by T. F. Torrey
“What?” I said. “That storm missed us by at least a couple of miles. You really think it will affect the river down here.”
“Sure,” John answered. “It rains up in the mountains and the water runs off and causes flash floods downstream. People get killed almost every year by thinking the rain missed them.”
“Wow,” I said. Nobody else said anything right away, surveying the situation silently.
“Then it looks like we have to walk around,” Erica said finally.
“Maybe not,” John said. He turned and walked back into the vegetation. “We need … we need …” He looked around, then spotted something. “Here,” he said. “Give me a hand with this.”
We walked over to where he stood by a tree maybe twenty feet long and ten inches thick at its base. It had been knocked over by the wind or age or whatever. With John giving directions, we dragged it to the wash, stood it up on its base, and let it fall across the wash.
“Wow,” Macy said. “The perfect bridge.”
“Mmm,” I said. “Not perfect, but it’ll do.”
It did. Within two minutes we were all across.
“You know,” Erica said almost proudly. “We make a pretty good team.”
I’d been thinking the same thing myself. As we continued our sunset stroll down the Verde River, I thought more about that team.
John was the undisputed team captain. It was his leadership that had brought us out here, his preparation that had fed us fish and kept us alive, and his skill and ingenuity that would take us back.
In an environment as hostile as the desert, where everything that grows will prick you and everything that crawls will bite you, we needed Erica. Her nursing skills would keep minor injuries from becoming major problems. And she was good to look at.
Macy provided a kind of enthusiastic extension of John Lupo. Without question he’d lend his hands and body to the efforts of John and the team. And he was not without his own skills, which he’d learned from John.
Sharon? Maybe she was the comic relief. No, that was Macy. Bitchy relief? No, that wasn’t really fair. I supposed that without her we all might have become overly optimistic and floated home on our own lofty expectations. Instead, we were walking.
I stopped wondering about Sharon’s worth and wondered about my own. Being mostly ignorant of the ways of the desert, about the best I could do was follow without griping. And I could paint. My paintings could portray the despair and triumphs of the team for posterity. Except that I’d lost my sketchbook back when the poachers had first shot at John and Erica and me. Oh, well. I could draw and paint from memory. No way could I ever forget this trip.
***
The insects in the wild desert frequently lifted a cacophony into the hot, dusty air, and with the approaching evening they were in full swing there by the river. Suddenly, though, a humming, buzzing noise off to my left rose through the din and caught my attention. Looking up, I couldn’t miss seeing the giant black insect flying my way, headed straight for me. It made a noise like a June bug, but it was clearly bigger than one. And louder.
I stopped in my tracks. Most animals will avoid people, and I figured that this one be no different. I expected it to fly past me or around me and out over the river.
Instead, it flew right up to me. Like a kamikaze pilot in a little black plane it flew right at me. Right at my face.
“Hey!” I shouted, ducking and swatting.
It missed me when I ducked, and I was amazed when it circled around for another pass at me.
As I backed away, my chest tightening with rising panic, I could see Macy and John running up behind the insect, back toward me.
I swatted and ducked again as the creature made another run at my face, and this time my open palm struck its hard body. It dropped swirling onto the rocks, bounced hard and landed upside down. As I watched in amazement it struggled to right itself.
Before it could, John Lupo’s foot came down on it. We all heard the sickening crunch, as though he had stepped on a pile of twigs. Big twigs.
Sharon and Erica approached cautiously behind Macy and John as we all looked down at the insect. It looked no less dangerous on the ground. Its thick, leathery wings must have had a span of six inches. Its torso was almost as long, black and nasty. From its head stretched huge jaws, still biting up at the air. Incredibly, despite John stepping on it, it wasn’t dead. That was one tough bug.
I was panting. “What, the hell, is that?” I asked.
“That,” Macy said, smiling, “is a hellgrammite. They’re like the Tasmanian devils of the desert.”
“It’s hideous,” Erica said.
“Yep,” John said grimly, and with that he stepped on it again, twisting his foot and grinding it into the rocks and sand.
Sharon looked at him inquisitively. “What happened to what you said before with the snake and the scorpion?” she asked. “You know, how the desert’s a dangerous place and we just have to let them live—”
“Not hellgrammites,” John said, cutting her off sharply. “Those things will take a wicked bite out of you. I hate those things.” He stopped. I could see that other words were in his head, but he didn’t elaborate further. This, it seemed, had actually shaken him, and at that we were all quiet.
It was the first time I had seen a hellgrammite and the first time I had seen John rattled. Both had caught me off guard. I would see more hellgrammites, but I would not, however, see John rattled again.
***
By now we had gone quite some distance downstream, though how far I couldn’t really tell. We’d been walking, I guessed, for well over an hour, but of course we weren’t walking in a straight line. I figured we had gone three miles at most, but probably not more than two.
Here the river spread out wide, maybe fifty or sixty feet across, and grew shallow.
“Wow,” Macy said. He had left the hellgrammite behind and was now looking at the river. “You can see the bottom the whole way across here. We could wade across easy.”
“Should we?” Sharon asked.
“Why would we want to?” Erica asked. “The poachers are on that side.”
“Yeah, but this side goes up,” Sharon said.
She was right. Ahead of us the riverbank rose into a bluff again with the river up tight against it. We’d have to walk uphill to stay by the river. Sharon was clearly getting tired, so she didn’t want to walk uphill if she didn’t have to.
“We’ll stay on this side,” John said. “It’s bad enough we have to be in the same desert with them. I don’t want to be on the same side of the river.”
“That figures,” Sharon said.
We stayed and climbed. It wasn’t as bad as it had looked, but it was enough of a climb to leave Sharon panting. My heart was still beating hard from my encounter with the hellgrammite. The vegetation thinned away as the bluff rose and leveled off about forty feet high. Our elevated viewpoint gave us an impressive view of the desert. The sun was just beginning to disappear behind the mountains to the west.
We got strung out a little as we walked up and along the bluff. Sharon slowed down to catch her breath. Macy slowed to stay with her. I slowed down more to stay away from her, and John and Erica, not slowing down at all, walked on away from us.
Ahead of them, the bluff and the river bent off to the east, our left. I was beginning to wonder if John and Erica were going to leave us behind when they stopped at the bend in the river.
At first I thought they’d stopped to let us catch up. Then I realized that they weren’t looking back at us, they were gazing at something on the river or just across it.
When we caught up to them, before we said anything, we saw what the lack of locomotion was about. In shared silence, and with a touch of apprehensive reverence, we all stared across the river.
Part 4
Chapter 19
Right off the bat, something seemed strange to me. “Something seems weird here,” I said.
Nobody else said anything.
We were overlooking a deep and quiet pool in the bend of the river. Downstream the river curved first to our left, then back to our right, then left again, like an S in which we stood inside the lower curve. Beneath us the water was wide and deep, but at the top of the S the channel narrowed into rapids where the water roiled angrily.
But none of that captured our attention. All eyes focused instead on the tan truck across the river at the top of the S. It was a big, four-wheel drive pickup, backed up toward the water, not quite as close as Macy had parked his. The truck had a dual-rifle rack in its back window and a jagged rock hole in its passenger side window.
“Is that the poachers‘ truck?” Sharon asked.
“I think so,” Macy said.
Erica shaded her eyes with her hand. “That’s it,” she said. “That’s the hole John smashed in the window. But I don’t see the poachers.”
“That’s great,” Sharon said. “Now they found us. They got us now for sure. We’re never going to make it back to Phoenix.” Almost sobbing, she moved over to Macy and put her head on his shoulder. He gave the top of her head a sour look.
“What do you think, John?” Macy asked.
John Lupo stood motionless. He had his outback hat drawn low against the setting sun, casting most of his face in shadow. It reminded me of the night I’d met him, when Macy and he and I had gone skating. Here in the desert he had that same air of confidence and control. I was glad he was the captain of our team.
His eyes probed the truck and the desert foliage around it, looking for the pair of poachers. He didn’t say anything, and I wondered if he’d heard Macy at all.
But just for a second. Then suddenly I was thinking what great targets we were up on the ridge like that.
“If they are looking for us,” Erica said, “or even if they’re not, we make great targets up here.”
The way our minds worked the same was uncanny, like we were somehow psychically in sync.
Macy and I looked at each other, then at John. He didn’t take his eyes off the scene.
“Maybe you should get down,” he said finally.
Instantly, Sharon dropped to the ground and sat facing away from the river. Erica crouched beside her, behind John, who remained standing motionless. Macy and I ducked low and crept to the edge of the bluff where we could gaze at the truck and look for the poachers. On John’s left, Macy leaned on his walking stick and peered over the edge of the bluff. I hid, partially behind a mesquite bush, to John’s right. We looked on in silence for a minute or so.
“Where do you think they are?” Macy asked.
John took a deep breath and let it out. “I don’t know.”
“Oh, great,” Sharon said, sobbing now from exhaustion or whatever.
“They made a ring of rocks behind their truck like they were going to build a fire,” John said.
We looked at the rough circle of stones at the water’s edge.
“There’s nothing in it,” Macy said.
“Maybe they’re out getting firewood,” John said.
Erica moved forward to where she could see. She crouched so close to me that I could smell her. I didn’t complain.
“Maybe they went after a deer,” she said.
“Could be,” John said. “Their rifles aren’t in the rack.”
“Oh, great,” Sharon said.
“I didn’t hear—whoa!” Macy’s words were cut off by the sound of shifting rocks and sand. The ground beneath him broke loose and began sliding down the face of the bluff. Macy scrambled and pawed on all fours over the sliding mass. His walking stick and about nine square feet of earth disappeared. Before any of us could react, he dived desperately up to the ground beside John. I looked over the edge in time to see the mass of sand and rocks and the walking stick plunge with a chunky splash into the river.
Panting, Macy collected himself on the ground beside John. Erica moved over and grabbed Macy’s arm. Reflexively, probably, but a little late. “Are you okay?” she asked.
I felt a strange twinge in my mind. Jealousy?
Apparently Sharon felt it, too. She got up and sat down between Macy and Erica. “Macy,” she said. “You have to be more careful.”
They exchanged gratitudes and I turned back to the river to ignore them. “That noise might attract the attention of—” I said, and finished quietly, “the poachers.”
John already had his revolver drawn.
Macy noticed too, and both of us instantly ducked and looked over at the poachers’ truck, expecting to see them there, rifles coming up at us.
Nothing. Still the truck stood empty, back up against the bubbling river, no one in sight anywhere.
“Jesus, John,” I said. “I thought they were over there.”
“What,” Macy asked. “What are you doing, John?”
John didn’t take his eyes off the scene.
Before he could speak Sharon exclaimed, “He’s going to shoot their truck, like they shot ours!” She bubbled excitedly at the prospect of a little revenge.
“Wait!” Erica said suddenly. “We can sneak down and take their truck and drive away. Leave them here and bring back the police.”
That sounded great to me. “You can just drop me off at home on your way to the police station.”
John shook his head. “No, they can’t be too far off. They’d see us or hear us before we could get down to the truck. Or they’d at least hear me start it up, and then there would be a gunfight. And we’d be sitting ducks climbing down this bluff to the river, or in the river, or in the truck. They’d get us for sure.”
A brief, quiet pause followed. Then John straightened his arm, pointing the gun at some unseen target across the river.
“So, what are you doing, John?” Macy asked again.
“I’m going to fire a shot down by their truck,” John said. “That’ll bring them out to see what’s going on. Then I’m going to shoot them.” He said it without emotion, just matter-of-fact.
“Wait!” Macy said. “You can’t just shoot them.”
“Why not?” Sharon asked. “They were going to shoot us, weren’t they?”
Macy was speechless.
Erica wasn’t. “Still, we can’t just shoot them. Even though they tried to shoot us yesterday, it’s still illegal for us just to shoot them for revenge today.”
“They’d shoot us now, if they had the chance,” Sharon said.
Now Macy found his voice. “Two wrongs still won’t make a right,” he said.
I was getting really tired of hearing that.
“So what? So you just want to let them shoot us?” Sharon said.
“No,” Erica said. “We should just walk on past them and continue down to Horseshoe Lake like we planned.”
“Horseshoe Lake’s still a long way off,” I said. “We might not make it that far.”
“What do you mean, we might not make it?” Erica argued. “We can drink river water and John can catch fish. If we walk tonight and tomorrow, we’ll be there no later than tomorrow night.”
“It’s not that simple,” John said, somewhat patronizingly. “Why do you think their truck’s there?”
We thought about that.
“They’re going to camp there for the night?” Macy suggested.
“No. Don’t you get it? They figured we’d head for Horseshoe Lake. Where else could we go? They knew we’d have to stay along the river, so they drove down here. They’re not camping or hunting. They’re waiting for us to show up so they can ambush us. They probably left the truck there as bait.”
Again we were silent.
“Still,” Macy said. “We can’t just kill them.”
“Why not?” Sharon asked.
“Because it’s wrong,” Macy said.
“And besides,” Erica put in, “we’ll end up going to jail.”
“I’m not going to kill them,” John said. “I’m just going to shoot at them. If I wound them, good. They’ll go away and leave us alone. We don’t really have much cho
ice right now. They chose this. They’re going to chase after us until they kill us.”
Again there was silence.
“It’s simple,” John said. “It’s us or them.”
“I choose us,” Sharon said.
No one spoke up to choose them, and John raised the gun again. All eyes were on the poachers’ truck, scarcely able to believe the violence that was about to unfold.
The crack and roar of a gunshot pierced the desert air.
The next second happened very slowly. John pitched forward, twisting back toward us as he toppled over the brink of the cliff down toward the river. I would always remember the look of bewilderment and surprise on his face before he disappeared. In that same instant, both Macy and I realized that the shot had come not from John’s revolver, but from the vegetation behind us.
We whirled, the four of us leaping to our feet.
Maybe the bubbling river had distracted us, or maybe we were getting worn out, but somehow the poachers had managed to sneak to within a hundred feet of us. One of them, the one who had apparently fired the shot, was down on one knee, rifle butt in his shoulder, barrel pointing at us. The other poacher scrambled out of the undergrowth, swinging his rifle around to shoot. The one down on one knee drew back the bolt action on his rifle and locked it forward again. Suddenly they were both ready to shoot, and we had nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.
“Jump!” I heard Macy scream, even as we were doing it.
We hit the water like three big sacks of flour.
Coming to the cold surface, I briefly had a fear of being landed on by someone. The current swept us quickly toward the rapids up the S.
Ahead of us, John already bobbed along through the rapids. Afraid he would drown, I swam quickly toward him, fighting the powerful undercurrent. The water became fairly shallow when I got into the rapids. I could have stood if I had been able to fight the current. Over the frothing of the river and my own splashing, I could hear Macy shouting to Sharon.
The water around John was pink with blood. He tried weakly to swim with one arm, barely managing to stay above the surface. His face was twisted in pain. I grabbed his vest at the shoulder to try to help him float. As I did, my fingers slipped through a hole in the vest into a soft and warm and fleshy hole in his shoulder. If I hadn’t been so concerned with staying alive, it would have been sickening.
