captain, was now mending a book with duct tape, while Dixie, who would be rowing their third boat, was starting to assemble their picnic dinner. She wore a yellow bathing suit top and a blue sarong knotted low on her hips; wet braids curled at her shoulders.
“How come there are only five sandwiches?” she asked.
“Four for me, one for you and JT to split,” said Abo.
“Well, someone’s going hungry,” said Dixie, “and it isn’t going to be me.”
JT smiled to himself. He was glad to have these two for his crew. Abo, who could always be counted on to loosen up a group, was thirty-five, tall and bony-legged, with bleachy-tipped brown hair and clear blue eyes. Nobody knew his real name. He was a farm boy from the Midwest who’d come out to study geology at the University of Arizona, then took a river trip and never went back to school. During the winter, he built houses and scavenged work up at the ski area. Reputedly, he had a son by a woman in California, a movie producer whom Abo had met on an earlier trip. He was a good guide, in JT’s view; not only did he make people laugh, but as an amateur geologist he knew the pastry layers of the canyon better than anyone.
Dixie, whose real name was just that, Dixie Ann Gillis, was twenty-seven. She was relatively new with the company, and he’d only done one other trip with her, but he’d been impressed when he watched her rescue a private boater from the Rock Garden below Crystal Rapid. She had strong opinions about a lot of things, and JT liked that about her. If you caught him with his guard down, JT might admit that he was half in love with Dixie, but she had a boyfriend down in Tucson whose picture she kept taped to the inside of her personal ammo box, and JT wasn’t one to mess with somebody else’s good thing. Besides, after 124 trips, JT knew how things worked in the canyon, knew you could fall in love at the drop of a hat, literally, before you even got through Marble Canyon. It was a guide’s life to fall in love, he knew; he’d done his share, but if there was one thing he understood these days, it was to stand back and not get caught up in things, trip after trip after trip.
JT unlatched the ammo box by his feet and took out the passenger list and scanned the names and notes. They were supposed to have fourteen passengers on the trip, but at the last minute one couple had canceled, which meant he was going to have to juggle the seating arrangements to balance out the boats. There were two vegetarians, three “no dairy,” one “high craving for red meat.” Most had no rafting experience, which didn’t surprise him; but one couldn’t swim, which did. There were two kids, which pleased him; kids usually brought a goofy spirit absent in adults, who too easily fell victim to excessive reverence for natural wonders. He made a mental note to assign the boys a job—can-smasher, maybe—so they could feel useful and independent from their parents.
He continued scanning. There was a couple from Wyoming, named Mitchell and Lena; Lena, he noted, was allergic to peanuts, furry animals, grasses, and pollen. Well, hopefully she was bringing along a box of Benadryl and an EpiPen or two. There was a mother and daughter, Susan and Amy. The one who couldn’t swim was a young man from Ohio named Peter, age twenty-seven, traveling solo.
Noting Peter’s age, JT glanced up at Dixie, who was reknotting her sarong. Don’t even think of it, he heard himself telling Peter. Don’t even try.
That evening, as the sky grew dark, boaters from all the groups gathered together and passed around a bottle of whiskey, sharing old stories, inventing new ones. Around nine thirty, JT, who’d passed on the second round, returned to his raft. He brushed his teeth, then unrolled his sleeping bag across the long, flat meat cooler that spanned the center of his boat. Even though it was dark, the day’s heat continued to radiate off the canyon walls. JT strapped on his headlamp and sat down and carefully and methodically dried off his feet. He rubbed them well with bee balm, then pulled on a pair of clean socks to keep his skin from cracking. Finally he stretched out on top of his sleeping bag. He settled