The River - Peter Heller Page 0,59
and they picked up their paddles and stroked easily upstream to the top of the eddy and out into the main current and let the river send the bow around in a wide accelerating peel-out, and then they were heading downstream, paddling in tandem, steady, not fast, and they stared ahead intently at the unbroken surface until it seemed their eyes ached, and listened hard for a rush and sift that was of water not fire. The river between the phalanxed woods, the black bulwarks of forest, was something metallic, faintly luminous, and they each wished it would stay that way and knew that it wouldn’t.
* * *
The cracks were the scariest. The sounds with no apparent flames. They paddled through an S-turn to staggered gunshots grown closer like an advancing front, which were the bigger trees exploding, and almost immediately they hit a long rapid. They could see the whitewater ahead like the thin line of distant surf, but it was much closer than it seemed and before they could scout a line or intuit one they each felt the waft of cold air and the rush came with it and the bow rocked up into a breaking wave and Jack braced the blade of his paddle into the froth and they were in it. Smack in the middle of the whitewater. They took water over the right side in the first wave but not much, but when they hit the second they took more, the gunwale gulped and she was awash in a couple of inches of ice water. They were heading left, they accelerated. They’d both seen and heard the gnash of a large hydraulic almost straight off the bow, a cresting pale hump that thumped and hissed in a lower register—the trough would be behind it—and they sprinted now, both, Wynn setting the left angle, not in unison, each paddling madly for enough speed to make it past the sucking hole. Wynn thought of nothing but speed, but he watched, amazed, as Maia reached for the cookpot clipped to the strap of the dry bag behind her and freed it and began to bail. She scooped and threw water over the side with her one good arm, with almost professional speed. Damn.
The stern just cleared it. The current accelerated at the left edge of the hydraulic and Wynn ruddered hard off the right side to straighten the boat and swing the stern away and around and even in the dark he looked down into a deep gnashing trough. They were in what they knew to be a ramping rock garden whelmed with whitewater, and the rush was so loud it went silent and they braced to hit a sleeper, the thud of a boulder barely underwater, and the sudden sideways upending, the flip and maybe the awful crunch of Kevlar as the boat wrapped and buckled around the rock…
And then they were by. The fast current and chop funneled down the middle of the river and the gradient seemed to level and they knew without looking that they were in a wave train, a rolling succession of breaking haystacks, and they did look and they could see the pale froth at the tops of the standing crests like whitecaps, and the crashing of water diminished to the discreet song of each single wave, and then the waves were smooth rollers, and then they were released: into the calm flat water of the pool, the metallic sheen of river stretching ahead again, almost placid, an uncertain respite.
She had bailed. Throughout the length of the rapid, and she bailed with one arm now as the current spun them into the flat. Must be feeling a lot better, Jack thought. He turned and said, “Phew.” Loud enough they both could hear. Then: “Hand me the bailer, would ya?” She did. He reached for the soaked shirt stuffed with blueberries and untied a sleeve and funneled the pot full and handed it back. “Fuel,” he said. “We might need it for the next one.”
* * *
They let themselves drift, for now. Tugged northward. On their left rose a continuous muffled roar as of storm and turbines punctuated by the pitched whine and pops of pressure cookers as they explode. Nothing to see, still, but a thickening haze. Jack thought it was eerie—the chorus of harsh instruments that should never commingle—and every now and then rose a thin scream exactly like someone being squeezed to death. Squeezed and sizzled to