THE HOUSE WAS SMALL, with only two bedrooms, a small living room, and a small kitchen/dining room. Rio showed me to my crash-landing site, his father’s bedroom. I made a thorough search for scorpions, even pulling back the sheet. Just in case, I got my camping flashlight out of my stuff and placed it on the nightstand before I turned out the light and got into bed.
I slept like the dead until I was awakened by the rapid beating of my heart. The room was pitch-dark. It was the middle of the night.
I flicked the flashlight on, pointed it all around. Not a scorpion in sight. My heart was still racing. Bad dream? Suddenly I remembered: bad dream, indeed, and it came rushing back. I was perched at the edge of a vertical mineshaft while Rio was lighting Roman candles and tossing them in. Suddenly I had lost my grip, and was falling, falling, falling.
Now that I was awake, my lower lip was itching something awful. I kept touching the spot to try to figure out what that was about. It was all I could do not to scratch it. At last my weariness won out and I was able to fall back asleep.
I slept well enough until the stillness of the night was shattered with what sounded like the wails of a lunatic. I bolted upright like a caveman with a lion at his throat. What was it, and where was I?
As the wails were followed by yips and barks, I came up with the answers, which were (A) coyote, and (B) my flaky uncle’s place in Terlingua, Texas.
It was a quarter after five. Dawn was beginning to filter through the screen window along with the bedlam. My lip still itched, and it felt swollen. I tried to get back to sleep but no such luck. Half an hour later the lunatic coyote was still carrying on.
Rio had left the door to the bedroom open so the cool air entering through the screens could circulate through the house. A coffeepot began to burble.
The bathroom was attached to the house, but you had to go out the front door to get there. “There’ll probably be a scorpion in the sink,” Rio called as I stumbled out the open front door. “Go ahead and annihilate it.”
His prediction proved correct. I looked for a weapon and found a book on the back of the composting toilet. It was entitled The World Without Us. No doubt it said that scorpions would do nicely in a world without people. “This one won’t get the chance,” I muttered as I mashed it with the spine of the book.
The scorpion dispatched, I checked myself out in the mirror. My lip was swollen something awful. I washed my face and hands with less water than my mother uses on one of her African violets. A gallon or two was all you really needed for a shower, Rio had told me the night before. The ghost town had finally gotten a water supply, but his house wasn’t hooked up to it. Too expensive, Rio said. They collected rainwater from the roof and hauled water when their cisterns ran dry.
Rio and his dad had enough electricity to power the lights, the stereo, a TV, and a DVD player. They didn’t actually get TV; the TV was for watching DVDs. The electricity came from solar panels on the hillside behind the house. They cooked on propane; their fridge and their hot water heater also ran on propane.
As I returned from the bathroom along the edge of the flagstone patio, I was keeping my eyes down on account of my bare feet and the scorpions. I didn’t see any, but I did notice a huge, hairy tarantula climbing onto the threshold of the open door.
“Annihilate it?” I asked. Rio was sipping coffee from a Mexican mug and watching the arachnid come in.
“No way,” he said. “That’s Roxanne.”
I soon learned that tarantulas make excellent houseguests, are virtually harmless, and pay for their lodging by eating insects, flies, conenose bugs, and sometimes scorpions. “I’ll show you what happens if I put her out,” Rio said. He carried Roxanne outside on the palm of his hand and gently set her down on the far side of the patio. “You drink coffee?” Rio asked as he returned.
“Not really. Gimme some.”
We sat at the kitchen table, drank Zapatista Blend, and watched the huge black spider turn herself around. She began to march back to the front door. Rio said that a tarantula moving indoors was a sign that the thunderstorms would come soon.
This was going to take a while. Roxanne lifted only one foot at a time. I gained an insight into how Rio entertained himself.
You wouldn’t have known this house had been resurrected from a ruin. The thick stone walls were plastered smooth and painted white as cream. The window frames were turquoise blue. The floors were smooth concrete with a light blue tint.
We took our coffee mugs and a couple of bagels outdoors to a patio table under a “ramada,” as Rio called it, a shade break of thatch supported by four poles. This early, we weren’t in dire need of shade. The morning air was almost too cool for T-shirts and shorts. I let out a massive yawn and said, “I could’ve slept another six hours.”
Rio shrugged. “If you don’t have AC, you have to take advantage of the cool part of the day or you’ll go mental.”
My finger went to my swollen lip. “Conenose bug got you,” Rio said. “It’s also known as Mexican bedbug, or assassin bug. Nasty sucker.”
“I didn’t see any. Are they tiny?”
“Not at all. They’re half an inch long, sometimes longer. Mostly they prey on insects. Their long beak injects saliva with a toxin that dissolves tissue, then sucks the insides out of the insect.”
“Your assassin bug mistook my lip for an insect?”
“Unfortunately, they also snack on mammals. With humans, they usually go for the lips, which is why they’re also known as kissing bugs. They’re a royal pain. You never know when it’s happening because the first thing they do is inject an anesthetic. Something else they inject makes your heart start racing, but only when they’re done and gone. That’s when you wake up.”
Just then, the sun began to rise over the Chisos Mountains. The first rays fell on a covey of quail darting across the flagstones behind Roxanne, who was climbing over the doorsill again. A roadrunner with a lizard in its mouth ran the length of the low wall that ringed the patio. It was the first I’d seen outside of a cartoon.
We headed back to the house for more coffee, not that I needed any. Stepping over Roxanne, who was headed for the bookcases, I checked out the art and photos on the walls while Rio was pouring. What caught my eye first was a piece of art the likes of which I’d never seen—a large hubcap painted in bright acrylics with a geometric design around the outside and a river scene at the center. A Mexican boy was sitting on a ledge and watching the Rio Grande as it wound through a canyon.
My eye caught the signature at the bottom of the hubcap. “Ariel painted this!”
“I told you she was an artist. Her hubcaps are all over West Texas.”
We started in on some cold cereal. A spiral-bound guidebook on the bookcase caught my eye, the mile-by-mile guide to the Lower Canyons of the Rio Grande. This was the section of the river I’d come out to paddle. I jumped up and brought it back to the table.
The guidebook contained photographs of canoes running the biggest rapids. I was riveted, but it was a tantalizing what might have been.
Rio wasn’t saying a thing, which was understandable under the circumstances. As I set it aside I said, “Those Lower Canyons look plenty challenging. It would’ve been a blast. Sorry if I drooled all over your book.”
Rio had a look in his eye. “Maybe we can still go for it.”
“Really? How’s that? You got my attention.”
“It’s a week-long trip . . . wouldn’t that be awesome, just the two of us?”
“No question,” I said, putting aside for the time being my first thought, which had to do with my parents. “You really think we could?”
“I don’t see why not. The only problem is, I don’t have enough money saved up. I could swing the groceries, but there’s a lot of driving involved. Another one of Ariel’s gigs is driving shuttles . . . I’m thinking she might help us out if we could pay her gas.”
“I brought some spending money. How much gas money are we talking about?”
Rio grabbed a map and put pencil to paper. Around two hundred dollars was the answer. Ariel’s round-trip driving on the front end would be 120 miles. The round-trip at the back end would add another 300 miles. I told my cousin I was good for the gas money.
“Is your bus ticket already paid for?”
“Same as the airline ticket. Both were round-trips.”
“Grab your flip-flops. I’ll show you our stuff.”
Rio led me out to the shed behind the house where they kept their river gear: a raft with frame and oars, coolers and propane bottles, life jackets, watertight food boxes, “dry bags” for storing personal gear, and on and on. The canoes were real beauties, sixteen-foot expedition-type Mad Rivers that flared widely through the middle for high-volume loads. Both bow and stern had a curving lift built into them, like the ends of a rocking chair leg, to deflect incoming whitewater. “You think your dad would be cool with it?” I asked. “Us going by ourselves?”
“I’ve been thinking about that. Yeah, I do. What about your folks?”
“I’d have some explaining to do. . . . They’ve been talking about me making independent decisions and suchlike. They know how hard I’ve worked for it. They knew it would be an adventure.”
“It would be an adventure, that’s for sure. Your call, Dylan.”
I told him I was leaning strongly in favor.
It was a three-minute walk to Ariel’s place, a school bus. Painted with colorful desert scenes, it was a real eye-catcher. Ariel was outside, painting a hubcap under a ramada like the one shading Rio’s patio table. She said she’d be happy to help us out with the driving.
The hubcap artist asked if we wanted to use her email. I took it she was talking about me running everything by my parents. Asking their permission, that is.
Inside Ariel’s bus, which was beautifully tricked out, my head was spinning. I wasn’t in any hurry to jump on the computer.
Rio could see I had a whole lot on my mind. He sat down to check the weather forecast and email some friends. I figured this was how he’d been emailing me. I went outside to sound out Ariel about my cousin. I asked how come she was confident about Rio and me heading off on our own.
“Rio is in his element when he’s on the river,” she told me. “I know. I’m an old river guide myself. If you two hang around the ghost town instead and bicycle up and down the highway and mess around near the mineshafts like kids do, that would be more dicey, in my opinion.”
Not to mention, I thought, that on the river I would be sleeping inside a zippered tent and not in my uncle’s bed with assassin bugs. “Thanks,” I said. “That’s what I wanted to hear.”
Rio came out of the bus. “Your turn,” he said. I went inside and emailed a message home. I told them that everything was great. I left out certain details like any mention of Rio’s father or his whereabouts. I said we’d be going on the river soon.