I thrashed my way along the last of the trail, which angled steeply down, following glimpses of Sandra as if she were my talisman. The thought that we would find food and shelter in any form gave me renewed energy. With every step the sound of the river grew louder until it inhabited the air around us.
In minutes Sandra and I stumbled into a clearing. An explosion of colorful gear took up much of the open space, except for a fire that burned cheerfully in the center of a circle of rocks. Six o’clock sun painted long shadows across the confusion of tents, backpacks, and sleeping bags. An orange-and-yellow raft with bright blue handles leaned up against a stand of trees. Five oars rested on the ground next to it. Rachel, cursing, knelt on one of two tents spread flat on the ground. She glanced up at us. “Wow, finally. I was about to start back and look for you guys.”
Sandra laughed as she let her pack slide off her shoulders onto a nearby rock. “Nice to see you too, Rachel.”
“Where’s Pia and Rory?” I asked.
Rachel looked up at me from her hands-and-knees position, her glasses slightly cockeyed on her still-mud-streaked nose and forehead. It occurred to me that here was a woman who might not age well, especially in the face. Too many of her emotions already lived there in ever-deepening lines around her eyes and mouth—even at age thirty-seven. But I loved her scrappy toughness; in fact, we all made fun of her for injecting her own Botox, and most of the time she took our ribbing with surprising good nature.
She sat back on her haunches. “Rory’s ‘showing Pia the river,’ ” she said with heavy use of finger quotes. She rolled her eyes and got back to work on the tent.
I listened to the river, a constant but not unpleasant roar through the woods beyond us. Sandra pulled out a bag of raisins from her pack and offered me some. I couldn’t believe how hungry I was. The curved spine of Rachel’s tent sprang up with a snap.
“Would I be interrupting anything if I went down there to check it out?”
Rachel shrugged as an answer before disappearing into the tent. After a moment she crawled out, grabbed her sleeping bag, scuttled back in, and zipped the screen shut.
“Okay, we’ll be right back,” I said to the tent.
Though there was no trail I could detect, Sandra followed me through a short stretch of dense growth toward an opening where leaves glimmered, catching and holding what daylight remained. I had a vision of forest creatures watching us as we blundered toward their watering hole, fleeing back into the woods or standing, unblinking, one soft paw raised in wait.
I burst through the opening, landing on a narrow strip of sandy mud that gave under my shoes, so I launched myself onto one of hundreds of smooth stones scattered across the shallows. Silvery water trilled over rocks, never more than a couple feet deep as far as I could see, but the river was so much wider than I had imagined! Broad enough to surround a twenty-foot island shaggy with young cottonwoods, roots exposed in shallow soil eroded by the current. Basking in the sun’s last rays, Pia lay stretched out on a slab of shale in the middle of the river, one knee bent and one arm flung over her eyes. Perhaps asleep, perhaps not. A metal bucket sat next to her bare feet.
Nearby, a glinting line of light jerked across the water tautly, then crisscrossed the surface. I followed the filament up to a fishing pole to Rory, who stood several yards upriver from Pia, the current rushing around his knees. Shirtless, he let out on the line and leaned back, the pole bending until I thought it would snap as he drew back still farther and pulled, then dropped forward and reeled in hard. The sun found the gold in the dark strands of his twined hair, limned his silhouette in orange. A fish sprang from the water, a foot long at least, speckled yellow and green. It twisted and flailed in the air, fantastically alive in these, its last moments, the hook clear through one side of its rubbery face, before it splashed back down and Rory reeled it in fast.
Pia sat up, gazing at Rory as he picked his way through the shallows with his wriggling catch and dropped it in the bucket. She got to her feet, said something I couldn’t hear, and he laughed and touched her arm. They hadn’t seen us yet.
• • •
Pia passed me the wine and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Firelight played on our faces as we sipped at metal cups of the boxed merlot Rory had stashed at the campsite along with the raft. The remains of dinner lay scattered about—baked-potato skins wrapped in foil, fish bones, scraps of bread, orange peels, abandoned Ziploc bags of nuts and dried fruit. Behind us, the tents rose up, two dark cutouts against the sky—our four-person tent, and Rory’s pup tent. Evening deepened around us, and always the river, its never-ending hush beyond the green and black.
Pia poked at the fire with a stick, then tossed it in the flames. “It’s our fault, you know,” she said with a sideways glance at Rory. By firelight she looked ten years younger; sparkling eyes, all grace and smooth, tawny skin. “We did it to your generation.” She stood up, impassioned. “We poisoned the earth and the air and the water for you to inherit. I just don’t know what else to say, except I’m sorry.”
She was so serious and full of conviction I wanted to laugh, but I kept my face passive and unreadable. The first flush of wine percolated into my tired bones, distancing me from the aches in my muscles, joints, and feet. I shifted in my seat—my rolled-up sleeping bag under my butt on the ground—and watched Rory as he squared his shoulders and gazed into the flames. Cross-legged on a log, he wore shorts and a sweatshirt with some sports logo along one sleeve, while Sandra and Rachel sat close to the fire wrapped in their sleeping bags.
“I don’t know, Pia,” he said. “I think it’s all of us. Not enough people of any age are doing enough. We all suck, basically.”
“As long as the almighty dollar is on the line, that’s what’s going to win out,” Rachel said.
“I guess.” Pia sighed. “I still think we owe your generation an apology.” She stretched out her bare long legs closer to the fire, flexed and pointed her feet in their bright red socks.
Rory laughed. “Not sure you owe me anything, but would anyone like to take a dip?”
“Now?” Sandra said, the first words from her in quite some time. We all looked at each other, then back at Rory, who shrugged.
“There’s this incredible pool in the middle of the island. It’s so much warmer than the river. I’ll show you. It’s awesome. And if the moon is as full as it was last night, we’ll be able to see like it was daytime. Don’t you want to really wash off?”
Everyone looked at pied piper Pia. We truly were wimps.
“Lead the way,” she said.
• • •
Though we had all brought bathing suits, not one of us paused to grab ours for this escapade. Interesting. But Rory and Pia had jumped up and gone galumphing into the forest so fast you could say that none of the rest of us had the chance to rifle through our backpacks and scare them up. For my part, I had no intention of swimming, but I had to wonder about everybody else, especially Sandra, who I thought wouldn’t skinny-dip in a million years. I loved my friends but wasn’t eager for them to see me naked or, frankly, to see them in the buff.
The beam from Rory’s flashlight danced around us as we barreled through thickets and brush on our way back to the river, sharing the merlot that at this point we drank straight from the box. In came my usual terror of everything—night creatures! Insects! Murderers!—but I found myself loving the sweet taste of the air, all the wildlife I couldn’t see, furred ears turned in our direction, and the approaching nearness of the living water. I followed the sounds of laughter and whooping up ahead until I stepped out onto a slender bank of sand, free from the clutch of trees.
Because the river was so wide, we could see a great expanse of sky, and though the sun had set some time ago behind shadowy mountains, the underbellies of clouds blushed pink. To the north, a jagged scrim of geese squawked across the glowing horizon. I wondered how the sky could feel so vast at times, so alive with the complex narrative of clouds and sun, moon, and stars; at others, so nothing, so commonplace and unremarkable. Was it because of where we were, or because I so seldom looked up?
Rory and Pia had already disappeared into a crop of young swamp maples on the island that bisected the river. The saplings yearned skyward, their roots clutching river rocks as they drank from the sandy soil beneath. A thought bubble concerning Pia and Rory drifted by in my half-buzzed brain—Maybe they want to be alone—but I continued to hop from rock to rock across shimmering strands of water, emboldened by wine and the insane beauty all around me. I was starting to enjoy the idea of doing whatever came next because it seemed like fun. My God, when was the last time I’d spent even an afternoon with that as my mantra?
• • •
The pool opened before us like a granite ice-cream scoop buried in the center of the stand of trees, a perfectly round hole three yards across and deep enough for Rory to cannonball, naked, from its slippery edges. All of us watched, stunned silent, as his compact bullet of a body displaced enough water to soak us through.
Pia went first, of course. She whipped off her T-shirt like a guy, grabbing the hem and pulling it over her head without regard for hair or makeup. Next came the hiking shoes. Stumbling this way and that, she kicked them off, barely untying the laces; then socks, belt-shorts-and-panties in one sweep; last, her bra—the center clasp of which she flipped open—then flung the thing from herself as though it had been burning her flesh. For a moment she reached her arms out skyward, as if acknowledging some sort of award, then, giggling but without an ounce of self-consciousness, she dropped her arms and began to pick her way along the mossy banks to the edge of the pool, grabbing at branches to steady herself.
Rory watched, bobbing and smiling from the center of the oasis.
Pia, naked. She was as beautiful as we had imagined her, the kind of athletic woman’s body that becomes nearly impossible after a certain age: toned arms; flat, nearly concave belly; not an ounce of back fat or bounce at the hips, instead just taut, curved muscle defining thighs and the backs of her legs. She found a toehold at the lip of the bowl and jumped, laughing, hair flying up and set ablaze by the vestiges of light, pale limbs flashing. In moments she popped out of the water and flipped her hair back, dog-paddling toward us.
“Come on, guys, get in here! It’s perfect!”
“It’s okay,” Rory said, watching us. He turned onto his back and began to float. “I have five sisters. I’m harmless.”
Rachel held her hands in tight fists, jammed into her hips. In her face I read disapproval, rage, maybe disappointment? She was another who surprised me sometimes . . . then she said, “Oh, what the fuck,” and began to unbutton her shirt.