In the Heart of the Canyon (13 page)

“Late July Every day it rains. Every day these boys get wet. Every day we’re looking at eight hypothermic Eagle Scouts. We guides, we’re pulling out every piece of clothing we have, just to keep these kids dry. Then we come up on Bedrock, where there’s this YOOGE rock that splits the river, and you have to stay to the right because if you go left you’re dead, and who knows what happened, but one of the boats misses the cut and they postage-stamp right up against the rock and these four kids disappear into the water. So! Now we have four boys with hypothermia, and when we get everyone ashore, we tell the boys to strip down and get into sleeping bags together. At which point the scout leader goes totally apoplectic, accuses us of trying to turn his boys into fags—his word, my apologies—and when we get the sleeping bags out anyway, he takes them all and dumps them in the river so they’re soaking wet and no good whatsoever.”

“What happened to the kids?” asked Jill.

“This is what’s so rich. They all warm up! On their own! So the scout leader is now completely convinced that he’s Mr. Outward Bound and we’re John Wayne Gacy. I thought the trip would never end.”

“Wow,” said Peter.

“Yeah
wow,” said Abo.

“I guess Mitchell isn’t so bad,” said Peter.

“Mitchell’s nothing,” Abo declared. “So I want you guys to be nice to him.”

“Did you hear that?” Peter told Jill and Susan. “Be nice to Mitchell.”

“We’re very nice,” they said in unison.

Peter couldn’t argue with the two women, but he also knew the difference between god-nice and smiley-nice. God-nice was how you acted when a new kid came to school, and his mother shamed him for crying, and so you invited him to play kickball during recess. Smiley-nice was how you acted when your mother made you play with the hairdressers kids while she got her hair done.

Jill and Susan, he was sure, were being smiley-nice.

As for other matters of group dynamics, Peter was also 100 percent certain that Dixie was sleeping with Abo. He knew this because when they were unloading the boats yesterday, he overheard Abo asking Dixie if she knew what a hernia looked like, and Dixie bent and inspected a very white part of Abo’s groin—felt it, even, with her own two fingers. And this afternoon, after they set up camp and Peter went down to Dixie’s boat to retrieve one of his beers, there was Abo lounging in the well of Dixie’s boat with his feet up in her lap so she could clean his toenails with her pocketknife.

They had to be sleeping together.

Peter took his beer back to his own campsite; he popped it open and savored that first cold, fizzy swallow. Their camp tonight was at the base of yet another rapid, on a small beach walled off by chunky gray slabs rising straight up out of the water. Not a lot of room here, and he’d spent some extra time helping Abo set up the groover tonight; as a result, he’d had to settle for a small uneven patch of sand close to the kitchen area, a site that lacked any privacy—Evelyn as usual having claimed the nicest spot. But Peter resolved to make the best of things tonight—he did, after all, have a full beer in his hand and two more allotted for the evening.

Nothing like cold beer in hundred-degree heat.

Upriver, Jill was trying to convince the boys to wash. They were having none of it, though, and huddled on the sand, hugging their knees. Peter knew he should go down to the river right now with his own bathing kit, horse around, splash the boys, get everybody laughing. He didn’t really like kids, but Jill wore such a pinched, irritated look that he felt sorry for her.

And he was all set to gather up his towel and wash kit, when out of
the corner of his eye, he saw Amy toiling across the sand in his direction. She was wearing her oversized Jamba Juice T-shirt and carrying her own wash kit, and when she got close, he could see beads of perspiration above her lip, right where a mustache would have been.

“Hey,” he said, squinting up at her.

“Hey,” she sighed.

“I was just going to go wash.”

Amy collapsed on her knees in the sand.

“You don’t look so good,” he said.

Finally she opened her eyes and breathed in deeply.

“Oh my god,” she said. “I’ve just never been so hot in my entire life.”

“Want some of my beer?”

And to his surprise, she took the can and drained what was left.

“Whoa,” he said. “Does your mother know you drink like that?”

“I’m almost eighteen,” she said, letting out a froggy burp. “When my mother was eighteen, it was legal.”

Peter had a thought. He knew it was against the law, but down here in the canyon, the law didn’t seem to apply. And based on what he’d seen in Susan, he didn’t think she’d mind.

“Don’t go away,” he said, and he went down to Dixie’s boat and gave the guides a goofy wave and got another two beers and came back and opened one and gave the other to Amy.

“Where’s your mother, anyway?” he asked.

“Reading.
Not
bugging the shit out of me, for once.”

“I can’t read down here,” Peter said, opening his second beer, which didn’t really count as his second, as Amy had drunk most of his first.

“Abo reads at night,” Amy said. “Have you seen him? He lies on his sleeping pad with his headlamp and reads before going to bed.”

Peter felt scolded.

“I’m supposed to be reading
The Satanic Verses
for my lit class next year,” Amy went on. “I’m having a hard time with it, though.”

Now Peter was unable to stifle his surprise. “I brought that book too!”

“Are you reading it?”

“No,” he confessed. “Its at the bottom of my bag.”

“It’s just so dense, and I want to like it because I know he’s a good writer, but—” Amy bent forward, as though inspecting her toes, and what might have thrilled him in Dixie, repulsed him in Amy.

“I should have brought Tom Robbins,” he began, but Amy seemed to have gone into another world, taking shallow hiccupy breaths. He thought she might be crying. Then he saw a little line of drool fall from her mouth to the sand. He suddenly regretted missing his chance to go bathe with the boys.

He cleared his throat. Some people, he’d heard, were allergic to alcohol. “Hey. Amy.”

She didn’t reply. Peter looked around to see if anybody was watching them. He wanted someone to come over, and he didn’t want someone to come over.

Then Amy lifted her head and took a deep breath. She sensed the drool and hastily wiped her mouth.

Peter nudged her. “What was that all about?”

“Nothing.”

“Fuck it’s nothing.”

“It’s a stomachache. It’s nothing.”

Nervously Peter looked around for Susan. “What’s your mother say?”

“Do not,” said Amy, “do not tell my mother. It’s the altitude,” she said.

Peter was going to note that they weren’t exactly in the Himalayas, but then Amy pointed to the water. “Look,” she said. “There are three rivers out there.”

Peter looked at the water. She was right. Next to shore were choppy, dancing waves; then farther out, the midstream core, churning downstream; and finally the eddy beyond, floating upstream in a blanket of bubbles.

“You want some Pepto-Bismol or something?”

“No.”

“Because the guides have all kinds of shit in that first aid box.”

“Jesus!”

“Don’t get mad.”

“I’m not mad.”

“You seem mad.”

“Well, I’m not. I’m just wishing I hadn’t said anything to you if you’re not going to leave me alone about it.”

“Fine,” he said. “I’ll leave you alone.”

“Thank you.”

Then, just as the mention of lice will cause anyone’s scalp to itch, so the mention of a stomachache made Peter feel a little queasy himself. He belched.

“Excuse me,” he said, then belched again. He noticed Amy’s wash bag. “Is that Vera Bradley?”

“How do you know Vera Bradley?”

“My ex-girlfriend liked those.”

Amy picked up the bag and let it dangle from her finger. “My mother bought it for me. I think they’re a total rip-off But it gives her a thrill to see me using it.”

“Hundred bucks for a little purse,” said Peter. “It used to kill me. But it made her happy.”

“How long were you guys going out?”

“Six years.”

“Who ended it?”

“She did.”

“That sucks.”

“Yup.”

“Aren’t you glad we’re not with a bunch of Boy Scouts?” she remarked, after a moment.

Peter finished his beer. “You believed that story?”

“I shouldn’t?”

“How do you know when a river guide is lying?”

“How?”

Peter shook his head. “Whenever he opens his mouth! God,” he added, “you are one of the most gullible people I ever met.”

W
hile everyone else was eating dinner, and when she was sure the dog wouldn’t come over and start sniffing her leg, Ruth settled herself on a log and rolled up her pant leg. She unwound the Ace bandage, then gently peeled off the gauze underneath. What she saw was not encouraging. The wound was still raw and weeping, and the surrounding skin was red and hot to the touch.

Was it time for the Cipro?

In their medical kit, Ruth had packed a five-day course of antibiotics. It was a practice they’d adopted after one particularly painful trip when she got an ear infection on the fifth night, the kind that could have been easily cured with a course of amoxicillin but which, in the absence of antibiotics, had Ruth clutching the side of her head in agony for the next six days and Lloyd worrying about long-term damage to the middle ear. After that, they always brought along a broad-spectrum antibiotic. It was not something they advertised; although he would have made it available if someone really needed it, Lloyd did not want the responsibility of prescribing drugs to strangers while on vacation.

Now, looking at her leg, Ruth knew she had a decision to make. The redness and swelling indicated treatment; on the other hand, there were no red lines shooting up her leg. If they’d brought along two courses of treatment (and why hadn’t they? What foolish oversight!), she wouldn’t have thought twice. But with just the one round of pills, she was reluctant. This was simply a surface wound, after all, something that should heal, as long as she kept it clean and used plenty of Neosporin.

JT came striding over. “You should have waited for me,” he scolded. “Look, the wind’s picking up; your cut’s going to get full of sand.” He knelt and inspected the wound and frowned. “I don’t like the looks of this. Let me see what Dixie thinks.” He called Dixie, and she came over and knelt and examined Ruth’s leg too.

But Dixie didn’t want to decide anything until they consulted Lloyd, so they called Lloyd over, and now Ruth cringed, because she was afraid Lloyd would bring out the Cipro, and she really didn’t think it needed Cipro, not yet; she had tended how many cuts and scrapes and gashes over the years? and she knew what infection looked like, and this was not it. But Lloyd came over, duly called, and he first got confused, and Ruth had to explain to him twice how it had happened (“What dog?”), and then, when he finally grasped that it was not a dog
bite
, he shrugged and told her to stick a couple of Band-Aids on it and stop complaining.

So JT and Dixie washed the wound and applied more ointment and bandaged it up, while Ruth sat feeling helpless, and Lloyd wandered over to Evelyn’s campsite and began emptying the contents of Evelyn’s day bag, in search of a long list of items he hadn’t seen since Lee’s Ferry.

Yesterday Jill had told the boys in no uncertain terms that they were to try and use the toilet, but by tonight she found herself caring about it less and less. What could happen, medically speaking? Five days wouldn’t kill them. Eight days wouldn’t kill them. Thirteen days probably wouldn’t kill them, but she doubted it would come to that.

Nor would it hurt Mark to go a day without sit-ups. Mark at forty had done well over two hundred thousand sit-ups: fifty per day, three hundred sixty-five days a year, for at least the fourteen years they had been married. At home he did them in their bedroom, upon rising. Here he did them on the sand, in the darkness, after everyone had gone to bed. Jill was grateful to have married someone who wasn’t going to let himself go, but she found herself wondering, as she lay on her sleeping mat listening to Mark’s little grunts, if he would really
develop a set of the dreaded love handles in fourteen days. And so what if he did? The world wouldn’t come to an end, she wanted to tell him. She would still love him.

Ten feet away, Sam began to cough. She recognized the succession of sharp dry hacks. She waited for the aerosol hiss, the quick inhalation of his asthma medicine. Nothing. Sam sat up.

“Where’s your inhaler, Sam?” said Mark, between grunts.

Sam kept coughing.

“It’s in his wash kit,” Jill told Mark.

“Where’s his wash kit?”

“In his day bag.”

She expected the audible sigh of exasperation that Mark made whenever the boys didn’t live up to his expectations (be prepared; be responsible; keep your meds available), but instead she heard him rustling in Sam’s day bag. Then came the squirt, the deep breath in.