“Chrissie’s always had a way with the English language,” Steve said as he slid down the rock and landed lightly beside Anna. Paul landed with a thump and a grunt.
Anna was tired and, seeing no blood gushing from Chrissie’s mouth, she walked the last ten yards to where the girl stood, gawping like a landed trout.
“What you got?” Anna asked easily, expecting a snake or drowned nutria.
“There,” Chrissie managed a word with her point.
“God dammit!” Anna breathed. A woman’s body was tangled in the branches, her face only inches above the water, her dress washed up, exposing her legs and her very pregnant belly.
NINE
T
he strainer had formed between two rocks, one on the shore and one fifteen feet out into the water. An uprooted tree had been caught between the boulders and served as the net that caught smaller debris until a dangerous tangle of limbs and twigs and reeds and garbage was created.
The cause of Chrissie’s screaming was nearly dead center, the current holding her fast to the strainer. Her hair was long and black and so intertwined with the nest of debris that had seined her from the Rio Grande that she seemed part of it, the human face of a nature god with the swollen belly of rebirth mocked by death. One arm floated free, the other was threaded up through the tangle as if she was trying to hold her face above the water.
Anna started to wade in.
“Don’t!” Carmen ordered. “Let me.”
Anna knew what she was thinking. “Law enforcement ranger, EMT,” she said, then pointed at Paul. “Sheriff.”
Carmen nodded and Anna thought she saw a flicker of relief in her eyes. Guides were better equipped to deal with the emergencies of the living than the dead. “Wait till we get a line on you,” Carmen said. “The undertow on a strainer can be something. Sucks you right in with the rest.”
Anna suffered a vision of a thorny cavern filled with corpses and was about to send Steve back to the raft for the line when she remembered.
“No line,” she said succinctly. “No raft.”
“Jeez,” Carmen said. She had forgotten as well. The guide should have looked silly: fingerless gloves, black silk long johns worn under her shorts to protect her legs from the sun, Mexican-made hat, brim sagging with water. She didn’t; she looked in her element, at home with the rain and the river. “Human line then. I’ll anchor. Cyril, Steve, Paul, then you.” Chrissie wasn’t included in the roster but, this time, there were no complaints.
Steve loped back upriver to collect his sister from where she’d been left with Lori and the sacred cow.
Anna waded a ways into the river, Paul at her side.
“To get her out we’re going to have to cut the hair off,” Paul said.
“That should be fun.” Anna’s Swiss army knife had scissors but the blades were scarcely an inch long. “Did you lose your pocketknife?”
Paul patted the many pockets of his cargo shorts. “No.”
Paul kept his blade sharper than Anna kept hers.
“She’s either been dead awhile or died recently,” Anna said, realizing she sounded like Maxwell Smart playing at Sherlock Holmes. “I mean rigor has either not set in or it has passed off.” She pointed to where the woman’s free arm waved easily in the current, the hand and fingers undulating as if they’d already abandoned human form and become part of the river.
“We should leave her where she is,” Anna said. “I doubt she is a rafter nobody bothered to mention went overboard. Crime scene and all that.”
“She’s probably from Mexico,” Carmen said. “And got washed down the river trying to cross to have her baby in the U.S. In the villages there isn’t a doctor or hospital, pharmacy, nothing like that. If they have the baby here, they get some medical attention and the baby is an American citizen. Pretty nice birthday present.”
“A wetback,” Chrissie said, and Anna wanted to slap her till she realized the girl wasn’t insulting the dead, she understood for the first time where the slur had originated. Swimming the Rio Grande.
“If we leave her, the next raft down will have a nice surprise,” Paul said.
Anna hadn’t thought of that.
Steve clambered over the rocks upstream, Cyril with him and, drifting in their wake like a sorry little ghost, Lori.
Carmen stood on the bank and held Cyril’s wrist in both her hands. Cyril and Steve locked hands on each other’s wrists, beginning the links in the human chain. Paul didn’t take Steve’s proffered arm but began unbuckling his belt. As he buckled it around Anna’s waist, she said, “You’re going to lose your pants.”
“Better my pants than my wife,” he answered.
Gripping the leather in one hand, he took Steve’s in the other and Anna waded in.
The water where the woman had been caught in the strainer nearly reached Anna’s sternum. She could feel the hungry strainer trying to swallow her, drag her feetfirst beneath its ragged teeth, and was glad of the sturdy leather belt around her and the feel of Paul’s knuckles against the small of her back.
“Pieta,” Paul murmured behind her.
Up close, the woman’s youth and loveliness shone through the graying mask. Eyes closed, features relaxed, her face was a perfect oval, the eyes dark-lashed and wide set, her mouth full but with a softness that was more maternal than sensual. Either her belly was bloated or she was very long into her pregnancy. Anna had seen more than her share of dead bodies and she’d never held motherhood to be particularly sacred. She’d never been one to coo over infants; but this woman touched her deeply and she felt a sting of tears.
The drowned woman’s legs bumped against Anna’s rib cage and the pregnant stomach seemed to be doing its best to keep her from getting in a position to cut the body loose. Gently, she pushed the body aside and insinuated herself between the floating hand and the torso. The dead might sadden her, but they didn’t frighten her. One of the perks of not believing in life after death, in ghosts and vampires, zombies and animated mummies. Still she wasn’t overly fond of snuggling into the embrace of corpses.
Close in the pull of the water from beneath the strainer was stronger and she took a minute to set her feet as best she could.
“I’ve got you,” Paul said reassuringly.
“And I’ve got you, babe,” Anna said, and heard him laugh.
With difficulty she fished her little knife from her shorts pocket and opened the wee scissors. “This may take a while.”
“No need to style it,” Paul said. “Hack away.”
Thick wet hair and one-inch blades began to do battle. Where she could, Anna pulled the hair free. Her fingers were growing numb from working the minuscule blades and the spring in the scissors was slipping. The rain had dwindled to a drizzle. One blessing to count, that and the fact that none of the rafting party had joined the unfortunate in the strainer.
“How are you doing?” Carmen called.
“Not too much longer,” Anna said. The dead hand brushed at her thigh and she jumped.
“What?” Paul demanded.
“Brush with death,” Anna said, and went back to her snipping.
Invisible beneath the mud-colored water, the hand brushed her again, a creepy snaking of flesh against flesh. This time Anna didn’t flinch externally but her insides were shrinking from the touch. Perhaps she had not completely evolved from the belief in the creatures of the night.
Anna’s scissors broke.
She borrowed Paul’s knife.
The last hank of hair came free and she sawed it off and fed it to the strainer. The submerged hand touched her thigh again. This time the fingers tried to close. Anna squawked. The instant’s belief in the netherworld blinked out.
“She’s not dead,” she said. Anna should have felt for a pulse, she should have done a lot of things but the body was cold to the touch, the temperature of the river, and Anna had done a bit of abdicating herself when she’d been cut loose on administrative leave.
“Hallelujah,” Paul breathed.
What had been a body recovery where the luxury of time and necessary roughness were a given became a rescue. Quickly, but with care, Anna loosed the woman’s hand from the sticks. Her fingers were clamped around a limb so tightly Anna had to pry them open one at a time. That done, the woman came free and Anna gathered her into her arms, her back against Anna’s chest, her head falling on Anna’s shoulder.
“Take us out,” she said, and the human chain began pulling her and her charge back to shore. The woman’s dress, cheap rayon with a flowered print, probably from Wal-Mart or Target, molded itself to the woman’s stomach. As Anna was led backward she had a mother’s-eye view of it. Lumps moved beneath the sodden fabric like kittens under a sheet.
“The baby’s alive as well,” Anna said. Paul did not repeat his short psalm of praise but she knew he was thinking it. As was she. New life was what the world needed at the moment, a life that hadn’t been mucked up by people. She didn’t believe in babies as blank slates. Genetics wrote in indelible ink. But they were another chance to get things right.
Paul walked upriver. Their gear was stowed in dry-bags, small ones for the daily use items, larger for the rest. He’d cut two loose before the raft had deflated and the smaller personal bags weren’t tied in. If they were lucky one or more would have hung up somewhere and could be salvaged.
With Carmen and Steve’s help, Anna carried the woman up the bank to an overhang where the river had carved out the shale. As a shelter it wasn’t much but it did keep the drizzle off. Anna knelt next to her and took her vitals as best she could. Her heart rate was slow, her skin cold, her eyes slightly dilated. There was a lump on her skull the size of a golf ball and cuts and abrasions on her arms and legs. All injuries that could be attributed to the river. Near as Anna could tell, none of her bones were broken and she wasn’t bleeding but for a slight ooze from the scratches.
“We need to warm her up,” Anna said. “Her body temp isn’t much above that of the river.”
“Nothing’s dry,” Steve said sadly.
“Lay down,” Anna told him. “Take off your shirt. You and Cyril, one on each side, put your arms around her and share your body heat.” At another time she would have asked them to strip to their underwear but they weren’t wearing enough clothes to bother.
Somewhat to her surprise they complied without question or complaint. “We learned this in Scouts,” Steve said. “It was a drag till we got to Explorers where there were girls to save, then they wouldn’t let us save them.”
“I remember how desperate you were to save Silvia Lieberman,” Cyril said.
“Yes. If ever a woman was built to be saved, it was the lovely Silvia.”
The twins lay on either side of the woman and pressed close. Chrissie and Lori had followed them to the shelter of the cliff and stood together as far from the action as they could without stepping back into the drizzle.
“What next?” Cyril asked.
Anna had absolutely no idea what was next. The usual arsenal of hot drinks, dry blankets and fire were floating down the river or lodged under a boulder.
“Elevate her feet,” Anna said. It wasn’t much, but it would keep some of the blood near the vital organs. “You carry a satellite phone, don’t you?” Anna said to Carmen.
“It’s in my dry-bag. In the raft.”
“Right.”
Anna thought for a moment. “What are the chances another rafting party will be by anytime soon?”
“It’s late in the season. Usually the water is low and people don’t book. We’ve got nothing till the weekend. There might be a canoe or two. There’s always somebody on the river, though. Could be an hour, could be ten.”
The woman caught in the long arms and legs of the twins as surely as she’d been caught in the limbs of the river was not going to last another ten hours of exposure. If she had any internal injuries, she might not last another ten minutes.
“Can you get out of the canyon anywhere?” Anna asked.
“There’s a rough trail up out of the slide on this side of the river. Very rough. More of a climb, but I wouldn’t be anywhere when I got there. The best bet is for me to float out the mouth of the canyon. There’s a road there. It’s paved and well used. Eventually I’d find somebody with a cell phone.”
“How long would it take you to float out?”
Carmen mused for a moment and stared at the river. “It’s eight miles out. A few hours, maybe.” Carmen would be floating out on her back the way Anna had come down through the rockslide. The river water wasn’t particularly cold, and with the cessation of the rain the temperature had risen into the seventies. Even if the sun came out and the air temperatures went into the eighties or nineties, hypothermia could still be an issue, given the woman’s long immersion in the river. Anna didn’t know enough about rivers to make an informed decision, but it didn’t strike her as a sound plan.
“I could make it,” Carmen said. Anna heard an echo of herself in the guide’s words and it was not reassuring.
“Rafters will be along soon,” Anna said, because it was as true as it was untrue and it was always good to look on the bright side.
“Unless you need me here, I’ll go beachcombing with Paul.”
“Anything we get is bound to be a plus,” Anna said.
“Keep a sharp eye out for the groover,” Steve said from his position as bed warmer. “Good hygiene is important in times of stress.”
The Kessler twins almost made up for Lori and Chrissie. Anna didn’t see the four of them as fast enough friends to plan another river trip together.
The unconscious woman wore a single white sneaker, brown now with the silt—the Rio Grande had taken the other one. Anna unlaced it and took it off. Her feet were narrow and swollen. Too much baby for her fragile bones. The soles were soft and the toenails filed and painted.
“Chrissie, I’ve got a job for you,” Anna called. The two girls were still hovering at the edge of the overhang, hating to stay but too scared to go.
Chrissie didn’t move.