We split up to gather rocks and pine boughs, whatever we could find to cover him. Thorn-studded brush lacerated our shins, but moving helped us keep warm. Sandra, now wearing Rory’s life vest over her own, found a couple of logs that she dragged up the bank and arranged alongside him. Rachel assigned me to build a cairn on the river to mark the spot.
As I stepped from rock to rock lugging stones to pile far enough out in the river to be seen, something tan and white twitched in the leaves near the bank. A young buck stepped delicately into a shallow eddy, glanced at me as if I were nothing, then dropped its velvet-antlered head to drink. The rocks shifted in my arms; I dropped one. Before I took another breath, the buck had turned to run, hooves clattering on river stones, before it crashed into the brush with a flash of its white tail.
As I balanced the last rock on top of the cairn, I remembered with a swoon the chocolate I’d bought at the store and stashed in one of the zippered compartments of my life vest. I took it out. Examined my prize. A froggy miniature Mr. Goodbar, half out of its wrapper. I ate it quickly, facing away from the bank, as if someone were watching me. A profound thirst followed. Head down, I hurried back to the shore.
Rory looked like a forest mummy under his encasement of tumbled stone and pine boughs. Pia and Rachel stood over him, arguing.
“Of course I know his last name. It’s Ekhart. Rory Ekhart.”
“We have to cover his face, Pia, for the same reason we had to cover his body.”
“Then let me do it.” She wiped the sweat and mud and tears off her face with the backs of her hands. She knelt near his head, gazing down at him the way a mother might over her dead child. Ants had found him. They mapped the poreless skin of his forehead and cheeks. She did her best to brush them off, then arranged leaves like puzzle pieces over his face, finally covering those with smaller flattish stones she’d collected by the river.
“I’d like to say some words,” she said as she got to her feet. “In case we don’t get back here.”
Rachel looked away, in exhaustion or impatience or disgust I couldn’t tell, as Pia tilted her head at the forest grave.
“Rest in peace, Rory Ekhart. Who knows what kind of man you would have grown into. I’m sure you would have been a good man, and the world is less without you in it.”
Then we left him. Quietly, in soldierly order, we filed down to the river to make our plan.
24
No one has anything? Are you sure? Check all your pockets,” Rachel said.
Guiltily I rooted around in all the zippered and Velcro-ed compartments in my vest and shirt, turned my shorts pockets inside out. I shrugged. Sandra extricated a mint-flavored Chap Stick used down to a nub, Pia a travel-size foldout brush and waterlogged hair band. Rachel had exactly nothing. We gazed at our depressing stash arranged on the flat rock we stood on, then returned everything to our respective pockets.
“Rory’s map,” Pia said. “If we just had that. I’m trying so hard to remember it.”
“Well, we’re at the Royal Flush, we know that. So we’re fifteen miles from where we started, with thirty more to go on the river. You know,” Rachel said, “we should just hike back upriver to our first camp.”
“I don’t know,” Sandra said, sitting down on the ledge we stood on. She pulled her arms and legs in, tucking herself under the two vests like a turtle. “Going downriver was ridiculous just now. Why would going upriver be any different? Either way, it’ll take us forever to get anywhere.”
“But at least we know where we put the raft in the river this morning.” Rachel squinted into the last rays of sunlight. “Think about it, wouldn’t you recognize that place?”
We nodded dully.
Rachel continued excitedly, “We get there and then look for that logging road right near the camp. We find that fucker and we’re out of here.”
I watched the river rushing by and tried to conjure that very morning, so many eons ago, when we pushed off from a narrow, sandy bank that looked like hundreds of sandy banks we’d passed on our way to the one yards from where we stood. Just a blur of forest and water and terror and death.
“I’m so thirsty,” Sandra said. “I can’t think I’m so thirsty.”
“Everybody’s thirsty.” Rachel put her hands on her hips. “We don’t have the purification pills.”
“I know.” Sandra pushed herself stiffly to her feet and made her way down to the water that surged beneath the rocks we stood on.
“What are you doing?” Rachel said, following her. “Don’t drink that. Get back up here.”
“Don’t talk to her like that.” Pia slipped her a sharp look. “Besides, for crying out loud, how bad can it be?”
“You could get sick! Really sick. You never know what took a crap upstream or what died. Some animal could be lying in the water decomposing. . . .”
Pia jumped down a set of natural stone steps to a place with enough room to kneel. Sandra lay on her belly, splashing her face and scooping water up into her mouth.
I got up.