RiverTime

by Rae Renzi

  The hint of a frown darkened his brow. “No problem.”

  But she didn’t believe him for a second.

  Chapter Eleven

  Jack felt a pang in the pit of his stomach when Casey walked away. By sheer will, he’d refrained from tightening his grip on her, pulling her closer, rather than letting her slip away. Not his usual response. Beautiful women were a dime a dozen to him—why should she be different?

  Because she didn’t behave as he expected. When she’d pulled him out of the river, her face had betrayed a mix of annoyance and anxiety, but no trace of recognition. She’d acted like he was some random guy, an unwelcome one at that, who’d washed up on her beach.

  He was surprised at first and hadn’t entirely bought it, thinking it might be an ill-timed version of playing hard-to-get. But the hours ticked by and her attitude toward him didn’t change. She seemed curious about him, but she was curious about everything, as if life and everything in it was a fun and interesting puzzle to be solved. She wasn’t solicitous of him, wasn’t even all that accommodating—beyond, of course, saving his life.

  In fact, she’d managed to convey that he was somehow lacking the usual complement of desirable characteristics. Further, she assumed he would pull his weight in terms of real work, real effort.

  Most likely it was the novelty of her indifferent behavior toward him that caused his reaction to her. That, and the sense of being free, unfettered, for a short while.

  Except something tugged at him, pulled at his gut when she was near. Something that sidestepped his usual defenses.

  He bent to pick up the towel, then flicked it clean of clinging bits of gravel. His eyes never left Casey’s retreating form. From across the campsite, she tossed a wary glance his way while she dug in her bag for clothes and ducked into the tent to change.

  She refused to sleep in the tent with him and had declined his offer to trade places. She apparently felt safer outdoors in the open. He made her edgy.

  Maybe appropriately so. If she knew what occasionally passed through his mind as he watched her, she’d probably be terrified.

  The open cavern, though providing shelter, was not long on comfort or convenience. Jack seized on this deficiency to keep himself occupied. As the saying went, idleness was the devil’s playground, and with his innate deviltry and too much idle time, his thoughts kept drifting toward inventive entertainments, all involving Casey.

  And, although the idea of getting hot and steamy with her was tantalizing, in his more lucid moments he recognized the danger an entanglement might cause. It wasn’t worth it.

  The camp needed a kitchen table. Someplace for them to sit and huddle over a cup of coffee, to discuss, oh, whatever came up. With Casey’s mind at the wheel, that might be anything, but he didn’t care—this kind of intellectual interaction, if that was what it was called, was rare for him and surprisingly agreeable. For damn sure, it was safer than other kinds of diversions that came to mind.

  He examined the back wall of the cavern, ran his fingers over the cool sandstone, traced the swirling layers, faithful recordings of the passage of time. One of the protruding ledges in the back of the cavern was exactly table height. It would make a good support for one side of the table. For the other side, he chose flat but thick rocks and stacked them carefully until they were as high as the ledge. He scavenged along the river until he found the uprooted remains of a tree small enough for him to manage, but strong enough to bear some weight. Luckily, among the supplies in one of the raft lockers were basic tools, like a camp shovel and a hatchet. His work would never be mistaken for that of a carpenter, but he managed to hack from the wood two poles of equal length and shave them flat on one side to support a tabletop. For this, he found a large, thin slab of shale, one of the many that littered their campsite.

  He had just heaved it in place with not a small amount of satisfaction when Casey came bouncing into camp.

  “Jack. Guess what I—hey, that looks great.” She ran her hand over the smooth patina of the rock that formed the top of the table. “Wow, look. This has got little tiny fossils in it. Did you do that on purpose? Put the fossils on top?”

  “Yeah.” Jack was pleased she had noticed. Although he was used to receiving praise, it had been a long time since he’d actually earned it.

  Casey looked from him to the table. “An artist. A sculptor?”

  “A structural engineer?”

  Casey turned and eyed him dubiously from top to bottom, pointedly lingering on his tattooed shoulder and arm. “Not surpassingly likely.”

  Jack laughed out loud.

  It must have surprised Casey, because she looked at him with her head tilted as she did when she was puzzling over something. But she had a smile on her face.

  “What were you so hot to tell me before you were distracted by the table?” he asked her.

  “I found something. Come see.”

  “What kind of something?” Her previous offerings had included scorpions, lizards and prickly cactus.

  “It’s a…kind of a…well, I don’t know, really. Maybe nothing. That’s why I wanted you see.”

  She stood looking up at him with a this-will-be-fun look in her hazel eyes and he believed her. Worse, he wanted to please her. In every way.

  Oh, how sorely he was tempted to temporarily reinvent his life. But if he did, could he ever go back?

  “Yeah, okay. Where?” he asked, giving up on the “what.”

  “I’ll show you. Follow me.” Casey smiled back over her shoulder, her curls a nimbus around her head, dancing in the wind.

  The rock under Jack’s feet suddenly felt less solid. It was on his lips to say “Anywhere.” But she was already gone.

  He caught up with her on the narrow trail that branched up and away from the beach path. It circled around and slanted up toward the cliffs. Here, big rocks were more numerous, and he and Casey had to clamber over and around several large boulders.

  “What were you doing up here?”

  “I just wondered about the trail. Where it leads. It didn’t really look like a goat trail to me.”

  “And exactly what does a goat trail look like?”

  “I don’t know, but that’s not the point.”

  Beyond her insatiable curiosity, he wasn’t sure what the point was, but he decided not to challenge her on this matter. She already suspected he was the spawn of the devil. He didn’t need to reinforce that by being confrontational too.

  They ascended to a point where the trail opened up, forming a long, wide ledge against a red cliff wall dotted with small hollows and cavities. Water had dripped through from the top of the canyon and leached out the minerals over eons, resulting in numerous small caves and tunnels. Perfect for snakes, spiders, scorpions and other dangerous creatures.

  “I hope you didn’t poke into each and every one of those openings.”

  She looked away from him, her silence indicating, first, that she had, and second, that she now realized it might not have been the pinnacle of mindful behavior.

  “Jesus, Casey, don’t you have a bit of sense? How, with your overdeveloped curiosity, have you managed to survive in the real world this long?”

  Casey looked at him, puzzled with a little hurt showing. She clearly had no idea what he was talking about. That slammed home to him how different their backgrounds must be. In her world, curiosity was obviously rewarded. In the world he had survived, it was rewarded only to the degree one believed in the afterlife.

  “Never mind. Show me your find.”

  Casey continued to look at him for another second or two then sketched a shrug. As quickly as that, the cloud passed and her face brightened.

  “It’s over here.” She led the way to the far side of the ledge. “Look.” She pointed into a hollow formed by a deep overhang.

  It was a cave, much like others, but larger, and the entrance was filled with rocks. The rocks hadn’t happened there by accident. They had been carefully placed to fill the entire mouth of the c
ave, leaving no opening larger than mouse-size. Painted on the rock wall flanking the opening were beautifully preserved pictograms, like those Jack had seen at Mesa Verde years ago.

  Jack walked up to the cave and, without touching it, examined the rocks, the opening and the pictograms. “My God. These are amazing.”

  “What does it mean, Jack? Do you know?”

  “Not really, no.”

  “But you aren’t saying ‘I haven’t the least idea,’ are you?”

  “Hmm.” He had a faint idea but not one built on concrete facts. His small fund of knowledge on the subject had come from his foster father, who was Navajo. But he didn’t want to get into that. “I really don’t know what it is, but my intuition tells me it might be something sacred, and these are warnings. We shouldn’t disturb it. We should leave it alone.”

  “Thought so.” Casey wiped a trickle of sweat off her forehead. “Can we rest a moment before we start back?”

  “Yeah, sure. Here.” He walked over to a flat rock at the edge of the trail. It was in the shadow of the overhang, out of the blistering sun and sheltered from the never-ending wind. The rock was slightly cool to the touch.

  They sat on the rock, an easy silence between them. Her initial wariness of him had abated somewhat. Well, and why shouldn’t it? Familiarity might breed contempt, as Jack had reason to know, but it also provided comfort.

  Casey leaned back and stared at him.

  “What?”

  “Are you Native American?”

  “No.” Jack was unsurprised. People asked him that all the time. But as he uttered the denial, a long-repressed memory flashed through his mind.

  He’d been very young, sitting with his mother on the steps of the public library, looking at a picture book of Greek myths. Jack was riveted by the stories about Zeus and the unusual forms the god sometimes took to father children. Jack had asked his mother, “Who’s my father?” That his father was absent from his life didn’t seem unusual—many of the kids he knew had missing fathers. But they did have fathers.

  A dreamy smile came over his mother’s face, one he hadn’t seen before. She looked down at him and smiled. “The wind, Jack. Your father was the wind.”

  That made sense to his child’s accepting mind. After all, hadn’t he just read that Zeus had turned into golden rain to become the father of Perseus? But the thing that grabbed him, that stuck with him, was the look on his mother’s face, a look at once wonderful and terribly sad.

  When he was older, he spent a lot of time trying to understand the relationship between love and sex, trying to reconcile the squalid reality of what he saw on a daily basis with the idealized version. He came to believe love was a fictional concept, made up, like so much else, to make humans feel they were different than animals. But they were animals, and had the same drives and hungers. He was convinced the romance of so-called love was just another device for human self-aggrandizement.

  Only occasionally did his certainty falter, mostly when he remembered that look on his mother’s face. He saw it only one other time. His mom had taken him to a carnival in town, and the two of them had some pictures taken in one of those instant photo booths. When his mother looked at the pictures, the same sweet look was on her face when she said, “You look just like him, Jack. You look like your father.”

  He glanced at Casey, sitting peacefully beside him.

  “Actually, I don’t really know. My father was…I didn’t know my father.” He fully expected this to open up a whole barrage of questions from Casey.

  But she said, “Me either. All I know is that he left us high and dry. I guess that’s enough.”

  When they stood to leave, a shimmer to the left caught Jack’s eye. He walked a few steps along the trail to discover he was standing on the extension of the ledge, which ended abruptly. Further to the left he heard what sounded like the rushing of a sizable stream. Peeking straight down over the protruding ledge, about thirty feet below, he saw a crescent of deep blue. The stream rounded a curve and reappeared again along a sandy beach—their beach.

  Casey shuffled up behind him, walking cautiously onto the ledge. “Jack, be careful. It’s windy up here. What are you looking at?” she asked, trying to peek around him without taking her hand off the secure rock wall behind them.

  He turned to face her. “I meant to ask, when you saved me, did you have to swim far?”

  “No, I didn’t have to swim at all. And a good thing, too, because the river wasn’t really good for swimming just then. Why?”

  “But you could have, if you’d had to, right?”

  “Sure. Why?”

  He grinned and grabbed her hand. “Short cut.”

  Then he leaped over the ledge, pulling her with him.

  She screamed all the way down.

  Chapter Twelve

  The temperature in the canyon dropped suddenly. A heavy, oily feeling hung in the air, and the light took on a greenish cast. A hush fell, as if the canyon had taken a deep breath and was holding it. Even the birds disappeared, along with the small creatures that usually skittered on the periphery of the camp.

  Partly to steer clear of Jack—she was still annoyed about his shortcut stunt the day before—and partly because their perishable foods wouldn’t last long, Casey spent the morning in a futile search for edible wild plants. There were bound to be some, but her information about these things was sadly limited. She vaguely knew that potatoes grew beneath the ground, tomatoes above, and nuts came from trees, but in the absence of little botanical signposts—Potato edibilis—she was reluctant to stuff unfamiliar herbage into her mouth, especially since most of the plants seemed to have a particularly martial outlook on life.

  Faced with diminishing hopes of finding the odd rogue tomato or cucumber, and with increasing expectation of foul weather, she was almost relieved when the canyon seemed to heave a long sigh and black clouds rolled in like a slow tidal wave across the sky, heralding the imminent arrival of a thunderstorm.

  Minutes before it broke, Jack slunk into camp, his face a sullen mirror of the sky. He’d left the camp early, without explanation, after what seemed to be a perfectly pleasant breakfast, albeit one during which he treated her to occasional intense scrutiny. That was fine. She could hardly expect him to report his every move.

  Still, given his obvious foul mood, the origin of which she couldn’t discern, she was prepared to browbeat him into helping her batten down for the storm. But before she opened her mouth, he roused himself from his sulk and began to move camping gear to the back of the cavern where it would be protected. The wind, unusually quiet during the day, had picked up again and capered around the camp, tugging at the edges of the tarp Casey was attempting to spread over the gear. Jack carried some large rocks over to weigh it down.

  Casey once again felt grateful for the little dome tent, this time for its portability. After they picked it up and carried it to the back of the cavern, Jack walked over to Casey’s open-air “bedroom” and scooped up her sleeping pad and pillow. She didn’t protest when he carried them into the tent—she couldn’t very well sleep in the rain—but she had mixed feelings. Sleeping next to Jack felt like crawling into the lion’s den. On the other hand, her options were limited.

  Lightning snaked across the sky, the accompanying thunder rolls still offset by a few heartbeats. Casey raced around to gather supplies for a tent-bound dinner, but before she finished, big, fat drops began to splat on the ground, and gusts of wind ushered sprays of rain droplets into the open cavern. Jack had had the good sense to turn the opening of the tent to the back of the cavern wall, giving the capricious wind less opportunity to dampen their sleeping quarters.

  They were both wet from the wind-whipped rain by the time they scooted into the tent. Congratulating herself on her forethought, Casey pulled out a couple of towels and tossed one to Jack, who immediately disrobed and dried himself, with no obvious concern for the effect his nudity might have on Casey. He might have been in a locker room.


  “You’re the least shy person I’ve ever encountered.”

  Jack stopped and looked at her in obvious puzzlement. “Shy? What are you talking about?”

  “Your clothes. I mean, did you grow up in a nudist colony or something?”

  Jack snorted. “Close enough.” He glanced at Casey. “Does it bother you?”

  “No, not at all.” She was, of course, lying through her teeth. “I just wondered why.” What she really wondered was what “close enough” meant.

  “Professional hazard.” He reached for some dry clothes. “What’s for dinner?”

  “Uh.” Professional hazard? Her mind circled on a short track that included stops at nude and professional and, inevitably, professional nude. Male stripper? Prostitute? No wonder sexuality poured off him like honey off a spoon. He was sex, the personification of womanly fantasy—at least she hoped it was womanly. Or did she?

  “Did you say something?” Jack spoke through the sweatshirt over his head.

  “No, nothing.”

  “Casey?” Jack, now fully dressed, crawled over to her and peered into her eyes. “What’s wrong?”

  Casey gave herself a little shake. “Nothing. Dinner?”

  She kept as far from Jack as the small tent would allow while she put out the food. He didn’t notice, or didn’t mention it. When nothing untoward happened for a few minutes—no seduction, no perversity, no…whatever, she began to relax.

  After all, if sex was business for him, he probably had standards of professionalism, including restrictions on giving—or taking—free sex. Sex was a service, seduction a technique. He probably had package deals—Plan A is your basic-needs-met option, Plan B includes thirty minutes of sensual massage in area of choice (foot, back, other), the Super Deluxe Plan allows for an entire night of debauchery.