Lava Falls

by Lucy Jane Bledsoe

  After finishing a second plate of pasta, Paige put a handful of Oreos in her shorts pocket and walked away from the circle of campers, who were happily reviewing their days on the river so far. She found a big rock out of earshot and took a seat to eat the cookies.

  She wondered what Justin was doing. He wasn’t really her boyfriend. They’d never done anything outside of work. Her mom would predictably say he was using her, meaning the fucking in the supply room. As if it couldn’t be the case that Paige was using him. Which was really more like it. Paige ought to tell her mother that she was a nymphomaniac. It’d be a kind of coming out. Anyway, Paige was definitely into Justin and wouldn’t mind hanging out sometime, outside of work, but truly, the sex got her through shifts and you couldn’t ask for more than that. Well, of course you could. But it was better to not tie herself to someone as depressed as Justin. She was free if someone better came along. Like a male Kara. She’d like that, someone confident and beautiful and kind, but not in a saccharine way.

  To her surprise, Brynn sauntered in her direction.

  “Hey,” Brynn said. Her straw cowboy hat was hella dope. So were her mirrored aviator sunglasses. So were her blue toenails. Her freckled skin had tanned over the past week and she looked like a model on the cover of a health magazine. “I ran out of sunscreen. I know it’s a lot to ask, but do you think you have any extra?”

  Paige liked that she had asked her. Besides Kara, there were no other young people out here. Well, Josie was youngish, but she was more like an old person in a young person’s body. Probably Brynn also wanted an excuse to walk away from the deadly boring dinner conversation.

  Brynn smiled when Paige didn’t answer right away. “I know, sunscreen is as valuable as gold down here. You don’t just ask for it lightly. The exchange rate’s gotta be high. Name your price.”

  She had a flirtatious smile. Paige wondered if she’d ever be interested in Justin. Probably not. She’d see him as a whiner, which he was. She should break up with him.

  “What I really want,” Paige said, “is out of this hellhole of a canyon. Can you do that for me?”

  Brynn laughed a loud and genuine laugh. “Seriously?”

  “Seriously,” Paige said. Then she thought of something else she’d like: the girl’s story. What was the deal between her and Howard? “I have a whole extra tube of sunscreen. You can have it.”

  “Oh, dude, thanks. That would be so helpful. I don’t know what I was thinking bringing just one tube.”

  “Is he your boyfriend?”

  Brynn removed the mirrored sunglasses and looked at Paige. For a quick moment, Paige thought she saw fear in her eyes, like tiny flashing SOS signs, but just as quickly the eyes flattened in defiance. Brynn squinted at the setting sun and said, “Howard’s my husband.”

  “For real?”.

  She nodded.

  “Are you in love?”

  “Do I, like, know you?” Brynn’s pink skin darkened. She seemed indignant, but not very indignant.

  “Because,” Paige continued, “you don’t seem like you are.”

  Brynn put one fist on her hip and cocked the forefinger of her other hand at Paige. “You’re mouthy, girl, you know that?”

  Paige nodded. “Were you, like, trying to get back at your parents or something?”

  Brynn laughed, but it sounded forced, and she shook her head. “Plus, that’s rude. That’s so rude.”

  Maybe she figured he’d die soon. But he wouldn’t necessarily. Paige’s great-grandma was ninety-six. With Alzheimer’s. Brynn could be changing Howard’s diapers and spoon-feeding him a few years down the road.

  “I just honestly want to know. You can trust me.” Paige surprised even herself with the ballsy inquiry. It just seemed like Brynn had a secret and, since there was nothing else to do down here in this hot, sandy, claustrophobic canyon, she wanted to hear it.

  “I don’t trust you. I don’t even know you. Can I get that sunscreen?”

  Maybe Paige had the story all wrong. Instead of an actual or psychological kidnapping, maybe it went the other way. Maybe Brynn was the one taking the old man for some kind of ride. He thought Brynn wanted the Grand Canyon. He thought Brynn wanted him. It was probably as simple and stupid as money. He might just have a little mishap down here where there was no law enforcement, where simple accidents like falling off of cliffs were as common as mud.

  Paige shivered despite the air temperature of 91 degrees Fahrenheit. She slid off the boulder and said, “Wait here.”

  After retrieving the sunscreen from her dry bag and hiking back up the beach to the boulder, she tossed the tube to Brynn, who pocketed it and walked away without even saying thank you.

  The encounter made Paige miss Justin. At least miss the sex. It was so straightforward: retreat to the supply room, lock the door, do it fast before anyone noticed they were missing. The only times she really had to listen to his rambling troubles were when they were both assigned to the front of the house, making coffee drinks together, and the other employees were on other tasks, which wasn’t all that often.

  The sun blazed orange as it dropped over the rim, leaving Paige overwhelmed by the complexity of this place with its hot wind and cold water, with the complexity, for that matter, of all of Earth and its crazy inhabitants, especially the humans, the crazy fucking humans.

  Kara was glad that the couple were camped with them that night. It was a nice break from the ongoing group dynamics, which were impossible to block out when you ate, slept, and shat in such close proximity. Paige wasn’t speaking to her mother Marylou, apparently because she felt the trip had been misrepresented to her. The pair already had had a public row over the makeshift toilet, which Paige thought too primitive, and the blowing sand, which Page claimed blinded her. For reasons Kara couldn’t detect, Laurie seemed annoyed with Maeve, snipping whenever the lovely older woman made an observation. Marylou drove everyone nuts with her constant singing; she knew a song to go with every task, be it dishwashing, rowing, cleaning the sand from her tent, or bathing in the river. She was super cheerful, which didn’t make sense, given the recent breakup of her marriage.

  Kara wanted only to focus on the jeweled river, the brilliantly hued canyon walls, the feel of the velvety sand on the soles of her feet, the feast of pink, yellow, and orange blossoms on the cacti, the ethereal music of the canyon wrens. She wanted only to rest her mind.

  Her job had been hell the past year. She worked as a firefighter in a small southwestern town and she loved the high-stakes moments, the endorphins-spiked action. She loved entering burning houses. Saving, rescuing. So many families still had their dogs and photo albums because of her team. Last year she’d jumped out of a second story house, into a waiting net, with a Maine coon cat in her arms.

  There were the failures, too. The times they arrived too late, the houses nothing but black crisps. Human lives lost. Once, even children. She’d spent hours in therapy over some of those lives, the ones where she believed that if she’d done something differently she could have saved them. She had moments when she felt those losses like asphyxiation, as if the oxygen had been drawn from her room.

  But nothing had prepared her for the challenges of being named lieutenant. Men she’d worked alongside, quite cordially for years, did not take well to her new supervisory role. Their insubordination took the form of jokes, ones she should be able to take if she had a sense of humor, and deafness, an inability to hear directives she gave. There were really only one and a half problem guys (the half someone was a problem only intermittently). What hurt were the others who, though they seemed fine with her leadership and did not crack the “jokes” or feign deafness, didn’t intervene. Their silence was its own form of insubordination. She knew she couldn’t complain. She knew she had to persevere. Stay the course. Prove, through as perfect work and decision-making as she could accomplish, her right to being lieutenant. But it had been a bitch of a year.

  What a pleasure to sit in a boat powered by the competen
t Josie, to witness her stroking through the rapids like a water dancer, to listen to her spellbinding explanations about how to read the river. Kara loved how much she was learning about the history of the whole planet, as evidenced in the rock layers. She loved the thrilling splashy rapids. She loved how for two weeks, no one questioned her own qualifications. She didn’t have to prove anything; she just had to listen, see, smell, and touch, follow orders and do her share of the work.

  Also, Kara was falling in love with Josie. The power of the feeling stunned her. The intensity of sensation drugged out her whole world, as if everything were an hallucination. The viridian water. The swirling millennia of rock in the canyon walls. The sweet mesquite breath in the air. The melodies of the wrens. It was all almost too much.

  The thing was, Kara knew better than to fall for someone like Josie. The woman’s outer toughness protected an inner vulnerability, a raw tenderness that people like Josie didn’t like to acknowledge. That dissonance appealed to Kara enormously. She viewed it as a sweetness, that internal longing doing battle with the armored exterior. But she’d learned long ago that whatever sweetness occasionally resulted in relationships with people like that, for example those first times making love when the sex overcame the armor, it was a deadly combination over time. When there was a big discord between a person’s outer self and inner self, the result could only be conflict. Those people often had tempers. Or intimacy issues—either too many lovers or refusing to have any (after letting you fall in love with them). It was so tempting to think you could flip a person like that, show her how to manage the tenderness, that it wouldn’t kill her. But Kara hadn’t had a lot of success in that endeavor and she’d vowed to stop trying.

  So Kara focused on the maps, the passing geological landmarks, and the startling scenery to distract herself from what would surely be a romantic misstep—no, a face plant—should she take it. She tried to convince herself that she was experiencing the powerful delusion of a situational crush: the joys of vacation, of a breathtaking landscape, confusing her sexual synapses. She resisted. The rigorous schedule—rising at dawn and rowing all day, setting up camp and making dinner, crashing into hard sleeps at dusk—aided her resistance.

  But then there were the long days on the water, Kara doing her best to get in Josie’s boat, where there was time to talk about everything: families, jobs, friends, and of course the river and canyon itself. The talk was as absorbing as lovemaking.

  The morning after the windstorm, Paige asked Kara if the two of them could ride in the same boat that day, and Kara had looked at her blankly, as if she barely knew who Paige was, and said, “Oh, I think Josie, Marylou, and I are going together today.” Paige rode with Maeve and Laurie again, and it was another torturous day, one terrifying rapid after another. They finally stopped, in the early evening, just upstream from Crystal Rapid.

  At dinner, Paige sat in the camp chair next to Kara, but a minute later Josie showed up carrying her own camp chair and said, “Is there room here?”

  There was an entire beach of room. And about five open spaces in the circle of camp chairs. What Josie wanted was for Paige to move, so she could sit next to Kara. She stood abruptly, knocking over her camp chair. She left it toppled in the sand and walked her plate to the trash receptacle. As she scraped away her food, she looked back at Josie and Kara, neither of whom had noticed her huffy exit, both of whom were bent over laughing at some shared joke.

  Paige left camp, following a dry creek bed leading up a narrow side canyon. Maybe she could hike all the way to the rim. How far to the closest town? She walked and walked and walked, sweating and crying both, draining her body of all its fluids. She carried no water, wore no hat. Maybe she could trigger an evacuation event. She imagined a helicopter swooping in overhead, hovering as the rescuers lowered a ladder, herself clutching the bottom rung, swinging freely over the river, between the walls of rock, as the rescue team reeled her up. Then off she’d go to a hot shower, a real mattress, the sanity of people her own age. But of course none of that would happen because none of their phones worked down here, not even for an instant, not anywhere.

  The pink coil looked like a huge fresh turd deposited on the black rock. As she stood staring, one end of the coil rose up, revealing a diamond-shaped head, two little beady eyes. Paige couldn’t move away, mesmerized by its geometric pattern of scales, the thick whorl of its body. The snake flicked its tail, shaking the packets on the tip. There was no mistaking the sound, dry and hollow like seeds in a pod. Paige was paralyzed not just by her fear but also by her attraction to the fear. Did anything matter at all? She was tentless, exhausted, hungry, thirsty, angry, and sad. The only person on this trip close to her age was a super-accomplished firefighter, someone she’d overheard Laurie say was wise beyond her years. Of course she’d barely given Paige the time of day. Let the snake strike.

  The rattler raised its head even more, along with the first four inches of its body, making a thick oozing approach. A forked tongue flicked in and out, in and out. Paige stuck her own tongue out in response. Josie had said something about a rattlesnake found only here called the Grand Canyon Pink.

  It struck, uncoiling and shooting forward, lightning quick.

  Paige screamed, fell backwards, pain exploding in her shoulder and right arm. Colors swirled in her vision, blue and green and brown, and most of all hot pink. The fuchsia bloom of a barrel cactus shouted an inch from her nose. She scrambled as fast as she could, scuttling away on her butt, bumping into more cacti, setting off dozens more tiny explosions of pain. She managed to get to her feet, the radiating pain acute. The snake was gone. How long did she have before the poisons attacked her vital organs?

  Paige stumbled back toward camp, tears and snot flowing. When she thought she could hear voices, she called, “Help!”

  All five women came running. Marylou unwrapped her sarong, spread it on the ground, and they laid Paige down. She screamed with pain as her skin made contact with the fabric and she bolted upright again.

  “Cactus spines,” Josie said. “She fell onto a cactus.”

  “Hold still,” Kara said.

  “They’re barbed,” Josie said. “Tweezers and glue.”

  “Glue?” Paige squeaked.

  Josie, who’d brought some just for this purpose, told Marylou where to find it. Marylou ran, wearing just her sports bra and panties, back to the camp to get the tools.

  All five women worked their way over Paige’s skin, locating the cactus spines. Kara pulled them out with the tweezers, her other hand finding thorn-free places on Paige’s skin to steady the girl who sobbed openly. It hurt so much she didn’t know if she could endure it. They found barbed spines in her hip, butt cheeks, and even one in her neck. They didn’t find a rattlesnake bite because there hadn’t been one. Just a foolish, clumsy fall onto not one but several cacti. Josie dotted glue onto the miniscule spines that Kara hadn’t been able to remove with the tweezers. After ten minutes, she peeled off the glue patches and the tiny little needles came out.

  Maeve handed Paige a full water bottle and she drank that down. Laurie gave her three ibuprofen and she swallowed those. Marylou dabbed antibiotic ointment on all the red spots where the cactus spines had been removed. And yes, her mom knew a song about cacti, and yes, she began singing it. Clad just in her cotton underpants and big white sports bra.

  “Shut up!” Paige screamed.

  Marylou stopped mid-lyric, looking as if her daughter had slapped her.

  “Hey, come on, Paige,” Laurie said.

  “If you weren’t so fucking checked out,” Paige raved on, “Dad wouldn’t have left. How can you sing all the fucking time? I mean, I practically died. A fucking rattlesnake struck me. And you’re singing. We’re all practically dying of dehydration, and you’re singing. We’re running a river that kills people for fun. You’re checked out, Mom. You sing all the time so you don’t have to think about anything. You are so fucking cheerful all the fucking time. I can’t stand it. I just can
’t. THIS IS NOT FUN. This trip is an ordeal. JUST STOP SINGING.”

  Marylou burst into tears and ran to her tent. They all listened to the sound of her zipping it up tight. Laurie stood looking at Paige for a moment, decided she could do nothing for her, and walked down to tend Marylou.

  “Just go,” Paige said looking right at Kara. She turned to Josie. “You too.”

  “But wait,” Kara said to Josie. “She said rattlesnake bite.”

  “We checked her all over. There was no rattlesnake bite.”

  Paige had never felt more foolish in her life. She knew the snake had missed. She knew that the pain came from her stupid stumble into the cacti. She shook her head hard and repeated, “Just go.”

  Maeve nodded at the two younger women. They exchanged looks and left. Maeve sat in the sand next to the sarong on which Paige sat, now sobbing into her arms folded on her knees. Maeve didn’t say a word, didn’t touch her, just sat beside her in silence for an hour. At dusk she stood and left as well.

  Paige watched the full moon rise. Then she rose herself and shook out her mom’s sarong, making sure to get it completely free of sand. She walked back to camp and found her bags of stuff, dug out her lotion, and applied it to her sore skin. The rest of the women were all in their tents, a couple already snoring.

  Paige walked over to her mom’s tent.

  “Can I come in?”

  Marylou didn’t answer with words, but she unzipped the tent partway. Paige unzipped it the rest of the way and crawled in.

  “Here’s your sarong. I’m sorry. I was a jerk.”

  Her mom’s face scared her, the extremity of sadness. She’d obviously been crying, the skin around her eyes swollen and damp. But worse, her entire face sagged, as if she had given up. Her mom never gave up. Paige hoped she wasn’t giving up on her. She hugged Marylou. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean what I said. I miss Dad.”

  “I miss him too.”

  “I don’t even know why he left.” Paige paused and added, “I mean, I know it’s not because of your singing.”