Take Me to the River (12 page)

Chapter 24
The D-Word

D
IEGO AND MY COUSIN
and I climbed aboard the helicopter and we lifted off. The direct route to Terlingua Ghost Town took us up the muddy brown river, over the twists, turns, and horseshoe bends of the Lower Canyons. The river from above, winding through that deep corridor of solid limestone, was a sight I would never forget.

As Tony Medina approached Upper Madison Falls, he was flying well above the range of Carlos's weapon. I had a window seat, and was keeping my eyes peeled for the fugitive. I spotted Lower Madison Falls, and pretty soon we were over Upper Madison.

The logjam was still there, at the head of the island that was submerged only the day before. Overnight, with the water receding, dozens of boulders had popped up like dragons' teeth.

My eyes went back to the logjam. Where was Carlos? Granted, I wasn't looking through binoculars like the River Ranger was, but I didn't really need them. I should have been able to spot the orange life jacket or the white shirt. I saw only logs and debris. Carlos had been on those logs within the hour, and now he was gone.

Rio and Diego and I had headsets that enabled us to hear what Tony and Rob were saying. Fifty minutes earlier, the suspect knew he'd been spotted. He even waved back. When the helicopter continued downstream, he knew it would soon come across us. He decided to jump in the river and try his chances in the rapids rather than wait for capture.

For the next fifteen minutes we backtracked, buzzing three or four miles of the canyon below the logjam, but failed to spot him.

The search-and-rescue helicopter showed up and hovered a few hundred yards away from us. We listened to the chatter back and forth. The other pilot was going to continue the search but attempt no rescue. Law enforcement and the armed forces on both sides of the border would be joining in. The search-and-rescue pilot said to tell the judge's son that the Mexican consulate in El Paso had already been notified that Diego was soon to arrive in Terlingua Ghost Town. His parents would be hearing soon if they hadn't already.

Diego was sitting right across from me. Despite the radio crackle, he understood. He was positively glowing. Rio and I reached out, and the three of us clasped hands.

Tony wished the other pilot good hunting and we flew upriver. It wasn't long before I was looking down at the Hallie Stillwell Bridge and the abandoned village of La Linda. There was the white church with the twin bell towers we had seen from the river.

A few minutes after that, as we passed over the downstream mouth of Boquillas Canyon, I spotted the wax makers working at their vat, and their burros. Before long we left the canyon behind, and the village of Boquillas came into view. Here we left the river and made a beeline for Terlingua Ghost Town.

We landed only a couple blocks from the Starlight Theatre, on a basketball court. Half-court to be exact. The hoop was askew and missing a net. This is where Rio and I would have spent our time shooting hoops if we had bailed out at the bridge instead of forging ahead into the Lower Canyons. I shuddered to think what would have become of Diego.

Rio climbed out of the chopper, then me. I turned around to catch Diego, and planted him on terra firma. Rob told us to check in with Ariel first thing. She had been following the storm on her computer, and was worried sick about us. We promised we would, said our thank-yous and good-byes, and waved to our friends as they lifted off.

In the heat of late morning, the ghost town was pretty much deserted. Rio and I got a few waves as we walked past the Starlight, river bags over our shoulders and Diego in tow. I got the idea that seeing Rio come off a river trip was nothing new around the ghost town. Unlike Ariel, those Terlinguans who just waved had no notion that we had gotten personally acquainted with Dolly. It was just as well. We didn't want to stop and talk. All we wanted was to get clean and find something to eat.

We trudged up the hill, passing Rio's driveway by in favor of Ariel's. Her bus came into view, and we quickened our steps. There she was, painting in the shade of her ramada.

We were halfway down her driveway when Ariel looked up and saw what might have been the filthiest, most banged-up trio ever to come off the Rio Grande. She shrieked and came running, paintbrush in hand. We were soon smothered with hugs and kisses and daubed with red paint. Our Terlingua homecoming couldn't have been sweeter.

“Did you meet a new friend on the river?” Ariel asked, meaning Diego. “Don't tell me—I've seen his face before.”

In a second, she had it. She'd seen a picture of Diego on TV, on the Midland/Odessa station. She was beside herself. Right behind us, a Jeep pulled into Ariel's driveway. It was her friend Yolanda from the Terlingua Trading Company. Yolanda fussed over the three of us, wanting to hear all about it. Through the trading post window, she had seen us get out of the Big Bend helicopter. She didn't rush out to greet us because she had just taken a call from the Mexican consulate in El Paso. She was on hold, waiting for the consul himself to pick up. Finally he did. The consul told her he would be arriving in three hours to pick up Diego Cervantes, the boy who had been kidnapped and was being flown to the ghost town.

“Clothes!” Yolanda cried. “The boy needs clean clothes.”

“And a meal—for the three of them,” Ariel added.

“And hot showers,” I chipped in.

The showers we would take care of at Rio's. The clothes search would begin with a family that had a seven-year-old boy. A lady named Georgene was going to fix us lunch. Georgene owned the Lost Lizard B&B just down the street and always kept a full refrigerator. She had the best patio in town and loved to feed people.

Yolanda left in a hurry to get Georgene started on lunch. Ariel made a successful call to the ghost town mother who had the seven-year-old boy. We headed around Ariel's back fence for home and those hot showers.

There was no one there to greet us but Roxanne. When Diego saw her, he about jumped out of his skin. Once they were properly introduced, he was cool with it. He hadn't known that tarantulas are harmless.

I'm going to fast-forward to two o'clock that afternoon, when the Mexican consul arrived from El Paso. The U.S. Army brought him on a medevac helicopter, not that Diego needed a medical evacuation. When the consul stepped out of the helicopter, he got a rousing ovation from a crowd of more than fifty. News travels fast in a small town.

The consul got a welcoming speech from the owner of Terlingua Ghost Town. Who knew that the ghost town had an owner? Everybody but me and Diego, apparently. The consul, a dignified man with flowing white hair and a full white mustache, gave a brief yet eloquent speech. It ended to applause and whoops and hollers when he shook Rio's hand and mine. This was a bit much for Rio. Some of his high school buddies had somehow heard what was up, and had raced from far-flung corners of the county to be there. “Speech, Rio!” they chanted. My cousin would've crawled under a rock if there'd been one handy.

Pretty quick, we were saying good-bye to Diego. He called us his
hermanos
—his brothers. He said he would never forget, and that his family would always be grateful. He hoped that Carlos didn't drown, that he would soon be caught, and that his worst nightmare—life in prison—would come true.

Diego waved from the open door of the helicopter. He was wearing jeans and a Terlingua Youth Soccer shirt that pictured a skeleton-kid dribbling a ball off his knee. He gave Rio and me two quick fist pumps and one more wave good-bye.

As the chopper lifted off, the whole crowd was waving. There wasn't a dry eye to be seen. Rio and I were still wiping tears when Rio was mobbed by his friends and a young woman named Amanda from KYOTE Coyote Radio.

Who knew that the ghost town had a radio station? Everybody but me. Amanda wanted an interview, and she wanted it now. She had her tape recorder in hand, and her microphone was at the ready. “How 'bout sunset?” Rio said. “Right here on the porch.” He told her he had promised to call his dad in Alaska on this date and right around this time, which turned out to be true. His father was in between his first and second trips on the Alsek River, and had arranged the call with Rio shortly after arriving in Alaska, not that Rio had ever mentioned it to me.

“I'm going to have to take some lumps,” Rio said. “Me not telling you and your family, like I was supposed to, that he wasn't even going to be here, that's not going to go over so good.”

“How about the river trip? Is he going to be as cool with that as you thought?”

“Maybe not,” Rio allowed, and went into the Starlight to make his call.

I had a call of my own to make, and lumps to take. I called from next door, at the Terlingua Trading Company. Naturally I was hoping that nobody would pick up, and I could leave a message. Guess who answered. That's right, my mother.

Where do I even start? I asked myself. I began with a cheerful “I just got back from the river!”

“Did you guys have a good time?”

“Incredible!”

“How'd you like your uncle Alan?”

I held my breath. The clock was ticking. “Uh, actually, he was in Alaska.”

It went downhill from there. The next subject that came up was the weather. Back home, they'd been worrying about Dolly. “Were you anywhere near the storm when it brushed the Big Bend?”

“Actually, Mom, we were right in it. We got back early because the river was so high and so fast.”

Were any of the rapids dangerous, she wanted to know.

Only the one with a logjam in it, I told her.

“Did you know there was a violent incident near the Big Bend, in the mountains in Mexico?”

“Uh . . . not until we ran into the kidnapper . . . and the boy who got kidnapped.”

Well, that's all I'm going to say on the subject of this phone call. It lasted about an hour, and I did some serious apologizing. My mom used the D-word—
disappointed
—five or six times. That about killed me. She forgave me before it was over, though, but only because I'd lived through it in one piece.

Chapter 25
Bringin' It All Back Home

A
RIEL HAD HER RADIO
dialed to KYOTE Coyote Radio when Amanda came on the air with the intro to her interview with Rio. Ariel and I were listening in from her place, under the ramada. “Just be yourself,” Ariel had told him.

It must have helped that Rio's buddies weren't there watching him. It was just Rio and Amanda in the station's tiny space in the building behind the Terlingua Trading Company, and he hit it out of the park. I wished my parents could've heard the interview. They would've discovered how golden he was, and how well he handled himself.

We spent the next day with Ariel recovering the raft and the rest of the gear we'd left at the takeout. A day and a half of desert sunshine had dried the road out enough for us to get through. Halfway down to the river we encountered a sheriff's department roadblock. The fish camp was off-limits until the manhunt was over. When we told them who we were and what we were after, they escorted us to the river. The sheriff scooped us with an update: Carlos hadn't been found, but his backpack had, with his weapon inside. The backpack had been discovered between Upper and Lower Madison, caked in mud, when the floodwater subsided. “Evidently he wasn't able to hang on to it as he swam the rapids and tried to get to shore,” the sheriff said.

We asked if there was any indication that Carlos was alive. The sheriff thought long and hard before answering. “Can't say,” he replied. To our mind, that was a yes.

As we loaded up our stuff, a couple of helicopters were working the area. We could pretty well guess that the United States and Mexico had boots on the ground as well. Carlos was probably hiding in some rat hole, waiting them out. We weren't very confident that he was going to get caught.

Late afternoon, as we drove into the ghost town and laid eyes on the Starlight, we knew something was up. The parking lot was packed, and it included a number of white vans with satellite dishes. “Hmmm . . .,” I said. “What's this all about?”

“Rio's radio interview, bet you anything,” Ariel said.

Rio had Ariel try to sneak her pickup past the Starlight, but they were on the lookout for us. Somebody pointed, and somebody else yelled, and suddenly we had a pack of media types on our heels.

“You might as well enjoy it,” Ariel told my cousin. “It's going to be great for the ghost town. Think of the gas that's going to get sold, and the meals, and the rooms, and the art, and the souvenirs!”

“I'd rather run Upper Madison again,” Rio groaned.

“Really?” I said.

“Not really . . . I can handle this . . . I can handle this . . . but you have to help me, Dylan.”

“As long as you're the front man,” I told him.

I had the passenger window down, and was taking in the sights and the sounds. This was unbelievable. A couple guys with big video cameras on their shoulders were already filming. I suppose Ariel's old truck with the oars and the raft frame lashed to the overhead racks was just the sort of material they were looking to shoot. We found out later they'd been filming around the ghost town all afternoon, killing time making “B roll” while waiting for us to get back.

We never even made it home. Covered with road dust and wearing our beat-up straw hats from the river, we did three interviews in the next two hours. The first was with the Midland/Odessa station, the second was with the El Paso station, and the third was with the San Antonio station. It turned out that the interviewers, and the crews, too, had all been in Terlingua Ghost Town before, covering the annual world-famous chili cook-offs. They were huge, apparently.

The TV reporters all wanted their interview to take place on Terlingua's world-famous porch, with the Chisos Mountains in the background.

That's where we did them, out in front of the Starlight. With my sunglasses to hide behind, it wasn't that bad. Rio kept pulling me in. What could I do?

The sweetest part was ending up the last interview as sunset was lighting up the battlements of the Chisos Mountains. I was saying how much I loved the ghost town, and the Big Bend, and the river. That I'd be back first chance I got.

Then it was over. They told us we would be on the late news in about an hour. We headed into the Starlight; all we cared about was supper. The place was packed, just jumping. A cowboy band was playing. There was a line to get seated, but they brought us right in, me and Rio and Ariel. Yolanda and Georgene and Amanda were waiting at a reserved table. We got a round of applause. This was crazy!

The owner of the Starlight came over, shook our hands, and said that everything was on the house. We ordered the biggest steaks they had. While we were waiting, the cowboy band called Rio up to sing with them.

The song Rio sang was that old Marty Robbins tune, “El Paso,” one of my all-time favorites. In the very first line, Rio dropped “El Paso” and replaced it with “Terlingua,” so it went like this:
“Out in the West Texas town of Terlingua, I fell in love with a Mexican girl . . .”

Rio knocked the place dead. When he sat down I asked him if it was true about the Mexican girl. “Not tellin',” he replied.

It was ten thirty by the time we got home. We were sitting up talking about the river when Yolanda knocked on the door a half hour later. My parents had called, and they wanted me to call back.

Hmmm . . . , I thought. Back in Asheville, it's midnight. I bet they've decided against letting me hang here uncle-less for three more days, and go home on the day I was ticketed for.

Over at the Trading Company, I punched up home with more than a little apprehension. Here's what my parents wanted to talk about: Rio's interview with KYOTE in Terlingua, Texas. Turns out KYOTE Coyote Radio was an affiliate of National Public Radio, and my parents always listen to NPR. Rio's interview played in Asheville a few hours ago, and they'd heard the whole thing. Rio was fantastic, and all was forgiven. Rio sounded so mature, they said, and so modest. He never came out and said it, but we had saved the judge's son!

My mother had something else to tell me. Soon after the interview, her brother called from Alaska. Uncle Alan hadn't heard the interview but she filled him in on it. They had a long talk about the two of us and what we'd done. They decided we were stand-up guys, even though we were also numbskulls.

My mom told me that both of them were tempted to rush to Terlingua ASAP, but decided against it. They thought we should have the full time together that my plane ticket allowed. Not only that, they were talking about my whole family coming out to the ghost town in late October for the chili cook-offs and the Day of the Dead. The weather was always perfect then, and my mother would love the Lost Lizard B&B. Her brother was guaranteeing that it was scorpion proof.

“So, are we really going to do it?” I asked my mom. “Come out to Terlingua this fall?”

“That's what I'm trying to tell you,” she said. “I'm overdue, as you know.”

Things were looking up. Way up.

It wasn't hard to kill the next three days. We put a lot of miles on Rio's mountain bike and his dad's. I still had that hundred dollars I hadn't taken on the river, and it was burning a hole in my pocket. I stopped by the quilt shop to see if they had any quilts made by the women of Boquillas del Carmen. They had dozens. I picked one out for my mother and had it shipped home.

I tried to track down another souvenir from Boquillas, something for myself. On the river, Rio had mentioned that in addition to quilts, Fronteras Unlimited also imported walking sticks from Boquillas as well as scorpions made of copper wire. I struck out on both counts. The TV crews had snatched them all up. Oh well; I could look for them in the fall.

On my last day we hiked to the brink of Santa Elena Canyon, lay on our bellies, and looked eight hundred feet straight down to Rock Slide Rapid. From above, I wouldn't have thought it was runnable. Rio said it wasn't as bad as it looked. We talked about paddling it in the fall.

On my fly day, we had to get up early to catch my eight
AM
bus out of Alpine. The sun was rising over the Chisos Mountains as Ariel drove us north. The big open desert sprinkled with mountains no longer looked like the far side of the moon. With Alpine in our sights, I spied a sign that said
DON'T MESS WITH TEXAS
. I got the threatening tone but couldn't make out what it actually meant, so I asked. My cousin got a good laugh out of that. He explained that it was the Lone Star State's antilitter motto.

Pretty soon we were standing on the curb in front of the High Desert Hotel, waiting for the Greyhound to lope into town. Rio asked me what the little cardboard box in the top of my backpack was all about. I said there was no such animal in my backpack as far as I knew. He said I should check.

I did, and I found a small box like he said I would. Inside was a wicked-looking scorpion fashioned from copper wire, cleverly braided. Its stinger was curled up and ready to strike. The eyes were made of small blue beads. “Awesome,” I said, holding it out on my palm. Rio beamed.

There was more to come. Ariel had a bright-colored Guatemalan bag over her shoulder. She gave it to me and said the bag was for my mother. “Look inside,” Rio said.

“What's inside the bag is for you,” Ariel added.

Here came the bus. I had just enough time to undo the bubble wrap and see what this present was all about. It was one of her hubcaps, with brightly colored geometric designs surrounding a canyon scene, a bird's-eye view of the Lower Canyons. There were two boats way down there on the winding river. One was a blue raft, and the other was a red canoe.

I just lost it. So did they.

All too soon the driver was throwing my duffel in the baggage compartment. We said our good-byes and our see-you-soons. I boarded the bus and took a seat on their side of the street. I had time to give them two fist pumps in honor of Diego before the bus blasted off in a cloud of diesel.

I have only one more thing to report. At the airport in El Paso, there was a headline in the newspaper that grabbed my attention on the way to the gate. It went like this:
FUGITIVE CAPTURED ALIVE IN MEXICAN DESERT
.

The story included a photograph of Carlos snarling like a rabid dog. It came as no surprise when I saw that his name wasn't Carlos. One of Mexico's 10 Most Wanted was on his way to prison.