In the Heart of the Canyon (8 page)

Ruth, who as a wife and mother had served many a meal that didn’t turn out as expected, knew enough to make the best of things. A little sand wouldn’t hurt anyone. She motioned for Lloyd, and they approached the table and made their sandwiches. Out of the corner of her eye she could see JT sitting down on the beach all by his lonesome, and she wanted to go give him a hug. She didn’t, of course; it would only embarrass him. Instead, she gave him an encouraging little wave, and he grimly nodded back.

Then she and Lloyd headed to the river’s edge, where a flat rock jutted out into the water. Across the river, a great blue heron perched on a wedge of sand.

Lloyd climbed up and settled himself. Ruth handed him her sandwich. She felt around for her footing—so hard to keep her balance these days, especially on rocks and sand!—and placed her hands upon the rock and was getting ready to swing one leg forward when suddenly a flash of red caught her attention. She looked up. A Frisbee sailed over her head. Lloyd looked up too, and then she heard Sam give a shout, and Ruth turned, but by the time she saw the dog careening in her direction, it was too late.

The next thing she knew, she lay sprawled on the wet sand with the wind knocked out of her, water lapping at her legs.

“Ruthie?” said Lloyd, peering down.

Ruth didn’t know whether to laugh or cry—that is, until she tasted
salt and blood and realized she’d fallen against the rock and bitten her lip; her eyes suddenly filled with tears, and she spat into the water and tried to stand up. The world spun, and then someone’s arms were around her and they were dragging her, helping her lie down where the sand was dry. Her tongue hurt; she realized she’d chipped a tooth and its ragged point was cutting into her. She felt herself drooling, and wiped her mouth.

Then she heard JT’s low, quiet voice gently telling her to drink; he supported her head and held a water bottle to her mouth, and she sipped and spat and sipped and spat. Dixie appeared by her side, opening up the first aid kit, and she felt someone straighten her right leg out on the sand. She hoisted herself up on her elbows, and it was at that point that she saw the three-inch-long gash down her shin.

“Lloyd?” she said, panicking.

“Right here, Ruthie,” and she saw Lloyd’s darkened face in a halo of bright sun.

“Let’s get her to lie back down,” JT was saying, and Lloyd supported her shoulders as she lay back on the sand. She could feel water being poured on her leg. Was it hot or cold? She couldn’t tell.

“What happened?” asked Dixie.

“One minute I was handing Lloyd my sandwich,” Ruth said. “The next minute I was on my back!”

“Your mouth is bleeding,” Lloyd said. “Get my suture kit,” he told Dixie.

“Maybe let’s take care of the leg first,” said Dixie.

Lloyd straightened up. “Don’t talk to me that way, missy!”

“We’ll get your suture kit, Lloyd,” said JT. “Abo, get his suture kit.” Abo nodded gravely and shifted positions.

“It’ll be all right, Ruthie,” Lloyd assured her.

All her life Ruth had punished herself when anyone in the family got hurt. Always she could trace it to some act of carelessness on her part. It was no different now. She should have been watching for the dog. And it was only the second day of the trip!

“I should have been watching out,” she said ruefully.

“How’d the dog get loose, anyway?” asked Dixie.

“Where’d this dog come from; that’s the important question right now!” Lloyd exclaimed. “What’s a dog doing down in the Grand Canyon?”

People exchanged glances.

“JT found the dog last night,” Ruth told him, patting his hand. “Remember? In the bushes?”

“Is this all the gauze we have?” JT asked.

Sam tapped Ruth’s shoulder. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry too,” said Matthew.

“Did you boys untie the dog?” Mark demanded.

“Sam did it,” said Matthew.

It was true. Sam had actually unfastened the knot.

JT was still fumbling through the first aid box. “Who packed this kit? We usually have tons of gauze. Go check the com boxes,” he told Dixie. “How’re you doing, Ruth?”

“Oh, me,” scoffed Ruth. “I’m doing fine.”

“Drink.”

Lloyd held the water bottle for her, and she drank again, still tasting blood. She hated being the center of attention, especially for an injury. Whatever it was, it would stop bleeding. It would heal. They shouldn’t be fussing over her. She was wasting everyone’s time when they should be enjoying lunch.

She sat up and shaded her eyes from the sun and looked at the blood-soaked square of gauze JT held against her leg. “Let me see.”

JT lifted the gauze. It wasn’t a clean split but rather a raw, messy wound. She saw grit and pink flesh, then a sudden flush of blood. JT pressed the gauze back. Ruth, who had tended to many cuts and abrasions while raising two children, reminded herself that wounds could look more serious than they really were. There was just a lot of blood here. They would clean it and bandage it up, and she would be fine.

She had to be fine.

Because if she wasn’t, who would take care of Lloyd?

A
fter bandaging Ruth’s leg, after wolfing down the rest of his sandwich and making sure the dog was tied up and privately explaining to Sam and Matthew how important it was to follow the Trip Leaders instructions, and if the Trip Leader said tie up the dog, it didn’t mean let the dog loose—after all that, JT called Park Service again. But now, even more than before, the ranger succeeded in making him feel like an imposition, rather than a guide looking out for the health and safety of his passengers and the canyon itself.

“What’d the ranger say?” Mitchell asked after JT hung up.

“He’s got other things to deal with, Mitchell.”

Mitchell nodded, reflecting on this for a moment. “Well,” he said, “I guess we just roll with the punches.”

“That’s right, Mitchell.”

“You sound tired.”

“Nah.” Though he was.

“Don’t worry,” said Mitchell, and he leaned forward and clapped JT’s arm. “We’ll figure this one out.”

JT glanced up. Mitchell’s large dark glasses made it impossible to see the man’s eyes, but JT could hear in his voice a concern for others that surprised him.

“Thank you, Mitchell,” said JT. “Did you get enough lunch?”

“It was terrific. You guys are doing a terrific job.”

JT managed a smile. He did a little better with private compliments but still felt bashful.

“Better put some more sunscreen on your nose,” he told Mitchell. “You’re looking a little red.”

Their lunch spot was at the mouth of a side canyon, so after cleaning up, Abo and Dixie led a group on a short hike. JT stayed with the boats, mainly to keep an eye on Ruth. He built a kind of hospital bed for her out of sleeping pads, with dry bags as bolsters. Out on the river the kayakers glided by; they waved and he waved back, and then he lay down on his own mat. He positioned his hat over his face, hoping he might drop off for a few moments, but he couldn’t stop thinking about the dog. They were five days from Phantom Ranch, where he might be able to convince someone to hike the dog out. But even if he did find someone, was it advisable to send a dog up the trail in this heat? He would require a lot of water, which could add eight, ten pounds to the load. And JT knew the people running the mule trips would balk; mules and dogs didn’t really mix on a steep and narrow rocky trail.

All too soon he heard voices and sat up to see the group returning from the hike. He scolded himself for worrying. The dog would be fine. They could keep him tied up all the time, if necessary. No one was going to go into anaphylactic shock.

“We’ve got the Roaring Twenties up ahead,” he told the group as they refilled their water bottles. “So tighten your carabiners, you might get dinged up and batted around, keep the bailing buckets handy, and expect to get very, very wet.”

“I won’t mind
that!”
Sam exclaimed.

“That’s the spirit,” said JT. “Okay. Into the boats. Same places as this morning.”

And so it was that, as they prepared to head out on this second afternoon, JT found himself tightening an extra strap around the dog’s life jacket. Sam and Matthew smacked water into each other’s faces; Jill dabbed more sunscreen on her nose; Mark dunked his shirt. Mitchell and Lena quickly reclaimed their seats in Dixie’s dog-free boat. Amy and Susan anxiously redistributed the contents of their day bags. Evelyn hiked upriver in search of maximum seclusion in which to relieve herself; Ruth limped toward JT’s boat; Lloyd followed, patting his shirt pockets for something.

And Peter Kramer wondered what Dixie looked like naked.

F
rom the right front seat in the paddle boat, Peter didn’t always have the best view of Dixie; her boat always seemed to be behind them, and he couldn’t turn around very often because he was the one setting the pace. But midway through the Roaring Twenties, Abo had them stop paddling so he could get out his kazoo, because he suddenly had an irresistible urge to toot them a song, and Dixie rowed on past, and there she was, in all her loveliness, her compact life jacket zipped up tightly over her red plaid shirt, her warped scarecrow hat on her head, braids peeking out from below.

Peter’s head spun, just imagining.

Oh, what a cigarette would do for him right now.

When his girlfriend broke off their relationship last fall after six long years together, nobody was more surprised than Peter. The news came out of nowhere: not only did she not love him anymore, but she had fallen in love with someone else, an insurance agent who drove a Mercedes-Benz and owned a lakefront time-share. A lovable insurance agent? Wasn’t that an oxymoron?

Peter didn’t get how something like this could happen, how one person could fall out of love without the other person suspecting anything. The words “clueless chump” ran like a news banner beneath his dreams, all night, every night. How had he missed the signs? There was the vacation with her girlfriends last summer, the many late nights with her book club, the mascara she wore when she went to the gym. (It turned out that was where they met: on the StairMaster! How clichéd, how … common! He imagined her not knowing how to access the TV channel, and there was John D. Rockefeller, ready to help.) Now they were married, living on a cul-de-sac, where from the
looks of all the stray plastic toys littering the yards someone was definitely pumping fertility drugs into the water supply.

But was he going to allow himself to spend any time whatsoever thinking about Miss Ohio and John D. Rockefeller on this trip?

Abo pocketed his kazoo. “Okay, paddlers, we’ve got Georgie Rapid coming up. Lets stay to the right and follow Peters lead. Peter! Look alive!”

Peter gripped his paddle. They floated toward the rapid, watching Dixie up ahead.

“And there she goes,” Abo murmured. “Looking good, looking good.”

Their own boat was now gliding toward the dark V of the tongue.

“Okay now—FORWARD!” Abo shouted as they began to pick up speed. “Come on, paddle, folks, paddle! Let’s move this boat! Here we go!” Peter dug hard with his paddle, leaning into the rapid as they plunged down, taking the first cold wave head-on. “Right turn!” yelled Abo. Instantly Peter began back paddling; it was like slamming on the brakes, and the boat went nowhere, and he back-paddled again, this time whacking blades with Sam behind him.

“Right turn, Sam!” yelled Abo. “Right turn—you’re
sitting
on the right, Sam; that means you gotta back-paddle, watch Peter! Come on, RIGHT turn, people, HARD right!” But the boat was already angling left, with lateral waves dousing both sides, and Peter, with an instinct he didn’t know he had, plunged his paddle down behind his hips, plunged it deep and then pivoted back using all his weight, all 186 pounds, rock hard abs, he was a Viking, Poseidon, Neptune, he was moving oceans. Water soaked his hips, but the boat magically pivoted and slid down into the trough below at a different angle; now they were turning right, narrowly missing a huge submerged rock along the left bank.

“Forward!”

Paddling in sync, they rode the tailwaves out of the rapid to join up with the other boats in the calmer water below.

“Stop!”

Peter froze with his paddle in midair as they bumped up against JT’s boat.

“Everybody in one piece?” JT asked.

Dixie was laughing as she swung her boat around. “I almost got stuck going left! Did you see me almost hit that rock?”

“I had to close my eyes, babe,” said Abo.

I didn’t, thought Peter.

“Mitchell, you might want to tuck that camera away for the next one,” JT said.

“That was cool,” said Sam. “I hope we tip over sometime.”

Abo squirted him with a water pistol. “Lets review a few things, Sam. You’re sitting on the right side of the boat. Now, if I say ‘Right turn,’ do you paddle forward or backward?”

“Back?” said Sam.

“Thank you, Captain Obvious,” said Matthew.

“Just watch Peter and do whatever he does,” said Abo. “You did great, by the way, Peter. Way to put some mojo into things!”