffs rising straight out of the river. Jill found herself mesmerized by the bubbling current, by the little whirlpools that spun out from her paddle at the end of each stroke. At some point, she heard Abo telling a story about two young men who swam the canyon with nothing but a kickboard to hold a few supplies. Sam didn’t believe him and asked Jill if it was true.

“Honey, if the guide says it’s true, then it must be true,” Jill replied.

Other than that, she kept to herself, her senses tuned to the dry heat, the shimmering water, the brilliant blue sky, and the stark canyon walls. So lost was she that it came as a shock when Abo abruptly steered the boat toward the right side of the river, where JT had already beached his raft. “Looks like lunch, folks,” Abo told them, and
Jill suddenly remembered that the last thing she’d eaten was a crumbly muffin from the hotel breakfast bar at five thirty that morning.

“Forward!” yelled Abo suddenly. “Come on, paddlers, we got a meal to prepare! Sam! Matthew! Lets see a little mojo in those strokes, you want me to starve to death back here?”

The first sign of trouble came when Sam complained for the fifth time about being hot. The guides had set up a table in the small bit of shade and were fixing lunch while all the guests were hanging around in the hot sun with not much to do.

“Well, you know what I said earlier,” JT told him as he scooped out an avocado. “If you’re hot, you’re stupid. Go take a dunk. Keep your life jacket on.”

“I’m going in the river,” Sam told his father.

“Don’t go too far. Do you think it’s okay?” Mark asked Jill.

“If the guide says it’s okay, it’s okay,” Jill replied.

So Sam waded into the water up to his hips, and with a great deal of shrieking, he hopped up and down and finally dipped below the surface, but only for the briefest of seconds, during which there was a moment of silence, broken by the boy’s explosive burst as he shot back up, screaming. It looked like so much fun that soon everyone was dunking themselves, much to the guides’ approval, and there wouldn’t have been a problem at all but for the fact that when Sam got out of the water, he somehow managed to trap a fire ant between his toes, and he started screaming and hollering again and threw himself on the beach in a frenzy and pulled off his sandal and flung it into the river, where it promptly sailed away.

JT made a dash, but by the time he reached the water’s edge, the sandal was gone.

Jill was mad because it was a good pair of Tevas, brand-new, and Mark was mad because it showed such a lack of foresight, and Matthew was mad because Sam was getting all the attention, and Sam rolled about in agony, kicking sand in everyone’s faces as they tried to determine just where he’d been bitten so that JT could dab the bite
with the stick of ammonia they kept in the first aid box for just that purpose.

“Right there, I think,” Jill said, splaying the boys toes. “Sam, be still!”

JT poked the ammonia stick between Sam’s toes. Sam screamed and kicked.

“For god’s sake, Sam,” Mark said.

“Try it again,” said Jill, but JT held back.

“What happens if you don’t use it?” she asked.

“Not much, at this point,” said JT. “You have to get it on in the first minute.”

People stood around them in a circle, peering down.

“I got bit by a fire ant in Africa once,” said Mitchell. “It’s no fun.”

Matthew dug in the sand, mumbling about how it was just an ant and he didn’t see what the problem was.

“Go stick it in the water, kiddo,” JT told Sam.

“I’m cold now,” said Sam.

Matthew remarked that it was only like two hundred degrees out.

“Just your foot,” said JT. “Come on.” And he helped the boy up by the arm. With great drama, Sam hobbled over to the water’s edge and dipped his foot into the water, his face breaking into a silent scream.

Mark watched with his arms crossed. “Please tell me you brought an extra pair of sandals,” he said to Jill.

“Flip-flops.”

“Nothing with straps?”

“No.”

“Oh cripe,” said Mark. “Darn him. He has no sense of responsibility.”

“He’s twelve, Mark.”

“When I was twelve, I had a job.”

Jill walked away. Mark’s job at the age of twelve was scooping leaves from his neighbor’s pool for five minutes every morning. Fortunately, before she could dwell on this, the other guides called out that lunch was ready, and they all shuffled over to the lunch table, where the crew had laid out a glorious banquet.

There were two kinds of bread, and ham, and turkey; slices of Muenster and cheddar cheese, tomatoes, red onions, avocados, cucumbers, pickles, and jalapeños; peanut butter and jelly; wedges of cantaloupe and watermelon; chocolate-chip cookies and nuts and Jolly Ranchers and M&Ms. Many had pooh-poohed the notion of lunch, certain they’d lost their appetite in this heat, but they suddenly found themselves ravenous and ended up packing as much between two slices of bread as they possibly could, then adding a little more for good measure. Susan tried jalapeños with peanut butter; Amy made herself a diet sandwich with turkey and lettuce leaves; Mitchell ate spoonfuls of jam straight from the jar; the boys squirreled away Jolly Ranchers in their pockets. Peter, of course, ate as much watermelon as he could without appearing gluttonous.

Meanwhile, the river flowed on, swiftly, quietly; constant and alive.

A
t the lunch buffet that day, Susan Van Doren was so conscious of people staring at her daughter that she almost confronted them head-on. Had none of them ever been fat? Had a fat friend? Watched the scales go up up up regardless of what they ate?

Get over it, Susan
, said the Mother Bitch.
Face it; your daughter’s fat because she eats like a horse. And she eats like a horse because you’re neurotic about your weight. You drink diet everything. You weigh yourself every-morning. For seventeen years, you’ve communicated your own obsession to her, and now look: two hundred and fifty pounds of maternal fault
.

Susan watched her daughter lumber away from the lunch table with nothing but a slice of turkey rolled up in a lettuce leaf. It broke her heart to see Amy making an effort, on this first day, to set some dietary standards for herself. Susan wished for all the world that the Mother Bitch would go into hibernation and allow her to feel like any other well-adjusted forty-three-year-old woman with a lot to be thankful for: a good job, a nice house, a sweetheart of a daughter. But the Mother Bitch was always there, yap yap yap, making her feel self-conscious about Amy. If she could, she would crush the Mother Bitch to a pulp.

On her personal information form, Susan had written that her goal for the trip was to learn something new about herself. Amy, she’d noted before mailing off the packet, had written that her goal was “to meet people who share a passion for the wilderness and anything out-doorsy and to see the Grand Canyon and above all to have fun
.”