Willing Hostage

by Marlys Millhiser

  “I’m afraid we’re down to survival rations,” he apologized and offered her hot bouillon and dry granola.

  Leah stared into her soup, listening to the roaring sound around the bend where the river would lead them after lunch. She knew the meaning of that sound in every cell of her nervous system … and she was committed.

  When she finished the bouillon, Goodyear licked at her cup. “Why does he put up with all this? Why doesn’t he just run off and leave us?”

  “This is why.” And her crazy spy brought out a can of Kal Kan Mealtime for Finicky Cats. “He wasn’t raised to be a wild animal.”

  Leah watched in a state of shock as he chipped away at the lid with his pocketknife. “That cat’s not finicky!”

  Goodyear left her side, crawled onto Glade’s lap, rubbed his neck against anything he could reach, and started his soggy motor. Glade emptied the kitty food onto a flat rock and chopped it into bite-size pieces.

  “And I get bouillon and cereal. If you ever treated me as good as you do that oversized imbecile of a feline food machine … I’d …”

  “You’d what?” He moved to her side of the fire, stretched out behind her, and warmed her where the fire didn’t. “What?”

  “I might … just might even shoot somebody for you.” She snuggled back against his body heat.

  “Wait till we get to Hardings Hole where we’ll stay till morning, Leah,” he whispered in her ear. “And I’ll pay you for all I’ve put you through today.” He kissed her cheek. “With interest.”

  Glade added wet firewood and the blaze turned to choking smoke. Goodyear licked all the food and half the moss off the rock.

  Leah tried to ignore the ominous roaring on the other side of the bend. “Why don’t weeds grow on mine tailings?”

  “Because a few inches of earth on top are alive, and what’s below is dead.” He disappeared behind the gorge of smoke from the fire and his voice came through it disembodied.… “Mining oil shale will bring tons of death to the surface. It’ll wipe out everything for miles, and to process it will rob water from more than Colorado, or Wyoming, or.…”

  “So drill oil from offshore, in the oceans.”

  “And leak death to the seas that provide life to an entire planet in one way or another? This river supplied water for people miles away in other states. Shale will have to take water from rivers like this one and so from cattle ranches, citrus groves, truck and grain farms, and cities. The places that provide homes and food can’t withstand the demands of shale to provide power.”

  “So what’s the answer?”

  “Put the billions required to serve up death in the form of oil into other kinds of energy.

  “Can it be done. Really?”

  “Most of it. The public may have to choose between an eighth control on an electric blender and suicide. But government and industry are set on keeping a profitable status quo.”

  “And yet, you’re going to deal with that very government.”

  “I’ve made an agreement to have something investigated and brought to light before too much damage is done to the Rockies.”

  Leah remembered the bull elk she’d seen just before she’d entered the CIA camp and wanted to tell him about it. It suddenly seemed important. But she was too tired to word it right. And he was too impatient to get back on the river.

  “We’ve got Little Joe and Big Joe to get through.” He kicked dirt on the fire till it died. “And then I promise you rest at Hardings Hole.”

  Goodyear drew blood from Glade’s hand as he was stuffed into his bag.

  “Take one thing at a time,” Leah told herself. Little Joe wouldn’t be as bad as Big Joe and she’d have practice on the little rapids first. But she wished she were back in Chicago with a ten-speed blender.

  The Yampa rounded the bend in a rush.

  The puny boat met a tumult of flying water that glanced off rocks in every direction.

  Glade yelled something behind her that she couldn’t hear over the angry clamor.

  Leah remembered to clamp her knees tightly on the slimy rim of the boat before it pitched upward and then swooped nose down into a deluge of churning foam.

  Something bludgeoned her in the nose. It may have been her paddle. Hair and water left her sightless. When she shot up again, the rubber boat was not between her legs.

  Chapter Thirty-one

  The life jacket tried to buoy Leah up. The Yampa tried to pull her under.

  It felt as if someone splashed a bucket of water in her face whenever she tried to breathe.

  The river took charge of her body, doubling it up and then stretching it out, turning and twisting it through the water, hammering it against slippery rocks that she would cling to, and then breaking her hold easily to hurl her on to the next rock. It was impossible to swim.

  She shot into the air, like a salmon trying to swim upstream, and thought she saw the boat bobbing far away before she spun around and water blurred her vision. The next time she could see, she found no boat. Nothing but crashing, swirling white … and the image of the dead bloated cow floating stiffly in a foamy eddy.… Had it met its death in rapids such as this?

  The Yampa sucked her under. Sound faded but her heart pumped terror to her ears in swift measured plops. And then she shot to the surface, only to meet a boulder with the side of her head. The blow turned the white-water world to black …

  … and a little girl swept way out on the end of a rope over a storm-tossed sea, came swooping down in a helpless screaming arc toward oily night water … and slammed into the side of a wooden sailing ship.

  Pain seared the lining of her stomach and the heavy gun slapped against her hipbone in repetitious agony. Reality and sight returned.

  Exhaustion numbed her. Her arms were too weak to grab for rocks; her legs, too heavy to move themselves and flung from side to side.

  Leah floated on her face. Her head jerked up to cough and gasp for air. The water was calmer, quieter. A board floated past her watery vision and she dragged a leadened arm up through weighted water to grab for it. It was her paddle.

  “If you’re thrown from the boat, try to swim ashore and light a fire,” he had said.

  But the “shore” was rock cliff she couldn’t have climbed if she’d had the strength to fight the current to get there.

  “Leah! Leah, grab the boat.” Something bumped her leg.

  She held dully to the paddle and coughed up Yampa.

  “Here, heave yourself over the side. Don’t give up, Leah.”

  Slimy cold rubber brushed against her face. “I can’t.…”

  “Yes, you can. Damn helpless woman.”

  The paddle tore from her grasp. He placed her hands on the rounded pontoon. “Now pull yourself along to the front and crawl up over the rim. If I pull you in here, I’ll capsize.”

  Leah moved hand over hand up the side of the boat even while being swept downstream. But she didn’t have the strength to haul herself out of the water. The rim buckled as he lay over the duffels to grab her wrist.

  She looked up into two dripping faces. One of them had the decency to look worried.

  The other looked like the reincarnation of the devil, with whiskers.

  With Glade’s help she got her shoulders onto the rim. He gripped the waistband of her jeans and gave her a final hoist. The boat lurched, tipped, and Leah slithered face first into the water on the floor.

  She turned over to lay with her head resting on the inflated pontoon, and he washed blood from her face with a sopping handkerchief.

  “You’re lucky to be alive, lady.” His head disappeared and she could hear the pump working. He peered over the duffels and smiled. “Can you feel anything broken?”

  “Yes. My spirit.”

  He laughed and stuck the pump on her side to clear the bilge there.

  Leah watched the sky dreamily as it began to drop rain on her face.

  “Well, we can’t get any wetter.” He started to tell her of the first time he’d “r
idden” Little Joe, trying to sound casual. But he glanced up from his pumping to survey the river and stiffened.

  “What?” She made an effort to raise her head.

  “Big Joe. Grab the ropes on the gear and hold on. I’ll try to solo this one.” The horrible but familiar roar almost drowned out his voice.

  Leah wound stony fingers through ropes and closed her eyes as the boat reared.

  There hadn’t been time to stuff the cat away and he slipped onto her lap from above, digging his claws into her clothing to stay with her, his body rigid. The downward swoop almost pulled her off the ropes and she knew Glade couldn’t do it alone. She felt the careening swing as they turned a full circle, and then was amazed to find them through the rapids on smoother water.

  “The river’s so high now that it slips right over Big Joe,” he said with triumph. “Hardings Hole coming up.”

  Leah stood on the firm sand of Hardings Hole. Her legs were still at sea and Glade had to steady her as they walked up from the beach.

  Thunder rumbled and ricocheted off canyon walls. Rain fell like an avalanche. “What’s that?” She reached out to touch a blob that appeared suddenly.

  “A picnic table. And there’s a grill set in concrete for roasting steaks—sorry, I didn’t bring any—and that’s—”

  “You’re kidding. People have picnics here?” Theirs had been the only boat on the beach.

  “The river and the weather are usually more cooperative. And this, believe it or not, is a ladies.” They approach a tiny green building. “Or maybe it’s the men’s. Anyway, it’ll keep the rain off you until I get the gear into the cave. I didn’t bring the tent.” He shoved her into a foul-smelling outhouse and shut the door.

  She used the facilities, listened to the rain, read the graffiti. On the inside of the door someone had scratched “To Be Is to Do—I Ching.” Beneath it someone else had lipsticked “To Do Is to Be—Sartre.” A later addition in ballpoint said “Do-Be Do-Be Do—Sinatra.” The bottom line, again in lipstick, had closed the argument—“I Do Bees—De Sade.”

  Glade would have agreed with I Ching and Sartre. Committed, he’d said. And she knew she was—to him as well as the river. And this time she couldn’t run from either of them. And she knew instinctively that there was no future in this commitment. If the Yampa didn’t get them, someone at Split Mountain Ramp would. They’d both have a fatal accident or the goons.…

  When she could no longer stand her thoughts or the smell, she stepped out into the clean cold water falling from the sky.

  Goodyear arched in a puddle under the picnic table, shaking first one prissy foot and then the next in a four-legged imitation of the Charleston. Even his whiskers drooped.

  Leah squelched over to the attached bench and sat. Rain washed the blood, clotted on her hair, in pink rivulets down the stringy blond strands lying over her breast. One of her pant legs was split to midthigh. Her ulcer had subsided to a duller but constant pain to keep the one on her temple company.

  “You know, cat? All I need right now is the curse?” she said miserably and rubbed her sore head. “And then I’d just have it all.”

  A high cliff wall showed fuzzily through the rain and ghosts of other picnic tables not far off. Lightning split something apart on the rim high above and brought a wet cat to her lap. Leah snuggled him close and tried to shield him with her arms.

  Glade, looking like a sailor in a squall, stomped by with duffels over both shoulders and disappeared around a corner of the cliff. When he came back for her, Leah carried Goodyear.

  “He’s shaking. Cats are susceptible to pneumonia.”

  “We’ll light a fire for him.”

  “Fire! There can’t be any dry wood for miles.”

  “All kinds of it in the cave.” And he led her around the end of the cliff and up a narrow trail.

  It was more of a shallow cavern, one whole side open, a smaller replica of the kind Indians used to build adobe cities in, high on steep canyon walls.

  Blackened rocks rested in a ring around the charred remains of a campfire and a heap of twisted sticks and logs sat at the back.

  Glade wrapped the trembling cat in a towel and found one for Leah.

  She slid out of squashy tennis shoes and stood barefoot on the dry sandy floor while he broke sticks for the fire. When she peeled off her jacket she found it ripped up the back and strangely lightweight.

  “Glade, I’ve lost the revolver,” she said with her hand still in the empty pocket.

  “Probably at Little Joe. I guess we’re down to one.” He struck a kitchen match on the boulder next to him.

  “Surely no one will follow us down that river. Why do we need guns?”

  “I expect our friends’ll try to pick us up downstream. After we leave here, there’s access to the river at several places if you disregard the law.”

  “I thought there wasn’t any way out.”

  “Not that we could walk—it’d be too far. Frankly, we’re sitting ducks in that boat if there’s someone on shore with a rifle. But if they sink us, they sink the papers. They’re buried over there in the corner.”

  “When you hide something, you go all out.” She pulled off her clothes. Her underpants had turned from white to the beige of the river and when she removed them they left a bikini outline of grit—tiny grains of dirt that the river had washed through her clothing. She could feel them everywhere on her drying skin with the tips of her fingers.

  Glade dug in the corner with a stick, drew out a package of black pastic, and then stood staring at the wavering shadow Leah cast on the back wall of the cavern while the real Leah stood by the fire behind him toweling the remnants of the Yampa from her body.

  She pulled her one change of dry clothing from a duffel and was dressed by the time he had his shirt off.

  “On what glorious adventure did you get that?” She made an attempt at her old flippancy and ran a finger down the ugly scar with the funny dip at its base on his abdomen. “What’s this, a dueling scar?”

  The marvelous laugh rebounded off cavern walls. “Leah, I told you my clandestine life was very dull, didn’t I?” He looked over his shoulder as if there were someone to overhear and pulled her close with that steel grip. “Actually, it’s a knife wound, a dirty knife wound,” he whispered. “That’s where they took out my gall bladder in Santiago.” And he laughed again when she pushed away. “The indentation at the bottom is from the resulting infection.”

  She spread out her sleeping bag by the fire.

  “You’re not the first blonde to fall for that, though.”

  “Oh, shut up!” She stretched out on her stomach with her face to the wall and watched his shadow.

  “Leah, I didn’t bring you on this trip to break your spirit.” His voice turned serious, soft in one of those lightning mood changes.

  “Why did you then?”

  “I didn’t know the river would be like this. And I don’t trust Welker. He’s a funny guy. And Leah”—he had a way of saying her name, when he wanted to, that made it sound different from the name she’d heard all her life “when I came down before, it was a fantastic experience.”

  The naked shadow knelt and she could hear him rummaging through a duffel. The shadow bent over her shadow. “I wanted you to see the river and its canyon.” He dabbed stinging fluid on the wound at her temple. “I thought … maybe you’d see why I have to do this thing with the papers.”

  “There isn’t any oil shale on the Yampa.”

  “No, but the beauty here and on the Flat Tops will be robbed by shale.” He massaged her neck and shoulders and she began to relax.

  “There are other places like this but precious few left for a whole country. Have you seen what we’ve done to the Appalachians?” His hands moved up under her blouse. “All along the eastern slope of the Rockies there’s a heavy population center hard pressed for water—”

  “All I’ve seen is water since I got to Colorado.”

  “But this is an unusual year
. And shale will bring whole new populations to the western slop. Those people will need water, too. Shale will take most of it just for processing.” His weight moved over onto her buttocks and his hands worked down her back till her skin tingled.

  She remembered Mr. Blum from across the street in Chicago. He’d raved about the bleeding-heart conservationist sissies in her mother’s kitchen. What would Mr. Blum think of Mr. Wyndham?

  “Think of canyons like this one, Leah”—he unhooked her bra—“filled with the debris from shale. Shale is mostly debris, you know, and dumping it into canyons is the best experts have found to do with it because it expands to—”

  “I wish they’d do it right now. Then I could climb up out of here.”

  The warm hands left her back and he moved away.

  Leah rolled over and sat up. She told the naked man who hunkered next to the fire about the bull elk she’d seen while waiting to turn herself in to the CIA and again experienced a sense of unreality. How strange to be sitting in a cavern talking of elk to a man who looked like an aborigine with his unruly mop of hair and exposed muscles.

  He added wood to the flames. “You imagined it. No elk would get that close to a pack of dogs and a helicopter.”

  “Well, this one did. And … he was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. His antlers were like trees and had a mosslike coating. He was enormous and his eyes were … watery and soft even with the terror in them. I wish you could have seen him … because there aren’t words to tell you … and—”

  “And all he asks is a place to live. Is that too much? To live outside the freedom of a zoo? Is it?”

  “No. I want him to live”—they were suddenly back together on her sleeping bag—“but people need jobs, too. In Walden—”

  “Other forms of energy produce jobs without taking so much clean air or water. That elk belongs to all of us, Leah. But most of all to himself.”