First Descent

by Pam Withers

  “Maybe someone can sneak into the guerilla camp and tell Alberto to come back?” the young boy suggested.

  There were only grunts from around the fire.

  “When are the kayakers returning?” someone asked softly, trying to ensure Myriam wouldn’t overhear.

  “Rex will return tonight, if he doesn’t change his mind or get lost or attacked on the way,” Papá replied. “The Brazilians said their thank-yous and farewells. Their packs were full. They won’t be returning.”

  Myriam turned her head just enough to see Papá peer at the sky, watching darkness descend. She’d worried all day about Rex’s safety, about Alberto sending him and his friends on such a dangerous errand, but she didn’t dare say anything. She’d noticed the sleeping bags strapped onto Henrique’s and Tiago’s packs and heard them tell her father good-bye. But Rex’s had been empty. So he plans to return – doesn’t he?

  “Tell Myriam to charge the white boy more money,” someone suggested.

  “She has already negotiated a very high price. Leave her be,” Papá said.

  Myriam hung her head. Yes, she’d negotiated a high price. The villagers had been impressed. But she hadn’t told anyone that a second payment was coming when he finished the river. She was toying with the idea of keeping that for herself, for her bus trip to campus. Now guilt enveloped her. She doubted she could go through with leaving her beloved village or defying her elders.

  “Are they likely to kidnap the white boy when he’s with Myriam?” someone asked.

  “Less likely,” Papá replied.

  “Is Myriam in danger if they do try?” someone else asked.

  “She is fast on her feet and knows the terrain well,” Papá said, failing to hide a note of concern. “They’ll let her escape.”

  “Shhh,” another said. “Here he comes. Alone.”

  The men looked over at Myriam. She turned, rose, and rushed to Rex, remembering to slow down at the last minute to not look too enthusiastic. There were many in her community who didn’t like her associating with a foreign white boy, whether it brought much-needed money for the community or not.

  “Myriam,” Rex greeted her, his smile broad in the shadows, his body poised as if to hug her. She shrank back.

  “I’m glad you found your way,” she said as he slid the pack off his shoulders and began unzipping it. “The others?”

  “They quit. I’ll carry on alone.”

  She didn’t know what to feel. Relief about the money, or worry about his safety. Didn’t he tell me it was risky for kayakers to paddle solo?

  Both the men and the women stepped forward to inspect what he’d hauled up the mountain. There were nods of admiration from the men, who’d said earlier a white boy couldn’t carry much, and grunts of approval from the women, who were already pushing forward to sort the bags of fruit, vegetables, canned beans and corn, and powdered milk Papá had requested.

  When Freddy and Flora ran to Rex, he squatted down and pulled out a chocolate bar. “They’ll share it with the other kids, won’t they?” he asked Myriam.

  She quickly translated for the twins, who gave Rex big smiles and ran to share their prize with their playmates.

  When the backpack was empty, except for a packet he’d reserved for himself, Rex nodded at the villagers, then at Myriam, and began walking to his hut.

  “Good night, Myriam,” he said, turning to wink at her in such a way that no one else could possibly see.

  She drew in her breath, burning with resentment. How dare he! But she could feel a half-smile hiding behind her frown.

  The next morning, Myriam’s mother offered to look after Flora, so Myriam had only Freddy to bike with. She followed Rex as he biked up to the trout tanks, where he’d hidden his boat and paddle two days before. She watched him stash the bike, then pick up his kayak and perch it on his broad, naked shoulder. He was wearing tight black rubberlike shorts, boots of the same material, and nothing else. He had his paddling jacket tied around his trim waist and a small waterproof pouch in his hand. She’d never seen a kayak or a kayaker, except in pictures, before Rex and his friends had shown up. Now she felt like she knew quite a bit about kayaking gear and how kayakers maneuvered their little boats around river boulders and through waves.

  She still thought it was ludicrous that someone would fly halfway around the world to paddle a river. It reeked of money, arrogance, and stupidity. But she couldn’t help admiring the way Rex made his little boat work the rapids. He seemed to read invisible routes through the water the way birds read air currents.

  In all her years of watching the El Furioso tumble by, she’d never imagined a vessel that could dance down it as if at play. However strange she found Rex and his motivations, she recognized in him the same fascination for river currents she’d always held. Is it possible a stranger can appreciate my river as I do?

  Rex set his kayak down on the riverbank and fished out his life jacket, paddle, helmet, and spraydeck. He flipped the boat over to inspect minor scratches, then turned and smiled at Myriam with a warmth that distracted her from the guilt and misery Alberto’s departure had invoked.

  “It’s calm here,” he said, seating himself on a rock, drawing his feet up to his knees, and staring at the peaceful water flowing by. She parked her bike and seated herself on a stump near him, studying his features as he watched the river. Morning sun shone on his white face, so full of both determination and gentleness. The scent of eucalyptus drifted on the breeze. Birdsong floated down from the softly drooping acacia tree branches, harmonized by the gurgling river.

  Myriam lowered Freddy to the ground. Immediately, he crawled up onto Rex’s overturned boat, positioned his legs like he was riding the community’s mule, and made cluck-cluck sounds like Papá did to urge the mule on.

  Rex chuckled. “Ride ’em cowboy, Freddy.” Then he turned to Myriam. “What’s after this calm section, Myriam?”

  She straightened her poncho over her jeans and shifted on the tree stump. Why doesn’t he just ask me to draw a map of the whole river and let me get back to my duties in the village? Then again, she loved the freedom of hanging out by the river all day and watching him muscle his boat around. She didn’t even miss Henrique and Tiago, who asked too many questions. Difficult political questions. But there was another reason Myriam was okay with continuing to come to the river with Rex. She was aware that her presence – specifically her ability to bring indígena guards running to her aid – discouraged any guerillas or paras who were eyeing him. Not that she could be certain they wouldn’t try something anyway.

  Beyond all that, though, since last night she’d been wrestling with how and when to ask Rex for the other half of the payment.

  “Myriam?” He interrupted her thoughts. “What’s after this calm section?”

  “Rex, I’d like to have the second payment before I tell you.” She couldn’t believe she’d actually said it. Hopefully not too abruptly? I need to collect it before the river kills you or the soldiers take you, she thought darkly. “You can trust me to keep guiding after the payment, you know.”

  He smiled, rose, and walked over to sit beside her on her stump. She stiffened. “I trust you, Myriam. But the deal was, I pay you when I reach the Magdalena.”

  Should I tell him now or wait for him to find out for himself? El Furioso would never, ever allow him to reach the Magdalena by kayak. And even if he did make it there, he shouldn’t hike back up through paramilitary territory to pay her. Never mind that he’d managed to return to her village the day the Brazilians had abandoned him.

  “I need the money now,” she insisted. “Our community needs it now,” she corrected herself with a stab of guilt. “I promise to guide until you give up.”

  “I’ll never give up!” he said.

  “Why? Do you get money if you kayak to the Magdalena? Do you get your name in the newspapers? Do you become a celebrity?” She tried not to let sarcasm and bitterness creep into her voice, but she couldn’t get past that he was usin
g her river for shallow purposes.

  He shrugged. “Yes, but I don’t care about any of that.”

  He met her eyes with a steadiness no liar would have been able to maintain. “Then why?” she asked again.

  He sighed, moving his hand near where hers rested, but refraining from touching her. “My grandfather tried to kayak the Furioso and gave up. I have to do it to prove myself to him.”

  Myriam gazed across the river, towards where Alberto was probably being initiated, this very moment, into a guerilla band he mistakenly thought would cure their people’s problems. Alberto is trying to prove himself to our village, she thought miserably, even though the paras might punish us for him joining up. That and to hurt me or get away from me.

  “That’s not a good enough reason,” she said aloud. “If your grandfather doesn’t love you, maybe nothing will change that.”

  Rex looked startled. He crossed his arms and surveyed her.

  “El Furioso isn’t going to take you to the Magdalena,” Myriam declared, then panicked that she’d said it. “Especially if you don’t have a better reason than that.”

  Rex stood and walked to his boat. He gently lifted Freddy from it and eased the boy into her arms, then turned his boat right-side-up.

  I’ve blown it, she thought. He’s going to slide into the river without paying me and without asking me again what’s below. If he dies, it will be all my fault, just like it’s my fault that Alberto is going to die. “Rex?”

  “I’m paying you,” he said gruffly, handing her a wad of money he’d pulled from his waterproof pouch.

  She counted it – the precise amount they’d agreed on for the final payment. She blushed and mumbled thank you.

  He backed away and sat down on the rock again, eyes not leaving her. Freddy gazed at the cash and poked a grubby finger at it.

  The money – enough to get to campus or to seriously help her community – felt like it was burning her hands. Her heart pumped double time. A big decision lay before her, but first things first.

  “When the rapids start again,” she said, “they’re very big. There are at least five of them, each broken by a small calm section. Then the river plunges over a waterfall.”

  He jumped up. “How tall?”

  “Like five of those trees, one on top of another.” She pointed to a nearby pine tree.

  “Fifty feet,” he calculated aloud. “Rocks or logs piled up below it?”

  She hesitated. “I don’t think so.”

  “Easy to walk around?”

  “Impossible to walk around. It’s the start of a canyon with high walls.”

  “And what is the whitewater like between those walls?”

  “Crazy. And not possible to kayak. You will have to stop at the falls.”

  Instead of declaring that he’d give up now, as she expected, he announced, “That is where you and I will part, then. But I will carry on. I figure it’s only half a day’s paddle from there to where the Furioso runs into the Magdalena.”

  She was about to protest when he pulled a nylon bag out from inside his kayak. A loop of rope stuck out of the bag.

  “This is called a throw bag. It’s for rescues.”

  She nodded, waiting.

  “Between now and the falls, if I get in a situation that forces me to come out of my kayak, and you are onshore, you could save my life.”

  Her eyes grew large. So Rex was finally admitting he could come out of his boat in the river and that doing so could kill him. Because Henrique and Tiago are no longer here to help.

  “How?” she asked.

  He stood and placed a hand through the rope’s loop. Then he loosened the drawstring on the bag. Inside, she saw that the loop was one end of a long rope that filled the entire bag. The other end was securely attached to the bottom of the bag. With one swift move, he threw the bag towards the center of the river. The rope unwound quickly until just the empty bag, still anchored to the far end of the rope, hit the water and started floating downstream.

  “If I were in the river, I would grab that, and you would reel me in, hand over hand, standing like this.” He bent his knees and straightened his back, hauling in the rope as if it had something heavy on its end.

  She looked serious, pulling Freddy close.

  “We need to practice it, Myriam.”

  “Okay.”

  First, he coached her in throwing the rope. She tossed, watched it unravel in the air, watched him pull it in and drop the coils of rope back into the bag each time.

  “You’re a quick learner,” he finally said, satisfied. “I’m going to get in my boat now, tip over, and come out of it.”

  He paddled to the middle of the river, capsized, and ejected, just like the time he’d done so before, hiding under the boat to amuse the twins. She gripped the rescue rope’s end loop and tossed the bag through the air. The bag, empty of rope by the time it reached the kayak, landed on the overturned boat with a thud. Rex grabbed it. She braced herself to haul him in, which was no easy task, given that he had hold of his boat and paddle, and the current had hold of him. Still, she managed to pull him and his gear to shore.

  Freddy clapped as Rex emerged, dripping wet, and went out to do it again. After several practice rescues, Rex seemed satisfied. He tugged off his paddling jacket and life jacket and stood in the sun’s warmth, naked from the waist up again.

  “But what if I’m not there when you need rescue?” she asked, failing to avert her eyes as he stood beside her.

  His wet shoulder muscles glistened in the sunlight. Droplets worked their way down his chest hair and over his flat stomach. He was powerfully built, more like Papá than the mostly scrawny men in her village. His smile was as wide as his helmet strap. He smelled of clean wet hair.

  “You will be. If I come to a rapid I think could separate me from my boat, I’ll position you at the bottom before I run it.”

  “Oh.” But that won’t work in the canyon, she wanted to say. You’ll be on your own there. And you’ll drown.

  “Myriam, is it safe for you to hike along the river while I’m paddling? Are there soldiers?”

  Myriam straightened herself in surprise. So he isn’t as naïve as I’d thought. And Henrique’s and Tiago’s departure has to make him wonder. She shrugged and tussled Freddy’s hair. “Maybe. But this is our land.”

  Rex moved closer to her, too close, and looked into her eyes. “You’re the bravest girl I’ve ever met.”

  She stepped back, shaking a little. Suddenly, she was less scared of soldiers than of him. Then anger surged. I’m not brave; I have no choice. My people have no choice! And he’d forced her into this position by offering her money that her community couldn’t afford to turn down.

  She lifted the whistle that dangled around her neck. “If I’m in danger, I blow on this, and those on guard duty will come running. We take turns being on guard duty, strung out within hearing distance of one another’s whistles.” She let the whistle drop back to her neck.

  He studied her face, then reached forward to touch the whistle. Her neck grew hot where it rested against her skin.

  “Will you blow it if I kiss you?”

  Panic seized her. She took two long steps backward and raised the whistle like it was a shield. “Get into your boat,” she ordered him. “You are here to kayak.”

  “No problem,” he said, shrugging his shoulders in a maddeningly unperturbed way. “I’ll paddle to where the next rapids start. I’ll wait for you there.” He pulled his paddling jacket and life jacket back on.

  She gathered up Freddy to secure him on her back and moved towards her bicycle. “Rex,” she said, hesitating.

  He turned.

  “If I call the indígena guards, they will come and protect me. But they may not be able to protect you.”

  He stood there for a long time. “You suggest I hide?”

  “Yes,” she replied, not willing to tell him there was no place a white boy who didn’t know this terrain could possibly hide. And he d
idn’t even speak Spanish. What is he doing here, anyway? And why should I care if they come for him, now that I have my money?

  He climbed in his boat, snapped the spraydeck around his cockpit, and launched himself into the current. She watched her client disappear around the bend, paddling in such a relaxed, easy fashion that she wondered if he’d registered any of their conversation.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Just as Gramps’ journal and Myriam had said, the calm section stretched for more than a mile. For the first time, however, my mind was not on the river and its features. Instead, it was torn between my growing attraction for the girl I’d just left on the bank and shadows I was beginning to sense along the shore. I kept glancing at the brush, onshore boulders, and trees that flashed by. Everywhere I looked, I imagined soldiers watching me.

  Why didn’t Gramps warn me it was dangerous up here? Because he had no way of knowing, I reminded myself. He couldn’t even get a topographical map, let alone know the exact whereabouts of ever-moving “pockets of resistance.” He’d assessed it the best he could. Henrique and Tiago had also thought it was okay till they got here.

  Reporters who try to determine what soldiers get up to on indígena land get murdered, Tom had said. So most people outside of Colombia wouldn’t have any way of knowing. But what about indígena reporters? Hey, that’s what Myriam said she wanted to go to university to become. But her family won’t let her. Bummer for her.

  I pivoted around a rock and sat bobbing in the eddy for a moment. A wind had picked up, and it felt like someone breathing on me. Pull yourself together, Rex, I told myself. You’re doing a first descent. You’ll have it nailed in two days, then you’ll be out of here. There’s nothing you can do about trouble that has been going on here for half a century. Just go with the flow, do what you’re good at, and finish what you came here for.

  I leaned out from my eddy, stuck my paddle into the current, and let it whip me out in an arc. A rock I hadn’t seen just under the surface broadsided my boat before my bow had fully swung to a downstream position. I had to throw in a slap brace to keep from going over. No biggie, but I heard Gramps’ voice nonetheless: “Sloppy, boy. Gotta keep your eyes open better than that.”