In the Heart of the Canyon (5 page)

Who could find fault with a girl like that?

Susan carried her sandwich across the beach to join Amy, who had
already finished eating. What an awkward situation this must be for her, Susan thought, and a sudden pang of remorse tore through her. Why had she planned this vacation? What kind of mother brought an overweight teenage girl on a trip where you lived in a bathing suit?

“Isn’t it gorgeous?” she said cheerfully.

“It’s hot.”

“Dunk your shirt in the water, like the guides.”

Amy stared cruelly at her, then trudged back to the lunch table and took a stack of cookies and headed off to the opposite end of the beach, where the old couple was sitting.

She’s really a caring, sensitive, thoughtful person, Susan wanted to tell the others. And really, what were a few cookies, in the grand scheme of things? Nevertheless, she worried that the others might not only judge her for the excess calories, but think she was eating more than her fair share. And Susan thought bitterly, once again, how unfair it was, the way people prejudged overweight people. This time she didn’t give the Mother Bitch any chance whatsoever to come back with her snide, fault-finding remarks, but rather stuffed the old hag back into her sack and tied it shut with a double knot.

Ruth Frankel smiled up at the girl and thanked her for the cookies.

“Look what she brought us, Lloyd,” she said.

“Who?”

“Amy! Amy, right? Amy brought us some cookies, Lloyd. Thank you, dear,” she told Amy. “Now you go sit down and enjoy yourself and stop waiting on us old folks.”

“Where did she come from?” Lloyd asked as Amy walked off.

“She’s on the trip with us,” Ruth reminded him.

“Well, she better lose a little weight or she’ll become diabetic. Oreos!” he exclaimed. “My goodness. Did you pack these?”

Ruth sighed inwardly. Even though she’d cleared it back in March with Lloyd’s doctor, she still wondered if it was a good idea for them to squeeze in this one last float trip. They’d been making this trip every year since they were a young couple, first running the river back
in the 1950s, before the dam was built, when Lloyd was a young doctor working off his medical school debt by volunteering on the Navajo reservation. Ruth had just started painting at the time, and she brought along her watercolors and dabbed splashes of color into her notebook—salmon, mauve, and eggplant, colors she would later reproduce all winter long, wherever she was. Later, they moved to Evanston, Illinois, where they raised their two children, but they returned year after year for two weeks in the canyon. They brought friends. They passed up ski vacations and trips to Mexico to save their money for this particular trip; one year, when both children were in college, they traded Ruth’s paintings in exchange for their fare. Didn’t they get tired of the same old trip? people would ask. Didn’t they want to see other places? The truth was, they both felt a renewal of the soul while on the river, something that their friends in Evanston—churchgoers all—failed to comprehend.

And then, two years ago, at the age of seventy-four, Lloyd began forgetting things. What he’d had for breakfast. What they’d done last weekend. Examining a patient, he found himself repeating his questions, and then he’d go back to his office and find he couldn’t remember what he’d just diagnosed. Ruth didn’t need a doctor to tell her what was wrong. Last year Lloyd’s condition was not so advanced, and they took their river trip as usual, without worry. This year, however, the increasing memory lapses and confusion had left Ruth debating the wisdom of a river trip. Was it irresponsible to take Lloyd? Alone, she visited Lloyd’s doctor and asked for his advice. He was an old friend and understood the spiritual significance of these trips for Ruth and Lloyd, and he listened to Ruth ticking off the worrisome incidents with a somber but skeptical demeanor. When she finished, he leaned across his desk and clasped her hands.

“Ruth,” he said, “you’re a cautious, responsible woman. Go. You’ll take good care of him. It will do more for his spirit than keeping him safe in his living room.”

So she’d signed them up for what she knew, deep in her heart, would be their last trip together. The hardest part was getting them
both packed, because Lloyd kept forgetting that he was going on any trip at all, let alone a two-week journey through the Grand Canyon. Upstairs in their comfortable colonial, Ruth laid out piles of clothes she intended to pack, and Lloyd would wander in and see them there all nice and fresh on the guest room bed and put them on and go out into the garden and stand with his hands on his hips. Ruth bought extra Metamucil biscuits and Lloyd ate them. She bought six tubes of sunscreen, only to have them disappear. At one point she lost her temper, shrieking that she was going to put him in a nursing home and go alone. But Lloyd just replied, “Go where?” and she cried all night, unable to forgive herself.

The biggest moment of relief had come at six thirty this very morning, when they loaded their bags onto the transport bus back in Flagstaff, climbed in, and took a seat; and the driver shut the door; and there was no longer any chance for Lloyd to open up their carefully packed bags, take something out, and lose it.

“I’ll bet she’s already diabetic,” Lloyd said now.

“Don’t you say a word,” Ruth warned.

“When’s Lava?”

“Not for another ten days.”

Lloyd shook his head gravely. “I tell them and I tell them and I tell them,” he said, “and they just keep on smoking.”

After lunch, as Abo and Dixie scrubbed dishes by the water’s edge, JT called everyone together and told them their first real rapid was coming up soon.

“How big?” Sam asked.

“Six, on a scale of one to ten,” said Mitchell, looking up from his guidebook.

“Well, maybe more like four at this water level,” JT said. “But it’s definitely big enough. So put on your life jackets, and tighten everything down, and let’s go!”

Jill fussed with the boys, making sure their life jackets were tight, their day bags clipped into place with the locking carabiners that had
cost five times what she expected at the adventure-gear store back in Salt Lake City. She tightened the chin straps on their hats. (She did
not
want Mark to know that she hadn’t packed extra hats.) Finally Abo had to tell her to quit checking on things and sit down herself. She obeyed, slightly embarrassed, and Abo pushed off, and they paddled down the river, three boats in a line: JT in front, Abo and his paddlers in the middle, and Dixie in the rear.

It wasn’t long before the river itself changed. Up ahead, the glassy water dropped off abruptly; every so often a sunlit spray danced above the horizon.

“Stop,” Abo commanded. “Listen,” and everybody fell silent. Sure enough, they could hear the hollow roar of the big water. Ahead of them, JT stood up on his seat to get a better view. His boat rocked a little. The current was rapidly picking up speed; JT waited until the very last minute, then dropped to his seat and quickly angled his boat to the left. Then the boat disappeared into the spray, and all you could see were a few flashes of blue as it bucked through the foam.

Their own boat was now fast accelerating.

“Feet in the stirrups, folks!” Abo yelled. “And pay attention! Sam! What’s it mean when I say ‘Hard Forward’?”

“It means paddle really hard!” Sam yelled back.

“That’s right! Forward!” Abo shouted, and they glided down into the tongue of the rapid, where the water formed a downstream V, dark and smooth and sinuous before exploding into a wall of chaotic white froth.

“Hard forward!” shouted Abo, and Jill dug deep and pulled as hard as she could as they barged on through. She felt the boat tip first to one side, then to the other; water came splashing from all directions, and the paddlers lost their synchronicity and knocked each other’s paddles. A long plume of silver spray drenched Jill’s face and blinded her for a moment, causing her to gasp for air, and when she opened her eyes another plume was coming and this time she just ducked like a coward, screaming with frantic delight.

Then, just as suddenly, it was over, and they were bobbing in the
tailwaves. There were whoops and hollers, and at Abo’s direction they all raised their paddles high into a tent formation, then slapped the water with a cheer.

Only then did Jill think to turn around and make sure her children were safe.

She’d gotten drenched, but oddly, she wasn’t at all cold; within minutes the sun had dried her arms and legs, and she was grateful now not to have a shirt on because the sun felt so good. She looked at Mark and Mark looked at her, and they both laughed out loud, something they hadn’t done in years together, and she glanced back and witnessed a miracle, namely, that the boys weren’t fighting and in fact had wide horsey grins on their faces, and she would never have said this out loud but she thought: Didn’t I say you would love it? Now, aren’t you glad you’re here?

Truly, she told herself. Keep your mouth shut.

T
hey camped that first night on a small beach sloping up to a sandy, rock-studded hillock that overlooked the river. To transfer the massive amount of gear out of the boats and onto the beach, JT had everyone form a fire line, with the guides in the boats unstrapping everything and handing it over, each bag, each box making its way from one set of outstretched hands to the next until the beach was littered with gear. Then, like speedy housewives, the guides whisked about setting up their kitchen, unfolding the long metal tables, hooking up the stove, arranging all the cookware. Abo filled two plastic buckets with river water and slopped them down on each end of the cleanup table. Dixie lugged the large flat fire pan across the sand to an open spot, got down on hands and knees, and leveled things out and wiggled the grill into place for the salmon they would be cooking tonight.

Meanwhile, JT went off to scout out a good place for the toilet system, known in river parlance as the groover. Having camped here many times before, he had a destination in mind and followed a worn path through a thick grove of feathery tamarisk, around some boulders, and finally up onto a ledge blocked off from camp by a huge boulder, with a prime view of dusty pink cliffs rising out of the glassy water. Good views from the groover mattered, a lot.

JT would bring everyone up here before dinner to educate them in the specific how-tos. But now, after a long day in the hot sun, what he wanted most of all was a beer. He hopped down from the ledge and headed back to the camp, his flip-flops kicking up a soft spray of sand behind.

But as he was passing through the thicket, a rustle in the underbrush
stopped him in his tracks. Dang if a territorial rattlesnake wasn’t going to spoil his groover site. He peered into the brush but saw nothing and warily moved on.

Then he heard another rustle, a quick shake, like dried beans in a pod. Now JT backed away, knowing full well that a snake encounter on their first night would set everybody on edge for the entire trip.
Fine. Keep the tamarisk thicket, keep the ledge site, you bugger. I’ll find another place for the groover
.

But as he turned, he heard a whimper, an anxious whine that definitely did not come from a reptile. JT peered into the scrub again.

There, panting heavily on a bed of leaves and sticks, lay a dog. Its fur was gray and matted, its nose crusted, and yellowish goop had collected in the corners of its eyes. Seeing JT, the dog trembled, and with the tremble came a quick chattering of its teeth—the sound JT had mistaken for a rattler. It was some kind of mutt, he wasn’t quite sure, but it seemed part poodle, part terrier, with loopy gray curls and a dirty wet wisp of a beard—actually, of the approximate lineage as the dog JT had had as a boy. With liquid black eyes, this direct descendant of the true and loyal companion that had slept in the same bed and shared the same bath and eaten the same bologna sandwiches as a very young JT Maroney now gazed straight into his heart.

JT had seen a lot of animals on his 124 previous trips down the river. He’d seen bighorn sheep and coyotes and countless ringtail cats who crept around camp in the middle of the night in search of leftovers. But he’d never seen a dog. For one thing, dogs weren’t allowed below the canyon rim. He’d heard other guides tell of the occasional Navajo cattle dog showing up, especially in this first stretch, where access to the river was easy. But JT had never run into one himself. And this sure as shit did not look like a cattle dog; wash it up and put a collar on it, and it might pass for a Biff or a Molly, with a plaid doggie bed and a personalized bowl nearby. JT couldn’t for the life of him imagine where it came from. Definitely not another boating party; they could never have gotten a dog past the ranger up at Lee’s Ferry. A renegade hiker, a dog-loving Ed Abbey living in the piñon?

JT held out his hand. The dog sniffed his fingers, then slapped its
tail heavily on the bed of branches. It struggled to its feet but could not get up, so it lay back down, setting its chin resolutely between its paws.

“Hey, boy,” said JT. “Come on. Get up.”

The dog didn’t move.

JT knew better than to handle an injured animal; he dug deep into the pocket of his shorts and held out a few oily peanuts. The dog sniffed, then licked them out of his hand. JT moved back a little and held out more nuts, and with a great deal of effort, one haunch at a time, the dog managed to raise himself on all fours.

Now JT could at least see what the problem was, for the dog was favoring its right front paw. JT moved in and, while offering more nuts, tried to inspect the paw. The dog drew back, but JT smoothed his velvety ears and kept feeding him nuts, and the dog calmed down enough for JT to finally locate an ugly cactus thorn lodged between the leathery pads of his paw.

No wonder the dog was whimpering.

“Easy, boy.” He cradled the dogs leg and with his stubby fingers tried to pick out the thorn. However, he only succeeded in breaking off the tip. The dog lay down and began licking the tender area.

JT glanced back toward camp. It crossed his mind that he should go back and get Abo and Dixie to come help him decide what to do, but he was still partly afraid that perhaps he was dreaming this all up, and by the time Abo and Dixie got up here, the dog would have vanished, and he, JT, Official Trip Leader, would be the butt of jokes for the rest of the trip.