Borderline: A Novel Part 6

Chrissie was a study in personal misery, the drowned cat, the clown with the pie in his face, Carrie at the prom, her dress drenched in pig's blood. Anna didn't doubt that, had Chrissie suddenly been granted Carrie's power, there would be h.e.l.l to pay.

Easter merely looked resigned. Her horns wrapped up in towels, her legs tied, she lay quietly on the stern of the raft and watched them with what Anna hoped was trust and not terror in her great brown eyes.

"Everybody ready?" Carmen asked.

n.o.body said they weren't.

"Okay, time to have fun," the guide said.

This was not white water as Anna knew it. Going into the maze of boulders in Santa Elena Canyon, the water did not froth and break, it bulged with sinewy strength, forming muscular ridges around the stones. The Rio Grande was a male river, testosterone fueled, mover of mountains. The farming out of the waters of the Colorado River up north had robbed it of some of the fierceness it once had and it lazed when the water was low but one could still feel the underlying aggression.

Today the river was flexing and stretching, in an exhilarating rush to the sea, people and stones and trees be d.a.m.ned.

Carmen was in the stern with Easter piled around her like a dusty brown bolster. Steve, then Anna, then Lori rowed on the American side of the raft, Cyril, Chrissie and Paul on the Mexican side. "We want to be in the middle," Carmen reminded them, "then, past that boulder, pull hard to the right."

"Aye, aye, skipper," Steve said.

The raft was heavy with the addition of the cow but not overloaded and they slipped neatly into midstream. "Oars on the right," Carmen called. Paul and Cyril and even Chrissie rowed, turning the bow neatly into the current. The Rio Grande lifted them and in a rush they surged toward the great slab of shale that divided the waters. "Hard right, hard right," Carmen shouted, reinforcing the plan she'd made on sh.o.r.e.

Paul and Cyril pulled hard on their oars. Chrissie, transfixed as a mouse eye-to-eye with a snake, did nothing. The oncoming boulder had paralyzed her. The stern was swinging to the right and Anna couldn't see the reason for it. Chrissie's failure to row would not make or break a turn. Running rapids was a sport as much of the mind as of the body. Between them Paul and Cyril had enough strength to control the raft.

"Row left," Carmen shouted. Anna had already dug her paddle deep, pushing a wide arc, trying to force the bow to point downstream. Steve had never learned to steer a canoe or raft and paddled straight ahead. Lori sat unmoving, her paddle thrust in the river nearly to her knuckles. Lori was serving as an unofficial rudder, the raft pivoting on her Sivo, h blade.

"Lori," Anna said sharply. "Row."

The young woman woke as if from a dream, looked back at Anna, her oar slipping from her hand and racing downstream ahead of them. The paddle crashed into the first rock and eddied away to the left. With the freakish suddenness that can turn an adventure into a disaster, the raft was against the rock, with Paul's, Cyril's and Chrissie's oars trapped between rubber and stone.

"We're okay," Carmen was shouting over the lowing of the cow and Chrissie's shrieks. "Lean into the rock, don't let the upstream side take on water, into the rock."

The raft steadied. The river held them fast but they were upright. "We're okay," Carmen said. Then the equation shifted. A dark shape bore down the river on a collision course with the raft pinned against the rock.

"It's going to hit us," Chrissie screamed.

"It's a garbage bag," Carmen screamed back. "We're okay."

Chrissie could not hear her and she scrambled to get out of the raft. The upstream gunwale dipped and the river poured in. Lori was gone in a second, taken from sight into the rapids. Cyril held on long enough to grab Anna's life jacket and yell: "Easter!" before the current s.n.a.t.c.hed her away.

"Go, go," Paul was yelling at her. "Forget the d.a.m.n cow." Easter was panicked, tossing her head back and forth weakly and bleating. The towel had torn free of one horn and was unwinding from the other in a sodden flag that slapped her and scared her more with each toss.

She couldn't leave it to die a slow death from water-boarding, or, if it was lucky, the raft would flip and it would drown faster.

"I got the head," Carmen said, and began pulling the slipknots they'd used to anchor an unresisting Easter in place. Anna's body was out of the raft and the current wanted her bad. She hooked one arm over the fat gunwale and pulled at the line holding Easter's back legs with the other.

"Cow!" Carmen shouted as the rope came free and several hundred pounds of beef struck Anna, pushing her beneath the brown water. She'd seen Easter coming in time to take a good breath. Rolling herself up like a hedgehog, she hugged her knees with one arm and her head with the other. A hoof or hip or shoulder bone clipped her, sending her spinning. Then she was just with the river. Her life jacket popped her to the surface and she came out of her protective ball and pointed her feet downstream so she could fend off solid objects.

Things had happened so quickly that by the time she had the luxury of thought it was too late. The current was too great to swim back to see if Paul and Steve and Carmen had cleared the wreckage safely and too swift to make her way to the bank until it let her.

As she rounded the boulder the raft was crucified against, a lump almost the same brown as the river rose from the depths. Anna stopped float S st boing and swam after the cow. The beast was trussed and so weak she didn't worry about intentional harm, though she did worry about accidentally getting gored. Four good strokes and she was next to Easter. She grabbed the cow's horns, letting the rest of the animal lead their way downstream, Anna's legs trailing behind, the cow's nostrils barely above water.

The rockslide was less than a hundred yards in length and within a minute had spewed Anna and the cow out onto relatively flat water. Steering the cow like a sled, Anna kicked to sh.o.r.e. Farther downstream, she saw Lori then Cyril, one on either side of the river, emerging from the water. Lori stumbled as if she were blind, and let Carmen, who had her by the upper arm, lead her.

Steve was okay, Anna was sure. He'd waved as he floated past her and the cow. There was no sign of Chrissie or Paul. At this point, Anna didn't care a whole h.e.l.l of a lot about Miss Chrissie. Had it been a choice between rescuing her or Easter, Anna would have had a tough decision to make.

Paul had to be upstream; Anna would have seen him if he'd pa.s.sed her coming down. A horrifying image of the raft turning turtle, sucked down and pinned by the river, Paul trapped beneath, loosened her bowels.

"Have you seen Chrissie?" Carmen called as Anna pulled enough of Easter from the water that the cow could breathe and would probably not get washed away.

"No. I'm heading back." Pushing the wet hair from her face, Anna trotted up the bank toward the jumble of boulders that shouldered both sides of the river where the slide provided such fine entertainment for the tourists.

A scream stopped her.

"Chrissie's alive," Anna said sourly.

Before she had to leave a child screaming for help to check on her husband, Paul floated into sight and crawled gasping from the river.

"Raft's gone," he said. "Easter got a horn in it. It and all the gear are gone."

Anna met him at the water's edge and started helping him off with his life vest. Guilt ate at her that she hadn't stayed to help, hadn't somehow made it back, that she'd floated cheerily downstream steering a cow while Paul hung back trying to save their gear.

The scream came again. In the instant Anna had laid eyes on Paul all thought of Chrissie had flown.

"Chrissie," Anna said before Paul could ask.

Chucking the vest, he began to run down the sh.o.r.eline toward the noise, Anna and Carmen on his heels. "Stay here," she shouted at Cyril, Steven and Lori as they pa.s.sed them. Cyril nodded. She was in the process of untying the cow's legs. Apparently, she valued the life of Easter slightly more than she did Chrissie's. Lori stood next to her, so close she was in the way, doing and saying nothing.

"I'll go with you," Steve s S yoontaid, and none of them argued. He loped out to join them, his long thin legs showing the ungainly grace of a colt's.

A smaller slide of boulders marked the end of their beach. Anna and Carmen, more agile than the men, were up and over them first. Chrissie was on the other side. Apparently unhurt, she stood near the water by a strainer woven of tree branches and reeds. When she saw them she pointed at the strainer and screamed again.

"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.

"G.o.d 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.

The strainer had formed between two rocks, one on the sh.o.r.e 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 G.o.d 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 th.o.r.n.y 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 sil Vm" ly: 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 pa.s.sed 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 n.o.body 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. [dedem"

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 st.u.r.dy 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 b.u.mped 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 rea.s.suringly.

"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 sh.o.r.e. 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."