Shirtless, Rory climbed into the raft and demonstrated the best way to sit and hold our oars. He straddled the lip of the raft, its thick rubber barely denting at his weight, then leaned back with bent knees. We watched his perfect abdomen tense flat as a board.
“This is the lawn-chair position. Remember it, okay? If we bail in some big water, you want your feet up, toes up and together like this, and keep your arms high.” He demonstrated. “If you fall in, first of all, don’t panic. You’ll be okay. You all know how to swim. Flip onto your belly when you can, but don’t try to stand up until you’re in shallow water. Or still water. And the key thing,” he said to the four of us, looking at Pia for an extra couple of seconds, “is to listen to me. Not just some of the time, but all of the time. And do what I say. Got it?”
We all nodded like children.
“And to remember that we are a team. I can’t emphasize that enough.”
We stared at him as if to look at each other would break some sort of spell.
“Last thing. We steer into the rapids, not away from them, and that’s going to feel weird, but that’s how we get through them. Any questions?”
Rachel eyed a bracelet Rory wore: braided strands of dull black hair strung with a few bright beads. “What’s that on your wrist? Is that your girlfriend’s hair or something?”
He looked hard at her, turning it a few times with his other hand. “It’s from my sheepdog, Lally. She died last year in a car accident.”
Pia made an “Oh” sound and took a step toward him as if to look at the bracelet, but he ignored her. “Anything else, about the trip?” Visibly hurt, she shrank back.
“I was wondering,” Sandra said, strapping on her helmet. She already looked younger than any of us, but with her face framed by headgear she could almost pass as a teenager. “You talked about ‘big water’ earlier. What would you call this water, then?”
He looked across the vast, humming river and laughed. “A bathtub! This is called riffle, if you need to call it something. It’s just fast, shallow water.”
Rachel picked up her oar, hefted it. “What about all this rain we’ve been having?”
“It’ll affect things, definitely. We’ll have to keep our heads up.”
She shaded her eyes with her hands as she looked at him. Stray coils of hair popped loose from her short ponytail, framing her face. “How many times did you say you’ve been down this river?”
“This’ll be my fifth run. I know it inside out.” He took a swig of Gatorade. “Anybody besides me know CPR, have first-aid experience?”
“I’m an ER RN,” Rachel said, fastening an elastic strap over the temples of her glasses. “Remember?”
“Right. Good to know.”
The sun beat down on us. My life jacket felt heavy and hot, and I started to get a little queasy. I could taste the processed pancake flavor in my mouth.
Rory dug around in one of the dry bags, pulled out a map, and laid it on the ground. We all gathered and knelt by it, studying it. It looked homemade, just a legal-size piece of paper, something printed off Google Maps and laminated. The river burst out of the top right corner, a fat blue line that narrowed as it turned and twisted diagonally across the paper, widening just before it continued off the page and forever, as far as I could tell. Squiggly green lines marked off elevations surrounding the river. No towns were marked.
Places along the river had been inked in with a steady hand. The Tooth marked a point where the river narrowed the first time; a few turns later a red X indicated The Hungry Mother (someone had crossed out the word fucker after Mother), followed by The Royal Flush, Satan’s Staircase, and—where the river grew wide—The Willows.
Rory snapped his head back and grinned, a signature cocky move that was beginning to wear on me. “Came up with those names myself. What do you ladies think?”
Pia laughed. “They’re awesome,” she said, her shoulder now grazing his. Perhaps he only moved in an effort to keep the map flattened on the ground, but he pulled away from her and dropped his finger on the top right corner of it, where the river was the fattest.
“We’re here. Today we travel . . .” His finger traced the blue line around the first narrowing, the Tooth; the second, the Hungry Mother; and third and twistiest of all, the Royal Flush. “Fifteen miles altogether. The Tooth and the Mother will be tricky but okay. I’m not sure about the Flush. We’ll scout it first, then we’ll either run it or portage. We take out around here tonight.” He jabbed at a place a third of the way across the map. “We set up there, camp. In the morning it starts out easy. There’s a long, calm five or six miles. It’ll feel like the Mississippi, but then it’ll narrow and get fast again around here.” He pointed at Satan’s Staircase.
“I don’t like the sound of that,” Sandra said.
“It’s a series of drops. Not bad. You guys’ll be old pros by then. In fact the extra water might help us in this case. Smooth it out.”