The Hotel Eden: Stories (19 page)

And sure enough, a moment later Glenna spoke again. “Jack,” she said. “Something’s happening with the water.” Her imprecision almost cheered me, then I looked and saw our sandbar was shrinking. Toby had reeled in and was walking back, stepping with difficulty in the soft sand.

“Jack,” he said. “The water’s rising.”

I stood still and watched it for a moment. The clear water crawled slowly and surely up the sand. The water was rising.

“My patch isn’t dry. Load everything on the raft as it is.” I set the cooler and my pack on the upside-down raft and Glenna put her suitcase and Toby placed the sleeping bags and the loose stuff in a heap on the raft. She paused long enough to snap a few photographs of our disaster.

The water inched up, covering our feet, lifting at the raft.

“We’re going to get wet now, aren’t we?” Glenna said.

“Yes,” I said. “Just hold on to the raft and we’ll float it down to the gravel spit.” I pointed downstream two hundred yards.

“Why is the water rising?” Toby said, laying his pole onto our gear.

“Power for Los Angeles,” I told him.

“Some guy’s VCR timer just kicked in so he can record
Divorce Court
while he’s out playing tennis,” Glenna said. “This water is cold!”

Finally enough water crept under the raft to lift it free and we walked it down into the deeper water of the fresh, cold Green River. “Jack,” Glenna said, blaming me for hydroelectric power everywhere, “this fucking water is cold!”

“Just hold on,” I said to Toby as the water rose toward my chin. “This will be easy.”

That is when I saw the next thing, something over my shoulder, and I turned as a small yellow raft drifted swiftly by. There were four women crowded into it. They appeared to be naked.

A
N HOUR LATER
, we started again. We had clambered out of the river onto the gravel, unloaded the raft, and let the patch airdry for thirty minutes while Toby and I chose our next series of flies and Glenna, stripped down to her tank top and Levi’s, commenced drinking cans of lemon and cherry wine coolers. Then we turned the raft over again, reloaded it, and tenderly made into the river. I immediately pieced Toby’s fly rod together, attached the reel, and geared him up with a large Wooly Caddis, the kind of mothy thing that bred thickly on this part of the river. I clipped a bubble five feet from the fly so it would be easier, this early in the day, to handle. Sitting on the side of raft, I began to organize my tackle, and I had to consciously slow myself down. My blood was rich with the free feeling I always get on a river. The sunshine angled down with its first heat of the day on my forearms as I worked, and I realized that my life was a little messy, but for now I was free. It was okay. I was now afloat in a whole different way. It was a feeling a boy has. I smiled with a little rue. Even in a life that is totally waxed, there are still stupid pleasures. It was morning, and I smiled; come on, who hasn’t screwed up a life?

Toby had a sharp delivery on his cast, which we worked on for a while as the raft drifted along the smooth sunny river. He was still throwing the line, not punching it into place, but he mastered a kind of effective half-and-half with which he was able to set the fly in the swollen riffles about half the time. It was now late in the morning, but there was enough shade on the water that the fishing could still be good.

I started working the little nymph in the quiet shady pools against the mountain as we’d pass. Once, twice, drift, and back. I saw some sudden shadows and I was too quick on the one rise I had. Glenna was sitting on her awful suitcase, back against the raft tube, her arms folded, drinking her coolers, quiet as Sunday school behind her oversize dark glasses. From time to time I had to set my rod down and avert the canyon wall or a small boulder or two in the river with the paddle and center us again.

Then later in the morning Glenna took a series of photographs of Toby as he knelt and fly-cast from his end of the raft. She was able, in fact, to film his first fish, a nice twenty-inch rainbow trout which answered the caddis in an odd rocky shallow, coming out of the water to his tail, and Toby, without a scream or a giggle, worked the fish into the current and fifty yards later into our now hot boat. He was a keeper, and Toby said, finally letting his enthusiasm show, “The first one I caught from a raft, ever.” I killed the fish on my knee, showing Toby how to tap it smartly behind the cranium, and put him in my creel.

“It’s awfully good luck to have the first fish be a keeper,” I told him. “Now our nerves are down and we can be generous with the newcomers.” Even Glenna seemed pleased watching us, as if her expectations for this sojourn were somehow being met.

I thought about the article I would write. I could have written it without coming, really. I knew the Green by the back. I would talk about the regulations (flies and lures only—no bait); I would talk about the boat launch and the fluctuating river level; I would say take along a patch kit. I would not mention anything that happened next.

The sun had straightened, into noon, and the fishing had slowed considerably. I had taken two little trout from pools in the lee of two boulders, handling them with exaggerated care for Toby’s information and then returning them to the water. Then, around the next bend, there was a long slow avenue of river and I found out I had been right about the four rafters. They had been nude. About a half mile down, under a sunny gray shale escarpment, there was a party in session. Eleven or twelve rafts of all sizes had been beached, and fifty or sixty people loitered in the area in a formless nude cocktail party.

“Fish this side of the raft,” I said to Toby, adjusting his pole opposite the nudists. Just as I settled him, with a promise of lunkers in that lane, Glenna spotted the other rafters and determined the nature of the activity. She was working down her third wine cooler, a beverage which evoked her less subtle qualities, and she cried out, “Check this out!”

A dozen or so of these noble campers sat bare-assed on a huge fallen log along the river, nursing their beers, taking the sun, watching the river the way people wait for a bus. I heard one call out, “Raft alert! Raft ho!” There was some laughter and a stir of curiosity about our little craft as it drew closer.

I wondered what it was about the wilds that made all these young lawyers feel impelled to take off their clothing. Is it true that as soon as most folks can’t see the highway anymore, they immediately disrobe? We came abreast the naked natives in an eerie slow-motion silence. They stopped drawing beer from the keg, quit conversations, stood off the log. Many turned toward us or took half a step toward the river. Glenna was leaning dangerously out of the raft on that side, another wine-cooler casualness (she was just full of wine coolers), and Toby had swiveled fully around from his fishing duties, striking me in the ear with the tip of his rod. I lifted it from his hands.

One bold soul strode down to the edge of the river, waggling himself in the sunshine. He lifted his cup of beer at us and called, “Howdy! What ya doing?” Behind him, still standing against the log, was a slender, dark-haired girl who looked a lot like Lily. She was about as tall and had the posture. Her breasts were pure white, the two whitest things I’d ever seen at noon on a river, a white that hurt the eyes, and her pubic hair glinted red in the bright sunlight. Oh, I don’t need to see these things. I need to fish and have my heart start again and be able to breathe without this weight in my chest. I could not physically stop looking at the girl.

“The same thing you are,” Glenna answered the young man. “Fishing with worms!” She laughed a full raw laugh back in her throat, leaning so hard on the side of the raft that a quick stream of cold river water sloshed in. As Glenna continued staring the man down and chortling, I thought, This is where it comes from: the devil and the deep blue sea. I am caught, for a moment, between the devil and the deep blue sea. I looked down into the crystal green slip of the river; the stones shimmered and blinked, magnifying themselves in the bent waterlight.

Slowly, we slid past the naked throng. It seemed a blessing that Glenna had not thought to take any photographs. I shifted some of the gear out of the new bilgewater and cast one terrible glance back at the girl and her long bare legs. The arch of her ass along that large smooth log caught my heart like a fishhook. Toby had collapsed like a wet shirt and was sitting on the bottom of the raft, soaking. He bore all the signs of having been electrocuted. I doused his face in a couple handfuls of river water to put out the expression on his face, and sat him up again with his fishing pole and a new lure, a lime-green triple teaser which looked good enough for us to eat. I almost had him convinced that it was still possible to fish in this world when I heard Glenna groan and I felt the raft shift as she stood.

I cursed the pathetic confectioneer who had invented wine coolers and turned to see Glenna reach down and pull her tank top over her head, liberating Romulus and Remus, the mammoth breasts. Shuddered by the shirt, they rippled for a moment and then settled in the fresh air.

“No topless fishing,” I said to her. “Don’t do that.” I handed her the shirt.

She threw it in the river. “I’m not going to fish,” she said back to me. Toby had put his pole down again. This river trip had become more dangerous than he’d ever dreamed. I put one hand on his shoulder to restrain him from leaping into the sweet Green River. When I felt him relax, I turned back to Glenna and her titanic nudity. It was still a day. The sun touched off the river in a bright, happy way. We fell out of the long straight stretch into a soft, meandering red canyon. It was still a day.

“Look, Glenna,” I said. She had opened another wine cooler. “Look. We’re going to fish. This is a raft trip and we’re going to fish. It would help everything if you would take your drink and turn around and face forward. Either way, you’re going to get a wicked sunburn.” I moved the three plastic-covered sleeping bags in such a way as to make her a backrest. She looked at me defiantly, and then she turned her back and settled in.

It was still a day. I took the bubble off Toby’s line and showed him how to troll the triple teaser. “There are fish here,” I told him. “Let’s go to work.” I tied an oversize Royal Coachman on my line and began casting my side of the river, humming—for some reason—the Vaughn Monroe version of the ominous ballad “Ghost Riders in the Sky.” I knew the words, even the yippie-ai-ais.

W
E PASSED
L
ITTLE
H
OLE
at three o’clock and I knew things would get better. Ninety-nine percent of the rafters climb out at Little Hole and we could see two dozen big GMC pickups and campers waiting in the parking lot. We’d already passed a flotilla of Scout rafts all tethered together in a large eddy taking fly-casting lessons. It was a relief to see that they didn’t have enough gear to spend the night on the river.

It had been an odd scene, all those little men in their decorated uniforms, nodding seriously into the face of their leader, a guy about my age who was standing on a rock with his flyrod, explaining the backcast. It was his face as it widened in surprise that signaled the troop to turn and observe what would be for many of them the largest breasts they would ever witness in person no matter how long they lived. Glenna had smiled easily at all of them and waved sweetly at their leader. I said nothing, but put my pole down and paddled hard downstream, just in case Glenna had really got to the guy and brought out the incipient vigilante all Scout leaders have. I didn’t want to be entangled in some midstream citizen’s arrest.

Anyway, it was a relief to pass Little Hole and know that we would see no more human beings until tomorrow noon when we’d land at Brown’s Park and the end of trail, so to speak.

By this time, Glenna was relaxed. She’d slowed her drinking (and her speech and about everything else) and seemed to be in a kind of happy low-grade coma, bare-breasted in the prow of our ship like some laid-back figurehead. Toby had been doing well with the triple teaser, taking three small trout, which we’d released. He handled the fish skillfully and made sure they returned to the river in good shape. I had had nothing on the Coachman, but it was not the fly’s fault. I had been casting in time with “Ghost Riders in the Sky”:

and a fish would have lucky to even catch a glimpse of its fur.

So there had been a little pressure, but now the long green shadows dragged themselves languorously across the clear water. It was late afternoon. We were past Little Hole. It was still a day. We dropped around two bends and were suddenly in the real wilderness, I could feel it, and I felt that little charge that the real places give me.

I had been here before, of course, many times with Lily. In the old days I thickened my favorite books in the bottom of rafts. Lily and I would leave the city Friday night, spend two days fishing scrupulously down the Green River, and drive back five hours from Brown’s Park in the dark, arriving back in town in time for class with a giveaway suntan and the taste of adrenaline in my mouth. My books,
The Romantic Poets, The Victorian Poets, Eons of Literature
, were all swollen and twisted, their pages still wet as I sat in class, some of them singed where I had tried to dry them by the fire. Those trips with Lily were excruciatingly one-of-a-kind ventures—the world, planet and desire, fused and we had our way with it. I remember it all. I remember great poetry roasting cheerily by the fire in some lone canyon while Lily and I lay under the stars. Those beautiful books, I still have them.

M
Y LINE TRIPPED
once hard and then I felt another sharp tug as my Royal Coachman snapped away in the mouth of what could only be a keeper. I set the hook and measured the tension. The trout ran. I gave him line evenly as the pressure rose, and he broke the surface, sixty yards behind us in the dark swelling river.