Читать книгу Rapid Descent - Gwen Hunter - Страница 11

A glimpse of twisted limbs, wet and black. A strainer—a full grown oak, half submerged, its branches tipped with yellowing leaves and its trunk wedged between two boulders—was just ahead. Blocking her course. A swirl of water opened out river-left.

Nell slammed her hips hard left and dug in, ferrying across the strongest part of the current. Paddling with all her might. She banged against the left bolder trapping the tree and let go of the paddle with one hand. Using her palm, she shoved herself into the smaller, weaker current to the side, a cheat created by the strainer debris. She caught a glimpse of a dead animal pinned in the oak, gray and waterlogged, fur dragged by the water. And a second glimpse, an instant still-shot of her palm pulling away, leaving a trace of a bloody handprint on the branch.

And she was around, into the cheat, bashing her boat bottom in the trickle of water. She allowed the kayak to bump onto a low rock and sat in the sun, unmoving, breathing hard. Shuddering. The roar of water was partially muted, an odd trick of acoustics stifling the sound. It was like she’d been shoved into a different world. Still and quiet and safe, full of shadow.

Her breath had a definite wheeze now. Her head throbbed almost as loudly as the water had only moments ago. Nell blew the river water out of her nose and sinuses, and leaned forward to rest her head on one hand. Her ring and the cold flesh beneath were icy on her hot face.

A tickle started in her chest. Nell coughed, the coarse ratcheting sound echoing along the rock channel. She coughed and coughed, her ribs spasming. Her abdominals clenched painfully and she coughed up a gob of…stuff.

She spat into the water where it was caught in a tiny whirlpool and swirled out of sight. The coughing stopped and she breathed. The wheeze was softer, less pronounced.

That dead animal…Not Joe. She knew it wasn’t Joe. But still she wanted to find a way back upstream, just to check. Just to be absolutely sure. But it wasn’t possible. No way. There had been no sign of Joe anywhere.

Her head demanded attention, its throbbing increasing in volume and intensity. She cradled her skull in both icy hands. The pain seemed to swell like a wave washing over her.

“I can’t do this,” she whispered. “I can’t. I’m not gonna make it. Not alone.” A single salty tear slid down her nose. For the first time since she was a little girl, Nell cried. Covering her sobs in the embrace of her own arms.

Caught in the shadows, in the narrow lee of rock, she thought about prayer.

She hadn’t been to church since her father died. The car crash had killed both him and the wife of a church elder, with whom he had been having an affair. She had been twelve. And she had blamed God. Even though she realized that her father made his own choices and his own mistakes, and that God had nothing to do with either her father’s infidelity or his death, she still blamed God. Because she knew that God, if he wanted to, if he really loved her, could have made her father love her mother. He could have kept her father alive. He could have. And he didn’t.

And she hadn’t prayed since.

But perched on a rock, in a trickle of water, near where Pine Creek entered the South Fork of the Cumberland, after facing her own death twice in as many heartbeats, with the worst of the rapids—the Narrows and the Hole—yet to come and her husband missing, Nell thought about prayer. She raised her head and looked up. The canyon walls were closing in, a narrow channel of foamy water and sandstone in browns and yellows, and gray-coal-stained river boulders. There was a patch of blue and glaring sunlight visible in the westward-facing cleft of boulders. She wiped her face, the chapped skin burning. Pale, thin blood dribbled from her fingers. This cold, the blood flow should have been constricted by the temperatures. But with a fever, her body was acting weird. She clenched her fists. Out of options, Nell talked to God.

“Get me out of this, okay?” Her voice was rough, pitched lower with sickness. Her words grated along her throat painfully. She massaged it with one hand and kept talking. “Get me out of this, help me find Joe, and…and we’ll talk about us later. Okay? Just…don’t let me die. And don’t let Joe—” She stopped, the words strangled in her throat. Unable to finish the sentence. The thought.

Instead, she popped the skirt and finished the water in the third bottle, tucking the empty into the hull of the boat. That left her twenty ounces of water. She resecured the skirt and pushed off the rock, downstream, into the still pool. The roaring of the rapids ahead was louder than anything she had heard before today. In front of her, the river disappeared, crooking around and behind a massive boulder. In an instant she was back in the maelstrom. Heading toward the Narrows and Jakes Hole, watching for Joe. For any sign of Joe. Anywhere.

Canyon walls rose above the tree line around her, boulders blocked both water and her way. Water spirits, cruelly playful, knocked against the boat, tipping and redirecting and spinning it, trying to capsize her, tricking her with foamy, hidden dangers. Her boat was underwater as often as it rode atop it. She braced and stroked and pulled with the current, reading it, working with the flow to power her small boat. She swept past a flat-topped boulder capped with a series of altars. Guides often found places on rivers to leave stacks of the rounded, pancake-shaped rocks, each successively smaller rock balanced on the larger one beneath. It was half play, half superstition. Nell tipped her paddle at the formations in salute.

She whipped around a strainer that appeared out of nowhere. An image of the strainer that had trapped her flashed before her again, then vanished. But it left behind a hard ball of fear and desperation in her chest. She took the next series of wave trains too tight, too stiff, and was pulled out of position, making an ungainly inflexible run.

Just before the Narrows, she pivoted the boat into a tiny patch of still water river-right, between two boulders that didn’t appear to be undercut, with no current that could pull her under. In the cleft they formed, she sat. Her breath heaved. Nausea stirred. Dehydration was raising its ugly head, but it was to soon too break open the last bottle of water. Way too soon.

Coming up was the meanest, most gnarly piece of MacGyver water on the run. A long, squirrelly, hairy-hard, impossible crapid to the max. She had taken it before, several times, but it was a dangerous stretch. The last time she ran it, one of the men in her party got dumped. He had to swim the hole and came out with a broken arm, dislocated shoulder and compound fracture of his right leg. Getting him to help had taken the entire five-man crew the rest of the day. It had been a hairy, scary afternoon. Randy, an old paddling buddy, hadn’t been on the water since. And now she was running the hole alone. She searched around, up the canyon walls, between the rocks upstream and down. No Joe. But if he’d been tossed and made it to the shore-side of a boulder, he would be out of sight. He could be ten feet away and she would never know.

Nell popped the skirt and drank water, knowing that she had now taken in eighty ounces of water and hadn’t yet needed to answer the call of nature. She dropped the bottle back in the boat and resealed the skirt. Checked her palms. The flesh was white and bloodless now, nails slightly blue gray with cold. A callus was torn and should be bleeding, should be hurting, but her hands were too cold to bleed and her adrenaline was pumping. She’d bleed and hurt later, when Joe was safe. When Joe was safe…

Chest muscles tight, she peeled into the current. The roar of water increased as the canyon walls climbed. Three and four hundred feet, they soared above her. After a glimpse around for her husband, Nell paddled hard, choosing a position midcenter of the Narrows. With a series of quick strokes, she helped the water take her.

The boat disappeared and reappeared under the water, bouncing over it. Spray slapped her in the face. She maneuvered the tiny craft through the growling snarl of water. Jakes Hole was just below her. The current to the inside of the turn swept under and vanished, taking with it anything it could grab. Water on the outside of the turn curled up, ripping against the rock face of the boulders and the base of the canyon. At the bottom of the turn, the water curled continuously, like an ocean wave breaking without ceasing, a trap for the unwary. The river plunged down and down, a powerful churn of white water.

Nell took the turn in perfect position, her body guiding the boat with ease, as if the water spirits had decided to lend a hand. She swept with the current, taking the crest high. Around the turn, and down, she paddled with all the energy and might she had, letting the water carry her downstream, building momentum. She took a hard drop. Into another hole.

The kayak seemed to stop. Water sucked at the boat, pulling it back.

Leaning forward hard, Nell paddled, her whole body working to breach Jakes Hole.

She fought, reaching the curl and pillow of water that marked the lower boundary of the hole. Water shot at her face. Suction dragged her back and down. Her arms felt on fire. Weighted. Her wet sleeves dragged at her. And she broke through.

The small boat rose up and over and out in a sudden swoosh of movement and texture, the water beating at the hull. If she’d had breath, she would have whooped with success. Ahead were IIs and IIIs. Easy-peasy by comparison to the hole. She was laughing softly under her breath, but the movement of air in her throat was raw and aching. After he finished beating her butt for boating alone, Joe would be so impressed. She thrashed down the soft, panicked “what if…” that threatened to rise.

A quarter mile later, Nell spotted a patch of color. Her heart stopped. Breath froze. Her eyes glued to the patch of red. Red, hard plastic. Molded and rounded. Pressed between a rock and the base of the canyon wall.

She didn’t remember ferrying across to the boat. Didn’t think or breathe or hope. Until her small boat bumped into the patch of red. It was a kayak. Swamped. Upside down.

She touched it with a cold hand. Knowing. Knowing it was Joe’s boat before she even turned it. One hand holding her paddle, one hand free, she slid fingers along the curve of hull, underwater, to the open cockpit. There was no skirt over it. No body inside, dead and drowned. She braced the hand gripping her paddle against the boulder and wrenched with her free hand to turn the boat up over her bow, hip-snapping to stay upright. Filled with water, the flooded boat was graceless, weighing easily four hundred pounds.

It rolled through the swirling river current like a dead animal. Upright. It was Joe’s boat. Battered and beaten. New scratches and a hard dent in the point of the prow. But no Joe. No Joe.

No Joe.

She screamed his name, the sound lost in the continuous roar. Screamed and screamed, the name echoing with the water. Screamed until her throat was raw and only scratchy sobs came from it. Shudders trembled through her as she searched the rocks nearby for any sight of him. Fear and hope raged through her. She looked for a man holding a paddle high, waving to attract attention. Looked for rocks piled in an X. Driftwood in a rescue emergency position, tied in an X. Looked for a body. Looked for Joe standing on a rock, patting the top of his head in the “I’m okay” signal. There was nothing.

No sign of Joe beyond the battered boat. No indication that Joe had ever been here.

The small rational part of her knew that he hadn’t been there. He had come out of his boat upstream somewhere. Hope believed—knew—that he had swum to a rock and climbed up high. She had missed his emergency signal. Had missed sight of him. And now he was behind her, alone and injured. Surely injured. Hope tumbled with despair.

Or perhaps he had come out of the boat just upstream, and had swum the Hole. Perhaps he was yet below her. Needing help.

Her fingers slid along the kayak as if petting it, numb with cold. The red of the boat filled her vision, obscuring the image of anything, everything else.

Blind with the bloody color of the boat, acting on instinct alone, by touch and feel, Nell popped her skirt and pulled out rescue supplies, rope and flex, and secured the boat to a slender rock upthrust in the river. The water-filled boat bobbled in the current.

Watching the boat, the roar of water seeped into her consciousness. The color of red bled away.

She had to get to the next takeout. Had to get help. Get a search party started. She had to get help for Joe. Leaving the boat tethered to the rock, Nell resecured her skirt. It took her three tries to get the skirt over the cockpit hole. Exhausted, she pushed into the current, heading for the takeout at the O & W Railway Bridge.

If she didn’t get help there, then she would push on to the final takeout, Leatherwood Ford Bridge, at the Bandy Creek Campground. Leatherwood and Bandy Creek were smack in the middle of a national park, the Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area. If she saw no one on the way to ask for help, at least there would be qualified people at Leatherwood. Boaters, hikers, park service officers. Help in abundance for Joe.

She had covered three miles of rapids. There were three more miles to go.

Nell read the water and moved into it, an automaton.

She didn’t think during the run, seeing it only as a series of still-shots. The water slamming upward in a column of spray. An altar of rocks seven stones high. A dangerous curl of water that wanted to pull her down. Buzzards pulling at a fish, its bones pale and thin. The glare of setting sun on the top of an oak. The image of a dead hemlock, branches feathered as if reaching for help. The feel of the rigid boat encasing her. The cold of the water on her chest and arms. The wet shirts holding little heat, leaching her meager body warmth away. Her paddle blade, entering the water in a clean stroke. The sight of an osprey overhead, wings extended. The inhuman beauty of the gorge, a palette of fall foliage against the sepia browns and muted grays of sandstone and granite walls. The rush of foam across her yellow and orange boat. Black, water-wet stone. Rushing water everywhere, a deafening roar. No Joe. No Joe.

No Joe.

The O & W bridge came into view at last, and Nell’s eyes swept the spaces where boaters would often rest after the long stretch of rapids. The takeout was empty, the water so high the sandy beach drowned beneath it. There were no hikers climbing to the trestle. No hikers walking along the bridge. No beached boats or rafts. No smell or sign of campfire. But just in case someone was there and not visible from the water, Nell boofed her boat atop a rock and unskirted. On trembling legs, she rock-walked to land and made her way up the steep hillside and concrete platform to the stairs the park kept in good repair.

At the top of the sixty-foot climb, breathless, she surveyed the bridge and nearby camping area. The O & W railroad no longer ran, and its rails and ties had long been removed, leaving a nearly level, winding, one-lane gravel road that traveled along the gorge. Hikers and horse lovers and vehicles used it, but not today. There was only a scattering of dry horse manure to indicate anyone had been through in days.

Nell cupped her hands, found her breath and shouted. “Anyone here? Help!” She listened, hearing only the roar of water. Using the height, she scanned the rocks below for signs of anyone, but mostly for Joe. She saw no one. She was alone.

Fighting tears, she retraced her steps down to the river rock and pulled her body back into her boat.

Shoulders burning, muscles stretching painfully across her spine and ribs, Nell seal-launched off the rock, into the water, and paddled past the bridge. Took the last of the big IIIs. She was a machine, unfeeling, unthinking. Her paddle blades moved with eerie regularity, in and out of the water, side to side. Heading for help.

By the time Nell crossed under the bridge at the Bandy Creek Campground and cut the placid water to the Leatherwood takeout, the sun was setting. The river looked black and still, no longer a hungry predator. No longer interested in pulling her down. Bored with her. Moving on to other concerns, other prey.

Shivering uncontrollably, teeth chattering, she beached the boat, the hull skidding across the sand and pebbles with a harsh swear of sound. She smelled campfires. Saw lights far up in the hills near RVs and tents. Caught a whiff of grilling steak. At first she saw no one, and then, as the wind changed direction, she smelled a campfire close by—the heady scent of cooking beef and burning hickory riding along the breeze. She tried to call out, but her throat made only a faint croak of sound. Pain scratched along with the broken note.

Sitting in her boat on the beach, cold, so exhausted she could hardly move, it took Nell two tries to unskirt herself. She had to twist and roll to her side. Push herself from the cockpit to the sand. Wriggling one hip and then the other from the opening. Breathing hard, she lay on solid ground, her feet still tangled in the boat with her dislodged supplies.

She kicked her way free and made it to her knees, then her feet. Drunkenly, she moved through the dusk upwind, following the scent to the day-picnic area and parking lot.

The campfire was a brazier attached to the side of a beat-up RV. The scent of marijuana and beer rode the air now, tangled with the smell of burgers.

Laughter. Music. A guitar. She stumbled into the camp. Three men and two women. Images of them standing, turning, open mouths round in shock. And the sight of the ground rising at her, telescoped by blackness all around.

Nell’s next coherent thought was of warmth and earthquake. Light. Water being dribbled into her mouth. The dark eyes of a woman, her face rosy in firelight. Cradling her as if she were a child. “Drink. Come on. Swallow. That’s a girl.” Nell swallowed. The water hurt going down as if her tissues had been abraded by claws. The tremors were her body, shaken by sickness or shock.

“We’ve called an ambulance,” the woman said. “And the park service.”

“Joe,” Nell said, her voice less than a whisper. “My husband, Joe. He’s lost on the river. Help him.”

“Shit.” The woman called over her shoulder, “There’s another one still on the water.” To Nell she said, “Where? Where did he go in?”

“Somewhere after the Double Falls,” Nell whispered. “I got caught in a strainer. Had a concussion. He left me to go get help. He didn’t come back.” The enormity of the last four words hit her. Joe didn’t come back. She closed her eyes and slid into darkness.