Better Angels (31 page)

Paul and Kal carried the inflated raft toward the rocky riverbank as Al brought up the rear, carrying three yellow-bladed paddles, three blue and red life-vests, and his mallet and chisel.

“You two should paddle from the bow,” Al said. “Your weight up front will help us punch through the waves better. I’ll steer from the stern.”

“Who made you captain?” Paul asked with a quizzical look.

“I used to do some rafting when I lived in Montana,” Al said with a shrug. With a deft blow to each of their six hand and foot electronic monitors, Al broke the watertight structure of each of their radio leashes. Annoying alarms began to yelp and squeal immediately.

“Plunge wrist and ankle into the water—now,” Al said. Paul did as he was told. To his surprise and relief the electronic leashes snapped open like handcuffs sprung by a jailer’s key. He didn’t leave his hand and foot in the rushing water long, though.

“Damn!” Kal said from the other side of the raft. “This water’s cold! You got that wetsuit on, Al?”

“I’m not going to screw around with putting on a wetsuit!” Al said as he began to climb into the raft. “We’re running out of time!”

“No,” said a voice out of the growing twilight. “You’re out of time.”

Officer Strom stepped out of the brush beside the river bank, gun at the ready.

“You really think you’re going to shoot the rapids at night?” Strom said, shaking his head, then stroking his mustache. “I should shoot you and that raft right now—and save you all from drowning.”

The guard lowered his gun. Paul, Kal, and Al stared at him, the cold of the water momentarily forgotten.

“I’m tired of watching men work themselves into an early grave,” Strom said at last, looking away from them, over the evening river. “Tired of watching men starve. I didn’t sign on for work at a death camp.”

The three would-be escapees glanced quickly at each other.

“I’m not seeing this,” Strom said. “I’ll give you three minutes to get out of here, then I’m going to start shooting. Calling for reinforcements. Search parties. Air support.”

The escapees stood stunned. Strom looked directly at them.

“Get on with you. Now.”

Paul, Kal and Al needed no further prodding, but quickly jumped aboard the blue and red raft and began paddling for their lives. Paul thought he heard Strom say something like
“¡Vaya con Dios!”
but he was too busy paddling—and too busy listening for Al’s hissed “Dig! Dig! Dig!” setting their pace—to know for sure.

In a moment they were in the river’s main channel, skimming swiftly away. In a moment more the chop in the current began to increase.

“We stay in the middle sixty per cent of the river,” Al said. “That way we avoid piling onto a tree trunk or getting hung up on tree roots. Even in the main channel we have to watch for big eddies. For whirlpools and suck-downs on the upstream sides of large boulders. When I say ‘Dig!’, you dig in with those paddles like you’ve been doing, so we can get the right position for the chutes and punch through the swells when we can’t go around them. When I say stop, you stop paddling immediately. It won’t be so bad while we still have a little daylight left. After that, we listen carefully—and pray.”

Paul and Kal became quickly more proficient at paddling in unison to Al’s commands—just in time for their raft to start into the first heavy rapids. Faintly, they heard gunshots coming from Strom’s direction, behind them. Soon the spray around the raft, golden and silvered and rainbowed in the fading light, was becoming full-fledged white waves crashing over the blue and red raft as they plowed through wall after wall of water, Al’s hissed “Dig! Dig!” sounding behind them like an angry metronome.

When the first wave broke over him, Paul was so stunned for an instant by the water’s frigid temperature that he almost dropped his paddle. He quickly recovered, though. After several minutes of being hit with successive walls of frigid water every thirty seconds or so, he found he was too busy staying focused on his paddling and his breathing to take more than cursory notice of the cold and white floods breaking over them.

As they punched through yet more rapids, Paul gradually found that, beneath his hotwire fear of drowning in white water, he was perversely beginning to enjoy this experience of (so far) successfully running a roaring river far beyond his rafting experience and abilities. Now, if they could just keep this run going, without bad luck taking them down.

After a time the river broadened out once more into a swift-flowing but whitewater-free expanse. Slackening their furious paddling and catching their breath for a moment, they saw that the evening had grown dark enough around them that they now had difficulty making out the shoreline. As they paddled and drifted down a long stretch of river mercifully free of strong rapids, the night grew steadily darker around them. The evening star, already visible, was soon joined by many others.

Slowly, however, the river’s mercy began to turn again to mercilessness. The rate of their drop downriver increased and the chop of the water intensified and made itself known again. The ridgelines above the river gorge—still faintly visible against the horizon in the last afterglow of sunset—began to narrow from gorge to canyon. As the walls of stone rose nearer to the river and higher above it, so did the waves in the river itself rise nearer and higher about their raft.

By the faint glint of whitewater in the deep twilight, but mostly by sound, they made their way through and around another broken staircase of rapids. They had a brief moment of respite as they rounded a bend in the river, but then another series of rapids began.

They had punched through the first two river waves in the newest set before it happened. Maybe, with only three people in the raft, they were just too light. Maybe in the darkness they didn’t position themselves right. Maybe they didn’t start paddling hard enough or soon enough to punch through the third wave.

Whatever the explanations that might occur to them after it happened, the fact was that one moment they were paddling madly trying to punch through a wave in the river and the next they were in the frigid water itself, scrambling madly in the cold and dark to grab hold of one of the lines on the side of the overturned raft they were hurtling along beside—their paddles lost or abandoned, the raft having swamped and flipped.

The frightening thing was not the speed with which the raft had overturned. The frightening thing wasn’t the breakneck speed with which the rapids bore them onward as they hung to the upside-down raft, legs dangling as they smashed helplessly along, too thoroughly in the river’s overpowering grip to even struggle against it. No, the really frightening thing was how quickly the icy water sapped the energy from their bodies, the will from their minds. In the first moments they weakened, finding it harder and harder for them to move their arms and legs. In a moment more it grew hard to think clearly. A moment after that, hard to think at all. Soon they would be unable to do anything beyond hanging on, trying to keep a death grip on life.

Paul called out Kal’s name, then Al’s. Both answered to both names. Over the wet whitenoise of the river, Kal’s voice sounded okay to Paul’s ears, but Al didn’t sound so good.

They passed through another drenching, near-drowning chute of whitewater, almost invisible in the dark for all its pummeling force. When they were through the chute, Kal called out, and Paul answered. When Paul called out, Al did not answer at first. When Al Brewster did speak again, he said only one word: “Cold.”

In a moment more they were hurtling helplessly through another series of tight rapids and steep chutes. One after another the drenching, drowning surges battered and overwhelmed them, until Paul thought the pummeling flood would never cease, or that he would cease before it did.

At last, more drowned and frozen than alive, Paul gazed up from the river of darkness in which he helplessly hurtled along, stared up to the river of starlight shining placidly over his head. In that moment he yearned inconsolably for a quick end to his suffering on the dark river in which he drifted here below.

The river slowed around him until at last the only sound was its lapping against the raft. Kal called out, three times. Paul at last answered. They both called out weakly for Al, again and again.

To no avail. They had lost Al. He had lost them.

Far upstream, in the direction from which they had come, they saw now in the distance a single spotlight shining from a point above the gorge, down into the river and along its banks.

“A chopper,” Kal said in a weak voice. “Looking for us.”

They were too weak to do anything about that, or about the light they now drifted toward, much closer to them, very near the river. As they came closer, they saw that it actually shone out onto the river, from a tall deck and great, barn-like boathouse at the riverside. In a moment more they saw a stir of activity from the deck, heard voices—one male, one female, calling to them. They tried to call back. Paul wondered how far his weak, constricted voice would carry.

Just before they passed out of the boathouse floodlight’s reach and into starlit darkness again, Al saw a pair of river kayaks cutting through the water toward him, then only one, as the pair of kayakers split up and the further one went around to the other side for Kal.

“Grab on here—right behind the seat,” said the woman who had paddled up beside him. “Hurry now—there are more rapids below.”

In his exhaustion, Paul’s hands had become so tightly clenched on the raft’s rigging that he had trouble working himself free. The sound of rapids growing closer rose in his ears. The woman shrugged her double-bladed paddle up under her left arm and forcibly pried Paul’s hands free of the raft and hooked them firmly onto a strap behind her seat. Dazedly, Paul held on as the kayaker paddled back toward the boathouse.

In a moment more the woman and her male partner were dragging him onto the boat dock, where Paul saw Kal already sitting, slumped over. One at a time, the man and woman helped Kal and Paul into a rustic family room on the second floor of the boathouse, where they began stripping the dazed escapees out of their sodden clothes. The woman said something about hypothermia and the man quickly started a fire while she went to gather towels and blankets and quilts. Soon both Kal and Paul were wrapped in blankets and seated in front of a quietly flaring woodstove, shedding waves of heat before them. In a few moments more they were both sipping hot herbal tea, Paul sneezing fiercely as he slowly came back to life.

Their rescuers were both older than Paul had first thought—gray-haired, lean, wiry people in their sixties at least. They introduced themselves as John and Ann Rusk.

“Sorry we couldn’t save your raft,” Ann said.

“Not to worry,” Kal said over his tea. “It wasn’t ours.”

John and Ann glanced at each other, the bespectacled John stroking his white, Mennonite-style beard.

“We’re spirit camp penitents,” Paul said, thinking the couple probably figured that out from the coveralls and the pale, chafed areas on wrist and ankle from where the electrical monitors had been. “We made a break from a road gang this evening. About two hours ago now, by the clock on your wall. One of our buddies, Al Brewster—he didn’t make it. We lost him in the last set of rapids, upstream.”

John nodded slowly.

“We figured that part about your being escapees, I guess,” said John. “Sorry to hear about your friend. I’ve heard you East Ridge camp people are mostly property crimes and politicals, not violent types....”

“That’s right,” Kal said. “We’re all politicals. Al was too, anyway.”

Ann gave a sad shake of the head.

“This morality enforcement thing has gotten way out of hand,” she said, looking into her mug of tea. “You’re both three-quarters starved and half-drowned, by the looks of you. No wonder people in the cities started rioting. Just last month they removed our minister. Way out here. For sedition. Put a Morals Officer in the pulpit in his place.”

Kal looked up.

“We’ve been sort of out of touch,” Kal said. “What’s been going on?”

John exhaled loudly.

“Hard to tell, the way the media spins it,” he said, “but I gather things started to change when some regular Army and National Guard units refused to shoot any more students or demonstrators. First in San Francisco. Then in New York, L.A., and Chicago.”

“The militias and about half the regular Army are still supporting Nadarovich,” Ann put in, “but the rest of the regular Army and the majority of the National Guard are supporting the popular uprisings. Especially since word got out about how a bunch of officers were making rape and murder a part of the ‘re-education’ of the women they were supervising in the headship camps.”

Paul looked up from his tea.

“Any parts of the country free of CSA control yet?” he asked.

“All of New England except New Hampshire,” John said. “Most of the Mid-Atlantic states. The Midwest from Wisconsin and Michigan into Illinois and Iowa. Oregon and Washington are free, west of the Cascades. The Rocky Mountain States are still solidly in Nadarovich’s column, though. Most of the South, too. A lot of the Southerners seem to think CSA stands for the second coming of the Confederate States of America.”

“What about around here?” Kal asked.

Ann shook her head.

“Hard to say,” she began. “The Virgin River runs from the heart of Mormon country almost to Las Vegas. That’s a fairly wide spectrum. This whole region could go either way.”

“If I was looking for some place friendlier to you fellows,” John suggested, “I’d head west to California. Since the Battle of Anaheim Hills, only the Central Valley is still held by CSA forces. The congressional district that sent Nadarovich to Congress all those years ago is up there somewhere. Sort of a favorite-son stronghold.”

Paul sneezed again, then huddled more deeply into the warmth of the blankets.

“You’re good folks,” he said. “How’d you avoid being sent to prison camp—or sending others there?”

“We’re Christians,” Ann said, “but not religious bigots.”

Kal glanced at Paul and smiled slightly.